Running Hot

by Krentz, Jayne Ann

  “I told you that I was responsible for Martin Crocker’s death,” she said quietly. “But he wasn’t the first.”

  Luther said nothing. He just waited.

  “There was another man. When I was fourteen.”

  “While you were in the foster care system?”

  “Yes.” She unfolded her arms and looked at her hands. “He came to my room one night. Said he was going to make a woman out of me. His aura terrified me. I fought back instinctively with talent but I had only recently come into it. I didn’t know what I could do, what I was capable of. I didn’t have any control.”

  “You fought back and he died.”

  “He was leaning over me, touching me. I put my hands on his chest and shoved.”

  “With your hands and the full energy of your aura.”

  “It was all instinct and panic on my part. I think he tried to scream but no sound came out. He just collapsed and died.” She closed her hands into small fists. “It was as if I’d touched a red-hot stove. But there were no marks on my palms. The pain faded rapidly. The worst was over within forty-eight hours. But four days later I was in a fast-food restaurant getting a slice of pizza. The clerk accidentally dropped the plastic plate. We both reached for it. Our hands collided. The burning sensation came back. Not nearly as strong but it hurt. I was terrified. I thought I’d been somehow marked for life.”

  He took one of her hands in his. “That was the first time you got sensitized?”

  She looked at his hand wrapped around hers, marveling anew at how good it felt to be able to touch and be touched.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What did you do?” he asked. “Afterward?”

  She knew he wasn’t talking about the pizza incident. “After the monster collapsed on my bed, I packed the few things I owned, took the money out of his wallet and I ran.”

  “Smart.”

  “I was afraid I’d be blamed for his death.” She hesitated. “And, given that I actually was guilty, I didn’t think it would be a good idea to hang around to try to explain things. In the end they called it a heart attack but the fact that I was missing along with the money didn’t look good. I knew I had to stay gone. I could not have gone back into that house under any condition.”

  “That’s when you hit the streets?”

  “Yes. I told you, my talent kept me alive there. It let me know who to trust and who to avoid. You could say that I was endowed with the ultimate in street smarts. I slept in shelters for a while. Washed a lot of dishes. Made some connections. Eventually I built up a successful small business selling . . . things.”

  “But not yourself,” he said, very sure.

  “No. Even if I had been desperate enough to sell myself, it wasn’t an option. It’s hard enough for me to touch people I like. I can’t even imagine trying to have sex with someone just for the money. I wouldn’t be able to stand it.” She made a face. “I probably would have freaked and wound up killing off my clients, which would not have been good for business.”

  “What did you sell?”

  “Mostly I brokered fake IDs on the Internet. My mother was a high-level crypto talent, a computer wizard. I learned a lot about navigating the online universe from her before she died. I was very good at putting buyers and sellers together.”

  “You took a commission on the deals you set up?”

  “Yes. It was actually a fairly lucrative line of work but it was also a tad risky. One day I decided to get a real job, something beyond dishwashing and selling fake IDs.”

  “Why?”

  She raised a shoulder and let it fall. “Mostly because I wanted to see what it was like to feel normal. I should have known better. I don’t think people like us ever get to feel normal.”

  “What kind of job did you get?”

  “Believe it or not, I went to work in a flower shop.” She smiled a little, thinking back. “I loved it, even if it didn’t make me feel normal. After a while I was promoted to manager. That’s where Martin found me. He came in to buy a dozen roses for one of his women. He recognized me immediately as a strong sensitive. He was a high-level strat and he understood right away that I could be very useful to him. He was managing a small casino at the time and he was having problems. He offered me a position on his security staff.”

  “What kind of problems was he having?”

  “A ring of cheats had targeted the casino. They were bleeding it dry. Martin’s boss began to suspect that he was the one responsible for the losses.”

  Luther gripped her hand more tightly. “What did Crocker have you do?”

  “I profiled the players. Pointed out the members of the ring. One thing led to another. Eventually Martin was promoted to president of the company that owned the casino. We branched out from there.”

  “He used you.”

  She shook her head. “It was an equal partnership. In exchange for my help, Martin saw to it that I made a lot of money and got an education. He used to refer to himself as Pygmalion. After he founded Crocker World, I not only got a very, very good salary, I got stock in the company.”

  Luther whistled softly. “A slice of Crocker World, must have been worth a fortune at one time.”

  “It was. When I first noticed the effects of the drug in his aura, I thought about selling off my portfolio and tucking the money away in an offshore account, but I was afraid Martin would find out. Once he started taking the formula, he became extremely suspicious of everyone around him. I had to be careful. Then I found out about the arms dealing.”

  Luther’s hand tightened around hers. “And the bastard tried to kill you.”

  “After Martin’s body was found, the value of the company shares plummeted to almost nothing. They never recovered.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered if they had bounced back. You still couldn’t have sold off your portfolio. The authorities would have noticed the activity in the dead butler’s accounts.”

  “Yes. Turns out the Arcane Society pays well, though, and it doesn’t cost a lot to live in Eclipse Bay. I’m doing fine.”

