Frost Security: The Complete 5 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  I scratched my chin as I watched her pull out the fixings.

  After a moment of searching, though, she straightened up and turned around, jar of mayonnaise in one hand and a little pot of mustard in the other, a perplexed look on her face as she set everything on the kitchen island between us.

  “What’s up?”

  “Just thinking, that’s all. I had some curry in here the other night. There’s a chef who comes up and cooks a private meal for you, so I have her up here.” She frowned and stuck out her lip. “And no offense to you or your tastes, but I’d take curry over a burger or a sandwich any day of the week.”

  I laughed. “I’m alright with a good curry.”

  “Really?” she asked. “You just seemed like a meat and potato kind of guy.”

  “Nah, I developed a real taste for the local food while I was stationed in Iraq. Lots of curry over there. Curried meats, curry sauces, kebabs.”

  “Well, then, you would love Hannah’s. I had her come up and make me a huge thing of it. Enough to last me a few days the night before the break-in.”

  “That good, huh?”

  She nodded, eyebrows high. “Oh yeah. My father got me into curry, actually. He would go back and forth between London and New York a lot, and he had a real taste for it.”

  I laughed.

  “I guess he wasn’t all that bad.” She frowned a little. “Not as bad as I make him out to be.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You must really like that stuff. Eat it all that fast.”

  She smirked. “So good, I think I got up in the middle of the night and…” She trailed off, her eyes looking right past me.

  “What?” I asked. “Ashley? You okay?”

  “That motherfucker…”

  “What, babe? What’s wrong?”

  “Father ate my curry. He ate my fucking curry.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine – Ashley

  Frank shook his head. “I don’t understand. What do you mean he ate your curry?”

  “I came in last night, and I looked in the fridge first thing. I wanted some of the curry that she’d left, but when I looked in there, I couldn’t find any. So I just assumed I’d eaten it all in the middle of the night or something. Instead, I went to make a goddamn sandwich, and I ended up seeing all the stuff from the break-in.”

  He gave me a look like I was a crazy person.

  “He’s been here,” I said. “Or he came back while I was out, Frank. I don’t know!”

  He scratched his chin, not betraying a single emotion.

  “Okay. Let’s go with the idea that he’s been here the whole time. Where could he have been hiding? The attic? The basement?”

  I shook my head. “We don’t have a cellar up here. And wouldn’t I have heard someone in the attic?”

  “Weirder things have happened. People went up with homeless people living in their attic more often than you think.”

  The idea of a random person living in my attic just gave me the willies. Way more than the idea of having my own father living up there, which was freaking bizarre on its own. I screwed up my face. “Let’s not discuss that.”

  He waved me off. “Fine. Where else could he be?”

  I shrugged. “I mean, it’s bigger than your place, Frank, but it’s not like I have wings of the house or something.”

  “Okay.” He took a deep breath and squinted his eyes a little. “You said curry, right? I could’ve sworn I smelled some curry upstairs earlier. Something I hadn’t smelled the other day, but that might be because it hadn’t gotten ripe enough.”

  I made a face. “Ew. Curry stench? I didn’t smell anything while I was up there.”

  Her put a finger to the tip side of his nose. “You should see me at wine tastings.”

  “You do wine tastings?”

  He just gave me a look. “Alright, let’s go check out the upstairs. See if we can find anymore clues.”

  Together, we headed up to the other rooms, to the one on the east side of the house that Frank said he’d smelled curry in.

  Built mostly over the garage, this room was off on its own and away from the others. Mainly, it was one of the spare bedrooms that we’d put guests up in whenever they came to visit, like for ski trips and the like. I think even Sheila had holed up here a couple different times after she’d had one too many during ski season. The room was dominated by, of course, the bed. Big picture windows graced the wall both over the head of the bed and the one opposite. This was one of the only rooms to do stretch to both sides of the house like that. Built-in bookshelves spanned the wall opposite the doorway, and my parents had loaded it up with leather bound volumes of all shapes and sizes. Most of them were law books, but there were other near-ancient scientific journals, old maps and atlases, and geography books.

  Standing in the bedroom doorway, Frank sniffed the air almost like a hound. He just shrugged when I gave him a weird look.

  “It’s how I smell,” he said.

  “Uh…huh.”

  “Well, it’s definitely from in here.”

  I sniffed the air, just like him. And, while I got a more distinct whiff than I had from just my normal attempt, I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary. Only old books, wood from the floors and built-in shelves, and fabric softener. The usual smells of the cabin. Disappointed that my nose wasn’t as talented as his, I went and sat on the bed.

  He gave me a strange look. “How long has your father had this place?”

  I shrugged. “Long as I can remember. Fifteen years maybe? I remember coming here when I was a teenager, I know that.”

  “Fifteen years, huh? Did he build it?”

  “Yeah…?”

  “Ever notice how short this room is?”

  I gave him a look. “No, I haven’t.” I got up off the bed and turned to him.

  He walked the floor of the room, measuring the floor plan by marking it off with his steps. “I’d put it all on black that this room is ten feet short.”

  I shook my head. “No way.”

