Bloodstone

by Gwen Hunter

  “How long can you keep up the pretense of being a grazer and not a meat eater?” Jubal asked. “You like your steak still mooing.”

  “Yeah. There is that. I need my protein. I told him I still eat fish, which grossed him out. He’s trying to convert me, but I’m not giving in easily, so save me some shrimp, too. God, I miss protein that had a heartbeat and hooves. There’s only so many ways to eat beans and sprouts and tofu.”

  Leaving them talking about the relative merits of soy-based products, Evan and I went to the back of the shop where I lighted the gas logs we seldom used and pulled out two fairly comfortable chairs, while he created a makeshift table from a low workbench Jubal used when beating different colors of gold into a single solid piece. The smell of Chinese filled the room. Evan pushed me gently into a chair and dished up cashew chicken. I didn’t ask how he knew what I wanted. St. Claire nutty strikes again, even if he hadn’t noticed.

  “Noe tells me Harry Boone came by with the latest news,” he said.

  “My fan and pal at the cop shop? The fair-minded, law-abiding, honorable Harry Weasel-Faced Boone? Yeah. He came by.” I sounded caustic and I didn’t care. “Quinn is really dead?”

  “Very.”

  My heart did a little lurch. I guess I hadn’t completely believed it, had held out hope that it was a lie, until now.

  “Eat. I’ll tell you about it after. Under that spiky-hair thing you’ve got going, you’re pale as a ghost.”

  “Ha-ha, boo.” But I ate.

  Evan finished before I did and leaned back in his chair, one suited knee crossed over the other, watching me. I studiously watched each bite lift to my mouth.

  “You want to tell me about the thirty-eight?”

  I put down chopsticks that were halfway to my mouth and pushed away the last three hunks of cashew chicken. It didn’t look so appetizing all of a sudden. Kinda greasy. I wiped my hands on a napkin, not able to meet his eyes. “Is this off the record?”

  “No.”

  “Then I have no idea where the gun is now.”

  “Did you shoot Quinn?”

  “No. And no, Quinn was not in the loft this morning. It really was the brown man.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Where is the gun?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Evan paused. “Well, crap.” He sat forward suddenly, surprise in his voice. “Aunt Matilda shot him!”

  I didn’t say anything. And I still couldn’t look at him. He dropped back in the chair, hands hanging over the chair arms. He had beautiful hands. The ring I had noticed on our first meeting caught the light, the beaten copper-and-silver setting glinting, the band shaped like interlocking crosses clearly etched, the small lapis stone almost black in the shadow. I really liked the ring, and wondered what significance it had for him. It wasn’t often a man wore a pinkie ring these days. But I guessed that now wasn’t the best time to bring that up.

  “Okay. Unless someone shows up in a clinic or hospital with a wound from a thirty-eight, we can say that the casing was one Jane brought home from target practice. She thought it was cool and wanted Noelle to make a glass bead from it.”

  Tears gathered in my eyes. I nodded. In a small voice I asked, “Tell me about Quinn? Please?”

  “He was dropped off on the side of the road near the county dump sometime before dawn. Forensic evidence suggests he was still alive when transported to the dump and dropped from the vehicle. No attempt was made to hide the body.” Evan watched me. “His throat had been cut. He bled out at the scene.”

  My eyes flew up. “He wasn’t shot?”

  “Oh, yeah, he was shot, too. With a nine mil. But he died of blood loss from a knife wound.”

  Jane hadn’t killed him. I had known it, but the reassurance was comforting. And Harry Boone should be neutered to keep from contaminating the rest of humanity with his genetic code. I shuddered a breath and held Evan’s eyes. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Cops suck.”

  He laughed and something flickered in the deep pools of his eyes. “Yeah. We do. But we’re great in bed.” His voice challenged and caressed all at once, and I caught an image from him of us, tangled in my sheets, all sweaty and hot and laughing. His imaginings, projected at me.

