Accomplice (2 page)

“Off the record. I promise.” His raised eyebrows
made him look sincere.

Lindsay snorted again. “Yeah, right.”

“You promise that I'm off the record right now?”
Jess asked. “You're not recording this or writing it down?”

“Scout's honor.” Damned if she didn't believe that
he actually was a boy scout.

Jess took a deep breath. “Fine. Gather up your
little crew of lookie-lous and get the fuck out of my house.”

She felt immense satisfaction at the way his jaw
dropped half an inch.

“Jess.” The word from her security guard was half
warning, half admiration.

“Don't shush me. He said we were off the record.
He promised on his honor. Well, on my honor I swear that if one more person
invades my privacy I'm going to--”

He held up one finger. “Don't finish that.”

She stared him down, despite eyes so sensual and
wide they made her toes curl. Despite the square jaw with the barest hint of
stubble on his cheek. Despite the vein that ticked slightly at his temple, and
despite the way he had loosened his tie a notch and unbuttoned the top button
of his shirt. The skin of his neck looked so smooth and supple that she wanted
to lick it.

Dear lord, she must be suffering from heat stroke.
There was no other good reason she should feel weak in the knees at the sight
of Grayson and his holier-than-thou scowl.

Jess took a quick breath. “Let’s just say I've had
a stressful week. The one thing I have been looking forward to is having a
little peace and quiet. And then some thief broke into my
home
, trashed
it, and took something that was very, very precious to me. Before I can even
process all that, you show up with your Boy Scout brigade and your legal papers
that give you the right to trash my home some more, and invade my privacy.”

He just stood there and took her verbal onslaught,
his face so impassive it made her want to scream at him.

“Don’t pretend that you are just here helping the
police. I know your name. You were investigating my husband.”

He didn’t back down from her gaze. But he didn’t
deny it either.

She threw up her hands and looked away. Was it
extra bad to hit an FBI officer? She bit her bottom lip until she got her rage
barely under control. Enough to grind out her next words instead of shrieking
them. “Charles. Kingsbury. Is. Dead. Even if you do find evidence against him,
what are you going to do, dig him up and put his corpse on trial?”

Agent Grayson's eyes almost softened. But the line
of his mouth was grim. “I am truly sorry for your loss of your husband. I am
not looking for evidence of his guilt.”

“But you are looking for something. Besides my
necklace.”

His eyes remained impassive and his face stilled.
Damn but he had a good poker face. “I am sure you have had a rough day, Mrs.
Kingsbury, and I need to get back to my office to file my report. Please rest
assured that we won’t stop looking until we find the guilty party.”

Lindsay’s hand on her shoulder was the only thing
that kept Jess from chasing after the retreating figure of Agent Noah Grayson.
Not that she knew what she would do if she caught him. Hit him with her shoe.
Confess all her sins. Beg for his help.

But men like him didn’t help women like her.

Jessica turned in a slow circle in the center of
the third-floor loft space that was her own personal gallery.

Empty hooks littered the walls like an
after-Christmas sale. Gone. Every painting in the room was gone. Stolen by that
thief of an FBI agent.

Almost of their own accord, her fingers flew to
the bare skin of her neck and chest.

Her necklace was gone, and all of her beautiful
paintings of it were gone. It wasn't the value of the diamonds that had her
worried, though lord knew she should be counting her pennies. If Brandon
Kingsbury had his way, Jess would be left with only the clothes on her back.

Charles' son—she refused to call a man twelve
years older than she her “step-son”—had hired one of the most expensive and
seedy attorneys in town to contest his father's will. A will that was more than
generous to all involved. Charles had left plenty of generosity to go around.

Never enough. Nothing he did was ever enough for
Brandon. Jess had never understood why her husband put up with the underhand
remarks and constant greed. Brandon never called unless he was short on money,
never spoke a kind word to his father, and never missed an opportunity to make
a crude remark about Jess.

“He's my responsibility,” was all Charles would
say on the matter. Despite their age difference, it was one of the few areas
where she and Charles hadn't agreed. She had learned to let the matter drop.
And to never be alone in a room with Brandon.

If Brandon had his way, Jess would be left without
her clothes and flat on her back.

Her only consolation in the theft of the necklace
was that at least it wouldn't end up in his hot little hands. Not that any
judge should be able to rightfully take away what was hers. Not that she
trusted the judicial system to do actual justice.

The paintings that used to hang here all shared a
common theme: that necklace. Portraits and still-life’s, they were some of her
favorite works. They were museum-worthy artifacts: mostly family portraits from
the Spanish ducal estate that had owned the necklace for over four hundred
years.

Discarded in the corner were a stack of her own
canvases. Landscapes and portraits and still-life’s. Nothing museum quality,
nothing precious to anyone but herself. Those seemed to still be in order.

But the feds had confiscated the half-finished one
that had been on her easel at the far end of the room. She discovered just last
week that she'd left her palette uncovered and all of the hues had dried to a
crackle. For months after the funeral, she hadn't had the heart to climb the
stairs, let alone sit for hours and paint.

