“This is scary?”
“I’d say ten thousand bucks-over that short period of time, for one account-is on the road to damn scary.”
She took another gulp. “You don’t suppose he just had a really high-yielding CD?”
Double damn, but he had to laugh. And she knew he couldn’t help it, because she smiled right back at him. “So,” she said cheerfully, “it looks as if Jon had been thriving in his blackmail career for quite a while. It’s not everyone who has that kind of job skill, Cord.”
“Trust you to see the positive.”
“Hey, at least he was good at it. Money seems to be showing up all over the place around here.” She braced, then clunked down her tea. “Okay. My turn. I was following the money, as we talked about. Going through the list of accounts in Jon’s Quicken. I can’t imagine he’d use an open program like that if he was trying to hide anything, so it was just as unlikely the police thought anything looked suspicious. And maybe they were right. But I found a payment of fifteen hundred dollars a month for the last eighteen or nineteen months to the same place.”
“What was the name?”
“JONA.”
Cord shook his head, mystified. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“I’m not through.” Her tone softened, the humor gone. “Once I pinned that down, I went back to when this all started. Around eighteen months ago, Jon paid a ton of credit card bills to various stores.”
“Nothing odd about that.”
“These stores were, like Toys ’R Us. A furniture store specializing in baby furniture. Several hundred dollars spent at another place, called Babies and Blankets.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Cord frowned.
Since he wasn’t drinking it, Sophie reached over, took his shooter of Talisker and threw back a slug. After another minute or two of violent coughing, she croaked, “I’m afraid it will. Wait a minute.”
She charged back into the computer room and came back with her booty from the printer. The four pictures were grainy, poor-quality prints, but they illustrated the same thing-a baby. The first was a newborn shot, followed by a baby who was obviously a little older, and finally, a shot of a toothless, hairless, chubby-cheeked baby in a red-and-white Valentine dress.
“A baby,” Cord said blankly. And without pause, swallowed three solid gulps of the Talisker-a drink that deserved being savored with respect. “This can’t be what it looks like. You’re telling me my brother had a
“I keep thinking that maybe there’s some other explanation. But I can’t think of one. He’s been paying regular support, paid for a bunch when the baby was born. The pattern’s pretty inescapable.” Sophie studied the last photo, then said, “Looks as if you have a niece, judging from the dress.”
Cord pushed away from the kitchen counter, the way a boxer might shoot off the ropes. “We’re getting out of here.”
“We are?”
“I’ve had enough. So have you. Enough of bad news and sad news. Enough of sleazy behavior and roads that lead to more sleazy behavior. Enough focusing on my brother.”
“But, Cord, we’ve finally broken through, really started making some major discoveries. For the first time, I think we have a shot at figuring out the player, or players, in this whole mess. But maybe we should even be calling the police, telling them what we found out-”
“A lot of
“Where to?” she asked bewilderedly.
Chapter 8
Sophie was still trying to fathom it. How they’d ended up
She’d never been to Silver’s before-never heard of it, and probably never would have, if Cord hadn’t dragged her here. The place was stuffed with young professional people, even this late on a Thursday night. Most looked as if they’d come directly from their jobs, judging from the business suits on the men and the heels on the women, and typical of Washington, the buzz was all about the day’s political events.
For an after-work hangout, the place struck Sophie as unusually appealing. The long bar gleamed under firelight and antique brass lanterns. Round ma hog any tables were packed in tight, but a few revelers had left their seats, pushed off suit coats and kicked off heels, abandoned their drinks and hit the corner dance floor. The music emanated from a new-fashioned jukebox-not the 50s era, art-deco type of box, but a brass-and-glass player with high-end speakers. Instead of quarters, the machine demanded bucks, and someone had emptied their pockets of singles to play a run of slow, bluesey love songs.
Those on the dance floor had abandoned politics, power and DC gossip. Tummies rubbed tummies. Arms hooked around necks. Cheeks rested against shoulders. Everybody wasn’t addicted to stress, Sophie mused. Every once in a while, people actually remembered what life was really about.
Like falling in love.
Her mind wasn’t remotely on the rest of the crowd, yet somehow she’d helplessly, hopelessly picked up the prevailing mood. Her arms, for instance, were roped under Cord’s neck. Her cheek was definitely snuggled in the crook of his shoulder. Her tummy didn’t happen to be rubbing against his tummy, because of the difference in their heights, but her tummy was unquestionably rubbing against his pelvis. Her breasts hummed awareness at the evocative contact; her pulse thrummed to the evocative beat of the song. If her eyes weren’t smoky with shock, she thought they should be.
The shock wasn’t finding herself in a place like this. The shock was that Cord had taken her here-apparently to dance. When he couldn’t dance. At all.
He could make a girl fall in love, though.
Since Sophie didn’t do reckless, didn’t want to do reckless, had never remotely even felt reckless since she was five, she figured this had to be Cord’s fault. She didn’t rub her tummy against a guy’s you-know-what. She didn’t look up at him, nakedly communicating longing and desire. She didn’t tease, with the graze of a breast, the tickle of a fingertip, the promise conveyed in the snuggle of body parts. She sure as Sam Hill didn’t put up with a guy stepping all over her feet.
So there was only one conclusion she could possibly reach-that Cord had forced her, completely against her will, to feel this way.
“Are you thirsty?” she murmured. “We ordered drinks and then never even waited until they got to the table.”
“Very thirsty. But not for drinks.” He looked at her…as if he were a starving lion, and she was the only thing he hungered for. As if she were standing naked and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. As if there wasn’t a thought in his head but wanting her.
See, she told herself. It wasn’t her fault little shivers kept chasing up her spine. It was all his.
“You don’t think,” she asked carefully, “that we should head home?”
“Hell, no. There’s nothing waiting for us back there but more serious problems. More grenades without pins. We’re not going home. Maybe ever.”
“Um, Cord.” She rubbed a finger on the nape of his neck. With her arms swooped protectively around him, she’d created a private cocoon between her face and his. Her eyes and his. She wasn’t sure which one of them needed more protecting, but for darn sure, the expression on his face was stark with stubbornness. “They’re going to close the place pretty soon.”
“But not yet. It’s not closing yet.”
“Don’t you have classes tomorrow?”
“Yup. An eight o’clock class, in fact. Don’t care,” he said; and then, as if all this talking had exhausted him, ducked down just those few more inches so his mouth could touch hers. Claim hers. Woo hers.
Her eyes closed. Plain old lust, she was positive she could have fought-or at least kept her head. But this
