No Safe Place

by JoAnn Ross

  As if summoned by an invisible bell, the butler arrived with the detective's jacket and walked the two men to the door.

  "Okay." As soon as they were alone, Kate spun on her mother. "What the hell were you and Tara up to?"

  "I don't know what you mean." A manicured hand flew to Antoinette's breast.

  "I mean, unless she got a personality transplant while she was having all that plastic surgery done, my sister would not have killed herself."

  "You don't know that. You've been off living your own life. Without any concerns for the mother and sister you left behind."

  "Yeah. You look like you've really been suffering." Kate waved a hand around the opulence. "So what kind of scam are you running on St. Croix?"

  Her mother jumped to her feet. Hectic red flags flew in her cheeks. "I'll have you know I love my husband."

  "Right. And hey, while I'm buying that, maybe you've got a levee you want to sell me?"

  "It's true."

  Kate folded her arms. "You don't even know the meaning of the word."

  "I do, too." Tears sprung to those thickly lashed eyes.

  "Go ahead. Turn on the damn waterworks. But all you'll end up doing is melting your mascara."

  If her mother thought she was going to tap-dance around the issue, Antoinette had another think coming. "Because guess what, I know you. You don't have an honest bone in your body."

  "I'll admit that I may have had a few faults—"

  "A few? That's like saying Ted Bundy had a few problems keeping girlfriends," Kate shot back.

  Her mother might have appeared to have metamorphosed into a southern society matron, but she'd always had a core of steel. And a heart every bit as cold and hard.

  "You needn't talk to me like that." She tossed up her chin in a gesture Nick would've recognized right away. "I might not have been the most maternal person in the world. But I tried, as best I could, with the resources I had as a single parent, to be a good mother."

  Kate opened her mouth. Closed it. Shook her head.

  Did her mother have even the faintest connection to reality?

  "You taught me to rifle purses before I was in kindergarten," Kate said through clenched teeth. "In what fucking child-rearing manual did you find that little gem of parenting advice?"

  "You needn't curse, dear. It's unnecessary. And unattractive. And I wasn't as fortunate as some people. I wasn't fortunate enough to go to college. Having two children to raise while I was still in my teens."

  "You were twenty."

  "Nineteen when I got pregnant."

  Kate couldn't argue that one. Nor did she want to get into an argument about birth control and safe sex, because it would just lead them off track.

  "I put myself through Loyola with loans and work-study. And you're right. I was fortunate that there were ways not to get pregnant."

  Like celibacy for her first three years at the Jesuit college in Chicago, but she wasn't going to share that with her mother, either.

  What was interesting was that Antoinette had kept up with her. She'd like to think it might have been because she'd cared. But the truth was that she'd probably just wanted to keep tabs on where her eldest-by-five-minutes daughter was in case she ever needed to hit her up for money.

  "And isn't it disappointing that you're not doing anything with that fancy degree?"

  "I became a cop."

  She chose not to add that Nick had pretty much nailed why. She'd wanted, in some small way, to try to pay back the man who'd saved her life. Saved her from turning out like her mother. And, oh God, like Tara.

  "Any high school graduate can be a cop. Why, I'll bet they even take people with GEDs. And really, dear, don't you think I know why you decided to go into law enforcement?"

  Kate knew she shouldn't bite. But she couldn't help herself. "Okay. Why don't you tell me."

  "Because you wanted to get back at me."

  "You have to be kidding!" Kate's barked laugh held not an iota of humor. "Christ. You've always thought everything was about you. I became a cop because I watched my father—"

  "Dennis Delaney was in no way your father," Antoinette shot back derisively. "He was the man who sent your mother to prison."

  "Because, excuse me, my mother was a damn criminal! Who was more than willing to lead her own children right into her own sad and shabby life."

  "You girls loved the drama. And when most children were eating at McDonald's, you just happened to be dining at some of the finest restaurants in the Gulf South."