  He went over to the bookcase and pressed himself to it. “There’s something on the other side of this wall.”

  “Another room?” I went over and pressed myself to it as well. I began pulling at the bookshelf, trying to see if I could somehow get it to budge. I might as well have been trying to move the mountain we were standing on.

  “Reckon so.” He tried to push and pull at the shelf unit, too, and it was almost gratifying to see this man nearly twice my size with muscles on muscles having as little luck as me.

  Then I had an idea. “Do you think there’s a special switch?” I began to pull books from the shelf, dropping them at my feet. “Like in a haunted house or something?”

  Instead of answering, he joined me, starting to pull the books down all around him.

  Finally, on my second shelf, I found one heavy tome that wouldn’t budge. It was an old encyclopedia from the early 1900s. The letter R. I stopped and looked at Frank, and he motioned me to pull it. I tilted it back towards me, like it was on a hinge attached to the bottom of the spine. It stopped when I fully extended it, clicking.

  “That do anything?” Frank asked, coming over and pulling the bookshelf towards him. The shelves swung out easily, perfectly balanced just like a normal, non-secret door on its hinges.

  Frank pinched his nose shut with one hand and drew his gun with the other. The smell of old, rotting curry hit us, blooming out from the pitch black room like an oil spill on the ocean, slowly rolling over both of us with its putrid scent.

  The bile rose up in my throat at the sudden assault on my senses, and I began to gag. “Jesus!”

  Apparently not afraid of anything, he stepped into the darkness, his gun sweeping over the unseen. I guess he was satisfied, because he holstered his gun and began searching for a light switch or a bulb string.

  I stepped into the room after him just as he found the switch for the overhead light.

  “Well,” he said as we looked around. “Reckon we found the fil
es.”

  Despite it being hidden, it was just a room like any other. Pictures of me and my mother adorned one wall. Just beneath it was an unmade cot, its sheets and blankets tossed aside. A small writing desk sat in the corner, pressed up against the wall with a lamp set on it and a small, plain chair tucked underneath. On top of it was the offending half-empty container of curried rice, already beginning to mold as a tiny swarm of flies settled on it. The only point of real interest, though, was what had been stacked against the wall on our left, with their contents spread across the hardwood floor. A half dozen banker boxes full of files and papers.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed. “I think you’re right, Frank.”

  Chapter Forty - Frank

  “What do you think they all mean?” Ashley asked from her corner of the spread.

  My eyes flickered back and forth between two seemingly identical printouts, both full of credits, debits, and account names. “Ain’t exactly a forensic accountant, babe. I just protect people.”

  We both knelt there, trying to make sense of the papers in front of us. Between all the stacks, there must have been thousands and thousands of pages. How long had he been collecting these documents before he packed them up in the Audi that was still downstairs and drove them across the country to the safety of this room? And who the hell had a secret room in their vacation cabin? I swear, some people just had too much damned money burning a hole in their pocket. And, more importantly, who left old food lying around like that? The longer I knelt there the more the smell of the curry felt like it was, inch by inch, pushing itself farther into every pore of my body. And, just beneath that smell of old spices, was something else. Human waste. He must have been using a bucket while Ashley was at home.

  I didn’t mention that last part to Ashley. She could do without that mental image.

  “Well, they’re here because my father knows they’re important.”

  “Yep,” I said, putting down one printout and picking up another, this one a photocopy of a check and a deposit slip. “Either he thinks it’s evidence against him, or evidence for him that someone might have destroyed.”

  “No chance of figuring it out then, huh?”

  I chewed the inside of my mouth. There’s nothing worse than having a clue right in front of you and knowing it’s a thread that could unravel the whole thing, but not knowing exactly how it fits in. This all might as well have been astrophysics or quantum mechanics, as far as I was concerned. I had about as much chance figuring this out and helping Ashley’s father with it as a monkey does of using a space shuttle to get to orbit.

  And that’s how I felt right then as I stood on the edge of the twenty or more piles of paperwork, all stacked up and organized in some mysterious way: a monkey, staring at the vastness of space, shaking my banana.

  “Know who might be able to help, though?” I asked. “Sheila Pearson. She’s apparently a whiz when it comes to financials.”

  “Sheila?” Ashley asked with a laugh. “Really? Her?”

  “Helped out Richard’s fiancée with her business.”

  Ashley shook her head. “I think this is a little more in-depth than an art gallery’s accounting, though. We need a CPA or something for this.”

  I put my paperwork back down on the piles they’d come from and stood up. I wiped a hand down my face and groaned as I looked around at it all. “Well, on the bright side, we’ve got something your stepmom and Barbara want.”

  She put down the papers she was looking at and picked up another stack that was almost thick as a ream. She shook her head as she shuffled through it. “I wish I remembered more from my finance classes.”

  I stepped out of the room, the smell of the rotting curry finally more than my shifter senses could handle. I sat down on the edge of the bed and took a deep breath. I liked curry, but not this much. Never this much. I took another breath.

  “What now?” she asked from the secret room. If she was phased by the stench, Ashley certainly wasn’t showing any signs of it.

