Chapter Seven
Tuesday, April 11 nine a.m.
Jeb parked the rented SUV in front of a trim little pale blue ranch. Small two- and three-bedroom homes neatly dotted a canopied street identical in the amount of pride the homeowner placed on their slice of the American dream.
Tom looked over the tranquil setting and regretted the commotion he was about to cause. There was no doubt this was the home. The old Silverado slept in the driveway. Somewhere inside was his, his…whatever she was.
“You got this,” Jeb said.
“She’s not going to want to come.”
“Of course not. If she did, she would have showed up at the breakfast date you insisted we keep. I’m not complaining, seeing as I got a hot meal in my belly and a crisp twenty in my pocket.”
“I had to give her a chance.”
Jeb shook his head. “You didn’t then. You don’t now.”
Yes, he did, and he couldn’t explain it. Instead of trying, he slid out of the truck and went to the front door. His knock was answered by a spry old man with a thick head of black hair. His hazy eyes roamed the space in front of him, his brows furrowed at the dark shape that was Tom. “Yes?” He spoke with a heavy Spanish accent.
The GPS Jeb had planted on the truck gave them the location. The county auditor’s website gave them the property owner. Pedro Morales.
“Mr. Morales?” he said, giving those eyes a focal point. “My name is Dr. Thomas Riley. I had a date this morning with Peach. She didn’t show up, and I thought I would just stop by and make sure she was all right.”
The old man’s eyebrows went up at the word “doctor” and then higher at the early morning date. “Let me see if she is awake.”
Peach’s grandfather closed the door enough to cut off Tom’s view into the house. A monologue of Spanish flowed in the distance—Tom understood only his name—then the door re-opened.
“I am sorry, Doctor. She is not home. Maybe she is waiting for you at your date?”
“Tom! She’s running.” Jeb’s shout came from the driveway. “Cut through the house.”
Tom opened the screen door and lowered his arm to sweep the old man aside. He took one stride when something came up sharply against the back of his legs. He face planted into the carpet and then pushed up, a sprinter out of the gate. Until something blunt caught him in the back of the head and sent him back to the carpet.
This was not part of her plan, and it pissed her off. Peach had better things to do today than play hide and seek with Dr. Tom and his sidekick, Pancho Hardass. While her grandfather stalled, she shoved the few things she needed to look for Rico into a small sack.
“I’m sorry, Doctor. She is not home. Maybe she is waiting for you at your date?”
“As if.” Peach soundlessly opened the back door and stepped out of the house. She crouched down and looked around the corner at just the right time to see Jeb’s head poke over the Beast.
“Plan B it is.” She broke at a full sprint for the back fence.
“Tom! She’s running. Cut through the house,” Jeb yelled, his voice closer than it should have been.
She planted a hand on a fence post and cleared it easily. He followed her over the fence into the abutting yard. Over another fence and into the street. She was good at the obstacles. He was faster on the straightaways. She stole a look as he closed. She turned into another yard, headed for another gate. A Doberman came off a rear porch and landed in the driveway with an “I’ll tear your head off if you come in my yard” bark. She changed her trajectory, but the mistake cost her. Jeb cut the angle and caught her in a flying tackle that ground her shoulder into the damp grass.
Fury led as she fought him with everything she had.
“Stop it,” Jeb hissed, his knee in her back. “We have your grandfather. Do you really want him dragged into this?”
“You son of a bitch. You touch one hair on his head and I’ll cut off your balls and send them to your mama in a Mason jar.” She kicked her feet, connecting with her target.
“Nice language. You kiss your grandfather with that mouth?” He secured her wrists with a zip tie and pulled her to her feet as the homeowner came to the porch. He cut off any question with the flashing of a badge. “You’re safe. The show’s over. Go on back about your business.”
