I hated the name. I hated the idea of her being in the Orient. And like the brat I am, I refused to even discuss it. So, the second she left, I called my old stand-by Mistress, who was delighted to oblige my whims.
One addiction or another with me.
At the time, Amber seemed marginally safer than vials of snow I had stashed in Boston from Morpheus. But with all things, perspective mattered. In retrospect, I would’ve been better off going to spend a week with Mamma Morpheus.
Amber was a train wreck of emotions, and by the end of the week, I was ready to go on a binger. Smart Sal should’ve stayed south after returning Amber home to Texas, but I avoided everything—Deacon, Anna, Juliet, and the wreck of my home with Kaci.
Part of me was ashamed.
I made promises to end the nightmarish Christmas wedding and had yet to fulfill those. Because of my reluctance, the day my life would end was being plotted out like an epic novel. I had tasted champagne, food, and more wedding cake than anyone ever should. According to Cat, Emily had tried on ten billion wedding gowns. I went into my father’s tailor, ordered a black suit, and called it done in less than half an hour.
I was losing grip faster than a shortening-ed up anal fist job. I wasn’t just getting reamed out; I was getting plowed by a giant two-and-a-half-foot rig bit. It was bad. And the more I thought about it, the worse it became.
By the time I got back home to Boston, I was ready to drown in a whiskey barrel. Little did I anticipate, Cat would be sitting in the driveway waiting to catch my ass.
Have I mentioned how much I love having her as my sister?
“What are you doing here?”
“I have cheese calzones and a case of beer, interested?”
“Hell, to the fuck yes!”
I swing the duffel from the trunk onto my shoulder and grab her box of fun from the front seat. “Tell me you didn’t fuck Amber?”
I give her that look—the I am a damn Raniero Whatd’ya-Think-Happened?
“How are things at work?” I ask, unlocking the door. The stench of death is unreal as I click on the light and see the mess of my house. “What the fuck?”
“Oh my God!” Cat screams. “That is….”
“Garrett Wheelerson’s body.”
I drop my duffel and grab my phone. “Vega, I have a dead body in my house…”
“Do you want to call the police or have a team?”
Either is risky.
If I call the police, then they’ll wonder why the fuck a Raniero has a dead body in the house. If I bring in a team, I run the risk of tipping off my father too soon.
Cat blinks at me as I say, “Bring a team.”
I hang up and look at the destruction. It’s different from the house in Sugargrove, but my intuition forces me upstairs. “Where are you going?”
“Up.”
“Shit!” She runs after me. “I’m not staying downstairs alone. What do you want to do?”
“Oh God…” Tucked safely in my bed is Daisy with a single bullet in her forehead. “No…”
“What the hell happened here?” Cat asks. “This looks like a murder/suicide.”
“Nah,” I say, shaking my head. “This is professional hit job made to look like that.”
“Your true colors are showing.”
Checking my watch, I count the days until Emily returns home. “We have six days to make this disappear.”
“Are you fucking kidding?”
“No,” I huff, heading back downstairs.
From the split level, she asks, “Now where are you going?”
Lifting my hands, I answer, “Outside to eat my fucking calzone.”
Vega didn’t just send one team. He sent three to expedite things. The lead was a man named Henry Duff who agreed with my theory. Cat and I slept in the guest house while the forensics team analyzed everything overnight. The bodies were sent to their lab and a missing person’s report would be filed as a decoy.
I didn’t want to work the crime scene and I so much as told Vega that the next morning. In agreement to keeping it on the low, I offered to run the investigation from the front end—who their associations were, who Garrett stuck his rod in, and what the motivations for their death might be.
And why my house?
Cat took the week off from work to go shopping for new things, and I called in a Sibyl janitorial team to clean the place. We needed to make it all vanish.
With Cat and I camped out in my untouched office—which seemed weird to me—considering everywhere else was destroyed, I ran everything through Georgia and Jas. With my mind on things other than the criminal world I couldn’t control, I started calling Zoe every day in Washington to check in.
I was slipping back into my old role and ignoring calls from The Unholy until Serene called on my work line. “We have an issue.”
I expected something to be wrong with Iris. “Is she okay?”
“Ashley attacked Amber.”
“Oh, Jesus…” I leaned back in my chair. “What do you mean attacked?”
“I mean she caught Dom and her in a…moment…and beat the living hell out of Amber. We thought she was going to be okay until her water broke. The baby was delivered—stillborn—at thirty weeks.”
“Where is Dom?”
“That’s what we don’t know,” she whispers, crying. “Ashley grabbed Romeo and took off. Dom is gone. I need you answering your phone. A warrant has been issued by Cruz for Ashley’s arrest, but you know as well as I do…if Dom finds her first…”
“He’ll kill her,” I reply, gripping the bridge of my nose.
“You got it.”
“Where is Nick?”
“With me,” she says. “And Deacon has been staying with Trudy.”
I quietly snicker to myself. “Can anything else go wrong?”
“I saw the case come up on the site,” she mentions, knowing about the murders. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I just need to know why two of my employees were murdered in my house.”
