“Sorry. I’m sorry,” he said again. His cell phone buzzed his pocket. “Would you excuse me?” He walked into the hallway and stood at the foot of the curving staircase that rose to the second floor.
“Hello?”
“You still at Francesca’s?”
“I just got here, actually. Why?” Steele frowned at the phone. What did his father think, he’d chartered a private jet to get from San Francisco to Napa and back in twenty minutes? Of course he was still here.
“I just got some goddamn info that’s gonna change your interview. Maybe your whole career, if you handle it right.”
His next words froze Steele’s feet to the custom granite tile. “Are you kidding me?”
“Do I sound like I’m kidding? I’m getting a live feed on it right now. Everyone’ll know in the next half-hour. What everyone won’t have is a play-by-play with a family member while it’s happening. Stay there, okay? We’ll release whatever you get on our website, hour by hour. As long as this lasts.” His father’s breathing sped up. “Can you handle it? Or do I need to send someone else?”
It took all of Steele’s willpower to bite back a torrent of profanities. Thanks for trusting me, Dad. “I can handle it.” Chance of a lifetime. He’d be on all the major news websites. His name. His face. His story.
“I’ll call you back as soon as I hear more.”
Steele hung up and slipped his cell phone into his pocket. Unbelievable. Horrible, of course, but also one hell of an opportunity. He chewed his bottom lip. How was he supposed to break the news to Francesca? She didn’t have a cell phone or a computer, and if there was a television in the mansion, he’d never seen it. Sequestered away in this house, atop this hillside, Francesca had cut herself off from civilization long ago. She’d never hear what had happened unless someone told her in person.
I have to tell her. Don’t I?
But how would she take it? How would he take it, if someone he barely knew gave him that kind of news? What if she passed out or had a nervous breakdown? What if she didn’t believe him or told him to leave?
Didn’t matter. He’d figure it out. And he had to do it nicely. Gently. So she didn’t threaten to throw him out on his ass. Finally, Steele had a chance to prove himself to his father. A chance for the lead on the front page of The Chronicle, a live feed on their website, a story circling around the world minute by minute as the drama unfolded. He’d have the angle no one else in California—hell, no one else in the world—would have.
He just wasn’t sure how to tell Francesca Morelli her only son was about to die.
1:00 p.m.
Kira wiped down the counter of Permanent Addiction as the lunch crowd slowed. “Hey boss, can I take a break?”
“Sure. Take ten.”
“Thanks.” She dropped the rag into a bucket of bleach and water and refilled her mug with black coffee. She didn’t know how the rest of the normal world functioned, getting up at dawn and working through the daylight hours. Moonlight was much less offensive than the sun.
She headed for the back door and dug into her pocket for a cigarette. One of these days she’d quit. She’d promised her father that years ago, after she started smoking at the too-young age of fourteen. Of course, he’d broken enough promises of his own, so she wasn’t sure she owed him any loyalty. She grabbed a pack of matches on her way outside.
Kira sank to a seat on the back sidewalk and stretched out her legs. A quiet, narrow alleyway, big enough for bikes and pedestrians, ran the length of the block. From here she could stare straight into the kitchen of Rosie’s Grille and the storeroom of a new art gallery. She could hear voices somewhere inside speaking in a melodic Spanish lilt. Beyond the storefronts, above the trees, rose the Sierra Buttes, huge hulking mountains that hugged the town of Yuba City. Scotty called them guardians, a landmass that kept the weather calm and the people happy. Today the sun bounced off their peaks, and though Kira knew that snow still topped them, from here they looked like bare, rippling pastures.
She took a long, satisfying drag on her cigarette and wondered how living near a certain landscape shaped a person, growing up. Did children who lived in the shadows of a mountain range spend their earliest days looking up, dreaming, watching the clouds make shapes? If you moved those same children to a seaside home, would they lose that distant vision? Would they start looking out rather than up, or develop a rhythmic gait that matched the waves they slept and woke to? Did growing up in a city of skyscrapers create tunnel vision from the day you were born? Or did living inside gated walls mean you looked at the world in fragments, in sliced-up pieces, so you could never see the whole of something for what it truly was?
There hadn’t been gates on Kira’s childhood home, though there might as well have been. She’d been trapped without even realizing it. Of course, those gates weren’t there to keep the monsters out. She’d found out when she got old enough that the true monsters lived inside.
She exhaled a ribbon of smoke and stared at the concrete. She hated the day after finishing a film. There was such a sense of finality, such a letdown, like the day after Christmas times one hundred. All the build-up, the nerves, the hard work, the insomnia ... then you woke to find an ordinary day followed the thrill of Santa shoving gifts down your chimney.
Not that Christmas had ever been a traditional family event in her home. Nothing traditional about that home at all.
“Can I bum one?” A man moved into her light and cast a shadow across her lap.
Kira tilted her head back and squinted. She tipped a cigarette out of the pack and handed it over.
“Thanks.” He squatted beside her, eased himself to a seat and flipped out a lighter. She recognized his profile. Thirty-something, lanky, quiet. He came in almost every week, usually on Fridays. Ordered a double espresso and a bagel, plain.