  I felt myself blush—the curse of redheads. His face tightened, green eyes going hard and hot. I fought squirming in my chair, fought giving off signals I wasn’t ready to follow through on, what with a house full of women upstairs and the store still open and demanding my attention. And Davie still lost to me.

  To give myself space, I stared at my plate and the last three bites of greasy chicken. Without bothering to use the chopsticks, I ate them all, not tasting a thing. Finally, licking my fingers, I said, “Find my brother. Find Quinn’s killer. Make sure Jane is safe. Then you can show me just how good cops—with the exception of Weasel-Face, who I refuse to envision in bed, not after that meal and on a full stomach—are in bed.”

  “I’m counting on it. Feel better?”

  He was talking about the meal and the images both, and I knew he had done it on purpose, shared his fantasy. My blush deepened. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “We have an early-morning eyewitness who saw a black SUV near the dump. That’s not much help in a county where more than half the population drive SUVs, but it’s something. We know that Quinn was in deep debt to the local collection boys and possibly Roman Trio for his gambling problem. And there’s speculation that he was involved with money laundering to help pay off his debts.”

  I nodded, trying to see dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks Quinn working with money laundering.

  “And because Davie has so much money perched offshore, the cops are wondering if Davie was involved. Maybe in charge.”

  “No way,” I said instantly.

  “We have to consider it.”

  “No.”

  “Tyler—”

  “You waste time considering that. I know better.”

  “How?”

  “Because Davie couldn’t hide that from me. I’d know it. I’d see it.”

  “He hid years of his life from you. Why not this?”

  I blinked slowly. Davie had indeed hidden years of his life from me. Years I had never bothered to ask about. Years…Ashes and spit. Could Davie be someone I didn’t know at all?

  “Orson Wylie and Colin Hornsburn are investors in a local bank. Usually federal banking laws protect banks and their investors from fraud being perpetrated by the employees or trustees. But Connersville Bank and Trust got around it by making loans to highly speculative companies and for highly speculative land deals. Your brother was an investor in that bank.”

  I gathered up the chopsticks and tea mugs and stood. “My brother is not involved with land speculation or money laundering. He isn’t.”

  “The bank was buying up land, just like David was. And the bank holds the mortgage on much of the land David bought in the last few years. David was in bed with Hornsburn and Wylie, just like Hornsburn claimed.”

  Bending again to close up the paper containers of food for Jubal and Noe’s dinner, I propped myself against the table, one hand supporting my upper body. I tilted my head to him and said very distinctly, “Then we just have to find out why. Because my brother did not do anything wrong. He—did—not!”

  “Okay. Let’s—”

  “Aunt Tyler?” Jane stood in the open door, surprise on her face. “Why are you wearing Daddy’s key around your neck?”

  I stared at my niece and then looked down. The ornate key was swinging on its thong, back and forth on my neck. “Davie’s key?”

  14

  Saturday, 7:30 p.m.

  With a single click of the remote, lights blazed on in Davie’s house, warming the cool color scheme, the windows black with the night beyond. Jane used the remote to light the gaslog fires in each room, to turn up the heat, and to turn on her favorite bubblegum radio station. The
top one hundred pop chart was on, and a boy band sang surprisingly innocent lyrics about kissing and holding hands. Jane danced and sang along as she led the way to her room.

  Jane’s sanctum overlooked the rushing stream, the white water caught in the outside security lights, cascading from above and plunging down only yards beyond the glass. Her suite was decorated in purple and blue, with a hand-painted mural of a Lord of the Rings landscape on the wall opposite the windows. A gas-log fire in the cave mouth of the mural flared up and capered along to the music. An antique canopy bed, hung with heavy drapes against the winter chill, stood in the center of the room. Jane could draw the thick, velvet, tasseled hangings closed to make a tentlike enclosure. A purple upholstered couch and matching white antique French armoires stood along the wall, framing a door that led to a closet big enough to house an elephant, and a bath right out of a fairy-tale princess daydream.