  Oh, to be human. Sometimes, at least.

  “Now?” I asked, getting up to go to the other side of the room to where the smell was less potent. “Now, I think we takes those files and get the hell out of here before someone else comes looking for them.”

  She lay the stack of papers in her lap and looked at me, those blue eyes of hers piercing mine. “Where do we take them, though?”

  I shrugged. “The FBI? The SEC? Peter will know.”

  “But what if they’re documents that Barbara and Elizabeth forged? Or faked? So that it would just look like my father had been doing all that stuff?”

  I slumped a little. She had a point.

  “We can’t just take it to the FBI without knowing what it means, can we?”

  “Well, ain’t like we can just sit on it. That’s still a felony if they find out, Ashley.”

  She put the stack back where she’d grabbed it from and got to her feet. “But if he’s innocent?”

  I sighed. “And if he’s not? What then? Look, you can’t figure it out, I can’t figure it out. Peter has contacts with a forensic accountant firm, people who deal with this kind of thing. With wire fraud and money laundering. But I don’t think he’ll help us with it.”

  She paced in front of us. “Okay, let’s try and figure this out. Why would my father leave all this here?”

  “Because it didn’t incriminate him? Because it did incriminate him, but he’s already on the run?”

  “Or,” she said slowly, almost as if she didn’t want to admit what was about to come out her mouth, “he didn’t have a choice in the matter.”

  I weighed the options. None of them were good. “Alright, let’s look at this objectively.”

  She nodded.

  “He was here until two nights ago. We know that because of the curry. He was here at least the night you had your, uh, personal chef up here.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m also pretty sure he was here the night of the burglary.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “The alarm code. Whoever came in here, your father may have been here to turn them off. Probably so the security company wouldn’t come out and look over the place before he was gone.”

  “Gone? You think he ran?”

  “Wouldn’t you? Crazy people come into your house looking for you or your paperwork? They’ve found you, so you bug out? But, you have to do it on foot because your daughter has the car you brought all the way out here.”

  “So he could be wandering around out there? In the woods?”

  What I couldn’t say was that I was pretty sure he wasn’t outside wandering in the woods. Jake or I would have smelled him when we were checking around out back. Instead, I just shook my head. “Jake’s a pretty good tracker. Got some Native American in him, or something.”

  She just gave me a flat look. “Jake?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, Jake. But, that’s besides the point. There wasn’t any sign of him.”

  “So we’re stuck? With no leads?”

  “For right now, yeah.”

  And that was when a strange look crossed her face as, downstairs, a donkey began to bray.

  “What the hell’s that?” I asked, getting up from the bed and pulling out my gun.

  “My cell phone,” she said, clearly flustered. She raced out of the room. “That’s my father’s ringtone!”

  Chapter Forty-one – Ashley

  Leaning heavily on the banister, I took the stairs two steps at a time, a constant mantra on my lips. “Don’t hang up, don’t hang up.”

  I ran through the living room, Frank trying hard to keep up as I weaved in and out of the destroyed furniture.

  I couldn’t believe I’d completely forgotten about my phone! How many missed calls might I have had from him? Or missed texts responding to the voicemail I’d left the day before? I snatched the phone off the small kitchen table as the donkey brayed again and again.

  “Father?” I asked, nearly breathless.


  “Ashley? Dear? Are you there?” His voice was just like I remembered it. Rich, cultured, smooth. If someone’s voice had a flavor, his would be cognac.

  “Oh my God! Where the hell have you been? I’ve been worried sick about you!”

  “Dear, don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself. I’m calling to make sure you’re okay, that’s all. I heard about what happened yesterday, and I wanted to make sure you were fine.”

  Frank came up just then, his brow furrowed and his jaw set as he watched me.

  I paused, my lips pressed into a thin line. “They didn’t hurt me, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m just here at the cabin, trying to clean up.”

  “Shaken up at all?”

  “No. I’m fine. I said I’m fine. Even though your cartel buddies were taking potshots at me and my bodyguard.”

  There was no response, just a sigh.

  “That’s right, I have a bodyguard now. A fucking bodyguard, father. That’s what this bullshit has done to me. So, yes, I’m fine, I guess.”

  “Ashley, they’re not my buddies–”

  “Clearly not. Well, not anymore, at least.”

  He sighed again. “I see you’ve spoken to your stepmother and Barbara. That they’ve gotten to you as well.”

  “I also found–” I paused as Frank began to shake his head at me, but I ignored him. “–your documents. What are they? What are you trying to hide?”

  Frank threw his hands up in the air and walked away from me.

  Which was fine. He didn’t know my father like I did.

  Father growled deep in his throat. “You didn’t tell that bitch Barbara about them, did you?”

  “No. Why shouldn’t I, though? What are they supposed to be? Why did you steal them from the office and drag them all the way out here?”

  He paused. My father almost never paused, not when he was being truthful. “They’re the papers they’ve been using to frame me for their embezzlement. Barbara somehow weaseled her way into the accounts and has made the financials look like I’m siphoning money out to the Caymans.”

  “You’re not though, are you?”