The Lucie Rizzo Mystery Series Box Set 2, page 51
part #5 of Lucie Rizzo Mystery Series
Interior lights glowed through a slit in the drapes. With the number of spotlights in front of her house, a 747 pilot might mistake it for a runway.
Lit up as it was, no one would get close without being seen. Which, Lucie supposed, was the point.
Life on the run.
Lucie shifted to park. “I’ll wait here. Take your time.”
On his way to the door, Henry turned back. “Come inside. You can’t be out here alone. Not after what happened.”
Point there. But, hello? This might be a tad awkward.
Awkward or not, she intended on not getting kidnapped and followed Henry to Mattie’s door, checking her surroundings as she went, scanning the bushes for any Sonny wannabes.
Rather than ring the bell, Henry rapped on the door. “It’s me. Open up.”
A second later, the door slid open and Henry paddled his hand at Lucie. “Hurry up. Step on it.”
Yeesh.
Once inside, Mattie closed and bolted the door. Next to it sat two large suitcases and a carry-on. Lucie didn’t need her master’s degree to know what that meant.
Henry gave them a long, pensive look, then lifted his chin to Mattie. “What are you doing?”
For a brief few seconds, she met Lucie’s gaze then let it bounce to the ceiling, the floor, the suitcases. Anywhere but Henry.
“Leaving,” she said, eyes still on the cases. “I have to go. They’ve found me. And now this arrest has brought everything back to the public eye. I’m not safe. And neither are you. I put Lucie in danger. I can’t live with that.”
“And what? You were going to leave? Not a word? And for God’s sake look at me. I deserve that much at least.”
She snapped her head up. “You deserved a lot more, Henry. More than me, by far. I’d have called from the road. I won’t have you or your family in danger because of me.”
“What about you? You can’t battle this on your own.”
Unsure how much to contribute, Lucie nodded. Way to step to the plate, mister. And then, well, what the hell? “He’s right. If you stay, you have a support system.”
Mattie eyed her. “Of all people, I can’t believe you’re saying that. You were almost abducted.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“Right,” Henry said. “And we have an update on the kidnapper. Tell her, Lucie.”
Me? “Uh, okay.”
Again, Mattie cut her gaze to the suitcases then faced Lucie. “I don’t have time for this. Please, I have to go.”
“Where?”
“Atlanta.”
Henry cocked his head. “Atlanta? Why?”
“I can’t fly anywhere. Paul Landon knows my new name. I’ll have to disappear. I’ll drive to Atlanta, make sure I wasn’t followed and get on a train to California. I already took Aphrodite to the kennel. When I settle in somewhere, I’ll send for her.” She held Henry’s gaze. “I have to pick up my daughter and we’ll run again. To Mexico. Or Canada. I don’t know,” she cried.
Lucie shook her head. All this running. Having lived under the Rizzo spotlight, there’d been plenty of occasions Lucie considered getting in her car and taking off without a word. At one time, she’d begged her ex, Frankie, another mob kid, to move to New York with her. Start over in a city not so caught up in her father’s day-to-day drama.
But Frankie, as much as he’d loved her, he couldn’t leave. At least not then. If only she’d been ESPN. When they offered him a job, he sure took off in a hurry.
Bitterness filled her mouth and she swallowed hard. Forget that.
She shook it off. It was for the better.
“Mattie,” she said, “how long can you do this?”
“What?”
“Live like this. Moving every few months and constantly covering your tracks in case Paul Landon, or whoever is after you, catches up. It’s not fair to you or your daughter.”
“I have no choice.”
“It’s not a life,” Henry added.
Lucie stepped forward, angling around Henry to grasp Mattie’s hands. “I can’t possibly understand. None of us could. But I know what it feels like to want to hide. To disappear for a while. You shouldn’t have to live this way because your father screwed up. Believe me, I tell myself that often.”
“Does it work?”
Lucie smiled. “Sometimes. I made a choice a couple years ago. I could go with the poor-me scenario or move past it.”
“How?”
