St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

phone. No messages. Damn it, Faroe, is it too much to ask for you to check in occasionally? “In the next forty-eight hours. But first you must agree to the terms.”
    “Nobody edits my stuff,” Martin said.
    “I wouldn’t care to,” Steele said distinctly. “But if it comes to filming any St. Kilda employees, you will disguise their faces, and in some cases their voices. This isn’t negotiable.”
    Prosser grimaced. “But—”
    “Not negotiable,” Steele repeated. “Martin has known that from the beginning. And before you think about screwing me or my employees, think about what St. Kilda Consulting is: a good friend, a bad enemy.”
    Prosser looked irritated but didn’t argue. “What’s in this for you?”
    “Journalists rarely inquire as to the motivations of a good source,” Steele said evenly. “Gift horses and such. All that journalistic ethics requires of you is the belief that my information is valid. It is.”
    “We’ll be checking,” Prosser said, looking at Carroll. “You can count on it.”
    Steele smiled. “I do.”
    Prosser drummed his fingers on the table and looked past Steele, thinking hard. “What we have now is maybe a ten-minute segment, maybe less,” he said finally. “We need more.”
    “Bertone’s backers are getting restless,” Steele said. “The window of opportunity is closing. You’re either in or you’re out. No more meetings.”
    “Okay. If we got some modern pictures of Bertone, here in the States,” Martin said quickly, “stuff from the inside, it would juice up the segment. Otherwise, people won’t believe philanthropist Bertone was once a murderous gun smuggler.”
    Steele sighed and gave in. “The Bertones are having a big party at their Pleasure Valley house on Saturday, plein air artists in some abominable contest. Would that do?”
    “If Bertone is in the pics, okay,” Martin said. “And we need some idea of how Bertone is getting around our banking laws.The kind of money you’ve talked about can’t be moved around legally without leaving a trail.”
    Steele’s pale eyes narrowed. If Kayla Shaw talked to save her own neck, she’d give them her boss…. “We’ll do our best.”
    Martin looked at Prosser.
    “You’ve got a deal,” Prosser said.
    “Okay!” Martin said.

6
    Pleasure Valley, Arizona
Friday
10:31 A.M. MST
    K ayla Shaw drove quickly up to the gate of Elena and Andre Bertone’s Tuscan-style estate. The five-acre building site for Castillo del Cielo had been blasted out of dry, rocky hills less than two years ago. Now the acres were green and white, lush and expensive. Glass, art tiles, and copper gleamed among columns of imported Italian marble.
    She suspected that beneath the marble was good old Arizona stucco.
    According to bank records, the Bertones had paid more than five million dollars for the land. They had spent another ten million on construction of the house, guest casita, staff quarters, pools, gardens, and a guarded gate at the bottom of the hill. They even had a heliport out beyond the pool, complete with a racy little helicopter tied down and waiting for the royal whim.
    The people who served the royal whims weren’t all directly employed. The Bertones had more than $125 million on deposit with American Southwest, which entitled them to an unusual level of service. Kayla paid bills for the Bertones, she movedmoney among their many accounts, she covered overdrafts and shortfalls, and she made house calls to Castillo del Cielo to pick up deposits and drop off receipts.
    In short, she was a gofer. It wasn’t what she’d thought banking was all about, especially private banking, but it paid the bills.
    As she waited for the guard to come out of his “shack” and buzz her through the gate, she looked at the tumbling, glistening wall of the water feature next to the guard building. Castillo del Cielo’s annual water bill for squad-sized showers, epic water features, and three swimming pools was almost as big as the escrow check in Kayla’s purse. As a desert girl that kind of extravagance made her uneasy, but the child in her delighted in the play of sunlight and dancing water, and the scent of water in the desert.
    Even if it was tainted with chlorine.
    She glanced through her open window at the guard shack, where a young man stood listening patiently to the phone held against his ear. Jimmy Hamm had been working for the Bertones for two months. He was a young, chatty former minor-league ballplayer who