Accomplice (6 page)

Jessica pulled scratchy, thin covers up to her
shoulders and shivered. The motel claimed cleanliness as its primary feature.
Apparently at the expense of actual comfort.

The mattress beneath her felt stiff and poky like
the springs on an ancient couch and the bathroom sink was a mustard color of
porcelain that had fallen out of vogue sometime in her diaper-wearing years. It
was actually clean.

And way better than sleeping in another bus
terminal for tonight.

She didn’t have many options besides sleeping on
the streets, and she had a little cash left. Not as much as she’d counted on
from the gift cards that were stolen, but enough for a few nights sleep in
cheap motels while she gathered supplies for her new life.

Only a chain link fence and some weather beaten
concrete separated the motel parking lot from the edge of I-55 here on the
south side of Memphis. A semi downshifted nearby, the low grinding noise
reverberating in the otherwise quiet room.

Jess checked the clock. Ten more minutes at least
until her clothes were done in the guest washer down the hall. She snuggled
into a pair of ratty old sweats, grateful to be clean and wearing anything
other than the same jeans she'd had on since she left her house. What she
wouldn't trade for a set of nice high-thread count sheets or her fluffy
bathrobe just now.

If all went well, she would soon be in much more
comfortable surroundings. If not...

She flicked on the TV.

Sappy movies, the shopping channel, CNN. With an
irritated grunt, she reached up to gather her hair into a ponytail. It was a
silly habit, and completely pointless now. Her fingers found empty air and her
shirt collar. With a sense of wonder, she patted the curling, inch-long locks
around her head.

Lindsay had shaved it short as a guy's hair, and the
dye was so black that she kept swatting her bangs thinking there was a bug on
her head. But the Goth-pixie look was easy to take care of. She had survived
almost three days on the road without washing it, and the free motel shampoo
had left it soft and shiny. Much, much easier than long layers that required a
drawer full of conditioning products and a salon-style blowout every morning.

Something on the screen caught her eye and she
paused to see the NBC nightly news. The bottom of the screen flashed the words
“Breaking News” and in the background, she recognized the gates of her LA home.

“--was shot today in an apparent altercation with
a burglar. This was the second incident in a month at the Kingsbury residence.
More on that in a minute. Cheryl, how is the officer?”

Jessica's mouth went dry as the scene cut to a
perky-looking brunette in a suit standing in front of her hedges with a
microphone. “LAPD are not releasing many details, claiming the incident is
still under investigation. But what they have said is puzzling. The perpetrator
was not apprehended, though an inside source tells me that the whole incident
was caught on video camera.”

Jess tried to focus on what else the woman was
saying, but she seemed to be having trouble breathing.

If the burglar came back, then he must not have
found what he was looking for the first time.  

Chapter 8

“You're supposed to be resting.” Cole chewed on
the end of a long plastic straw, looking unconcerned. He propped his feet up on
the edge of Noah's hospital bed.

Noah shrugged, then winced as his shoulder both
burned and itched with the motion. “No, I'm supposed to be working. It wasn't
my idea to go on medical leave. They're supposed to be letting me out of here
any time now. Did Cutlass ever get that testimony he claimed to have?”

Cole cocked his head. “What testimony?”

“The other night, he said he had hard evidence on
the Kingsbury case.”

Cole's brow wrinkled in concentration and his lips
thinned out to a hard line. “If he did, he's not showing it around. Not that I
could tell you about it now. You're on medical leave. Officially off the case
for now.”

“Right.”

Cole quirked a smile. “Right. Speaking of work, I
got incident report from Thompson. There is a gate by that corner of the wall
where you were shot. It’s pretty well hidden by all of the vines and overgrowth
there. Estate security though it was padlocked shut. LAPD didn't find any
padlock.”

“Huh. I guess we know how the jewel thief got in
and out of the estate.”

Cole nodded. “Yeah. And surveillance camera
coverage is pretty crappy back in that corner. Not enough light to see anything
after dark. Still, we're going back over all the footage. There is something
else. What do you think of these?”

The print on the stack of paperwork was small and
they were filled with columns and columns of data. Noah frowned. “What am I
looking at?”

