Past Tense (23 page)

“Trusting soul, aren’t you?” Bennett’s lip curled. “Taking anonymous messages. That wasn’t even Olivia who phoned you at the pub to change the meeting. It was Jason.”

“Damn,” she muttered in useless chagrin. “And I suppose it was Jason who phoned Tony to say you’d been called in for questioning?”

Bennett smiled silkily. “Of course, my dear.”

Sam stared at the ugliness that had once been her fiancé. No, he hadn’t suddenly grown warts, but she could no longer see the smoothly groomed exterior. She saw inside him, the twisted evil of his soul. “And you drugged me.”

“Just enough in your lemonade to make you feel a little confused, not enough to do any harm. Your story about going to the warehouse was confusing enough. Now when the police find the knife in your flat, I’d say your credibility will be pretty well nonexistent.”

Tony ground his teeth in angry frustration as Bennett manhandled Sam toward the car. He debated tackling Wheeler, using his fists to wipe that supercilious smirk off his face. But with two guns, one for each of them, the odds were stacked against him.

Wheeler pulled the car door open. “Get in,” Bennett ordered, taking a tighter hold on Sam’s arm as he poked the gun into her side. “You first, Theopoulos.”

Sam crawled in after Tony, settling down with relief as Bennett let go of her. Tony wrapped his arm around her shoulders, giving her a quick smile that warmed some of the chill from her bones. Together they might have a chance.

Bennett climbed in beside them while Wheeler ran around the car to get into the front seat. The driver pressed a button, locking the doors.

The drive through Central London’s congested streets seemed endless, but in reality it took less than an hour to reach a construction site in the East End. Several hard-hatted workers eyed the group curiously as they trooped over the muddy ground toward a huddle of trailers set up as offices.

The weapons might be invisible, but Sam was conscious of the hard grip Bennett kept on her arm and the shape of the gun in the hand he had tucked in his overcoat pocket. She shivered as a cold wind carried drifts of fog off the river. A pile-driving machine pounded rhythmically, drowning out all other sound.

Bennett nodded to a man coming out of one of the trailers. “’Afternoon, Tremblay. Some business to take care off. Please see that we’re not disturbed.”

“Right, Mr. Price.” The accent was French-Canadian.

Bennett was known at the site. The realization slammed into Sam’s brain. Then she saw the logo painted on the trailers: Price Enterprises. No wonder Aunt Olivia had said Bennett’s business was doing well if he were involved in this mega-project that would change the face of East London.

Bennett handed Wheeler a ring of keys and waited as he unlocked the door of the last trailer. Inside, a desk, a filing cabinet and a photocopier took up most of the space. An electric heater warmed the air, combining with the fog seeping through poorly sealed windows to create an oppressive humidity.

“Sit down, Samantha,” Bennett ordered, gesturing toward a straight chair opposite the desk.

He stripped the tie from Tony’s neck and used it to lash his hands together behind his back. With a vicious twist he pulled the silk taut. Tony flexed his fingers. They were already beginning to tingle. More than a few minutes like this and the circulation would be cut off. He gritted his teeth, tensing his wrists in an effort to work some slack into the knots.

Wheeler took over guard duty as Bennett unlocked the file cabinet and took out a folder. Seating himself behind the desk, he placed the file in front of Samantha.

“Okay, Samantha, the games are over. You’re going to sign these papers.”

She glared at him defiantly. “Why should I?”

“Because if you don’t—” he directed a slight nod at Wheeler “—your friend Tony will soon be begging you to.”

Before he finished speaking Wheeler doubled his fist and slammed it into Tony’s stomach. Sam felt tears stinging her eye as Tony grunted in pain and hunched over, nearly falling. Grabbing a handful of Tony’s shirtfront, Wheeler pulled him up and landed a second blow to his kidney. Tony turned white but managed to gasp, “Don’t do it, Sam.”

“Make it easy for him, Samantha,” Bennett said with an infuriating smile. He extended a pen to her. “Sign the paper.”

Sam looked down at the folder. Shocked, she took in the words. “I, Samantha Smith Price, being of sound mind…”

Skipping through the conventional legal phrases, she slid her gaze to the bottom. “I leave my shares of stock in Smith Industries to my husband Bennett Price, as well as the trust fund from my grandmother…” More legalese, then a place for signatures in which the witnesses had already signed. Only the space with her name typed below it remained blank.

