Elizabeth Lowell - Blue Smoke and Murder

Is she selling them?

Does she really have them or were the JPEGs pre-burn files?

Is it all a scam?

Had the old lady’s grandniece been in on it from the jump?

The garbled signal didn’t have any answers. Neither did his own experience with Modesty and Jillian Breck. Modesty had died before she talked. Jill had been clever enough to avoid his trap altogether.

Even ducks know what to keep away from during hunting season. Dodging me in Mesquite didn’t exactly require big smarts on her part.

But it irritated the hell out of him.

Score tossed the script aside with a curse. “Keep after it. And if that bug moves from its present location, tell me ASAP.”

“How far? The government is dicking with the GPS again. Three-hundred-foot radius of error.”

“Set up a one-mile guard perimeter. Tell me if or when she breaks that fence. Even ten feet beyond that mile. Got it?”

“Got it.” Amy stood and headed for the door. The green tips of her hair bounced stiffly.

Score read the script again and again. Nothing new popped. Except his blood pressure. He really needed to hit the gym before someone stupid redlined his temper.

But more than a workout, he needed to find out what the Breck bitch was up to.

He looked at his calendar. He didn’t have too many appointments in the next few days that couldn’t be handled by other employees, but he had a few he should handle. He supposed he could assign another operative to Breck.

Not likely. Not with the old lady dead. Even if they busted it down to manslaughter, I’d do hard time.

This one I keep real close.

Silently he rubbed thumb against index finger, wondering if he should get closer to the Breck woman now or risk waiting.

If she had the paintings, yes, he should be closer.

If she didn’t, no.

If. If. If.

He laughed out loud, the sound as reckless as he’d like to be. But he was too smart to be stupid.

I should cut back on the ’roids.

Not yet. It’s too much fun twisting big guys’ dicks.

He shook his head over the skinny runt he’d once been and went back to his calendar. If he had to, he could handle the Breck woman and not be missed from work.

He almost hoped she’d make him do it.

RENO

SEPTEMBER 14

1:38 P.M.

Caitlin Crawford glanced up from the computer in her home office as her husband walked in. He looked out of place among the sleek modern furniture she loved. He was dressed like a weekend cowboy who’d never been on a horse. In the decade they had been married, she still hadn’t gotten used to his wardrobe. But she’d learned to accept it.

A rich man was entitled to his oddities.

And it was really odd that Tal had taken her for his third wife solely because she came from an upper-crust Pasadena family who could no longer afford its good breeding. He’d acquired her like one of his paintings, enjoyed parading her “class” in front of his friends and business associates, and kept on wearing his hick cowboy boots and bolo ties.

And losing money.

He has a lot to lose, she reminded herself. Anyone who can afford Pollock and Picasso has more money than he knows what to do with.

Caitlin’s mother hadn’t raised any stupid daughters. Caitlin might not know about the intimate details of her husband’s business transactions, but she had hired someone to keep tabs on all of his bank accounts. Cash was her bottom line. Being raised genteel and poor in a rich neighborhood had taught her what made the world go round.

It wasn’t sex.

But her husband didn’t make finding out about his accounts easy for her. Tal was old-fashioned about more than his wardrobe. She had a house account that he generously filled and never mentioned how business was, if she should spend less or more. If it weren’t for whispers and rumors, she wouldn’t have known that federal tax collectors had been taking a very hard, long look at some of his business write-offs. She didn’t know why, or what, or how serious the government’s case was. She only knew enough to be afraid.

If Tal went down, she’d go down with him.

“How did the meeting with Lee Dunstan go?” Caitlin asked. Her tone was upbeat, her smile warm, and her stomach tight with fear.

“I told you not to worry about a thing, baby. It’s all taken care of. The IRS will be sniffing up someone else’s butt real soon.”

