Hush: A Thriller Part 2

Dropping her flowers in turn, Emma choked out, "'Bye, Jeff," then broke into noisy, racking sobs as she stepped back from the edge of the grave.

Emma had adored her big brother.

Riley's heart ripped open and bled.

"Oh, baby." Margaret wrapped her arms around her daughter, who turned into them and lowered her head to sob openly on her shoulder.

Riley heard the whirr of the cameras, felt the sudden heightening in the crowd's interest as they zeroed in on Emma's heartbreak. She stiffened. Her hands closed in impotent fists.

Vultures.

There was nothing she could do. No way to protect Emma. No way to protect Margaret. No way to protect herself.

Lips tightening, chin tilting up in defiance of the mult.i.tudes clearly feeding on this fresh infusion of drama, Riley faced the fact that her only option was to continue to stand beside Jeff's mother and sister and endure as Father Snyder intoned the closing words of the service.

"I can't believe he's dead," Emma sobbed. "Why?"

"We're going to be okay, Em," Riley promised her sister-in-law quietly, while Margaret held her daughter close and murmured what comforting words she could. Jeff hadn't told his mother or sister about his conviction that George's a.s.sociates were being b.u.mped off, because he hadn't wanted to worry them, and Riley hadn't told them that she was actually the one who had found Jeff's body: after she'd gotten well away from the house, an anonymous call (from her, on her ID-blocked cell) had alerted the police, who had officially discovered it. Nevertheless, Margaret and Emma shared her certainty that Jeff had been murdered, because they knew him as well as she did-and because the thought that he had killed himself was just too dreadful for them to bear. If they knew what she knew they would never let the matter rest. She was afraid that delving too deeply into Jeff's death might make them targets.

She was afraid that delving too deeply into Jeff's death might make her a target. It was kind of like that if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest-where-no-one-can-hear-it-does-it-make-a-sound thing: if no one knew that Jeff had told her all his suspicions, that she had his phone, which contained the connect-the-dots material he had put together on the other questionable deaths and possibly photos of his killers and who knew what information besides, did that mean she was in danger anyway?

There was no way anyone could know that she had been the one to find Jeff's body. There was no way anyone could know that she'd taken Jeff's phone. There was no way anyone could know what was on that phone.

Was there?

Once the funeral was over, once her brain fog had lifted, she meant to go through the material on Jeff's phone with a fine-tooth comb.

But then she looked back at Margaret and Emma huddled together, and thought maybe she wouldn't. After all, nothing she found would bring Jeff back. She had herself and Margaret and Emma to think about now. Maybe it would be best to simply let a murdered ex-husband lie.

"I miss him so much," Emma sobbed into her mother's shoulder.

Riley's insides twisted. For the three of them, Jeff's death was the ultimate nightmare, the culmination of nearly a year of terrible events, and if one of them openly broke now under the weight of it, the only surprising thing about it would be that it hadn't happened sooner.

Father Snyder said, "Let us pray."

Riley bowed her head at the priest's directive. But the last thing in the world she felt like doing was praying, and her eyes stayed open. As Father Snyder's voice filled the air, she scanned the crowd. Impossible to say who she resented more: the unabashedly curious who, like her, ignored the directive to pray and kept craning their necks, or the reporters and camera crews that mingled with the crowd as if they had every right to be there, or Margaret's contingent of exquisitely coiffed and dressed high-society friends, only a very few of whom had bothered to stay in touch after George's arrest, or the snotty mean-girl group from Emma's expensive private high school who were obviously eating the whole thing up, or the dark-suited law enforcement types who stood out in this sea of dark-suited men because of their square-shouldered posture, their closed expressions and watchful eyes.

She was equal opportunity, Riley decided: she hated them all.

Her eyes collided with the glance of a tall, powerfully built man who was staring straight at her. His face was harsh-featured, too grim at the moment to be described as handsome, with broad, Slavic cheekbones and a hard mouth above a square jaw. His dark hair was cut ruthlessly short, and he had a deep, real-looking tan, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. She guessed him to be in his late thirties, and she was as sure as it was possible to be that she had never seen him before in her life. He stood far back in the crowd, and she probably wouldn't have noticed him except that he was inches taller than the people around him and was regarding her intently.

Everything about him, from his haircut to his well-cut black suit to the big, muscular body it covered, to the way he stood with his hands clasped lightly in front of him, made her think federal agent.

Like everyone else, the feds were searching for the missing money. Hard to believe that something in the neighborhood of a billion dollars could just up and vanish, but George continued to insist that all the money was gone, spent in maintaining his lifestyle. She, Margaret, Emma, and especially Jeff had been questioned so often and so extensively about what they knew of its whereabouts that they had come to detest federal agents on sight.

