Onyx Webb: Book Two

by Diandra Archer

  The room was empty. There was no one there.

  Cecelia let out a breath and entered the bedroom.

  She set the champagne bottle down on the dresser and reached down, pulling off her shoes and tossing them at the base of the bed. Then she reached up and began to unbutton her blouse.

  Ummm, ummm, ummm…

  The humming was directly behind her now. Cecelia spun around and faced the full-length mirror hanging on the wall. And then she saw him.

  It was Osvaldo Montezuma Sanchez. In the mirror.

  Cecelia had watched Sanchez die in the electric chair with her own eyes a year and a half earlier, so how—?

  Osvaldo Sanchez’s gray form came at her through the glass, and Cecelia swung the champagne bottle, shattering the mirror. But he was still there. Sanchez reached out and wrapped his arms around her petite frame and pulled her toward him.

  “I told you I’d be back.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Orlando, Florida

  February 23, 2010

  It was almost four o’clock in the morning when Tank pulled the limo to the curb near the entrance of the 55 West building and turned off the engine. Gone were the crowds of young ladies in short skirts and high-heels desperate for attention, as well as the hordes of cologne-drenched, testosterone-laden males looking to give it to them.

  Tank lowered the smoked-glass partition, glanced in the rearview mirror and said, “Hey, guys. We’re here.”

  Neither Koda nor Dane moved an inch. Each of them had a few drinks at the bar before the séance, with Koda pounding down another few Belvedere rocks from the limo bar, before finally drifting off.

  Tank honked the horn. “Koda, Dane, we’re here,” he bellowed.

  Dane sat up, rubbed his eyes. “That was fast,” he said.

  “Yeah, time flies when you’re out cold,” Tank said. “You wanna wake up sleeping beauty?”

  Dane grabbed Koda’s arm and shook him hard.

  Nothing.

  “We could have stayed in St. Augustine,” Tank said through the window. “We had rooms with nice beds, all paid for.”

  “There’s no arguing with him, Tank,” Dane said. “You don’t know how crazy he’s been.”

  “About the mirror, right?”

  Dane nodded.

  “Try punching him in the arm,” Tank said. “It’s either we get him awake, or we’re going to have to carry him up.”

  Dane reached out to give Koda another shake, but stopped when he saw that Koda’s cheeks were wet.

  He was having the dream again.

  “Christ, I thought he was over that,” Tank said. It had been no secret that Koda had seen a therapist—an entire troupe of them, actually—after his mother had disappeared. “You think it’s the mirror that set him off again?”

  Dane shook his head. “He’s done this for as long as I’ve known him, but, yeah, it’s gotten worse since he saw the girl.”

  “Maybe this séance wasn’t such a good idea?”

  Dane didn’t respond.

  Koda woke just after ten-thirty the following morning, his head pounding. He looked around the room and recognized nothing. Where was he? Had they gone back to the Casa Monica?

  No, the rooms at the Casa Monica were tastefully decorated in a Spanish theme and this place, wherever he was, reminded him of the inside of a spaceship from a bad 1960s movie.

  Koda made his way to the window and looked out to see the SunTrust building across the street—where the Mulvaney Property International offices were—and realized he was at home, in the penthouse on the thirty-first floor of the 55 West building.

  With his head splitting, Koda left the master bedroom and worked his way toward the living room where he could hear My Chemical Romance playing on the sound system, combined with the unmistakable whirring-sound of a commercial juicer.

  Mika’s juicer.

  Koda entered the living room and looked around to find that everything was different—the sofas, tables, art, everything. Each and every stitch of furniture gone—replaced—even the carpeting had been changed.

  “What in the hell?” Koda yelled over the juicer’s noise.

  Mika looked up and saw him standing there. She hit the pause button on the juicer and came around the kitchen counter into the living area and kissed him on the cheek. “What do you think? Fabulous, huh?” she asked, flinging her arms open wide for dramatic effect.

  Koda crossed the room and turned the music off. “What made you think it was okay for you to do this?”

