Tail Spin

back to the original invoice.”
    What was a lowboy? Was she joking? An invoice from the eighteenth century?
    Jack said, “No, I didn’t know that.” He listened to her talk about how Americans like Queen Anne splats and kidney-shaped seats, how they prefer cherrywood to mahogany. Those fancy cabriole legs sank at least three inches into the thick, expensive carpeting. You couldn’t pay him to sit in one of those chairs.
    “And the three Turners,” Rachael went on. “Jimmy did like those paintings. I remember him telling me about them. They belonged to his mother.” She looked around the reception area, lust in her eyes. “To have a huge budget to decorate a space like this—wouldn’t that be something? I decorated a half-dozen commercial spaces in and around Richmond. I had to work my butt off to be both creative and cheap.”
    “Did your clients appreciate what you did?”
    “They all did, and that’s nice. Actually I prefer being in on the design process itself, though, creating a space for a specific look and a specific function. My client list was growing nicely before I went to meet Jimmy.”
    They heard a throat clear and looked over at two young women and two young men seated behind a huge swath of highly polished mahogany, each seated at an individual computer station, all nicely dressed, all working industriously on keyboards or speaking in hushed voices on phones. Except for one young woman, who had a raised eyebrow and beautiful fingernails.
    Jack smiled at Rachael, nodded toward the young woman. “Let’s go hassle that bright-eyed young lass at reception, see where our prey is.”
    The young lass—her tag read Julia—looked suspicious at first, then fell victim to Jack’s smile, a phenomenon Rachael had already observed a couple of times. It seemed Julia couldn’t help herself, she loosened up, smiled back at him. “Good afternoon. How may I help you?”
    Jack opened his wallet, showed her his creds.
    Julia’s smiled wavered.
    “We’d like to see Ms. Kostas, Julia.”
    “Ah, well, yes, may I tell her what it’s about?”
    “No,” he said. Then he smiled that lethal smile again, lowered his voice. “National security.”
    Julia immediately rang a number and spoke quietly.
    “I’ll show you to her office,” she said. They followed her down a wide hallway with Stubbs horse paintings on the walls. There were half a dozen niches along the way holding antique vases filled with lush trailing ivy, warmed by small circular overhead lights.
    Julia knocked lightly on a set of mahogany double doors, opened t hem, and they stepped into a large rectangular room furnished with spare, plain blond Scandinavian furniture, not a single antique in the place. Lots of windows filled the room with afternoon sunlight and views to die for, but still the office felt cold.
    “Ms. Kostas, this is Special Agent Crowne and, ah ...” Julia turned brick red because she’d neglected to ask Rachael her name.
    “I know who she is, Julia. You may leave us now.”
    Jack had read all about Laurel Abbott Kostas on the drive over to Abbott Enterprises International headquarters in Baltimore. He’d studied several unflattering photos of her. She wasn’t by any stretch a beauty. Still, given the wealth factor, he’d expected her to have at least a hint of glam, designer everything, but there wasn’t a scintilla of pizzazz in this woman. Her eyes never left Rachael as she slowly walked toward them. Her hair was neither short nor long, salt-and-pepper, not a sophisticated salt-and-pepper like his mom’s, whose hair was cut in a swinging bob, but flat, drab, and coarse. She wore no earrings, no makeup to soften the sharp angles of her face. Her eyes beneath thick black brows were cold stone gray, her mouth pinched and small. She was wearing a plain gray suit and low-heeled pumps, her sole jewelry a wedding band. She didn’t look fat or thin; what she looked like was a cold and hard matron, or a prison warden. She wasn’t smiling. She looked older than her fifty-one years. He wondered what she’d looked like at twenty-one, what she’d looked like when she married Stefanos Kostas at age thirty-five.
    “Hello, Aunt Laurel.”
    Laurel Abbott Kostas looked at Rachael with a combination of distaste and indifference, and there was something else, something feral in those stone cold eyes of hers. “You are a bastard, Ms. Janes. It’s very possible you are not even my brother’s unfortunate mistake. I am not