Hide From Evil (25 page)

And, okay, the endless loop of what they’d done last night running constantly in the back of her mind wasn’t helping matters any.

“You can take the Subaru,” Ibarra said, indicating the blue station wagon parked in the spot farthest from them.

Krista let out a sigh of relief when she saw it had a completely enclosed cab.

“You sure it’s going to get us there?” Sean asked skeptically, noting the dent on the front fender and the rust spots on the rear panel. “Looks like that thing has seen better days.”

“She’s not much to look at on the outside, but my cousin kept it in perfect running condition.”

“I’m just happy we get to use a key to start it,” Krista muttered. “One less felony to add to my list,” she said as she walked over to the car, opened the passenger door, and set the backpack of ammunition on the floor.

“But you are carrying concealed without a permit,” Sean said, a ghost of a smile crossing his face as he regarded her over the top of the car. “But don’t worry, that’s just a little misdemeanor.”

Chapter 14

T
he car ride was torture, trapped in the small space with Krista mere inches away. At least had the distraction of the reports Ibarra had pulled, cross-referencing the larger deposits into Nate’s accounts with suspicious deaths, which Ibarra expanded to include not just suicides but accidents as well.

He’d loaded everything up on a mini laptop with security features that would render their communications invisible to anyone who cared to monitor. He also outfitted them with a secure satellite phone that would both provide them a direct line to Ibarra—who was staying put for now—and enable them to make untraceable outgoing calls—finally, a secure connection to the outside world.

As Sean drove, Krista sifted through the data and found a possible hit.

His name was Steven Amstel, a customs official who had died in a boating accident while on a fishing trip in the San Juans. According to the official report, he was intoxicated and had fallen off his boat, hitting his head in the process. He’s slipped unconscious into the water and drowned.

But according to the toxicology screen, his blood alcohol content was a mere .085, barely above the legal limit, enough to indicate a few beers but not enough to make a man of his size sloppy drunk.

And interestingly, at the time of his death, he’d been investigating a trafficking ring where goods and people were allegedly being smuggled over the Canadian border.

“There’s nothing that links them directly,” Krista said, “but this has Karev written all over it.”

And buried deeper in the files, yet another connection to the omnipresent JD Partners.

Jesus, how deep did this shadow corporation’s influence go?

And would John Slater’s files provide the clues?

She sent Ibarra a text with the information to see if he could dig up any more details.

He was amazed at her focus and ability to stay on track, especially after the discovery of her father’s involvement with JD Partners. She’d been visibly upset, taking it like a physical blow. But shaken to her core, she hadn’t fallen apart.

As a man who had seen some of the toughest guys in the world crumble, he couldn’t help but admire her strength.

Yet another damn thing to drive him crazy. As though the chemistry radiating between them wasn’t distracting enough. Even with the discovery of possible additional evidence, Sean found it hard to keep his focus where it should be: on analyzing the information they’d found and pulling all the threads together to see if they could connect the bank accounts to the real live human or humans who were behind the killings.

Jesus, he’d been through years of some of the most grueling training on the planet, designed to keep him focused and on task, so that when the world was literally blowing up around him he didn’t waver from his mission.

Turned out that to him at least, Krista was more dangerous than a nuclear bomb. Everything about her was a distraction. The warmth of her skin, the scent of her flooding the car so thickly, even the cold air blowing through the open windows offered no relief. He knew it was his imagination, but he swore that with the new dark hair, her own scent got darker, richer, and even more mind-blowing.

Which was ridiculous, because he of all people knew she was still blond where it counted.

He rolled his shoulders and told himself to get his mind out of the gutter and made himself a silent promise: When and if they got out of this mess, somehow, some way, he was going to work Krista Slater out of his system once and for all.

As they drove, he entertained thoughts of taking her back to his cabin, caveman style, and keeping her there for a week, a month—as long as it took.

But for now he needed to put a lid on all this craziness, get his head off of Krista and back on the task of getting them out of the mess that had them running for their lives.

