19

GRANT

“It is with deep regret and profound reluctance that I present to you Mariah Ying.”

I watch, that deep regret and profound reluctance spilling over, as Penelope approaches the table where Mariah sits, working. We’re once again in the Café du Black Tar, once again meeting for not-coffee and back-channel talk. Penelope took one look at this place’s peeling linoleum interior and declared herself enchanted.

“Agent Ying is the hacker friend I was telling you about,” I add. “Mariah, this is my wife, Penelope Blue.”

I’m not sure what I expect from these two women being in the same room together, but neither one is known to be shy around strangers—or around me. I’ll be lucky to walk out of this café with my dignity intact.

“Did you really hide inside a safe as it was being transported on an armored truck?” Mariah asks. She forgoes the traditional handshake—physical contact, like people lingering in her office, has always been something she strives to avoid—and squints at Penelope from behind a pair of dark-rimmed glasses. “And for the full eight hours it made its route?”

“Technically, it was closer to nine hours. The driver got stuck in traffic.” My wife gives a delicate shudder at the memory of those four metal walls and a dwindling oxygen tank. It’s amazing to think about how successful a greaseman she was, given her fear of tight spaces. Amazing and frightening. She’s not a woman to balk at a challenge, no matter how foolish it might be.

As our current situation attests.

“Hot damn,” Mariah says, summing up my feelings. “You’re hardcore.”

“And did you really hack in to the Treasury and change the serial numbers on all the five-dollar bills printed in the United States for three whole months?” Penelope asks.

Mariah turns to me with a grin. “Aw, Emerson. You told her about me?”

Flipping her off is useless. By this time, Mariah and Penelope have forged an unbreakable bond of questionable ethics and mutual admiration. I knew this was a bad idea.

“Sorry I had to ask you to meet me here,” Mariah says and gestures for Penelope to take a seat. There’s only one other chair at the table, so I’m left to stand. “The coffee is terrible, and the food is worse, but this is one of the most secure places to talk in the city.”

“Oh, we can totally meet at my dad’s place next time,” Penelope offers. “It’s equally secure, and it comes with room service.”

“Absolutely not,” I say. “I may have allowed you two to drag my morals this low, but I draw the line at using Blackrock’s hideout. We’ll say what we need to right here.”

My tone of authority can make at least half a dozen agents in the New York field office cry, but of course, it has no power here. Penelope shrugs with a calm, “Suit your stubborn self,” and Mariah laughs to see my wife put me so neatly in my place.

I know better than to pitch myself into a fight tipped so far out of my favor, so I pull the blueprints out of my interior jacket pocket and hand them to Mariah. I spent a few hours this morning trying to decipher the markings, but I didn’t get any closer than I did with Penelope a few days ago.

Much to my dismay. Part of me wanted to figure out what the schematics are for and why my wife is so keen on locating them—without her knowing about it. But I didn’t, and I promised to trust her, so here we are. In a secret meeting to beg more favors from a hacker who knows enough about my activities to hand me over to her superiors and have me stripped of my badge within minutes.

Trust is hard.

“We were hoping you could find out what type of building this is and where it’s located,” I begin. “I know it’s not much to go on, but—”

“Of course.” Mariah lifts her glasses to the top of her head and skims the blueprints. “Is it here in the city?”

“I think so, but I can’t say for sure.” Penelope’s tone is anxious. “I have reason to believe it’s a jewelry store, but Grant and I both feel like it might be something else.”

“That’s because it is something else,” Mariah says.

Penelope and I exchange a glance.

“What kind of something else?” I ask.

“My best guess?” Mariah hands the blueprints to Penelope. “An art gallery. Either that or a museum. In my experience, they’re almost interchangeable.”

“But you barely looked at it,” I protest.

Beside me, Penelope echoes, “A museum?”

“It’s big for a gallery but small for a museum, which means if it’s local, it’s either the Youngtown Gallery in SoHo or the Conrad Museum uptown. I haven’t been to either of those, or I’d be able to confirm it for you.”

