Elusive (On The Run Book #1) (17 page)

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BURROWED deep in the covers, it
was the aroma of coffee that woke her. She pried one eye open—it still felt
like the middle of the night, despite the sun blazing through the parted
curtain—and focused on a paper cup on the nightstand. She struggled into a
sitting position and consulted her watch. No wonder she felt like it was the
middle of the night—it
was
the middle of the night back in the Midwest. She took a cautious sip of the
coffee and noticed Jack sitting on the end of the matching twin bed, his head
bent over the spreadsheets.

“Hey, you kept those in order,
didn’t you?” she asked. “I worked hard on that last night.”

He shot a look at her over his
shoulder. “You always were cranky in the morning,” he said in a neutral tone.
“Have some more coffee. Yes, I kept everything in order. There’s food in the
bag, too.” He went back to the spreadsheets.

Zoe opened the bag on the
nightstand and found a warm chocolate croissant. Light and flaky and rich with
dark chocolate, she decided it was the best breakfast she’d ever had. When she
emerged from the bathroom, dressed in her freshly hand-washed clothes, Jack was
flipping back and forth through the pages at a frantic pace. “What is it?”

He ignored her. Pages fluttered
through his fingers until he stopped abruptly, his hands going slack. Zoe
caught the stacks before they slid to the ground. “Watch it.”

“Two sets. He had two sets, the
bastard.”

Zoe tapped the edges of the sheets
to straighten them. “What?”

“Connor. He had two sets of
books.” He strode away, then back. “The number and letter codes were
abbreviations for our clients.”

Zoe slowly sat down across from
him on her bed. “Of course. The two sets of dates. I thought he’d printed the
same spreadsheet twice.”

Jack rubbed his hand down over his
face and stopped when it covered his mouth as if to keep his words
internalized. Zoe scanned down the two top sheets, comparing columns of
numbers. The differences weren’t huge, but they were there. “Subtle enough that
you wouldn’t catch it.”

“I couldn’t catch it if I never
saw the real numbers,” Jack said as he stood and paced to the window. “No
wonder he was always doing the books on his laptop and the files were never
available.” He hit the window frame with the open palm of his hand. “I should
have seen it. I should have picked up on it. I should have done more than just
glance at the accounts.”

“I don’t see how you could have.
Connor handled all the money and the accounts, right?”

“I should have realized something
was up when Sharon offered to update the accounts receivable, and Connor
brushed her off. He never passed up the opportunity to avoid work.”

“You can’t beat yourself up about
not realizing Connor wasn’t honest with you. Most people don’t assume their
business partner is embezzling money.”

“But he did,” Jack said, pushing
away from the window. “And there’s nothing in there that shows where the
millions came from. Even his second account didn’t have that kind of money in
it.”

Zoe didn’t have an answer for
that, so she said, “Did you see this?” She held up her toilet paper list, which
unfurled down to her feet.

The frustration and
self-recrimination was still there in his expression, but it went down a notch.
“No, I thought it was your list to Santa, and I didn’t want to peek.”

She rolled her eyes, but was glad
to see his mood lighten a bit. “The only thing I want from Santa is to not be
one of the most interesting people to the FBI. Or to be shot at again,” she
added. “It was the only paper I had. Do you know if Connor traveled to these
places?”

Jack took the list. “Most of
these are legit, as far as I know,” he said with a flare of an eyebrow. “I
think we have contacts and accounts in these cities, but maybe that was all a
smoke screen, too.”

“What about VCE?”

“That one I don’t know, but we can
find out.”

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Naples

Monday, 10:25 a.m.

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AS Zoe and Jack emerged from the
hotel into the narrow cobblestoned street, the desk clerk, who was washing down
the front steps called, “
Ciao
.”
Jack replied, then took her hand and led her down the steeply declining street.
Zoe had been so tired when they’d arrived that she hadn’t taken in much about
their surroundings.

Buildings painted pale lemon,
light tan, even salmon pink towered five, six, sometimes seven stories high on
each side of the street, creating a dim, canyon-like feel. Laundry dangled from
balconies, and wires crisscrossed the tiny band of blue sky above. Peeling
advertisement flyers pasted to the walls warred with graffiti and street signs
for attention. Car horns, the buzz of mopeds, and the steady drone of some sort
of drill filled the air.

