Kitabı oku: «Payback»

Jasmine Cresswell
Payback

For Alexander, always in my heart…

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Epilogue

One

Herndon, Virginia, October 3, 2007

Luke Savarini took a second bite of the lobster ravioli, just to be sure he hadn’t judged too hastily. He’d been right the first time, he decided, letting the flavors dissolve on his tongue. There was too much oregano, and the sauce splashed over everything was weighted down with excess cream.

Anna, his sister, watched his reaction and then gave a crooked smile. “Not up to scratch, huh? My veal is okay, but not spectacular. Want to taste?”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Luke put down his fork, pushing away his heaped plate. With all the food there was in his life, he avoided eating anything he didn’t completely enjoy. His waistline and his taste buds both thanked him.

“Why did you insist on bringing me here, Annie? You’re not usually a fan of second-rate Italian.”

“The restaurant is owned by Bruno Savarini. He’s a cousin of ours, sort of. His grandfather and our great-grandfather were brothers.”

Luke rolled his eyes. The most remote and fragile twigs of the family tree all made perfect sense to his sister, whereas he had his work cut out simply keeping track of the names and birthdays of his six nieces and nephews.

He mentally reviewed the vast clan of Savarini cousins. “Okay, I’m working hard, but I can’t place a Cousin Bruno.”

“He’s Great-Uncle Joe’s grandson. You must have run into each other at a wedding.”

Luke grinned. “Yeah, but that’s almost the same as saying I’ve never met him. Can you ever recall a Savarini wedding with less than two hundred relatives milling around and at least half of the men singing ‘O Sole Mio’ at the top of their lungs?”

Anna returned his grin, tacitly acknowledging the cheerful mob scenes that passed for family gatherings in the Savarini clan. “Bruno had his sixty-fifth birthday last month. He’s short and stocky, with brown eyes and an olive complexion—”

Luke laughed. “Well now, that narrows it right down. Short, stocky, brown eyes. I guess only ninety percent of Savarini men fit that description.”

Anna tried to look severe. “Just because you’re a six-foot, gray-eyed genetic freak, there’s no need to get snooty. Anyway, I brought you here because Bruno plans to retire as soon as he can find a buyer for his restaurant. He has crippling arthritis and he only comes into the restaurant occasionally nowadays. You’d be astonished at how much better the food tastes on the days when he’s here.”

“I wouldn’t be astonished,” Luke protested. “I’m a chef, remember? I know just how much difference it makes when you have somebody talented in charge of the kitchen.”

“The restaurant is in a fabulous location,” Anna continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “The decor is attractive and the kitchen is state-of-the-art. And Bruno has plenty of loyal customers. Look around you. The place is full. That’s pretty good on a Wednesday, especially since we’re eating late.”

Far from looking around the restaurant, Luke’s gaze fixed on his sister with suddenly narrowed focus. “Wait. I must be slow on the uptake tonight because I’ve only just realized why we’re here. You want me to buy this place, don’t you?”

Anna had the grace to blush. “Well, you’re a chef. You own restaurants. Bruno wants to retire and he’s our cousin. It seems a natural fit.”

Luke felt a surge of affectionate exasperation. It was a familiar sensation in Anna’s vicinity. She was a brilliant physicist, working for a government agency that she claimed was part of the Department of Education, although he’d believe crayfish grew on trees before he believed that. He loved her more than any of his four other siblings, which was saying a lot. But whereas she found quantum mechanics and string theory simple concepts, the economics of running a family business had always dangled far beyond her ability to grasp.

He took a sip of Chianti and then toasted his sister with the glass. “I appreciate your good intentions, Annie, but I can’t just randomly acquire restaurants all over the country. I live in Chicago, remember?”

“News flash. Have you noticed there must be thirty flights a day between Chicago and Washington, D.C.? A thousand miles isn’t so far.”

Luke laughed, genuinely amused. “From your perspective, maybe. That’s what comes of working all day with astronomers who consider Alpha Centauri to be practically banging on the back door because it’s only a billion miles away—”

“You’re missing several zeroes,” Anna said. “And it is banging on the back door as stars go.”

“Yeah, well, that’s my point, Annie. A billion or a gazillion, it’s all in a day’s work for you. However, when you’re running a restaurant, a thousand miles is a long way. You need to be on the spot so you can keep an iron grip on quality control, not to mention you have to be on hand to step in whenever there’s a crisis.”

His sister wasn’t ready to give up. “But you have three restaurants in the Chicago area already, and you can only be in one of them at a time. And they’re doing so well…”

Luke mentally crossed his fingers; he was superstitious where his restaurants were concerned. “You’re right, Luciano’s is succeeding beyond my wildest hopes. And part of the reason the restaurants are doing well is because they’re all in the Chicago area. Where I live.” And where he was already working a minimum of sixty hours a week.

She sighed. “I hoped that the lure of opening a restaurant in the D.C. area might be enough to tempt you to visit more often. I miss you, Luke, much as I hate to admit it, seeing as how when we were growing up you were a totally annoying snot.”

He raised his eyebrow. “Me? A snot? You must have me confused with one of your other brothers. Tom, maybe. He has major league snot potential.”

She shook her head. “Uh-uh. No confusion. I’m talking about you.”

“How quickly good deeds are forgotten.” Luke gave an exaggerated sigh. “What about the time I saved you from being discovered with the captain of the baseball team in Mom and Dad’s whirlpool tub? When you were both naked, no less. I figure that ought to have earned me at least a decade or two of gratitude.”

“My God, Robert O’Toole and the hot tub.” Anna’s expression was suddenly arrested. “I’d forgotten about that.”

“If Dad had found the two of you, trust me, it would be one of your more vivid teenage memories.”

She chuckled in wry acknowledgment. “Love is weird, isn’t it? For two whole months I was convinced my life would be over if Rob didn’t ask me to the senior prom. And I haven’t given him a single thought since the day I left for college.”

“He would be devastated to hear that,” Luke said dryly. “Rob definitely fancied himself.”

She gave a nostalgic grin and her gaze became wistful. “Damn, I miss you, Luke. Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider buying Bruno out?”

Luke quelled a moment of temptation. “I wish, Annie, but I’m already stretched way too thin, time-wise. I’m sorry.”

She gave a resigned shrug that didn’t quite conceal her disappointment. “Oh, well. It was worth a try.”

