Payback Page 15

  “It occurs to me it would be very useful to have a picture of Consuela Mackenzie.” Luke took two slices of hot, crusty bread and slipped one onto Kate’s side plate. “With Consuela’s photo to show around, we’d be doubling our chances of having somebody recognize either her or your father. And I suspect Consuela goes shopping a lot more often than he does.”

  “I agree it would be great to have her picture. But we have no way of getting one.”

  “Are you sure? This is a hell of a long shot, but is it possible that Adam might have found a photo of Consuela among those documents in the safety-deposit box?”

  “I could call and ask. It seems unlikely, though, don’t you think? Surely Adam would have told us right away if he had a picture of the woman who was with Dad the night he disappeared.”

  “Maybe not. My guess is Adam said as little as possible about Consuela out of deference to your mother’s feelings.”

  “You could be right.” Kate frowned into her soup. “You know, I realized last night that we’ve all been too protective of my mother, me included. It doesn’t change reality by refusing to acknowledge it, and my mother has never been somebody who likes to ignore facts. Uncle Paul is the worst offender, but we’ve all followed his lead and played along.”

  “It’s partly because she’s handled the bigamy situation with such dignity that I guess everyone feels protective.”

  “But we need to move past that,” Kate said. “There’s no way to transform the twenty-eight years Mom spent with my father into a legal marriage, so we have to accept we were all duped and turn the page to a fresh start. We need to get over it already.”

  “I thought that was what Avery’s new house and new career were all about.”

  Kate wrinkled her nose. “Practically, she’s moved on. Emotionally, everyone is still in full protective mode. And not only of Mom, but of me, too. Adam even brought his new wife to Chicago when I was in Europe. I’m sure it’s because he’s tiptoeing around the fact that Megan is Dad’s daughter by his Wyoming wife and he didn’t want to ruffle my feelings.”

  “Maybe you need to take the initiative and invite Megan to Chicago. She’s your half sister, after all. Ron’s deceptions as a father presumably hurt her every bit as much as they hurt you.”

  “You’re right, I should invite her.” Kate finished the slice of bread Luke was sure she hadn’t noticed she was eating, and absently brushed crumbs from her fingers. “I spent a lot of time when I was growing up wishing I had a sister. Now I have one and I haven’t made the slightest effort to meet her.”

  “You probably needed these past six months to stop thinking of her as a rival and start seeing her as a fellow victim.”

  “You’re right again. How annoying of you.” Her smile softened her complaint. “Adam and Megan got married in Las Vegas, with two complete strangers as witnesses. At the time I was just relieved they didn’t make things difficult for Mom and me by trying to arrange a big wedding in the hope that it would reconcile the two branches of Dad’s family. Until now, I never allowed myself to wonder how the two of them felt exchanging their vows without any friends or relatives to keep them company.”

  Luke reached across the table to squeeze Kate’s hands, the comforting gesture automatic. He stopped as soon as he realized what he was doing and picked up his spoon again. “If they’re truly in love, the ceremony will have been wonderful wherever they had it.”

  Kate flashed him a smile that was almost affectionate. “You’re such an optimist, Luke, always willing to see the silver lining lurking in the darkest cloud. Wouldn’t you want to have all your brothers and sisters at your wedding?”

  About to toss off a reply, he stopped to consider. “I’d enjoy having a huge party so that I could show off my new wife to all my hundreds of relatives, and the Savarini cousins could get together and sing their usual slightly drunken version of ‘O Sole Mio.’ But the exchanging vows part…No, I think I’d be happier if it was just me, the woman I loved, and a priest. As far as I’m concerned, Adam and Megan had the perfect wedding.”

  “I hope they felt the same way.” Kate still sounded dubious, but she looked more cheerful. “Anyway, back to getting our hands on a photo of Consuela Mackenzie. It’s definitely worth asking Adam if he has one. The answer’s almost certainly no, but let’s find out. I’ll call him now.”

