“Robbie!” She stepped aside to let him in. “What are you doing here?”

“Really?” he asked. “I thought the pizza box was a dead giveaway.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “Sorry, I’m not myself.”

“No, but your place looks put back to rights,” he said. “I was worried you might be nervous about being alone.”

He put the pizza and wine down on her coffee table, and took the time to scratch Heathcliff’s head. The dog stood on his hind legs and hugged Robbie around the knee. It was a gesture the dog reserved for those he particularly liked, and it made Lindsey smile to see the Englishman was one of them.

“You didn’t have to go to so much trouble,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“It was no trouble,” he said. “Dylan and I spent the afternoon looking at Yale’s theater program, so it was a quick stop at Wooster Square for pizza, one of which he and his friends devoured on the ride back while I guarded this one for you and me.”

“I’ve seen teenagers eat,” Lindsey joked as she handed him the corkscrew. “You were taking your life into your hands there.”

“You’ve no idea,” he said with a wink.

Lindsey went back to the kitchen for plates and napkins. When she rejoined Robbie, he was sitting on the couch while pouring two glasses of wine.

Although Lindsey could have sworn she wasn’t hungry, the smell of the white pizza from the famous brick oven pizza joint in New Haven made her mouth water.

Heathcliff sat at full alert until Robbie shared his crust with him. Lindsey found it small wonder that the dog adored the men in her life; they both spoiled him rotten.

“So do the police have any idea who ransacked your place or why?” he asked.

“Not that I’ve heard,” she said. She took a sip of wine and set her glass down.

“You’re worried about your brother,” he said.

“I’m beside myself,” she admitted. “I just wish I could figure out who these people are that are after Jack, who the woman was who snatched him and the identity of the man who called me. I know that if I could just figure that out, then I’d have some sort of clue. I mean he’s an economist, he’s not James Bond.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asked.

“I’m not sure about anything anymore,” she said.

“What did he do for a living exactly?”

“I’m a book person, not a number person,” she said apologetically. “From what I understand, he consulted with companies and helped them drive sustainable growth using long-term strategy tools or something like that. The gist was that he was hired to boost the company’s sales when it had stagnated.”

“So he was a hatchet man?” Robbie asked. “That could make him very unpopular.”

He took a bite of pizza and studied her face while she thought about his question.

Lindsey took another sip of wine. “No, he didn’t go in and terminate employees. He mostly scrutinized the company’s way of doing business, their leadership, the current market, and their profit margins. He then made recommendations on how they could improve.”

Lindsey took a bite of her own slice and chewed while she pondered the possibility that her brother’s business was more dangerous than she had realized.

“Was he part of a company?” Robbie asked. “Did he have an office? Anyone you could call and ask?”

“When he graduated, he worked for a firm in Boston, but my brother is a roamer. He enjoyed working globally because he said it gave him a better feel for how businesses operated worldwide. He enjoyed immersing himself in different cultures.”

“Is there anyone who would know where he was most recently?” he asked.

“I—” Lindsey began but a fist pounding on her door interrupted whatever she was about to say.

“Expecting someone?” Robbie asked.

“No,” she said.

“Maybe if we ignore them, they’ll go away,” Robbie suggested.

The pounding resumed.

“Or not,” Lindsey said. “Excuse me.”

“Certainly,” Robbie said on a sigh and then downed his wine in one swallow.

Before Lindsey could reach the door, a familiar voice shouted, “Open up, Vine, I know you’re in there.”

Lindsey’s eyes went wide. She knew that voice. It was Sully, and while he rarely ever lost his temper, she could tell he was not happy.

She turned to look at Robbie, who shrugged. For one of the world’s most talented actors, he did not sell it very well, and she narrowed her eyes as she studied him.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“Innocent until proven guilty,” Robbie said.

“Hang on, Sully,” Lindsey said as she fussed with her new locks. “I’m opening up.”

No sooner had she pulled the door open than Sully strode into the room.

“I knew it!” he cried. “You set me up so you could take advantage of my absence.”

“Did you fall off your dingy and get water on the brain?” Robbie asked. “Whatever are you talking about?”

