* * *

  The missing puzzle pieces had to be in the shell companies. As soon as they were settled into a suite in Vegas, Paul focused on the financials. One shell company led to another which ended in the Cayman Islands. Following the second, not for money, as Winchester had, but to see what the business was moving around in terms of goods, or properties, maybe he’d land on an area of business—either physical or interest-wise. Like textiles. Or IT equipment. Maybe they managed cleaning services. He’d seen a cleaning service charge to the company that had paid Kelsey’s rent and mortgage. He’d already followed up on that. After he’d made a few phone calls, he’d discovered that they had been hired to clean the home before the new owner moved in, but never actually met the owner. A key to the vacant home had been left in an envelope for them under the doormat.

  But the other shell companies that also seemed to empty into the Cayman Islands account...he had no legal way into their records, but he could investigate their names, as he had the first one, then run a search and see if anything came up.

  He wouldn’t find the owner, but with many of their other leads dead for the moment, he’d be happy just to know where to possibly start looking. He wasn’t done with Thomas Gladstone, either. The guy had capitulated too easily.

  Which was believable if his father really had put him on a tight leash. Something that would be easy enough for Paul to find out with a single phone call to the old man. But not until he was sure he wouldn’t be sending evidence further underground.

  For all he knew, the Gladstones were in deep—and not separately, but together.

  Maybe Kelsey had gone from son to father and the baby had been Thomas’s half sibling... Lord knew, Kelsey Carmichael had Daddy issues. Had come by them quite honestly. Her old man had been a piece of work...

  Had Kelsey’s father even attended her funeral?

  He could just imagine how that would have gone over with Gloria present...

  “Paul!”

  Phone to her ear, Haley burst through the door between their two rooms. “Turn on the TV,” she said, grabbing the remote and turning it on herself. She’d showered, put on a pair of jeans and a white short-sleeved top, in spite of the 103-degree temperature outside, and was wearing the soft cotton socks they’d purchased, along with the antibiotic cream and bandages from shops downstairs.

  The lone flip flop he’d carried from the garden had been thrown in the trash when the Pahrump police had determined that it wasn’t evidence as no one but Haley had touched it during the crime and they knew where she’d been. As soon as she was ready, they were supposed to be going to another shop in the hall of shops between their resort and the next one, to pick up a few more things for both of them to wear. And then on to wherever he was taking them next.

  She’d been swinging one knee impatiently as she stood there on one foot, with the other barely touching the floor by the toes, as she worked the remote.

  “There,” she said. “I’ve got it.” Apparently meant for her caller as he had no idea what she had. Or why.

  Based on the tense expression she was wearing, he wanted to know, though, and stood up, fully focused on the television screen as a commercial played.

  “Jeanine just 911’d me. Said that she was watching the news, saw a preview of an upcoming story...” she said to Paul and then, into the phone, “J? I’m putting you on speaker phone.”

  She pushed the button. Jeanine didn’t greet him. Did he say hello to his ex-wife’s best friend? They’d been close once upon a time. In the end, she’d hated him.

  At least it had felt that way.

  “Hey, Jeanine.” The words pushed out of him.

  “Hi, Paul.”

  That was it. No small talk.

  But it was enough.

  “A top story tonight with a sad ending... Noah Willoughby, heir to his deceased father’s fashion label empire, a business currently being run by his mother, was found dead in his apartment overnight...”

  “That’s him!” Jeanine’s voice came loudly over the phone. Filled with tension. Fear. “As soon as I saw his picture flash up as the coming-up-next story, I knew it was him. I swear to you, that’s the guy I saw, the one who said he was afraid he’d led them to Haley...”

  “Twenty-one-year-old Noah graduated from University of Las Vegas last month and was set to head up the production division of his father’s label called Charles! next month. Noah’s been working for the Charles corporation since his sixteenth birthday, starting out on the production line. His father, Charles Willoughby, also a racecar driver, died on the track when Noah was a freshman in high school. Noah was at the track with him and witnessed the crash...”

  Paul’s brain picked off words, key information, as though he were snatching them out of the air, bringing them to his mental table.

  Associations he’d seek out. He didn’t focus on the young face splashed on the screen, but he noted, quite clearly, that if it was Noah who’d traveled to California to warn Haley, and then he’d ended up dead, the chances of her being in very serious danger had escalated.

  And that there could very likely be a baby.

  Just as he acknowledged that the news was only going to broadcast the good stuff about the kid. He had to get to the real life, find out who and what Noah had been involved with outside his father’s business.

  And find out if Charles! had ever used the services of a lawyer named Grainger in Pahrump, and what connections, if any, there were between Thomas Gladstone and Noah Willoughby.

  It was also possible that Jeanine was wrong.

  “I thought you didn’t get a good look at his face,” he said now.

  “I didn’t think I did. Not that I could describe for the police. But when I saw him, I recognized him immediately. It’s his eyes. I can’t describe them, but I recognize them. And the forehead and bridge of his nose. They remind me of that guy who played Peter Pan. That’s probably why he seemed elfin to me. It’s him.”

