by Cassie Miles
He checked his side mirror. The black sedan was one car back, still following. Dusk was rapidly approaching. Some vehicles had already turned on their headlights. If he was going to confront the man in the sedan, he should make his move. Darkness would limit his options.
Sean didn’t necessarily want to hurt Morelli. He wanted to talk to the guy, to have him send a message back to James Wynter that Sean wasn’t somebody to mess around with, and he was protecting Emily. The bad guys needed to realize that she wasn’t helpless, and—in his role as her bodyguard—he wouldn’t hesitate to kick ass.
He set a simple trap. Accelerating and making a few swerving turns, he sped into a large, mostly empty parking lot at the west end of Cherry Creek Mall. Sean fishtailed behind a building, parked and jumped out of the car before the black sedan came around the corner.
His original plan had been to hide behind his car, but a better possibility appeared. Though the parking lot was bare asphalt right now, there had been snow that morning. The plows had cleared the large lot and left the snow in a waist-high pile near a streetlight. Sean dove behind it.
Holding his gun ready, he watched and waited while the black sedan cautiously inched closer and closer. It circled his car, keeping a distance. The sedan parked behind his car, and a man got out. He braced a semiautomatic pistol with both hands.
“Sean Timmons,” he shouted. “Get out of the car. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You got that right.” Sean came out from behind the snow barrier. His position was excellent, in back of the driver of the sedan. “Drop the gun and raise your arms.”
If it came to a shoot-out, he wouldn’t hesitate to drop this guy. But he wouldn’t take the first shot. The man set his gun on the asphalt, raised his hands and turned. “We need to talk.”
Since they were standing in view of a busy street with rush hour traffic streaming past, Sean lowered his gun as he approached the other man. In spite of the gun, this guy didn’t seem real threatening. Dressed in a conservative blue sweater with khaki trousers, he wore his hair slicked back. His pale complexion hinted that he spent most of his time indoors.
Sean asked, “Is your name Morelli?”
“John Morelli.”
“Are you a hit man, John?”
“Of course not.”
“What do you want to say?”
“It’s about your ex-wife.” He took a step forward and Sean raised his gun, keeping him back. “If you’ll let me talk to her, I can explain everything.”
He sounded rational, but Sean wasn’t convinced. “You could have called her,” he pointed out.
“I tried,” Morelli said. “I left messages on her answering machine. She’s a hard woman to reach, especially since she gave me a fake name.”
That much was true. “How did you find out her real name?”
Morelli didn’t answer immediately. He exhibited the classic signs of nerves: furrowed brow, the flicker of an eyelid, the thinning of the lips and the clearing of his throat. All these tics and twitches were extremely subtle. Most people wouldn’t notice.
But Sean was a pro when it came to questioning scumbags. He knew that whatever Morelli said next was bound to be a lie.
“It’s like this,” Morelli said. “I saw her on the street and followed her to her house.”
“You stalked her?”
Quickly Morelli said, “No, no, it wasn’t creepy. I guessed her neighborhood from something she said at our interview.”
“Not buying that story.”
“Okay, you got me.” He tried a self-deprecating gesture that didn’t quite work. “I got her fingerprint at our interview and ran it through identification software.”
Sean had enough. “Here’s what I think. Your boss, James Wynter, used an illegal wiretap, overheard her name. When he pulled up her photo, you recognized the reporter who interviewed you.”
Morelli was breathing harder. A dull red color climbed his throat. “I don’t know anything about illegal wiretaps, and I’m insulted that you think I would be that sort of person.”
As if being a stalker was more reputable? “This is your last chance to be honest, Morelli. Otherwise, I’ll turn you in to the feds. They keep an open file on Wynter, and they’ll be interested in you.”
“Wait!” He lowered his hands and waved them frantically. “There’s no need for law enforcement.”
“Don’t tell me another lie.”
“Truth, only truth, I swear.”
Sean tested that promise by asking, “Did Wynter send you to Denver?”
“Yes.”
“What were you supposed to do?”
“Find your ex-wife. When he said her name was Emily Peterson, I didn’t know who he was talking about. I knew her as Sylvia Plath.”
Sean stifled a chuckle. Emily’s obviously phony alias referenced a famous poet. “What made you think she might come looking for me? Did you miss the ‘ex’ in front of husband?”
“After I learned that she’d gone on the run, I checked her background on the internet. Your name popped up, and I knew. The first person the girl would look to for help was her macho, ex-FBI husband who runs a security firm.”
His story sounded legit. Or maybe Sean just enjoyed being called macho. He liked that he was the guy to call when danger struck. Or was he being conned?
Morelli was turning out to be a puzzle. He readily admitted that he worked for Wynter and he carried a gun, but he looked like a middle-aged man who had just finished a game of billiards in a sunless pool hall. He was less intimidating than a sock puppet.
Sean made a guess. “You don’t get out of the office much, do you?”
“Not for a long time.” He gave a self-deprecating smile. “I’ve had both knees replaced.”
