Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  Mira speculated that Tango was located at a critical juncture on the planet’s energy grid of ley lines, so that it was a power spot like Stonehenge, the Mayan ruins, Machu Picchu, Tikal, the Egyptian pyramids. She felt this theory explained why her psychic abilities were heightened on Tango. Sheppard didn’t know squat about any energy grid or ley lines, but he certainly knew about Mira’s abilities.

  He swiftly severed this line of thought.

  Here and there, scattered haphazardly across the sand, lay the lingering evidence of Danielle’s wrath—plastic bottles, aluminum cans, trees, mounds of garbage that had washed up during the storm, flattened beds of sea oats, the remains of a wooden canoe half buried in the sand. The dunes that once had graced this beach were gone and the half-dozen docks that had jutted out into the water had collapsed or been swept away. Just ahead of him, a landslide filled with trees and brush blocked his path.

  Sheppard slowed and walked out into the shoals of the tepid Gulf. As he leaned over to splash water on his face, his arms vanished up to the elbows in the mist. Its air was cooler than the temperature of the water and felt oddly pleasant against his skin, like small, delicate kisses. Celibacy, he thought, could do that to you.

  He waded out more deeply, cooling himself off from his run. The mist now reached to his waist. Spellbound, Sheppard barely heard the first soft, whooshing sound and didn’t connect it immediately with anything unusual. Then he heard it again, louder and closer, accompanied by a lot of splashing, and slowly raised his eyes.

  Four dolphins emerged from the mist, water shooting from their blowholes, the air filled with their clicks and whistles.

  They arched gracefully, so close to him now that he could see their faces, mouths like playful smiles, their small, wizened eyes. The clicks and whistles became another sound, a kind of music that rose and fell with the beating of his heart, the rush of blood through his veins.

  The dolphins turned, two of them moving to Sheppard’s left, the other two to his right, and circled him in opposite directions. He turned too, watching as they dived, surfaced, dived and surfaced again and again. Their music swept through him, one wave after another, and he knew they were scanning him with their sonar, gathering information about him.

  Years ago, off the coast of Venezuela, he and his mother had gone swimming with wild dolphins. A pod had surrounded them and taken an inordinate interest in his mother, bumping up against her, clicking and whistling as if to communicate something to her. A few days later, she’d found out she was eight weeks pregnant. She believed the dolphins had known because they’d zapped her with their sonar, the dolphin equivalent of ultrasound.

  But he sure wasn’t pregnant and didn’t think he had any kind of tumor—another detail that a dolphin’s sonar had been known to pick up. He wondered if dolphin sonar could read loneliness. Or a broken heart.

  Don’t go there.

  Maybe they were just having fun, trying to engage him in a dolphin game. One of the two smaller dolphins suddenly shot toward him and as she passed within inches of his body, water exploded from her blowhole, drenching him. She whipped away, clicking wildly, a noise that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

  Sheppard flopped back into the water, kicking his legs, splashing his arms, and whistled long, joyful notes. The dolphins picked up speed, their powerful tails whipping the water into a white froth. One of the dolphins bumped into him, startling him. He grabbed onto its dorsal fin and the dolphin sped away, pulling Sheppard along.

  Exhilaration whipped through him. He tried to pull his legs in toward his body so they didn’t create such a drag in the water, but the dolphin was moving too fast. He squinted against the assault of the salty air that stung his eyes, the muscles and tendons in his arms and hands now screaming for release. The dolphin abruptly turned again, with her companions gleefully turning on either side of her, their collective clicks now so loud that the noise threatened to burst open Sheppard’s skull. The dolphin dived, water rushed into Sheppard’s mouth, burned a path up through his sinuses, and whatever exhilaration he’d felt collapsed into fear that he could drown out here.

  He released the dolphin’s fin, but the vortex created by its rapid movement sucked him down, down. His ears popped from the pressure change. It was as if a plug had been pulled in the floor of the Gulf and he was swirling down through it like yesterday’s bathwater. His feet touched bottom—how deep? Thirty feet? Forty? He propelled himself upward, arms moving frantically, eyes pinned to the murky light very far overhead.

