by Sharon Sala
His stomach was growling, but after a quick prowl through the cabinets and the fridge, he settled for what was left of a package of Oreo cookies and a Pepsi that had gone flat. The “meal” settled his belly but not his soul.
He felt lost, even aimless, which made no sense. He thought about what he’d agreed to do for Cat Dupree. He didn’t regret it, but he couldn’t help but wonder why he kept involving himself in her business. She was sexy, aggravating, hard as nails and not prone to being friendly. He couldn’t figure out why he even cared what she thought about him. He knew plenty of pretty women. But, he had to admit, none of them were Cat Dupree.
He thought of Cat again, alone in her apartment and waiting for Bradley to arrive. He knew she was scared. He also knew she would never admit it.
Problem was, he wouldn’t put it past her to play detective alone, which was a foolhardy thing to do, but that scar on her neck was visible proof that she’d been in danger before. He didn’t know what she wanted of him, but he knew he was going to have a hard time telling her no.
Finally he headed for his office, booted up his computer and began going over the list she’d given him. Hours later he looked up, realized how long he’d been at this, and then glanced down at his notes and the pages he’d downloaded. He’d made some headway into Mark Presley’s private life, but whether it led them to Marsha Benton remained to be seen.
He looked toward the phone. He’d half-expected Cat to call after Bradley’s visit, but she hadn’t, which meant there was probably nothing to tell. All Bradley could have done was take the machine in and have their experts analyze it to see if they could separate anything specific from the noise. It was a long shot, but all they had.
He thought of his family, trying to imagine losing track of one of them, and felt guilt at how long it had been since he’d called them. Despite the hour, he picked up the phone. His dad wouldn’t go to bed before the Tonight Show with Jay Leno was over, no matter what.
The phone rang twice and was in the middle of the third ring when someone picked up. He heard his dad’s gruff voice and smiled.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Dad, it’s me. Wilson.”
The gruffness shifted to one of delight.
“Hey, son! How have you been?”
“I’m good, Dad. How about you guys?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Having a little trouble with arthritis in my hip and knee, like always. Your Mom’s chin deep in Christmas. The house looks like Santa’s damn workshop, if you know what I mean…but don’t tell her I said so.”
Wilson laughed. He could imagine the sight. His mom was big on setting up what she called “scenes” all over the place. One room had the Christmas tree with the wrapped presents underneath. For the past twelve years or so, she’d also been collecting pieces of what she called her “village,” adding to it each year, which also meant that the setting for the village continued to get larger. Last year, he remembered, she’d set up her village on the sideboard in the dining room. His dad had complained all Christmas Day that there were so many doodads in the house that there was no place left to put the pies. She’d set up a card table in the kitchen for all the holiday desserts, which had been eaten anyway, regardless of where she’d put them.
“You comin’ home for Christmas?”
“Don’t I always?” Wilson asked.
His dad chuckled. “If you know what’s good for you.”
“Is Mom asleep?” Wilson asked.
“Yeah, but I can wake her up. You know she’ll want to—”
“No, don’t do that,” Wilson said. “I’ll call again when it’s a more decent time of day. Just tell her I said hi and that I love her.”
“I’ll do that. Take care of yourself, son.”
“You, too, Dad. I’ll call again soon.”
Wilson was still holding the receiver long after the line had gone silent, thinking about his parents, and what a good life they’d given to him and his brothers and sisters. He couldn’t imagine what Cat Dupree’s life had been like after her father’s murder, but from her ‘don’t trust, don’t touch’ attitude, he knew it couldn’t have been good. Still, he would do what he could to help her and, in the meantime, keep his emotional distance.
Finally he left the office and moved back through the rooms. It was dark outside now. He thought of getting dressed and going to get something to eat, then decided against it and ordered in.
He called his favorite Chinese restaurant, knowing it stayed open until eleven, ordered two entrees and three egg rolls, as well as a side order of vegetable fried rice. While he was waiting for it to arrive, he made some fresh coffee and drank it at the window while watching the busy traffic on the streets below.
It was raining hard—what his daddy called a toad strangler. Thankful he wasn’t in his truck on some stakeout, he poured himself a second cup of coffee.
When the food finally arrived, he gave the delivery boy a generous tip for having to come out in this weather, then sat down and ate his way through sesame chicken, and beef and vegetable stir fry, as well as the rice and egg rolls.
As he started to throw the empty boxes in the trash, he noticed the fortune cookie in the bottom of the sack and opened it. He grinned when he read it.
Be ready for great changes.
In his business, that was a given on any day. He tossed the fortune, ate the cookie, then turned out the lights on his way to bed.
The bedroom was quiet, and the bed was cold. The wind was coming up outside, and it sounded to him as if the rain blowing against the windows was turning to sleet. Thankful that he was home, he pulled the covers up over his shoulders and settled in.
The sheets were chilly, but his body heat and the extra blankets on the bed soon warmed them up. He rolled over onto his side, relaxing with every breath that followed. Outside, the icy pellets quickly covered the roadways, making travel deadly while Wilson slept.
