Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  He laughed. Even to him, though, the laugh sounded false, a bit too loud, too quick, too forced. “Bad teeth and white socks. Sounds promising.”

  “Hmm. And that’s the rah-rah-cheerleader version:’ “What’s the Morales version?”

  She tipped the shades forward and peered at him over the rims. “No electricity for—what? Five weeks now? Six weeks? My car’s scraping empty in the gasoline department, so to conserve, I walk or ride my bike to the store or Ace or Luke give me a lift into town. Annie, Nadine, and the three cats are staying in Miami, with friends who have electricity, there’s about fifty grand worth of damage to the bookstore, half that for the house, my insurance company hasn’t issued shit, FEMA is a joke, and most of the work that’s being done is paid for from loans or goes on credit cards. But I’ve got great credit. Anything else you’d like to know, Shep?”

  He instantly felt guilty. Not once in all these weeks had he offered Mira help or support. He had moved out of her place with his self-righteous indignation and cut her off completely. “I can get you gas through the Bureau, Mira. I can get you a generator, a curfew pass, whatever you need. Just ask.”

  “Look, you made it pretty clear you don’t want to see me again, period. And that’s fine, it’s your choice. So don’t expect me to ask for your help, Shep. In fact, the missing boy is the only reason I called you. Have a great day.”

  With that, she poked her sunglasses higher onto the bridge of her nose, turned the bike around, and pedaled away from him, moving like the wind.

  A huge, swelling tide of regret swept through him.

  Chapter 5

  Paradise

  Finch had a weakness for redheads. Eden Thompkins’s hair was long, thick, rich with waves and texture, a flamboyant copper mane that his fingers begged to touch, comb, caress. The freckles scattered across her cheeks with such wild abandon seemed delicately beautiful and yet strange, as though nature were experimenting with her genes. Her body was luscious enough to gobble whole, round and full in all the right places, but with a flat tummy and hips as sharp as knives. Finch had met her in a bar.

  Before the hurricane, she’d tended bar at Pepe’s Restaurant fifty hours a week. But with tourism in the Keys now dead, her hours had been sliced in half and she had a lot of spare time. So they spent much of that spare time in bed.

  As far as beds went, this one was fi

  rst-class---Swedish, made of some mysterious material that molded itself to your body. No creaking, squeaking, rusty springs. As they rolled across it, the silence of this bed enveloped them, swallowed them. She was naked, her skin a cool silk against his. He wanted to sink into those cat-green eyes and confess about Adam. Or brag about how he’d pulled it off. Or both. But he didn’t. Couldn’t. Not yet. Maybe never. He wasn’t sure where or if she would fit into his life in the future. And until he knew, Adam would remain his secret.

  Eden often accused him of being secretive and complained that she knew almost nothing about his past. The truth was that her knowledge of his life consisted of the colorful fictions he had told her, that he was a computer consultant, on the road a lot, that he lived and worked on the houseboat where she’d visited him on numerous occasions. She didn’t know about the house on Sugarloaf, his early acting career, or that he’d been forced to flee Hollywood, a castoff, a reject, a failure. She had no idea that he’d made a killing on stocks when he’d worked in Silicon Valley and had left California as a millionaire. He had wrapped himself in so much secrecy that at times it nearly smothered him and left him feeling lonely, isolated, and desperate for the kind of companionship she provided.

  Back in the early weeks of their relationship, when Eden had her own secrets, she had told him he reminded her of an actor she’d seen years ago on a TV series. A sliver of cold had licked at his spine. Yeah? What series was that?

  I can’t remember the name. It was about this family with two sons and one of them was really a rotten guy.

  Couldn’t have been me. I never did TV, he’d said with a laugh.

  Even in the unlikely event that the ten episodes ever went into reruns, he thought, she wouldn’t recognize him. No one would. As the consummate chameleon, he had remade himself half a dozen times since Hollywood, each time immersing himself in a new role, a new persona. He was the ultimate method actor and, like Brando, Paul Newman, and Al Pacino, a follower of Lee Strasberg’s techniques.

