Written In Blood

by Lowe, Shelia

  “If you think she’s not your child, why don’t you have DNA testing done?” she asked.

  The look he turned on her made her regret the question. Maybe for some reason of his own, he didn’t want to know. “Listen, lady,” he said. “I don’t need you psychoanalyzing me. I just need to find that kid before she does any more damage.”

  Handwriting didn’t lie, and Claudia had studied Annabelle’s until her eyes hurt. If she listened to Giordano, he was telling her that his daughter was a raving sociopath. She said, “If you’d seen Paige’s body, there’s no way you could believe Annabelle was involved in her death.”

  He shook his head in what she judged to be mock sadness. “Claudia, Claudia, you think I’m a coldhearted monster like that bastard out there in the tank? You got no idea what I’ve been through with her.” He broke off and stood up. “Come with me.”

  “What this time?”

  His laugh grated. “No more sharks, just Annabelle’s room.”

  Claudia followed him upstairs to a large bedroom made bright by a bank of windows overlooking the grove of avocado trees. Taking in the flat-panel television, the iMac on a built-in computer desk, the DVD surround-sound system, she couldn’t fault Giordano for the material comforts he’d provided. Annabelle appeared to have it all.

  All except what she really needs.

  Giordano crossed the room to a large cardboard box that had been placed on a chair. Ripped open, strips of peeled back adhesive tape hanging loose. “Sorensen Academy sent all her shit home,” he said, reaching in and taking out a leather-bound book. Claudia remembered his conversation with Diana in Annabelle’s room and guessed he had been there to pick up her possessions.

  “She won’t be going back there,” he said, handing the book to Claudia. “Read the last entry.”

  Taking the book, she saw that it was a diary, the broken lock violating its secrets. Nothing could be more invasive than breaking into a young girl’s diary. But these were extraordinary circumstances. Claudia flipped through the pages. She caught her breath at the date on the last written page: Christmas Eve, the last day Annabelle and Paige were seen alive.

  She noted with frustration that the positive changes she had observed, both in personality and handwriting, had regressed under the stress of Annabelle’s mental state at the time of writing. Annabelle’s handwriting had begun to open up, expand a little. This writing was more like what Claudia had seen in the first sample weeks earlier with its narrow letters and squeezed spaces.

  I have to talk to Cruz, Annabelle had written, underlining the words.

  He cares about me more than that bitch Paige. He’s so awesome—I’m gonna give him his present tonight. I can’t wait to see him. Neil was mad about the belt, but too bad. He asked if it was for my father—as if! Then he guessed who it was for, but too bad. I don’t care what he thinks. It’s my art project. When Cruz finds out I made it myself, he’ll like me even better.”

  Typical teenage stuff. Except that Paige had been strangled with a belt.

  “She did go over there,” Claudia said. “But she didn’t give him the belt. She didn’t get a chance.”

  “You know about this Cruz character?”

  She nodded. “He’s the athletic director at the school.” She filled him in on some of what Annabelle had seen at Cruz’ cottage on Christmas Eve.

  “This is the first I’ve heard about the sonofabitch,” he said, jabbing a finger at the diary. “If he’s laid so much as a pinkie on her, that fucker’s gonna get whacked.”

  Given his own rumored involvement with young girls, Claudia found his rage ironic. “He was sleeping with Paige,” she hurried to assure him. “Cruz doesn’t have the profile of a pedophile.”

  But even as she said it, she wondered whether she could be wrong about Cruz. The only handwriting she’d seen of his was in the note card Annabelle had lifted from Paige, and that hadn’t sent up any red flags. He had yet to return the form she had e-mailed him, which would give her a better fix on his motivations.

  Claudia had seen plenty of cases where publicly upstanding adults had secretly used children in ways that sickened her. Still, Cruz displayed confidence with adult women, which suggested he wasn’t the type to go for a troubled young teen.