Slowly she was coming out of that shell. Putting
the pieces of her days together. Beginning to feel...not like herself, really.
But human again.

She had just replaced the paints in that dried up
palette last week, begun trying to recreate some of the hues she had been
working with before. The new palette was still here, and she re-checked the
lid, making sure it was air-tight.
Like she would ever get that painting
back now.

Someone had knocked a stack of charcoal sketches
to the floor and she bent to pick them up. She had wanted to paint her necklace
this time, so she had it out of the safe all week as she sketched it, posing it
on a mannequin head, with fabrics, flowers. Trying to find just the right
light.

Jess had locked the necklace downstairs in the
study before she left for her weekend away. She remembered turning the dial,
double-checking the handle, hearing the harsh click of metal from inside.

As far as she knew, the only other living person
who knew the combination to that safe was Brandon Kingsbury. She hoped that the
police had hauled his ass to the precinct for questioning.

The problem was the she knew he wasn't the thief,
and it would take the LAPD about thirty seconds to come to the same conclusion.
He had a golf tournament in Florida over the weekend. There was constant video
coverage of his smirking face plastered across three cable channels.

Jess straightened the sheets of newsprint and went
to set them back onto her workbench when a smaller piece of spiral notebook
paper fell out from between two large sheets.

It was another sketch, but not hers. The technique
was crude but effective—it was an ink drawing of a woman hanging from a noose,
her head bent to an awkward angle and her eyes bulging out. The woman wore a
necklace. A necklace just like hers.

***

Noah thumbed through yet another stack of
photographs of the evidence from the Kingsbury mansion. He had gone over
everything once in person before signing it into the property department. He
had to be missing something.

The department's forensic accountants had tracked
a series of cash transactions that individually looked innocuous. But taken
together, there was a larger pattern of money being moved from the late Charles
Kingsbury’s U.S. accounts into offshore ones. The links were always indirect.
He would spend lavish amounts of cash on parties, his personal jet, his
mansion, vacations, cars. Within a few weeks, a foreign investment would pay
dividends. He was either the luckiest investor in the world or a criminal.

The trick was that foreign link. How had he gotten
the money out of the country?

Those suspicious transactions had ceased abruptly
a year ago.

Just last month, Noah’s boss, Billy Bob Cutlass,
had passed along an anonymous tip that the Hearst Diamonds held the key to the
mystery. The tip had come from an informant on another case—one that Noah
wasn’t briefed on. The informant hadn’t been any more specific, and Cutlass
wasn’t at liberty to share any more details about how a necklace was going to
help unravel a money laundering scheme. Especially a money laundering scheme
masterminded by a dead man.

As far as Noah was concerned, this case should
have been closed alongside the lid to Charles Kingsbury’s casket. And it would
have been, too, if it weren’t for that informant. Then there was the circumstantial
evidence against Jessica Kingsbury. There was no way she could be ignorant of
all of her late husband’s business dealings.

But the case was thin and Noah had a hunch that it
wouldn’t get any thicker. Had Charles lived long enough to be indicted, no lawyer
with more than two brain cells would have allowed his wife to testify against
him. Knowledge of a husband’s misdeeds wasn’t enough to convict a wife. The
evidence made Jessica look more like a victim than an accomplice. But he had
yet to figure out who else could have been involved in Kingsbury’s schemes.

The problem was there were too many possibilities.
Kingsbury’s lawyer. His son, Brandon. Any number of acquaintances. The Kingsbury’s
were known for entertaining, and their guest lists read like a Who’s Who of
politics and business.

Now that the same necklace had gone missing,
Cutlass was even more insistent he was on the right track. The Hearst Diamonds
and Jessica Kingsbury were both keys to some larger, more nefarious scheme.
Noah wished he could feel the same enthusiasm for the case.

“Hey Grayson. Did you read the insurance report
yet?” Cole set a fat, sweating cup of soda on his desk next to a paper bag that
smelled suspiciously like chili sauce.

Noah's mouth watered at the scent. Their shared “office”
was a pair of cubicles that shared one long stretch of Formica desk. And one
trash can, which Cole tended to fill with his fast-food wrappers.

Noah motioned toward the sack. “You know how much
trans-fat is in one of those?”

“That's what makes it taste so good.” Cole
unwrapped one foil bundle and bit into the oozing tortilla.

Noah tried to ignore the wafting aromas of garlic
and pepper as he closed the file full of photographs and opened the large,
double-wrapped envelope that had been couriered over from LAPD's grand theft
department earlier that morning.

He wondered why they hadn't just faxed it until he
got to the second page.

“What's it say?” Cole's mouth was still full of
burrito.

Noah shook him off and started again from the top.
He had that fluttery feeling in the pit of his stomach. Instincts or nerves or
whatever it was, this was big. Breakthrough big.

