Curious Minds (Knight and Moon 1)

“Mr. Grunwald needs to see you,” he said. “Immediately.”

“Tell him I’ll be there in a half hour.”

Bummer, Riley thought. Now what?

She turned right on Park Road instead of left and cursed the traffic all the way to Constitution Avenue.

Thirty-five minutes later she got off the elevator on the seventeenth floor of Blane-Grunwald and went directly to Werner’s office.

“I’m sorry I missed your call yesterday,” Riley said to Werner. “I was with Mr. Knight.”

“The call wasn’t important,” Werner said. “I asked my assistant to check in with you to make sure Emerson was comfortable with our arrangement. Unfortunately, the call this morning is of a more unpleasant nature. Maxine Trowbridge has been murdered. I got a call early this morning from the New York office. She was found on Liberty Street, in the Financial District. She was stabbed. Apparently. The details are pretty sketchy.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I know it’s a shock.”

“No. It’s not possible. How could Maxine be in New York?”

“We’ll never know. I suppose she went up there yesterday.”

Riley sensed movement on the far side of the room and realized there was another man in the office. He’d been sitting quietly in one of the Eames chairs that flanked the window.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Werner said. “This is my brother Hans.”

The man stood up, all six foot four of him, massive and imposing in his four-star-general uniform. Hans Grunwald, the director of the NSA. One of the most powerful men in America. The second man in the rowboat.

Riley had a rush of panic, fearing Hans had seen her in the kayak. She’d been wearing the RoboCop visor, and for the most part they were hidden in the cattails. Still, it was hard to miss a woman with red hair.

“Were you close to Maxine?” Hans asked Riley.

“No,” Riley said. “I hardly knew her.”

“The police think it was a robbery,” Werner said. “Her purse, her watch, and her rings were all missing. Such a tragic waste.”

The gold, Riley was thinking. The broken sunglasses. The men in the dark suits. They killed her and dumped her in New York.

“I never had the pleasure of meeting Maxine,” Hans said, “but Günter always spoke so fondly of her.”

Riley’s mind was spinning. Hans had just lied to her. He’d seen Maxine alive, only yesterday.

“I have to go,” she said, moving for the door. “I’m late for a meeting with Mr. Knight.”

Werner blocked her way, looking ever so sympathetic. “Of course. But we were wondering. The police, as I say, think it’s a simple robbery. But then, they don’t know about Günter’s disappearance. And they don’t know about his…special relationship with Maxine.”

“Relationship?”

“Surely it was obvious.”

“Okay.”

“It’s possible, some would argue, that they were planning to run off together. And they had a falling out.”

Riley took a beat to answer. “You think your brother could have killed her?”

“No, no,” Werner and Hans said in the same breath.

“Not at all,” Hans said.