Innocent as Sin (3 page)

“Okay. If we got some modern pictures of Bertone, here in the States,” Martin said quickly, “stuff from the inside, it would juice up the segment. Otherwise, people won’t believe philanthropist Bertone was once a murderous gun smuggler.”

Steele sighed and gave in. “The Bertones are having a big party at their Pleasure Valley house on Saturday, plein air artists in some abominable contest. Would that do?”

“If Bertone is in the pics, okay,” Martin said. “And we need some idea of how Bertone is getting around our banking laws.
The kind of money you’ve talked about can’t be moved around legally without leaving a trail.”

Steele’s pale eyes narrowed. If Kayla Shaw talked to save her own neck, she’d give them her boss…. “We’ll do our best.”

Martin looked at Prosser.

“You’ve got a deal,” Prosser said.

“Okay!” Martin said.

Pleasure Valley, Arizona
Friday
10:31
A.M. MST

K
ayla Shaw drove quickly up to the gate of Elena and Andre Bertone’s Tuscan-style estate. The five-acre building site for Castillo del Cielo had been blasted out of dry, rocky hills less than two years ago. Now the acres were green and white, lush and expensive. Glass, art tiles, and copper gleamed among columns of imported Italian marble.

She suspected that beneath the marble was good old Arizona stucco.

According to bank records, the Bertones had paid more than five million dollars for the land. They had spent another ten million on construction of the house, guest casita, staff quarters, pools, gardens, and a guarded gate at the bottom of the hill. They even had a heliport out beyond the pool, complete with a racy little helicopter tied down and waiting for the royal whim.

The people who served the royal whims weren’t all directly employed. The Bertones had more than $125 million on deposit with American Southwest, which entitled them to an unusual level of service. Kayla paid bills for the Bertones, she moved
money among their many accounts, she covered overdrafts and shortfalls, and she made house calls to Castillo del Cielo to pick up deposits and drop off receipts.

In short, she was a gofer. It wasn’t what she’d thought banking was all about, especially private banking, but it paid the bills.

As she waited for the guard to come out of his “shack” and buzz her through the gate, she looked at the tumbling, glistening wall of the water feature next to the guard building. Castillo del Cielo’s annual water bill for squad-sized showers, epic water features, and three swimming pools was almost as big as the escrow check in Kayla’s purse. As a desert girl that kind of extravagance made her uneasy, but the child in her delighted in the play of sunlight and dancing water, and the scent of water in the desert.

Even if it was tainted with chlorine.

She glanced through her open window at the guard shack, where a young man stood listening patiently to the phone held against his ear. Jimmy Hamm had been working for the Bertones for two months. He was a young, chatty former minor-league ballplayer who stared at her legs every chance he got.

She wondered if he’d be so flirty if he knew she made out the employment checks Elena signed.

“Mrs. B. says you can go up, but please hurry,” Hamm said, coming out of the shack and smiling at Kayla. “Are you late? You’re never late.”

Kayla glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “Nope.”

“She’s been edgy,” Hamm said, leaning against the Explorer’s door. “The old man is back.”

“Mr. Bertone?”

“He got in late Thursday night. At least I think that was him in the back of the limo. Never seen him to swear to it.” Hamm leaned close and whispered, “Never seen him in daylight, either. You think he’s a vampire?”

Kayla rolled her eyes. “He’s a globe-trotting businessman.”

“Yeah? What business? Drugs?”

“Drugs?” She laughed and shook her head. “Switch to decaf, Jimmy. Mr. Bertone trades in oil and other natural resources. Now open the gate before you make me late.”

Reluctantly Hamm stepped back from the Explorer. He leaned inside the guard-shack door and triggered the gate mechanism.

Kayla shifted into gear and rolled through, both amused and irritated by Hamm’s persistent interest in her and his employers. She could handle the smiling come-ons, but the Bertones put a high value on their physical and fiscal privacy. Wealthy families were targets for everyone from civic and political fund-raisers to thieves and kidnappers. The wealthy kept the world at bay with gates and security cameras and a thick layer of servants, lawyers, and bankers.

