Seeing Red(97)

Two things he refused her. He wouldn’t attend every charity event and fund-raising ball and black-tie gala to which they were invited. He insisted on living a private life, out of the mainstream and certainly out of the limelight.

The second refusal regarded her infertility. He refused to participate in any humiliating testing or biological engineering.

Not to be denied her heart’s desire for a child, Greta scheduled monthly sexual marathons until one resulted in pregnancy. Her joy was complete. To Thomas’s staggering surprise, he’d shared it. From the day of her conception, Tiffany had been the golden fabric that had enwrapped them.

Now here they were tonight, as estranged as two people could possibly be.

“You didn’t eat much dinner,” he said. “Can’t I get you anything?”

“No, thank you.”

He never failed to offer; she never failed to decline. “Well, I hope you can get to sleep soon. Good night.”

He was backing away when she stopped him. “Thomas, who was that who came to the house a few nights ago?”

Rarely was he taken completely off guard. It took him seconds to recover. “What?”

“The night of the ice storm. Someone buzzed from the gate. You let him in.”

“Oh, that. Yes. It was one of our neighborhood security officers. He was checking to see that none of our lines were down and that we still had power.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

The contradiction was another turnabout. He covered his surprise with an abrupt laugh. “I beg your pardon?”

“He wasn’t wearing the uniform of our neighborhood patrolmen.”

A trickle of cold sweat slid down Thomas’s spine. “You saw him?”

“I looked over the balcony as he was leaving. Was he … Did it have something to do with Tiffany?”

He gave an exaggerated sigh of impatience. “There was a break-in at one of the office buildings I own. The alarm went off and scared the intruders away. The officer came to report the incident to me personally. Nothing to it at all.”

“Then why did you lie about who he was?”

“Because I never want to burden you with trivial matters. I’d forgotten all about it.” She said nothing. As they stared across the room at each other, Thomas imagined the chasm between them widening. “Try to sleep,” he said. “Good night.”

Almost as soon as he pulled the door shut and headed down the hall toward his bedroom, his cell phone rang. Greta’s uncharacteristic curiosity had unsettled him. He answered with a brusque “Yes?”

Jenks said, “Bad time?”

Thomas went into his bedroom and closed the door. “What do you want?”

“I caught John Trapper snooping around The Major’s house.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. Our man in common thought you should know.”

Thomas had expected that by now Trapper would have followed up on their meeting in his office. He had anticipated hearing something from him today, and it was perturbing, and a little disquieting, that he hadn’t.

“Did he say what was he doing there?”

Jenks told him how Trapper had explained himself. “But I didn’t buy it, so I circled back and checked the house, inside and out. I didn’t notice anything missing or disturbed. But just Trapper’s being there is disturbing enough.”

“I’m sure it is to you.”

“Should disturb you, too.”

“Why? I didn’t flub the attempt on his father’s life.” He could imagine Jenks gnashing his teeth over the insult. “Anything else?”

“This morning Trapper created a ruckus in the sheriff’s office over the suspect.”

“Who anyone with half a brain can see is being set up. It does sound as though Trapper has had a busy day, but I haven’t heard anything that warrants this call at this time of night.”

That was a lead-in for Jenks to tell him about finding the flash drive in Trapper’s wall and to share with Thomas what was on it.

But Jenks said, “That’s it for now.”

No mention of the flash drive? Thomas couldn’t ask outright about it without revealing that he knew of its existence, and the only way he could know was through Trapper.

Either the men in Lodal didn’t have it, or had it but couldn’t crack it, or were purposefully keeping from Thomas that it existed and what was on it. Each of those eventualities was worrisome.

With feigned nonchalance, Thomas said, “If that’s it, please tell our man in common to stop whining to me about his own failures, and Trapper.”

Before Jenks could offer a comeback, Thomas disconnected. He crossed to the bar, poured a scotch, tossed it back and poured another, something he rarely did. More than he wanted to admit, even to himself, Jenks’s call had upset him.

If the men in Lodal were in possession of Trapper’s flash drive, they wouldn’t be overly concerned about his snooping around the crime scene or creating ruckuses.

But if they hadn’t raided Trapper’s office and taken the flash drive, who had? Who had it now, and just how incriminating was the evidence on it?

Thomas had gambled on making a preemptive move, but possibly, in his eagerness to get justice for Tiffany, he had left himself vulnerable. Trapper might yet go to the authorities with no intention whatsoever of negotiating a deal for Thomas, with or without his flash drive, with or without anything substantive.