Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  MiraMiraMira … The sound of her own name echoed, rising and falling with the scent of grass, heat. She lifted up on her elbows and the faces around her snapped into clarity: Sheppard, Goot, Suki. Behind them stood Charlie Cordoba and Paul Nichols.

  “I want her off this goddamn property,” Nichols barked.

  “Back off, Paul” Suki snapped. “I invited her here.”

  The only possible way she could have ended up on the ground outside Adam’s bedroom window was if she’d dived through it. She didn’t remember doing it. Didn’t remember anything. One moment she was outside a waterfront house and the next moment she was on the ground. No memory connected these two events.

  Mira sat up straight, knuckled her eyes, tasted dirt in her mouth. She pressed her hands to her thighs and tried to stand up, but her head spun. Sheppard helped her to her feet. “You okay?” he asked.

  “I need some paper. And a pencil.”

  Off came his pack and out came a number-two pencil and a small sketch pad that was exactly the size she needed. “You just happened to have a sketch pad?”

  He shrugged. “Old habits die hard.”

  Meaning: He had monitored her so often in the past that he now included a sketch pad and pencil in the provisions he carried in his pack. “Thanks,” she said.

  She got shakily to her feet and weaved away from him, from everyone, and rounded the corner at the back of the house. She went inside the screened porch, kicked off her sandals, and sat at the shallow side of the pool where there was shade. Mira dropped her tired feet into the water, set the sketch pad on her lap, and began to draw what she recalled of the house.

  She sketched with her eyes half-closed or shut altogether, her hand seeming to move of its own volition. She realized that in memory, she could see through the glaring brilliance of the sun glinting against the water. She could see a seawall, a dock that jutted out into a canal, trees and tropical shrubbery in the yard, wooden fences. She sketched all of it, and when she looked up from the pad, there was a bottle of water in front of her, a bowl of fresh fruit. And the gray teddy bear. Suki stood nearby, biting at her lower lip, arms pressed to her waist.

  “You’ve been sitting there for ten minutes, so lost in what you’re drawing that you didn’t even hear me say your name, Mira.”

  Was she saying this because she wanted an answer? Mira wondered. Or was it just an observation? “Suki, from the time you left the room to when you and the others were standing over me, how much time passed?”

  “Maybe five minutes, probably less.”

  Mira held out the sketch pad. “This is where Adam is. It looks like a house in the Keys.” It looked, she thought, like every house in the Keys. “It’s as specific as I can get right now. He’s okay, I saw him again.” Saw him from inside the funnel of light. But she knew how that would sound and didn’t say it. “I can get more, but not right now. I’m spent.” She pushed to her feet.

  “Can I give you a ride somewhere?” Suki asked.

  “Thanks, but I’ve got my bike.” Right now, all she wanted to do was get out of here. “I’ll give you a call when I’m ready for the next round. In the meantime, let me know if you hear anything.”

  Suki accompanied her outside, neither of them speaking until the screen door banged shut behind them. “What’s this bastard want, Mira?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said before, look into the history of the house, that’s the most I can tell you right now. We’ll talk,” she said quickly, and hurried off to find her bike.

  It was on the front porch where she’d left it. As she mounted it, Charlie Cordoba came around the corner of the house. “You can’t leave by the road. The press will descend on you.”

  “I’ll go through the trees.”

  “And make sure you don’t leave the island unless you give me a call first, Mira.”

  She burst out laughing, couldn’t help it. “Right.”

  Cordoba hooked his thumbs inside his belt and stood straighter, taller. But even straighter and taller didn’t make him tower over Mira. A badge, a gun, and hubris: That was the sum total of his authority over her. “I’m serious, Mira.”

  “I know. You see an opportunity for publicity on a high-profile investigation that might boost your own status. That’s pathetic, Charlie.”

  Color flared in his cheeks. “I could arrest you right this second on suspicion of murder.”

