Soft Focus

  “You must have some idea of when it disappeared?”

  His mouth twisted slightly. “Tyler Page went home sick yesterday afternoon. I think he took the specimen with him when he left Excalibur.”

  “Are you telling me that he just walked out of here with Soft Focus?”

  “Tyler Page is the most respected member of the research team. Security had no reason to search him.”

  A fresh wave of outrage shot through her. “Why wasn’t I told immediately?”

  “Primarily because I knew you’d go ballistic and start threatening to yank our funding.”

  She smiled coldly. “You were wrong.”

  “Was I?”

  “On one count, at least.” She shot to her feet. “I’m not going to go ballistic. But I certainly intend to speak with my lawyers as soon as I get back to the office. Without the crystal, Excalibur is dead in the water, and we both know it. The Fund has a right to terminate the contract.”

  “That’s a little shortsighted, don’t you think? You and your precious Fund stand to lose a fortune in future profits. Soft Focus will be worth millions in the long term.”

  “You’ll have to find it first, won’t you?”

  “I’ll find it, Miss Cabot.” His eyes were brilliant, unwavering. “Don’t doubt that for even a second.”

  The relentless certainty in his voice sent an electric chill across her nerve endings. He meant every word he said. He would do whatever it took to recover the crystal.

  Slowly she sank back down into the chair. “So, what’s this plan of yours?”

  He studied her thoughtfully for a long time. Then he got to his feet and dug a set of car keys out of the pocket of his jeans. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  She hesitated.

  He glanced back at her over his shoulder as he went toward the door. “Don’t worry. I’m not planning to invite you to view my etchings again. I learned my lesson six months ago.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  SHE WAS STILL SEETHING WITH RESENTMENT fifteen minutes later when Jack brought the car to a halt in front of the nondescript little house. She hated the fact that he could put her on the defensive so easily. Just a single, pointed reminder of their one-night stand, that’s all it had taken. How was it possible that he could still have this effect on her? He was the one who should have been mortified by the reference to the short-lived affair, not her.

  She studied the dirty windows, the unkempt, overgrown front yard, and the chipped and flaking paint on the porch.

  “This is Dr. Page’s home?”

  “Yes. As you can see, he’s not big on the details of household maintenance.” Jack shut off the engine, removed the keys from the ignition, and climbed out. He leaned down to speak to her through the opening. “I came here looking for him last night as soon as I realized that Soft Focus was missing. He was already long gone.”

  She slowly got out of the car. Jack walked around the hood to join her. Together they went up the cracked sidewalk. She watched him remove a key from his wallet.

  “Where did you get that?” she demanded. “You are a suspicious woman, Miss Cabot.”

  “Some things I learn the hard way, but I do, eventually, learn them. I’ve come to understand, for instance, that it pays to ask questions first where you’re concerned.”

  He acknowledged the unsubtle accusation with a slight inclination of his head. “I know what you mean about learning things the hard way. Take me, for instance. I haven’t ordered ice water in a restaurant in six months.”

  She eyed him sharply. This was the second nasty crack he had made concerning lessons learned. Surely he was not hinting that he considered himself the injured party in that debacle six months ago? Talk about raw nerve.

  “It sounds as if you may have developed some type of phobia,” she said with saccharine-sweet concern. “Perhaps you should see a therapist.”

  “Haven’t got the time.” He inserted the key into the lock and twisted the doorknob. “Besides, bottled water is cheaper than therapy.”

  “Are you going to tell me how you came by Page’s house key?” She cringed inwardly when she heard the prim edge in her own voice. It was Jack’s fault, she thought. He had a way of bringing out her least endearing qualities.

  He shrugged and opened the door. “Page keeps a second set of keys in his office desk. He’s the classic absentminded scientist. Always locking himself out of his own house and car.”

  “So you just helped yourself?”

  “Yes, ma’am. In the same spirit in which he helped himself to my Soft Focus specimen.”

  “Our Soft Focus specimen,” she corrected automatically. “You’re going on the assumption that Page stole it?”

  “That’s my current working hypothesis, yeah.” Jack stood aside to allow her to enter the heavily shadowed living room. “Given the fact that he’s missing and that he’s the only one who had motive, opportunity, and the technological know-how it would take to remove it from the lab, I’m going with it for now. Unless, of course, you’ve got a better one.”

  “No, I don’t.” She came to an abrupt halt as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. “Good grief. You’re right. Page isn’t much of a housekeeper, is he?”

  The room had a shabby, neglected air. Faded cushions adorned a sagging sofa covered in cheap orange fabric. There was a film of dust on virtually every surface. The threadbare carpet looked as if it hadn’t been vacuumed in at least a decade. There were crumbs on a plate that had been left balanced precariously on the arm of the plump, overstuffed sofa. A cup with dried brown residue in the bottom sat on the coffee table. Something green was growing in it.

  The room didn’t just feel cluttered, Elizabeth thought. It felt old. As if it were in a time warp. There was an oddly familiar look about it, she realized. Something about the way light slanted through the blinds creating bars on the floor reminded her of a scene from an old film. The sleazy detective’s office, she thought. Just before the mysterious lady client walks through the glass-paned door.

