Trinity Harbor 3 - Along Came Trouble (22 page)

“Okay, let’s get out of here,” he said, unable to hide his suddenly foul temper.

Before he could rise, she put a hand on his arm. He felt the muscle twitch beneath her touch.

“Tucker, I know it hurts you to hear al this, but I did love him at the beginning. I got caught up in the idea that together the two of us could make a real difference in people’s lives. When we first met, we talked about al of his plans and ideals. We were on the same wavelength. I didn’t even realize it was more than that for a long time. Ironical y, it was Daisy who saw it. What I saw as intel ectual compatibility, she realized covered a deeper passion. I think that was why she was so furious with me. She thought I was deliberately cheating on you, when in my mind that was far from true. Only after she told me what she suspected did I take a good hard look at what I was feeling and realize that I had deep feelings for Larry. I swear to you that I broke it off with you before I acted on those feelings. We were never sneaking around behind your back.”

He knew she thought he would find comfort in that, but it stil hurt. He clung to the bitterness because it kept the other, more dangerous, feelings at bay.

“And you could be much more important as the wife of a big-time politician, right? You could do good works on a much grander scale than you could being the wife of a smal -town sheriff,” he said angrily. “Even if he was a Spencer.”

“Yes,” she said, regarding him with an unflinching look. “I thought I could. I know now how wrong that was on so many levels it would take the rest of the night to get into al of them, but at the time, yes, that was my thinking. I’m sorry.”

Tucker withdrew from her touch. “Yeah. So am I.”

“I just keep on hurting you, don’t I?” she asked, regarding him with what appeared to be genuine misery. “Do you want to drop this investigation? If that would be easier for you, I’l understand.”

Tucker bristled at the suggestion that he couldn’t take being around her. “I started it, I’l finish it,” he said tightly. “Let’s get out of here. This place is starting to give me hives.”

Mary Elizabeth chuckled at that. “It has that effect on me sometimes, too.”

After a beat, Tucker laughed, too, and just like that the tension was broken.

Outside the soft, sultry air was refreshing compared to the air-conditioned sterility inside. He took a deep breath, as much to clear his head as cleanse his lungs. He could do this. He could be around Mary Elizabeth for however long this investigation took without going crazy and hauling her into his arms.

Just then, though, he glanced down into those petal-soft violet eyes of hers and completely lost his train of thought…and his common sense.

“Tucker—”

Before she could finish whatever she was about to say, he leaned down and covered her mouth with his, catching her gasp of surprise. Fire licked through his blood with the speed and power of lightning. Desire and need rocketed along right behind.

He had wanted this for so long, dreamed about it. The taste of her was always with him, as unforgettable as his name, as sweet as ripe watermelon.

His breathing was ragged, his body hard, by the time his brain final y kicked back in. When he forced himself to release her, to take a step back, her little moan of protest was almost enough to ruin his resolve.

“We’re not going to do this,” he said, half to himself.

“We just did,” she pointed out reasonably.

“I mean again.”

“Ever?”

“Ever,”
he replied emphatical y.

Hurt flickered in her eyes. “Your cal ,” she said mildly. “But, Tucker, it real y would be too bad if we didn’t.”

And, Tucker thought, it would be devastating if they did.

14

R
oland Morgan had a briliant mind for technology, but little business acumen. Liz recaled Larry’s opinion as she and Tucker walked into Roland’s office and found him total y absorbed by something on his computer screen, his desk littered with empty foam coffee cups, his hair disheveled and his eyes bleary behind his thicklensed glasses. He was dressed for comfort rather than success in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt it looked as if he’d slept in.

Roland blinked hard when Liz spoke to him, then greeted her with a distracted smile. “You’re here already?”

“It’s been over an hour,” she pointed out with amusement. “Obviously you lost track of time. You must be working on something new.”

“Just trying to get a bug out of a program that we thought we were ready to start marketing for Christmas.” He gazed around as if he hadn’t noticed the state of his office before. “Sorry about the mess. I came straight back here after the funeral, and I’ve been up for more than twenty-four hours. If I can’t get this cleaned up, we’l never get it into production. Marketing’s having a cow. They’ve bought hundreds of thousands of dol ars in magazine space and TV spots to push this for the holidays.”

