What's in a Name? (39 page)

“
Wait,” Kelli said.
“By the time I was hired by Berlyno, Hollingsworth was long gone. I
would never have noticed the discrepancies. That wasn’t what I was
hired to do.”

“
Not a chance he was
willing to take,” Griffith said. “When Dwight found out they were
doing a complete system overhaul, he panicked. By then, he’d
parlayed his earlier … windfall, shall we say, into Hollingsworth
Industries and moved to Chicago with his grand political
aspirations. He convinced his old boss he knew a better systems
analyst, someone local to Philly and Berlyno let you go. I guess
the boss felt guilty, because they gave you a nice chunk of change
for doing nothing.”

Griffith didn’t seem to notice they’d
stopped walking. Anything to delay what Blake hoped would not be
the inevitable worked for him. He needed to keep the man’s mind off
their final destination.

“
Okay, Vance. I’m
confused. Indulge me. Let’s take it from the top. Dwight embezzles
money, but he thinks he’s covered his tracks. He moves to Chicago
and Hollingsworth Industries grows by leaps and bounds. He starts
laying the groundwork for his political career.

“
Then he finds out
Kelli—as Casey—is going to look at Berlyno, and he’s afraid she’ll
uncover the embezzlement. He gets her off the job and thinks he’s
okay. How am I doing so far?”

“
Not bad, Windsor. Not
bad.” Griffith’s gun hand dipped.

The tightness in Blake’s gut eased a
fraction. Keep talking. Keep him occupied with him, not Kelli.
“Maybe he checks up on her from time to time—finds out her company
closed and she left the country. Now he’s feeling like he’s really
home free.

“
But one day he sees
her picture in a plastic surgeon’s office and panics. He’s seen
Kelli Carpenter’s picture in Thornton’s brochures, and he realizes
she’s got a new appearance. Maybe she’s still around. The picture
doesn’t tell him enough, so he sends me to Camp Getaway for the up
close and personal reaction.”

“
You’re
close.”

“
The timing doesn’t
work,” Kelli said. “You needed to make sure everything was taken
care of or your dreams of controlling the governorship were gone.
I’ll bet you were doing a lot more than Dwight knew, weren’t you?
You were looking for Casey Wallace long before I surfaced at the
Camp Getaway project.”

Griffith gave a self-satisfied smirk.
“Of course. I’ve been involved since the early days. Dwight was a
jerk. He refused to consider a worst case scenario. So I had to do
it for him. Besides, better if he didn’t know. Made it easier for
him to be honest.” Sarcasm oozed with his final word.

Crap, now Griffith’s focus was back on
Kelli. Along with the gun. Blake watched Kelli’s eyes widen.

“
Didn’t know what?”
she said. “You didn’t … You couldn’t have … Tell me Charles and
Lucas didn’t die instead of me. You didn’t kill them.”

Blake gripped her elbow, pulled her
closer to him. He felt her shaking. Cold? Fear? Or anger? He
shifted his gaze to Griffith. Something in the man’s eyes told him
he might have killed them if he’d been in the loop at the time. He
shuddered along with Kelli.

“
No, nothing like
that,” Griffith said. “Before my time. A convenience store shooting
in San Diego doesn’t make the Philly papers, so Dwight never saw
it.”

Kelli lifted her chin. “So how did you
find me? Through Dr. Einsel, right? Dwight saw the pictures and
told you I might still be around.”

Griffith shrugged. “More or less.”

Blake saw the pause, the quick shift of
Griffith’s eyes. There was more than he was saying. The pain of his
own fingernails in his palms made him take a breath and unclench
his fists. Did he hear sirens in the distance? Police cars were as
common as drunks in this neighborhood, but would the cops look down
this alley?

Afraid to turn toward the sound for
fear Griffith would notice the approaching wail, he raised his
voice. “There’s more, Vance, isn’t there? How did you put
everything together?”

“
It wasn’t all that
hard. You have to start with no assumptions. Find the beginning. I
started with Casey Wallace’s disappearance and backtracked her
history. When I found the convenience store shooting, I wondered if
she took back her maiden name.” Griffith flicked a glance in
Kelli’s direction. “It’s more common with divorced women, but it
was worth a shot.”