“Spill it, man. I can't stand the suspense.”

Noah threw him a pointed look, and another at the
soda cup that was making a small puddle of condensation next to Cole's own
stack of papers.

His partner shrugged and moved the files out of
harm's reach. “Happy?”

Noah shrugged. “That diamond necklace that Jessica
Kingsbury keeps in her Hollywood residence is insured for one point two million
dollars.”

Cole whistled.

“And it's a fake.”

Cole's jaw dropped. “So we have her on insurance
fraud?”

Noah shook his head, skimming through the
remaining pages. “I don't think so. That one point two million dollar number is
based on the value of the diamonds in the necklace.”

“Wait, what? I thought you said it was a fake?”

“It is. The Hearst Diamond Necklace is a
five-hundred year old piece from some long-dead royal family's crown jewels. It
is priceless. The necklace that was stolen is an exact copy made out of real,
and very valuable, diamonds.”

“It’s a real fake.” Cole grinned. “What does that
mean for us?”

“They obviously made no effort to hide that the
necklace was a copy from the insurance company. There is a copy of the original
purchase agreement from a jeweler downtown included right here in the
paperwork.”

Cole waited for Noah to continue.

Noah waited for the idea to form in the trainee's
head.

“Got it boss. I will research that jeweler. See
what kind of dirt I can dig up.”

“And?”

Cole raised one eyebrow. “And?”

“And make us an appointment to talk to them in
person. You don't have to stake out the place to find out more about them.
Sometimes you just walk through the front door and ask.” Noah clapped one hand
on Cole's shoulder. “Now if you will excuse me, I'm due in Cutlass' office for
a briefing.

His boss had a glass wall and a door that shut,
but the furnishings inside were of the same monochrome laminate and
particle-board of the cubicles outside. Still, having the privacy to hear your
own thoughts instead of your coworker's phone conversations would be a nice
change. God, Noah hated desk work.

“Report, Grayson.” Cutlass squeaked back in his
chair and waited. His balding head reflected the early afternoon sun that
peeked in a large window.

Noah told him the quick version of his afternoon
at the Kingsbury mansion then his conversation with Cole.

“Is that all you've got?”

“We are following every lead, sir. I am open to
suggestions or new angles. Everything we've tried so far has hit a brick wall.
The necklace idea is a long shot anyway. Even though the thing is a
reproduction instead of the genuine antique, it was real. Real diamonds, real
workmanship. Someone put a lot of money into making that necklace valuable.”

“Don't focus on the necklace. Focus on the girl.
Something tells me that she knows more than she's sharing.”

“That is what you keep telling me, but we don't
have anything to take to a grand jury. If Jessica Kingsbury knowingly
participated in her husband's blackmail schemes, or his money laundering, or
God knows what else he was up to, then they covered her tracks better than
his.”

The older man leaned forward at his desk, resting
his elbows on the cracked vinyl desk mat as he spoke. “Look, Charles Kingsbury
was smart. His little plaything, not so much. Just keep watching her. Without
her husband around to cover for her, she is bound to screw up.”

Noah swallowed a sigh. “Sure, boss.”

***

Jess ducked behind Tony’s hefty form as she
half-jogged up the steps of the courthouse. The screech of tires on the street
behind her threw a shiver down her back and she tried to ignore the voices that
called her name from the sidewalk below. Paparazzi. Just what her day needed.
One of her high heels twisted slightly, sending a sharp pain up her ankle and
she stopped to give it a shake.

Light bulbs flashed. The din of voices grew
louder.

“You all right ma'am?” Tony gently took her arm
and helped her up the remaining steps.

“I will be better once this is all through.” After
this meeting with her step-son Brandon and his lawyer. After the lawsuit. After
she got her necklace back. After she figured out what to do with the rest of
her life. Then, maybe things would be better.

“Yes ma'am.”

Her lawyer, Leon Norrell, waited past the metal
detectors, his expression grim. His expression was always grim in public. “Good
morning, Mrs. Kingsbury.”

She smiled at him, relieved to see the familiar
face. The crinkles around his eyes loosened just a notch. It was as much of a
smile as he ever gave.

“I will wait with the car, ma'am.”

She nodded to Tony. He had a concealed carry
permit, but his gun wasn't welcome inside courthouse and he wouldn't trust
anyone else with it. Besides, in today's verbal battle, Leon was the only
defender she needed.

They headed up the elevator to an upstairs meeting
room, the kind used for arbitration. Which this was, of a sort. Brandon had
demanded that the judge allow him details of the robbery, claiming that he had
a personal stake in the goods that were stolen.

“I am sorry that you had to go through the circus
out front. I tried to argue with the judge that an in-person meeting was
unnecessary. But Mr. Kingsbury's lawyer must have made a more convincing
argument.”

“It's all right. Let’s just get this over with.”

They walked down a terrazzo-floored hall and past
a secretary to their private meeting room. Inside was a conference table with
half a dozen chairs.