Page 51 of Hunted

Squaring her shoulders in resolve, she stepped inside and closed the door.

“Here.” Connor pressed the flashlight into her hands. “Lead me to the office.”

“It’s in the basement.” She bit her lip. “There’s a separate entrance. I should have told you?—”

“I saw it already. This was the easiest lock. Lead on.”

Lexi made her way through the kitchen, feeling like a thief in the night, which was exactly what she was, come to think of it.

“Here,” she said when they reached the basement door, and she pushed it open. She took a step downward, only to gasp in surprise when Connor’s arm snagged her waist.

“Easy,” he whispered. “I don’t want you to fall.”

She closed her eyes, resisting the impulse to lean back against him, or tip her head sideways so she could press her ear to those lips whispering so close. Instead, she took a deep breath and moved on. More slowly now, though. And instead of worrying about being guilty of breaking and entering, she was wondering why he’d be so concerned about her falling if he didn’t care about her. And wondering if he felt the same chills and tingles of awareness that she did whenever they touched.

She reached the bottom. He let go of her. Her disappointed sigh was involuntary, and he couldn’t have missed it. He was still too close. She turned left at the base of the stairs, moving the flashlight’s beam around until it landed on the office door.

“That’s it.”

He went to the door, tried the knob. “Shine the light on the lock.”

She did. This time he didn’t bother with the tools. A simple credit card maneuver that even she was familiar with, and the door surrendered as the first one had. It swung slowly into darkness even more inky than that filling the rest of the house.

“There are no windows in here. You can safely turn the light on.”

He did, filling the square oak-paneled office in light. “That helps.” Then he turned slowly, scanning the desk’s many coffee stains and uneven stacks of envelopes and scattered notes on scraps of paper. He turned to the filing cabinet and pulled a drawer open. “Hey, what do you know? Unlocked. Let’s see, Smith, Stanton, there we are, Stoltz, Elliot.” The file folder slid from the drawer with an ominous hiss.

Lexi stiffened, wondering if its contents would shatter everything she’d ever believed about her father. Or vindicate him, as she’d been insisting all along they would.

Connor set the folder on the desk and, to her surprise, stepped away. She looked up and met his steady gaze. “Go ahead,” he told her. “He was your father. You have every right to look first.”

Nodding, she pulled out the desk chair and sat down. Then, hands trembling, she flipped open the folder. Her father’s will sat on top. Beneath that, the letter he’d left behind describing the funeral arrangements he preferred. The cremation. She flipped more pages, found more papers and finally came to a copy of the one she’d signed, giving Jim McManus permission to retrieve the contents of the safe-deposit box for her. There was a handwritten note on the bottom. It said simply, “Safe.”

She read the word aloud, lifting her head slowly, turning it until she met Connor’s eager stare.

He frowned. “Safe?”

She nodded, lifting the paper to him, showing him the notation. Connor scanned the room, stopping when his gaze fell on a painting of dogs playing poker on the wall to the left. He went to it and lifted it down, revealing the small wall safe the painting had been concealing.

“Oh.” If the single word conveyed a wealth of disappointment, it was no wonder. Lexi had been hoping to find the truth once and for all tonight. “I guess we’re out of luck.”

“Sweetheart,” he said, and there was a gleam in his eyes. “You’re forgetting how I got my nickname.”

She widened her eyes and leapt to her feet. “You can’t?—”

“I won’t hurt anything but the safe, and we’ll reimburse him for that.”

She shook her head. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Come on, Lexi. What’s more important? Finding and ending a WMD that could wipe out millions, or the chance we might mess up some lawyer’s office?” He pulled a roll of duct tape and a plastic grocery bag from his duffle, then stood up on a chair to cover the smoke detector with them.

“It’s just not …” She’d been turning in a circle out of sheer frustration as she spoke, and then she stopped. “Look! The light on the answering machine is blinking.”

“So?”

“Well, if we listen to the messages, we might find out they’re on their way home right now. We might find out they’ll be here later tonight or early tomorrow. And if that’s the case, we don’t really need to do this.” She turned to face him, lifting her hands. “Do we?”

He grimaced. His chin fell to his chest. But he got off his chair, reached past her, and pressed the playback button.

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