Out of Mind coa-2

by Stella Cameron

  Even in poor light Rock’s tattoos were a shock to the eyes. He shrugged and stepped inside.

  “Thank you so much for doing this,” Willow said. She had been in Marley’s flat when she got the call from Zinnia. Marley had heard everything and made it clear that either she went with Willow to do what she could to help at the Brandts, or Marley would join in with the protests that were bound to come when the family found out about the plan.

  “Fabio said he’ll catch up with us later,” Rock said. He whirled his ever-present hunk of keys and tools on their chain. “Could be he’s not keen on going over to that house at all, but I said I’d lend a hand.”

  “You’re a prince,” Willow said and kissed his cheek. “What’s Fabio afraid of?” she whispered while their faces were close.

  “Rabid bats? Voodoo? Disappearing like Chris did? Getting sucked into the case at all? Who knows? He’s a good guy.”

  Willow liked him even more for his defense of Fabio. “Sure he is. It’s natural to be nervous around all this.”

  “Well, you people have had plenty of practice,” he said with a smile that sent friendly crinkles from the corners of his eyes. “Me, I never could stay away from the action—any action. Er, we do have an audience, kid. They don’t look happy to see me. Who’s the dangerous-looking guy?”

  “Which one?”

  Rock U. raised one corner of his mouth. “The one sitting on the desk. I already know Ben Fortune when I see him.”

  “The other one is my brother, Sykes. And he is dangerous, but only if he’s got a reason not to like you.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay then, I’m fine. I am so likable it hurts sometimes.”

  Willow led him to Pascal’s office and ushered him inside. “This is my friend, Rock U. He’s a tattoo artist.”

  “Really?” Sykes said, and Willow admired how straight he kept his face.

  “His shop is in the building with my offices.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “We walked through it to get to you, remember?”

  In fact, she had completely forgotten. “That’s right. Rock’s taking Chris’s place on a job for me this morning.”

  Rock said, “Yes.”

  Willow looked sideways at him. “I’m really sorry, folks, but I’ll have to leave now. I’ll try to get back as early as possible.”

  Marley stood up. “Have they said what they want you to do—exactly?”

  “No.” And Willow didn’t appreciate Marley opening the door to questions, not that Marley did so deliberately.

  Willow couldn’t avoid looking at Sykes’s deep blue, very suspicious eyes. “What is this job that’s so important you have to leave in the middle of everything?” He looked significantly at the delicate key on its white velvet bed.

  “As much as anything else, it’s duty,” Willow said. “For some reason, Chloe Brandt trusted me. She wanted me to take over running her home and that isn’t a decision you make lightly.”

  “She seemed to,” Ben said neutrally.

  Willow ignored him. “Her best friend, Vanity, called Zinnia and asked to get hold of me. Vanity’s the model. Zinnia thinks fast so she put her off and contacted me directly herself. Evidently, Vanity was even closer to Chloe than I knew. She’s going to pieces and begging me to go over there to manage things in the coming days.”

  “So now you’re a funeral director?” Sykes said.

  Willow stared at him, and he had the grace to pull in one corner of his mouth in a rueful way.

  “If anyone can help them, you can,” Ben said, surprising Willow. “You’ll stay with her, Marley?”

  “Of course. And no one’s talking about arranging a funeral, Sykes—that won’t happen anytime soon, will it?”

  “Probably not,” Sykes said, already back to being cynical.

  Ben glanced at Rock U. as if he wished the man would disappear. “We’ll be around,” he told Willow, with emphasis on around.

  “You’re kidding me,” Sykes said. “You’re going to let her go back into that house?”

  “I can’t stop her if she wants to go,” Ben said, although Willow wasn’t fooled by his innocent expression. She wanted to know his angle.

  Pascal had been silent to this point. He stirred. “You really think this is a good idea, Ben? I don’t believe you like it any more than I do. If that’s true, put your foot down.”

  Rock U. whistled tunelessly and Ben laughed. “If that means you’d like to see me try stopping Willow from doing what she wants to,” Ben said to the man, “I can’t oblige. I pick my battles. And I always avoid sure losers.”

