Superstition

by Karen Robards

  Mario and Cassandra and Tina would have their work cut out for them, Nicky thought, patting the puffiness under her eyes with her pinkies with horror. Maybe things would improve during the day, but right now she was looking like the poster girl for the morning after the night before.

  A cold shower helped with the bags, if nothing else. She put a little lotion on the whisker burn, and added a peach-colored T-shirt that fit close around her throat in hopes that it would cast a flattering glow over her face and hide the hickey at the same time, and she realized that she had done the best she could without professional help.

  She would grab a cup of coffee and head out. Next stop, the hospital and Livvy. Then she had to do a little more digging into Tara Mitchell’s father. . . .

  The funny thing was, she reflected as she crossed the living room and glanced out through the big front window to see that Joe’s cruiser was no longer parked in front of the house, she’d known that Joe wasn’t in the house almost from the time she’d woken up. The place had felt empty in a curious kind of way, as if its energy had gone. If she was that attuned to him, she had it bad, Nicky thought, as she walked into the kitchen to find Dave sitting at the table, holding a pencil and checking off data on a computer printout that lay on top of a stack of papers scattered across an open folder. A cup of coffee was sitting beside him. A glance told her that Cleo was, as expected, looking in through the back door. A further glance told her that the day was cloudy and overcast—not a ray of sunshine in sight.

  Great.

  “Hey,” Dave greeted her when she said a cheery good-morning and started pouring coffee into a cup. “Joe had to leave. He said to tell you he’d call you later.”

  If Nicky had thought she looked bad, it was nothing compared to how awful Dave looked. His eyes were bloodshot, his normally ruddy cheeks were pale, and every muscle in his face drooped.

  Nicky felt a little thrill of alarm.

  “Is anything wrong?” she asked, her coffee cup suspended halfway to her mouth. Her first thought was that something had happened with the Lazarus Killer.

  Dave grimaced. “Amy moved out last night. She took the kids and went back to her ex-husband.”

  “Oh,” Nicky said softly, having heard all about Dave’s girlfriend during the long hours he’d spent babysitting her. She sat down at the table and looked at him sympathetically. “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, sure. Like Joe said, it just wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Joe said that?”

  Dave nodded. “He had her pegged right from the start, I guess. Cleo, too. Neither one of them ever liked Amy. I guess I should have listened.”

  Nicky reached across the table and put her hand over his.

  “There’s somebody out there who is right for you, Dave. You’ll find her. You’ll see.”

  “I guess.” He made a face and took a sip of coffee. “At least I get to take Cleo home again. I know Joe’s ready to see her go. I’ll pick her up later today, I guess.” He finished his coffee and started putting the papers he’d been working on back into the folder. “You ready to go?”

  Nicky nodded, finished her coffee, and stood up.

  “THIS PLACE HAS TURNED into a damned freak show,” Vince growled, glaring out the window of the squad room at the dozen or so men in Civil War-era uniforms marching across the courthouse square. A TV camera crew rode alongside them on a mobile camera unit, taping the whole thing. The white tents and blue beach umbrellas of the press occupation had been joined by a full contingent of vendors hawking everything from lemonade to “I survived the Lazarus Killer” T-shirts. “What the hell do you suppose they’re doing now?”

  “At a guess, I’d say something about the history of the island.” Joe glanced out the window without much interest and then turned back to the dry-erase board where pictures of Karen Wise, Marsha Browning, and Livvy Hollis—who was considered a victim although she had survived—were taped to the top right, while pictures of the three earlier victims were taped to the top left. Everything the most recent set of victims had in common was listed beneath their pictures, while everything those three women had in common with Tara Mitchell, Lauren Schultz, and Becky Iverson was listed beneath the girls’ pictures. Acquaintances, places they had frequented, hobbies they had enjoyed, things like that. There was a surprising amount of overlap between all of them except Karen Wise, Joe thought, going over the list. But then, the other five had all been residents of Pawleys Island, which was small, and which meant, necessarily, that their lives would overlap. Even fifteen years apart. So far, Karen Wise’s link was that she had spent approximately two hours on the island before being killed.

  Not a lot of time to meet a murderer.

