They glanced at each other, then back to me. I didn’t move other than to shiver again.
The older of the two, with salt-and-pepper gray hair showing at the edge of his hat line, spoke. “There were reports of gunshots out this way. We wanted to make sure you were not injured.”
I squinted my eyes to look at his tag and shook my head. “No gunshots since I’ve been home, Officer Schmidt.” I tried to see if there was anything obviously off about him. A hint of magic. I turned so my left side was closer to them. Eleanor had a bit of a nose on her.
She shimmied in her holster. “No magic.”
“What was that?” The officer quirked an eyebrow.
“I didn’t say anything.” Best to play dumb here.
“And the report that one of your dogs was shot?” The younger of the two cleared his throat. “Dr. Rickets let us know.”
Damn it.
“We came home and found him shot, yes, that’s true. He was probably out chasing deer and got caught by a hunter.” I didn’t look away from his eyes. “That’s life when you live this far out of town.”
“You don’t know who might have done it?” Officer Schmidt flipped open a small notepad and pulled a pen from the pocket on the front of his coat.
I frowned, trying my best to look confused, and sad, and not at all pissed that they’d showed up on my doorstep. “No, how could I? Half the town likes to hunt this time of year.”
He nodded and scribbled something down. “Mind if we come in?”
“Actually, I do. I’m going through my husband’s things, right now.”
The younger officer’s eyebrows shot up. “This soon after his death?”
Fucking insensitive little asshole.
Now I was truly pissed. “Listen, you grieve the way you want to grieve, and I will grieve the way I want. When your spouse and child are ripped from your lives in a split second, I’ll be sure to show up on your doorstep and tell you just how to deal with emotional shit. Sound good?”
I think I was screaming at them, the words a torrent that couldn’t be stopped. Rage, grief, anger, frustration, it was a dark mixture I could not contain. The door opened behind me. I knew it was Zee by the intake of his breath. He put his hands on my arms, the warmth seeping through me and anchoring me long enough that I could rein myself in.
“Officers, my niece has been through a great deal. Perhaps another time would be better?” His words were polite but the tone was all business. He wasn’t really asking them, he was telling them to fuck off as nicely as he could. I let him steer me back into the house as they backed away to their car with promises to return.
“Phone first, to be sure. I would hate for you to see her break down again,” Zee said. I wanted to look back, but kept moving into the house.
Officer Schmidt said something but I didn’t catch it as Zee slammed the door shut and locked it behind us. I shook from top to bottom, the anger giving me the energy to keep going when my body was beyond exhausted and demanded time to sleep. When the adrenaline faded, I was going to crash hard.
“Zee, Dr. Rickets spilled on us.”
He shook his head. “He said nothing. I was there with him the whole time and he went right into surgery with Abe. There was no time, but that means someone else who knew the dogs had been shot told the police.”
“Unless it was the police who were here and did the shooting.” I was already striding back through the house to Justin’s office. “Check the tire tracks against the others. I’m almost done in the office.”
Zee followed me for a few steps. “There is no rush now, Nix. You need to sleep.”
“I need to damn well figure something out or I won’t sleep!” I snapped. “I can’t sleep knowing that something Justin was doing caused his death, and Bear’s!”
Zee let out a sigh, and turned away. I didn’t feel bad for yelling at him. There was too much on the line right now. And he of all people would understand what I was going through.
Back in the office, I searched through the papers and filing cabinet, and when Zee came back in, he stepped up to help without question. There was nothing out of place other than the mess. The sponsorships were all there, the paperwork was all perfectly in order once I put it back together. Magazines with Justin on the cover. I closed my eyes. Had he been a world-renowned stunt skier, or had that been a lie too? Had I buried my head so deeply that he’d pulled that over on me?
“Think it’s weird that they didn’t take the computer?” Zee pointed out the laptop, untouched on the desk.
“Yeah, that is weird.” Confusion flickered through me as I ran a hand over the laptop. I’d avoided technology, mostly so I wouldn’t be found. Because all it would take was one random picture and I had no doubt my father would be on me like a wolf on a fresh kill.
I opened the computer and flicked it on. Unless they weren’t techie at all.
“Abnormals then?”
“That’s my thought,” Zee said. He leaned over my shoulder. “What do you think you might find?”
“I’ve never looked Justin up,” I said. “I trusted him. The magazine covers made it real. The money made it real. I need to see how good of a liar he was.”
I looked up at Zee and he put a hand on my shoulder. “Doesn’t mean he didn’t love you.”
“You think I was married to a con man, too?” What was meant to be a joke, fell flat between us.
I stared at the screen, pulled up the Internet with the click of the mouse and typed Justin Stark skier into the search bar.
Nothing.
I swallowed hard. Funny how the last and most blatant piece of evidence was proving to be the hardest to swallow. All the rest had been theories and conjectures. I tried a few variations of Justin’s name, misspelling it. I finally looked up the magazine he was often featured in. Ski Boldly.
The website came up with a message across it and I could do nothing but laugh as I read it out loud. “Website no longer active. Ski Boldly has been purchased by Winter Sports and will no longer be run as a physical magazine, but as an E-zine. We hope you continue to enjoy our articles at your leisure from the comfort of your laptop.”