He leaned across the table and briefly rested his hand on his sister’s. The movement shifted his perspective and his gaze happened to land on a couple seated at the table closest to the entrance. The man’s back was turned toward their table, but as Luke watched, the man laughed and reached out to put his arm around the woman’s shoulder so that Luke glimpsed him in profile. The man listened to his companion for a moment, and then laughed again at whatever she had said. A sudden lull in the noise allowed Luke to hear the sound. It was teasing and low, a throaty chuckle. It was also eerily familiar.

Shock momentarily froze Luke in his seat. Then he jumped to his feet, grabbing his chair just in time to prevent it toppling over. “Be right back,” he told his sister, moving swiftly toward the couple.

“Luke, what’s wrong? Where are you going?”

He didn’t answer, partly because he was having a hard time catching his breath, partly because he was focused with hypnotic intensity on the couple by the door. The man must have sensed that he was being observed. He glanced up and his head jerked in visible shock. He immediately rose to his feet, putting his hand in the small of his companion’s back and hustling her toward the exit. She followed without a word of protest, oddly compliant.

A waiter carrying a heavy tray crossed Luke’s path, obscuring his view. He wished he could push the waiter violently aside, the way they did in the movies, and to hell with the food arrayed on the tray. But the habit of deferring to a server carrying dishes was ingrained and Luke skirted the waiter, losing another crucial few seconds in his journey toward the exit. He had to excuse himself twice to an oblivious woman whose chair stuck far out from the table, forming an impromptu barricade. When he’d negotiated that obstacle, he squeezed past the two final tables separating him from the hostess station and reached empty floor space. The man and his companion were nowhere in sight.

Luke ran outside, cursing himself for having wasted too much time being polite. Why hadn’t he just elbowed and shoved his way across the dining room, and to hell with flying dishes? Unfortunately, the parking lot was crowded and he couldn’t immediately spot the couple. Dammit, surely there hadn’t been time for them to drive off?

The lot served several specialty stores in addition to Bruno’s restaurant, and there were at least a dozen people strolling around, as well as a van pulled up to the curb, collecting trash. Although the lot was rimmed by lights, the humidity was high and there was a slight mist hanging in the night air, making it frustratingly hard to see. Luke finally picked out his quarry simply because the man was running, his companion jogging awkwardly in his wake, hampered by her high heels.

“Stop!” Luke yelled, ignoring the interested stares of passersby. “Stop, for God’s sake! Ron Raven, is that you? Ron, stop!”

The man didn’t answer. If anything his pace got faster. The woman, indifferent to the damp pavement, tugged off her shoes and ran barefoot across the lot.

Luke tore down the aisle of parked cars, catching up as the man clicked the car locks with his remote and slid behind the wheel of a silver-gray Mercedes. Ron, or his look-alike, didn’t even wait for his female companion to get into the car before turning on the ignition. He was already backing out of his parking space before she closed her door, and long before she could have latched her seat belt.

Luke gave a final burst of speed and caught up with the couple. He stood behind the car, waving his arms. It was impossible for the driver not to have seen him, but the car continued to back up.

Jesus! The guy was going to run him over if he didn’t move, Luke realized with a flash of total incredulity. At the last minute, he had no choice other than to jump to one side. Without a backward glance, the driver swung around on squealing tires and dashed for the exit.

“That man sure was in a hurry.” A middle-aged woman stared at the disappearing Mercedes, her frown disapproving. “Crazy drivers. He could’ve killed you. If he keeps driving like that he’s going to cause an accident for sure. You okay?”

“Yes, thanks.” Luke realized just in time that if he could get the license plate number, the police would have a way to track down the owner. “Excuse me. Really, I’m fine.”

He squeezed between two parked cars and dashed into the next aisle where he had a better view of the Mercedes racing toward the exit. It was a Virginia plate, he saw, with the license number AB7 4K3. Or maybe it was 4K8. He squinted, trying to confirm one number or the other, but the plate was dirty, the night dark, and the car was rapidly receding. The Mercedes sped down the block and made a sharp left turn at the first corner. Luke was a fast runner, but he knew he didn’t have a chance in hell of catching up with it. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his Palm Pilot, jotting down the license plate numbers before he could forget them.

When he realized he’d been staring at the empty road for a full minute, he walked back into the restaurant and wove his way around servers and crowded tables, returning to his sister. His legs felt surprisingly shaky and he slumped into his seat, breathing hard. Anna started to lecture him, but changed her mind when she got a good look at him.

“What is it?” she asked. “For heaven’s sake, what happened just now? Are you okay?”

“I’m not sure.” He reached for his wineglass and then pushed it aside and took a gulp of water instead. He put the incredible truth into words. “I think I just saw Ron Raven.”

Two

“Who is Ron Raven?” Anna’s forehead wrinkled in puzzlement and then she gave a jolt of surprise. “You mean the Ron Raven? The guy from Raven Enterprises who bankrolled your first restaurant and then turned out to be a bigamist?”

“Yes, that’s who I mean.” Luke tried not to sound impatient. “I just saw him. He was over there, eating dinner with some woman.”

Anna’s eyes widened in shock. “But you can’t have seen him—he’s dead! He died in Miami this past spring.”

“Supposedly.”

“What does that mean, supposedly? Ron Raven was murdered, and so was the woman who was with him in his hotel room the night he disappeared. We talked about the murder a half dozen times already. Good grief, Luke, you can’t have forgotten! There was a ton of stuff about Ron Raven on TV. It turned out he had one wife in Chicago and another in Idaho—”

“Wyoming,” Luke corrected.

“Right, Wyoming. He also had three kids. Two with the Wyoming wife, and another with his wife in Chicago. They’re all grown-up, of course.”

“Anna, I know all this stuff—”

“We talked about seeing his children on TV.” Anna shoved a swathe of shiny, dark brown hair off her forehead, oblivious to Luke’s answers. “They were all disgustingly attractive, although they didn’t look much like one another. And one of his children was in the news recently. Ron’s son. I don’t recall his name, but he’s a celebrity lawyer in Denver.”

“Liam Raven. I wouldn’t exactly call him a celebrity, although he’s tried a couple of notorious cases.”

