Suspicious (On the Run) (8 page)

“Jack, this isn’t good.”

Jack spoke with his head in his hands. “I know. We’re done.”

“What?”

“Safe Haven is done. Everything Safe Haven is…it’s all linked to Millbank and Proust, and Harrington, in particular. Our start-up money came from the finder’s fee that Millbank and Proust gave us, which came through Harrington.”

Melissa’s words about ruining Safe Haven echoed in Zoe’s head, but she pushed them away. “But no one—well, except the bank—knows where that money came from.”

“But we got our first clients because of the return of the stolen art.” Jack waved his hands over the folders. “And when it comes out that Harrington was involved in all these major thefts…we’re done.”

Zoe bit her lip then said, “Too bad there’s not a fireplace in here.” Jack looked at her then down at the files in front of him as she said, “but we could drop them in the river, or soak them in the shower until they’re a soggy mess, then throw them away in some random trash bin. If we take them with us…”

“Too risky. If Alessi brings us in again before we have a chance to destroy them, it would be more incriminating evidence that he could use to make a case that we helped Harrington. Let’s get them back exactly as they were.”

“I don’t like it,” Zoe said as she reluctantly handed the towel-wrapped bundle back to Jack.

“Zoe, this is what we found on our own, in a few minutes of searching. Imagine what Alessi will be able to find with all the power of an official investigation—he’s probably checking Harrington’s bank accounts, credit cards, phone calls. Everything. Harrington could even have these same notes scanned and saved on a computer somewhere.”

“That’s true, but Harrington seems to avoid tech when he can. Alessi is probably searching our bank accounts and credit cards, too,” Zoe said, gloomily.

“Probably,” he agreed.

“At least our incredibly low bank balance will show him we’re not lying. I doubt any thieves skate as close to being overdrawn as we do.”

Jack laughed. “True. And we’re using a burner phone, so that gives us a little extra time, too.”

“So, we’re unintentionally off the grid. I’m sure Alessi will interpret that in completely the wrong way.”

“Only partially off grid. There’s still the credit card charges for our hotel, but that’s not going to matter. Once the word gets out that Safe Haven is linked to the theft of the Flawless Set, we’re done.”

“But we’re innocent.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jack said flatly. “You know how things are spun. Once word gets out about Harrington, people will assume we were in it with him, helping him steal the Flawless Set, and from there, it’s only a short leap to wondering if the whole thing—our company, you, me—if we’re all complicit.”

“That is crazy,” Zoe said, but inside she felt a horrible sinking feeling. All they’d worked for, all Jack’s hopes and dreams, smashed—and for a second time, too. “I think you’re jumping to a conclusion.”

Jack shook his head. “Sorry, but I’m not.” He ticked the items off on his fingers. “We’re here in Rome at the time of the theft. We’ve had meetings and communication with Harrington outside regular channels.” Jack swallowed then said, “Harrington duped us. He cleverly set us up. The whole ‘help-me-I-smell-a-rat-in-the-company’ drew us in very effectively. If you hadn’t been in the bathroom today and accidentally found the bracelet, we’d be in custody right now, assumed accomplices.”

Zoe paced to the window then back to the desk, fisting her hands in frustration. She felt such a rush of anger at the whole situation. She had an urge to sweep the papers off the desk and scatter them around the room, but she fought it down. It wouldn’t do any good. She blew out a calming breath instead. “Well, that’s not what happened. And we’re not going to sit around and be the patsies.”

“I believe I’m the patsy here. Singular. Harrington only hired me.”

“Yeah, we both know how well that will go over if the police find us. There’s no way they’ll believe I wasn’t in on it. They won’t parse it out into you and me, separately. We’re in this together.” Zoe strode to the window then swung around. “You know what we’re going to do?”

A smile crept onto Jack’s face. “I think that’s a rhetorical question.”

“You bet it is. You already know the answer. There’s one way to make sure we don’t go down for any of those thefts.” She waved her hand at the folders. “You know what I’m going to say, right?”

“Yes, but I like this militant side of you.”

She moved toward him.

“Okay, I’ll say it,” he said. “We find Harrington ourselves.”

She nodded. “And the Flawless Set. If he doesn’t have the jewels on him, he’ll know where to find them. Then we turn Harrington and the jewels over to the police.”

***

“Welcome to Roma, signora.”

Gemma towered over the Italian officer by a good six inches. He introduced himself as Colonel Alessi. She wasn’t sure what the protocol was for greeting a European business colleague. She’d traveled on business before, but it had always been to the States. She waited to see if he would commence with the European double cheek kiss, but he simply turned and led the way to his office where he gestured at a chair across from his desk.

