“You busted into my house.”
“We believe Jones is responsible for the theft and sale of a famous diamond,” said Rickard.
“Really? Would that be the Sweet Celestia?”
The agents exchanged an unfathomable agent look that was bad news whatever way Aria viewed it. “What? I read the news.” The story had broken while she’d been in the air, but she’d read it in the paper left in the back of the cab she took from the airport. The Celestia had auctioned for sixty-five point two million only to be discovered as a fake.
Both agents passed her on the stairs, Rickard sneezing again and Choi tossing over his shoulder, “Stay away from Vegas, Ms. Harp.”
She clattered down behind them. “That’s it?” If only they knew scamming tourists was part of her alibi. She got no response. That couldn’t be it. “Wait.”
She still had the envelope in her hands. She got to the kitchen and spread out the contents on the counter. The deeds, a bank statement, a key. The agents were at the front door. There was a tidy two mil in the bank a decade ago. The key would open a storage facility and unless she judged wrongly, it would be filled with rare antiquities, most of them obtained illegally.
It wasn’t the Sweet Celestia, but it was real.
Cleve had done everything right by her. She knew he’d loved her when they’d both lived in this house. He’d taken Celestia if not because he still loved her, to keep her safe. She couldn’t let him get put away for that.
“What if I could help you put Cleve away?”
That brought both agents to a stop on the front porch. Choi turned. “The same Cleve Jones you’ve had no contact with in a decade.”
She shrugged, the same way he had earlier. It wouldn’t endear her to them and it might endanger her.
She didn’t know if the word of a thief could save a thief, but she had to take the risk and try.
Chapter Ten
Cleve wasn’t ready for the boredom. It was all about the walls. Four gray ones. One had a door in it, painted gray. A single bunk attached to the wall with a thin mattress on it and an over-laundered gray sheet. He wasn’t getting past the walls anytime soon, other than to hit the commissary to eat, and to be interrogated. Again.
He’d been here three days after the flight from Japan, humiliatingly handcuffed, as if he was a truly dangerous felon, a violent stand-over man or a wannabe gangster, but it felt like thirty years. They couldn’t hold him much longer without charging him. They’d only kept him as long as they had because they deliberately bungled the paperwork knowing he’d disappear the moment he could shake the tail they’d invariably put on him.
Everyone involved knew he was guilty but it would come down to what evidence they could get that would stick. And apart from being appallingly distracted after completing the deal with Shoma in Nagasaki, Cleve had been careful, very careful, about not being sticky and having a legitimate cover story. Lessons from the professor he’d learned well.
But he should never have gotten caught in the first place. On an ordinary workday, he’d have known he was being watched. He’d have taken appropriate action to avoid being cornered, but he’d been thinking about how to track Aria, how to arrange for a majority share of the Sweet Celestia’s sale to get into her hands. Whether she’d be angry enough to stay hidden again and if there was any point opening yet another bank account in her name, hoping she’d show up to claim it.
He was thinking of how she’d made him feel when she’d gone off with that brick wall looking for sex, about how he’d have kneecapped the big guy rather than let him have her. About the savage joy he’d felt when she’d said she hated him but came on his hand, and how hard it was to leave her sleeping, knowing he might never see her again when she was all he could see when he closed his eyes.
Now he was thinking about who’d betrayed him, because despite being distracted, it was no accident he was sitting in this holding cell trying not to pine for Aria.
The bunk bed was hard and there was no pillow. Pining wasn’t for career criminals. It was probably written in the professional criminal code, fine print he’d missed. Pining is punishable by incarceration in gray-walled rooms. Once you decide on a life of dodging the law you’re disqualified from pining for a decade-old romance with a woman who spent that long staying hidden from you.
It was common sense.
It was as depressing as sleeping in your car, as finding your soul mate again after a long search and being forced to betray her.
He lapped the cell once more. It was the boredom doing this to him, making him twitchy, making him replay that short time he’d had with Aria and build it into something more than it was. It wasn’t about snapping into each other like two halves of a lethal pair of scissors, two blades sharped by the existence of the other. It wa
s basic curiosity after all the time apart and the rat in a trap game of being hunted and caught. Surely the chemistry was just a by-product of all that, not a reason to want to recut his future.
Assuming he was going to have one that wasn’t confined to gray walls.
The boredom was punctuated by an unappetizing lunch of unidentified slop, during which he kept his eyes down and his senses on high alert because a good proportion of the men in here were killers and gangsters, and then it was time for the frivolity of interrogation.
Two officers arrived to escort him to an interview room, much as they’d done every day since he’d been here.
“Gentlemen,” he said when they arrived. “Nice day for it.” He had no idea if it was raining oceans outside, but any polite conversation was good conversation.
“You can stop with the pleasant, Jones,” the grumpier of the two said. “You’re not winning any points with us.”