In a quivering voice the man said, “I don’t know anything about it.”
Shaw sighed. “Paul... Mr. Harmon wants it back.”
There was no answer for that. “I...”
“That’s a hundred thousand dollars. No questions asked.”
“I...” The pronoun stretched out this time. Quite lengthy.
“It’s out of the country, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Which was enough of an answer for Shaw.
His eyes met Nilsson’s and she nodded. LeClaire, and the others, now had confirmation they’d gotten the real S.I.T.
She kept her hand near her weapon while Shaw stepped forward and collected the attaché case.
As they walked toward her Range Rover, LeClaire shouted, “Wait! Can I move now? Can I lower my hands?”
Disconnecting the call, Shaw said to Nilsson, “So how about that lunch?”
14
Don’t think about the damn thing, she told herself.
Allison Parker, doing the ungainly and adored butterfly stroke, finished her laps and climbed from the backyard pool. She’d done a mile today.
Do. Not. Think.
The forty-two-year-old brunette, tall and in taut athletic shape, was wearing a blue Speedo one-piece. She pulled off the matching swim cap and snagged a towel. The cap helped but wasn’t a tight seal. Her hair, long and curly, dripped, tickling. This she blotted first, and then dried the rest of her body.
Don’t think...
Swimming occasionally came with a memory: of another pool, the one in the backyard of the house she’d recently sold. Their marital home.Formermarital home. She could picture the lapping water, the comforting blue tiles, the stonework of the deck, the mismatched metal and plastic furniture on the stone patio.
But those images were overshadowed by what she’d been thinking of today, while trying not to. The white cement sculpture, a shallow three-dimensional relief in the wall of the rinse-off shower beside the pool.
A seahorse.
The creatures can be comical or eerie or sensuous. The one at their old house was supposed to be the last of those, smoothly curved and with a seductive eye.
Don’t think... But think she did.
She sees the snowflakes falling delicately, landing on the creature’s head and back and tail. Flakes melting. It appears to be crying.
Mid-November. The family is in the kitchen. Parker is thinking of Christmas baskets and baking. Jon and Hannah are working on a school project.
But then he rises and, with that damn look in his eyes, says he has to go out. He won’t be long.
“No, please,” she says. Not a woman who begs, she is begging now.
The night has been good. It doesn’t need to go bad.
Parker brought herself out of the memory and finished blotting, hung the towel on a rack, to dry in the sun, pale though it was. She wrapped a glaring-yellow SpongeBob SquarePants towel around her, stepped into her orange flip-flops.
Her hair drooped, stringy. Center parted, it ended at her shoulders.