“The simplest of answers, Sal.”
I glance at Cat, briefly wondering if she had it in her. Of course, she did. She was a Raniero. “Run it.”
“… Which one?”
“All,” I reply, knowing we’re speaking in code. “See if anything pops up.”
“Will do.”
I hang up the phone, still staring at Cat, and I ask, “Did you do it?”
“Kill Daisy and Garrett?”
I nod.
“No, but someone wants you to think I did.” I furrow my brow. “Did the cameras not pick up anything?”
“Two people, both in black.”
“That’s descriptive,” she giggles. “Don’t accuse me again, Sal.”
“I had to ask,” I excuse, lighting a smoke.
She cocks her head. “Did you do it?”
“I was balls deep in Amber.”
“Sounds like you weren’t the only one,” she reprimands, clasping her fingers together. “You need to stay the fuck away from that girl.”
“You’re making that sound so easy.”
“It was until you started falling off the wagon and going to hang out with The Unholy in Texas,” she alleges. “Think about it. Almost every time you go down there, something bad happens. Maybe it’s the heat.”
“It’s winter…”
“Maybe it’s the climate or the atmosphere or the fucking people! Salvatore, I don’t fucking know, but I’m watching my brother self-destruct as his two lines get closer to intersecting by the day.”
“What should I do?”
“Go back to fucking work,” she snaps, waving her hands about. “And not to RE!”
“I can’t get out of it yet…there are too many big deals on the line…”
She closes her mouth and glances away. Calmness overcomes her fire as she contains it within a second—I’m so envious. She leans forward and says, “There is always going to be another big deal on the line; we run the fucking mob. Figure out a da
te to get out and fucking go, but make damn sure you let me know when that is. Because I’m leaving too.”
“Who is the most likely to have done this?”
“One of the disenfranchised workers Garrett had an affair with,” she answers. “But one of them was a mother of four. While my sleuthing maybe off, I’m not buying she would risk it. Any other mother might but not Lyra. She’s busted her ass for everything she has.”
“Is she the one whose husband was a firefighter?”
“Yeah, he died. Leaving RE hurt her, but she felt she had no choice.”
“Because Garrett was a fucking scary asshole,” I add.
“And the other one was Debra and she is well into her grandmother years,” Cat informs. “And I don’t think Grandma baking pies to bring to work on Monday morning did it, either.”
“Serene said think simple.”
“What about Emily?” She bravely suggests the unthinkable. “Do we know anything at all about Maka? Or the Grangers?”
“Not a fuckin clue about Maka,” I remark, rocking in my chair and chewing on the tip of a pen between drags of my cigarette. “But we’re about to.” I send the quick text message to Georgia with Maka Overim’s name and website. “The Grangers are sleazy, but I don’t think they would.”
“Eric Henderson.”
“He’s dead; I killed him.”
“Parents? Siblings?”
Silence washes through me as I remember that night in the shed. I was no better than Nico. Or Deacon for that matter. I killed Eric in cold blood because he raped Emily. She was twelve. She got pregnant. The baby, Noah, went to live in Alaska with her grandparents. And my father had her fixed by Jack Kerris.
“You know I never thought about what I was doing,” I whisper. “I just kind of blacked out and went into kill mode.”
Just like Atticus warned I would do after his science experiment took hold in my brain.
But the only thing was—at eighteen, I hadn’t been to his lab yet.
I was a killer long before CAE v2.0 came into my world.
“Sally…”
I glance up, leaving the darkness, and know my sister is innocent. “Tell me about the attack in the parking garage.”
“We’ve been over it.”
“Do it again,” I say, getting up and flopping on the leather love seat. I hear the worker bees, sanding the floor and repairing the house, but I pay them no mind. “Please.”
“We had just come out of the little boutique near the café.”
“The one by the office?”
“Yes,” she says. “We were almost to the car when these two goons jumped out from behind a car. I thought they wanted to rob us.”
“What kind of car?”
“Black SUV…”
“Did they get out of it?”
“I don’t know,” she says, closing her eyes.
“Think Cat.”
She shakes her hands by the side of her head. “I am!” She looks up. “There was a man.”
“Where?”
“At the café, we both mentioned he was weird and kind of creeping us out. That’s why we went into the boutique. Because we thought if we went in there that maybe he would be gone by the time we left. I didn’t want him following us to the car.”
“Can you describe him to a sketch artist?”
“Yeah, I probably can.”
Every case starts with a baseline.
And my job is fucking it up.
44
Cryptic Muses
With the house coming back together, I call Vega and ask him to send one of his best paper and pencil guys. Turns out it is a she—Kristen Asher. She’s young, but after reading over her resume, I know she’s good. Kristen is not only a skilled artist but a talented profiler. Her dual role could potentially unlock clues in Cat.
Every agent approaches a case with their perspective.
When the perspective shifts, so does the vision.
Even in terms of our interrogative art with Nissa, each of the four viewed the spectacle differently. I believe it is those minor details which have the potential to rebuild a case. Everyone sees things with their own eyes. And just because I didn’t see what you did doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
It’s similar to passing on a secret from one person to the next, it becomes elaborated or deteriorated or misspoken, so the big pictures with all parties is imperative.