Her priority was her grandfather. She’d spent enough time with Tom to be confident that he was not the kind to hurt an old man—no matter how pissed he was at her. The pressing issue was getting them away from the house. She walked confidently beside Jeb, knowing she had leverage. Tom would take what she copied and be happy with it. Once they were gone, she’d find where that damn bug was hidden. She’d searched the truck last night and came up empty. Tired and cold, she hadn’t been as thorough as she needed. Mistake. Big mistake. One she couldn’t let her grandfather pay for.
Jeb kept his hand around her arm as they walked up the steps side by side. “Tom? We are coming in.” He opened the door, swinging Peach through first.
“That is far enough, señor.” Poppy stood in their modest living room with a shotgun in one hand. “Peach. Are you hurt?”
She wanted to cheer. Thought they could come into their house? No freaking way. She stepped over Tom to stand behind her grandfather. “No, Poppy. I am handcuffed but not hurt.”
“Tom? Can you hear me?” Jeb kicked at his brother-in-law’s foot.
Tom laid on his stomach, hands taped up behind his back, feet bound at the ankles. A discarded frying pan laid next to him. He moaned as he rolled his head left and right, like it was too heavy to lift.
“Let her loose,” Morales said.
“I can’t,” Jeb answered. “I used a plastic zip cord. I need to cut it off.”
“You are not getting near me with a knife.” She looked over Tom to see what Poppy had done. There were no marks that she could see, but his beautiful brown eyes were dazed. She dropped to her knees, her thigh against his shoulder. “Tomas?”
“I am calling the police,” Morales said.
“No!” Peach and Jeb shouted.
“We can work something out,” Jeb said. “Let’s all just sit down and calmly talk about this.”
Poppy swung the barrel toward Jeb’s voice. He kept it low, coincidentally aiming for the gut. “Why are you kidnapping my Peach?”
“We aren’t kidnapping her. We just have a few questions. I want to know why she set up to meet my brother-in-law,” Jeb said, all threat washed out of his voice. “Why she was at the construction site yesterday afternoon? Why she went back there last night?”
She looked up at her grandfather and gave him the whole story. It started with Fabrini’s comment about Rico and then Tom investigating it. She admitted to stealing his notes and files. She euphemized seducing Tom to “having a nice dinner with him.” Neither of them needed the truth. Her confession was in Spanish, was completely honest with her grandfather without giving a thing to Tom and Jeb.
Her grandfather listened as he always did and then asked two questions. “Did Rico cause the accident? Does this doctor believe Rico did?”
“I know absolutely that he didn’t cause it, Poppy. He was on the phone with me, and I saw him through my binoculars. He did everything he could to stop it.” She pointed at Tom with her chin. “His notes had a lot of questions, but he crossed out operator error as a likely cause.”
Poppy’s eyes grew large. He took a staggering step backward and spoke in English. “You saw him die? My son?”
Jeb leaped over Tom and gained control of the gun. “Who is your son?”
“Rico Morales, the crane operator.” Tom rolled until he managed to sit. “Jeb, put the gun down. Cut Peach and me loose. I’m sorry, Mr. Morales. I’m sorry for your loss and what happened here today. I was hired by the owner, Frank Fabrini, to determine the cause of the crane failure. He didn’t trust that the official investigations would get to the truth.”
Peach held very still while Jeb cut the restraints with a large pocketknife, and then told her grandfather how it was. “Fabrini is just trying to cover his own ass, Poppy. He plans to blame it on Rico. I heard him. It doesn’t matter what Tom finds.” She hated Frank Fabrini as she hated no other. An arrogant, rich man ready to walk across the bones of the people who worked for a living. He was the reason her uncle was missing and likely dead.
“Not Frank,” Tom said in a voice of clear confidence as Jeb cut through the thick tape. “He has been serious about safety since he lost his older brother in a construction accident. He was on the site after hours and fell in a hole that wasn’t covered properly. By the time Frank found him the next day, he was dead. Frank blamed himself for his brother’s death. He still does.”
Her grandfather swayed with weariness, suddenly looking a decade older. “They have not found him.”
