The Private Concierge

“Priscilla, are you all right?” Lane asked. “How can I help you?”

Priscilla begged Lane to call the segment producer for the morning show and reschedule the taping. “Please,” she implored, “do it now. Tell them I’ve had an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

Priscilla assured her it wasn’t serious, just horribly embarrassing.

“I’ll take care of it,” Lane said. “Now, please, take a deep breath and calm down. Are you sure you’re all right? I could call one of our concierge doctors if you need medical care. It’s completely private.”

“No! No doctors. I’ll be fine. Just call the segment producer and get the taping rescheduled. No one else needs to know about any of this, all right?”

She clicked off and dropped the phone in horror, unable to believe what had just happened. Everything had been so perfect. It had felt like fate, the stars aligned. She’d never felt more poised or ready for anything. This was supposed to have been her shining moment. And he’d ruined it. This was all his fault.

She began to sob and swear and beat on the unconscious man, oblivious to the video camera trained on her. It was held by a silent, shrouded figure who was concealed by the same thicket of bushes where she’d been planning to drag the body. Priscilla may have dodged one bullet this morning, but there was another gun aimed straight at her.

6

Darwin LeMaster couldn’t remember how to answer his cell phone. It was his own damn phone, too, the one he’d designed, patented and turned into a revolutionary new communications system, according to technology reporters. It came with one-touch concierge access, a GPS system, biometric fingerprint recognition and the ability to make not only secure, but untraceable, calls. The Darwin phone had made him a twenty-eight-year-old man of means and a phenom, whatever that meant, in the field of electronic networking.

BFD. He still couldn’t answer it.

Right now, it was playing “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath at high volume, the equivalent of getting kicked in the head by a donkey, which was what it took to get Darwin’s attention most of the time. But this was no ordinary call. From the moment he’d seen the incoming number in the digital display—her number—his brain had vapor-locked. What good was an IQ at the genius level if you couldn’t take a phone call from a steaming-hot woman?

The noise stopped, and he breathed a sigh of relief. The call had gone to voice mail. But he also felt a body slam of recrimination. What kind of man was he? Sometimes he wondered if he even had a penis.

All around him in the cavernous, cluttered office that his coworkers called Command and Control Center 1, electronic equipment whirred, interrupted by mysterious intermittent beeping. The aroma of stale coffee sullied the air, wafting from the dozen forgotten plastic cups that were stranded wherever he’d set them when an idea hit. This morning’s breakfast, a glazed doughnut with one bite out of it, had been abandoned to a napkin on the file cabinet next to his desk. Mostly he forgot to eat, but even when he remembered, he couldn’t seem to gain weight.

He picked up the doughnut and bit a hunk out of it, chewing absently. Women worried about men who couldn’t gain weight. It brought out the mother in them—and while his boss and longtime friend, Lane Chandler, didn’t openly bug him about putting on poundage, she’d brought the doughnuts by this morning.

She had openly bugged him about sprucing up the command center, said it was the nexus of the entire concierge service and a selling point for prospective clients. She’d suggested professional organizers and decorators, but he’d been putting her off.

He rose and stretched, imagining a cat as he rippled the vertebrae of his spine. This was his lair, and he didn’t feel like conducting tours. He’d been chided for being reclusive and secretive with his pet projects, and maybe his critics had a point. He had actually boarded up the office windows, preferring the eerie phosphers of LCD screens to natural light.

He could run the world from here. On the wall opposite his desk, several large GPS grids, glowing with red dots and streaming arrows, covered the most populous areas of the country. The electronic maps meant Darwin could locate any of their forty-five members with a Premiere Plan and a fully featured Darwin cell, as long as they were within range and their phone was on.

He had also designed the circuitry necessary to scramble signals. If a Premiere member called in and requested a secure line, Darwin could hook them up with a couple clicks of his mouse, at which point the call could not be intercepted or recorded. Well, except by Darwin, of course. Any system was only as secure as the person who created it.

But no one worried about Darwin. He didn’t have a penis.

He kicked a box of old circuit boards out of the way and dropped to the floor. “Give me twenty, you pussy,” he grunted.

