Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  And what is it this time? Another gambling debt? A drunk? A woman? What? “Who discovered Gladys’s body, Agent Sheppard?”

  “A woman who was out for a walk,” Sheppard replied, and told her the rest of it.

  She sat there in stunned silence, her thoughts scrambling around like hungry mice, and tried to make sense of it. “Mira the psychic? The owner of One World Books? That Mira?”

  “Yes. Your husband is considering charges against her for trespassing, but decided to wait and discuss it with you.”

  She spun around, livid. “We will not be pressing charges. And where was my husband?”

  “He got caught by the curfew on his way back from Miami.”

  Right. Sure, he did. “What else do I need to know, Agent Sheppard?”

  “I’ve told you everything we know. But I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “Sure. Anything. Please.”

  “In recent weeks, have you gotten any odd phone calls or e-mails? Anything threatening or out of whack?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Have you hired anyone new to do your lawn or do work on the property or in the house?”

  “Before the hurricane, we had a lawn service. Now Paul pays one of the neighbor kids to do it. The two of us managed to fix our porch so it’s at least livable, but we haven’t been able to find anyone to repair it correctly. So I doubt if there have been any new people working on or around the house.”

  Blake clicked into COM 3 and asked, “Have any deliveries been made to the house that you weren’t expecting?”

  “No.”

  “Does your son have any allergies or medical conditions?” Sheppard asked.

  She bit her lip, fighting to keep back tears. “No medical conditions. But recently, he’s been adamant about keeping his door open at night. It embarrasses him, but he seems afraid. He has an imaginary friend too who he claims… protects him.” A desperate yearning to touch her son, to hold him, swelled inside her and her voice cracked. She paused, cleared her throat.

  “Has he mentioned anything to you over the past few months about being followed?” Sheppard asked. “Or strangers talking to him? Anything like that?”

  “Nothing. Before the hurricane hit, he was going to a summer camp on Tango. One of us usually drove him. Occasionally, we carpooled with another friend of his, a boy who lives just down the road from us. But that family left before Danielle hit and they haven’t been back. Adam’s most constant friend is in Boston for the summer.”

  Blake glanced over at her. “What else can you tell us about Adam?”

  “He’s a lacto-vegetarian, very resourceful and bright. His interests are… oh, hell. He’s a forty-year-old man in a thirteen-year-old’s body.” And unable to hold back her tears any longer, she covered her face with her hands.

  Sheppard gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. “We’ll find him.”

  They sat in the living room, where the air had grown hot and stale because the generator wasn’t powerful enough to accommodate the AC system. Two battery-operated floor fans whirred quietly nearby, stirring the humid air. Suki just wanted to go to bed, but apparently sleep and bed wouldn’t happen for her any time soon.

  “The Bureau will reimburse you for any expenses you incur while we’re here monitoring the phones,” Sheppard was saying.

  Paul’s head bobbed up, down. Suki just sat there, numb and stricken, mulling over the fact that if her husband of fifteen years had been home last night, Adam might be here now.

  “We’d like to release a photo of your son?” This came from Sheppard’s partner, John Gutierrez.

  “Isn’t that premature?” Paul asked.

  No, it isn’t, Suki thought, and went over to one of the wall photos. She chose a black and white picture of Adam taken two months ago, when they had gone away for a long weekend in the Bahamas. Because of Adam’s passion for dolphins, they had rented a house on a beach where the mammals were known to congregate. While she and Adam had spent their evenings swimming with dolphins, Paul had sulked in the house because he didn’t want to “swim with fish.” In other words, Suki and Adam should do what he wanted to do.

  Not exactly a great family outing.

  “Here, use this one.” She handed Sheppard the photo of Adam.

  “C’mon,” Paul snapped. “If we release this now, the media will be jammed in the street out front by dawn.”

  “I don’t care,” she replied. “Send it out, Agent Sheppard.”

  “Are you willing to go on TV shows?” Gutierrez asked.

