Elizabeth Lowell - Innocent as Sin

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

Rand 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.”

Pleasure Valley

Friday

10:37 A.M. MST

Kayla Shaw let the silence expand as she looked at the Bertones. She was a ranch girl, born and raised. She rode, she shot, she killed her own snakes with the little folding knife she always carried.

But she had a cold feeling that Bertone was way beyond her varmint-killing skills.

It’s too late to worry about your job. Worry about your freedom instead.

And with that, Bertone had pocketed her little recorder.

She hadn’t asked for it back. She knew she wouldn’t get it.

“I do believe that’s as silent as I’ve ever heard our little banker be,” Bertone said after a time, smiling at his wife.

Elena’s smile was meant to comfort Kayla.

It didn’t.

“There’s no need to be frightened,” Elena said casually. She tapped the heavy letter-size envelope that Kayla had dropped. “This is a great opportunity for you. Every woman needs her own independent means. This is how you’ll become free.”

Silently Kayla watched the Bertones. She sensed that the less she said, the less she’d sink into the quicksand that suddenly had appeared beneath her feet.

Andre sat down next to Kayla and laid a large, plain brown envelope on the white linen tablecloth.

“You become free,” Bertone said, “or you lose your freedom. The choice is yours.”

Kayla swallowed and hoped her voice sounded less frightened than she was. “What choice?”

“Quite simple. You’re a felon.”