Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)
Page 2
She pressed the doorbell, listening for that sonorous ring, that melodic hello, but didn’t hear anything. Of course not. No power, no doorbell. She rapped sharply. Run, whispered a soft, inner voice. Run now, while you still can.
The temptation to take off nearly overpowered her. She didn’t want to straddle two worlds anymore—this one and something other. But given the clarity of the vision and the discrepancies with what she saw in front of her—that the house wasn’t on fire—and the fact that a child was involved, she had to check. At the very least, she needed to find out if a child even lived here.
Mira started to knock again, but realized the door wasn’t shut tightly. She touched it with the toe of her shoe and it creaked open slightly, releasing warm air from inside the house.
Goose bumps broke out along her arms, the skin along the back of her neck tightened. Mira hesitated and finally nudged the door with her foot again. This time, it swung wide open.
She called out once more, her voice echoing through the cavernous house, and crossed the threshold, calling out again. She glimpsed the cat as it vanished into a room off the hallway. Then a figure appeared at the end of the long hall, a portly woman in a blue flowered dress. She stared at Mira, hands on her teapot hips.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Mira said, speaking loudly, as though the woman were deaf. “But I was…”
The woman seemed to motion for her to come in, then moved quickly through a doorway on her left and out of Mira’s sight.
“Ma’am?”
No answer.
Yeah, okay. What did that mean? Come in but don’t talk to me? Mira went inside and hurried down the hall, past an exquisite display of island art, then an original Salvador Dali, a pen-and-ink Picasso, an original Andy Warhol. An art collection already worth more than everything she owned.
She paused in the doorway of the largest kitchen she had ever seen. Light spilled through a pair of skylights and a double bay window that overlooked a large screened pool with a curved slide, a Jacuzzi at one end and an explosion of colorful plants at the other. The woman stood at an island in the center of the kitchen, looking around with an expression that revealed profound confusion.
“Listen, I’m really sorry to intrude like this, but can you tell me if a child lives here?” Mira asked.
The woman didn’t hear her. She ran her hands over her face, then smoothed them over her dress, and suddenly thrust out her plump, fleshy arms. She turned them this way and that, examining them, her confusion deepening. She lurched forward with sudden, shocking swiftness, crossed the kitchen—and dissolved into the wall.
Aw, shit, she looked so real. Who was she? Not the woman from the vision.
Mira lurched forward and ran into the room on the other side of the wall through which the ghost had vanished. Mira glimpsed her moving down a hallway, the blue flowers on her dress bright and vivid enough to attract butterflies. Mira’s internal alarms shrieked. The muscles in her legs, her shoulders, her jaw had gone tight, tense. Leave, the inner voice warned.
The woman melted through a door at the end of the hall, on the north side of the house. Mira loped after her, shoes pounding against the tiled floors, and threw open the door. In a single, sweeping glance, she determined the bedroom belonged to a teenaged boy with some unusual interests—poster-sized photos of dolphins and whales covered one wall, a large model plane hung from the ceiling, the ceiling looked like outer space. The only hint of normalcy lay in the movie and music posters that covered another wall. The ghost in the blue flowered dress stood completely still, staring down at a woman in voluminous pajamas who was sprawled on the floor. Blood stained the front of her pajama top; her eyes gazed vacantly at the ceiling.
The Himalayan raced past Mira’s legs, screeched to a stop like a cat in a cartoon, its back hunched, fur going up. It started hissing.
“That’s me,” the woman gasped. “I’m dead.” She looked at the cat. “Dolittle sees me.” She raised her eyes to Mira. “You see me.” Her mouth quivered. “I… I…”
Static filled Mira’s head. She understood she wouldn’t be able to see the woman much longer, that their connection was breaking down. “Who did this?” she asked quickly.
