The Next Right Thing (Harlequin Superromance) (23 page)

“Open your coat, please.” Cammie handed back the bag.

She did, accompanied by a hurt, almost bewildered look in her eyes.

What an actress.

Cammie reached over and patted under Laura’s arms, along her sides, down the small of her back. All she felt were expensive fabrics.

“Come in,” Cammie said, stepping aside.

She followed Laura inside—she’d learned the hard way to never walk in front of this woman—and observed how she surveyed the room as she strolled inside.

“It’s how I imagined it’d be decorated,” Laura said, turning to her.

“Early Saint Christopher?”

She pulled back her lips, exposing pearly white teeth. “I was going to say comfortable, family-like.” She blinked, obviously waiting for something.

“Care to sit down?” This new version of Gwen-Laura was eerily polite and businesslike, although Cammie had already put together that the woman was cagey-smart.

“Thank you,” Laura murmured, selecting a seat at the end of the couch where Val had been sitting minutes earlier.

Cammie sat a few feet down from her, close enough for her recorder to capture their conversation.

“Let’s skip to why I wanted to see you,” Laura said.

“Let’s.”

“I know from my internet research that you got into some trouble recently. Seems you got caught attaching a GPS device to a vehicle.”

Probably the same article Marc read, but Cammie didn’t feel like chatting about it. She nodded, once.

“I checked the licensing commission website and saw that your Nevada P.I. license has since been suspended.”

Cammie nodded again. Never again would she tag a Mall Queen type as being dumb.

“Where does that leave you, workwise?” Laura asked pleasantly. “Are you a full-time process server or do you have a job?”

“Let’s just say I’m looking.”

Laura leaned forward slightly. “Given your tenacity, skills and intelligence, we have a business proposition for you.”

She smelled something that might be helpful to Marc. “Who’s we?”

“My business partner and I.”

“Business partner as in boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Same boyfriend you had while engaged to Marc?”

She smiled.

“What’s the business proposition?”

“We need someone like you full-time in Vegas to work with clients, handle wholesale distribution and accounts receivable.”

“What’s the business?”

“In a minute. Have you ever worked with bookkeeping software?”

“Like the kind you used at Marc’s firm?”

“Not quite. It actually runs in the background.”

“Is this background accounting software what you used to cook the books at Hamilton and Hamilton?”

That smile again. Laura reached over with both hands and gently ran her fingertips along Cammie’s hips. Touching the smartphone in her pocket, she locked her gaze with Cammie’s while reaching inside her pocket. She was so close, Cammie could smell her spicy perfume, count every laugh line around her peach-glossed lips, although she doubted laughing was how she got them.

“I like you, Cammie,” she murmured huskily, pulling out the phone, her free hand lingering on Cammie’s other hip, “but trying to use your smartphone a second time to catch me is a little, oh, redundant, don’t you think?”

Laura leaned back and looked at the recorder image on the face of the phone.

“Have I ever told you,” she said softly, “how much I admire your sneaky ways?” She tapped a red stop button. “Now let’s erase this recording and turn off your phone so we can really talk.”

After a few more taps, Laura set the phone behind her on the end table. Looking at Cammie, she didn’t seem the least bit upset to have caught her in the act.

Without material evidence as to what Laura had up her designer sleeve, Cammie was left with one option—memorize key points in this conversation and put them into an affidavit. The document might not sway the ADA reps at tomorrow’s deposition, but it was better than nothing.

“In our business,” Val said in a level, cool tone, “you could make a lot of money. Forty to fifty K per month, depending on the volume of material you receive and advance to us.”

“What kind of material?”

“First, a few rules. No skimming, no cheating and we’ll bonus you.”

“So which federal crime are we talking? Drugs? Hijacked products?”

“Absolutely nothing that dirty. We’re talking cash, the lifeblood of our nation. All we want you to do is move the cash. Darling, we’re talking truckloads.”

Darling?
“And the cash comes from?”

