“Fire Marshall thinks it might be some kind of prank. You know, bored high school kids getting their jollies. There’s been a lot of that this summer.” He shuffled one of the piles of paper on his overflowing desk.
Chase frowned. “Seems extreme for a joke. Could the
prank
be connected somehow with Vito’s death?”
Jim didn’t answer the question, turning instead to face Emma. “Have you talked to your friend Tony since the two of you argued the other night? Has he tried to contact you via email or text?”
“No. I meant to text him right away after the weird run-in with Vito, but my friend Kathy called and then the shop got busy. I literally didn’t have a free minute until Chase walked in at closing time.” She took a sip of the coffee, glancing at him over the cardboard rim. Chase smiled encouragingly. She took a deep breath and ran through the events of the evening. “We walked the dog home, went to dinner at the Lobster Pot, walked on the beach, heard the screams, and ended up here at your desk, where I managed to misplace my phone and purse.”
“Oh, right!” He reached under his desk and withdrew her purse. “Lucky I saw this and put it away. One of those drag queens we hauled in last night was eyeballing it.”
“Thank you.” She dug into the side pocket and pulled out her cell. Dead. “The battery needs a charge. I can’t tell if he called me or not until I plug it in.”
Jim pulled out a charger and cord. “Looks like we have the same model. There’s an outlet there on top of the desk, in the base of the lamp.”
While she waited for the phone to gain minimal charge, Jim asked Chase about his work. Chase gave him the short version about the North Atlantic gyre and the “plastic soup” he and his intern had been sampling for the last month. He mentioned using the labs at CCS, and Jim grew excited. “I hope you plan to mention the facility when you publish, I mean, I assume you’re going to publish your findings.”
Chase nodded. “Eventually. After I make my formal report.”
“CCS needs more exposure. They do such groundbreaking work with the whale populations migrating through here in the spring, but they struggle for funding attention.” At Chase’s puzzled look, Jim’s cheeks reddened. “My girlfriend is a research scientist at the facility. She spends most of her days out at sea and regales me with stories at dinner.”
Chase looked intrigued. “She’s home for dinner every night?”
“Most nights. It’s rare for Meghan to be out on the boat for too long of a stretch.” Jim smiled. “I’d miss her like crazy if she had to stay out there for weeks on end like most ocean researchers.”
“Is that what you do?”
Both men turned to look at Emma. She felt her cheeks burn, but didn’t lower her gaze, keeping it glued to Chase. “Are you out at sea for weeks on end? Never home?”
He grimaced, giving a curt nod. “That’s my life. Since I was nineteen.”
She couldn’t let it go. “How often do you see your family?”
“Christmas and Easter. Sometimes dinner with my mother in the City if her calendar accommodates mine.”
“Accommodates? What does your mother do for a living that she has to fit you into her schedule?”
“Charity work.”
Something clicked into place inside Emma’s brain. “Your mother is Lennox Anderson.
The
Lennox Anderson, formerly Lennox Vanderbilt, married to investment banker Rothwell Anderson. That makes you Charles Xavier Vanderbilt Anderson, their only son.”
Chase stared back at her, looking uncomfortable. “How do you know all that?”
“I work in fundraising. It’s my job to know who the billionaires are.”
Jim cleared his throat, bringing them back to the present. “Hey, it looks like your phone has a charge.” He checked the battery icon glowing on the screen. “Can you see if you have any text messages or missed calls from your gangster?”
“He’s not my gangster.” But she hit the power button, sending the phone into its start-up dance while she processed this new information about the man seated at her side. Chase wasn’t merely a superhero scientist trying to save the world from itself.
He was a
billionaire
superhero scientist trying to save the world. Did that make him Batman? She couldn’t help the smile that crept onto her face at the image. Christian Bale had nothing over Chase Anderson, at least not in her mind.
Did the money make a difference in how she felt about him? She’d be lying if she said it didn’t change things. But the other information was a lot more troubling than the fact the guy was a billionaire and way out of her league. He spent forty weeks of the year out at sea and rarely saw his family, and thought it all perfectly normal and acceptable. Was that why such a sexy, eligible bachelor found himself single in his thirties? No one had a chance to scoop him up because he was never in port long enough to set down roots. Could she live like that? Could she tolerate having a boyfriend who was away more than he was at home? Like Jim said, she’d miss him like crazy.
