Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2) (11 page)

Worst of all, it must have been someone who knew of the medal. A friend of the family.

“I thought you might understand,” Niall said after a while.

I sat up straighter. “What do you want me to do?” At first glance, this wasn’t something straightforward that I could help with.

“There are two things,” he said slowly, struggling back to his feet. He made his way over to a bureau where some letters were lying and picked up a couple of pages to hand them to me. “First off, the insurance company are bilking us on the damage.” He waved at the doors to the balcony, which were obviously repaired but not yet painted. “And when I complained, they suggested they might not renew coverage.”

I frowned. Surely, this was more Kath’s line than mine. Whatever problems my younger sister and I had with each other at the moment, she surely wouldn’t refuse to help the Quinns on a legal matter. She was a lawyer; this would be easy stuff for her. Then I scanned the letters and suddenly it all made sense.

The insurance company was claiming that the thief couldn’t have gotten in by the balcony.

“You remember,” I said, laughing despite the seriousness.

I opened the balcony doors and walked out. He joined me as I leaned over the railing and looked down.

“Easy. How do you want to do it? You could get an insurance assessor here, or you could film it.”

He considered it. “I don’t think they’d send someone. I’d rather just film you and send it to them.”

“Okay, do you have a video camera?”

“I’ll borrow one this afternoon, if that’s okay.” He raised an eyebrow at me.

“That’s fine, Niall. And I’m not going to charge you for climbing up the side of your building.”

I turned to go back in, but he caught my arm.

“Listen, spider-girl, I’m not having you do anything without payment. Just not. Get over it. Your minimum charge is an hour. I know. I asked your secretary.”

“An hour’s standard rate is a rip off for a couple of minutes climb. And Tullah’s my…” Damn, I hadn’t gotten around to giving her a title. “…apprentice.” That sounded right. It had overtones of being given all the boring jobs.

“An hour. Take it or leave it.”

I shrugged and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I can’t believe you remembered what I used to get up to when I was fourteen.”

“If I hadn’t, Cassie would’ve reminded me.”

“Has she forgiven me?” I’d climbed the side of their house and left frogs in his daughter’s bed. Well, she shouldn’t have called me a toad. No matter how good a friend she was, she should have known the founder of the Urban Crazy Climbing Club was not a person to be messed with.

“What? Already? It’s only been, oh, not even fifteen years.”

“Sixteen,” I said.

“Yeah. Sixteen. I guess you…” He trailed off. Fifteen years ago, Dad’s illness meant the practical jokes and climbing and lots of stuff had just stopped. “Anyway, she said to give you her love, and she’ll look you up the next time she comes back.”

Yup, and I could expect some payback. She was as bad as me about practical jokes. After the frogs, she’d left anonymous messages for me—‘revenge is a dish best eaten cold’—at every opportunity. She knew how to get inside a person’s head, even at that age. I blame her for my paranoia.

It all stopped when Dad got sick, of course.

These days, she was a freaking shrink over in New York, like they need another one there. She would be formidably scary now, if the dish was finally ready. I grinned to myself. It would be good to see her again and see how she was. It’d take more than frogs to put me off.

We went back inside. I looked at the insurance letter again and shook my head. They had really gone overboard on this. They were refusing to pay for the damage to the balcony doors, claiming it would have been impossible to get up to the balcony, which I was going to enjoy disproving. They practically implied that the Quinns had damaged their own doors. For what? Then they insisted that the front door must have been left open, and that constituted negligence, which put the whole claim in doubt.

The really bad news was that the medal wasn’t even covered on the insurance, not that you could put a value on it.

“I’m very careful about the door when I do go out, which isn’t often, these days.” He settled himself back into his chair, and I perched on the arm of the sofa.

“Okay, one step at a time. We prove it’s easy to get to your balcony from outside first. You said there were two things?”

I heard the sound of the front door, and got up. Niall’s lips moved. I can lip-read and what he mouthed was short and Anglo-Saxon.

His wife, Ruth, bustled in and stopped dead. Her face went chalky pale.

“What’s she doing here?” she demanded.

Whoa! Where was ‘hello, Amber, we haven’t seen you in years?’

“Amber’s come here just to try and help with the insurance claim, Ruth,” said Niall.