Penelope holds the blueprints, staring at them as if seeing them for the first time. I’m as impressed as she is by how quickly Mariah placed them, but I set my wonder aside in favor of more concrete answers.

“How can you be so sure?” I ask.

“Please. You’ve hacked into one museum building plan, you’ve hacked into them all. Rooms that size almost always mean someone is showing something off, and there’s electrical wiring between every stud. You need that if you want alarms on each display item.”

Damn. She’s good. I’m glad—and not for the first time—that she’s on my side.

“Of course, if it’s in another city, your guess is as good as mine,” she says. “Did you want me to double-check? If you give me a few minutes, I can pull up both Youngtown and Conrad.”

I’m about to ask her to do it, but my wife interrupts. “No, that’s okay. You’ve been a big help.”

I lift a brow. “You sure? We came all this way…”

“There’s no need.” A smile, quick and fleeting, crosses her face. “I got the information I wanted. I’m good.”

“That’s it?” That seems easy. Too easy.

She nods and begins another intense perusal of the blueprints, her brow furrowed and eyes averted from mine. This would ordinarily be a loud warning that now is a good time to demand answers—who gave them to her, why they have her in such a worry—but Mariah draws my attention.

“I also have some information on that other thing you asked me to look into,” she says.

I don’t miss a beat. “Leon’s past caseload?”

“Yeah, but you’re not going to like it.”

My heartbeat picks up. I lean down to get a look at her screen, but she closes the laptop and hands me a sheet of paper instead.

“What’s this?” I hold the page at arm’s length. “There are only six names listed—and one of them’s the Picasso case I solved for him.”

“Those are the only six cases he’s worked on in the three years he’s been with the Bureau,” she says.

A quick mental calculation of my own workload hands me roughly twelve times that amount in the same window—and that’s with the Warren and Penelope Blue investigation taking up most of my efforts. We’re known for moving slow in the Major Thefts department, thanks to the scope and scale of the rings we uncover, but six cases is ludicrous.

“How is that possible? Even if he’d arrested the entire crew for the Harry Winston heist of ’08, there’s no way they’d let him get away with a track record that bad, much less reward it.” I scan the list. In addition to the Picasso bust, three of the names are small-time retail jobs, but I don’t know the other two, which isn’t a point in his favor. Ours is a field where celebrity matters. “I don’t understand. What’s he been doing all this time?”

“According to what I found?” Mariah shrugs. “Not much. In fact, he took an extended leave of absence last year. Ten months of it, to be exact.”

“Maybe he was working undercover,” Penelope offers.

“As what?” I ask. “A bumbling, ineffective criminal mastermind?”

“Maybe he’s working undercover now,” she amends.

“As what? A bumbling, ineffective criminal mastermind?” I rub my hand along the back of my neck, feeling tense. Nothing about this man makes sense, and it’s starting to seriously piss me off. Either he’s obsessed with my wife, or he’s not. Either he uses his position as a cover for theft, or he doesn’t. Just once, I’d like him to show me his true face. “At least tell me this much. Those three retail cases…were the items recovered?”

“Yeah, they were—in full and without a fuss. There’s no way he could have kept them for himself. Sorry, Emerson. Looks like he might not be the bad guy you were hoping for.”

“I don’t hope anyone is a bad guy,” I say, shaking my head at this well-matched pair of miscreants. “I only hope to catch them before they do too much damage.”

“I’m with Mariah on this one.” Penelope casts an anxious look at her blueprints again before whisking them off the table and out of sight. “Maybe it’s not Christopher. Maybe the Peep-Toe Prowler is someone else.”

“You mean Tara?”

“Yes,” she says quickly. “I mean Tara. I never could picture him in heels anyway.”

I grunt my dislike of that theory. Tara would make a neat and tidy answer, but I know the way that woman operates, and this isn’t her style. She likes to make a mark, leave a trail. For her, fame is half the goal—and if I can believe my guys tailing her, she’s become a model citizen as of late.

I’m missing a step, not seeing something that’s right in front of my face.

“Well, I’m not giving up that easily,” I say. Taking Penelope’s hand, I pull her to her feet. Her fingers feel small and cold inside mine, and I give them a reassuring squeeze. “One closed door doesn’t mean anything except that it’s time to open a window.”