  Despite the seriousness of the argument, Antoinette's ruby-red lips curved into a faintly reminiscent smile. "Do you remember that Easter brunch when I wore the empathy belly under the maternity smock?"

  "And pretended to faint, and Tara screamed bloody murder, and while both of you held everyone's attention, I lifted billfolds from purses." It was the day she'd told Nick about.

  "We left that restaurant with nearly a thousand dollars. Which paid for a vacation in Hollywood."

  Where Antoinette had stood in Judy Garland's footsteps and had been thrilled to discover that she wore the same size—five and a half—as those famous ruby slippers.

  Kate didn't really remember that part of the trip, having been much more enthralled with Disneyland's Jungle Cruise, but her mother had told the story so many times she could picture it in her mind.

  In fact, the mental image was so clear that two years ago when a thief had broken into the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in the middle of the night and stolen one of the six pairs of the slippers created for the movie and insured for a million dollars, Kate had actually wondered if, just maybe, her mother had been behind the theft.

  "We were kids," she said. "We had no way of knowing right from wrong. Especially when you made it a game."

  "It's very sad."

  Antoinette reached into a drawer in a hand-carved table and took out a gold cigarette case, the kind you only saw movie stars using in 1930s and 1940s movies. She lit a cigarette with a matching gold lighter, drew in a deep breath, and let out a sigh on a plume of blue smoke.

  "What's sad?"

  "That you've grown up to be so rigid. When I remember you as such a happy little girl."

  "I don't want to talk about this anymore."

  "Fine. Why don't you tell me about your very delicious Nick Broussard?"

  "He's not my Nick. And there's nothing to tell. I needed a PI to help me prove that Tara didn't kill herself. Detective Landreaux recommended his former partner. End of story."

  "Now who's the liar?" Antoinette's sly smile was that of a cat who'd just come across a succulent bowl of rich sweet cream. "Have you slept with him yet?"

  "That's none of your business."

  "Ah. I knew it." She nodded, pleased with herself. "I am, after all, psychic."

  "Aphony psychic," Kate corrected.

  "If you don't choose to believe, that's your business," her mother said airily. "But the chemistry between the two of you is more than a little apparent. Yet you were still comfortable in each other's space. Which tells me that you've scratched the itch at least once."

  She flicked a gaze over Kate's face. "From that visible beard burn on your face, I'd say rather recently. Perhaps even right before you came over here."

  "Again," Kate said through gritted teeth, "any relationship I may or may not have with Nick Broussard is none of your business."

  "Of course you're entitled to your little secrets, darling. We all have them."

  She paused, a significant beat. Knowing her mother as well as she did, Kate waited for the other shoe to drop. It didn't take long.

  "Including your Nick. I suppose, given that you're so close, he's told you about his little problem with the police department?"

  "I know he left. To open his own investigative agency."

  "He left," Antoinette agreed with a nod of her sleek blonde head. "But it wasn't exactly of his own choosing. And the agency came after he was thrown off the force for corruption."
<
br />   "I don't believe that."

  Nick might play a little fast and loose with the rules.

  But corrupt?

  No way.

  "Why don't you ask him?" her mother asked.

  Her smoothly modulated tone was mild. But the gotcha look in her pansy Liz Taylor eyes told Kate she was enjoying her daughter's discomfort. Once again the cat image came to mind. But this time she imagined her mother as a sleek Siamese toying with a mouse. The mouse, of course, being her.

  "I will."

  Her mother was a textbook pathological liar. She was also, like all successful grifters, an expert at knowing exactly which buttons to push.

  "But for now, I want to know what you know about Tara."

  "Not a thing. Really," she insisted. "Except that she was always my problem child. Always needing attention."

  "Maybe because she never got any from you. "

  "That's a cruel thing to say."

  "Sometimes the truth hurts."

  "She had problems. Mental problems."

  "What kind of mental problems?"

  "She'd get depressed."

  What a surprise, living with this woman.

