BY JANET EVANOVICH

The Fox and O’Hare Novels (with Lee Goldberg)

The Heist

The Stephanie Plum Novels

One for the Money

Two for the Dough

Three to Get Deadly

Four to Score

High Five

Hot Six

Seven Up

Hard Eight

To the Nines

Ten Big Ones

Eleven on Top

Twelve Sharp

Lean Mean Thirteen

Fearless Fourteen

Finger Lickin’ Fifteen

Sizzling Sixteen

Smokin’ Seventeen

Explosive Eighteen

Notorious Nineteen

The Between the Numbers Novels

Visions of Sugar Plums

Plum Lovin’

Plum Lucky

Plum Spooky

The Lizzy and Diesel Novels

Wicked Appetite

Wicked Business

The Barnaby and Hooker Novels

Metro Girl

Motor Mouth

Trouble Maker (graphic novel)

Nonfiction

How I Write

Pros and Cons is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

A Bantam eBook Original

Copyright © 2013 by The Gus Group, LLC

Excerpt from The Heist © 2013 by The Gus Group, LLC

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Heist by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

eISBN: 978-0-345-54943-3

Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

Cover photograph: Claudio Marinesco

www.bantamdell.com

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

First Page

Excerpt from The Heist

About the Authors

FBI Special Agent Kate O’Hare sat in her cramped cubicle at the Federal Building in West Los Angeles and stared at her computer screen. She had an empty Domino’s pizza box shoved into her wastebasket and six empty Coke cans lined up on her desk. A half-empty bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos was filed under “N” in her file cabinet, and her keyboard was gummed up with chocolate crumbs from the pack of Oreos she was currently working her way through. Her brown hair was clipped back in a snarly mess, her white shirt had a small pizza sauce smudge on it, and her blue eyes were narrowed in concentration.

Cosmo Uno looked over the five-foot-high partition that separated his cubicle from Kate’s. Cosmo was two years older than Kate, and two inches shorter. This meant he was thirty-three, 5′ 4″ tall, and had to stand on a box to snoop on her.

“Hey, Katie,” Cosmo said, “What’s shaking? What’s doing? What’s brewing?”

“I’m working,” Kate said, her eyes glued to her screen, not indulging Cosmo by looking at him.

“You shouldn’t be eating all those Oreos. They’re going to make you fat. Maybe I should help you eat them.”

Kate didn’t move her head, but she cut her eyes in his direction. “You make a move on my Oreos and I’ll shoot you.”

“What are you working on? Are you still trying to find Nicolas Fox? Remember when you almost got him in St. Louis, but he disguised himself as a Hall of Fame guy and was doing color commentary in the announcer’s booth at Busch Stadium the whole time you were looking for him? That was a good one. And then there was the time you were sure he was trying to steal a giant panda from the National Zoo, but Fox escaped through the Reptile Discovery Center. Ryerson was with you on that raid, right? I hear he ran out of the snake exhibit screaming like a little girl. I wouldn’t have screamed. I like snakes. You should take me next time.”

“No.”

“Okay, I get it. You’re a loner. You’re the Lone Agent. Get it? The Lone Agent.” Cosmo gave a snort of laughter. “That’s hilarious.”

Kate slumped in her seat.

“I tell everyone I hit the cubicle jackpot on account of I’m next to you,” Cosmo said. “Most of the agents on this floor are boring, but you always have something good going on with Fox. You know what I think? I think you’re obsessed with him. I bet you even think about him in the shower. I bet you think about him when you go to bed at night. I think you’re hot for him.”

Kate opened her top drawer, removed her Glock, and laid it on her desktop alongside her computer. Cosmo considered the gun for a beat, stepped off his box, and returned to his desk.

“Idiot,” Kate murmured, stuffing another Oreo into her mouth.

For weeks Kate had been surfing newspaper websites and skimming crime reports from various law enforcement agencies. She was looking for big-money thefts and swindles that were audacious, creative, cocky, and self-indulgent, all trademarks of a Nicolas Fox scheme. It was tedious, laborious, utterly unglamorous work, but she hoped if she could get to the scene of Fox’s next crime fast enough, while the tracks were still fresh, she’d have another shot at finally nailing him. She’d been chasing him for three years, and the chase had turned into a game for him, and Cosmo was right, it was an obsession for her. And okay, she thought the guy was kind of cute, and criminally brilliant, but that didn’t mean she was hot for him, did it?

Nicolas Fox, currently posing as Merrill Stubing, wedding planner to the stars, held Caroline Boyett’s hand as he led her out of her fiancé’s Chicago penthouse living room and onto the rooftop garden. The wedding was set to take place on Saturday, only five days away, and Nick was thinking about the placement of guests and principals. Placement was important because Nick’s crew would begin moving through the penthouse relieving Caroline’s fiancé, Milton Royce, of every valuable not bolted into the Carrara marble floors just as Milton’s exhibitionist bride started her slow journey to the altar. Guests would be seated in the garden, positioned in such a way that they would be facing Lake Michigan, their backs to the interior of the penthouse. Only the officiating minister would be staring into the condo, and he was part of Nick’s crew. Milton would also be facing the living room for a short amount of time, but thanks to his bride’s kinky choice of wedding gown, Nick felt certain that Milton’s eyes would be glued to her chest.

“This is so exciting,” Caroline said. “In five days I’ll be Mrs. Royce. Of course it won’t be all fun and games. There’ll be some work involved. I’ll have to change over all my credit cards.”

“So tedious,” Nick said.

“Yes, and I’ll have to be vigilant to make sure they’re nothing less than platinum.”

Caroline Boyett was going to be fifty-eight-year-old Milton’s third and most expensive wife. He acquired her the same way he did his wealth—through a hostile takeover. When Milton met Caroline, she was the young trophy wife of the CEO of a Cleveland dog food company. Royce grabbed the dog food company on the cheap and sold it off for its underlying real estate value. Milton then seduced Caroline away from her husband with the promise of her being squired off to luncheons in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Phantom and waking up every day in his ten-thousand-square-foot $12.5 million penthouse. The penthouse was atop the Windsong Building, a twenty-story Beaux-Arts masterpiece on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive.

