Chapter Twelve #2
Unless he’s already dead, Landon thought, well aware that wishing for a favorable outcome alone wasn’t always enough to make it come true.
“Right now, though, I’m more concerned about your safety.
If the unsub was desperate enough to accost you in broad daylight on a public campus, there’s a good chance he probably also knows where you live. ”
“That thought did cross my mind,” Raquelle admitted.
Landon told her with assurance, “Until your attacker is taken into custody, I can arrange protection for you.” The last thing he wanted was for her to be a sitting duck for a suspected killer—whether on campus or at home.
Landon knew she had a top-of-the-line security system in place, but he feared it could still be breached by a determined foe.
He stopped short of saying he would be happy to move back in with her temporarily—not wanting it to seem like he was exploiting a vulnerability for something she wasn’t comfortable with at the moment.
“Okay,” she said simply. “I just hope you can get him—before he finds Eddie.”
Katie looked at her. “If the unsub did manage to get off campus, between surveillance video and, if necessary, pairing you with a sketch artist, we should be able to track him down sooner than later…”
Landon was of the same mind. But seeing was believing.
Until such time, he didn’t want anything to happen to Raquelle.
Not when they were just starting to reconnect.
They needed time to see if this relationship was real or only a product of weakness that Eddie had inadvertently made possible.
It could all still crumble like a castle made of sand, once the case had run its course.
With Eddie a casualty for his trouble when the dust settled.
* * *
AT HELENE’S ITALIAN HOUSE, a restaurant on Gervais Street in the Congaree Vista section of Columbia, Ivan Pimentel sat across the table from his wife, Ava.
At forty-seven, she was still as beautiful, slender and loving as the day they met.
Married for twenty-five years and counting, they had three children, now all adults and doing their best to make smart choices.
Ivan tried hard not to micromanage their lives, but it wasn’t easy. Especially if he felt they were going astray. Fortunately, Ava seemed perfectly capable of using her influence to keep them from falling off the cliff, as it were.
Beyond that, Ivan had more pressing concerns.
His hired killer, through Yusef Abercrombie, had failed to deliver on his mission to take out Eddie Jernigan.
Or at least that appeared to be the case.
But there was still no sign of Eddie, as though he had been eliminated.
Or was that a false read that would ultimately come back to haunt him?
Ivan feared that the art dealer stoolie was simply lying low and staying out of sight—perhaps still working with the FBI to bring down his operation.
Fortunately, he had tried to stay one step ahead of them.
That included clearing out the warehouse of stolen and forged works of art before it was raided by the feds.
This gave them less to work with in trying to tie him to federal crimes committed in the art world and beyond.
Still, he needed Eddie Jernigan out of the picture, one way or the other.
If the man who was supposed to make this happen wasn’t up to the job, then someone else would be.
“You’re not eating,” Ava said, breaking into his thoughts as she stopped moving a fork on her plate of chicken fettuccini Alfredo.
Ivan gazed at her face bordered by crimson hair in an angled bob and then at his half-finished veal piccata. He forced himself to slice his knife into a piece and respond tonelessly, “Got distracted. Have things on my mind.”
Her eyes widened curiously. “What things?” she demanded.
“Nothing you need to be concerned with,” he said, knowing full well that keeping her out of the loop on his illicit activities limited his wife’s exposure, should everything ever come crashing down like a rocket out of control.
“I’m always concerned about anything that affects you or our children,” Ava told him flatly.
He softened his position, offering her a grin as he said sweetly, “I know that, and I love you for it. This is just business. Everything will be fine. I promise.”
“Okay,” she relented and returned to eating.
So did he, washing it down with a sip of red wine.
But just as Ivan was happy to have circumvented the delicate balance between his home and business lives, his cell phone rang. He removed it from the inside pocket of his pinstripe suit coat and saw that the caller was Yusef.
Though he hated to take the call, giving Ava another reason to be annoyed, Ivan knew he had no choice considering the stakes for him at the moment. “I need to get this,” he told her and stood, not waiting for a response.
After stepping a few feet from the table, Ivan answered the phone and said irritably, “Yeah?”
Yusef responded bluntly, “We’ve got a problem.”
“What is it?” he demanded, then listened as his assistant gave him some unsettling news pertaining to Eddie and the man who was supposed to eliminate him.