there was no mistaking the barrel chest. It belonged to Mitch Wainwright. Kit took two steps backward, nearly stumbling. Her body felt electrified with panic.
“Can I offer you a lift, Ms. Finn?” Wainwright asked, his voice as inviting as the tip of a knife. She began to make out his features in the darkness and saw his lip curl. “It’s not really safe to be running around down here at this hour.”
“No.”
There was no one else within sight now, and she knew if Wainwright chose the right moment, he could force her into the car without anyone noticing.
“That’s a shame. Because it seems like it’s time for us to have another little talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” she called toward him.
“Is that so?”
“Yes. For some reason you think I have something you want but I don’t. I’m irrelevant to you.”
“And yet you won’t leave my employees alone. Here you are tonight, gabbing with another one of them.”
She could see then how it must have appeared to him: that she was trying to pump Sasha, which was exactly what she had been doing.
“She—she wanted to hire me as a decorator.”
“I’m not sure what game you’re playing, Ms. Finn,” he said, “but I can assure you it’s a dangerous one. No one targets me, or my company, or my employees. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“You have to believe me, I—”
And then, improbably, a cab appeared, crawling up the street behind the limo, its roof light on. Kit shot up her arm. Seconds later the cab pulled ahead of the limo and stopped. Kit nearly tore open the door and heaved herself inside. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wainwright jerk in surprise.
“I just need to get out of here,” she blurted out to the driver. “That man—he was harassing me.”
The driver, his head wrapped in a turban, studied her in the rearview mirror.
“You want me to call 911?”
“No, no. Just head north, okay. The east side. Once we get away, I’ll give you the address.”
She crouched down in the seat and peered out the rear window. Wainwright was darting back into the limo.
“Take the FDR, okay?” she told the driver. “It’ll be faster.”
When Kit checked a few seconds later, the limo was behind them but by the time the cab driver had made a couple of turns, it had vanished. Of course, she told herself. Wainwright wasn’t going to engage in a car chase and risk being stopped by the cops.
Kit’s heartbeat finally slowed, the sound of it no longer pounding in her head. She smiled for just a second, imagining what the expression on Wainwright’s face must have been when she bolted into the cab.
But then the realities of the night came crashing back. Wainwright had obviously skipped his dinner and started searching for her right away in the car, perhaps even sending Kennelly on foot to increase the chance of locating her. She replayed Wainwright’s words to her: “No one targets me. . . .” Standing there on the curb with his legs slightly straddled, he’d looked like a beady-eyed Terminator.
For the first time since she’d fled the bar, Kit fixed on Sasha’s ugly revelation. As she’d raced through the streets, she’d been too panic-stricken to dwell on it, but now there it was in all its ugliness. Kelman was involved with Sasha.
Last night, Kit had finally let down her guard with him, allowing the infatuation she’d sandbagged behind some barrier to seep through again, and it turned out she’d been a crazy fool to do that. Clearly, Kelman had strung her along, pretending to have a romantic interest in order to serve his own ends. What if, as she’d suspected in the past, he’d been involved in the insider trading scheme himself and had later double-crossed his partners, enraging them. He may have used her as a distraction for the people at Ithaka, a distraction that had put her life in danger and led to Avery’s death. He’d conned and manipulated her but fed her enough truth for her to believe his story.
What he’d never anticipated, however, was that her path would cross with Sasha’s.
Four blocks from Baby’s apartment building, Kit shifted in the seat and checked again out the back window, straining to see in the darkness if any of the car lights behind them belonged to a limo. There were only taxis and a few regular cars. When she entered the apartment a few minutes later, Baby was hunkered down in the living