Elusive (On The Run Book #1) (20 page)

She suddenly felt too warm. “So
did you find the Street of Dreams—er, I mean, Shops?” Zoe asked.

“It’s on the map. Shouldn’t be too
hard to find.”

––––––––

Venice

Tuesday, 8:37 a.m.

––––––––

“THIS place looks familiar,” Zoe
said forty-five minutes later as she glanced around the
campo
, a small cobblestoned
square lined with shops, cafés, and stately buildings with Moorish windows. “I
think I remember that green awning at the restaurant next to the gondolas.”

Jack consulted the map again. “We
must have taken the second street, instead of the third.” He sounded a bit
frustrated.

“Don’t worry about it,” Zoe said.
“Venice is notorious for being a difficult city to navigate. We should probably
just ask.”

“We don’t want to draw any
attention to ourselves.”

“Then we should buy a camera and
some clothes in bright colors.” The layer of clouds had burned off as the sun
rose and with every minute that passed, there seemed to be exponentially more
tourists wandering the city. “It really is a tourist city. It seems like almost
everyone here either is a tourist or works in a tourist-related job,” she said
as they left the
campo
,
or small
piazza
,
and walked over a small arched bridge to a skinny street lined with shops. “Do
you think there’s some pattern to the stores? It seems to be mask, glass,
leather, and paper, repeated over and over again,” Zoe said, glancing into the
window crammed with gaudy carnival masks in every possible shade.

“No idea,” Jack said, his
attention focused on the map. “Take a right here,” he said, “then
left
. That’s what we did
wrong last time.” He nodded down the tunnel-like street and said, “The Street
of Shops.” They meandered down the street, matching their pace to the browsing
tourists.

Zoe stopped in front of an alcove
set into the stucco wall. “It’s the Madonna,” she said, excitedly. “From
Connor’s pictures.” Inside the pointed arch, the flat-featured mother and child
looked serenely at one another. A note, a candle, and a few dried flowers
rested on the ledge of the small shrine.

“Are you sure?” Jack asked.

“Yes. It’s the same pose and the
same background—dark blue with stars. Connor was definitely here.”

They continued down the street,
and even at their slow pace, they almost missed the small sign, a plaque sent
into the wall beside a doorway. “Wait,” Zoe said, catching Jack’s sleeve.
“There it is, Murano Glassworks,” she said coming to a stop in front of a
window with several glass vases and exquisite glass sculptures on display. The
interior of the shop was dark.

“Open at ten,” Jack said, reading
the card behind the iron bars covering the glass door.

They paced back the way they’d
come and Jack pointed to a small sign for the Hotel Art Deco.

Jack stuck his head in the empty
reception area. There was a wooden desk with baroque engravings atop a worn red
Oriental rug, two small bentwood chairs in front of the desk, and a row of
cubbyholes on the wall behind it. “No computer. Either they only keep paper
records or they use a laptop that isn’t here,” Jack said. “I guess we’ll have
to ask.” His tone conveyed that he’d rather be snooping through computer
records.

He made a move to go inside, but
Zoe said, “Let’s get a picture of Connor. He may not have used his name. We can
ask if anyone remembers him. I bet we can find an Internet café.”

They returned to the street.
“Sounds good. There’s only about ten rooms, so hopefully someone will remember
him.”

After more walking, they found an
open Internet café and used some of their dwindling euros to buy an hour’s
worth of Internet. Zoe went directly to the sites of the Dallas newspapers. She
swallowed and shot a glance at Jack. They were front-page news. “I’d hoped that
the story would have faded,” Zoe said. Jack just shook his head as he said,
“There’s one with a picture of Connor. Print that and I’ll pick it up at the
front.”

Biting her lower lip, Zoe skimmed
through the article, then let out a whoosh of breath. “Nothing new,” she
informed Jack when he returned. Then read aloud, “The pair was last seen in Las
Vegas. Local and federal law enforcement officials are coordinating their
investigation and urge anyone with information to contact them.” She turned to
Jack. “Then what happened at our hotel in Naples? They knew we were there.”

