By way of an answer she dived face-first through the opening, performing a neat flip in midair and landing catlike on her feet beside him. Faint moonlight from down the hall lit the startled look on his face.
She moved out silently on the balls of her feet. This was when her traditional, soft-soled, Japanese slipper- shoes really earned their stripes. She paused before the first doorway, waiting for Jeff to join her. They fell automatically into the usual patterns of spinning low and fast past openings and leapfrogging past one another as they advanced toward the front of the house. The place was empty.
She couldn’t resist showing off when they reached the stairs. A three-inch-wide stainless steel ribbon served as the handrail for the curving staircase. She leaped up onto it and ran down it, pausing only when she reached the bottom of the staircase. She stopped just short of the main floor. If the owners had any sense at all, they had pressure sensors or some sort of motion detectors down here.
Jeff looked appropriately shell-shocked when he joined her a few seconds later.
“Damn, woman. If you ever get tired of this gig, you should consider a career in the circus.” He added sourly, “Please don’t do that again. My heart couldn’t take it.”
She grinned unrepentantly at him.
Standing on the first step, he took a long look around the ground floor through the various modes of the goggles. Finally, he declared, “I can’t believe it, but the ground floor’s clear.”
She shook her head. These people had been
“Why’d the Ghost leave all this behind?” she asked. “Why only the one painting? Once he got in here, he could’ve taken every last one of these works at his leisure.”
Jeff frowned and moved off toward the far wall and a blue, cubist painting. Even she recognized it as a Picasso. “That’s an excellent question. Particularly since I’d estimate we’re looking at easily two hundred million dollars’ worth of art.”
She was staggered. “Really?”
Jeff nodded grimly as he examined a painting closely. “This Picasso is probably more valuable than the Monet that the Ghost took.”
“Sounds like our guy’s stealing on commission then. He’s not going after random art to pawn. He’s stealing specific pieces for a collector.”
Jeff moved away from the Picasso and stood back to look at a large Impressionist scene of water and boats. “No doubt about it.”
She commented lightly, “Good thing we’re on the right side of the law. Between the two of us, we could make a fortune nicking this stuff.”
He grunted. “This one job would set us up for life.”
They traded knowing looks. Temptations like this weren’t uncommon in their line of work. However, it was the rare operator who crossed the line, and neither of them were of that weak-willed ilk.
She asked, “Now what? You wanna climb back out of here, or should we make a phone call to Detective D’Abeau and give him heart failure?”
Jeff grinned. “The guy could use a good heart attack. Serve him right for flirting with you the way he did.”
“He wouldn’t be amused,” she warned.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Jeff replied reluctantly.
She followed him back upstairs, using the actual steps this time. They reached the air vent and she looked up at it. “If I were the Ghost, I’d have left a rope hanging here to climb out on,” she remarked as she hoisted herself back into the vent.
“Now that you mention it, there’s a rounded dent in that far corner of the vent opening,” Jeff commented. “Like a rope would make if a lot of weight were put on it.”
“Good eye,” she replied. Jeff nodded, acknowledging the compliment as she asked, “Need a hand up?”
“Nah.”
He showed off a bit himself by jumping and grabbing the lip of the opening. While hanging there, he curled up in a ball and then shot his feet up and forward through the opening. As intellectually advanced as she might consider herself, a primitive part of her still thrilled at the masculine display of strength. Yup, she was officially a mess.
They crawled back out onto the roof and re-secured the vent cover before easing over to the edge of the roof. From there it was an easy matter to retrace their route down to the porch, down the sidewalk between the cameras, and back out to their car.
They reached their hotel room slightly before dawn and retired to their respective beds quickly. It felt exceedingly strange, knowing that Jeff was sleeping so nearby, enjoying the hotel’s six-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets against his skin the same way she was. Eventually, she resorted to a self-hypnosis exercise and managed to put herself to sleep, but it wasn’t an easy thing. Memories of sapphire eyes and a vibrant male body pressing intimately against hers kept interrupting her best efforts to clear her mind.
A delicious smell of freshly fried bacon woke her up the next morning. She opened her eyes and jolted to see Jeff standing beside her bed, smiling down at her.
“Good morning, beautiful.”
Oh, crap. Pajama check. Thank God she’d pulled on a sloppy cotton T-shirt last night and not the whisper-thin silk nightshirt she usually favored. “Uh, hi.” She pushed her hair out of her face and rubbed her eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“I brought my favorite cat burglar breakfast in bed.”
She sat up, propping several pillows behind her back. He set a lap tray across her legs, and she stared down at steak, fried eggs, stewed tomatoes, bacon, a stack of pancakes, and half a red grapefruit. “I couldn’t eat all of this in a week of breakfasts!”
He shrugged. “I didn’t know what you’d like, so I ordered a variety.”
“Have you eaten yet?” She picked up a spoon and dug into the juicy grapefruit.
“Heavens, no. My grandmere taught me that a gentleman always feeds his lady first.”
“You know, I think I’m starting to like your grandmere.”
His eyes clouded over. “Too bad you can’t meet her. She passed away a few years back. Cancer.”
Quick sympathy speared through her. She knew how bad it hurt to lose a beloved anchor in one’s life. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged, but there was old pain in the gesture. He changed subjects abruptly, and she went with the flow in total understanding. “Here’s the morning newspaper. You and I managed to stay out of it.”
“Thank goodness. That’s the last thing we need.” She dug into the fried eggs and pushed him the stack of pancakes.
She watched, appalled, while he drowned the flapjacks in syrup.
As he cut into them, he asked, “So where’d the Ghost get the stickum he used to climb the column? Yours came in an aerosol can. If he flew to Barbados, he couldn’t have brought it with him. So where on the island did he pick it up?”
She shrugged. “A sporting goods store, probably.”
“Can’t be too many of those on this island. Think it’s worth tracking down?”
“Our particular talents are probably better used elsewhere. Why don’t I mention it to Detective D’Abeau? He’s got plenty of manpower to check it out, and he’d love to hear from me again,” she said lightly.
A black look flitted across Jeff’s gaze, but to his credit, he made no comment.
Feeling a little guilty for the poke, she said quickly, “What are the odds that we can guess where the Ghost will strike next? I’m not fond of always being one step behind the guy like this. I’d rather be waiting for him at his next hit.”
Jeff opened his mouth to reply, but a knock on the hallway door startled them just then, and he was out of the room before she could blink. She leaped out of bed and threw on pants, grabbing a pistol and sliding toward her bedroom door on bare feet.
“You can come out,” Jeff called. “The hotel had some faxes to deliver.”
She didn’t question the fact that he knew to tell her to stand down. He’d assumed she would cover his back, and he’d assumed correctly. She stowed the pistol in the holster sewn in the back waistband of her slacks and stepped out into the sunny living room. “Who’re the faxes from?”