  Good God what was with this guy anyway? “Okay. So arrest me. Where’s my murder weapon? What’s my motive?” And who’s my attorney? “Suki hired me. The press will have a field day with that one. You want to fuck with me, Charlie? Then, great, take me in. Haul my ass in.” She leaned toward him. “And watch your entire case go down the tubes in seconds.”

  Just then, a balding man with hunched shoulders took shape off to Cordoba’s right. He wore a red Ralph Lauren shirt, riding jodhpurs tucked into shiny black boots, and clutched a riding crop. You tell him Graham said he’s ashamed of him, the man said to her.

  “And by the way, Charlie, Graham is standing next to you in his riding clothes and says to tell you he’s ashamed of you.,,

  Mira didn’t have any idea who Graham was, but Cordoba did. He looked around uneasily, then gave a quick, nervous laugh. “Yeah, right. Sheppard buys your ghost bullshit, Mira, but I don’t.”

  Graham spoke again. Mira listened, nodded. “Graham wants me to remind you of what happened the summer you went to stay with him in Coeyman’s Hollow. Something about the sound of the train and that eerie green light moving along the tracks that night.”

  Blood drained from Cordoba’s face and he wrenched back from Mire, stammering, “You’re a… a… carnie show, Mira, that’s what the hell you are.”

  Graham was trying to butt in, urgently tapping Cordoba on the shoulder with his riding crop. The crop kept passing through Cordoba. Mira thanked Graham and asked him to go away, please. Cordoba was oblivious to all of it. He shook his finger at Mira, babbling threats.

  Mira ignored them both and interrupted Cordoba. “Here’s the deal, Charlie. Boy is missing. Housekeeper was killed by same guy who has boy. Simple, right?”

  Then she pedaled away, leaving Cordoba and Graham in a cloud of dust.

  The path through the pines and ficus trees at the back of the house wasn’t meant for bikes. Within the first few moments, the bike hit the huge remains of an uprooted ficus tree, a booby trap. The bike skidded, she lost her balance, went down, and air rushed from her lungs. She lay there, struggling to catch her breath, the wheels on the bike spinning noisily in the hot, still air. A bluejay flitted past, twittering with annoyance at her intrusion.

  Why was it that every time she tried to leave this property she fell? She rolled onto her side, drew her legs up to her, chest, and tried to reconcile her performance in the house with the check for two hundred grand from Suki. She wasn’t so sure her abilities were worth that kind of money. She couldn’t perform on demand. The information was either there or it wasn’t, and none of it came with guarantees. How could she justify what Suki was paying her?

  She heard sounds behind her and glanced around to see an electric cart bouncing down the path, Sheppard at the wheel. Light and shadow ebbed and flowed across the planes and angles of his face. “The path isn’t fit for bikes,” he said, pulling to a stop beside her. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “How about a lift to the store?”

  “That’d be great.”

  Sheppard swung out of the cart and beat her to the bike. He pulled it upright, pushed it over to the cart, lifted it into the backseat. Mira climbed into the passenger seat, careful not to touch anything that might hold a residue of Sheppard or of anyone else who had been in the cart. She kept her hands pressed to her thighs, puzzled about his real motive for following her into the woods. It wasn’t just because he was worried about her taking the path on a bike.

  “Suki said she hired you,” Sheppard said as he got in and started the cart.

  “And you di
sapprove?”

  “Me? No way. But I imagine that right about now, she and Nichols are arguing about it and Cordoba is scrambling to figure out what you know and how he’s going to deal with all this.”

  “It’d be better if Charlie just got the hell out of the way and let you and Goot do the job. But he won’t do that. He’s going to be trouble for you, Shep.”

  “Did the room turn cold like it did yesterday when you and Nichols were in there?” he asked.

  “No. I didn’t see anything this time, but this presence, this spirit, seems really pissed off. It was like she was having a temper tantrum.”

  “Suki showed me the sketch you did of the house. She’s going to give me a copy. Whatever information you give her, Mira, we need it too.”

  “I’m working for her, not you, Shep. It’s her choice to share it or not.”

  His glance was sharp, quick, annoyed. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Just what it sounds like. She paid me, not the Bureau.”