Detective Bradley hadn’t stayed long at Cat’s apartment. He’d heard the message, agreed with Wilson McKay that it sounded like a helicopter, and packed up the machine.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” he said. “I’ll take it in and let our techs examine it more closely. They can filter and separate all kinds of sounds from a recording.”
Cat watched him bagging up the machine in frustration. Her first instinct, after hearing it, had been to charge out the door and start searching, but she didn’t have a notion in hell of the first place to start. She thought of what she’d asked Wilson to do. If he was successful, it would help. At least then she would know where to start looking and what to ignore.
“Have you talked to Presley?” she asked.
Bradley shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t share information about an ongoing case.”
Cat frowned. “But the case is my business.”
“Not at this point, ma’am,” Bradley said.
Cat glared.
“So there’s nothing you can tell me?”
He hesitated, then remembered the car.
“I can tell you that Ms. Benton’s Lexus showed up on one of the exits off the freeway. It had been stripped clean but was identified by the VIN number. We’re looking at the possibility that it might have quit on her and she took out on her own to get help. Maybe met with foul play from that angle.”
Cat rolled her eyes.
“Did you check the calls on her cell phone?”
Bradley frowned.
“We’ve requested the list.”
“I can tell you one thing. Marsha wouldn’t have walked across the street when she could have ridden. If she had car trouble, she would have called immediately for help.”
Bradley fired back. “Not if her cell phone was dead. They do go dead, you know.”
“Her car was equipped with all kinds of high-tech stuff. I know there was a built-in phone, as well as a GPS mapping system with a built-in phone. If one thing quit, she had a half-dozen other gadgets at her fingertips. She called me. Remember?”
>
He glanced down at the answering machine and sighed.
Cat continued to hammer him with questions.
“Had the car been wrecked?”
“No, but—”
“Then it was dumped,” Cat said.
At that point Bradley thanked her for calling and left.
Frustrated, Cat paced from room to room until her stomach growled. She went to the kitchen, opened a can of soup, ate it straight out of the pan in which she’d heated it, then went to bed.
She fell asleep within minutes, unaware that the rain that had been falling since evening had turned to sleet, or that the roads were becoming impassable.
As she slept, she began to dream, but instead of a continuous scene, it consisted of images flashing through her mind, like looking at old pictures in an album.
Cat was sitting at the kitchen table. Her mother was standing beside her, laughing as she set a birthday cake in front of her. There were four candles on her cake, and her daddy was taking a picture.
“Smile,” he’d said.
She looked up just as the flash went off.
She was still blinking from the flash when the image shifted. It was cold. The blowing wind burned her skin. She was at a cemetery, staring down at a small, flat marker. Cat couldn’t read, but somehow she knew it bore hermother’s name. She could hear her father crying. It scared her worse than the fact that her mother had gone away.
“Daddy…where did she go?”
“Heaven.”
“Is it far?”
“Yes.”
“Can we go, too?”
She never heard his answer, because the image shifted again. This time, she was being led through a long series of hallways. The smell of orange oil from wood polish burned her nose. The sound of her footsteps echoed on the tiled floors. Yesterday she’d been in the hospital. She’d asked to go home. But someone had told her she couldn’t go home because there was no one left to take care of her. The horror of that knowledge had frightened her so much that she’d been afraid to ask what came next.
She walked through an open door as a woman said her name. The woman took her by the hand, and they walked away. She couldn’t see the woman’s face. She never remembered the faces, and it didn’t matter, because they never stayed the same.
When the image shifted again, she was with Marsha. They were standing in front of a mirror, putting on makeup. Marsha was laughing at the blob of mascara on Cat’s eyelid. Cat stuck out her tongue.
It was the night of their high school prom and they’d gone without dates. They were seventeen.
When the image shifted again, Cat and Marsha were putting icicles on a Christmas tree. It was their first tree, in their first apartment. It had a single strand of lights and a gold-foil star. Marsha was bending down, hanging the last of her icicles on the bottom of the tree. As she did, Cat hung the last of her icicles on Marsha’s butt.
Marsha stood up, laughing, then flung hers at Cat.
A siren sounded, sweeping past Cat’s apartment in a blaze of lights and noise. She woke up with her heart pounding, her cheeks covered with tears. The dream had been so real. Even though the rational part of her knew it was nothing but an old memory, she still had to get up and see if there was a Christmas tree in the living room.
Her heart was pounding as she walked down the hall and checked. Disappointment was shattering. The reality of her life was far different from her dreams. There was no tree. There was no Marsha. Not here. Not anywhere—ever again.
The siren that had awakened her was fading in the distance. The silence in her apartment should have been comforting—like a promise that all was well—but it made everything seem empty, instead. Only after she started walking back to her bedroom did she realize that her feet were freezing. She hurried down the hall, then, once in her room, got a clean pair of socks before jumping back into bed. She put the socks on beneath the covers, taking comfort in their softness and extra warmth, and tried to go back to sleep, but she couldn’t.
She rolled over onto her back, then pulled the covers up beneath her chin and stared at the shadows her night light was making on the ceiling. There was a huge weight in the middle of her chest, and she kept repressing the urge to wail.