  Giordano moved in close, looking over her shoulder at what Annabelle had written. Too close. She could feel the heat coming off his skin, became aware of his after-shave, the warmth of his breath on her neck. He might be boorish at times and lacking in social graces, but there was no denying his good looks and, at this moment, his sheer animal magnetism.

  Claudia’s heart was racing as she stepped away and turned toward him. “I, uh—the handwriting shows that she was upset when she wrote this.”

  For a moment, Giordano looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. Then he interrupted, ignoring her comment. “What about the belt? She says she was giving this clown a belt. Don’t you get it?”

  “I get it, Dominic, I get it. You’re thinking she used the belt to strangle Paige. Well, I just told you, Paige was with Cruz that night. Cruz said they played sex games that involved a belt around the neck. Don’t you think it’s a little more reasonable that he might have killed her accidentally? If he was that wasted, he might not even remember it.”

  Giordano paced to the window and back, putting the weight on his prosthesis so that it thumped on the hardwood floor. “If she’s not involved, why is she hiding?”

  Claudia just looked at him for a long moment, hardly daring to voice her fear. “Maybe she’s not hiding.”

  “He killed Paige and then he killed Annabelle and hid her body somewhere? If that’s how it went down, he doesn’t know who he’s dealing with. Nah, something doesn’t smell right here.”

  He was right about one thing—it made no sense for Cruz to have told Claudia about his and Paige’s experimentation with autoerotic asphyxiation if it had resulted in her death. Unless he blacked it out.

  Giordano’s face crumpled for a moment; then his jaw set into a hard line. “Goddamn it, I’ll choke the life outta the little bitch. We have to find her before the cops start sniffing around. I’ve got a lot riding on—”

  He broke off and with a rush of aversion Claudia realized that he was talking about his reputation. She held up the diary. “Would you mind if I hold on to this for a while?”

  “Sure, why not?” Giordano looked at her with speculation in his eyes. “I want to hire you to help me find her.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t need to hire me. I’m already involved up to my eyeballs.”

  “I want you on my payroll. At least then you’d have to keep me in the fucking loop.”

  “I’m not interested in your money,” Claudia said, determined that he wasn’t going to control her the way he did other people. “And there’s one thing you can be sure of—I won’t betray her, not to you or anyone else.”

  Giordano turned and aimed a vicious blow at the bedroom door, leaving an indentation in the wood from his knuckles. “This is getting out of hand,” he shouted. “We gotta bring her in.”

  When Juan dropped her at home, Claudia checked her voice mail. There were no calls from Jovanic, but there were two hang ups listed as Out of Area.

  She worked through the afternoon, analyzing a handwriting sample for a client who was hiring a new employee, breaking at six to watch the news.

  She heated a frozen dinner while they rolled tape of Juan driving her in and out of the Giordano estate in the Hummer; then she logged on to the Internet and surfed the Web for a couple of hours, searching out news stories about Paige and answering e-mails that had stacked up over the previous week.

  When the phone rang around eleven, she grabbed the receiver, hoping to see Jovanic’s cellular number on caller ID. Instead, the display read Out of Area.

  She pressed the talk button. “Hello?”

  Only the sound of rapid, ragged breathing on the line.

  “Who is it?” Claudia asked, somehow knowing
.

  A voice whispered, “It’s me, Annabelle.”

  Chapter 24

  Claudia closed her eyes, dizzy with relief. Then her mind started clicking into gear. She mentally checked the gas gauge of the Jag, then grabbed pen and paper, ready to note an address. “Annabelle, honey, where are you?”

  “I didn’t mean what I said about hurting her.” Annabelle whimpered, choking on tears. Her disembodied voice sounded slurred, as if she had trouble getting her tongue around the words. “It’s all my fault.”

  Claudia’s heart sank. Could she have been wrong all along? She put on the Adult Authority Voice. “Annabelle, tell me where you are. I’ll come get you right now.”

  “They’re gonna lock me up,” the girl said dully. “But I didn’t hurt her. I swear I didn’t. He said the cops won’t believe me because I was in trouble before.”

