Passion to Die for

by Marilyn Pappano

  “This is my job. It’s what I do.”

  “No one will think less of you if—” He broke off at the sharp look she gave him, barely visible in the thin illumination of the streetlamps.

  Desperation and low self-esteem: the biggest reasons women wound up in the sex trade. Teenage girls who were thrown out by their families or who ran away because of problems at home lacked the confidence that might allow them to find some other way to survive. They were befriended by the other working girls, targeted by the pimps, easy marks because all they wanted was to stay alive and to matter to someone.

  Ellie’s parents deserved to burn in hell for what they’d done to her.

  They drove the few minutes downtown in silence. He parked in her usual space, then followed her up the steps to the rear entrance. A lone light shone down directly overhead as she unlocked and opened the door. Then she paused. “You can go run. I’ll be here.”

  “That’s not why I’m staying,” he said, and it was true. He was sticking close today in case she needed the support, in case folks proved him wrong or Kiki came by to arrest her.

  With a nod, she went in, turning on lights, starting coffee.

  “This place is spooky when it’s empty.”

  She smiled for real this time. “No, it’s not. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a home.”

  And that was just sad.

  When the coffee was ready, Ellie poured two cups and stirred in sweetener, handed one to him, then left the kitchen. Instead of heading straight to her office, she stopped just outside the bar.

  One light was on over the bar itself, casting deep shadows around the edges of the room. Her fingers gripped the coffee mug tightly, and her gaze was narrowed. Trying to remember Saturday night? Walking through the arched opening, talking to Deryl, sitting in one of the back booths with the woman dressed as a witch.

  With a shudder, she turned away and went to her office, switched on the lights and sat down at the desk. Tommy sat in the chair nearest her. “I have no doubt Martha was devious enough to plan the blackmail scheme by herself, but was she smart enough to get proof of your background? Was she smart enough to find you?”

  Ellie stared down into her coffee. “Wednesday night, the first time I saw her, she gave me copies of all my arrest reports, the photographs taken by the police, everything.”

  He remembered talking to her in the gazebo later that night, hearing the rustle of paper beneath her coat when she stood up. “She didn’t get copies of arrest reports and booking photos of a minor legally.”

  “Legally or not, she had them. As for finding me, I asked her how she’d done it, and she grinned and said, ‘I have my sources.’”

  What kind of sources did an unemployed alcoholic woman have? “Did you change your name legally?”

  “No.”

  “Did you keep in touch with anyone from Atlanta? Maybe someone you knew happened to come into the restaurant?”

  “There was no one to stay in touch with. And if someone I knew had come here, I would have hidden in the storeroom until they left.”

  “Provided you saw them before they saw you.”

  Her nod was regretful. “When Jeffrey reserved the private dining room for Jared’s birthday party, I didn’t realize he would be inviting all those lawyers and judges and clients from Atlanta. I spent the whole evening in a panic that some assistant D.A. or judge would remember me.”

  Maybe one of them had. Maybe an old friend of Martha’s had happened to pass through Copper Lake on her way someplace and recognized Ellie. Or maybe Martha had hired someone to find her. It wouldn’t have been easy, but it was usually possible.

  “Do you ever think about finding your mother?” Ellie asked him.

  The change in subject surprised him, but he went with it. He supposed there was only so much focusing on her own troubles she could bear. “Sure. But I’ve never tried.”

  “Why not?”

  “She left us. She never called, never sent a note saying ‘I’m okay,’ never wanted to know how we were doing without her. If I found out she was dead, that maybe she’d wound up on the streets and died all alone, I’d feel really crappy. And if I found out she’d gotten sober and made a new life for herself that didn’t have room for us, I’d feel really crappy. And if she’s still drinking, still miserable, still not able to cope…” He shrugged. “It’s better not knowing.”

  She nodded a sad agreement. “Better for everyone. I never wanted anyone to know I used to be a hooker, and I bet everyone who now knows wishes they didn’t. Except Kiki. She probably got a kick out of it.”