  “Still, you had to walk away from the empire that you and Crocker built.”

  “Toward the end the profits were tainted by the arms deals that Martin had arranged for Nightshade. Blood money.” She shivered. “Even if it had been safe to do so, I couldn’t have touched those shares. Not for anything. It sickened me to realize that, for a time, I was a part of that business.”

  He put an arm around her and pulled her close against his side.

  “Not everyone would have seen it that way,” he said. “Money is money. A lot of folks would tell you that the blood washes off very easily.”

  “They’re wrong.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Daddy was dead.

  Damaris huddled on the edge of the bed, trying to stop the drug-induced shivers while she fought the tears. She’d had him for such a short period of time, only a year, and now he was gone. It was almost impossible to believe. He had seemed so strong, so powerful, so invincible.

  William Craigmore had been a wealthy man. His death had made news on the Internet and then in the morning papers. “Reclusive Financier Found Dead in Home.” But she had known hours earlier that something had gone terribly wrong in Honolulu. She had lived on hope for a while, telling herself that the sense of doom was just another side effect of the drug. But when the first reports started appearing online, she was forced to face the truth. Daddy was dead.

  The only thing she did not understand was why the body had turned up in his Los Angeles residence. She refused to believe he died from a heart attack. She knew he had gone to Honolulu because he called her once from there to let her know he was on the ground and to reassure her that everything was under control. That was the last time she had spoken with him. The next day his body was discovered at his home in L.A.

  Impossible. Whatever had happened to Daddy happened in Honolulu. And that meant that J&J was responsible.

  The phone warbled, making her
flinch. She turned and picked it up off the bedside table.

  “Hello, Vivien,” she said quietly.

  “I just heard the news.” Vivien was furious. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just found out myself. I was going to call in a few minutes.” She massaged her temples. “I needed a little time to get over the shock.”

  “What happened?” Vivien demanded.

  “I don’t know. The papers are calling it a heart attack but I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t, either, not for a minute. They got to him, didn’t they?”

  “J&J? Yes, I think so. I don’t know how. They must have figured out that he was Nightshade.”

  “Do you think they know about you and me?” Vivien sounded genuinely concerned for the first time.

  “No, we’re safe. Daddy was very careful to keep both of us a secret. Even if they did find out about us, there’s not much they could do. J&J has no evidence that we were involved in anything illegal.”

  “This is all so awful,” Vivien whispered. “So completely unfair. It isn’t right.”

  Damaris was surprised and touched to hear the anguish in her sister’s voice. Vivien had evidently harbored more feelings for Daddy than she had let on.

  “I know,” Damaris said. “We had him such a short time.”

  “It is so damn typical of the bastard.”

  “What?”

  “Dying like this, before he found that aura talent for me. Honestly, if he wasn’t dead, I’d be more than a little tempted to give him one of my private performances.”

  “Vivien—”

  “Was it too much to ask? A name. That’s all I wanted, just the name of the bitch. But no, Daddy had to get himself killed before he found her. One lousy name, that was the only thing I ever asked of him. The bastard wouldn’t even give me that much.”

  Damaris sank back down on the bed. “He did find her, Vivien. He also found her bodyguard. That’s why he went to Honolulu. He was going to fix things for us.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Vivien demanded.

  “I didn’t tell you because Daddy wanted to take care of her. I can give you the name but it won’t do you any good. Now that Daddy’s gone we’ve lost our access to the J&J files. It’s just a name.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Grace Renquist.”

  “You’re sure?” Vivien’s voice sparked with excitement.

  “Yes, but, I don’t see what you—”

  “Thanks. Bye for now. Rehearsal time. You wouldn’t believe what I’m having to put up with from the conductor here in Acacia Bay. He’s an absolute nobody but he thinks he can give orders to La Sirène.”

  The phone went silent. Damaris sat looking at it for a long time. Daddy was dead and, for all intents and purposes, so was she. He had been her source for the drug and now she was cut off. The good news was that soon there would be no more of the dreadful injections. The bad news was that Daddy had warned her that if she stopped taking the drug, she would go insane and die. She had a little more than a three-week supply left. It was just a matter of time now. She wondered if Vivien would miss her.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Luther watched Grace come out of the sea, removing the mask and snorkel as she walked through the light surf. Water spilled down her shoulders, breasts and hips. Her hair was sleeked behind her ears.

  She had picked up the little black bathing suit at one of the boutiques on Kalakaua that morning. He had thrown the snorkeling gear into the backseat of the Jeep and driven her to the secluded little cove that he thought of as his private slice of paradise.

  Wayne and Petra had sent them off with a couple of sandwiches, some bottled water and instructions not to come back until the dinner service. A real date, he thought.

  Grace dropped lightly onto the towel beside him under the umbrella, looking fresh and vibrant, utterly feminine and wet. Incredibly sexy.

  She gave him a curious look when she reached for a bottle of chilled water.

  “Something wrong?” she asked,

  He realized that he was staring at her.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Sex.”

