Kiss Read online

  “I am hardly the evidence that will convince him. I sure wasn’t persuasive last time.”

  “We have data.”

  “Half-fleshed data. Data that wasn’t even sound enough for me to run with before the accident. I hadn’t even put it in front of my editor yet. Besides, for all we know the senator is not ignorant of what has been happening. He might even be the mastermind behind it all.”

  Shauna glared at him. “I don’t believe it. I can’t.”

  “Why not? The man has to keep up appearances. You don’t think he’d hire Wilde and Spade to keep his own hands lily-white?”

  “He would have killed them himself to protect Rudy.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go basing your actions on your gut right now. Not unless you want to get yourself killed. Because I guarantee you McAllister doesn’t feel the same way about you.”

  The fact stabbed Shauna deep. Even though his words were true, they were cruel. She made her hands into fists and pressed her knuckles against her eyelids and took a long breath.

  “Mr. Spade called me this morning,” Khai said. Shauna startled. She’d forgotten Khai was in the Jeep with them.

  Miguel twisted to look over his shoulder. “That would have been nice to know.”

  “He was upset, worried. Said he’d gone to meet you in Corpus Christi and found your car, your phone, some clothes. He asked me to call him if I heard from you.”

  “This was before or after we called you about the elephant?”

  “Before.”

  Shauna held her breath.

  “I called him back after we spoke and told him you were with someone, I didn’t know who. That Wayne Spade, he is dangerous. I said you told me you needed to get away, that you were going to Guatemala and asked me to have some money wired to you. I remembered you telling me that you went there often.”

  Shauna’s relief expressed itself in a light laugh. “Brilliance happens,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Why would he believe Khai?” Miguel said.

  Khai said, “I gave him the name of a bank there. I found it online.”

  “You made up account numbers too?”

  “He wouldn’t have asked me for those, even if he doubted me.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’d go there,” Miguel said.

  “But it could mean he won’t waste his time coming back here,” Shauna said.

  “The truth is, we can’t possibly know where he is,” Miguel said.

  Khai said, “I offered to collect the things he’d left at the house, have them ready for him. He said he wouldn’t be coming by and instructed me to ship them to Houston.”

  “He’s going back with Wilde,” Miguel said.

  “Or just as easily on his way to Guatemala,” Shauna countered.

  “The point is, he’s not here.”

  “But the senator is,” Khai said.

  Now Shauna twisted in her seat. “What else do you have up your sleeve?”

  “He leaves again tomorrow morning,” Khai said. “His car came up the drive as I was leaving.”

  Shauna decided. She needed to talk to Landon, needed to seize this opportunity.

  “This is an in-your-face chance, Miguel. We should take it.”

  Miguel shook his head. “Your father knows me. If he’s in on this, if he sees me with you . . .”

  “You’re right. We can’t let him see you until we know,” she said to Miguel. “I’m going in with Khai. Wait where you drop us, and I’ll be back out as quick as I can.”

  Miguel set his jaw, and she braced for a list of reasons why he would not let her out of the car.

  Instead, when he parked a short distance from the house, he studied the windshield and said, “Watch out for Spade.”

  30

  Shauna was slightly surprised when the security detail allowed her to enter the house through the kitchen. Perhaps Patrice was not here. Or Trent had kept his promise to talk with Patrice about ending the lockout—before their falling-out.

  The women parted ways in the red-tiled hall. Khai squeezed Shauna’s hand. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “God is with you.”

  The sentiment caught Shauna off guard. “My mother used to say that to me. Is that from the Bible?”

  Khai nodded. “For those who believe him.”

  “She also used to say, ‘Nothing can separate you from the love of God, Shauna.’ Is that in the Bible too? Or is it just a nice idea?”

  Khai’s mouth broke into a wide smile. “It’s from the book of Romans. ‘Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future—’”

  Shauna hardly heard the rest. Neither the present nor the future.

  “‘—will be able to separate us from the love of God.’”

  Goose bumps trickled over Shauna’s arms.

