Sidney Sheldon's Chasing Tomorrow (Tracy Whitney) (6 page)

“Who are you?” she asked him rudely.

“I’m Jeff Stevens. This is my house. Who are
you
?”

Newscaster lady handed him a business card. It read:
Helen Flint. Partner, Foxtons.

“You’re a real estate agent?”

“That’s right. A Mrs. Tracy Stevens has instructed me to put this property on the market. My understanding was that she is the sole legal owner. Is that not correct?”

“No. It’s correct,” said Jeff, his heart beating faster. “The house is in Tracy’s name. When did she instruct you to sell it, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“This morning,” Helen Flint replied briskly. Pulling out a house key from her Anya Hindmarch handbag, she began unlocking the front door. Now that Jeff had confirmed the fact that he wasn’t a co-owner, he’d become an irritation.

“Did you see her?” Jeff asked. “In person?”

Ignoring him, the agent punched in a code to turn off the alarm and walked into the kitchen, taking notes. Jeff followed.

“I asked you a question,” he said, grabbing her by the elbow. “Did my wife come to your offices this morning?”

Helen Flint looked at him as if he were something unpleasant that was stuck to the bottom of her shoe. “Let go of me or I’ll call the police.”

Jeff did as she asked. “I’m sorry. It’s just that my wife’s been missing for more than two weeks. I’ve been terribly worried about her.”

“Yes, well. Your personal problems are none of my business. But in answer to your question, your wife instructed me by telephone. We haven’t met.”

“Did she say where she was calling from?” asked Jeff.

“No.”

“Well, did she leave a number, at least?”

“She did not. I have an e-mail address. She said that would be the best way to contact her.” On the back of another card, the agent scribbled something down. “Now, if you don’t mind, Mr. Stevens, I really must get on.”

Jeff looked at the card. His heart plunged for a second time. It was a Hotmail address, generic and untraceable.

“If she contacts you again, Miss Flint, please ask her to get in touch with me. It’s really very important.”

The real estate agent gave Jeff a look that clearly translated as
Not to me it isn’t.

Jeff went back to Gunther’s.

“At least you know she’s alive and well.” Gunther tried to get Jeff to look on the bright side at dinner.

“Alive and well and selling our house,” said Jeff. “She’s dismantling our life together, Gunther. Without even talking to me. That’s not fair. That’s not the Tracy I know.”

“I suspect she’s still very hurt.”

“So am I!”

It pained Gunther to see Jeff fighting back tears.

“I have to find her,” he said eventually. “I have to. There must be something I’ve missed.”

REBECCA MORTIMER WAS GETTING
ready for bed when the doorbell to her apartment rang.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.” Jeff Stevens’s gruff, gravelly voice on the other side of the door made her heart skip a beat. “Sorry to come by so late. It’s important.”

Rebecca opened the door.

“Jeff! What a lovely surprise.”

“Can I come in?”

“Of course.”

He followed her into a living room littered with half-drunk cups of coffee and books on Celtic manuscripts. Rebecca’s hair was wet from the shower and the nightshirt she was wearing clung in places to her still-damp skin. Jeff tried not to notice the way it rode up when she sat down on the sofa, exposing the smooth, supple skin of her upper thighs.

“The disk you gave me,” said Jeff. “The footage of Tracy with McBride. Where did you get it?”

For a moment Rebecca looked nonplussed. Then she said, “Does it matter?”

“It does to me.”

She hesitated. “I can’t tell you, I’m afraid.”

“Why not?”

“I’d be betraying a friend. It’s complicated but . . . you’ll just have to trust me.”

Now it was Jeff’s turn to hesitate. “Do you have another copy?”

Rebecca looked surprised. “Yes. Why?”

“I destroyed the original you gave me. I was angry and I wasn’t thinking straight. But I’d like to look at it again. I’m hoping there might be some clue in there, something I missed the first time that might help me find Tracy. Can I have it?”

Rebecca pouted. “All right.” She’d hoped, assumed, that Jeff had come here tonight to see her. Doing her best to mask her disappointment, she walked over to her desk drawer. Pulling out a disk, she handed it to him.

“She doesn’t love you, you know.”

Jeff winced.

“Not like I do.”

He looked at Rebecca, genuinely surprised.

“You don’t love me. You barely even know me.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes it is. Believe me. Besides, I’m far too old for you.”

“Says who?” Rebecca coiled herself around him like a cobra, kissing him with a passion that caught Jeff completely off guard. She was a gorgeous girl, but he wasn’t ready for this. Gently but firmly, he pushed her away.

“I’m married,” he said. “What happened between us the other day—”

“
Almost
happened,” Rebecca corrected him.

