Her eyes were huge. “I…but I talked to Vivi just this morning—”
“We’ll discuss it later,” he cut her off. “Not here. Let’s just get the fuck out of this place. It’s making my flesh creep.”
“Ah, y-y-yes,” she agreed, flustered. She looked around herself, wildly. “Um…what was I—”
“Laptop. And clothes,” he reminded her. “Quickly.”
It didn’t take her long once he started helping, scooping stuff out of drawers at random. That perked her up. She shoved him away with an irritated sound and finished packing clothes, but then came the shoes, the toiletries bag: vials and bottles and tubes, packets of this and that. And then the books. Fuck a duck. She heaved eight of them into the huge suitcase. Big motherlovers, too. The trolley wheels were probably going to collapse.
He dragged her out the door after that, scanned the stairwell landing, and stuck his head back inside her door. He made an obscene gesture, for the benefit of any hidden cameras he hadn’t found.
“You’re not getting her,” he told the bug that lay on the table. “Fuck off and die, shithead.” He slammed the door, for emphasis.
Nell was alarmingly quiet in the car, staring ahead, throat bobbing. He knew the feeling. She was trying to swallow it. It wouldn’t go down. But the silence was so heavy, it was making him twitch.
He reached for the first thing he could think of to break it. “Do you have a copy of that letter your sister found?” he asked.
“I have it scanned onto my computer,” she said. “Why?”
He shrugged. “I’m just—”
“Interested. Yes. I’ve noticed.” There was a touch of acid in her voice that silenced him again.
He stared out the window, wondering what his next move should be. He saw a Korean deli coming up on the corner, with banks of multicolored flowers on display. “Stop the car,” he told the driver.
Nell looked startled, as the car braked and he flung the door open. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “This’ll just take a second.”
He stared at the flowers, at a loss, and grabbed a bunch of the best-looking long-stemmed roses out of a bucket. He handed the boy sitting next to the flowers a couple of twenties, and got back into the car.
“Here.” He handed her the flowers, realizing too late that the long, thorny stems were still dripping. He hadn’t even had them tied, wrapped, trimmed, anything. But she was looking wide-eyed, charmed. She sniffed them. Smiled at him. It had worked. Praise God.
After a moment, she groped for his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I appreciate the fact that you’re interested. I’m probably alive because of it. I just don’t get it. Why is this happening? It’s senseless.”
“Money,” Duncan said.
She looked over at him, blankly. “Huh?”
“Money is why this is happening,” he repeated.
She looked doubtful. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, Duncan, but I don’t have very much of it. Practically none, to be honest.”
He shook his head. “There’s a short list of probable motivations for crimes like this. Insanity, revenge, or money. It doesn’t look like you girls have pissed anyone off that badly—”
“We haven’t,” she cut in. “We’re goody-goody pussycats.”
“And there’s the murdered jeweller and his whole family, too, so I’d strike personal revenge as a motive. We could consider revenge against your mother, but that falls pretty flat, since she’s passed on. Insanity’s a possibility, but there are the references in those letters, to maps, searches, keys, secrets. Whoever this dickhead is, he’s invested time and money watching you, and probably your sisters, too. Whatever Lucia wanted you girls to find? It means big bucks. Very big. And they’re not going to stop till they have it.”
Nell hid her eyes and massaged her temples. “It’s so ironic,” she murmured. “If that’s true. We don’t need this money, wherever it comes from. We don’t give a shit about money. None of us do. All we want is to live our lives in peace. Oh, God. There’s so much to freak out about, I’m in tilt.”
“Don’t think about any of it,” he suggested.
“Slick solution. Neat trick.” There was a smile in her voice. “And just exactly how do you suggest I do that?”
It had been such a weird evening already, he decided one more crazy risk wouldn’t change anything. He lifted her hand, and gave it a long, lingering kiss. “I’ve got a few good ideas,” he said.
She laughed behind her hand, and the vibrations in her shoulders went on for so long, he got scared she was crying again.
“I had no idea I was so damn funny,” he said. “Who knew.”
Her shoulders shook harder. She threw her head back, and wiped her eyes. “It’s not you. I just can’t believe it. I felt safe, in my place, after I put the alarm in. The thing cost a fortune. And the whole while, they were watching me. God, it’s disgusting. How did they get in there?”
“They probably wired the place before you put the alarm in.” He handed her his phone. “Call your sister. If she’s told you where she’s going on that telephone, tell her to change her plans.”
“Oh, God, you’re right,” she whispered. “Vivi.”
She called, and he listened to her garbled, one-sided conversation for the rest of the drive to his Upper West Side condo. The driver pulled over at the lobby entrance. She was still talking as he paid the driver.
“…can’t stay with me there any longer, Viv. Haven’t you been listening? They’ve been watching us all along! We can’t go near the place until we fix this mess. Go to Liam and Nancy’s…Yes, I know, but be a grown-up, Viv. Being a fifth wheel is better than being stuffed into the backseat of a car…. Oh, no, don’t worry about me. I’m staying with a friend.” Her eyes flicked to Duncan. Her voice got defensive. “No, you don’t know him…. Yes, it is a him, okay? And so? What of it?”
Duncan heard a shrill, tinny burst of female verbosity from the telephone, and Nell rolled her eyes and snorted. “If you must know, he’s the one who clobbered the kidnappers for me…. Of course I knew him before! He’s my new boss.” Another impassioned burst from the phone. “Look, Viv, I know it’s crazy, but can we thrash this out another time? Come to the seisìun at Malloy’s tomorrow night with Nancy and Liam, and we’ll talk there, okay?…Of course. You be careful, too.”
She ended the call and handed the phone back. “She’s staying with an old art school friend she met at the fair by chance, so we never discussed it on the bugged phone. Thank God. The Fiend has no line on her there.”
“Could you folks work this out once you’re outside the vehicle?” the driver asked, his voice plaintive. “I got another call. I gotta go.”
Duncan led her into his building, dragging her huge trolley behind him into the elevator. Up thirty-five floors, and he closed the door after her, engaged the chain, the dead bolts, the alarms.
He let out a long, relieved breath. Finally. He had her right where he wanted her.
Chapter
6
Nell looked around, impressed. His apartment was huge, almost empty. Austere to the point of chilliness. Blond wood on the wide expanse of gleaming floor. Three gray couches, grouped in a square around a low table with a vast plasma TV and entertainment console. A big, shadowy kitchen, back in a distant corner. Picture windows with stunning, brilliant cityscapes on two sides. A big terrace. A scattering of black-and-white photographs hung on otherwise blank walls.
“Wow,” she murmured. “Is this place, uh, yours?”
He nodded.
Um. This apartment answered any questions a person might have about how lucrative the business of intelligent data analysis program design had been for him. It beat academia and poetry writing all to hell. Not that it mattered. She hadn’t chosen to be a scholar for money.