  “About this? No. The picture’s enough. I’ll give a statement to the press if I have to. But no TV. No John Walsh. No cable shows. Nothing like that.” She sat back down, her body wooden with exhaustion.

  “Other than the questions I asked you on the flight down here” Sheppard said, “is there anything else you can tell me that would help us out here? Is there anyone… anyone at all… whom either of you have angered so badly that this person would take your son?”

  If you only knew how many people we’ve pissed off, Suki thought. How many sweet young things had Paul alienated over the years? How many directors, producers, and other actors had she pissed off? Dozens. But would any of them do something as vile as kidnap Adam, the one person on whom her world pivoted?

  Doubtful.

  “No one,” Paul said, and pushed up from the chair and walked out of the room.

  End of discussion. Good-bye, FBI, good-bye, good-bye.

  Suki sat in the middle of Adam’s bed, the bedside lamp on, his pillow bunched in her lap. His Himalayan cat, Dolittle, was curled up beside her. He usually spent most of his time outside, but since the hurricane had been staying closer to home and sleeping inside at night. He seemed to understand something had happened to Adam because every so often he lifted his head and drew his warm, rough tongue over Suki’s arm, as if to offer comfort.

  Now and then, she pressed the pillow to her face and inhaled the scent of her son, that strange sweetness of childhood with its private thoughts, its teenaged secrets. And when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she wandered around his room, as restless as a ghost, studying the wall posters and touching everything, as though the touch would bring him back to her.

  The model airplane that hung from the ceiling had been a gift from her father the year before he passed away. She could still see five-year-old Adam, working diligently at piecing it together, painting it, his little hands as deft as an adult’s. The odd cuckoo clock on his dresser had been a gift from Paul’s mother, and it was cuckoo, as Adam used to say, because it never gave the right time. His collections of DVDs and music CDs were as diverse as his hundreds of books and more than a thousand wildlife photos he’d taken, many of them of whales and dolphins. Adam, genius.

  In New York, he had been in a private school for gifted children. Here on Tango, he was in a gifted program in the public school and it was better for him. He had more friends than he’d ever had in New York, and this year even had three girlfriends. He had gotten involved with two after-school clubs—one on the environment, so that he could indulge his passion for marine life, and the other in computers and software development, at which he excelled. In another week, he would turn fourteen, and in the fall would enter the tenth grade, a year ahead of the friends he’d left behind in New York.

  And now he’s gone. Some maniac had broken into her home, killed Gladys, and stolen her son.

  “Stop,” she whispered.

  “Suki?”

  Shit, no, she didn’t want to talk to Paul, not with feds still in the house. But she had nowhere to hide. “In here,” she called.

  He came to the doorway, a man now pushing fifty and a decade older than she was. When she’d met him on the set of her first movie, which he was directing, his thick hair had been the color of pine bark. It was still thick, but now it was gray and thinning. His eyes were now pinched, with deep laugh lines at the corners. He had gained weight over the years, twenty pounds or so, and although he
wore it well enough, he didn’t do anything about it. No gym, no runs, no moderation in his diet, nothing at all.

  Paul didn’t do much directing now either. Ten years ago, his directing career had flatlined and her own career had begun to shine. But Paul, forever resourceful, had written two bestselling books on screenwriting, gave seminars several times a year on his techniques, and now taught three classes in the film department at the University of Miami. Everything about him was excessive.

  “I just got off the phone with Agent Sheppard,” he said, stepping into the room. “He’s going to hold off a bit on releasing Adam’s photo. He’s really pushing for you to go on John Walsh’s program, that…”

  She didn’t hear the rest of his pitch, and that was what it amounted to. Paul pitching, always pitching--a script, an idea, a concept, even to her. She suspected that Paul, not Sheppard, was the one pushing for her to go on Walsh’s program, perhaps because their sons shared the same name. Dramatic irony. Good TV fodder. Great publicity. Yada, yada.

  “I’m not going on Walsh’s program, Paul. I’m not going on 20/20 or MSNBC or an other show, cable or network. Got it? If and when the press converge, I’ll make a statement.”

