“It couldn’t hurt to ask,” Mac insisted. He knew what he would have done in Atlanta. He’d have had Calliope Pearson sweating in an interrogation room for so long she’d be forced to ask for a drink. And when she tossed the soda can, he’d have had her DNA without asking. But maybe the gendarmes didn’t operate the same way.
“DNA testing takes a long time,” said John. “And I imagine the gendarmes are no more interested in paying for a test that won’t tell them anything useful than your own department in Atlanta would have been.”
“The gendarmes don’t have to pay for it or even request it. Michel could just ask her who she and Nikki might know in common. You can ask her about the DNA as a personal favor, as Nicole’s brother. A private lab can have paternity results in twenty-four hours, full profiles in less than seventy-two if you’re willing to pony up the cash. They aren’t backed up with casework the way government labs are, at least in the US.” Mac watched John struggle, cheapskate versus brother.
“Fine. Not that Miss Pearson is likely to agree.”
“Unsure of your powers of persuasion?”
“Dammit, Brody—”
“Gentlemen! Saint-Simone, would you be so kind as to check the dining room for Mademoiselle Pearson?”
But Callie was gone.
***
A single main road circled the island, and Callie had set aside her first full day to drive it. Her tape recorder rested in the passenger seat, ready to capture her impressions, but she couldn’t concentrate on the sights, sounds, or smells. Even the unlikely sight of a parade of goats running through a strip mall at the edge of Marigot, the capital of the French side, as if intent on an afternoon of shopping, failed to overcome the memory of the grim-faced gendarmes at breakfast.
They had to have come about Brody’s missing wife. Where could Nicole Lewis Brody have gone? Had the police found her? And if so, was she well? Had she made accusations against her brother or her husband? Was she even alive?
After leaving the dining room, Callie had returned to her room to see if she could find a picture of Nicole on the web, to judge for herself the similarities in their looks. She’d found several articles about the missing heiress, all carefully worded. Without a ransom demand or a body, none of the journalists seemed willing to commit to calling her absence a crime. None wanted egg on their faces should she be discovered on a party boat or in a rehab center. Only a few photographs were available, none particularly sharp or close-up. Nicole preferred the European party scene and hadn’t attained enough celebrity status to attract paparazzi interest, so she was never the focus of the photographers’ attention, merely one of the “beautiful people” in the background.
And she was beautiful, no question about that. Callie had forced herself to admit the validity of Mac’s assessment: Nicole’s silky blond hair, almost breakably slender figure, and impeccably made-up face far outshone her own. Nicole Lewis Brody was the kind of woman other women hated—never a hair out of place or a run in her hose. She and Brody must have made a striking couple. His shaggy, unkempt black hair, the menacing scar slashed across his face, and his broad, muscular frame perfectly complemented Nicole’s brand of delicate femininity. Callie caught herself wondering whether the woman had planned it that way, then castigated herself for the catty thought. Brody’s reaction to Callie had painted his wife in a less-than-flattering light, as had the articles about her wild lifestyle and the mystery surrounding her disappearance, but Callie wasn’t given to accepting others’ opinions as her own.
She pulled into a small parking lot having driven the Dutch side and most of the French side, and ended up in the tiny village of Grand Case. Of course, she’d have to do the whole thing over again, preoccupied as she’d been, but for the moment her stomach was reminding her of her interrupted breakfast. Across from the parking lot, a cheerfully painted building boasted a sign for “Calmos Café.” Both “calm” and “café” sounded pretty good, and her friend Marlon had recommended the spot, so Callie draped a beach towel around her neck, slung her tote bag over her shoulder, and followed the sign’s arrow down a shady pathway.
No more than thirty feet from the sidewalk, the passage widened to reveal a typical beach bar. The space had no walls other than the one created by the tiny clothing shop facing the street. The beamed roof rested on poles and palm trees, and the floor was nothing more than hard-packed sand. Should a hurricane destroy it, the bar could be rebuilt in a matter of days.
“Bonjour!” A slim young man behind the bar—or inside it, really, given that it formed a rectangle in the center of the covered space—waved Callie toward the beachfront area. “Take a spot anywhere. I will be right there.”
Callie did as ordered, passing beyond the roofed area to the white-sand beach. A dozen faded umbrellas shaded lounge chairs, only a few of which were occupied. Two topless women lay at the water’s edge, letting the tide, swells rather than waves, cool the lower halves of their bodies. Both were tobacco brown, and Callie’s pale, sun-sensitive skin shrank in painful protest. Didn’t they worry about skin cancer?
When the waiter arrived, she ordered a grilled seafood plate for lunch, opting for a mango daiquiri rather than coffee. So what if she had a puzzle to solve and an article to write? She was on vacation, too. Positioning her chair for maximum shade, she pulled out the Frommer’s guide to St. Martin and settled down to learn about the island’s colorful history.
Half-asleep from the sun, the food, and a second daiquiri, she jerked awake when she overheard a young man talking to two women under the umbrella next to hers. She closed her eyes and pretended to doze, letting her mind translate the conversation into English.
