Hush: A Thriller Part 21

"This man-" Margaret said, and Riley knew that she was referring to Finn. Riley had told her that the FBI agent who'd come to her rescue after the attack on her at her apartment was the one she had called in the aftermath of Emma's kidnapping "-is he competent? Do you trust him?"

The first question she could answer unreservedly, the second was more complicated. But there was only one answer she could give Margaret to both.

"Yes and yes."

"All right." Margaret still trembled from head to foot, but she sat up and visibly tried to pull herself together. "Bill is coming, you say? And I can tell him about Emma being kidnapped, but I'm not supposed to tell him that we already found the money or-or anything like that."

"That's right. You can tell him everything except that," Riley said. She released Margaret's hands and stood up. "I have to get ready to go. Do you want to wait in the living room for Bill?"

Margaret took a deep breath and nodded.

Riley left her on the couch with a shawl around her shoulders, a cup of coffee and a m.u.f.fin on the table beside her, and a program Margaret liked playing on the TV. Then she hurried to do what she needed to do.

Quickly and carefully, she told herself.

First, she pulled on a pair of rubber gloves from the kitchen. Then she extracted George's black book from Emma's painting, and took it into Jeff's bedroom. Looking around the familiar room made her stomach tighten with grief, but there was no time for anything except the task at hand. Loading the machine with fresh paper from an unopened package beneath the desk, she used the copying function on the printer to copy each page in George's book. Jeff had brought the printer from George's Oakwood office with him when they'd moved into this house, which was what had given her the idea of how to circ.u.mvent the problem with the fingerprints. The copied pages wouldn't have any fingerprints on them because she was wearing gloves, and if anyone bothered and was able to trace them back to a copying machine it would be to one that George would have had access to. No one would find her and Margaret's fingerprints on the original black book.

Once that was done, she grabbed a cigarette lighter from a drawer in Jeff's desk, set George's black book alight, and dropped it in the bra.s.s incense burner that Jeff had used for G.o.d knew what purposes to burn. She never would have suspected that one day she'd bless her ex-husband for keeping his drug paraphernalia handy.

The faintly rubbery smell worried her a little-she wanted to leave no trace of what she was doing-but there was nothing she could do to mask it. Fortunately the smoke detector was at the other end of the hall.

While the book burned she grabbed the SIM card from its hiding place and replaced the one in her phone with it. It was a simple procedure: pull one out and click the other one into its place.

She was mult.i.tasking-clicking through everything she could access on Jeff's phone while making a dash for the bathroom, where she dumped the fine black ash that had been George's little book down the toilet and flushed it away-when she made the first disturbing discovery.

Two emails had been sent to Jeff on the day he died from an account she'd never seen before. Of course, Jeff, being Jeff, had lots of contacts she didn't know about, and the fact that she didn't recognize the account wasn't what alarmed her.

One message, sent at 5:17 p.m., read, Hi from Paris, no greeting, no signature, and the other one, sent at 5:23 p.m., read We'll always have Paris.

Reading them, Riley froze in the act of turning on the water in the sink. All kinds of alarm bells went off in her mind.

Hours after receiving the two emails, Jeff had died.

Jeff had read them, but he hadn't earmarked them in any way. He hadn't saved them. He hadn't forwarded them.

He hadn't told her about them.

He obviously had not picked up on the message, because that he would have told her. But she did, immediately.

The emails seemed to be clear references to Emma's painting.

In other words, to the location of George's black book.

Her heart skipped a beat.

Who had sent them? George? But she didn't think he had access to email in prison. Certainly not unsupervised email. And she was pretty sure that any account from the prison would be labeled as such.

So who? She couldn't begin to hazard a guess.

But if someone had known about them, would that have been enough to, to use Finn's words, stir the pot?

The mere thought was enough to make Riley's nerves tighten.

Should she delete them? she wondered feverishly. Would they provide Finn or whoever went over the material from the SIM card with enough information to tell them where George had hidden his black book, which was in essence his map to the money? Could they possibly lead investigators to Margaret and her?

Riley thought hard about that as she left the bathroom with the now clean and dry incense burner.

Unless someone knew specifically about Emma's painting, she didn't see how those emails could lead back to it.

"Riley? Is everything all right?" Margaret called anxiously. Her voice was unsteady, and Riley had little doubt that she was hanging on to her composure by her fingernails.