  “I hear men do that a lot.”

  “What about women?”

  “We think about it, too,” she said, “but it is possible that we have broader fantasy horizons.”

  “Yeah? What else shows up on your horizon?”

  “Shoes come to mind.”

  They both looked at his bare feet.

  “Shoes are sort of absent from my horizon,” he admitted.

  “It’s okay.” She patted his bare leg. “You have very nice feet. Big and strong.”

  “You like big, strong feet on a man?”

  “To tell you the truth, I never paid much attention to male feet until quite recently.” She smiled somewhat smugly and slipped on her sunglasses. “But now I find them utterly fascinating.”

  “Good to know.”

  She lounged back on her elbows. “You never told me why you quit your job with the police department.”

  He contemplated the frothy surf while he considered. He had known the question was coming. She had told him her story. She had a right to know his. More than that, he wanted her to know it. The exchange was part of the bond.

  “I told you that my talent had its uses while I was on the force,” he said.

  “Yep, the way I see it, you must have been the great neutralizer in any kind of dangerous situation. One stroke of your aura and the bad guy drops his gun and goes to sleep. Cool.”

  “There were other things I could do with my talent.”

  She tipped her head a little to the side. “Such as?”

  “Get confessions.”

  “Hmm. Confessions. Double cool.”

  “Without laying a finger on the perp,” he said evenly. “I never touched your client, Counselor. Check out the videotape of the confession. Your guy couldn’t wait to tell us how he beat the victim to a bloody pulp.”

  “How did that work for you?”

  “Great. For a while. You’d be amazed how easy it is. Deep down a lot of them wanted to tell me how smart or how macho they were. Robbing a convenience store is an adrenaline rush. Breaking and entering a house is a thrill. Murder is the ultimate power trip. Perps want to impress the cops. Show them how tough they are. So, on some level, yes, a lot of them wanted to talk. I just gave that natural inclination a psychic shove in the right direction.”

  “I always assumed guilt was the motivating factor in a confession.”

  “Sometimes it is.” He fished a bottle of water out of the cooler. “I can work with a bad conscience, too. With a few tweaks, a little nagging regret or anxiety about what your parents will think can become crushing guilt.”

  “All it takes is a little subtle manipulation and the suspects suddenly can’t resist spilling their guts, is that it?”

  “Get it on videotape, add a little hard evidence and you’ve usually got a case. No rubber hoses or misleading statements required.”

  She looked at him very steadily, her eyes unreadable behind the glasses. “You must have been a very good cop.”

  “I was,” he said. He drank some of the crisp, cold water. “Very, very good.”

  “So you quit because you felt you had turned into some kind of psychic vigilante.”

  He had known she would understand. What surprised him was the sense of relief that descended on him.

  “Something like that,” he said. “It was never a fair fight. Statistically speaking, most of the perps I came in contact with were seriously messed up, the products of horrific parenting or no parenting at all. A lot of them had been abused as children. Many had some kind of mental illness. Nearly half the suspects I caught couldn’t even read a newspaper, let alone hold down a decent job.”

  “You felt sorry for them?”

  He smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t go that far but the truth is, the ma
jority of the people I helped send away didn’t stand a chance against me. I could and did violate their right to due process without anyone else, including the suspect, knowing it.”

  “You didn’t violate their rights in the legal sense.”

  “No, but I sure as hell did in a very real sense.”

  “You accomplished a lot of good, Luther. Putting bad people away. Getting justice for the victims. Those are important to a civilized society.”

  “That’s what I told myself for several years. But I found out the hard way that the vigilante thing carries a load of bad karma.”

  “Your two broken marriages?”

  “Among other things. I also managed to freak out so many partners that eventually no one wanted to work with me. I got a reputation for being a lone wolf. That’s not good when you’re a cop. You’re supposed to be part of a team. I tended to make the people around me very uneasy.”

  She frowned. “Did the other detectives you worked with ever realize what you were doing?”

  “They knew that I almost always got results but they didn’t know how I got them. Hell, they didn’t want to know. A few concluded that I was somehow hypnotizing the suspects. Turns out no one wants to work too closely with a guy who may be able to hypnotize you without you knowing it.”

  “I can see where that might be an issue,” she said.

  “I went through partners the way the Dark Rainbow goes through dishwashers. Some of the other guys had enough natural sensitivity of their own to wonder if there might be a paranormal explanation for my string of confessions. They didn’t like that idea any better than the hypnosis theory.”

  “Because it made them question their own mental health?” she asked.

  “Most successful cops have a fair amount of intuition when it comes to dealing with the kind of folks who lie, cheat and kill. They’re usually happy to admit that they have good instincts.”

  “Aren’t good instincts viewed as an asset in the police world?”

  “Sure. But no cop wants to get slapped with the psychic tag. The woo-woo factor can kill a career real fast.”

  She studied him intently. “You just walked away from the job?”

  “There was what I guess you could call a final straw. An incident. People died. I walked away after that.”