Don't Look Down (18 page)

Sheesh. She was just going to look at something, for
Pete’s sake. To be a successful thief, she needed to have total self-confidence and a good measure of caution—and the ability to drop the latter in favor of complete recklessness at a moment’s notice. Maybe she wasn’t stealing tonight, but the same rules applied. And she was looking forward to it so much, the ache physically hurt.

She headed down to the garage. Stoney had the Bentley, but this time she wanted something less conspicuous, anyway. She stopped just inside the garage door. “Inconspicuous. Right.” Not in this garage.

After a moment she flipped open the key rack and lifted the set of keys for the ’65 Mustang. Penchant for smooth sophistication or not, Rick was still a guy. And guys loved muscle cars.

It was cherry red with the personalized plate RA 65, but neither would matter much at night. She punched open the garage door and roared down the drive. Hot dog.

The gates swung open on command, and she headed northwest. It would be too much to hope that the hooker and the photographer would be working tonight, but she could do a little research, regardless.

Leedmont had told her that he’d stopped somewhere along Lantana Road. That was still a pretty nice section of town, which made sense. A rich guy wouldn’t want to pull over either for fun or to do a good deed if he thought he might get mugged or car-jacked. At ten o’clock on a Thursday night, though, the area was pretty deserted.

Samantha turned into a McDonald’s parking lot and pulled out the photo Leedmont had given her. He hadn’t been sure of the exact location along the street where the girl had bent over him, but at the time he wouldn’t have thought it very significant.

From the angle of the picture, the photographer was on a
third floor. There were several two-story shops where he could have waited on the roof, and a handful of apartments and condo buildings, too.

At least she knew which direction Leedmont had been heading along the street, which halved the number of possible perches. Streetlight placement narrowed it down even further. It would be easier to do this from above looking down, but at this point she wasn’t willing to break into that many places. Two or three, sure, but not ten or twelve.

She made one speed limit pass from east to west, then circled around to do it again more slowly. Her thief’s eye allowed her to eliminate a couple of rooftops as too exposed, and a handful of apartments with flower pots and cats sitting on the windowsills. Not that flower and cat people couldn’t take blackmail photos, but they definitely fell to the bottom of the list.

She stopped again, this time at a gas station, and sketched out the south side of the street over a four-block stretch, then crossed out the least likely positions and ones that obviously didn’t match with the photo’s street lighting.

“Six,” she counted aloud. Two apartments, a condo, and three rooftops.

The next step was to get the apartment numbers and see what she could come up with on the Internet to find names that went with them. But before she could let her fingers do the walking, her feet needed to do some.

She parked and headed up to the apartment building. The glass doors were locked, with an intercom on the side. Entry by permission only.

“Right.”

She pulled a paper clip and a magnet out of her shorts pocket. In twelve seconds she had the door open and slipped into the building.

She stopped on the third floor in front of the first of the two possibilities. Knocking, she donned a slightly off-center smile for the benefit of the peephole. “Rob?” she called. “Robby?”

The door clicked and opened. A dark-haired man who looked to be tired and in his early thirties gazed at her. “There’s no Robby here,” he said.

“No? I’m sure this is the apartment number he gave me.” Deepening her smile, she leaned against the door frame.

Beyond him the television played some song sung by dancing Muppets. As she risked a glance into the depths of the main room, a short version of the guy at the door wobbled past.

“There’s still no Robby here.”

“Okay. Sorry to bother you. I’ll give him a call.”

She backed off, and he shut the door. One down, one more in this building to go. And then it was the condo and the rooftops. Counting down ten doorways, she stopped and knocked again. “Hello? Robby?”

Nothing.

Samantha waited a few beats, then knocked again. “Rob? Are you okay? I thought we were supposed to meet tonight, cutie pie.” That sounded fairly harmless, she decided. If she came across as a kook or a stalker, nobody in their right mind would open the door.

The apartment beyond the door was absolutely silent. The window from the street had been dark, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Still, she couldn’t leave without taking a look inside.

“Okay, Robby,” she called, “I hope you’re not naked, because I’m using my key.” Or paper clip.