  "Once, when she was twenty, she tried to slit her wrists. She was hospitalized for three months."

  "I'm sorry." Which didn't even come close to describing how sorry.

  "As I said, she was a difficult child."

  "I meant I was sorry for her. Was she on antidepressants?"

  "Off and on," Antoinette said, dismissing the subject with a wave of her hand.

  "Did you know what she was doing for a living?" Kate asked.

  "She was a hostess on the Crescent City Casino ship."

  "She was a hooker."

  "Prostitution's illegal."

  "Like everything you've done to make a living all your life isn't?" Kate blew out a frustrated breath. "Look, I'm sick to death that my sister was hurting and I wasn't here to help her. But I don't give a damn about what she was doing to earn a living except for the fact that it couldn't have helped her self-esteem, and I'd think that having sex for money would be horribly depressing.

  "But unfortunately, it's too late to do anything about that now. So, what I came here to find out is if you knew about that videotape."

  "What videotape?" Her violet eyes widened innocently. Which, of course, didn't mean a damn thing.

  "The tape she was using to possibly extort money from Leon and Stephen LeBlanc."

  The color drained from Antoinette's face. "She couldn't have thought she could ever pull off such a reckless scheme!"

  "Nick says she was."

  "Leon was dangerous enough. But at least he's fairly civilized. From what people tell me. But Stephen." She shook her head. "The word on the younger LeBlanc is that if he's not a psychopath, he's at least a sociopath."

  "I suppose it takes one to know one."

  "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." She took another shaky puff, then stabbed the cigarette out in a crystal dish. "Martin doesn't like me to smoke," she revealed. "I've been trying to cut back, but this has been such a dreadfully stressful time."

  "Speaking of your new husband, what con did you play to land in this place?"

  "What makes you think I ran a con?"

  Kate's only answer was a long, hard look.

  "Well, that answers that," Antoinette decided, dropping the southern country-club accent. "You really are a cop."

  "Yes. I am."

  "At least you were. From what I hear, you've had a few problems yourself back in the Windy City."

  Do not let her draw you into another endless argument you can never win.

  "Your husband can't be a stupid man." Kate doggedly stuck to the topic. "He's going to find out what you did. Whatever it is."

  "No. He's not." Her hands trembled as she shook another cigarette out of the case. "Because I'm going to fix it."

  Oh, hell. "I don't want to hear this, do I?"

  "You're the one who insisted," her mother reminded her on another stream of smoke.

  "It all began when I met this lovely young man who worked as a title clerk at the office of Motor Vehicles ..."

  33

  "SO," KATE TOLD NICK AS THEY LEFT THE HOUSE, "what she and that guy from the OMV were doing was essentially stealing the cars' identities by stealing the identification numbers from luxury cars and SUVs and putting them on stolen vehicles."

  "Which was essentially laundering the hot cars," he filled in. "Once they had a legitimate VIN number, they'd be easier to register."

  "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised you'd know about that. Given that we're still driving around in a stolen SUV."

  "Yeah, I'm not wild about that idea, either. But if it makes you feel better, as soon as we get back to the marina, I'm going to call a tow truck to take it back to the casino."

  "I'm glad to hear that. But what's changed?"

  "While you were having that little chat with your mother, Remy told me they picked up the Hulk."

  "Really? Wow. That was quick."

  "They got lucky. The firefighters saw him watching the burning car with a bit too much interest. Let's face it, we had a break; the guy's not real hard to miss."

  "Well, that's true enough. So why was he trying to kill us?"

  "Actually, Remy's pretty sure he was after me. And it's a long story I promise to share as soon as we're back on The Hoo-yah."

  "Does it have anything to do with you leaving the police force?"

  So much for choosing his own time and place, Nick thought with an inner sigh. "Your mother didn't waste any time."

  "She's always been big on controlling the situation."

  As was her daughter. Nick figured that must've been one helluva conversation the two of them had had.

  "I got kicked off the cops." There. It was out.

