A Dangerous Harbor (26 page)

Inside, they each took their appropriate seats; Raul behind his desk, still littered with piles of folders, and Katy on the hard plastic chair in front of it. On the wall was the same kind of big school house clock that only a short week ago inched painfully through the hours of her life.

He laced his fingers together and said, "He didn't deny that it was his weapon and his fingerprints are on it."

"Anyone else's?"

"No."

She sat forward in her chair. "Time, water, weather will deteriorate any viable prints."

His dark eyes held hers for a moment longer and then he smiled. "Did you know that fingerprinting analysis was discovered by an Argentinian by the name of Juan
Vucetich
in 1891?"

"Fascinating, but you still don't think he did it, do you?"

"What I think doesn't stand up to the evidence, the gun, his prints."

"I hear that the FBI is putting together a case against Wallace Howard."

He leaned back in his chair. "Yes, but it is Spencer Bobbitt who is of interest to my government, and subsequently how I became involved with this investigation. Your government wants to be sure of his innocence before they have him extradited back to the States."

"Spencer is a con artist and a fraud but he has no priors so what's their interest?"

"They weren't, until his accountant Wallace Howard offered them information about a shipment of stolen case-goods to be transported across the border, which of course were packed with guns and drugs because that's what the Sinaloa Cartel does when they transport anything in trucks. Naturally, the FBI alerted our federal task force and the shipment was seized."

Then she remembered Wally begging
Myne
to let him take care of her because Spencer would no longer be her benefactor. So Wally had a backbone after all. "Wally found a way to get out from under Spencer's thumb after all."

"Turning in his boss to the FBI would also get him immunity from prosecution.”

"Ah, but Spencer Bobbitt did not get where he is by allowing others to get the upper hand."

"Yes? What is it you're thinking, Katy?"

"Wally tells Spencer he's retiring, has his game all in place, but Spencer finds out about it and turns the tables on Wally."

"How?"

"Don't know yet, but I'd bet my lunch money on it, because that retirement gift of a nice new sailboat turned out to be a wreck. Spencer's little joke and a message that Wally's plan was going to backfire on him."

"And you think Wally killed the girl as revenge?"

"Yes, I do. Booth knew the whole story and tried to blackmail him for it and died."

"There's only one problem. Wally Howard has stomach ulcers and was in our local hospital that night."

Katy blinked. "But he could've hired someone to do it like he hired that Mexican kid to push me off the cliff."

Raul spent a few seconds absently-mindedly shuffling papers around on his desk, then stood up. "I see you brought
Myne
to see Spencer. I can arrange for you to talk to him, if you like."

"I think I'll pass, at least for now," she said, disappointed that Raul didn't jump to the idea of Wally as the killer. If anything he seemed distracted.

"
Myne
thought Jeff Cook was in love with her, but the guy's a gigolo…"

"
Mujiero
," he added thoughtfully.

"Yes, a womanizer. He's got a reputation for fleecing middle-aged women. He's also romancing Astrid Del Mar, the magician's assistant? You caught their gymnastics the night Booth was found in the water. And, if it means anything, Astrid is a pathological liar and a kleptomaniac… she stole my favorite
scrunchy
."

"
Scrunchy
?" His quick smile caught her as a surprise.

"Yes, like this one." She indicated the colorful, fuzzy band holding her ponytail.

He tapped at the pile of paperwork on the desk, looked as if seeing it for the first time, and then asked, "Will you please have dinner with me tonight?"

She searched his face for some hint of an answer to her questions, but Raul's eyes remained on her waiting for her answer. She looked at his hands resting on the desk and once again thought how much she liked his broad palms, the blunt fingers with their clean, pared nails.

"Alright. Where?"

"I will pick you up at the entrance to your marina tonight."

"Italian again?"

"Something different, if you will allow?"

She hesitated, still annoyed that he wasn't taking her theories about Wally as the killer seriously enough, then shook it off. Tonight. Dinner. A break from all of this. She'd enjoyed the last one, hadn't she?

"What time?"

"I will be there at six-thirty, unless that is too early?"

"No, that's fine, I'll be there."

He didn't walk her out the door and back to where he found her in the waiting room; instead, he simply nodded at the pile of work on his desk.

Katy returned the nod and left the way she'd come in, her footsteps echoing down the hall as she wondered at his sudden shift away from the investigation. When she got to the waiting room she saw
Myne
surrounded by Mexican cops and decided she needed to rescue her before she caused a minor riot amongst all the testosterone in the police station.

She gingerly helped the wilted
Myne
into a cab and thought the girl had the look of a whipped puppy

"He wasn't amused by the diamond earrings?"

"I don't want to talk about it,"
Myne
said, her voice squeaky with recent tears.

