Accomplice (5 page)

The woman in the mirror was a stranger. Black,
inch-long hair gelled to spiky points all over her head. Raccoon-like eyeliner.
Dull skin. Brown-painted lips. Shadowed, baggy eyes.

Jess gulped and patted the oversized sweatshirt
with the USC logo. She placed her hand on her hips, drawing in the fabric, to
remind herself that there really was a body inside the shapeless clothes. Her
body. She let go of the sweatshirt, leaving dampish smears from her cold,
sweaty palms.

She opened the faded army-surplus duffel and
rifled through the contents one last time, flipped through the small stack of
plastic credit cards that she had hidden in the hollowed out section of a
paperback romance. She had more in a runner’s pouch fastened around her waist.
Do they strip-search passengers boarding greyhound busses?

Jess pushed the thought aside and re-zipped her
duffel. Outside, she heard the tell-tale creaking of the automatic gate and the
muffled rumble of cars passing through. More engines started, and someone peeled
out, tires squealing on the pavement.

The chase was on.

She wanted to watch, but it was too dangerous.
Someone might catch her profile at the window and the game would be up before
it began.

The smell of the hair dye was beginning to make
her nauseous. Jess’s stomach turned over. She hadn’t eaten all morning. She
hadn’t eaten much for the past week. Acid burned the back of her throat as she
fought the urge to throw up again.

This was worse than her first photo shoot, when
she’d slammed three shots of tequila to loosen her up, and the alcohol had gone
straight to her head. Flushed and giddy, she had begun stripping off her
clothes before she had staggered halfway down the hall from the makeup room.
Rick, her agent, had caught her before she got the cow-print brassiere
unfastened, and dragged her onto the set.

“Don’t waste all your energy on the cleaning
crew,” he’d whispered into her ear, before licking her earlobe and squeezing
one butt cheek. She had yelped when he smacked her on the bottom and walked
away, leaving her standing in the hot spotlights of a faux-farm scene, the
photographer and lighting technicians laughing at her.

There was no strategically placed fringe or blue
denim thong today. And this costume covered her entire ass and then some. But
that didn’t calm Jess’s nerves. There was no script for this play and she could
get a lot worse than a whack on the rear if she screwed up. She wondered if
concrete shoes came with spike heels and fishnets.

She waited until the cars had been gone for more
than twenty minutes. By now, her town car would be stuck in interstate traffic
on the way to the airport. Hopefully with most of the paparazzi close behind,
hoping for a shot of the Black Thong Widow, as one of the tabloids had dubbed since
the runway show.

She hoisted the heavy duffel over her shoulder.
The weight of it nearly threw her off balance and she had to steady herself on
the back of the vanity chair, her black-lacquered fingernails gouging expensive
silk.

It was now or never. Jess straightened her
shoulders under the awkward bag and stepped to the door, allowing her fingers
to trail gently over the framed photo of herself and Charles, taken shortly
after their wedding in a chateau in the south of France. They had stopped for
coffee in a quaint bistro in Paris, and had asked the waiter to snap their
photo. He looked so young and virile in that photo, so happy. Tears threatened
to swell up in her throat, but she forced herself to breath. The time for tears
was long over.

The back staircase led past the kitchen and down a
short hallway to one of the garages. Most of the staff had left early, but she had
to hurry. The groundskeepers might still be here, and at least one security
guard stayed on round the clock. The fewer potential witnesses to her exit, the
better.

The old Escort wagon was parked in its usual spot.
Dull gray with a slightly crooked bumper and a missing hubcap, it was usually
reserved for the housekeepers to run errands. She had sent Claudia, one of the maids,
on half a dozen errands the past week alone. The woman's short haircut had been
the inspiration for Jess’s disguise. She hoped that the ruse was enough to fool
any reporters who were inspired or lazy enough to stick around and stalk the
rear gate.

Jess pushed the button for the automatic garage
door opener with her elbow. She threw the duffel in the back seat of the Escort
and climbed behind the wheel. The keys were on the dashboard, right where they
were always kept for convenience. She started the car and checked the gauges. A
full tank. Excellent. She slid the driver seat forward, adjusted the mirrors,
and drove out of the garage.