I shook my head and shut the laptop slowly. “Didn’t you run his information when he and I first got together?”
Zee pulled up a chair and sat beside me. “I did. It all checked out.”
“That kind of cover-up . . . how much money would have to be thrown at it?” I raised an eyebrow as I drummed my fingers on the desk.
“More than any normal police investigation. Deep pockets, Nix. Very deep pockets. And likely more than a dose of magic in order to get by me.”
I ran a hand over my face. “So, we’re talking about what, then, some sort of private investor? What could he have possibly been doing to warrant a full lie about his life? To me?”
My stomach fell as the truth slowly spun out. “Something about me. He was working with . . . something to do with my family?”
Zee shook his head. “Again, that can’t be right. If that had been the case, they’d have killed you, or at the very least taken you back to your father. But that doesn’t mean it might not have been someone like your family. Someone with power and money and no scruples. Mancini. Fannin. Yousef. Just to name a few.”
Unspoken between us was the one word, the one kind of family it could be. The Collection. They worked very similar to and sometimes in conjunction with the human mob. My father worked on the edges of the Collection for years, fancying himself one of them because he had power and money and had made a literal deal with the devil. But they smartly never let him into their inner circles because he was a normal. Not to mention, he was too much of a loose cannon, even I knew that. The head of the Collection was Mancini and he wouldn’t let my father in for reasons known only to him. In my younger years when I’d still thought my father was the king of the world, that had pissed me off as though it were a slight against all of us. Now, it was just plain amusing.
“No hard evidence yet, thoug
h. Let’s keep looking. There have to be clues,” Zee said. He was right, I felt it in my gut. The pieces were slowly revealing themselves to us, but I didn’t doubt there were more revelations coming.
I drummed my fingers on the desk again. “Then we keep looking.”
My gaze slid to the drawers of the desk, all of them ripped out and shattered on the floor.
A niggling feeling began at the base of my skull and I closed my eyes to pull up the memory that whispered through me.
“You almost done?” I put my head through the office doorway. Justin was bent over some paperwork. He grinned up at me, and slid the papers into the top right drawer.
“Almost.”
“Well, don’t dawdle. I can’t sleep when I know you’re still up working.” I gave him a wink. He winked back and stuffed his hand into the drawer again. His family bible was on the desk next to him, open wide.
“Give me thirty seconds. Think you can strip in that time?” His grin was wide as he waggled his brows at me. Laughing, I turned away. His hand was still in the right-side drawer.
Almost like he’d been working on something specific.
I dropped to my knees and looked in the cavity where the drawer should have been. I slid my hand in, flattening my palm and feeling along the sides first, then the bottom of the shelf. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“Got something?” Zee crouched beside me, flicking on a flashlight from his pocket. I pushed my hands upward onto the top of the narrow space and there was the softest of clicks. I looked at him.
“Yeah, I do.”
Chapter Six
The click on the top of the drawer’s space seemed to echo between Zee and me. A hidden compartment was nothing strange in my previous line of business. Hell, I had two in the barn myself.
Justin had been no stunt skier, so just what was he besides a con man?
My heart pounded in a way I didn’t like, that I couldn’t slow down. The top of the empty drawer space dropped down into my hand, a folding compartment. I peered in and Zee angled the flashlight better for me to see. In the thin space of the hidden area, a small sheaf of wrinkled papers lay. Carefully, I pulled them out, stood, and spread them across the desk.
I stared at the papers, counting them. A dozen sheets, and I couldn’t make out a single word of it. Letters, yes. Numbers, yes. Even a few symbols I recognized. But the others? “What is this, Chinese?”
“This part is Hebrew.” Zee tapped a small section. “That’s Russian.”
I kept staring at the paper, seeing the bits and pieces of languages and symbols I recognized. I touched each one as I spoke. “This is Japanese, Egyptian, Korean . . . I have no idea what these are.” I swept my hand across several sections of paper, frowning at them.
And then the paper glittered blue, and all the symbols shifted, danced across the page and rearranged themselves.
Zee let out a low whistle. “Now that’s a damn code. Magic and human, blended to make it unbreakable.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.” I touched a symbol and it flared under my finger and then shot off to another piece of the page.
Zee picked up one of the papers and handed it to me. “Code it may be, but this is a list of some sort, that much is obvious. Even with the symbols moving, they are staying within their constructs.”
He was right, there seemed to be a pattern that could be a list, even with the moving bits and pieces. Two lines of coded writing, side by side. No matter how the symbols moved, that much stayed. I closed my eyes, thinking through the ache in my body. My pelvis break throbbed, humming with pain, and I forced myself to think through it, to use the pain to clear my mind.
“The bible was the only thing taken . . . the family bible was his key to this.” I tapped my fingers on it. “I’m sure of it.”
I took the paper and held it up. I flipped it over. The reverse was same. “A list of what, though?”
He put a hand on my shoulder. “I think this can wait for tomorrow, Nix. It’s after dinner. I’m going to make us something to eat, and then you are taking a Percocet whether you like it or not so you will sleep.”