Kelli’s mouth opened, then closed. “You
knew I was Karen Abbott.” Blake watched the wheels turn as she
processed the information. “You found me at Berkeley. Even before
Dwight found out about my surgery.”

“
Let’s just say I knew
you were there. I watched you. Thought everything was
copasetic.”

The sirens faded away and the shred of
hope Blake allowed himself vanished. He set his gaze on Griffith,
using his best boardroom stare. “So what made things
un-copasetic?”

“
The Camp Getaway
brochure,” Kelli said. “Combined with the before and after pictures
in Dr. Einsel’s office.”

“
She’s pretty smart,
Windsor. Too bad. In my line of work, smart people can be a
problem.”

“
So you got Dr.
Einsel’s clerk to check the files,” Kelli said. “You matched Karen
Abbott’s new face to the picture of Kelli Carpenter from the Camp
Getaway brochure. And you knew where to find me.”

“
I’m still confused,”
Blake said. “After all this, what was Dwight going to do if I came
back and said Kelli was Casey?”

Griffith gave a guttural laugh. “I told
you, the man never thought that far ahead. Maybe he was going to
bribe her,” he pointed the gun at Kelli and Blake held his breath,
“or just ask her nicely to keep her yap shut.”

“
Tell me,” Kelli said.
“Thornton. Is he in this with you?”

“
Nope. Actually,
Thornton would have been a better candidate than Dwight, but the
man’s got too many ethics to go into politics. He couldn’t even
stand being a lawyer. Now he makes money just so he can give it
away.”

“
So you set up my
cover with Construction Temps.” Holy crap. Blake couldn’t believe
he was actually trying to get someone to point a gun at him, but
Griffith’s gun seemed to point at whoever was talking and Blake
didn’t like it pointed at Kelli.

Sure enough, Griffith swung the gun
back toward him.

“
Like I said, Dwight
doesn’t do a lot of thinking. I told him he couldn’t send you
knocking on the door to ask Kelli if she was Casey. He insisted,
but he agreed to a more subtle approach. I volunteered to handle
it, made a couple of phone calls, faxed your phony references to
EnviroCon. The beauty of working with the head men is they don’t do
much work themselves. Your people call their people and voilâ! They
think they’re talking to Thornton’s people. Of course, Dwight had
no idea I’d followed up with a little plan of my own.”

Blake kept his hands in his pockets
where Griffith couldn’t see them balled into fists. “Why are we
here now? Why did Dwight send you after us?” Somehow, this didn’t
seem like something Dwight would do, not that it mattered at this
point. But he couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe he’d worked closely with
the man and hadn’t seen the evil.

“
Are you kidding?
Dwight’s running on a truth and honesty platform. He’d probably
bust a gut if he knew I had you here. Might even withdraw from the
campaign.” He glanced at Blake and snorted. “Just my luck to hook
up with someone who thinks he can be an honest
politician.”

Good. Griffith was watching him now.
“One thing you haven’t explained. If you were so worried about
Kelli knowing something, why didn’t you find her at UCLA?” He added
a hint of derision to his tone. “Or maybe you weren’t smart enough
to look.” Blake took another half step back, daring the man to
approach. If Griffith came after him, maybe Kelli could dash for
it.

Griffith shook his head as if he’d seen
through Blake’s ploy. “Like I said, Windsor. If you want something
done right, you have to do it yourself.” He gave a twisted smile.
“I sent Robbie Kirkland to Berkeley and when he and your lady
friend here disappeared, I figured it was all over. It wasn’t until
much later, when I saw the EnviroCon brochure that I realized I’d
made a mistake.”

“
Wait,” Kelli said.
“Who’s Robbie Kirkland?”

“
Oh, yeah,” Griffith
said with a sardonic grin. “You would have known him as Robert
Kilian.”

* * * * *

Kelli’s world tilted. She staggered.
Blake’s arm wrapped around her waist. Someone had sent Robert. All
his charm, all his caring—everything had been a lie. Until he’d
tried to rape her. Shit on a stick, he probably intended to kill
her. Years of guilt floated from her shoulders.

“
Looks like the little
lady didn’t know she was set up,” Griffith said. “What happened to
Kirkland, anyway?”

