Flash (23 page)

“What did you do?”

“It was the last straw. I told him that I intended to file for divorce. I don't think he believed me.”

“Is that what made him take off for Pamplona?”

Olivia hesitated. “No. As I said, I don't think it ever occurred to Logan that I might actually leave him. He assumed that I was as invested in his career as he was.”

“So what sent him to Pamplona?”

“My cousin Nina came to her senses and ended the affair.”

“Ah.”

Olivia looked at the canvas in front of her. “Logan was still deep in the throes of his obsession with her. I think he went a little crazy. He said he had to get out of the country for a while.”

“So he left for Spain, and the Dane family blamed you.”

“That pretty much sums it up,” Olivia said. “They were grief-stricken. Logan's brother, Sean, took the news very hard. Logan was his older brother. He had idolized him. They all needed to place the guilt on someone. I was the obvious target.”

“And you let them place it squarely on you,” Jasper muttered. “For Nina's sake.”

He sounded irritated, Olivia thought, surprised. Apparently he did not think highly of her decision. On the other hand, she had the strange feeling that he empathized. It was as if he understood what she had gone through when she made her decision three years ago.

“There's not much else to tell,” she continued. “Except that, a few months ago, Nina fell in love, really in love, with Sean. But she feels so guilty about what happened three years ago that she can't let herself be happy. She thinks that if Sean and his family learn that she was Logan's so-called Dark Muse, they'll all turn against her.”

“Is that true?”

Olivia recalled the look in the eyes of the Dane family at the funeral. “Probably.”

“Hell. The blackmailer threatened to reveal the affair, didn't he?”

“Yes.” She reached up to massage the tight muscles at the base of her neck. “That's it in a nutshell.”

Jasper pondered that. “But he threatened you, not Nina. He obviously knows that you've kept quiet about the past in order to protect her. Hell, you even let Crawford Lee Wilder print that garbage about you without making a protest. The blackmailer figures you'll be willing to pay to go on maintaining the silence.”

“He's probably also concluded that I'm a richer target than Nina. I've got deeper pockets, thanks to my half-ownership in Glow.”

“Forty-nine percent,” Jasper corrected absently.

Olivia almost smiled, in spite of the mood. “I beg your pardon, my
forty-nine-percent
ownership. Either way, it's obvious that I can afford more blackmail than Nina could.”

Jasper's eyes darkened. “Someone knows a great deal about you, Olivia.”

“Too much.” She stopped rubbing her neck. She folded her arms tightly beneath her breasts instead. “The thing is, until I got that note, I was positive that I was the only other person, besides Nina, who knew about the affair. I just don't understand how the blackmailer could have discovered it.”

“Maybe Nina confided in someone?”

Olivia shook her head quickly. “No, I'm sure that she has never told a soul. Her greatest fear is that the secret will come out. It's eating her up inside. She thinks I'm the only one who knows about it.”

“Can you think of anyone else besides you and Nina who could possibly have known about the affair at the time it occurred?”

Olivia looked at him. “There was one other person, of course. But he's dead.”

Jasper's eyes narrowed. “Your uncle?”

“As I said, Uncle Rollie was the one who told me about it.”

Jasper glanced around the echoing exhibition hall. He took Olivia's hand. “Let's get out of here.”

He couldn't think of a great place to talk about dead men and blackmail so he took her to the closest place, instead. Myrtle Edwards Park on the waterfront. He
chose the path labeled “heels.” The one that ran parallel to it was labeled “wheels.”

He studied the small, choppy waves of Elliott Bay and put his questions into an orderly pattern. “How do you think your uncle found out about Logan and Nina?”

“In a lot of ways, Uncle Rollie was an old-fashioned patriarch.”

Jasper was briefly amused.
“Patriarch
is an odd word to use to describe a man who was happily gay.”

“I know.” Olivia carefully unsealed the triple-shot latte she had purchased from a sidewalk espresso stand. “But it was the truth. He was the oldest of his generation and the first really successful member of the Chantry clan. He had a very strong sense of family responsibility. He provided jobs for relatives who needed them and summer employment for their kids. He helped finance first homes and first cars. Established college funds. Never forgot birthdays. Etc., etc.”

“I get the picture.”

“He always seemed to know what was going on in everyone's life. He kept track of things. He was obsessive about his files.” She took a quick sip of her latte. “Both verbally and in his will, he gave explicit instructions to me to destroy all of his personal records after his death.”

Jasper glanced at her. “Did you carry out those instructions?”

“Didn't have to.” She took another sip. “There was a fire in Uncle Rollie's study the day after we got word of his death. It took care of everything.”

He came to an abrupt halt. “Arson?”

Olivia nodded. “The police said there had been a rash of trash bin fires in the neighborhood where Uncle Rollie lived. They think the arsonist got especially bold that night and tried to burn down a whole house. He probably chose my uncle's because it was vacant.”

“I see.” Jasper resumed walking. “Back to my question. How did Rollie learn about the affair?”

Olivia made a face. “If you want to know the truth, I suspect he hired a private investigator. Pretty tacky, huh?”

That brought Jasper to another halt in the middle of the path. “Why in hell would he do that?”

She sighed. “Uncle Rollie never approved of my marrying Logan. He told me that Logan was using me right from the start. He had the decency to shut up about it after the wedding, but I know that he was still worried.”

“So he kept tabs on Dane?”

“I wouldn't put it past him,” Olivia said. “All I know for sure is that one day Uncle Rollie took me to lunch and asked if I knew that Logan was having an affair with Nina. He was furious, not only on my behalf, but on Nina's. She was young, inexperienced, and out of her league. Logan took advantage of her naïveté and innocence.”

“What did you say?”