  “Yes,” Rock U. said, catching Willow’s narrow stare.

  “I don’t like it that I’ve got something to prove,” Willow said. “It’s not the only reason to go in there and do the best job I can, but I’m a pragmatist. Nothing will convince people I’m not part of some sort of killing campaign faster than if it gets around that I am in the Brandt house at Vanity’s and Val’s request. People don’t ask murderers into their homes.”

  “Mrs. Brandt was killed in that house,” Pascal said. He folded his arms over his broad chest. “You may not be allowed back there. Have you thought of that? It’s a crime scene. Do you want to be filmed for the news being turned away by the police?”

  Willow had already thought of this slant. The risk was worth taking. “Got to go now, folks. Keep a TV on so you don’t miss any action.” They deserved better from her than sarcasm. “That wasn’t funny. Sorry. Please don’t worry about us.”

  Walking away from them wasn’t easy. Willow and Marley did it anyway.

  Rock didn’t interrupt their thoughts, but drove quietly Uptown.

  Willow turned the pieces of information they had over, tried to fit them together from different directions.

  “Embran,” Marley said from behind her. “They aren’t giving up.”

  “How many of them are here?” Willow thought aloud. She remembered Rock was listening and didn’t say any more.

  “That’s what Gray was talking about last night,” Marley said. “It’s not knowing that makes us vulnerable.”

  Willow nodded. “I shouldn’t have waited so long to be part—”

  “You’re with us now,” Marley said. “And remember, none of this is your fault.”

  “I’m being used.”

  “We’ll find out why,” Marley said.

  Willow swallowed, sickened by her next thought: would they find out why she had been singled out before the Embran got what they wanted?

  Chapter 25

  “You’re sure Marley and Willow are okay?” Gray asked Ben. “I’ve seen what those things are capable of, and it isn’t pretty.”

  Gray was a very unhappy man at the thought of Marley being closer to any danger than she had to be.

  It was lunchtime and they’d just arrived at Café du Monde in the French Market.

  “Sykes is on it,” Ben said, repeating what Gray already knew. “Nat asked for you and me to come. If we made an excuse to stay away, he’d ask too many questions.”

  “Let him ask,” Gray said belligerently. “Marley’s my wife, not his.”

  “You think this is easier for me?”

  Gray sighed and shook his head.

  Ben slid his arms forward on the table, picking up powdered sugar as he did so. “I didn’t know Café du Monde was a cop hangout,” he said, watching tourists laughing and snorting the white sugar from platters of hot beignets all over their clothes. The more they brushed at the powder, the more it spread, and not all of them kept laughing.

  “It’s not,” Gray said. In this light, with one side of his face in sunlight, if Ben concentrated, partially using his third eye, he could see faint signs of the vicious scars showing through from the inside of his cheek, scars from wounds that had all but slashed their way to the outside. “Nat’s decided he’s invisible here because people he doesn’t want to see don’t think to look for him in this crowd.” He would never have found the almost-hidden scars from Gray’s childhood if Wil
low hadn’t explained what had happened and given Ben’s powers another challenge.

  Willow’s ability to see hidden scars and read what they meant was unusual.

  A kid in an apron slid cups of café au lait in front of them.

  He dropped the check on the table and said something Ben couldn’t hear over a sudden riff from a clarinet. Ben handed over a couple of bills. The clarinetist sat just outside the metal fence around the café and a banjo player joined him to swing into “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” The guy on the banjo cranked out the words in a pleasingly rusty crackle.

  People sweated slowly by on the sidewalk.

  “You want to move somewhere quieter?” Gray bellowed.

  Ben saw Nat approaching with Bucky Fist and shook his head. “I like it right where we are, and I guess it does what Nat wants it to do. He’s something else. How he manages to look like Mr. Congeniality when he’s churning inside, I’ll never know.”

  Conversation paused an instant when Nat swung his wide shoulders through the crowd, his skin shining against his white shirt. When Nat grinned, Ben laughed at the sigh he heard from a teenage girl nearby.

