“I haven’t looked at the menu yet, have you?” Knox asked.
“You look. I know.”
I ordered a double cheeseburger with fries, a salad, and a chocolate milkshake. “Don’t say a word,” I told Knox when he looked up at me with wide eyes.
“Same,” he said to the waitress. “Except for the milkshake. I’ll have coffee.” Knox turned to me when she walked away. “You had a question?”
“How long will you be in town?”
“Indefinitely. Doc was in Italy too. I told him I was needed at home. He and Tackle said they’d cover me.”
“Oh. I mean, that’s nice.”
“Tackle and I already talked about me working for his dad, so that’s covered too.”
“You already talked about it?”
“Before I left on this last job. He said there was plenty of work if I wanted it.”
“By ‘last job,’ do you mean the missing-person case?”
“Yeah, but it got a whole helluva lot more complicated than that. Does the name Richard Emsworth mean anything to you?”
“Sounds familiar.”
“It was his daughter, Tara, who was missing.”
I raised a brow.
“Do you know her?”
I shook my head.
It took my brother twenty minutes to tell me what had transpired since he left at the beginning of January.
First, he’d tracked the daughter to Italy, where her father, who had been accused of art forgery as well as wire fraud, was purported to be.
Then after accusing her of being the forger, Knox had found out that the man he’d believed she was involved with but was actually her half brother, was responsible for the crimes. Something about the way he told the story told me he was leaving a lot out.
“Knox?” I asked between bites of my cheeseburger.
“Yeah?” he said, sitting back and wiping his mouth with his napkin.
“Did something happen between you and Tara Emsworth?”
He laughed. “Is it that obvious?”
16
Tackle
“Anything you wanna talk about?” Doc asked when he sat in the seat beside me shortly after we’d boarded the plane that would take us back to the States from Italy.
“Why, do I look like there is?”
“You have since Halo left.”
“Did he say anything to you about what the emergency was?”