In the Bertones’ shoes, she would have done the same. Especially as they had three young children to protect from the world’s predators.

Mentally going over the final details of the Bertones’ big art party tomorrow, Kayla pulled into the car park behind the five-car garage. She turned off the engine and automatically gathered her leather valise and purse. She hesitated, put the escrow envelope in the valise, and headed for the back of the house, where Elena had her office. Along the way Kayla waved to the Brazilian chauffeur, Antonio, who was washing a massive black Hummer. Head-high lilies bloomed along the flagstone path to the house. Everything looked and smelled green.

Money green.

“Down here,” Elena called.

Kayla swerved without breaking rhythm. Apparently Elena was on the terrace between the Olympic-size pool and the children’s splash pool.

“You’re late,” Elena said. “But I saved you some brunch.”

Kayla slid onto a chair beneath the sunshade and dropped her leather bag on the flagstone.

“I’m a minute off, by my clock,” she said cheerfully, “and you can blame that on your gate guard, who keeps trying to charm me out of my tiny little mind every time I come by.”

“Of course he does.” Elena gave her the million-candle-power smile of the international beauty queen she’d once been. “You’re an attractive young thing who makes a good living and he’s a former athlete who doesn’t like working for his bread and butter.”

The cool social calculation in the words was pure Elena. She was a stunningly beautiful woman whose figure had only been improved by having three children. She was shrewd, opinionated, socially ambitious, and arrogant in the way that only a gorgeous woman with a few hundred million in the bank could be.

In the quiet of her own mind, Kayla admitted that she would never like Elena, didn’t really trust her, but was fascinated by her just the same.

Then there was the fact that Elena was a loving mother to three energetic, utterly confident children. Raised just short of the Brazilian slums herself, Elena had a gut-deep understanding of the difference between poverty and wealth, family and standing alone against the world. The children were home-schooled, as the public schools in America simply weren’t equipped to handle kidnap targets.

No matter what Kayla might think of Elena as a person, she respected her client’s dedication to her children.

“Where are the kids?” Kayla asked.

She looked around the grounds, half expecting to see Miranda or Xavier or Jonathan peering out from behind one of the marble columns in front of the pool house. In truth, she visited
Elena more often than business required because she enjoyed the children.

“I asked Maria to keep them in the house for a few minutes, while we conduct my business,” Elena said.

Oooookay,
Kayla thought.
No small talk.

“What do you need?” she asked, pulling out a small digital recorder. Elena’s directives rarely came in twos or threes.

“Several things.” Elena lowered her chin and looked at Kayla over the top of her sexy Italian sunglasses. “Are the finances all in order for the Desert Art Week?”

“I don’t know about the rest of the festival, but everything is ready for your event. I wish we could call it something besides ‘The Fast Draw.’” Kayla kept her voice neutral, but it was an effort.
If I was a self-respecting painter, I’d sharpen the end of a brush and fall on it before I entered that contest. I don’t care if first prize is twenty-five grand. There’s something belittling about the whole thing.

Elena shrugged. “I didn’t choose the name. I simply supplied the money and the place. The arts are very important.”

Especially for the socially ambitious,
Kayla thought sourly. Social climbing was one of Elena’s less charming traits.

Hey, if you’d been raised next door to a slum, you’d want to be accepted by the high and mighty, too,
Kayla told herself.
You’re just jealous of her looks.

They’re worth being jealous of.

With an effort Kayla dragged her mind back to the Fast Draw event, which was part of an annual art festival conducted to raise funds for the Scottsdale Desert Museum. Thirty landscape painters had been invited to paint the same subject in a two-hour timed contest. This year the Bertones had made quite an impression by offering their estate as the painting site and promising to purchase the top three canvases. Then they had doubled the total prize money to fifty thousand.

The local press had gone gaga. Not only was Elena Bertone ravishing and intelligent and a sublime hostess, she was incredibly generous too. Definitely the best thing to happen to Scottsdale since reliable tap water.

“The Fast Draw is the name they’ve used for years,” Elena continued. “I’m not ready to change that tradition yet. Have you done everything I required?”