  “If Wayne finds us, you will not be safe,” Shauna said, worried for the woman who had so selflessly helped her so many times.

  “I’m not afraid. I’m taking leave this afternoon to visit my brother.”

  “I hope this is a . . . memorable time for both of you,” Shauna said.

  “It couldn’t be otherwise.” Khai left her with a hug.

  Shauna watched her go, wondering if it was possible that God’s love, like her mother’s, had never abandoned her, whether she had merely stopped looking for it in her life.

  A noise in the kitchen snapped Shauna out of her reverie. She considered where Landon might spend the afternoon, if an hour or two was the only time he had. The fitness center, maybe. Her father’s study was on the other side of the house, the large patio between them. She stepped to the nearest window.

  No one at the pool. It was October 24 and unseasonably cool, too cool today to be out, even in Texas. Taking the full-circle hallway to the back wing, then past the bedrooms, she kept an eye out for Rudy, whom she wanted to hug, and Patrice, whom she planned to avoid. She saw neither.

  Coming into the wing containing the offices, she turned right and stopped to listen before she would come into anyone’s view. She heard voices. Patrice, on the phone in her office, door open. And Landon, having a one-sided conversation with someone in his office, probably also on the phone. She caught mention of a poll. She eased herself into a position where she could, she hoped, see into his office without being seen.

  The tone of Landon’s voice pulled her closer. This was a voice she had not heard since—since she couldn’t say, easy and unaffected by a public expectation. This was a voice she had heard more often as a child, well before her mother’s death, and if she’d been asked a moment sooner, she would have said she couldn’t remember it. But there it was. Patient, smooth like pumpkin pie, and warm like the sun on a winter’s day.

  This was not the strained voice of a man days away from a national presidential election. Whom was he speaking to? She dared to look.

  The curtains of Landon’s office were drawn against the noon glare, and bulky bookcases lit by dome lights provided the main lighting. Landon sat at his desk with his back to the door, tipped back in the leather seat as far as it would go, stocking feet on the ink blotter, big toe looking green under the emerald glass shade of a banker’s lamp. He cupped a tumbler full of melting ice in both hands and laughed at his own joke.

  In his own mechanical chair on the opposite side of the desk sat Rudy.

  Shauna moved into the door frame and leaned against it, smiling at her brother. The horrible bruises around his eyes had faded. Or maybe it was the lighting. He looked good. Better anyway.

  Landon must have noticed Rudy’s eyes shift, for as his chuckles tapered off, he put down his feet and shifted forward in the chair to see who stood at the door. She had the presence of mind to turn the ring on her right hand so that the diamonds faced her palm.

  He lifted his empty glass her way, a meaningless toast offered with a shrug.

  “Shauna. Rudy and I were just catching up.”

  The tension of their last encounter still reverberated.

  �
�Hi, Landon.” She took a tentative step into the room, then rounded the desk and stooped to place a kiss on Rudy’s forehead. “Hey, Rude. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  She took the seat next to her brother. Landon looked at her, silent, as if she couldn’t have hoped to enter the conversation he was having with Rudy and so wouldn’t continue it.

  “That’s quite a shiner you’ve got,” he said, tipping up his glass though there was nothing left in it to drink. Shauna glanced toward the bar at the back of the room.

  “Can I get you some more?” she said.

  He waved her off. “Day’s young. The gray cells have a long way to go yet. Rudy and I were celebrating the passage of a little bill of mine today.”

  Shauna noticed for the first time that an identical tumbler one-third full of dark creamy liquor over ice sat in front of Rudy.

  “Congratulations.”

  “A bit prone to accidents these days, are we?” His gaze fell on her swollen cheekbone again.

  “Apparently so.” She looked at Rudy, grateful for his presence. “Landon, I need to talk with you about a . . . sensitive matter. Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Campaign’s going fine, thanks for asking. Ahead in the polls by 15 per-cent and growing, so long as I don’t slow down and Anderson doesn’t make any more royal mistakes in front of the press.”