  She pushed away her half-empty soup bowl and took out her cell phone. Shamefully, she realized as she dialed his number that this was the first time she’d called Adam at home since his marriage. Despite the fact that he was president of the only bank in Fairfax, and she always had to negotiate her way past his assistant, she’d preferred to do that rather than risk having to speak to Megan.

  Now, finally, she geared herself up to talk to the sister she’d never met, and then felt almost a moment of letdown when Adam answered.

  “Kate!” Her uncle’s voice was warm. “I’d say this is an unexpected pleasure, except that you almost never call me just to chat. I hope everything’s okay?”

  “Everyone is fine, more or less. How are you? And…Megan?”

  “We’re wonderful, thank you. Busy, but hoping to see you soon.”

  “Any chance that you and Megan could come to Chicago for Thanksgiving? I actually bought a bed for my guest room after I got back from Europe, and I can promise you the best pecan pie outside of Georgia.”

  Adam’s voice deepened. “Thank you for the invitation, Kate. Sincerely. Megan and I would love to come and see you sometime soon, I really mean that, but we’re going to spend Thanksgiving at the ranch in Wyoming. Liam, Megan’s brother, is planning to get married to Chloe while we’re there, so it’s a pretty big deal.”

  “Well, I understand that weddings have to come first.” Kate realized she was envious of Adam and the fact that he would be attending Liam’s wedding, whereas she hadn’t been invited. It was crazy to feel jealous when she’d never set eyes on her half brother and sister, but after months of studied indifference, she was suddenly impatient to meet the unknown members of her family. “Just keep in mind that Mom and I are hoping to see you both soon.”

  “We’ll compare calendars and get back to you very soon. How is Avery? She sounded excited about her new house the last time we spoke.”

  “She is excited. And the renovations are going faster than we’d hoped, so she should soon have a really attractive office at home for meeting with clients. Actually, though, it’s not Mom I’m calling about. It’s about my father.”

  “Oh, Lord, I should have guessed! I got a couple of e-mails from Paul this past week. Apparently some fruit loop thinks he saw Ron in Washington, D.C., and you’ve hired a private investigator to follow up—”

  “Well, the fruit loop who thinks he saw my father is sitting across the table from me right now and he can hear you. His name is Luke Savarini, he’s one of Chicago’s premier chefs, and we’re in D.C. trying to find somebody who can provide us with an address for the man Luke saw.”

  “Ouch! Removing my foot from my mouth…” Adam sounded more amused than contrite. “Let me rephrase. As I understand it, your friend got no more than a glimpse of this man across a crowded restaurant. They never exchanged a single word. Leaving aside the issue of whether it could possibly have been Ron, how in God’s name do you expect to find an address for a man seen for a couple of seconds in a public place? And why are you doing the investigating personally? Did you fire the detective? Paul suggested he was very competent at his job.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “It’s also important. I can sure make the time to listen.”

  Kate brought Adam up to date on the tragic murder of George Klein, and the results of their interview with the Sunrise store clerk. “It would be one thing if the clerk had simply claimed to recognize the picture of my father,” she concluded. “But she did much more than that. She recognized the name Consuela Mackenzie and identified her as Belizean. Adam, it can’t be a coincidence that Stewart Jones—a man who looks exact
ly like my dad—is doing his shopping in the company of the woman supposedly with Ron Raven the night he disappeared. That’s stretching the long arm of coincidence miles beyond breaking point.”

  Adam was silent for a full thirty seconds before responding with a single, vicious expletive.

  “Yes, that was pretty much my reaction,” Kate said calmly.

  “Why did you call?” Adam asked finally. “Just to keep me in the loop, or is there some way you think I can help you find the son of a bitch?” He made no apology for the insult to Kate’s father.

  “If you have a picture of Consuela Mackenzie you could send us, we figure it would double our chances of finding somebody who recognizes her or Dad. Apparently she hasn’t even bothered to change her name, which suggests she may have been more careless than my father about handing out contact information. Maybe she assumes nobody in the States knows about her link to my father?”