  “Well, somebody had to do it,” Mika said. “This place was like a man cave from a bad 1970s movie. So I told your dad what I had in mind, and he said to do it as long as I kept the cost under $100,000, which was impossible of course. The art cost that much all by itself.”

  Koda glanced around the room. The place did look more like an art gallery than a penthouse apartment, paintings and sculptures covering virtually every square foot of the place.

  Koda felt a sudden wave of nausea wash over him.

  Oh, dear God.

  Mika knew Koda was going to be upset when he realized what she’d done. “It’s gone,” she said, determined not to dance around the question.

  A feeling of panic began to rise in Koda’s chest. “Gone? What do you mean by gone?”

  “What can I say, honey,” Mika said, returning her attention to the juicer. “The mirror thing was starting to get on my nerves. And face it—sitting in front of an old piece of glass for days on end, waiting for a girl that doesn’t exist to show up? It just isn’t healthy.”

  “What did you do with it, Mika?”

  “I traded it,” Mika said.

  “Traded it? Traded it for what?”

  Mika pointed at a large canvas on the far side of the room. The painting was a wild, intense abstract piece—a multi-hued sea of acrylic and oil, splashed across the canvas in a frenetic cacophony of colors and emotion. The signature in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas contained a single name…

  Onyx.

  Just Onyx, nothing else—except for a small spider dangling from the bottom of the letter y—painted in red.

  Chapter Twelve

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  October 1, 1935

  “Give her the whole box of poison if you have to,” Claudia said after Ulrich updated her on Onyx’s condition.

  Ulrich knew he couldn’t put more in her food than he had already, or Onyx would know for sure, so he switched to other poisons. First, he tried arsenic. Then cyanide, then Lysol—then mercury, laundry detergent, sulfur, hemlock, analine dye, pyrethrum, and Jamaica ginger.

  Nothing worked.

  Each time Ulrich switched to a different poison, Onyx was unaffected for a few days, then she’d get violently ill. And just when it seemed she coud not go on another minute, she’d recover somehow.

  Ulrich was out-of-his-mind perplexed. He’d given her more poison than any human should be able to survive. Damn it, why wouldn’t she die?

  After a full month had passed, Claudia was apoplectic.

  “I don’t care what you have to do, strangle her or throw her in front of a train, but Onyx is either dead by tomorrow or I will tell my daddy—The Owl—everything.”

  Ulrich waited until one o’clock in the morning to walk over to the train station where he stole an unlocked Chrysler. Then he drove down Fremont and parked across from The Apache. On the front car seat next to him was a two-foot length of rope and a pair of leather gloves.

  Onyx would be done with her final set around two.

  Admittedly, he hadn’t taken Onyx seriously when she’d told him she was going to start singing; after all, he’d never heard her sing a note before that time. Now Ulrich could see Onyx on stage through the large front windows of The Apache from where he was parked. The silky-smooth strains of her voice drifted out onto Fremont Street.

  He sat there listening as Onyx worked her way through her set list… “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”… “All of Me”… “I’ve Got t
he World On a String”… “Try a Little Tenderness”… wrapping with her favorite song of all, “Moonlight Bay.”

  Suddenly Ulrich found himself thinking about the first day he’d met Onyx near the Tchefuncte River Lighthouse on the banks of Lake Ponchartrain and how beautiful she looked in the mid-day sunlight. It was as if a fever broke. What in the hell was he doing?

  Ulrich put the car in drive, did a U-turn on Fremont and took a right on Ogden toward The Night Owl.

  He didn’t have to kill Onyx.

  He could kill Claudia!

  Ulrich turned off the headlamps of the stolen Chrysler and pulled into the rear lot behind The Night Owl saloon.

  Ulrich looked at his watch. It was ten minutes after two in the morning, and he knew that Claudia would be coming out any minute. He pulled on the leather gloves, grabbed the rope and walked in the darkness to the rear door of the building, near the bottom of the stairs.