"Everything's fine!" Riley called back, and, pocketing her phone for the moment, went into Jeff's room. Margaret needed someone to be with her, and Riley felt bad for leaving her alone when she was in such distress, but there was nothing else she could do. She had to move as quickly as possible. Things would go far more smoothly if she finished everything she needed to do before, say, Bill arrived, or before so much time had pa.s.sed that Finn started wondering what she was doing.

Putting the incense burner back in place, she picked up the copied pages and folded them into as small a square as possible.

Then she headed back for the kitchen.

"Can I get you some fresh coffee?" Riley called as she pa.s.sed the doorway to the living room. Margaret was sitting where she had left her, huddled on the brown couch, the coffee and m.u.f.fin untouched beside her. The TV was on, but Margaret had turned the volume down so that Riley could barely hear it in the kitchen. She was as sure as it was possible to be of anything that Margaret was not actually watching it.

"No. Thank you," Margaret responded with dignity. Margaret's good manners were as natural to her as breathing, but under the circ.u.mstances they broke Riley's heart all over again. Even while she was clearly in anguish, Jeff's mother was cla.s.s to her bones. "Riley, what-"

The sound of the front door opening caused Margaret to break off and sent a rush of alarm through Riley.

Who-?

"Bill," Margaret said in a thankful tone, alleviating most of Riley's fear. Her only concern about the new arrival was what she needed to get done before Bill came in search of her. She quickened her step as Bill answered Margaret with, "My dear, what is it?"

Margaret said something that Riley didn't catch because she was too busy easing a pewter urn off the top of a cabinet, where it stood sentry over a fern and a clay figure Jeff had made in elementary school. The urn contained the cremated remains of Horatio, the family's beloved Scottie, who had pa.s.sed away some six months before George was arrested. George would have had access to it, and to her knowledge no one had bothered it since it had been placed on top of the cabinet. As a hiding place for the copied pages, it would work.

Uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the lid, she dropped the pages in among the ashes, muttered, "Sorry, Horatio," screwed the lid back on, and replaced the urn.

Her work done, Riley had just stripped off the rubber gloves and tossed them in the trash when, as she had predicted, Bill came into the kitchen.

"Margaret told me what's happened." Bill frowned at her as she walked toward him with a quick nod of greeting. His usually florid face was pale. "She said you're working with the FBI on it."

"Yes." Riley stopped to put her hand on his arm. It was Sat.u.r.day morning, and Bill was still dressed like he was going into the office, in a suit and tie. "That agent who helped me after I was attacked: I called him right afterwards. He's waiting for me now."

"What's that taxicab doing out there?"

"It's possible the house is under surveillance. The agent didn't want me to be seen with him, just in case. We're going to meet up somewhere else."

"Margaret says you're going to visit George."

"Yes. I'm going to see if I can get him to tell me where the money is. If I can, then we'll follow the kidnappers' instructions when they call."

"What if George won't tell you? What if he's telling the truth, and the money's spent?" Bill asked.

"I don't know. I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

"Holy moley." Bill shook his head. "Just-holy moley."

"I have to get changed." Acutely conscious of the pa.s.sage of time and Finn waiting for her, Riley gave his arm a pat and moved past him. "I'm going to be gone overnight. Stay with Margaret, will you please?"

"Of course I will."

Riley went into Jeff's room, changed into a yellow sundress from the suitcase she'd never gotten around to unpacking, zipped the suitcase up, and, pulling it behind her, left the room.

"You be careful," Margaret murmured as Riley hugged her good-bye. "And call me."

"I will," Riley promised, and went out the door.

In the cab on the way to her rendezvous with Finn, Riley was starting to take Jeff's SIM card out of her phone and replace it with her own when she remembered something: she never had taken a good look at those pictures Jeff had snapped right before he died.

Glancing out the window to gauge where they were in relation to the strip mall, she realized that she didn't have much time. Clicking on the photos, she looked at the first one that came up, which would have been the last one Jeff had taken: two men, walking toward the camera, deep in the shadows of night. They were wearing baseball caps and windbreakers-given the heat, that was suspicious right there. Their faces were indistinct because of the darkness, but Riley was pretty certain that she didn't know them. The second picture was of the same two men a little farther away. Of course, it would have been taken before the other one.

The thought that she might be looking at Jeff's murderers as they closed in on him made her palms grow damp.

She was suddenly glad that Finn would be seeing these pictures.

Then she clicked on the third picture. It, too, had been taken not long before Jeff died, and it, too, was of a man wrapped in darkness.

