Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  “I walk every day,” Mira said. “And this morning my walk brought me here. As I approached the top of the hill, I heard someone shouting for help.” She went on from there, and noticed the odd expression on Cordoba’s face as she described the woman on fire, the kid’s face pressed to the glass, the car that passed through her. But Sheppard understood immediately.

  “So was this a future event or something that had happened in the past?” Sheppard asked.

  “I’m not sure.” But as the scene replayed in her head, she realized it was like a hologram, vividly real and yet not real at all for her. It was as if she had stumbled into a memory loop that belonged to the house, the property. Was that what the black and white images meant? A new twist in her abilities, here but not here? Where in time did the hologram belong?

  “You said the woman was on fire.” Goot leaned forward, eyes and voice intense, needing to nail down the details. “Why was she on fire?”

  “The house was on fire,” Mira replied. “I assume her clothes had caught fire.”

  “Can you describe the car? The driver? The woman?” Sheppard asked.

  “The boy was young, the driver was a blur. The car looked like an old Buick. I don’t know what year or model.”

  “How about the color?” Sheppard asked.

  “I saw all of this in black and white, like a negative. The woman wasn’t Suki Nichols. Anyway, I came up to the house to find out if a boy lived here, if there had been a fire. The door wasn’t shut all the way, so I nudged it open and called. A woman in a blue floral print dress at the end of the hail waved for me to come in. She, uh, turned out to be the housekeeper’s ghost.”

  “A ghost.” Cordoba smirked, then burst out laughing. “Sweet Christ. I’ve heard a lot of reasons for trespassing, Mira, but never that one.”

  Go pound sand, Charlie. “It’s what happened.”

  Cordoba held out his hands, the reasonable man attempting to use logic on his FBI counterparts. “Gentlemen, please. This is such a crock of shit I can’t begin to tell you. She has a vision, a ghost invites her into the house, and it turns out to be the spirit of the dead woman. How convenient.”

  “Excuse me, Charlie.” Mira resented the way he addressed Sheppard and Goot, as though she weren’t present. “But you weren’t quite as quick to dismiss a ghost when I told you the problems with your wife’s pregnancy were because of a malign presence in your house.”

  Color flooded his neck and cheeks and for seconds, his eyes held hers, their message clear: I told you to keep that reading between us. She glared back at him and he quickly looked away.

  The good ole days are gone, Charlie. Attack me and I’ll bite.

  “It’ll never stand up in court,” Cordoba said lamely.

  “Whose court?” she shot back. “Yours?”

  He shook his head. “Look, I’m just doing my job.”

  Mira leaned forward and hooked her finger at Cordoba, who also leaned forward. “How’s your hearing, Charlie?”

  “My hearing? It’s good. Very good. Why?”

  “Fuck you,” she whispered, and pushed to her feet. “I’m done here. Whenever you decide to arrest me, you know where to find me.”

  “Hey, hold on a minute,” Cordoba called after her. “I’ve got more questions.”

  She kept right on walking. “Talk to my attorney.”

  She crossed the massive living room and was halfway up the hail when Paul Nichols came barreling through the front door, his cell pressed to his ear. He saw her, stopped, and ended the call, his body blocking her exit.

  He was a big man—about six feet tall, slightly overweight, but mostly stocky, like a wrestler, with massive shoulders. His dark hair was going gray and starting to thin and his paunch attested to a fondness for dark lager beers. He stabbed a finger at her.

  “I’m pressing charges against you.”

  “So I heard. Excuse me, please. I’m on my way out.”

  “Fifty people are out there now, looking for my son. You… you…” His voice cracked.

  Mira didn’t intend to stick around for his meltdown. She sidled past him, careful that her body didn’t brush up against his, but Nichols grabbed her arm, whipping her around. “You can’t just walk into a person’s home,” he hissed, his cheeks burning with patches of bright pink, his hand still gripping her forearm. “You can’t just…”

  There he is, humping a woman whose face she can’t see, his hairy, massive body covering the woman completely. He sweats, grunts, and growls like some sort of beast, and the woman’s thin, tanned legs tighten around him and…

  Mira jerked her arm free. “You lied, Paul,” she said softly.

