Glass Houses (8 page)

“It was the man who rang up earlier. At first I thought it wasn’t, but then I realized he just didn’t have cotton wool in his mouth.”

Aiden took a sidelong look. She was looking right back. So earnest and anxious. So pretty. And maybe more than a few tacos short of a full-meal deal? Hadn’t that been Vanni’s line? “Cotton wool in his mouth?”

“Sorry. You say cotton. Inside his cheeks. I’ve read how people put cotton wool in their mouths to change their voices. Or a flannel—washcloth to you—over their mouths. Or perhaps that was a flannel over the telephone receiver. I knew it was him, though, because he mentioned ringing me earlier about the kill fee.”

“Ah, I see.”

Olivia heard other words in her head:
He intended to kill me but attacked someone else by mistake.
She said,
“
When I didn’t agree to give him the photographs, he said he only needed the negatives. Then he pushed an envelope full of money and things through the door.”

Rather than gaining any reassurance from this revelation, Aiden got a too-familiar feeling of foreboding. “Olivia, did you give him the negatives?”

“He gave me the money.”

“So you’ve said.” He could see her hands trembling in her lap. “Just take a deep breath and stay with me on this. Because he gave you the money, you gave him the negatives?”

“I feel
so
awful.”

“Save it. We don’t have time for you to crack up on me.” His voice had turned hard, and his profile was sharp, the corner of his mouth turned down, and that muscle she’d often noticed in men’s cheeks worked back and forth. Oh, dear, he was grinding his teeth. She’d made him really angry.

“I don’t mean to snap at you,” he said. “It goes with the
territory, I’m afraid. I get intense about business and I forget to make nice.”

Make nice?
“You don’t have to pretend to be what you’re not for me. I’m a stranger to you anyway. Well, I am really. Oh!” She jerked around to sit facing him. “I didn’t give him the ones he wanted. Oh, dear, I see what you thought. He asked for negatives, so I gave him some. But they weren’t the ones from the shoot for Penny Biggies.”

Aiden shook his head and gave the steering wheel a punch. “Atta girl.” He looked at her again. Her head was bowed, and she was engrossed in pulling at her skirt. “But the money—”

“I know, I know.” She frowned. “I shouldn’t have taken the money, but I decided I hadn’t asked for it and I’d find a way to repay it later.
I
needed a way to buy that ticket without anyone being able—oh, drat—being able to make an excuse to go to the credit card company and find out about my transactions. You didn’t want them to, either.
Blast
it.”

The side seam of her skirt had apparently been closed into the seatbelt. She’d managed to pull it free, but at the expense of tearing the seam. While he stole repeated glances, she assessed the damage, then took hold of a trailing thread and wound it around a finger to break it off.

“What were the other things in the envelope?” he asked, as much to distract her from obvious distress over her clothes as to find out the answer.

“
Not in the same envelope. There was a second one stuck to the one with the money. Two checks, an old ticket to the pictures, and a dry-cleaning receipt. Oh,
no.
”

Olivia was definitely not the kind of girl who wore her skirts slit from hem to hip, but she didn’t have a choice—at least not at the moment.

Of all the dreadful things to happen, Olivia thought. She tried to cover her exposed upper thigh, where pale peach-c
olored gar
ters held up lace-topped stockings.

Aiden kept his attention firmly on the road ahead. “This is the Belt Parkway,” he said. “A lot of the areas you see in Brooklyn used to be considered undesirable. Rough. Dangerous, even. Mostly it’s all been cleaned up. There are some great real estate buys here now. The Zanettos—that’s where we’re going—they live in Clinton Hill. They’ve got this wonderful old house. Mama Zanetto and her husband brought up seven children there. Mr. Zanetto passed away some years ago. I never met him. But Pops Zanetto, the grandfather, is still there. Wild old guy.” He was running out of prattle, but she seemed to have grown still now. “Tell me about the checks.”

She didn’t answer, and he risked another look. Olivia held both of her hands clamped over her left thigh, but she wasn’t doing an efficient job of keeping peach-satin garters and the lacy tops of her stockings covered. So the big question was, did that sexy underwear tell the real story about the lady’s personality? Aiden hoped so.

He faced resolutely ahead once more. Why did he hope so? What did it matter one way or the other? She wasn't likely to be planning to seduce him.

Shucks.

“I feel ridiculous,” she said in a very small voice. “It’s nice of you to pretend I haven’t ripped my skirt, but we both know I have.”

“Yeah. Well, maybe you could turn it around so the seam’s at the back.”

Olivia stared at Sam. “At the back?”

A faint colo
r rose along his cheekbones. “
I guess not. The front, then?”

She sputtered, and started to laugh; she couldn’t help it. Sam grimaced. He shook his head. “Stupid suggestion. When we get where we’re going, stand close to me until I can maneuver you somewhere to change, okay?”

“I hope so.” The many hours since she’d slept, and the tension packed into those hours, were beginning to blunt her ability to think at all.

“The checks, Olivia.”

She opened her purse and pulled out a crumpled envelope. “I couldn’t take them out on the plane. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea for someone to see me doing that. There’s more
money in here, too.” A lot of money. This all got more weird, and being here felt the weirdest part of it all.

“Who are the checks made out to?” Sam asked.

Olivia slid them out. and the rest of the money.
“
This one’s to Moody and Fish Antiques.” She riffled through several more. “They both are, and they’re written on the same account. It doesn’t have a name, just a number, but there’s a New York contact listed underneath, an Alberto Fanelli. Two checks written by one person within a couple of days. Both to Moody and Fish Antiques. Why wouldn’t you write just one check?”

“You’ve got me. They’re not endorsed, though?”

