going to need one.”
When she slammed the door behind him, Patrick didn’t even flinch. He wasn’t impressed with her anger. She was in the business of selling privately owned records of the past, and she had every right to sell anything she wanted that she’d bought from private citizens. But when she sold stolen documents from the National Archives, she was stealing the history of the United States.
And she wasn’t going to get away with it, he promised himself. The problem was, even though he’d led her to believe differently, he didn’t have a clue how many documents her father had really taken from the Archives. He’d tracked down those ten that had been sold on eBay, and knew for a fact that there weren’t any more posted on the Internet, but that didn’t mean anything. The more valuable items could have been sold to private buyers and would never see the light of day again. Without Mackenzie Sloan’s cooperation—and records—his investigation was at a dead end.
He had to find a way to gain her trust, he decided, and the only way he could think of to do that was to appeal to her apparent love of history. If greed hadn’t completely darkened her soul, she just might care enough about the loss of some of the documentation of the country’s past to step up to the plate and help him. If that didn’t work, then he’d appeal to her own self-preservation. She wouldn’t like prison.
And he wouldn’t like putting her there. There was nothing he liked more in a woman than intelligence, and she had plenty of that. When you added flashing blue eyes, a pretty face and plenty of spunk to the package, she was a hard woman to ignore.
Suddenly realizing where his thoughts had wandered, he swore softly as he reached his car. He didn’t care how pretty she was; he wasn’t interested in her as anything but a suspect. He had no use for a lying woman—he’d been there, done that—and had good reason to never trust any female other than his mother and aunts ever again. A smile from Mackenzie Sloan didn’t change the fact that she was a suspect. And if his investigation proved that her father was guilty and her partner in crime, she was going to hate the day he ever walked in her shop. Because he would do everything he could to put her in jail.
Pacing restlessly, her stomach roiling with worry, Mackenzie snatched up the phone the second it rang. “Stacy! Thank God!”
“What’s wrong?” she demanded. “I just got your message. Are you all right?”
Not sure if she wanted to cry or throw something, she said, “No, I’m not all right! You know that good-looking hunk you thought was so wonderful when you were here earlier? He’s an agent with the National Archives, and he’s investigating me.”
“What? John and I will be there in ten minutes.”
Eight minutes later, Stacy and her husband, John, rushed into the shop. Sinking into a chair at the reading table, Stacy rested her hand on her stomach and braced herself. “Don’t sugarcoat it. Give me the worst. What are the Feds after and what did you say?”
“In a minute,” Mackenzie said, frowning as she and John both stepped to her side. “Are you all right? I shouldn’t have called you. I wasn’t thinking.”
“I’m your lawyer, silly,” she scolded. “Of course you should have called me. And just because I’m pregnant, doesn’t mean I can’t work.”
“You’re supposed to be taking it easy,” John reminded her. A tall, quiet man who absolutely adored his headstrong wife, he knew better than anyone that Stacy did what Stacy wanted to do. Still, he tried. “The doctor said—”
“He’s an old woman, sweetheart,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “He worries too much. I’m fine.”
Mackenzie exchanged a look with John, who only grinned and shrugged. Mackenzie couldn’t be quite so blasé. Stacy was more than her best friend. She was the closest thing to family she had left. And from the moment she’d told her she was pregnant, Mackenzie had been worried to death about her.
And with good reason. She’d never been pregnant herself, but Mackenzie knew the risks. When she was twelve years old, her mother died in childbirth, and that tragedy still affected her sixteen years later. If something happened to Stacy…
“You still need to put your feet up,” she said quickly. “Here, let me get you some tea.”
Watching her flit around the shop, into the kitchen and back for hot tea and homemade cookies, then stoke the fire in the fireplace, Stacy finally said quietly, “It can’t be that bad, Mac. Tell me.”
Up until then, Mackenzie would have sworn that even though she was furious with Agent O’Reilly, she was in complete control of her emotions. Then tears came out of nowhere to sting her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she choked, furiously wiping at the tears that spilled over her lashes. “I just can’t believe this is happening. The Feds think Dad stole documents from the National Archives.”
“What? You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, it gets better,” she replied. “According to Agent O’Reilly, I knowingly sold the documents Dad stole on the Internet.”
Her friend looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “That’s ridiculous! You’ve never done anything dishonest in your life, and neither did your dad. Agent O’Reilly’s obviously made a mistake.”
Mackenzie desperately wanted to believe her, but he’d seemed so sure. “He had a playbill I’d sold on eBay,” she said, pacing restlessly. “It was from Ford’s Theatre the night Lincoln was shot. He claims it was Lincoln’s and belongs to the Archives.”
“That seems like a difficult thing to prove unless it’s got Lincoln’s blood on it,” John said, frowning. “Where did you get it?”
“From Dad. He told me he bought it from the descendant of a congressman who was in the audience that night.”
“That’s certainly possible,” Stacy said. “Obviously, you believed him at the time. Why wouldn’t you? The question is…do you still?”
Mackenzie had been asking herself that ever since Agent O’Reilly walked out the door. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t want to believe Dad would do such a thing, but there’s no other explanation. If that playbill really was stolen from the Archives, how did it end up in Dad’s possession if he didn’t steal it?”
“Maybe he bought it from the thief,” Stacy suggested. “If that’s the case, the story he told you was probably the same one the thief told him. He wasn’t lying.”
“Or he bought it from a legitimate owner,” John pointed out. “Playbills would have been given to all the theatergoers at Ford’s Theatre the night Lincoln was killed. How many people saved theirs? There’s probably dozens of them in private collections.”
“But wouldn’t Agent O’Reilly know if it belonged to the Archives?” Stacy said, frowning.
“Not necessarily,” Mackenzie replied and repeated what the agent had told her about how documents were inventoried at the Archives. “Just because a document doesn’t have any stamps or file numbers doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong to the government.”
“So he can’t be sure that the playbill belongs to the Archives, either,” John said. “If that’s the case, why is he going after you?”
Mackenzie