“How about Larry? Was he having a cow?” Tucker asked, drawing a startled look from Roland.

“Roland, this is Tucker Spencer,” Liz explained. “He’s investigating Larry’s death for me.”

Roland stood and held out his hand. Liz noticed then that he was wearing socks but no shoes. She spotted a pair of wel -worn running shoes across the room. She had to bite back a grin at the contrast he made to her designer clad, perfectionist husband, who seldom had a hair out of place even after hours on the campaign trail.

“Good to meet you,” Roland said to Tucker. “Anything I can do to help, I’l try, but Larry and I pretty much went our separate ways around here. He left the tech stuff to me, and I left al the rest to him.”

“Mind if we sit over here?” Tucker asked, gesturing to a sofa and chairs. “We’l try not to keep you from your work for too long.”

“The break wil probably do me good,” Roland acknowledged. “My brain’s pretty much fried right now. Anybody want coffee?”

“How about bottled water and some food?” Liz suggested instead. “I’l check the fridge in Larry’s office. There’s usual y some fruit and cheese in there. You look as if you could use some nourishment, as wel , Roland.”

“Sure. That would be great.”

“Tucker, bottled water for you, too?”

“Sounds good,” he said.

She could hear the murmur of their voices as she went through the connecting door to Larry’s office. Inside the spacious room with its plush carpet, shiny mahogany desk and expensive furnishings, she paused. For an instant it almost seemed as if she could smel a lingering hint of Larry’s aftershave. Though he had spent increasingly less time here in recent months, this office—this entire sedate brick building on a tree-lined street—had meant a lot to him. It had been the first concrete proof of his accomplishments, a new structure built to look as if it had endured through the centuries.

Visitors were always stunned to learn that the building was less than ten years old.

In an odd way, that summed up Larry. The image, the facade, were coldly calculated for effect. Few people knew the man underneath. She certainly hadn’t, and she had known him as wel as anyone.

Born in a failing coal mining town on the western fringes of the state, he had developed a fire inside to achieve something extraordinary. In an ironic way his mother and father had fanned that flame through their own indifference to their poverty. They’d been stunned by the heights he’d attained.

His mother had died shortly after the dedication of this office, his father a year after Larry had been sworn in for his first term in the house of delegates. Neither had attended these events. Larry hadn’t invited them. Only later had Liz learned that the omissions had been deliberate. He’d been embarrassed by them. He hadn’t wanted anyone to see his humble beginnings. He’d preferred that his business associates and his constituents identify him with the generations-old respectability of the Swans of the historic Northern Neck.

Liz had never met Mrs. Chandler. His mother had died before she and Larry had been introduced. She had met his father only once, briefly, before the wedding. Shortly after the wedding, Martin Chandler had fal en gravely il . Later Larry went alone to the funeral, taking less than half a day off from his second campaign to attend and then only because he’d understood that television cameras were bound to record the moment.

So many signs that he was emotional y bankrupt and she had missed them al , she thought sorrowful y as she retrieved the food from the refrigerator and carried it back to Roland’s office.

She found him and Tucker discussing basebal , of al things. Both, it turned out, were ardent fans of the Atlanta Braves, whose minor league players were based in Richmond. Either Tucker had already found out everything he needed to know from Roland or he’d determined that there was nothing to be learned.

She dispensed the food and sat back to try to figure out which. It took only moments to realize that Tucker was just cleverly putting Roland at ease.

Once Larry’s partner had distractedly eaten half a dozen crackers with cheese on them and an apple, Tucker’s expression turned serious.

“Look,” he began, “to get back to the reason we came by, can you fil me in on how the company’s doing?”

“You’d be better off talking to the chief financial officer for that. Like I said before, I don’t pay a lot of attention to the business details.” Roland shrugged and pul ed off a wry grin. “No head for numbers.”

“Surely Larry fil ed you in when there were ups and downs,” Tucker persisted. “You received financial disclosure reports, something, right?”