She turned them over. “Yes, they are. There’s a stamp. Moody and Fis
h Antiques, Museum Street, WC1. I
think that’s Bloomsbury.”

“Is that in London?”

“Yes. A very good area of London.”

“How much are they for?”

Olivia looked at the sum on the first check. Chilly prickles shot out on her scalp. The second one didn’t make her feel any better. She found a pad and pen and wrote the two sums down. Several times she added the figures.

“How much?” Sam prompted her.

Her gaze drifted to the window and ugly highrises standing shoulder to shoulder, beside the big road and stretching away into the distance. Theo would croak if he had any idea what was happening to her. She wouldn’t allow herself to think about her parents. When she looked ahead again, Sam was steering to the right on a long curve, and she jumped at the sight of a car coming straight toward them.

An illusion. She’d forgotten they were on the opposite side of the road from England. Tiredness had really got the better of her. “I need to count again. I’m having difficulty concentrating.”

Once more she added the figures. How hard could it be to add two sums together? Surely she had the decimal point in the wrong place.

“Got it now?” Sam said.

Should she involve him in this any further? He braked for a huge lorry with red, white, and yellow plastic strapped over the loads on two beds. The plastic flapped. Too many images to assimilate.

“Olivia?”

“Yes.” His legs fascinated her. Long, very long, and when he gave the car more petrol or pressed the brake, muscles in his thigh hardened and stood out beneath his gray suit trousers. When he took his other foot from the clutch, the fabric caught around his calf.

Yes, Theo, I’m a nutter.

Aiden turned his head and caught her apparently watching his driving technique. He saw the instant she realized he was looking at her. She went back to the checks she apparently didn’t want to tell him about.

She’d forgotten the gaping skirt. He narrowed his eyes. The outside of her left leg showed from high-cut peach-satin panties at her bared hip, all the way past matching garters and sleek thighs to her pale, very sheer stockings, to a shapely calf and slim ankle. Too bad about the flat brown shoe, not that there was anything wrong with his imagination. Disposing with the skirt altogether, and getting rid of both shoes, painted the kind of picture in his mind, and resulted in the kind of reaction elsewhere, that made him hope she wasn’t studying him too closely.

“I must have this wrong,” she to
l
d him at last. “If I’ve got eight hundred and ten, then one, two, three zeros, how much does that say?”

“Where’s the decimal point?”

“It comes after all that. Then the final two zeros.”

“Shit,” Aiden said, applying the brake before he realized what he was doing. Rapidly, he accelerated again.
“
Match your figures to the checks again. Add them. Then give me your total one more time. Slowly.”

He heard her muttering as she did as she was told. Then she announced exactly the same figure as before. “It can’t be, can it?”

“Eight hundred and ten thousand? If you haven’t transposed numbers, or added wrong, then that little duo represents over three quarters of a million dollars.”

“Pounds.”

“
Shit.
I forgot. That’s got to be more than a million dollars.
”
Something big was going down here. No way was there a chance Mr. Moody and Mr. Fish wouldn’t be searching for their million. “I don’t want you carrying that. It’s not safe.”

Olivia felt even more sick. “He wanted to push me under a tube train,
”
she said softly.
“
It was really early in the morning. This morning. Before I left England. He came into a bakery where I was shopping. I’d never seen him before, so I had no idea he was the man who called about the kill fee earlier, but he scared me. Then he followed me, and I went into the station because I didn’t want him to follow me home. He pushed someone who looked like me instead.”

The Cadillac slowed dramatically. Sam leaned forward over the wheel, frowning fiercely as if trying to be sure he’d heard what he thought he’d heard.

“
The other woman had on almost identical clothes and the platform was really crowded. One minute he was feeding rats on tire rails with crisps, the next I heard the screams. He was gone, and that poor woman was on the ground. Someone had saved her, thank goodness.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this the minute you got off the plane?” Sam’s voice sounded different.

“You didn’t give me a chance—no, that’s not true. I wasn’t sure how to say it, or even if I should.” She was perilously close to tears. “It was in Hampstead. He sickened me. There are rats on the tracks, and he was feeding them crisps. He—”

“Yeah, so you already said. Sicko.” She wasn’t to know how much it took to impress him. “Then what happened?”

She told him and added, “So I did all right, didn’t I? I mean,
I
didn’t completely panic when I realized he was the man at the door later. And I managed to get away without him knowing where I’d gone.”

Her innocent ability to believe in this scenario was disconcerting. “Possibly,” he said. Treating her like a child wouldn’t help.

The skin on her thigh was smooth and very white. Her head was bowed, and her dark hair separated to show equally vulnerable-looking skin at the back of her neck. He’d like to kiss her neck first, then make his way to her thigh, the inside of her thigh where his tongue and lips and warm breath would tickle and make her squirm.

Holy hell, Flynn. Get a life.

“You did well,
”
he muttered. And what, he wondered, had the man who fed rats done when he discovered what he’d put through Olivia’s front door? “You think he just went away after leaving your house? Simple as that?”

Sam sounded so impersonal and tough. But he was an FBI agent, and he had to be tough. “I didn’t see him again.”

Aiden decided not to push her further on the point. It was perfectly possible this guy had seen her being driven away and followed.

“I know what to do,” Olivia said, feeling inspired and relieved at the same time. “I’ll mail the checks back to Mr. Moody and Mr. Fish with what money is left, I can put in an IOU for the rest. No, I’ve got it. I’ll write a personal check for the balance and ask him to hold it till I let him know I can cover it.”

Oh, my, God.
“We’ll work it out together, Olivia. I bet beaches and water weren’t what came into your mind when you thought of Brooklyn.”

“I suppose not. More like gangs and graffiti—only I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it much.” The beach looked more like scrubby marshlands to Olivia. “Why are we going to the—
the people you talked about?”