Authors: Elizabeth Lowell
Las Vegas
November 4
Evening
D
ry-eyed, Miranda
watched while the nurse wheeled the crash cart out of Tim’s room. The cart hadn’t helped. Nothing had.
The light and joy of her life was dead.
Feeling brittle and very old, she picked up the phone, punched in a number, and waited. Very quickly she heard the familiar voice.
“He’s dead,” she said. “Now there’s only one thing I want from you. You do to Socks what Socks did to him. I mean it. You understand?”
He didn’t like it, but he understood. He had been planning to do it anyway. He just didn’t want to be rushed. Too many mistakes that way.
“I understand,” he said. “Are you going home?”
“I don’t have a home anymore. Timmy’s dead. Don’t you understand?
He’s dead.”
“A car will come for you at the clinic. He’ll take you to another place. Stay there.”
Before Miranda could agree or disagree, he hung up.
Sedona
November 4
Night
S
hane missed the
rural mailbox the first time. It was easy to miss, because the “road” that led off toward the hills and cliffs was dirt, rocks, and weeds.
“Maybe the last address on that box was wrong,” Risa said as they bumped off the paved road and into Virgil O’Conner’s “driveway.”
“You have a better idea of where we should look for the gold?”
“No.” Nothing valuable had been left in the dump that was Cherelle’s last address.
Sycamore trees with pale bark and branches twisted and shimmered like ghosts in the moonlight. Risa had more time than she wanted to admire the trees’ eerie beauty, because Shane was driving the rental truck over the miserable excuse for a road. She winced as a rock leaped out and attacked the right front tire.
“Sure you don’t want me to drive?” she asked.
“You think you could do better?”
She started to say yes, then held her tongue when she saw the pile of rocks he had avoided by swerving over to the right. “No, but then I’d have the steering wheel to hang on to.”
Shane grinned like a raider.
After she checked over her shoulder—stars, moon, no headlights—she said, “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you.”
It was more of an accusation than a question, but he answered anyway. “Yeah. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy the backcountry.”
“Speaks someone who never lived in East Bumblefart.”
“I thought you were from Arkansas.”
“Same difference.”
“Hey, I happen to know that there are some grand places in—”
“I never saw them,” she cut in. Then she blew out a rushing breath. “Oh, hell. You’re right. The countryside is beautiful, all shimmery with heat and secrets. It was my life that sucked.”
“Yeah, funny how that sours you on a place.” He checked the rear and side mirrors. Nothing but night. “I’d have to be bound, gagged, and drugged to go back to Renton.”
“Where’s that?”
“Washington. State, not D.C. Between Seattle’s sprawl and the trackless Cascades. Lots of green because there’s lots of rain.”
“You sure got all the way out,” she said.
“Meaning?”
“Green and rain are the last words I’d think of to describe ‘Lost Wages,’ Nevada.”
“Love at first sight,” he agreed. “How about you?”
“The same. All the distance. The space. The emptiness. It was alien as hell, and I loved it instantly. Watch the—!”
Shane swerved to avoid a skunk and cursed when something on the undercarriage scraped on a rock.
“Whew,” Risa said, fanning the air in front of her face. “I’d forgotten what they smell like. Did you miss it?”
He checked the rearview mirror and saw a black-and-silver shape waddle toward the creek bed.
“Yeah.” The bottom scraped again over a combination of a pothole and a rut. He swore. “Can you tell me what the hell point there is in putting four-wheel drive on a baby pickup truck that has the same clearance as the average minivan?”
“Gee, let me see,” she said. “I’m guessing that minivans have a low dick quotient.”
“Never thought of it that way.”
“You’re a man,” she said, turning to look back over the road.
“You noticed.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, I did.”
Her smile made Shane wish they were on the dirt road for no other reason than to find a quiet place to steam up the windows and each other. But they weren’t.
“See anything?” he asked.
“Stars, moon, black cliffs, sycamores like ghosts . . .”
“And the back of your neck itches,” he finished.
“And the back of my neck itches,” she agreed. “Yours?”
“Like fire.”