Ten yards from the rear gate was a small keypad.
Everyone in the place had a unique pin number, so that security could track the
comings and goings in the place. Jess hesitated, her fingers a few inches from
the pad. It used to be that the staff only needed a PIN to enter the grounds
for their shift, not to leave also. That was back when she trusted them.

She punched in Claudia's number. She had her own,
of course, but that would be easy to trace back later. She could make up a
random number, but after a couple of bad entries, then an alarm would sound
somewhere.

There was a lone, dark colored sedan still
watching the employee entrance. As she pulled up to the curb, her blinker on,
Jess saw two men lean forward in their seats. Her heart thumped so loudly that
she was sure they could hear it. Jess pulled away from the drive, turning right
onto the narrow side street, the shadows of her privacy wall looming above the
passenger side of her car. She fought the urge to slam on the accelerator.

Drive casually
, she thought.
Like you
are going to the grocery store for eggs and milk and bread. Not running for
your life.

In her rearview mirror, Jess saw the two men relax
backwards into their seats, their engine off. Two blocks later, she took a left
onto Elm. No one followed.

She was free.

***

“Tell me this is a bad joke. How the hell
did
you lose a Playboy Bunny?”

Noah held his tongue. Rage had already turned his
boss’s corpulent face an alarming shade of magenta, and Noah was afraid that
any backtalk would cause the man to burst a blood vessel. CPR training was
mandatory for all field agents, but Noah had no wish to place his lips anywhere
near Agent Billy Bob Cutlass’s greasy mouth.

He schooled his features into what he hoped passed
for respect and gave his report. “Mrs. Kingsbury was scheduled to depart for
her Cayman estate two days ago. Our agents in the field reported spotting the
subject departing her estate in her chauffeured town car.

“They followed the car to the private airstrip
where her jet was fueled and waiting. Lacking a search warrant, they were not
permitted onto the premises, but the agents captured several still photographs
of a red-haired woman fitting Mrs. Kingsbury’s description boarding the jet. As
did photographers from several media outlets.

“The flight plan filed with the FAA showed a
direct flight to the Caymans. No unscheduled stops were reported, and the jet
landed as planned.”

“So what?” Cutlass spat the word at Noah, one wet
droplet hitting Noah’s folded hands. “We have diplomatic ties to the Caymans.
Turn over every seashell on every beach. She has to be under one of them.”

“I don’t believe that will be necessary, sir. We
have already verified that she isn’t there.”

“She went parachuting out of a jet over the Gulf
of Mexico?”

Noah swallowed a sigh of exasperation. “I don’t
believe she ever boarded that plane. Customs officials in the Caymans have already
confirmed that Mrs. Kingsbury did not enter the country. All of the passengers
and crew onboard the plane disembarked and the plane is currently parked in a
private hangar. She never left California.”

“Why,” Cutlass said slowly, nastily, “Did it take
you two days to come and tell me this?”

“Sir, we only have two agents currently on the
ground down there. And they were on the wrong island, working another
operation. It took time to reach them, and time for them to travel, and then
they had to gain access to her private compound, and determine whether or not
she was really there.”

And in their failed attempt at celebrity
sight-seeing, the two agents in the Caymans lost the trail of the arms dealer
they were assigned to be trailing, but Noah didn't mention that. He hoped like
hell that Cutlass got chewed out by the director for pulling rank like this.

“Time is a luxury that you don’t have. Find the
bitch, and find her fast. We have a case almost ready to present to a grand
jury. The attorney general would prefer to have the criminal in hand when the
indictment is issued. We already have near irrefutable proof that she was in
the extortion plot from the beginning with her husband. Hell, by the time our
investigation’s complete she might have masterminded it.”

“What evidence is that, sir?”

Noah barely kept from flinching when the man’s
steel gray eyes lighted on him. “I worked with your father on a couple of
cases, you know.”

Noah’s shoulders stiffened. “Is that so.”

“He would stop at nothing to bring down his
target. Never failed to get his man. Well, almost never.” Cutlass quirked his
lips in a grin that was half smirk, half sneer. “I keep hoping you would live
up to his memory. Don’t fuck this one up, Grayson. Find the girl and take her
down.”

Noah walked slowly back through the maze of
cubicles to his desk, sat down heavily in his chair, and loosened his tie a
notch. He picked up a foam football with the NU logo blazoned in red and white
and tossed it a couple of times as he replayed the whole conversation in his
head.