“Almost happened,” Jeff agreed. “Well, it shouldn’t have. I was hurt and angry, and you’re a beautiful girl. But I love my wife.”

“Your wife’s a whore!” Rebecca’s sweet, innocent features twisted suddenly into an ugly mask of jealousy and rage. Jeff stepped away from her, shocked. He had never seen this side of her before.

A horrible thought struck him. As if someone had cut the cable of an elevator he was taking, he felt his stomach lurch and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

“How did you get the footage?” he asked again. “Tell me!”

“I won’t!” snapped Rebecca. “Can’t you see you’re missing the point here? Tracy’s been screwing around behind your back.
That’s
the headline. Who cares how I caught her. The point is I did. I did it because I care about you, Jeff. I love you!”

But Jeff was already gone, the disk clutched tightly in his hand.

AT SEVEN O’CLOCK THE
next morning, Jeff sat in Victor Litchenko’s basement office in Pimlico, staring at a screen.

Victor was an old friend and one of the top audiovisual experts in the London underworld. A master at doctoring footage, both images and sound, Victor Litchenko described himself as a “digital artist.” Few who’d worked with him disagreed.

“It’s actually not a bad piece of work,” the Russian said at last, sipping at the double espresso Jeff had brought him. “The most common mistake amateurs make is to go for something too complex. But here she simply doctored the time line and changed the lighting. Very easy. Very effective.”

“So it
is
Tracy?”

“It
is
Tracy. The footage itself is genuine, nothing’s been superimposed or patched together. All she did was to change the time clock in the bottom right-hand corner. You think this was shot at two
A.M.
because there’s a set of numbers there telling you so. If you strip those out, like
so
”—he tapped a few keys—“and remove the superimposed shadowing she used like . . .
so . . .”
Some more tapping. “Voilà! Now, what do you see?”

Jeff frowned. “I see the same exact thing but in the daytime. There’s Tracy, coming out of the hotel. And there’s her lover.”

“Ah, ah, ah.” Victor interrupted him. “Look again. What makes you think that’s her lover?”

“Well, they’re . . . She kisses him. Right there,” said Jeff.

“On the cheek,” said Victor. “How many women do you kiss on the cheek every day? And then what happens?” He fast-forwarded the footage in slow motion. “They embrace. A friendly hug. They part ways. Shall I tell you what that looks like to me?”

“What?” Jeff’s mouth felt dry.

“It looks like two friends having lunch.”

Jeff watched the footage again, slowly.

“It’s the oldest trick in the book, and one of the best,” said Victor. “I’ve used it in countless divorce cases. A man and a woman coming out of a hotel at two
A.M.
and embracing, after the woman’s told her husband she’s spending the night three hundred miles away?
That’s
an affair. But edit the circumstances just a little, and what have you got?”

Jeff’s voice was a whisper. “Nothing.”

Victor Litchenko nodded. “Exactly. Nothing at all.”

THE DESK CLERK AT
the British Museum smiled warmly.

“Mr. Stevens! Welcome back.”

Jeff hurried past her up to his office and pulled open the door.

His desk had been dusted but otherwise was exactly as he’d left it the day he stormed out. The day he last saw Tracy.

Rebecca’s desk was empty.

All her things were gone.

IT TOOK HIM TWENTY
minutes to reach Rebecca’s building. Ignoring the bell to her flat—no warnings, not this time—Jeff pulled a hairpin out of his jacket pocket and expertly picked the lock.

Once inside, he slipped upstairs, ready to break into the apartment itself and confront Rebecca. The bitch had deliberately deceived him, sabotaging his marriage and playing him for a fool. When he thought about how close he’d come to sleeping with her, he felt physically sick. But that was all in the past now. Now Jeff knew the truth. Now he was going to make her pay. He was going to find Tracy, and force Rebecca to tell her the whole truth. Tracy would still be angry, of course. She had every right to be. But when she saw how desperately sad and sorry he was for ever doubting her, when she realized what a Machiavellian, twisted young woman Rebecca Mortimer really was . . .

Jeff stopped outside Rebecca’s flat. The door was wide open.

He stepped inside. The place looked like a bomb had hit it, clothes and books and trash strewn everywhere.

An elderly Indian man looked surprised to see him.

“If you’re looking for the young lady, she’s gone, sir. Took off last night and told the security guard she won’t be back.” He shook his head bitterly. “No scruples, these young people. She still owed me three months’ rent.”

CHAPTER 5

S
HE OPENED THE BRIEFCASE
and looked at the money.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand?”

“Of course. As agreed. Feel free to count it.”