Her heart skipped a beat.

There was no mistaking this man's ident.i.ty: it was Finn.

- CHAPTER -

TWENTY-TWO.

She looked like a sunbeam, was the stupid-a.s.s thought that first a.s.sailed Finn as he watched Riley slide out of the taxi and come walking across the asphalt toward him. Bright yellow dress, vivid red hair-no wonder that, for a moment there, it was like she was all he could see. The taxi took off-she must have paid the driver before getting out. He would have gotten out of the car to relieve her of her suitcase but caution prevailed. The word was that she wasn't under surveillance by Emma's kidnappers, but the word had been wrong before, and anyway Emma's kidnappers weren't the only players in the game.

It was better all around if anyone who might be watching never got a chance to get a good look at him. Not many people in the business knew who he was, but all it took was one photo and a lucky hit with facial recognition software and his ident.i.ty, along with the Agency's interest and involvement, would be all over the international spook community about as quick as somebody could click a mouse.

Anyway, Riley was handling her suitcase just fine. For all her slender build, there was nothing fragile about her. The gauzy dress with its sleeveless, figure-molding top and long, flowy skirt was superfeminine, as were her strappy high heels. With her ivory skin and delicate features and banging body, she was super-feminine.

Good thing he was becoming too well acquainted with her to be fooled.

This magnolia-by-way-of-the-Steel-Belt had cast-iron b.a.l.l.s.

She was looking right at him. Her expression was unfriendly. Her luscious, full-lipped, kiss-me mouth was... downright grim.

Fair enough.

He was feeling kind of on the grim side himself.

He'd had ears in Margaret's house, and Riley had done her drag-the-other-woman-into-the-bathroom-and-mask-their-conversation-with-running-water thing again.

He doubted she'd done that to tell her Emma had been kidnapped. No masking necessary for that conversation.

Not long after, he'd gotten a notification that Jeff's cell phone had just been turned on. Seeing as how Jeff's cell phone was in an FBI lab missing a vital part, that seemed unlikely.

What seemed way more plausible-in fact, he was willing to bet his life on it-was that the SIM card that was in essence the brain of Jeff's cell phone had been activated.

He didn't even have to ask himself by whom.

He d.a.m.n well knew.

FORGET OFFERING to help her with her suitcase. Instead, Finn stayed inside the car, popped the trunk as she approached, and waited.

Which was fine, Riley told herself. She didn't need his help. She could heft that suitcase into that trunk perfectly well by herself.

If, once her suitcase was in there nestled beside his, she slammed the trunk hard, it was because she wanted to make sure it was latched.

Then she yanked open the door and slid into the pa.s.senger seat beside him.

"Put on your seat belt," was how he greeted her. A growl. Which was perfect, because it matched her mood. As she complied-she might be angry, apprehensive, and a whole host of other emotions too tumultuous to name, but she wasn't an idiot-he slid on a pair of Ray-Bans and drove out of the parking lot.

She gave him a long, hopefully not obvious, look. Not helpful. Bottom line was, he looked hot. He looked cool. He looked like a fricking federal agent that she would be a fool to trust any farther than she could throw him.

Which was, not at all.

The question was, was she afraid of him?

For a few moments, as he negotiated the local streets and got the Acura onto I-45 North heading for Dallas, neither of them said anything. With the sungla.s.ses concealing his eyes, his rough-hewn features were impossible to read. He seemed to be concentrating on the road, which at that moment was a free-for-all as the crazy East Texas traffic whizzed in and out around them. When finally they were clear of the city and the traffic settled down, he glanced at her.

"You tell Margaret about Emma?" The growl was gone. There was nothing at all in his voice now.

She wanted to yell at him. No, she wanted to accuse him. She wanted to plug that SIM card back into her phone-it was at that moment in a zippered pocket of her purse-and show him that picture of himself and shout, explain this.

But it had occurred to her that she didn't really know Finn Bradley at all. He was a big, buff, good-looking guy who turned her on. They had s.e.xual chemistry so electric that even now, when she was suspicious out the wazoo of everything he said and did, she could look at his hard profile and uncompromising chin, at the stern lines of his mouth, at the breadth of his shoulders in the tailored charcoal suit and the powerful length of his legs bent to accommodate the gas and brake pedals, at his tanned, capable hands on the wheel, and feel herself starting to go all hot and shivery inside.

So was she afraid of him?