Mike looked at him in disbelief. “What am I supposed to do? Seduce her?”
“No one would ask you to do this if we didn’t think you could. And, besides, I seem to remember that you’ve succeeded with several women. There was that girl in Lake Worth. What was her name?”
“Tracy, and she got ten to twenty. This one is a good girl. How do I deal with her?”
“I don’t know. Treat her like a lady. Cook for her. Pull out her chair. Girls like her fall for gentlemen. I’m sure that’s how Vandlo got her. And before you ask, no, you can’t kidnap her and you can’t shoot Stefan. This young woman, Sara Shaw, has to stay there to help you find out what those two want.” The captain grinned in a malicious way. “We’ve arranged for Stefan to be away for the whole time before the wedding. We gave him some family troubles that he can’t ignore.”
“Such as?”
“Even though he divorced his wife, we know he’s still attached to her, so we arrested her on a DUI charge—which was easy. She’s done a lot of drinking since Stefan left her, so we just picked her up one night, and now she’s facing jail. We let her call him in the wee hours, and just as we’d hoped, he came immediately. If he gives us any trouble, we’ll lock him up until he cools off.” The captain smiled. “I wonder what he told his fiancée to explain why he went running off to his ex-wife?”
Mike was closing his thermos, his mind still on how to accomplish this mission. “I doubt if a liar like Vandlo had told her about his ex-wife.”
“Eventually, you’ll have to tell Miss Shaw the truth, so that should be a point in your favor. Whatever you do, you just have to do it fast,” the captain said. “And never forget that this young woman would be the fourth one to disappear after she got attached to Stefan Vandlo. He used a fake name and took those girls for everything they had. Then the girls ‘disappeared’ and the boyfriend, Vandlo, couldn’t be found.”
“Yeah, I read that,” Mike said. “And if it weren’t for some vague eyewitness reports, we wouldn’t know who he was.”
“Right, because Stefan left nothing behind, not so much as a fingerprint. And you know the rule: no evidence; no conviction. Personally, I’d like to arrest the man right now, but the higher ups want an undercover operation so we can get the mother. We take away her son and she’d just start using her nieces and nephews. She’s the brains so we have to get her out of action. Permanently.”
Mike looked at his watch. “I just need to stop by my apartment to get some things, then I can leave—”
“Uh, Mike,” the captain said in a tone of apology, “it looks like you haven’t seen the news in the last couple of hours. There’s something else you need to know.”
“What happened?”
The captain took the last documents from the bench and handed them to him. “I’m really sorry about this.”
When Mike opened the folder, he saw a computer printout of a news story. Apartment Burned, the headline read. Cigarettes to Blame, Say the Authorities.
Mike’s anger flared as he looked at the photo. It was his six-story apartment building and flames were coming out of the corner of the fourth floor—his apartment.
He put the papers with the others before he looked up at the captain. “Who did it?”
“The Feds say it m
ust have been . . . Let me check. I don’t want to misquote anyone.” His voice was sarcastic as he flipped a paper over. “‘A fortuitous accident’ is what they called it. Lucky for them, that is.” The captain’s eyes were sympathetic. “I’m sorry about this, Mike, but they want you to go there clean. Your story is that your apartment burned down, so you decided to take a much-needed vacation from police work. It makes sense that you’d stay at your sister’s apartment since it’s empty. It’s supposed to be a coincidence that her place is on the same property as Miss Shaw’s. We—they—want you to lie as little as possible. Oh, yeah, I nearly forgot.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a new BlackBerry, and handed it to Mike. “Stefan cut his teeth on pickpocketing so when you do meet with him he’ll take your phone. We don’t want him to find any numbers on it that would give you away. While you’re in Edilean you’re to contact us only through your sister. Will that be all right with her?”
“Sure,” Mike said, and renewed his vow to tell Tess to stay away. The case must be really serious if they’d burned down his apartment. He’d never tell anyone, but Tess had been sending him baked goods from her friend Sara Shaw for years now, and it was Mike’s opinion that anyone who could bake like she could deserved to be saved.
When Mike was silent, the captain said, “Sorry about your clothes.” They all knew Mike was a “dresser.” “What did you lose?”
“Nothing important. Tess keeps whatever means anything to me in a storage bin in—” He hesitated. “In Edilean.”
“My advice is that you don’t visit it.” The captain wanted to lighten the mood. “Again, too bad about the apartment. I was going to volunteer to look after your goldfish.”
Mike snorted as he stood up. He didn’t have goldfish or a dog or even a permanent home. He’d lived in furnished, rented apartments since he left his grandparents’ home at seventeen.
Mike glanced at the roadway that wound through the park. He’d take a run—he needed it—then go. “I’ll leave in two hours,” he said. “I should be in Edilean about ten hours after that—if I use the siren now and then, that is.”
The captain smiled. “I knew you’d do it.”
“Want to go for a run with me?”
The captain grimaced. “I leave that torture to you. Mike?”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful, will you? Stefan has a bit of a conscience—or at least a fear of reprisals—but his mother . . .”