Superstition

by Karen Robards

  Joe barely managed to contain his amusement.

  “That’s cold.”

  “Yeah.” Dave made a face, took another swallow of beer, and burst out, “I don’t blame Amy for being mad, I really don’t. But Cleo didn’t just attack her. She’s not that kind of pig. And anyway, she wouldn’t have been sleeping in the kitchen if Amy’s brats—uh, kids—hadn’t broken the gate off its hinges by swinging on it. You know she always stays in the backyard.” He looked at Joe appealingly. “I was going to fix that gate first thing in the morning, too. But then this happens.”

  Joe shook his head. “Ain’t that always the way?”

  Dave narrowed his eyes at him. “It might be funny to you, but it isn’t to me. Now Amy says that either Cleo goes or she does. So what am I supposed to do?”

  A beat passed in which Joe took a reflective chug from his beer.

  “How long you been living with Cleo?” he asked.

  “About eight years.”

  “How long you been living with Amy?”

  “About a month.”

  “There you go, then.”

  Dave stared at him. “You saying I ought to get rid of Amy?”

  Joe shrugged. “Unless you want to get rid of Cleo.”

  “I can’t do that.” Dave looked hunted. “Amy’ll get over it. She just needs a little time. If you’ll just let Cleo stay here for a day or two . . .”

  “No,” Joe said. Until he’d moved south, the only contact he’d ever had with any sort of pork had been in the supermarket, all wrapped up in neat packages and ready to eat, and that was the way he liked it. “No way. Sorry, but I don’t do pigs.”

  “What’s to do?” Dave argued. “She just stays in your backyard. I’ll come over and feed her and clean up after her and everything. You won’t even know she’s here.”

  “No,” Joe said. “She’s not staying.”

  “If I take her back home with me, Amy says she’ll throw me out.”

  “It’s your damned house.”

  “I know, but I can’t say that to Amy. She’ll hit the roof.”

  Joe looked at Dave for a moment in silence.

  “Dave, buddy, did it ever occur to you that maybe you and Amy aren’t exactly a match made in heaven?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Clueless wasn’t the word.

  “Well, she’s . . .” Joe floundered, looking for a tactful way to put what he had to say. The whole Big Brother thing was not his style. He wasn’t good at it. He didn’t want to be good at it.

  “Hot?” Dave supplied.

  Definitely not the description he’d been looking for. Mattress-tested was more on the order of what he’d had in mind, but he didn’t think that would be particularly sensitive.

  “Experienced” was what he settled on. “More experienced than you.”

  Dave made a face. “Like, who isn’t?” Joe’s expression must have changed, because Dave added in a rueful tone, “In case it’s escaped your notice, there aren’t exactly dozens of hot women hanging around my house, wanting to take me home to meet Mama. I’m lucky Amy’s willing to take a chance on me.”

  She’s the lucky one, and you can bet your ass she knows it was what Joe wanted to say, but no sooner had the words formed in his brain than they stuck in his throat. Getting into a conversation like that was way more male bonding than he wanted to do here.

  “So, will you keep Cleo for a day or two?” Dave asked hopefully, having apparently read something in Joe’s face that he interpreted as a softening of Joe’s already firmly stated position.

  “No,” Joe said. “Get somebody else.”

  “There isn’t anybody else. Who? Most of the guys I know have a wife, kids, a dog, a family. Families don’t mesh with pigs.”

  “I don’t mesh with pigs.”

  “Joe, come on. You’re the only single guy I know with a fenced backyard. Anyway, you owe me, remember?”

  “I owe you?”

  “Remember down at Linney’s Bar when those two girls were drunk and throwing up in the parking lot and somebody had to drive them home in his patrol car? I did it, and you said, ‘I owe you one.’ Remember that?”

  “It was a friggin’ figure of speech, and you know it.”