The temperature in the room dropped so rapidly that the next intake of breath hurt the inside of Mira’s chest. Frost formed on the mirrors, the metal surfaces. The closet door began to glow a luminous blue. The young woman Mira had seen in the driveway emerged from the blue, stepping out of it with a dancer’s grace. She wasn’t on fire now, wasn’t shouting or frantic. She had a beautiful face and wore loose, khaki-colored pants, a rose-colored shirt, sandals. The cat, Dolittle, apparently saw her too, and took off, a blur of speed. The young ghost slipped her arm around the shoulders of the older ghost, then glanced deliberately at Mira, as if aware of her only now. Both women vanished and the blue glow winked out like a candle.
During this entire episode—which lasted maybe twenty seconds—the room had grown as cold as death. Mira’s teeth now chattered. She blew into her hands to warm them. Her knees creaked and complained as she sank to the floor beside the dead woman. Mira gently shut the corpse’s eyes. Her fingertips tingled, a sure sign that if she opened herself a little more she would be able to pick up information about the woman. But she already knew more than she cared to know. She rocked back onto her heels, noticing that the room was warming as quickly as it had chilled, and struggled against a tidal wave of emotions. Sadness for the woman, deep regret that she herself had gone against her own judgment and entered the house at all. But she had chosen. Only a single option remained. She pulled her cell from her back pocket and punched out Wayne Sheppard’s number.
It rang and rang. Either it was turned off or Sheppard refused to take her call. She left him a message. Just as she snapped her phone shut, an explosion of noise and shouting erupted from the front of the house.
“Adam? Gladys?” The man’s voice boomed and echoed through the rooms.
“Back here,” Mira shouted, getting to her feet.
The man loped through the doorway, breathing hard, blinking rapidly, and looked at her as though she were—what? A thief? A serial killer? “Who the hell are you?” he demanded. “Where’s my son? What…”
The sight of the corpse eclipsed his raging monologue. “Gladys,” he whispered, and his eyes darted back to Mira. “My son, where’s my… son?”
“I… I don’t know. When I came in here, the body was on the floor, the…”
“Don’t you fucking move,” he yelled, wagging one hand at her and pulling out his cell phone with the other. “I’m calling the cops.”
“Hey, for all I know, you’re the one who did this.” Mira, still clutching her cell, stepped forward.
“Stop,” he hissed, and whipped out a gun and pointed it at her. “Stop right there.”
The sight of the gun triggered an inchoate, elemental dread in Mira. She patted the air with her hands, backed away from him, tried to speak calmly, as though she were dealing with a recalcitrant two-year-old who had found Daddy’s gun. “Okay, okay, I’m sitting down, see?” She lowered herself to the floor beside the dead woman.
He backed up to the door, shut it, leaned against it. “Yes, hello,” he said urgently. “There’s been a murder… my son’s gone… A woman… broke into my house and…” His voice cracked and he started to sob. “I… I don’t know… At home… I’m at home… I…”
The temperature in the room started dropping again and the ghost in the khaki tunic pants stepped out of the wall and looked directly at Mira.
Say something, Mira pleaded silently.
Her skull filled with so much static that her head pounded.
In moments, the room felt like the Arctic again. Mira scooted back until her spine was up against the foot of the bed and pulled the end of the quilt around her shoulders. The man, no longer talking on his cell, looked around anxiously, murmuring, “What the hell. Why’s it so cold in here? Did the power come back on or what?”
Chapter 2
Spenser Finch
Sugarloaf Key
Spenser Finch caught himself grinding his teeth and immediately stopped. The last dentist he’d gone to had told him that if he didn’t stop the grinding, his teeth would be stunted in about five years. Not acceptable. His teeth were his best feature, still perfectly straight, strong, and healthy. In his thirty plus years, he’d had only three cavities, one when he was in his teens, two when he’d worked in Silicon Valley. No root canals, no crowns, no caps. He even had his wisdom teeth. But his old man had had rotten teeth, an upper bridge, all sorts of problems. Go figure.
He held his jaw still and gazed down at the kid. Every detail he had tended to in the last year had paid off. Right now, he thought, he should be feeling elation. Joy. Pride. Instead, a deep unease gripped him, as if he had forgotten some small but vital detail that might catch up to him tomorrow or next week. Even worse, he didn’t have a clue what to do with the kid once he came around. He didn’t know squat about kids. Couldn’t stand them.