Kayla didn’t have to check her notes. The Bertones were far and away her most important client. The fact that her boss, Steve Foley, had given the Bertones exclusively to her a few months ago still amazed her. Maybe he’d guessed that she was mentally packing up and heading out for greener employment pastures.

“The funds are all in the prize account,” Kayla said. “I’ve arranged for a commercial sign painter to do the presentation checks so that they’ll show up in the press photos.”

“Good.” Elena made no secret of the fact that she wanted her face and discreetly presented cleavage on the society pages at least once a week. “The caterer has given me a price of two hundred dollars a head for the Fast Draw party, but he demands a cashier’s check before he serves a single canapé.”

He must have worked for the superrich before, Kayla thought. People who spent lavishly didn’t always pay on time. In fact, they rarely did. “If you want to pay the wine bills and the rest of the party expenses when you pay the caterer, you’ll have to top up the entertainment account. I can pull it from the household account as usual.”

Elena removed her sunglasses and looked at Kayla like she was interviewing for a job rather than already an employee. “No.”

The tone and the cool appraisal in the wide brown eyes made Kayla’s neck tingle.

“Deposit this in the entertainment account,” Elena said, taking
a cream-colored vellum envelope from beneath her plate. “It should settle all bills.”

Kayla took the envelope. The heavy paper flap wasn’t sealed. She lifted it and removed a single handwritten check. It was drawn on a foreign bank she’d never heard of. Her eyes widened.

“Twenty-two million dollars,” she said. “Holy—there must be some mistake. Even you couldn’t spend that much on a party.”

“Your job isn’t to judge my expenditures.” Elena’s voice was as cold as her eyes. Her faint exotic accent deepened. “Your job is to deposit and withdraw money at my desire.”

Kayla’s stomach knotted. The words
compliant and complicit
were part of any private banker’s training.
Compliant and complicit bankers
were no longer legally immune from the implications of their acts. Or as Kayla thought of it: Launder money and go to jail.

“I’ll be glad to deposit this check in any account you specify,” Kayla said, “but, as I’m not familiar with the bank the check is drawn on, I’m required by federal government regulations to ask a few questions.”

“Questions?” Elena’s expression hardened. “You’re a banker, not a police official.”

Kayla sighed. It wasn’t the first time one of her clients had bristled at being questioned. It wouldn’t be the last.

But the law was the law.

“Look, I’m not wild about the rules, but I can’t change them,” Kayla said briskly. “If I don’t follow the rules, American Southwest’s compliance department will be all over me like dust on the desert and I’ll lose my job.”

“It’s too late to worry about your job,” Andre Bertone said behind Kayla. “Worry about your freedom instead.”

North of Seattle
Friday
9:36
A.M. PST

R
and McCree dabbed at the yellow paint he had just drooled onto the dark green oilskin of his Barbour coat.

“Hell,” he muttered without conviction.

It wasn’t the first time he’d splashed oil paints on himself. It wouldn’t be the last. There was a vivid stain across the shoulders of one of his favorite shirts that looked like a Jackson Pollock abstract. He’d acquired it when the wind blew a wet canvas off the easel and slammed it into his back while he was peeing against a nearby tree. Just one of the hazards of painting outdoors rather than in a studio.

Once he and Reed had laughed about their spattered wardrobes. Not any more.

Don’t go there,
Rand told himself.
Reed is dead and I’m not. Life’s a bitch and she’s always in heat.

All I can do is what he asked me to—paint and live enough for both of us.

He rammed the easel into the wet, cold earth. The meadow at the edge of the old Douglas fir forest had been a favorite subject
for three generations of McCrees—grandmother, mother, and twins. The daffodils his grandmother and mother had planted in the meadow had grown from a clump of sunshine to a golden glory the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Wind, cold, and rain were the flowers’ favorite weather. The coastal Pacific Northwest provided plenty of all three.

With a pencil Rand sketched a few lines on the white grounding of the fresh canvas. First was a waving line a third of the way down from the top to establish the horizon, then another line a few inches lower to show the edge of the cliff. That left three-fifths of the canvas for the meadow and the windblown shout of yellow that was daffodils.

