Flash

cold, wet fabric of his shirt clung to his skin. Olivia flinched in his arms.
    "Good grief." She stepped back quickly, pushing a tendril of wet hair out of her sultry eyes. Her kiss-softened mouth curved in with laughter. "I'm soaked. So are you."
    "You see what I mean about my lousy timing."

10
    « ^ »
    S he was still laughing a few minutes later when she handed him his jacket and his briefcase and ushered him out of her cozy little villa.
    "Hurry." She leaned out into the hall to watch him get on the elevator. "The cab will be downstairs by now. You don't want to miss your ferry."
    Jasper was still smiling to himself when he got out of the elevator eleven floors below. He should have been feeling at least a little let down, given the abrupt ending to what had promised to be an interesting evening. But for some reason he was in a surprisingly good mood.
    There was a new, unfamiliar sense of anticipation humming inside him, a feeling of possibilities.
    Or maybe it had just been so long since he'd gotten laid that he'd forgotten what the prospect could do for his mood.
    He nodded to the doorman who had summoned the taxi and walked out onto the sidewalk. The wind gusted, sending another sheet of rain across his shoulders.
    The cab was not directly out front. It waited on the far side of the street. It figured.
    Jasper jogged through the rain to where the taxi was parked. He opened the door of the cab and got inside.
    "Ferry dock," he said.
    "You got it."
    Jasper looked back as the car pulled away from the curb. His eyes went straight to the eleventh floor. It was easy to spot because Olivia was standing at the railing, watching him leave.
    The Mediterranean warmth of the sunny palazzo glowed behind her. She had put on a hooded raincoat for the second venture outside. It gave her a romantic, old-fashioned glamour. Juliet on a high-rise balcony.
    As he watched, she raised her arm in a farewell wave.
    He returned the salute and then settled back against the seat. A mistake. The movement plastered his damp shirt against his back. Still, he felt good.
    Very, very good.

    The rain was still coming down steadily forty-five minutes later when he walked off the ferry on Bainbridge Island. But he was still feeling good. He found his Jeep in the parking lot, climbed inside, and drove to the big house overlooking the waters of Puget Sound.
    The mildly intoxicated sensation lasted until he walked into the darkened kitchen.
    Three steps past the door, he came to a halt, keys in hand. For a moment he listened to the silence. There had been a lot of it since Kirby and Paul had left for college. He was slowly growing accustomed to it.
    But for some reason the sense of deep quiet was disturbingly intense tonight. It felt wrong.
    Awareness flickered through him. He reached out and pushed the control panel button that turned on the lights in every room in the house at once. When the place was fully illuminated from top to bottom, he listened hard.
    No panicked, fleeing footsteps. No squeak of floorboards.
    But the sense of wrongness persisted.
    Jasper walked slowly from room to room. Nothing was missing. There was no evidence of a break-in. No shattered windows. No one leaped out of a closet.
    The heavy door to the basement was still safely locked. Jasper had had it specially designed. It would have taken a great deal of effort to open it. Any attempt to do so would have left obvious signs.
    The average burglar probably did not expect to find anything of value in a basement, Jasper thought. And given that most prowlers were after items that could be fenced quickly and anonymously, the assumption would have been correct.
    He worked the sophisticated code to unlock the door. Then he opened it and went slowly down the steps. In the light of the overhead fixtures he surveyed his row of gleaming metal file cabinets.
    They were solidly made, built more like safes than standard cabinets. They housed and protected the kind of information that he did not trust to computers.
    There was a
lot
that he did not trust to computers. He liked to think of himself as a modern businessman, but he could not deny that he had an atavistic distrust of the new information storage and retrieval technology. He was keenly aware of the risks and vulnerabilities.
    Inside the file cabinets were the confidential background information on clients, tax records, and personal financial data that he had accumulated during the years he had been in business.
    There were