Ellie Ashe - Miranda Vaughn 02 - Dropping the Dime (5 page)

He smiled and his eyes crinkled. "That's not what I meant."

"Oh," I said, flustered again at his concern. "Sure. I'm fine."

He stared, watching me and then after a long moment he smiled again. "Don't worry about Bethany."

I shrugged as if it didn't matter, but I wasn't fooling him.

"I'll see you soon," he said. His voice was low and I was very conscious that we were alone in the empty conference room now. "It will be nice working with you again."

"I'll try not to get you shot this time," I said.

His smile widened. "I'd appreciate that."

He turned and left, and I went back to my desk, my stomach fluttering from the encounter. I might be able to tell Rob and Sarah that my feelings for Jake were neutral and professional. But I couldn't lie to myself.

I studied the glossy brochure for the Bishop Valley Estates and then looked back at the paperwork that Kathryn had left behind. The marketing materials were selling an entry-level, three-bedroom, two-bath house, and the sales pitch was doing a pretty good job of making me rethink my housing search. Well, that and the fact that I'd had a near-run-in with Rob and Aunt Marie at the hot tub last night.

"Are you thinking about buying a Leonidis home?" Sarah asked, standing over my desk. She'd spent the morning stalking a reluctant witness to serve a subpoena and was dressed in knee-high black boots and a body-hugging green dress that brought out her green eyes and creamy complexion—genetic gifts from her Chinese mother and French father. They were gifts she didn't mind using to do her job, either. The witness had actually approached her across a crowded university cafeteria so she could serve him the subpoena. Then he asked her out.

Whoever said blondes have more fun had never been rendered invisible by standing next to Sarah. Seriously, if she wasn't my best friend, I'd totally have a complex.

"I don't know. It's a long commute," I said, still looking at the floor plan.

"Lots of people live there and commute to their jobs." She picked up one of the other brochures. "It sounds like a nice neighborhood."

"I've never even been out there." I gave the cheery photograph a last longing look before putting it back with the other paperwork.

"Well, let's go for a drive. You said you didn't have much to do today. And this will be sort of like working on Kathryn's case."

"I guess we should know as much about the Leonidis Company as possible," I said, warming to the idea of getting out of the office. "But I'll only go if we take my car. I'm not hopping on the back of your bike."

I'd never have the guts that Sarah had, able to zip through traffic on a motorcycle, and I was perfectly fine with that.

"Your car is a piece of—"

"Hey, it runs!" More importantly, the aged Volkswagen GTI was paid for and cheap to insure. It was fairly reliable, as long as I tracked the odometer carefully and remembered to fill up regularly, because the gas gauge was stuck at the halfway mark. Sarah had christened it the Golf Ball because it was small and white and had dents all over.

"Fine, fine," she said, waving a hand dismissively at my defense of the Golf Ball. "Rob's in court all day, so he won't miss us."

I jumped up and shoved the papers I'd been reviewing into my desk and grabbed my purse. The law office was quiet and warm, and the financial documents were dull beyond measure, even for someone with an interest in finance. I'd been at imminent danger of nodding off at my desk before Sarah's interruption.

We drove through a light drizzle to the suburbs on the north side of the city, past identical entrances for planned communities, tidy parks, and new schools. The boulevards were wide and smooth, a testament to the increased property taxes the residential housing boom had brought a decade earlier. Behind the slightly pretentious entrance signs for "Harbour Oaks Community" and "Rolling Hills Ranch" subdivisions, the neighborhoods were bouncing back from the foreclosure crisis, but slowly. Investors like Davy Donnelly and families who were pursuing the American Dream had purchased the tract homes at inflated values, hoping to sell them as they inevitably gained in value. When home prices plummeted, owners were stuck in homes worth far less than what they owed, and some walked away from the homes. Others were stuck with loans that had deceptively low teaser rates, and just when the houses' values plunged, the mortgage payments escalated—preventing the homeowners from refinancing for more affordable rates. That added more fuel to the foreclosure crisis, driving property values lower, and creating a seemingly endless cycle of despair.