  The salt water clawed at his eyeballs, his lungs pleaded and screamed for air. His foot caught on something—a tangle of branches and refuse, he wasn’t sure, couldn’t see clearly. He jerked his leg back and forth, up and down, fighting to get his foot loose. His lungs swelled, threatening to burst. It was the ultimate claustrophobia, blackness encroaching at the edge of his vision, his head spinning.

  Sheppard doubled over, desperately clawing at the branches and the tangle of seaweed and fishing lines that trapped his foot. But the whole mess of whatever it was had caught on rocks. If he could work his foot free of the shoe, if he could get the goddamn shoe off, if he…

  The last of his oxygen exploded from his lungs, panic seized him. No air, no air… As the blackness swam closer and closer, something shot into his rapidly narrowing field of vision. He couldn’t make out exactly what it was—dolphin, shark, sea monster. The strong current whipped a huge, tangled veil of pale seaweed in front of and to the sides of the shape. He tore frantically at the netting and lines, his fingertips now raw and bleeding.

  For a brief instant, the tangled stuff parted and Sheppard glimpsed the impossible. The seaweed looked like hair. He suddenly knew his oxygen-deprived brain was coughing up near-death visions of a woman’s face—beautiful, delicate, pale—with luminous green eyes. I’ll get you out of this mess, she promised.

  Then water rushed into his lungs and the blackness seized him.

  “Shep, hey, c’mon.”

  A woman’s voice. Hands rolling him onto his side. Water surging up his throat. He started coughing and half the Gulf exploded from his mouth. He rocked back onto his heels, wiped his arm across his mouth, and looked into the face of Tina Richmond, the M.D. who headed up the Tango bureau’s latent-fingerprint unit. A fellow runner.

  “You all right?” she asked, kneeling beside him.

  “I… I think so.” He coughed some more, wiped his arm across his mouth. “What the hell happened to you, Shep?”

  I saw a mermaid. “I nearly drowned.” He knuckled his burning eyes. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I started running on this beach after the hurricane.” She pulled a towel and a bottle of water out of her pack and handed them to him. “Take small sips. I saw fog rolling in off the water and covering this area of the beach. When I ran into it, I nearly tripped over you.”

  “Did you see the dolphins?”

  “I heard them. They were thrashing around out there like crazy, stirring up the fog. This fog is weird. I’ve never seen fog here before.”

  If it was fog. “Me either.” Sheppard rubbed the towel over his face and arms, sipped from the bottle of water. The muscles in his arms and legs twitched and trembled from the exertion.

  “You lost a shoe,” she remarked, pointing at his bare left foot.

  He felt like he’d lost his mind. He told her about the dolphins, about getting trapped at the bottom. He didn’t mention the other thing he saw. “I blacked out down there.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Not quite here.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “Three miles down the beach.”

  She sank to the sand beside him. “Let’s sit a while, then I’ll walk back with you.”

  “I appreciate it, but don’t interrupt your run.”

  “You’re saving me a phone call. Let’s talk about the bullet that killed the Nicholses’ housekeeper. I got the autopsy and ballistics report late last night. She died from a s
ingle nine-millimeter to the heart. The firing-pin marks and the ridge on that cartridge came from a Walther P99. They ran the gun print through the ATF and FBI databases, and didn’t come up with any match for other crimes.”

  Not too surprising, Sheppard thought. Even though computers and other technological advances had moved ballistics light years beyond what it had been during his first stint with the Bureau twenty years ago, matching a single bullet to other crimes remained an imprecise science. With 270 million firearms owned in the US. alone, the databases of the FBI and ATF held fewer than a million images of fired bullets.

  “There’s always a chance he hasn’t shot anyone before?”

  “Sure, Shep. About as much of a chance as a UFO landing on the lawn of the White House. He shot her from a distance of five or six feet, probably just as she came into the bedroom. The bullet was a semi-jacketed, so the internal damage was extensive. She died instantly.”

  “What about latent prints?”