  “How long can you stay, Spense?” Eden whispered, nibbling at his ear.

  “For another hour or so.” I need to get back to the house, to Adam. “I’ve got an appointment with a client at five-thirty, then need to move the houseboat to a marina for some minor repairs.” Covering his ass for what he foresaw to be an absence of at least several days and perhaps as long as several weeks. “Do you work tonight?”

  “Yeah, I got a couple of hours because someone called in sick. Pepe’s is still running off generators, but we’ve got a limited menu and people still come in to drink. The bars are the only places where you can get booze. Listen, if you need a place to stay while the houseboat is being repaired, you know where the key is, Spense.”

  He moved his body over hers and brought his mouth to her forehead, her cheeks, her breasts, murmuring, “You talk too much.”

  Every time he was inside her, he felt a secret thrill—he was where Paul Nichols had been. In the beginning, when he had watched the Nicholses to learn more about them—their routines, passions, all the minutia that made up any family’s life—he didn’t know Eden even existed. Then he followed Paul one afternoon when he headed off to Miami to teach a class. He taught the class, all right, but on the way there he stopped at a motel on Big Pine Key. And didn’t come out for hours. The only thing that could mean was a woman who was not Paul Nichols’s wife.

  At the time, Finch couldn’t understand why any man would cheat on the likes of Suki Nichols. Then he saw Eden as she and Nichols emerged from the motel that evening. She looked like a goddess fallen from Olympus. Right then, he knew he had to refine his plans, that she was his missing piece.

  Does she suspect me?

  Doubtful. She was too trusting and he was very good at what he did.

  Afterward, they lay side by side, stroking each other. His fingers slipped and slid over her damp skin, through her beautiful hair. Finch arranged her hair on the pillow so that it fanned across the fabric, copper against the blue, with her pale face as the sun. Her eyes watched him and crinkled at the corners as she smiled, amused. He sometimes wondered if, when she was a nurse back in North Carolina, her patients had hungered for her in the way that he did.

  “What do you think about when we make love?” she asked.

  This was how they talked during these long hours in her first-class bed. “How beautiful you are. What do you think about?”

  “I don’t. When we make love, my mind goes totally blank.”

  Finch lifted up on an elbow and with the tip of his finger, circled her belly button, a nipple, and connected them with an imaginary line. His fingers crept lower, her eyes fluttered shut, the lids as pale and translucent as eggshells. Her right arm came up over her head, fingers closing over the railing, grasping it as he moved his hand between her thighs.

  It was uncomfortably warm in her bedroom. Her generator was just large enough to power the window AC unit, her fridge, and a light or two. The air conditioner struggled against the thick torpor of the afternoon heat. But he didn’t want to interrupt the flow to get up and turn on the fan. He stroked her slowly, watching the minute changes in her expression, the way her breath quickened with her excitement.

  Leaning forward, he slid his tongue across her lower lip and whispered, “What did you do in bed with him?”

  Her eyes opened, she frowned. “What a weird question.”

  Finch’s hand stopped moving. But she brought her hand over his and said, “Don’t stop.”

  Then tell me what want to know, Eden. He touched her in a certain way and she gasped and gripped the sides of his head.
He hated being constrained and snapped his head free. “Did he do that to you?”

  “Never. It seems like he barely touched me at all. It was usually over in about forty seconds. He liked the seduction part of it.”

  The foreplay.

  “Sometimes he couldn’t get it up, and then he would make it sound like it was…. my fault…”

  “What pleasure did you get out of it?”

  “I … I guess my pleasure came from who… he is.”

  Finch couldn’t compete in that department and he blamed both Paul and Suki Nichols for that. But he could drive Paul Nichols out of Eden’s mind and reward her for answering his questions. In moments, paroxysms of pleasure shuddered through her, her hands twisted the sheets, she cried out.

  Now he really couldn’t take the heat in here any longer. He got up and turned on the battery-operated floor fan.