Kelli shrugged away from Blake and
faced Griffith, drawing strength from her rage. “You can go to
hell,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll enjoy your company.”

“
After you, my dear.”
Griffith waved the gun. “Enough chitchat. Let’s walk.”

Five paces from the edge of a
foundation that gaped beneath them like the Grand Canyon, she heard
the sirens coming back. Relief washed through her. A glance at
Blake showed him gathering himself. Was he going to try something
stupid? She had it all under control. Afraid if she so much as
changed her expression, Griffith would panic and shoot, she kept
her expression neutral when she spoke.

“
Give it up, Vance.
You’ll never get away with it.”

When Griffith turned toward her, Blake
swung at his gun hand. Vance spun around. Blake kicked. Encumbered
by the coat over his arm, Vance ducked, feinted and Kelli heard a
gunshot.

“
No!” she screamed,
anger and fear coursing through her, chasing away the cold. Then
she heard footsteps racing toward them, felt strong hands grasp her
arms, securing them behind her back.

“
Not me,” she said.
She pointed with her chin. “Him. Vance Griffith. He’s trying to
kill us.”

“
Wait right here,
ma’am,” a woman’s voice said. “Let us do our job.” She kept her
hands on Kelli’s wrists.

“
Is Blake all right?”
Kelli shook her head to clear it. Now that she could think, she saw
the police officers who had seemed to materialize out of nowhere. A
policewoman held her away from the three others, who were crouched
on the ground over Blake and Griffith.

“
Call the medics,” she
heard someone say.

Hours later, Kelli sat in front of
Blake’s fireplace sipping a brandy. He sat across from her,
pale-faced, lips white around the edges. Blake had been patched up
by the paramedics and she’d been taken to the police station
despite her protests to wait for him. She’d given her version of
the events, been told Mr. Griffith was in custody and that Mr.
Windsor was giving his statement.

Torn between running and waiting, she’d
come back for her laptop to find Blake not home yet. Before she
could decide if she dared wait to see him once more, he’d dragged
through the door. He hadn’t spoken, simply poured them each a drink
and collapsed in a chair. Pain etched on his face, he set a small
prescription vial on the nearby table.

She picked up the vial and read the
label. “If you’d take one of these, you’d feel better.”

“
Later. Right now, I
prefer this.” He lifted the glass of Scotch he held in his left
hand. “Besides, the bullet just grazed my arm. I’m not even sure
it’s bad enough to say, ‘It’s only a flesh wound.’“

She shook her head in exasperation,
smiling when Blake lifted his eyebrows. No more need to control her
automatic gestures. “Back to that bad movie dialogue, then?”

“
It’s all I can manage
at the moment, I’m afraid. It’s been quite a day.” He stretched his
legs out, leaned back and closed his eyes.

“
I warned you to stay
away from me. And the funny part is—if Griffith hadn’t interfered,
I’d never have given Berlyno Manufacturing or a gubernatorial race
in Illinois a thought.” She paused. “I wonder what I’d have done if
I had known. I wasn’t exactly without an ugly secret of my
own.”

“
Things have changed,
haven’t they? Finding out about Robert.”

Had finding out she’d been duped
changed things for Blake, too? Did he think of her as a stupid
female, someone blinded by charm and flattery, incapable of seeing
the brutality below the surface? With Blake’s eyes closed, she
couldn’t tell. At the moment, however, she would agree with him.
“I’m going to need to get my head around that one.”

Blake swayed, winced in obvious pain
and the internal control she’d been clutching like a life rope
snapped. She got up from the leather chair and stood over him.

“
And what did you
think you were doing, charging a man with a gun? I had everything
covered. You could have gotten us both killed.”

His eyes popped open. “Is that any way
to talk to the man who took a bullet to save your life? And ruined
a perfectly good suit, by the way.”

“
What happened to ‘it
just grazed me’? And I’m not done here, Windsor. The cops were on
their way. I called them. It was a matter of stalling for time
until they got there. There was no need for your
heroics.”

He pounded back his Scotch and slammed
the glass on the end table. “Heroics? Is that what you thought? I
was thinking more along the lines of survival. And what do you
mean, you called the cops? When? How? And why didn’t you call
me?”