  “Ellie—”

  Abruptly she pushed away from her desk. “I’d better see if Ramona needs any help.”

  Tommy hadn’t heard Ramona Jackson, baker of prize-winning biscuits, breads and cheesecakes, come in, but no doubt Ellie knew her employees’ routines as well as her own. Figuring she needed a break from him as well as the conversation, he let her go, settled back and drank his coffee.

  By noon he’d had four cups of coffee, a full breakfast and a hefty serving of Ramona’s new recipe for banana-caramel cheesecake. Ellie was hiding as much as possible from both customers and staff, and when she did have to deal with them, she was edgy and couldn’t meet their gazes. When Lieutenant Decker came in a few minutes after twelve, she blanched and went stiff, then looked relieved when he beckoned Tommy out of the office.

  “I got a break,” Decker said once they’d reached the loading dock.

  “Someone confessed to stealing Ellie’s car and running down the old hag?”

  “No. Isaacs’s father had a heart attack while in Charlotte on business. She’s gone up there with her mother.” Decker raised one hand to stop Tommy from responding. “It’s a minor heart attack, from what I understand, but anything that gets her out of my way is good.”

  Tommy couldn’t help defending her, even if he shared the lieutenant’s sentiments. “It’s her first major case. She wants to close it quickly and make a good impression.”

  “I’d be more impressed if she wasn’t so narrow-minded. I know she’s best friends with Sophy, who has a thing for you, and you’ve got one for Ellie, but there’s no room for bias in this business. She should have asked to be reassigned the same time you did.”

  “You can remove her,” Tommy pointed out.

  “Or I can work with her and, if not teach her something, then at least keep a tight rein on her.”

  Decker removed a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket, looked at it a moment, then put it back. Thirty hours earlier, Tommy had stood in the same place and tried to smoke his very last cigarette. Only his shaky hands and Robbie’s interference had stopped him. Today he didn’t feel even the faintest desire.

  After a moment, Decker gave him a sideways glance. “You know about her life as Bethany.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Poor kid.”

  “She thinks it’ll change the way people think of her.”

  “It will with some of them.” Decker lowered himself to sit on the edge of the dock. Tommy joined him. “I worked narcotics in Dallas for five years. A lot of my informants were prostitutes. Most people didn’t think much of them, and they didn’t think much of themselves. It didn’t matter whether they were doing twenty-dollar blow jobs in a car or thousand-dollar-an-hour hookups in a fancy hotel, they all wanted the same thing—to get out and make a new life someplace where no one would ever know what they’d done before. And if they got that new life, their biggest fear was people finding out about the old one.”

  “It’s no one’s business what she did,” Tommy said with a scowl.

  “I agree. But Ellie’s dreaded this for fifteen years. She’s always had the fear, and you know Martha Dempsey played on it. She probably always told the kid she wasn’t worth a damn, and no doubt it was easy to convince her that everyone else would think the same thing.”

  “I don’t believe Ellie’s guilty.”

  Decker shrugged. “The lab geeks are
looking at the car and the clothes. If there’s anything to find, they’ll find it. Robinson’s meeting me here.” He glanced at his watch. “She’s late.”

  “She’s always late.” Even as Tommy spoke, a county SUV pulled into the lot. Marnie Robinson climbed out, lifted a kit from the back of the vehicle, then approached them, her strides long but unhurried.

  “I’m here,” she said unnecessarily. Decker made a show of looking at his watch again, but she ignored him. “Where’s the bar?”

  “Inside,” Decker said.

  “Through the kitchen and to the right,” Tommy explained.

  “Where’s the kitchen?”

  He jumped to the ground and led the way to the steps. “Haven’t you ever been here?”

  “I don’t eat out.” Her expression was dead serious when he held the door for her. “Germs.”

  “Wonder what else she doesn’t do,” Decker murmured.

  The lights were on in the bar, though they didn’t provide much illumination. Deryl was behind the gleaming length of mahogany, mixing up a drink that looked disgustingly like raw egg yolks. “Hey, Lieutenant. Detective.” His gaze flickered over Robinson. “Lab rat.”