  “Are you ever going to solve this?” Vince turned to glare at him. “I’m guessing no, right? You know what? From start to finish, this is all the fault of your girlfriend’s damned TV show.”

  His girlfriend. Joe instantly pictured Nicky and felt something that was ridiculously akin to a warm-and-fuzzy glow right in the region of his heart. Vince had called her that before, and it had annoyed the hell out of him at the time. Now the description felt right.

  He hadn’t meant for it to happen, but somehow or another, Nicky managed to get through the flak vest he’d zipped around his heart. The thing about this case was that the killer seemed to be focused on her. That not only scared the hell out of him, it also made him want to catch this guy in the worst way and stomp his ass into the ground before he could come after Nicky again—which Joe had a real bad feeling that before this was all over, he was going to do.

  “Working on it,” Joe said mildly to Vince, and went back to studying his chart.

  BEN HOLLIS WAS with Livvy in her hospital room when Nicky walked in. Leonora had just arrived, too, and Uncle Ham, who had spent the night, was just leaving. Uncle John, who had come to fetch Uncle Ham, was standing right inside the door, arms crossed over his chest, glaring at Ben. And Hayley was there, too, bawling her head off in the arms of a uniformed nurse who was carrying her from the room.

  The tension in the air was so thick that Nicky, who was carrying a vase of Livvy’s favorite daisies, nearly turned around on the threshold.

  Then she sighed, cooed at Hayley in passing, and kept going to plunk her daisies down on the table by Livvy’s bed. Look at it this way, she told herself: The good news is that Livvy is well enough for the family to have sunk into chaos as usual.

  Back to his usual GQ self, Ben greeted Nicky with a curt nod, which she returned with disinterest. If this was war, and it seemed it was, she was squarely on Livvy’s side.

  “You think about it,” Ben said to Livvy, and to Nicky’s surprise—and in the teeth of the concentrated glares of everyone else in the room—he bent down to brush his mouth against her cheek.

  Which Livvy averted.

  Then he walked out of the room as everyone practically hissed at his back.

  “What was that?” Nicky was wide-eyed as she looked at Livvy.

  “He wants to get back together.” Livvy didn’t look as happy about that as she presumably should.

  “The bimbo dumped him.” Uncle Ham’s voice seethed with vicious satisfaction.

  “And I’m guessing that he’s figured out just how much he stands to lose in a divorce,” the ever-practical Uncle John added in a dry tone.

  “It’s possible that he’s finally realized just what he’s throwing away,” Leonora said to Livvy. “Sometimes it takes a crisis for men to get a clue.”

  “So, what are you going to do?” Nicky asked her sister, awed by this latest one-eighty-degree turn in Livvy’s once-Stepford-perfect life.

  Livvy met her gaze. Her blue eyes looked troubled.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m thinking.” Then her gaze shifted and dropped, focusing like a laser on something about a foot lower than Nicky’s eyes. “Is that a hickey on your neck?”

  “DEPENDING ON HOW you look at it, the list of possible suspects ranges from pr
actically limitless right down to zero,” Joe said. He was talking to select members of what Vince, from the steps of the police station, which he had exited an hour before, had described to the media as the Lazarus Killer Task Force, which, also according to Vince, was working under the mayor’s direct supervision 24/7 and was well on the way to solving the case. In actual fact, the Lazarus Killer Task Force was the entire police department, which really was working as close to 24/7 as it was humanly possible to do but wasn’t a whole lot closer to solving the case than they had been on the night of Karen Wise’s murder. They were all on a steep learning curve, and there was a mountain of information to wade through, but at some point, Joe was hopeful that somebody was going to dig up the kernel of evidence that would lead to the truth.

  Of course, unless they got lucky, he might be a grandpa by then.

  “We’ve got these guys here.” He tapped a list of fifteen men, all violent criminals who lived within a two-hundred-mile radius of the island, who’d been convicted of a violent crime and had spent the last twelve to fifteen years in prison. He was seated at the long table in the police station’s grungy beige conference room, with Bill Milton, George Locke, Randy Brown, and Laura Cramer—or, in other words, Sunday morning’s edition of the Lazarus Killer Task Force—around him. “I want pictures and a physical description—height, weight—on them by tomorrow.”