  He seemed a little shocked by this, that her abilities weren’t available to him just for the asking. Maybe, she thought, this moment for Sheppard was the equivalent of what she’d felt yesterday morning when she’d realized he was wearing a shirt she’d never seen before. Her life was moving forward, after all. It buoyed her spirits, and she suddenly felt more generous toward Sheppard.

  “I don’t see why Suki would refuse to share my insights, Shep. She wants to find her son.”

  Then, out of the blue, he blurted: “Mira, have you ever seen a mermaid?”

  Of all the questions he might have asked just then, this one never had crossed her mind. “Uh, no. Why? Have you?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I think a mermaid saved my life this morning.” He stopped the cart and the story spilled out.

  Mira sat there in complete shock, her left brain coughing up all sorts of reasons that Sheppard might imagine seeing a mermaid: breakdown, sorrow, trauma, all of it related, naturally, to their split and the abrupt change in his lifestyle. Wishful thinking. Whether Sheppard had imagined the mermaid or actually had seen her smacked of some profound inner shift in his belief system. And quite frankly, she felt a bit envious that he had seen something, experienced something, that she never had.

  “What do you think it means?” he asked.

  Was he asking her as a psychic or as an ex-lover? Did that distinction even matter? “It reminds me of that movie called Whale Rider.”

  He nodded, remembering. “Last spring. Yeah, you, Nadine, and I watched it.”

  “It’s like you’ve ascended into myth or something, Shep.”

  “It felt more like a plunge than an ascension.” He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. Sunlight streamed through the treetops and lit up his beard like a Christmas tree. Around them, crickets chirred for rain. “On the island of Chiloe, in Chile, the belief in mermaids is so widespread, Mira, that it’s part of the culture. You see images of mermaids on ashtrays, restaurant walls, coffee mugs. The local fishermen believe that when they see a mermaid facing out to sea, it means the fish are running and the day’s catch will be good. When she’s facing the shore, the fishing will suck.”

  Only Sheppard would talk about mermaids in Chile, she thought. “We don’t live on Chiloe.”

  “But we live on an island where mermaids are part of the local mythology. Like the Loch Ness monster in Scotland. Or the Mothman in West Virginia. Maybe I just tapped into Tango’s cultural belief system or something. Didn’t Jung say something like that was possible?”

  Carl Jung had said a lot of things about mythology, but she didn’t know enough about the specifics to comment. What struck her most about Sheppard’s confession was his obvious need to place his experience into some sort of context that would reassure him he had not gone off the deep end.

  That was new. And disturbing. Despite all the weirdness they had experienced in their five years together, he never had doubted his own experiences and beliefs about what was real.

  “If it were a dream, how would you interpret it?” she asked. “What would the images suggest to you?”

  “That the investigation into Adam’s disappearance is about to take me into unknown territory.” He paused, thinking, frowning. “That I’m diving deeper into an unknown world.” He looked over at her. “Into your sort of world, Mira, where the unthinkable is actually business as usual.”

  “You believe I live in an unthinkable place? Thanks a lot.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, Shep. I don’t know what you mean. Explain it to me.” Talk to me.

  His large, beautiful hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Consensus reality says that mermaids don’t exist. But I know what I saw, what I experienced. It’s the same thing for you. When you intuit something the rest of us can’t see, you don’t doubt your impressions. Like with Tia Lopez.”

  Okay, she’d been waiting for this one, a reference to the final blow to the relationship. Lopez, who had killed five abusive men, including her husband, had been busted out of jail by the same man who had broken into Mira’s home during Danielle, allegedly seeking a refuge from the storm. He and his girlfriend, Lopez’s cell mate, had inflicted such chaos and damage on Mira and her family that it was inconceivable to Sheppard how Mira could side with Lopez in the end and allow her to escape.

  “Excuse me, Shep. But Lopez saved my life, Annie’s life, Nadine’s life. She put her ass on the line for all of us.”

