Payback Page 14

  Luke chose some dark-roasted Guatemalan coffee beans and Kate wandered around the store before picking out a plump, dark-skinned angel from an enchanting selection of pottery figures. A hand-lettered sign indicated the little statues were sculpted and painted by Mayan Indians from the village of Todos Santos in northwest Guatemala. They waited until they were the only customers in the store before taking their selections over to the counter.

  “Hi,” the clerk said, closing the drawer of the cash register from the previous transaction. “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it? Perfect fall weather.”

  They both smiled their agreement. “We’re especially enjoying it,” Luke said. “We flew in this morning from Chicago and it was looking a lot like winter when we took off.” He held out Kate’s angel, along with his coffee and a credit card.

  “I love the angel you chose. Aren’t the expressions on those figurines wonderful?” The clerk smiled at Kate as she swiped Luke’s card. “They’re all hand-painted by the village women in Todos Santos and it’s been a great new source of income for them. Usually the cash in those villages remains firmly in the hands of the menfolk.”

  While she waited for the transaction to process, the clerk wrapped the angel in tissue and tucked it into a sturdy bag. “There. I hope you enjoy the coffee, too. You’ll find it’s robust without being bitter.”

  “That sounds perfect,” Kate said as Luke signed the charge slip. “Actually, we were hoping you could help us with some information about a personal matter.”

  “Personal?” The clerk appeared instantly wary, her smile vanishing.

  “My father went missing more than five months ago.” Kate spoke quickly, so that the clerk’s remaining goodwill wouldn’t have time to dissipate. “He disappeared without a trace and for a long time we had no idea where he might be. Then, just recently, we learned that he’d been seen in this area. We even have a credit card receipt from this store, signed by him, so we know he shopped here at least once. His name is Stewart Jones.”

  “I’m sorry, miss,” the clerk said, continuing to look wary. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “We hired an investigator to see if he could trace Kate’s father.” Luke took over the spiel. “The detective’s name was George Klein and he was in here on Thursday or Friday morning. I understand you were very helpful—”

  “Not me.” The clerk denied the suggestion that she’d been helpful with as much fervor as if she’d been accused of committing a heinous crime. “I wasn’t here last week. The owner of the store is always here from Monday to Friday and she might be able to help you. Her name is Alana Gomez and she’ll be back at work tomorrow.”

  Obviously searching for an excuse to avoid any more conversation, the clerk handed over a business card from the little display rack on the counter. “Alana will be here no later than 9:00 a.m. You might want to come back then.”

  “Thanks, we appreciate your help,” Luke said, not yet ready to give up. If this particular clerk hadn’t spoken to George Klein, it might mean she had information to share that the detective hadn’t known about.

  The clerk clearly wished they would leave the store, but she seemed reluctant to be outright rude to a woman searching for a missing parent. Luke pressed lightly against Kate’s back in a silent cue that she should take over the questioning again.

  Kate not only picked up on his hint, she played the sympathy card. “If you wouldn’t mind answering another question, I’d be so grateful. As you can imagine, my family has been worried for months and everyone was excited when we finally got a lead on my father’s whereabouts.” Kate was careful not to appear overeager or threatening as she reached into her purse for a picture of Ron Raven.

  “I guess I already explained that we have a copy of a charge slip that shows my dad must have been in this store on the morning of October 3. I know it’s stretching things to ask if you can remember a customer from three weeks ago, but this is a picture of the man we’re looking for. As I mentioned already, his name is Stewart Jones.”

  Kate handed over the photo and the clerk studied it reluctantly, but with attention.

  “Here’s the receipt from the transaction that day.” Luke passed a copy across the counter.

  The clerk’s forehead furrowed as she studied both the sales slip and the photo. “He does seem a bit familiar,” she conceded. She stared at the picture some more and then shrugged. “I’m sorry. I think he might have been a customer of ours, but I don’t remember a thing about him. He certainly isn’t a regular. But Alana went to the airport to pick up her parents on the third, so I was helping out by working here that day. Not all day, of course, but for a few hours. It’s quite possible that I served your father, because the man in that photo does look vaguely familiar.”

