He put all that mental noise gently aside as he approached Diana Evans’s block. He circled the big, comfortable 1930s bungalow style house, surrounded by trees, rhododendrons and hydrangea bushes. A deep-set porch girdled the entire house.
Nick parked on the next block and assessed the other houses as he walked by. Not much activity. No kids playing, no one washing cars or trimming hedges. The approach to her house was screened by foliage.
He had a bunch of possible cover stories ready on the tip of his tongue as he climbed the stairs to the front porch. But when he knocked on the door, it gave way, swinging inward at the pressure, and he had a sudden, cold premonition that he wasn’t going to need them.
One last glance over his shoulder to make sure that no one was watching, and he pushed the door open with his knuckles and went in.
The place had been tossed. Completely trashed. He walked slowly through the wreckage, careful not to touch or disarrange anything.
Room after room, the same thing. The silence was absolute.
He climbed the stairs, his neck crawling and his stomach rolling.
He found her in the master bedroom, sprawled half-in, half-out of the adjoining bath. He stared down at her slender, twisted white form.
She was naked. The length of her hair, her coloring—she did look like Becca, superficially. Apart from the fact that she was very dead.
Her face was grotesquely distorted. She had been strangled. Her face was livid, her eyes bugged out, her tongue protruding. There were marks on her throat.
He kneeled down, for a better look, although the gesture was more ceremonial than anything else. She was stone cold, her skin already taking on a greenish tinge. He found a washcloth, not wanting to leave any accidental trace of himself and lifted her wrist. Stiff as a board.
So they had come for her yesterday sometime. He thought of the conversation with Mathes that Becca had recounted, how the man had bullied Diana into doing something that scared her to death. Of her distress later in the evening. The drinking, the vomiting, the weeping.
So the woman hadn’t been mean and cold enough to suit them. This was to her credit, but he would withhold his sympathy for now.
Greed had gotten her into this, after all. It was always greed.
He had absolutely no desire to involve the cops in his problems, but he didn’t have it in him to just leave Diana Evans’s body there, without announcing her death to anyone. She’d paid the ultimate price for whatever hellacious shit she’d gotten herself mixed up in. She deserved for her mortal remains to be treated with respect. At least.
He finished his sweep of all the rooms, just to be thorough, and ran down the stairs again. He picked up the phone using his own sleeve to cover his hand, and dialed 911.
The dispatcher answered the emergency line. “I’m at Number 5958 Whittaker Street,” he said. “A woman has been murdered here.”
He laid the phone down, leaving the line open, the dispatcher’s voice still squawking out high-pitched questions, demanding more info.
He walked out the door. Still no one around. He went swiftly to his truck and got the hell away from the place. He was feeling woozy, queasy and emotional. Him, Nick Ward, the so-called ice man. Christ, what was his problem? He fell in love, and turned suddenly to slop.
He wanted to hear Becca’s voice. He wanted comfort. He yanked out his cell, pulled her up.
Damn. Her fucking phone was busy. He wanted to throw the worthless piece of junk right out the window.
Becca smiled as she drove off in her rental, thinking of Nick. She was a big girl. She had to learn to act like an alpha female, or he would stomp all over her.
The first stop after the bank machine was her apartment. It felt odd, as if she were visiting a place she remembered from when she was very small. The sights and smells were familiar, but it had shrunk. She was a bigger person now. The ceiling felt lower, the furniture cramped.
She poured some water on her plants, tossed her dirty clothes into the hamper, pulled out fresh clothing, as much as would fit in the suitcase. She tried to think of anything she might conceivably need in the next couple of weeks, and tossed it higgledy-piggledy into the bag.
She hauled it out into the front room, feeling vaguely anxious and twitchy. Goaded by some inner urge to move, move, move.
She stopped in the living room and tried to breathe the jittery feeling down, but as she looked around, her back prickled coldly.
She looked around again. What was it? Something wasn’t the way she’d left it. She never pushed the phone to the exact middle of the table. She never propped the pillows in that particular way.
Someone had been here. Someone had touched her stuff. She felt an ice-cold churning, wonky and unstable in her lower body. She stared around, wondering if this was just stress, psyching her out. Making her nuts. And then her eyes focused on the stuffed animals on the shelf.
Bingo.
She always had Carrie’s threadbare pink bunny with the long arms embracing Josh’s tortoise on one side, and Carrie’s Goldilocks bear on the other. But the bunny was flopped forward, one long pink ear draped across the bear’s lap. Arms out, in dangling supplication.
She reached up, pulled the animals down. Her blood ran cold.
A small, squat black video camera sat there, its gleaming round eye regarding her coldly.
Her mind whirled. Stomach, too. The Spider had found her. He knew where she was, and who. Which meant that he knew about Josh and Carrie, too. She wanted to throw up. She didn’t have time. She was being watched. Right now, as she stared up with horrified eyes.
She swallowed hard. Lifted her hand. Gave the camera the finger.
And with that act of empty defiance, she pulled the camera down and shoved it into the kitchen garbage, with the tinfoil and the coffee grounds. The garbage was ripe and nasty after three days of neglect.
And now? She stepped out onto the porch with her suitcase and ran her eye up and down the street. Would she be shot or abducted? Or simply followed? She tried to memorize every make and color of car in sight as she hauled her suitcase down the stairs. Her legs shook beneath her.
No one appeared to follow once she turned onto the big street, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. It meant she’d been fooled. She’d been fooled before. She tried Josh again, then Carrie. Still nothing.
She was unnerved, shaking, on the verge of tears as she drove. She wanted to call Nick, but he would just go bananas on her, and at this point, there was nothing he could do. She might as well proceed with her day’s agenda. Ditch that damned rental before it bled her dry.