The problem for Milton was now that he’d wowed Caroline with his money, he couldn’t put the brakes on her spending. Their wedding was going to cost more than Milton’s first two combined, thanks to the grandiose notions of Merrill Stubing, the wedding planner Caroline called her “godsend.” Stubing had earned the nickname three months ago when Caroline was standing in front of Neiman Marcus and he’d tackled her out of the way of a speeding Smart car. And as if that dramatic first meeting wasn’t fateful enough, it had happened at the exact moment she was beginning to plan the wedding of her dreams. Caroline was envisioning herself on Milton’s arm just as Stubing appeared out of nowhere and threw her to the sidewalk.

Truth is, the meeting between Caroline and Stubing wasn’t attributable so much to fate as to meticulous planning. Nick and his crew had executed the Smart car stunt with practiced precision. And now Nick was taking the time to ensure that the wedding would unfold with practiced precision too, because the success of his heist depended on it. If Caroline rushed down the aisle, his carefully orchestrated plan would go out the window.

Nick paused in front of the open French doors, and he and Caroline faced Milton, who was standing on the far side of the garden on an X chalked onto the weathered granite tile floor imported from a pillaged Italian villa. Caroline was wearing skinny white jeans, gold strappy five-inch heels, and a magenta see-through blouse. Nick was wearing a form-fitting sheer black silk Armani sweater, tight designer jeans, and Hermès orange suede loafers. Milton was wearing the same thing he’d worn for the past thirty years: black slacks, black dress shoes, and a white shirt. He had a few strands of hair left on his head, a soft roll of fat around his middle, and a stent in one of his coronary arteries.

“In five days this rooftop will be a safety hazard,” Nick said to Caroline and Milton. “The inferior steel girders that were used to cut costs will groan under the combined weight of your fat friends and relatives. I calculate there will be in the vicinity of twenty tons on the hoof, but do we care? No, we do not. We will be swept away by the beauty of the occasion. Lucky for you that you hired me. No other wedding planner would have the ability to take your mind off possible imminent death by the use of flowers and twinkle lights.” He turned to Caroline. “And you, my dear, will be the ultimate distraction in your one-of-a-kind, shockingly flimsy wedding gown.”

Caroline shivered in excited anticipation. “I’ll be the talk of the town.”

“Dumplink, you’ll be the talk of the entire country,” Nick said.

Caroline gave him an earnest look. “I want everything to be perfect.”

“Perfection is my middle name,” Nick told her. “If one of your guests choked on a meatball and died, if one of the millions of candles we’ll be using set your living room on fire and everything went to cinders, I’d still make sure your wedding ended in perfection.”

“I knew I could count on you,” Caroline said.

Milton wistfully looked over the edge of the rooftop at the traffic below.

“If you jump it’ll make a mess,” Nick told him. “Your head will crack open like a cantaloupe, and they’ll have to scrape your brains up with a spatula. And that would be such a shame, because you’re a very attractive man when your head is intact.”

Nick winked at Milton, and Milton grimaced.

“On the big day I’m going to escort Caroline out of the master suite to the French doors leading to the garden,” Nick said. “She’s going to stand there and let everyone ogle her. There’s going to be a lot of oohhh and ahhh. And we might need to have some paramedics on hand in case any of the really old geezers has a heart attack when he sees her.”

Caroline giggled and clapped her hands. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes.”

Nick smiled. The human race never ceased to amaze him. Particularly, he was intrigued by the way people found each other. In an odd way, Caroline and Milton were a perfect match. They were both totally self-absorbed and ruthless and, by their own standards, very successful. Milton would tolerate Caroline until something new caught his eye, and Caroline would peck away at Milton until he was carrion.

And Nick knew that Milton wasn’t the only male on the roof deck at risk of becoming roadkill. Nick was playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Kate O’Hare, taunting her with clues designed to annoy. Truth is, he was inexplicably attracted to her. She was a tantalizing mix of girl next door and junkyard dog.

“This is going to be so majestic,” Caroline said. “When do I start walking down the aisle?”

“When you hear the band playing Burt Bacharach’s ‘The Look of Love,’ that will be your cue to slowly glide down the aisle,” Nick told her. “You will be a vision in white, and you will walk very slowly so you don’t slip on the rose petals and break your back. Also if you walk too fast your breasts will bounce out of your bodice.”

The slow walk down the aisle was important to Nick because he needed four minutes and eleven seconds of distraction to steal all of Milton’s treasures, including his priceless collection of golden Chachapoyan tribal artifacts.

Caroline looked across the terrace to Milton. “Will Burt be here?”

“No, he will not,” Milton said. “Burt was unavailable.”

Not that Milton had bothered to check. The wedding was already going to be too expensive without flying in celebrities.

Caroline frowned. “It won’t be the same without him.”

Nick patted her shoulder. “I’ll make sure you have the highest quality digital sound system money can buy.”

Caroline continued to pout.

“What about Dionne Warwick?” Nick said. “Maybe Dionne is available. Wow, what a voice.”

“Yes, Dionne!” Caroline said.

“She’s not available either,” Milton said, staring daggers at Nick, who pretended not to notice.

“What about her sister Celine?” Caroline asked.

Milton looked incredulously at his fiancée, and for a moment Nick feared he might cancel the wedding on the spot.

“Dionne Warwick doesn’t have a sister Celine,” Nick told Caroline. “You’re thinking of Celine Dion.”

“Yes,” she said. “How about her?”

Milton looked like he was still contemplating jumping, and Nick saw his whole scheme slipping away.

“Not a good idea,” Nick said. “If we had Burt or Dionne or Celine here, no one would notice them. Once you step out in your gown it will be all about you. You’ll be the star of the show. Burt would get kicked to the curb. And you know how fragile some of those celebrity egos can be. We wouldn’t want to be responsible for Burt’s mental breakdown.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Caroline said. “I’d never want to do anything to harm Burt.”

“And you’re the luckiest man in Chicago,” Nick said to Milton. “All the other guys out there—well, at least the straight guys—are taking Viagra to get a good stiffy going. We’re going to have to tranq you so you don’t go animal on us and ravish Caroline on the spot when you see her in her wedding gown.”