  “I already checked them out,” Milton objected. “They’ve all got alibis for at least one of the attacks.”

  “Yeah, and I checked out this group.” Brown was looking at another computer-generated list of the people who had called Karen Wise’s cell phone in the last half hour of her life. Joe’s gut feeling about the call with the static hadn’t borne fruit, but that scenario still tugged at his mind. “Nobody on it is even a possibility. Most of those calls came from Chicago. One was from Kansas City. None of them could have done it, because they were hundreds of miles away from Pawleys Island at the time.”

  Which was why the scenario of Karen Wise being lured from the house to her death by a phone call with fake static on it was running into trouble.

  “I still want pictures and a physical description,” Joe said. “By tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow was when he expected his former good buddy from the DEA to come through with the enhanced pictures of certain interesting library patrons. With those in hand, he meant to start making comparisons.

  “I don’t suppose it’s going to do any good to tell you I went over this group with a fine-tooth comb?” Locke picked up the third sheet, which contained the names of everyone who had been at the Old Taylor Place on the night of Karen Wise’s murder. “Not only did I check them out, I cross-checked to see what they were doing when Marsha Browning was killed and when Olivia Hollis was attacked. There’s not one person there who doesn’t have an iron-clad alibi for at least one of those times.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “I know. I want their pictures and descriptions anyway.”

  BY THE TIME Nicky pulled up Twybee Cottage’s driveway for Leonora’s live-on-tape channeling session, the day’s gloomy start had degenerated into a full-fledged thunderstorm. Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Torrents of rain pelted down, cutting tiny rivers through the pea gravel. The dull roar of the rain drowned out even the ubiquitous sound of the sea. Nicky got out and ran for the back steps with an umbrella over her head as Andy Cohen, who was babysitting her for the afternoon, pulled into the parking area behind her. On the back porch, Gordon stood with his camera focused on the sky.

  “This is great,” he said to her as she shook her umbrella and folded it before heading inside the kitchen. His face was positively gleeful. “What a backdrop. Talk about your vintage haunted-house shots.”

  Glad Gordon was so well entertained, Nicky went inside and found herself immediately swept up in an embrace by first Tina, then Cassandra, then Mario, who were all in the kitchen with the tools of their trade spread out on the table and counters.

  “I’m so glad you’re doing okay,” Tina said as the hugfest ended. “You look wonderful.”

  “She does not.” Cassandra had been studying her with her head cocked to one side. “You got bags under your eyes. I’m going to have to break out the Preparation H for that. And what’s that on your neck?”

  “A hickey,” Tina squealed, looking closer. Her eyes flew to Nicky’s. “Ohmigod, who’s the guy?”

  With the best will in the world not to, Nicky could feel herself blushing. It was, as she’d known all her life, the curse of the fair-skinned.

  “ ‘Dickey’ I know,” Mario said thoughtfully. “A false shirt. But what’s this hickey?”

  “You know, a love bite,” Cassandra told him. She pursed her lips. “Kissy-kissy.”

  “Can we just get on with this, please?” Nicky picked up a lip brush and thrust it at Tina. “Or I’m going to do it myself.”

  JOE DROVE ACROSS the South Causeway Bridge toward the mainland more slowly than usual because of the downpour. The rain was pelting down so heavily that he and the other drivers had their headlights on. The cruiser’s windshield wipers were in continuous motion with a rhythmic swishing sound that, combined with the dull roar of the rain itself, was almost soporific in its effect, especially since he’d gotten something like two hours of sleep the night before. Not that he was complaining. At least the way he’d spent the previous night was a good way not to sleep. The best, in fact. As a cure-all, hot sex beat every other treatment he’d tried, hands down. Today he was feeling like himself again. Like the Joe Franconi he’d been before. A kinder, gentler version, maybe, but at least the same guy. Knowing that he was not totally nuts helped, of course—the fact that Nicky had actually seen Brian, too, blew his mind almost as much as the knowledge that he was being haunted by his own personal ghost—but most of the credit went to Nicky.