“They say a water-skier found her at Plum Bay.” He drew out the story, relishing his position as gossip-bearer. “He got near the rocks, and, poof! There she was. The gendarmes cannot identify her. They say that she is terribly damaged, that she was in the sea a long time and fish and sharks ate parts of her. Still, they believe it is Nikki Lewis.” Lewis, Callie noted, not Brody. However long Nicole and Mac had been married, it wasn’t long enough to alter the locals’ perception of her as a Lewis of Paradis de la Mer rather than as Mac’s wife.
“Did she fall from a boat?”
“No. My friend in the gendarmerie says she was murdered.” He dropped his voice so low Callie almost missed the next word. “Strangled.”
Both women gasped, luckily loudly enough to cover Callie’s own startled inhalation. “No!”
“Yes! According to my friend, they suspect the husband or the brother killed her.”
“But why?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Callie saw him shrug. “Only God knows. My friend says the gendarmes are almost certain it was a man who killed her. Strangulation is rare between strangers, and the two men closest to her are John Lewis and Mac Brody.”
“Unless she had a lover,” offered one of the women.
“Pah!” The second woman practically spat. “You have obviously never seen her husband. No woman with a man like him at home would shop for something else.” And oh, boy, did Callie agree on that point. Brody rubbed her the wrong way—and the feeling was obviously mutual—but even so, she had to admit that the irksome personality came wrapped in a hell of a hot physical package.
The man had evidently imparted all his gossip, so he shifted away to pass it along to another group farther down the beach. The two women speculated for a while on Nikki Lewis’s fate, revealing she’d been known on the island as a party girl, even after her marriage. Callie tried to imagine Mac Brody by Nikki’s side in any of the photographs she’d found on the web, and failed. He would never have fit into Nicole Lewis’s social set. What had possessed the woman to marry him? The memory of his green gaze sweeping her body intruded, and she shook it off. So what if he reeked of sex? No one in the modern era got married for that.
Suddenly, the sun seemed unbearably hot. Definitely ti
me for a swim.
***
Exhausted, and liberally crusted with sand and salt, Callie thanked the gods of contractors when she arrived back at the resort to find she didn’t have to climb the stairs. The elevator doors parted onto the third floor, and a fan-driven breeze cooled her overheated skin. She staggered down the hall, tugged along by the anticipation of getting clean and taking a nice nap before dinner. But when she opened the door to her suite, her hopes for a relaxing evening took a fatal dive.
Her computer was gone. The little desk sat almost directly opposite the doorway, so she noticed the empty surface before she set foot over the threshold. Could the thief still be inside? But no, he would have done his work while his victim was likely to be at the beach or the pool, having lunch, or shopping in Marigot or Philipsburg. Still, she listened for several seconds before proceeding slowly and cautiously into the room.
A brief search revealed the thief had taken the few pieces of jewelry she’d brought with her as well as her laptop. That fact should have reassured her—proving the guy to be a regular burglar who took whatever he could carry—but she couldn’t shake the idea the theft was somehow tied to her investigation. With a longing glance at the bathroom’s multijet shower and fluffy towels, she took the elevator back down to the lobby and explained the situation to Claudine, who quickly ushered her into the business office and urged her into one of the leather chairs before rushing out to find Mac and John. Callie could hear the two men arguing even before they entered the room.
“You’re supposed to keep this place secure! How did a thief manage to sneak in?” John’s voice was a low roar, imparting rage without alerting the whole hotel to the crime. Impressive.
“Who says he snuck in? Maybe he’s always been here, or maybe he made a reservation.”
“Our guests don’t need to steal. And you’re supposed to vet all our employees.”
“I’ve only worked here eight months. In that time, you’ve hired four people. Three of them are seasonal—they aren’t here at the moment. The other one is Giselle, Alexandre’s niece. If someone who works for you took Miss Pearson’s things, you hired them before you hired me.”
The door opened and John hurried across the room to kneel in front of Callie and clasp her hands in his own.
“Are you all right?” As John questioned her, Mac turned away to confer quietly with Claudine.
“I’m fine. Pissed, but fine.” She extracted her fingers from John’s and tucked them beneath her thighs. She hadn’t stopped to get a jacket from her room, and the air-conditioning in the office felt far too cold against clothes damp from her swim.
“Claudine says you got back from the beach and found your belongings had been taken?” Mac tossed the last words of the question over his shoulder as he answered a sharp rap at the door. Claudine handed him a blanket, which he brought over and draped across Callie’s shoulders. With brisk, impersonal motions, he rubbed her arms, then folded the blanket around her like a cocoon.
“Yes.” Callie had to crane her head backward to see him because he had remained behind her, while John still knelt in front. “I’m afraid I was at the beach all day, so I can’t narrow down the time frame at all. I left at ten thirty and only just got back.”
“It’s not your job to concern yourself with timing,” John assured her.
“Nope,” Mac agreed with a half smile, “that’s my job, but it sure would have been nice if you could have given me a hand with it.” Humor with a hint of sarcasm laced his voice, and Callie wasn’t certain whether to be amused or offended. Amusement won, and she laughed.