She looked away from the document, her face feeling as if the skin had mummified over the bones. “So you’re going to get it all, Bennett.”

For a second he looked startled, but at once comprehension crept into his eyes. “Ah, I see you know about the arrangement your father made with me. He wanted to be sure you married well this time. It was part of the agreement I made with him. Once you sign these papers and the marriage certificate—the date on it coincides with a business trip I took to Europe—no court will be able to dispute my claims.”

Her lips would hardly move and she didn’t recognize her voice as she whispered. “You planned all along to kill me.”

“No, my dear. It wouldn’t have been necessary. Look at this other document. You’ll see. As soon as we married I would have got half of Smith Industries. When you disappeared, I couldn’t claim it.”

“That’s how you covered your ass,” Tony retorted. “It always bothered me that the prenuptial agreement seemed so heavily in Sam’s favor.”

“Shut up,” Wheeler snarled, aiming a blow at Tony’s head. Ducking to one side, Tony deflected the worst of it. Even so, Wheeler’s fist made a sickening thud as it connected with Tony’s shoulder muscle.

“Stop,” Sam cried. “You’re killing him.”

“Not yet.” Bennett smiled grimly. “But I’m prepared to if you don’t sign. And remember, there are lots of ways to die.”

Sam’s eyes skittered from Bennett’s face to Tony’s. All the color had gone from his skin, leaving it a pasty gray. He looked sick, almost as sick as she felt.

“Okay, give me the pen.”

“Sensible decision, Sam,” Bennett said. “You see, that’s where you and I differ. I’ve always found it safer and more profitable not to care about anyone. Too much emotional baggage slows you down.”

“What a rotten way to live.” Sam stabbed at the paper with the pen. Perhaps someone would contest these diabolical documents with which she signed away both her integrity and her life.

“Maybe,” Bennett said complacently. “But if you don’t care for anyone, no one can use it as a weapon against you. Emotions have no place with ambition. That was Dubray’s weakness. He got soft, too soft for this business. If he’d played along, he could have had a great future.”

“A future that ended permanently last night,” Tony said. He glared murderously at Wheeler as the man lifted his gun. “Try it, Wheeler. Another body might not be so easy to explain.”

Snarling, Wheeler pulled back his arm to hit Tony once more. “That’s enough, Jason,” Bennett said crisply. “He’s right, of course. There’ll be no murder.”

His smile turned thin and cruel. “We’ll keep you in cold storage, so to speak, for a day or two, and then you’ll die in an accident. The tragedy will be a good human-interest story. Two lovers going off together, only to die in a car crash.”

Turning back to Samantha, he rifled through the papers until he found the one he wanted. “Sign this one too. It’s a letter giving me power of attorney. You know,” he added, “the double indemnity clause in our insurance policy will work right into my hands.”

As Tony had warned, Sam thought sickly. She looked at Tony, her eyes wide and desperate, trapped. The nod he threw her was not so much a gesture of his head as a flicker in his eyes.
Go ahead
, he seemed to be telling her,
we’ll undo it later
.

She carelessly scribbled a signature she hoped would be questioned, tossing down the pen when she’d finished. “There, are you satisfied?”

Bennett eyed her, never losing the smile she wanted to smash down his throat. “Not really, my dear.” He stroked his hand over his chin as if he wished it was her skin. “But I guess it will have to do.”

“Just for the record, Bennett,” Sam asked with defiant look in her eyes, “were you ever in love with me as you said once?”

Bennett’s smile slipped from his face, and for an instant she could have sworn he looked regretful. “You were sweet, Samantha. If I believed in love, I would have felt it for you.” He picked up the overcoat he’d taken off. “However, power and money are more important than love, more important than sex or lust, as well.”

He was a stranger. Sam hadn’t known him at all. Tony on the other hand—her eyes sought his, clung to the warmth in their dark depths—she’d known Tony only a matter of weeks, yet he’d never been the stranger Bennett was.

Tony coughed, his throat sore from the effort of breathing after the blow to his stomach. “Just how do you think you’ll engineer this assassination, Price?”

Bennett laughed. “Who said anything about an assassination?”

“Dubray did. He phoned me and said someone was going to die.”