  And then she noticed the movie posters on the walls. Cold-eyed men with guns, sultry, dangerous femme fatales, lots of screaming yellow and red ink. Lots of shadows.

  She glanced at some of the titles. The Blue Dahlia. Mildred Pierce. Stranger on the Third Floor.

  “Page is into film noir,” she said.

  Jack closed the door. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  She walked slowly through the room. “On the face of it, it looks like he just walked out the door and might be back any minute.”

  “Don’t think so,” Jack said. “His closet is empty and his personal stuff has been cleaned out of the bathroom. He’s gone, and I’m damn sure he took the crystal with him.”

  “But why would he steal it? What can he hope to do with it on his own?”

  “Sell it,” Jack said succinctly.

  “But Excalibur holds several patents on the crystal. No competitor would touch it, because you could tie him up in court for years.”

  Jack’s mouth twisted in a humorless smile. “That leaves a whole lot of other potential buyers, including several foreign business interests and the governments of a half-dozen countries, who don’t give a damn about patent rights.”

  She sighed. “Yes, it does.”

  “It also leaves us,” Jack said quietly.

  “What?” She spun around to look at him. “You think Tyler Page might try to sell it back to Excalibur?”

  “Why not? Page knows exactly how important that crystal is to the company. He also knows that we’re under a tight time crunch. If we don’t have Soft Focus available for the Veltran presentation, we’re dead. It will take months to produce another sample of the crystal large enough to use for a demonstration.”

  “But that’s equivalent to taking it hostage and holding us up for ransom.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why, that little—” She broke off as a depressing thought struck he
r. “I don’t think he’ll try to sell it back to us. Excalibur doesn’t have any extra cash. And even if I dig into the Aurora Fund reserves, we couldn’t possibly compete with bids from foreign business consortiums or governments. Tyler Page must know that.”

  “Sure.” Jack paused. “But there are two reasons why I think we might be in the running.”

  “Go on.”

  “First, Page is brilliant in his field, but he’s a man of limited horizons in other respects. He’s spent most of his life in a lab. I doubt that he knows how to go about contacting foreign business interests, let alone foreign governments. That kind of thing takes a certain amount of sophistication and experience.”

  “Maybe some foreign interest contacted him first and offered to buy it from him.”

  “It’s possible, but if he’d sold us out already, I think he would have been smart enough to leave the country. He’s got to know that I’ll be looking for him and I won’t stop until I find him.”

  She frowned at the cold determination in his voice. “You’d use your own time and money to look for Page, even if it was too late to save Excalibur?”

  “I wouldn’t have any other choice,” he said simply.

  “What do you mean, you wouldn’t have any other choice? Of course you’d have another choice. You can cut your losses at Excalibur and find a new client.”

  “I don’t do business that way.” He looked around the room, as though the conversation had begun to bore him.

  “Wait a second,” she said. “Are you saying this is about your reputation?”

  “I’m a consultant, Elizabeth. My reputation is all I have to sell. I always fulfill my contracts. No client of mine has ever been burned this badly on my watch. I sure as hell don’t intend to set any new precedents with Excalibur.”

  “For heaven’s sake, you sound like a hired gun who makes his living shooting down your clients’ enemies for them.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “You’re talking revenge here, not your professional reputation.”

  He managed to appear even less interested in the direction the conversation had taken than he had a moment ago. “Call it what you want. The bottom line is that I’ll do whatever it takes to find Page, and I have a hunch he knows that.”

  She eyed him warily. “All right, I get the point. You said the first reason you think Page is still in the country is because he lacks the know-how to sell Soft Focus abroad. What’s the second reason you think he’s still hanging around?”

  He angled his head toward the nearest of the film posters hung on the wall. “That’s the second reason.”

  She followed his gaze. “I don’t get it.”

  “When you know a man’s secret passion, you know his greatest weakness.”

  Baffled, Elizabeth studied the poster more closely. An enigmatic Humphrey Bogart and a sultry Lauren Bacall were posed in a tense scene. The title, Dark Passage, was scrawled in red across the bottom.

  She looked back at Jack. “So Tyler Page likes film noir. How does that help you find him?”

  “He isn’t just a fan of old movies,” Jack said. “He actually produced a new one.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Jack went to the table and hefted a book from an untidy stack. It had a black and white cover. Elizabeth noticed the word noir in the title.

  Jack opened the book and removed a glossy little brochure that had been carelessly stuck between the pages. “I found this last night when I came looking for Page.” He handed the pamphlet to her.

  The picture on the front featured a seedy-looking private eye, complete with trench coat and gun in hand, standing in a dark alley. The cold light from a neon sign above a nearby tavern cast his profile into sharp chiaroscuro. The words “Mirror Springs Annual Neo Noir Festival” were printed down one side of the picture in yellow ink.

  Elizabeth looked up. “What’s this all about?”

  “Like I said, Tyler Page made a movie.” Jack jerked a thumb at one of the posters. “That one over there, to be specific.”

  “You’re kidding.” Elizabeth walked toward the poster to get a closer look.

