St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

inside she was jittery, irritated, fretting and pulling at the bit like a green-broke bronc.
    Freedom.
    She could taste it.
    She just couldn’t live it anymore.
    Grow up, she told herself impatiently.
    I did. I don’t like it.
    Working with Bertone and the glittering Elena was too high a price to pay for being an adult.
    Where’s my backpack when I really need it?
    The path ended in a head-high wooden gate next to the wall of the seven-car garage. The motion-sensor light mounted on the corner of the garage came on as she approached. Hidden speakers breathed out faint music from the party.
    The garden walls were covered by fast-growing flowering vines whose twisted stems were almost as thick as her wrists. The fragrance was like a caress in the dry air. The padlock on the gate was open, hanging crookedly behind the latch. The wrought-iron latch lifted smoothly, almost silently. She hesitated, then stepped into the Bertones’ refuge from the rest of the world.
    It felt like a flower-lined trap.
    With a whisper of metal on metal, the gate shut behind her. The sound made her jump. She pushed at the gate, reassuring herself that the padlock hadn’t somehow leaped up and closed itself over the latch, locking her behind high walls.
    The gate opened instantly.
    With a relieved sigh, Kayla turned back to the garden. It was as beautiful as hard work and money could make it. Roses and gardenias, flowering vines and palms as graceful as dancers, heady fragrance and inviting stillness. The walkways were monitored by motion sensors so that every few steps she took lit up a new vision of artfully arranged plants. A fountain sang softly in the darkness ahead, drowning out the murmur of music from concealed speakers.
    As she walked toward the fountain, more lights came on, making the water shimmer with life and possibilities. The gentle music of water soothed her nerves, as it was meant to do. Desert cultures realized how people became starved for the liquid promise of water.
    Lights went out behind her, making her nerves jump. The motion sensors were on short timers. She felt like running around the garden, setting off all the landscaping lights.
    Or just running, period, right out the gate and into her car.
    Kayla fought with the impulse, telling herself that she was jumping at shadows. She’d met other bank clients in public parks and private homes, behind guarded doors and in skyboxes at sporting events, in parking lots after hours and at restaurants after ordinary diners were sent home. She shouldn’t be nervous about meeting the Bertones in their garden while a party chattered on a few hundred feet away.
    Well within screaming distance.
    She just wished that Bertone wasn’t a crook. But then, he wasn’t the only ruthless man in the private-banking world. He was simply the one who was her client.
    Big honking deal, she told herself roughly. Settle down. Even the lapdog artist has real teeth.
    She’d seen them a few minutes ago, when Rand watched Andre Bertone walk away from them. Rand’s words echoed in her mind: You have no idea what’s at stake.
    Hardly the reassurance she needed.
    Hardly the words of a foot-licking lapdog.
    Uneasiness crawled over Kayla. She couldn’t just stand and wait for the Bertones to schmooze their way through the guests and down to the garden. Impatiently she paced the flagstones, light blooming softly in front of her and then fading behind her into scented darkness.
    Disturbed by her passage, a canyon wren sang from the flowering vines growing thickly on the far garden wall. After a few moments the bird settled into an irritable kind of silence.
    She looked at her watch. Seven after seven.
    Overhead a billion stars glittered through the ambient radiance of the city night. She considered counting them to pass the time.
    The hell with this. I’m not waiting around like some kind of goat staked out for the tiger’s gloating pleasure.
    As she turned toward the wooden gate, the lights went out. The metal-on-metal sound of the gate’s padlock closing came like a gunshot.
    Silence.
    Then came the soft whine of hinges moving, a hidden garden door opening. The wren shrieked and exploded into the night, flying as rapidly as Kayla’s wild heartbeat. Her eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness.
    A figure stepped from behind the vines into the faint radiance cast by a wall of pale flowers. The man was too thin to be Andre Bertone, too thin to be anyone Kayla recognized. He pulled the door shut