Five hours later, Sean parked the car along a curb in Seattle’s ritzy Washington Park neighborhood. He pulled a cap over his closely shorn hair and slipped on a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

Despite the cloudy day, Krista followed his lead and put on oversize shades as they climbed out of the car. With the haircut and the wardrobe change, she looked nothing like her usual self. No one, not even a neighbor who had known her all of her life, would match this urban fashion victim to cool, classically beautiful Krista Slater.

Unless that person was intimately acquainted with her body, Sean thought, shifting uncomfortably as his eyes drifted to the long line of her legs, the muscles flexing and shifting under the clingy fabric of her pants. Others might not know her, but he’d recognize the curve of her neck, exposed now by the new haircut, across a crowded room.

He gave himself a mental shake and forced his brain back to the mission.

Sean followed Krista around the block and up the walk to an imposing iron gate. The main gate was wide enough to allow access to cars, and there was a keypad with a built-in speaker that would be level with the driver’s side window if you came in by car.

Krista bypassed the keypad and went for the smaller gate to the right. She pulled her key ring from her purse and,
click, click
, they were inside the ten-foot-high, ivy-covered brick wall that surrounded the house.

Sean let out a low whistle as he got his first glimpse of Krista’s father’s house. It looked like someone had transplanted a miniature French chateau to Seattle, complete with a cobblestone circular drive featuring a fountain in the center. To the right of the main house, Sean saw what looked like a four-car garage. “Nice digs.”

Krista shrugged. “Pays well to defend rich scumbags,” she said.

Sean gave another quick look around as she walked straight up to the front door. A place this big—Sean couldn’t tell for sure from the front but he’d bet the house was at least six, maybe seven, thousand square feet, not including the grounds—needed a decent-sized nearly full-time staff to stay on top of everything. Sean had expected maybe a nice craftsman, not a sprawling mansion potentially crawling with staff. “You sure we’re not going to run into anyone? A housekeeper, a gardener?”

She gave a quick shake of her newly dark head and opened the door with her key. “It’s May.”

“So?”

“Elinor—my father’s wife—is in Maui until June, which means my father spends most of his time at the office or on the golf course, and staff works on half time.” The hard soles of her flat boots sounded against the marble floor of the entryway.

Sean followed her inside, his nose picking up the scent of furniture polish and traces of expensive perfume. The entryway was dominated by a sweeping staircase, the curved kind Sean had only ever seen in hotels or in movies. “You grew up in this house?”

“Since my mom and dad divorced.”

“Which was when?” Sean asked.

“When I was six,” she replied.

“You split time between both parents?” he asked, and then told himself he shouldn’t give a crap how Krista grew up. Yet for some godforsaken reason he was intensely curious about Krista’s past.

“No,” she said as she locked the door behind her. “My mom wasn’t really into parenting,” she said with little air quotes around the last words. “She moved down to Southern California to find herself. Last I heard she was playing sugar mama to a guy who’s my age.”

She tried to play it off like it was no big deal, but beneath her flippant tone he sensed it still stung a lot more than she wanted to let on. He felt a pinch deep in his chest and had to force himself not to pull her into his arms.

It was clear from her posture she didn’t want to walk any further down memory lane, so Sean took a moment to take in the details of the cold, imposing mansion. To the right of the staircase he could see a large, formal living room, and behind it an archway that looked like it might lead to a kitchen. Krista turned right and started purposefully down the hall. “Office is this way.”

He followed at a slower pace, trying to imagine what it must have been like to grow up in this mausoleum. Not fun, judging from the few pictures of Krista, her father, and the dark-haired woman who must have been her stepmother.

