The Marquesa's Necklace (Oak Grove Mysteries Book 1) (15 page)

“My name,” Elijah said, looking down towards the floor, “Is Matthew Elijah Hennessey.”

As I ran to my room, I slammed two doors behind me. I piled the boxes of my clothes on the bed. Too many for me to carry very far, but Sarah would come and pick me up, I was sure of it. I needed to talk to her anyway, and warn her about Eric. If I called her first, I would have time to gather up the rest of my things before she got here.

I picked up the receiver of the phone on the desk, held it to my ear and reached to dial. No dial tone. I punched the button on the main part of the phone a few times, and got nowhere. Frustrated, I pulled the phone cord, cursing loudly. When it whipped by me, I realized what was wrong. It was unplugged!

With the receiver still in my hand, I bent over to see where the phone jack was. All I needed to do was plug the cord back in and I could place my call. Maybe I should call 911 first. And then Elijah’s hand was on my arm. “Don’t do it, Harmony, please.”

My self-defense classes finally paid off. I swung around, hit his cheek with the receiver, elbowed him in the side, and then kicked him behind his knee. He yelped in pain and dropped to the floor. I stood over him, glaring. Lando and Scotty, alerted by the noise, came rushing into the room and started laughing. I glared at them too.

“You did that?” Scotty asked, grinning from ear to ear and pointing towards Elijah.

“Yes, and I’m not sorry.” I poked Elijah with my foot. “I think he’ll survive.”

“Can I get up now?” Elijah asked. I nodded and backed away. I’d dropped the receiver, but both hands were clenched into tight fists. “Would one of you get me a bag of ice?” he asked, rubbing his cheek as he stood up. “I’m going to need it.”

Scotty, still laughing, left. Lando, shaking his head, asked “Do you want me to stick around to protect you, Eli?”

Elijah looked at me as he brushed himself off. “As long as he doesn’t make any funny moves, I’ll let him live,” I growled.

“Okey-dokey. I think I heard something interesting happening on the police scanner anyway.” Lando strolled out of the room, whistling.

The muscle in Elijah’s cheek was twitching. “Was that necessary?”

“Instinct.” I shrugged. “You startled me. You’ll know better than to sneak up on me next time.” My anger started to fade.

Smirking, Scotty handed a bag of ice to Elijah, high-fived me, and left the room, closing the door behind him.

I sat down on the only chair in the room. The other one had been moved to the room I now called “the command center.” Elijah, after looking around, took a seat on the edge of the bed. “So I guess I should explain.”

“That would be a good thing. Maybe you can start by explaining why you didn’t tell me you’re Jake’s brother.”

“Cousin, actually. But we lived only a few blocks apart and growing up, we were inseparable. And I didn’t tell you because I figured you would react exactly the way you did.”

Fair enough. “So how long have you been spying on me?”

“I wasn’t spying on you. Jake asked me to check up on you once in a while. He was worried about you.”

“And you dropped everything to do that?”

I swear he blushed. “Jake talked about you so much I couldn’t resist checking you out. I found it hard to believe that a woman had actually tamed him. And when I saw you, I understood why.”

“Then you started stalking me? I’m sure that’s what Jake wanted.”

“No.” Elijah paused. “No, I just dropped into town occasionally. At least, until the day your car blew up.”

“It was you!” I remembered the report about a man in a brown suit leaving the scene. “You blew up George!”

“George?” He smiled, but I let it slide.

“My car.”

“Not me. I spotted some shady-looking guys fooling around under your car, and I was going to take it to a friend to have it checked out. I learned to hotwire cars as a teenager, when I was hanging out with the wrong crowd. Friends of Jake’s, mostly. I thought I could get the car back to you before you missed it. Anyway, I’m not sure what they did to it, but I was able to jump out before it caught on fire. After that, I came back to town a lot. I was worried about you.”

With good cause. “Did you follow me in D.C.?” I asked.

