Extreme Exposure (15 page)

“I’ll go get a vacuum. There are a couple in the office closet.” He returned a minute later and plunked the old canister-style vacuum and separate carpet attachment on the floor.

When Emily saw it, she smiled. “I see you don’t vacuum much. That’s for carpet.”

“You’re right. I picked it because it reminds me of one my mom used to have.” He bent down to pick the vacuum up. “I’ll go get the other one.”

“Wait. Why would she have a carpet vacuum?” She looked at him for a long moment.

He stared at her, not understanding.

Dropping to her knees, she opened the canister. A thick vanilla envelope had been stuffed into the top compartment, where extra attachments were usually kept. Holding the envelope, she jumped up, smiling.

He gave her a thumbs-up. “That’s pretty clever, of both of you.”

“It’s not like Amber to have two vacuums, and especially one with a carpet attachment when she has no carpet.”

Someone opened the door. Emily, eyes wide in alarm, slipped the envelope underneath a seat cushion on the sofa.

Celia walked into the living room. “Remind me to paint that door,” she said, not greeting them. “Who paints their front door purple?” She plopped down on the sofa, leaning back. Underneath her was the envelope, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Emily said, “Want to go to the kitchen for a cup of tea?”

Celia shook her head no. “Are you just getting started?”

He said, “It won’t take too long.”

She looked at Emily. “I forgot to say so earlier, but Amber left the bottle collection to you.”

Emily’s eyes widened. “Are you sure?”

“I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway.” She flicked her hand.

“I’d be happy to have it.” Emily sat down beside her cousin. “Did Amber have a will?”

“Apparently she had it drawn up not too long ago. We didn’t know anything about it. Mom inherits, but she gave half to that addictions place where she worked. I’m sure that will be put to good use.” She rolled her eyes, indicating she thought the exact opposite was true. “Nothing to me, her sister, but whatever.”

She stood up. “Got to go. Just wanted to let you know you can take the bottles. And make sure you get that key back to me.”

*  *  *

That night, back at the motel room, lights on and curtains closed, Emily sat on her bed with Amber’s papers spread out around her. There was a standard letter-size notebook, eighty pages, and a file folder with about several dozen sheets of loose paper. They’d also grabbed a handful of files from the office so they could take a better look at them.

She picked up the notebook, leaned against the headboard. “I’ll start with the notebook.”

Matt looked through the file folder they’d found in the vacuum. “I don’t see a will.”

She looked up. “Maybe she hadn’t got a copy yet.”

After half an hour, Matt said, “I don’t see anything that jumps out at me. In fact, I think some of these pages must be duplicates of what I saw at her house. They look familiar. I’ll start going through the files from her office again.”

A while later, she put down the notebook and stretched her neck. A dull ache above her eyes signaled the start of a tension headache. “From what I can see so far, these notes are all about the insurance case. She made a lot of notes. It looks like every time she talked to her lawyer or someone at the insurance company, she wrote down the name, date, and details of the conversation.” She rubbed her temples. “But for a neat person, I’d forgotten how messy her writing was. And she uses a lot of abbreviations.”

“How often did she make a note?”

She looked back to the first page. “She started in February, just a few things at first, and the case was obviously already going on by then. At first it’s once a week or so, and it’s pretty routine, but then she starts writing more and more.”

“Anything important?” Standing up, he laced his fingers and stretched his arms out above his head, palms outward. Dark, wavy hair fell across his forehead. Side on, it was obvious he had the chest and back muscles to fill out his broad frame. He was wearing the same shirt, which fit him in the shoulders but was too large in the waist. No man should look that good.

“Emily?” He was staring at her. “Find anything?”

Feeling her cheeks warm, she looked down, bought time by picking up the notebook. “It…it’s hard to say if there’s anything important in here for us. Most of it is pretty mundane, like this one from July 24, ‘Got a call from Joel’—that’s her lawyer—‘and he says court mediator may be appointed.’ It’s pretty dry reading.”

“Is there anything personal?”

“Doesn’t look like it. How are you doing?”

“Nothing stands out yet. She did have a lot of medical expenses. Some of them were covered by insurance, some not, but nothing outrageous.”