  “You were with the other woman and if you’d been home, your son would be here this morning.”

  His body seemed to convulse, then to shrink in size, and he stepped quickly away from the door, from her. Mira slipped outside, into the scorched summer air, and hurried down the driveway. In her haste to get away from the house, from Nichols, Sheppard, Cordoba, the whole stinking mess, she stumbled over her own feet, lost her balance, and fell.

  Her knees struck the ground first. She started to laugh, then rolled onto her side, rubbing her bruised, skinned knees. Losing it, you’re losing it, c’mon, fast, get out of here.

  Mira rocked back onto her heels, and saw the Himalayan watching her from under nearby bushes. You a ghost cat? Or just wish you were? Are you the boy’s cat? Is that it?

  The cat blinked and edged back farther under the bushes, out of sight.

  Mira got up and made a beeline for the ravaged hill she had followed up here hours ago.

  Her cell, tucked in her back pocket, played the 1812 Overture. She slipped it out, saw Sheppard’s number in the window. Forget it, she thought, and turned her cell off and ran for the sanctity of the undamaged pines.

  Chapter 4

  Car Talk

  Sheppard’s fury at Cordoba was nothing compared to what he felt when Paul Nichols stormed out onto the porch, shouting, “She left and you jerks are standing around looking at your dicks? Go arrest her. Take her in. Something.”

  Cordoba appeared to have been zapped with a paralyzing spray. Goot stood up, as though Nichols were a judge or royalty, but couldn’t seem to find anything to say. Sheppard pocketed his phone, marched over to Nichols. “We know where to find her, Mr. Nichols. Please have a seat.”

  “Listen here…” His eyes darted to Sheppard’s badge,. looking for his name. “Agent Sheppard. I want her…”

  “Sit. Down.”

  Nichols blinked, started to say something, and thought better of it. As he sat down, he said, “I’ve already answered questions. I’ve given my answers.”

  “You haven’t answered my questions.” Sheppard remained standing. “When was the last time you saw your son?”

  “Yesterday morning, when I drove him to camp. Gladys picked him up and they got home around two. I spoke to him then by phone.”

  “How long has Gladys worked for you?”

  “Two years. Since we moved here. We trusted her implicitly.”

  “In the past few weeks or months, Mr. Nichols, have you felt at any time that your home was being watched? Did you get hang-up calls? Weird e-mail or letters? Did your son ever tell you he was followed? Approached by strangers? In other words, has anything out of the ordinary happened?”

  “Look, Mr. Sheppard.” He sat forward, his large hands folded on the tabletop. Earnest. Soft-spoken. Mr. Intensity spouting what was supposed to be logical, reasonable. “Given the nature of my wife’s fame, there are always e-mails, letters, calls, and what have you from every imaginable sort of crazy. But nothing that has involved or even alluded to Adam.”

  Cordoba finally roused himself from his celebrity torpor or whatever had afflicted him. “Who besides Gladys knew you were going to be late last night?”

  “No one, unless Gladys called her daughter, but she wouldn’t have any reason to do that because her daughter lives in Tulsa.”

  “You di
dn’t notify your wife?” Goot asked.

  “My wife was in business meetings in New York. There was no reason to contact her.”

  How quickly he replied, Sheppard thought, and made a mental note to ask Suki Nichols what sort of arrangement she and her husband had about glitches in child care. “I hope you’ve contacted her since all this happened.”

  Nichols looked pissed now, nostrils flaring. “Of course I called her. And she’s on her way back. I resent the implication that I’m hiding information from my wife, Mr. Sheppard.”

  You said it. I didn’t. “We’re going to be setting up a special unit here in the house to monitor calls in the event that you receive a ransom demand.”

  “We’ll… we’ll pay whatever is asked.”

  “We’ll see what unfolds.”

  Cordoba butted in now. “The FBI handles the missing-child part of this investigation, Mr. Nichols. But the Tango County PD handles the homicide investigation and the, uh, trespassing charges against Ms. Morales.”