“I suppose I did,” Roland said, gazing helplessly at a row of file drawers along one wal . “I imagine Selena put them in there. She’s very efficient.”

“Selena is?”

“My secretary, Selena Velez.”

“She worked for Larry, too,” Liz told Tucker.

“She was a lot more useful to him than she was to me. About al I had her do was take messages and keep marketing off my back.”

“Did Larry keep any important papers in a safe?” Liz asked. “Or would everything be in his files?”

“Oh, no, there’s a safe,” Roland said at once. “State-of-art security. I lock a lot of my stuff in there. Corporate spying being what it is these days, Larry convinced me I had to be careful to protect whatever I was designing.”

“Could you show us?” Liz asked. “There are some papers of Larry’s I can’t seem to locate. I thought they might be here, locked away for safekeeping.”

“Sure,” Roland said, leading the way to what looked like a built-in bar in a smal hal way between the two offices. He pressed a hidden button and the bar swung open, revealing the heavy steel door of a walk-in vault.

“Hold on,” he said sheepishly. “I have to check the combination.”

“You haven’t committed it to memory?” Tucker asked.

“It’s electronical y programmed to change every few days. Larry set it up that way, because I tended to write the combination on scraps of paper, which wound up in the trash or sitting in the middle of my desk. He concluded that he had to have a way to counteract my forgetfulness.”

“How on earth do you figure out what it is if it’s always changing?” Liz asked.

“I keep the code in a secure file on my computer. Now if I can just find the piece of paper I used to get in there a couple of days ago, I should be able to figure this out.”

While Roland went to work out the current combination for the vault, Tucker looked at Liz. “Is he for real?”

“He’s bril iant and single-minded. It made him a perfect match for Larry, because he was completely wil ing to have Larry handle everything except the technological stuff.”

“So Larry wasn’t a technology whiz himself?”

“He could hold his own up to a point,” Liz said. “But Roland is definitely the genius behind the company’s success.”

“You don’t suppose he got tired of being the behind-the-scenes guy while your husband basked in al the glory, do you?”

Liz promptly shook her head. “Does he look as if he cares about that?”

“Were they fifty-fifty partners in terms of profits?” Tucker asked.

“I believe so, but you’d have to ask Roland.”

“Ask me what?” he said, coming back with a scrap of paper in hand. He worked the lock with nimble fingers and the heavy door swung open.

“What was your partnership agreement with Larry?” Tucker asked.

“We each owned an equal share of the stock, and between us we held control ing interest in the company. The remainder was sold publicly on the New York Stock Exchange starting last year. Before that we were on Nasdaq. Larry was ecstatic when we had enough assets to make the jump. He said it final y put us in a league with the big guys like Microsoft and AOL Time-Warner.”

“Any merger or takeover offers on the table?” Tucker asked.

“If there were, Larry would have turned them down flat. This company was his baby,” Roland said.

Liz nodded in agreement. “This company brought him the kind of respectability he’d craved. He would never have sold it.”

“Not even if he was short on cash for his next campaign?” Tucker persisted.

“Not even then,” Liz said.

“Could you have forced him to sel ?” Tucker asked Roland.

Roland regarded him with complete bafflement. “Why would I?”

“Debts,” Tucker suggested. “The desire to move on to a new chal enge?”

Roland laughed. “I’ve earned more money since we started up than I ever dreamed of having. I live a very simple life. No fancy car. No fancy house.” He gestured toward his clothes. “No designer clothes…and definitely no political aspirations.”

“What about a new chal enge?”

“Every day around here is a chal enge,” Roland insisted. He gestured toward the open vault. “Take a look around. Maybe you’l find those papers you were looking for. If you don’t need me for anything else, I’m going to get back to work.”

Liz glanced at Tucker. “Any more questions for now?”

He shook his head. “No. Thanks for your time. We’l let you know when we’re on our way out.”

“Sure thing,” Roland said, his expression already distracted as he headed back to his computer.

“Any idea where we should start?” Liz asked, studying the unlabeled files stacked from floor to ceiling in the vault.