“I was on water taxi duty this evening, which is usually quite dead in the dark days of December, but no, I had three different calls for pick up out in the farthest islands in the bay, and, big shock, when I got to each one, no one had called for taxi service.”

Lindsey turned from Sully to Robbie. “You didn’t.”

“I refuse to answer that on the grounds that I might incriminate myself,” he said.

“Why you . . .” Sully lifted his hands like he was about to throttle the other man.

Robbie, being quicker on his feet than most, managed to keep the wide coffee table between them. “Hey, you got to spend a whole night with her. I was just evening it up a bit.”

“I almost froze out there, not to mention the amount of gas I wasted for nothing,” Sully said. He looked like he was going to lunge across the table but instead he snatched a piece of pizza from the box.

“Bill me,” Robbie said.

“Oh, I will,” Sully said. “But now you can leave, since I think it’s my turn to watch Lindsey.”

“The night’s not half over,” Robbie protested.

“It is for you,” Sully said.

Lindsey rolled her eyes at Heathcliff. Enough was enough. She picked up the box of pizza and shoved it at Sully. Then she maneuvered so that she was behind both of them. With one hand on each of their backs, she applied a steady pressure until she had them out the door and into the hallway.

“I can’t tell you how lovely it’s been, really,” she said. “Now good night.”

She shut the door in their faces.

“Well, you certainly managed to bollocks that up,” Robbie snapped.

“I managed to?” Sully argued. “What was the big idea sending me out on a fool’s errand?”

“Your words, not mine,” Robbie said. “I’m an actor. I can’t help it if I’m no good at strategy.”

Lindsey wondered if they would stand there and bicker all night. She opened her door a crack and said, “Good night, gentlemen.”

With sulky glances, they obviously took her meaning and began to walk down the stairs. She noted they were sharing the remains of the pizza and took that as a good sign.

She did check the lock on her door once to make sure she and Heathcliff were safely locked in. Then she did a quick scan of all of her window locks. Yes, the break-in had given her a case of the wiggins. There was no doubt about it.

She finished her glass of wine and took the empty plates to the kitchen to be rinsed. She ran the conversation she’d had with Robbie through her mind. It bothered her that she didn’t know as much about her brother’s business as she should. What kind of sister had only the vaguest clue as to what her brother did for a living?

She went over to her small desk by the window. It was fully dark outside and the living room lights reflected the room on the window glass, making it hard to see out but easy to see in. A sense of caution zipped over her nerves. She reached over and closed the thick curtain.

She sat at her small desk and opened her laptop. She scrupulously saved all the e-mails she received from her brother in a file appropriately labeled “Bro.” It took her computer a minute to get going.

Last year, Lindsey had attended a cybercrimes workshop put on by the state library association. Being providers of the Internet to the public at large, libraries were finding that some users knew how to hack the filters that were put in place to keep the computers in the library safe for all users.

One of the many things the detective teaching the class had taught them was how they could trace a criminal user back to the library by tracing the IP address, which stood for Internet Protocol address, a numerical label assigned to every computer, printer and other device within a network. Lindsey had never really thought the information would come into play in her life, but now she wondered. If Jack had been using a foreign network when he e-mailed her, she might be able to trace where he had been most recently by locating the origin of the IP address.

Lindsey opened the file from the workshop that listed the websites that could help her trace Jack’s IP. Then she opened her personal e-mail and frowned. How was she supposed to figure out his IP address from an e-mail? She switched back to her notes. Sure enough, scribbled in the margin were notes for just that.

She chose an option she had never noticed before that read “show original.” Bingo! A bunch of cybertext came up on her screen that read like gobbledygook to her, so Lindsey figured it must be right.

She checked her notes. She cut and pasted the gook onto the query screen of a website that said it would track the IP. It came back a second later with a message that said it was unreadable. She checked and trimmed her original cut from the recognizable words “return path” to “content.” She sent the query again. This time a chart came up.

Lindsey had to pause to pump her fist. She was pretty sure any computer-savvy ten-year-old could have done this in half the time, but still she had managed it. She felt the need to let out a nerdy “Woot!” before she got back to work.

