Vanessa had picked up the space-age–looking gear from the trunk of her car when they’d stopped at her parking garage on the Lower West Side. She’d convinced him to pretend to be part of a bomb squad while she flashed her badge at the desk clerk to gain them entry into his apartment without any witnesses.
Now, she joined him in the elevator and pushed the button for the seventh floor. His floor.
“You’re freaking brilliant.” The doors closed, but he didn’t remove his mask yet in case the building kept security cameras in the elevators. “You sure your department won’t boot you out for saying there was a bomb threat in the building?”
As the car chimed its arrival on seven, the doors swept open onto an empty hallway where he led her to his apartment.
“If the desk clerk is taking money from the mob to keep an eye out for you, I refuse to care how we gained safe passage in here.” She whipped off her mask once he opened the door and ushered her inside the space he hadn’t laid eyes on in six months. “Besides, I convinced the hot-pretzel vendor out front to offer a half-off special for the next half hour. There’s only a handful of people home at this time of day anyway, and with cheap pretzels, how can anyone complain?”
Alec took off his mask, too, and set it aside until he could collect his backup copy of the accounting records. The
clean
accounting records before someone had revised them to make it look as though he’d been pilfering out more than his fair share.
“If I’ve learned one thing in life, it’s that someone always complains.” He made a visual inspection of the apartment, moving quickly since Vanessa hoped to be out of the building within twenty minutes. “Help yourself to whatever you’d like, but let’s be careful not to displace any of the dust. I’d rather keep it looking like we were never in here in case any unwanted company comes calling.”
“I’m fine.” Vanessa’s suit crinkled as she walked, following him through the short corridor leading to the two bedrooms and a den in back. “Want me to help you with anything? Pack more clothes? Dig up any more hidden weapons?”
“Again with the guns.” He slid open the closet in the den and removed a ceiling tile just above a set of storage shelves, wishing she’d forget about seeing the .357. She’d mentioned it twice on their drive uptown. “You know, I don’t ask you about why you happen to have gas masks in your car trunk.”
“They’re exterminator suits.” She plucked at the Mylar-looking fibers of the shirt she’d draped over her outfit while she watched him fish around the ductwork in the ceiling opening. “My sister is a lawyer, and she’s dating an exterminator one of her partners represented last winter.”
Finally, he found what he sought—a padded envelope wrapped in insulation like the other ductwork. Not exactly a high-tech disguise, but he’d hoped it would blend in enough with the surroundings to go unnoticed by anyone who decided to fish around up there.
“An exterminator?” He tore off the insulation and tucked the envelope under his arm before replacing the tile. “Seems like an odd match for an attorney.”
“No worse than a cop and the guy with mob ties.” She picked up a few stray strands of the insulation and tucked them in her pocket. “You found what you need?”
“Assuming the disks survived the fluctuations in climate up there—yes.” He didn’t need anything else from the apartment that had served as little more than a place to crash between jobs. He’d spent most of his time on job sites for McPherson Real Estate the past three years. “Let’s put on the bug masks and get the hell out of here before someone decides to check into the identity of their bomb experts more closely.”
He walked slowly through the room, careful not to raise any dust as he headed for the living room.
Until he noticed Vanessa wasn’t following him.
“You coming?” He turned to see her still in the den, staring at something on his desk.
“How long did you say it’s been since you were here?” Gently, she flipped over a page of his desk calendar.
“Six months, give or take.” He picked up the bulky masks they’d worn in and retraced his steps toward the den, eager to be on their way now that they’d retrieved the disks. “Why?”
“You’ve had the evidence to prove your innocence all that time and you never came forward?” Her fingers fell away from the calendar as she straightened, but she didn’t move toward the door. Instead she seemed rooted to the spot as she stared at him.
Measuring his words, he had the niggling feeling he was missing something here and couldn’t quite grasp the link.