He looked at the proportions and realized he needed an element on one side of the picture to force the viewer’s eye across the meadow, out over the water, and on up toward the sky, which would be the intense light blue that only came after an early-morning spring rain.

With the pencil he moved a fir tree thirty yards across the meadow, creating the effect he needed. That was the joy of the canvas. It let imagination and artistic necessity rule over a world that was full of brutal, unchanging, and often ugly reality.

Before Rand could finish mixing the daffodil colors on his palette, he heard the faint, nasty snarl of a small helicopter. With the eye of a hunter he scanned the horizon off to the east, in the direction of Seattle. The aircraft came in low over the water, rose a hundred feet as it approached the island, and headed straight for him.

Rand held his breath, weightless as the wind, feeling himself spinning away. He’d seen helicopter strafing runs before. The last one had been while Reed lay wounded on the floor of a St. Kilda helo. They’d taken off just as another helo strafed them. Rand got lucky with an AK-47, bringing down the attacking helo as it went by on its second strafing run.

But he’d been lucky too late. Bullets had stitched through Reed, leaving him bleeding from too many wounds. Dying.

Dead.

Get a grip,
Rand told himself fiercely.
That was five years ago. Nobody gave a damn but me.

The helo slowed its approach but came straight in. Fifty yards away it flared and settled onto the meadow Rand had been painting. The little craft’s landing skids crushed daffodils as well as grass.

Rand waited, willing himself to breathe again.

The side door popped open. A tall, lean man in blue jeans and a Gore-Tex windbreaker stepped out.

Though Rand had walked out of St. Kilda Consulting five years ago, he still had friends there. He recognized Joe Faroe instantly—Faroe, who had come close to dying last year in a shootout with a drug lord on the Mexican border.

Reflexively Faroe ducked his head, avoiding the helicopter’s rotor. As he did, he realized he was walking on the perfume of crushed flowers.

“Sorry, Rand,” Faroe said when he was close. “Hope we didn’t kill any of them.”

“So do I.”

“I suppose if I offered to shake your hand, you’d clock me.”

“Now there’s a thought.” Then Rand shrugged and forced the tension clamping around his neck and shoulders to loosen. He associated Faroe with Reed’s death, which wasn’t precisely fair.

But it was real.

“You’re wasting my daylight,” Rand said roughly. “I don’t want to talk about old times; they weren’t much fun. I don’t want to get drunk with you; I don’t get drunk anymore. And I sure as hell don’t want to re-up with St. Kilda Consulting. I’ve lost my
taste for useless adventures in feral cities and failed states. So just climb back in that helo and disappear.”

Faroe rubbed his neck and hid a grin. “Grace was right. I should have brought her. You wouldn’t be rude to a pregnant woman.”

Rand looked at the horizon. He’d liked Faroe once. What happened to Reed hadn’t been Faroe’s fault. They’d all been consenting adults. With a muttered curse he combed his fingers through his wild mane of hair, yanked the watch cap back into place, and practiced being civilized.

Because rude or civil, hot or cold, Faroe wouldn’t leave until he was good and ready.

“Heard you’d been wounded and got yourself a wife and a kid,” Rand said.

“Marriage was a lot less painful.”

Rand almost smiled. “Heard she’s a judge.”

“You have good ears. But Grace resigned. Now she has all of her brains and expertise and no federal bureaucracy cramping her.”

“She’s good for you,” Rand said, surprising both of them. “The last time you came after me, we ended up brawling.”

Faroe smiled like a choirboy. “Yeah, she’s knocked off some of my rough edges.”

Rand gave the other man a long look. “You’ve still got plenty to go.”

“Makes your heart warm, doesn’t it.”

Shaking his head, Rand gave in. “What do you want?”

“St. Kilda has found the Siberian.”

Rand went completely still. Then his heart slammed and his senses sharpened to the point of pain, the hunter fully in control for the first time in years. He’d searched long and hard for his twin’s murderer, only to be frustrated by failed states and stonewalled by his own government.

“You’re certain?” Rand asked.

“Very. You still have the negatives?”

“Yes.”

Faroe waited.

Rand started gathering up his painting supplies. “My cabin is just through the trees. We’ll talk there.”