“Really?” Le Tour said, perking up. “Desmond Slattery?”
“Yes. You know him?”
“We met just last year,” Le Tour said and Bree thought her cheeks flushed a little. “He’s quite the character. Scotland Yard. Man’s man.”
“If your idea of a man’s man is someone who wears Savile Row bespoke suits.”
“And wears them well,” Le Tour said and laughed a little girlishly.
Bree grinned at her. “Shall I tell Des you say hello the next time I talk to him?”
“Don’t you dare.” Le Tour smiled, then went to her purse. “Here, you e-mailed me about these last night.” She pushed a thumb drive across the table. “Profiles of the judges.”
Bree took the thumb drive and put it in her pocket, impressed. “That was fast.”
“We have several freelance researchers and hackers on speed-dial.”
“Helpful.”
“Extremely,” she said and checked her watch. “I have one still trying to find copies of the blueprints for Abelmar’s remodel. Can you tell me why you want to see them without giving me any details?”
Bree hesitated. “I’m trying to confirm the existence of secret rooms.”
Le Tour winced, drank her coffee. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Put someone other than me in Canard tonight and tell me what he does.”
The head of Bluestone Paris shook her head. “That I cannot do. If I put one of my own in there, it will soon be common knowledge in the office that we are looking at Abelmar. And I do not think you want Abelmar knowing that. Correct?”
Bree thought about that. “For now,” she said. “But at a certain point, I’ve found it can help a great deal to let a target know you’re watching him.”
Chapter
20
Los Angeles
I dreamed of Bree in Paris.
She was in some dimly lit jazz club, sipping from a champagne glass and looking like a bombshell in stiletto heels and a sleek, formfitting black dress with a slit high up the right thigh. She was alone at a table near the stage but kept glancing over her shoulder toward the shadowy back of the club, as if she were expecting someone. A quartet and a single singer came onto the stage.
The drummer sat at his kit and stomped several times on his bass drum. Then he stomped on it some more, then again and again.
That’s when I startled awake and realized someone was pounding on my hotel-room door. I lurched out of bed, peered through the keyhole, and saw Ned Mahoney standing there in workout gear.
I opened the door. “I’m bagging the gym, Ned, I didn’t sleep well last—”
“I just got a call from Pat Loughlin,” Mahoney said. “They’ve lost communication with the two agents guarding the widow White and her family out in Pasadena. He’s coming to get us in ten minutes.”
I set a world record for showering, shaving, and dressing, grabbed a to-go cup of coffee in the lobby, and went out the front door just as LA Supervising Special Agent Loughlin pulled up in a black Suburban. Mahoney came out the door behind me, puffing and staring at me as if he couldn’t believe I’d beaten him.
“It’s a talent,” I said and climbed in the back.
The second Mahoney shut the passenger-side front door, Loughlin pulled away. “We need this like a thumb in the eye,” he said. “I’m thinking we could be in for a frickin’ shitshow.”
“When was the last time you had contact with the two agents?” I asked.
“Half past three this morning,” Loughlin said. “Supposed to check in again at five thirty. When they didn’t, they got called. When they didn’t answer, I got called. I called their personal phones. When they didn’t answer, I called Ned.”
“No one’s knocked?” Mahoney asked.
“Sheriff’s deputy rang the bell at the front gate of the estate.”
“Estate?”
“Correct,” Loughlin said. “No answer. I told her to stand down, wait for us.”
We’d stayed at a hotel in Burbank, so it didn’t take long for us to get to the old and tony neighborhood in Pasadena. An LA County Sheriff’s patrol car sat idling ahead of us on the street where Amelia White’s parents lived and where the FBI agent’s widow had retreated with her children in a time of grief and crisis.
The deputy told us no one had gone in or out of the gate since she’d arrived, and that was nearly forty-five minutes ago. Loughlin thanked her and pulled over to park.