  She was talking quickly, more like expressing aloud her internal free thinking, but the Jeanine Paul knew had been anything but a drama queen. She’d taken everything in stride. Too much probably.

  Which was what had drawn her and Haley together.

  “While cause of death won’t be known until after an autopsy, a person at the scene, speaking with anonymity, said that it looked like he’d overdosed...”

  Paul’s internal sirens started ringing and, spinning around, he got to work.

  He had a baby to find.

  An abductor to find.

  A potential killer to find.

  And an ex-wife to protect.

  Chapter 12

  Her neck was stiff. Her feet stung, but with the salve she’d put on them, coupled with the cotton socks that had kept them moist, but breathable, for an hour, they were surprisingly walkable. With no deep cuts or punctures, she’d gotten lucky. It helped that the flip-flops she’d bought had thick yoga mat bottoms on them. She’d paid more than she ordinarily would for a pair of sandals, but Haley didn’t even blink about that part. Picking them up in black, and white, too.

  Money meant nothing to her at the moment, as evidenced by the new black cotton shorts she was wearing with a white tank that hung loosely down to her waistband. There were a couple of other outfits in the shopping bag she’d left in her room. They’d come back only long enough for her to change; no way was she taking time to remove more tags and put clothes away in her suitcase.

  She’d have gone out in her jeans and the heels she’d bought the night before, just to get going sooner, but Paul had suggested that it would be better if she blended in more with the Strip’s thousands of tourists. Wearing jeans in temperatures over a hundred could make her an easy spot. And she couldn’t run in the heels.

  That last comment had been sobering. Reminding her that they were facing impossibly high stakes. Taking on the moneyed world of Vegas to find something that someone didn’t want found.

  Paul had used his own moneyed influence to have a new car waiting for them when they got downstairs. He’d purchased it, another SUV, so it had temporary tags that wouldn’t be traceable to anyone until at least sometime the next day, maybe longer, depending on how quickly the paperwork and DMV registration happened. The new vehicle was midnight blue.

  He was donating the black one to a home for boys in Vegas, taking the suggestion from the dealership owner who delivered the new vehicle to the hotel.

  The list of people the Charles! corporation was associated with, or had ever had a run-in with, or been to a party with, was seemingly nonending. The chances of Thomas Gladstone and Noah having come into contact was highly likely.

  Paul had explained that he was zeroing in on Noah Willoughby himself, first. Before they’d left the hotel room the last time, he’d been on the phone and had told Haley that he’d used his own access to friends in high places, which vetted a call to the local coroner who admitted that Noah’s cause of death was definitely an overdose. And it didn’t look like an accidental one.

  Added to the amount of drugs in his system, and a suspicious-looking injection site, was the fact that while the kid had had a drug problem in high school, following his father’s death, he’d been clean ever since.

  “This first place we’re going, Ambrosino’s, why is it first?” They were running out of time and the only way to get the job done was to tamp down emotion and focus. A lesson she’d learned from Paul. In the past and during their current association as well.

  After an hour on the internet, he’d emailed the list of their next stops to her, asking her to go over it and see if anything sounded familiar, or prompted a memory of something Kelsey might have said in one of their phone conversations.

  With disappointment, bordering on despair, she’d recognized nothing, but had downloaded the list to her phone with a self-order to focus.

  “A social media post showed a posthumous honoring of Charles Willoughby there this past year. A young man who’d been recipient of a scholarship from a program financed by Charles! was just hired by NASA, and that, among other ongoing accomplishments from the elder Willoughby’s life, was highlighted...”

  All of which was heartwarming, but what it had to do with Kelsey or...

  “It makes sense that the Willoughbys would have chosen a favorite place, a place that had been frequented by the family enough to feel like home to them, to host such an evening.”

  “They’ll likely know a lot about Noah,” she translated, nodding.

  “And family history. I’m hoping that someone there will be willing to speak with us and you might be better suited to make that happen.”

  “Taking the family angle.” She nodded. “Me being Kelsey’s sister, and her being recently deceased.”

  “I was thinking more that depending on how close Kelsey and Noah were, she might have been there before, and you, as her sister, are taking a nonthreatening look out of love, just to learn all you can about her life in Vegas, which makes them feel safe to be chatty...”

  Truth. Without bringing in the drama.

  Haley wasn’t sure about the chances of either of them pulling that off, especially with the long line of dead ends they’d run into, the urgency pushing at her back and the butterflies in her stomach, but she liked the sound of it.

  She liked working side by side with Paul, too.

  Liked being with him without all of their crap getting in the way.

  And was beginning to think that maybe, when the job was done, they could find a way to become friends.

  Or, at the very least, to stay in contact with each other now and then.

  Kelsey would like that.

  Until the divorce, she’d been fond of Paul.