  “Look, now that you’ve given the feds Adam’s picture, you need to use your fame to get as much coverage as possible.”

  Dolittle jumped down from the bed, hissed as he trotted past Paul, and scampered out of the room. The cat didn’t like Paul, never had. The feeling was mutual.

  Suki went over to the window and gazed out into the darkness. Sheppard told her they believed the kidnapper had come in through the utility-room door and had escaped through this window. She didn’t feel anything one way or another about the utility-room door, but the window felt right to her. In the aftermath of the hurricane, without enough juice from the generator to run the AC, all the windows had been open, even at night. Especially at night.

  “Where were you last night, Paul?” She turned, facing him. “You promised me that while I was in New York, you would be home with him every night.”

  “I didn’t get off campus until—”

  “That’s a lie.” Suki glared at him. “You were with whoever the current lady is, Paul.

  A little tryst in the afternoon that held you up so you couldn’t get back here before curfew, before the ferries stopped running. Or maybe she lives somewhere between Miami and Tango and you had the best intentions to get home before curfew, but oops, she was just so intriguing. Whatever it was, whoever she is, this is your fucking fault.”

  His face burned with phony indignation. “You want receipts, Suki? You want proof? You want the cell records so you can see when I called Gladys to let her know I wasn’t going to make it? I stayed in a goddamn hotel, for Chrissakes. By myself.”

  “Sure, just like you did when you were having your little fling with…” She waved her arm in the air. “Whatever her name was, you know who I mean. That aspiring screenwriter who salivated over every word you uttered. Or what about that female director who wanted you to work with her on a script she was supposedly writing for me? What about that, Paul? You think I’m blind? I know what’s been going on and right before Danielle hit, I did something about it. I went to an attorney. We’re done, you and me. I’m bailing and Adam is going with me.”

  For months, she had tried to talk to him about their failing marriage, her suspicions, all of it. And for months, he had walked out every time she had raised the subject. But he wasn’t walking now. He stood there like a grizzly bear that had run into a wall, shaking his head, his eyes seeming to slide around in their sockets as if they had torn loose from tendons, muscles, bones, whatever had held them in place.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “I didn’t realize you hate me so much.”

  The trump card, it always worked. Now came the wounded eyes. She couldn’t bear to look at him and turned back to the window, where she saw her own reflection, her short blond hair looking as though it hadn’t been combed in weeks, her eyes red and swollen, her mouth set in a grim, stubborn line. Hardly the movie version of Suki Nichols.

  “There hasn’t been anyone else since that horrible stretch when Adam was two. You were off on shoots most of the time, my career was crashing, and we had a kid who… who was…”

  “Never a problem,” she said quietly.

  “But who needed parents who were together, a unit, and we couldn’t do it. We fucked up big-time.”

  We. How she hated a plural used in that particular way. And how vastly their memories—and their versions of reality—differed. When Adam was between the ages of two and eight, she had taken him with her on her shoots, to every set, every far-flung corner of whatever continent. He was written into her contracts. Paul was never saddled with the responsibility and Adam had tutors when he needed them. And he had her, always.

  Only Paul was absent.

  She couldn’t do this now, couldn’t deal with any more of this conversation, of Paul and his lies. “I’m going to bed,” she murmured. “I can’t keep my eyes open any longer.”

  But as she started past him, he reached out and grabbed her hand, pulling her to him. “Don’t do this,” he whispered. “Please. Don’t do this. He’s my son too.”

  And there in the emptiness of their son’s bedroom, she weakened. Their pain merged. Adam was gone and they were both to blame. She knew that. Yes, she had tried to be present in the way a parent is supposed to be present. But bottom line, Adam had been an accident, unplanned, unanticipated, and inconvenient. He had been a toddler when Paul’s career had spiraled downward and hers had been racing upward, and if she didn’t work, the bills weren’t paid.

