Page 33 of Hotter than Wildfire

“Ellen Palmer.” Just saying the name made Montez’s blood speed up. “Used to be head accountant here.”

Piet’s eyes were the lightest blue Montez had ever seen. In direct sunlight they looked so pale they were almost white. “Tell me about her.”

Montez gulped down the rest of his whiskey to calm himself down. Just thinking of the bitch…” What do you want to know?”

His voice was calm, thoughtful. “What kind of woman is she? Flashy, loud? Quiet, bookish? Any hobbies? Is she the friendly kind? What does she look like?”

Well, that was something Montez could answer easily. He slid across two photos, both taken at a company picnic a year and a half ago.

Piet studied them carefully, spending about five minutes on each photo. Montez fidgeted in his chair. Damn, he wanted to get going. Finally, Piet spoke. “So tell me, tell me everything.”

Montez did, leaving out only the dollar amount of the missing palettes and what happened to Arlen Miller.

“And then?” Piet’s voice was so fucking calm.

“And then the bitch just…disappeared. Been gone for a whole fucking year. I had men fan out, I had her phone tapped, I got her mail, I checked her credit cards. Nothing. It was as if she had vanished off the face of the fucking earth.”

“But then you ran her down again.”

Montez squinted suspiciously. “How the fuck did you know that? No one knows that.”

“It only stands to reason. You wouldn’t have called me in now if you hadn’t. You found her and then you lost her.”

Put like that, it made Montez’s blood pound heavily through his veins. She’d slipped right through the fingers of two of his guys in Seattle. And it was a good thing his three guys in San Diego were already dead because he wanted to kill them all over again for letting her get away. Again.

“Yeah. There’s this singer who became real popular, only no one knows her real identity. She goes by the name of⁠—”

“Eve,” Piet said and raised his eyebrows slightly at Montez’s expression. “Music travels the world, Gerald. And there’s only one singer in the world whose identity is a secret. Most of them are—how would you Americans put it? Very out there. How did you connect the two?”

“Sheer chance.” Montez felt the bile rise up in his stomach and swallowed it back down. “There was a radio on in the background at a restaurant about ten days ago. I heard a voice, a song. I’d heard them before. Ellen was singing that song in her office one day. It turned out that the song was written by this Eve, and I recognized the voice and the song, so I put two and two together.”

“I understand she’s been pretty good up until now about keeping her identity a secret,” Piet said thoughtfully. “I heard she recorded in a separate room from the musicians. And she’d have the money now to buy herself a lot of privacy.”

“Uh huh. But she didn’t think to protect herself against the one guy who knew her identity.”

“The agent.”

Montez nodded.

“Where’s the agent now?”

“Bear bait in the Cascades. He was in Seattle. So was she. She’d been there nine months.”

“What did you get out of him?”

Montez ground his teeth. “Not much. He didn’t know her real name, he never found out where she lived. She’d tell him where to meet him—some cafè or park bench. She never gave him zip.”

Piet narrowed his eyes. “Except, I’m guessing, her cell number.”

Montez nodded. “Yeah. It was a prepaid job, but we got an address from that. We were waiting outside her apartment. Bitch never showed and then the cell was turned off. The next ping we got was two days later, in San Diego, of all places. Had to really scramble to get men there. Luckily, three of my men were working in Tijuana, so they left that job and came up. The phone was in a hotel room. My men called and the front desk said she was out. So they laid out an ambush.” He ground his teeth. “My men are good. They all know what they’re doing. I wasn’t anticipating any trouble. In fact, I’d flown back here from Seattle because they had orders to bring her here. I’ve got…business with the bitch and wanted to be ready for her. But something happened and three good men are dead and she’s still in the fucking wind.”

“She had protection,” Piet said.

“Oh yeah.” It still burned. “One guy. One gun, one guy.” He met Piet’s eyes and saw that he understood completely. “Wherever she is, she’s got protection.”

Piet went silent for a full ten minutes. Montez couldn’t stand it. He poured himself another whiskey. He’d puzzled this long enough. Let someone else work it out, goddammit.

Piet suddenly stood up. “Let’s go.”