  Unfortunately, such fuzzy recognition wasn’t going to get them anywhere. “Kate’s father may have had a woman with him,” Luke said, determined to explore every possible avenue before throwing in the towel. “The woman we’re talking about has a petite build and she’s slightly below average height. She’s in her late thirties, with dark curly hair. We heard one report that her name is Heather. Does that ring any mental bells?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.” The clerk shook her head vigorously.

  “The name Heather may not be correct,” Kate said. “Her name might be Consuela Mackenzie. Consuela is from Belize.” She shot a faintly challenging glance in Luke’s direction. She clearly recognized that by identifying the unknown woman by the name Julio Castellano had claimed for his niece she was taking a giant leap based on nothing more than a hunch and a story woven by a convicted murderer. “Since this store features a lot of pottery from Mayans living in the area on the border between Guatemala and Belize, it seems quite likely that Consuela would enjoy coming here to shop.”

  The clerk’s face lit up in a surprised smile. “Consuela Mackenzie? Oh, of course I know Connie! She’s been in here several times. She loves the coffee and the little jars of sauce we import for cooking chicken Pepian. Alana, the owner of the store, is from Guatemala, but I’m from Belize, too, you know, or at least I was born there.” She actually chuckled. “I’m old enough to remember when it was still called British Honduras.”

  “What a coincidence!” Kate seized on the link, however tenuous. “My uncle and his wife were just in Belize and they said it was a beautiful country.”

  “Oh, it is. And so unspoiled in a lot of areas. Whereabouts were they? Your uncle and aunt, I mean.”

  “In the southwest, mostly. And of course they visited Belize City.”

  “A lot of cruise ships stop in Belize City nowadays, but not so many people travel inland.”

  “My uncle flew in from Mexico. It was quite a journey, I believe.” Which happened to be the truth, even if not quite in the way it sounded.

  “Yes, we still don’t have very good transportation links to get tourists in and out of Belize. Our population is too small.” The clerk, increasingly mellowed by Kate’s appreciation of her native land, studied the photo of Ron Raven again. “You know, now that I’m looking at this picture in context, I’m sure this man has been in here a couple of times with Connie. He’s your father, you say?”

  “Yes. We…his family…think he must have lost his memory,” Kate said. “Otherwise, we can’t imagine why he wouldn’t come home. There were no arguments, no disagreements of any sort before he disappeared. We’re really worried about him.”

  “I’m sure you must be.” The clerk hesitated for a moment, then turned away and busied herself rearranging the jar of pens by the cash register before deciding to share her thought.

  She finally stopped fussing with the pens. “I don’t mean to pry, but is your mother still married to your father?”

  “No, absolutely not. Not for years and years.” Kate smiled and Luke appreciated the irony of her entirely truthful answer. “You don’t have to worry that we might be angry because my dad has found a new companion. We just want to make sure his health is good. T
hat’s all.”

  The clerk was visibly relieved. “Well, if I’m remembering right, I don’t think you have any worries. The man with Connie didn’t strike me as a person who’d lost his memory. The opposite, in fact. He struck me as one of those men who is very confident about themselves, you know? He was never rude to Connie or angry, but I sure got the impression that he was the man in charge of that relationship.”

  “That sounds like my dad. He always wants to be in charge.” Kate deliberately made light of the clerk’s comment, although Luke could see that she was holding on to her self-control by the thinnest of threads. “I’m so anxious to get in touch with him. Is there any way you could look up their address? Maybe you have a record of it for some reason. We’d really appreciate any help you can give us in contacting them.”

  The clerk immediately looked wary again. “Next time they come into the store, I’ll be sure to let them know you’re trying to find them. Why don’t you write down your names and address, and then I’ll have it handy to give to them?”