“The police were never involved until recently. Why come forward? Whoever is trying to set me up has a lot of money at stake and possible criminal charges hanging over their heads. My gut says that person isn’t going to let me anywhere near the cops without retaliation of some sort.”
“So you just hid the evidence and opened a rec center while you waited for…what?” The skepticism in her tone suggested she thought he was off his rocker.
“For the smoke to clear.” Hell, these were details he didn’t want to delve into. Especially not with a woman who’d gotten under his skin the way she had in the past twenty hours. “For my enemies to be made known. Can’t we talk about it in the car?”
He nudged her arm with her mask, ready to make tracks from this lifeless apartment.
“Hell yes, we can talk about it in the car.” The inscrutable expression on her face transformed to obvious anger. “Right after we finish talking about this part of it here. Because I want to know if you’ve ever considered that by keeping your evidence and your secrets to yourself, you are actually protecting a felon.”
“I told you—I’ve been waiting for somebody to make a false move. Reveal themselves.” He stepped over to the window and edged aside the blinds enough to see down to the street. The handful of evacuated tenants seemed to be keeping the pretzel vendor busy while the building superintendent scowled and talked into his cell phone off to one side of the crowd.
Instincts hummed to life, urging him to get out now.
“If nobody ever comes forward with information, the police are left with a damn big burden to piece together information at a crime scene they didn’t personally witness.” Her voice quieted, her flash of anger transforming to a bitterness he didn’t understand. “Maybe if you were willing to share your evidence with the police six months ago, they could have used it in conjunction with their own information to make arrests and serve some justice.”
“Or maybe they would have considered the source and assumed any guy related to Sergio Alteri must be part of a crime family.” She wasn’t naive enough to think he could have just strolled into a cop shop with his disks under his arm and be taken at his word. Was she?
He moved to lower the blind when a police car came into view down on the street below. Slowing, the vehicle came to a full stop when the building superintendent flagged it down.
Time to get the hell out of Dodge.
“Police are here.” Shoving the headgear on Vanessa, he slid on his own and lunged for the door. “We can take a back exit if we hurry.”
He didn’t need to hear her agree. She launched into action as fast as him, tugging the door shut behind them as they moved into the corridor.
By silent agreement they took the stairs down. Seven floors flew by as they hustled toward street level, the computer disks a reassuring weight in his inside pocket as they smacked against his chest. When they reached the final door to the sunny late afternoon, Alec levered it open and walked briskly toward her car parked a half block down the street.
He kept his mask on to help protect his identity from his neighbors or anyone else inclined to sell him out to the first person who showed up looking for him. The pseudo bomb-squad outfit attracted plenty of attention, however, including a few shouts for information from building tenants who’d wandered around to the other side of the building.
Vanessa picked up the pace the last few steps, sprinting the rest of the way to her car and vaulting inside. She had the engine in gear and the vehicle in motion before he’d completely shut the passenger-side door.
Alec peered into the rearview mirror as she sped away on the relatively quiet side street.
“Only a couple of gawkers saw us leave.” He tossed the exterminator mask into her back seat. “Maybe we should ditch the car in case they do a check on the plates.”
“This is New York, remember?” Vanessa shook out her long, dark hair from the confines of the headgear as they turned a corner. “No one ever turns in any information to help the police.”
Her darkly muttered words called to mind her anger back in his apartment.
“Okay, what gives with all the righteous indignation about submitting evidence?” He settled back into the seat, as she drove uptown toward the Third Avenue Bridge.
The Bronx.
Somehow her unease with the city’s toughest borough came into play here. She’d admitted to being uncomfortable there last night, despite her thorough martial art training and the fact that she carried a weapon. Now today she was getting more on edge with every passing streetlight.
When she didn’t say anything for the long moments they waited for an out-of-towner to figure out how to get around a double-parked delivery truck, Alec knew he’d hit on something.
“This thing—whatever is making you gung ho about submitting evidence—it has something to do with why you hate the Bronx, doesn’t it?”
