Deadly Little Secrets Page 0,15

Millionaire. “I gotta go, I’m getting another call. Later?”

“You bet,” Ana said, heading for vending to get something sweet.

Before the end of the day, Ana had a text saying there would be a pass for her at the door if she’d give Jen a name for the pass. Digging through her desk, Ana got out her folder with alternate identities and picked one of her favorites.

“Shirley Bascom. That looks good.” Shirley, as her alter ego, was about the right temperament to be going out for an evening at the gallery. A red wig and a pair of glasses would do the rest. Not that a gallery would check that closely if a millionaire gave her name as a guest. She texted the name to Jen.

She spent the rest of the week and all of Friday sorting through the data, arranging it to suit her, making sure she knew whose pieces had come from which gallery and which showing. She pulled out and sorted everything that had come from Prometheus, both before Luke Gideon’s death and after it.

Only two fraudulent items were on the list after Luke’s death. Interesting. She wondered what Carrie McCray had changed, if anything.

“You going tonight?” Pretzky sneaked up on her again.

Ana refused to jump, refused to give Pretzky any more satisfaction.

“Yeah. Got a pass through a connection. Using an alias, not that I really need it, but it’ll keep things clear and separate.”

“Good.” Pretzky surprised her by approving. Ana had figured she’d bitch about it. “Keep me posted. Send an e-mail after you leave the event, fill me in.”

“Will do,” she said, glancing up. Pretzky was frowning at her, a strange look on her face. “Problem?”

“Of course not. See that you report in, Burton,” she said curtly, stalking away.

“Have a good weekend,” Ana called. She nearly winced again as the words left her mouth. She didn’t want to fraternize with Pretzky. Didn’t want to imply friendship. Didn’t even want to hate the woman. She didn’t want to feel anything for her current post other than the tedium of wading through the files.

Connecting with her peers, feeling for anyone, meant emotions. Emotions meant pain, and she wanted to avoid any more of that for a while. It had taken her a month after Rome to pick up the pieces of her heart. She’d known everyone on the team there, from their dogs’ names to their birthdays, childhood hangouts, and even their favorite gelato. Knowing them that well made their loss a constant black hole, especially since she felt responsible. She’d lost her parents so young, and those memories had leapt in to compound the loss of her friends in Rome. One day they were there, the next, gone.

Talking to the agents who’d worked this case originally, she’d come perilously close to getting involved again. Emotionally invested. Dealing with an irrational attraction to Gates Bromley made it worse.

Uh-uh. No way.

Before she could dig herself a hole of despair—far too easy in her current mental state—the alarm on her PDA chimed the time.

“Shit,” she cursed, cutting the thing off mid ping. “An hour to get home, damn it.”

She’d waited too long to leave. She’d meant for the alarm to remind her, at home, that she had to get dressed. Shutting down her computers and flinging things into her briefcase, she hurried out.

Luckily, it took her only forty minutes to get home, a near-miracle for a Friday night. Even with that bare excess of time, Ana was still over thirty minutes late to the Prometheus Gallery to meet Jen. She hadn’t finished her deep data runs on the gallery, Carrie McCray, and her late husband. She preferred to have the data at hand, but there hadn’t been quite enough time to get it all done. She’d made the choice to have the info on the art be her primary focus, but she had the basics on McCray and everything else. If she had to, she could wing it.

“Good evening, ma’am.” The attractive, tuxedoed man at the door greeted her with a smile. “If I could have your name?”

“Oh, certainly!” She pretended a breathy excitement she in no way felt. “It’s Shirley, Shirley Bascom.” She smiled in turn. “Ms. Shirley Bascom,” she emphasized as she tossed the long strands of the red wig over her shoulder. She’d already assessed him as gay, but you never knew where a little flirting might get you. She was rusty though, and it showed.

Confirming her suspicions, he blushed a bit but suavely deflected her ersatz