“Maybe they’re not releasing that
detail,” Jack said. Zoe switched to Italian news, opened a window on a
translation program and began searching news from Naples. Jack, who had been
hovering over her shoulder, sighed and pulled up a chair. “What? We have time,”
Zoe said. “The store doesn’t open for another half hour and we paid for the
whole hour of Internet access.” She paged through several lines of results,
then clicked on a story about an incident at a hotel in the
Via Chiaia
area. The
translation wasn’t flawless, but she got the gist of the article. She twisted
toward Jack. “Someone called the police and reported a bomb at the hotel in
Room 12.”

Jack gave the article a
considering look. “That could be what the police released to the media.”

“You mean that may not be what
happened? Why would they lie? Why would they do that?”

“Maybe that’s what they were asked
to do. We’ve been a lot more relaxed this morning because we think they don’t
know where we are. Maybe that’s what they want us to think. We let our guard
down, they’ll catch us unaware.”

Zoe glanced at the window, almost
expecting to see uniformed men closing in on them. But there was no one there
except a short, sixtyish Italian woman puffing away on a cigarette as she
walked her Corgi and a delivery guy pushing a cart full of boxes.

“Or maybe it was a coincidence.
Maybe we got caught up in some crank call,” Jack said.

“I don’t believe that,” Zoe said.

“Me either.”

“Okay, one more site,” she said as
she went to Jenny Singletarry’s blog. She’d broken the story about the sighting
of them in Vegas. Maybe she had something else. The page loaded with a picture
of Connor smiling roguishly, his eyes twinkling under his blond hair. The title
of the article was “Con Man.”

Zoe read aloud, “Connor Freeman
appeared to be a partner in a small business start-up that had beaten the odds
in the sometimes brutal green industry sector, but his murder reveals that he
was more con man than anything else, and his business was more a house of cards
than a solid investment. A man with a shady past, he’d spent most of his life
in Las Vegas, running small time scams...” Zoe quickly ran through the list of
known scams Connor had pulled to the next section.

“Questions remain as to why
Freeman moved his scams to Dallas and whether or not his business partner was
also his partner in the GRS con, which bilked money from companies and
investors, promising green recycling options, but then disposed of the products
in the cheapest—and least green—way possible. Bogus press releases and chatter
on trading message boards pushed the stock price up until it collapsed.
Investors, who are left with huge losses after the stock bottomed out, are
fearful that they will never see the return on investment they were promised.”

Zoe swiveled toward Jack. “Could
that be true? That GRS was a front? That’s what she’s saying, right?”

Jack closed his eyes for a few
seconds. “I don’t see how it’s possible. I checked everything. I approved
everything. I talked with our clients, the presidents of those companies. And
our contacts overseas...I spoke to them, too.”

“She has a long list of sources,”
Zoe said, reluctantly. The fine print, complete with lots of links was almost
as long as the story. “And, Connor did have two sets of books,” Zoe said,
slowly. “I don’t suppose it’s crazy to think he could set things up to make it
look like you had clients when you didn’t.”

Jack ran his hand down over his
mouth as he shook his head. “Most of them were very hard to get in touch with.
I’d call them; they’d call back and leave a message. I wrote it off...time zones,
they were busy people. It was all fake,” he said quietly. “A mirage.”

“Not all of it,” Zoe said,
pointing to a paragraph. “It says there were some legitimate contracts and some
recycling was done as promised last year, but then everything else...”

“Our explosive growth, our amazing
rise, that was phony.” Jack blew out a breath and shook his head. “It was
engineered to make it seem like we were a good investment. Connor was always
all about the stock. He wasn’t too interested in what we actually did, just the
stock price.”

Jack said something under his
breath, and Zoe gripped his arm. “You’re not the first one to be conned and,
apparently, he was really good at conning people. I never suspected he did
this. I knew he was a jerk. I had him pegged on that one, but the rest...I had no
idea. He’d fooled a lot of people. I’m beginning to see why someone wanted to
kill him.”

Jack didn’t reply. His face was
tight and angry as he scrolled through the article again. Zoe knew he was
mentally beating himself up over the mistakes he’d made. She decided to leave
him alone. Instead, she concentrated on sorting out her thoughts. Things had
been moving so fast that she’d barely had time to process everything that had
happened. This was the first chance she’d had to catch her breath and think.