  “That could be,” Adam agreed. “Julio Castellano implied to us that she’d never been to the States until she left Belize to meet up with Ron in Miami, so she’s not likely to run into somebody who knows her from way back. Although, if she’s kept in touch with Castellano, presumably he’s told her Megan and I were in Belize, and that we now know she’s the woman who was in Ron’s hotel room the night he disappeared.”

  “Well, I realize that getting a picture of Consuela isn’t likely to make a huge difference to our chances of finding my father, but Luke and I are clutching at mighty thin straws here and two pictures are presumably better than one. If you have a photo you can send, even if it’s not clear, it has to improve our odds.”

  “You’re in luck,” Adam said, his voice still grim. “There was a photo of Consuela with Ron in the safety-deposit box. I already scanned the picture into my laptop, along with all the other documents Megan and I found. A couple of mouse clicks and I can e-mail the picture to you right now. Do you have your laptop with you?”

  “I never leave home without it.” Kate patted the briefcase on the seat beside her. “Thanks, Adam. This might be the break we need.”

  “Wait! How are you going to get prints you can show around?”

  “This isn’t sleepy old Fairfax!” she said, laughing. “We’re in a shopping center only a few miles from the White House and Washington, D.C., is a wired city. There are probably a dozen different places right in this plaza that could run us off a copy.”

  “In fact, there’s a print shop on the other side of the plaza.” Luke intervened to point out the familiar logo.

  “Okay,” Adam said. “I’m attaching my picture of Consuela to an e-mail right now. You should have it in a couple of minutes.”

  “We’ll go and find some wireless network we can access so that I can download it,” Kate said. “Thanks, Adam. We’ll let you know as soon as anybody recognizes it.”

  “I’ll warn Megan that Ron Raven has apparently returned from the dead,” Adam said, his voice grim again. “I’m afraid she’ll take it hard. Your mutual father sure knows how to screw up other people’s lives, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “That and making money seem to be the two things he does best.”

  Thirteen

  S am, the young man who helped Kate hook her laptop up to one of the store’s printers, was good-looking and knew it. He ran a quick, practiced glance over her body, his gaze lingering on her breasts, and she saw the immediate predatory gleam that lit up his melting brown eyes. In normal circumstances, she’d have cut him off at the knees. Today she gave him a flirty smile and made a point of letting him know that Luke was her brother, not a boyfriend.

  Luke took their sudden kinship in stride and did no more than roll his eyes behind Sam’s back while she played dumb bunny to Sam’s superhero. Feeling like the poor man’s version of Paris Hilton, she did her best to act as if she had difficulty telling the difference between her keyboard and her mouse pad. Fluttering her lashes, she expressed awe and gratitude at Sam’s ability to unite her laptop with the store’s photo printer.

  She zipped through their story of her search for her father, keeping the tale short since it was clear that Sam had far more interest in the size of her boobs than in her angst over a missing parent. He must have been listening with at least some of his attention, though, because as the picture of Consuela and her father emerged from the printer, he gave a sudden jolt of recognition.

  “Hey, I know this woman,” he said, picking the photo up from the printer tray. “Is she the one you’re looking for?”

  Kate nodded. “Either her, or the man with her. The man is my father.”

  “I don’t recognize the man—” Kate had a suspicion that men generally came and went in Sam’s world without much notice from him “—but she’s been in here a couple of times and I’ve helped her mail packages.”

  “Do you remember the last time you saw her?”

  Sam scratched his head. “I dunno. She hasn’t been in for a while. It’s probably been a couple of weeks. Maybe three.”

  Her father had already run, Kate thought despondently. Ron knew he’d been spotted and he’d probably hightailed it out of the D.C. area right after selling his car. Stewart Jones, Australian diplomat, had morphed by now into some new and completely unknown identity. The chances were that any address she and Luke managed to ferret out for “Mr. Jones” would simply be another dead end.

  Still, she had to try to dig up any information she could, and Sam seemed relatively easy to work on, especially in comparison to the clerk at Sunrise. He struck her as the type to blow off store policies and hand over an address for her father if he happened to feel in the mood to impress her.