  Ten minutes passed and still no Claudia. Ulrich took a few steps to his left and peered through the window into the club. Claudia was on her hands and knees, pulling on a metal ring and lifting up a door that was hidden in the floor. Claudia placed a large stack of bills into the hiding spot, lowered the door and repositioned a small rug over the area.

  Ulrich made his way back to the car with another change in plan. Don’t murder Onyx or Claudia; just steal the money and go! That would serve everyone right. Surely there was a woman out there who’d truly appreciate him.

  Ulrich waited for Claudia to lock the door and leave. With no one in sight, Ulrich punched the glass window with his gloved fist, reached in and undid the lock. He quickly stepped inside and went to the spot.

  Ulrich pulled the rug back, pulled on the metal ring and gasped. The secret compartment didn’t have that day’s receipts—it must have had a month’s worth. There was so much money he couldn’t hold it all and searched around for a bag to carry it in.

  I have just pulled off the heist of the century, Ulrich thought as he made his way to the door, and from the Spilatros no less!

  Then, Ulrich heard a noise from behind him.

  Ulrich turned to see Flavio Spilatro—one of the brothers—standing behind him. Having had too much to drink, as usual, Flavio had passed out in the rear booth of the saloon. Now he’d finally come to.

  “Who in the hell are you?” Flavio asked, slurring his words.

  The question was apparently rhetorical since he did not wait for an answer and rushed at Ulrich like a drunken football player. Ulrich took a step to the left and watched as Flavio grabbed at thin air and went tumbling down the stairs—promptly breaking his neck.

  Ulrich peered down the stairs.

  There was no movement.

  Christ.

  Stealing money from the mob was bad enough, but killing a mob boss’s son?

  Ulrich ran from the bar, climbed in the car, and began pounding his fists on the steering wheel. “Damn it!” he yelled. How could things have gone so bad so quickly? Why did the world have it out for him?

  Ulrich looked at his watch. It was almost three in the morning. He needed to get home, get packed, get Onyx, and get out of town.

  Though Ulrich told Onyx not to go to the doctor under the guise of their not being able to afford it, she’d gone anyway.

  Now, almost a week later, the doctor who’d seen Onyx received the detailed report for the blood he’d drawn and couldn’t believe what he was reading.

  Poison.

  More accurately, poisons.

  And in such large quantities no human could survive with them in his or her bloodstream.

  He dialed the telephone number of the patient—a woman named Onyx Webb—written on her paperwork. It turned out to be a work number for a place called The Apache.

  The manager at The Apache informed the doctor that Ms. Webb had failed to show for her last three work shifts and had been fired. No, they did not have any forwarding information.

  The doctor hung up the phone, upset that he was unable to warn the woman that someone close to her clearly wanted her dead.

  The tests did not lie.

  Onyx Webb was being poisoned.

  And as if that were not enough, she was pregnant. Whoever was poisoning the woman was not only killing her but also poisoning her baby.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Savannah, Georgia

  July 16, 1982

  Assistant DA Cecelia Jaing had not missed a single day of work since joining the district attorney’s office and suddenly she had missed three in a row.

  The Wyatt Scrogger trial had concluded on Tuesday evening, and when Cecelia had failed to show up for work on Wednesday morning, everyone wrote it off as a well-deserved hangover.

  When Thursday rolled around and again the Asian attack dog failed to make an appearance, her coworkers began to wonder what was going on. Calls to her apartment went un-answered and messages left on her answering machine went unreturned.

  When she didn’t arrive on Friday morning, the police were sent to her apartment. Fearing the worst, the apartment manager was summoned to open the door and upon entry, the worst was confirmed:

  Cecelia Jaing was dead.

  The body—described by the first officers to arrive as “gray and lifeless”—was found on the bedroom floor at the base of a set of dresser drawers. Next to the dresser was a large mirror that the responding officers described as “broken, perhaps in some kind of struggle.” This led to Detective Leo Igler being called to what was now officially being referred to as a crime scene.