While Kristen and Cat are in my study, going over every little detail that Cat can remember, I chew my way through the cap of a pen thinking about the transmission of information. I should’ve talked to Ashley. Not just threatened her on her wedding day. It wasn’t that I doubted Dom, but she could’ve provided me with insight as to where in the hell she might have ran off to with Romeo.
In essence, my teeth are gnawing away like a rat on a plastic toy because I fucked up.
And I know I fucked up.
I let the corrupt mafia brain lead the cognitive agent.
To be honest, I’m getting tired of bad shit happening and changing gears in my mind may just get me back where I belong. I stop approaching every request like my father’s son and start a more sinister, twisted way of thinking. The danger is I end up floating down a shit river full of maimed corpses and heinous beasts where the only thing good is the high at the end just to stop the replay.
In many ways, being in my father’s world is easier. I expect the language and knowing the lingo is half the battle. With cases like the Bordertown Murders, there is no expected language, but a puzzle with jagged pieces dumped on a laptop that I’m left to decipher.
These are the choices the Pixie left me with.
I could abandon my post, but then I leave a lot of loose threads dangling in the wind for someone else to come pick over and fuck up. The Unholy was created to usurp our father’s control, but like everything in life, The Four Horsemen are evolving, too.
With my bleak outlook in hand, my phone rings on the arm of the reclining chair. It’s Hot Pants and I should answer it.
“Raniero…”
“I ran the phone numbers,” she solemnly says.
“What no Hi, you Italian stud! or How is the sausage hanging?”
I hear her breathe without a single keystroke or wind-up toy in the background. “Nissa hired Jack Kerris.”
All the shit misfiring in my brain comes to a sudden, abrupt screech of rubber tires. The marks against this man I have trusted for so long keep piling up. I keep trying to forgive them and use them to my advantage, but the time is coming where excuses no longer work. I take on a professional tone, “Thank you for informing me, Agent Wills.”
“Anytime, sex machine.”
I need to hit the ground with my own boots. I hate foot work because I never know when I will trip, stumble, and fall into a pit of snakes. I don’t have a choice this time.
I mentally flip back through Kaci’s files. She became involved with Jack Kerris at a very young age. Her desire to marry the man should’ve been my first clue because she never would have married down. Her husband needed to be as lethal and diabolic as she was.
I’m not sure what that says about me.
Holding the phone, I call the one guy who knows it all—the complete, unedited story. He’s seen some shit and came out the other side to a blissful retirement in a home outside of Austin, near Lake Travis.
“D… I need you to call me back, Hoss.”
I spend the rest of the day, pacing the floor and waiting for the callback from Dale Archer. He was my partner until he up and left me. It wasn’t my fault. Namely the extenuating circumstances around the affair he was having with his niece, Priscilla “Jaid” Grace. They were crazy about one another, and for a while, we were incredible in working cases together because we all had a connection back to Kaci.
Everything always goes back to Kaci.
But I’ve ventured off the path because her directions ceased.
What would Kaci do?
I peek in at my sister in a tran
ce-like state as she continues to describe the man she saw at the café in detail. I close and lock the door to the man cave and drop the curtains. I drop the wooden blinds and turn off the lights. I pull off my Henley and gray sweatpants, crack my neck and knuckles, and kneel on the floor in the middle of the plush cream rug.
“We need to talk. You and I.”
I close my eyes, trying to find her. I know she is with me. I know she is here. In my mind, I spot her on the sofa with her pink cropped hair and tattered blue jeans and ripped up Tool concert tee. Her feet are bare, but her toes are painted a teal…aquamarine…color. She smiles at me.
“First things first, Pretty Boy.” I hear her voice and tears spill from beneath my lashes. “Stop that. You don’t have time for that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’ve got us in a real pickle.”
“Why do you think I’m doing this?”
“Too many drugs probably, but I’m not going to harp on you about that. Fuck knows you’ve been through a lot. Your sister is right, you need to cut the ties with Amber. Maybe I should’ve told you that months ago. If the bitch starts being wack, it’s time to react.”
I laugh—alone and crying. “Maybe this is a breakdown.”
“No, this is a call for help. Not a cry. Big difference, don’t weaken yourself to something you’re not.” She slides off the sofa and crawls across the floor. Her golden green eyes sparkle and her skin is as fine as the day I met her. The days before all the chemicals took hold. The cancer was always there. Always present. Always waiting for the right time to strike. “Stop rehashing me. This isn’t about me.”
“You shouldn’t be able to read my thoughts.”
“I’m in your head dumb ass.”
I can’t stop sobbing. “What do I do?”
“Break it down. Stop looking at all of the shit going wrong. What is the most important thing?”
“Iris,” I whisper, answering easily.
“Then you do whatever is necessary to protect the asset.” She lays her hands on mine. I feel the chill of her aura pass through me. “Next problem is what are you going to do…”
“I don’t know. There is too much going on and I’m drowning.”
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