“I didn’t mean he was famous,” Anna clarified. “I meant he works for famous people. He defended the mayor of Denver’s wife when she was accused of murdering her husband. That was just a couple of months ago, wasn’t it?”

Anna’s sense of time, like her sense of distance, worked better on the astronomic scale, but in this instance she was more or less correct. “Yes. The mayor of Denver was murdered back in August.”

“I watched some of the TV coverage because of the connection to Ron and your restaurants. Liam Raven got the charges against the mayor’s wife dropped before she ever came to trial.”

“Liam must be good at his job. Ron was good at his job, too.” Luke gave an ironic shrug. “I guess professional competence runs in the Raven family.”

“You can’t get away from news items about the Ravens these days.” Anna leaned back in her chair, nursing the last of her wine. “I saw a picture of Ron’s Chicago wife in a magazine at the dentist’s office last week.”

“Avery Raven.”

Anna wrinkled her nose. “Avery Fairfax. That’s the name she goes by these days, apparently. She was attending an opera performance to benefit abused wives, which struck me as somewhat ironic given her personal situation.”

“Or perhaps just very brave,” Luke suggested.

“Maybe.” Anna sounded unconvinced. “Avery’s beautiful, but I saw her interviewed on Larry King and she struck me as a real snob. The sort of woman who has her initials embroidered on her underwear and would never leave the house without wearing her pearls.”

“Is that how she struck you? In the clips I saw of her after Ron died, she looked pretty much shell-shocked to me.”

Anna shrugged. “That, too, I guess. Anyway, the point is you must have been mistaken about seeing Ron Raven.” Her voice took on a hint of amusement. “He’s six months dead, which kind of rules out the possibility that he was eating dinner here at Bruno’s.”

Luke suspected he was being foolishly stubborn, but he fought against Anna’s simple logic. “The cops never found Ron’s body, or the body of the woman who was in the hotel room with him. Who’s to say he’s really dead?”

“The entire world, except you.” Anna frowned, amusement vanishing. “The only reason the cops didn’t find any bodies is because the killer took a boat miles out to sea and tossed them into the Atlantic. You saw those chilling security videos of the murderer using a dolly to wheel the bodies onto a yacht. The video was on every TV channel and in every newspaper. You couldn’t avoid the clips even if you wanted to.”

Luke shrugged. “Those videos never struck me as proving very much. All you saw was a masked person—you couldn’t even determine male or female—pushing something onto a boat deck.”

“Not something. The guy was clearly wheeling body bags.”

“Okay, body bags. But they were zippered shut, for heaven’s sake! They could have contained anything from dirty laundry to the Russian Imperial crown jewels.”

“Yep, you’re right, they could,” Anna said crisply. “But the cops believe those bags contained the bodies of Ron Raven and the woman who’d been with him in the hotel room and they’re most likely right. After all, the cops found traces of blood in various places on the boat and you yourself told me a reputable lab used DNA testing to confirm that the blood belonged to Ron Raven. DNA matches don’t lie, Luke.”

“I understand that. I’m not disputing that the DNA evidence confirms the blood on the boat deck was Ron’s.”

“Well, there you are.”

“The fact that a lab established the blood was Ron’s doesn’t tell us anything about how the blood got onto the boat,” Luke pointed out. “If I took a vial of your blood and dripped it across the floor of my bedroom, it doesn’t mean you’re dead or even that you were in my bedroom. A DNA match would simply prove that the blood on my bedroom floor was yours.”

“And this is relevant to Ron Raven’s murder because…?”

“Because we have no clue if Ron was dead or alive when his blood ended up on the deck of that stolen yacht.”

“What exactly are you suggesting?” Anna’s gaze focused on him with new intensity. “That Ron and some unknown woman faked their deaths convincingly enough to persuade the entire Miami police force they’d been murdered? Good grief, Luke, get a grip.”

“I just saw Ron, so that’s what must have happened.” Luke knew he sounded as stubborn as he felt. “It would have been easy enough for Ron to cut himself and sprinkle blood to fake a shooting.”

“It wouldn’t have been easy at all.” Anna shook her head. “There was a lot of blood. We’re not talking about Ron pricking his finger. We’re talking lots and lots of blood, in a spatter pattern that suggested he’d been shot.”

“If Ron had a good reason to disappear—and presumably he did—he might have been willing to sacrifice a pint or two of blood.”

“You’re forgetting something important—the police identified his murderer.”

“Yeah, so they did.” Luke’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “And we all know the cops have never pinned a murder on the wrong culprit.”

Anna turned her left hand palm up and wiggled her fingers. “Okay, on this side we have weeks of intensive professional investigation and a ton of forensic evidence suggesting Ron Raven was murdered in his hotel room by a man who’d already committed other murders.” She turned over her right hand. “On this side we have the fact that you saw somebody who looks like Ron Raven eating dinner in Cousin Bruno’s restaurant.”

She tilted her head in exaggerated perplexity. “Hmm…let’s see. Which theory should we go with? Is Ron dead or alive? Gee, I can’t imagine.”

Luke leaned across the table. “Stop being a smart-ass and explain to me what we know about Ron Raven’s disappearance that makes it impossible to believe the guy faked his own death.”

“I thought I just did that, but I’ll do it again.” Anna ticked off on her fingers. “There was enough blood in Ron’s hotel room to suggest he was seriously injured. Ditto for his female companion. In that same hotel room, the cops found DNA from a convicted felon who’d already spent years in prison for murdering two other people. So we have two bleeding victims and a known killer in the same hotel room. Plus there’s been no activity at any of Ron’s bank accounts since the day he disappeared. If he faked his own death, he walked away from a load of money. Why would he?”

“Because he was a bigamist and his life was getting complicated?”

“He’d been a bigamist for decades,” Anna retorted. “Neither of his wives suspected anything.”

“Maybe he left for financial reasons, then.”

“He wasn’t under any unusual financial pressure. Everyone agrees Raven Enterprises was profitable at the time he disappeared.”

Luke pushed back his chair, giving in to a burning need to do something more productive than argue the odds with his sister. Or maybe he just didn’t want to acknowledge the logic of his sister’s viewpoint. “I need to talk to the server who waited on Ron Raven.”

“The server who waited on Ron’s look-alike,” Anna corrected.

He ignored her reproof. “Sorry, Annie, I won’t be more than a minute or two. Choose something decadent for dessert, okay?”

