"Give me what I want or it gets worse from here." Gates smacked her again, and she couldn't stop her startled gasp. "Your grandmother started a list of clients, then sold it to Karen Ehlers with the business. I have every reason to believe it's in this house. I want it now."
She cupped her hot cheek. "Why would it be here?"
"Because Ehlers told me she gave it to Marie before she died. Your grandmother was her momma whore. When Karen got worried about her safety, she hid it here, a sort of insurance policy. You might have heard that Karen had decided to write an exposé. She thought that list would ensure that no one came after her, a sort of mutually assured destruction. She promised not to use real names, but everyone would have figured out her clients' identities."
Belle shrank back. "I don't know anything about it. I only met my grandmother once, when I was a child. We didn't keep in touch. I was surprised she wrote me into her will at all."
Gates frowned. "But you've been living here. You must have seen something. I found a draft of that Ehlers bitch's actual manuscript. She'd written the part that identified her clients and their sexual preferences in code, based on that list. I destroyed the manuscript and all the electronic copies of it I could find. I need to do the same with that fucking list. The elite of New Orleans are on it, and being exposed would ruin them."
Belle wasn't so sure about that. New Orleans wasn't exactly known for being uptight and prudish, but Gates clearly wasn't willing to take any chances.
And that was when she remembered the camera.
If she could trip the motion detector, at least she could capture her attackers on video and they would be identified. They wouldn't get away with murder. And leading them upstairs would take them further away from Tate. She had no idea how long it would take him to metabolize the drug, but she didn't like that gun being so close to his helpless form.
"I haven't found anything like a list." The minute she gave it up, they were both dead. She couldn't imagine how Eric and Kellan would cope if they had to walk into this house and find her body, along with Tate's. They would be devastated. She had to fight for every second.
"Well, that is very bad for you," Gates snarled, raising another hand to her.
She raised her hands to ward him off. "But I haven't searched her bedroom."
Gates's eyes narrowed. "You've been sleeping there."
She shook her head. "No. Not since the first couple of nights. I moved into one of the smaller rooms because I couldn't sleep in the master. I heard voices."
Gates chuckled, a nasty sound. "Yes, I had Mike set an audio device in the ceiling above the bed. It was tripped after the light was off and the room went still. The device would whisper when you were asleep and turn off the minute you moved. It was supposed to make you want to move."
Clever, but she would try to use it to her advantage. "It scared me. I didn't like to go into that room, but I know my grandmother kept a lot of very personal things in there."
She'd found pictures and a box of little keepsakes. The closest was big, and Belle hadn't even started to clean it out yet. There were storage boxes under the bed, as well. With any luck, she could keep them upstairs and searching for a very long time.
Gates nodded toward Helena. "You look through the office and the library. I'll take her upstairs. Don't make a mess. Our scenario is not a burglary. The last thing I need is for the cops to go over this place with a fine-tooth comb."
Helena let her go, obviously secure in the fact that Belle had another gun pointed straight at her chest. "I thought you had your interns looking through there last week."
So that's why he'd insisted on "taking inventory" of everything in the house. They might have looked through drawers and rifled through closets, but they had obviously missed her grandmother's hidey-hole.
"I couldn't actually tell them what I wanted them to find. I told them to bring me anything that looked like personal notes because Marie Wright might have jotted additional instructions about the division of her estate. Of course, the idiots didn't find anything. Start looking for hidden compartments," he instructed Helena. "Wright was a whore for a long time. She ran a brothel herself. She knows how to keep a secret."
"What about him?" Helena frowned as she looked toward Tate's body.
Gates waved off the worry. "He'll be out for hours. Don't worry about him."
As her grandmother's lawyer marched her up the stairs, Belle prayed Tate had the chance to wake up again.