After she left the office in London, Gemma had hurried back to her tiny basement flat, thrown some clothes in a suitcase, and headed for the airport. She’d caught a late afternoon flight and now, three hours later, had left the spitting drizzle of London behind.

Alessi slapped both hands on his desk and drew his chair forward. “Now, I will tell you what we know.” He concisely outlined their theories about the robbery and how the investigation had proceeded. “We are focusing on three people, Harrington Throckmorton and a married American couple he gave an award to at the exhibit, a Jack and Zoe Andrews. On the morning the theft was discovered, we received a tip that they were all responsible. Throckmorton’s disappearance and a plaque modified to smuggle the Flawless Set out of the opening that was presented to the couple, indicate we should continue to concentrate on them.” He handed over a folder with a list of names and details. “The attendees at the exhibit and a summary of the interviews conducted so far.”

Gemma scanned the list as Alessi went on to describe the hollowed-out plaque and their theory of how the Flawless Set had been stolen. “And there are no other suspects?” Gemma asked when he finished.

He shrugged. “There are always other suspects.” He waved at the long list of attendees. “But for now, we concentrate on the three.”

Gemma nodded. She knew all about prioritizing leads. She ran her finger down the list of names again, more slowly.

“You recognize a name?” Alessi asked.

She shook her head. “No, none of them jump off the page at me, but there’s something…I can’t quite figure out what it is.” She had the sense that she’d seen one of the names before, but she couldn’t place it. The vague feeling of familiarity hovered at the edge of her thoughts like an annoying gnat. She concentrated on each name, testing it, turning it over in her mind, but couldn’t pin down the thought. She sat back. “I may have just read about one of these people in the papers in London—something like that.”

A tap sounded on the door, and a young man hurried inside after Alessi called out for him to enter. As the younger man put some paper in front of Alessi and spoke hurriedly in Italian, he caught sight of Gemma and delivered the last of his information, his gaze fastened on her. He spoke so rapidly she couldn’t understand a word. Alessi snapped out a few orders and shooed the man out of his office. He left, rubbernecking and smiling at Gemma. He nearly ran into the doorframe on his way out.

Alessi picked up a cell phone and made for the door.

Gemma jumped up. “Wait. Where are you going?” She grabbed her purse and followed him.

Alessi hurried down the hall. “Signor Throckmorton rented an apartment near the Pantheon,” he said over his shoulder. He was moving so quickly that she only caught up with him outside the building as he reached for the handle of a dark blue sedan labeled with the word “Carabinieri” in white.

Gemma moved to the passenger side. “I’m coming with you.” She had expected a bit of pushback—most investigators were territorial—and she was in Italy, where
machismo
wasn’t exactly unheard of, after all. But she hadn’t expected him to simply walk—no run—away from her.

She tensed for an argument, but he tipped his head to the side and waved her into the car. “Certainly.”

He put on the lights and siren, gunned the engine, and slipped into a tiny opening between a delivery truck and a motor scooter. Gemma cringed, automatically swinging her feet to the side, as the motor scooter surged up to her door then braked hard, seconds before the impact.

“They always stop.” Alessi raised his voice over the noise of the siren. “Romans are good drivers.”

They would have to be, Gemma decided as she watched Alessi and several other Carabinieri cars, which had followed them, sweep in and out of traffic with casual abandon.

Alessi said, “You are surprised,”

“At the traffic?” Gemma asked.

“No, that I didn’t leave you.” Alessi shifted gears and powered around a slow moving hatchback.

“I thought you might not want me,” she said candidly.

“Nigel sent you,” he said, as if it settled everything. “I trust him, so I trust you.” Gemma nodded. Of course, the two department heads would have met, probably at conferences over the years. “And,” he raised his finger to emphasize his point, “you saw the stack of files on my desk, no? There is no end to the crime. I will take all the help I can get. I apologize for hurrying away from you. When there is a good lead, it is all I see.” He cupped one hand around his eyes like a blinder on a horse. “It is all that matters.”

So not machismo, but pursuit of the case that had him leaving her in the dust, she thought and put it down to the passionate Italian nature. She couldn’t imagine Nigel sprinting down the hall after a hot lead. He was about as likely to do that as he was to jump up in the middle of a meeting and dance a jig.

“But I will not forget you again,” Alessi said.

“Good. Because I won’t let you.”

Alessi slowed down for a red light, checked the traffic, and then crossed the intersection.

“How much farther?” Gemma asked.

“Ten minutes more if we are lucky with the traffic.”