“From people who owe us, and that’s all you need to know.”

A picture started taking shape in Cammie’s mind. “I’d be your Las Vegas hub.”

“Yes.”

“I’d use that software that runs in the background of another, legitimate accounting program.”

“Yes.”

“Like what you used at Marc’s law firm.”

“Exactly.” Laura laughed a little breathlessly. “And it was like taking candy from Mr. Puppy Love. I created shell accounts, then moved money from his legitimate trust accounts to the other accounts in the background. With this shadow system, we can easily move money from underneath the U.S. Treasury’s nose to our personal checking accounts and nobody’s the wiser.”

“Forty to fifty K a month? What’s the bonus?”

“Five percent of volume. By the way, our Phoenix hub is running five mil a year.”

“Lucrative.”

“How do you think we can afford that house in San Clemente? We have one twice that size in Puerto Vallarta.”

“Marc was small fry—why screw him out of money?”

“I already gave you the short version. But here’s the full story. Let’s just say my business partner got into a little trouble with the feds. A separate issue, unrelated to our business, but still a problem. He turned snitch and we had to leave town for a while. We headed to Denver, I met Marc, thought he had a ton of bucks to go with those great abs, and a girl’s gotta make a living. What can I say?”

In the distance, a freight train rumbled toward its destination. Cammie had heard it many times, knew it to be a mile or so away, but at the moment it felt as though it were roaring right through the living room.

Laura had brought that kind of full-on, crashing destruction into innocent people’s lives. All because
a girl’s gotta make a living.
Cammie clasped her hands together for fear if she didn’t, they’d strangle that girl.

Laura checked her wristwatch. “Look, I have a client meeting I need to get to.” She met Cammie’s eyes. “Here’s the last part of the deal. You’re a no-show at that depo tomorrow. I can’t afford to have you put my empire in jeopardy. Plus, my business partner and I are prepared to give you an additional bonus for complying with this request—enough to buy a new, very nice car to replace that junker outside.”

“That’ll work,” Cammie said tightly.

“You’re in?”

Cammie nodded, once.

“Good. On my way back from Denver, I’ll drop by again with that bonus, and we’ll finalize our arrangement.”

Cammie walked Laura to the door. As she reached to open it, Laura stepped in closer, her face nearly touching Cammie’s.

“Here’s to a long, profitable friendship,” she whispered. She touched her lips against Cammie’s. “Bye, baby.”

Cammie shut the door, locked it and wiped her mouth. Through the blinds, she watched the red Viper reverse out of the driveway and head down the street.

She walked into the center of the living room. “Tolstoy!”

Val ran out, a worried look on her face, a bat in one hand, Cammie’s bedside lamp in the other.

“What?” Val yelled, looking frantically around. “Where is she?”

“Gone.” Cammie shook her head. “The lamp, too?”

“I thought I might need extra ammunition.” Val tossed the bat on the couch, set the lamp on the coffee table. “Why’d you yell Tolstoy?”

“She kissed me.”

“Lesbian-like?”

“Lesbian-like.”

“Tongue?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.” Cammie picked up her smartphone and released a heavy sigh. “She found my phone, saw I was recording everything and erased it. If I write it all down now while I can remember chunks of it, I can put it into an affidavit for Marc’s deposition tomorrow.”

“No need.” Val walked to the rubber plant, reached inside and pulled out her phone. “You know that handy motion detector program you showed me how to use? It’s been running this entire time, recording audio and taking video of this room.”

Cammie smiled as a warming relief spread through her body. “Val, have I told you lately that I love you?”

“No, but you can start now. And, by the way...”

“Yeah?”

“Call me Watson.”

“Okay. And, Watson, by the way?”

“Yeah?”

“No tongue.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

S
EVERAL
HOURS
LATER
, Cammie set up her laptop on her uncle’s TV tray. After Regina had died, Frankie stopped eating at their dining table and ate all his meals in front of the TV. Now that he was with Delilah, he ate at his table again, even when he was alone, and the TV tray sat in a corner of the dining room with a Hamm’s Beer ashtray on it for guests.