Luke made his way across the room and stood quietly while the young woman served entrées to a party of five businessmen. He stopped her as she hurried back toward the kitchen, glancing at her name tag as she whisked past.

“Hey, Merrie, I’m sorry to delay you, but my name’s Luke Savarini. Bruno Savarini is my cousin.” He nodded across the room toward Anna. “And that’s my sister, Anna. You might recognize her since she’s one of your regular customers.”

“I’m sorry. I’m new here.” The server smiled, trying not to look as impatient as she undoubtedly felt. “Anyway, it’s great to have you with us, Mr. Savarini. I hope you and your sister are enjoying your dinner.”

“It was delicious, thanks.” Luke usually had a difficult time lying about food. This time, he barely noticed. “You’re the server for this table near the door, aren’t you?”

Merrie glanced to the empty table he was indicating and nodded. “Yes, why? Is there a problem?”

“Not at all.” She already seemed on the defensive, Luke thought. He needed to reassure her that she wasn’t about to get into trouble. “The thing is, I believe I saw an old friend a few minutes ago. He’d been eating at this table but he left before I managed to catch his eye.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help—” Now that she knew she wasn’t facing a reprimand, the server was visibly itching to get away.

Luke stepped in front of her, debating whether a healthy tip would make her more forthcoming. He decided against the tip, afraid it might be such an obvious bribe that she would clam up even more. “My friend and I lost track of each other when he moved to the D.C. area six months ago. I wondered if he was a regular here at the restaurant.”

“I wouldn’t know. Sorry, Mr. Savarini. Like I said, I’m new. I only started last week and I’d never waited on him before, that’s for sure.”

“Did he pay by credit card? If so, could you tell me his name? That would help me to confirm it really was my friend.”

Merrie wasn’t stupid. Her smile vanished. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t give out personal information about one of our customers. As it happens, though, the guest you’re inquiring about paid in cash. In fact, he left without even waiting for his check. He just dropped a bundle of twenty-dollar bills on the table, but it was more than enough to cover his bill. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’re really busy and I need to get back to work.” She walked away before Luke could ask any more questions.

“Well, that got me precisely nowhere,” he said to his sister, sliding back into his seat. “The server admitted the guy didn’t wait for a check. He simply left a stack of twenty-dollar bills on the table to pay for his meal. As the owner of three restaurants, I can tell you that almost never happens.”

“Let it go, Luke.” His sister handed him the dessert menu. “The reality is that Ron Raven is dead and you saw somebody who looked like him.”

“The man recognized me,” Luke said. The more he replayed the incident in his mind, the more convinced he became that he’d seen Ron Raven, not some look-alike. “He knew I’d recognized him and he bailed without even waiting for his check. Then he damn near ran me down in the parking lot in order to avoid talking to me. If it was somebody who just looked like Ron, why was he so anxious to avoid me?”

“Because you made him nervous the way you were obviously pursuing him?”

“No.” Luke gave a decisive shake of his head. “He ran because he recognized me. Then he dropped a pile of cash on the table to cover his bill because he hoped to get out of the door before I caught up with him. And it worked.”

Luke knew he was being obstinate, but the sound of Ron’s laughter and the tilt of his head had seemed familiar even before he’d glimpsed the man’s features full face. A stranger might happen to look like Ron. What were the odds that the same stranger would also sound like him and have similar mannerisms?

Anna was silent for a moment, finally giving real weight to the possibility that her brother had seen what he claimed. “If that man was Ron Raven and he recognized you, that means he hasn’t lost his memory….”

“I agree.”

“But if Ron isn’t suffering from memory loss, he’s deliberately hiding. That can’t be good, especially for his families.”

Luke shrugged. “His wives and children already know Ron was a liar and a cheat. How is it worse for them to know he’s a live scumbag as opposed to a dead one?”

“Maybe it’s not,” Anna conceded. “But I sure as hell would think long and hard before I went to either of his previous wives and informed them that I’d just seen their supposedly dead husband eating dinner in my cousin’s restaurant. Their most likely reaction is to have you arrested for harassment.”

“Don’t they have a right to know?” Luke was unsure how he would answer his own question.

“Know what, precisely?” Anna demanded. “That you think you may have seen a man who looks like Ron Raven, but he left the restaurant before the two of you exchanged a single word? Wow! There’s news to set the blogosphere humming.”

“I wouldn’t be telling his families I saw a man who looked like Ron Raven,” Luke answered quietly. “I’d be telling them I’m pretty much one hundred percent sure that I saw Ron Raven, alive and in the flesh.”

Anna drew in a sharp breath, taken aback by his conviction. “You were simply a business acquaintance of Ron’s, not an intimate friend. You probably didn’t meet him more than a couple of times.”

“Try at least a dozen. Usually one-on-one, and sometimes for meetings that lasted as long as three or four hours. Ron Raven was a hands-on type of investor.”

“Even so, it was six years ago and you’ve been leading a hectic life ever since then. Memories blur. Impressions get distorted. Plus, you have no idea what sort of people his wives and children are. Do you have the right to mess with the lives of people you’ve never even met?”

Luke was silent for a long time. This was what came of stubbornly clinging to the notion of privacy in a family where if one person sneezed on Tuesday, by Friday every sibling and ten percent of the other relatives would have called to find out how the guy’s cold was progressing.

“I have met Ron’s family,” he said finally. “Or at least his Chicago wife and daughter. I know them quite well, in fact.”

Anna stared at him. She was thirteen months older, which meant that she’d known him for the entire thirty-four years of his existence. Apparently something in his voice had alerted her to the fact that his meetings with Avery and Kate Raven involved more than socializing with the family of the man who’d provided him with investment capital.

“Define what you mean by knowing them quite well,” she said, in an ominous, older-sister tone of voice.

Luke cursed silently. If he hadn’t been thrown for a loop by the glimpse of Ron Raven, he would never, ever, have laid himself open to this sort of sisterly scrutiny.

He tried to speak with brisk indifference. “Kate…Ron’s daughter…is a pastry chef. She was a member of the U.S. team that competed in the Coupe du Monde de la Patisserie last year. The design concept for their chocolate torte was Kate’s and their team took the bronze medal. The French team won, of course—they always do—but the U.S. has never even placed in that competition before. These days, Kate is working as head pastry chef for La Lanterne, the finest bakery in Chicago.”