  Although the artwork paid homage to classic poster design, she saw now that it was a contemporary image. It featured a sultry blond actress with fine, sculpted features and eyes that had seen far too much of the dark side of the world. The woman wore a figure-hugging, low-cut gown and held a gun at her side. She gripped the weapon with casual ease, as though accustomed to its weight.

  The phrase “Once you start running in Fast Company you can’t stop” was written in slashing red script across the top of the poster.

  Elizabeth read the rest of the poster quickly. Fast Company. Starring Victoria Bellamy. Produced by Tyler Page.

  She glanced up. “So?”

  “Take a look inside the brochure,” Jack said. “One of the movies scheduled to be premiered at the Mirror Springs festival is Fast Company.”

  She opened the brochure and flipped through the list of films until she saw the title: “Fast Company. Produced by Tyler Page.”

  She raised her eyes to meet Jack’s. “It takes money to produce a film, even a small, independent one like this. Did Page have that kind of cash?”

  “Good question.” He gave her an approving smile. “I happen to know someone who is very good with computers. I asked him to see if he could get a look at Page’s bank transactions during the past year.”

  “That doesn’t sound real legal.”

  “Stealing the results of his employer’s secret research project wasn’t real legal, either. At any rate, it looks like Page went through a lot of money in recent months. Mostly for expenses associated with the film. But judging from the amount, I doubt that he could have underwritten all the costs of Fast Company. I’m guessing there were other investors.”

  She frowned. “But Page got the credit as producer?”

  “Yes. Who knows? Maybe he was the biggest investor. My computer whiz also picked up on the fact that, in addition to funding Fast Company during the past year, Page cleaned out his bank account two days ago. Furthermore, wherever he is at the moment, he did not use his credit cards to get there.”

  “You had your whiz check Page’s credit-card records, too?”

  “Figured I might as well make a thorough job of it.”

  Elizabeth grimaced. “Leaving the pesky little legal issues aside, I have to admit that it does look as if Page planned his recent disappearance.”

  “Damn right he did.” Jack’s eyes gleamed with brooding anticipation. “But I think I know where he’s going to turn up next.”

  She realized he was looking at the brochure in her hand. She waved it once. “This film festival?”

  “Yes. Page poured everything he had into Fast Company. I doubt if it’s much of a film. Just a small, independent production. We’re not talking big-budget Hollywood blockbuster here. Probably won’t ever be screened anywhere else in the world except at the Mirror Springs festival. But I’ve done a lot of research into Tyler Page during the past few hours, and I can tell you one thing for sure.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No matter what else is going on in his life, Page will find a way to attend the premiere of Fast Company. That film is the culmination of all his fantasies. He sees himself as a player. For one week, at the Neo Noir Festival, he’ll get to live his dream. Who could resist an opportunity like that?”

  Understanding dawned. Elizabeth hurriedly checked the dates on the brochure. “It says the festival starts this Saturday. This is Wednesday.”

  “I’m leaving for Mirror Springs on Friday morning,” Jack said. “That little SOB is going to show up there. I can feel it. And when he does, I’m going to be there waiting for him.”

  The grim promise in his words sent a chill down her spine. “Jack, maybe we should call the police in on this.”

  “You know as well as I do that calling in the cops wouldn’t do any good. This is white-collar crime. Nobody call
s the cops in on this kind of thing. The goal is to recover Soft Focus, not send Page to jail. One whiff of the police and we’ll never find him in time to get the crystal back for the Veltran presentation.”

  “I hate to admit it, but you’re probably right.”

  She was only too well aware that nine times out of ten, businesses did not call in the police in situations such as this. The fear of bad publicity, alarmed clients, and panicked investors was more than enough to make any corporation think twice before going to the authorities.

  “The way I figure it, we’ve got two shots at finding Page,” Jack said. “Either he’ll contact me to let me make an offer to buy back Soft Focus, or else he’ll show up at the film festival. I’m betting he’ll do both.”

  “I’m not so sure, Jack. For heaven’s sake, you’re a business executive, not a private investigator. What makes you think you can find Page?”

  “Go easy on the boundless admiration and unqualified support, will you? I’m not sure I can handle so much wide-eyed flattery from my client’s biggest creditor.”

  She told herself she would not respond to that. She hated it when he made her sound like a brass-brassiered Valkyrie. She was never more acutely aware of her own femininity than when she was in Jack’s vicinity. He, on the other hand, had as much as made a public announcement to the effect that he thought she was capable of sinking the Titanic.

  Very deliberately, very carefully, she refolded the brochure and dropped it into her shoulder bag. She gave him a steely smile. “You make an excellent point, Jack. I am your biggest creditor. As such, I’ve got a vested interest in the recovery of the specimen. I’m going to go to Mirror Springs with you.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I don’t think so.”

  “If Page does offer to let you ransom the crystal, you’re going to need cash. Lots of it. No bank will loan you the money. Excalibur doesn’t have the reserves, and I seriously doubt that you possess those kinds of personal financial resources. Face it. You’re going to need the Aurora Fund.”

  “I can handle Page on my own.”