“By figuring out that my father’s bad decisions are not my fault. I won’t take that on. It’s stifling and frustrating and…well…exhausting. My dad won’t change and once I accepted that, I figured out how to be Lucie Rizzo, entrepreneur instead of mob princess.”
“This is different.”
“It sure is. But you have a choice. Right now the universe has thrown a crossroad in front of you. You can run from a place you seem to love.” Lucie glanced back at Henry. “And the man who comes with it. Or you can stay and fight. We’ll help you. Tim is a great detective. He understands the law. And, hello, have I mentioned my father has one of the country’s greatest criminal defense attorneys?”
Believe me, sister. I’ve needed him a lot recently.
Henry cleared his throat. “Innocent people shouldn’t run. You shouldn’t.”
For a few seconds, Mattie stood still, her eyes locked on Henry. Holy cow the pressure. If she turned away, game over. She’d break Henry’s heart and then Lucie would have to kill her. Bury her body in a swamp somewhere.
One with a lot of gators.
Finally, she let out a hard breath that sent her ample boobs bouncing. “I don’t know how to fight this,” she said, her voice sailing up an octave. “It’s…a lot.”
Henry moved closer. “Honey, listen to what Lucie found out. Then decide.”
Mattie blinked, eyes shimmering with moisture, and it kicked Lucie straight in the chest.
Ach.
Maybe the gators were overkill.
How many times had Lucie gotten into hijinks that should’ve sent Tim racing to the door? No matter what, he’d stood by her. Loyalty, apparently, ran in the family because Henry, probably confused, angry, and hurt all at once, still found it inside him to call this woman honey.
A good man. Just like his nephew.
Lucie held up a hand. “He’s right. Hear me out. You at least owe me that much.” She smiled. “What with almost getting me kidnapped and all.”
Guilt. As much as she hated to employ it, got the job done.
Mattie snorted. “You’re something else, Lucie. I’ll give you ten minutes. Then I have to go.”
Ha.
They’d see about that.
The deadline came and went. Yet here they were, still parked on Mattie’s sofa while she took in all that Lucie had just shared. The stakeout, the search of Sonny’s room, the boarding pass from his Boston to Palm Beach flight. Lucie kicking the crap out of Sonny and his subsequent admissions, all of it laid out carefully for Mattie to dissect.
When Lucie emptied her brain of all things related to Sonny Peppers, Mattie threw her hands up, smacking them against her skintight jeans. “He expects us to believe he doesn’t know who hired him?”
“As nutty as it sounds, my dad said it’s possible.” Dad would know. Sigh.
“What’s the address of the building he spoke of?”
Lucie checked her phone and read it off.
“Huh.”
Placing one hand on Henry’s knee, more a gesture of familiarity than anything, Mattie levered up from her spot and quick-walked to her suitcases. She’d better not be skipping out. Not without some sort of response other than huh.
But, surprise, surprise, rather than head out the door, she pulled a laptop from her carry-on, bringing it back to the sofa and booting it up.
“At work,” she said, “we’d use Boston’s property assessment website to check the values of listings. The owners are there and if their address is different from the property, it’ll list both.”
Oh, brilliant. Lucie pushed out of her chair and moved behind the sofa to look over Mattie’s shoulder.
Mattie’s fingers flew over the keyboard—she must have aced typing class. A screen popped up welcoming them to the site. Mattie typed the address into the search box and…Voila. A new page popped up with type small enough to convince Lucie a trip to the eye doctor might be in her future. She leaned in and squinted as she scanned.
Property type: commercial. Value: $875,000.
Come on, where are you?
She continued reading and…bingo.
Owner: Paul Landon.
Mattie straightened her shoulders, closed the laptop, and stood. “I have to go.”
Whoa. Hang on. Before Mattie took a step, Lucie ran to the suitcases and held her hands up. Childish? Sure. Did she care?
No.
Dog-tired and short on patience, she couldn’t worry about her maturity level.
“Just hold on,” Lucie said. “It shouldn’t be a shock that Landon owns that building.”
“Oh, it’s not. It confirms that I need to go. Move.”
