Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) (4 page)

“Yeah, we just loved you and that black girl,” her companion said. She’d obviously spent her money on hair and false eyelashes, as opposed to Olive Oyl’s expenditure on her breasts and liposuction. She blinked rapidly and I wasn’t sure whether she was batting her eyes or trying to see out from under the clumpy mascara. Or maybe a strand of her bleached hair had gotten caught in an eyelash when she’d teased her bouffant into place.

I cringed with Texas shame. Before I could do more to reply than smile and say thanks, they went on.

“I hope this line moves fast, because I have the worst case of sand fleas,” Hairdo said in what I think she intended to be her whispery-secret voice. “You would not believe.”

I had lived on St. Marcos for three years and had never heard of sand fleas. I was quite sure I did not want to hear about them now, but something told me I had no choice.

“I know! I brought a hairbrush to scratch mine with, but they’re in my unmentionable place, so it’s not ladylike to do it out there,” Olive Oyl said.

To my horror, she pulled a blue-handled hairbrush out of her purse. I turned away quickly. If I were Catholic, I would have been chanting and counting my rosary beads right about then. I stuck my hand in my purse and caressed my package of Clorox wipes.

One of the stall doors opened and Ava walked out, not bothering to hide her fleeting grin.

I motioned the two women ahead of me. “Y’all go on ahead. I know how badly you . . . itch.”

“Why thank you, sweetie. Now don’t forget—we want to buy you a drink.”

They disappeared into the stalls, chatting loudly. We stayed quiet until they left.

“Now you see where locals get their bad impression of continentals?” Ava said.

“Oh my, oh yes, God yes,” I said, but I was thinking, “Just so y’all know, I am ashamed these women are from Texas,” à la Natalie Maines circa 2002. So many statesiders brought their worst, most drunken behavior to the islands.

When I escaped the bathroom, I found Nick texting madly at the bar. A fake thatch roof topped the mahogany bar, giving it a cheesy look that would have worked fine on the beach, but inside the Yacht Club, not so much. Clear bottles of Cruzan Rum with colorful labels for each flavor lined the wall behind it. The popular rum was made on St. Marcos, and you could buy it cheaper than milk. The bartender poured drinks like he had taken one too many sleep aids; his throng of patrons was lined up three-deep before him.

One of the many nice things Nick had done for me since we first got together was to give up alcohol. He had an O’Doul’s by his right hand. When he saw me, he stuffed his phone into his pocket and replaced it with the beer.

The insecure teenage girl in me couldn’t help herself.

“Who were you texting?” I asked.

“Oh, no one. Work stuff,” he said.

“Which is it? No one or work?”

“Umm, work.”

“Our work?”

“No, a different case.”

Why didn’t this make me feel any better? I scanned the room for some giggling hotty reading a sexy text from my husband, but saw none. I needed to get a grip. I tugged at my dress to cover the bulges of post-baby fat.

“Are you ready to take me home, Mr. Kovacs?”

“I thought you’d never ask, Mrs. Kovacs.”

When we exited the club, I slipped off my heels. Without warning, Nick swept me into his arms and marched us to the car.

“Wow, this is nice. Will I get the kind of treatment tomorrow at work that I’m getting tonight?” I asked.

He chuckled and deposited me in the passenger seat.

“Tomorrow we are back to business, Mrs. Kovacs.”

“All business?”

“All business. But that’s tomorrow. Tonight we get to pretend that I am the geeky kid who picked up the hot singer after her show.”

“Excellent. And the next morning the geeky kid goes to work only to discover the hot singer is his new boss?”

My husband laughed aloud as he turned the Montero to the right and out onto the highway. No blinker. Nick often didn’t bother with the details. Was a blinker technically required when leaving a parking lot? I didn’t know. I hoped he piloted his plane more carefully than he drove.

“Keep dreaming, Katie.”

“What? You think I couldn’t handle running the business?”