“Well, hell. You were supposed to go all dick quotient on me and say how it’s my hormones or something.”
“ ‘Or something’ has my vote.”
“I sure don’t see anything back there but a whole lot of nothing.” She gave up and half turned in the seat to make checking over her shoulder easier. “But the moon is bright enough for someone to run without headlights.”
“Is that a suggestion?”
“No. I gave up that kind of midnight tag when I was fifteen.”
“What kind of tag?”
“The kind where you shut off your headlights and play bumper cars on country lanes until you’re the last idiot on the road.”
Shane whistled. “Sounds like fun. Why’d you give it up?”
Risa started to duck the question, then shrugged. “Because the guy driving pulled off the road and tried to rape me. He probably would have, if Cherelle hadn’t come over the backseat and shoved his balls up his ass with her knee while she screamed that just because she did it for money didn’t mean her friend did for free.”
Shane’s hands flexed on the wheel until his knuckles were pale as bone. “That’s one I owe her.”
“I think ten thousand dollars is adequate repayment,” Risa said dryly. “A little later Cherelle left town with a traveling drug salesman. All kinds of drugs, apparently, but that’s not why she left. The kid she’d kneed was the son of the county sheriff. Maybe if that hadn’t happened, maybe she would have steadied down and . . .” Risa’s voice died.
For a time there was only the thump and grate of tires over a rough dirt road.
“Do you really blame yourself for the choices Cherelle is making now?” Shane asked finally.
“My mind doesn’t. My emotions . . .” Risa shrugged slightly and tried to explain what she rarely thought about. “She was my mother and my sister and my friend all in one.”
“Is she the same girl now that you remember from fifteen years ago?” he asked.
Risa wanted to say yes. She couldn’t. “Sometimes. Just sometimes.”
“And those are the times that really hurt.”
She closed her eyes for an instant. “How did you know?”
“I have my share of fifteen-year-old regrets. And they don’t change a damn thing about the world today.”
“Your father?”
“And my mother. I wanted them to love me as much as I loved them, but I gave up on my father before I was ten. It took me longer to see what my mother was and wasn’t.”
Even now the words stuck in Shane’s throat, in his mind. Until a few years ago he had blamed his father for everything, a blanket condemnation born of a boy’s helplessness and rage. “She never stood up for her own child against him, even when I was way too young to do it myself. Especially then. She’d just wring her hands and make cupcakes. Jesus. To this day I can’t stand the sight of cupcakes.”
Risa ached for the boy he had been. “Did your father beat you?”
“That would have been too crude. Bastard Merit isn’t a crude man. He simply, systematically, stripped me of every thread of self-respect. Nothing personal. He does it to everyone who hangs around him long enough.”
She let out a long breath. “And here I thought he just got bad press.”
Shane smiled. “The man gives more than two billion dollars a year to various tear-jerking causes. It improved his press to no end. Mother’s idea, by the way. It hurt her that her husband had a reputation as the biggest shit-heel since Nero.”
“What a pair we are,” Risa said. “I always wanted a real family, and you always wanted to get the hell away from yours.”
“Like I said, I’m no good at the relationship thing.”
“How would you know?”
“Mother tells me every time we talk and I refuse to ‘get along with’ my sweet old man.”
“Well, that clinches it. You’re hopeless. Your mother ought to know, seeing as she’s such a howling expert on healthy relationships.”
Silence, then a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I never looked at it that way,” Shane admitted.
“As an adult?”
“Yeah.”
“If it helps, I avoid looking at Cherelle that way every chance I get.”
He hesitated. “That could be dangerous.”
“I figured that out about the time I was playing hurdles in the casino. But . . .”
“But Cherelle still saved your ass when you were fifteen.”
“Yes.”
Shane could picture it all too well, including the part that Risa didn’t talk about. “Did you ever think your ass wouldn’t have needed saving if Cherelle hadn’t been having sex in the backseat while the sheriff’s son raced through the night drinking beer and listening to all the grunts and moans?”
Risa didn’t answer, which told Shane that his assumption had been right.
“Someday,” he said, “you might think about the fact that you and Cherelle ended up in different places because you started out different in the same place.”