Matt sat down and they resumed looking at the papers. Still feeling flushed, she resolved to give her full attention to the notebook.

It was another half hour before something made her snap to attention. She looked at Matt. “This is interesting. I skipped to the end. There is a note about a will. She picked a different lawyer to draw it up, somebody in Albany.”

“Does she say why?”

She shook her head. “Maybe she had a falling out with this Ackerman, the one who was looking after the settlement.”

“Do you know anything about him?”

“No, other than that he refused to see me before, probably because of client confidentiality, although he never did say. Should we try again?”

“I doubt he’d want to reveal what the problem was, if there was one.”

“You’re right. But how will we find out what he was doing that Amber objected to?”

He shrugged. “We need some sort of evidence to suggest he was doing something wrong, but I’m not seeing that here.”

“You’re right. Maybe she just wanted to give another lawyer some business. Amber was like that.”

Matt picked up his cell phone. “Let’s google him.” After a minute, he said, “He’s with Scott, Cameron, and Daly lawyers. There’s a short bio. He specializes in civil litigation, practiced law for twenty-five years in Riverton. There’s a picture, looks about fifty.”

He handed her the phone and she took a look at the photograph. She was about to hand back the phone when something occurred to her. She looked more closely. “He was at the party.”

Matt glanced at the picture. “You could be right. If it’s the same guy I’m thinking of, he was sitting one table over, next to a woman with long gray hair.”

She nodded slowly. “Mrs. Ackerman, yes, she’s been at the house before. She’s quite stylish. He’s short but a big guy, looks more like a body builder than a lawyer. He didn’t stay long.”

“You know, I think he might have left early. Maybe he was trying to avoid us.”

She turned her attention back to the notes. There had to be more to the notes than she was seeing, if Amber had bothered to hide them. But what? “This is interesting,” she said a few minutes later. “Amber wrote in mid-August—that would have been just before she was killed—about a phone call to her lawyer. She wrote, ‘Called J. Ackerman to discuss issues with settlement. He said his secretary would call for a time.’ Two days later, she writes, ‘Still no word from lawyer. Jason says to be patient.’”

“Did she ever get that call?”

“No, I checked. I wonder what she wanted to talk to him about.”

“It almost sounds like she thought he was avoiding her.”

“That’s another thing to ask Jason about. We know Amber talked about it with him. The lawyer won’t tell us, but maybe Jason will.”

“You’re right.” He stood up, stretched his arms. “There are still more pages, but my eyes are getting buggy. Want to take a break, go out for a beer?”

“Okay, just let me use the bathroom.” She went in, pulled a comb through her hair, put on some lip gloss.

When she came out, Matt went in. She gathered up the papers and slipped them into the vanilla envelope.

A sound came from outside, a car door closing. She walked to the window, drew the curtain aside with a finger. Two men stood beside a car, looking in her direction. One of them was large, the same size as the man who had chased her at the cabin.

Heart pounding, she ran to the bathroom, tapped on the door. When it opened, she told Matt what she’d seen. His face went gray, and then he told her to grab the files and their shoes. While she did that, he picked up his multi-tool from his knapsack and something from a drawer in the desk and walked over to the locked door leading to the adjoining room.

“What are you doing?” she hissed. “We’ve got to go out the window.”

He put his hands to his lips, whispered, “It’s a tumbler lock, easy to open.” He put one of the tools at the bottom of the lock.

Her knees went weak, threatened to give out. This couldn’t be happening. “What if there are people in there?” Ears pricked, she thought she heard footsteps on the walkway outside their room, but her heart was beating so loudly she could have imagined it.

“I hope they don’t mind guests.”

Matt put a paperclip in the top of the lock and did something with the tool at the bottom of the lock. It clicked open.

She slipped into the room first, grabbing the knapsack. He pulled the door closed, locked it. She stood ramrod straight against the wall, not moving, not breathing, her pulse pounding in her throat.

Not a second later, the door to their old room opened.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

S
tanding flat against the wall, Matt cast a quick eye around the adjoining room. With the curtains open, bright lights from the parking lot streamed down through the double-paned window across the floor, bouncing onto the walls and their faces.

