Double Vision (24 page)

Yesterday, she would have handed the information about Taylor's possible whereabouts and Senator Radcliff's involvement to JT and Bayard and let them deal with it. Today, she had a different perspective. She trusted both men as individuals, but she couldn't trust the organizations they worked for. Alex had a line into the FBI and possibly other law-enforcement agencies. The fact that he also had Radcliff, a former military adviser to the Pentagon and now a United States senator, in his pocket, was even more frightening.

If Taylor was being held in Radcliff's house, revealing that information could place Taylor in even more jeopardy. She had thought it through, going over and over the facts, and every time she had come to the same conclusion. If she followed the logic—that she was Alex's goal, that it was the money Esther had stolen that he wanted—then until he had her, Taylor was safe.

Once Alex realized that using Baby had failed, he would employ his backup plan and offer a deal—Taylor's release in exchange for her. The thought of handing herself over to Alex filled her with dread, but if she had to, she would do it.

Striking out on her own was a risk, maybe a stupid one. It was possible that Taylor's best chance at survival lay with the authorities, who were trained to deal with hostage situations. But with the FBI mole still in place and undetected, she didn't think so. The way she saw it, as long as she was on her own, she could control the way events unfolded.

She unfastened her wristwatch, then left it on the kitchen counter. She was tempted to take it, tempted to cling to the safety the watch and JT represented, but if she kept it then JT would follow and she couldn't afford the connection. If he knew what she was going to attempt, he would stop her.

A sharp rap at the front door almost stopped her heart as she led Baby down the hall to her bedroom, and she quickened her step. The caller was probably Kurt, although there was a remote possibility it could be JT.

Keeping Baby close, she slipped out of the French doors in her bedroom and onto the back deck. Baby's claws clicked on the bleached hardwood, the sound distinct, although it wouldn't be discernible to anyone standing on the front porch of the house. Seconds later, they stepped into the thick cover of a creeper that grew on the veranda and spilled over into the adjacent border of shrubs and trees. Rina urged Baby through the shadowed tangle, staying close to the fence line.

The fence was going to be a problem. There was no way she could get Baby over the six-foot-high wooden palings that bordered the rear of the yard. She was going to have to find a way under the chain link they were presently following, and walk out through the neighbor's property. The only blessing was that the nearest dog lived four doors away, which meant she and Baby should be able to make it to the street without a major ruckus.

Keeping a firm grip on Baby's harness, she began working her way closer to the mesh. It was overgrown by shrubs, and in places trees overhung it, but aside from the hazard of dodging low branches, Rina counted that as a positive. The trees were old and so was the fence. In places it was damaged and sagging.

Her fingers trailed across a section of bare mesh. A sharp rapping froze her in place. A soft drizzle had started, muffling sound, but the tinkle of glass breaking was clear enough. Whoever had been knocking on the door had just broken into her house.

Whispering a command for Baby to sit, she crouched down and felt around the thick layer of leaves at the base of the fence. Scraping the leaves away, she managed to get her fingers underneath the wire and lift it, but the gap was narrow. She would have to go down on her belly. Getting Baby through was going to be more difficult.

She shrugged out of the knapsack, pushed it under the fence, then snaked under the wire. It wasn't graceful, and it wasn't quiet, because leaves rustled and the fence made a jingling noise, but she was through.

Pulse racing, she hauled the fence as high as it would go, no longer worrying about the noise. Only seconds had passed since she'd heard the sound of breaking glass. Whoever had broken in would search the house before they would think to check the backyard. She softly commanded Baby to come and pulled on the harness, reinforcing the message that she wanted him to go under the fence. With a faint grunting sound, Baby shimmied under and surged to his feet.

Shrugging into the knapsack, Rina took a moment to listen. Apart from the distant hum of traffic, the faint sound of a television show playing in the Spurlocks' house just yards away, and the slow drip of moisture off leaves, the night was silent.

Gripping the harness, Rina stepped out from behind a neatly shaped shrub onto bare lawn and began to walk, Baby padding silently beside her.

