Whiplash - Catherine Coulter [3]
She eyeballed the opening above her. It wasn't very wide, but on the other hand, thank the good Lord and the gym, she wasn't either.
She heard Royal and Carla Alvarez fumbling with each other not twenty feet away, laughing, kissing, sex-walking, she knew, toward that sofa. She had to be quiet.
She got both hands outside, one on the edge of the outside wall, the other on the window frame, and pulled herself up and through the opening. She hung upside down, looking at bushes a galaxy away.
She heard Caskie Royal say something, then his footsteps coming toward the bathroom.
No choice. She wiggled through and did a lovely tuck into the bushes.
She landed on her shoulder, the shrubbery cushioning her fall, and lay there, breathing slowly, querying her body parts. She was okay, she hoped.
She turned her head and looked up. Would he notice the wide-open window? Would he wonder? Would he be suspicious?
With her luck, he and Carla would probably take a pre-sex shower. She heard them still laughing and talking, coming closer. The shower was small, but not that small.
She rolled off the bush, bent nearly double, and took off running toward the dark woods of Van Wie Park at the back of Schiffer Hartwin's American headquarters.
She ran faster when she heard a yell coming from the bathroom.
Okay, so they knew someone had gone through the window, but they'd have no clue who it had been. It was okay. The cops would want to know if anything had been taken. Royal would search his files and see the date stamp on the Project A file. He'd know someone had read it. Would he know it had been copied? Would he tell the cops? No, he couldn't risk it. On the other hand, if he thought it through, he'd realize that someone probably had those files, and there'd be no way to keep the fabricated Culovort shortage from getting out. There'd be hell to pay.
For that, she couldn't wait.
She hoped it scared the crap out of him.
If the cops were called in, they'd know only one thing for sure. The thief was a small boy or a female, because no male over the age of twelve could have squeezed through that window.
Once inside the Van Wie Park woods, she went down on her knees, sucked in air, and looked back. Lights now flooded the bathroom and the office.
She heard what she hoped was a cop car screech into the parking lot in front of the building. In that moment she knew the guard had called the cops, not Caskie. What are you going to say, Caskie?
She was grinning as she ran through the trees and out the back to the back road that led to the main highway that ran through Stone Bridge. No sex for the wicked tonight, Caskie.
With the cops there, Caskie would have to go on record. On record with what, that was the question. He'd also have to explain to his wife what he was doing in his office late on a lovely Sunday night with Carla Alvarez.
Once she'd hiked half a mile to her baby, a muscular light blue Hummer H3, she fastened her seat belt and turned the ignition. She loved the sound of the powerful engine. She drove slowly down the road for a bit, realized her heart was still pumping too fast and her hands were still shaking. She pulled over to get herself some time to calm down. She sat back, closed her eyes, and thought back to her client, Dr. Edward Kender, professor of archaeology at Yale in New Haven. He'd been a friend of her father's, someone she'd known from her earliest years. Dr. Kender wasn't an emotional man, but she could imagine him grinning from ear to ear in excitement when he read the Culovort files she had tucked in her jacket, as he recognized the power the contents