  “I’m sorry I canceled our dinner last night” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You haven’t asked me how things went.”

  “I figured you would tell me if you wanted to.” He returned to the bed, stretched out beside her, and pulled the sheet up over them. “What happened?”

  “I met him at the motel, after his class, just like he wanted. And I let him buy me dinner and we had some wine and I told him we were done. He really lost it.”

  Finch smiled at this, the image of Paul Nichols losing it. He wasn’t used to being dumped by the women he messed around with. When Eden called to cancel their dinner date last night, she said she was meeting with Paul, to end it once and for all. Finch already knew that Suki was out of town, and Eden’s call had assured him that Adam would be in the house alone with the housekeeper. Thanks to all his planning, he was able to make his move. He had been ready to make that move for a year.

  “I left around eleven and by then, it was too late for him to leave and make the ferry back to Tango, so I guess he stayed at the hotel all night.” She giggled, a small, girlish sound, and pressed her hand over her mouth. “He had already called the housekeeper to tell her that he wouldn’t be back and he couldn’t very well rush home, now could he?”

  “So how do you feel about it?”

  “Wonderful.” She rolled onto her side, stroking his face, then whispered, “Make me come again.”

  Entering paradise, he worried about what would happen when Eden heard about Adam’s disappearance. She was his only connection to the Nichols family. What would she do? She undoubtedly would blame herself, reasoning that if she had refused to meet Paul last night, he would have gotten home and he would still have his son. But would her guilt consume her? If she called Paul Nichols, the cops might find out he had a lover and would track Eden down.

  No, no, none of this would happen. Eden would live with her guilt. She would keep her secrets secret. He would make sure of it.

  Chapter 6

  Suki

  Thanks to a bomb threat that turned out to be bogus, her plane from New York was delayed five hours and she didn’t touch down in Miami until seven that evening. She was frantic with worry. With her cell dead and the plane idling on the Miami tarmac, she was isolated from the people who might provide information she so desperately needed.

  The flight attendant moved through first class, apologizing in her soft, breathless voice and passing out glasses of champagne as consolation prizes. Suki shook her head at the proffered glass.

  “Can I get you anything else?” the attendant asked, flashing her fluoride smile.

  “Yes, a phone that works.”

  “Did you try the phone on the back of the seat in front of you?”

  “It’s as dead as my cell phone.”

  “Oh.” That annoying smile shrank.

  “What’s the holdup?” Suki asked.

  “I don’t know.” She patted the pockets of her uniform, pulled out a cell phone, handed it to Suki. “Use my phone.”

  My God, Suki thought. Redemption. “Thanks very much. I’ll pay you for the call.”

  “No, that’s okay, Ms. Nichols.”

  No wonder she was so nice. Four years ago, when Suki had been nominated for—and subsequently had won—an Oscar for Acid Trip, people had started recognizing her more frequently when she was in public. She still wasn’t comfortable with it and hated it in situations like this, when her preferential treatment usually meant the other person expected something in return—read my script, get me a callback, give me an interview. She was treated like royalty and yet she’d done nothing to deserve it. Even though she’d been outspoken against the war in Iraq and had been a vocal critic of the current administration’s military policies, she never had fought an insurgency, saved a country, or brought peace to her corner of the world.

  She quickly punched out Paul’s cell number and reached his voice mail. She tried the house number, lost the signal, punched it out again. Paul answered on the second ring, his voice quiet, cautious. “Paul Nichols.”

  “It’s me. Did—”

  “My God, Suki, where the hell have you been? You haven’t answered your cell, the—”

  “Stop it,” she hissed. Their son was missing and he was giving her the third degree. “Did Adam come home?” As though he had wandered off, taken a walk, and gotten lost. “Is there any news?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  A huge rift opened in her heart. “Jesus, Paul.” Her voice cracked and she turned her head toward the window. The plane had stopped at the gate.

