Seduced by Sunday (31 page)

“You think I fucking care what you want? You’re in this just as deep as I am. Now get in there, and make it look good.” Alonzo nodded toward the bed. His wife, for however short their marriage would be, was stoned and squirming on the bed.

Alba ripped his shirt from his shoulders, kicked out of his pants, but left his whites on.
Pussy.

It sickened him, the look of her like this. Not emotionally, of course, he’d never loved the woman, but how weak she was in such a short time. Day two of mainlining, and she was his bitch. So easy. If he could make a living hooking innocent women on drugs he wouldn’t have to prove himself any longer.

Then again, if this worked out, hooking
this
woman would be the first of many.

Alba climbed into the bed, hid his hips with the sheets, and buried his head into Gabi’s shoulder.

Alonzo started snapping pictures.

Gabi turned to him, her eyes unfocused, her lips smiling. “Hey, what are you doing over there?”

“Smile, honey.”

She did . . . and he snapped a candid that would keep Val quiet forever.

Val wished the never-ending ocean below him would fade away to land. Then he’d know he was closer Gabi.

Closer to ending all of this.

Margaret reached over and grasped his hand for the umpteenth time since the photo had landed in his e-mail.

“He needs her,” Margaret whispered.

“She didn’t look like her.”

Margaret looked away. “I wish it wasn’t Gabi. We both know it was.”

There were two photographs, one with Gabi holding out her arm for an awaiting needle, and another of her in bed with a man Val didn’t recognize. The image left him physically ill, ready to murder. The images were captioned with a simple
if you know what’s best for both of you, leave Italy
message.

“How did this happen?” he asked. How would he ever look his sister in the eye again?

“It’s not your fault, Val. You didn’t know.”

The private jet, arranged by Margaret’s boss, carried them home. “I’m responsible for her. She’s my sister.”

“Blame me. Michael and I forced our way on your island . . . then the trouble began.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Margaret drew her hand away. “Are you giving your sister drugs?”

“No!”

“Did you arrange to take pictures of her in bed with a stranger?”

Val felt his blood boil. “No!”

“Then you didn’t do this. Now stop feeling sorry for her, for you, and let’s work this out. We’re three hours to Miami and we have nearly no plan as to what we’re going to do when we get there.”

Val pushed out of the plush leather seat of the private six-seater plane, and moved about the cabin.

All the time in an airplane left him with too many stagnant hours with nothing to do but question why he didn’t see this coming.

Even with all the pictures, the reconnaissance that Margaret and her friends had provided, there was still little to no proof that Alonzo was involved. Except that the man had his sister. Val had left messages for Gabi on her cell phone to call him. Left a message on Alonzo’s that Val didn’t expect them to be out so long, that if he didn’t hear from him directly in twenty-four hours, he would notify the authorities about a possible downed yacht.

Who was he kidding? Alonzo was the only connection with every dot. The wine, the winery passing off a vintage that wasn’t his . . . the crew member left on Sapore di Amore who could have taken pictures. If Captain Stephan was someone Alonzo knew . . . the dots were complete.

“There’s a missing link,” he vocalized for Margaret’s benefit.

“More than one. Let’s place our suspect in the role of the bad guy here. Stephan . . . what do we know about him?”

“He moves passengers on and off my island.”

“Sounds innocent enough. How long has he worked for you?”

“A few years, I think.”

“Longer than Alonzo has been in the picture?”

“Yeah,” Val told her. “According to Lou, none of my employees have skipped out of work since the pictures of you and I showed up. Stephan is still shuttling passengers.”

“Could he know Alonzo? Be working with him?”

“It’s possible. I guess. Why?”

While they talked, Margaret jotted notes down on a pad of paper. “We know Stephan is an alias. That makes him a suspect in something. Not what’s happening now with Gabi, since he’s not missing from his island duties. But he could have been someone behind the pictures early on.”

“That’s more probable than a housemaid.”

Margaret made a dark line on her notepad and started to question again. “When did Gabi meet Alonzo?”

“A year . . . maybe a little longer. We were at a fundraiser on the mainland. I met Alonzo and introduced them.”
I introduced them.

Val squeezed his eyes at the nausea in his stomach.

“Focus, Masini. How did
you
meet him?”

Val shook the guilt from his limbs. “At the bar, the auction . . . I don’t remember. We started to talk. He told me he was in the wine business, and asked who was my lovely wife. I corrected him and Alonzo made my sister blush. I thought it was cute. He sent flowers, wine . . . They started dating. It didn’t take long for him to ask me for her hand.”

“Archaic.”

“Not for me. I expected it. Alonzo knew I’d been the man of our household for many years. I suppose Gabi and I were both honored by his action of asking me permission to marry her.”

“But not your mother,” Margaret said.

“My mother never liked him. Said he was too smooth, too shady.” When did Val stop listening to the ramblings of his mother?

“So Gabi liked him, you liked him, then what?”

Val shrugged. “We fell into a comfortable pace. I asked that he not rush their wedding for my mother’s sake. He didn’t seem happy about that, but agreed. He drops anchor on the island often. He understands the need for limited access of his crew and has always respected that. In what I believed was an effort to woo my sister, he started delivering crates of wine without charge. My guests enjoyed it, so I added his selections to the menu.”

“But the wine isn’t his. So he’s passing another vineyard’s wine off just to schmooze your sister?”