This got another giggle out of Caroline, and Milton finally smiled. He liked the idea that he might be able to go animal without pharmaceutical assistance.

“Every man on this rooftop is going to be wishing he was in your shoes,” Nick said to Milton, “but she’s all yours. Caroline will be your greatest, most enviable treasure.”

Actually, Caroline and the four-carat diamond she had on her finger would be the only treasure left in Milton’s penthouse.

The wedding would take place on the lake-facing end of the rooftop garden. The reception would be held in the living room, which had been cleared of its usual furniture and filled with tables and chairs. For the most part, the golden idols were displayed in Milton’s study, bedroom, and dining room, areas that were on the city-facing side of the penthouse and would be off limits to the guests, allowing Nick and his crew almost unfettered access to the collection. Nick had already cataloged every item and assigned them to crew members by location.

Nick led Caroline across the garden to Milton. “When the song ends, you’ll stand here together, under an obscenely expensive arch of flowers, and you’ll speak your vows in the flattering glow of moonbeams and candlelight.”

“I could cry just thinking about it,” Caroline said.

“Me too,” Milton said, contemplating the price of the flowers and candlelight, relieved that at least the moonbeams might be free.

Nick put his hand to his heart, showing that he was also overwhelmed with the wonderfulness of it all. “And here’s the big finale, are you ready? I just love this part. When the minister declares you man and wife, the instant you kiss, the band will play a triumphant version of Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ and the sky will erupt in fireworks from a barge on the lake.”

“Will it be Neil?” Caroline asked.

“No, it will not,” Milton said. “He doesn’t do weddings.”

“But he sang at the wedding in Saving Silverman,” Caroline said.

“That was a movie,” Milton said. “He doesn’t do weddings in real life.”

“He didn’t in the movie either. They kidnapped him,” Nick said.

Milton held his ground. “I am not kidnapping Neil Diamond.”

“You would if you loved me,” Caroline said.

“The band might drown Neil out, anyway,” Nick said.

“You’re right as always,” Caroline said. “I’ll settle for the band.”

The way she put it, it seemed like Milton was getting off easy only having to pay for a band. So everyone was happy, especially Nick. Between the fireworks and the music, nobody would hear the bang when he blew open Milton’s safe.

Kate set a large coffee with cream and a small white bakery bag on her desk and booted up her computer.

Cosmo popped up and looked over the cubicle wall at her. “It’s Friday, so you must have a cheese Danish in that bag.”

“I don’t get a cheese Danish every Friday.”

“Yes, you do. Onion bagel on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And a cheese Danish on Friday. Am I right, or am I right?”

“You’re right. Don’t you have work to do? Don’t you have any pending files?”

“I was involved in the Ramos Green investigation, but Green died yesterday. He accidentally walked into a bullet. You live by the sword, and you die by the sword. What goes around comes around. Am I right, or am I right?”

Kate blew out a sigh. She tried hard to be a team player. And she wanted to like Cosmo. She really did. But jeez Louise, he was annoying. “You’re right.”

“So what about you?” Cosmo asked. “Are you making any progress with Fox? Are you closing in on him? Are you ready to pounce? You’re going to pounce on him and nail him, right? BAM!”

Kate looked at Cosmo and wondered if he’d shut up if she punched him really hard in the face. Probably not. She would feel good, but it would be wasted effort. And then she’d feel guilty, and she’d have to buy him a bagel or something.

“So what are your plans for the weekend?” he asked.

Kate opened her coffee and took the cheese Danish out of its bag. “Nothing special.”

“How did I know that? You’re going to work, right? Not me. All work and no play makes Cosmo an unhappy boy. I have a smokin’ date with a sizzling chick. Runner-up for Miss Lompoc. If they gave extra points for the biggest gazongas she would have won, if you know what I mean.”

“Gee, I’d like to chat some more but I have stuff to do,” Kate said.

“I bet you’re wondering how a little guy like me can always get these hot dates.”

“Actually, no.”

“It’s the size of my gun. Right off the bat, I show them my gun.”

“I tried that once,” Kate said, “but the guy I was talking to went to the men’s room and didn’t come back.”

Three cups of coffee and a long morning of dead ends later, Kate stumbled onto a lead. “Holy Love Boat! Set a course for adventure!” she sang out. She did a happy dance while she waited for the article to print, ripped it out of the machine, and ran down the hall to her boss, Agent in Charge Carl Jessup.

Jessup had positioned his desk so that he faced the window and had his back to the door, a furniture arrangement he’d been told was horrible feng shui and was probably responsible for his chronic constipation, mild gingivitis, and the unusually high number of birds that flew into the bulletproof glass. But he didn’t care. He liked to watch the traffic inching to and from the San Fernando Valley on the 405 freeway. He said it helped him think.

“I found Nick,” Kate declared, waving the paper.

Jessup swiveled in his seat to look at her. He was in his fifties and had a face like a photograph that someone had crumpled up and tried to smooth out again.

“Congratulations. Where is he?”

“Chicago.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I like long stories, particularly ones that end with big arrests.”

“Four months ago Jerry Bodie, a guy who made his fortune selling timeshares to people who couldn’t afford them, hired a high-end moving company to transport his classic car collection from Miami to his new home in Las Vegas. The cars never got there. The transport company was a fraud. It caught my attention because Bodie is just the kind of person Nick likes to swindle.”

“Rich?”

“And crooked, ruthless, and greedy. The man Bodie hired to move his cars was Tod Stiles. That’s the name of a character from the old TV series Route 66.”

“I loved that show. I don’t remember the names of the heroes, but I’ll never forget their car, a ’61 Corvette. I wanted one just like it. Hell, I still do.”

Kate tried out a mental image of Jessup in a ’61 Corvette and came up short. She could better see him in a ’54 Buick that was dragging a muffler and belching black exhaust.

“Yeah, well, anyway, I sent Bodie a photo of Nick and got a positive ID,” she told Jessup. “Nick was Stiles. He probably had the cars sold before Bodie gave him the keys.”

“How does a swindle that happened four months ago in Miami put Fox in Chicago today?”