Her face went to the other extreme, red with anger. She struggled before she regained control. What on earth had happened?

“I am sorry, Amber, just barging in and not saying hello. This has been a very trying time for us, and thank you for the offer. I know you mean well, but what could you do that the police can’t?”

“I haven’t said I would do anything about investigating the crime, Mrs. Quinn,” I said. “I’ve agreed to prove the insurance company got it wrong. You know, saying the burglar couldn’t have gotten in from the balcony.” I was going to ask again about the second thing Niall had mentioned, but he was making signs for me to shut up.

“But that’s a waste of money we don’t have,” she said.

“I’ve said I would do it for free,” I pointed out. I never was good at shutting up, and why had she gone so overboard when she’d seen me?

“Then you shouldn’t waste your time on our behalf either, thank you, Amber. I think we’ll manage to get the insurance company to allow our claim on our own.”

“Ruth, you know they’re not playing ball,” said Niall. “They haven’t answered the last letter, and the guy won’t even speak to me on the phone.”

She glared at him for not supporting her, but seemed to reluctantly concede the point. Better late than never, she remembered her manners and offered me coffee. I wanted to get away from here, but I couldn’t refuse—it’d get back to Mom as rudeness on my part.

We sat in the kitchen around their table. Mrs. Quinn was one of those people who edge towards whatever it is they want to talk about. When she finished catching up on my mother and feeding me news of Cassie, I could almost hear her creeping up on the subject of Kath.

“We had such a good talk with Kathleen,” she said finally. “We heard all about the engagement. Taylor sounds like a wonderful catch for her.” Her eyes slid across to Niall, and they did that silent, longtime married couple communication.

Niall, who’d been sitting back and just listening, shifted forward in his seat and leaned on the table.

“Amber,” he said, “we’ve known you so long. Y’know, when you came back from the army…well, when you came back, it felt like you’d never been away. If only Cassie had been here, we’d have had you come around for dinner.”

Despite his quick recovery, I caught the stumble and made the connections in my head. Niall called Kath to get my number. Kath claimed I was never in the army.

My service record in Ops 4-10 was sealed and not even the army pay division had access to it. When I left, Ops 4-10 paid me a retainer, but rather than set it up properly, they’d disguised it as a veteran’s disability compensation. A pen-pushing bureaucrat called Lieutenant Krantz had got on my case, certain I was going to lead him to a huge fraud running in the army. When Colonel Laine had hauled him off, he’d tried to get his revenge by telling Kath I couldn’t have been in the army because he couldn’t see any records for me. That had set off an avalanche of mistaken assumptions in my sister’s mind.

“With you and Cassie so close, we feel you’re like a daughter to us, Amber,” said Mrs. Quinn. “You do feel you could tell us if you were in trouble, don’t you?”

What else had Kath told them? In her last drunken rant, she’d accused me of being a whore and a drug addict as well as lying about being in the army.

“It’s not that we think you’re in trouble,” said Niall quickly, shooting looks at his wife. “But…” he paused and ran a hand over his forehead. “Look, your mom always made a big thing about you. Kathleen’s always felt she was being measured against you. You understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded. Even the demon in my throat had shut up. This was like watching a car crash happening in slow motion and not being able to stop it.

“And now she’s such a successful lawyer, doing well in her firm.”

“I’m doing fine too, thanks,” I managed to say. A little stretch of the truth.

“Of course you are,” said Mrs. Quinn. “It’s just that it’s not quite the same thing.”

I would rather have my job than Kath’s, but I was never going to persuade the Quinns of that. They had an old-fashioned opinion of what was an acceptable job for a woman. Lawyer was daringly advanced for them. There was a good reason Cassie had chosen to be a psychiatrist in New York rather than Denver. PI came down somewhere with sweeping streets.

“You don’t resent her success, do you?” said Niall.

“No! I’m happy she’s doing well. I’m happy she’s engaged. I—”

“It’s just that she said you caused a bit of a problem for her with your behavior at the charity ball last week. With the partners in her firm,” interrupted Mrs. Quinn.

“The problem was that she hadn’t bothered mentioning she had a sister until I showed up,” I pointed out. “That kinda drew attention to me.”