The housing market was recovering, and Leonidis Developments had survived the downturn and seemed to be thriving. The financial reports that Kathryn prepared showed the company was back on track. Leonidis Developments had built its reputation on its custom homes, creating communities of mini-mansions along manmade lakes and golf courses with fancy accoutrements, like exclusive member lodges that featured country club like privileges. It had three such developments in various stages of completion.

"Turn here," Sarah said, looking up from the map on her phone. I followed her directions off a four-lane boulevard and onto a two-lane road that curved toward the foothills in the distance. We passed a sign announcing we were entering the town of Newbury, population 1,800. Immediately after that was a massive billboard with directions to Bishop Valley Estates, a Leonidis Community. The photograph showed a two-story home with a wrought iron balcony, the house lit up from within and creating a warm glow that contrasted with the dusky skies behind the cream-color stucco finish. Palm trees framed the slightly curved driveway that led to the three-car garage.

Clean air. Excellent schools. Close to work.

"Are all the children above-average?" I asked, frowning at the image. It looked like every other subdivision in every other suburb.

Sarah laughed and pointed to a fork in the road ahead. "We go right here. But if you were to head left, you'd drive through the town of Newbury, and eventually, you'd end up at Quinn's place, the Bishop Ranch."

For a hundred years, the Bishop Ranch encompassed the entire scenic valley, with the exception of the tiny hamlet of Newbury. It was a massive cattle ranch operation. This explained the boots. But not the criminal record.

"What's his story, anyway?" I asked.

"Quinn runs the ranch now that his dad is semi-retired," Sarah said. "I met him when I started working for Rob about five years ago. All I know is he pleaded guilty and spent a couple of years at Lompoc."

"But why was he in Lompoc?"

"It was some sort of drug conviction."

"Whoa. Really?" I tried to reconcile the handsome cowboy with the image I had of drug traffickers,
a la
popular culture.
Scarface
.
The Sopranos
.
The Wire
. Cartoonish villains from numerous episodes of criminal procedure television shows.

"Yeah. I don't know the details, but it couldn't have been a huge case because he only did two years in a minimum security prison camp."

"So you don't know anything about the case?"

"No, not really. I heard he was working in Los Angeles at the time, training horses for movie shoots."

I raised an eyebrow. An interesting choice of jobs. An interesting man.

"He doesn't do that anymore?"

"No. From what Rob told me, he never went back to Hollywood after he got out."

Sarah pointed out the turn into the Bishop Valley community, and I slowed the Golf Ball to make the corner then followed the signs to the model homes. There were five houses open for tours, and as soon as we entered, a saleswoman sprung from the chair behind a desk.

"Good afternoon," she said with a toothy smile. The tag on her blouse said her name was Barbara. "Welcome to Bishop Valley. Have you visited us before?"

I backed up a step from the aggressive sales pitch, but Sarah moved forward and took a brochure from a display in the center of the room. The table was a Plexiglas box under which sat a three-dimensional display of the Bishop Valley subdivision. Lots were marked with different colored dots.

This was Simon Leonidis's latest and greatest project. The Bishop Valley subdivision was started before the housing bust and aimed to be a high-end community of mega-McMansions. But after 2007, when the economy began its downward spiral, the Leonidis company revamped the plans. Now the master-planned community consisted of three tiers of houses.

The biggest houses were closest to the Bishop River—custom monstrosities on huge lots, some of which backed up to the river. Then came a swath of slightly smaller, less customized houses, crowded against each other as the developer sought to maximize the amount of house that could fit on the smaller lots. The houses weren't custom-built, but they were big—at least 3,600 square feet each—and had three-car garages and exquisite landscaping features. Construction on these two neighborhoods had slowed in 2008, when the housing market crashed, but was off and running now.

And more recently, Leonidis had started construction on the newest phase of Bishop Valley, which featured what I thought of as normal houses—three-bedroom, two-bath homes on postage stamp-sized lots. These homes were even tighter together, with fewer fancy features, but were selling like hotcakes. This was the section that Sarah and I were looming over.