“I checked out the passenger lists of every flight, train, boat, and bus out of Miami that left within twenty-four hours of Bodie giving Nick his cars. I ran those lists against the index of characters in The Complete Directory of Episodic Television Shows. It’s Fox’s MO. He picks his aliases from old TV series.”

“I knew that,” Jessup said.

“Anyway I got one hit. Lewis Erskine flew to Chicago.”

Jessup nodded. “Erskine was the hero of The FBI. Used to drive a new Ford around D.C. landmarks at the end of each episode.”

“Are cars the only thing you watch TV shows for?”

“I like cars,” Jessup said. “What else do you have?”

“Erskine never left Chicago. Mickey Mouse, Archie Bunker, Darrin Stephens never left. No television character left Chicago in that time frame.”

“So in your mind this means Fox is in Chicago?”

Kate presented him with the computer printout. “This means he’s in Chicago! For weeks I’ve sifted through Chicago papers for potential crimes, and I came up with zip, bupkis, nada, nothing. And then today while I was doing my usual fast scan I accidentally logged on to the Style section of one of the papers and this popped up on the first page.”

“ ‘Caroline Boyett to Wed Milton Royce’?”

“Look at the photo!”

“Lucky Milton,” Jessup said.

Kate did an eye roll. “Look at the man with Boyett. It’s Nick Fox.”

Jessup squinted at the printout. “Are you sure? It says the guy is Merrill Stubing.”

“Merrill Stubing was the captain on The Love Boat. The article goes on to say how Merrill Stubing rescued Caroline from being hit by a car in front of Neiman’s, and now he’s her wedding planner.”

“The guy looks poofie.”

“It’s Fox! He’s a master of disguise.”

“So I’ve been told.”

Okay, so the picture was a little grainy, like it had been taken with a cell phone and not intended for newsprint, but Kate was still almost 50 percent sure it was Fox.

“Can you fact-check this a little before I fund a trip to Chicago?” Jessup asked.

“Yessir. Absolutely.”

Kate rushed back to her cubicle and researched Milton Royce. The man had lots of money, two ex-wives, an extensive art collection, and what looked like the skimpiest combover in the history of hair. She could find no further information on the wedding planner. She returned to Jessup and asked him for a contact in the Chicago office.

Jessup scrawled a name and number on a scrap of paper. “Reginald Gunter,” he said. “He’s a good man. Don’t drive him nuts.”

“Fox is in Chicago,” Kate said. “I feel it in my gut. I know he’s there.”

“Back in the day, when I was a special agent, I was convinced that a bank robber I was chasing was hiding out in Pittsburgh. I led a full-scale raid on a downtown hotel based on a pizza delivery order that I was sure he’d made. Meatballs, anchovies, and pineapple.”

“Were your instincts right?”

“No. It was a major screwup that got my boss transferred to Sitka, Alaska.” Jessup paused for effect. “I hate the cold, Kate.”

Kate traipsed back to her cubby and called Gunter.

“I think Nicolas Fox is posing as the wedding planner for the Royce wedding,” she told Gunter. “I need you to go to the Windsong Building and get an ID from the concierge. If you don’t have a photo on file I can send one to you.”

“I don’t see Nicolas Fox as a wedding planner,” Gunter said. “What’s in it for him? He’s a scammer.”

“He’s also a thief. What does Milton Royce have?”

“Lots of money. And a collection of golden idols.”

“Then that’s what he’s after.”

“Do you want me to approach Royce or his fiancée?”

“Negative,” Kate said. “I don’t want to take a chance on spooking Fox.”

“It’s going to be a zoo in that building,” Gunter said. “The wedding is tomorrow night. We got an alert on it. It’s going to be a media circus.”

Kate paced for an hour and a half while she waited for Gunter to call back.

“You need to relax,” Cosmo said, looking in on her. “You’re leaking nervous energy, and it’s giving me eczema. You want to know what I do to relax?”

“No! Do not tell me.”

The phone rang, and Kate snatched it up.

“I couldn’t get a positive ID,” Gunter said. “The concierge wasn’t sure. He said the wedding planner is flamboyant and has spiked-up blond hair, and the guy in the photo looks normal. Personally, though, I think you might be on to something. I couldn’t find anything to verify Merrill Stubing or his business. I’ll check around some more tomorrow.”

At five A.M. Kate dragged herself out of bed, got dressed in the clothes she’d worn the day before, and shuffled into the kitchen to make coffee. She’d thrashed around all night, unable to get Fox out of her head.

“I hate him,” she said to her Mr. Coffee machine. “He’s totally corrupt. He has no regard for the law. He’s arrogant. And he’s cute.”

Deep inside, Kate knew that Nick’s cuteness was the single attribute that annoyed her the most. Criminals were not supposed to be attractive. At least, not as attractive as Fox. Fox was the physical embodiment of her dream man. How crapola was that? When she had time, she was going to have to reconstruct her dream man. Change his hair from brown to red. Give him a less than perfect body. And no more dreamy brown eyes. No more smiling, kissable mouth. Her dream man would have to have a mouth like a frog’s, thanks to Nicolas Fox.

“Ugh,” Kate said, grabbing the last yogurt out of the fridge. “Nicolas Fox is scum.”

She took her coffee and yogurt to her laptop and pulled up Chicago news. She bypassed the night’s killings and found a gossipy feature on the front page of the Style section.

People will be lining up along Lake Shore Drive tonight for a fireworks show courtesy of Milton Royce, the so-called “King of Hostile Takeovers.” The fireworks, launched from a barge on Lake Michigan, are part of Royce’s extravagant wedding ceremony, which is being held tonight at his twentieth-floor penthouse atop the famed Windsong Building. Controversy still surrounds the city’s unprecedented decision to allow the fireworks over the strenuous objections of residents concerned about the increased noise and traffic.

The article went on to talk about accusations that city officials were too beholden to Royce, a big contributor to local political campaigns, and how the wedding, with its exclusive guest list, was considered the social event of the season.

“This has Nicolas Fox written all over it,” Kate said to herself. “He’s planning something big when the wedding is in full swing. I’m at least seventy percent sure.”