“Prepaid Visa debit cards purchased by one J.
Kingsbury.”

Noah flipped the pages, scanning dollar amounts.
There were dozens of them listed, anywhere from fifty to two thousand dollars
apiece. He whistled. “I thought we checked for any big withdrawals recently.”

“These were used as Christmas bonuses for the
staff. They were all bought last November.”

Noah ran his fingers through his hair. “So why are
we looking at them now?”

Cole grinned. “Keep reading. I said they were
bought
last year. But not all of them were activated.”

Noah looked. Sure enough there were a few
scattered numbers that still had their full initial balances. And there, towards
the end, were a few that had just been activated within the past three days.
“Did you trace these?”

“Yup. One of the cards in that list just checked
into the MGM Grand. While you're hanging out in your jammies with a Band-Aid on
your arm, I'm headed to Las Vegas.”

Noah looked up from the last line on the sheet and
cocked a brow at Cole. “You sure that's a safe bet? Vegas isn't the only hit on
this report.”

“I know, but we have traced all of the other cards
to various employees or people that Jessica does business with.”

Noah scanned down the list of towns where the
latest charges had been made, trying to commit them to memory. Most were in the
LA area. A few around New York, others at online retailers. The most recently
activated were all in Vegas.

“Can I keep this?”

“Hell no.”

Noah handed it over. “Have fun at the casinos. The
travel per diem sucks, by the way. You won’t be staying anywhere near the
strip.”

Cole pulled the straw out from between his teeth
and balled it up. “Better a Motel 6 in sin city than this joint. Good going
getting yourself shot.”

“Too bad I didn't catch the guy. Did you ID him
yet?”

Cole looked away.

“Spill it.”

“Cutlass seized the tape claiming something about
an internal investigation. But I have a buddy down in media, where they should
be processing the recording.”

Noah frowned. “So, what?”

“Internal Affairs has it and they aren’t sharing.”

Noah sat back, feeling like he'd just had the wind
knocked out of him. “What’s that about? You need to be running facial analysis
on the guy. Cross-referencing it with the staff, suspects, known
thugs-for-hire.”

“Yeah that’s what I thought. Cutlass about popped
a vein when I asked. You know the one on his head that bulges? Anyway, at the
department all-hands meeting yesterday, Cutlass went on about how pissed he is
that you blew your cover on the job.”

Noah raised an eyebrow.

Cole shrugged. “I think he's trying to show off to
some big-shot in the DC office. He was in meetings all morning and then started
issuing orders like he was some kind of drill sergeant. I could care less if
they promote him, as long as they get him out of here. The man’s an
incompetent, angry asshole. Zero for three.”

Noah lowered his voice, not sure how well a voice
carried through the hospital hallway. “He ordered me on that stakeout. Me
personally. He wants me off the case, doesn’t he?”

“I’ve got your back.” Cole clapped Noah on the
good shoulder as he stood to leave.

***

Several hours later, Noah drove himself home from
the hospital left-handed. His right arm throbbed where the stitches closed a
three-inch gash from the burglar's bullet, and the skin around the wound itched
under the sticky bandage. He was sweating by the time he pulled into the cozy
one-car garage and hauled himself to bed after downing the antibiotics that he
had been given.

Because he blacked out, they had kept him for an
extra night. Concussion. He'd gotten one playing high school football, too, so
he had a “history” of concussions. And now he couldn't sleep. He'd spent too
long lying in the damned hospital bed.

Something was wrong with the Kingsbury case,
something that nagged at him. It didn't make sense that Jessica would go to so
much trouble to disappear from the media, only to check into such a prominent
hotel on the strip where she was bound to be noticed.

On the other hand, this was the second time that
her home had been broken into while she was gone. What was the connection? Estate
security thought nothing in the house had been stolen, so what the hell was the
man in the alley after?

And worse, did she hire the thief herself to steal
her necklace? Her attorney was tight-lipped about the lawsuit over the estate,
but it didn't take a genius to assume that such a valuable piece of jewelry
could be a sticking point. Maybe she was trying to protect it from falling into
Brandon's hands.

There had to be something more to it.

Damnit. She had been trying to tell him something
the other day on the rooftop. Trying to offer some kind of information. And he
hadn't listened.