  “The only latent print we found that doesn’t belong at the house was Mira’s.”

  “She found the housekeeper’s body.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  Sheppard told her what had happened.

  She just shook her head. “Frankly, I think Charlie Cordoba is way too eager to get involved in a high-profile case. It won’t matter to him if Mira is the last person on the island who would kill anyone. He’ll dig up a motive and try like hell to make it stick. She’d better be careful, Shep.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m the last person she’d seek out for advice.”

  Tina gave his arm an affectionate squeeze. She knew they’d split up. Everyone he worked with knew it. As long as they had lived on Tango, their names among friends and coworkers had been uttered as one: MiraandShep. It was a tough habit to break.

  “Any ransom demand yet?” she asked.

  “Not as of one this morning when I finally crashed in my office.”

  “Maybe the kid ran away after the intruder shot the housekeeper, Shep.”

  “Wouldn’t he be home by now?” Sheppard shook his head. “It doesn’t feel like that. I think this guy had been watching the family for quite a while. He knew what he was doing, where to enter, where to exit, who was home and who wasn’t.”

  “He?” Her glance chastised him for being sexist.

  “A generic term, Tina. Really.”

  She slapped his upper arm with the back of her hand. “Hey, lighten up, okay? That was a joke.”

  He reminded himself that Tina was married to an attorney for whom nuance was an art form. “Statistically, most kidnappers are male.”

  “Screw statistics. What’s your gut say?” she asked.

  “That the abductor is male.”

  “His motive?”

  “Money is the reasonable answer. And the Nicholses have plenty of it.”

  “If we remove money from the equation, what’s left?” Her index finger shot up, as if testing the direction of the wind. “Revenge.” Her middle finger snapped up. “Desire. You have something I want. I covet your wife, kid, life, house, career, whatever the hell it is that draws TV and movie viewers to celebrities and elevates them to the status of royalty.” Now her ring finger joined the parade. “Random madness. The guy sees a kid, decides he wants him.”

  They walked along the beach now, Sheppard holding his lone shoe in one hand, the bottle of water in the other. He noticed that the fog had dissipated completely. “In the desire category, maybe it’s a matter of projection,” he said. “You’re famous and beautiful, so if I take something that belongs to you, I’ll become famous and beautiful.”

  “He’s after publicity?” She nodded. “That’s possible. Or Paul and Suki Nichols are after publicity.”

  He could believe that of Paul Nichols, but not of Suki. If Paul Nichols wanted publicity and had arranged the kidnapping of his son to get it, then he was a monster, not just a publicity hound. Despite the man’s short fuse and outrageous behavior, Sheppard couldn’t connect him to the monster category. Not yet anyway.

  They reached the parking lot. Sheppard heard his phone ringing inside his Jetta and hurried to answer it. As he opened the door, a blast of hot air rolled over him, scorched, crisp, with a thick scent of leather. He plucked the cell off the passenger seat. The number that came up in the window identified the caller as Tango PD. That meant Charlie Cordoba or one of his pals.

  “Agent Sheppard.”

  “Shep, it’s Charlie. The kid’s photo was released to the news services two hours ago and now we’re about to have a major situation.”

  “I didn’t authorize that release,” Sheppard said. His target time had been eight A.M. “Who did?”

  “We don’t know. But the paparazzi and the press are all over it and there are more on the way. I got a call from one of the ferry captains. His six-A.M. run was so jammed with press vans that the company had to bring out a second ferry just for commuters.”

  A logistics nightmare, Sheppard thought. That was what this would be. Was becoming. Is.

  “There’re only two hotels on the island that have full power restored—the Hilltop Inn and Tango Motor Lodge, and their rooms are filling up fast. We don’t have the capacity right now to support all these people. We have one functional gas station that’s usually out of gas by eight in the morning. Our public restrooms haven’t reopened. What the hell are we going to do? Tell them to camp in the preserve? Even the preserve is a mess. Worse, the Nicholses lost the fence around most of their property during the storm and all that stands between them and the press is the gate and a strip of iron fence.”

  “Did you notify Mayor Dawson?”