She stepped into the dark family room and quickly closed the door behind her. If somebody was lurking, she didn’t
want to be silhouetted in the light from the hallway. For a long moment she stood still, listening, then slipped a pair of leather gloves out of her purse and pulled them on.

By now in her career she’d gotten good at sensing her surroundings, and her gut told her that no one was home. Leaving the lights off, she made her way around a couch and coffee table, stopping to check the stack of mail there and dimly note the name Al Sandretti as the addressee before she went on to the window.

If this had been her place, she would have put a half-dozen potted plants—probably a few ferns and some orchids—on the deep windowsill. Al Sandretti, though, had left it bare. Well, not entirely bare, she noted as she twisted the lever to open the wood blinds an inch or so. Street light flooded in to reveal a camera sitting on one end of the sill.

Instead of picking it up, she fingered the blinds and looked down at the street. A low thrill ran through her bones. The angle matched Leedmont’s photo exactly.

“Bingo,” she breathed.

Samantha picked up the camera. It was a .35 millimeter film rather than digital, and that surprised her. The ease with which the photographer could post digital pictures on the Internet probably didn’t matter, though, if he was only concerned with getting a check. Of course the guy could be a technophobe, but whys and wherefores were beside the point.

All that mattered at the moment was that film meant a finite number of copies and a master negative. Setting down the camera, she went searching.

It was a fairly small space, and the search only took a few minutes. Whatever the guy did for a living during the day, he kept the stuff for his night job organized. The two-drawer file cabinet in the bedroom was locked, but it only took a
second to open it. In neat alphabetical order about fifty files, each one with a varying number of photos and a negative, filled both drawers.

The photographer obviously went to a one-hour photo shop and got double or triple prints. Leedmont had been right—some of the files had notations of three and four and even five separate payments. Apparently Al Sandretti just sent out regular requests until a mark got tired of paying. She couldn’t tell if the mark’s wife got brought into the game after that, or not.

While she had no problem with a guy getting shaken down for cheating on his significant other, at least half the photos she looked at could easily have been setups like Leedmont’s. And whether Sandretti ever followed through with his threats, it would be almost impossible for the mark to deny fooling around with a hooker and have anybody believe it.

Sam pursed her lips. “What the hell,” she decided, and began emptying all the files into one. She was one of the good guys now. And besides, this was just sleazy.

Finished, she closed and locked the drawers again, hefted the bulky folder she’d removed, and headed for the door. Just inside, she pulled off her gloves, opened the door with one of them, and then stepped out and closed it with the loose glove again. Bye-bye fingerprints.

Stuffing the gloves back into her purse, she made her way to the elevator. The nearer of the two opened as she reached it. Sam took a small step back, flashing a smile as a large, tanned Schwarzenegger wannabe emerged.

“Hey, babe,” he rumbled, taking in her chest as they passed.

“Hi,” she returned shyly, edging into the elevator sideways to partially shield the folder from his view. Unless
every instinct she possessed was wrong, that was Al Sandretti. Yipes. Who knew the Incredible Hulk was for real?

Normally she didn’t run into her victims on the way out of their place. The encounter sent her adrenaline through the roof as she trotted back to the Mustang.

The whole gig had been way too easy. She’d anticipated having to stake out the post office box and doing more sleuth work from there to find the photo. bmp file or the negative.

She put the folder on the passenger seat beside her and started the car. Leedmont was going to be happy—and she’d just made ten grand.

Not a bad night’s work, if she said so, herself.

At forty-two minutes past eleven Richard sat on the edge of the bed to pull on his athletic shoes. “North of downtown” was fairly vague, but it gave him a place to begin looking.

Ben said she’d taken the Mustang, which meant she hadn’t been heading anywhere particularly posh or secretive. In addition, she’d worn her shorts and a T-shirt. That still left a great many places for someone of her skills to be.

Stopping in his office, he unlocked the back cabinet and pulled out a Glock .30, which he dumped into his jacket pocket. Wherever she was, he was going prepared to get her out. To the outside world, being twelve minutes late was barely worth mention. Samantha Jellicoe worked in increments of a second—and in her line of work, former or not, any of those seconds could kill her.