He snorted. “Let’s hope the world never has to know.”

Nick and I arrived at the gate to the Petro-Mex Refinery at nine a.m. the following morning, a little bleary but upright. The geeky kid/hot singer game plus a wake-up with the twins had kept us up past our bedtime.

I looked down to admire my outfit. Thank the Lord I had invested in chocolate Spanx pants that let me pull off a professional look without squeezing into my old-life work clothes. The money sunk into my lawyer wardrobe was another reason that losing the rest of my baby weight was a necessity.

“Nicholas Kovacs and Katie Kovacs, here to see José Ramirez,” Nick informed the guard, handing him our driver’s licenses.

“Nicholas?” I whispered. “Is that your secret agent name?”

“Nicholas” did not show any sign that he’d heard my question. Some people had no sense of humor.

Several uniformed guards emerged from the small gatehouse and surrounded our car. Harry Belafonte sang “Day-O” through the distorted speakers of a boom box beside the door. I couldn’t help but notice the guards carried guns, canisters of what appeared to be pepper spray, and knockout batons. Holy cripes, were they expecting an invasion of the body snatchers?

“Nick, are we in trouble?” I asked.

“Huh?” he asked. “Oh, you mean the guards?”

“Uh, yeah. I mean the armed guards swarming our vehicle like paratroopers.”

“No, this is normal.”

“I don’t think this is very normal.” Maybe in Iraq or Russia it was normal, but last I checked, St. Marcos was a territory of the United States of America.

“Normal for them. They get a lot of threats. Some of it’s post-9/11 hysteria, but Petro-Mex is a weird hybrid. They’re here in the U.S., so they attract terrorists who oppose the U.S., but they are also Mexican, and that means Mexican politics comes up. They have problems with crazy locals occasionally, too. And they’ve had attacks in Mexico by the drug cartels, which lean on them pretty heavily for payola in their territories. It’s so bad they have a humongous standing reward for information leading to the apprehension of anyone involved in terrorist plots against them.”

“What do drugs have to do with oil?” I asked.

“It’s a geographic relationship. The cartels in Mexico operate regionally. Their reach extends far beyond drugs, although drugs are their focus. I pulled up an article about a couple of attacks on Petro-Mex in Mexico by the Chihuahua cartel. It’s in the orange folder in my briefcase. You should read it.”

While the guards continued to sweat us, or conduct the slowest ID check of all time, I pulled out the article and skimmed. The Chihuahua cartel had hit three Petro-Mex sites in north central Mexico this year. The cartel, run by a former Mexican federal agent named Ramón Riojas, claimed that Petro-Mex owed them a percentage on oil production in their region, and that Petro-Mex had refused to pay. The government had done nothing, and the article suggested it was powerless against the cartels. They sounded like mafia to me.

Now Petro-Mex was building a pipeline through the same area. The article quoted an “impeccable source” as saying that the cartel had promised a strike on Petro-Mex if it didn’t comply with their demands for payment on production and the pipeline. But Petro-Mex was stalling, because to do so would embarrass them internationally and hurt them financially. The author listed some of Petro-Mex’s global operations, including the refinery on St. Marcos, and opined that the cartel would target operations in the countries that could put the most pressure on Petro-Mex if an attack occurred on their soil.

It sounded to me like the Chihuahuas’ bite would hurt worse than their bark. I put the article back into Nick’s briefcase and looked out the window at a holstered gun with a brown hand resting atop it.

“I think I just peed my pants a little,” I said.

“Toughen up, old girl. I think we’ve landed a dream client. Think of the long-term potential for Stingray here.”

Old girl?
Before I could smack my business partner around, the guards motioned us through the gate and over a speed bump that resembled a small brick wall.