Nice try, lady. Not happening. “Let’s call Tim. He’ll know what to do. Please. Don’t leave before we muddle through this.”
Without waiting for an answer, Lucie whipped out her phone. “Give me two minutes.”
Phone to her ear, Lucie shifted right, standing directly in Mattie’s path.
“No,” Mattie said. “Move.”
Lucie held up a finger. “It’s ringing. One sec.”
Before the second ring, Tim picked up. “Ugh,” he said, his voice groggy from disturbed sleep. “Why are you calling me from the kitchen?”
“I’m not in the kitchen.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Hey. Don’t give me a hard time. Henry wanted to see Mattie and he’d been drinking. I couldn’t let your uncle drive while under the influence, could I?”
“Or maybe you both could’ve waited until morning?”
No one would ever accuse Tim of being a romantic, that was for sure. “Listen, Romeo, if you’d let me, I can give you information before Mattie lams it again. And I’m not being dramatic. As we speak, her bags are lined up at the door and she’s ready to blow right through me to get out of here.”
The classic Tim sigh streamed through the phone line. “What have you got, Columbo?”
That was more like it. When Mattie shifted right to circumvent her, Lucie sidestepped. No one was leaving until Tim weighed in. “The building Sonny Peppers said he picked up the money from is owned by Paul Landon.”
“Hunh,” Tim said.
“Is that a good hunh or a bad hunh?” At times, like now, it was hard to tell.
“It’s a non-committal hunh.”
Terrific. Lucie smacked herself on the forehead. Could she get a break here? “What does that even mean?”
On the other end a rustling noise, the unmistakable sound of covers being tossed aside, filled the silence. “It means I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t do anything until I get there. And tell Mattie to stay put. I’m tired and cranky. Chasing her down in the middle of the night would piss me off.”
Lucie squeezed her eyes shut, fought the fatigue fogging her brain. “It has to be him who sent Sonny, right?”
“Luce, if this guy is any kind of a decent criminal, which he must be if the Feds have yet to charge him, he won’t pay a hitman by leaving the money at his own damned building.”
Darn it. She smacked herself again. How had she missed that? “You think it’s—”
“—a setup? Yeah. Someone is framing Paul Landon.”
“I had a thought,” Lucie said from her spot on the sofa when Tim strode through Mattie’s door.
He circled around, kissed the top of her head, and dropped next to her. “Can’t wait.”
Oh, ha-ha.
She should wallop him for being a smart mouth, but he looked so adorably rumpled in a wrinkled T-shirt and basketball shorts that she couldn’t do it. The kicker was his hair. He wore it close-cropped, but long enough that after sleeping the velvety red strands mashed down on the right side. That’s what being a side-sleeper got him. He’d attempted to throw some water on his head and fix it, but what she loved about her man was that he didn’t care what he looked like when a crisis loomed. Tim was all about action and getting things done.
Even if his hair wouldn’t cooperate.
In the eight minutes it took him, she’d had a brainstorm and quickly commandeered the laptop. Yes, it was after midnight, but her strung out mind and body had reached that pivotal point when fatigue morphs into twisted mania that’d keep her going for hours.
She tapped the screen. ““You’ll love this, big boy. Wyoming Secretary of State’s website.”
“Okay. I’d planned on calling them in the morning.”
“Well, Detective, why wait when we can—wait for it—download a list of all companies registered in the fine state of Wyoming.” She threw her arms up in triumph.
Tim’s eyebrows hitched. A spark of his tenacious need for the truth lit his green eyes. “Seriously?”
“Yep. Mattie showed me a website with Boston property tax assessments. It got me thinking, so I did a search for owners of Wyoming companies. That brought me to this website. It should give us contact information for owners and registered agents.”
He high-fived her and something churned low and deep in her belly. Ninety-eight point five percent of the time, Tim poo-pooed her investigations. Not that he doubted her intellect or skill. He simply hated her putting herself in tenuous situations that might get her hurt. Or worse.
A high-five from Tim? She might as well have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
A few taps later, Lucie watched the download bar crawl.
“Big file,” Tim said.