Peach wrapped her arm around him, wishing she could take it all away, heartbroken because she couldn’t. “They will, Poppy. The Coast Guard won’t give up, and neither will I. I’m going back out today. I’m going to get closer to the shore.”
“It’s been nearly seventy-two hours,” Tom said gently.
She stared into his eyes, letting him see beneath the surface. “I won’t stop until he is home.”
Tom sat alone at the kitchen table with an ice pack pressed to his head, scowling at the frying pan that sat on the stovetop. He was never going to live this down. Knocked out cold by an almost blind man with a frying pan. After the wave of grief passed, Pedro Morales busied himself with being a host, bringing Tom into the pretty little kitchen. The spic-and-span room and hospitality did nothing to stop the drum line that banged in his head. He swallowed the little white pills, downed the glass of water, and readjusted the ice pack.
After tending to Tom’s head, Peach had taken her grandfather to his room. The combination of grief and the confrontation had drained him of energy. She came into the room rubbing her wrists.
“How is he?” he asked.
She sat in the chair next to him, gingerly lowering herself. “Heartbroken. How are you?”
“Bent but not broken. He has some aim for a blind man.”
“He isn’t completely blind. Not yet, anyway. Poppy was a hell of a shortstop in his day. He came here from Guatemala to play baseball. Never made it to the majors, but he met my grandmother, and that was that.”
“So that part was true?” He set the ice pack down and held out his hand. “Let me see your wrists.”
She put her hands in her lap. “I’m okay.”
He waved his open hand impatiently. “I’m a doctor. You’re supposed to listen to me.”
She rolled her eyes but placed a hand in his. “You’re not that kind of doctor.”
He held her hand as if it were a precious treasure. “Jeb must have been very irritated with you. Give me the other.”
When she complied, he inspected the matching marks and then set the ice pack over them. Her light green eyes watched his every move as if she expected him to bite at any moment. He smoothed back the hair that had escaped her braid and then brushed grass from her shoulder. The icepack was removed and the wounds re-inspected. This time, he treated them with the soft brushing of his lips.
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
He lifted his eyes, his thumbs making soothing circles over the marks. “I like you. I have from the first minute I saw you.”
She frowned and shook her head in disagreement. “No. You—”
“In the bar, the first night I was in town. The manager was tossing you out.”
“He thought I was a hooker.” She sneered, and her eyes narrowed, as if the insult were fresh.
“You were lighting him up. I thought, ‘I hope that stupid son of a bitch knows how to protect himself.’ I didn’t get a good look at your face. If I had seen your eyes… You threw me the next day, with the blond wig and the accent. I love your eyes.”
She cleared her throat, looking away as if uneasy.
He was getting to know her. When she wasn’t comfortable with something, she just turned away from it. She didn’t argue; she just left. He wanted her to know there was another option. “You could have stayed.”
She shook her head adamantly. “It was too late as it was. I should have left hours earlier. I tried to knock you out with Poppy’s sleeping pills, but you wouldn’t drink the water.”
He stopped rubbing her wrist. He couldn’t have heard her right. “Sleeping pills? In the glass by the bedside table?”
“Yes.”
Tom dropped her hands as he leaped to his feet, staggering a little when the world spun. “You drugged me?”
“No. I tried to drug you. That’s completely different,” she said, her voice reasonable.
“How? How in the world is that different?” He heard his voice climb but couldn’t stop it.
“The courts have long differentiated between the intent to do something and actually doing something. If I go into a store, intent on stealing a candy bar, but I don’t actually steal it, then I cannot be prosecuted for stealing.”
She was so calm as she made the argument that he was dumbstruck. “How…but…no. How can you make that argument? You did drug the glass of water. You did try to get me to drink it. The fact that it didn’t work does not get you off.”
“Of course it does.”
He pulled at his hair. “No. No, no, no. Besides, I did drink it last night.” His voice rose a few decibels.
She looked up with a small grin of satisfaction. “I bet the full night’s sleep did you good.”