She closed the Chicago news site and went to a travel site. Ten minutes later she was booked on a midmorning flight to Chicago and had a discounted room at the DoubleTree. It was Saturday, and she hadn’t heard back from Jessup about funding an op, so she was on her own. She was going to Chicago on her own time and with her own money. She wasn’t following protocol and it was probably a dumb thing to do, but she was doing it anyway. At the very least, she’d get to see some fireworks.

It was close to six o’clock when Kate checked in to her hotel. There’d been a delay at LAX that stretched the four-hour flight to five hours, there was a two-hour time difference between L.A. and Chicago, and the taxi ride into the city had been interminable.

She tossed her carry-on suitcase onto the bed and unpacked her Kevlar vest and FBI windbreaker. Not that she was planning on raiding Chicago’s wedding of the year, but you never knew when a Kevlar vest would come in handy. And okay, there was a remote possibility that she might raid the wedding.

She realized she hadn’t taken her phone off plane mode, changed her settings, and immediately got a message with photo from Gunter. The photo showed the wedding planner in tight jeans and a fitted silk shirt. His hair was blond and spiked. Caught him helping with a flower delivery, the message read. What do you think?

Kate called Gunter. “It’s him,” she said. She was almost 85 percent sure. “How quickly can you assemble a strike team and get them on scene?”

“Forty-five minutes to an hour. Assembling the team isn’t the problem. The problem is disrupting a wedding on private property without cause and without appropriate authorization.”

“Understood. I’m in Chicago. I just arrived. I’ll go in alone, and I’ll be discreet. All your men have to do is seal the building from the outside. How far is the DoubleTree from the Windsong?”

“Not far. It’s a short walk.”

“I’ll meet you at the Windsong.”

Kate jammed her vest and her windbreaker into a tote bag, shoved a couple extra ammo clips in, and grabbed a bag of chips from the minibar. She ducked into the bathroom and checked herself out. No mustard on her shirt from the ham and cheese sandwich she’d had for lunch. No sandwich bits stuck between her teeth. Her hair was no messier than usual. She swiped on some lip gloss and decided this was as good as she was going to get under the circumstances. Heck, it was pretty much as good as she got under any circumstances.

She reached the Windsong ahead of the team and hung in the lobby, watching guests arrive. The concierge gave her the fish eye, so she moved outside. While she waited, she called Jessup.

“I’m in Chicago,” she said. “I’m visiting an old college friend, and I happened to run into Gunter, who happened to get a photo of the wedding planner. And I’m almost eighty-seven percent sure it’s Fox.”

“Eighty-seven percent?”

“Maybe it could go as high as ninety-two percent.”

There was a vague noise on the other end of the line.

“Was that a groan, sir?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“You’re killing me.”

“Just doing my job.”

“And you’re calling me why?”

“I was sort of thinking of inviting myself to the wedding. It’s tonight, and I’ve got a strike team assembled.”

“O’Hare, you can’t just barge in on Milton Royce’s wedding. Do you have cause?”

“He has a large collection of golden idols.”

“I don’t care if he has a large dick collection. You need a good reason to enter. For that matter you have at least eight percent doubt that it’s Fox.”

“My plan is to sneak in and see for myself before I call the team in. I’ll be discreet.”

“You’re lots of things,” Jessup said. “Discreet isn’t one of them. I need permission for this. Hang tight while I make a phone call.”

Kate disconnected and looked at her watch. She saw a van parking in a red zone at the end of the block and walked toward it. Gunter got out of the van and met her halfway.

“We’re in a slowdown while we get permission,” Kate said.

Caroline was wearing a tiny white lace thong, diamond drop earrings, and white satin kitten heels. The kitten heels were a concession to Milton so she wouldn’t tower over him on their special day. She was in her dressing room with Nick, her arms outstretched, waiting for him to help her wriggle into her gown. Wedding guests were congregating on the other side of the oversize mahogany double doors that opened onto the master suite. Music and conversation drifted through the doors. Nick looked at Caroline and wondered how he was going to get her into the gown. He was very good at getting women out of their clothes but had little to no practice getting the clothes back on them.

“Be careful not to mess my hair,” Caroline said. “It took forever for Maurice to get it to look like this.”

Nick thought Maurice should have taken less time. Caroline looked like she was wearing the wedding cake on her head. Maurice had piled up the huge mass of platinum blond hair and decorated it with pink flowers and sparkle dust.

“We’ll go up from the bottom,” Nick said, hoping it was a good idea. “I’ll hold the gown and you step into it.”

He went down to one knee, and Caroline carefully stepped into the circle of silk, bringing her hoo-ha two inches from the tip of Nick’s nose. Nick worked the material up to her ass, took a deep breath, and tugged. He was wearing a white tuxedo with a black tie and a pink handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket, and he’d sweated through his shirt from the exertion of remembering he was supposed to be gay. He slipped the gossamer-thin spaghetti straps over Caroline’s shoulders, she arranged her double D’s, and Nick zipped her up, thinking it would be a miracle if the straps held.

Caroline looked at herself in the ornate gold-framed full-length mirror. “Do you think I look fat in this gown?”

“Fat” wasn’t the first adjective that came to Nick’s mind. The first adjective was YIKES! And that was followed by HOLY CRAP!!

“You’re not fat,” Nick said. “You’re stunning. No one will be able to take their eyes off you.” And this was true because she was close to naked, with a scandalous amount of boobage showing. The gown was cut so low it was practically frontless and backless. The white satin material clung to her like plastic wrap, and the slit in the skirt was so high Nick was afraid the little man in the boat might jump out at any moment.

“This will be a night to remember,” Nick said. “You stay here and think beautiful thoughts. I’ll come get you when everything is in place.”

He left Caroline in her suite, closing the doors behind him, and walked down the short hall to the living room. Guests were still hanging out, guzzling drinks and scarfing down hors d’oeuvres while his crew of a dozen uniformed caterers mingled among them with serving trays. He caught the eye of one of the servers, a pickpocket named Hoppy Hayward, and gave him a slight nod. It was the signal that it was time for the caterers to drift off to the kitchen and begin stuffing plastic trash bags with the Styrofoam packing pellets they’d stashed in the crates of linens and dishes.