At the moment, Adam Nichols lay flat on his back on the bed in the spare bedroom, sleeping off the shot of Valium Finch had given him after he’d hauled him out his bedroom window and carried him to his electric golf cart. He’d gotten the Valium from a pharmacist he’d met in one of the Key West bars who was into heavy downers. He didn’t know how long it would last before Adam came to, and worried that he hadn’t calculated the dose correctly. Suppose the kid died? What then?
No, that wouldn’t happen. He knew he had calculated the dose correctly. Details were his specialty. He was so anal about details that he had an entire notebook and a massive file on the computer devoted to just Adam and his family. Finch had studied them the way biologists study a particular species.
He knew, for instance, that Adam was a lacto-vegetarian, a computer whiz who also played the piano by ear. He occasionally smoked pot with his buddy, Jorge, an older rich kid who lived up the block. He was a voracious reader, was tops on the school track team. Finch knew that his mother’s accountant saved her more than two hundred grand in taxes last year and that his old man had a mistress. He felt such intimacy with the Nichols family that they were like his extended family. In that context, he merely had borrowed Adam, nothing more.
Borrowed. Considering that he had studied and spied on the family for months, broken into their home and nabbed their kid, shot him full of downers, loaded him into his houseboat, and brought him here to his place on Sugarloaf Key, borrowed was a stretch.
On the bed, Adam stirred, groaned, and rolled onto his side, hands tucked between his knees. Finch moved closer to the boy, studying his face. He definitely was his mother’s son—the same beautiful bone structure that had graced movie screens for twenty years, the blond hair, the wiry body. Yet he was small for his age, maybe five and a half feet tall and a hundred and twenty pounds. When Finch was his age, he had reached his full height of six feet one and had lurked around with hunched shoulders, his head perpetually bowed, trying to look smaller, shorter, invisible. It really wasn’t a fair comparison, though. Finch’s childhood had been shit. Adam’s was the American dream.
He noticed a stray bit of electrical tape stuck to the corner of Adam’s mouth and quickly picked it off. With any luck, he wouldn’t come around until this afternoon. Regardless, Finch had prepared the room well. The double bed was deliciously comfortable, with two down pillows, fresh towels in the bathroom, and some of Adam’s clothes tucked in the drawers. For entertainment, he had a DVD player and a library of several dozen movies, including some of his mother’s. The satellite TV gave him access to more than three hundred channels. Hell, he could watch news from Russia and cartoons from Japan, if he wanted to. The Xbox games were the newest on the market, the Mac was equipped to the hilt with everything except Internet access. There was also a library of e-books, all selected with Adam’s tastes in mind. Finch figured that a busy teen would be less trouble.
He had kept the hurricane shutters on the windows. Here and there, a dusty, muted light filtered through. The shutters would prevent Adam from knowing exactly where he was. Would keep him somewhat off balance. It also meant that even if he found a way to break the glass—damn unlikely—he still wouldn’t be able to escape.
The windows were fiberglass-reinforced and consisted of three layers—two heat-treated glass sheets with a thin layer in the middle that was made of polymer reinforced with glass fibers. Finch knew what they could withstand because he had conducted the same tests that the glass industry did. He’d fired a two-gram bullet that struck the glass at 160 miles an hour, at the exact same spot until the glass broke, and then did the same test on a standard glass panel. The standard panel broke after about forty shots. The fiberglass-reinforced panel could withstand at least a hundred shots before it broke.
He had done his homework. That was how you won the game.
And this game had been a long time in the making. A dozen years. When he thought back to that time, the exact sequence of events and dates got all mixed up in his head. But he knew he had gone to Hollywood when he was eighteen, a self-taught computer guy with a GED, good-looking, talented, but still a wannabe, determined to become the next Big Name. He had given himself five to seven years to make it.