“So, first, we assumed Connor’s
death was somehow related to your old job and the incident with Francesca, but
Costa is deep in hiding somewhere. Retired and living the good life, probably
taking senior bus trips and doing water aerobics at the local Y, at least
according to two people who have connections and would know if he was involved.
So we scratch him off the list and move on. You don’t have any other possible
personal enemies—right?”

Jack gave a little half laugh.
“God, I hope not.”

“Good. Okay, then back to Connor.
Maybe all this is centered on Connor, and you just got caught up in it. Maybe
one of the companies....”

“Unfortunately, it appears that we
only had about three true clients according to this,” Jack said throwing his
hand at the computer in disgust.

“Did any of the people who ran the
companies seem like the type who’d...do something drastic if they found out about
the fraud?”

“No, these are legitimate
businesspeople we’re talking about. They’re into profit and loss, stock ratios,
stuff like that. And lawyers,” he added. “They’d sue us before they’d try to
kill us.”

Zoe leaned back in her chair, arms
crossed, and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Then one of the investors?”

Jack focused on the table. “I
don’t think so, mostly because of the timing.” He angled the keyboard toward
him and brought up a financial website. He typed in the code for GRS stock and
looked at the last few weeks. “No, everything looked great, spectacular even,
right up until the day Connor was murdered. Our stock was rising steadily,
goosed on by fake press releases,” Jack said, running his hand over his mouth.

“According to the article on that
blog, Connor spent quite a bit of time on financial message boards talking the
stock up, too.”

“Right, but the stock price didn’t
begin to fall until after Connor died. It looks like it’s bottomed out,” he
paused and swallowed as if it were painful for him to even say the rest of the
sentence, “at seventeen cents. Even if an investor suspected something, the
stock didn’t go down until after Connor died. No, I don’t think it was a
disgruntled investor.”

“And killing Connor and framing
you wouldn’t solve the problem of their lost investment,” Zoe said.

“That’s the other portion of this
equation—the money. Where is it?”

Zoe spread her hands. “I don’t
know the first thing about tracking missing money.”

Jack said, “I’m sure the FBI is
tracking that. If there’s a way to find out where it went, they’ll uncover it.”

“So that leaves us with...no money
and no suspects?” Zoe said, a feeling of gloom sweeping over her.

“About right.”

“There has to be a reason for all
this. It wasn’t random,” Zoe said, straightening her back, determination
returning. “We still don’t know what Connor was doing here in Venice. Let’s run
that down and see what we find out. Maybe that will answer our questions.”

“It’s all we have left.”

––––––––

“I’LL be fine,” Zoe said, placing
her hand firmly on Jack’s shoulder as he rose to follow. She pushed him back
down into the chair at the café table. “Only one of us should go. Two people
will stand out more, and it’s better if she only sees one of us. That way, if
the police question her later...if they track down where we went, she’ll only
have seen me.”

“If you’re not back in five
minutes, I’m coming in.”

“Fine. Just don’t be early.”

Zoe squared her shoulders and
tried not to look anxious as she crossed the
campo
to the hotel on The Street of Shops. She gripped the photo in her hand and
stepped into the tiny room that served as the hotel lobby. A woman in her
twenties with a beaky nose and frizzy golden hair in a halo around her head sat
behind the desk.

“
Boun giorno
. English?” Zoe asked.

Zoe thought the young woman’s
sharp nod didn’t bode well for potential information gathering. Zoe held out
the picture of Connor, but the woman kept her clasped hands together on the
desk. She seemed to be all business.

“Have you seen this man? He’s
gone. Just up and left,” Zoe said. It was true. Connor was gone. He wasn’t ever
coming back.

The woman looked at the picture
for a long moment, her lips clamped together. Zoe had to get something from
this woman, she thought, quickly looking over the desk. There was now a laptop
among the papers and, if she knew Jack, his next suggestion would be to get a
look at the laptop. Zoe didn’t want to do that—look what had happened last time
they’d tried to look at someone’s computer. Surely, she could convince this
woman to help her? The blond had unclasped her hands and was now tapping a pen
against a stack of papers impatiently.

