Double Cross (2 page)
I turned on the water and cupped my hands beneath the faucet. It was time to wake up and plan what we would say to Elise. After splashing my face and patting it with a towel, I turned around, leaned back against the sink, and crossed my arms. I caught a whiff of the lavender cologne I’d taken to spraying on my wrists before bed. The Internet said it would soothe me into peaceful slumber. For fifty dollars an ounce, it should have brought me warm milk and rocked me to sleep. I tried to recall how I’d slept the past few nights, then caught myself. I was just looking for ways to waste time. I needed to focus. The issue at hand was Elise.
Simon informed me about the missing money just before he left for Beirut. His former accountant, Brandon, had confronted him about it, thinking that Simon had been skimming. Simon wanted someone to know that he hadn’t done it, someone who could tell Kacey that her dad was not a thief. That’s why he told me. In case he didn’t come back. And as the whole world knew, he didn’t come back.
Elise was the obvious person for the board of directors to choose to wind up the business of Simon’s ministry. She had been his top assistant for years. When I told Kacey about the missing money, though, she bypassed Elise and went directly to the board to demand an audit—impressive gumption for a twenty year old. It didn’t take the auditors long to confirm that Simon had nothing to do with the missing money.
The accountants concluded that the board had assigned the cat to clean the birdcage. Elise had set up dummy vendor accounts at banks around the country in a classic embezzlement scam. Simon’s ministries had major construction projects going, and Elise issued bogus contractor invoices to Simon Mason World Ministries from fake businesses with post office box addresses that she controlled. When the ministry mailed the payments, she picked up the checks from the post office boxes and deposited them in the bank accounts. Who knows where the money went from there.
The ministry had grown so quickly during the years before Simon’s death—and Simon was so trusting—that controls were lax. When the invoices came in, the payables department paid them without question. By now the money was probably stuffed under a mattress in some tropical paradise. That was another thing I intended to pursue with Elise. She had developed a great tan.
Before I stepped into the shower, I wrapped myself in a towel and went back into the bedroom. I pulled my .357 Sig Sauer out of my purse and checked the magazine. It was full. I slipped the pistol into the inside pocket of my purse. Elise didn’t strike me as the type to get violent, but people did weird things when backed into a corner. If I’d learned anything during my time in the Secret Service, it was to hope for the best—and prepare for the worst.
CHAPTER
TWO
KACEY AND I USUALLY didn’t talk much before our first cup of coffee, and that morning was no different. By 7:15 I was easing my Camaro onto the Dallas North Tollway. A half-mile in front of us, the highway looked like a Christmas display. Taillights blinked and faded, then blinked again as early commuters tapped their brakes and squinted through their windshields into the fog.
I looked at Kacey out of the corner of my eye. “I’ll have to get creative if we’re going to make it to Elise’s by eight.”
Kacey nodded and yawned, but even in the dim light from the dashboard I could see her fingers clutching her coffee carafe. I gunned the engine, cut back across the entry lane, and veered onto the first exit ramp. Though my quick entry and exit from traffic would have made a driver’s education teacher cringe, it wasn’t the cause of Kacey’s anxiety. In the months since Simon hired me to take charge of his security, she had ridden with me plenty of times—including once, after her kidnapping, when things were plenty dicey. She was not a nervous passenger; she was dreading the morning’s meeting with Elise as much as I was.
Why shouldn’t she dread it? Confronting a person with evidence of embezzlement was no small thing. When that someone was Kacey’s father’s most trusted employee, a woman Kacey had known since she was a kid . . . well, my knuckles on the steering wheel were as white as hers around the coffee carafe. I eased off the gas and turned left onto Northwest Highway. With any luck I could cut across to I-35E and take a straight shot north to Lewisville before traffic became completely knotted.
As I drove, I pulled out my phone and checked my office’s voice mail from the prior evening. The first two were from clients I had been neglecting since Simon hired me to take over his security in March. In the months since Simon’s death, I had been trying to work my security business back to normalcy, but I hadn’t yet gotten to everyone on my client list. I made a mental note to follow up that afternoon.