  "For corruption?"

  "That was the charge."

  "But not the truth."

  He looked over at her, met her steady gaze. "It was the truth as far as it went."

  He watched her processing that. "But it wasn't the whole truth and nothing but the truth," she said.

  "No."

  "I knew it."

  "That's it?" Surely Detective Law and Order wasn't prepared to drop the subject that easily?

  "For now." She placed a hand on his thigh. "Of course I want to hear the story. But you told me you'd tell me when we got to the boat. That's enough for me."

  "It's a complicated situation." Nick wondered what he'd ever done to get so lucky to meet this woman, who didn't trust easily but for some reason trusted him. "Meanwhile, you were telling me about your mother. Who, by the way, isn't exactly Donna Reed."

  "Noticed that, did you?"

  "I didn't have to be a detective to spot the clues. It also explains a lot about your sister. And makes me admire you even more. It couldn't have been easy. Raising yourself while trying to be a surrogate mother to your twin."

  "It was the way it was." Kate shrugged. "We've both seen kids grow up in a lot worse situations. At least we always had food and a roof over our heads. We might have had to move in the middle of the night because we were scamming the landlord for the rent. But nothing was so bad that we could even qualify as associate members of the endangered-children-of-the-world club.

  "Anyway, Antoinette and her boy toy were part of a national ring that trolled mall parking lots, car dealerships, and online auction sites, finding cars that matched the ones they'd already stolen."

  "Which, with the help of corrupt title clerks like the boy toy, who'd forge the signatures of owners who'd applied for duplicate titles after their VINs were stolen, essentially changed auto theft from a street crime to a white-collar offense."

  "Exactly. Which is a lot more difficult to catch. Not to mention prosecute. I'd already heard about it before Antoinette got involved. There was one group in the Southwest, Operation Road Runner, that allegedly cloned cars worth eight million dollars."

  "Not exa
ctly kids going joyriding on a Saturday night," he said.

  "Tell me about it. A lot of the cars with the altered VINs are sold to other criminals. But lots of private buyers, auto auction houses, and car dealers can end up being duped. So, essentially, you could buy a car from say, St. Croix Mercedes, only to find out later that it had actually been stolen from some guy in Wisconsin. Or even Canada."

  "And that's where St. Croix came in."

  "Exactly. The Louisiana wing of the group needed a dealership to launder their hot cars through. St. Croix was the obvious patsy. His kids are grown and scattered around the country. He was widowed five years ago, so he'd been living alone all that time. And my mother, you may have also noticed, is not without her charms."

  "She's attractive enough. In a Flashy CZ sort of way." He reached out and squeezed her thigh. "Unlike her daughter, who's the true gem in the family."

  Color, the bane of all redheads, rose in Kate's cheeks. "That's a very nice thing to say."

  "It's easy to say. Because it's the truth ... So, did Antoinette get St. Croix mixed up in the VIN ring?"

  "If she's to be believed, and that's always a crapshoot, because there are times I think she doesn't even know when she's lying, he doesn't know a thing. She says that although she arranged to meet him on purpose when she went to buy a Mercedes, she honestly did fall in love with him. Enough that she told the guys running the show down here in the Gulf that she was dropping out. That she wasn't going to put her husband's business, his reputation—which apparently is golden down in this neck of the woods—and his life in jeopardy."

  "And I'll bet they were just tickled to pieces about that."

  "Tickled enough they tried to kill him."

  "The plan being that your mother would inherit the dealership. And they'd be back in business."

  "Exactly." Kate nodded. "Of course he was a fool not to make her sign a prenup, but—"

  "He loved her."

  "Yeah. So here's the thing: Antoinette, for the first time in her life, finds herself on the horns of a moral dilemma. Choice number one is that she can dump the life of crime and live happily ever after with the love of her life."

  "Which is going to be hard, given that her former band of merry men are trying to make her a widow," Nick said. "Lucky he's a tough old bird."