The homophobic drill sergeant who rented space in Darwin’s brain got exactly seven military-style push-ups before Darwin collapsed. While he was lying there on the floor, surrounded by boxes of high-tech detritus and thinking about all the ways he needed to overhaul his life, the revolutionary cell phone sounded again. Sharp staccato bursts, each one more imperative than the last. The hotline.

He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Thank God, a crisis. He didn’t have to face the terrifying prospect of inviting a woman—make that the ultimate sexual-fantasy woman of the new millennium—to dinner and then maybe to his place, and then maybe to something approaching the sexual realm, like his bed?

A one-man Pluto shot would have been more realistic.

“Darwin, you have voice mail,” said a come-hither female voice.

The phone was giving him a reminder, just as he’d programmed it to. If it had had legs, it would have jumped off the desk and strolled over to him. He would have to work on that feature.

He pushed to his feet, grimacing as he limped over to the desk, grabbed the phone and thumbed the Talk button. “What is it, Lucy?” That was her name from the old days when they lived together on the streets.

“Please, Dar, call me Lane,” she said. “I need you. Can you come to my office right away?”

Lane unbuttoned her suit jacket and flapped the lapels to create a breeze. She liked to think that she’d come by her reputation as a cool customer deservedly, although right now she was anything but. Her face was flushed and her cleavage damp. Why did women always perspire there first? She really should plan for that when she was deodorizing in the mornings.

At any rate, she’d just run a crazed segment producer off at the pass and narrowly averted some kind of crisis. She didn’t know what kind because Priscilla Brandt had hung up on her before Lane could ask. But at least Ms. Pris would get another shot at success.

Congressman Carr and Simon Shan might not.

Ned Talbert certainly would not.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

Lane looked up to see Darwin shambling into her office, tall and floppy as an Olympic pole-vaulter, his mop of dark curls bouncing, and his baggy, worn jeans hanging on his narrow hips. He was nearly thirty, but he really hadn’t changed all that much in the fifteen years she’d known him, except that he was a millionaire now instead of a juvenile delinquent—and so was she.

“Shut the door, Dar. Lock it, too.”

His dense, expressive eyebrows lifted. “We have a receptionist out there,” he said. “Why don’t I tell the gray angel that we don’t want to be disturbed.”

The gray angel was their vibrant seventy-year-old receptionist, Mary O’Dell, who could have stalled a tactical squad of marines, she was so good. But TPC had an open-door policy, and anyone really determined to see Lane was unlikely to be stopped for long.

“I don’t want Val barging in on us,” Lane explained.

Darwin shut the door and locked it. Val Drummond had started in the mailroom and his fortunes had risen with the company’s. He ran the administrative arm, but he was also handling concierge operations now that Lane was busy with the company’s new expansion plan. But Val’s promotion hadn’t eased the tension between him and Darwin. Val was like the solid and steady but less gifted younger brother with a bad case of sibling rivalry. He was competitive with Darwin for Lane’s time, and he seemed to resent that she and Darwin were much more than just the creative spark behind TPC. They were close friends with a bond that almost defied explanation, even to them…although, oddly, Darwin himself had been cutting ties with Lane lately.

But maybe it wasn’t odd at all, Lane allowed. He had his eye on a sweet young thing he’d met at a comic-book convention. Seems they’d been friendly for a while, but now they were getting closer, and as much as Lane missed Dar’s company, she knew it was good for a recluse like him to have someone in his life besides her.

Lane slipped off the jacket to her pantsuit and undid a button at the neckline of her blouse, still too warm to relax. It was time to tell him. This business was Dar’s life, too, but it went beyond that. She trusted and confided in him as she did no one else.

“Well?” he said, perching on the arm of the high-back leather guest chair. “Are we going to end the suspense any time soon?”

She held him off a little longer, taking a detour behind her desk to the console that smelled of freshly quartered limes. She always had some there in a crystal bowl, as much for their tart essence as for the drinks. She poured a glass of ice water and held up the pitcher, offering him some, too. He shook his head, and she pressed the glass, cool and moist, to her check, aware that he seemed perplexed by his normally unflappable partner.