The lawn was as flat as a bowling green and empty of all cover, apart from a row of trees placed with military precision down the side of the house and a tidy clipped hedge that ran parallel with the trees along the boundary. Blue light flickered through a gap in the drapes of the Spurlocks' sitting room window and the sweep of light from the kitchen lit up the neighbor's backyard, which bordered the rear of Rina's property.

A footfall made her freeze. Pulse thudding, she stepped into the deep shadow of a tree and held Baby in check. A flicker of movement beneath the ancient magnolia that hung over her back fence drew her eye. Someone was in the Spurlocks' neighbor's backyard.

Another movement registered, this time higher. Whoever it was, they were climbing the tree. The figure became briefly visible as he stepped across a thick tree limb and onto the rim of the fence and was caught in the wash of light flowing from the Spurlocks' sitting room directly behind her. As he turned to let himself down into her backyard, Rina caught a brief flash of a face and blond hair and froze.

Not a he.
She.

Diane Eady was climbing into her backyard.

The second Diane disappeared over the fence, Rina moved. A twig snapped beneath her shoe just as she caught a second flicker of movement by the magnolia. She held her breath, certain she had been both seen and heard. Long seconds ticked by while she remained rigidly still. The figure moved, swiveling as he examined the line of trees, and she realized that even though he
had
looked directly at her, he hadn't registered that she was there, because the deep shadow of the tree trunk and the glaring light behind her had made her invisible. The line of the clipped hedge hid Baby from sight.

Something metallic gleamed. A gun.

The moment Alex had shot Cesar replayed itself. Her chest squeezed tight, a raw sound rasped from her throat.

A heavy droplet of rain exploded on her forehead, a second hitting her shoulder. All around she could hear the sharp rapping as the rain came down in huge droplets, spasmodic and tropically heavy. Still, the figure didn't move. She could feel his intensity as he continued to search. The rain increased in intensity, falling like a thick gray curtain, thundering on the roof of the house behind her and blotting out the night.

Still frozen, she stared in the direction of the tree, but she had lost him in the murk. He could have moved; he could be just feet away. She wasn't sure.

A flash of light reflecting off pale, wet skin jerked her gaze to the left. With a lithe, fluid movement, he dropped over the fence into her backyard.

Earl Slater.

A shudder worked its way down her spine. Diane and Slater, together.

Diane had been working for Alex all along.

Don't think. Move.

Numbly, she urged Baby to walk on. She didn't know how long Diane and Slater would be, but it could only be a matter of minutes before they discovered that she wasn't in the house. She needed to be gone before that happened. They would likely leave the property the same way they had entered it, and she couldn't count on the sheer luck that had kept them both invisible a second time.

She stepped from shadow into glaring light. Rain pounded on her head and soaked through her sweater and jeans as she strode beneath the wet rank of trees. She could feel Baby's warmth against her right leg. Canned laughter erupted from the Spurlocks' sitting room, the sound disembodied, and suddenly the abyss that separated her from that kind of normalcy registered, starker and more distinct than usual. The Spurlocks would have had their dinner and would now be comfortably ensconced in front of one of their favorite game shows. She knew Audrey worked part-time at an insurance office, and that Walt ran his own marine-engines repair business in town. She had heard the sound of a lawn mower earlier, which meant Walt must have cut the lawns when he'd gotten home from work.

Audrey and Walt were inside their house, warm and dry and secure. No one was hunting them, or was ever likely to. No one wanted to dissect the contents of their heads. No one wanted them dead.

Slater had had a gun.

Water squelched in her sneakers as she made it past the sitting room to the front yard. Cast into shadow by a thick front hedge, the pretty formal borders and bricked paths looked grim and monochromatic.

For long seconds she hunched beneath a dripping rose arbor that curved gracefully over a white picket gate and surveyed the street. The yellowish glare of the streetlamps glimmered off slick sidewalks. There were two vehicles, a truck and a sedan, parked on the opposite side of the asphalt. Steam rose in tendrils off the road, as she studied the vehicles. One should have contained Hal, but both appeared to be empty.