“I’m sorry to take up your time,
but if you could help me out, I’d really appreciate it.” Still no change in her
facial expression. Zoe was seriously beginning to wonder if the woman spoke
English at all. “He was supposed to be somewhere else, but I found his travel
plans, and he’s been here—a lot.” She stumbled on, thinking of everything that
had happened in the last few days, she let the horror of finding a dead body,
the questioning by the police and the feds, the thought that Jack was dead, the
fear that had raced through her when Stubby Guy shot at her...she let her
emotions surface and felt her throat go scratchy and her vision blur slightly.
She sniffed, trying to get herself back under control. She couldn’t completely
lose it here in front of this cold stranger.

“You should sit,” the woman said
as she yanked opened a sticky drawer, pulled several tissues out, and handed
them to Zoe.

As Zoe leaned forward to sit down,
the ring she wore on the chain slipped over the neckline of her shirt and swung
free. Zoe took the tissue and wiped her eyes while the woman stared at the ring
for a moment. Then she abruptly held out her hand for the picture. Zoe handed
it over.

“Because I hate cheating bastards,
I will help you,” she said. She gave the picture a quick glance. “Yes. He was here.
Several times.
Signore
Johnson. He comes, stays in Room Eight, always alone. He does not meet anyone
here or bring back anyone,” she said, and Zoe was surprised to see a trace of
compassion in her face. “That is all I know.”

It wasn’t much, but it was
confirmation that he’d stayed there. “Room Eight? Do you think I could see it?”
Zoe asked, wondering if that was pressing her luck, but the woman glanced at
the cubbyholes behind her and gave a very Gallic shrug. She pulled the key out
of the slot, and Zoe quickly followed her to a narrow staircase. “Is broken,”
she said, gesturing at the elevator that looked big enough for either one
skinny pre-adolescent or two emaciated runway models.

As they stepped onto the third
floor, the top floor, she said, “He was a strange one, always in his room. I
asked him if he saw the basilica or the palace, and he said, ‘no time.’ Why
come to Venice to sit in a room?” She shook her head at the incomprehensible
Americano
.

She unlocked the door and stepped
back. Zoe entered, glanced around, and thought that asking to see the room had
been a stupid idea. There was nothing to see. Connor hadn’t been here in
weeks—what was the last date? Two or three weeks ago? The room had been cleaned
and probably occupied by several other tourists during that time. The room had
dark exposed beams on the ceiling, a carved armoire, and a delicate Venetian
glass chandelier, all beautifully kept and perfectly clean. There wasn’t even a
tissue in the trashcan in the white-tiled bath.

“It’s charming,” Zoe said as she
moved to the room’s window. The floor was high enough to give an excellent view
of the faded orange roofs interspersed with domes and bell towers. Her gaze
dropped lower, and she realized she was also high enough to see over the burgundy
awning at the hotel’s doorway. In fact, she had an excellent view down the
Street of Shops and could see the front door of Murano Glassworks. Zoe stepped
away from the window. “He asked for this room, especially?”

“
Si
, always,” she said.

––––––––

––––––––

––––––––

JACK was walking toward the hotel
when Zoe emerged from the doorway. She quickly paced over to him, threaded her
arm through his. “Connor stayed there,” she said, her voice excited. “He
specifically asked for Room Eight.” She paused when they were far enough down
the street to get a good view of the whole street. She studied the hotel’s
façade for a moment, then said, “It’s the only room with a clear view of Murano
Glassworks. The other rooms are either too low or the view is blocked by the
hotel’s awning or the sign for the
trattoria
,”
she said glancing up at the sign for the
Trattoria
da Lucia
.

“You got into the room?” Jack
asked, surprised.

“Yes, the desk clerk doesn’t like
cheating bastards, which is what I let her think Connor was.” Zoe tilted her
head. “Actually, he was a cheating bastard, just not in the area she thought.
Anyway, the woman said he always asked for that specific room, and he never met
anyone at the hotel or brought anyone back. He didn’t go out to sightsee. He
spent most of the time in his room.”

“Watching Murano Glassworks, you
think?”

“What else could he be doing?”

They both looked toward the store,
which now had the door propped open. A man emerged and walked in the opposite
direction. Jack tensed as Zoe said, “Hey, that was Stubby Guy.”

“Your turn to wait at the café,”
Jack said, handing her some euros from his pocket.

“But—”

“One person attracts less
attention,” Jack said, already moving away across the cobblestones.