She turned the laptop so its screen faced the couch where she and Laura had been sitting. Then she pulled up one of the dining room chairs in front of the computer and sat.

She glanced up at the cuckoo clock on the wall, an heirloom of her grandmother’s that she remembered from a long-ago visit to Nonna’s house when she’d been three or four. Cammie remembered sitting in front of the clock, anxiously waiting for the hand-carved woodchopper to chop wood, and the little cuckoo to twitter, which occurred when the large white-scrolled hand was straight up or down. The woodchopper and cuckoo no longer worked, but the clock still kept time. Right now, it was five minutes to three.

A few hours ago, within minutes of Laura’s departure, Cammie had called Marc on his cell to discuss Laura’s visit and the recordings she’d obtained, but he’d been heading into a jail for a client visit and couldn’t talk. They hurriedly scheduled a meeting via Skype at three o’clock.

Most people used Skype to communicate with friends and family, but Cammie used it primarily for her investigative work. When out in the field, she’d sometimes communicate with her clients using Skype on her smartphone. Using the video call feature, she could walk through a scene and share real-time video footage with a client while discussing it at the same time. More often, she used Skype to conference in attorneys during witness interviews. When possible, she preferred to use her laptop because of the larger screen image and the ability to access other programs, both of which she’d be doing today with Marc.

She blew out a nervous breath, looked at the clock again. Three minutes to go. She got up and checked her reflection in a wall mirror, even while telling herself it was vain and silly to care about her appearance. He’d ended it, right? What did it matter how she looked?

Who was she kidding? It mattered.

This would be the last time they’d see each other for a while, maybe ever, and she wanted his last memory of her to be, well, memorable. In the good sense.

She wore the Snooze T-shirt because it brought back good memories, besides being her favorite T. Her hair fell in loose dark curls past her shoulders. She wasn’t a master at applying eyeliner, so the dark lines on her lids wobbled a bit, but only someone close up with a magnifying glass would notice. She had to smile. As a kid she couldn’t draw a straight line with a crayon, either. And coloring within the lines of a box? Forget it.

Delilah had left some foundation and blush after the makeup adventure the night they’d all dined at Piero’s, so Cammie had brushed some pink onto her cheeks and dabbed her lips with a dark pink lipstick named Divine Wine. Unlike Delilah, Cammie wasn’t heavy-handed with the tinting—she put on just enough to give her some zip.

Although, it’d taken some extra effort to look
zippy
after Laura’s surprise visit. Cammie had dealt with her share of felonious scheming psycho-criminals over the years, but not with one who’d tried to bribe
and
kiss her.

As Val had said, “That girl’s got a hitch in her git-a-long.”

She looked at the clock. A minute to three.

Cammie’s hand trembled, her heart pounded. Reactions that had nothing to do with Laura’s visit and everything to do with seeing Marc again.

She returned to the chair. She powered on the computer, set up Skype and pressed the video call button.

He appeared in the center of her screen like an image in a crystal ball. The seconds slowed, then froze in place as she stared at his face. She eased in a breath, missing his scents.

He looked like a well-groomed actor in a TV commercial. His hair was stylishly cut—the way she remembered it when they worked together. He wore a tweed jacket, blue oxford button-down shirt and yellow tie. She’d visited his home office once to deliver a case file, and recognized the credenza in the background filled with books and photographs of his father and Emily.

Time caught up to the present as she glanced at the corner of her screen and saw her face—long and pale with odd pink splotches on her cheeks—in a small box. That same image would be enlarged on Marc’s screen.

“Hi, Cammie. I just got in.” Maybe it was the video quality, but those eyes had lost their luster, their electric blue subdued to the color of twilight.

“Hi.” She smiled. What she’d hoped passed for a genuine-looking smile appeared anxious and wan in the small box. She made a mental note to not look at her image again—it was bad enough being apprehensive talking to him, worse if she watched herself being so. “I don’t remember you dressing up so much for jail visits.”