Thanks to the computer work he’d done on the side, he never had to depend on his acting to pay the bills. He didn’t have to wait tables, tend bar, or do any of the other usual and awful things that wannabes were forced to do. It had freed him. And within three months of his arrival, his cocky charm had paid off. He had landed print and commercial gigs because, as one photographer had confided, the camera loved his face. Other opportunities had followed—the role of a leading bad boy in a short-lived TV series, then several small parts in movies. And just when he’d been poised to make a leap into the big time, Suki and Paul Nichols had entered his life and had caused him to fail at the one thing he had loved above all else.
If she had been a different sort of woman, if she hadn’t had the clout she’d had when their paths had crossed, if she had gotten sucked in by his talents or his smile or some other goddamn thing, the entire course of his life would have been different. But that wasn’t the way things had turned out. So now the entire course of her life would be different because of him.
Karma.
Finch stood there watching Adam as he slept off the drug, and couldn’t help feel a bit sorry for him. The kid was just a pawn in some vastly complex game that even Finch didn’t fully understand. After all, other people in his life had screwed him and he hadn’t gone after their kids, now had he?
But only a few people held the defining power over the crossroads in your life, he thought. His old man had held that sort of power over Finch. And he was dead. Suki Nichols had held that kind of power too, and before he was finished he would make her wish that she were dead.
He pulled the sheet up over Adam’s body, suddenly terrified that if the kid got sick here—from the cool air that poured out of the AC vent, from stress, fear, a virus, bacteria—what the fuck would he do then? Aspirin, vitamin C, Echinacea: He had only so many options for sickness.
Finch’s old man had believed that a shot of whiskey could cure anything. So by the time he was twelve or thirteen, Finch had downed more shots of whiskey than he could count. In his milk, his hot chocolate, sprinkled over his pancakes and scrambled eggs. He rarely drank now and when he did, it was nothing more than a cold beer or a glass of wine.
He enjoyed an occasional joint and considered leaving a couple for Adam. To take the edge off. But if he left behind joints, he would have to leave matches or a lighter. Either of those could be a potential weapon.
Suddenl
y, Adam bolted upright, his dark eyes widening,, darting about frantically, and then he started shrieking.
Nothing intelligible issued from him, just a relentless, high-pitched noise that clawed at Finch’s nerves a million times worse than fingernails scraped across a chalkboard.
He watched as Adam leaped off the bed and ran to the door. He jerked wildly on the handle, but the door was controlled electronically and the remote-control clicker was in Finch’s back pocket. Scream away, kid. Go for it. Get it all out.
Adam kicked the door savagely, repeatedly, and kept right on shrieking. Then he ran over to the window and beat his fists against the glass. He spun around, eyes burning, face bright with rage. “Let me outta here, you can’t do this, it kidnapping, it’s…” He threw himself at Finch.
He wasn’t ready for it, didn’t anticipate it, and the assault nearly knocked him off his feet. Adam clawed and kicked, hit and bit. For such a small fry, he was surprisingly strong, rabid, wild. Finch grabbed him by the arms, lifted him up, up into the air, and tossed him onto the bed.
“No screaming, hitting, clawing, biting,” Finch shouted.
Adam fell silent, his face as bright and shiny as a new penny. “Why… why’re you wearing a mask?”
“So I don’t have to kill you.”
That shut him up. The power of language, Finch thought with satisfaction. But the kid’s silence lasted about ten seconds.
“Alien masks are so, like, retro. Especially ones like yours, where the aliens have those huge, shiny, black wraparound eyes and a slit for a nose and an asshole for a mouth.”
“How poetic, Adam. Let’s get something straight. You’re going to be here for a while. The more cooperative you are, the better you and I will get along. In return for your cooperation, you can use whatever is in this room.” Finch threw his arms out, indicating everything he had assembled here for the kid. “And you’ll get three square meals a day and as many snacks and so on as you want. I’ll leave a Styrofoam cooler in here filled with water, soda, whatever else you drink. We clear?”