“Didn’t know you smoked,” she said.
“Didn’t know you did.”
She stubbed out her butt. “Trying to quit.”
“Aren’t we all.”
He was good-looking, tall and wiry, with a crooked nose that had probably been broken more than once. Round glasses with kind, bluish-gray eyes behind them.
“I’m Alex.”
“Kira.”
He gave her a long, steady look. “Have we met someplace? I mean, besides the coffee shop?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You look familiar.”
She chuckled. “You use that line on all the girls?”
He smiled and shook his head. “It wasn’t a line. And no, I don’t. I just tend to remember most striking women I meet.” He folded his arms over his knees. “There’s something about your face...or your eyes, actually.” He snapped his fingers. “Hey, you know who you look like?”
“Who?”
“That actress who disappeared a few years back. Edoardo Morelli’s kid.” He stared at her. “You aren’t—nah, stupid question, right? What would she be doing in a place like this?”
What, indeed? “Yeah. Stupid question.”
But he was still staring at her. “You heard what happened to Morelli, right?”
“What?”
He let out a stream of smoke. “He got kidnapped by a bunch of terrorists. Over in the Middle East somewhere. It just happened. It’s all over the news.”
Kira left kind Alex with the gray eyes sitting on the sidewalk and ran inside as fast as she could. She flipped on the flat-screen TV that hung in the break room.
Patti, the other waitress working the day shift, opened the door. “Felix said you were talking to some guy out back. Good-looking? With potential?”
“Nope. It was nothing.” Kira grabbed the remote and started flipping channels. Soap operas. Cartoons. Reality shows of jokesters playing pranks on unsuspecting people in grocery stores and parks. Where the hell were all the news stations?
“You know, any other single woman would be snapping up those phone numbers you get all the time,” Patti said. “You got a boyfriend somewher
e that nobody knows about? Or a girlfriend?”
Kira switched channels. “Nothing that exciting, sorry.” She came across another soap opera. The music swelled, the characters wrestled their way into bed, and the scene faded with a close-up shot of the headboard vibrating. But just as the soap’s resident vixen strode in, the picture changed. A local news anchor appeared on the screen, and a bright blue banner scrolled across the bottom. The ominous words “Special Report” flashed on and off.
“We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this news update...” The anchor scowled into the camera. “International film star Edoardo Morelli has just been taken hostage by a radical terrorist group...”
Kira dropped the remote.
“...at this point authorities are releasing no other information. However, one source reports that a Middle Eastern news station broadcast a picture of Morelli bound at the wrists and ankles approximately an hour ago. Again, we have no additional information about the motive of this terrorist group or their demands...”
“Oh my God. Wow.” Patti hunched forward in her chair. “That’s crazy. Why would they kidnap him?”
Kira didn’t answer. Her mouth had gone dry.
“Viewers may recall that Morelli’s daughter Isabella vanished from their home in Napa Valley nearly seven years ago,” said the news anchor. “There is no indication yet that the incidents are linked, but authorities are not ruling out a connection.” An instant later, a picture of a female Edoardo look-alike with long hair flashed onto the screen: Isabella, in her last formal head shot, after starring in her last film at seventeen years old.
“Hey, that looks like...” Patti trailed off and turned to look at Kira.
She fled for the bathroom. Halfway there, her cell phone rang. She barricaded herself in the tiny stall and left her phone in her pocket.
Shit. Double shit. First the guy outside, now Patti. Probably Isha too, as soon as she saw the news. And Scotty, who would kill her for not telling him the truth. A pair of feet entered the stall beside her. She stared at the floor. Only after the person flushed and left the bathroom did Kira fish out her phone and check the screen. Missed call. No message. She didn’t recognize the number.
She emerged from the stall and took her time washing her hands. What the hell am I supposed to do? Her heart jumped in her chest. Her phone rang again, and she closed her eyes. This is bad, isn’t it? Really bad. She reached up to touch the sterling silver pendant that hung around her neck and ran her fingers over the lettered design that matched the one tattooed on her hip. Gnothi sauton.
Against her better judgement, she answered the call. “Hello?”
It lasted less than three minutes. She wanted to ask the man how he’d found her, but she guessed Francesca still had connections in the right places. The woman probably had a private investigator following Kira for years. She stared at the wall and agreed to what he asked. Yes. I heard. I will. I’ll make sure. She’d sworn never to return home, but she was young and confused and so goddamn heartbroken she’d barely known her own name the day she walked out. Things had changed in seven years. She’d changed. There were things in that house she needed to protect. Secrets no one could ever know about. She was strong enough now to go back. She had to be.
“Felix, can I take the rest of the day off?”
He frowned. “Is it an emergency? We’re already short staffed today, and...” He stopped and studied her. “Never mind. If you need the day, take it. We’ll be okay.”
“Thanks. I’ll try to be back tomorrow.” But how long this nightmare might last, she had no idea.
“We’ll hold down the fort. Just take care of yourself.”
