Evil in All Its Disguises

by Hilary Davidson

  CHAPTER 17

  Gavin pulled out a chair for me before taking a seat for himself, and I had a fleeting vision of us being on the world’s most uncomfortable first date. He made an effort, one that was far greater than Martin’s offhand charm, but it felt contrived. He was so eager to please. I wondered if he was doing this for Martin’s benefit somehow, even though his boss was on the other side of the world. Maybe he thought I was in touch with Martin and might report back to him one day. He had no reason to know the truth.

  “What do you think of the china? Exquisite, isn’t it?”

  “Stunning,” I agreed. “Where did you find it?”

  “My friend Josef sent it from Prague. He has the most impeccable taste of any man I know.”

  I continued to stare at the china, desperately trying to think of something to say. As if reading my mind, Gavin said, “Lily, I hope you don’t mind my speaking about Martin. I know you two didn’t part on good terms, but I feel as if he’s the elephant in the room with us.”

  “It’s fine. It just feels strange to meet up with someone I only knew through him,” I admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen you except with Martin around.” I took a bite of the savory cheese bread. It was every bit as good as it smelled.

  “He left me watching over you at Pantheon’s Christmas party one year. He had a business call.”

  I’d forgotten about that completely. Gavin had hovered over me like a mother hen. “Yes, about that hotel in Shanghai. I’d forgotten that.” Of course, I couldn’t tell him about the conversation Martin and I had had afterwards. Did Robo-Rex take care of my girl, like I told him to?

  You shouldn’t call him that, I’d said, but I’d also laughed.

  Just wait till you see him roll over and do tricks.

  Well, he did fetch me champagne.

  Bet he had his tongue hanging out the whole time. You should’ve had him roll over and play dead.

  Martin, you really shouldn’t call him that.

  All right. What about Gavin the Gray? Is that a better title?

  I don’t understand why you’re mean when you talk about him. He must be doing good work, or you’d fire him, right?

  He doesn’t do good work. He does great work. Martin drained a glass of scotch. Wish I could fire him, but I need him around. Sometimes, I think he’d be better at running the company than I am. All he does is work. He doesn’t care about anything else.

  Gavin’s voice broke into my thoughts. “I prefer it this way.”

  “Sorry. What?”

  A shadow passed over his face. He cleared his throat. “I only meant that it’s nice to get to speak with you, without having Martin burble on all the time with his humble brags.”

  I realized belatedly that Gavin had been trying to give me another compliment in his stiff-necked way. I blushed slightly, but all I said was, “His what?”

  “You know. ‘Oh, poor me, I have to go to this awful dinner so some silly people can give me another award.’”

  “You forgot to add the part about the award being for all of his selfless humanitarian work.”

  A dark look full of understanding passed between us. We both knew the score, and we were in full agreement. I took a long, satisfying hit of black coffee. That was just what I needed.

  “I take it that you two aren’t speaking at this point,” Gavin ventured.

  “No. It’s been a long time since we’ve been in touch.” I doubted that Martin had told Gavin anything that had happened back in January; he had plenty of reason to bury that. For all intents and purposes, he’d planned to kill my sister; the fact that he was mistaken in the identity of the woman he wanted dead was just a technicality to me.

  “I suppose I should mention that Martin hasn’t stopped talking about you. He still thinks you’ll end up together one day.”

  “That will never happen.” I set my cup down with more emphasis than I’d planned, and a little coffee sloshed out. “Damn,” I muttered. Most of it had ended up in the saucer—the cups were made for tea, not coffee—but a dark brown spot wound up on the table. I dabbed at it with my napkin. Gavin didn’t seem to notice.

  “Not that it’s any of my business, but I’m extremely glad to hear that, Lily.”

  I glanced at him, wondering if the lapdog had been replaced by something more assertive, or if these sentiments had been boiling underneath a calm, unflappable surface for a long time. Martin took a sly amusement in Gavin’s awkward manner that was hard to hide. Maybe Gavin had finally caught on.