  “Just for tonight.” Dave’s voice, his eyes, his whole demeanor was pleading. “Just so I can go home. Tomorrow I’ll find someplace else, I swear.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake . . . all right, for tonight. Tonight only.”

  “Thanks, man.” Dave jumped up from the table and rushed him. For an alarmed moment Joe thought he was going to be the recipient of a big ole Southern bear hug, so—since his position smack against the counter ruled out retreating as an option—he stuck out his hand. Dave grabbed it and wrung it vigorously. “I appreciate this. Anytime you need a favor, all you gotta do is holler, and you got it. I’ll just go out and make sure she’s comfortable now, and then I’ll get out of your hair.” He frowned as though remembering something. “By the way, weren’t you going to turn in early? I kinda hoped—thought—you wouldn’t even know Cleo was here until in the morning.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said dryly. “Something came up. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”

  “Sure, okay.” Dave was already headed for the back door, clearly eager to be on his way home now that his problem had been solved—or had been turned into Joe’s problem.

  “Wait a minute,” Joe said as Dave opened the door. “What do I do if the pig gets hungry or something?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry. I already put her food dispenser and water dispenser in your yard. Like I said, when I got the idea of bringing her over here, I thought you were going to be asleep. I was going to leave you a note.”

  “That would have been something nice to wake up to.”

  But Dave was already out the door and missed the sarcasm.

  A glance at the clock in the microwave told Joe that it was one-thirty-eight a.m.

  So much for getting to bed early.

  He wasn’t tired now. Or, rather, he was too tired, wound, his mind racing a mile a minute just like it had been almost continually since it had occurred to him that the murder of Karen Wise was his problem to solve. Method plus opportunity plus motive equals a viable suspect, but the problem was that nobody’d been able to find the weapon, too damned many people had the opportunity—so far, the pool included practically everyone on the island except the few people in and around the Old Taylor Place at the time whose alibis he’d (tentatively) been able to verify—and the motive could have been anything. Or nothing at all. A psycho on the loose was the scariest possibility, but it wasn’t the only one.

  The sick bastard—if it was Karen Wise’s killer who was doing it, which at this point was nothing more than an assumption, and one thing he had learned over the years was that assumptions could be dangerous, because they sometimes blinded you to the truth—was sending messages to Nicky. That added a new twist, and a new kind of pressure, to the investigation. He was pretty sure that she was safe in Chicago, but . . .

  But the message seemed to promise two more killings. Close together. Whatever the hell that meant, it could not be good. With a renewed sense of urgency, Joe picked up the file, extracted the printed-out e-mail, frowned down at it, and discovered that he couldn’t read it: The words were blurring on the page.

  For a moment, he almost panicked. Then he realized that his eyes were probably just too tired to focus properly, and the panic subsided.

  But the dull throbbing behind his temples didn’t. Face it, he told himself. After five nights of practically no sleep at all, he needed a minimum number of hours of sleep tonight to continue to function at anything near optimal capacity. If he didn’t sleep, he was worthless to the case.

  He hated to do it. It felt like backsliding, like a failure. But otherwise . . .

  Padding barefoot toward the bathroom, he let the thought trail off.

  The bathroom was small, basic, and ugly. Everything from the tiled w
alls to the toilet, sink, and bathtub was puke-green. As a nice contrast, the floor was a mosaic of tiny gray, white, and pink tiles, and the little bit of wallpaper that covered the untiled portion of the wall around the medicine cabinet was a pink-and-green floral. Instead of a shower curtain, the tub was enclosed with frosted-glass sliding doors with big plastic daisies stuck to them.

  Some long-ago resident had clearly been more concerned with safety than aesthetics.

  But ugly or not, the bathroom was his and it worked, and in the end, that was all that mattered. Pulling open the medicine cabinet, he picked up the bottle of prescription sleeping pills that the hospital had sent him home with.

  That had been more than eighteen months ago now, and the bottle was still almost full.