An expression of intense hatred fled across Bennett’s face, twisting his mouth into a vicious grimace. But he recovered quickly. “So what?” he said tightly, his eyes hooded. “People die all the time, especially those in high places. At a conference as potentially volatile as this, it would be a superb, dramatic touch, don’t you think?”

“The security is tighter than a hangman’s noose,” Tony said while his mind raced over possible slip-ups that might have been made.

“Ah, but that’s where the weakness lies. You trust people. When there’s enough money available, you find out that anyone can be bought, for any job.” He tapped one perfectly manicured finger on the papers Samantha had signed. “And this will ensure that there’s plenty of money. I didn’t need Germain, after all.”

“Yeah, Germain,” Tony said. “Where did he come in, anyway? Did you even bother to look for Sam before he so conveniently died?”

Bennett’s lip curled. “Inconvenient is more like it. Germain was going to supply the cash, but when he was killed—not my doing, by the way—that source dried up. I never liked using him, anyway, because if it was found out, I would be blackmailed at best, and ruined at worst. Even though I figured Sam would show up sooner or later, I got a private detective to speed up the process.”

“Then you didn’t need to break into poor Mr. Collins’s office to get my address,” Sam said. “Especially with Wheeler already living in my building, spying on me.”

“I needed some of the information in the files,” Bennett said. “Besides, it seemed a good idea to keep you on edge. You’ve already been to the police several times with wild, improbable stories. When you disappear along with Tony, they won’t even question it until your bodies are found.”

“It won’t work, Price,” Tony retorted. “It’s hardly going to look plausible if I disappear just when the conference delegates are coming to my hotel. In fact, the police may already be looking for me.”

“Well, they won’t find you.” Bennett shrugged into his coat. “You can count on it.” He peered out of the dusty window. The pile driver had stopped its pounding. Quiet settled over the construction site as the workers locked up their tools and closed up for the day. “A few more minutes and it’ll be safe to move you.”

Move us where
? Samantha wondered with a sick feeling in her stomach. Her eyes met Tony’s and she saw the same bleak dismay in his face, although he tried to cover it with a facsimile of a grin.

Moments passed, punctuated only by the hoot of a tugboat on the river. Outside, the heavy clouds produced a premature twilight.

To Sam’s surprise they didn’t go to the car when Bennett herded them out of the trailer. Instead he set a brisk pace to the edge of the site where excavations the size of city blocks awaited the pouring of concrete foundations. Earthmoving machinery stood silently by, the shifting river mist giving them the appearance of dinosaurs in a primeval swamp.

Bennett was forced to untie Tony’s hands so that he could clamber down a wooden ladder into one of the pits. His fingers were numb, clumsy on the risers, and once he almost lost his grip as the stinging pain of renewed circulation cramped his hand.

Wheeler gave him a push, nearly sending him to the bottom without the benefit of the stairs. “Get a move on. We haven’t got all night.”

“Leave him alone,” Samantha retorted. At the bottom of the pit, she sloshed through water that was ankle deep in places to Tony’s side, wrapping her arm around his waist.

“I can manage, Sam,” he muttered. “Just look after yourself.”

“I got you into this.”

“No, you didn’t,” Tony interrupted. “I walked in with my eyes open.”

“Knock off the chatter, you two.” Wheeler swung his gun meaningfully.

He marched them across the pit to the opposite side where lumber was piled in preparation for building the foundations. One wall was already prepared and it was to the corner that Bennett led them. Here an alcove, probably for an exit stairway, jutted out from the main building. It, too, was lined with wooden forms, ready for pouring the concrete.

Bennett took hold of a crowbar and began to pull the short planks loose from the narrow end of the alcove, nails shrieking loudly as he drew them out. In a short time he’d cleared enough space for a man to get through.

“In there,” he growled.

Tony glared belligerently at Wheeler and for a moment Sam feared that he would attack the man in spite of the gun he held on them. “Why not kill us now, and get it over with?”

“I’d like nothing better.” Wheeler’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Bennett calmly pushed the gun aside, lifting his own. “We’ve got preparations to make. I don’t want any possibility that someone will suspect foul play later. Anyway, Sam, I thought you might enjoy thinking over what you could have had if you’d cooperated.” He laughed. “
Au revoir
. We’ll be back in a day or two.”