Jenna’s eyes darted back to the doorway James had walked out of but there was no sign of him.
She looked to the other man seated next to Deacon.
Lachlan Taylor.
Lisa had been right. She’d said soon as they’d known she was in New York, they would assemble and come for her. It had taken them less than twenty-four hours.
Lachlan was here because he was the only one who might know about Jenna and she had plans to eliminate him along with James Thomas, making it look like a CIA mission gone wrong.
She heard his footsteps before James appeared in front of her. He slid a photograph across the desk. She stilled when she looked at it. Where had he gotten that from?
“That’s Leonardo. He was my Italian boyfriend,” she said, fighting to keep her voice calm.
“Was?” Lachlan asked, tilting his head.
“Was,” she said, looking at him. She shrugged. “We went our separate ways. He was quite inquisitive, not a characteristic I wanted in a boyfriend given my career choice.”
“You said you were in Rome with Black Widow when Fred died, but that’s not true,” James said, and she looked back to him. “Based on these photographs, you were in Paris.” James looked at her a long moment.
“For one night I was in Paris with my Italian lover. We were barely gone twenty-four hours.”
James’s eyes narrowed. “Twenty-four hours is plenty of time to fly from Rome to New York, perform a kill, and fly back. Lisa would’ve chartered a private jet using an alias, which meant she wouldn’t have needed to pass through long security lines or immigration, so that makes it even more possible.”
“What did Lisa have to gain from her brother’s death? She was the one who had to go into hiding. She gained nothing from his death, so give me one good reason why she would do it.”
“Because he was getting close to finding her. She saw Lachlan at the tour, and she got spooked. Lachlan forced her hand, so she sacrificed Fred’s life for her own safety. Fred was a man of honor, and as much as he was trying to protect her, eventually he might’ve had to turn her over if he couldn’t negotiate a deal, and she knew it. So, she took matters into her own hands,” James said.
She looked at him, bored. “Well, we clearly disagree. And you’re missing one thing: she was working at the Colosseum that day. Shouldn’t you be able to verify that?”
He tilted his head, his eyes never leaving her but she could almost see his mind churning, trying to solve the puzzle but he was missing one major piece. His phone rang and he brought it to his ear.
“Thanks,” he said then hung up. “Cuff her hands,” he said with a tight voice before he walked from the room for the second time.
JAMES
“She called this number twice, once at Grand Central and again while she’d been walking,” Samuel said.
“Unless there’s a third person involved, I’d bet my life that number belongs to Lisa. Can you trace it?” James asked.
“The phone is off right now. But she may turn it on again and check it. It’ll only be for a second—it’ll tell us where she is and nothing more. She’ll be using a burner phone from here on,” Samuel said.
“What can you find on the boyfriend?” James asked, pacing in a circle, his eyes on the manicured garden outside the study bedroom. The lights lit up the garden, but it was the shadows James wanted to see.
He felt eyes on him again, but he put it down to the unease that had followed him everywhere since Lisa had resurfaced.
“Leonardo Ricci. Thirty-four years old. Presumably dead,” Samuel said.
James stopped pacing. “Dead?”
“It looks that way. His brother reported him missing... a few weeks after the trip they took to Paris. Bank account activity stopped then too as did his cell phone usage. It looks like Leonardo disappeared.”
James rubbed the back of his aching neck. “Why would she kill him, Samuel?” he asked, more to himself than Samuel. “From the photos, which are only photos of course, but she looks smitten with him. Of course, that could all be an act—someone in her line of work needs to be an actress.”
“Maybe it wasn’t an act and he tried to end it and she didn’t like that,” Samuel said.
James nodded but he wasn’t convinced. “Or maybe he was a loose end.”
No sooner had the thought entered his mind that the window cracked and the alarm screamed through the house.