  She ignored him, too.

  Decker led Markham through a recitation of Ellie’s time in the bar Saturday night, having him show where the witch had sat before Ellie came in, which booth they’d occupied, which side each woman had taken.

  “You clean the tables every night after closing?” Tommy asked as Robinson took out a variety of fingerprint powders.

  “Yeah. And I wiped this one down as soon as they left because Ellie spilled her drink. Sorry.”

  Robinson continued, bypassing the tabletop for the inch-high lip that surrounded it and the bench where the witch had sat.

  “She had one ale, probably twelve ounces, and spilled part of that,” Decker remarked. “How much?”

  “I don’t know,” Markham replied. “Most of it went on her clothes, but I cleaned up maybe two ounces from the table.”

  Tommy leaned against the bar, staring into the distance. Markham went back to his egg-yolk sludge, and Decker came to stand beside Tommy. “You thinking what I am?”

  “There’s no way Ellie got blackout-drunk from less than one ale.”

  Decker nodded. “So, unless she went someplace else when she left here and tied one on, there might be another reason for her memory loss.”

  “Hey, Markham,” Tommy called over his shoulder. “Did Ellie pick up her drink or did you take it to her?”

  “I was going to, but the witch offered because I was busy.”

  The perfect opportunity to dump something into the glass, give it a swirl or two, then present it to an unsuspecting victim. Guys in bars did it to girls all the time. “If she was drugged, then she couldn’t have been driving the car when Martha died.” Saying the words aloud sent a rush of relief through Tommy. He’d thought she was innocent—had realized it like a thump to the head when he’d sat on the coffee table the afternoon before and said, I don’t believe you did it. Still, it was one thing for him to believe in her innocence, another entirely if the evidence supported it.

  “Okay, let’s go to the hospital and get her blood drawn,” Decker said. “It may be too late for anything to show up, but—”

  “The drug of choice for this purpose, because of its ready availability, is flunitrazepam, also known as Rohypnol,” Robinson said without looking up from the prints she was collecting. “It’s usually gone from the blood within six hours, but can be found in the urine for twenty-four to seventy-two hours, depending on the person’s metabolic rate and how often and how much she urinates.”

  It had been about forty hours, so they were out of luck with the blood. They might get a hit on a urine test, though. Might.

  “However,” Robinson went on, “if she spilled the drink on her clothes, then we should find some residue on the fabric. All we’ve looked at is the bloodstain, which belonged to the victim, by the way. I doubt the tech even noticed the other stain.”

  “Let’s take her over to the hospital anyway,” Decker said. “Just in case.”

  There usually was no “just in case” with Robinson; she was always right. But Tommy was feeling pretty hopeful as he and Decker made their way to Ellie’s office. The lab would find traces of a drug in the stain on her clothing, and she would have the satisfaction of knowing she didn’t kill her mother.

  So who did kill Martha Dempsey, and why were they blaming it on Ellie?

  She wasn’t a killer.

  Though there had been no evidence of drugs in Ellie’s blood, the lab had found traces of Rohypnol in her urine and in the alcohol staining the skirt and the shawl she’d worn Saturday night. Tommy’s theory was straightforward: the well-dressed witch had drugged Ellie’s drink, then yanked a few strands of hair from her wig, borrowed her car, run over Martha and returned the car. Unfortunately, though several of the waitresses had seen the witch, too, none had recognized her.

  Ellie should have been more relieved. In truth, she just felt raw. All day long, she’d been on edge, feeling as if she must have a whole array of scarlet letters tattooed on her forehead: M for murderer, P for prostitute, C for criminal, W for worthless and whore, two of her mother’s favorite words. Had people looked at her any differently? She couldn’t say, because she’d been too ashamed to look back at them.

  But everything had certainly felt different. Having a detective—even if it was Tommy—shadow her every move, A. J. Decker bringing a technician into her restaurant to treat it as if it were a crime scene, Tommy and A.J. escorting her to the emergency room to have her blood drawn…She hadn’t escaped the sensation of gazes following her, judging her, until they’d returned to Tommy’s house soon after the dinner rush started.