He couldn't listen. The moment he told her that
she was his primary suspect, she would have summoned her lawyer and put herself
just as far away. Noah's gut twisted at the memory of her, half-dressed and
vulnerable, and sexier than any woman had a right to be.

Damn but she was good. He had always prided
himself on being able to tell the true criminals apart from the innocent. He
had a pretty good track record, too, if you looked at convictions. The trouble
with Jessica Kingsbury was that his instincts told him that she wasn't really a
criminal, but the evidence they had been gathering in the money laundering case
made her look guilty as hell, assuming they could pin it on her. If Cutlass had
a witness with something solid...

He threw back the covers, giving up on the thought
of sleep and padded to his desk. He had copies on his laptop of many of the
same news articles that were in her file at the office. He started skimming
them again, starting with the flurry of blog posts and leaked photos of her and
the Tennessee senator that had hit the tabloids about a year before Charles
died.

Someone had stuck a camera lens through a window
and captured scenes of her sitting in the senator's lap, of his hand on her
mini-skirt-clad bottom, and of her appearing to kiss the man. The photos made
Noah's stomach turn.

Senator Grant Wilson was not a young man, nor was
he what most people considered an attractive older man. Some of the women
around the office had said that he had a certain charisma to him. But the whole
affair made no sense. She was already married to a rich, older man. Why risk
her marriage—and the eventual inheritance of his estate—by dallying with a
less-rich older man?

An anonymous tip, traced back to someone in the
Senator's Tennessee home, had accused her of blackmailing him with those
photos. But then Wilson himself went on national television, owned up to the
affair, and apologized to his wife.

The original investigation into the blackmail
fizzled at that point, but forensic accountants had already begun digging into
the Kingsbury financials, and the money laundering case was born.

An anonymous tip.

Noah stared at those photos again. Why the hell
would she do it? What did she have to gain from an affair with a married man?
Why blackmail someone when she had, by all accounts, plenty of cash of her own?
He just couldn't see it.

But he did see something else. Noah clicked back
and zoomed in to the photo of Jessica sitting on Wilson's lap, and saw
something he hadn't noticed before. She was wearing the Hearst Diamond
necklace.

Noah pushed back in the chair and lowered his sore
arm. The wound throbbed and the muscles of his back were tight from lying on a
plastic-wrapped hospital bed for a day. It wasn't the shot that kept him home,
but there was no way the bureau would let him work field duty or tote a gun for
a couple of weeks with a concussion.

Helpless and pissed was a bad combination.

He dialed Cole's cell.

“Do you even care what time it is?” In the
background, Noah could hear bells and voices.

“I hear Vegas never sleeps.”

Cheers went up somewhere near Cole. “What do you
need?”

“Any leads yet?”

Cole muttered something and the phone went fuzzy
for half a minute, then quieted. “Damnit, Noah. You better not be calling about
the case.”

Noah smiled into the phone. “Of course not. I just
wanted to know if you'd won anything yet.”

There was a pause. “Nope. Worst run of luck ever.
What do you think I should try next? Craps? Sports?”

 “Why don't you give up on gambling and hit the
spa?”

The noise level on Cole's end increased again. He
must be walking through the casino floors. “Good call. I could use a facial.
Whatever the hell that is. Look, Noah, my signal is weak in here. Go to sleep.
I'll call back when my luck turns around.”

Noah clicked off the phone. Cole's luck wouldn't
turn around. Jessica Kingsbury wasn't in Las Vegas. He took another look at the
photo of her and the senator, then googled the man. He found his political
website and clicked over to the man's bio. Noah skimmed the words on the page
listing endless charities and law firms, awards and committees until he got to
the Senator's background and home life.

One city name jumped out at him.

If the odds were long that Cole could find Jessica
in Vegas, then Noah's of finding her anywhere else in the country should be nonexistent.

Noah had a competitive advantage: he had studied
every fact and figure of Jessica's life. He knew her bank account balances,
what salons she frequented, what kind of detergent and brand of soap her staff
purchased for the house. And though he didn't yet know Jess's real name, he had
a few substantial clues as to where she came from.

He needed to pack.