  Bucky twirled a chair on one leg, set it down backward and sat astride. He wore his baseball cap back to front over most of his curling, sandy hair and rolled a toothpick in and out of the gap between his two front teeth. He looked like everybody’s idea of the charming-goofy all-American brother.

  Gray had filled Ben in on Bucky, who was one of the toughest cops Gray—a former supertough cop himself—had ever met. He pointed out that anything less would become a meal for Nat Archer.

  “Hey, man,” Nat said, gripping first Gray’s, then Ben’s hand in a hard thumb hook. “How’s it going?”

  Sliding into a chair, Nat put both hands flat on the table and leaned in. “We may have something. We just got the news.”

  Ben breathed out through pursed lips.

  “Looks like we got a common thread,” Bucky said, serious now.

  “We’d like to have your cooperation, Ben.” Nat’s head didn’t move a lot, but Ben figured he knew the position of anyone within ten yards.

  “Why?” Ben said.

  “Willow was there when Chloe Brandt died. She was questioned then, but I’ve got more to ask. Some of the things I’m going to say to her—the questions I’ll ask—could piss her off. Pissed-off witnesses are a pain in the ass. I’m hoping you can make sure she stays reasonable. I’ll be using photographs. That’s where I want your help, Gray. You and Marley saw the victims we had a few months ago. Blades thinks there are similarities between those and Mrs. Brandt.”

  “You’ve heard from Blades,” Gray said. “What did he say?”

  “Baker and Green, different weapon from Brandt.”

  Ben thought about that. “So what does it mean? Two killers or two weapons?”

  “Blades thinks two weapons, two killers.” Nat said. “Copycat.” He let his eyelids droop.

  “But you don’t,” Ben said.

  The big shoulders rose a couple of inches and stayed there. “We’ve got three corpses and the cause of death on all three is heart attack. That’s a nice way of saying they were scared to death. With some sort of bat—I don’t know if there was any bat—dive-bombing you, you could get frickin’ scared. The Green woman lost an eye before her heart quit.”

  Ben wrinkled his nose. “How come that didn’t hit the news?”

  “You know why.” Nat gave him a straight look. “We won’t be talking about it anytime soon. Chloe Brandt’s face isn’t the only place she was cut.”

  “Define cut,” Ben said.

  “Similar to Baker, but not the same,” Nat told him. “Baker’s are puncture wounds. Jabs. Brandt’s got multiple short slash wounds made with a very sharp, chisel-ended weapon. Fairly small weapon. There are welts under the wounds that could have come up before or after she was cut. What’s on her face is nothing compared to the ones in her scalp. Most jammed into the skull itself before they were yanked out and the next one was made. Blades says nine of them. The hair was soaked with blood.”

  “The wounds still didn’t kill the victim,” Bucky said. “This is all some sick thing about fear.”

  “Yeah,” Nat said. “Her neck was broken, too. My take is one killer, two weapons—this time around. Tried to make it look as if the brass corners on the daybook did some of the damage to Chloe Brandt. Nothing doing there. Blood on the book, okay, but the wounds don’t match the corners, and the corners would be demolished if they’d been used. I don’t know why they bothered with it.”

  “You want coffee?” Gray asked, although his own drink was untouched. Nat looked different to Ben, sharp-featured like a man on the hunt. He’d slipped back into homicide detective mode.

  “Nah,” Nat shook his head. “We need to go. Now.”

  Ben drained his cup and stood up. “Where? The morgue?”

  “Uptown,” Nat said. “Brandt house.”

  Chapter 26

  Even with all the draperies drawn back from the windows and the sun glittering through spotless glass, the Brandt house felt cold and filled with shadows.

  Vanity had met Willow and Marley when they arrived. Val sat out by the pool with Preston Moriarty, and they remained there.

  Tomorrow night Val was throwing a party to celebrate his dead wife’s life. With the help of Marley, Rock U., and promises from Fabio, and the rest of the staff who would be there later, Willow was in charge of what felt to her like macabre—insane, inappropriate—theater.