“You’re going to say I’m crazy, but hear me out,” she said at last. “I think we could be in trouble.”

“You and I?”

“No, the service, TPC. Dar—” She was actually hoping he would laugh at her. “Do you think someone might be trying to damage this company, even to bring it down?”

He frowned. “You are crazy.”

“Yeah, probably. I hope so.” She took a drink, swallowing some ice chips with the water. The cold streaming into her chest cavity was almost painful. Maybe she was overreacting, but the planned expansion into two more major cities had her spooked. She’d borrowed a small fortune to finance the move, and everything depended on being able to capitalize on the service’s growing reputation. It had been relatively smooth sailing until recently.

Quickly, she brought Dar up to speed on what had happened. He already knew about Shan and the congressman, but he didn’t know that Ned Talbert had signed on the dotted line the day he committed what was being called first-degree murder and suicide.

By the time she was done, Dar had fallen into the guest chair, apparently in surprise. “So, Ned Talbert was a client?” he said. “Wow, what is that now—three of our top clients?”

“Three in three weeks, and one of them is dead. It’s surreal, a nightmare. But, listen to me now. I did something, well, rash. No one knew that Ned Talbert had signed, so I shredded his application.” She hung her head at Darwin’s disbelief. “Don’t look at me like that. I panicked. I handled his credit-card transaction myself because Mary was out of the office—and then I forgot to give Talbert his copy of the contract, so I had all the paperwork.”

She sighed and looked up, beseeching him to understand. “I didn’t know what else to do. When the Burton and Shan stories broke, that sleazy gossip Web site reported that they were our clients. How would it look if they found out about Talbert?”

“Like all our clients are jinxed? Like we’re the kiss of death?”

“Exactly.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

Thank God, she thought. He understood her impulse to save the company. He was a street kid, too, thinking with his wits, thinking survival. “I didn’t want to believe it. I told myself I was being paranoid. Am I being paranoid, Dar? Two clients, maybe, but three? Can that be a coincidence?”

It raised a question that Lane didn’t want to ask. Who would be next? She hadn’t told him about Priscilla, but she was hoping that would turn out to be nothing. She was hoping it all would turn out to be nothing, just a figment of her overwrought imagination.

She walked to the windows that looked out on Century City and beyond that, the Pacific coastline, continuing to cool herself with the frosty glass and the sharp scent of lime. It was a bright fall morning with a hint of crispness in the air, but the weather wouldn’t get chilly for another month, and at least half the people on the streets below wore shorts. This was southern California, land of perpetual flip-flops.

Darwin spoke over her thoughts. “Considering everything, you’re one of the least paranoid people I know,” he said, “and if anybody had a right to be, it’s you, given where you’ve been and what you’ve done.”

“Yeah, thanks for reminding me.” He was trying to say she’d come a long way, baby, all the way from her distant, sordid past. She and Darwin had been runaways on the street when they met, both of them cold, hungry and sick. Darwin had needed medical attention. As his condition worsened, Lane had been forced to make some desperate choices. Although now she wondered if there was a choice when someone’s life was at stake. The only people who knew about that time in her life were Darwin and the cops who put her in jail and threw away the key.

Darwin propelled his long frame out of the creaking chair and walked over to her, quietly relieving her of the ice water. She relinquished the glass without a word.

“Maybe it’s bad luck and bad timing,” he suggested. “Most celebs have a self-destruct mechanism that gets triggered just seconds after they hit it big. We’ve seen that happen.”

She nodded, wanting him to be right. He wasn’t as driven as she was—and didn’t even want the expansion. It was Val who was pushing her to grow the company. She and Val were alike in that way, hungry, if that was the right word. But it was Darwin who had her heart, and her allegiance.

She fought the urge to brush doughnut crumbs from his T-shirt—and lost. He dodged her questing fingers. “Listen to me,” she said. “Even if everything we’re talking about is coincidental, we have to be on our toes—you and me. I’m not discussing this with anyone else, obviously. But the service’s reputation is at stake.”

He held the glass against his cheek as she had, apparently curious about the sensation. “Why would anyone want to bring this company down? And why would they go to such extremes to do it?”