“How did he take the report?” Cole asked, not
looking up from the screen full of numbers he studied.

Noah fired the ball at Cole in response. The
rookie caught it cleanly two inches from his head and immediately threw it
right back.

“That well, huh?” asked Cole, grinning.

Noah grunted a reply and tossed the ball to the
corner of his cube, where it slid through a pile of papers—mainly boring office
memos and scratch paper that he’d not bothered to shred yet.

“Now what?” Cole was still waiting expectantly.

“Now,” Noah said slowly. “We find her.”

Once, endless rows of corn had felt like prison
bars, locking Jess into a life she hated. Monotonous in their drab gray-brown,
they swayed in the dusty wind gusts as if mocking her love of color. Of
dancing. Of change. The landscape of her childhood home had consisted of flat
cornfields, flatter soybean fields, and the occasional clump of cows lazing
under a lone, scraggly tree.

Growing up in Small Town, Nowhere, she had itched
and strained at her world, pushing every boundary and limit, until the ropes
that held her fast had shredded. Then she ran.

First to community college in Nashville. When her
father had died in a car accident—alone in his pickup with nothing but a sharp
curve, a steep ditch, and an open can of Bud to blame—the small support he had
provided was gone. She had packed up her paint brushes and boarded a Greyhound
bus for Los Angeles. In her bag was little besides her clothes and a worn and
stained business card with a scrawled phone number of Rick, the man who had
promised to make her rich and famous.

Infamous, maybe. The asshole had not made her rich.
He had provided her with a shabby studio apartment with an itsy-bitsy closet
stocked with itsy-bitsy clothes. Belly-baring T’s, skirts so short that they
would be indecent on a four-year old, corsets made of satin, of leather, of
peacock feathers. For two years, she had not owned a single pair of shoes with
a heel lower than three inches high, or pantyhose with a crotch.

Still, he did find her work, taking a generous sixty
percent cut of every paycheck. At first, he seemed to share most of it with
her: in champagne, fancy dinners, in high-profile clubs. Like every bad
relationship, once the shine was off of the apple, his interest in Jess waned.
It could have been worse. She had a roof over her head, an ever-increasing
network of contacts for modeling jobs and personal appearances, and didn’t have
to whore herself to anyone but Rick.

Then she met Charles and learned what respect felt
like. What love was. How it felt to have a home of her own. But marrying a rich
older man didn’t save her from infamy, and here she was, running away again.
Running backwards.

Once Jessica had driven away from her Hollywood
home in the housekeepers’ errand car, her plan was simple: Find the bus station
and leave town. She ditched the car in an abandoned lot and hoped that it would
take at least days before someone towed it. Before someone guessed where she
had gone.

She had changed busses twice, once in Las Vegas
and again in Albuquerque. It wasn’t until the bus was already hours into its
journey to Tulsa that she noticed the broken zipper on her duffel bag. 
Frantically, she dug through the bag’s contents. Her hollowed-out paperback
book, the one hiding a stack of prepaid Visa gift cards—her only source of
money—was gone.

***

It was a perfect August night in LA. Seventy-five
degrees, with a light breeze that smelled of sweet ocean. Thin clouds draped
the stars like bridal tulle. Or maybe it was smog. Noah sipped a triple-shot
espresso and gave his head a shake, trying to stay awake.

Stakeouts were one of his least favorite pastimes.
They ranked barely a notch higher than busywork, filling out papers, and
searching computer databases. Important jobs, but surely there was someone who
was better at it than he was. There had been an officer watching the Kingsbury
house round the clock since the robbery, and no one had yet to spot anything
more interesting than a stray tom cat who howled at odd hours of the night. He
hated sitting still.

Wish I’d brought Cole to keep me company.
But then both of them would have been snoozing at their desks the next day.

If anyone was going to carry the blame for this
fuck-up of an assignment, it would be Noah. He was the one who was supposed to
find the answers. He was the one who had studied every detail of her life,
every photo, every press release, every change of hairstyle or facial
expression. He was the one who failed to produce enough evidence to indict her.
He was the one who lost her.

He was the one who wanted her, who kissed, her,
who nearly wrapped her legs around his waist and buried his cock inside her
like a randy teenager up on a rooftop in full view of the waiting press below.

