Jane Sullivan - One Night In Texas

Alyssa assured the poor woman that of course it had been an accident and of course they had insurance to cover such things, but the housekeeper had been so freaked out that Alyssa had sent her to work on another floor. Then she’d taken off her jacket, tossed it onto the bed and cleaned up the mess herself.

In her mind she was already formulating a plan. She’d phone Owens’s decorator for the name of the gallery that had sold him the piece to see if they had a similar one. With luck, she could have it in place before Owens returned from his golf game—a weekly appointment he kept without fail—and discovered the empty pedestal. A similar piece of art couldn’t replace the one-of-a-kind vase that had been broken, but at least it would let Owens know that she’d made an effort to rectify the mistake in the most expedient and effective way possible. Since he’d only lived in the building a short time, she was especially motivated to solve the problem to his complete satisfaction.

Then, as she was twist-tying the trash bag, she heard a soft whirring noise. The rear elevator?

She froze. It couldn’t be. Mr. Owens wasn’t due back for two hours. The man never cut short his golf game. Never.

Sensing that something wasn’t right, Alyssa stood motionless, the strangest chill skating across the back of her neck. She peeked out of the bedroom into the living room. A man came into view and her heart jolted hard. It wasn’t Gerald Owens.

It was a man in a ski mask.

Suppressing a gasp, Alyssa backed away. A burglar? How had he bypassed the security system?

Her jacket was lying on the bed across the room, her phone in the pocket. All she had to do was dial 9-1-1. She started in that direction, only to hear footsteps and realize he was coming toward the bedroom.

With no time to grab her phone, she shifted her gaze wildly around the room, looking for a place to hide. She hurried to the closet and slipped inside, closing the door silently behind her. The closet light was on. But just as she reached up to turn it off, she heard his footsteps and pulled her hand away from the switch. If he saw the light go off, he’d know someone was in the closet.

With every step he took, her heart rate escalated. She clasped her hands together to stop them from trembling, sure he could hear the slightest move she made.

Then she heard nothing. She felt a shot of relief, only to realize that the absence of footsteps indicated that he’d reached the bedroom rug.

Which meant he was right outside the closet door.

DEREK KNELT on the rug in the master bedroom, flipping the corner back to reveal the floor safe. Again, the state-of-the-art technology offered in this building was working against Owens. With the software Derek had access to, the electronic keypad lock was a whole lot easier to crack than a combination lock.

Derek took off his jacket and stuffed it into his backpack, then pulled out his small laptop computer and flipped it on. Using a wireless connection, in a matter of seconds he set up an interface with the lock at its programming port. He hit a few keys, then sat back to wait as the computer ran the possible combination sequences.

“It’s only a five-digit combination,” he said to Kevin. “We’ll be out of here in no time.”

“Good. That means I might be able to go fishing this afternoon after all. I hear they’re really biting up at Lake Dallas.”

Unlike Kevin, Derek was glad this job had come up at the last minute. If it hadn’t, he’d have been at a wedding rehearsal right now, of all things. Talk about dodging a bullet. What would have been the point of him being there, anyway? How tough could it be to stand up with Gus at the front of that church and hand him the ring at the right time?

Derek didn’t like weddings. They seemed like a whole lot of time and expense to accomplish something that had the same end result as going to a justice of the peace, assuming a man were crazy enough to get tied down in the first place. Unfortunately once Gus had met Sally, Derek hadn’t stood a chance of keeping him. Gus had quit the team a year ago, started a security business and then asked Sally to marry him.

Derek couldn’t imagine that kind of life. He thrived on the excitement of crisscrossing the country to solve problems that had to stay under the radar of standard law enforcement. He loved the autonomy he had to get the job done any way he saw fit. He had so many aliases for his undercover operations that sometimes he had a hard time remembering his real name. Because of his profession, he’d never even considered tying himself down to a lengthy relationship, much less a marriage. Likewise, was it really fair to expect a woman to tolerate his here-today-gone-tomorrow lifestyle?

Suddenly the words flashed on the screen: combination found.

“I’m in,” Derek told Kevin. “How’s it looking downstairs?”

“Coast is clear.”

Derek returned his laptop to the backpack, punched in the code on the keypad, then opened the safe door. He pulled a penlight from his pocket and flicked it on. A sweep of the interior of the safe revealed a small stack of folders. His intelligence said that Owens had yet to deliver the DVD of Galloway to his client, and when Derek opened the top folder, he saw just how dead-on that information was. In the left-hand pocket of the folder, he found a DVD that was labeled clearly with Galloway’s name. Owens was a meticulous record-keeper. Derek smiled to himself. Anally retentive criminals made his job so much easier.

“Got it,” he told Kevin.

He was about to close the folder and tack it into his backpack when his attention turned to the right pocket of the folder, which contained photos, lists and other information about the blackmail operation. As Derek flipped through the pages, he came to a stunning realization.

He might have solved one problem, but he’d just found five more.

“Holy crap,” he said.

“What?” Kevin said.

“It looks as if Galloway isn’t the only congressman Owens is blackmailing.”

There were photos of several more congressmen, as well as detailed plans for blackmailing each of them. One other congressman shared Galloway’s predisposition toward women’s clothing. Two had been caught cheating on their wives. Two more were victims of setups that only made it look as if they’d been cheating. But real or staged, it didn’t matter. Either one could send a man’s reputation right down the toilet.

“How many are we talking?” Kevin asked.

“Five others besides Galloway.”

“Why didn’t we know about them?”

“Apparently, Galloway is the only one who came forward and asked for help.” Derek flipped through a few more pages and saw a schedule of delivery dates. “Right now it looks as if Galloway was the last guy Owens collected information on, and it’s the only DVD he hasn’t yet sent to his client.”

Derek wasn’t sure what to do with the file. If Galloway was the only one being blackmailed, he’d take it, along with every other file in the safe. But now that it was clear that other congressmen were involved, he didn’t want Owens to know that somebody had broken in. Owens would alert his client in a heartbeat, which meant they wouldn’t stand a chance of locating the rest of the blackmail material that had already been delivered.

“Call Washington,” Derek told Kevin. “Get in touch with Sedgewick. Tell him the situation. We need some new marching orders.”

Derek waited impatiently as Kevin made the call, anxious to get the hell out of this apartment before something else went wrong. Only two minutes passed before he heard Kevin’s voice again, but it felt like a hundred.

“What’s the word?” Derek asked.

“We need to grab Owens and get him to Washington for interrogation. They need to find out who his client is so they can have a shot at locating the blackmail material before Monday morning. And bring everything else in the safe, too. They want to know what else this guy is up to.”