She called a cab as soon as she started in on the paperwork at the rental place, and told it to meet her at a nearby intersection that was a couple of blocks the wrong way down a one-way street. She hoped that was a crafty enough evasion technique to fool seasoned mobsters, as she puffed down the sidewalk, dragging her suitcase behind her.
She finally managed to breathe once she’d slid into the back of the cab and slumped down out of sight in the seat. She dragged out her phone again and pulled up Josh’s number.
Wonder of wonders. It was ringing. “Hello? Becca?”
“Josh! You scared me to death! Where the hell have you been?”
“Oh, well…” His voice trailed off. “I, um, I met someone.”
His evasiveness in the face of her own stark fear made her furious. “Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been? Where the hell are you?”
“I’m at my new apartment,” Josh said cheerfully. “I’m moving in with Nadia.”
“Nadia? Who the hell is Nadia?” Her voice cracked.
“Calm down, Becca. Nadia’s wonderful. I met her a couple days ago, and we’ve been together twenty-four-seven ever since, and now she’s invited me to move in with her. Todd can have my room in the HellHole, since he’s been sleeping on the downstairs couch for three months anyhow, and I’ll move in here and help Nadia with the rent on this place. I can work extra shifts at the Electronics Barn to cover—”
“Moving in with her? You just met this girl when?”
She was being a hysterical harpy, which never worked with Josh, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was too freaked out, too scared.
“Night before yesterday. But you’ve got to understand, Becca. She’s amazing. She’s sweet, and smart, and she’s so amazingly beautiful, I just can’t believe that she—hey! Stop that, Nadia. No, it is true! No, really, stop…that tickles…oh, shit…”
The voices on the other end of the line degenerated into a goofy, giggling scuffle, and Becca waited, teeth clenched, for them to sort it out and get themselves under control. “Becca?” Josh’s voice came back, raw with laughter. “You still there?”
“Yes. I am,” she said grimly.
“It’s weird. I just turned on my phone for one second to call the pastry place to send us some cupcakes, and the same second, boom, you call me. You must be, like, psychic.”
“No, just desperate,” she snapped. “Look, Josh, I’ve been calling all morning. I’ve been out of my mind, because Carrie—”
“Don’t worry,” Josh wheedled. “Everything’s great. I’ve never been so great in my life. Oh, hey. That’s a great idea—hold on a sec—” There was a murmur and Josh came back on. “Nadia says, why don’t you just come over? Come have brunch with us or lunch or whatever! See for yourself how special she is. She really wants to meet you. I told her how you basically raised me and Carrie, and she said that when her mom died, she and her little sister in Moldova were just like—”
“Joshie, I can’t,” she said. “I’m in trouble, and I need to—”
“Sure you can! Tell me all about it here. I’ll text you the address. Come over. I’m turning off my phone. I really want you to come. OK?”
“Josh, please, I—”
Click. The connection broke. Becca stared at the phone in dismay. She tried the number again. Sure enough, he really had turned off his phone. She could have shrieked in frustration.
She already disliked this seductress Nadia. Whoever the hell she was, she had to come out of the woodwork right now, at the worst possible time, and turn Josh’s brain to mush.
Which was kind of unfair, considering her own whirlwind romance, and the distinctly mushlike state of her own silly brain.
Still. God help them all. She tried Carrie’s number. Still off. She wished she’d mentioned that to Josh before he turned his phone off.
Her phone chirped. Message. She checked it.
855 Gavin St. Garden Apt. C u there!
Argh. The only thing to do was just go there and jerk on the lovesick little punk’s ear in person. If she could get him alone without Nadia, the perfect shining angel, in attendance, she’d just lay out the whole damn story for him. The real deal. Uncensored.
Maybe it would scare some sense into him. She could only hope.
She leaned forward to get the cabbie’s attention. “Excuse me. You have to take me to another address. Do you know Gavin Street?”
Nick wasn’t sure why he was driving by Richard Mathes’s house. It didn’t make sense to tip the guy off to being observed, wiping out any chance of following him. But planting a beacon on Mathes’s car without being seen, now that was a risk that could yield big benefits.
He was startled by how rattled he’d been from finding Diana Evans’s body, although stuff like that tended to take him by surprise long after the fact. He’d be thinking he was fine, as cool as a popsicle, and then he found out he couldn’t sleep for a month.
Evans’s murder was definitely Zhoglo’s work, but he was sure this prick Mathes had something to do with it.
He drove by the house. Hell of a place. He guessed that famous heart surgeons had to make a pretty decent buck, but this place looked like more than a pretty decent buck house.
This place looked like a bottomless bank account house.
It was a sprawling white mansion. A three-story, turn-of-the-century Victorian, with lace and frills, a widow’s walk, pointy towers, turrets and beveled bay windows. More like a cake than a house. A big, perfectly landscaped flowering garden. A huge lawn, dotted with majestic, century-old trees.
He circled around the big loop and took another look. The black BMW with the plates that Davy had detailed for him was parked in the driveway, not inside the enclosed garage. Nick took that as a written invitation from fate to go plant a discreet slap-on beacon bug. Five days of battery juice to monitor the good doctor with X-Ray Specs. Yeah.
Anybody stopped him—well, he didn’t think he could pass for a Jehovah’s Witness or a vaccum cleaner salesman, but fuck it. He’d improvise. He was good at it. In fact, a lot of the time, his seat-of-the-pants solutions to problems were ultimately better than when he slapped his brains around for an advance plan.
He parked his truck a discreet distance away and strolled through the pricey neighborhood. Dappled sun filtered through the moving leaves, making a constant green shadow-show on the ground. The ground was still fragrant and humid from the rainstorm the night before. It was beautiful…birds twittering, wind rustling.
And all he could see was that naked woman on the floor, eyes bugged out, the marks of hands clutching her throat. The image was burned into his retinas.