Nick continued out to the rooftop garden, where Milton was knocking back his third martini of the hour. Milton was standing under a white gazebo that was sagging under a massive amount of floral color and twinkle lights. A band was blasting out Barbra Streisand songs, which were being sung by a Dean Martin impersonator. Paper lanterns swayed overhead, in imminent danger of catching fire from the hundreds of flaming candles set out on hightop tables and nestled in elaborate flower arrangements.

Nick approached Milton and gave him a wide smile. “Showtime! Are you ready?”

“Good God,” Milton said, not looking all that happy.

“It’s not too late,” Nick said, nudging Milton with his elbow. “You could walk away from all this and meet me at the bar on the corner. You know what they say: The only difference between a straight man and a gay man is a six-pack of beer.”

“Get away from me,” Milton said. “Stand on the other side of the room. The best part of this wedding is that I’ll never have to see you again.”

“I’ll take that as a yes to my original question, so we’re good to go.” Nick said.

Nick returned to Caroline, ushering her out of the bedroom and through the living room. He signaled to the band and they went into “The Look of Love.” Caroline and Nick paused at the French doors.

“This is it,” Nick said. “Enjoy the moment.”

Caroline nodded, gave Nick’s hand a squeeze, and took a tiny step onto the rose-petal-strewn pink velvet carpet that led down the aisle. Everyone turned to look at her. There was a moment of stunned silence, then a collective gasp. Milton’s jaw dropped and his eyes bulged. The lounge singer stumbled over a lyric. The wedding photographer couldn’t snap pictures fast enough.

This is great, Nick thought. Everyone’s happy. Caroline feels like a total sexpot. Milton is beside himself to be marrying a total sexpot. And the guests are on the edge of their seats, not sure where to look first, waiting for a nipple slip, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bride’s wedding-day taco. And Nick was happy because all eyes would be glued to Caroline for the next four minutes and eleven seconds. He turned on his heel and met his crew coming out of the kitchen with the trash bags stuffed with packing pellets.

“You have four minutes, starting now,” Nick said, tapping his watch. “Go!”

The crew split, working room by room, grabbing idols, packing them safely into the bags, and carting them to the freight elevator off the kitchen and then down to the garage.

Nick went to Milton’s office, removed a nineteenth-century painting from the wall behind Milton’s desk, and exposed a wall safe. The theft of the golden idols would make splashy news, but the real moneymaker for Nick was a flash drive that Milton kept in his safe. The flash drive held all of the account numbers and passwords to Milton’s offshore bank accounts. Nick took a handful of explosive Semtex putty out of his pocket and applied it to the surface of the safe.

Kate looked at her watch for the hundredth time. Why wasn’t Jessup calling her? Did he realize time was ticking away? She could hear the band playing twenty floors above her, and half a block away she had two vans filled with agents playing craps and catching up on their Twitter accounts. She went inside the Windsong Building and approached the mountain of a man who was guarding the elevators. She flashed her badge and identified herself.

“I need to go up,” she said.

“I bet.”

“I’m serious.”

“Nice try. Merrill Stubing, the wedding planner, warned me about you.” The guard held up a photograph of Kate that had been lifted off her sister’s Facebook page. “He said the paparazzi might show up pretending to be feds.”

Kate looked past the guard and stared at the bank of monitors behind him. A uniformed female caterer was standing at a loading dock in the underground garage. The woman was handing bulging plastic bags to a guy who leaned out of the open rear end of a panel van that said YUMMY GOOD CATERING on the side. One of the bags split open, but the guy caught what was inside before it hit the floor. The object in his hands was a golden head about the size of a honeydew melon. On the monitor, two more caterers emerged from the service elevator and climbed into the van. The back doors of the van closed, and it pulled away. Another Yummy Good Catering van took its place from somewhere else in the garage.

“Robbery in progress,” Kate said into her Bluetooth earpiece. She was 98 percent sure. “Seal all exits.”

She turned and ran from the lobby and around the corner of the building to the back alley just as a van was heading for the street. Kate slipped into the garage before the roll-up door could drop down and seal the ramp. The van drove off. The door closed behind her.

She hurried down the ramp, slowing as she neared the first parking level. The woman was still on the loading dock and was now passing bags to a man in the second van.

Kate stepped forward, gun drawn. “Halt, FBI.”

At that same instant the elevator doors opened. Four more caterers came out, saw Kate, and froze.

“Run!” someone yelled.

Everyone took off in different directions. Kate couldn’t chase them all, and she couldn’t lawfully shoot any of them, so she shot out the tires of the van instead to make sure it wouldn’t be going anywhere. The Yummy Good Catering van slumped to the ground like a weary cow. The gunshots echoed through the garage.

Special Agent Gunter was in Kate’s earpiece. “What’s going on down there? I’m in the lobby, and I just saw you shoot a catering truck.”

“They aren’t caterers. They’re thieves. They’ve scattered in the garage. Detain anyone who tries to leave.”

Kate stepped into the service elevator and pressed the button for the penthouse.

Nick placed the blasting caps in the Semtex putty and emerged from Milton’s office just as “The Look of Love” was ending and the last of the crew members slipped out the front door with their bags. He glanced at his watch. They’d pulled off the heist with eleven seconds to spare. He walked across the living room and checked on the progress of the wedding ceremony outside. Caroline was radiating sex at the altar, and Milton was beaming.

Nick felt his cell phone buzz with a text message from his crew leader. The FBI is here! They’re everywhere!

Nick calmly went back to Milton’s office, passed the safe rigged with plastic explosives, and strolled out onto the empty, city-facing side of the penthouse deck. He looked over the edge and saw the task force vehicles on the street. The building was surrounded.

The elevator opened at the penthouse, and Kate stepped out into a short hallway. Two caterers rushed at her, knocking her out of the way. They jumped into the elevator, the doors closed, and the elevator descended. Kate walked through the living room and peeked out at the rooftop garden, where the ceremony was coming to an end. She scanned the crowd for Nick.

“Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?” a jowly, black-robed minister asked the bride’s cleavage.

“I do,” she said.