  Landon referred to the deputy campaign manager who had replaced Rudy and couldn’t resist a camera.

  She knew she would have to wait, let him stay in control of the conversation. “I’m sorry he’s been such a headache.”

  “Well, I can tolerate a dull pain so long as it gets me where I need to be.

  Rudy here, though, he gets the credit for the grunt work. Anderson didn’t have to do a thing but keep Rudy’s strategy in motion. You did a fantastic job, son.”

  Shauna felt a fresh grief for what she had lost in Rudy. Grief, it turned out, was all that connected her to her father anymore. The loss of her mother and the loss of Rudy fell heavily on them both, but from different angles. She wondered if grief would eventually be what severed their thin ties.

  Perhaps. If Landon continued to blame her for the wreck.

  “Will Rudy go to the White House with you?” she asked.

  “Maybe. Like to have him there. But his therapy is here. We might have to wait and see, give him time.” His mouth moved around these words like someone else had fed them to him. Patrice, no doubt. The practicality couldn’t hide the underlying passion. If it were up to Landon, these two would never be apart.

  Shauna took a risk. “I would like to help with Rudy. Here. As long as he needs it. If you trust me with that.”

  “Pam’s doing a fine job.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “What was so important that you crashed our little meeting here?”

  Faced with the opportunity she had insisted was so critical, she realized she didn’t know where the front door was. How to enter this conversation? There was the direct: What part are you playing in the laundering scheme that’s funding your campaign? There was the oblique: Would you tell me about the profit-sharing structure at MMV, why it was changed a few years ago? There was the reluctant: I heard this rumor, and I can’t possibly believe it’s true. And there was the desperate, bottom line: Wayne tried to kill me, and I need to know you’re not a criminal about to take the White House; I need to know you weren’t behind it; I need to know you love me too much for that.

  In one second she shut the door on each of these options, seeing intuitively how far south they would go, and how fast. These questions would fail to get her closer to both her father and the truth. Was there even a way for her to have both—intimacy and honesty? Or were they mutually exclusive where Landon was concerned?

  When her father rose from his seat as if to end the conversation, she threw off the burden of her hesitation and spoke the next words on her lips without thinking them through.

  “You and I fought right before the accident.”

  “I’m not sure an apology is worth much at this point.”

  “I wasn’t—that’s not what I meant to do.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  Shauna took a deep breath.

  Landon said, “Rudy would not have gone back with you if you weren’t so hot under the collar.”

  “Tell me what we fought about.”

  Landon dropped back into his seat. “Now isn’t that ironic? You can’t even remember.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You got some crazy notion into your head that my out-of-pocket donation to the campaign was dirty. That’s ridiculous, Shauna. I can’t believe you would think I would—”

  “It wasn’t just my notion.” Wrong thing to say!

  “No, I don’t doubt that Statesman reporter was feeding you ideas, taking advantage of your employment at Harper & Stone. And who knows what else.”

  The insult made her flush. She had to keep this conversation on target. “I think the mistake I made was in assuming you were aware of how MMV’s profits had skyrocketed. I assumed you engineered it.”

  She hoped he hadn’t engineered it. Oh, how she hoped!

  “And how would I do that? I haven’t been involved in their strategies for years. Wilde took that over when I entered politics and has never screwed it up. He’s had great success, ‘Wilde Success,’ we call it, in the international markets. Indonesia, Thailand, even Cambodia. What’s shocking about that? I’ll tell you again, Shauna, and I said this that night—you can check my tax returns, you can audit me, you can hold a magnifying glass over every penny I’ve ever earned. I would not jeopardize my career or my office by doing something so inordinately stupid.”

  Shauna put her hand on Rudy’s knee and dropped the tone of her voice to a low, even level. “Landon, I’m pretty sure that my hunches were correct—not about you, but about the money. And I’m even more sure that the accident was no accident at all. Someone set that up.”

  Landon shook his head and wagged a finger at his daughter. “Shirk your responsibility all you want, Shauna. It’s still pinned on you, no matter what outrageous ideas you’ll cook up.”