“That I don’t know, but we are a concierge service, and we take care of our clients. That includes protecting their privacy and their safety, if it comes to that. We can’t ignore anything that could put them at risk.”

“True, but it doesn’t make sense. A competitor wouldn’t want to hurt our clients. They’d want to steal them.”

She shrugged. “So, maybe it’s the paparazzi. Jack the Giant Killer. He’s the one breaking all the stories—and no one seems to have a clue who he is. Why hasn’t someone exposed him by now?”

Lane was angry about that. So far JGK had operated in total anonymity. Even Seth Black, the owner of Gotcha.com, swore he didn’t know who JGK was, but despite that, Seth had been willing to give Jack his own byline and publish his exposés. Everything was done electronically, of course, to protect Jack’s anonymity.

Dar seemed to be considering Lane’s idea. “I suppose it could be some kind of payback, especially since Val and Seth Black tangled earlier this year over Judge Love. But even if Black and his henchmen are targeting us, how much damage can they do? What are the odds that our clients are going to keep screwing up on a grand scale?”

Again, Lane hoped he was right. But Trudy Love was another TPC client—and a perfect example of screwing up on a grand scale. She was an ex-judge who’d officiated over a divorce-court TV show and had made her name excoriating cheating spouses. Lane could do nothing to save her career once she herself had been caught double-dipping, a phrase Trudy had made a household word.

“Jack destroyed Judge Love’s career with those pictures of her and that burly, tattooed biker who wasn’t her husband,” Lane reminded Darwin. She cocked her head. “And then Val tried to scare off Seth Black with a bunch of empty legal threats.”

Darwin snickered. “So, Black is bringing down Val by destroying our clients one by one? Maybe even setting them up for the fall and then breaking the story? I hate to be the one to break it to you, Lane, but our clients are burying themselves. Do you really think Seth Black is capable of framing Ned Talbert for a murder-suicide?”

That was a stretch, she had to admit. Black was a vicious snitch, not a hit man, and Lane could prove nothing. It was just a gut feeling that her company had a bull’s-eye on its back, but it was a strong one.

There were no more crumbs on Dar’s shirt. She brushed at it anyway. “Just say you’re with me, okay? We have to stay on top of this.”

“Of course I’m with you. I’ll do a background check on Seth Black and scour his site—and I’ll check out JGK, too. If I can’t find out who he is, maybe I can figure out who he’s going after next.”

She thought about hugging him, but he was saved by his cell phone. It was buzzing, as if he was getting some kind of alert. Darwin’s personal phone was truly a one-man band. He hit some buttons and began to read the display screen.

“What is it?” she asked, alarmed at how pale he was.

“Video feed from the Associated Press.”

“Feed about what?”

Darwin looked up. “Jack the Giant Killer just saved me some research. Here’s his current victim.” He flipped the cell phone so that Lane could see the screen.

It was hard for her to watch the stark news footage of Priscilla Brandt beating up a homeless person. Lane sat down on the console behind her, jiggling the water pitcher. Shock seemed to take hold, causing her to shudder and go numb at the same time. The acidity from the limes burned her nostrils.

“That’s number four,” she said under her breath. Priscilla had said the situation was embarrassing, not violent. It looked like assault with a deadly weapon. She could wind up in prison. Priscilla hadn’t been with TPC six months, but Lane knew her background, and she’d sensed a desperation in Priscilla to succeed. Lane could relate to that to some extent. She’d fought her way out of the gutter, too, and maybe she’d done some questionable things along the way, but she’d never tried to kill anyone.

Lane went to her computer and pulled up the Gotcha.com Web site. Jack the Giant Killer’s byline dominated the opening page. Ms. Pris is Pissed! screamed the headline.

“Listen to this,” Lane said. “‘Ms. Pris had a manners meltdown. This morning, Priscilla Brandt, author of a bestselling book on etiquette, viciously assaulted a homeless man. Apparently he camped out on her lawn, impeding her tea-garden interview with morning-show anchor Leanne Sanders, so Brandt knocked him cold with an iron statue, but couldn’t drag him off her property. She shrieked obscenities and beat the homeless man with her fists. She then called Lane Chandler, her private concierge, for help.’”