“By the power vested in me by the State of Illinois,” the minister said, “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

The bride and groom kissed. The band and the singer belted out “Sweet Caroline.” Fireworks erupted over Lake Michigan, and the penthouse shook.

Kate knew it wasn’t fireworks that rocked the building. It was a blast that came from the other side of the penthouse. She hurried across the living room, slipped on a splotch of spilled cocktail sauce, and clipped a tray of canapés that had been left on a serving table. Kate and the canapés went down to the floor in a clattering mess of tiny meatballs, avocado and spinach dip, smoked duck in soy sauce, and prosciutto cheese balls.

“Freaking fudge!” Kate said. “Damn. Mother fornicator.”

She scrambled to her feet and limped into the short hall that led to the master suite. Smoke was spilling out from under the closed and locked mahogany doors. Kate kicked the doors open, saw the scorched wall and the blown-open safe, and knew why Nick had planned a finale of fireworks. It was genius, Kate thought. You had to admire the man’s style.

French doors opened off the master suite onto a balcony on which Kate could see Nick Fox facing her. He was sitting on the four-foot-high masonry balcony wall, his back to the city skyline. He smiled at Kate and gestured to her shirt.

“I see you tried the canapés,” he said. “I made them myself.”

Kate looked down at her splattered jacket and shirt, swiped up a glob of green and white goo and tasted it.

“Avocado and spinach dip,” she said. “Needs salt.”

“You’ll have to let me cook you dinner sometime.”

“I’ll pass on that. I’m not crazy about prison ingredients.”

“Neither am I.” He glanced over his shoulder at the twenty-story drop to the ground.

Kate didn’t like what the glance implied. “Don’t do it, Nick.”

“Would you miss me?”

“Yes!”

“How much would you miss me?” he asked her. “A lot?”

“Don’t push it.”

“Admit it, deep down inside you like me. You think I’m cute.”

Kate narrowed her eyes. “Are you going to jump, or what?”

Nick smiled, sent her a little wave, swung his legs over the wall, and disappeared from view.

Kate felt her heart give a painful contraction. “No!” she shouted. “You idiot! I didn’t really want you to jump!”

She crossed the balcony to the wall and peered over at Nick in time to see his customized handheld parachute open. She watched him for a minute as he glided toward the skyscraper canyons of downtown Chicago, ate a meatball that was stuck to her jacket, and then called Gunter. Next in line was a call to Jessup.

“I tried calling you,” Jessup said, “but you weren’t picking up.”

Kate filled him in. “Gunter is coordinating a chase with cooperating local law enforcement,” she said.

“If you need help with follow-up, I can send someone,” Jessup said. “Cosmo, maybe.”

“No! Not Cosmo.”

The FBI, the Chicago Police Department, and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office all put choppers in the air, but they couldn’t find any sign of Nick or his parachute. Kate led a search of the surrounding neighborhood, but she knew it was futile. There was too much ground to cover, and Nick had a head start. So she armed a bunch of agents with copies of The Complete Directory of Episodic Television Shows and sent them off to look for TV characters trying to leave town by planes, trains, or automobiles.

Somehow all of Nick’s crew had managed to slip out of the building, but a third of the golden idols were left behind on the loading dock, so it wasn’t a complete loss. And Kate had the satisfaction of knowing that her instincts had been 100 percent right.

She straggled back to her hotel just as the sun was coming up. She was exhausted, and done with smelling like cocktail meatballs. She wanted to shuck her food-stained clothes, take a hot shower, and wash the spinach dip out of her hair.

She unlocked her door, stepped into the room, and froze. There were Toblerone wrappers on the bed, room service dishes on the table, a bouquet of roses, and an unopened bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket of ice. Her first thought in her sleep-deprived state was that she’d walked into the wrong room. She was about to double-check the number on the door when she realized that a pink handkerchief was tied like a ribbon around the champagne bottle. She’d seen the handkerchief before … in the breast pocket of Nick’s white tuxedo.

Un-freaking-believable, she thought. While she’d been dragging her butt all over town looking for him, the jerk had been in her room ordering room service and raiding her minibar. She had to give credit where credit was due. The man had Volkswagen-size cojones. Really big brass ones.

She drew her gun and looked under the bed, in the closet, and in the bathroom. No Nick. But he’d for sure been there. She sat on her bed and plucked a card off her pillow. In a masculine scrawl she’d come to recognize, Nick Fox had written Looking forward to next time.

THE END … until THE HEIST.

Read on for a sneak peek of The Heist

The first novel in Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg’s explosive new series!

Kate O’Hares favorite outfit was her blue windbreaker with the letters FBI written in yellow on the back, worn over a basic black T-shirt and matching black Kevlar vest. The ensemble went well with everything, particularly when paired with jeans and accessorized with a Glock. Thirty-three-year-old Special Agent O’Hare didn’t like feeling exposed and unarmed, especially on the job. That all but ruled her out for undercover work. Fine by her. She preferred a hard-charging style of law enforcement, which was exactly what she was practicing on that 96 degree winter afternoon in Las Vegas when she marched into the St. Cosmas Medical Center in her favorite outfit with a dozen similarly dressed agents behind her.

While the other agents fanned out to seal every exit in the building, Kate pushed past the security guards in the lobby and made her way like a guided missile to the first-floor office of Rufus Stott, the chief administrator of the hospital. She blew past Stott’s stunned assistant without even acknowledging her existence and burst into Stott’s office. The startled Stott yelped and nearly toppled out of his chrome-and-mesh ergonomic chair. He was a chubby, bottom-heavy little guy who looked like a turnip that some bored wizard had tapped with a magic wand and turned into a fifty-five-year-old bureaucrat. He had a spray tan, tortoise-shell glasses, and crotch wrinkles in his tan slacks. His hand was over his heart, and he was gasping for air.

“Don’t shoot,” he finally managed.

“I’m not going to shoot,” Kate said. “I don’t even have my gun drawn. Do you need water, or something? Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not okay,” Stott said. “You just scared the bejeezus out of me. Who are you? What do you want?”

“I’m Special Agent Kate O’Hare, FBI.” She slapped a piece of paper down on his desk. “This is a warrant giving us full access to your concierge wing.”

