Read St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin for Free Online

photos.”
    “Good.” Elena made no secret of the fact that she wanted her face and discreetly presented cleavage on the society pages at least once a week. “The caterer has given me a price of two hundred dollars a head for the Fast Draw party, but he demands a cashier’s check before he serves a single canapé.”
    He must have worked for the superrich before, Kayla thought. People who spent lavishly didn’t always pay on time. In fact, they rarely did. “If you want to pay the wine bills and the rest of the party expenses when you pay the caterer, you’ll have to top up the entertainment account. I can pull it from the household account as usual.”
    Elena removed her sunglasses and looked at Kayla like she was interviewing for a job rather than already an employee. “No.”
    The tone and the cool appraisal in the wide brown eyes made Kayla’s neck tingle.
    “Deposit this in the entertainment account,” Elena said, takinga cream-colored vellum envelope from beneath her plate. “It should settle all bills.”
    Kayla took the envelope. The heavy paper flap wasn’t sealed. She lifted it and removed a single handwritten check. It was drawn on a foreign bank she’d never heard of. Her eyes widened.
    “Twenty-two million dollars,” she said. “Holy—there must be some mistake. Even you couldn’t spend that much on a party.”
    “Your job isn’t to judge my expenditures.” Elena’s voice was as cold as her eyes. Her faint exotic accent deepened. “Your job is to deposit and withdraw money at my desire.”
    Kayla’s stomach knotted. The words compliant and complicit were part of any private banker’s training. Compliant and complicit bankers were no longer legally immune from the implications of their acts. Or as Kayla thought of it: Launder money and go to jail.
    “I’ll be glad to deposit this check in any account you specify,” Kayla said, “but, as I’m not familiar with the bank the check is drawn on, I’m required by federal government regulations to ask a few questions.”
    “Questions?” Elena’s expression hardened. “You’re a banker, not a police official.”
    Kayla sighed. It wasn’t the first time one of her clients had bristled at being questioned. It wouldn’t be the last.
    But the law was the law.
    “Look, I’m not wild about the rules, but I can’t change them,” Kayla said briskly. “If I don’t follow the rules, American Southwest’s compliance department will be all over me like dust on the desert and I’ll lose my job.”
    “It’s too late to worry about your job,” Andre Bertone said behind Kayla. “Worry about your freedom instead.”

7
    North of Seattle
Friday
9:36 A.M. PST
    R and McCree dabbed at the yellow paint he had just drooled onto the dark green oilskin of his Barbour coat.
    “Hell,” he muttered without conviction.
    It wasn’t the first time he’d splashed oil paints on himself. It wouldn’t be the last. There was a vivid stain across the shoulders of one of his favorite shirts that looked like a Jackson Pollock abstract. He’d acquired it when the wind blew a wet canvas off the easel and slammed it into his back while he was peeing against a nearby tree. Just one of the hazards of painting outdoors rather than in a studio.
    Once he and Reed had laughed about their spattered wardrobes. Not any more.
    Don’t go there, Rand told himself. Reed is dead and I’m not. Life’s a bitch and she’s always in heat.
    All I can do is what he asked me to—paint and live enough for both of us.
    He rammed the easel into the wet, cold earth. The meadow at the edge of the old Douglas fir forest had been a favorite subjectfor three generations of McCrees—grandmother, mother, and twins. The daffodils his grandmother and mother had planted in the meadow had grown from a clump of sunshine to a golden glory the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Wind, cold, and rain were the flowers’ favorite weather. The coastal Pacific Northwest provided plenty of all