Lucky Charm (10 page)

They had been friends since grade school, he and Bill. That left a big gap in his life.

A mugging, the cops said. That’s how they thought Bill had been killed.

According to them the assailant had gotten carried away and killed Bill by accident. Bill’s wallet had been empty, his watch and wedding ring were gone.

Not possible. Matt knew that. Not a mugger. Bill hadn’t gotten that soft.

He and Bill had taken some specialized training while they were in the Rangers. Maybe Matt had found more use for it after they’d gotten out but when they were horsing around there was no doubt Bill remembered. The moves had still been there. Maybe he’d lost his edge a little but not so much that some hopped-up junky could have taken him.

It had taken someone like those boys last night to take Bill down.

The thugs had to have been watching, waiting for Matt, Bill’s wife Penny and the kids to leave the house to arrange for Bill’s funeral. It was no coincidence. Moments afterward, they’d broken in and stolen every bit of electronics in the place. They’d also stripped Bill’s office of almost every scrap of paper.

Everything except his blotter and the trashcan full of Bill’s random doodlings.

More than anything else, those doodles had tipped Matt off that there was more going on here than anyone knew.

It had wrenched at him then, in the first pangs of grief, as he looked at the blotter covered them.

Bill had doodled whenever he was thinking on the nearest scrap or piece of paper. Once he’d doodled on the last page of Matt’s thesis when they’d shared a room at college. At the time, Matt had been pissed.

The phone call and Bill’s doodles had given Matt a direction, someplace to look and had only been confirmed when Matt had gone to Bill’s office to get his personal effects. His office had been stripped, too, of everything except his blotter.

The doodles, though, had survived. They were everywhere. At Marathon Corp., there had been a doodle of the company name encircled by arrows pointing inward at the edge of the blotter. He found another doodle on a piece of scrap paper in the trash. Marathon and Genesis Co., another finance company, had been linked with doodles of more arrows. When Bill doodled, if it was good thoughts they were circled, circles within circles. Bad thoughts had arrows like lightning bolts.

Those jagged lines had been everywhere.

It was thin, but it and the phone call were all he had.

Next time he’d have to be careful and probe Marathon’s defenses a little more circumspectly to try to find a way past them. Even now he didn’t know how they’d spotted him. He’d missed something about their security. He knew more than a little something about that, he thought wryly, or he should. What was it he’d missed? That was something else he’d have to check.

It was too soon to try again, though, he thought as he stepped out of the shower and toweled off, using a corner to clear the steam from the bathroom mirror. One glance convinced him of that.

The bruise on his face would make things more difficult. It made him noticeable – something he didn’t want. That was one advantage women had, they could hide bruises behind makeup. That wasn’t an option for him. A troll through the public records was called for, instead. He’d try to track down the connection between Marathon and Genesis through more conventional means. What he could do, he would. Public servants didn’t care if you looked as if you’d had a run-in with a Mack truck. Matt didn’t expect any more satisfaction from there than he’d had in San Diego or Sacramento but it had to be done. The bases had to be covered.

Outside of the general similarity in product – finance – there didn’t seem to be a connection between the two companies.

Making himself a little space, he pushed through some yoga to loosen up his muscles a little more before he dressed. The sun salutes weren’t so demanding on his body. He knew some guys found yoga a little too… something…but the stretches were perfect for times like these.

Then he headed for the library.

The local newspaper archives were a little more interesting. Marathon made the financial pages a little more often than he would have expected. For what was essentially a fairly esoteric product for most of mortal man, they seemed to have a highly developed publicity machine. He found little blurbs about Marathon’s financial wizardry everywhere. Joe Public was actively encouraged to consider investing with Marathon as a sure way to see a steady return, especially Joe Senior. And he did. The financial ratings were good, sometimes very good. Nothing spectacular but it did catch the eye. In none of those articles, though, did he read the explanation for Marathon’s success where others had failed. Nor did he find any connection to Genesis.

All the financial pundits gave glowing reviews.

Matt wasn’t certain why that bothered him but it did. Maybe it was simply the notion of having all the talking heads raving about Marathon that made him wary. It wasn’t normal for any of them to have the same opinion on anything. The last time that had happened it had been Bernie Madoff.

Perhaps it was simply paranoia over the circumstances of Bill’s death talking.

There was still, however, the truism that
just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t following you
. In fact, they’d made a movie with Mel Gibson about that. At the moment, Matt wasn’t willing – yet – to chalk it up to that.

Instead, he returned to his hotel room.

Surprisingly, they had a good wireless Internet setup, as he’d discovered when he’d gone on line to find a nice, out-of the way hotel, but promises like that didn’t always held true. In this case it had. He e-mailed Darrin to ask him to do some checking for him. Phrasing it carefully, he tried to pique Darrin’s interest without specifically telling him what it was about Genesis that intrigued him. Darrin would be his barometer, his temperature check, as he was in so many ways. There was a reason he was the boss, he had impeccable instincts. Darrin had been a cop before he’d opened his detective agency and he hadn’t lost his edge.

It was still frustrating. Bill’s death, the break-in afterwards, the security Marathon used, all indicated the company was up to something they shouldn’t be but the only place to find out for certain was in Marathon’s offices. Except that he couldn’t get in.