  The first couple weeks at home, when sleep had been absolutely impossible, he’d taken them dutifully, night after night. He’d told himself that he needed sleep, that sleep would help his body heal, help him recover faster. But the real reason he’d taken the damned things was that he had craved oblivion, craved falling into a dark hole for a few hours every night, when he knew nothing and remembered nothing and regretted nothing.

  As soon as he had realized that, he’d quit with the pills. What had happened had happened. The only thing he could do was face the truth of that, and learn to deal with it.

  But now he needed sleep, and he knew himself well enough to know that the kind of sleep that came in those little yellow pills was the only kind he was going to get tonight.

  So enough with the soul-searching, he told himself, and he popped a pill and washed it down with a swallow of water from the sink without further ado. Then he walked through the house, turning off the lights and TV and checking the doors, shucked his clothes, and fell into bed and lay there on his back with his eyes open and his hands folded behind his head, staring up at the ceiling so that he wouldn’t have to see anything else as he waited for the pill to work.

  NICKY ARRIVED in her office on the third floor of the Santee Productions building promptly at eight a.m. the next morning, and breathed in the familiar scent of stale air and coffee with resignation. The term “office” was really a misnomer; “cubicle” described her workspace better. It was beige with charcoal carpet, maybe six feet by eight feet, with a continuous desk surface built into three walls, and a shelf running around the same three walls about four feet above the desk. The desk, the surface of which was beige laminate, was home to an assortment of work-related objects including a computer, scanner, and printer, two telephones, an overflowing in basket, and an assortment of neatly stacked files. The latest ratings chart had been pushpinned onto the bulletin board on the wall beside her computer, with Twenty-four Hours Investigates’s position circled in red. The shelf, also beige laminate, was crowded with videotapes and a row of small TV sets in case she wanted to watch several channels at once, as she sometimes did in the case of, say, breaking news. The fourth wall, the one with the door, was also the only one with a window. It was a very nice window, quite large, complete with short beige-and-charcoal-striped curtains and a pull-down shade. Its only drawback was that it didn’t face the outdoors. Instead, it provided her with an excellent view of the corridor that separated her office from the offices just like it across the hall.

  The ones with real windows.

  Around Santee Productions, which was the company that owned and produced Twenty-four Hours Investigates and many other made-for-TV programs, office space was allocated by virtue of an individual’s status within the company. Nicky had realized early on that her cubicle said it all. The Twenty-four Hours Investigates gang had been given the interior rectangle of offices on the third floor. This was a clear indication that they, and their program, were very small, unimportant cogs in a very large, very results-oriented organization. A closer glance at the chart confirmed that Twenty-four Hours Investigates was number 78 in the latest ratings. Not good, but better than the 89 it had been the previous week. It had fallen from number 42 in the fall, when the network had opted to keep it around because (a) it was relatively cheap to produce, and (b) they didn’t have anything better to replace it with.

  But unless something turned around fast, her chances of ever getting an office with a real window didn’t look good.

  Fortunately for her morale, she wasn’t in her office all that much. She was just as likely to be out somewhere working a story, or in a meeting, or downstairs on the set, which was a good thing. It kept her from getting claustrophobic and depressed.

  CBS, take me away.

  “Morning, Nicky. You doing okay?” The speaker was Carl Glover. She didn’t even have to look around to be sure: She would recognize that deep, velvety voice anywhere. As one of the two other on-air reporters for Twenty-four Hours Investigates—the third was Heather Hanley—Carl was both coworker and rival.

  Nicky dropped her purse into the drawer in which she kept it, then turned to smile at Carl. A shade under six feet tall and about her own age, he was leaning a broad shoulder against her doorjamb, looking gorgeous, as always, in a navy pin-striped suit that had probably cost the earth, white shirt, and pale blue silk tie, his dark blond hair brushed until it gleamed and worn long enough so that it flipped up at the ends, his baby-blue eyes—they almost exactly matched his tie, which had been chosen, no doubt, to bring out their color—sliding over her.

