He listened awhile to hear if Thomas and his Middle Eastern wallet man would drop anything worthwhile, but they didn’t seem to be buddies: Thomas read the paper while the stranger stood at the window and stared at the street below.

Jack eased back into the larger duct and checked out his options.

2.

2.

“What are we doing here?” Alicia said as Gordon Haffner ushered them into a mahogany-paneled conference room.

“Having a meeting,” Haffner said. He looked confused as he laid a file folder on the gleaming surface of the oval mahogany table. “Isn’t that why you called? To have a meeting?”

“We met in your office last time, so I thought—”

“This is much roomier.”

Alicia glanced at Sean O’Neill, who replied with a barely perceptible shrug.

“Is something wrong?” Haffner said.

Yes, but Alicia couldn’t tell him what. They’d set up this meeting to allow Jack to identify Thomas’s backers. But what if the backers met in here instead of Haffner’s office after the meeting? Jack would be eavesdropping on an empty room.

If she demanded to meet in Haffner’s office, would that make him suspicious? And what would that accomplish if the backers were set to meet here afterward?

Jack needed to know about this conference room. And she could think of only one way to do that.

“Wrong?” Alicia said, letting her voice rise. “You want to know if something’s wrong! Let me tell you what’s wrong!” She raised the volume, pushing it to a shout. “Your client, my half brother Thomas Clayton, is what’s wrong! Do you have any idea what kind of a slug you’re representing? Do you know what he did to me Thursday night?”

She saw O’Neill turn her way and give her a quick smile and a wink.

But as she started in on the details of her abduction, she found she no longer needed to force the volume, or act angry. Suddenly the rage was real and her pitch rose.

Gordon Haffner’s face went a little pale, and Sean O’Neill’s smile faded.

Alicia heard her own voice… screaming…

3.

3.

You’re beautiful, Alicia.

Jack smiled as he watched her wind down from her tirade. He’d been crouched outside the return from Haffner’s office, pondering his next move, when he’d heard a woman screaming. He hadn’t recognized the voice—a scream was a scream—but he’d followed the sound. After all, no one should be screaming in an attorney’s office, unless maybe it was a client who’d just got a bill.

A few turns this way and that, and here she was, sliced by the louvers of a register high in the wall of some sort of conference room, doing a very convincing Screaming Mimi.