  There was almost zero chance that Ron Raven would come back to this store, Luke thought, watching Kate write down her contact information. Ron knew he’d been spotted and would never run the risk of returning to one of his old haunts.

  “It would be a major breakthrough if you provide some way for us to contact Consuela Mackenzie,” Luke said. “Even if Kate’s father isn’t living with her, she probably knows his current address. As you can imagine, quite apart from all the emotional turmoil, there are several legal issues pending. We would be so grateful if you could supply us with an address….”

  “Oh, heavens, I couldn’t give you Connie’s address even if I knew it.”

  “How about her phone number? Do you have a phone number for her?”

  The clerk hesitated, and then shook her head, her hands clasping to form a sturdy barrier. Her body language was the epitome of resistance and Luke resigned himself to the fact that they were going to get nothing more out of her.

  “We talk about Belize when Connie comes into the store, but we’re not friends, or anything. Even if I knew her address, it would be completely against store policy to share it with anyone.” She shot an apologetic glance toward Kate. “I’m sorry.”

  “I can understand that.” Luke hid his frustration as best he could. Store rules undoubtedly forbade the sharing of personal information, and there was no reason for the clerk to put helping total strangers ahead of her job security. That, of course, was part of the reason they’d been paying George Klein to investigate: he had years of experience developing clever techniques for persuading people to part with confidential information. Experience would have enabled George to gauge whether a hundred-dollar bill slipped across the counter was more likely to produce Connie’s address or an irate demand for them to leave the store. With this particular clerk, Luke was pretty sure it would be the latter.

  Kate made several more attempts to extract contact information, but the clerk became less cooperative as the minutes ticked past. Eventually, Luke decided there was nothing for it but to thank her and move on. He propelled a reluctant Kate from the store and led her into a bistro located a couple of doors down.

  “We weren’t going to get anywhere, Katie. We were just raising the hostility level.”

  “But she knew their address, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, I think she did. If we don’t get lucky anywhere else, we can come back tomorrow and talk to her boss.” He glanced at the business card. “Alana Gomez. Since Alana’s the owner, she at least wouldn’t worry that talking to us could get her fired.”

  “Presumably George already talked to her. If George couldn’t weasel an address out of her, why would we?”

  “Because a daughter is more sympathetic than a paid investigator?” He handed Kate the bistro’s lunch menu in an effort to distract her. It was now almost two and most of the lunchtime crowd had dissipated, so they had been seated at a table by the window with a pleasant view onto the sunny plaza.

  “I think I’m too angry to eat.” Kate drew in a shaky breath, putting down the menu after a single quick glance. “Until now, a big part of me assumed that you’d made a mistake in believing you’d seen my father. But after talking to that clerk, it’s crazy to keep pretending Stewart Jones is an Australian diplomat who happens to look like my dad. It’s glaringly obvious that Stewart Jones and Ron Raven are the same person.”

  “More and more likely, but still not certain.”

  Kate gave an impatient shake of her head. “If Mr. Jones was simply a look-alike, he wouldn’t be running around the D.C. area with precisely the same woman from Belize that we had already been told was in my father’s hotel room the night he supposedly died.”

  Her logic was irrefutable, and Luke wasn’t willing to soothe her with lies or platitudes. He recognized that she was more wounded than angry, which was okay, since he was feeling enough anger for both of them. This ultimate deception of her father’s must hurt in the deepest and most painful way. Damn Ron Raven, he thought viciously. As if it wasn’t bad enough to be a bigamist, what the hell kind of a man disappeared for months, allowing his wives and children to believe that he’d been brutally murdered?

  Luke ordered bowls of homemade cream of asparagus soup for both of them, since Kate didn’t seem to care what she ate at this point and soup was easy to get down. Despite the unresolved tensions that lingered from finding her in bed with his high school buddy, he wanted to make the hurt in her eyes go away. And, apparently, he was enough his mother’s son to believe that hot food would do the trick.