“So, I say before we leave, we take the place apart.” Zoe looked around the room, assessing it for possible hiding places.

“You think he hid the Flawless Set here?”

“Why not?” She looked pointedly at the files. “He obviously didn’t think anyone would be looking around, or he would never have left those files out.”

“True. Okay, I’ll look at the rest of the desk.”

“Then I’ve got the living room and the kitchen,” Zoe said.

“First, I think we need something a little better than dishrags. There was a closet on the landing,” Jack trailed off as he moved to the front door, opened it with the hem of his shirt, and slipped outside, leaving the door open. He returned in a few moments, wearing a pair of threadbare work gloves. He tossed a pair of rubber gloves to Zoe as he closed the door. “Storage closet, filled with cleaning supplies and a toolbox.” He waved a pair of pliers and a screwdriver at her as he crossed back to the desk.

“Okay.” She drew on the gloves. “But I hope we don’t need to dismantle anything.”

“Better to be prepared. I should have brought my backpack with me today.”

“Because then you would have been vindicated for bringing duct tape on an international flight.” After he was caught without certain tools of the trade that Jack needed on another trip, he had packed for this trip with all contingencies in mind. He’d said he didn’t know exactly what Harrington wanted him to do at the exhibit and wanted to be prepared for all possibilities. Zoe wasn’t exactly sure what he’d packed in his backpack, but knew his stash included binoculars, tools, and duct tape. The duct tape, in particular, had not gone over well at airport security.

“No, I had gloves in there,” Jack replied in a slightly offended tone.

Zoe examined the chair and searched under the cushions. She moved to the couch and had just picked up one of the cushions when the faint slam of a door echoed through the building. Rapid footsteps pounded up the stairs. Zoe paused, the cushion suspended in the air and looked at Jack. “Harrington?” she whispered.

Jack had a drawer half-pulled out, but was frozen, listening as well. The footsteps grew louder.

Jack shifted quietly to the door, but the footsteps stopped. A door closed with a thud that shook the building. “That sounded like the floor below us,” Zoe said.

“Yes,” Jack agreed. “Probably just someone coming home from work.”

Zoe nodded and they went back to their search, but this time they both had a single-minded focus and moved as quickly as they could. Zoe finished with the furniture and moved to the kitchen.

“Be sure to check under the drawers.”

“I know how to search,” she said. “I learned by searching for your hiding places,” she reminded him

“Touché.” He picked up the screwdriver and went to work, checking outlet covers.

The kitchen was small, and it didn’t take Zoe long to move through the mostly empty drawers, cabinets, and refrigerator. Harrington was clearly a man who ate out. The only thing he seemed to use in the kitchen was the trashcan, which was filled with pizza boxes and take-out containers. As Zoe moved to the bedroom, she said, “What are we going to do if we don’t find anything here? It makes sense he would want the Flawless Set close to him, but what if he did the opposite? What if it’s in a safety deposit box, or what if he gave it to someone else? It might even be out of Italy for all we know.”

“He’d have the same issues with opening a safety deposit box that we would. It’s only been a short time since the exhibit, and Alessi is going to be looking into his every movement since then. Anything unusual will draw attention.”

“But that’s not going to help us find the Flawless Set.” Zoe stepped out of the bathroom and moved to check the bedroom. “We can’t trace his steps.” She waved away a dust bunny from under the bed and sat back on her heels. “It looks like we’re running out of options.”

Jack stopped tapping baseboards. “I think we have to turn it around and go at the problem a different way.” He pulled their burner phone from his pocket. “Reverse engineer it, so to speak.”

Zoe opened the closet doors. “You mean, figure out the person Harrington will sell the jewels to?”

“Exactly.”

“But that could be…anyone.”

“No.” Jack punched some numbers in his phone. “I bet there are only a handful of special—i.e. shady—dealers who handle ‘merchandise’ like the Flawless Set. Fortunately, we know someone who knows shady people.”

Zoe’s thoughts skipped over their list of friends and acquaintances. “Masard?” she asked, surprised that Jack would know the Parisian antique dealer’s phone number off the top of his head. They’d met him last year when they’d run the missing artwork to the ground. “I don’t know if he deals with jewelry much,” Zoe said, thinking of Masard’s shop crammed full of furniture and paintings.

Jack shook his head. “No, our
other
friend with shady connections.”

Her face cleared. “Oh, Nico. Of course.” She went back to looking through the closet. Nico was exactly the right person to call. They knew they could count on him to keep things quiet, and, despite his rather ridiculous manner, his knowledge of underground criminal dealings was vast.