Unlike the informal and sometime goofy snapshots of him and Megan that had covered nearly every surface of his grandparents’ walls, the only pictures of Krista were formal and so tightly posed that her smiles almost looked like grimaces of pain. In the pictures of the three of them, Krista stood slightly off to the side. He leaned in to study a portrait where she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. Her father and stepmother sat shoulder to shoulder, hands clasped so Elinor’s massive diamond ring caught the light, self-satisfied, almost smug smiles on their faces. Off to the side with her pale-blond hair and wide, solemn eyes was Krista, as though she understood even at that young age that she wasn’t really part of the main unit.

“Are you coming?” she called. “No one’s here now but I don’t want to hang out any longer than we have to.”

Even as he told himself Krista’s poor-little-rich-girl upbringing wasn’t his concern, it hurt him to think of that sad-eyed young girl. He could only wonder how the recent discoveries about her father might be chewing her up inside.

He continued down the hall and found her in what had to be her father’s office, with its massive desk, heavy leather club chairs, and shelves and shelves of leather-bound books.

Krista stood in front of a wall lined with wooden filing cabinets. She tugged at one drawer, grunting when she found it locked.

“I got it,” Sean said. He pulled out his lock pick and knelt down on the floor. As he slid the pick in, he felt her shift and then she was kneeling next to him.

“Careful not to scratch the lock,” she said, close enough for him to feel her breath against the skin of his neck. His hand shook a little and he mentally listed the top ten reasons it would be really bad to turn around, pin her down on the thick, no doubt woven rug, and have her right there in her father’s office.

Come on, give her one happy memory in this ice chest of a house
, his dick argued. The big head won out, barely. He slid the pick in and opened the lock with a soft
click
. She started to flip through the first drawer while he continued down the rows of drawers, unlocking as he went.

Not finding what she was looking for in the first drawer, she moved down to the next, and then the next.

“There’s a bunch of stuff for Karev, but nothing for JD Partners,” she muttered and continued to sift through the manila files. “Damn it,” she swore. “If he kept any files, they should be here.”

Sean swallowed back his own disappointment and started to shut the drawer he’d been looking in when something caught his eye. His jaw started to clench as he pulled the thin folder out. He opened it up and found it held what looked like a business contract. “Do you have any idea why your father would have a file for Nate?”

Krista gasped and rushed over to peer at the contents of the folder. “I have no idea.” She flipped through the papers. “It’s a transfer of ownership document,” she murmured. “And there again, JD Partners is involved. They transferred ownership of a piece of land up in Bellingham to Nate.” She flipped through the pages, her mouth pulling into a tight line when none of them revealed the identity of the company’s owners. “No signature pages”—frustration made her voice tight—“but there are a few handwritten notes.”

Sean looked over her shoulder at the yellow-lined paper full of handwritten scrawls. Nothing but a few notes about the deal. Nothing interesting except—“‘Ref. D.M. Strictly confidential.’ What does that mean?”

“Could be a note on who referred Nate as a client or maybe D.M. is one of the parties involved in JD Partners.” Krista looked up from the documents, her face grim and pale. “I thought nothing he could do would surprise me,” she said, her voice shaking so hard Sean couldn’t stop himself from covering her hand with his. He threaded his fingers through her icy ones as she clung for dear life. “It’s one thing that he represented JD Partners, but to knowingly do business with that psycho…” She swallowed hard. “When the truth came out, Nate’s name was all over the papers. There’s no way he didn’t remember—”

A loud thump sounded outside the door. Sean’s stomach jumped and in the next breath he wrapped his arm around her waist to pull her down behind the heavy leather couch. From here, he had a bead on the door so he could see who was coming. No idea yet how they’d get out if whoever that someone was decided to plant it for a while, but he’d jump off that bridge when he came to it.

With his chest pressed against Krista’s back, he could feel their hearts thudding against each other and he struggled to slow his breath. He kept his gaze pinned to the doorway, barely breathing as he heard the whisper of movement.

A small white paw appeared in the doorway, followed by a black-and-white face dominated by green eyes. Then a sleek black body ending in a long, white-tipped tail entered the office.

Krista let out a relieved groan. “Goddamn you, Boots, you almost gave me a heart attack.”