  And it was a rush—a thirty-minute wait for a table, unusual for a Monday night. Murders were few and far between in Copper Lake; people wanted to check out the suspect in the latest. Prostitutes were few and far between there, too; maybe that was their interest in her. Maybe they’d thought her own restaurant was the best place to hear the latest gossip, or they wanted to supplement their own gossip. Why, I saw her last night, and she looked like she couldn’t care less about all the fuss. Or She looked pretty ragged, so it must be true. A thief and a whore in our midst! How did we not see it sooner?

  Go home, Carmen had advised, and after a long day, Ellie had been happy to obey. After all, she wasn’t of any use to the staff when she was afraid to leave her office. Now she sat at the table that filled Tommy’s small dining room, the remains of dinner in front of her. Anamaria and Robbie had come over, bringing the food with them, a spicy recipe passed down through generations of Anamaria’s family from one of her Cuban or Haitian ancestors. Ellie had eaten her share but remembered nothing else about it.

  “Let’s let the men do dishes,” Anamaria said, bumping against Ellie’s shoulder to get her attention. “We’ll take our tea out on the deck and enjoy knowing that they’re doing the work.”

  Gratefully Ellie followed her out. All Tommy and Robbie had talked about was the case, until she thought her head might explode. She was so sick of thinking, talking, wondering, worrying. She just wanted…

  She wanted life to go back to the way it was before Martha had shown up in town. No, to the way it was a year ago, when Tommy was still satisfied with what she could give him. She’d loved having him in her life, loved the sex and the companionship and loving him and being loved by him.

  Loving him. She’d never told him. She’d always been fearful of her past, of being hurt, betrayed, abandoned, outed. If she never acknowledged, even to herself, that she loved him, then somehow she would be safer. He could break up with her, which he had, but as long as she’d never said I love you, her heart wouldn’t break.

  Her logic had been a bit faulty.

  The evening was cool, the tea hot in sturdy porcelain mugs. They sat side by side on the steps, Anamaria easing herself down with a laugh. “Mama Odette says I
’m gonna be big as a house before this girl comes. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a second one in there, hiding behind the first.”

  “You’re a lucky woman,” Ellie said quietly.

  “So are you.”

  She resisted declaring her disagreement with a vehement snort. She had been lucky for five years. But luck couldn’t last forever, neither good nor bad. This, too, shall pass.

  But what would she have left when it was over?

  Anamaria gave her a sidelong look. “Have I ever told you about my mother?” She briefly paused for Ellie’s No. “Her name was Glory, and she was a beautiful woman. She was also a kept woman. At least, that’s what some people called her. Easy, slut, whore…different people, different names. But that was how she supported herself and me. She always had a handful of regular clients, and she saw them once or twice or five times a month. She satisfied them sexually, and they satisfied her financially.”

  Ellie had known most of the girls working her territory fifteen years ago, had been friends with some and disliked others. But she’d never known anyone who’d escaped the streets and made it into the world of escort or mistress. It was safer sex, more money, less humiliating, but it was still prostitution. “Why did she do it?”

  “She liked men, she liked sex and she liked money. Much more frivolous reasons than yours.” Anamaria’s shrug was a blur in Ellie’s peripheral vision. “She had choices. She was smart and clever and a good psychic. She turned down more marriage proposals than most women ever get. She had no need of a husband. She wanted to live life on her terms, and if anyone disapproved, she laughed in their faces.”

  “And yet you got married.”

  “I’m living life on my terms.” Anamaria’s sweet smile faded as she laid her hand on Ellie’s arm. “Mama chose that life for herself, and she accepted the consequences that came with it. You didn’t have a choice, Ellie. You didn’t run away from home, you didn’t want to live on the streets, you didn’t want to have sex with strangers. You’ve already paid dearly for the misfortune of having bad parents. You can’t keep punishing yourself for it.”