You don’t go on the run so much as you buy your escape. You need capital, but it can’t be cash—the courts will strip you of cash. But they can’t take your property. Not unless they can prove it was stolen. And I happened to have a fat collection of very expensive, legally obtained jewelry.
CHAPTER 7
EXCEPT THAT my collection had vanished.
I kept the most valuable pieces—a Tiffany tiara, a double-row gem-encrusted bracelet, three pearl necklaces, a blue sapphire Heart of the Ocean replica, an 18-karat-gold locket, five sets of diamond earrings—inside a large cardboard box marked FEMININE PRODUCTS. I kept the box wedged between the piping and the wall of the bathroom sink, hidden behind columns of spare toilet paper. Burglars will riffle through your drawers. They’ll tear art from the walls looking for a safe. But they generally steer clear of toiletries. I’d thought I was being clever.
My heart started beating so hard I could feel it in my toes. Maybe, I thought, Anthony had moved my jewels. He always believed his custom-made safe was impregnable, had told me more than once that I was being ridiculous. I ran back through the bedroom and into the hallway, pulled up a corner of the carpeting, and spun the dial on Anthony’s sunken vault. Nothing inside but a ledger and some pictures of his late mother.
Maybe Anthony had moved my stash to a more conventional locale. I checked all the places jewelry might normally be kept: the engraved mahogany case on my vanity table, my dresser drawers, my desk drawers. All empty. Every last piece gone.
Who else would have known to look in that box under the sink?
I thought, Sarah.
I thought, Serena.
I thought, Sarah and Serena.
Had they teamed up to kill Anthony and rob me? The idea didn’t sit right. We’d always gotten along, even gone on day trips together when Anthony was away. But then I couldn’t remember the last time they’d both been absent on the same morning. At first I felt betrayed. Then I realized it went beyond simple betrayal. They knew my history with Vincent, knew Florida’s top crime boss would be only too happy to kill me limb by limb. They’d set me up. It was probably one of them who called Vincent from Anthony’s phone.
No more time for thinking. I heard a car pulling up the gravel driveway, moving at top speed, then hitting the brakes hard. I went to the window, peered through the blinds. Vincent had sent his top dogs: Mr. Defoe, a consigliere of long standing, and Johnny Broch, Vincent’s go-to muscle. I watched them jump out of their sedan and take the porch steps two at a time. At least they had the courtesy to ring the bell.
Anthony’s paranoia was about to pay off for a change. In addition to the obligatory panic room, he’d had hidden passageways built all over the house. The panic room wouldn’t do any good. Either they’d wait me out or find their way in: Anthony and Vincent shared the same architect. But the paneling behind the armoire in the front bedroom swung open if you touched it in just the right spot, and behind that paneling was a ladder leading straight to the garage. I hooked my travel bag over my shoulder, heaved the armoire out of the way, and started down.
We had twin cars, his and hers Bentleys—his a four door, mine a coupe. If Anthony had been really smart, he’d have kept some kind of low-profile getaway vehicle: a Ford Focus or a Hyundai Elantra—something that would blend in once you’d made it past the driveway. It’s hard to go unnoticed in a Bentley, but then I guess that’s the point.
I got behind the wheel of the coupe, tossed the travel bag on the passenger seat. Anthony must have searched far and wide to find the slowest-moving automatic garage door in Florida. I watched it inch its way off the floor, counted to fifty before it even cleared the front bumper. “Come on, come on, come on,” I begged. My nerves got the better of me. I hit the gas too soon, clipped the bottom of the door, heard an unholy scraping as it ripped the paint from the Bentley’s hood. Outside, I floored it, saw Vincent’s men sprinting for their sedan in my rearview mirror.
I took our winding, gravel access road at eighty miles per hour, kept expecting more of Vincent’s goons to pop out from behind the bushes. If they had, I swear I’d have run them over. But the only button men I had to worry about were in the sedan on my tail, Defoe behind the wheel. And they were gaining steadily, as if the Bentley was a Model T and they were driving a tricked-out Aston Martin.
My best hope was to make the highway, then let the Bentley’s engine put some distance between us. I ran every red light in the local town, passed a truck around a blind turn, took the on-ramp doing a hundred. They were right there with me. I darted between lanes, looked up to see Defoe grinning, our cars not five feet apart. I got onto the shoulder and floored it. I figured this would end one of two ways: with a caravan of state troopers in my rearview or with a clean getaway. I couldn’t allow any third option.
They kept pace for a long stretch, then started to fade. Maybe the Bentley wasn’t such a bad choice after all. When there was enough distance between us, I slipped into traffic, got off at the next exit, zigzagged down suburban streets until I was sure I’d lost them.
I pulled into a strip mall and practiced my deep breathing, willing my pulse to slow. Then I started for Tampa, taking back roads all the way.
CHAPTER 8
DETECTIVE SEAN WALSH
ANTHONY COSTELLO was an old-fashioned accountant: he hoarded paper. If he bought a stick of gum back in 1990, he still had the receipt, and he demanded the same from his clients. Lucky for me, he was also cautious, bordering on paranoid. Anthony hung on to every scrap, but he didn’t keep any of it—incriminating or otherwise—in the house. He rented adjoining storage units at Pete Owens’s Stow-and-Go on the outskirts of Tampa. I know because I helped him find the place.
I first met Pete Owens back when I was working Robbery and he refused to testify against one of his cat burglar tenants. A weekend in jail did nothing to change his mind. That’s the kind of guy you want watching your stuff. Pete didn’t so much as bat an eye when Anthony signed the lease “Jonathan Dough”—maybe because Anthony agreed to pay triple the rent, plus ten grand for permission to knock down the cement wall between the units.
Of course, I hadn’t told Heidi about the Stow-and-Go. Or anyone else, for that matter. Call it pleading the Fifth in advance. Why implicate myself over five hundred square feet that no one knew existed? Not to mention that having Anthony’s business files in my back pocket gave me a leg up on my former partner.
I waited for the lunch hour to pass, then drove to the facility, punched in the access code, and watched the steel gates slide open. Anthony’s units were at the back, in an alcove beyond the sight lines of his fellow tenants. Picking the industrial lock—Anthony, like his uncle, trusted me only so far—took longer than I care to admit. I stepped inside, flicked on the overhead, pulled the door shut behind me.
If I’d been the one writing Anthony’s eulogy, I’d have led with this: He was the most compulsively organized human being I’ve ever met. The walls of the double unit were lined with identical floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, each cabinet representing a calendar year. Turn to the left once you walked through the door and you could go from 1995 all the way to 2017 without finding a single sheet of paper out of place. I turned to the right. The year I wanted was 2015.