"Are you in the market?" Barbara, the chirpy saleswoman, asked.

"I'm not," Sarah said. "But my friend is."

She pulled me forward by my arm, and Barbara zeroed in on me like a heat-seeking missile.

"Have you been approved for a loan? If not, we have excellent finance options. Do you have children? We have excellent schools here. Are you looking for something to start with? Or are you moving up?"

I choked out some acceptable answers, and Sarah and I managed to escape through a side door to begin a self-directed tour of the model homes. I shoved a half-dozen fliers into my purse as I shut the door of the first house behind me.

"Man, they work on commission, don't they?"

Sarah nodded. "Let's check this out."

We moved through the five model houses, oohing and aahing over the walk-in closets and window seats. We were the only people browsing early on a Wednesday afternoon, so we took our time and talked about the features as if I were planning to invest in a suburban tract house.

"Do you like the microwave over the stove like that?"

"Sure, gets it out of the way. What do you think of this pantry?"

"I like it. Why is the laundry on the second floor?"

It was fun poking around, even though it felt like we were in someone's home. There were even family portraits on the bookcase in the office and a wedding picture on the wall of the master suite. When we were in the last house, I realized the pictures were all the same and of the same happy newlyweds.

"Hey, is that Ana Leonidis in the wedding portrait?"

Sarah turned from admiring the marble shower and studied the large framed photograph. "Yeah, I think it is."

The woman in the photo had long, black curly hair, bright green eyes, and smooth olive skin. Her white teeth gleamed against rosy lips. The man she was leaning into had blond hair, blue eyes, and a lean swimmer's physique. He was handsome in that Sears catalog way—sort of bland and inoffensive. Not one feature stood out, but put together he was attractive. Just not memorable. But that could have been because he was completely overshadowed by his wife.

"She's really pretty," Sarah said.

Pretty was not the right word. Ana Leonidis was gorgeous in a mythical way. Suddenly, the story of Helen of Troy came to life. This was the sort of face that could start a war.

A door closed in the front of the house, and voices filtered down the hall to where Sarah and I stood in the master bedroom.

"I hope it's not that saleswoman," I whispered.

She nodded, and we stayed quiet, hoping to stay unnoticed and get out of the tour without another onslaught of sales incentives.

"I do not want to hear you mention those damn solar lights one more time, Alexi."

A woman's voice rose and behind that, the sound of the sliding glass door opening.

"They work just as well," a man said. Heavy footsteps followed the clicking of heels on the tile floor.

Sarah pulled me away from the window and nodded toward the view of the backyard patio. Ana Leonidis was walking out of the living room into the backyard, followed by a tall, dark-haired man who had a masculine version of her same beautiful features.

"Holy fuck, this family hit the genetic lotto," Sarah hissed as we hid behind a high-backed settee by the window seat to watch the Leonidis siblings.

I silently agreed with her. The man walking along the patio was drop-dead gorgeous. This was a man who didn't fade away next to his beautiful sister, even with a deepening scowl on his face.

The siblings moved toward a splashing fountain in the corner of the small backyard.

"Why did you put this in? I told you, we're moving away from the fountains."

"That's not your call. I like the fountains."

"They use too much water. And it is my call."

The Leonidis siblings stood, both with arms crossed, glaring at each other.

"We have plenty of water," she snapped. "You can't remake the company as you want to, Alexi. Dad isn't giving up his vision for every hare-brained scheme you hatch."

Alexi threw up his arms in frustration. "It's not a scheme, it's being responsible."

His sister smirked. "You call adding thousands of dollars to the cost of building each house being responsible?"

"The solar panels pay for themselves. I showed you the breakdown. It will work."

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. "It's not going to fly. He'll never go for it."

"He might if you and Milo would support me once in a while instead of just blindly going along with everything he says. You're a vice president of this company, not a professional kiss-ass."