“I admitted I'd had some suspicions and that I was already considering a divorce. I never asked Uncle Rollie outright how he had learned about the affair, however.”

“You just assumed he'd used an investigator?”

“It was a logical assumption. I knew that he hired a firm from time to time to, uh, check out stuff.”

“What kind of stuff did good old Uncle Rollie check out?”

She looked at him over the rim of her latte cup. “Potential business partners, for example.”

“Me, for instance?”

“Uh-huh.”

Jasper whistled softly. “Makes sense. I had Rollie's background investigated before I signed the contract to finance Glow's expansion.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “Sheesh. Lord save me from obsessive-compulsive information types.”

Jasper ignored that. “The bottom line here is that Rollie and at least one other person besides yourself knew about the affair.”

Olivia looked briefly baffled. Then she nodded. “Oh, sure. Of course. The private investigator—” She broke off. “Hey, do you suppose the investigator is using the information in his files to blackmail people connected to some of his former clients?”

“Unlikely. Too obvious. And too easy to check out. Besides, I'm sure your uncle used a first-class firm.” Jasper considered the possibilities. “There's another interesting question here, though.”

“What's that?”

“Any chance that Rollie knew about Zara's former career in X-rated films?”

Olivia mulled that over briefly. “Sure. In fact, I'd bet he did know about it although he never mentioned it, of course. Like I said, Uncle Rollie knew just about everything about everyone in the family. Why?”

“It gives us a link. Don't you see? Whoever is blackmailing
you and Zara knows information that only Rollie Chantry knew, right?”

“As far as I'm aware, yes.”

Jasper paused to connect a few more facts. “You said there was a fire in Rollie's house that destroyed his personal files.”

“That's right.”

“Did his bank register and credit card statements survive, by any chance?”

She gave him a curious glance. “Where are you going with this?”

“If we assume that the private investigator-turned-blackmailer theory is unlikely, that leaves two other possibilities we need to check.”

“And they are?”

“Either someone got into Rollie's personal files before the fire and removed some of them—”

“Oh, my God. I never thought of that.” Olivia stared at him. “What if the fire wasn't random vandalism? What if the blackmailer broke in, stole some files, and then set the fire to cover up the theft?”

“Possible, but I think there's another possibility. What if the blackmailer broke in looking for information and found the location of it, instead? He might have still gone ahead and set the fire to cover his tracks.”

“What do you mean?” Olivia demanded.

“One of the reasons your uncle and I did business together was because we understood each other. We had a lot in common.”

She raised her brows. “Not everything, fortunately.”

He smiled fleetingly. “You're right. Not everything. I'm not gay.”

“You can say that again.”

“But we did have the same approach to information,” Jasper continued. “And the same degree of respect for it.”

“So?”

“So I think I can almost guarantee that if Rollie possessed information that he knew was potentially damaging to members of his family, he probably stored it somewhere safer than his study.”

Olivia's eyes widened. “What in the world made you think of that possibility?”

Jasper thought of the heavy, locked cabinets in his basement. “It's what I'd do.”

“I see.” Olivia's voice was very dry.

“Did you check the basement of his house?”

“There was only a partial basement. Nothing in it. I looked when I cleaned out the place.”

“Nothing in his study survived?”

“Nope. He didn't use fire-proof filing cabinets.”

Yet Chantry had apparently treated information with the same kind of respect that he, himself, did, Jasper thought. Which meant that Rollie would have taken pains to protect the most vital and the most potentially dangerous records.

“Safe deposit box?”

“I cleaned it out, too. I was his executor, so I got stuck cleaning out everything. There was nothing unusual in the box.”

Jasper went down a mental list of options. “What about a storage locker in a commercial self-storage facility?”

“Uncle Rollie never mentioned one.”

“If he had a locker,” Jasper said slowly, “there would be a record of it somewhere.”

“Probably in his study. Burnt to a crisp.”

“To paraphrase an old expression, there ain't no such thing as free storage. Not in this day and age. If Rollie had a locker, he was paying for it. And if someone got into it after his death, there will be a record of that, too.”

“Hmm.” Olivia pursed her lips. “I've arranged to have his mail forwarded to me so that I can be sure to pay any outstanding bills or credit card statements. I haven't received an invoice from a storage facility of any kind.”

“If he had an off-site locker, he probably paid the rent annually or semiannually. You might not see a bill for months.”

“In which case, the charge would probably be on one of his credit card statements or buried in his check register.”

“Damn.” Jasper thought quickly. “We'll have to request copies of the statements and canceled checks from the credit card company and the bank. That's going to take a few days.”

“No,” Olivia murmured, “it won't.”

He glanced sharply at her. “What do you mean? Weren't they destroyed in the fire?”

“Yes, but after the funeral I ordered copies of Uncle Rollie's bank and credit card statements. The lawyer and I needed them to settle the estate.”

Jasper allowed himself a cautious flash of optimism. “You've got them stored somewhere very convenient, I hope?”

“In my basement storage locker.” She took another swallow of coffee. “I'll dig them out this afternoon and take a look.”

“I'll help you.”

“Right.” Clearly energized, Olivia polished off the latte and tossed the empty cup toward a nearby trash can with a flourish. “You really think we may be on to something here?”

“Maybe.” The cup would never make it into the trash can, he thought. Olivia had made no allowance for the gently gusting wind. Both her aim and her timing were off.

He watched the breeze catch the empty latte cup just before it reached the can. The paper vessel was whipped about by the light air currents. It sailed away onto the grass.

“Darn. Hang on a second.” Olivia veered off the path to chase down the wind-tossed cup. She scooped it up, dropped it into the can, and trotted back to join Jasper.

He refrained from pointing out that it would have been more efficient to have simply put the cup directly into the trash can in the first place. He had a feeling she would not appreciate the advice.