That they'd had the nerve to invade Jeff's funeral infuriated her.

b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

She glared at the man, which she realized a split second into it was a waste of time and effort-he wouldn't be able to tell because of her sungla.s.ses.

". . . Amen," Father Snyder said, concluding the prayer, and Riley's attention s.h.i.+fted back to him as, along with the rest of the crowd, she responded with the obligatory "Amen."

Moments later the service ended, and when she glanced back toward the tall fed he was gone.

FINN'S GAZE swept the crowd again. The tinted windows darkened the scene but didn't interfere with the details. Viktor Arshun was there. So were Tony Millan, Omar Khan, Al Guzman. All serious bad guys, enforcers for the Russian mob, stateside organized crime, Islamic-fascist interests, and the Medelln drug cartel, respectively. He knew them by sight, because it was his business to know them by sight. They didn't know him by sight, because it was his business to make sure they didn't. He had no doubt there were others like them in the mix, as well, circling the family and closest friends of George Cowan like sharks around chum.

Like him, they were after the money. From the look of things, Cowan had picked a lethal bunch to screw over.

No wonder he had practically run into the arms of the FBI when his crimes had been found out, pleading guilty even before he could be put on trial. Federal prison, where he was currently segregated from the general population, was the safest place on earth for him under the circ.u.mstances.

If he'd ended up anyplace else, he'd already be dead.

"Anything jump out at you?" Bax asked. He was behind the wheel of the inconspicuous gray Acura that was parked along the service road a few cars behind the limo that had brought the family to the cemetery. Far enough away to remain unnoticed among all the parked vehicles lining both sides of the road, but close enough to allow Finn to keep his eye on his target: Riley Cowan.

Who, to his annoyance, had made him. Her oversized sungla.s.ses had concealed her eyes, but the way her mouth had tightened as she looked at him, the way her jaw had firmed and her back had stiffened, the whole hostile vibe he'd picked up from her as she'd zeroed in on him out of the hundreds of mourners in the cemetery, had left him in no doubt that she'd noticed him and either taken an instant personal dislike to him (unlikely) or pegged him as a representative of something she had a problem with. Exactly what she had pegged him as, he couldn't be sure, although he guessed it was probably some kind of cop. It didn't matter: he wasn't there to be noticed, and it had prompted his retreat to the car. He'd just slid into the pa.s.senger seat beside Bax.

"Nah," Finn replied. He was burning up in his black suit, and not sorry to be out of the blazing heat even if it did slightly hamper his monitoring of the situation. Remote surveillance-hidden cameras, listening devices, etc.-had its limitations: person-to-person encounters outdoors were notoriously difficult to keep tabs on that way. Which was why he'd been standing among the crowd watching when he'd been made. He decided to humor Bax by feeding him what the other man would consider information. "They were talking to people before the service started, but none of it was really one-on-one. Looked like regular funeral stuff."

Jesus, the air-conditioning feels good. Texas in August is hot as h.e.l.l. Who could live full-time in a place like this?

For an instant Finn thought of Wyoming: the weather would be beautiful, cool and sunny, nothing like this raging furnace. He'd give a lot to be back there right now, working the ranch he'd bought and was slowly whipping into shape. Fixing fences, constructing shelters for the herd of Angus cattle he was building up, tending to the livestock-all that had been therapy for him after his last a.s.signment had gone disastrously wrong. He'd almost been killed, a friend had been killed, and he'd retired. For almost three years, he'd been free. Had thought he was free forever. Then the summons had come: they needed him again.

His lip curled: it was one of those offers you couldn't refuse.

He hadn't even thought they knew where he was.

"You really think one of them knows where the money is?" Bax asked.

"Hard to say," Finn responded noncommittally, knowing that Bax was referring to the Cowan women who he was watching, too. "George had to know his house of cards was going to collapse someday. No way he didn't prepare for the eventuality. No way he doesn't have a stash. No way he didn't tell somebody where to find his stash. Was it one of them? I don't know yet."

"My money was on Jeff. But with him dead and no activity anywhere..." Bax shrugged and his voice trailed off. Once Finn had informed him that he hadn't killed Jeff, Bax had been able to take a more objective view of what had gone down. By no activity, he meant none of the literally thousands of communication channels the government was monitoring had lit up in the wake of Jeff's death.

"Doesn't mean he didn't know," Finn said, glancing at the camera. "Just means he didn't tell anybody we know about before he died. At least, not so we've discovered."