“Then I have nothing left of my childhood but lies.”
“No, you have a child’s memory in an adult mind. Not the same thing at all. Your love for your friend was true.”
“And yours for your mother, your father?” Risa challenged.
“Inevitable. Hell, part of me still loves them. I just don’t like them worth a damn.”
Risa was still wrestling with that when the road bent to the right and ended in the dusty front yard of a clapboard house.
Las Vegas
November 4
Night
J
ohn Firenze sat
in his gleaming private office and wanted to kill something. Not just anything. One thing in particular. His fucking stupid nephew Cesar, whose fucking stupid face was plastered on every TV screen in Vegas.
It was just a matter of time before someone phoned an ID to the cops. Then Firenze would be answering questions before the Nevada Gaming Control Board. He would have to up his contributions to every politician in sight before this mess went away.
The intercom buzzed, telling him that his executive assistant was still on duty. He approached the switch the way he would a coiled rattlesnake. “Yes?”
“Your nephew called from a pay phone.” The voice was quiet, cultured, and female.
“Did you tell him to give himself up to the police?” Firenze said.
“As you requested, yes, I did.”
“And?”
“He declined. Vigorously.”
Firenze could imagine. At the best of times Socks had a vicious temper. This wasn’t the best of times. He closed his eyes and tried to find a way out. There wasn’t one.
“Connect me with the police,” he said.
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
“So am I. At least his mother isn’t alive.”
“Yes, sir.”
Impatiently Firenze waited while he was put through to whichever badge was chasing tips on the “Hawaiian Shooter,” as the local Vegas channel had dubbed him. It was very important that Firenze, as a casino owner, appear to be cooperating with the police.
Not that he thought the cops had much chance of finding Socks really soon. Even his fucking stupid nephew would have enough sense to take the money his uncle had sent him and hang out on the houseboat at Lake Mead until they could cook up a passport and ship him off to some distant cousins in Italy and wait for everyone to forget his name.
Much as Firenze wanted to throttle the miserable son of a bitch himself, blood was still blood.
Sedona
November 4
Night
R
isa knocked on
Virgil O’Conner’s door again, waited again, knocked again. No light came on inside or out. No sound came from the small house.
“Still no one stirring?” Shane asked as he came around from the rear of the house.
“No. Is there a car parked back there?”
“Just a bike.”
“As in motorcycle?”
“As in pedal your ass off.” While Shane spoke, he absently rubbed the back of his neck.
“Still itchy?” she asked.
“Yeah. You?”
She hesitated. “It reminds me of . . .”
“What?”
Silence. A sigh. Her hands gleamed in the moonlight as she made a fluid gesture that managed to evoke both giving in and refusing to give in. “Wales.”
“Where you dreamed?”
She looked surprised that he had remembered. “Yes.”
He turned toward the blank windows and closed door of Virgil’s home. The wood was the color of sycamore bark, ghostly. “Is the house making you itchy?”
“Not quite. Or not only.” Risa made a frustrated sound. “Damn it, I don’t want this! I didn’t want it in Wales, and I don’t want it now.” She hissed between her teeth. “But it’s real, isn’t it?”
“For some people.”
“The odd ones, you mean.” The line of her mouth was unhappy.
“Someone with musical ability is odd to people who are tone deaf.”
“Are you?”
“Tone deaf?” he asked, deliberately misunderstanding.
She simply waited.
“Yes,” he said after a minute. “I’m one of the odd ones. I guess.” He shrugged. “Hard to tell. All I know for sure is I live in a time and a place that financially rewards an understanding of numbers, of patterns, that damned few people have. The fact that many of my business choices—also known as hunches—have no basis in Western logic is politely ignored. Whenever I’m interviewed, I join in the chorus and sing about long-term trends and short-term gains and analyzing markets with fuzzy formulas and all the reassuring bullshit that explains why I’m rich and the next guy isn’t.”
“You work hard.”
“So do other people.”
“You’re intelligent.”
“So are—”
“—other people,” she finished. “But you see things other people who are hardworking and intelligent don’t see, is that it?”
