Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8
I STOOD IN my bedroom at Riverley Hall, taking a mental inventory. I’d had to venture upstairs, no matter how depressing the memories might be. What did I need for my trip to Colombia? On the bed, a small suitcase lay open with the essentials piled inside.
Normally when I went abroad, I was going somewhere I owned a house or apartment, but I had neither in Colombia. I kept a few things at Eduardo’s, clothes mainly, but he’d bought a lot of the outfits for me and they weren’t to my taste. Dresses, tops, skirts, cover-ups for lying out by the pool, all very conservative. I wore everything anyway, because it pleased him, but I still needed to take my own clothes for when I wasn’t at his place.
A passport lay beside the suitcase. Tonight I’d become Maria Delgado, one of two identities I used to travel to Columbia. Maria worked as an interior designer. I’d just put on the wig that matched her passport photo, and along with her papers, I’d take fabric swatches, wallpaper samples, and a sketchbook with drawings of room concepts. If anyone cared to check, I even had a website, although if they called the number listed, Sloane, my office assistant in Virginia, would inform them I wasn’t currently taking on new clients.
It was a solid identity, just as long as nobody asked me to actually sketch anything, because I couldn’t draw for toffee. It was Bradley who’d filled up the pad with pictures for me, and they certainly looked the part.
An envelope slipped into the back of the sketchbook held a collection of photos—one of everyone associated with the case. Fourteen dead gunmen, although missing bits of face made some of them a bit fuzzy, plus the pack we’d used after Black’s murder containing photos of the guys from the van. Obviously, the driver got burned beyond recognition, but Mack had found a shot of him from a surveillance camera in the hotel parking lot and enhanced it as best she could.
As I threw extra clothes into my luggage, I clung to the hope that Eduardo or someone on his staff might recognise one of them.
When I’d checked forty-five minutes ago, right before sorting out my hair, everyone had gone to bed except Luke, who was determined to finish hacking into something or other before he went to sleep.
I didn’t really care what.
Don’t get me wrong, the information Mack, Luke, and the others found with their computer searches could be invaluable. But it had its limits, and I always believed that by talking to people face-to-face, by watching their body language and feeling the vibes they gave off, I could glean information not found in electronic format. Hence the need to catch a plane.
My phone chose that moment to ping with a text message.
Ryan: Still at Albany House. Tia’s okay and behaving herself.
I bet she was.
Emmy: The bedrooms are out of bounds. All of them. This is not a hands-on job.
Ryan: How about the couch?
Emmy: I mean it.
Packing complete, I put in a pair of brown contact lenses. On a scale of one to Ashlyn Hale, my alter ego who’d dated Luke, I rated myself a seven for mediocrity. Finally, I fastened the necklace I’d received for my birthday around my neck and slipped the note that came with it into my wallet.
I’d be travelling commercial, so the only weapon I carried was a knife stuffed in the front of my bra. When the metal detector went off, I’d claim it was the underwire that caused it, as usual. I’d yet to find an airport security guard confident enough to give me a really good grope.
The clock struck midnight as I stole down the stairs and took the tunnel to the garage, keys to one of the Ford Explorers clutched in my hand. All was going swimmingly until I opened the driver’s door, at which point Nate stepped out the shadows and climbed into the passenger side.
Oh, rats.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“Would you believe I fancied a pizza?”
“And the pizza place will only serve brunettes?”
“Okay, you got me. Fine. I’m going to Colombia.”
No point in lying, not to Nate. That was the downside of knowing someone for as long as I’d known him—trying to fib right to his face was pointless. He saw straight through it.
“I knew you would be.”
“So where are you going?” I eyed up the holdall sitting on his lap.
“I’m coming with you.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, but the determination in his voice told me he wasn’t.
“If you go, I go.”
“No way. It could ruin everything. I’ve always gone to see Eduardo alone. I don’t know if he’d even come for me if I was with somebody else.”
“What do you mean, come for you?”
I sighed and spilled. “The way it works is that I check into a particular hotel, and when he knows I’m there, he sends somebody to pick me up.”
Nate paused a few seconds as he tried to rein in his exasperation, then offered a compromise.
“How about we travel separately? I’ll keep an eye on you from a distance, but I’m not letting you go alone.”
“It’s not your choice.”
“Before he died, Black and I made a promise to each other. If anything happened to either of us, he’d look after Carmen, and I’d look after you. As well as that, I care about you, believe it or not. I may not always agree with the way you do things, but I can’t deny you get results, which is why I haven’t locked you up and thrown away the key.”
“Touching.” And it really was, even if my reply came out snarky.
“Emmy, I’m coming along whether you like it or not.”
I knew from experience that if Nate decided to do something, I wouldn’t be able to change his mind, and if the situation had been reversed, Black would definitely have been on the plane with Carmen. Secretly, I was also pleased at the prospect of having backup, especially Nate, who’d spent a lot more time in South America than me and had the skin colour of a local.
“Fine. Whatever.” Great, now I sounded like Bradley when his wilder decorating ideas got vetoed. “Just make sure you don’t screw things up for me.”
I should have told Nate not to talk as well, because on the way to the airport, he started with the interrogation.
“So, tell me, why are you so positive that Garcia won’t execute you on sight? You’ve been hazy on that so far.”
“Because if he had a problem with something Blackwood was doing, he’d talk to me about it, not shoot my husband.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Maybe not with one hundred percent certainty, but close to it.”
“Why? All the information we found on Garcia suggests he should have been committed years ago. He’s renowned for being violent and unpredictable.”