She couldn’t prove it—but she knew it. Mimi was dead.
Three simple words that, used together, became something obscene.
Morning came in a blast of cold wind, with the roads dangerously slick, coated in a good inch of sleet and ice. Even though she’d been willing to brave the weather, everything she’d planned to do had to be delayed. Cat was still willing, but the rest of the city had come to a halt.
After a half-dozen phone calls, it became apparent that the businesses that were open were operating on half staff, while the rest of them hadn’t bothered to open at all. It left her with renewed frustration as she was forced, once again, to delay her search.
Being a bounty hunter, she knew how to find bail jumpers. For the most part, they weren’t very smart, and most of them had a tendency to hide out in their old neighborhoods, either with an old girlfriend or some family member. It was just a matter of checking out the addresses, then running them down.
But Mimi’s disappearance was different. Whatever had happened to her had been beyond her choice or control. Cat was firmly convinced that Mark Presley had done it, but with the resources he had at his fingertips, he could make anyone disappear.
Then there was the phone message she’d left on Cat’s machine. If the last place Mimi had been with him had been in a helicopter, that meant her body could be anywhere—even out of state.
Frustrated, Cat stood at the windows overlooking the highway, watching the traffic. Very few cars were on the roads, but the few that were, were sliding all over the place. Even as she was standing there, she witnessed a three-car pile-up. When the drivers got out to survey the damage, two of them wound up falling, and only one got up. She winced at the pain on the fallen driver’s face. From the way everyone was behaving, he’d most likely broken a bone.
She thought about going down to help, then realized that she wouldn’t be able to do anything more than what the others were already trying to do. One of them was on a cell phone, obviously calling for help, while the other was kneeling beside the fallen driver.
When she finally saw a police cruiser and an ambulance approaching, she walked back to the sofa, picked up the remote and then sank down onto the cushions. She’d never been any good at mindlessly watching television, but there wasn’t a lot left to do. She glanced at the phone, thinking about calling Wilson McKay, and then changed her mind.
But the longer she sat there, the more antsy she became. Whether it was his go-to-hell attitude or his less than proper buzz-cut and earring, he was hard to ignore. He’d promised to help. She could at least call and see how his investigation was going. As she was going to get the phone, it rang.
“Hello?”
“Cat, it’s me, Wilson.”
The sound of his voice eased her sense of isolation.
“Everything’s a mess outside,” she said.
“Yeah, I know, but I have some info. I just don’t know if it’s going to help our situation,” he said, as he stretched lazily, then strode toward the windows.
Ice was layered on everything. If it hadn’t been so dangerous, it would have been beautiful. He remembered then that Detective Bradley had been going to her place yesterday.
“Did Bradley show up?”
“Yes. He took the machine. Said he’d put their techs on it and see if they could sort any kind of background noise from what we heard.”
“They’ll do their best,” he said. “Did he mention anything about Presley?”
“No. If he’s talked to him, he didn’t share what he knew.”
“That’s probably because there’s nothing to tell,” Wilson reminded her.
“He did say they found Mimi’s car.”
“The hell you say? Where?”
“Somewhere on
the freeway.”
“Wrecked?”
“No. Just stripped and abandoned.”
“Damn. That doesn’t help much.”
“I know,” Cat said, and then added, “What about the stuff you found on line?”
“I printed off a bunch of information.”
“Good.”
“Let me ask you something,” Wilson said.
“Anything.”
“Did you ever think about him hiring someone to do her in and dump her?”
“No. What was between them was personal. I don’t think he would have wanted to advertise the problem to anyone.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“So, Wilson, you said you printed out the stuff you found on Presley and Mimi, right?”
“Yes.”
“Fax it to me.”
“Yeah, I can do that. Give me your number.”
She rattled it off, then hung up without saying goodbye.
Wilson stared at the phone, wondering if this was how a woman felt who’d just been fucked and dumped without comment. While he hadn’t had sex with her, he was being used. Trouble was, he’d offered, so he could hardly be pissed that she wasn’t being as appreciative as he would have liked.
He tore off the page from his notepad where he’d scribbled her fax number and headed for his office.
Eight
Mark Presley handed his credit card to the jeweler, then smiled benevolently as the sales clerk wrapped the Christmas gift he’d just purchased for his wife. Tahoe was a place that catered to wealth, and this jewelry store was no exception. The necklace Mark had chosen was elegant, the teardrop diamond a perfect shade of yellow. He knew the exact moment when he was going to present it to her, too. It would be on the pillow beside her when she woke up Christmas morning. She would squeal, open the gift, then cry. She would throw her arms around his neck and shower him with kisses, after which he would strip her naked and make mad, passionate love, or what passed for it.
Penny wasn’t exactly the type of woman who was willing to branch out and try something new. She wanted it missionary style, three times a week, and usually in the dark. Only once in a while did she get frisky, but whenever it happened, Mark was happy to oblige. After all, she was directly responsible for his current lifestyle, and he wasn’t going to do anything to mess that up. There was always a time later for Mark’s predilection for erotica, and plenty of women who were willing to participate.