“Oh, I will. Later. Not that I think you’d cheat me.”

“I should hope not.”

“But people do make mistakes.”

He smiled. “I don’t.”

He
had
made mistakes, of course, in the past. Mistakes that had cost him dearly. The worst mistake he’d ever made had involved taking Jeff Stevens and Tracy Whitney at their word. Those two repellent swindlers had destroyed his life, once. Now, in some small way, he had returned the favor. Destroying their marriage wasn’t enough. But it was a start.

“I didn’t enjoy this job,” the girl was saying, emptying the contents of the briefcase into her own, tattered backpack. She’d cut her hair since he last saw her in London and now wore it short and black, in a sixties-style bob. He preferred it to the look she’d adopted for Rebecca Mortimer, all long tresses and freckles. Youthful innocence didn’t suit her.

“Tracy Whitney may be a bitch, but Jeff Stevens is a nice man. I felt bad for him.”

The man’s upper lip curled. “How you felt is not relevant.”

It is to me,
she felt like saying, but she didn’t bother. She’d learned long ago that arguments with this man were fruitless. Despite his brilliant intellect, or perhaps because of it, he had the emotional sensitivity of an amoeba. Come to think of it, the analogy was probably unkind to amoebas.

“Anyway.” He smiled that creepy smile of his, the one that always made her shiver. “You got fucked, didn’t you? Women all love getting fucked, especially by Stevens. Your little titties are probably tingling right now just thinking about it, aren’t they?”

She ignored him, zipping up her backpack and locking it. She had not slept with Jeff Stevens, as it happened. Rather to her annoyance, Tracy Whitney had interrupted them right at the crucial moment. But this was not information she intended to share with
him.
She’d be happy when they got back to robbing art galleries and jewelry stores.

“I mean it,” she said, standing up to leave. “Any more old scores you can settle yourself.”

“I’ll be in touch,” said the man.

FOR A MONTH AFTER
Tracy left him, Jeff went to ground. He rented a flat in Rosary Gardens in South Kensington, unplugged the phone and barely went out.

After more than ten unreturned voice mails, Professor Nick Trenchard tracked him down at the flat.

“Come back to the museum,” he told Jeff. “You need to keep busy.”

He tried not to show how shocked he was by Jeff’s appearance. Jeff wore a full beard, which made him look decades older, and his crumpled clothes hung off his skinny frame like rags on a scarecrow. Empty beer cans and take-out boxes littered the apartment, and the TV was permanently on low in the background.

“I
am
busy. You wouldn’t believe how many episodes of
Homeland
I missed since I got married,” Jeff quipped. But there was no laughter behind his eyes anymore.

“I’m serious, Jeff. You need a job.”

“I have a job.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Drinking.” Jeff collapsed onto the couch and opened another beer. “I’m pretty good at it, as it happens. I’m thinking of giving myself a promotion. Maybe something in the Jack Daniel’s division.”

Other friends tried and failed to intervene. In the end it was Gunther Hartog who refused to take no for an answer.

“Pack your bags,” he told Jeff. “We’re going to the country.”

Gunther had turned up at the flat in Rosary Gardens with a small army of Brazilian women who set about picking up the mountains of trash that Jeff had accumulated during his self-imposed imprisonment. When he refused to move from the couch, four of the women lifted it off the ground with Jeff still on it, while a fifth swept the floor underneath.

“I hate the country.”

“Nonsense. Hampshire’s beautiful.”

“Beauty’s overrated.”

“So’s alcohol poisoning. Get your suitcase, Jeff.”

“I’m not going, Gunther.”

“You
are
going, old boy.”

“Or what?” Jeff laughed. “You’re gonna ground me?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Gunther. “That would be ridiculous.”

Jeff felt a sharp stabbing pain in his left arm. “What the . . .”

He just had time to see the syringe, and Gunther’s satisfied smile, before everything went black.

IT TOOK AN ENTIRE
month to dry Jeff out. By the time he was sober, and sane enough to start eating and shaving again, summer was already upon them. Gunther had hoped that perhaps Tracy would have gotten in touch by now, but there was still no word.

“You must move on with life, old boy,” Gunther told Jeff. “You can’t spend the rest of your days waiting for the telephone to ring. That would drive anyone mad.”

They were strolling in the grounds of Gunther’s seventeenth-century manor house, a thirty-acre paradise of formal gardens, lake and woodland, with a small farm attached. Gunther had been a pioneer of self-sufficiency long before it became fashionable and prided himself on the fact that he lived almost entirely off the fat of his own land. The fact that the land had been bought with stolen antiques didn’t dim his view of himself as an honest farmer.