“That is not the point,” he said, dropping his voice to a hiss. “You. Drugged. Me.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “You should thank me—”
“Thank you!”
“You’re welcome. If it wasn’t for me copying your computer files, they would all be lost.”
He slammed his open palms on the table. “What. Did. You. Do?”
“Easy,” Jeb said, leaning against the doorway, arms crossed over his chest.
Tom’s hands trembled. He shot a “shut up” look at Jeb and then zeroed back in on Peach. “Tell me.”
She rolled her eyes and walked out of the kitchen. He followed her, his fingers curling into talons the right size to lock around her throat and throttle the woman. Through a white-painted door was a room with more random stuff than a flea market. He recognized the wet suit that was slung over the back of a chair. On the seat piled a foot high with books was the blond hair that had captured his attention. A shift of black was trying to escape from the garbage can. The little black dress he had torn off her with his teeth.
“Here.”
The simple word made him look up. He took the shiny black hard drive from her out-stretched hand.
“It has your hard drive, the images on your digital camera, and pictures of your notebook. I couldn’t copy the film images, so those are really gone.”
A strange and unexpected wave of relief lowered his temperature from sizzling to controlled. He hadn’t lost a thing. “The work isn’t lost.” He smiled at the unexpected gift but then remembered himself. “Don’t try to distract me. Why did you steal my files?”
“I didn’t steal them.” Her chin was in the air defiantly. “I copied them, leaving them in exactly the same condition as they were.”
“Just tell me why,” he repeated, biting his lips to prevent an argument.
“Fabrini blames my uncle. Rico did nothing wrong. I needed to know what you knew and what you thought.” The chin that began so boldly in the air ended tucked against her chest. “My uncle is a good man. He loves Poppy, and he loves me, and he did not cause that crane to fall.”
“The data doesn’t support operator error. I’m just getting started on the analysis but…it fell wrong.” He felt the pain radiating from her. “Later, when we’re past this, I need you to talk to me. I need to know what you saw.”
She nodded, rubbed the heel of her hand over her heart.
Tom couldn’t imagine the pain. He ached for her, reached for her, but she pulled away, wrapping her arms protectively around her stomach. Then she lowered her arms and began to pace. Up and down that narrow path in her room, she constantly massaged that spot over her heart.
“He had forgotten his lunch. Again. I parked on the bluff. There is a spot where it was easy to see him. He watched his signal man while they fastened the deck he was supposed to lift. Everything was fine…and then…”
She had lived through this first time alone. This time, he was here. There was no making it all better, but he knew he could make this moment bearable. He stepped into her path and wrapped her in his arms, tightening them when her voice cracked. She struggled, but he didn’t relent. He tucked her head under his chin and just held on.
“I was sitting outside, in the dirt, praying the Coast Guard would bring my uncle back. I heard Fabrini. I heard him shout that he wasn’t going to have this pinned on him when it was the crane operator’s fault. He shouted that he needed Riley’s boy. I followed him that night.”
“To the bar,” he said, holding her in place and smartly not saying anything about how wet his shirt was becoming.
She nodded. “I saw you check out the blondes—”
“I didn’t.”
She laughed, just a little. “You absolutely did. I wanted to know what you knew. And I knew how to find out.” She pushed him away and crossed her arms under her chest. “You can ask for an apology, but I won’t give it. You got what you wanted—a hard, guilt-free fuck. Nothing held back. I got what I wanted. No regrets.”
Tom winced. His love life was like one of those little plastic swimming pools they use for toddlers—cheap and shallow. Sure, it was fun to splash around in when things were hot, but once things cooled off, there was nothing left but empty. He opened his mouth to deny her pointedly accurate description of his intention from the minute he saw her. He shut it because he couldn’t.
The woman standing in front of him dared him to rebuke her. He looked at her face, seeing both strength and vulnerability in her beautiful features. In that moment, he felt something, a…connection. That’s what it was. He felt a connection to her that he had never felt with a woman. It wasn’t just sex. It was great sex. And it was the freaking incredible few hours they had spent together in that restaurant talking. Laughing. And, since he was being honest, he could admit that he respected her. After all, she had outsmarted him at a game he’d been playing for years.
