St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

made a startled sound.
    The driver was Jimmy Hamm.
    He looked past her, searching for any dust from followers. “You’re clean,” he said to Rand. Then, “Shit, what happened to the fur?”
    “Freddie.”
    Hamm glanced at Kayla in the rearview mirror and smiled. “Hey, darlin’. Love that take-no-prisoners grin.”
    With that he put the idling vehicle in gear and accelerated out of the construction yard onto the street.
    Kayla dipped her chin, looking over the rims of her sunglasses at the man who had flirted madly with her for the past several months.
    “Liar,” she said.
    He took his eyes off the road for a second and glanced in the mirror at her, surprised. “What? What did I do?”
    “You let me think you had the hots for me,” Kayla said. “But you were just trying to get inside Andre Bertone’s life and his bank accounts.”
    “Babe, you thought I had the hots for you because it was the truth.” He gave her a friendly leer. “That was the easiest cover I ever put on.”
    Rand turned back from watching their rear and said to Hamm, “Remember what Faroe said about the interesting ones.” Rand smiled from the teeth out.
    “Well, hell,” Hamm muttered. “Kayla, can you ID the dude that made the hard pass at you last night?”
    Startled, she looked at Rand.
    “In Bertone’s garden,” Rand said, and this time his smile was real.
    She hoped her floppy hat covered her blush.
    “Yes,” she said to Hamm. “Not that I want to see that cockroach again, but I’d recognize him.”
    “I did a little nosing around with my colleagues on the security detail,” Hamm said. “Then I checked the employee database and came up with a possible name, Gabriel Navarro. He’s supposed to be some kind of majordomo of the estate grounds, but nobody remembers seeing him around any of the gardening crews.”
    “I recognize the name from the employee payroll,” Kayla said, “but if Mr. Navarro is a gardener, even the chief cheese, he’s really well paid.”
    “How much?” Rand asked.
    “Ten thousand a month.”
    “I’m betting he plants things in six-foot holes,” Rand said.
    Images of the handcuffs and the ugly little pistol spiked through Kayla’s memories. Gooseflesh rippled. She hated being scared, but she was too smart not to be.
    Hamm wheeled onto a westbound on-ramp, merging with light Sunday-morning traffic. “St. Kilda hacked into the employee database at the Castle in the Sky, so we know where Gabriel lives.Faroe hired two private types to stake out Gabriel’s house. He’s there, but we need Kayla for an eyeball ID.”
    The last thing Kayla wanted to see again was the face of her nightmare. “Sure. Whatever. Let’s get it over with.”
    “Change into these first,” Rand said, dropping jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap on Kayla’s lap. Then he looked at the driver. “Handsome, if I catch your eyes in the rearview mirror while she changes, you’ll need a new nickname.”
    Hamm kept his attention on the road. Strictly.

43
    Guadalupe, Arizona
Sunday
8:55 A.M. MST
    H amm parked on a dirt side street that had a view across a sandy town square toward two ancient whitewashed churches. If Kayla squinted enough to fuzz out the freeway in the background, she could almost believe she’d been transported five hundred miles south, into the Sonoran Desert of interior Mexico. The bells in the tower of the larger church began ringing, calling the faithful to worship. A knot of dark-skinned, dark-haired young men plodded across the sandy square toward the church.
    “That explains something,” Kayla said.
    “What?” Rand asked.
    “The man in the garden—”
    “Gabriel Navarro.”
    “—was Latino but not really Mexican. He was too dark, like mahogany-colored lava.”
    Rand waited, absently rubbing his shaved cheek. He felt naked. “So?”
    “This little town is called Guadalupe,” she said. “It was established more than a century ago by Yaqui Indians from northernMexico, refugees from the Mexican Civil War. The man in the garden was muy indio, very dark.”
    “That means we’re going to have a hell of a time getting closer,” Hamm said.
    “Wrong color?” Rand asked.
    “Or something,” Hamm said. “The Yaquis are clannish as Gypsies and twice as suspicious. They don’t even trust their fellow Mexicans. That’s why there are two churches side by side, both Catholic, one for Mexicanos and the other for Yaquis.”
    “Guess we won’t be walking around,” Rand