  She tapped the photo, indicating Consuela. “If this woman mailed packages from here, would you have a record of her address? Her name is Consuela Mackenzie, or she might have given you my father’s name, Stewart Jones.”

  “I’m pretty sure they have an account with the store.” Sam sent her an assessing glance, clearly enjoying the knowledge that he was in possession of information Kate wanted.

  She blinked. “They have a personal account? Here?” She was shocked enough that this time she didn’t need to fake sounding stupid.

  “Yeah. That way it’s quicker to mail things, you know? We’ll even pick up packages at your home once you have an account with us.”

  She supposed her father might have risked setting up an account rather than paying cash for every transaction. These days, people paying cash ran the risk of being remembered simply because of their rarity. And, as her father had apparently calculated, giving people a false name still left him pretty well protected: he could shed the Stewart Jones identity the moment it became a problem, so it wouldn’t matter too much if a few stores had records of the biographic details for a nonexistent person.

  “If my father has an account here, then you certainly must have a record of his address. Could you tell me what it is?”

  “Sure.” Sam laughed. “If I wanted to get fired I could tell you.”

  She’d overestimated her seductive charms, Kate reflected ruefully. Sam was willing to flirt, but he wasn’t a total fool.

  Luke spoke for the first time. “We’ve taken up enough of your time, Sam. Thanks for your help. How much do we owe you for the copy of the photo?”

  Kate glared at Luke, silently protesting the abrupt termination of her conversation, but he gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, warning her to keep quiet.

  “I dunno the exact amount until I ring up the charges. There’s tax and stuff.” Sam’s gaze swiveled toward Luke for no more than a second before fixing back on Kate. “How would you like to pay?”

  “We’ll pay cash.” Luke followed him to the nearest cash register, pulling out his wallet as he went. He set his wallet on the counter, and rested two hundred-dollar bills on top. Sam looked at the money and finally looked—really looked—at Luke.

  “We’re grateful for your help,” Luke said. He made no reference to the two hundred dollars, keeping his bland
gaze fixed directly on Sam.

  “Er…. right.” Appearing unsure of himself for the first time, Sam keyed in codes and numbers and informed them their total charge amounted to seven dollars and thirty cents. Luke paid with a ten-dollar bill and dropped the change into his jacket pocket. He left the two bills sitting on the counter.

  “Okay, then.” Sam eyed the two hundred dollars. “I guess that’s it.”

  Luke showed no sign he was aware of Sam’s interest in the money. “Did you give me my receipt?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No, I don’t think you did.” Luke gave the bills a casual flick toward Sam. “I’m pretty sure we’re still missing our receipt. I need it for my tax records.”

  Sam hesitated. He sneaked a furtive glance over each shoulder and, apparently satisfied that no managers were watching, quickly keyed a command into the computer terminal. He hit the print command and almost simultaneously scooped up the bills, shoving them into his pocket.

  “Thanks for stopping by today. Come and see us again soon.” Sam’s voice squeaked with nerves. His role as Cool Dude apparently didn’t extend very deep. He handed Luke the one-page printout, looking so guilty that if a manager had been in range, he or she would have come running. Kate could see that the sheet did at least have words written on it, but she couldn’t tell if Sam had given them an address, much less an address for Stewart Jones. His nervousness boded well, though.

  Sam was already disappearing through a door marked Staff. Kate was quite sure her mother would say that they’d only be getting the reward they deserved if Sam took their bribe and then failed to deliver the goods.

  “What did he print out for us?” she asked as soon as they were outside the store. “By the way, I owe you for my plane ticket as well as the two hundred bucks you just used to bribe Sam.”

  “You can give me a check sometime. No rush.” Luke handed her Sam’s sheet of paper. Stewart M. Jones, she read, 344 Maple View Drive, Herndon, Virginia, 20170. A Virginia driver’s license number was recorded, as well as home phone, office phone and cell phone numbers.