  Jane went straight to her closet and stood in the doorway looking back at us, her expression urging us on. Evan and I followed through the Princess-Barbie-Doll room to find Jane on her knees in front of a box on the floor. Lifting off the top, she removed a key from a jumble of costume jewelry and offered it to me. While Jane shoved her hanging clothes back to reveal a blank wall, I compared it to the key around my neck. It was an exact match. I handed it back.

  Jane stood and grinned at us, both victorious and secretive. With one hand, she pressed the wall a couple of inches to the left of the rod support. A faint click sounded and a small panel gave way to expose a keypad lock and a keyhole. Jane punched in six digits, hit a green button, then stuck her key into the keyhole and turned it. All very 007.

  “Abracadabra,” she said. The wall opened up to reveal a well-lit room about eight feet on each side, and only seven feet high. Shelves lined two walls, with Murphy bed–style bunk beds and emergency supplies on the other.

  “Holy sh…ah, moly,” Evan said.

  Jane laughed, twirling on her toes with excitement. “It’s my Secure Room. Only four people in the whole world know about it, you two and Daddy and me. Not even Quinn knows about it.”

  My heart did a painful little shuffle at the realization that I still had to tell her about her bodyguard’s death.

  “It’s fireproof and bombproof, up to, like, nuclear, but not against the newer bunker-busting bombs,” she said with that informative yet lofty tone young girls seem to manage so easily. “It has its own ventilation and air-filtering system against nuclear fallout and germs and stuff. And we got enough supplies to last three weeks—food and batteries and solar battery backup, and battery-powered TV and radio, and everything. Everything except places to pee.” She rolled her eyes and took on an aggrieved tone. “Which would be really gross, but Daddy said plumbing would mean other people would know about our Secure Room. If we ever get stuck in here, we have to pee in the empty water containers.”

  “What all’s in here?” Evan asked, his tone still dumb-founded.

  “Stuff. That’s my secret stuff.” She pointed to the narrow shelves to the left of the entrance. “That’s Daddy’s.” She pointed to the back wall. Davie’s shelves were considerably deeper, stacked with lots of specialized electronic equipment I could only guess at, and dozens of wooden boxes.

  I moved into the claustrophobic space and reached for a random box on the shelves at the back wall. The box was dovetailed wood, an antique cigar humidor with a gold crest on the top. I opened it. Inside were discs, old three-and-half-inch floppies. They were dated one for each week in April, seventeen years ago.

  I closed the humidor and checked another. It, too, contained floppies, each in order by week. I estimated there were several years’ worth of floppies, if each box held the same thing. They did, up until ten years ago, when the floppies changed over to CDs. I opened each box and passed it to Evan, who glanced inside and nodded, once or twice grunting with what I took to be he-man, big-bad-cop interest. It was clear he had no idea what he was looking at. When he finished inspecting each box, he slid it back in place.

  The last box I carried back to the bedroom. Jane was stretched out on her big bed, watching the plasma-screen TV in an open armoire. I held up a CD. “Jane, can I try to load this onto your PC?” I asked.

  Not taking her eyes off the screen, she shrugged.

  I touched the mouse to bring up the screen and inserted the CD. It opened instantly, displaying a Department of Defense logo in one corner, and a Q Core logo in the other. Feeling chilled in the warm room, I scrolled down. It was a series of reports matching the date marked on the front of the disc. The first report concerned a man named Francois LaMarche, who appeared to be a banker. The report covered a mundane conversation over his office phone between the banker and a Londoner listed as M. Fitz-Howard. Fitz-Howard was footnoted and cross-referenced to another date and CD from earlier in the year.

  I scrolled down. The other reports were less prosaic, most transcribed and translated into English. One group of reports concerned ten-year-old conversations between the head of Exxon and several other men, one in the Sudan, one in Libya and one in Iran. They dealt with oil deals, the kind of insider information that would have made a canny investor on Wall Street drool. And rich enough to find an appropriate medical cure for his condition. I thought about the money in Davie’s offshore accounts and ejected the CD. I inserted the next.

  It too contained written transcripts, translated and footnoted. All were about financial deals between men in power and who I understood to be shadowy figures in governments with which the U.S. was having problems, a decade ago and now.