  When Adam was born, when he had been very young, she had been more interested in herself and her career than in her son. Dear God.

  She tightened her arms around Paul, he clutched at her, and they stumbled back, back, and fell onto Adam’s bed. Paul ripped off her tank top, she tore off his shorts, and they fucked like there had never been any hope for any tomorrow, anywhere on the planet. And when it was done, she lay there in her sweating heap of flesh, her face turned toward the wall, and hated herself for what she had become.

  Chapter 7

  Ghosts

  The silence wrapped around everything. Mira couldn’t hear herself breathing and pressed her fingers to the underside of her wrist, feeling for her pulse. Okay, she was alive. She pinched herself to make sure she was awake. Yes. Then how come she was standing on the stoop outside the trailer in the gym shorts and T-shirt she’d worn to bed? And it must be morning, she thought, because she could see the thinnest threads of gray light seeping through the trees to the east.

  Question: If it was so close to sunrise, why weren’t the birds singing?

  She curled her bare toes against the cool concrete. It felt real enough. And the mist that swirled across the ground also looked real. But where had the mist come from? In five years here on Tango, she couldn’t recall having ever seen anything like this.

  Was it mist? Maybe she was developing cataracts or had a detached retina or something. She walked down the steps. The mist swirled around her feet and swallowed them to the ankles. It didn’t seem to move at all now. She glanced at her watch; the hands had stopped.

  And when she looked up, Tom emerged from the mist and the silence as if it were all perfectly natural that they should meet like this. The watch, right? She spoke to him, but her mouth didn’t move. When the watch stops, that’s how l know I’ll see you?

  Sometimes the watch, sometimes the mist, sometimes a combination. He put his arms around her. He felt solid, warm, real, completely human. Let’s walk, he said.

  Let’s not. She stopped, stepped back from him, folded her arms against her. Her dead husband looked as she remembered him, the same thick, chestnut hair, warm brown eyes, a quick, engaging smile. He even wore regular clothes—shorts, T-shirt, sandals. It seemed odd to her that every ghost she’d seen wore human clothes.

  What do you expect, Mira? White robes? Tom asked. I
create an image based on your memories. That’s all.

  Tell me why you’re here.

  He took her hand. I’ll show you.

  And suddenly she was in another place, a room where a teenage boy sat in front of a computer monitor, clicking through photographs. As they moved closer, Mira realized the person was Adam Nichols. The photos apparently upset him; tears coursed down his cheeks. She tried to see the details of the photos, but it was like trying to read a book in a dream. She took in other details about the room, noticed the shutters on the windows, then said to Tom: Okay, he’s alive, but where is he?

  He didn’t answer. Mira spun around—and fell out of the dream, onto the floor. Ricki, the golden retriever, licked her face and whined. Someone rapped at the door.

  “Mira?” Ace called. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, fine. I fell out of bed.” She got up and opened the door. Ace’s face was skewed with worry. “See? All here.”

  “Jesus, girl, you scared me. It’s five-thirty in the morning and I hear you arguing with someone.”

  “Tom.”

  “Tom?” Ace’s brows shot up. “You mean, like, the Tom?”

  The Tom. Yes. The same Tom who, years ago, had defended Ace in a trumped-up drug charge and gotten him off. The same Tom who had fathered Annie, who had helped buy Mira’s first bookstore in Lauderdale, the same Tom who had taken a bullet during the robbery of a convenience store on the night of Annie’s third birthday. The only Tom she’d ever known.

  Ace poked his head through the doorway, glancing around. “He was here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe I was just dreaming. I wish this would stop happening to me.”

  Ace leaned against the door frame, a tall, gangly black man with hair as tight and wiry as a Brillo pad and deep, soulful eyes. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his psychedelic shorts. He wore a blazing red T-shirt with the words SUNSET PERFORMER screaming across the front of it in brilliant yellow. He and his partner Luke probably owned two dozen such T-shirts, free advertising for their routines on the Tango boardwalk—Ace as an escape artist, Luke as a tightrope walker.