Would it be worth it?
The cell phone interrupted her musing, with dings and beeps for various alerts: missed phone calls, waiting texts and queued up emails, all with their own unique noises.
All from Tony.
Her stomach plummeted right through the floor, down into the basement. “Looks like he’s been trying to reach me.”
Jim nodded. “So that might be your answer after all. He’s involved in this murder, whether you like it or not.” He grabbed his desk phone and started dialing.
Chase put an arm around her shoulder. “Maybe you should listen to the messages before passing judgment. He is your friend. Or was.”
“Is.” Emma looked into those stormy eyes and felt the butterflies in her stomach take flight. For better or worse, she’d already fallen for this guy. There was no turning back now, even if his mother was the biggest fish on her “Must Catch” list, and even if his job kept him out on the water more often than not.
You need to be flexible when dating a billionaire superhero, right?
She turned her attention back to the phone screen and unlocked the device. The notification dings kept sounding. “Damn, I guess Tony was desperate to speak with me.”
She brought up the text messages first. Most of them were short. She read them out loud as she scrolled up through the last six.
“
Call me.
“
Where r u?
“
Why don’t u answer?
“
I need u 2 call.
“Call me.”
Jim interrupted. “Okay, we get that he wants to talk to you. Did he leave anything a little more detailed on the phone messages?”
“I’ll check.” She pressed the call button and entered the password to retrieve her messages.
“Put it on speaker,” Jim instructed.
“Is that necessary?” Not that she was hiding anything. She wasn’t dating Tony and had been totally honest with Chase. But it still felt like an invasion of privacy to listen to her phone messages with an audience.
Jim nodded. “Let’s all stay on the same page, shall we?”
Chase rubbed her knee again, soothing her jittery nerves. “It’s okay. Whatever he says, we’ll work it out. And if he threatens you again, the police need to know.”
“He didn’t threaten me, not really,” she mumbled. “He threatened Vito.”
Who ended up dead
. She hit the button to put the messages on speaker and turned up the volume.
“First new message,” said the electronic female voice.
“Emma, it’s me.” She recognized the voice as Tony, nodding to answer Jim’s unasked question. He sounded distracted, as if measuring each word before speaking. “I’m wondering…if you saw my cousin. I can’t get hold of him. He was expected for a…lunch meeting in Boston. Call me back if you’ve seen him.”
“To return a call press 8, to erase this message press 7…” the electronic voice ran through her options.
“Hit save and let’s hear the next one,” Jim told her.
Emma did as instructed and Tony’s voice filled the air again, this time sounding angry, his words clipped and sharp. “Emma. I need to talk to you. Call me from the phone at your mom’s house. Things are happening and I don’t like that you aren’t calling me back.”
The next message turned out to be her friend Kathy. “Hey, girlfriend! So what’s the scoop with your sexy scientist? Did he fulfill all your secret fantasies from high school science lab? Or are you saving some of…” Emma hit the delete button without letting the rest of the message play out, her face burning with embarrassment. She heard Jim chuckling but didn’t dare take her eyes off the phone screen.
Chase squeezed her knee. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m glad you told your friend about me.”
She let out the breath she’d been holding and tried to grin. “So much for secret fantasies.”
“Don’t give up on them so easily.” His hand inched up her thigh, sending heat pulsating through her body.
Jim cleared his throat. “Can we rewind this next message? Some of us are trying to solve crimes, not get laid.”
Emma’s cheeks burned hotter, frowning at Jim’s crude remark. She hit the button to play the message over again, and they listened to one of Emma’s coworkers leave a detailed message about a resource requisition form that she’d apparently filled out improperly. She shook her head. “Gretchen is such a pain in the neck about forms,” she said under her breath, drawing a chuckle from Chase.
“She’d probably get on famously with the ever-efficient Christine.”
Emma smiled. “Is that part of her job title? Like assistant or director? She’s the ever-efficient?”
He rewarded her with a wide grin. “Something like that.”