“We don’t have a concierge wing,” Stott said.

Kate leaned in close, locking her intense blue eyes on him. “Six obscenely wealthy and desperate patients flew in today from all over the country. They were picked up from McCarran airport by limos and brought here. Upon arrival at your private concierge wing, they each wired one million dollars to St. Cosmas’s offshore bank account and immediately jumped to the top of an organ waiting list.”

“You can’t be serious,” Stott said. “We don’t have any offshore bank accounts and we certainly can’t afford to rent limos. We’re teetering on bankruptcy.”

“That’s why you’re conducting off-the-books transplant surgeries using illegally acquired organs that you bought on the black market. We know those patients are here and being prepped for surgery right now. We will lock this building down and search every single room and broom closet if we have to.”

“Be my guest,” Stott said, and handed the warrant back to her. “We aren’t doing any transplant surgeries, and we don’t have a concierge wing. We don’t even have a gift shop.”

Stott no longer looked scared, and he didn’t look like he was lying. Not good signs, Kate thought. He should be in a cold sweat by now. He should be phoning his lawyer.

Eighteen hours earlier, Kate had been at her desk in L.A., tracking scattered intel on known associates of a wanted felon, when she’d stumbled on chatter about a certain financially strapped Las Vegas hospital offering organ transplants to the highest bidder. She dug deeper and discovered that the patients were already en route to Vegas for their surgeries, so she dropped everything and organized a rush operation.

“Take a look at this,” she said, showing Stott a photo on her iPhone.

It was a medium close-up of a man about her age wearing a loose-fitting polo shirt, soft and faded from years of use. His brown hair was windblown. His face was alight with a boyish grin that brought out the laugh lines at the corners of his brown eyes.

“Do you know this man?” she asked.

“Sure I do,” Stott replied. “That’s Cliff Clavin, the engineer handling the asbestos removal from our old building.”

Kate felt a dull ache in her stomach, and it wasn’t from the Jack in the Box sausage-and-egg sandwich she’d had for breakfast. Her gut, flat and toned despite her terrible eating habits, was where her anxieties and her instincts resided and liked to communicate with her in a language of cramps, pains, queasiness, and general malaise.

“Cliff Clavin is a character on the television show Cheers,” she said.

“Yeah, crazy coincidence, right?”

“What old building?” she asked him.

He turned to the window and pointed at a five-story building on the other side of the parking lot. “That one.”

The building was an architectural artifact from the swinging ’60s with its lava rock accents, big tinted windows, and a lobby portico topped with white gravel.

“That was the original hospital,” Stott said. “We moved out of there a year ago. We built this new one to handle the demand for beds that we wrongly anticipated would come from …”

Kate wasn’t listening. She was already running out the door. The instant she saw the other building, she knew exactly how she and those six wealthy patients had been duped. The man in the photo on her iPhone wasn’t Cliff Clavin, and he wasn’t an engineer. He was Nicolas Fox, the man she’d been pursuing when she’d stumbled on the organ transplant scheme.

Fox was an international con man and thief, known for the sheer audacity of his high-risk swindles and heists and for the obvious joy he took in pulling them off. No matter how big his scores were, and he’d had some huge ones, he kept going back for more.

Kate had made it her mission at the FBI to nail him. She’d come close two years ago, when she’d discovered Nick’s plot to plunder a venture capitalist’s twentieth-story Chicago penthouse of all his cash and jewels at the same time that the self-proclaimed “King of Hostile Takeovers” was getting married in the living room.

It was a ballsy move, and pure Nick Fox. To pull it off, he somehow got himself hired as the wedding planner and brought in a motley crew of thieves as the caterers. When Kate crashed the wedding with a strike team, Nick’s crew scattered like cockroaches when the lights go on, and Nick parachuted off the top of the building.

Choppers were called in, streets were closed, roadblocks were set up, and buildings were searched, but Nick slipped away. When Kate finally straggled into her hotel room at dawn, there was a bottle of champagne and a bouquet of roses waiting for her. All from Nick. And charged to her room, of course. The whole time she’d been hunting for Nick, he’d been relaxing in her room, watching pay-per-view movies, ordering room service, and helping himself to the Toblerones in her minibar. He’d even stolen the towels on his way out.

The bastard is having way too much fun at my expense, Kate thought as she bolted through the hospital lobby, out the door past two surprised agents, and charged across the parking lot.

When she reached the cyclone fence around the old hospital building, she was sweating and her heart was pounding so hard she could almost hear it. She drew her gun and slowly approached the entrance to the lobby. As she got closer, she saw a red carpet and a sign that had been obscured in the shadows of the alcove under the portico. The sign read:

Welcome to the St. Cosmas Concierge Medical Center. Please excuse our dust as we remodel to give you more privacy, luxury, and state-of-the art care.

Hugging the lava rock walls she made her way to the door, yanked it open, and spun into the open space in a firing stance. But there was no one to aim at. Kate faced an elegantly furnished lobby decked out with contemporary leather furniture, travertine floors, and lush plants. On the wall behind the empty reception desk were photos of the surgical staff. She looked at the photos and immediately recognized two of the faces. One of them belonged to Nick Fox, a stethoscope around his neck, exuding doctorly strength and confidence. The other one was her, with a dopey, drunken smile on her face. Her picture had been lifted, cropped, and photoshopped from the bridal party pictures taken years ago that were now on her sister Megan’s Facebook page. “Dr. William Scholl” was written in bronze letters under Nick’s photo, “Dr. Eunice Huffnagle” under hers.

About the Authors

JANET EVANOVICH is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Stephanie Plum series, the Lizzy and Diesel series, twelve romance novels, the Barnaby and Hooker novels and Trouble Maker graphic novel, and How I Write: Secrets of a Bestselling Author.

Visit Janet Evanovich’s website at

www.evanovich.com

Facebook/JanetEvanovich

or write her at

PO Box 2829

Naples, FL 34106

LEE GOLDBERG is a screenwriter, TV producer, and the author of several books, including King City, The Walk, and the bestselling Monk series of mysteries. He has earned two Edgar Award nominations and was the 2012 recipient of the Poirot Award from Malice Domestic.

www.leegoldberg.com