  “Who said—” Time enough for that later. “Annabelle, you’ve got to tell me where you are. I promise, I’ll help you.”

  Annabelle broke into strangled sobs. “I think—a hospital. It’s dark all the time. Claudia, I don’t feel good.”

  “Can you give me an address? Are you in L.A.?”

  “Oh no!” Annabelle gasped. “No!”

  The line went dead.

  Dominic Giordano’s rant wound down. “Goddamn it, you got nothing! What the hell hospital? Where?”

  “If I knew that, I’d have called the cops, not you.”

  “Did you try pressing call return?”

  “Dominic, you’ve asked me that eighty times already. Maybe you should reconsider your attitude. I’m not the enemy, remember?”

  She heard him draw a sharp breath. “Merda,” he muttered. “I’m up to here with this shit.”

  Claudia rested her head against the back of her chair and pressed her toes into the carpet, rocking back and forth. The movement comforted her in some small way. “She said someone told her she would be blamed. It doesn’t sound to me like she killed Paige.”

  “Jesus, Claudia. You think the cops are gonna buy that?”

  “She sounded drugged.”

  “She’s done a lot of stupid things, but not drugs.”

  Apparently he didn’t know about the pot in Annabelle’s backpack.

  “If she’s in a hospital she could have been given drugs,” Claudia said.

  “Now I have to get someone checking every fucking medical office in the state. Goddamn it.”

  Callous bastard.

  Annabelle’s drawing lay atop Claudia’s desk—the clever sketch of her father pushing a car over the edge of a cliff.

  Her mother died in a car wreck . . .

  Keeping half an ear on his diatribe, Claudia opened a Web browser and Googled Annabelle’s mother. The first of the twenty-five links listed was titled An Inside Look at Valerie Vale’s Life. She clicked on the link, murmuring, “Uh-huh,” at appropriate intervals so Giordano would know she was still on the line.

  The young actress was the only child in a show-business family. Her mother was a model and her father an orchestra leader. On her seventeenth birthday, with the permission of her parents, Vale married thirty-two-year-old movie mogul Dominic Giordano, the producer of her debut film, City of Light.

  I guess he always liked them young, Claudia thought, feeling sad for Valerie Vale. She read on.

  Giordano, whose Sunmark Studios has long been rumored to have ties to organized crime, took full charge of his young wife’s career, casting her in a string of highly profitable starring vehicles, which showcased her youthful glamour.

  However, Vale told our reporter that acting was not her first priority, and the role she really wanted to play was wife and mother. Four years later, she got her wish when her daughter, Annabelle Lee Giordano, was born.

  Annabelle Lee.

  Had Vale been a fan of Poe? Claudia wondered, or had she just heard the name and liked it? Already, the child’s life had been as ill-fated as her namesake. It sounded to her that Dominic had used his beautiful young bride more as a puppet whose strings he played to his own tune, a trophy wife.

  Like Paige had been to Torg Sorensen.

  She scrolled down the screen as the article continued.

  Misfortune followed when Giordano lost a leg in a rare shark attack while surfing on Maui’s west coast. After his recovery, Valerie complained to friends of his increasingly morose behavior, which eventually escalated to alleged physical abuse. Police were called out to the Malibu estate on more than one occasion for domestic disturbances.

  Tragically, Valerie Vale’s life was cut short when the brakes of her convertible apparently failed and she lost control of the car. The twenty-seven-year-old Vale suffered severe head injuries after a horrifying plunge off a cliff on Pacific Coast Highway only a short distance from her home, and died after lingering in a coma for nearly a week. Annabelle Lee, who was six years old at the time, was in the car with her mother, but escaped serious injury.

  Vale’s other passenger, Tony Belmont, her leading man in the film she was making at the time of her death, described what could have been a scene in one of his movies as he told investigators how he grabbed the child and leaped from the car just prior to the accident. Devastated by his inability to save Vale, Belmont refused to talk with reporters. Yet the tragic story does not end here.