If Jeff had talked to whoever had killed him, the sharks wouldn't still be hanging around. Word spread fast in a community like theirs, and somebody would be making a grab for the money. Unless the recipient of Jeff's confidence was smart enough not to make a move.

His gaze fastened thoughtfully on Riley Cowan, holding hands with her mother-in-law, whose other arm was around her wilting and tearful teen daughter.

Despite the heat, and the tragic circ.u.mstances, the three of them still managed to look coolly elegant as they stood for a moment talking to the minister with the crowd in motion around them. They were no longer card-carrying members of the one percent-far from it-but despite the spectacular fall in their circ.u.mstances they still had that indefinable air about them that marked the rich. He supposed that wasn't so surprising in the mother, Margaret, who was rail thin with the kind of carefully kept, chin-length blond hair that seemed universal to wealthy women of a certain age, or the sister, Emma, a pretty teen with a long, flaxen ponytail, who incidentally was the only one to show the kind of emotion he would have expected from the deceased's loving family. They'd been born rich, lived all their lives in a silver spoon world. The ex-wife-the joker in the deck-whose bright red hair and killer curves made her stand out in the crowd, was the one who surprised him.

Who kept on surprising him.

For the funeral her sleeveless dress was knee-length, figure-skimming, conservative. A far cry from the short, tight number she'd been wearing when he'd watched her discover Jeff's body. With her milk-white skin and fine features, she looked as to-the-manor-born as any of them.

Not bad for the daughter of a diner waitress and a steelworker. The background check he'd done on her had revealed a gritty past. Her dad had abandoned the family when she was eight. Her mother had died when she was seventeen, after struggling to provide for Riley and a younger, disabled sister. After that, Riley had done it all, going to school, working, taking care of the sister right up until the sister died, about six months before she met Jeff.

And the rest, as they say, was history.

Finn hadn't liked Jeff Cowan. He had zero respect for the guy. But he had to admit that the bogus billionaire's baby boy could pick 'em: the woman was out of the ordinary, and not just because she was smokin' hot.

But did she know where the money was? The jury was still out on that. At the very least, her actions made her extremely interesting to him.

To begin with, she'd squawked her head off to the local yokels about her suspicions that Jeff had been murdered, but she hadn't said a word to anybody about walking inside the family mansion in the middle of the night and finding her ex-husband's body. And as far as he could tell, she hadn't told a soul about taking that phone.

Which ten minutes later she'd disabled by removing the battery, so that if anyone tried remotely locating it they would come up empty.

He wouldn't have expected her to even think of doing something like that, much less know how to do it.

Smart woman. The question was, how smart?

She had a degree in finance. And she'd been building her own investment firm before George's arrest brought the walls tumbling down.

It was a combination that had earned her his undivided attention, unless and until a more viable prospect came along.

"You sure Cowan didn't commit suicide?" Bax asked, his tone almost diffident. A chubby five eleven, he had chipmunk cheeks, a snub nose, and smallish blue eyes beneath a light brown brush cut. He was an FBI special agent, but not exactly what anyone would picture when they thought FBI agent: he was a number cruncher, a computer nerd, a geek whose specialty was financial crimes.

Finn had been brought in as the "a.s.set recovery specialist," in alphabet agency speak. With no official government role, he had an unofficial mandate to do whatever he had to do to locate the missing money. Bax was, technically, his supervisor. The handler charged with holding the attack dog's leash.

Good luck with that.

"Yeah," Finn replied without elaborating. Once upon a time, as a deep-cover CIA operative, it had been his business to get men to talk. He knew all the techniques. He had no doubt that Jeff's eventual death might well have been part of the program that night. But someone had gotten sloppy, and it had happened sooner than antic.i.p.ated.

If whoever had killed him had been good at their jobs, Finn might even have arrived in time to save the little t.u.r.d's life.

For a price, of course. Everything worth having always came with a price. In Jeff's case, that price would have been information.

He had a feeling that by the time he'd shown up, Jeff would have been more than willing to tell everything he knew.

"Maybe we should just go ahead and question her. Now that the funeral's over and everything, I mean," Bax said uneasily. He was referring to Riley Cowan, whose bright red hair made her impossible to miss among the eddy and swirl of the crowd.

Finn watched her walking across the gra.s.s.

"Margaret! Emma! Riley! Look this way!" a man shouted.

Finn turned his head to find that TV crews were closing in on the women. Local cops were present to provide security. Not one of them made a move to intervene. Heading off a.s.sault by media clearly wasn't why they were there. All three made the cla.s.sic mistake of looking toward the shout as reporters and cameras converged on them. They had no security, and their only defense against the onslaught was to avert their faces and hurry toward the limo. A couple of men in suits, rent-a-cop types, got between the women and the oncoming horde. A uniformed driver-part of the package provided by the funeral home, Finn had no doubt-jumped out to open the rear door for them.