He was rather pleased with his casual summation of Kate’s life. All professional accomplishment and nothing personal. Anna, unfortunately, was not deceived. “How long have you been dating her?” she asked. “And how the hell could you have kept quiet about her all those times we discussed Ron’s disappearance?”

“I’m not dating her.” Under his sister’s unrelenting gaze, he expanded his answer. “Not anymore. We broke up a while ago.”

“Before her father was murdered?”

“Yes. A few weeks before, in fact.” To be precise, not long after their argument as to whether Luke respected her professional ambitions enough to take time off from the opening of his newest restaurant to fly to Lyon and watch her compete in the most important contest of her professional life. The preparation and endless hours of practice for the Coupe du Monde were so arduous they had both known Kate would be unlikely ever to enter the contest again. Seven months after their breakup, he was finally able to admit that his decision not to fly to France had probably contributed to the chain of events leading to their final, hideous confrontation.

Anna looked hurt. “Quite apart from all the times we discussed Ron Raven’s murder, why didn’t you ever tell me you were dating somebody special?”

Because he’d worked his ass off to keep the affair quiet. Because while he and Kate were dating, he’d been desperate to develop the relationship minus the analysis of his parents, his five siblings and all the assorted in-laws and cousins who might decide to stick their noses into this latest interesting piece of Savarini family gossip. Ironically, the spectacular emotional storm that ended his relationship with Kate had taught him the hard lesson that there were far more ways to screw up a relationship than subjecting it to benevolent interference from a close-knit family.

“There was no point in talking to you about Kate. It wasn’t serious and we didn’t date all that long.” Eight months wasn’t very long, he soothed his conscience, so he wasn’t exactly lying. Luke hurried on, dodging more sisterly questions. “The thing is, I do know Kate and her mother well enough to be fairly sure that if Ron Raven is alive, they would want to hear about it.”

A gruff, rumbling voice greeted them from across the room, saving him from further cross-examination. Thank you, Jesus.

“Anna, mia piccola, come stai, carina?”

“Bruno! Che sorpresa piacevole! Sto bene, grazie. E tu?”

“Eh, cosi, cosi. No, no, don’t get up, Anna.” Cousin Bruno squeezed her shoulder. “What a treat to find you here! I’m glad I decided to stop by the restaurant after my daughter dragged me to the movies. We saw this horrible, boring movie about blowing up cars. If there was anything more to the plot, I must have missed those two lines of dialogue.”

Anna laughed and stood up to hug him, ignoring his command. “Bruno, stop complaining. You know you love movies with lots of car chases.”

“Yes, providing there’s a plot squeezed in between the chases.” He patted her shoulder. “You should have told me you planned to eat here tonight. I would have skipped the movie and been here to welcome you both.”

“I wasn’t sure what our plans would be. Luke’s only in town for twenty-four hours. By the way, do you remember my brother, Luke?”

“We never met.” Bruno shook hands. “But I ate at your restaurant last year when I was in Chicago. Luciano’s on Chestnut. I inquired after you, Luke, but the sous-chef told me you were at one of your other places that night. You can be very proud of what you’ve achieved with Luciano’s. The meal my brother and I ate was spectacular.”

“Thank you. It’s a relief to know you were there on a night when we didn’t screw up.”

“Somehow, I get the impression that you and your team don’t screw up very often.” Bruno pulled out a chair and sat down. “Well, I can’t compete with Luciano’s—we don’t even try to cater to that level of sophistication—but I’m proud of the desserts we make here. What can I get the two of you? Our tiramisu is made from an old family recipe handed down by my grandmother, and it’s the best ever, if I do say so myself. The panna cotta with caramel sauce is mighty fine, as well. We use buttermilk in addition to the cream and it’s not as bland as the traditional recipe.”

“I love your amaretto ice cream,” Anna said. “It’s my personal favorite.”

“Then amaretto ice cream it shall be for you, cara.” Bruno gave her hand a fatherly squeeze. “Luke, how about you?”

“The panna cotta would be great,” he said. “I’ve never made it with buttermilk and it sounds interesting.”

Their desserts arrived along with tiny cups of aromatic espresso and Luke chatted politely with his cousin, who seemed both a kindly man and an experienced chef. Maybe the ravioli has just been an unfortunate exception to generally good food, Luke mused. The panna cotta was certainly first-rate, and the buttermilk made for an intriguing variation on an old standby.

Bruno excused himself to have a word with his staff, and Anna worked hard to keep Luke from reverting to their previous conversation about Ron Raven. Since Luke was working equally hard to prevent her picking up their conversation about Kate, the atmosphere around the table was unusually strained. They were both relieved when Bruno returned after a few minutes and sat down across from Luke.

“Merrie, one of our servers, asked me to give you this,” he said, handing Luke a thin, crumpled credit card receipt. “She said you were inquiring about a couple that was seated at one of her tables. Apparently, they left this behind.”

Luke picked up the flimsy slip of paper. “I appreciate Merrie thinking of me. But she told me that couple paid their bill in cash.”

“They did. This isn’t one of our charge slips,” Bruno said. “If it was, I couldn’t pass it on. But Merrie found it tucked in among the stash of twenties they left behind to pay their bill. She was about to toss it away when she saw me ordering your desserts and realized you really are my cousin. Since this charge slip is nothing to do with us or the meal they ate here, and there’s no way to return it to the couple, I figure there’s no harm in handing it over to you. Merrie says you were interested in this man.”

There was a definite question in his cousin’s voice and Luke repeated his story about seeing an old friend he’d lost touch with. “I’m not sure if I’m enthusiastic enough to track him down through a credit card bill, but I appreciate Merrie’s gesture. Tell her thanks from me, will you?” He deliberately downplayed his interest, since he could only imagine how Bruno would react if Luke repeated his claim to have seen a supposed murder victim eating dinner on the other side of the dining room.

Bruno seemed satisfied with Luke’s explanation, and left to go back to the kitchen after another profuse round of good wishes and goodbyes.

Luke smoothed out the charge slip, scrutinizing the scanty information as he and Anna made their way back to her car. The charge of forty-three dollars and change had been made earlier in the day at an establishment called Sunrise. There was no indication of what sort of establishment Sunrise might be.