“Sure is. With any luck, we can sort it by registered agents.”
Tick, tock, tick, tock. Almost downloaded.
Tim craned his neck to look down the short hallway leading to the back of the house. “Where’s Uncle Henry and Mattie?”
“They went to her room to talk. This has devastated him, Tim.”
“My mom will freak.”
Again with his mother? Lucie liked the woman—a lot—but certain boundaries shouldn’t be crossed. “Yeah, well, all due respect, it’s not her life. What if Mattie is innocent? Henry would be turning his back on the woman he loves.”
He did the Tim sigh. Well, too bad. Someone had to think of Henry’s emotional vulnerability in all this.
“Luce, I hear you. But I don’t know what to think.”
“The frustrated mob princess side of me thinks Mattie got the shaft. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling about this one.”
“And if you are?”
She couldn’t go there. Being wrong scared the you-know-what out of her. “I don’t know. But we need to give her a chance.”
Lucie glanced at the screen. Download complete. She clicked the file, watched the wheel spin for an agonizing fifteen seconds until a spreadsheet—a mess of one—popped up.
Tim leaned forward. “The columns are all screwed up. You can’t sort it like that.”
An understatement for sure. Not only were the headers not matching up with the corresponding columns, some of the fields had merged. “Don’t panic.”
“Uh, I’m a Chicago cop, if spreadsheets scared me, I’d be committed by now.”
Always appreciative of Tim’s gallows humor, Lucie snorted. So cute, her man. “We can search the spreadsheet for Helen Craft. If she’s in here, we copy the data to a clean sheet and in the morning start calling the numbers.”
“Good,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
“This is fun, isn’t it?”
“My uncle’s life going down the crapper?”
“Not that. Working together. I like it.”
He flashed the O’Brien smile and locked those lush greens on her. “Me too. I love you, Luce.”
If she wasn’t so tired, he’d totally get lucky after this.
“I love you, Detective.”
She leaned over and planted one on him. Right in Mattie’s living room, just bam. This wasn’t a ho-hum, casual kiss either.
Open mouths and tongues were involved.
She angled her head, giving him and his fabulous tongue better access. Totally getting lucky, later.
His hand came around, settling on her hip. He gave her a squeeze and slowly pulled back. “We’re in the middle of something here and you do this to me? You’re evil.”
“I know.” Bad, Lucie. Bad.
Such a slut. But she’d rocked his world—and maybe specific parts of his anatomy Lucie had grown fond of.
Lucie shook off the buzz left by Tim’s lips and focused on the spreadsheet, cracking her knuckles as she read. “Quit distracting me. We have things to do. Search term: Helen Craft.”
She typed the name in and the cursor went to the first entry for Helen Craft.
“Boom,” Tim said. “Got one.”
“Yep.”
Lucie copied the row into a new spreadsheet and clicked back to the original list. She clicked the search arrow again.
Helen Craft.
“That’s two,” Tim said.
The second was copied into the new spreadsheet and Lucie repeated the exercise. Thirteen times.
When all entries had been exhausted, Lucie slouched against the back of the sofa, the laptop still resting on her legs.
Tim peered back at her. “Different addresses all over the state.” He waggled a finger. “It doesn’t say her company’s name.”
“No. Just Helen Craft.”
Tim sat back, rested his head on the cushion while he stared up at the ceiling. Thinking. “We can’t assume she doesn’t own a management company.”
“Remember that scandal last year. The law firm?”
He looked at her. “The one that helped their clients hide billions in overseas accounts?”
“Yes. Their sole function was to be a registered agent for wealthy people trying to evade taxes. That’s all they did. The entire firm.”
“If Helen Craft was on that level, she’d have more than thirteen companies.”
True. Damn him. Lucie grunted.
Still mulling it over, Tim went back to studying the ceiling. “Let’s break it down. She’s working for someone, say Paul Landon, whose son happens to be the in-house real estate guy for a major US retailer. For shits and giggles, we’ll say it’s That Girl. Daddy—being Paul Landon—connects the developers with his son. Or daddy partners with them. They buy buildings in certain markets.”