She checked her notes again and logged on to the website that could track an IP address. Success was short lived. The first few websites she tried couldn’t find the IP. She tried another and another. No luck.

She needed something more to go on. She opened up her e-mail and read her brother’s messages. Jack was not one to post much more than “Hey, I’m alive!” which, while reassuring when she hadn’t heard from him, was also very annoying because it really gave her no details as to where he was or what he was doing.

Usually, the only way she discovered where he’d been was when her birthday or Christmas rolled around and a box that looked as battered as if it had walked all the way from its destination to her house arrived and inside she would find anything from a Tibetan singing bowl to a Costa Rican string bracelet.

“Jack,” she said to the miserly list of e-mails in her Bro file, “when I see you again, we are going to have a very long talk about communication, your lack thereof, and how you will improve or face my wrath.”

Finally, in the fifth e-mail she scanned, there was a kernel of information. His closing sentence read, Linds, I’m south of the border consulting on plantas de café. Hope to be home for the holidays. L, Jack.

Jack spoke at least four languages fluently and a smattering of others. It was one of the reasons he liked to be a global business consultant—he got to dust off his language skills. Lindsey had always thought that his use of the language of the country he was headed to was him showing off, but now she was grateful. It was the first solid lead she’d gotten. It fit, too, as the woman who’d absconded with him had an accent and she was clearly a beauty, a Latin beauty.

So Jack had to have been in a Spanish-speaking country and was there assisting with a company that produced coffee. At least, given her college Spanish, she hoped plantas de café meant coffee plants. She supposed she could use an online translator, but it seemed pretty obvious.

Lindsey rubbed her eyes. Sleeping on Sully’s couch had been fitful, since she was worried about her brother, freaked out that someone had followed them, and frankly, distracted by how close Sully had been. Her exhaustion was catching up to her and she yawned.

She logged on to the library’s website. She needed a quick business breakdown about the coffee industry. Ironic how much a cup of java would help her right now, she thought. She chose the “Business Insights: Essentials” option and typed in a search for the coffee industry.

Under the subheading “Roasted Coffee,” she read all about the history of coffee, the difference between the arabica and robusta beans, the importance of storage and roasting, and a multitude of other facts. Finally, in a small paragraph toward the bottom, she saw the listing for the countries where it is grown, with Brazil leading the way by producing one third of the world’s coffee.

Brazil. So maybe plantas de café was not Spanish so much as Portuguese. She sincerely hoped so. Either way, she knew her next step was to find and search a Latin IP address registry.

Heathcliff suddenly dropped on top of her feet, and Lindsey scratched his head while she waited for her search. Finally, it popped up with a Latin IP address registry. She cut and pasted the IP address into the search, and sure enough, the country of origin was verified as Brazil. Jack must have been using one of the computers belonging to the Brazilian company he’d been hired by to send his e-mail.

The cybercrimes detective had talked to them about how some criminals use a proxy server to hide their IP and thus their specific location, but there would be no reason for Jack to do that, so she had to assume this address was legit.

She was afraid to look and see how many coffee companies were in Brazil. She had a feeling it would be like trying to locate one particular bean in a silo of coffee beans. Was there anyone in Jack’s inner circle who would know?

Surfacing like a submarine from the depths of her brain, the name Stella McQuaid rose to the top. Lindsey logged on to the library’s website, and from there she went into the newspaper databases.

She found an article written two years before about Stella McQuaid. At that time, she was still working for the consulting firm, New System Technologies, which Jack still worked for in a freelance capacity. She remembered that Jack had thought very highly of Stella. Lindsey wondered if they’d kept in touch. It was too much to hope that the Brazilian coffee company was a freelance gig for this company, but hey, she wouldn’t know until she asked.

She glanced at the clock. It was closing in on midnight. She’d have to wait to call Stella’s office in the morning. She tried to convince herself that she was okay with that.

She shut down her laptop. She turned off the lights. She wondered what had become of Sully and Robbie and then told herself it didn’t matter. She was safe, she told herself. Perfectly safe.

She unlocked her front door and peeked out just to do one more visual sweep for peace of mind. It was a mistake. The sight before her gave her anything but peace. Instead her voice was full of ire when she asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”