“What’s the name on the charge slip?” Anna asked, clicking her key to spring the locks on her car.

Luke held the slip up to the light. “Stewart M. Jones.”

“You see!” Anna looked relieved. “I told you the man you saw wasn’t Ron Raven. Now you can relax and stop obsessing about seeing dead people. I feel as if I spent the past hour living in an outtake from The Sixth Sense.”

The fact that the name on the charge slip read Stewart Jones proved nothing at all about the identity of the man Luke had seen in Bruno’s, as his sister must realize. If Ron had faked his own death, he wouldn’t be opening charge accounts under the identity he’d just been at great pains to get rid of.

Anna must be afraid that he was seeing visions of Ron because he was hung up on his failed relationship with Kate, Luke decided. As it happened, his sister was way off the mark. He wasn’t fixated on Kate—far from it. Their affair had ended in nothing less than misery and he sure as hell wasn’t wasting any time regretting its end. Kate might be beautiful and sexy and have the same career interests as he did, but their personalities were polar opposites. Not to mention the fact that her concept of faithfulness bore no relationship to his.

He realized now that their character differences had mattered almost as much as the betrayals. As their affair started to unravel, their differences worked to the surface, causing unbearable friction. His frustrations had boiled over into the sort of noisy Italian explosiveness he’d spent most of his adult life learning to control. Kate had reacted to each of his displays of temperament with a deeper and deeper retreat into icily silent WASP disapproval.

Even the memory of those last few weeks was enough to make Luke feel slightly sick, quite apart from the horrors of the final denouement. Allowing his sister’s comments about the real identity of Stewart M. Jones to slide past unchallenged, Luke tucked the charge slip into his billfold and took his seat next to Anna in the car. He returned the conversation to family, food and the imminent birth of their youngest sister’s first baby and made sure he kept it there.

For all his silence, Luke’s conviction that he’d seen Ron Raven remained strong. But six months had already passed since Ron disappeared, and Luke decided he could afford to wait until he got back to Chicago before notifying the authorities that, far from moldering in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, Ron Raven was alive and well, and seemingly enjoying life in one of the more prosperous suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Three

Chicago, October 10, 2007

The Miami police department didn’t even bother to be polite when Luke called to inform them that he’d seen the supposedly dead Ron Raven eating dinner in Herndon, Virginia, a week earlier. Dismissed by a bored clerk—his call never made it as far up the hierarchy as a real cop—he tried again with the Chicago police.

Smarter this time around, he directed his call to a detective sergeant whom he’d met eighteen months earlier when Luciano’s was being remodeled. The cop had been assigned to find out who was stealing construction materials from the restaurant site and Luke figured the two of them had a good rapport.

Their rapport apparently didn’t extend far enough for the cop to believe Luke’s claim to have seen Ron Raven. His tale was received with greater politeness, but with the same bored disbelief demonstrated by the police department in Miami. The bottom line was that cops in both places had fielded hundreds of reports alleging that Ron Raven was alive, and the fact that Luke described himself as an old friend and business acquaintance of the deceased carried no particular weight.

“Has it occurred to you that maybe you’ve received so many reports because Ron Raven is alive and people really are seeing him?” Luke finally asked, no longer bothering to hide his frustration.

“No,” the cop responded baldly.

“That’s it?” Luke asked, incredulous. “Just no?”

“What do you want me to say?” The detective sighed. “We receive reports like this every time there’s a murder that attracts a lot of TV coverage. And when there’s no body to be buried, you can guarantee that half the weirdos in the state are going to claim they’ve seen the deceased.”

It was sobering to realize that from the detective’s point of view he was simply one more wing nut craving notoriety. “But you’ve dealt with me before!” Luke protested. “You know I’ve met Ron Raven because it was right in your report about the thefts from the construction site. You needed a record of who was providing financing for the restaurant and I told you then—almost three years ago!—that I had a revolving line of credit with Ron Raven.”

“That’s true.” The cop’s voice added a layer of impatience to existing boredom.

“And it isn’t as if I’m calling you when Ron Raven’s disappearance is being hotly reported by the media. They moved on to fresh meat weeks ago. Months ago, in fact.”

“I’m sure you believe what you’re telling me, Mr. Savarini—”

“But you don’t believe me, and you have no interest in conducting any sort of follow-up investigation.”

“No, I don’t.” In view of their past acquaintance, the cop relented enough to expand on his reply. “Look, here are the facts. I pulled up the case notes while you were talking and I’m reading them right off my computer. In the three months the investigation was on active status, we took reports from a hundred and twelve people claiming to have seen Ron Raven. Do the math. That’s around ten supposed sightings a week. Miami police have taken hundreds more. On top of that, six callers told us they’d committed the murder, and another three identified themselves as the woman who’d been in the hotel room with Mr. Raven. We followed up on all six confessions and interviewed all three women who claimed to have been in the Miami hotel room. Our detectives concluded the closest any of those people had come to seeing Ron Raven was via the TV screens in their living rooms. That was your tax dollars at work, Mr. Savarini, from May until the end of July. A complete waste of time and police resources. Be grateful the case has been put into inactive status. Except for the warrant outstanding against Julio Castellano, of course. Now, if you thought you’d seen him, I’d be more interested.”

“The fact that crazy people like to confess to murders they didn’t commit proves nothing about whether I saw Ron Raven in Virginia last week.”

The cop no longer sounded bored, only impatient. “We have forensic evidence that proves Julio Castellano, a twice-convicted murderer, was in Ron Raven’s hotel room,” he snapped. “We have bullets and blood-spatter patterns in the hotel room, in the exact places forensic experts would expect if the victims were shot while they were running from the bed. We also have security video of two bodies being wheeled onto a yacht. Based on discrepancies between the ship’s log and data collected from the yacht itself, experts have calculated that the boat traveled a total of thirty-five nautical miles that night without knowledge or permission of the owners. Trust me, Mr. Savarini, we know exactly what happened to Ron Raven the night he disappeared. He was murdered. He’s dead and his body—what’s left of it—is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”

It was depressing to hear Anna’s arguments repeated more or less point by point. Luke realized that announcing he had the number of the car in which “Ron Raven” had driven away from the restaurant was going to get him nowhere. The chance of the Chicago police department agreeing to run the numbers was somewhere south of zero. He cut short what was clearly a useless exercise by thanking the cop for his explanations and hanging up.