One of the vehicles had to belong to Slater. The fact that they were parked close together didn't bode well. It was possible Hal wasn't in his vehicle because he had concealed himself on one of the neighboring properties to keep a watch over her backyard. If that was the case, there was no way he wouldn't have spotted her sneaking through the Spurlocks' place, or Diane and Slater going over the back fence into hers.

Pushing the gate open, Rina stepped out onto the sidewalk with Baby and broke into a run.

The rain eased to a thin drizzle as the intersection loomed. To reach the bus station, they would have to cross the road. Heart pounding, lungs aching, expecting at any moment to hear Slater call out, she launched off the curb. Now that the rain had almost stopped, apart from the mist, the night was clear. She and Baby were glaringly visible.

Seconds later, she paused in the deep gloom of an overhanging tree and studied the empty street. The only movement she could detect was the rustling of tree branches as a faint breeze sprang up, and the shadowy silhouette of someone in the house directly across the intersection as they walked past a lighted window. Apart from the two vehicles parked across from the Spurlocks' place, nothing was out of the ordinary. The street looked like it did most evenings when she had walked around the block: pretty, pleasant and utterly normal.

Tightening her grip on Baby's harness, she backed into the shadows, turned on her heel and, once more, broke into a run.

L
ights blazed in every room of Rina's house when JT pulled into the drive. It took him less than thirty seconds to conduct his own search and establish for himself that Rina and Baby weren't there. There were no signs of blood or a scuffle. The fact that she had left her SUV in the garage meant that either someone had gotten to her, or she had sneaked out.

He was going with the latter theory.

He studied the wristwatch sitting on the kitchen counter. She had left in a hurry—closet doors and drawers had been left open, a box of Baby's dog toys was abandoned in the hall—but she had taken the time to leave her watch in a place where it was instantly visible. The message was clear. She had left on her own and she didn't want to be followed.

Kurt joined him at the counter. “There's been some traffic out back. At least two came over the back fence. From the footprints, either two men—one large and one small—or else the small guy is a woman. I'm betting on the blonde. And, no, the shoe size wasn't Rina's.” He jerked his head at the neighboring property. “She and the dog went out that way. I've already talked to the Spurlocks, and they didn't see or hear a thing.”

“What about Hal?”

Kurt looked grim. “We found him in the trunk of his car. The coroner's doing the paperwork now.”

JT stared at the activity on the back lawn. With three local, linked homicides now on the books, complicating the ongoing federal case, the issue of jurisdiction was sticky. Latham, a heavy hitter from the U.S. Marshal's office in Beaumont, was here, along with Maloney, Rina's WitSec contact. So was Lawrence Atkins, one of Bayard's FBI agents who just happened to be in town. He was willing to bet Ed Marlow wouldn't be far behind, and neither would the press. Time to leave. “I need your car.”

Kurt dug in his pants pocket and handed him a set of keys. JT swapped him the keys to the rental he'd hired. No explanation was needed. JT had lost his vehicle and all of his equipment, including his laptop and his satellite phone. He needed the communications system. Kurt, who would be stuck in Beaumont for the foreseeable future dealing with the formalities surrounding Hal's murder and the investigation into Wendell and Sayer's deaths, could get by with a phone until replacement equipment arrived.

Kurt walked with him to the car, leaned in and retrieved his briefcase and files. “Where are you going?” His gaze slid to a car that had just pulled in against the curb, and to Bayard's distinctive profile. “No, wait, don't tell me. I don't want to know.” Being squeezed by Bayard wasn't his favorite pastime.

JT slid behind the wheel. “I'll be in touch.”

Kurt had already checked the flights out, and the bus and taxi companies. There had been a report of a blind woman with a Seeing Eye dog on one of the short, regular bus routes, but after that, nothing. Her name hadn't registered on any flight manifests yet, which could mean she had rented a car.

Something had happened, something big. It was possible that she had been frightened by Sayer's death and the implication that Wendell had led Lopez to her, but he didn't think that in itself was enough to scare a woman who had chosen to stay in Lopez's house, pretending to be blind so she could force herself to remember the account numbers and recover evidence that her father had been coerced.

The only reason Rina had to strike out on her own was Taylor. According to Kurt, she hadn't received any calls on her landline, but that still left her cell phone.