“This goes to the
Via Chiaia
, a pedestrian
shopping street,” Jack said as a small car approached. Her knowledge of Italy
centered on tourist highlights of the major cities, mostly Rome, Florence, and
Venice along with information on the easiest ways to get around the country.
While the guidebooks she worked on had sections about Naples and other cities,
they were brief. Jack had lived here. This was his territory, and she was glad
to let him take the lead.

They shrunk toward a pink
building, and Zoe found herself nose to nose with—inexplicably—an image of Yoda
on an advertising poster plastered to the wall as the car edged passed them. A
second later, a moped whipped around the corner and buzzed by them. The driver
of the moped held a kid of about three braced between his arms. Under the pink
helmet, the kid had a pacifier in her mouth.

They resumed walking, and a few
blocks later, Jack said, “Here we are.” He pushed open the door to a shop with
the words “Internet Point” above it. Zoe blinked, adjusting to the dimness of
the room then headed for an open computer, climbing up on a tall barstool
positioned under a high counter. Jack paid at another counter, then joined her.
She quickly logged on and brought up a search engine, selected English as the
language, then typed in the airport code.

“Marco Polo Airport in Venice,”
Jack read, his voice baffled.

Zoe sat back, her chin in her
hand. “You didn’t know he went there?”

“No. No clue at all. My standard
answer lately it seems,” he said bitterly.

“What do you think he was doing?”

“I don’t know. Venice is a tourist
town. We didn’t have business prospects there.”

“This isn’t the first time Venice
has come up. The glass paperweights are from there.”

“But we ordered those online.
There was no need to go there. It must have been personal.”

“Let’s see if this street is in
Venice.” She typed in
Calle
delle Botteghe
along with the word “Venice” and hit enter. Zoe
clicked on one of the results, and a map popped up with the street pinpointed
near the sinuous curve of the Grand Canal. “Street of Shops,” Zoe read the
translation then pointed to a hotel icon near the pinpoint. “I bet that’s where
he stayed, Hotel Art Deco. I remember that name from his journal.”

Zoe’s fingers did a gentle tap
dance on the keys, but she didn’t push any buttons. “It’s got to be important.
Should we go there?”

“Not until I hear from Roy.”

Zoe swiveled on the barstool, and
her knees bumped against Jack’s thighs. He shifted back an inch. “Sorry,” Zoe
said and forcefully ignored the thoughts shooting through her mind about how
weird it was that she was hyper aware that her legs were so close to his. She’d
lived in the same house with this man and never once thought about his thighs
during the last year.

Mentally, she told herself to
focus. “Jack,” she said, looking up into his face, “I don’t know if Roy is
going to be able to help us. He didn’t seem very...confident.”

“I know,” Jack said, “but he might
surprise us. He’s done it before. We’ll meet him tonight and then decide what
to do next.”

Zoe nodded, then glanced at the
computer out of the corner of her eye. “Should I?”

Jack frowned. “What?”

“You know...Google us?”

“God, no. We’ve got enough to
worry about as it is.”

“But it’s better to know.”

“Fine, just don’t type in our
names.” Zoe bit her lip, then spun back to the computer and typed.

“Who’s that?” Jack asked, peering
over her shoulder.

“Oh, so you do want to see after
all?”

“You’re a pain, did you know
that?” Jack said, but Zoe could tell from his voice that he was smiling.

“It’s a reporter. She’s the one
who told me about the search warrant.”

Zoe expected some links to the
newspaper to come up with Jenny Singletarry’s name, but to her surprise, there
were many more links to a blog called
The
Informationalist
. It was a blend of hard news, commentary,
celebrity news, and Dallas event listings. The video of them in Las Vegas
topped the news column.

A quick scan of the Italian media
sites confirmed Jenny Singletarry’s summary at the end of the article, which
stated that investigators had no new leads, and the couple was still at large.

“At large,” Zoe said as they
emerged on to the pedestrian shopping street filled with window displays of
high-end designer goods. “It makes us sound like criminals.”