“If seeing is another word for dreaming, and if dreaming is another word for knowing without logic, yes, I see.”
“I missed that part of your biography,” she muttered.
“I never told anyone except you. How many people have you told that you dream of things you have no way of logically knowing?”
For a few moments it was so quiet that he could hear the night wind sliding down from the top of the bluffs, stirring over the land like a breath out of time.
“You,” she whispered. “That’s it. I don’t even like admitting it to myself.”
“Why?”
She made a sound that could have been a laugh or a cry. “When I was a child, I thought that was the real reason my first mother abandoned me, because I was different. And that finding out about my difference killed my adopted mother.”
“Did you dream that? Is that how you knew?”
She paused, then, “No. I don’t dream about myself. Just . . . things. Antiquities. And not all the time or all antiquities. Just special ones. Very special.”
“Like Wales.”
“Yes,” she said in a voice as soft as the wind. “Like Wales.”
“Is it the place or the ritual use of the artifacts associated with them that calls to you?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure they can be separated.” She rubbed her arms and turned away from him, toward the night. “I really don’t want to go into this. Ever since I figured out that most people didn’t react like me, I’ve done my best to ignore it.”
“It hasn’t gone away, has it?”
Angrily she spun back toward him. “What do you want from me?”
“The feeling that I’m not entirely alone in this. I’ve spent my life feeling like odd man out of the human race.”
“Okay. Fine. I’m odd woman out. Feel better?”
“Two odds make an even.” He grinned. “That makes us normal.”
She stared at him, then laughed. “Fuzzy formulas, huh?”
“Works for me.” He pulled her close, kissed her hard, and looked down into her moon-drenched face. “So do you. Wait here.”
Risa was still tasting him and at the same time trying to follow his so-called thought processes when she realized that he was opening Virgil O’Conner’s front door.
“You can’t just—” she began.
But he already had.
“—walk in,” she finished.
With his fingers still wrapped in his nylon wind shell, Shane felt around on the wall until he found a switch. Against the pouring white power of moonlight, the sixty-watt bulb in the overhead fixture looked like a round yellow candle flame. It was enough to show a couch with a pillow and a rumpled blanket, a scattering of thick books lying open on an old dining table, and an unlighted room beyond.
The only sound was that of something small and nocturnal that had been disturbed by the sudden light and was racing back toward darkness on tiny clawed feet. The air hinted of old food, more a suggestion than a smell. The feel of the place was indefinably empty. Not the ripe emptiness of recent death, but the thin sense of abandonment that comes without human life.
“Nobody home but the mice,” Shane said, stepping into the light.
Risa’s breath caught as she saw the gleam of something metallic in his hand. A gun.
Despite his comforting words, Shane checked out the dark room just off the main living area before he holstered his weapon at the small of his back once more.
The little room was like the rest of the house. Nobody home.
Shielding his hand with his jacket, he flipped on the light switch. The bedroom was no more than eight feet by eight feet, just enough space for a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, and a series of pegs on the wall that served as a closet. The area was messy, but not with the wild disorder of a place that has been searched. This was more the normal carelessness of a man who lived alone and didn’t care if dirty clothes gathered dust bunnies in the corner until washday, whenever that might be.
Rubbing the back of his neck, Shane looked around again. He didn’t know what was nibbling at him; he only knew that something was. Feeling like an idiot, he pulled out a penlight, knelt, and looked under the bed. All he saw were marks in the dust, as though something had been dragged out. Maybe a suitcase. It would explain the fact that no one was home and the only wheels around were on a bicycle.
He wished he could believe the nice, logical explanation. He couldn’t. He found himself sweeping the area underneath the bed with his light again and again. He
knew
something was there.
He just couldn’t see it.
“Shane?”
Something in Risa’s voice brought him to his feet in a rush that didn’t end until he was in the living room near her. “What is it?”
“The books.”
“Did you touch them?” he asked more sharply than he meant to.
“I didn’t have to. Look.”