Somehow, she had managed to give Kurt the slip.

When he'd initially read Rina's file, like the other agents involved, he had wondered just how innocent she could be when she was married to Lopez. For a while the surveillance team had run a book on whether she was innocent or guilty, but after watching her for a few weeks, the joking attitude had begun to bug him. He'd come to the conclusion that she might be living with Lopez, but nothing about Rina Morell was cut and dried. For a while he had wondered if her detachment was caused by some kind of medication, but after checking her medical files and finding that the only medication she took was an occasional codeine-based product for headaches, he'd had to change his mindset.

In his spare time he had dug through every recorded piece of information he could find about her. Her psychological reports and school records had proved the most interesting. Her IQ was way higher than average, bordering on genius, she had the same photographic memory Esther had had, and she had been categorized as gifted with painting.

When Morell's assets had been impounded, he had made a trip to the house at Seacliff in San Francisco to take a look. He wasn't a psychologist or a criminal profiler, he just went on the facts, but when he'd stepped into her old room and had found a closet full of paintings, Rina had come into abrupt focus.

When he'd studied the canvases, he'd experienced the same feeling he got when he stepped out onto open prairie. Looking at what she had painted as a ten-year-old child, he had understood her on a level that had nothing to do with profiles or medical reports. The things that had been done to a child capable of that kind of creativity and insight had made him feel sick.

Over the past few months of researching her background, the picture of what had actually happened, as opposed to what had been visible on the surface, had become clear. Rina had been blinded in the accident that had killed her mother, then virtually imprisoned while Lopez had waited for Rina's memory to return so he could get his money back. Just over two years ago, he had stepped in and married her to make sure no one else could slide in under the wire and get the information if she did begin to remember. When he had her isolated from Cesar and any other family and friends, Lopez had attempted to reproduce the trauma that had caused the amnesia in an attempt to get the account numbers.

Rina's escape into WitSec had left a lot of loose ends dangling for Lopez. Aside from the fact that her testimony would put him behind bars for life, he knew she had recovered her sight. In theory, with the blocks in her mind dissolving, she was closer to remembering than she ever had been—just when she had slipped from his grasp. The fact that he had taken the risk of putting a price on her head—a move that could expose him—demonstrated just how badly Lopez wanted her back.

JT pulled in at a gas station, filled up and bought coffee and painkillers. Before driving out, he booted up the computer, punched in his PIN and accessed the GPS system. He waited while the system searched. Seconds later he had his signal.

Swallowing a couple of painkillers, he chased them down with a mouthful of coffee and turned back onto the highway.

 

Rina checked into a seedy motel in the Tenderloin, a run-down section of San Francisco just west of Union Square filled with budget accommodations, bars and an eclectic mix of cheap cafés. She signed the register using a fake name, paid in advance with cash, and when the clerk asked for ID, she slid two twenties across the counter. As she tucked change into her purse, she noted the time on the clock behind the reception desk. Six p.m. It had taken her almost twenty-four hours to reach San Francisco.

After she and Baby had caught the bus in Beaumont, following the advice of the driver, she had gotten off at a shopping center near the airport. The shopping center was open twenty-four hours, and she'd found everything she'd needed there: coffee, food and a rental car. Asking the bus driver for advice had been a risk, but she had been aware that the driver would be questioned, anyway, and it was highly unlikely he would forget a blind passenger with a Seeing Eye dog boarding an almost empty bus after dark. To put Marlow, JT and anyone else making inquiries off the scent, she had told him she was catching a flight to Dallas.

She'd stayed on the Beaumont Highway all the way to East Houston, then pulled in at the first motel with a vacancy sign. After snatching a few hours' sleep, she and Baby had gotten back on the road, but instead of heading for Dallas and its busy air terminal, she had driven to San Antonio and caught a flight out from there.

Flying at all had been risky, but she hadn't been able to afford the time driving to the West Coast would take. She had minimized the risk by using her credit card to pay for a flight to L.A. When the flight had gone, she had paid cash for a second flight that was boarding, this time to San Jose. As extra insurance, she had worn a dark blond wig she'd bought in Houston and Baby was checked on as pet cargo. That way she had been able to board and exit the flight as an unaccompanied passenger, not the woman and Seeing Eye dog combination the authorities, and Slater, were looking for.