“They think we are.” Jack led them
under a crumbling barrel-vault arch with angels and horses adorning the stucco,
down through a short street lined with low-branched trees, and around another
corner back into a street packed with taxis. “Where are we going?”

“There’s someone I need to talk
to.” They entered the parking garage where they’d left the car. Keeping up with
Jack, avoiding pedestrians, and not being run down by speeding mopeds had
brought her attention back to the city. “It’s too much to take in,” Zoe said as
she climbed into the tiny car. “Too much to see.”

“That’s Naples for you. Barely
controlled chaos. About three million people squashed into this city.” Jack
merged into traffic, and Zoe sucked in her breath as they bounced along the
rough pavers.

“That wasn’t even an opening,” she
said as the car shot through a gap between two cars.

“Plenty of room,” Jack said as he
touched the horn and a car that had been drifting into their lane shifted away.
“At least, in Naples it is.”

Another car slid in front of them
and Zoe said, “There wasn’t an inch to spare!”

“Yep.” Jack shifted gears and
deftly maneuvered the car in front of a bus. “Like a live-action Mario Cart
game, isn’t it?” Several mopeds whined by them, lacing in and out of the gaps.
Zoe did a double take and saw a dog on the foot platform of one of the mopeds.
Ears flapping and tongue lolling, the mutt’s head was tucked between the front
of the scooter and the driver’s leg.

Jack yielded briefly at a red
light before zipping through the intersection along with the rest of the cars
in the street. The buildings and their coatings of graffiti blurred as their
speed picked up. “No one really pays attention to red lights here. Or lane
lines.” He laid on the horn again as another car veered toward them as they
circled a roundabout.

“The Smart Travel guidebooks warn
tourists about the traffic in Naples, but this is ...crazy,” Zoe said,
instinctively flinching to the side as a tour bus closed in on her side of the
car as it attempted to merge into the traffic circle. Brake lights flared and
all the cars came to a dead stop. “Look at that bus,” Zoe said. “The driver is
practically in the seat with me.”

“He won’t hit us,” Jack said
calmly, watching for a gap in the cars that had begun to inch along. “They
hardly ever actually hit you. Scrape you, yes. Hit you, no. Come on, you should
love it here—all this chaotic activity, this impulsive, passionate motion.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,
but I miss Dallas traffic,” Zoe said and fought off the urge to stamp on the
non-existent brake pedal as another teeny car breezed blithely into the
miniscule gap between their front bumper and the next car.

“Good thing it’s not rush hour,
then,” Jack said and spun the wheel, turning onto a less crowded street. People
on the sidewalk, signs in Italian, piles of trash around garbage bins, and
street vendors selling purses and gold jewelry flashed by. They followed the
twisty maze of bumpy streets until the tires gripped smooth asphalt and Jack
said, “There, we’re on the freeway. You can open your eyes now.”

“I didn’t close my eyes. Well, not
much. I think I need to provide some detailed feedback for the next Italy
edition,” Zoe said. “It focuses on the quaint and beautiful. You know,
crumbling butter-colored villas, ancient ruins, scenic vineyards.”

“That’s Tuscany,” Jack said with a
smile. “Naples is a little more...gritty.”

There wasn’t as much traffic on
the freeway, and Zoe looked out at the city, which spread from the sea to the
side of a mountain rising in the distance, its gentle slope swirling out like
the folds of a vintage 1950s woman’s skirt. As they sped toward it, Zoe studied
the top of the mountain, which looked as if it had been sliced off at an angle.
“Mt. Vesuvius,” she breathed.

“I thought you’d want to see it.”

Jack periodically checked the
mirrors, but didn’t seem to see anything that worried him. He took an exit
slowly, maneuvered through more tiny streets, until they came to a parking area
near a grouping of shops and a small train station. “Come on. Nico should be around
here somewhere,” Jack said as he slammed the car door.

“Who’s Nico?”

“An old friend.”

They strolled by vendors selling
fruit, orange juice, lemon juice, pizza, and Panini sandwiches from tented
kiosks. Tourists in bright jackets and sensible shoes with cameras slung around
their necks thronged around an ugly modern building labeled Scavi de Pompeii.
“You brought me to Pompeii,” she breathed, grabbing his arm.