“It’s a business fraud case, and these guys are accustomed to lawyers in suits, even on Sundays.”

“Case going well?”

He loosened his tie. “There’s a lot of money involved, and some important people on the other side. This isn’t going to be an easy haul, for either myself or the accused.” He gave a wry smile. “Mostly for the accused, of course, because when this is over, they’ll be reeling, wondering what hit them.”

Lawyers going to trial were like boxers before a big fight. Both postured and bragged, making a crushing defeat of the opponent sound like a given.

“Thanks for making the time for this call.”

“You said you had evidence for tomorrow’s deposition. Let’s get to it.”

His voice was controlled to the point of being cold. Determined to not let that unravel her, she asked politely, “Did you have a chance to check your email?”

“No. I’ll bring it up now in my browser.” She heard the clatter of the keyboard as he typed. His gaze shifted to another part of his screen. “There it is.”

“Double-click on the attachment.”

A pause. “Done.”

“Did a media player open on your screen?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Don’t press the play button yet.” She hesitated, wondering if she should repeat what she had told Marc that stormy day outside the jail—that Laura wasn’t pregnant. No, timing felt wrong. She’d broach the topic again at the end of the call. “I suggest you have a legal pad and pen handy for taking notes, especially when she gets to the part where she describes the deceptive accounting practices she used at your law firm.”

“Got them here on my desk. How’d you capture the video without her knowing?”

“Have to give credit to Val. Laura had wised up to me, frisked me for my smartphone. Meanwhile, Val had been quick-witted enough to plant her phone with the motion detector program running.”

“Laura frisked you?”

“I frisked her, then she frisked me.” That sounded weird. “You’ll see what happened on the video. Before we begin, I want to tell you that from my perspective, Laura McDonald is a big-time, big-dollar, dangerous career criminal. After you see the footage, you’ll probably want to burn CDs for the depo tomorrow.”

“All right, I’ll hit Play now.”

“Just a moment—I have one more note before we begin.” She paused, wondering how to phrase this delicately. “When we get to the end, I want to say that our lips never touched.”

He gave her a look. “Whose lips?”

“Mine and Laura’s.”

“I thought you meant yours and Val’s.”

“Oh, no. She was in a back room during this recording.”

“Does this kissing have something to do with the frisking?”

“I can’t believe you asked that with a straight face.”

“You’re the one who brought it up.”

“I did.”
Wish I hadn’t.
“Just wanted to clarify things.” She tried to read the expression on his face, but it’d be easier interpreting the stone ones on Mount Rushmore.

“Was Laura aware that someone else was in the vicinity?” he asked.

“No.”

He paused. “Anything else?”

“You don’t see Laura at first, but you’ll hear us talking on the porch. Audio’s muffled, but discernable. I turned up the volume during that part so you can hear our exchange. Then you’ll see her as she enters the room. Eventually she sits on the couch...” Cammie looked over her right shoulder at the couch while gesturing to it. “Can you see it?”

“Quite well.”

“Want me to hold up the screen so you can get the layout of the room?”

“No. I remember it.”

Except for his frisking-kissing question, their businesslike rapport was unnerving. It was as though they’d never touched, never kissed, never stolen pleasures with greedy abandon.

“Val’s smartphone was in that rubber plant,” Cammie continued. “She has a wide-angle lens on it—attachment is the size of a quarter—so you can easily see the area from the front door to the couch.”

“I understand. Shall I hit Play?”

“Go ahead.”

He cocked his head and listened intently to the segment where Laura and Cammie were off camera, pausing the video when Laura said she was driving to Denver after her meeting.

He glanced at his wristwatch. “She’s likely on the road now.”

Cammie nodded. “Now or soon.”

“She said she’d made the drive many times from Vegas to Denver. When we were...together...she made several weekend road trips, by herself, to Utah. Claimed they were to some spa. Now I’m realizing she was probably heading to Vegas.”