A phone call before she boarded the flight to a kennel in San Jose had provided the solution of what to do with Baby when she reached San Francisco. She didn't want to let him out of her sight, but together they were too visible. For an extra fee, the couple that ran the kennels had agreed to collect Baby from the airport. Rina had paid ahead for a month's stay, nonrefundable, with the rider that she would collect him within a week. When they had requested contact details, she had provided a friend's address and phone number in San Diego. If she didn't survive the trip, Elena would make sure that Baby was cared for.

Now that she was just hours away from Eureka, her plan was simple. Once she located Radcliff's place, she intended to call Bayard and tell him she and Baby had been taken hostage and were being held there. The fact that she had gotten to a phone at all would make her call suspect, but that was exactly what Taylor had managed to do, so the idea was plausible. In any case, Rina planned to terminate the conversation before questions could be asked, leave the line to Bayard open, and plant the phone on the boundary of Radcliff's property. With any luck, Bayard would jump at the bait and whoever it was who had been sabotaging the FBI busts wouldn't have time to compromise this one.

She had tossed up simply calling Bayard from San Francisco, but she couldn't risk the fact that he might be able to locate the origin of the call whether it was a cell phone or a landline. The fact that she was asking him to invade a senator's residence, an action that could put his job on the line if she was wrong, added to the need for her to be physically close to Radcliff's address so that at least that part of the call would be validated.

After unpacking in her room, she walked toward Union Square. She needed to buy a number of items, including clothing. One of the things Esther had taught her was that if she dressed right for an occasion, she was more likely to get what she wanted, and with less fuss. In this case, she needed a more formal outfit that would help her blend in with the business community, and she couldn't buy those clothes from any of the shops she had used to frequent. She had never been that well known in San Francisco, courtesy of her blindness, but she
was
known. Reclusive or not, the fact that she was Cesar Morell's only child had always guaranteed that.

The mall she finally settled on had a clutch of mid-range boutiques and, according to the site map, an Internet café, which was her other requirement.

Before she drove to Eureka she intended to retrieve the contents of Esther's safe-deposit box; she couldn't risk leaving that particular job incomplete, in case she didn't make it back.

According to the FBI, if Esther had compiled evidence against Alex, they had never found it. Knowing how meticulous her mother had been, Rina was certain she would have collected evidence and stored it in a place Alex couldn't reach. She was equally certain that was what the safe-deposit box held.

She needed to find out about the protocol for accessing the safe-deposit box before she walked into the bank. By now there would be an APB out on her. She would only get one chance at retrieving the contents of the box and she didn't want to be turned away because she lacked the right documentation.

The Internet café, situated centrally in the mall, was easy to find. After a brief tussle with an unfamiliar mail program, Rina was online. She accessed the Web site of the bank she needed to research, and saw that the bank was a subsidiary of the Swiss bank Esther had used to work for, Bessel Holt.

The guidelines for safe-deposit boxes were straightforward. When you rented one, you rented space in the bank vault. The person renting the box, and anyone else they wanted to have access, had to sign a card. Every time the box was opened, the signature was compared with the signatures on the card. It took two keys to open the box, one held by the owner of the box, the other held by the bank. The bank didn't keep a copy of the owner's key, so if that was lost, the box would have to be drilled open. In the event that the person who rented the box died and there was no other signatory, a death certificate and a power of attorney were required.

That explained why Esther had placed the power of attorney in with the key. The only thing she hadn't been able to supply was the death certificate.

When a copy of the deposit box information had printed out, Rina did a search on Senator Radcliff. A string of news articles came up. She struck gold with an older magazine article about Radcliff's ex-model wife and their award-winning designer home. The article had been published before his recent election to the Senate, but even so, the magazine had been careful, not allowing any detail of the house plan itself to be published and only photographing tantalizing glimpses of the exterior and the interior decorating. However, the names of both the architect and the interior designer were supplied. Rina hit the print button on the article, then terminated the session.