  “She’s your primary suspect, right? In both instances?” Nichols asked.

  “It’s too early to charge anyone with anything,” Sheppard said before Cordoba could reply.

  Nichols stammered, “But she trespassed, she…”

  “And you intend to file charges about the trespassing.” Cordoba again. He seemed eager to establish Paul Nichols’s intentions while Sheppard and Goot were present.

  Nichols rubbed his jaw. “I think I’d like to, uh, discuss this with my wife before we decide what to do.”

  Interesting switch, Sheppard thought, and wondered if he and Mira had exchanged words when she’d hurried out of here.

  “But I don’t want her leaving the island,” Nichols added quickly.

  “She’s not going anywhere,” Sheppard said.

  “How can you be so sure of that, Mr. Sheppard?” His tone had grown increasingly hostile while he’d sat there, and now sounded downright nasty.

  “Because she owns a business and a home here. Because I believe her story.”

  “So you’re biased.”

  You’re goddamn right, moron.

  “He’s not biased,” Cordoba replied. “He has an opinion.”

  “Did you know your wife got a reading from Ms. Morales?” Goot asked.

  “A reading? What’s that mean?”

  Goot and Sheppard glanced at each other, thinking the same thing, that Nichols didn’t have a clue. “Mira is a psychic,” Sheppard said. “She also owns a bookstore in downtown Tango.”

  “A psychic? You mean, like…” He shook his large, dimpled hands. “As I come into your vibration…”

  “Not exactly,” Goot snapped. “She’s worked with the FBI, local police departments…”

  Nichols sat forward, elbows resting on the table. “Look, I don’t give a good goddamn what you call her.” His eyes went to Cordoba. “If I have to file charges to prevent her from leaving the island, then I’ll do it right now.”

  Cordoba shook his head, suddenly switching sides. Again. “Talk it over with your wife, Mr. Nichols. Right now, Ms. Morales is our primary suspect in a homicide and that’s enough for us to keep an eye on her.”

  “If she’s your primary suspect, then arrest her, for Chrissakes.”

  “We don’t have any evidence,” Cordoba said. “But you have my word, Mr. Nichols. She won’t leave Tango Key.”

  Just then, the forensics team arrived. Nichols stood up. “I’m going to join the search party. You have my cell number if you need me.”

  As soon as he left, Sheppard muttered, “What an asshole.”

  “Hey, Shep,” Cordoba said. “Maybe you need to recuse yourself from the investigation, given your relationship with Mira.”

  “We don’t have a relationship anymore. So there’s nothing unethical going on here, Charlie.”

  With that, Sheppard headed into the house to talk to the forensics team. He felt Cordoba’s eyes burning large, black holes through his back.

  Sheppard walked around the property, getting a sense of its size, how far it was from the main road, the distance from the house to the trees behind it and along the north side. At one time, a fence had surrounded the property. But it had collapsed during the hurricane, except where the fence was iron—the gate at the end of the driveway and the fence just to either side of it. The gate was electronic, but wasn’t connected to the generator, so he had to push it shut.

  He headed into the woods where Mira had walked earlier this morning and kept glancing back at the house, at the windows of Adam’s room, to measure the distance. Thanks to the lack of leaves, the room was visible until the ground sloped downward. Sheppard followed the twisted path down through the bent and damaged trees, skirting piles of dead branches and debris, and emerged on Mango Drive, at the opposite end from where Mira’s store was located. Had Mira inadvertently followed the kidnapper’s path up the hill to the Nichols’s place? Or had the man approached from the back, where the woods were denser and filled with Australian pines?

  His phone rang; Mira’s number appeared in the window. Typical, he thought. She had refused to take his call when she’d stormed out, but now she was calling him. Whatever.

  “Hey, Mira. What’s up?”

  “Are you still in the house?”

  “I’m on Mango Drive.”

  “Where on Mango? I don’t see you.”

  He stepped out from the trees and glanced down the sidewalk. Mira pedaled toward him on her bicycle, black hair flying out behind her, a shiny veil. He waved.