  “Wayne and Trent and Leon are in a position to rig MMV’s policies in any way that’s beneficial to them.”

  Landon snatched his glass off the desk and marched back to the bar. “This sounds like some half-baked theory that reporter would feed you. What was his name? Lopez?”

  Shauna was glad her father wasn’t looking at her. She didn’t want to bring Miguel into this yet.

  “I tipped my hand, asked Wayne the wrong kinds of questions. He figured me out.”

  “He would have gone to Wilde, and then Wilde would have come to me, and my issues with you would be a whole lot more complicated than they are now.” Landon uncapped the bottle of liqueur and poured it over his watery ice.

  Shauna rose and crossed the room to stand next to her father. She needed to keep him calm—for Rudy’s sake—and hoped he would open up to her, for the sake of truth. For the sake of their crumbling relationship.

  “He went to Wilde, but the two of them didn’t go to you. Wouldn’t it make sense for them to keep you in the dark? You get legitimate deniability. The less you know, the less you’re guilty of.”

  He spun to face her. “I’m not guilty of anything but tolerating your pitiful need for attention.”

  She pleaded with her eyes for him to remember that Rudy was still in the room with them. Landon took a drink.

  “Of course you’re not.” She laid a hand on his arm. “But Wayne . . . Landon, I have evidence that he tried to kill me.” She pointed at Rudy. “Wayne did this. Uncle Trent did this. Not me.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He was closed to her touch. She wasn’t getting anything.

  “Rudy wasn’t supposed to be in the car.”

  “Wilde would have stopped it.”

  “But Wayne had put the machine in motion. Dad. Can’t you see what’s going on?”
/>   Landon exploded with just enough self-control to protect his son. His voice and emotions were restrained, but his face was bright red in the dim room. He set his drink on the counter and leaned in close to Shauna.

  “If Wilde and Spade were involved in anything so illegal, and if they thought you were going to expose them, they would have found a dozen other ways to keep you quiet. They would have sought my advice. They live and breathe on my authority. And if I knew about it, and if I was such a devil that I needed to cover it up, I would have taken out that loco Lopez, not my own children.”

  “Wayne tried to kill him too.”

  Landon closed his eyes, exasperated.

  “Miguel Lopez was in the car with me.”

  “You were at the party together? What do you think that says about your motivation, Shauna? And why wasn’t he on scene? Why isn’t he in the accident reports? Are you the only one who saw him? I suppose Wayne planted drugs in your car too?”

  Shauna looked at Rudy, unable to bring the conversation around.

  “And who else has our dear Wayne Spade tried to take out?”

  She knew better than to bring up Corbin Smith at this point.

  “People don’t murder over money laundering, girl. They don’t kill over a plain vanilla, white-collar crime.”

  “No, they don’t. They kill to gain the presidency, Landon. Listen to me. There is something so much bigger than we realize going on here. I don’t know what it is yet, but I promise you—if it’s big enough to kill for, it’s big enough to destroy everything you’ve ever worked for.”

  She cupped his face in her hands as if he were the child. “Dad. I’m only here because I couldn’t bear to see that happen.”

  As she spoke the words, she was not at all surprised to understand that they were true. She sensed the gap between them close by a hairline, as if he was dropping his defenses against her. Would he give her access to his own mind? Was that what she wanted?

  She wanted to be close to her father. She didn’t want to steal from him.

  She was close enough to see the horizon of his mind, crowded with a city-scape of memories. She saw the street forged by Landon’s fraternity with Trent. It cut through the peaks and valleys that she recognized as McAllister MediVista’s booming growth. She saw in the background, barely perceptible, the smaller world of his childhood. In the foreground were buildings crowded with people: colleagues he trusted, political opponents he had grown to hate. She spotted her mother in a mansion at the calm center and was tempted to linger there, but unwilling to take something so precious from her father. She saw Patrice, her arm linked in Landon’s at a fund-raiser held at Columbia University, where she was a tenured professor of economics. Shauna saw herself. She saw Rudy.