He had no idea who the client was. Couldn’t, in fact, tell male or female on the phone. Cruz could recalibrate the synthesized voice with a little effort. But it wasn’t the client who was the issue. The client wanted Amelia-Mia dead.
She was the issue.
Should’ve done it last night; then this would be a nonissue. He’d be on his way to the airport and a Brazilian beach.
First time he’d ever hesitated.
He tried to tell himself the hesitation was due to the odd feeling in his gut that the story his client had told him didn’t add up. Or maybe it was just his dick insisting on some playtime. He was in uncharted territory with not knowing why the fuck he was hesitating.
There was no rational explanation for it at this point.
All he knew was that his dick sure was happy about it.
Cruz shook his head. He was getting sloppy. His gut—and most certainly his dick—had fuck-all to do with completing the job he’d accepted.
The only reason he hadn’t finished the job was that murder opened up all sorts of drama he didn’t need. He did accidents. Autoerotic asphyxiation, no matter how much fun, would bring the heat’s spotlight on him, the strange new guy in town living outside her back door, his DNA all over her house. He could claim that was due to being her handyman, but now that he’d been all over her bedroom, in her closet, and in her bed, he doubted anyone would believe that he was just a handyman.
Fucking a woman sure could make someone suspect motive. Mia needed to have an accident, and now that he’d been stupid enough to do her every which way but dead, it needed to be a damn good, believable household accident.
He’d see if there was anything of interest on her computer, something that would finally convince him that she was exactly what and who he’d been told she was—a greedy, perverted, child-killing bitch—then do his job when he got back to the house.
After switching the bright yellow truck for a ten-year-old black Honda Accord he’d parked at a busy Walmart Supercenter, he drove to the fast-food place a few miles away, debated waiting in the drive-through line. He was hungry, and needed caffeine desperately. He’d had little sleep after he left Mia.
After finding the computer, he’d sat watching her until her breathing indicated natural sleep and not oxygen deprivation.
He’d gone back to the camper to sleep for a few hours, wanting to be back before she noticed he was gone for too long. Oso had already commandeered the narrow bunk, and Cruz had ended up hanging off the side of the uncomfortable mattress as the damn dog snored loudly right in his ear.
With the Honda smelling like grease and coffee, he pulled into the parking lot, already full with the breakfast crowd. Even this early, there was lots of movement: people lining up, cars coming in and out of the drive-through, people parked and talking on cell phones.
Great Internet access for the taking, and nobody to give a shit about one more guy wearing a cap, sitting in his car enjoying a couple of Egg McMuffins.
He inserted the thumb drive into his computer. No email, which was suspect, but not surprising. She’d done an efficient job of disappearing. The only things he found in her browser history were hundreds of how-to articles and various online purchase confirmations. There was a document with several hundred names on it, some of which had been struck through, and a to-do list with numbered items below in some sort of abbreviated shorthand.
Cruz tried to figure out what SWS and SIP might be, but he came up blank. Still, the list was the only incriminating thing on her computer. He copied the whole thumb drive onto his own computer to analyze later. “Fuck.” Definitive proof, it was not.
In the end, the trip wasn’t quite a waste of time. He checked his own computer. There was a reminder from his New York agent that he had another project to tie up. He hit Delete. More important than that other life were the two emails from an ex-lover whom he’d asked to put out feelers in Beijing. Lì húa Sòng worked in some secret capacity within the Chinese government. If anyone could give him answers, it would be her.
One had a grainy image of Amelia Wellington-Wentworth attached. Her arrival in Beijing ninety days ago. So that fact still stood.
She couldn’t deny Blush’s business dealings in China. She’d been there, several times this year alone. Since she’d been there, she must be aware of the illegality of hiring underage children as slave labor in horrific conditions. Slave labor without recourse.
The second email from Lì húa was a small news story in a local Chinese newspaper about an accident at a Guangzhou cosmetics manufacturing plant. Three days earlier a massive fire had broken out, more than three hundred kids had died, hundreds more suffered smoke inhalation and burns and were in critical condition. All because the stairwells had been blocked off so the kids couldn’t sneak off somewhere to rest.