  “It sounds like you two aren’t getting along as well as you used to.”

  “I don’t know that we’ve ever been that close,” Gavin said. “Martin has been rather dependent on me. Of course, he also loves to make fun of me, but I don’t take that personally. That’s just Martin’s style. He…” There was something bitter in Gavin’s face, but he reined it in. “He’d love for everyone to think he does a great job running Pantheon, but the truth is he’s just extraordinarily talented at claiming the credit for other people’s work.” His head was down, but he was watching closely for my reaction.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

  “I didn’t think it would. I knew you would understand.” He didn’t smile at me, but the muscles in his face relaxed considerably. Instead of the guarded, unemotional man I was used to, this one seemed like someone I could relate to. “You should have seen him at the board meeting in Paris. He was crowing about how he’d increased revenues in a terrible global climate. The truth is, I’m the one who has increased the revenues. The numbers overall are terrible. The only reason we’re showing a profit is because of the Mexican hotels I’ve acquired. Martin is so weak-willed, he wouldn’t even go into the Mexican market, you know.”

  “I remember,” I said. “He came down here, years ago, and someone tried to kidnap him. He told me he’d never set foot in the country again, because it was run by drug cartels.”

  “Exactly. It was only when I went in, with a plan and with all of the necessary connections, that Pantheon opened a Mexican division. We’re behind every international chain here. I can’t tell you how much catching up we’ve had to do. Yet we’re already in the black. At the company meeting, I had to bite my tongue bloody not to shout that in front of everyone. Pharaoh was too busy patting himself on the back, in public.”

  “Pharaoh?” I almost choked on a piece of cantaloupe.

  Gavin’s face paled. “I’m sorry, Lily, I shouldn’t have assumed—”

  “No, that’s hilarious.” I chewed thoughtfully. “Jesse, my best friend, used to come up with nicknames for Martin, but none of them ever fit so perfectly. I love it.”

  We gazed at each other as I weighed his words. Part of me wondered if Gavin might be plotting against Martin for control of the company. A vengeful section of my brain lit up at the thought of that, even as the rational side said it was none of my business. Go for it, I thought. Dimly, I thought I could hear the sound of Claudia’s wicked laughter. She would have been more than impressed.

  “So what did Martin have to say about this place?” I asked. “I can imagine him becoming apoplectic when he saw the guest rooms or the bungalows.”

  Gavin’s head turned to me sharply. “You saw the bungalows?”

  “I went for a walk this morning.”

  “Do you know that every one of them is fully rented for the next two years?” The pride in Gavin’s voice was unmistakable.

  “That’s… incredible.” It didn’t seem polite to point out that none of the bungalows was ready for guests, unless the occupants liked the idea of plastic-sheeted windows or a lack of interior walls.

  Gavin picked at some sliced fruit, sawing it with a knife. “Martin just enjoys the profits we’re raking in here. He hasn’t seen this hotel, or any of the others in Mexico.”

  “But he always checks out properties himself before making an offer.”

  Gavin gave an elaborate shrug. “He used to do that. Lately, Pharaoh has been slou
ghing off the real work. I know he’s been globe-trotting, looking for new business opportunities, but nothing has materialized in months.”

  A year and a half had gone by since I’d broken my engagement to Martin; it had been nine months since I’d seen or spoken to him. That was more than long enough for circumstances at Pantheon to change. “It must be hard for him to see this division outshining the others, when he’s had nothing to do with it.”

  “Especially because he’s petrified of Mexico,” Gavin added. “He truly believes if he sets foot in this country, he’ll be kidnapped.”

  “That sounds paranoid, even for Martin.”

  “I suppose. To be fair, there was a kidnapping threat against him last year. That happened when I was opening our first Mexican hotel in Cabo.”

  “That’s terrible. Martin’s already paranoid about safety. He doesn’t need anything to push that further.”

  Gavin’s lips tightened into a grimace. “Of course, Martin was perfectly fine with sending me here in his stead.”