  While they waited for their meals to arrive, he asked her to fill him in one more time on the details of Adam’s experiences in Belize. The fact that Ron Raven was keeping company with Consuela Mackenzie suggested it was important to learn as much as possible about her. Talking about Consuela provided the added bonus that focusing on a factual account of complicated events might stop Kate brooding over her father’s multiple betrayals.

  Kate seemed willing enough to talk about Consuela. She explained in more detail than before how Adam, her mother’s younger brother and the president of a bank in rural Georgia, had joined forces with Megan, Ron’s daughter by his Wyoming wife. Together, Adam and Megan had flown to Mexico City on the trail of three million dollars that Ron Raven owed to Adam’s bank. Since the Flying W ranch, Megan’s family home, was the collateral for the loan, she had at least as much interest as Adam in tracing the missing money.

  The trail had eventually led them to a platinum mine in rural Belize where, they discovered, Ron Raven had invested millions of dollars. When Adam and Megan’s inquiries threatened the profitable operation of a platinum smuggling ring, they had been grabbed from their beds and taken captive. Adam and Megan both swore they would have been murdered and their bodies tossed to the desert vultures if not for the intervention of Julio Castellano.

  The circumstances of their rescue had left Adam and Megan with little time for chitchat, but Julio Castellano did explain that the woman in the Miami hotel room with Ron Raven was called Consuela Mackenzie and that she was Julio’s own niece. Consuela Mackenzie, at least according to Julio, was in love with Ron and had been for some time. It was because of Adam and Megan’s adventures in Belize that Ron’s wives and children had learned the name of the mystery woman sharing Ron’s hotel room on the night of his disappearance.

  Julio Castellano had saved Adam and Megan from certain death by having them driven to Belize City under cover of night and arranging for them to fly back to the States. In return for the rescue, he asked them to access a safety-deposit box in Miami where documentary proof identifying the ringleaders of the smuggling operation had been stashed by Consuela.

  Adam and Megan had found the documents exactly where and how Julio indicated, which proved that at least part of his story was true. They’d copied all the documents and then handed the originals over to the Belizean authorities, with yet another set of copies going to the owner of the platinum min
e. Arrests had been made, prosecutions initiated, and the smuggling ring had been closed down. Since that time, however, neither Adam nor Megan had heard any word from Castellano.

  “I guess that isn’t surprising,” Kate said, leaning back to allow the server to place bowls of steaming soup in front of them. “There’s still a first-degree murder warrant outstanding for Julio Castellano in Miami. Of course, Julio insisted to Adam and Megan that he hadn’t killed Ron Raven.”

  “Astonishingly, a statement that appears to be true!”

  “Yes, it seems he was telling the truth after all.” Kate gave a rueful smile. “Anyway, I guess it’s not surprising that Castellano is keeping quiet. Presumably he has nothing to gain by letting Adam and Megan know where he is.”

  “The opposite,” Luke agreed. “He has a lot to lose. Telling them his location would simply increase his risk of being extradited by the Miami cops and charged with Ron Raven’s murder.”

  “I’m not sure Adam and Megan would feel obligated to tell the cops even if they knew where Castellano was.”

  “Do you blame them? When I called the Miami police, I got the impression that every detective on the force down there is bound and determined to see Castellano convicted, regardless of any evidence to the contrary that might come to light.”

  “My mother said the same thing. Right now, if Castellano was forced to stand trial, our family would be in the crazy position of trying to convince a jury that he couldn’t be guilty of murder because my father is alive.” Kate shook her head. “Good grief, the situation is insane!”

  “Hopefully, it’s not going to get to the point of Castellano being on trial, or anything close to it.” Luke handed her a spoon. “Eat some soup. You must have left home at five this morning to get to the airport on time, and I’m sure you didn’t bother with breakfast.”

  She pulled a face. “You’re turning into my mother.” But she took the spoon and ate some soup. “It’s good,” she said. “I’m hungrier than I realized.”