  * * *

  “Yeah, I know her...knew her. Noah... God rest his soul...told me she’d passed.” The older woman with a white apron tied around her jolly-looking belly glanced up from the photo Haley had just shown her and motioned Paul and Haley toward a table off in a little alcove in the darkened room. A guest could easily get lost in time inside Ambrosino’s. Going back years...with the photos of Rat Pack associates on the walls, red real-leather-padded booth benches and solid cherry tables. And going back hours, too, as, even at three in the afternoon, it looked like nighttime.

  Cozy nighttime. Family dinner nighttime. Friends getting together to laugh over good food and wine type of nighttime.

  Paul followed Haley’s lead and took the seat he’d been shown at the table. Haley’s presence, her plea to the maître d’ at the reception desk, had netted them the chance to speak to the head chef who’d been cooking for the Ambrosino family for over forty years. A feat which would have taken him longer than Haley to accomplish, if he’d been able to succeed there at all.

  Sometimes credentials tore down walls, other times, they erected them.

  “Did you know her well?” Haley asked Maria, leaning in toward the woman, her ponytail falling over her right shoulder—giving Paul an expected glimpse of her neck, and the bruise that was forming just beneath her left ear. Fury filled him, swift and sharp. Unlike any he’d felt before that morning when he’d known for certain that Haley had been abducted.

  “...sweet and funny, and so good to our Noah...” With a moment of mental blankness, he returned to the conversation at hand, the important moment that was happening, and realized that he’d actually missed part of a critical interview.

  Heat moved up his neck to his face, making it difficult for him to sit calmly, to sit at all. And he couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t in danger from a foe completely separate from the one they were seeking. He had to get the job done. To know Haley was safe.

  And then he had to get out—of her space, of her life—before she sucked him back under the spell that had nearly unhinged him the first time.

  “I don’t know how he met her—he just started showing up with her now and then, swearing that there was nothing between them, when I teased him, but I could tell he was sweet on her. Didn’t matter to me that she was a bit older than he was. These days, who cares?” She threw up her hands, both palms to the ceiling. “He said they were friends, helping each other out some, and I know she definitely helped him, going with him to the first few Charles! black tie functions he had to attend as an official member of the board. I know ’cause they came back here afterward for ice cream. My boy all grown up, meeting his grown-up business responsibilities, and then sitting in his tux eating ice cream!” She chortled. And then sobered, her eyes, capped by wiry gray bangs, filled with tears. “I can’t believe he’s really gone,” she said, shaking her head. Then, after pulling a handkerchief out of her pocket and wiping her face, said, “And don’t listen to what they say about him. I saw the news. Ain’t no way that boy took drugs and killed himself. He didn’t even drink alcohol, not even for his twenty-first birthday, he was so afraid of kicking in an addiction. That’s why they came here for ice cream...”

  With a feeling that the woman was going to go on for hours—hours that could be critical to finding a baby alive—Paul said, “When was the last time you saw Kelsey?”

  The chef frowned. “Kelsey?” she asked looking almost affronted. “Who’s Kelsey?”

  “She is,” Haley held the picture back in front of Maria. “You said you knew her.” With a glance in his direction, Haley signaled distress.

  “I do know her!” Maria tapped the photo gently. “But that’s not Kelsey. The last time I saw that woman was about six months ago. But her name’s Maya. Maya Ambrose. I know because we teased her that her name was so much like Ambrosino’s!”

  Click. Click. Click.

  Pieces latching into place. Not to form a picture yet. But giving him a solid side of border—and a need to get back to his computer.

  Maya Ambrose. Like Ambrosino’s.

  A fake name? Taken from a family place beloved by her lover?

  Her lover. A man who’d risked his life to warn Haley—someone Kelsey would have told him about, as the younger sister had clearly depended on her older sister for every bit of strength she’d ever had—that Kelsey had had a baby that was in wrong hands.

  Who better to know that than the man who’d fathered the child?

  Who’d be more likely to risk his life, than the child’s father?

  Where Gladstone factored into it all—and a lawyer in Pahrump—he had no idea, but one thing was for certain.

  The visit to Ambrosino’s had been a game changer.

  * * *

  Flying high with hope, Haley wanted to hug Paul as they left Ambrosino’s. She flung her arm through his, pulling it to her side as she always had in the past, without thinking about what she was doing.

  As soon as his warmth pressed against her, she dropped her arm, stepped away, but she couldn’t undo what she’d done. Her side had felt him. Remembered him. Sent the message through the rest of her body. Which responded immediately. Strongly.

  It missed him.

  He didn’t show any reaction to her blunder, but she didn’t really look at him, either. Just started babbling about everything they’d just heard. Repeating herself more than once as she exclaimed over the breakthrough. The reason they hadn’t been able to find records of Haley for the past year.

  She’d been using an assumed identity.

  “At least we know she was here,” she said as Paul pulled out into traffic on his way to the next address on their list. A club that Noah had frequented, as found on the social media site of another young man who’d seen him there. Not someone he’d known, just someone with a quasi-celebrity sighting.

  “But what I don’t get is why they had to hide a baby. I mean, I know there’s an age difference, but Kels was only twenty-eight. Seven years isn’t scandalous even for a conservative family, if they are one. Especially not in Las Vegas.”