“Why don’t you leave the investigating to me, hotshot?” Wheeling the car around the perplexed tourist who patiently waited to be let into traffic with his blinker flashing, Vanessa maneuvered up Third Avenue and told herself she would not break a sweat in front of the man watching her like a hawk from the passenger seat.
Still, her neck went hot, her pulse pounding with an urgency unusual for her. She’d been called an ice queen more than once around the precinct, and not just because she’d turned down plenty of offers from the guys on the force. She had a reputation for being in control. Cool under pressure.
And yet right now, she seemed to be fracturing at the seams at a question she ought to be able to blow off.
“Vanessa?” Alec reached over the console from the passenger seat to lay a hand beside hers on the wheel. Not taking control, but suggesting it without much subtlety. From his raised voice, she got the impression he might have called her name more than once. “Let me drive.”
“Shit.” She hadn’t realized until he suggested it that she was hanging on by a thread. Old symptoms from five years ago—the flashes of heat, the sudden wash of fear—reared up in small doses. How the hell had that happened? “Okay. I think the close call at the apartment building caught me off guard.”
Lame excuse. She knew it. She knew he knew it. But if she didn’t start reasserting some control for herself, she didn’t know what might happen. No sense ramming her car into a fire hydrant because she was warding off a panic attack.
“There’s a dock by the river up here. Under the bridge.” He pointed to a turnoff, a side street safely on the Manhattan side of the Third Avenue Bridge. East Harlem she could handle.
Pulling out of traffic, she didn’t bother getting close to the dock where a few power-company trucks blocked the way. There was a gap in the parked cars to one side of the street and with no problem she pulled into the vacant space behind a motorcycle.
Finding something intelligent to say to Alec that would make him drop the whole incident—including his question about why the Bronx made her spaz out— now
that
presented a problem.
Hoping maybe just to blow it off instead, she breezed out of the car and headed around to the passenger side. He held the door for her while she slid into the seat, accepting her sidekick position as if it weren’t a huge slap to her ego.
She attempted to stretch her mouth into a smile, but that might have been a mistake, since her effort only earned her a scowl as he slammed the door and went around to the driver’s side. So much for pleasantries.
When they were locked safely inside the car again, Alec removed the keys from the ignition and threw them under his seat.
“Now that we’re not risking our lives in rush-hour traffic, why don’t you cut the BS and level with me for a change?” He leaned an elbow on the leather armrest between their seats, crowding her even with the console between them. “What is it that’s getting you tied up in knots all of a sudden? And don’t try to give me some crap about the near miss at my apartment. We couldn’t have handled that any better.”
She resisted the urge to swipe a hand across her forehead or maybe massage her temples. Instead she concentrated on a messenger streaking past the car on a bicycle, his legs pumping as though his life depended on whatever he carried in his satchel. Why hadn’t she chosen a job with those kinds of clear-cut goals? Deliver the package.
Simple. Focused.
She felt herself calming down a little bit. Until Alec’s voice slid into her faraway thoughts.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass when we get to the Raven Club, by the way.” He reached beneath the seat to adjust the position back several inches. “I’m in no hurry to find out anything about the damn carjacking when all I really want to know is what’s messing with your head, Vanessa.”
He wasn’t going to take them to the Raven Club? Of all the obnoxious ways he could choose to piss her off and interfere with her job…
She might have railed at him, but before she could spit back a retort, her brain simmered down enough to acknowledge he hadn’t said he
wasn’t
taking her, just that he didn’t care when they went. She was damn well losing her mind from stress and worry and the strange mental collision of her past and present last night.
Ever since she’d been hauled from Alec’s car, she’d told herself that it would not be an act that went unpunished.
Unprosecuted, rather.
She’d find out who’d tried to scare the living daylights out of her last night, and she’d put them on trial for the crime. It would be one small victory to take the place of the bigger battle she hadn’t won. Could never win now.
One way or another, she meant to put her old ghosts to rest.