  “Yeah. He said that since the missing kid is a potential kidnapping and falls in the fed domain, I should call you. With the island still under curfew and emergency management, he can order them off the island by dusk. For those who choose to stay on Tango, there will be rules they’ll have to follow—or they’ll face deportation.”

  “Deportation is what they do to illegal immigrants, Charlie.”

  “You know what the hell I mean. Dawson will be joining us for an emergency meeting over at the Nichols. Gutierrez, too. Thirty minutes. Be there.”

  Not likely, at least not in thirty minutes. He was drenched, had only one shoe, and needed to shower. “Hey, Charlie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t take my orders from you.”

  Sheppard disconnected before Cordoba could reply.

  Chapter 9

  Developments

  Finch, sitting in front of the Mac in his den, went through the video feed, editing, enhancing, cropping, zooming, a wizard working the magic of digital technology. He ran the edited feed once again, fine-tuning it, disguising his voice, playing with shadows, light, textures, deleting anything that might give away the location, his identity, or his purpose. He added background music, a score stitched together from music straight out of his favorite films. If anyone paid attention, they might pick up a few hints from it all. Then he burned two DVDs.

  Afterward, he sat back with a mug of rich Cuban coffee and watched the finished product, seven minutes and seven seconds of edgy drama. It excited him. There was just enough to terrorize but not inform, to seduce but not consummate. It would make Suki and Paul Nichols feel the way he had as a wannabe, waiting desperately for a callback.

  He doubted if either of them would connect these events with him. Even if they thought back far enough, it was unlikely they would remember him, the tall, thin, twitchy guy who had auditioned for the male lead in Bluff, their production company’s antiwar film. In the final auditions, it had come down to him and the man who eventually got the part. No one had bothered to tell him when the selection had been made; he’d heard it on the ubiquitous grapevine. He had been so certain the part was his—he deserved it, it would make his career—that no other Hollywood rejection had felt quite like this one had, as if he were still trapped in his teens, back in that Seattle trailer park, his old man’s whipping boy.
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br />   He’d gone over the edge for days after that, moving through a thick, red fog, driven by rage and bitterness. He had stalked the casting director, Priscilla Branchley, an arrogant woman with pursed lips and glassy eyes who wore designer clothes and carried a clipboard with her wherever she went. One night he had slashed her tires; another night he’d made repeated obscene calls to her home. Then he finally got her alone, in her car, a knife at her neck, and instructed her to drive into a particular canyon and pull off the side of the road.

  By the time she stopped, she was hysterical, her swollen eyes beet red, great, heaving sobs exploding from her mouth. She swore she had wanted him for the part but that Suki and Paul had overruled her. When he pointed out she might be saying that just to save her own ass, she told him to look at her clipboard, the paperwork was still there. So he did.

  Suki says he has homicidal eyes, Paul thinks he’s unhinged.

  But the truth had not set Priscilla Branchley free. Finch had knocked her out, doused her and the inside of her car with vodka, set fire to it, and rolled the car over the lip of the canyon.

  He’d fled Hollywood that night—not out of fear of getting caught, but because he knew he could never audition again for anything. That he and his Hollywood dream were finished. His enormous sense of failure brought back all the years of living in abject fear of his old man, feeling like less than nothing.

  For weeks afterward, he had saved newspaper articles about the death of Priscilla Branchley and photos of her funeral. When Bluff was released the following year, the rave reviews often mentioned Branchley’s brilliance and tragic death, believed to be an accident caused by alcohol. Bluff won some minor awards, had a respectable showing at the box office, and had catapulted the leading man from Nobody to Somebody, into a career that should have been Finch’s. Suki and Paul had become the new darlings of Hollywood. Ultimately, it had brought all of them to this moment in time.

  Kismet, he thought. Karma. Yes indeed. He loved the idea that because of his actions, Suki, Paul, and the cops were scrambling to figure out the 5Ws. In the movie business, these were the essential tools in understanding a character. Who was this character? Where was the action taking place? When did it happen? What was the dramatic conflict? Why did the character do what he did?