“If you go to Naples, you’ve got
to see Pompeii,” Jack said.

She smiled at him and, for a second,
she flashed back to that crazy night with the dark sky as a backdrop to the
flashing lights of Vegas. It all came back to her in a rush, the press of his
hand on the small of her back as they moved through the crowds, the wind
stinging her face as they rocketed through the air, the cascade of water
dancing in synch with music at the fountains.

“It was a good drive. It let me
make sure no one was following us. And it got us out of Naples. I’d rather not
stay in one spot too long.” His matter-of-fact tone was like a spray of cold
water on Zoe’s cozy memories.

He handed her some euros. “You get
our tickets. I’ll meet you by the gate.” His gaze was fixed over Zoe’s
shoulder. He crossed the courtyard area to the group of men selling guidebooks.
He approached a young guy with short, dark hair combed up into a spike that ran
down the center of his head. He wore a tight royal blue jacket over a white
shirt with jeans, which managed to both sag at his waist, but fit skin-tight
around his legs like the legs on her tightest pair of skinny jeans. He had
mirrored sunglasses and flashed a white grin when he spotted Jack.

Zoe got the tickets, refusing to
think about money. She was at Pompeii, and she wasn’t going to pass up a chance
to see it.

Jack rejoined Zoe, and they moved
quickly through the gates, then passed the guides hawking their individual tour
services. “You found him? Nico?” Zoe asked.

“Yes. He’ll be along shortly,”
Jack said, unfolding the map that came with the tickets. He waved toward the
tall stone archway, the entrance to Pompeii. “Have at it.”

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Dallas

Monday, 11:45 a.m.

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MORT looked up from the file and
rubbed his eyes. Sato dropped a bag onto the conference table, then flopped
into the chair. “Man, I don’t know why you’re reading that thing again.”

Mort grunted and turned a page.

Sato shrugged out of his suit
coat, tossed it over the back of another chair, then removed a foot-long
sandwich from the bag, placed it beside his can of Sprite, then slid the other
sandwich across the table toward Mort. “Tuna. No cheese.”

“Thanks. Didn’t go to the mall for
lunch?”

“No.”

Mort sniffed. No flowery scent
wreathed his partner. “How’s Althea?”

“Don’t know.” Sato unwrapped his
sandwich. “Haven’t seen her in a couple of days.” His phone vibrated, and Mort
saw the readout on the screen—Chloe, the crime scene technician. Mort smiled as
Sato grabbed the phone, then lolled back in the chair to have a conversation
that wasn’t related to the case at all.

Mort made a mental note to buy
Jenny some Twizzlers. She was right about Sato moving on to a new girlfriend.
She’d called that one. Mort chewed on his sandwich. He still couldn’t believe
Jenny had pulled that Vegas lead out of thin air. It almost made up for tipping
off a witness who’d fled.

Sato hung-up with a satisfied smile
on his face. “So, find anything new?” he asked.

“Not really.” Mort picked up a
piece of paper. “I don’t see how two people can be so elusive. There’s nothing.
No credit card charges, no bank withdrawals. How are they surviving? Who’s
hiding them? They can’t have disappeared into thin air.” Sato shrugged, and
Mort let out a gusty sigh before going on. “Got the info on what Andrews and
the redhead did in Vegas on their last trip.” After Jenny came up with the
Vegas lead, he’d put out the order to run down everything on their prior trip.
“Late night dinner at the Bellagio, visits to a few clubs, then—get this—they
rode roller coasters on The Strip.”

“Coasters?” Sato said, “Not
exactly a typical date night.”

“Right. But nothing about these
two is typical, is it? Anyway, credit cards show an early morning breakfast at
an IHOP a few blocks off The Strip, then a trip up the Eiffel Tower later that
morning.” Sato nodded his head, approvingly. A trip up the Eiffel Tower was
more like it. “Then a stop at a jewelry counter for a 1.23 carat square
princess-cut diamond ring, and on to the wedding chapel. No charges after
that.”