She might've felt sorry for the girl, but then she remembered the helpless sixteen-year-old who'd been shot and tossed into the water to die.

"Are you going to be okay?" Katy asked.

"I… I don't know." She held up a folded check. "He signed a check to pay for the lawyer, but then I don't know what I'm going to do for money next week. He says he's broke."

"I suppose you could sell those diamond earrings?"

She brightened for a minute while she fingered the earrings, then gave Katy a rueful grin.
 
"I would but they're not mine, they belong to Mrs. Bobbitt. He just lets expensive stuff like this sit around in drawers while I
gotta
look through his
ol
' pants pockets for food money."

"Was it Jeff's idea for you to try the diamonds?"

She shuddered and looked away. "I was a fool to think I could get away with it. Told me if I tried anything like that he'd have me fitted for cement shoes.
 
He could do it, too. He has people who can do it for him. He can do anything he wants, even from jail."

This only strengthened her conviction that Spencer hired the Mexican kid to try to kill her. "So, what do you think your chances are with Jeff, now that you don't have any money?"

"I thought I knew. Right up to when he brought me that fish, banged me one last time and then
tol
' me he wasn't coming back unless…"

That explained the hatchet job done on the Dorado.

"
Myne
, you don't need Jeff Cook. He's not what he purports himself to be. He doesn't have a captain's license and he's not enrolled in a maritime academy, either. He's a part-time actor with a reputation for fleecing older women out of their money."

Myne
sat quietly for a moment, and then straightened, her eyes twinkling. "Does Astrid know?"

"Uh, no, I haven't told her yet."

She reached out and grabbed Katy's hands in both of hers, the bangles tinkling against her wrists. "I'll do anything,
anything
in the world, if only… please don't tell her about Jeff."

She didn't dislike either of these girls, but she also didn't like the idea of a promise she might have to break.

"I'll tell you what. If it doesn't cause any harm, I'll agree to keeping mum on the subject of Jeff's inadequacies."

"Oh, you know about that too, huh? Well, I suppose sooner or later that would come out. And to think I
tol
' him size don't matter."

Time to take her home, get a shower and meet Raul for dinner and see if she could get him to explain why her theory about Wally wasn't working.

At the appointed hour, Raul turned into the hotel driveway and up to where Katrina waited under the shade of the portico. He got out, opened the passenger side and when she hesitated, said, "I think we can dispense with the chauffeur act from now on."

He smiled as she swept aside her skirt, got into the car and buckled up.

Behind the wheel, he pulled into traffic and adjusted the AC to her preference from last time.

She nodded her thanks and asked, "So, where are we going?"

"It's not far from here," he said taking a turnoff from the highway onto a mountainous road winding upward past gated properties. The car climbed up over hills until at
last
it glided along a high adobe wall and stopped at a gate with a bronze plaque on the wall that proclaimed this was
Los
Sueños
. A touch of a button on his visor and the double gate slid open and the car moved quietly down a graveled path, then up and around a thick grove of olive trees until it opened up to an incredible view of the ocean below. She got a peek of a flat copper roofline jutting out from a cliff as the car swept down into a garage.

With wonder in her voice, she asked, "Whose home is this?"

"Mine. Come, I will show you the view," he said, getting out of the car and going around to her side, offered her a hand.

Katrina hesitated. "And your wife…?"

He bent down to her eye level. "Will you trust that I'm not leading you into the den of iniquity?"

"That sounds like a dare, Raul—and you know what I'm talking about."

"Yes, yes," he said, sighing. "And I promise you an answer that you will approve. Come, we will go around to the main entrance so that you will have the full effect of the view."

He opened the front door and they stepped inside. The foyer was dark when they walked in, then hidden automatic recessed lighting warmed the room. Katy looked down to see that she was standing on a solid piece of black marble. It was still light enough for her to see beyond the entrance. And what she saw astounded her—the house appeared to be airborne with nothing to stand between her and the wide open sky.

"An optical illusion," he said taking her arm. "It's a bit disconcerting when you see it the first time but if you step closer you'll see that it is only because the living room is sunken."

Feeling disoriented, she kept close to Raul's and shuffled her feet along the solid cool marble until she came to the edge.

Where before nothing existed but a great expanse of sky, now there were floor to ceiling windows and a wide living room with a sunken seating area.

At the sound of his keys tumbling into an art glass bowl on a metal pedestal she was startled to hear a woman's voice calling, "
Cena
,
querido
!" And then there was the laughter of children.

Shocked back into reality, she started to speak and the voice called again. This time she cocked her head. There was something about that voice; the timbre was the same in each call, but still… the lilting, modulated tones of a woman's voice, almost as if….