All Night Long (31 page)

She eased her foot off the accelerator. It was probably not a good idea to drive too fast when you were shaking from head to foot, she thought.

H
e met with Ken Tanaka in a small café located on a narrow street off Union Square. Ken claimed that the little hole-in-the-wall served the best pastries and baked goods in San Francisco. After a couple of bites of the croissant he had ordered, Luke concluded that he was right.

Ken slathered butter on his own croissant and angled his head at the page of handwritten notes he had put in front of Luke.

“You see why I didn’t want an e-mail trail leading to either one of us?” he said.

“Sure do,” Luke agreed.

He contemplated Ken, who was sitting on the other side of the table. He had never consciously thought about what a private investigator was supposed to look like, but somehow Ken didn’t fit the profile. Then again, Tanaka didn’t look like a man with a degree in forensic accounting, either.

It was easy to underestimate Ken. His quiet, friendly, reassuring manner made people lower their guard. He had been very good at questioning civilians unlucky enough to be caught in a war zone. More than once he had obtained information from a small boy or a frightened woman that
had prevented Luke and the rest of the team from walking into an ambush.

No doubt about it, Ken was good at handling people. But his greatest talent was his almost preternatural instinct for following the money. His firm specialized in corporate security, but Luke knew that the feds came knocking when they wanted Tanaka’s expertise to help track drug and terrorist funds.

Luke looked at the notes. “Give me the short answer.”

Ken took a bite of the flaky croissant. “In the past four months there have been four large sums of money transferred into an offshore account that I traced back to Hoyt Egan.”

“How’d you do that?”

Ken raised one brow. “You don’t want to know.”

“Right. Go on.”

“In my humble opinion, either Egan is taking payoffs from an unknown source for an unknown reason, or he’s collecting blackmail. My gut tells me we’re looking at a series of extortion payments.”

“Big bucks here.” Luke drank some coffee. “He’s got something on the senator, doesn’t he?”

“I’d say that’s the most likely scenario under the circumstances. Guy running for president probably has things to hide. But there are other possibilities.”

“The fiancée? Alexa Douglass?”

Ken reached for the jam. “I checked around. She and Webb started dating about six months ago. From all accounts, Alexa Douglass is an ambitious woman who is determined to marry Webb. If Egan discovered something in her past that would cause Webb to call off the wedding, it’s conceivable that she might be paying him to keep quiet.”

“Egan is playing with matches and probably out of his league. Blackmail is a dangerous line of work.” Luke sat back in the booth. “Wonder where Pamela Webb fits into this thing.”

“Starting to think she really was murdered?”

“The dots are connecting.”

Ken applied more jam to the croissant. “You were always pretty good with dots. What now?”

“I’m going to have to think about that for a while. I need to talk to Irene. This is her mission. I’m just assisting.”

Ken smiled. “I’m looking forward to meeting this Irene. She sounds interesting.”

“You’ll like her.”

“Almost forgot.” Ken reached inside his hand-tailored jacket. “Here’s that key you asked me to get for you.”

“I’m suitably impressed.” Luke reached across the table to pick up the key. “I didn’t give you much notice.”

Ken managed to appear highly offended. “It’s an apartment complex. One bored guy on duty in the manager’s office. How hard do you think it was to create a little distraction that made it possible to get into the office and make a duplicate of the master?”

“Not hard, I take it.”

Ken did not dignify that with an answer. Instead he picked up a plastic sack he had put on the seat when he first sat down.

“Here’s your outfit,” he said.

“Appreciate it.” Luke took the sack. “You got a look at the apartment complex when you went there to get the key. Any words of advice?”

“Yeah. Don’t get caught.”

I
t was midafternoon and the sun was out, but it seemed to Irene that the windows of the house of her nightmares at the end of Pine Lane were just as dark as they had been at midnight seventeen years before.

She halted the compact in the drive and sat quietly for a moment, summoning her courage and fortitude for the task that lay ahead. Walking back into her old home was going to be hard, maybe the hardest thing she had done since she attended the funerals of her parents.

Like every other building in Dunsley, the house looked smaller and more weathered than she remembered, but otherwise disturbingly familiar. Aunt Helen had sold the place as quickly as possible after the tragedy. She had not made much of a profit, because no one in Dunsley wanted to buy a house in which violent death had occurred. The realtor had eventually found an unsuspecting client from San Francisco who acquired it with the goal of turning it into a summer rental.