  Shortly after Vale’s death, Tony Belmont was mysteriously attacked in his home by unidentified intruders and was left with disfiguring facial lacerations that ended a promising acting career.

  “Claudia, are you listening to me?” Giordano snapped.

  “What? Yeah, of course . . .” Wrapped up in the story on her monitor, she had tuned him out and had no idea what he’d been saying. She pulled her attention back to the conversation and tried to pick up the thread.

  “—looking at this Montenegro prick—the one she wrote about in the diary.”

  “You’re checking out Cruz? The police are already doing that.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” said Giordano. “I intend to find out for myself how he’s involved.”

  “Cruz likes Annabelle,” Claudia said, concerned about the menace in his voice. “I don’t believe he’d hurt her.”

  The line went silent except for Giordano’s breathing. She asked herself why she hadn’t called the police. The answer was, Giordano was a jerk, but Annabelle stood a better chance with him than if the police found her first.

  When he finally spoke, his words were a non sequitur. “How can she be in a hospital? No friggin’ hospital contacted me.”

  “Dominic, what about the police?”

  “Forget it. I’m not telling them, and neither are you.”

  Irritation surged through Claudia like an electric shock. “You know what? I’ve had it up to here with you telling me what I’m going to do or not do. I think the police need to know she called.”

  “Yeah? What good’s that? You didn’t get a location, you didn’t find out who she’s with; you didn’t get anything useful out of her.”

  Claudia didn’t wait to compose herself before responding. “You have balls the size of grapefruits to talk to me that way,” she shouted into the phone. “I care about Annabelle, and I don’t need you hassling me.”

  With a charge of intense satisfaction she slammed the instrument back into its cradle and stood there for a moment, steadying her breathing. She’d had her fill of Annabelle’s father.

  She went downstairs to the service porch. The laundry basket was on top of the washing machine, filled with the clothes she’d sorted and left unwashed when Kelly dragged her to the mall.

  After making the gruesome discovery of Paige’s body she had been in such a hurry to get out of her clothes and into the shower, she’d shed them without emptying the pockets. Digging through the dirty clothes, she uncovered the jeans she’d worn the day before.

  Detective Pike’s business card was folded in with the cash and credit card she had intended to use on the abortive shopping trip. She stared at his phone number
, sucking on her lower lip. It was well past midnight. Could he do anything if she called him tonight? As Giordano had so crudely pointed out, she had no concrete information to supply.

  Except that Annabelle is alive.

  She hesitated to wake Pike. Giordano was probably right; the cops weren’t likely to buy Annabelle’s tale, whatever it was. She decided to compromise and leave a message at the police station. Pike would get it in the morning.

  The next call was an easier decision, but Cruz’ answering machine picked up after four rings. Wondering whether he had heard from her, too, Claudia left him a voice mail that Annabelle had phoned.

  Later, lying in bed alone, chasing sleep, she wondered what Jovanic was doing and why he hadn’t called. She closed her eyes and tried meditation breathing for a while, but that didn’t help. She realized that she was longing for him to be there, holding her, comforting her with his warmth.

  Deep down, she understood that his brusque attitude arose out of his concern for her and she forgave him for it. He believed she had become overly involved with Annabelle and he wanted her to avoid getting hurt.

  Well, she had gotten hurt, but that didn’t make her care any less about what happened to the girl.

  She sat up and punched her pillow into submission, then lay back, yearning for the sound of his breathing, slow and steady at first, accelerating as his hands moved over her body, arousing her. With an almost perverse melancholy, she let herself imagine the sensation of him gently nibbling her ear, whispering loving promises of what he would do to please her. The more she fantasized, the stronger the longing for him grew, until sheer exhaustion overcame her and with it, sleep.

  Her cellular phone rang, startling her awake. Blurry-eyed in the semidarkness, Claudia fumbled to answer. “Hello?”

  “Claudia . . .” Annabelle’s voice. Tense, urgent, still whispering, but clearer than in her earlier call.