“You’re on a job?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“Be safe, Bells,” she said, disappearing into Quin’s office to, no doubt, tell him about the latest scandal one of our clients—or our clients’ children—had gotten into. That was her job. To spin a story on social media until the client came out like the good guy, not the spoiled pricks who had no respect for anyone else or the law.
Once upon a time, she would have been the kind of woman my family would have called in to mold a story until I came out looking like the good guy, not the spoiled little rich kid.
Brandon Adams didn’t live far outside of Navesink Bank. He was about thirty-five minutes away in an affluent area where properties were a little more stretched out. Which worked in my favor. Because people were much less likely to hear any commotion until it was too late. And even if they heard something, they sure as hell wouldn’t be able to see anything since their properties were spaced so far apart. And, from the looks of things, most of them were lined with old trees with trunks as big as your average linebacker, obstructing the mansions from the street view.
Not perfectly.
But I didn’t need perfect.
See, I had a little trick up my sleeve that I hadn’t told Quin or Nia about.
And that was the fact that I happened to know Adams’s neighbor.
Sure, she was all of eighty-seven, hard of hearing, and had the charm of your average honey badger. But I knew her. I’d swung her around more than a handful of dances at charity events over the years, back when her wheelchair-bound husband would ask it of me, then later when he was gone, and you could tell that she felt his absence at social events.
So I drove up her driveway like I’d done only maybe twice before, and always at events she was having. And I got out and grabbed a hostess gift from the many I kept in my trunk for this sort of situation.
I walked up to the door and was greeted by a butler who may well have been older than Gladys herself, and I swore I could hear his bones popping as he turned to go find the mistress of the house.
She came out into the hall a few minutes later in a cloud of smoke and a grass-green silk caftan with her meticulously dyed light brown hair already up in rollers.
“Bellamy Bancroft,” she greeted, gaze both pleased and confused at the same time. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Mrs. Randolf, I remember you saying the last time we saw one another that if I were ever in the neighborhood, that you would love to do a duet at your piano,” I reminded her, though it was mostly a lie, and I was taking a chance that she was still with it enough to call me out on it.
But she did love piano.
And she had complimented me on my playing once.
There was just enough for her to flash back on and think it was possible she’d forgotten a random invite from several years prior.
“Oh, of course. Of course. Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said, taking the bag from my hands. Inside, she’d find a standard Tiffany vase, the kind I practically bought in bulk because it suited just about any woman. It was the same reason I kept cigars on me at all times. Sure, sometimes you ran across a man who didn’t indulge in them. But experience told me they were few and far between, at least in the East. Things were different with the upper echelon on the Pacific Coast. “Come on in. The piano is through here,” she said, waving me into the conservatory toward the back of the house.
And so, as a cover for a murder I was about to commit, I sang old show tunes with the elderly neighbor who enthusiastically danced around until she got a call from one of her grandchildren.
“Do you mind if I take a tour of the grounds while I wait?” I asked, getting a dismissive wave from Gladys that was all the invitation I needed.
From there, it was an old routine.
I’d done more than enough missions in my day to know how not to make a sound, even when walking in wooded areas, even when wearing loafers instead of appropriate shoes, even without any gear, even after years out of the military. Some things you just never forgot.
As much as Nia had touted about the security, I understood through experience how lax actual guards could get day in and day out on the same job with no actual threats to worry about.
The cameras were another problem all together, but as I made my way into the backyard and the flood lights that should have been automatic didn’t pick up my movement, I got my first inkling that something wasn’t quite right with the security system.