He’d already called her cell phone three times, but as he headed down the stairs to the main floor he dialed it again. A second later the faint strain of the James Bond theme echoed up from the direction of the kitchen and garage hallway.

The sound stopped. “
Hola
,” her voice came over the phone. “I’m only ten minutes late.”

She appeared in the foyer below him, the phone still to her ear. Richard lowered his as he finished his descent, sharp relief digging into his chest. He wanted to grab her, but she’d be offended by his lack of faith in her abilities. “The James Bond theme?” he said instead.

“It seemed appropriate.” Samantha looked him up and down, stopping directly in front of him. “Going somewhere?”

“Not now. You’ve got to change my ring.”

“Nope. You’re James Bond.” Leaning closer, she placed a soft, slow kiss on his lips. “Thanks for being ready to charge to the rescue.”

“Yes, well, it’s what I do.”

“Mm-hm. And it just so happens that I’m in the mood to be shaken and stirred. What do you think about that?”

He grinned, taking her free hand to head with her back to the bedroom. Whatever she’d been up to, she was back and she was safe. “I’m at your service.”

Richard was downstairs finishing breakfast and reading the
Wall Street Journal
when Laurie Kunz called. After a few minutes of pleasantries and chitchat, she agreed to meet him at her office that morning.

She was of course a professional businesswoman. At the same time, though, Samantha’s comments about how deeply the Kunz offspring had or hadn’t been affected by their father’s murder stayed with him. She’d tossed and turned for the past two nights—which he knew because she’d nearly brained him twice—and had even gotten out of bed to watch television for an hour or so before dawn. As far as he knew, she was still in bed. Laurie, though, who had
buried her father two days ago, was up by seven and making business appointments.

“Business as usual,” he muttered, sipping tea. Perhaps she had her own way of grieving, but to a casual observer it didn’t look well. And appearance was everything in Palm Beach society. On the other hand, he was becoming accustomed to noticing things that the rest of society might not.

His phone rang again as Samantha staggered into the dining room and grabbed a chocolate doughnut off the side-board. “Good morning, my love,” he drawled, looking at the number ID as he picked up the phone. “It’s Sarah.”

She nodded, slumping into the chair beside him and only smiling when Reinaldo appeared with a chilled glass of Diet Coke. Richard stifled a grin as his London secretary briefed him on the day’s schedule. Halfway through, though, he stopped her.

“They’re coming in tomorrow,” he said, frowning. “Saturday. For a Monday meeting.”

“That was my understanding as well, sir,” his secretary’s efficient voice came. “But when I checked with Mr. Leedmont’s office to confirm the flight details, they informed me that the rest of the Kingdom board will be landing in Miami at one o’clock today, your time. And the meeting has been moved up to ten a.m. on Saturday.”

Shit
. “Why didn’t they let me know?”

He could hear her hesitation over the phone. “They claim to have done so, sir, but I’m positive we never received anything. I triple-checked e-mail and all of my voice-mail messages and I—”

“I’d believe you before I believe them, Sarah,” he broke in. Richard knew as well as anyone that in a buyout, the contract was only a small part of the process. Nerves weighed at least as heavily. “We’ll adjust. Did you inform Ben?”

“Yes, it’s on his updated schedule. And I’ve arranged for a half-dozen rooms at The Chesterfield, since that’s where Mr. Leedmont is staying.”

“Excellent. Thank you for the heads-up, Sarah. Please e-mail me the latest list of attendees, and send it on to Donner’s office, as well.”

He shut the phone off and thunked it onto the table, swearing under his breath.

“What’s wrong?” Samantha asked.

“Leedmont’s up to something. He’s flying the rest of his board in a day early, and he’s moved up the meeting to tomorrow.”

“But isn’t this
your
meeting?”

“Apparently I was informed of the schedule change.”

She snorted. “This is one of those alternate reality problems, I bet. Happens all the time in
Star Trek
.”