  Leo was not happy to get the call. If it turned out to be another murder, he was going to be downright pissed. In all his years on the force, he’d never had more than three open murder cases at any one time—at present he was working six.

  If things were as the uniformed officers had described, Cecelia Jaing would make seven.

  Leo and Sergent Elton Nahum—the department’s crime scene photographer—took the short six-block ride from the station to Jaing’s apartment on West Oglethorpe Avenue. They were greeted with three pieces of good news.

  First, the place didn’t smell too bad. Leo hated the smell of a rotting corpse more than just about anything else, and when they entered he was surprised that there was virtually no noticeable smell of putrefaction.

  Second, the uniformed cops stayed out of the place as Leo had asked. Once, he’d arrived at a crime scene and found one of the uniforms sitting on the deceased’s toilet, smoking a cigarette and reading a blood-stained suicide note.

  Last but not least, though the structure was one of the older buildings in the city, there was an elevator to get Nahum and his God-forsaken wheelchair to Cecelia Jaing’s fifth-floor apartment.

  Leo entered first, walked the scene and took a few notes. He noted the broken mirror and the bottle of champagne, still in the dead woman’s hand, suggestive of a violent struggle.

  The apartment had been locked from the inside, with no sign of forced entry. There was no fire escape, and five floors was too great a height to jump.

  Leo also noticed the expression on Cecelia Jaing’s face, her eyes wide open and her mouth open wider still. Her tongue extended further than one would think possible, frozen in a look of…? Of what, Leo wondered. Surprise? Terror?

  When Leo was done, Nahum rolled in and began snapping away. As much as Leo disliked the crippled Vietnam War veteran, he found the man to be thorough—excessively so—often taking hundreds of photos when a dozen would have done the job. Though the station had a fully equipped darkroom, Nahum insisted on developing his photos at home. Think what he may about the man on a personal level, Leo Igler had to concede that Sergent Elton Nahum was a consummate pro.

  Saturday was one of Leo’s regular days off, but he’d been summoned to the coroner’s office. When Leo asked if it could wait until Monday, the coroner said, “Just come.”

  Leo walked into the coroner’s exam room. “Better be good.”

  “Good?” the coroner said. “I don’t know about good.
But weird? Yes, definitely weird.”

  Leo crossed the room to the stainless-steel table. Cecelia Jaing’s body was cut open and splayed out like a giant dissected frog.

  “What am I looking at?” Leo asked.

  “You know how, within a couple hours of death, the skin starts to get some purple-red discoloration from livor mortis?” the coroner asked.

  “Yeah,” Leo said.

  “Two to six hours later, rigor mortis sets in—starting with the neck, eyelids, and jaw. After that we get the first sign of putrefaction of a body, assuming the person has been dead for forty-eight hours, is a greenish skin discoloration on the right side of the lower abdomen, spreading to the chest and upper thighs.”

  “If you say so,” Leo said.

  “Everything I just mentioned? Well, in this case, we’ve got none of it. Nothing we would expect to have happened has happened. And look at this,” the coroner continued. “You know how bacteria normally resides in the colon? No bacteria. No sulphur. The body requires bacteria and sulphur for digestion, Leo. I’ve never done an autopsy where they aren’t present, but here? Again, nothing.”

  Leo knew just enough biology to fake his way along, but he did know that bacteria and sulphur were two key reasons a human body began to putrefy—which, in layman’s terms, meant to smell and eventually stink.

  “What did it smell like when you entered the apartment?” the coroner asked.

  It didn’t.

  “Nothing,” Leo said, “there was no smell at all.”

  The coroner nodded as if this was expected, then continued. “Putrescine, diaminobutane, cadaverine, pentanediamine—each should be present…”

  “Okay, I get it,” Leo said. “What does it mean?”

  “If I didn’t know the woman’s age—that she was young and in relatively good health—I would have said she died of old age. More specifically, I would have say it looks like the life was literally drained from her body.”