“I don’t know who that was. As far as I can find out, it wasn’t any of the government agencies. If they were following you, you’d never know. I think it’s the same people who grabbed you last night.”

I quirked one eyebrow in an unspoken question.

“I’ve been monitoring the police for quite a while now.” Elijah grinned and then hurriedly put the ice back on his cheek. “Let’s just say I have unauthorized access to their computer system.”

Great. Another hacker. “And who do you suppose these people are?”

“My theory is it’s someone Jake crossed along the way. He never did stop hanging out with the wrong crowd. But if we knew what they wanted, it would help us figure it out.”

“I know what they want,” I said quietly.

Chapter Nineteen

Back in the command center, I told the three men about the attempted robbery, and the information that Eric had revealed to me the night before. I described the necklace, unable to put into words its elegant beauty. At some point, my salad had been shoved back into my hands. I gobbled down a few bites as Lando fiddled around on his laptop and brought up several images on his screen.

“Is this what it looked like?” he asked, choosing and enlarging one.

I quickly swallowed. “Not quite. The necklace Jake gave me had more rubies.” I pointed to the chain. “There was another group of jewels here and here. You can’t really see it in the picture Elijah gave me, and that’s the only time I wore it. Where did you get the picture anyway?” I asked, glancing at him.

“The one I left for you in the library? Police files. They were already investigating the two of you,” Elijah said. “Probably had someone undercover or in plain clothes in the restaurant that night.”

“Did he tell you what it was worth?” Lando asked me as he navigated to a different web page.

“No, and I didn’t ask. I realized it had to cost more than I was comfortable with so I gave the necklace back to him. I assumed he returned it to the store.”

Lando let out a low whistle. “Are you sure your cuz wasn’t into distributing illegal pharmaceuticals?” he asked Elijah, pointing to some small print on the computer monitor, too little for me to read from my chair. “Because that’s a hefty price tag.”

Elijah leaned over and peered at the screen. “No way in hell Jake could afford that. At least, not that he ever told me. What did he do, steal it?”

Stunned silence blanketed the room. “Holy freakin’ shit,” Scotty finally whispered. “I think you’ve got it.”

“That stupid son of a,” Elijah caught himself, “beehive,” he finished lamely. “He always imagined himself as James Bond gone bad, but this…” He shook his head. “Did Jake think he would get away with this?”

“Obviously, he has,” I pointed out. “He isn’t in prison for theft. There wasn’t a whisper of this at his trial.” We had been tried separately, and after I’d been pronounced not guilty, I sat through every day of his proceedings. This was turning into a day for revelations, because I suddenly remembered where I’d seen Elijah before.

“You were there,” I said. “At the courthouse. At least one day.”

“Two actually. I couldn’t stay for the whole thing,” Elijah said. “They let me talk to Jake before I left. He figured he was going to be found guilty of something. That’s when he asked me to keep an eye on you.” He was going to say more. He had that look in his eye. The look that made a part of me want to melt. He even had his mouth open when Lando interrupted.

“That’s all well and good, but how does it help us now?”

“Can you get your cousin to tell us where he put the necklace?” Scotty asked.

“Not likely.” Elijah grimaced. “That’s admitting guilt. The last thing he wants to do is spend more time behind bars.”

“Maybe we can track where he went between the night he gave it to me and the day we were arrested,” I suggested. “Follow his trail, figure out what cities he actually traveled to those weeks.”

Elijah nodded. “Good idea. Can you access his bank records, Lando?”

“I’ll get to work on it. But what do we do if we find the necklace?”

“Turn it in to the cops,” Elijah said. “Not the local ones, I don’t trust them. But if we could find out where he stole it from, we could return it anonymously.”

Scotty turned to his computer. “I doubt I’ll be able to hack into the National Crime Database, but I can try,” he said. “Though I’m not sure what to look for.”

“We can narrow it down with my spreadsheet,” I said.