“I hate it when my own reasoning
comes back to bite me,” Zoe said under her breath. Jack disappeared around the
corner. Zoe’s glance pinged between the café on the
campo
and the glass shop. It really was no
contest. She wasn’t thirsty. She wanted to shop, specifically at Murano
Glassworks. She knew Jack would not be happy, but she gave a mental shrug and
headed for the shop. She’d just take a quick look around.

A bell over the door jingled as
she stepped inside. The thin sunlight lit up the door and display window, but
once she’d moved a few steps into the shop, it was much dimmer and cooler. The
shop was fairly small, about ten square feet. The richness of the decoration
made Zoe think it must have been part of a larger
palazzo
that had been divided into shops. The
lower portions of the walls were paneled in a rich, dark wood. The floor was a
terrazzo mosaic in shades of pink, cream, white, and gold with a compass rose
at the center. A pink all-glass chandelier with gold leaf accents hung
suspended from the coved ceiling. The chandelier had been converted to
electricity. Modern light bulbs glowed from plastic candle-shaped holders.
Exquisite glass displays ranged around the room: bowls in pale pastels, vases
in brilliant bursts of primary colors, even figurines in the shapes of horses,
flowers, and fish. A counter at the back of the room showed off jewelry in
bright colors. A very modern cash register and credit card machine sat atop the
counter at the back of the room. Beyond the counter, a door stood open,
revealing a large dark-paneled corridor.

The shop was empty, so Zoe strolled
carefully among the glass. She tucked her messenger bag close and stepped
cautiously, afraid that if she bumped something and broke it, she’d never be
able to pay for it. A price tag peeped out from behind a translucent pale blue
bowl with a fluted edge. One hundred-twenty-nine euro. She didn’t need to do
the currency conversion to know that she couldn’t afford to break anything.

Zoe edged her way through the
tables and shelves for a few minutes, but no one arrived to mind the store.
She’d assumed they had a closed circuit camera somewhere and were monitoring
the room, but maybe not. She browsed carefully through the displays. Why would
Connor care about this shop and all this glass? She hadn’t seen anything like
the decorative glass in his apartment or his house in Dallas. He didn’t seem
the type to collect
objet d’art
either. She stopped at the back of the store at a small table covered with the
round paperweights filled with
millefiori
.

These paperweights were exactly
like the ones Connor had insisted GRS give to clients. She picked one up. The
rounded glass magnified the intricate designs captured inside. She turned it
over. A green felt pad covered the bottom, but unlike the GRS promotional
paperweights, this one didn’t have the GRS logo and contact information on it.
She put it back, eyeing the white boxes on the table, which contained more
paperweights.

She’d also seen them in Eddie’s
store in Vegas as well as Connor’s apartment. A cardboard box half filled with
the white paperweight boxes was shoved partially under the table. It looked as
if someone had been unpacking the box and been interrupted. Some of the square
white boxes that filled the interior were piled on the floor. Each white box,
the perfect size to hold one paperweight snuggly was topped with a black stamp
of the winged lion.

Stacks of the small boxes lined
the back of the table, stock to move to the front of the table as the
paperweights sold, Zoe assumed. She scanned across the pristine imprints of the
winged lions, each figure crisp and sharp, except for one. It was in the
cardboard box at her feet. The smudged outline stood out sharply among the
other perfect imprints.

Connor had a box of these
paperweights at his apartment. She remembered looking at it as she explored his
place and thinking it odd that he’d had some delivered there. GRS didn’t have
any clients in Vegas—they only had three clients, period. Why would he need a
whole box of these paperweights? It really wasn’t much to go on, but there was
nothing else that even remotely connected to Connor here—at least, not that she
could see.

She reached down and picked up the
white box with the smudged winged-lion imprint. The lid held tight, but she
pried it off and saw it contained a paperweight, this one in shades of red and
blue with little flecks of white and gold worked into the design. She pulled it
out and turned it over, feeling a wrinkle in the green felt.

“
Boun giorno
.” The voice came from behind Zoe’s
shoulder and she jerked with surprise, almost dropping the paperweight. She
caught it, tucking it into her chest and turned to the woman. The woman’s
attention was fixed on the paperweight Zoe held close. She murmured something
to Zoe in Italian, an apology, Zoe assumed, but she wasn’t concentrating on the
woman’s words because she was so fixated on her face.

It was Francesca.