Jim slapped a palm on his desk. “Seriously, could we cut out the flirting? Just for a little while longer? I can’t hear a goddamn thing.” Luckily, the rest of the messages proved to be dead air and dial tones. Pressing the button for more information after each call told them three were from Tony’s cell phone. The other two were from an unknown number.
“End of messages,” the electronic voice finally proclaimed.
Emma’s eyes bounced from Jim to Chase and back again. “Now what?”
Chapter Twenty
Chase couldn’t believe what he was hearing out of the cop’s mouth. “Are you kidding me? She’s not calling him!”
Jim looked determined. “Does she have another choice? He’s going to keep calling until he gets through. She may as well place the call herself. That way at least she’s got back up. Unless of course you have a better idea?”
His mind clicked though various objections, realizing none of them were what the cop would consider “valid arguments.” The bottom line? He didn’t want Emma having anything more to do with a potential murder suspect. Finally he resorted to schoolyard tactics. “You can’t make her call.”
Emma slumped in her chair. “Chase, I think Jim’s right. I have to call Tony. I don’t think he killed his cousin, but I have to know what’s going on. What if it has something to do with the fire at my parents’ house? What if someone else gets hurt?” Her eyes flicked to Jim. “Did anyone call my dad to warn him about the smoke damage? He said he was coming home this weekend.”
Jim nodded. “I spoke to him myself. He’s understandably upset and wants you to phone later, when we’re done here. They were going to push for Sean to be released tomorrow morning, thinking he’d be more comfortable at home, but I suggested they all stay up in Boston a few more days while we sort out what happened. Sean’s certainly better off where he is.”
“Because you don’t really believe the fire was a prank.” Chase stated it as a fact, not a question.
“I don’t,” Jim said. “Right now Emma needs to call her gangster to determine what direction we go next with this investigation.”
She sat up straighter. “I’ll do it. But I can’t call him on speaker phone, he’ll know something’s wrong.”
“We’ll do a three-way call,” Jim explained. “If I mute my phone he won’t know I’m listening and recording on the other line.”
Chase watched emotions play over Emma’s face. Fear, anger, pain, and confusion finally resolved into determination. He wished he could take away some of her pain, but wasn’t sure what he could do or say to make this easier. He pulled his chair closer to lend physical support, but in the end, Jim was right. She needed to call and tell Tony about his cousin’s death, and see where the conversation went from there.
After establishing the connection between her cell and Jim’s recorded line, she dialed Tony to add him to the call. He picked up after two rings and started right in without a greeting. Chase heard his New York accent loud and clear as she held the phone away from her ear. “Emma, I told you to call me from the house phone at your mom’s.”
“Well, hello, to you too.” Emma’s attitude morphed from worried to pissed. Chase smiled to see color rising in her cheeks.
God, she’s beautiful when she’s angry.
Tony continued with his clipped tone. “Call me back on the landline.”
“I can’t. There’s been a fire.”
His voice changed in an instant, filled with alarm and a genuine concern that set Chase’s teeth on edge.
How dare he act like he’s worried about her! This is his fault!
“Are you okay? Were you at home when it happened?
Marone a mi
, are you calling from the hospital?”
“I’m fine,” Emma said. “Someone set fire to a trash barrel in Mom’s living room. But listen, about your cousin, V—”
Tony cut her off before she could say his name. “I heard the news, babe. Tragic.”
“I’m so sorry, Tony.”
“Yeah, me too. So when are you coming home to me? Aren’t the movers scheduled for Saturday? That’s the day after tomorrow. You all packed?”
She blinked. “Um, I had to cancel the movers.” Her eyes darted to Chase, then flicked over to Jim who shook his head. She scrunched her eyebrows together, as if unable to decipher the meaning of the head shake. “Thing is, I’m not allowed to leave town.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Would you believe I was one of the last people to speak to your cousin yesterday?”
“Yeah, I know he was coming to see you, to apologize like I told him. But you never called to say he made it so I wasn’t sure…about the timing.”
Of the murder
, Chase added in his head. He felt more than certain of the guy’s involvement in the killing, whether he’d done it himself or merely ordered the hit. He squeezed Emma’s knee again, hoping to lend support as she plowed on with the conversation.