Taking Emily’s shaking hand, he pointed to the floor and they inched down. Only when he was sitting in the shadows did he dare release his breath. Putting his arm around Emily, he pulled her close.

The men were moving around in the other room, talking, not loudly but not whispering either. Putting his ear to the wall, he couldn’t make out words. There was more shuffling. A minute later, there was a scrape of metals rings across a rod. One of them had opened the shower curtain.

Five minutes later, the men left the room and stood on the walkway outside the door, talking again. A moment later the acrid smell of cigarette smoke wafted in the air. The sliding window was open six inches. Emily stared at it, wide-eyed. He squeezed her hand.

The men walked to their car. He stayed where he was for a few minutes, just to be sure, before getting up. Picking up the files, he stuffed them into his knapsack. “We’ll have to go out the bathroom window. They may be watching our room, waiting for us to come back.”

“What about our stuff?”

“We’ll have to leave it. It’s too risky to go back.”

He went through the window first, dropping onto the strip of mowed grass behind the motel, caught the knapsack Emily tossed down, and helped her to the ground.

They crept along the side of the motel to the far corner. At the front of the motel, across the street, the grocery store was closed but the large parking lot out front was illuminated. To the side was an empty parking lot. Behind them was an apartment building, separated by a six-foot-high chain-link fence. That was their best bet.

They climbed the fence, crossed the grounds of the apartment building, and kept moving, not stopping for ten minutes until they came to a school three blocks away. Streetlights cast a yellowish glow on a row of small houses opposite the school.

Emily let out a long breath before she chuckled. “So that’s why you like old motels.”

“What? Did you think it was the decor?” He smiled. “Stick with me. You’ll learn a thing or two. Like the fact that old motels sometimes still have old locks.”

“Please tell me that in your normal life you don’t break into other people’s motel rooms.”

“Nope, just one of those skills that was useless until tonight.” A dog barked from the backyard of one of the houses. “I’m going to go get another car.”

“Can’t we just get a cab?”

“I’d like to, but cab drivers tend to remember their passengers.” Especially when they looked like she did. “Want to come or wait here?”

She glanced around, pointed at a covered side entrance of the school. “I’ll wait there.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

She touched his arm. “Try not to pick the most expensive car you see.”

For a moment, he thought she was serious, but she smiled, lifting the corners of her mouth. Crinkles appeared around her eyes.

His heart did a funny flip. She’d never have to wear makeup, not with a smile like that. It made her the most beautiful woman in the world. It made him hate to leave her side, but he had to get a car.

Fifteen minutes later, he pulled up in an older-model white Chevy. Rolling down the window, he whistled and, as Emily ran up, leaned across and opened the door.

He said, “I don’t think anybody will be missing this car for at least a day. The mailbox at the house I got it from was stuffed full. I’m guessing they’re away.”

Twenty minutes later, they stopped on a side street near another motel. Opening the trunk, he found a rag, ripped it in two, and they wiped the Chevy for fingerprints.

Five minutes after that, Emily came out of the motel office with a key for a room at the back. She had insisted on paying. He put the knapsack down on one of the two double beds, looked around at the fake wood paneling, worn carpet.

“No adjoining room,” she said.

“We’ll check out tomorrow.”

“At least we know we have to be really careful.” Shoulders drooping, she sat on the bed, staring at her hands.

He said, “Let’s try to get some sleep. We’ll go see Jason tomorrow. He’s our best lead.”

“He’s our only lead,” she said, her tone leaving no doubt that she wasn’t banking on him having much to say.

*  *  *

Early the next morning, Emily waited at the motel room while Matt took a cab back to their old motel to pick up the rental car. They’d debated leaving it there, phoning the rental company to tell them where it was, but decided to take a chance and keep it. It would take too much time to get a new one.

She was wearing the clothes she’d slept in, but was long past caring. Rubbing puffy eyes, she tried to remember the last time she’d had a good sleep. There was too much going through her head and a very soft mattress hadn’t helped. Not to mention she’d spent half the night wishing Matt would leave his bed and slip in beside her. She stole a peek out the window. The parking lot was empty. A long, jagged crack spread across the pavement like a lightning bolt.