My jaw ticked, but I knew when to argue and when to let him lead. The rational part of my brain told me he was right. I was running on empty. “Okay. I’ll see if I can find a backup master key for this then.”
Dinah laughed. “Oh please, you don’t think any of us buy that?”
I tossed her and Eleanor on the desk on top of the papers. They were created by magic deeper than any I’d ever dealt with, and so I knew there were things about them I didn’t understand. Talents they had yet to show me. “You two see anything you want to share with me?”
Zee left the three of us in the office.
I flicked on a few more lights and sat at the desk, the papers spread out in front of me, the two guns resting on them.
“You already know it’s in code,” Dinah said. “What else do you want?”
“Do you recognize any of the magical symbols?” I tapped a finger on the paper, the images dancing away from my skin like fireflies.
Eleanor shivered. “This one is the sign for death.”
“And this one for pain,” Dinah chimed in.
“Torture.”
“Agony.”
“Blood.”
“Demon.”
“Mayhem.”
They fired back and forth at rapid speed and then both paused. I knew it would be Eleanor who spoke next even though she’d spoken the last word.
“Devil deal.”
I clenched my jaw shut tightly as I struggled to contain the sudden anger at that last. “My father?”
“It doesn’t say Romano,” Dinah said. “Just Devil deal.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
I slid them off the papers and looked over the sheets without touching anything. The movement of the symbols slowed and settled.
They were all written in Justin’s hand except for the sheet with the double-sided list. That one was a combination of his writing and someone else’s. Justin’s scrawl was sharp, angled, and dark. The other was finer, cleaner, like the person had taken their time with the symbols.
I started with making a list of the languages and symbols I recognized. So many, though, why so many? I counted fifteen that I knew, and at least that many that I didn’t. None of that included the magical ones.
Bits and pieces all used to make up a code, a code and a set of papers that if I was right, Justin and Bear had died for.
What the hell was on this paper?
Jaw ticking, I went to the shelves I’d so hastily shoved back together. Most of the books were Justin’s. He’d had a thing for ancient cultures. For other countries. That’s what he’d told me.
I searched through until I found a book on ancient Egypt and pulled it out. Flipping through the pages, I found notations here and there in the margins. Tiny little things.
Parts of the code.
“What the hell were you up to, Justin? And who did you try to con that went south?” I put the book on the desk and kept looking for others while I waited on Zee to call me. I wondered if Justin would have stayed with me if he knew how deeply I’d been in that world. I’d told him I was one of the Romano daughters, and let him believe I was the one who “died.” It went well with my desire to disappear from my family, a good cover. I never told him about the money I’d taken. Never told him that I’d been the enforcer for my father, or that my father had quite literally made a deal with the devil. I never told Justin that I’d chosen my enforcer role because it meant I was safe. It meant I could kill anyone who stepped wrong.
A cold shiver ran down my spine, and a wash of fatigue spilled up in its place.
I had to keep moving, keep looking, but there was a time and a place for the search. Whoever was looking for this code would be back. I picked up the papers and tucked them into my shirt.
Dinah and Eleanor were next, back into their holsters. I left the office and wove my way to the back door of
the house.
“Putting the papers in the vault?” Zee asked as he tossed a couple steaks on the grill pan.
“Safer there, I think.” I slid on my heavy coat and was out the back door in a matter of seconds. Down to the barn, I went. First I checked on the mares, tossed them some food, and ran a hand over their bellies. Only then did I go to the saddle rack in the tack room. I put the coded papers not in with the money, but in a second smaller compartment in the floor. A decoy compartment to keep the money safe. A few stacks of bills, some jewelry, and a couple interesting trinkets were stashed there. I put the papers under them, and shut the trap door. The seams were barely visible, but someone looking would find it.
That being said, if they got this far, I was probably already dead.
I made my way back to the main house, my mind reeling with everything I’d learned and all the possibilities that lay in front of me.
We ate dinner, Zee offered me the Percocet, and I took it begrudgingly. I fell asleep on the couch, not willing to go back to my bedroom, trashed as it was. I woke up the next morning, sore and angry. I fed the horses, checked on the mares, and cleaned the stalls with Zee’s help.
That became the ebb and flow of our days. We took care of the ranch. Zee fed me, and I sat in my tack room as I tried to break the code Justin had put together. We fended off the police twice more. Dinah and Eleanor kept me company in the small hours of the night when I couldn’t sleep.
Abe came home.
Two weeks after the accident and about a week after an empty Christmas, the phone rang. I answered it without looking. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Stark, this is Chief Lars of the Jackson Hole PD. I have the official report on the accident and wanted to let you know what we found, if you’d like to know, that is.”
I wasn’t holding my breath that any of what he told me would be true. “What did you find, Chief Lars?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, it’s as we thought when we first came on the scene. The brake lines were frozen, which caused a catastrophic failure of the braking system. The brakes were old, and it was truly an accident.”
“Bullshit,” Dinah muttered from her spot on the desk. I was always impressed at how good her hearing was.
Fury of a Phoenix (The Nix Series Book 1) Page 8