  A tentative suggestion from Willow that the event might be better in a few days threw Vanity into a tantrum. She raged that if the police had their way her dear Chloe would never be put to rest and this memorial was happening now. Willow had backed off at once.

  Flitting from one room to another, dodging the police, who had sections of the house still closed off, Vanity talked to herself under her breath. A green Hawaiian-print silk tunic and narrow pants, scarlet patent sandals and matching toe and fingernail polish were, she had explained, what would make Chloe happy.

  “Those other women arrived,” she said to Willow in the kitchen. “I hope they’ve brought enough.”

  She was talking about the Potted Ladies, who were to smother both inside and outside of the Brandt home with flowers. “Don’t worry,” Willow said gently. “The ladies are really good at what they do.”

  Willow had spoken with the police on-site and they assured her there should be no problem with entertaining the following evening, but she worried that something could change.

  “If necessary, we can keep the party to the grounds and kitchen,” Willow said, thinking aloud. Vanity’s horrified eyes reminded Willow of what a fragile woman she had on her hands—and in charge of a potentially large event.

  “It won’t be necessary,” Vanity said, breathy. “The police said they’ll be out by tonight.”

  “Or tomorrow,” Willow said gently. No point in holding back now.

  With a Brandt binder open on the kitchen island, Willow went over lists. Working from Chloe’s own computerized records, Marley was using the small office off the foyer to call prospective party guests personally. E-mail had gone out first, but the calls were to appease Vanity. Willow had expected the response to be sparse, and then to deal with frustration from Vanity and, possibly, Val, but so far almost everyone had accepted the invitation.

  “Chloe did love parties,” Vanity said, turning water on and off in the sink—her hands making airy gestures in between. “I know there’s something I’m missing that would make it perfect for her.”

  Chloe hated parties. You told me that yourself, Vanity. She didn’t show up for the last one she gave.

  Willow was seriously worried about Vanity, whom she would rather see in bed and sedated. When she wasn’t following Willow, telling Rock U. yet again how to erect the garden marquee he was clearly comfortable putting up with the help of the men who had delivered it, or leaning over Marley while she made calls, Vanity stood at a di
stance from the taped-off foot of the main stairs. Each time she could get close enough, she asked when the last traces of Chloe’s blood could be cleaned away.

  Abruptly fixating on something in the grounds, Vanity walked out of the sliding doors leading to the terrace. She kept on walking until she reached Val and Preston, who both got up and hugged her.

  A movement caught Willow’s attention: Marley hovering outside the kitchen door, trying to see who was there.

  “You look like a scared rabbit,” Willow said. “Vanity’s gone outside.”

  Marley slipped into the room, a sheaf of papers under one arm. “Now she wants costumes,” Marley said, her brow furrowed. She gripped the edge of a counter hard with one hand.

  “Sit down,” Willow said. “You’re letting this get to you. My other people will be here just as soon as they can—one of them can make the calls, or I will.”

  Looking past Willow at a section of blank wall, Marley’s frown deepened. She narrowed her eyes and the frown turned very angry.

  “What is it?” Willow said, glancing around.

  Marley shook her head once and turned her back. “Costumes. I’ve got to call everyone back and tell them to come in costume.”

  “No, you don’t,” Willow said. “I’ll deal with it. Vanity isn’t thinking.”

  “She wants a masquerade ball. Masks. High drama, is what she said.” Marley faced Willow again, but her eyes slid off to look in the same direction as before. “That isn’t appropriate,” she said, barely moving her lips.

  “What?” Jumpy, Willow chafed her arms. “Oh, you mean the ball idea? There isn’t going to be a ball if I can stop it.”

  Marley went to the sink and looked out into the grounds where Vanity stood with Preston and Val. The three of them were nodding with evident enthusiasm.

  “You want to bet she’s not telling them about this incredible idea of hers now?” Marley said. “It’s going the extra hundred miles, she says. Shows the level of adoration Chloe’s friends had for her. Adoration was the word she used.”

  “Wow. That would probably mean decorating the place to theme.”