And he would be the one to do the most boring,
useless jobs left and give Cole a chance to save the day, assuming there was
still a day worth saving.

Shit
. Dragging his own career through the
toilet was bad enough. There was nothing left here to watch, but he had no
other leads to follow up on tonight. The jet was still parked in the Caribbean.
Half of her crew had not yet been located. Field agents had visited three other
vacation spots that Jess and her husband were known to frequent. They still
could find no record of her family, and Brandon Kingsbury—the closest thing
they had to a robbery suspect—had been under observation for almost as long as
Jessica.

Besides, Cutlass had refused Noah’s request to
cancel the surveillance and had re-assigned Noah’s backup officers to a
breaking case. The man’s gravelly voice still echoed in Noah’s head. “
You
fucked up this case, Grayson. I have a source promising hard evidence—enough
for a grand jury. You know, the same shit I expected you to find. I want your
butt in that alleyway tonight, where you can't screw up anything else.”

Headlights poured through his front windshield as
a car turned down the alley that led to the servants' entrance of the Kingsbury
place. Well, theirs and about half a dozen more estates. Noah jotted a quick
note about the make of the car and hoped that the dashboard camera got a clear
shot of the license plate.

He felt like Elmer Fudd staring down the rabbit
hole, knowing all the while that Bugs Bunny was long gone. He glanced at the
clock. Nearly four A.M. Someone would be here soon to pull the dawn shift until
a couple of uniformed officers came on the scene after eight. Only a few more
hours to stay awake.

Ahead, the vines that covered the grounds' wall
shimmied.

Noah blinked and raised a pair of night-vision
goggles to get a better look at the spot. It was nearly halfway down the block
from the rear gate. There was nothing there now.

Must be that damned randy tom cat.

He relaxed back, rubbing his neck.

And then the vines shimmied again. This time he
was sure of it.

He focused the camera at the spot and snatched up
the goggles again. He had walked the perimeter of that wall a dozen times, and
studied satellite photos and building permit schematics of it a hundred times.
There was nothing in that corner but brick wall and hedges.

When the wall seemed to shift, Noah reached for
his gun and his radio with cautious movements. Maybe it was a really big
possum. Or maybe there was a concealed gate in this part of the wall.

His pulse flicked strongly against the collar of
his shirt and his fingers grew cold with anticipation as he waited for
something else to happen.

The vines stopped moving, but the shift in the
garden wall held. Had someone seen him? His car had a good vantage point,
mainly hidden by an oversized trash bin belonging to the neighbors, but he
wasn't invisible.

The wall moved again, and this time a dark-clad
figure emerged.  Between the shadows, the dumpsters, and the cars, he couldn’t
tell if the figure was male or female, black or white. Armed or not.

Noah punched in a silent call to Cole requesting
backup, and palmed his service weapon. The heft of the metal was a familiar
weight in his hand and he moved slowly towards the car door.

The figure held his position, and Noah held his
breath. If he made a commotion, then the perp would surely run back inside the
grounds. Without knowing how to get in, Noah would be forced to knock on the
front door and politely request entrance, giving the person more than enough
time to hide or gather a convincing story.

After about sixty-eight breaths, give or take, the
figure began to move, walking with a smooth grace and staying close to the
shade of the vines.

Noah eased the car door open and climbed out,
hunched down. The figure didn't stop or look back.

He crept toward the wall and made to follow,
flicking the safety on his gun to off.

The hum of an engine announced a second car at the
far end of the alley.  Noah froze, his shoulder half buried in twining flowers
and leaves against the wall, hoping like hell he wasn't visible in the sudden
yellow light.

The figure ahead, he could see, was definitely a
man. Average height, slim build. The guy picked up speed and began jogging
toward the car. The headlights shut off, plunging the alley into deep black
again, hiding the silhouette of the mystery man.

The only way he could catch the man was to step
out of the shadows and run.

He never got a chance.

The crack of a gunshot rang out nearby and pain
exploded in his left shoulder, knocking him off balance.

Noah tried to return fire, but the force of the
impact had set him reeling and his eyes hadn't quite adjusted to the sudden
loss of light. He pointed his gun at something shapeless and black that hovered
over him and squeezed the trigger as the figure smashed something down on his
head.

He didn’t feel his head bounce on the concrete.