“We won’t know that until we find out if there are other vendors buying his brand. The island goes through many bottles a week, but I don’t think we take all his stock.”

“Aren’t there international shipping regulations to jump through to buy direct from Italy?”

Val took the seat across from Margaret. “I hate to sound uninvolved, but I have people for that. In the case of Alonzo, he gifted the wine. I’ve never paid a dime for any of his bottles. The wine shuffles hands in Italy, then makes it to his yacht . . . or his supplier that sometimes came to port with crates of the stuff.”

“Do you know the name of the ships coming in? Their captains?”

Val hated that all he could do was narrow his eyes toward Margaret.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You have people for that.”

“All good questions,
cara
. Ones I will ask when we get home.”

She picked up the pen, scribbled on the paper. “Mislabeled wine travels from Italy, to where? Then it makes it to your island. All to impress a girl? I don’t buy it. There has to be more.”

“Bootleg wine is big business.”

“Not when you’re giving it away for free,” Margaret reminded him. “No, Alonzo needed you, Gabi . . . the island . . . I’m starting to think the wine is insignificant. Or a decoy for something else.”

Val’s head went straight to the image forever burned in his head . . . the one with Gabi willingly holding out her arm for a needle.

“The island limits eyes by the nature of it. How do you keep the authorities happy? Who regulates you?”

“The health department passes off on us yearly. Same with the hotel commission and regulating parties. I don’t have complaints so I don’t have many problems.”

Margaret pushed back in her seat and tapped her fingers against the armrest. “So you could be doing nearly anything on the island
and no one would know. You’ve buttoned down Internet activity, sworn your guests to secrecy, cut out photographs that are an everyday part of every twenty-first-century life . . . you could be trafficking slaves, drugs, sex . . . no one would be the wiser.”

Val started to lose feeling in his fingers as he gripped the edge of the armrests. “Jesus.”

“Alonzo is trafficking something . . . something better than a few bottles of wine. If he marries your sister, she won’t call him out. If he blackmails you, you have to go along with him—”

“The hell I do!”

Margaret offered the first smile of the hour. “Or so he thinks. Bottom line, he thinks he’s safe by being
family
. Then before he can marry your sister, Michael and I show up and notice something funny about the wine.”

“Alonzo flips,” Val suggested. “Sees his plan falling apart.” The map of probability started to surface in Val’s head.

“He has a plan set to take photographs to compromise your efforts on the island.”

Val squeezed his eyes shut, swore in Italian. “One of Alonzo’s men said he was ill the week you were on the island. Said he couldn’t travel on the yacht until he was better.” Val met Margaret’s gaze. “He stayed when Alonzo wasn’t there.”

“The guy that cornered me in the hallway?”

“Maybe.”

Val ran his hand over the growing beard on his face. “Then you leave with Gabi.”

“After Gabi and Alonzo fought.”

News to him. “They were fighting?”

“She was questioning marrying him. Right before we left the island, he kissed and made up. A couple of days later, Alonzo makes a grand gesture to whisk her away for a romantic weekend . . . that is going on a week now. At the same time we chase the wine lead . . .
someone he knows sees us, or maybe a search on Michael shows that he’s in Italy . . .”

“Damn, Margaret . . . we’re assuming a lot here.”

“Are we? What part isn’t true?”

“We don’t even know if Alonzo has Gabi . . . something else might have happened to both of them.”

Margaret laughed . . . a full-throat chuckle with a shake of her head. “I know for a fact that Alonzo spends more money than he makes. I know the winery makes next to nothing. If he makes money legitimately, it’s not on any books. What does that sound like to you, Val? And Gabi left with him and now nasty pictures of her follow a threat that we leave Italy immediately. There’s only one person who should be threatened by us being there . . . he’s guilty until proven innocent in this case.”

Val started to shake. “I introduced them,
cara
.”

Margaret’s voice softened. She moved to the seat beside him and took his hands in hers. “The man played both of you . . . my guess is he knew who you were before you said hello. There are a lot of sick people out there.”

If anything happened to his sister . . . if the pictures were any indication, it already had. “I’ll kill him.”

“Save it, Val. You’re not a murderer.”

“Watch me.”

Margaret shook her head. “They don’t offer coed bunking in prison. I’d be an accessory . . . it could get messy.”

Val tried to smile and failed. “You don’t do sleepovers.”

“I really don’t do sleepovers with Bertha in the top bunk. So let’s put killing talk out of the conversation. Let’s find them and pool the resources we have to get Gabi away from him.”

“My resources are limited. I can pay ransom . . . pay the help to get her back . . .”

Margaret tilted her head to the side. “
Our
resources, Val. Rick is on this like stink on Alonzo’s skin. Why? Because he works with Blake. The pictures of Michael can threaten Samantha’s business, which Alonzo knows nothing about . . . he’s stepped in something deeper than he’s prepared to understand. I don’t know if Alonzo is working with anyone else, but I doubt they have hands that reach as far as my boss and her friends. I have serious strings to pull . . . and the best part . . . these are decent people who would be thoroughly pissed that an innocent woman was at risk because of some asshat.”

He wanted to believe Gabi would return home unharmed . . . but that was looking less and less likely.

Seemed every time Michael returned, his childhood home shrank. The four-bedroom, two-story house seemed big enough growing up. The quiet street housed the same people since he was born. On occasion, someone would grow old and one of the kids would either take over the house, or move an aging parent in with them in the neighboring town.