Lane stopped, shaking her head in disbelief. She glanced over at Darwin, who was back in the chair, collapsed like a punctured tire. “Do you believe me now?”

7

She was legit. Her concierge service was first-class all the way. Rick’s Internet search had pulled up countless references to TPC as the crown jewel of the private-concierge field, despite its fairly recent appearance on the scene six years ago. A large infusion of investment capital from an unspecified donor had launched the company, and a reputation for consummate perfectionism had kept it going. TPC was known for its round-the-clock devotion to making the lives of its clientele complete in every way.

Apparently there was nothing a TPC concierge wouldn’t do, as long as it was legal, according to its founder and CEO, Lane Chandler.

She was legit, and successful.

Rick wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It was always easier dealing with people when you had some leverage. In her case, doubled-jointed escorts and masseuses who specialized in happy endings would have been helpful. Of course, he always had her criminal past to fall back on.

Her company Web site described the boggling array of services offered and the different plans available. If you wanted round-the-clock attention with all the extras—and you had unlimited funds—the Premiere Plan was your baby. Rick found more than he needed to know about the company, but no mention of Lane Chandler’s background anywhere, except the usual references to education, work experience, achievements and service awards.

She’d received a BA in business administration from Pepperdine on a full scholarship program. Highest honors, which didn’t surprise him, despite her questionable start. He could still see the hungry glint in her mist-blue eyes. Funny how the soft-focus gaze and butterscotch voice had made her edges seem all the sharper, even at the tender age of fifteen.

A gossip Web site called Gotcha.com had broken stories about the messy scandals with some of TPC’s clients, but Ned hadn’t been mentioned among them. Rick also found references to the service’s expansion plans, and the heavy debt it was carrying. Maybe she needed money. Now, there was a motive to go after the package Ned was holding. She could use the contents to blackmail the VIPs involved in the epic scandal her own arrest had caused. She seemed to be a magnet for scandal, no matter what she did.

But how did she know Ned had the package?

Rick sat back in his chair to think. He rested his feet on the desk next to a carton of take-out Chinese. He’d found it in the fridge, left over from before he went up to the mountain cabin. The rush of hunger he’d felt when he opened the refrigerator door had dizzied him. It had been over thirty-six hours since he’d eaten, and he’d wolfed a forkful of the pork lo mein, but couldn’t get it down. His throat had closed up, and even a basic act like swallowing had been a challenge. He didn’t know if it was grief, stress or…something else.

The pills, he told himself. Maybe he needed to lay off that garbage.

He’d entered into a specialized form of private investigation when he’d left vice years ago. Essentially he did things that law enforcement wouldn’t—or couldn’t—do. It had kept him busy and paid well. But, over the last few weeks, he’d closed all his open cases and informed his clients he was taking some personal-leave time. That was all they needed to know. All anyone needed to know.

Now, here he was, faced with the toughest investigation of his life—and as much as he wanted to walk away from it, he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. He had to do something. The question was, what?

His sigh was resigned. A talk with Ned’s housekeeper might be the way to start. Less complicated than the Lane Chandler situation, which could easily take him places he didn’t want to go. Ned’s funeral arrangements were being taken care of by his attorneys, who were also handling inquiries from the press. The public knew Ned as a star outfielder, not as Rick Bayless’s friend, so Rick had been left out of it, thank God. He could not have dealt with that right now.

Rick hesitated, listening. A loud pop came from somewhere in the house, launching him out of the chair. The carton of lo mein landed on the floor with a splat and Rick kicked it aside, taking care not to slip in the streaming juices. It sounded like a gunshot, and it had come from down the hall. He could see nothing through the open doorway, but someone was definitely in his house.

He slipped out of the small office, his bare feet soundless on the Mexican tiles. He crept down the hallway, his back to the wall, wondering if the intruder had found his gun. It was in the top drawer of the night table next to his bed, but the noise had come from the other side of the house, the kitchen, and he could hear a clicking sound coming from that direction.