He glanced over the top of her head to a book that was open on a table a few feet away. Then he narrowed his eyes and walked closer. A beautiful photo of the Snettisham torc took up one page. The opposite page showed a series of gold brooches.
“I’m trying to believe it’s a coincidence,” Risa said.
“Having any luck?”
“No.”
“Neither am I.”
“The gold was kept in those boxes we found at Cherelle’s place,” Risa said bleakly. “I sensed it.”
Shane didn’t point out that she hadn’t said anything about it. He didn’t have to, because he had sensed the same thing.
And everything they found tied Risa’s old friend more tightly to a theft that had ended in murder.
“Cherelle must have gotten the gold from Virgil O’Conner,” Risa said unhappily. “That’s what Socks meant when he said something about her getting it in Sedona. But where did Virgil get it? And how? This isn’t the home of a man who has millions to spend on solid gold antiquities.”
Shane pulled out his communications unit. “No cell coverage,” he said. “Figures.” He recorded a voice message that would go out to Rarities as soon as the unit got within range of a cell. “Let’s see if we can find anything personal here that would speed up a Rarities search on him. If not, they’ll have to make do with the addresses on the box. Do you have any gloves?”
“I always carry exam gloves in my purse. They won’t fit you.”
“Then I’ll just have to watch over your shoulder.”
“And tell me what to do,” she muttered as she opened her purse.
“I was looking forward to that especially.”
“Ha ha.” She snapped on the gloves. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you I feel like slime going through someone’s house this way.”
“I’m not wild about it myself.”
“But you’re going to do it.”
“If it would make my neck stop itching, I’d turn this place upside down.”
“I’d help,” she admitted.
Risa started her search right where she was. She flipped through the books with the efficiency of someone accustomed to sorting through pages filled with dense text and artifacts.
As promised, Shane looked over Risa’s shoulder. The books covered everything possibly gold and probably related to Celtic style from 1000 b.c. to 1000 a.d. The pages that detailed figurines, brooches, torcs, bracelets, knives, and masks were often dog-eared. Other than that, and notes in the margins written with a kind of cramped desperation, the worn books held nothing of Virgil O’Conner’s life before today.
There were no drawers, wastebaskets, boxes, or any other place in the main living area where papers might have collected.
Or gold hidden.
“Was there a desk in the other room?” she asked.
“No.”
“Telephone?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll start in the kitchen.”
It didn’t take long. The kitchen was smaller than the bedroom. The phone was a primitive wall model that didn’t even have a speed-dial feature. The counter below the phone was stacked with bills and materials marked “Occupant.” O’Conner didn’t have an active social calendar.
“Electricity,” Risa said, flipping through the messy stack of papers, working backward in time. “Telephone. No water bill, so he must have a well. No personal letters. Property tax bill, soon to be overdue. Bank account statement showing three hundred dollars and thirty-one cents. Savings account with one hundred and one and sixteen cents. Repair bill for a new tube on a bike tire. Random grocery receipts scattered through the rest. End of papers.”
“No credit card bills,” Shane said. “No vehicle payments. Wonder if he even had a driver’s license.”
“Maybe he kept business stuff somewhere else.”
“Maybe,” Shane said, “but I’ve got a feeling he kept everything that mattered to him right here.”
“A feeling.”
“Yeah.”
She sighed and began going through kitchen drawers and cupboards. It didn’t take long, because there wasn’t much to see. None of it was useful, unless you cared that Virgil O’Conner liked pinto beans and rice, with occasional cans of grapefruit juice to spice things up. The electric stove had pots and pans and burned-on food. The refrigerator was small and empty but for a few pickles floating in cloudy liquid. A gel-filled knee brace and a tray of ice cubes waited in the freezer.
“I really don’t want to paw through his closet,” she said.
“He doesn’t have one. Just a dresser.”
“Oh, goody. I feel so much better.”
Shane watched her walk into the bedroom, sensed her shiver of recognition more than saw it, and waited, wondering if she finally trusted him enough to share what she had spent a lifetime trying to hide.
“O’Conner kept the gold here,” she said in a low voice.
“Thank you.”
The smile she gave Shane was almost sad. “Two odds make an even, right?”