“Makes sense.”

“Does she discuss those trips further in this video?”

“Not specifically.”

“All right,” he said, pressing a button, “let’s resume watching.”

She heard Laura’s voice in the video. “It’s how I imagined it’d be decorated.”

He leaned closer, his expression tightening. Cammie felt like a voyeur, watching him watching her.

She’d already viewed this video at least five times. Although it was difficult to tell that Laura had a flat tummy underneath that jacket, it wasn’t impossible. If he hadn’t wanted to believe Cammie when she told him Laura wasn’t pregnant, maybe he could see it for himself.

His eyebrows pressed together, a black canopy over his eyes. “Can you believe this?” He glanced at Cammie. “She researched your Nevada P.I. license—knew it’d been suspended.”

Cammie watched his face while listening to herself on the video ask Laura if her business partner was the boyfriend she’d had while involved with Marc. Except for a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth, he kept his face still, wooden. An ache sliced through her. It was almost worse seeing his self-control than if he had let down his guard and shown his feelings.

She told herself she should look away, but she couldn’t. She was riveted by his responses, as minute as they were, for reasons she couldn’t justify or explain. Although, if she were to be brutally honest with herself, she was holding on to any shred of emotion, even if it wasn’t for her, as a last connection to the man she’d loved.

“Interesting,” Marc murmured. He flicked a glance at Cammie. “You still have the name of that computer forensics guru in Denver?”

“Richard Ross.”

“Maybe he can find that background accounting program,” Marc muttered, writing something down.

After a few more moments, Cammie heard Laura make the “Mr. Puppy Love” reference.

Marc snorted something unintelligible under his breath, followed a few seconds later with a low whistle after Laura mentioned the Phoenix hub taking in five mil.

When it came to the exit scene, and the kiss, Cammie held her breath. She hadn’t seen that coming, hated that it had happened, but Marc again showed no reaction.

The video ended.

He met her gaze. They looked at each other for a prolonged stretch of time.

“The ADA’s going to back down when they see this,” he said.

Maybe it was the angle of the monitor, but the look in his eyes had softened. Staring into the deep well of his eyes, she read in them that he’d finally forgiven her.

If he’d looked that way three days ago, she’d have been elated. But at this moment, she felt something different...something she couldn’t put her finger on.

“As Laura says in the video,” Cammie noted, “she’s going to be in Denver for that deposition tomorrow.”

“I’d like you to be here, too.”

“You heard me promise her that I wouldn’t be. If she sees me in that room, she’ll bolt.”

He nodded. “Good point. Bolting from a deposition would only get her a contempt of court citation. That’s chump change considering her million-dollar problems.”

“You’re not referring to the tape while questioning her, right?”

“Not referring to it, not showing it, not giving her any reason to split. Although the way I phrase my questions will make it obvious they’re based on information from you.”

“No way around that.”

“No.”

“But considering she doesn’t know a video exists, she’ll view it as my word against hers. That won’t throw her off all that much.”

“My take, too.” He folded his arms and leaned forward, looking squarely into the screen. “This video has wire fraud, theft, money laundering all over it. I’ll contact the Denver P.D. as soon as we end this call and ask for a theft detective to sit in at the deposition. The detective will be in a suit and look like any of the other lawyers in the room, so Laura won’t know there’s a cop present. He’ll arrest her at the end of the depo.”

Cammie blew out a breath of relief. “Good to hear. Because, as you know, she wanted to visit me on her way back from Denver.”

“Was she bringing roses?” He offered a lopsided smile.

“Funny,” she said dryly.

He turned serious again. “I’ll make a copy of the video for the feds. That business-partner boyfriend is in their get-rich scheme as deep as she is, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already investigating this happy couple.”

“What happens if she clams up and claims the fifth amendment?”

“There is no right to silence in a civil case. My case is civil, and she can’t clam up and claim the privilege.”

“Not worried she’ll show up with a lawyer?”