  CHAPTER 18

  It was only later that morning, when I was lying naked, face-down on a massage table—my senses blurred by the sound of soft guitar music and the mingled scent of papaya and cocoa and a flower I couldn’t identify—that Gavin’s words really sank in. I hadn’t had time to think about them before that; after breakfast, I had a headache, and went up to my room. I woke up more than an hour later when the phone rang; it was the spa calling to tell me I needed to come down early to fill in a medical history and sign a waiver. I was discombobulated and achy, and I started to wonder if I’d picked up some kind of bug on the plane. It was hard to tell how much of the problem was my stressing out over Skye. Thinking about her seemed to hurt my head, because I couldn’t decide whether I was afraid for her or furious at her.

  In the spa, I started to puzzle out which was the lesser of two evils: stay a little longer at the Hotel Cerón until I understood what was going on with Skye, or move to another hotel and check out Acapulco like a responsible travel journalist. What I really wanted to do was abandon the city entirely and grab the first flight back to New York. The latter was seriously tempting: New York was my hometown and my first love, my best friend was there… and so was Bruxton. Something caught my breath, just a little, every time I thought of him, a part of me that was hopeful in spite of everything in my life that pointed the other way.

  You can run, whispered a voice from the far reaches of my brain, but you can’t hide.

  I’m not trying to hide, I shot back.

  There were plenty of reasons for me to go back to my hometown. It meant visiting my sister’s grave, as well as my father’s. While I wasn’t in touch with Martin, I was on speaking terms with his teenage son, and I owed him a visit. Ridley’s mother had disappeared from his life when he was small, and he’d come to learn enough about his father’s Machiavellian ways that he despised him. For a time, Ridley had turned to my sister, who—in spite of being an addict—had nurtured him in her own way. Claudia had thought of Ridley as a little brother and, partly because I wanted to honor her memory, I tried to as well. I’d seen him once in the spring, while I’d been playing Florence Nightingale to Jesse. Ridley had come to Jesse’s apartment, bearing a bag of old-fashioned candies and a compact disc he’d burned for me with songs by different acts, basically a modern analog of the mix tape boys had sometimes made for me when I was in high school. I hadn’t recognized any of them except for Johnny Cash, but Ridley’s choice—“Sunday Morning Coming Down”—only made me sad. Talking to Ridley was depressing, too. It wasn’t so much what he said, because he spoke very little. It was his difficulty making eye contact and his stubborn silence. It was the way he’d suddenly thrown his head on my shoulder while we were sitting on the sofa, as if he were a young boy and I was his mother. There was something in his frantic need for contact that drained me.

  Ridley’s face hovered in my mind, and when I remembered his father was in Burma, my shoulders hunched up.

  “Is okay?” the masseuse said, kneading my upper back and summoning the only two words of English I’d heard her speak. She repositioned a couple of the heated stones that she’d lined up with my spine.

  “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” My face was mashed into what spas called a cradle, a horseshoe-shaped cushion that kept my spine straight. When I opened my eyes, I could see the masseuse’s foot with its bunions. I closed my eyes again.

  “Is okay?” she asked again.

  “Is okay.” I repeated after her. That was true of the massage, but not of the thoughts racing through my brain. Ridley was undoubtedly in New York while his father traveled for work. Ridley, with his issues with drugs and violence and all of his emotional baggage. Of course, Martin left him with a guard to watch him, because of kidnapping threats, but Ridley had ways of giving the guard the slip. When Ridley had visited me in the spring, he—

  My upper body jolted up and the flat, hot stones clattered to the floor. It was as if someone had shot an electric current into my body. The masseuse leaped away, a torrent of rapid-fire Spanish pouring out of her, but I wasn’t listening. I sat up straight, hearing Gavin’s voice in my head. There was a kidnapping threat against Martin last year. That happened when I was opening our first Mexican hotel in Cabo.

  For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Kidnapping threat. It all fell into place so suddenly that I felt cold shock, as if I’d just jumped into ice water.

  “Que pasa?” the masseuse asked me. What’s wrong? Her voice was sharp. I’d scared her.