Scenes from old gangster movies where some poor shmuck was getting his kneecaps broken with a baseball bat flashed through Sean’s mind. But he didn’t go there. This was the twenty-first century, and criminals were more corporate...more like the man standing before him.
“There’s something bothering me,” Sean said. “When you called the TST office, you used your own phone.”
“So? I wasn’t giving anything away. My number’s unlisted.”
“An easy hack,” Sean said. “I might even be able to do it.”
“I should’ve used a burner.” The corners of his mouth pulled down. He seemed honestly surprised and upset. What is going on with this guy? If Wynter hadn’t sent him to wipe out the witness to his son’s crime, why was Morelli here?
Sean said, “What were you supposed to do when you found my ex-wife?”
“To warn her.”
“About what?”
“If she prints her article from information I gave her, it’s going to have several errors. Wynter Corp is planning a significant move in regard to our real estate holdings.”
As he spoke, his face showed signs that he was lying. His lip quivered. He even did the classic signal of looking up and to the right. For a thug, Morelli was a terrible liar.
“Seriously,” Sean said. “You want me to believe that you rushed out to Denver, tailed my car through rush-hour traffic and pulled a gun so you could talk real estate?”
“Doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“Last chance. Tell me the real reason. What do you want from Emily?”
“I want to find out what she knows.”
His statement seemed sincere. “Why would you think Emily has information that you don’t?”
“She’s been researching Wynter Corp for quite a while, and it’s possible she stumbled over some internal operations data that would be embarrassing to Mr. Wynter.”
“Lose the corporate baloney. What’s the problem?”
“Somebody’s stealing from us, and we want to know who.”
>
“Now you’re talking.” Sean believed him. Wynter wouldn’t be happy about somebody dipping into his inventories. “Do you really think Emily might have information you missed? Is she that good an investigator?”
“Her first article on Wynter Corp was right on target.”
It occurred to Sean that if he pretended that Emily had valuable information, the hit men wouldn’t hurt her. Luckily, he was an excellent liar. “I shouldn’t tell you, but she’s come up with a working hypothesis. She’s figured out what’s happening on the inside. If she gets hurt, it all goes public.”
“I knew it was an insider.” Morelli cleared his throat. “And there’s that other matter I need to discuss.”
“The murder?”
“She might have imagined seeing something that did not, in fact, happen.”
Sean shook his head. “She’s sure of what she saw, and she won’t be convinced otherwise.”
“How much would it take to unconvince her?”
And now Sean had full comprehension. Morelli wasn’t here to kill her. He’d come to Denver to seduce her into working for Wynter Corp with cash payoffs and assurances that she was brilliant. Clearly, he didn’t know Emily.
It was time to wrap up this encounter. If Sean had still been a fed, he would’ve taken Morelli into custody and gone through a mountain of paperwork to come up with charges that would be dismissed as soon as Wynter’s lawyers got involved. As a bodyguard, he didn’t have those responsibilities. His job was to keep Emily safe.
He made a threat assessment. “Are there other Wynter operatives in Denver?”
“No.”
But a quick twitch at the corner of his eye told Sean the opposite. “How many?”
For a moment, Morelli sputtered and prevaricated, trying to avoid the truth. Then he admitted, “One other person. He does things differently than I do.”
Sean translated. “He’s more of a ‘shoot-first’ type.”
“You could say that.”
He needed to get Emily out of town before the less subtle hit man caught up with them. He picked up Morelli’s pistol, removed the ammo and returned it to him. At the same time, Morelli handed him a business card.
“It’s got all my numbers,” Morelli said.
“I’ll get your message to Emily. If she agrees to talk to you, she’ll call. Don’t approach her or me again.”
They walked away from each other, each returning to his separate rental car. As Sean slid behind the wheel, he wished that he could trust Morelli. It would’ve been handy to have an inside man at Wynter Corp.
As he drove to the homely, little Chinese restaurant where they always ordered carryout, he checked his rearview mirrors and scanned the traffic. There was no sign of Morelli. He didn’t know what the other hit man—the more dangerous thug—would be driving.
At the restaurant, he spotted Dylan and Emily sitting at one of the small tables near the kitchen. He would have been annoyed that she’d left the security of the office and put herself in danger, but this happenstance worked for him.
She stood and faced him. “Next time,” she said, “take your damn phone. I was worried.”
“Ready to go?” he asked.
Dylan held up a large brown paper bag with streaky grease stains on the side. “It’s our usual order.”
“Bring it. I get hungry on plane rides.”
Emily gaped. “Plane?”
Sean wasn’t going to hang around in Denver, waiting for the second hit man to find them. For all he knew, Morelli had already contacted his partner-in-crime. Sean and Emily had to escape. The sooner, the better.
Chapter Nine
Emily had no idea how Sean accomplished so much in so little time. It seemed to be a combination of knowing the right people and calling in favors; she couldn’t say for sure. Maybe he was magic. In any case, he’d told her that Denver was too dangerous, and within an hour she was on a private jet, ready to take off for San Francisco.