It was approaching 11:00 a.m., almost time for him to leave for work, and way past time for him to stop obsessing about a sighting that apparently nobody cared about except him. He was sweaty after his morning run, and he retreated to the bathroom to take a shower in preparation for the long hours ahead. He’d be lucky if he was back in his Lincoln Park condo before two or three in the morning, and that was assuming the night produced no major crises at any of his restaurants.

Luke let the water pound in a scorching stream over his head and body. The cops were convinced they had the case of Ron Raven’s disappearance wrapped up, despite the minor detail that they hadn’t actually managed to arrest the alleged murderer. Who was Luke to persist in the claim that he’d seen Ron eating dinner in Herndon, Virginia, when the rest of the world was happy to accept that the guy had long since become an all-you-can-eat buffet for the Atlantic fishes?

Even if he was right and the rest of the world was wrong, he had no good reason to hurl himself against the brick wall of police indifference. The eight months he’d spent dating Ron’s daughter didn’t justify sticking his nose into Raven family business months after his affair with Kate had ended. God knew, he had enough problems within his own family to keep him occupied for the next lifetime or two. He sure as hell didn’t need to take on anyone else’s family problems.

But, dammit, he’d seen Ron Raven! The annoying conviction remained, despite his efforts to wash it down the shower drain. Luke reminded himself of all the reasons why this was a totally lousy time for him to set off on some idiotic quest to convince the world that Ron was alive. The sous-chef at his newest restaurant in suburban Winnetka had sliced open his thumb yesterday, which meant that Luke would be putting in ten long hours of intensive labor tonight, instead of merely checking in for a couple of hours before transferring to his flagship restaurant in downtown Chicago. The Food Network had called yesterday and asked him to tape a show for their upcoming series on America’s most exciting new chefs. Somehow, his already crammed schedule for next week had to be expanded to include eight hours of interviews, with a camera crew trailing him while he cooked and the network expert analyzed everything from his fall seasonal recipes to his underlying technique.

Luke turned off the shower and shook water from his body. Clearly, he didn’t have time right now for pursuing ghosts, literal or metaphorical. Nevertheless, he found himself grabbing a towel and padding wet-footed back into the spare bedroom that served as his home office. Tucking the towel around his waist, he grabbed his Palm Pilot and retrieved a phone number for George Klein, a private detective he’d hired over the summer to identify a dishonest Luciano’s employee.

George greeted him warmly, a soothing change after the indifferent cops. “Luke, it’s good to hear from you again. How are you?”

“I’m fine, but I need your help. Nothing to do with the restaurants, thank God. Either the security systems you put in place are working or I’ve managed to hire some really loyal and honest employees. I hope it’s the latter.”

“I do, too. There’s nothing I like better than to install protective systems that never get activated. So, how can I help you?”

“I’m hoping you can run a license number for me. It’s a Virginia plate, and I need to know who the car is registered to. Do you have any contacts in Virginia?”

“A couple. Hopefully, they’ll come through for me. Give me the plate number and I’ll give it my best shot.”

“I’m not sure of the final digit. I was reading the license in the dark and I couldn’t see whether it was AB7 4K3, or AB7 4K8. What I want to know is the name and address of the owner. The car was a silver gray Mercedes coupe, by the way. I don’t know if that makes a difference.”

“Absolutely. It’s a big help.” George Klein was far too discreet to inquire why Luke wanted to track down a Virginia license plate. “I’ll have both sets of numbers run through the DMV database, and if my contacts are still good, I should be able to get names and addresses for you before the end of business tomorrow.”

George called early the following afternoon, tracking Luke down at the smallest and least formal of the three Luciano restaurants, a trattoria in Oakbrook. He informed Luke that the vehicle registered as AB7 4K3 was a Hyundai, owned by a woman. Her name was Jennifer Parker and she lived in Reston, Virginia.

“Based on your description of the vehicle as a gray Mercedes, I assume that’s not the person you’re looking for,” he said.

“No, I’m trying to trace a man,” Luke said. “He’s an old friend and we…um…lost touch.”

George Klein was kind enough to ignore Luke’s lame attempt to justify his snooping. “The vehicle registered as AB7 4K8 is a Mercedes CLK 550 coupe,” he said. “The color is listed as Evening Pearl. That sounded more like the vehicle you’re looking for.”

“Yes, it sure does.”

“Apparently it was sold last week. The system caught up with the change of ownership only a couple of hours before I checked, so we got lucky. It’s currently registered to a Mercedes dealer in Arlington, Virginia. I figured you’d want to know the name of the previous owner—”

“Yes, I sure do.”

“It was a man called Stewart M. Jones.”

Luke’s breath caught at the now-familiar name. It might be sheer coincidence that Mr. Jones had sold his car right after Luke chased him down in the restaurant parking lot. But the hasty sale could also mean that Ron Raven was so determined not to be traced that he’d been willing to part with an almost-new Mercedes to avoid discovery.

“Do you have an address for Mr. Jones?” Luke asked the detective.

“I do. Mr. Jones gave his place of residence as McLean, Virginia—2737 Elm Court to be precise.”

“Thanks, George. I really appreciate the swift service. Can you do one more thing for me? Find out if Stewart Jones is still living at Elm Court.”

“I figured you might want that information.” George Klein sounded pleased with his forethought. “I already checked with the owners of the building. According to them, Elm Court is a short-term rental place but it’s pretty upscale, mostly catering to diplomats and international businessmen. Unit 6, which is where Mr. Jones was living when he registered his car, rents for five thousand bucks a month, furnished, weekly maid service included. That’s not out of sight for the D.C. area, but it’s obviously not cheap, either. Mr. Jones stayed there for only one month and left three months ago, with all his bills paid up. From the point of view of the management company, there was nothing in the least remarkable about his stay or his departure. They screen all tenants, of course, and Mr. Jones passed the screening without a hiccup.”

If Ron Raven were alive and wanted to conceal that fact, then Washington, D.C. would be an ideal city for him to hide in, Luke reflected. Nobody noticed strangers or transients in the D.C. area because the city was full of them. From Ron’s perspective, there were few cities in the United States that would offer better prospects for lucrative business deals, combined with plenty of comfortable places to hide.