  “Pido disculpas. Tengo que vestirme.” I’m sorry. I have to get dressed.

  “Estás enferma?” Are you sick? She was looking at me as if I were demented.

  “No, estoy bien. Tengo que ir.” I’m fine. I have to go.

  She pulled up the sheet, holding it in front of me until I grasped it, realizing she wanted me to cover up my breasts. I was so shell-shocked I hadn’t given a thought to the fact I was naked. Then she opened the door, shaking her head and muttering something that sounded a lot like loca, before disappearing with a sharp click.

  Sitting there, on a table, Skye’s disappearance started to make sense to me for the first time. If she was involved with Martin, and Martin was in danger of being kidnapped, there was a very real reason to fear that that was what had happened to Skye. That would explain why she’d disappeared so suddenly: someone had snatched her. She’d never planned to ditch me; she was coming back to the table, but she didn’t get the chance.

  I swung my legs down, putting it together in my mind. Where had Skye been going? Was it possible that she had gone up to her room with someone? Maybe that was why her suitcase was missing, as well as her laptop and camera and valuables.

  What if Skye were being held for ransom because of her connection to Martin?

  I slid off the table and into the terrycloth robe the spa provided me. My feet went into the plastic slippers, and I opened the door and rushed down the hall. I could hear the massage therapist talking about me, and the part I could translate wasn’t flattering. She was crazy! She threw the stones everywhere!

  I needed to talk to Gavin and Denny immediately, but I could tell that if I made a break for it in my robe and slippers, I’d be restrained by the staff. I rushed down the hall to the changing room, found the key for my locker, and got dressed in under a minute. Bra. Panties. Simple royal blue dress without mud stains on it. I panicked for a moment when I realized my bracelet wasn’t there, before remembering it was upstairs in my room, sharing space in the safe with my necklace and laptop.

  The emails. What about the emails? My gut instinct was that Skye hadn’t written them. They looked like something she’d send, and they’d come from her account, but there was something off about them. Was it crazy to think that Skye might have been forced to send the messages? Maybe the emails were to throw people off her trail, and the ransom demand would come in later.

  I hurried to the hallway, but I tripped and fell against a wall; everything was spi
nning around me, and I felt faintly nauseous. But the sensation passed, and I headed out of the spa and down a deserted hallway. I passed a series of tiny boutiques, all barricaded with signs saying they were closed. The eerie isolation of the Hotel Cerón was getting to me. I raced to the hotel’s reception area, desperate to find someone, anyone, who could help Skye.

  CHAPTER 19

  My mind was reeling as I raced along the hallway. I’d been wondering if Skye was playing some kind of game with me; for all I knew, she wanted me to think she’d left Mexico while she was really holed up in another room at the same hotel. Stranger things had happened. But with each step I took, that possibility seemed more remote.

  I was desperate to talk to Gavin. However unpleasant Apolinar was, I needed to see him, as well. Suddenly, the security tapes were of the utmost importance. They would reveal who Skye was with when she left the hotel, if she’d been drugged, and whether force had been applied. But when I got to reception, the first person I saw was Denny. She was hugging a tall woman with burgundy hair, olive skin and figure-hugging jeans. When Denny pulled back I saw it was Roberta Needleston, and I felt the urge to run back to the spa. But Roberta spotted me before I could.

  “Is that Lily? Lily Moore! Lily! Lily!” she called, her shrill voice reverberating from the tiles. “Hello, beautiful, how are you?” She stumbled forward, grinning and throwing her arms wide for a hug.

  “Roberta. What a surprise.” I inhaled her wine fumes, but they were immediately squeezed out of my lungs by her bear hug.

  “It’s good to see you, Lily! It’s been a long time.” Roberta, to be fair, was a sweet-tempered person who never said a cross word to anyone, at least not while she was drunk, which was virtually all the time. She was the publisher, editor, and main writer behind a wedding magazine that came out every six months. As far as I could tell, it pretty much repeated its content with every issue, obviously relying on a new crop of engaged ladies to buy the recycled material.