  After the fourth CD, I sat back in Jane’s leather desk chair, swinging the chair left and right. Evan sat to my side, thoughtful. “I’m guessing that your brother was part of DOD back when DOD wasn’t supposed to have much intelligence-gathering power. And he took his work home with him. Literally.”

  Suddenly Jane sat up. She clicked off the remote and listened. A soft beeping sounded from the intercom speaker near the door. Jane crawled to the edge and jumped from the bed, ran to the intercom and punched a button. A screen appeared with green lights. And one blinking yellow light.

  “Spit and decay,” she said. I started at hearing my swear words come from her mouth. “We got an intruder.”

  She ran to the PC and pushed the desk chair aside, with me in it. Two keystrokes later the security system was on screen, including a layout of the house and grounds and a schematic of the alarms themselves. Jane pointed to a blinking green light that turned orange as we watched. “Someone’s coming through the front gate. They forced it open.” The light turned red. At the bottom of the screen words appeared.

  SECURITY BREACH AT MAIN GATE ENTRANCE. VIDEO ACQUIRED.

  VIEW VIDEO? YES. NO.

  FOLLOW PROCESS OF INTRUDER? YES. NO.

  ALERT LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT? YES. NO.

  Jane hit yes to all three questions. Over the computer hookup, we could hear the ringing of the county cops. On the monitor, the screen split in thirds, horizontally. The security schematic remained on the top. The middle view became the detailed, recorded video from the front gate, and at the bottom was the video from the security cameras as they tracked, in real time, the progress of a monster-sized SUV speeding up the driveway.

  On the center screen, a face in a black ski mask appeared for an instant, recorded before the vehicle crashed through the wrought-iron, reinforced gates. In the passenger seat, I caught a glimpse of a second figure in black.

  On the bottom, the video whipped from one camera angle to the next as the SUV raced toward the house.

  “Get in the Secure Room. Now!” Evan barked. He pulled his weapon with one hand, his cell phone with the other, and sprinted for the stairs.

  Jane didn’t move. She sat frozen, staring at the monitor.

  “Emergency Services. What is the nature of your emergency?”

  I jerked, adrenaline kicking in late. A computer voice from Jane’s PC said, “This is SecureMountain Security Systems. We are reporting
a security breach.” The calm, digitized voice gave the address and went silent.

  I grabbed the phone beside the PC and said, “There’s a black SUV approaching the house, viewed on the security cameras. Masked men inside. An armed state police officer is on the premises and has gone to the front of the house. My niece and I are taking refuge in the lower level of the house in a—” Jane grabbed my wrist “—in a closet. We are not armed.”

  “I am dispatching an officer to the location,” the 911 operator said.

  Jolted to movement by my near gaffe, Jane punched other keys. The video on bottom settled on the front driveway. The SUV slammed to a halt. Four men poured out. They were heavily armed. Jane hit other buttons.

  “One officer?” I said. “If you send one officer, he’ll be cut down in two seconds. These guys are carrying automatic weapons.” Why automatic weapons? Not to ransack a house or find something. Only to kill or kidnap.

  I heard a faint hum as something happened upstairs and behind me. I turned and saw the black of the windows and the white water outside slowly vanish as massive steel plates closed in. I had once seen hurricane shutters close on a high-tech, beachfront condo. That system had nothing on this. In moments, the entire back wall was a solid bank of folding steel plates.

  “What is that?” I demanded.

  “Security and storm shutters,” Jane said. Her voice was shaking and so were her hands, but she moved with certainty, a well-practiced ease.

  “You’ve done this before,” I said.

  “We drill security measures every week. I can do this in my sleep.” The claim seemed to steady her. “In my sleep,” she repeated, stabbing another key that divided the middle screen into two smaller screens with differing views of the grounds and house.

  Evan appeared in the doorway, his gun at his thigh, pointed to the floor.

  “I thought I told you to get in the Secure Room.”

  “We have time,” Jane said. “It’ll be a while before they get in.”