The third message was from a private investigator friend, the one I’d hired to look for my mother. His message was garbled, and I couldn’t make it out. Looking back, it was just as well. I learned soon enough what he wanted to tell me.
My mother had run out on Dad and me when I was nine, and for the next eight years Dad made excuses for her. In the meantime he did his best for me. Unfortunately the Army Special Forces didn’t provide much training for raising girls. Besides, as much as he loved me, he had issues of his own. The battles he fought, both the Army’s and his own, depleted him. He taught me what he knew how to teach—to move, to shoot, to take care of myself—but for the other things, girl things, I was on my own.
As for his excuses about Mom, I swallowed them for years. By the time I was seventeen, though, I had killed two men and cradled Dad’s head in my hands as he died. Life had stopped allowing me the adolescent luxury of gullibility. I tossed out the excuses and faced the truth: Mom left because she had her eye on something better, plain and simple. Of course, that knowledge didn’t make me want a mother any less. Anyone who doesn’t understand what I’m saying should try being seventeen and completely alone. Your brain can tell you that you have no choice but to be tough, but that doesn’t stop you dreaming of a safe home, a warm fire, and a mom and dad.
But that wasn’t the reason I was looking for her. If not for Simon, I probably would have left things as they were. One of the last things he told me before he died was that he hoped I would find her, give her a chance to make things right. Considering everything he had done for me, I owed it to him. I owed it to myself, too. My mother was the last loose end in a long, sordid story. Or, at least I hoped she was.
Besides, in a strange way the search made me feel that Dad and Simon were still close by. After all, we were all connected—Mom and Dad and Simon and I. I liked that feeling. I hadn’t had a surplus of connections in my life.
I hit the wipers to clear the layer of mist that the fog had deposited on the windshield. From the corner of my eye I saw Kacey run a finger under the neckline of her sweater, then cross her arms and stare out the passenger window. Along the side of the road, a cluster of unlit restaurants emerged from the fog like hulking ghosts creeping from a gloomy netherworld. After we passed, I watched in the rearview mirror as they receded into the mist.
I shivered. “Fog creeps me out.”
Kacey merely shrugged. What was she thinking? She’d already been through so much. At some point a college kid should get to be a college kid, but I doubted that day would ever come for Kacey.
I wanted to touch her arm and tell her everything would be all right, but I stopped myself. I was probably already bugging her to death, hovering over her like a den mother since I moved into the house. How could I not? I knew what it was like to lose a father, and I knew what it was like to love Simon Mason, although the way that I had loved him was still too complex for me to decipher. If I was oppressively protective of his daughter, then that was too bad. Maybe someday, looking back, she would appreciate the attention—attention I’d have given anything for when I was her age.
I lifted my carafe out of the cup holder and took a drink. On a morning like this, caffeine could only be good. Maybe it would jolt me out of the contemplative bog in which I’d been mired since the alarm went off.
North of town the fog had settled into the low places where the highway crossed creeks and drainage ravines. Each time we descended a hill we dipped into the haze and then climbed out of it on the other side with a gray slick on the windshield. I continued to work the wiper knob with my finger to keep the windshield clear. As we moved farther from Dallas, the rising sun gradually burned larger gaps in the haze, and by the time we approached Elise’s neighborhood the hills and valleys were indistinguishably bright and crisp.
Elise’s house was one of the first that had been built in a large new development on the outskirts of Lewisville. After turning into her subdivision, we passed homes in various stages of construction—some partially framed, some partially bricked, and some nothing more than plumbing pipes extending like plastic fingers from gray foundation slabs. Interspersed among the construction were weedy lots with colorful metal for sale signs that shook in the morning breeze.