“I agree that I need to move on,” said Jeff, stopping to admire a cote full of homing pigeons. He and Tracy had used one of Gunther’s birds on their last job together in Amsterdam. “But I can’t face going back to the museum. Rebecca ruined that for me. Along with the rest of my life.”

The bitterness in his voice was painful.

“Ah, about that,” said Gunther. “I managed to unearth some information about the young lady. If you’re interested.”

“Of course,” said Jeff. In some strange way, Rebecca felt like a link to Tracy, one of the few he had left.

“Her real name is Elizabeth Kennedy.”

If Jeff was surprised that “Rebecca Mortimer” had been an alias, he didn’t show it. He’d spent most of his life in a world where nothing was what it seemed.

“She grew up in Wolverhampton, poor thing, raised by adoptive parents who couldn’t control her from the start. Very bright, evidently, but she did poorly at school. Two expulsions by the time she turned eleven.”

“My heart bleeds,” said Jeff.

“At sixteen, she’d had a string of minor run-ins with the law and got her first custodial sentence.”

“For?”

“Credit-card fraud. She volunteered at a local charity and downloaded details of all the donors from their computer. Then she skimmed tiny amounts, a few pence here or there, off each contribution. She made off with over thirty thousand pounds in eighteen months before anyone caught on. Like I say, she’s smart. She kept it simple.”

Jeff thought about the amateurishly doctored video footage of Tracy and Alan McBride and felt sick.

“After she got out of prison, she never went home again. These days she’s after bigger fish. Jewel thefts mostly. She’s quite the expert. Works with a partner apparently, but nobody knows who.”

“What was she after at the British Museum?” Jeff asked. “Apart from me.”

“We don’t know. But I suspect nothing. She used the internship as cover while she pulled off other jobs in London. Her name’s been linked to that hit on Theo Fennell last Christmas.”

Jeff’s eyes widened. The theft of half a million pounds’ worth of rubies from Theo Fennell’s flagship store on Old Brompton Road had been the talk of the London underworld. The job had been perfectly executed, and the police had been left without a single clue.

“Any idea where she is now?”

“None,” said Gunther. “Although if I knew, I’m not sure I’d tell you. I’d hate to see you spend the rest of your days banged up for murder, old boy. Such a waste.”

They strolled on, along a gravel pathway lined with cottage garden plants: roses and hollyhocks and foxgloves and lupines.
He’s right,
thought Jeff.
Hampshire
is
beautiful. At least Gunther’s little corner of it is.
He wondered if he would ever be able truly to appreciate beauty again. Without Tracy, every sense seemed dull, every pleasure blunted. It was like looking at the world through glasses permanently shaded gray.

“I do need a job,” he mused. “Maybe I could try a smaller museum. Or one of the university history departments. University College London is supposed to be looking.”

Gunther stopped dead in his tracks. When he spoke, he was quite stern.

“Now look here. Enough of this nonsense. You’re not cut out to be a bloody librarian, Jeff. If you want my opinion it was the nonsensical decision to give up your career that caused all the problems with you and Tracy in the first place.”

Jeff smiled indulgently. “But, Gunther, my ‘career,’ as you call it, was breaking the law. I was a thief. I ripped people off.”

“Only people who deserved it,” said Gunther.

“Maybe. But it still meant I lived my life on the run, always looking over my shoulder.”

The older man’s eyes gleamed mischievously. “I know! Wasn’t it fun?”

Jeff burst out laughing. It was the first time he could remember doing so in months. It felt good.

“Just think what a comeback you could have,” Gunther said, waxing enthusiastic, “now that you’re a bona fide specialist in antiquities. You have the contacts and the brains. You can talk the talk and walk the walk. Nobody else out there can do that, Jeff. You’d be unique! Have you any idea what some of these wealthy private collectors are willing to pay? These are people who are used to buying whatever they want: homes, planes, yachts, diamonds, lovers, influence. It
incenses
them when they covet objects that simply aren’t for sale. Unique pieces of history. Objects that
only you
can track down and acquire.”

Jeff allowed the appeal of the idea to wash over him for a moment.

“You could name your price,” said Gunther. “What do you want, Jeff? What do you
really
want?”

The only thing I want is Tracy back,
thought Jeff.
I’m just like Gunther’s collectors. I can have it all. But the one thing I really want, no one can give me.

Gunther watched Jeff’s face begin to fall. Realizing he was losing him, that the moment was passing, he made his move.

“It just so happens I have exactly the job to get you started,” he said, clapping his bony hands tightly onto Jeff’s shoulders. “How would you like a lovely little jaunt to Rome?”