Zoe finished with the closet and stripped the rubber gloves off her sweaty hands. Nothing.
It’s not here
, she said to herself. The lack of discovery should have been disappointing, but there was something else, some important thought teasing at the edge of her mind that overrode the setback.

She stepped back, surveying the room as Jack’s voice on the phone faded to a murmur. There was something off. She scanned the room again. If she could just concentrate, it would come to her…

Jack appeared in the doorway. “Nico says he’ll ask around. We’re going to meet him at his fiancée’s apartment.”

Zoe nodded in an abstracted matter and walked slowly into the living room, then snapped her fingers. “There’s no suitcase.”

“What?”

“The maid told you there was nothing in Harrington’s hotel room, but there are clothes in the closet in the bedroom, so he was here. That cream-colored suit he wore when we met him at the Pantheon is in there. There’s no mistaking it, so Harrington was staying here, but there’s no suitcase here. Last night, after the exhibit, Harrington must have returned here, packed his suitcase, and left.” Zoe rubbed her temple. “He took the jewels, and he could be anywhere. Some other hotel in Rome, or he might even have left Italy.”

“Alessi will run down any travel, if Harrington charged it.”

“But that won’t do
us
any good. Maybe we could talk to the neighbors, see if he mentioned anything, a city or another hotel.”

“Better if no one here notices us.” Jack cocked his head to the side.

“Wait. The trash. There wasn’t anything in the kitchen but empty food boxes, but the desk. Was there a trash can near the desk?” Zoe asked, already moving to the desk.

Jack didn’t answer, but instead went again to the wall near the window that overlooked the street and carefully looked out, his back against the wall.

A trashcan was tucked into the footwell of the desk. Zoe fell on it as if it were a treasure chest, scrabbling through a few crumpled receipts and a couple of discarded letter-size pages. The receipts were all for food—pizza and coffee. Zoe flicked through the larger pages. The first ones were mostly blank with only a header or footer, and a few lines of text, the extra pages that print sometime at the tail end of a print job. A small printer rested on the corner of the desk. A laminated card with directions for its use was taped to the side, so Harrington must have had a laptop and printed some documents recently. The receipts had been on the bottom of the trashcan and were dated within the last two days. The printed pages had been on top of them.

“Zoe, we’ve got to go.” Jack picked up the pliers and screwdriver from the edge of the desk and shoved them into his back pocket.

“What?” Zoe edged up to the window. She’d been so absorbed in the papers that she hadn’t been listening to the activity on the street, but there were Carabinieri cars parked directly in front of the building. An officer was already at the steps, speaking into the intercom, a blond woman in civilian clothes at his elbow.

Zoe flitted to the window on the other side of the room and looked into the courtyard. “There’s a police car pulling in here, too.”

Jack grabbed the rubber gloves from where she’d tossed them down on the back of the couch, gave the room another swift glance as the buzz indicating the release of the front door carried faintly through the building. Jack looked at Zoe. “They’re in.”

Zoe shoved the papers from the trash in the pocket of her shorts then reached out to open the windows. “We’ve got to go out this way.”

Jack grabbed her elbow and pulled her back toward the front door. “No.”

She planted her feet. “Jack, I know you don’t like heights, but we have to. We can’t stay in here, and they’re coming up the stairs.”

“You’re right, we can’t stay here, but if we go out that window, we’ll be forced onto the roof.”

“It’s the only way—”

“No, not the only way. I climb with the speed of a sloth, which would slow you down and make us both vulnerable, but there’s a bigger issue. Did you happen to notice if this building is connected to the next one? Will we be able to get across to the next building?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“I don’t either.” Using his shirttail to cover his hand, Jack opened the front door and listened. More than one set of feet pounded up the stairs.

“We can’t go out that way,” Zoe whispered.

“We’re not going out. Yet.” Jack listened for a second until there was a break in the footfalls, which meant they had reached a landing and were walking along the length of it to get to the next flight of stairs. As soon as the slam of feet on the steps stopped, Jack slipped out the door of the apartment, pulling Zoe with him. He closed the door silently behind them.

Zoe stifled a groan. “Now we’re trapped. They’ll just find us sooner.” The rapid pounding of the feet on the stairs resumed as Jack propelled Zoe to a door across the landing. He whipped the closet door open, and motioned Zoe inside. She wedged herself between a vacuum cleaner and a mop. Jack squished in, and as he pulled the door closed, Zoe caught the flash of movement on the stairs in the tiny gap between the door and the frame before Jack closed it completely, and darkness enclosed them.