  “Suki, we’ll find him. The press is going to be all over the story soon. Someone’s meeting you at the airport and—”

  “It happened on your watch,” she snapped, and disconnected before he could defend or excuse himself and before she could find out who was picking her up.

  The flight attendant came down the aisle again and Suki returned her cell phone. “Thanks very much.”

  “Not a problem. The, uh, captain says you’re supposed to get off first. The FBI is here to pick you up. Did you check your bag through?”

  The FBI? Why? Adam was only missing, he hadn’t been kidnapped or anything. This wasn’t serious enough for the FBI, was it? “No, I’ve just got a carry-on. I’ll get it.”

  Suki quickly retrieved her bag from the overhead bin and followed the attendant to the door of the cabin, where a Miami Dade cop waited. His eyes widened when he saw her. He seemed flushed and nervous when he spoke.

  “I’m, uh, supposed to escort you out to the tarmac, ma’am. We’ll go up the ramp here just a ways, then out a side door so we can avoid the crush of passengers at the gate.”

  “Why the tarmac?” she asked.

  “There’s a plane waiting for you.”

  Moments later, they passed through a side door, down a flight of stairs, out onto the tarmac and into the oppressively warm Miami evening. A tall man paced pack and forth in front of a twin-engine Cessna, a cell pressed to his ear. When he saw them, he slipped the phone in his shirt pocket and hurried over.

  “Agent Wayne Sheppard.” He extended his hand.

  He hardly looked like an FBI agent: bearded, jeans and a T-shirt, running shoes. But the ID tag clipped to his shirt pocket looked real enough. “Why the plane?” she asked.

  Sheppard ignored her question, looked at the cop. “Thanks again for your help, Sergeant.”

  “Sure thing, Agent Sheppard. Ms. Nichols, me and the wife, we’re big fans of yours. Could I, uh, have your autograph?” He held out a pad and pen.

  Suki asked for their first names, so she could personalize the autograph. He thanked her profusely, his gratitude embarrassing her. She felt relieved when Sheppard took her bag, touched her arm, and urged her toward the plane.

  She got into the passenger seat. Sheppard ducked into the back. “Suki Nichols, Ross Blake,” Sheppard said.

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” the pilot said, and handed her a headset. “Put this on. It’ll make it easier for us to talk while we’re in the air.”

  Suki noticed that he was missing a finger and s
uddenly linked that fact to his name. “You own Tango Sea and Air.”

  Blake—blond, blue-eyed, nearly as tall as Sheppard—looked surprised. “If we’ve met and I don’t remember, then I must be well on the path to dementia.”

  “My husband, Paul Nichols, has used your chartering services from time to time. I remember him mentioning you.”

  “Maybe dementia has arrived already. I want you to know how sorry I am about your son. If I can be of any help, just let me know.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “There’s no better pilot around,” Sheppard piped up from the backseat.

  Blake started the plane, ran through his checklist, and radioed the tower. While he waited for a response, Sheppard leaned forward and tapped her on the shoulder. “If you turn the dial to COM 3, we can talk without disturbing Ross.”

  She did as he asked, slipped on the headset, and Sheppard got right down to business. He gave her a detailed rundown on where the investigation concerning Adam now stood. The search of the property and surrounding woods hadn’t yielded anything. No ransom demands had been made, but the phones in her house were nonetheless wired in the event that a kidnapper called.

  “Why’re you assuming he was kidnapped?” she asked.

  Sheppard’s silence caused her to turn around. They were airborne now and in the glow from the cockpit, his expression made it clear that Paul hadn’t told her the full story. “It’s possible that he ran away, but right now, we’re treating this as a kidnapping because your housekeeper’s body was found in his room.”

  “Gladys is dead?”

  Her eyes filled with tears and she turned quickly around, struggling with emotions that nearly overwhelmed her. Gladys had been their housekeeper since they had moved to Tango two years ago, when Paul had been invited to teach film courses at the University of Miami. Adam had adored her. The fact that Paul hadn’t told her about Gladys meant he was covering up something.