  “Okay, I see you.”

  She disconnected and, moments later, stopped in front of him. She wore dark sunglasses that reflected twin images of his face. He would rather see her eyes, where everything she felt would be naked, obvious. Without that visual cue, he was clueless.

  “I wanted to tell you the rest of what I picked up, but without anyone else around,” she said.

  “I was hoping for something like that. How come you didn’t answer your phone when I called?”

  She shrugged. “I just wanted to get away from the place.”

  “You were pissed.”

  She tilted her glasses back onto the top of her head, revealing her magnificent eyes. “Yeah, I was. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Shep. I appreciate that you went to bat for me as an attorney. But after weeks of us not even talking to each other, it seemed, well, sort of beside the point.”

  “I just wanted to make it clear to Charlie that he wasn’t going to pull any bullshit.”

  “Oh, he’ll still try. Charlie’s eager for recognition. Sort of like Dillard was, you know?”

  Leo Dillard, Sheppard’s former Bureau boss, had been indicted several weeks ago as a result of information Sheppard and Goot had uncovered during those endless hours during Hurricane Danielle, when they had been confined to a cellar with Dillard and former Chief of Police Doug Emison. Sheppard figured he must have karma with corrupt authority types like Dillard and Cordoba. Well, maybe not Cordoba. Maybe the man was just misguided. He wasn’t sure yet about him.

  Mira pointed off toward the right. “He came from that way, on an electric cart, and followed the same path that I took when I hiked up the hill. He left the cart at the edge of the trees and got in through the utility-room door. Once he was in Adam’s bedroom, the housekeeper surprised him and he shot her. He then took Adam out through his bedroom window. If I were you, Shep, I’d keep the utility-room part of this out of the press.”

  He nodded, slipped a notepad from his shirt pocket, and scribbled the basics. He actually had a good memory for detail, but needed an excuse to look away from her. Up at the house, he had noticed that when he looked at her, he remembered touching her face, running his fingers through her luxurious hair, making love to her—memories that disturbed him.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Paul Nichols was with his mistress last night. I don’t know who she is, couldn’t see her face.”

  “And you picked this up when?”

&
nbsp; “In the hall, as I was leaving. Paul Nichols has got some major screws loose. Also, I think the house is haunted.”

  Here we go, he thought. Back into the weirdness of Mira’s world. “You mean, by the housekeeper?”

  “No. The woman I saw in my initial vision. She helped the housekeeper cross over.”

  In his head, some little gremlin whistled the refrain from The X-Files.

  “When she was in the room, with Nichols holding a gun on me, the air turned to ice. He felt it. I also picked up a phrase. Car talk.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  She shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “When did you pick it up?”

  “When I was hiking back down the hill. It was, like, I don’t know, a residue, an echo, something connected to that first vision.”

  After five years of working with Mira on various types of investigations, Sheppard knew enough to pay attention to everything she said. He knew what questions to ask. Hell, he knew the drill better than anyone. What might seem inconsequential or silly often turned out to be the very thing on which the entire investigation turned.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  “It’s all I can remember now.”

  He put his notepad back into his shirt pocket. “I thought you weren’t going to do this anymore.”

  It was a loaded remark and he knew it. But he was curious. Mira dropped her sunglasses back onto her nose, hiding her eyes again, and mounted the bike, one foot on the pedal, the other still touching the sidewalk. “This one sort of found me. And it involves a child.”

  “So how’ve you been, Mira?”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. He hadn’t wanted to make any of this personal. He’d gotten along fine without her for the last four weeks and really didn’t want to know about her, her personal life, her daughter, the dog, the cats, none of it. Hell, he’d even gone to a movie with another woman, a relative of Goot’s girlfriend, Graciella. A looker, a federal attorney with whom he’d had zip in common. He’d been bored out of his mind. But it was a start, right?

  “Oh, I’ve been fantastic. Life right now is really grand, you know? Met a couple of interesting men… well, one of them needs a dentist and the other wears white socks and needs a fashion consultant, but hey, how shallow am I?”