“It’s good that you can laugh.” John rose, both voice and posture somewhat stiff. “If any of our other guests have been robbed, I hope they’ll be as relaxed.”
“This hasn’t happened to anyone else?” Before John could answer, Callie waved at two of the other leather desk chairs. “And would the two of you please sit down?”
Both men rolled their chairs near to her, forming a tight triangle, before Mac spoke.
“So far, only you have reported anything missing.” His tone indicated he found the singularity as suspicious as she did.
“First the gendarmes at breakfast,” John said, “now this. What you must think of us. I assure you, Paradis de la Mer is not usually in such disarray.”
“I’m sure it’s not. I promise, these occurrences won’t taint my article.” An easy promise since she doubted she’d manage to write it at all.
“That’s very kind of you. We’ll find another room for you; you won’t be comfortable in your current one.”
Callie considered. “Actually, I don’t need to move. It’s only one more night.” She could feel Mac’s eyes, sharp and evaluative, but kept her own on John.
“I thought we had agreed you would stay at the Paradis!”
“We didn’t, really.” Although keeping her room would make her investigation easier, John’s insistence and increasingly obvious flirtation were beginning to wear on her nerves.
“I’ll put you in one of the bungalows.”
Mac’s choke precisely echoed Callie’s own reaction. She knew to the penny how much the Paradis charged for a single night in one of their seven beachfront cabins, especially since the dollar’s plummet relative to the euro.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No, seriously. We never fill the bungalows in the off-season, and you’d have plenty of privacy there to work on your writing.”
The offer was too tempting to refuse.
“Wonderful,” John gushed when she accepted. “I’ll have Ben move your things as soon as I see which one is empty.”
“Don’t trouble Ben; I’ll do it myself. And please, no maid service. I’d rather not have someone in every day.”
“I’ll tell Ayida,” said Mac. “I want to talk to her about Miss Pearson’s computer anyway.”
“Ayida’s been with us for ages! You can’t imagine she had anything to do with the theft!”
“I don’t. It occurred to me she might have noticed whether Miss Pearson’s computer was on the desk when she tidied the room. But, hey, you don’t want me to work out the weekend, it’s fine with me. I should pack anyway.”
Callie looked from one man to the other. “Pack?”
“As of Monday, I’m out of a job and out of my house,” said Mac.
“You say that as if it’s unwarranted!” John turned to Callie. “You saw the gendarmes this morning! He probably killed my sister!”
“You don’t even know the woman they found is your sister.” If asked that morning, Callie could not have conceived a scenario in which she would defend Mac Brody, but since her father’s death she had found herself in more than one previously unimaginable situation. “And from what I hear, the police are just as interested in you as they are in him.”
“Where did you hear such a thing?”
“On the beach in Grand Case, same place I heard they couldn’t identify the woman. In all probability, the gossip has spread all over the island. At the very least it’s saturated the French side.”
“Dammit, I—”
“It’s all right,” Mac broke in, his voice oddly gentle. He touched the back of Callie’s hand with one long finger, creating a tiny electrical current that raised all the fine hairs along her forearm. “John’s made his opinion more than clear, and I have no desire to work where I’m not wanted.”
“Look—”
“You gave me until Monday to get my things together, so I figured to keep doing my job for the next forty-eight hours or so. But if you don’t want my help, like I said, it’s no skin off my nose. I still think you should talk to Ayida. And deal with that other matter we discussed at breakfast.”
“What matter?” asked Callie.
“The security chief here,” said John, voice rich with disdain, “recommended asking you for a DNA sample to c
ompare with the woman found on the beach.”
Callie studied Mac, who offered no apology, excuse, or explanation.
“Why?”
“Because my wife is dead, or at the very least missing. And you’re here, you look like her, and you just became the first guest in the history of the Paradis to have her room burglarized. Even if I believed in coincidence, which I don’t, I’d have a hard time accepting all those things as unconnected.”
“And if it turns out I am related to the woman on the beach? How would that help? Doesn’t it make more sense for John to get tested? Or have you already identified her?”
It was John who answered. “No, we aren’t certain of her identity. But I haven’t been completely open with you about Nicole. She is—was—the product of an affair my stepmother had, so testing me won’t help. But you look so much like Nicole that if you shared DNA with the woman they found, it would be one more confirmation. I don’t know who her father was, so I can’t ask for his help, but perhaps your father . . . one of your parents was related to him?”
“My father did not have an affair with Nicole’s mother, if that’s what you’re implying.” Callie wiggled her shoulders, trying to release the instinctive defensive tension. John was trying to make sense of an unimaginable situation—if anyone could understand that, she could. And what, really, did she know about her father? He’d obviously kept secrets. “It’s possible, I suppose, that one of them was related to either Ava or her lover.”
“Could you ask them?”
“My mother died when I was a child, and my father died six months ago. So no, I can’t ask. But it doesn’t matter. Without Ava’s lover’s name, I’d have had nothing specific enough to ask anyway. And, as to the other, my parents were devoted to each other. My mother was ill for years—if their relationship had any weaknesses, it would have self-destructed.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mac.
“That must have been dreadful for you.”
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