  Lasciviously. He barely bothered to try to hide the lecherous gleam in them.

  “Sure,” she said, although it wasn’t entirely true. But despite his calendar-boy looks, Carl was a snake—no, a shark—and to show him any weakness at all was to invite getting eaten. “How about you?”

  “Oh, I’m fantastic.” He smiled at her. “But you look like hell. Maybe you should think about taking a few days off. To recover, you know.”

  Okay, Nicky told herself as she fixed him with a cold stare, she probably did look like hell. A dying yellow-and-purple bruise formed a semicircle around her left eye, and various other scratches and contusions were hidden beneath her well-tailored black pantsuit. Getting to sleep the night before had proved almost impossible, which probably meant that she had visible bags under her eyes and lines of fatigue around her mouth. But concern for her well-being was not his motive. This was a cutthroat business, and Carl was a player. Did the insufferable egotist really think she didn’t know the score? If she took a few days off, that would mean more stories and more airtime for him, to say nothing of Heather. Of course, it was always possible that if Nicky took his advice and stayed home, he would push Heather under a car.

  “Don’t you have some place you need to be?” she asked.

  “Actually, I do.” His smile widened as he straightened and saluted her. “I have an eight-fifteen appointment with Sid. See you later.”

  He turned and disappeared down the hall. It was all Nicky could do not to glare at the empty doorway in his wake. Dropping that disturbing pebble into the previously smooth pool of her morning had been the reason for Carl’s visit, Nicky realized. Sid could only be Sid Levin, and telling her that he had an appointment with him was akin to announcing an appointment with God. Nicky narrowed her eyes. Carl never did anything without a purpose, and therefore, his needling of her had a point. The question was, what?

  It took her a minute, but she finally realized that frowning into thin air wasn’t going to help her figure it out. If it concerned her, the point would be revealed in its own good time.

  Doing her best to dismiss Carl from her mind, Nicky tried to throw herself into her routine and almost immediately ran into another problem. Usually when she got in to work, she dropped off her stuff in her office and made a beeline for coffee before coming back to start her day by checking her messages. But today was different. Today, she wasn’t going to be able to do that. To get to the coffeemaker, which was in a small break room at the south end of the hall that also housed vending machines and assorted goodies, it would be necessary for her to walk past Karen’s cubicle.

  She wasn’t up for it. Not
yet. The sheer shock of Karen’s death was beginning to wear off, but the pain and sense of unreality remained strong. Last Friday morning when she had passed Karen’s office on her way to get coffee, Karen had come out and gone with her. They had talked about the upcoming trip to Pawleys Island. Karen had been excited about it. . . .

  Nicky closed her eyes and willed the memory away. The impulse to just turn around and walk off the floor and out of the building was suddenly all but overwhelming. She had sick days, personal days, and vacation days that she could use to stay home and, in Carl’s words, recover. But with Carl and Heather and the realities of television and sweeps month in mind, she rejected that option almost at once. She was at work and staying at work and, since that was the case, the only thing to do was get busy. Reliving the nightmare over and over again in her mind was useless. It had happened, and there was no undoing it.

  As callous as she felt even thinking it, the cold, hard reality was that life—and Twenty-four Hours Investigates—went on.

  As if to prove it, the third floor was its usual Friday-morning hive of activity. People walked down the hall chatting and calling to each other as they passed open doors. Phones rang. TVs droned. One of the overhead lights buzzed a little behind its metal grate, as if the tube was about to burn out. Her computer hummed as she turned it on. She almost hated to check her messages—the one from Lazarus508 was seared into her brain—but e-mail was vital in her line of work, and she couldn’t avoid it.

  The little thrill of fear that slid down her spine as she opened her mailbox was unnecessary, as it turned out. A quick scan of her new messages revealed nothing alarming. Unless, of course, she considered an e-mail from jfranconipawleysisland.gov scary.