“So people say, but he’s not always like that. And he’s as sane as you or I.” Okay, perhaps that was a bad example. “Eduardo recognises that in order to maintain his position at the top of the tree, people have to fear him. He cultivates the image of being unstable, and yes, that involves doing some nasty stuff, but he’s actually very smart. Calculating. And he’s never given me the slightest indication that he wishes me harm.”
“People change. When did you last see him?”
“Thirteen months ago.”
“Speak to him?”
“The same,” I admitted.
“So before Black’s death, right? How do you know he hasn’t taken offence to something one of you did in the meantime? You were trying to take out a network of cocaine dealers, after all.”
“Firstly, it wasn’t his coke; therefore they weren’t his dealers. Which means that far from being upset, he’d be pleased. Secondly, I may not have seen him or spoken to him, but he did send me a birthday gift and a note yesterday. A note that basically said he hoped Black’s killer came to a nasty end. And even if he was an olive short of a pizza, which he isn’t, he’s hardly likely to have a diamond necklace delivered to me in the morning and then follow it up with a death squad later on the same day.”
I fished the note out of my bag and passed it over to Nate, and he flicked on the interior light to read it. “I don’t see anything in there that says he hopes the killer’s dead. And what’s more, you don’t even know for definite that this came from Garcia.”
“Yes, I do. It’s not the first time he’s sent me a birthday present, and I recognise his writing. And he says he hopes I get closure like he did. He got his closure with death.”
Nate’s sideways glance told me more questions were coming. “I’m intrigued—how do you know so much about Garcia? Or know him at all, for that matter? He’s not the type of person who’s easy to cross paths with.”
“I did a job for him once.”
Nate groaned. “I take it this was one of your ‘special’ jobs that didn’t go through Blackwood?”
“It mostly did. Only one part stayed off the books.”
“Drugs related?”
“No, not at all.” After recent events, I figured Nate had a right to know. “It was eleven years ago. Do you remember Robert Frost?”
“The congressman’s son? The one who turned out to be a serial killer?”
“The one and only. His fourth victim was a college girl called Camilla McKinley. Happy go lucky, nineteen years old, her whole life ahead of her. Top of her class in biochemistry. They found her naked body in a disused storeroom at Virginia Tech three weeks after she died.”
“I remember that. The cops screwed it up, didn’t they? Lost some of the evidence.”
“And that’s when we got hired to investigate.”
“Didn’t you point the finger at Frost, but he hung himself before you got a chance to pass our files over to the police?”
“That’s what it said in the report I filed, yes.”
“I get the impression there’s a ‘but’ coming?”
“I used a teeny bit of poetic licence in what I wrote. My report said Camilla’s stepfather hired me, but the client was actually her real father. I knew him as Edward Graydon.”
“I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”
“I didn’t find out until later that Edward Graydon was Eduardo Garcia.”
“How much later?”
“When I met him to present my findings. I spent a month pretending to be a college student, but it didn’t take long to finger Frost as the culprit. He may have been rich and handsome, but there was something cold about him. He gave me the creeps, and that’s not easy to do. When we went on a date, he left me in the car while he paid for gas, and I found a pair of gloves, a knife and a length of rope in his glove compartment. Most guys that age would have a condom and some breath mints.”
“That’s hardly conclusive, though.”
“Most guys wouldn’t have six perfectly preserved pairs of women’s breasts in their freezer either, which was what I found when I poked around his house. That was enough for me.”
“Fair enough. I’ll give you that one.”
“So after that, I flew to Colombia to tell Edward what I’d found, and that was when I met Eduardo. Even back then, he travelled abroad as little as possible. He believed because Frost was the son of a congressman, and because that congressman was well known for being a devious git, there was a good chance sonny-boy wouldn’t get everything he deserved. And I agreed with him. It wouldn’t be the first time someone rich or famous got away with murder—just look at that ex-football player.”
Another groan. “I think I know where this is going. I take it Frost had a little assistance with his suicide?”
“Someone as arrogant and self-centred as he was would never have contemplated killing himself.”
“Did Black know you killed Frost?”
“He had the feet end when we chucked him over the balcony.”
“I might have guessed. And you’ve kept in touch with Garcia since then?”
“Yes.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“We have dinner every so often. Shoot the breeze.”
“You’re officially nuts, you know that, right?” Nate shook his head in disbelief. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Around the time the Frost thing kicked off, your cousin had just died from an overdose. After you spent half an hour ranting about the dangers of drugs, I thought it was best to keep quiet.”
“My cousin was an idiot. I got annoyed because I had to deal with the paperwork. Anyhow, that was a decade ago. You’ve been seeing Garcia all this time?”
“Yeah, but it’s not the kind of thing you bring up in casual conversation, is it?”
“Only you could think it was perfectly normal to drop around for dinner with the leader of a Colombian drugs cartel.”
“He’s still just a person like anyone else. Well, maybe not quite, but he’s not the monster everyone makes him out to be.”
“I’ll have to reserve judgment on that for now. So, what’s your plan?”
“Check into the Coralia Club Hotel and wait.”
“That’s it? That’s your whole plan?”
“Yes, but don’t worry. It’s a really nice hotel. The staff have always looked after me well. Mind you, Eduardo would put them six feet under if they didn’t—he owns it.”
With Nate sighing like an out-of-shape asthmatic, I pulled into short-term parking at Dulles International Airport. We split up once we were inside the terminal, queueing separately to buy tickets. Then, after half an hour of avoiding each other in the departure lounge and a much-needed gin and tonic for me, we took off for the sunny climes of South America.