He had to respect that.
He reached out to Peach, wanting to soothe the ache she wore on her sleeve. She stepped to the side, knocking his hand away.
He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Oh, I’m not so sure about the ‘no regrets’ part.”
Jeb stood at the small kitchen table, disemboweling Peach’s purse. Her wallet was set to the side, flipped open to a none-too-flattering DMV picture.
“What the hell are you doing?” she said loud enough to wake her grandfather.
“What does it look like, Esmeralda?”
She kicked hard. Right between his legs. Jeb went down and took the table with him. Curled into the obligatory fetal position, he cradled his wounded soldiers as he rocked back and forth.
She put her foot on his throat hard enough to get his attention. “Are you going to use that name ever again?”
“No, ma’am.”
She pushed a little harder. “So we have an understanding, you and me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Jesus,” Tom said as he walked into the room. “Jeb, what did you do?”
Jeb’s eyes flashed. “Me? She’s standing on my throat. She kicked me in the balls, and you want to know what I did?”
She removed her foot but stayed light on her feet. Jeb was a big man, and she had no intentions of giving him any advantage. “If you guys are done, get on your way. I have work to do.”
Tom righted the table and picked up the purse and its contents while Jeb climbed off the floor. “What kind of work do you do?”
She shook her head. “The question and answer period of our show is over. It’s time for you to exit, stage right. Take the bug you put on my truck with you.”
“I want to talk to you more, about the accident. Here,” he said when she was about to put him off and handed her his card. “Call me. Well find a time and a place that works for both of us. What you know…it could make all the difference.”
Oh, he knew the right thing to say. She was feeling raw and irritated at Jeb, but those would pass. She was beginning to trust him and would give him any help she could. “Fine. I’ll call you tomorrow. Now please go. I need to take care of my grandfather.”
Like gentlemen, they left. Ten minutes passed, and she did a sweep of the neighborhood. If they were still out there, they were good. She didn’t find a thing out of the ordinary. Her cell phone rang. She’d deleted the contact but recognized the number. With a shake of her head, she declined the call. She’d had enough emotion for one day. She needed to work, to focus her mind in order to give her heart a break. The kitchen table was commandeered as a desk. She booted her computer and accessed the portable hard drive. Methodically, she searched and studied the files from Tom’s computer and the info she scanned from Hawthorne’s office.
Peach was blessed—or cursed—with a mind that loved chaos. She had a knack for seeing the order in disorder, for deciphering patterns and visualizing in three dimensions. Each image appeared on the screen for seconds, maybe a minute. She wasn’t memorizing it. She was looking for relationships. How thing 1 and thing 2 were related. How thing 3 was disconnected.
Two hours later, she had a worm. A nice plump, juicy worm, the kind that would make great bait on the end of a line. If she played this one right, she might just hook a thief.
Hawthorne’s files had given Peach a firm direction, but it lacked details. There was a reason people said, “The devil is in the details.” It was most often where a man screwed the hell up.
She needed to go out.
Poppy had come out of his room, tired bags under his eyes. He shuffled to the living room and turned on his shows. It was hard to leave him alone in this difficult time, but sitting in the house did neither of them any good. They needed facts, and she knew where to find them. She changed into jeans and a knit shirt that fit like a second skin, then restocked her “work” bag.
“Poppy, I’m going out.”
“Work or play?”
Her hand on his shoulder, she leaned in and kissed his leathered cheek. “My work is play.”
He clasped her hand. “You had a call before. On your phone. Maybe it was your friend. Will he be coming back with you? You would make a good team.”
“Poppy,” she said as a warning, then softened her tone. “The only man I need on my team is you. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Her grandfather kissed her hand. “Vaya con Dios.”
“Amen,” she muttered as she set out to not steal more information.