The sun burned onto Kira’s neck as she hurried to her car. For a long five minutes, she sat in the driver’s seat without starting the engine. Images slipped in with her before she could push them away. A little girl playing on the back lawn with her father. A ten-year-old asking her grandmother to play dress-up. A precocious fourteen-year-old wearing makeup and sneaking out to meet a boy in town. An eighteen-year-old thinking she knew everything about life, discovering a secret that made her realize she knew nothing at all. Disowning her family. Fleeing the house. Throwing her phone in the ocean as she drove over the Golden Gate Bridge. The nightmares. The shame. The heartbreak that followed.
She wrapped her arms around her waist and told herself she absolutely could not, would not, vomit on her lap. It happened a long time ago. Maybe she’d overreacted. Maybe it wasn’t that big a deal. Yeah, right. She fumbled for the ignition and turned up the AC as cold as it would go. Her head fell back against the seat and she closed her eyes. Seven years. Four traveling the country until she ran out of money, and three more in Yuba City. She’d thought that might be long enough, but the way she felt right now, it could’ve been seven minutes since she’d left. The pain was that raw.
She ran her fingers over the steering wheel. She could pretend she was someone else all she wanted; she could change her name or her hair color every day of the week. But she’d never dealt with the truth that lay inside that house. She had to go back. The media was already circling the wagons. They were brutal; they’d dig until they unearthed nuggets of smut to share with a greedy public. And if they couldn’t unearth anything, they’d make it up. So she had to beat them at their game. She had to find out everything, had to know every last detail about her childhood and then make sure it stayed buried forever.
Kira took a deep breath. Five minutes later she was on her way home.
2:00 p.m.
Steele baked in the afternoon sun. So much for the rain that had threatened earlier. Across the room, Francesca stood in the center of the parquet floor and twisted her hands together. Miles hunched in the background and offered her a little white pill and a glass of water.
“I don’t want it.” She slapped at the servant’s hand. He blinked and disappeared.
“What did they say?” she asked Steele. “Tell me exactly.” Her eyes blazed.
He licked his lips and thought about asking for another glass of sherry, just to kill his thirst. He wondered if she had any beer in the house. “It’s a small radical group, flies under the radar most of the time.” He’d never heard of them before, not like that meant anything. Seemed like extremist groups built themselves up, killed themselves off, and started over again more often than he could keep track of.
“They’re holding him until they get a prisoner exchange.” His father hadn’t been too specific in the last phone call, which had come almost forty minutes ago. Steele thought maybe a cop would come to the house, or at least check in, but for now the authorities didn’t seem too concerned with Edoardo’s mother’s response to the kidnapping. He cursed himself for leaving his iPad at work. Usually he kept it in the car, but he’d been running late and hungover this morning. He’d have to send in updates from his phone.
“What about money? What if we pay them off?”
“I’m not sure. I think they want something else. Political clout.” Or to make a statement by executing Edoardo on camera. But he didn’t mention that.
Francesca’s lips trembled and she reached for the back of the sofa to steady herself. “If they do anything...if anything happens to him...” For a moment she wavered. Then, as he watched, she gathered herself together again. In a matter of seconds, her expression smoothed and her posture softened. She lifted her chin and blinked away any emotion that might have betrayed her.
It’s as if she’s in front of a camera, presenting the face that’s right for the moment.
“Where’s Miles? Miles!”
The old man shuffled in again. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Get Carl on the phone.”
Carl. Steele jotted down the name. “Is that...”
“My attorney,” she snapped. “Our family attorney, though Eddie was a fool and got his own hack years ago. Carl will find out what they want, what we can do. I can’t believe they won’t take money, if we offer them enough.” Her gaze roamed
the room, landing on nothing. “And Miles, see if Simon will stay on with Rex until morning. I’ll pay him overtime. I want two guards watching the house at all times.”
“Of course.”
“Look outside,” she ordered as the servant left the room.
“Sorry?” Steele said.
She pointed at the window beside him. “You see anyone out there?”
He pulled back the curtain. For a moment he wondered if she was going mad with paranoia. No terrorist groups hiding in the hills of Napa Valley, last time I checked. Then he realized she meant the media, cameramen and reporters pulling up in their dark vans and descending on the place like vultures onto carrion.
“Ah, no, no one.”
“Good.” She gave him a long glance, all the way up and down, and then wiggled her fingers in a dismissive wave. “I suppose it’s all right if you stay. For now.”
“Thanks.” He glanced through the scribbles of shorthand on his notepad. Three pages so far, mostly just her weeping and worrying, but he’d turn it into something. Movie Star’s Mother Distraught with Worry, or maybe Morelli Plans to Pay Off Son’s Terrorists, though if he leaked that straight away, she’d probably toss him out of the house. He wondered absently how much she was worth.
“So your son never received any threats before now, as far as you know?”
“Threats, no. People always made noise. He’s a movie star. That’s what happens. There was a young girl who followed him around for a few months. She left notes in the mailbox, sent him these odd packages of old mixed tapes she made. And pictures of herself dressed in lingerie.” Francesca made a fac. “Terribly tacky stuff. One time she broke into his trailer, when he was filming up in Ontario. But that was years ago. And that was a silly woman. Not a terrorist.”
Countdown: Steele Page 3