Even with our windows up, the scent of freshly sawed lumber seeped into the car. I thought of Dad’s workshop in the old garage. He liked to build things, to work precisely with his hands. I pictured him smiling up at me from his workbench, a level on the table and a hammer dangling from a loop at the waist of his jeans. Some scents, I suppose, are really just memories in a form that never fades.
We passed crews of construction workers as we moved deeper into the subdivision. Some pulled tool boxes from the backs of pickups. Others dangled their feet from tailgates and crammed the final bites of fast- food breakfasts into their mouths. One of the workers put his fingers to his lips and wolf-whistled as our car passed. Kacey laughed and waved. I pressed a little harder on the gas.
At five minutes past eight, I eased the car to a stop in front of Elise’s two-story country French house. It sat alone at the end of a cul-de-sac that backed up to a tree-lined lake. It faced east, and the December sun was just high enough to glare orange and gold off the front windows, giving the first floor the look of a blazing brick oven.
I turned off the ignition and leaned toward Kacey. “Do you want me to do the talking?”
She ran both hands back through her hair, suspending it above her head until she gave it a flick that sent it tumbling, dark and shiny, over her shoulders. She chewed her lip, and I was impressed that a girl her age was even considering taking the lead in such a difficult conversation.
Just as I was about to suggest that she let me handle it, she opened the door and swung her long legs out of the car. “Be my guest.”
I opened the car door and slung my purse over my shoulder.
The yard was a patchwork of newly laid sod, brown, dormant, and soggy. Though late fall had been mild even by Dallas standards, the lawn still smelled more like cold mud than warm grass. Only about three-quarters of the shrubs had been planted in the beds in the front of the house, and it was apparent that Elise had moved in before the elaborate landscaping was complete.
Smeared boot prints mottled the front walk, evidence of the most recent contingent of yard workers. On our way to the door, Kacey and I twisted our steps over and around the muddy blotches, like schoolgirls contending with a hastily chalked hopscotch board. When we arrived at the door, a north breeze was skimming the front of the house, dipping and rebounding in the recessed entryway. After ringing the bell, I buttoned my jacket all the way to my neck and shoved my hands in the pockets of my jeans. Living in Texas had made a winter wimp of me.
There was no sound from inside. I rang again while Kacey cupped her hands around her eyes and looked through the door glass. “Everything’s dark,” she said.
“Maybe she’s still in bed.” I rang again.
Kacey dug into the oversized leather bag that hung from her shoulder and pulled out her phone. She checked for the number and punched it in, then put the phone to her ear and waited. After a few seconds she tapped a button and dropped the phone back into her purse. “Voice mail.”
I motioned toward the driveway that stretched past the side of the house to the rear-entry garage. “Let’s try around back.”
We worked our way back up the muddy walk and around to the driveway, which we followed toward the back, stopping momentarily at the one window at the side of the house. I stood on my toes and peered through a slit in the blinds. A quilted day bed in the corner was smothered in red and beige pillows with embroidered cows. Against one wall was a desk painted off-white and accented with a red rooster lamp. “Nothing here but farm animals. Let’s head around back.”
As we approached the rear, Kacey stopped and held up a hand. “Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“It sounds like a car running. She must be in the garage.”
“The little rat! She was trying to bolt before we got here.”
Kacey looked at me over her shoulder. “Little rat?”
I shrugged sheepishly.
She smiled. “Do you think we should fill her full of lead with our Tommy guns?”
“Okay, okay. I’ve never called anyone a rat before. It just popped into my mind. I think I kind of like it, though. It’s functional.”
She rolled her eyes and continued down the driveway.
The three-car attached garage was in the back corner of the house. The garage door faced rearward, toward the lake. Behind the house, the driveway broadened into a large, square slab, which allowed a car to come down the driveway and do a U-turn to enter the garage. Just to the side of the slab was a huge backyard, enclosed in a black iron fence. The yard sloped for a couple hundred feet toward the lake. Through the fence I could see that the back of the house opened onto a railed-in redwood deck.
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