“Yes, that was clearly a mistake on her part,” said Niall.

“But that wasn’t really it, was it, Amber?” Mrs. Quinn wasn’t going to let this go. I could see Niall thought Kath resented me and was blowing things out of proportion. Equally, Mrs. Quinn thought there was something in it. It was all a matter of what Kath had actually said to them.

“She told you she was being evaluated for a partnership?” asked Mrs. Quinn.

I nodded.

“And she asked you to be discreet. But I understand you danced with all the international delegation—”

“It was a ball, Ruth,” Niall said, holding his hands up as if to slow her down.

Mrs. Quinn stopped, but there was more of the meaningful, silent communication between them.

“Look, Amber,” said Niall. “It wasn’t really about dancing with the delegates. And there was probably a good reason for the other things Kathleen said. But you must know the partners in that firm of hers are…very traditional. ” He licked his lips nervously. “We understand a business like yours takes a long while to get going, and things might be a bit tough for you now. I can really understand how dazzling it must be when someone that rich pays attention to you.”

It took a second or two to register. It was almost funny. During the course of the charity ball, I had danced with a whole string of vampires, including Luc Matlal. And I’d danced an enjoyable waltz with a werewolf, Alex. I’d saved Jen from Tucker’s attempted assassination as we left.

But the thing that Kath and her firms’ partners had noticed was that I’d enjoyed dancing with Jen, too obviously for their conservative tastes.

Before I could say anything, Mrs. Quinn cut in again. “Obviously, we don’t know her, but the things you hear about the way these wealthy people live…”

“Drugs, orgies, that sort of thing?” I took my jacket off. “Kath probably said she could see I was taking drugs. Have a look.” I stretched my arms out over the table. I was right, they tried to look for needle scars without actually appearing as if they were. “As for Jennifer Kingslund, she hired me as a PI and security consultant, and yeah, we’ve become friends. Why that should be of any concern to Kath or the partners at her firm, I have no idea.”

My cell just had to beep right then and I pulled it out to glance at the caller ID. Oh, gods. Alex. What great timing.

“Look,” I said, getting up. “I appreciate that you’re concerned for me, and clearly, I’ve got to talk some sense into Kath, but I’ve got to go now. It’s been great seeing you again. I’ll be back here at four this afternoon, Niall.”

I tried to appear as calm as possible, but as I trotted down the stairs, I was seething. What the hell did she think she was doing, talking to the Quinns like that? Niall apparently didn’t believe it all, but Ruth was another matter. I hoped I’d done enough to prevent Ruth from calling Mom and upsetting her on her vacation.

Kath had overstepped the boundary this time, and I was going to have to tell her that in plain terms. If she couldn’t handle that, my sister and I had a problem.

But there was something else back there with the Quinns. The Mrs. Quinn I’d known wouldn’t have been so shocked to start with, regardless of what she’d heard about me. The thing that seemed to set her off was the thought that I was investigating the theft of the medal. Her first reaction had been alarm and dismay.

I was very, very interested in the second thing Niall wanted to talk to me about.

Meanwhile, I had a man to call back. A werewolf, to be more precise.

“Alex?”

“Amber, are you around?”

“I can be there in five. Thank God you called. We need—I need to—”

“Door’s open for the right person,” he interrupted me.

“Oh, it’s a magic door, is it?” I said, thrown off my train of thought and warming to his tease. I tossed my jacket into the back and got in the car. “How does it work?”

“Smoke, mirrors and the flexor, extensor and brachioradialis in the forearm and various adductor muscles in the shoulder and upper arm. Mainly.”

“God, clinicians are the pits,” I groaned.

“Ex-clinicians,” he corrected me. “Yeah, but we really understand how bodies work. See you in five.” He ended the call.

I wondered if I could make it in three. My body had some understanding it urgently wanted him to do. After I’d cleared up a couple of things, my conscience said. He might not want to do anything for me after he heard what I had to say.

Chapter 11

There was no sign of smoke or mirrors when the door opened. Alex was wearing nothing but shorts and he looked hot enough that there should have been smoke. I checked out his flexor, extensor and adductor muscles, mainly by feeling his arms closing around me as the door slammed shut.