The fact that “Stewart Jones” had passed a standard credit check didn’t surprise Luke in the least. Ron Raven had been running background checks on prospective clients for three decades and he would certainly know all the danger points he needed to protect himself against. On top of that, he’d been concealing his bigamous lifestyle for twenty-eight years. Never confiding fully in anyone, procuring duplicate documents and spinning stories to obscure the truth would be second nature to him. Now that he thought about it, Luke realized Ron Raven was almost uniquely qualified to disappear and reemerge with a new identity.

Unfortunately, the more convinced Luke became that Stewart Jones and Ron Raven were the same person, the more difficult it became to imagine how he was going to track the guy down. On top of that, he would soon have to consider the issue Anna had raised last week: Would he be doing the Raven family any favors by telling them he’d seen Ron? Or would he be heating up an emotional pot that had just started to cool down from the traumatic news of Ron’s death?

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that Mr. Jones left a forwarding address,” he said to George Klein.

“He left an address, but it’s in Australia. In Adelaide, to be precise. I haven’t followed up. I figured I’d talk with you first before going to that expense.”

“Stewart Jones’s forwarding address is in Australia?”

“Yes. You sound surprised.”

“I am.”

“I take it you didn’t know that Mr. Jones is an Australian diplomat?”

“An Australian diplomat?” Luke stared blankly at the contract with a seafood vendor that he’d been reading before he picked up the detective’s call. Ron Raven clearly had acting abilities his family didn’t know about if he’d managed to pass himself off as an Australian.

“Luke? Are you there?”

“Sorry, you surprised me, that’s all. I assumed…Mr. Jones…was an American.”

“Perhaps he is. If you’re a person trying to hide, adopting a foreign identity is a great first step.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because superficial identity checks in the States are all set up around social security numbers. An Australian diplomat doesn’t have an American social security number, meaning that credit checks are a lot more difficult. Not to mention more expensive.”

“And that would make it harder for somebody to identify Stewart Jones as a fraud,” Luke said.

“Absolutely,” George agreed. “But if Stewart Jones isn’t really Australian, we can soon find out. Do you want me to check the Australian address he gave the rental company?”

Luke’s first instinct was to stop this investigation right now. What the hell was he trying to achieve by chasing a chimera across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean? In the end, though, he couldn’t quite let go.

“It can’t hurt, I guess, since we’ve come this far so quickly. Thanks, George. Some information about Mr. Jones’s forwarding address would be useful. Can you dig deep enough to find out if we’re talking about a mail drop or a residence?”

“Sure thing. I could also check with the Australian foreign ministry and confirm whether or not they have a Stewart M. Jones on their diplomatic roster.”

“That would be great. Although Mr. Jones passed the background check conducted by the Elm Court management company, so I’m not sure that we’re going to unearth any discrepancies without going to a lot of trouble.”

“You’d be surprised—make that alarmed—at how easy it is to pass a standard credit check. I’ll just peel back a couple more layers and see what we uncover.” George paused. “It would help if I knew what I’m trying to find out.”

“For now, I’d prefer just to tell you that you’re right, and I think Stewart M. Jones is a stolen identity someone has adopted.” Luke gave up on the unrealistic pretense that he was conducting a simple search for an old friend. “If the Australian authorities acknowledge they have a diplomat called Stewart Jones, could you get a description of him? That way, I can compare the man I saw with the Stewart Jones employed by the Australian government. I don’t want to make any accusations or leap to any wild conclusions until I’m sure I didn’t just see a hardworking Australian guy who happens to look like somebody else.”

“I’ll do my best. In fact, if I tell the Aussies that I’m investigating a suspected identity theft, they’ll probably be quite willing to cooperate.”

“Thanks for all you’ve done so far, George. I’m very grateful.”

“Glad I could be of help. I’ll hold off on sending you a bill until I’ve contacted the Australian authorities and traced this address in Adelaide.” The investigator’s voice took on a tinge of laughter. “If I give you the damage in one fell swoop, you’ll only be shocked once.”

Luke avoided thinking about Ron Raven for the rest of the night, which wasn’t hard, chiefly because the pressures of serving top-quality food in three crowded restaurants, one with an injured sous-chef, occupied every scrap of his attention. He assumed George would take at least a couple of days to get back to him and he was almost glad of the delay. However, he’d underestimated George’s efficiency. Luke opened up his e-mail the next evening and found a note from the detective already waiting for him.

Thought it might be easier to put this in writing, instead of interrupting your work schedule. Mr. Jones’s forwarding address in Adelaide turns out to be for an abandoned warehouse. I’ve attached an aerial picture of the site, which as you can see is surrounded by a chain-link fence and appears deserted. I spoke to a local cop (local to Adelaide, that is) and he assures me that any mail forwarded to this warehouse from the States during the past six months would have been returned to sender or delivered to a dead-letter box, since the ownership of the site is in dispute between two companies.

I checked again with the superintendent of the apartment building in McLean, Virginia. He has no memory of any mail either being forwarded to Stewart Jones or being returned from Australia. It seems likely, therefore, that no first-class mail for Mr. Jones ever arrived at Elm Court after he left there in late June.

I also contacted the Australian embassy in Washington, D.C. I informed them somebody might be fraudulently using the identity of a supposed Australian diplomat, Stewart M. Jones. The embassy informed me that there has been no diplomat of that name serving in any capacity in the United States for the past two years. They wouldn’t comment on whether they have a diplomat of that name assigned elsewhere.

The management company for the Elm Street rental properties at first declined to share with me how they checked the credentials and references for prospective renters. After some persuasion, a clerk parted with the information that all applicants are required to provide a security deposit equal to three months’ rent. If the applicant’s check clears, the rest of the credit check is cursory. Renters are required to provide a work phone number, and this number is always called. However, since applicants provide the work number themselves, they—in this case, Mr. Jones—have complete control over how the call is answered. Mr. Jones could pretend that a caller had reached the Australian embassy, and then provide himself with a glowing reference. Child’s play for anyone with experience in setting up a scam. Sometimes I wonder why anybody in this country bothers to be honest, when deception and fraud are so easy.

Bottom line: Anyone wanting to rent accommodations at the Elm Street location could use almost whatever name they pleased with little risk of having their alias exposed.

Let me know if you need to investigate further. Sincerely, George Klein.

P.S. Invoice attached.