“Shit!” Most of the coffee from the mug in my hand splashed onto my lap. Lukewarm coffee with loads of sugar-free hazelnut Coffee-mate in it (the pouring kind, not the clumpy powder kind). Another reason to be thankful for the brown Bod-a-Bing pants, which would camouflage the spill while smelling like coffee for the next hour, and reek hideously of spoiled milk after that. This would give me incentive to end the meeting before my pants turned into a pumpkin and the Petro-Mex folks discovered a stinky Cinderella in their midst. A Cinderella fast asleep with her head on their conference room table because she hadn’t had enough coffee after a late night with Prince Charming.

My lips vibrated from the roar as we passed a large piece of equipment on the other side of an interior fence. My nose curled, too.

“This place smells like poo,” I said. “Do they have a cattle feedlot in here?”

One corner of Nick’s mouth lifted. So maybe his sense of humor had returned; the man did not function well on less than eight hours’ sleep. “That’s mercaptan. No feed yards.”

Smells like cow shit anyway, I thought.

I said, “This place is freakin’ huge.”

The five-minute drive to the administration building ended at a surprising oasis. I counted thirty-two majestic palms tickling the skyline, their trunks encircled with nodding elephant ears. A manicured green lawn stretched from the road to a brown stucco building edged with beds of Ginger Thomas, the official flower of the Virgin Islands, bright yellow in a tangle of green bush. To the left of the entrance, tiny waterfalls cascaded over the rock ledges of four ponds, one into another, barely disturbing the black, white, and orange koi swimming between the lily pads at the bottom. Why had Petro-Mex gone to so much trouble?

The industrial plant was spread out over 3,000 coastal acres and included the housing communities, the refinery proper, an enormous tank field, and a deep-water marine harbor. Nothing stateside compared to it in size, although there were larger similar properties elsewhere in the world. The relative isolation of this particular refinery, though, made for unique challenges and characteristics. The lack of pipelines connecting it to its markets led to the necessity of the big tank field and robust harbor, and because emergency services on St. Marcos were practically nonexistent, the refinery maintained a fire-rescue-emergency response organization bigger than that of a small city in the U.S.

At the front desk, we had to register our laptops and phones. Jiminy Crickets, I thought, they really do mean business. Finally, a young local woman escorted us down the utilitarian halls to a windowless conference room at the center of the building.

We entered the room and five dark-haired men rose in unison, their chairs rolling back silently over the hunter-green carpet. Like the previous night, the men spoke over each other in effusive greetings that were mostly directed at me. I obligingly presented my cheeks for their kisses and shook hands all around.

Nick and I took a seat at the oval table and I eyed its thick mahogany top and glass cover.
Damn, I’m going to get fingerprints all over it.
I acknowledged to myself the difficulty of this Transformers moment, back from island wife/mommy/musician mode to the professional I’d been less than three years ago.
Steady, girl.

“Welcome, Nick and Katie. Katie, my name is José Ramirez,” said the one man I recognized from the Yacht Club the night before. The tall handsome one. He introduced the others. “We are so glad you have moved to St. Marcos and can help us. One quickly finds that the police here are of little help in matters such as this one.”

“Nice to meet you all,” I said.

“Happy to be of assistance,” Nick added, the formal at-work Nick I hadn’t seen since the days we had slaved away together at Hailey & Hart in Dallas.
Hey, this guy is kinda sexy.

“I hope that you did not have too much trouble getting here this morning? The security can be overwhelming to those not used to it,” Ramirez said.

I agreed. “The security was intense. But so was the traffic. An eighteen-wheeler nearly took us out coming around the corner to the plant. It all but tipped over.”

Nick shot me a look. What? It was true. I heard my mother’s voice in my head: “Katie, if you can’t think of something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

Ramirez clucked. “It is a problem. We open our jet fuel rack at nine a.m. each day, and the local drivers race to get in line. If they are first to fuel up, they have the greatest chance of fitting in repeat trips to the airport during the day. A matter of commerce. And not a good one.”

Nick said firmly, “We understand.” I got the impression he didn’t want me to open my mouth again about the trucks.