After she’d been whisked to a small airfield south of town, Sean rushed her into an open hangar and got her on board a Gulfstream G200. Her only other experience with private aircraft was a ski trip on a rickety little Cessna, which was no comparison to this posh eight-passenger jet. Sean left her with instructions not to disembark.
She strolled down the strip of russet-brown carpet that bisected the length of the cabin. Closest to the cockpit were four plush taupe leather chairs facing one another. Behind that was a long sofa below the porthole windows on one side and two more chairs on the other. The galley—a half-size refrigerator, cabinet, sink and microwave—was tucked into the rear.
Her stomach growled, and she made a quick search of the kitchenette. There were three different kinds of water in the fridge and the liquor cabinet was well stocked, but the cupboards were almost bare.
At the front of the cabin, she sank into one of the chairs. The cushioned seat and back cradled her, elevating her to a level of comfort that was practically a massage. Still, she didn’t relax. A persistent adrenaline rush stoked her nervous energy.
Bouncing to her feet, she paced the length of the aircraft, all the way to the bathroom behind the galley to the closed door that separated the cockpit from the cabin. Sean had left her suitcase, and she wondered if she should change out of the black sweater she’d been wearing since before dawn this morning. A fresh outfit might give her a new perspective, and she needed something to lighten her spirits and ease her tension.
Not that she was complaining about the way Sean had handled the threat from Morelli. He’d done a good job, but she wished that she’d been there. Somehow it felt like the situation was slipping through her fingers. She was losing control.
Or was she overreacting? The trip to San Francisco had originally been her idea, not his. But she had new information and needed to reconsider. Sean should have consulted with her before charging into the breach and arranging for a private jet. She had opinions. This was her investigation. He wasn’t the boss. When push came to shove, he was actually her employee.
A sense of dread rose inside her. She’d felt this way before. Frustrated and voiceless, she was reminded of the final, ugly days of their marriage. Until the bitter end, Sean had tried to make all the decisions. He wanted to be the captain who set their course while she was left to swab the decks and polish the hardware. Her only option had been mutiny.
In the past when she’d tried to stop him, she failed more than she succeeded. He was so implacable. And she didn’t want to fight. Make love, not war. She’d changed. No longer a nineteen-year-old free spirit who tumbled whichever way the wind was blowing, the new Emily was solid, determined and responsible. As soon as she could get Sean alone, she meant to set the record straight.
Dylan stuck his head through the entry hatch. His long hair was out of the ponytail and hanging around his face, making him look like a teenager. “I brought you a brand-new, super-secure computer.”
He sat and wiggled his butt. “Nice chair.”
“Very.” She sat opposite.
Obviously he’d been in this jet before. He knew exactly how to pull out a table from the wall. When it stretched out between them, he set a laptop on it, opened the lid and spun it toward her. “As I’ve said before, about a hundred times, anything can be hacked. This system has extreme firewalls, but when you’re not using it, log off with this code.”
He typed in numbers and letters that ran together: 14U24Me.
“One for you two for me,” she read.
“Easy to remember.” He reached into his backpack. “And here’s your new cell phone, complete with camera and large screen. It’s loaded with everything that was on your old phone, but this baby is also secure. It bounces your signal all around the world.”
She stroked the smooth plastic cover. “I’ve missed having a phone.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get tempted to play with this. Keep texting to the bare minimum and don’t add a bunch of apps. In the interest of security, keep your calls short. And when you aren’t using the phone, log off.”
“I thought cell phones could be tracked even when they were off.”
“Not this one. Not unless somebody hacks my most recent software innovation, and that’s not going to happen for a couple of weeks at least.” Digging into his pocket, he produced her flash drive. “You can slip this back into your necklace. I’ve got a copy.”
“While we’re gone, will you keep hacking Wynter?”
“You bet.”
“You might run comparisons between shipping manifests and inventory, plus sales figures.”
He pushed the glasses up on his nose. “Morelli seemed convinced that there was theft. That gives me another angle.”
In her research, she hadn’t uncovered any evidence that someone was stealing from Wynter. But she hadn’t been using the sophisticated hacking tools that Dylan so deftly employed. Part of her wanted to have him teach her; the more ethical part of her conscience held her back. Hacking wasn’t a fair way to investigate.
Dylan stood. Before leaving, he gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek. “I know Sean is supposed to be taking care of you. But keep an eye on him, okay? Don’t let him do anything crazy dangerous.”
“I’ll try.”
When Dylan left, she was alone in the cabin. Still seated, she peered through a porthole. Through the open door to her hangar, she could see one of the lighted runways, part of another hangar and several small planes tethered to the tarmac. The control tower was a four-story building with a 360-degree view that reminded her of some of the lighthouses up the coast in Oregon. As she watched, a midsize Cessna taxied to the far end of the airstrip, wheeled around and halted. With a burst of speed, the white jet sped forward and gracefully lifted off. Silhouetted against the night sky, the Cessna’s lights soared to the right, toward the dark shadow of the mountains west of the city.