She managed not to curse out loud. Or scream. Eighteen months ago, the head of the accounting firm Tal used for business and personal record-keeping had been indicted, tried, and sent to jail for fraud, leaving behind a lot of financial wreckage for the IRS to sift through, searching for taxes owed on unreported profits.

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said, smiling through her clenched teeth.

She just wished she believed it. But Tal never talked business with her, which left her dangling alone with her vicious fear of being poor again.

“Would you like to go over the guest list for the post-auction party?” she asked.

“I’d rather be whipped.”

Caitlin had been expecting that response. Tal had married her to add a gloss to his home, his entertaining, and his reputation. Because she’d been raised to be a rich man’s wife, she was good at gloss. Since she wasn’t the type to count money that wasn’t in her hand, she’d cut the guest list down to people who could do Tal’s various business interests some good, and to hell with his freeloading shirtsleeve relatives and old acquaintances. He wouldn’t miss them unless someone pointed out their absence.

The money saved would go to her own hidden bank account, along with everything she’d skimmed from the household account.

A woman married to an older man had to look out for herself. Though Tal would never admit it, he simply wasn’t as quick as he’d been five years ago. Or even last year.

“Then I won’t bother you with the details of the party,” Caitlin said, smiling.

“You need any more money in the household account?”

“Don’t I always?”

Tal laughed and pulled a checkbook out of his jeans pocket. “Fifty do it?”

“Sixty?”

“Hell, these parties just keep getting more expensive.”

“And you keep getting more business from them.”

Tal laughed. “You got me there. Sixty it is.”

Smiling, he wrote his wife a check for sixty thousand dollars. She was a bargain at twice the price.

Class couldn’t be bought, but it could be married.

BRECK RANCH

SEPTEMBER 14

1:49 P.M.

Jill drove up to the old cabin, put on the parking brake of Zach’s truck, and turned off the engine. She was still rather surprised by him. When she’d said that the dirt track leading to the old homestead was hard to find unless you knew what you were looking for, he’d just handed her the keys to his truck.

Altogether an intriguing man. Unexpected, too. She could tell he liked the way she moved, but he hadn’t even hinted at a pass, much less made one.

Very intriguing.

Irritating, too. The longer she was with him, the more the idea of a pass appealed.

“Home sweet home, such as it is,” she said.

Zach closed the computer he’d been using. Silently he took in the weathered old cabin backed up against a red sandstone cliff and tucked beneath a massive old cottonwood.

He whistled softly. “And here I thought I lived with pieces of history.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I’m not on a contract for St. Kilda, I collect abandoned industrial art-old muscle cars of the ’60s and early ’70s-and restore them. Carcheology, as it were, relics of a time before OPEC ruled. But this cabin goes back to a time before internal combustion engines owned the world, a time when seeps of crude oil in Pennsylvania weren’t worth the land they sat on.”

Jill smiled. “I’d like to have lived then.”

“You’re one of the few people I’ve ever met who could actually do it.”

The compliment surprised her. She glanced sideways at Zach. He was looking at the cabin, his light brown eyes like a hawk’s, missing nothing.

Intriguing, irritating, intelligent. Sexy in a lean, easy-moving way.

She shook her head at the direction of her thoughts. She’d never jumped a man. She wasn’t planning on starting now, no matter what her hormones were pushing for.

“What did St. Kilda say about Blanchard?” she asked, turning away from anything personal.

“There are art dealers in east Texas, and there are men with the last name of Blanchard in east Texas, but no man fits in both categories. Or woman.”

“He could have been just visiting, or looking for art.”

“He could have been a figment of his own imagination.”

She smiled rather grimly. “Yeah, that occurred to me when I saw my trashed car.”

Zach studied the weathered cabin with its thick, crooked shutters and rifle slits that had been filled in during a later, safer era. He’d seen the bones of pioneer cabins while he scoured the rural West for old muscle cars, but he’d never seen a place this old that people still occupied.

“The dude was hoping you’d bring the paintings with you,” Zach said.