  She’d healed something inside him. Taken something that was broken and made it whole again.

  Like his heart.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that he had this horrible sneaking suspicion that she now owned it, which was something to worry about another day. For now, he meant to just savor the fact that she was part of his world for as long as he could.

  Lightning flickered across the sky, lighting up the roiling gray clouds above and the ink-black waters of Salt Marsh Creek below the bridge. He was on his way to Georgetown County Hospital to ask Livvy a couple more questions. It had come to his attention that she and her husband might have employed as a gardener one of the men on the list of violent offenders who were recently released from prison.

  As a solution, how easy and neat would that be? Vince would practically kiss his feet.

  But something about it just didn’t feel right.

  In fact, as he left the bridge and turned onto Highway 17 toward the hospital, Joe realized that he’d had the equivalent of a brain thorn all day. It had been poking him, irritating him, refusing to allow him to forget about it. Now he realized what it was—something Vince had said: “From start to finish, this is all the fault of your girlfriend’s damned TV show.”

  Vince was right. It was.

  Tara Mitchell, Lauren Schultz, and Becky Iverson had suffered their fates fifteen years before. Nothing had happened since. The case had gone dormant. Most people had forgotten—until Nicky’s show had come to town and stirred things up again.

  This rash of murders—the whole Lazarus Killer thing—had begun with that TV show.

  Joe thought about that for a moment longer, then picked up his cell phone.

  THE FRONT PARLOR (which was really old-house-speak for living room) at Twybee Cottage was basically reserved for guests—or Leonora’s private clients.The family rarely used it. The walls were painted deep gold, the floor was covered with an ancient (read “old and thread-bare” rather than “antique”) Oriental carpet, and the furnishings were Victorian-era couches and chairs, some with the original horsehair stuffing. There was a fireplace with a beautiful mahogany mantel and two windows, one look
ing out onto the side yard where Livvy had been attacked, and a larger one facing the sea. The curtains—the same gold brocade that was in the study—were closed on both windows at the moment, in an effort to improve the lighting. On such a dark day, Gordon and Bob were having to work extra-hard to properly light the shot.

  Leonora, in her full psychic-medium garb of purple caftan and lots of makeup, was seated on the red velvet-covered sofa, with Karen’s black blazer in her hand. Her eyes were wide, her lips were tight, and every time Nicky looked around, she got a glare.

  “I’m not getting anything,” she hissed at Nicky after calling for a break. The cameras had already been on her for a full five minutes, during which nothing happened.

  Nicky suppressed a sigh. The diva was back, the block had not lifted, and the timetable was tight. Welcome to her life.

  “Just take your time,” she said. “We’ll keep the cameras rolling, and you just sit there and do what you do.”

  Leonora gave her an evil look.

  “How can I do what I do if I’m blocked?”

  Nicky took a calculated risk. “He almost killed Livvy, mother. And if you can’t help us, he may come after her again—or come after me instead.”

  Leonora stared at her. Then she closed her eyes and ran her hands over the blazer again.

  Nicky motioned urgently to Gordon and Bob, who were filming from two different angles because the size of the room didn’t permit much camera movement. The cameras came back on.

  Leonora sat silently on the couch, fingering Marsha Browning’s watch. She touched the other items—her eyes were still closed—and went back to Karen’s blazer.

  “I feel . . . I feel . . .”

  Nicky held her breath.

  The group crowding the hallway went totally silent. Isabelle Copeland, a slim, blonde, twentysomething production assistant who had flown in with the team to fulfill Karen’s duties for this final segment, had been on her cell phone to Chicago, reporting on the progress of the filming almost continually since Nicky had arrived. Her phone—now hopefully set on vibrate—was clutched against her breast in both hands as she watched with total absorption. Mario, Tina, and Cassandra, having encountered Leonora in diva mode before, were wide-eyed and as silent as the grave. Marisa hovered just out of camera range, tape recording away. Uncle Ham (Uncle John was at the hospital with Livvy) had his arms folded across his chest, leaning back against a wall as he watched. Harry lurked near the back of the hall, looking resigned. Andy Cohen, driven from his car by either curiosity or the storm, stood near Harry.