“What spreadsheet?” Elijah asked, suddenly tense.

“Jake’s postcards didn’t come from the right places. So I created a spreadsheet to try and match the postmarks with unsolved crimes.” Three pairs of eyes fastened on me. “I didn’t get it finished,” I apologized. “I got as far as listing the local papers for each city. If I had my laptop, I’d show it to you.

“Is your laptop at your apartment?” Elijah put one hand on my knee. “Can Luke or Joe get it?”

“No, I left it in Dolores.”

“Dolores?”

“My car. The Jaguar. Her name is Dolores. Is she still in the restaurant parking lot? Does anyone know?”

All three men tried unsuccessfully to hide their grins. “Do you name everything?” Elijah asked.

“I refuse to answer that.” I poked my fork around in my salad, still half-uneaten.

“Dolores,” Elijah chuckled, “was impounded.” I hoped they hadn’t scratched her towing her. Elijah’s voice turned serious as he continued. “That’s how I found out you were in trouble. Everyone in town knows you wouldn’t abandon your car. When the restaurant staff realized it had been in the parking lot for a couple of hours and you were gone, they called the police. And when the officers discovered you were last seen as someone helped you get into a different car, they assumed something was wrong.”

How about that? The locals got something right. “Any way we can sneak into the lot and get her out? Or at least the laptop? I have spare keys at the apartment.”

Lando shook his head. “Not without more time for planning. We don’t have the local connections to carry out something like that on the fly. Besides, there’s no guarantee your laptop is still in the car. I assume they searched your vehicle, and they may have taken your laptop out. Probably trying to use it to find clues to your whereabouts.”

“Only if they can get past the encryption password,” I said. A little program I had installed after my arrest. I wanted to make the cops work harder if they ever confiscated my laptop again. The first thing that came up when the laptop was turned on was a password field. After three incorrect attempts to log in, the laptop automatically shut down. With a string of thirty characters, I suspected the password would satisfy even Lando and Scotty.

“So that’s out. Unless we get the postcards and start from scratch.” Elijah sighed. “And I’m not sure it’s worth the risk of going back to the apartment.”

“Or,” I said, keeping my face expressionless. “We can just retrieve the spreadsheet from my on-line backup.”

“Someone give the lady a cigar.” Lando clapped slowly. “I knew you were going to be useful.” He stood up, bowed and indicated his chair. “Have a seat and do your magic.”

“You do what for a living?” Scotty asked as he peered over my shoulder to examine the spreadsheet. “You don’t think like a stripper.” He grinned and avoided the pen thrown at him.

“Research. I’m normally hunting down information from Victorian England, but nothing is out-of-bounds.”

“You obviously have a logical mind. I like how you set this up. So let’s figure out the best method of attack.” Scotty ran his fingers over his keyboard.

“Break it up into parts. You and me try to figure out where he got it, and,” I looked at Lando, “You can see if there was any logical place for him to stash it.”

“And what do you want me to do?” Elijah asked with amusement.

Lando handed him the earphones. “We need someone to keep listening to the police.”

I started from the most recent entries, while Scotty started with the oldest ones. Lando didn’t have much to do, and completed his part within minutes without finding anything of value. So he returned to trying to access Jake’s financial records to see if they held any clues.

About an hour later Scotty pushed away from the desk. “I see a pattern developing here.”

“Me too,” I said.

“What did you two find?” Elijah asked, taking off the headset. He’d been fiddling with his phone most of the time.

“Breaking and entering, theft, that sort of thing. Usually in wealthier neighborhoods. Jewelry appears to be the most common item taken. Occasionally old coins.” I looked at Scotty. “You?”

“Same thing. No fingerprints, no suspects. If it was your cousin, Eli, he was pretty slick.”

Elijah put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “He always talked about making a name for himself, but I never expected him to do it this way.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, patting him on the shoulder.

He looked sideways at me. “He talked about going straight for you. I guess he couldn’t do it.”