  He ignored what she said and rushed on. “Because of something you saw about Lopez, you were absolutely certain that she deserved to go free,” he went on. “Fuck legalities. You were right and everyone else was wrong.” He sounded angry, looked angry. His nostrils flared. “Well, that’s how I feel about this. I know what I saw. A mermaid saved my ass.”

  So doubt about his own experience—his sanity—wasn’t the issue, she thought. Anger at her was the issue. “Why’re you so pissed off? I’m not passing judgment on your experience.”

  “Because I don’t want to know about the weird and the strange, Mira. I don’t want mermaids and things that go bump in the night.”

  In other words, he didn’t want her, that was what he was really saying. She digested this and all its implications, then swung her legs out of the cart. “Thanks for the lift. I’ll take the bike the rest of the way.” She pulled the bike out of the back, knew at a glance that she wouldn’t be able to ride it the rest of the way downhill, and started pushing, fuming. She just wanted to get away from him.

  “Mira, hey, hold on,” Sheppard called after her.

  Mira ignored him and kept on walking, faster, faster. Moments later, Sheppard caught up to her. “What’d I say? What is it?”

  He didn’t get it. “I feel like walking.”

  He caught her hand. “Stop, okay? Just stop and talk to me.”

  The moment he took hold of her hand, circuits opened up between them and images of his life without her rushed into her. She jerked her hand away. “She’s drop-dead gorgeous, that woman you had dinner with.”

  Sheppard was taken aback—she saw it in his expression—but recovered quickly. “She was a cousin of Graciella’s, an opinionated jerk, and by the end of the evening I told her off. And I really wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Peer into me like that.”

  “Hey, you touched me.” She threw out her arms, the bike crashed to the ground. When she continued, she heard the fury in her voice. “This is what I am, Shep. I’m sorry that you think it’s weird and strange, but I can’t turn it off to suit you.”

  He looked so miserable and confused that when he suddenly put his arms around her, it caught her by surprise. He drew her against him and everything inside her screamed that she should pull away and start running, but she couldn’t. It felt so good for him to hold her, to hear the strong, steady beat of his heart, that she brought her arms around him and for long moments, they stood in the shade and fragrance of the pines, hug
ging each other.

  And suddenly, all her repressed desire for Sheppard came roaring to the surface, and he felt it and slid his fingers through her hair, tilted her head back, and kissed her. A soft, tenuous kiss at first, then deeper. His hands slid to the small of her back, to her waist, up under her shirt, and against her skin and her breasts. Desire sprang from every pore in her body. The rest of the world fell away from her. She forgot where they were, the weeks of loneliness, everything but the physical sensations of Sheppard’s hands against her.

  They stumbled until she was backed up against a tree, in the deep shade of the pines. His mouth went to her throat; they fumbled with zippers. Her shorts slipped down her thighs, the fabric rustling like dry leaves against her skin. She was breathing hard; blood rushed and pounded with the fury of a stormy ocean surf inside her head. The trunk of the tree scratched and clawed at her shirt, but the waves of intense pleasure that coursed through her obliterated everything else.

  Distantly, a horn blared, and the sound of it snapped her back into the here and now. She pressed her hands to Sheppard’s chest, pushing him back. “Wait,” she said hoarsely. “What’s this mean? Why’re we doing this?” She jerked her shorts back up, straightened her tank top. “This doesn’t solve anything. I’m still the thing that goes bump in the night.”

  Sheppard stepped away from her, fumbling with his clothes, tucking his shirt in. He looked disconnected, rattled, like a man emerging from a dream so real that he couldn’t quite figure out where he was or what had happened or why. “I didn’t mean to… aw, fuck it,” he spat, and all his walls went up, she could almost see it happening. When he spoke again, his voice was controlled, cool, all business.

  “Do you want a ride or not?” he asked.

  “That’s it?” she burst out. “Do I want a ride?”

  “What do you want me to say, Mira?”

  Now that his walls had gone up, she couldn’t reach him. “What just happened? Was this a booty call, Shep? Is that it? You’re horny, so you followed me into the woods? Just what do you want from me anyway?”