“What are you going to do?” Mariah asks.

“Find a window.”

* * *

“How was your tea party, by the way?”

I escort Penelope out of the café with a hand on the small of her back, aware of how tense she feels under my fingers. Her body has always been a great means of communication—as a contortionist and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on, her body is one of her best tools of the trade—and I’ve learned to read every inch of her skin.

“Oh!” A round-eyed, startled gaze flies up to mine. “Good. It was good. Fancy.”

“Good and fancy. Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me everything?”

“Because I’m not telling you everything,” she says promptly and then pauses. I know enough to see that pause to its natural conclusion, so I wait. “I, um, met a woman there.”

“I was under the impression you were going to meet several of them. Any likely suspects? We’ve interviewed everyone who was at the parties where the thefts occurred—multiple times—but we haven’t found any patterns worth following up on.”

“No, no. It’s nothing like that. They were all pretty normal—well, one of them might be addicted to pain pills, but she left fingerprints all over the medicine cabinet, so I doubt she’s a suspect.”

My lips twitch as I struggle to suppress a laugh. I’m not going to ask how she knows that.

“This was a woman named Jane. Jane Bartlett.”

She sounds familiar, but not in a way that raises alarms. In fact, the only thing remotely alarming is the way Penelope sighs over her name, her gentle exhalation full of longing and admiration.

She’s never sighed over me like that.

“She’s amazing. Beautiful and funny and nice…” Her voice takes on a wistful note. “I saw her at lunch with my grandmother the other day, too, but I didn’t know who she was. She kept staring at me, so I figured she was someone I stole from once.”

Again, it’s with considerable effort that I keep from laughing. Only my wife wouldn’t remember all her past marks, and only my wife would brazen it out when potentially confronted with one. Every other thief I’ve known—and I’ve known my fair share—would have fled at the first sign of recognition.

“I take it she turned out to be a friend rather than foe?”

Penelope releases another of those sighs. “She knew my mom, Grant. She was her best friend growing up.”

I stop in the middle of the sidewalk, my hand around her waist compelling her to do the same. Some conversations require a complete suspension of time and movement, and this is one of them. “Oh, Penelope.”

“I know.” Her lips lift in a wistful smile. “She said I remind her of my mom. She even promised to tell me stories about their childhood together.”

“I’m so glad,” I say, and I mean it.

This hole in Penelope’s life has been a painful one. When she was young, her dad gave her an education and a roof over her head, but he’s hardly what I’d call a soft man. No one kissed her knees when she scraped them jumping out of three-story buildings; no one sang her back to sleep when nightmares came. She was pitched into adulthood way too young and under circumstances I shudder to think about.

Yet she still managed to grow into this warm, funny, vibrant human being everyone can’t help but love—and she did it on her own.

“How does Erica feel about it?” I ask.

“That’s the weird thing,” Penelope says. “She didn’t seem to care. You know how she always changes the subject whenever I mention my mom? Well, it didn’t happen this time. With Jane there, she actually opened up for once.”

“Yeah? What did you find out about her?”

“Mostly that she was a pain in everyone’s ass.”

I don’t bother suppressing my laugh this time. “Why am I not surprised?”

She draws a deep, contented breath. “I don’t mind being so lost now, you know? It’s weird. Knowing that one tiny thing about her is like finding the door to a whole new side to myself. For the first time in my life, I get to be more than just Warren Blue’s daughter. I get to be part of her, too.”

My heart gives a painful lurch. You’re not lost, I want to say. Not when you’re with me.

“I’m so happy for you,” I say instead. I pull her into my arms and kiss the top of her head, her hair sending up the familiar scent of citrus shampoo. “This Jane person sounds like just what you need.”

“I think she will be,” Penelope says, but as soon as I release her, a troubled look descends. “At least, I hope she will be.”

My instincts kick in. She’s not telling me something.

“And you’re sure there isn’t anything else?” I ask as gently as I can. I watch and wait, hoping she’ll give me more.

She forces a smile. “I’m sure.”