When she had lived here, the house had been a warm, golden tan with brown trim, Irene reflected. Somewhere along the line it had been repainted a light gray. The trim around the windows and the front door was black.

It will look different inside, too,
she promised herself.
Probably been through several owners. Bound to be new carpet and new furniture. It won’t be the same. It can’t be the same. I don’t think I can take it if it looks the same as it did that night.

Her breathing was all wrong, quick and shallow. It occurred to her that it might have been a very good idea to wait before she came here, until her nerves had settled down after the road rage incident.

But she dared not put this off any longer. She had to know why Pamela had gone to the trouble of renting and rekeying the house.

She opened the car door and got out before she could talk herself into leaving and coming back some other time. One thing was certain, she thought, taking the key out of the pocket of her trench coat, she was definitely not going in through the kitchen door this time.

She went up the front steps, crossed the porch and inserted the shiny new key into the lock with trembling fingers.

Drawing a deep, centering breath, she opened the door.

Shadows swirled in the hall. Automatically she reached out to flip the light switch on the wall. Another chill went through her when she realized that she remembered exactly where the switch was located.

She closed the door slowly and made herself walk into the living room. The curtains on all the windows were closed. The interior of the room was drenched in gloom, but she could make out the furnishings.

Relief washed through her when she saw that someone had, indeed, redecorated. Her mother’s pictures were gone from the walls. The sofa, armchairs and wooden coffee table were generic summer rental, inexpensive and, best of all, unfamiliar.

Keep moving,
she ordered herself,
or you won’t get through this.
She knew there was, in fact, a very sound reason for hurrying. It would not be a good idea to be caught inside the house. True, it had been her home in her youth,
but she had no claim on it now. If someone noticed her car in the drive and called the police, she would have a major problem on her hands. Sam McPherson was definitely not her best friend at the moment. As far as he was concerned, she was still the prime suspect in an arson case. The last thing she needed was for the chief to send one of his men out here to investigate a possible intruder in the house on Pine Lane.

She walked slowly through the shadowed living room into the dining area.

How do you conduct a search when you have no idea what you’re looking for?
she wondered.
Think about this. If Pamela did intend for you to find the key and if she wanted you to use it, she probably would have made certain that you would recognize whatever it was she wanted you to discover here.

The wooden chairs and table in the dining room were all new, too. The curtains were closed. That was good, she thought. The last thing she wanted to do was look at the view. It would remind her of all the meals she had eaten in this room, her father seated at one end of the table, her mother opposite, and her in the middle looking straight out at the lake and the old dock.

She pushed aside the memories with the skill and determination born of long practice. Turning, she made herself go to the entrance of the big, old-fashioned kitchen.

At the threshold she was forced to come to a halt. Nausea twisted her stomach. Her breath seemed to be locked inside her lungs. She could not go any farther.

It was all she could do just to make herself look into the room where she had found the bodies. She gave the counters a swift, sweeping glance, saw nothing out of the ordinary and then spun around before she got physically ill.

If the object of her search was in the kitchen, it would have to remain there. She could not bring herself to walk into that space. Surely Pamela would have realized that.

She fled back through the dining room and living room
and stopped in the front hall. She knew her labored breathing was caused by incipient panic, not exertion.

Take it easy. You’ve got to do this logically, or you’ll never find whatever it is you’re looking for.

She went down the hall to her old bedroom. Dread and certainty gripped her every step of the way.

Like the other rooms, her bedroom, too, had been redone. The colorful posters had been taken down, and the sunny yellow walls that her mother had helped her paint were now a boring shade of beige.

There was a white cardboard box on the bed. On top of the box was a book. She recognized the small volume immediately. It was a paperback romance novel, one that had been published seventeen years earlier.

Anticipation shuddered through her. She crossed the floor, removed the book and lifted the cover of the white box. Inside was a white dress sealed in clear plastic. At first she thought it was a wedding gown. Then she realized it was too small. A christening gown, perhaps, she decided. There was another object in the box, a video.

She replaced the lid of the box and reached for the paperback novel. The badly faded cover illustration depicted a beautiful blond heroine in the arms of a dashing hero. Both were garbed in romantic nineteenth-century fashions. The edges of the pages were yellowed.

She opened the book to the title page and read the inscription written there.

She tested the weight of the small volume in her hand. Few people would have noticed that the book was a little too heavy for a paperback novel, she thought.

I
t’s too large to be a christening dress.” Tess examined the plastic-wrapped gown that Irene had placed on her coffee table. “Maybe it’s an old costume that she wore for Halloween or a school play.”