Ramirez said, “As you know, our employee, Eddy Monroe, died of a gunshot wound to the head several days ago.” Um, yeah, in our driveway. “The police ruled his cause of death a suicide. We are not convinced this is true. These things you already know. Nick has been kind enough to take the case and do some preliminary work. I have brought in some of my co-workers,” he said, including the others with an elaborate flourish of his long-fingered hand, “and would like to update them on what Petro-Mex hopes to accomplish, and your results so far.”

Six heads nodded in acknowledgment, mine one of them.

“I appreciate everyone’s discretion with some of the comments I will make, and would remind you that we are all subject to confidentiality agreements.”

Nods again.

“Several factors are at play. One troubling issue is that we experience a higher than normal rate of suicide in the refinery community. Not just among our employees, but among their family members as well.”

One of the other men broke in. “We cannot accept the police’s quick judgment about Mr. Monroe, if for no other reason than the emotional strain the label of a suicide puts on all of us. It’s too easy, too convenient, and at the same time too damaging. And it hurts our ability to keep valuable employees and replace those we lose. It’s already hard enough for my people in human resources to attract people to work here.”

Wow. This was news. Truly, they kept the suicides in the family. Very Stepford Wives of them. Maybe that explained the overly Zen gardening outside.

Another Petro-Mex employee interrupted in Spanish. This sparked a heated discussion that I could not follow, other than the words “terrorista” and “muerto.” Terrorista didn’t need an English translation, and my limited Spanish vocabulary included muerto, the word for “dead.” I dug my fingernails into Nick’s thigh but he just sat there like a drugstore Indian.

Ramirez held up his hand and interrupted the other men sharply. “Enough. We can discuss this when our guests are not present.” He turned to Nick and me and added, “My apologies for the lack of manners of my colleagues. It will not happen again.” Said colleagues averted their eyes, and I heard an audible expulsion of breath. Hot prickles marched up my neck.

“Now, where was I?” Ramirez asked. “Ah, yes, the other factors necessitating your inquiry. While Mr. Monroe was from the United States, his wife is from Mexico. She has requested the investigation, and we want to honor her wishes. Mr. Monroe does not present a classic case for suicide . . . too many signs point us in another direction.” He placed his hands on the table in front of him and laced his fingers together. Done.

What signs? I didn’t ask aloud.

Nick spoke. “Thank you, José. After our telephone conversation on the night of Mr. Monroe’s death, I secured the police report. I’ve also spoken with Detective Tutein again.” He swiveled his head toward the other Petro-Mex employees. “For those of you who didn’t know, Katie and I were already involved in this case before Mr. Ramirez called me. Mr. Monroe died right outside the gate to our home. Detective Tutein interviewed me as a witness for the investigation by the police.” He looked back at Ramirez. “Suffice it to say, Tutein did not appreciate my visit. I didn’t get anything from him except a few subtle chuptzes.”

“Not unexpected,” Ramirez said.

My turn. “We have scheduled an interview with the widow, Elena Monroe, this afternoon. Also, we will need access to the hard drive of Mr. Monroe’s computer, or computers.”

Ramirez said, “I will arrange—” but he was interrupted by the same man who had spoken up about the impact of the police’s suicide finding. He was speaking loudly in Spanish this time, and Ramirez raised his voice in return, then turned back to Nick. “We will have to get back to you about the computer.” Then he spoke to everyone in the room. “Any questions for Nick and Katie, gentlemen?”

The four other dour-faced men said nothing, and Ramirez concluded the meeting. What the hell was going on here? I was pretty sure it wasn’t my pants that were stinking up this case.

As we stood up in the stifling silence, Ramirez kissed me goodbye. A mere five minutes after it had begun, and with nothing accomplished as far as I could tell—unless you count me being creeped out even more about this case than before—our meeting ended on a resounding minor chord.

Damn.