The tilt of Riley Cowan's head and her long strides as they ate up the gra.s.s radiated anger. Those oversized dark gla.s.ses hid her eyes, but her jaw was rigid with tension and her mouth was hard with it.

"I want to hold off approaching her directly for a little longer," Finn replied to Bax, watching as the trio reached the limo.

Stonily ignoring the shouting, swarming reporters that her woeful security team was doing a p.i.s.s-poor job of holding at bay, Riley got in last, sliding into the car behind her mother- and sister-in-law. He got the impression that she was protective of them, which was another interesting thing under the circ.u.mstances. Since she'd divorced the Crown Prince, he would have expected her relations.h.i.+p with her in-laws to be less than cordial.

If nothing happened in a day or two, he decided, he would pay her a visit, but for the moment he preferred to wait and see what, if anything, she would do. Now that Jeff's funeral was over, she might make a move.

He would be waiting if she did.

Softly, softly, catchee monkey.

- CHAPTER -

THREE.

"Will this awful day never end?" Margaret murmured as Riley stopped beside her.

Under the cover of the rattling of the air conditioner and the murmur of dozens of voices, it was possible to steal a few moments of private conversation even though the house was packed. The older woman was pale and exhausted-looking, with dark circles under her eyes. Riley's concern for her, already high, ratcheted up another notch.

"The answer was a big 'no,' hmm?" Riley's voice was equally low. She could tell that just from looking at Margaret's face. Margaret had been meaning to ask Bill Stengel, their longtime lawyer, if there was any way around the clause in Jeff's small life insurance policy that precluded a payout for suicide, especially in the face of the family's contention that he was murdered. When Riley had seen them talking a few minutes before, she'd been pretty sure of the topic.

"Bill says the company has to go by the official cause of death." Margaret sounded defeated.

"Figures." Riley wasn't surprised. The way things had been going lately, the surprise would have been any sc.r.a.p of good news.

They were in the small dining room of the modest brick house that Margaret and Emma had shared with Jeff after George had gone to prison. With a living room, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms, and a single bath all on one level, the rental was a little run-down but had the immense advantage of being cheap, which was what mattered most to them nowadays.

The walls were painted in muddy earth tones, the floors were scuffed hardwood, and the furniture-because the family hadn't been allowed to keep much more of their previous belongings than a few select personal items and their clothes-had been bought at a secondhand store.

Margaret looked as out of place in it as a peac.o.c.k in a chicken coop, but she was adapting with a dignity that, to Riley, was the embodiment of what she'd grown up referring to as cla.s.s in North Philly. (One thing Riley had learned since marrying Jeff was that people with cla.s.s never talked about anyone having cla.s.s. It was the poor shmucks without it, of which she had to admit she was still one, who used cla.s.s as a descriptive.) Case in point: without any outward sign of embarra.s.sment, Margaret was hosting the traditional postfuneral reception in a house that most of her acquaintances clearly, if silently, despised.

In theory, only close friends of the family should have been present, but in actuality the guests were a hodgepodge a.s.sortment ranging from a few of Riley's coworkers to Jeff and Riley's onetime couple friends to high school students to members of some of Houston's wealthiest clans. A pair of security guards at the door-they worked weekends at the Palm Room just like she did and Riley was paying them out of her own pocket for tonight-were charged with keeping out undesirables, such as media and law enforcement types. Catty, gossipy socialites were harder to defend against, and Riley had little doubt that the Cowans' reduced circ.u.mstances would, like Jeff's death and George's arrest, be an endless topic of conversation among the country club set for the foreseeable future.

"Did you eat?" Riley asked.

"Yes," Margaret replied. Riley knew Margaret was lying but she also knew that there was no point in calling her on it. None of them had been able to eat more than a few bites at a time since it had happened. "I don't think Emma has."

Emma had a troubling tendency not to eat when she was under stress. She'd always been slender, but since George's arrest she'd lost weight until now she was almost too thin. Riley hated to think what kind of long-term impact Jeff's death might have on her.

"She'll be okay," Riley said, both because she wanted to comfort Margaret and because she wanted to believe it was true.

"I hope so." Margaret glanced toward the dining room table, where several guests were at that moment loading their plates.

Earlier she'd overheard one of Margaret's couture-clad friends whisper to another, as she'd picked up one of the coated paper plates and looked down at it with distaste, "Honestly. This is just embarra.s.sing. Even if you didn't have a dime, don't you think you could do better than this?"