With sunglasses to cover some of the bruising on his face, he watched the building from across the square.

There had to be a way around the problem of getting inside those offices. A deliveryman he could impersonate or something. Some way inside.

In the midst of the lunch crowd, something familiar caught his eye, a flash of dark gleaming hair and pale skin. Then the people stepped clear enough for him to see clearly.

Ariel.

So she worked in the building? That explained what she’d been doing there but not why she’d been there at that time of night. She certainly hadn’t been dressed like cleaning staff.

Nor did it explain why she was staying in a cheap motel. Maybe she’d transferred or something but hadn’t been able to find a place yet?

There wasn’t enough information for him to speculate. Had she said anything about what had happened, he wondered? He didn’t think so, somehow he thought she’d respect his secrets and would want to keep it to herself. Certainly after what happened that morning.

His eyes took her in as he remembered the morning. A heated curl of desire moved deeply through him. She’d been so sweet, so responsive, giving back as much as she’d taken.

The sun glowed on the waves of her shining black hair, casting blue highlights from it, as her brilliant eyes went to one of her companions and she smiled. It was a pretty smile, warm and friendly.

Somehow, though, she seemed set apart from the others.

She did catch the eye, though, with both her face and figure. She moved gracefully, hips swaying. Not a lot of women walked like that anymore. The memory of those hips, rising up to take him in, the way she responded, the feel of her, rolled through him again sending a bolt of heat deep into his groin.

For the first time he realized he hadn’t thought of Jeannine in days, not while making love to Ariel and not since.

Jeannine. Tall, blonde, cool and lovely Jeannine. The original ice princess.

Matt had thought he’d loved her and he’d certainly wanted her to love him. Her distance only seemed to stoke his need, she’d always been just that little bit remote and unreachable as if she were somehow just beyond his grasp. He didn’t know what she’d seen in him – although part of him guessed, whether he admitted it to himself or not.

To his surprise it was hard to call her face to mind and for the first time doing it didn’t cause him pain. Maybe he was finally getting past it. He’d dated since their breakup but nothing serious, nothing that gelled, as least partly because Jeannine had always been there in the back of his mind. Why couldn’t she have loved him?

Now, for the first time, he wondered if he hadn’t been in love with the image of her.

Coolly beautiful, with long straight ash-blonde hair falling smoothly down her back, Jeannine had been slender, her eyes a nearly a cat-like yellow. As tall as she was she’d been nearly eye-to-eye with him. For some reason, though, Matt had always felt slightly off balance with her. A part of him had been aware somehow that she was always looking at other men, always assessing. She’d always been conscious of things and rarely enthused unless he bought her an expensive gift. That was difficult with his responsibilities. Small-breasted and thin-hipped, she’d professed to like sex but never seemed to enjoy it much. At least, not with him. It just seemed to serve her purposes.

Ariel? Her cries of pleasure, the feel of her body trembling beneath him and tightening around him still echoed through him. He had no doubt he’d pleased her. Every motion, every gasp, every twitching muscle had told him that. She’d reached out to touch him in return, had stroked and caressed him in ways Jeannine never had.

The thought of it dug at him. Hadn’t he learned his lesson? Hadn’t Jeannine been enough? How many times did he need his heart broken, his ego savaged? And it had been. He’d been coldly, coolly rejected. It wasn’t enough. He hadn’t been enough. The not knowing why, precisely, tore at him. It had hurt. A lot. He didn’t want to hurt like that again.

One night was nothing.

If things had been different…maybe… But they weren’t.

He drifted back among the crowd so Ariel wouldn’t see him.

It was Bill he had to think about. That was the mystery he had to solve. He had to find a way into Marathon and he would.

Ariel, though, wouldn’t be it.

“Hey, Ariel,” Miriam said on their way back from lunch, “a bunch of us are going out tomorrow night. Since it’s your last night, you should take a chance to have a little fun while you’re here. Why don’t you come with us? There’s this little Mexican place we go to, the food is good, there’s a band and everything.”

It had been a long time since Ariel had gone out simply to have a good time. How long had it been? She cast her mind back, thinking, and her heart twisted a little at the memory.

Before.

Everyone kept telling her it was time to move on, though. Maybe it was and maybe here, so far from familiar memories, it would be easier. It wouldn’t hurt as much as it might have back home.

A chorus of enthusiastic voices from the others surprised and pleased her. Although she usually made friends with one or two people in an office, invitations like this didn’t come that often. In the past when they had, she’d turned them down.

Maybe for a change, she’d do something different.

She laughed. “Okay, okay, you win, I’ll come.”

One of the guys, Steve something, wrapped an arm around her waist. She’d already pegged him as the office Lothario.

“I get the first dance,” he declared.

She stepped tactfully out of his grasp in a fluid motion. That much involvement wasn’t on the agenda and certainly not with someone like him. He was strictly of the one-night-stand variety. Especially since he knew she was leaving. With no possibility of any future involvement, she was a safe target. Or so he thought.

Whatever had happened with Matthew, it hadn’t been light, thoughtless or meaningless, as it would be with someone like Steve. Matthew had been both thoughtful and caring.

Miriam stepped between them, put as arm around Ariel and gave Steve a glare.

“Back off, Steve. We want her to have a good time.”