She had looked like an Amazonian queen that day, clad in camouflage cutoffs and a cactus-green tank top. She wore the length of rope and boot knife more elegantly than most women wore jewels. The dying sun cast half of her face in copper as she scrambled upslope, nimble as a mountain goat. Dark hair whipped around her ice-chip eyes each time she paused to look back at me. I thought my heart might burst from love and pride as she waited for me by the burning carcass.
“Now do you see why burning is a terrible way to get rid of a body, Janey?” Her calf flexed as she nudged the unfortunate creature with the toe of her hiking boot, revealing the wet, red mess spilling from a tear in the singed fur. The muscle tissue around it was gray and had already begun to cook. “Internal organs are too wet to burn, even if you use a gallon of accelerant.”
“Who did this?” I asked, nose buried in the crook of my arm against the bitter, lung-blackening smoke.
“Poachers, probably. Looks like they hacked off the best parts and decided to burn the rest.” Gently and with infinite tenderness, she had peeled my arm away from my face. “Learn this smell, baby. This is the smell of a burning body, and there’s nothing like it in the world.”
There had been a lot of esoteric things my mother wanted me to know. Facts now leaping through my head like a herd of startled rabbits as I stared at the blackened human body at my feet.
The skull was often the most charred due to the scant amount of soft tissue over bone.
The body had burned hottest and longest where the clothing had acted as wick, the fabric soaked and fueled by the melted fat.
Muscles and tendons shrank as they cooked, curling arms and legs into a pugilistic stance common to boxers. Flexion of elbows, knees, hip, and neck. Hands clenching into gnarled claws.
She was a woman.
Had been a woman.
The fire had eaten her face. Burned her hair away. Left her mouth a fearful rictus. Death’s ecstatic grin carved into fleshless cheeks, the tissue beneath it slick and red in the places where it had split open.
Beyond recognition.
These words had always seemed like an expression. An exaggeration. But they weren’t. Not really. What I was looking at could scarcely be deemed human but for the bones. Their long, delicate lines beginning to show beneath flesh that fire had stripped away.
Beautiful bones.
Where had I heard this phrase?
Valentine.
Good buildings begin as beautiful bones. Your mother has them. So do you.
So it was at Valentine’s building site with the metal skeletons of his design rising from the earth all around me that his words circled back again and landed with a synaptic snap.
I went to my knees. Searching for something, anything that would render the idea impossible.
She was the right size.
This is not my mother.
The right shape.
This cannot be my mother.
Those could be her teeth.
Your mother is waiting.
The first drops of rain sizzled as they hit the skull. Cold on her cheeks, cold on mine, both of them warmed by the same fire.
I shouldn’t be able to look at her this way. I shouldn’t be able to look at anything this way. Feeling no horror. No grief. Only the cool blue flame of recognition that my life had been one long climb to an inevitable disaster. The sum total and purpose of all my mother’s preparations.
“Jane!”
Floodlights and slanting rain hung a shimmering curtain on the air. I squinted through it, my mind dully arriving at recognition just in time to see him get shot.
Chapter Seventeen
I’d never ridden in an ambulance before.
If Bixby had had his way, I wouldn’t have been riding in one now.
Luckily the man in question was buckled to a stretcher, and the paramedics didn’t seem as concerned about his protestations as they did staunching the bleeding from his hand.
Or what was left of it.
“I don’t want her in here.” He gestured to me with his crimson-stained gauze mitt, wild eyed and pale faced, whether from anger or blood loss, it was difficult to say. “She needs to go back to the building site for questioning.”
About this, he was not wrong.
In the confusion resulting from the simultaneous arrival of cops and paramedics, Bixby had identified himself as an off-duty officer, and I had identified myself—out of his earshot, of course—as his fiancée.
They’d taken one look at the blood squirting from his wounded hand and hustled both of us into the ambulance, ignoring his insistence that they leave him behind to help process the scene.
Allowing myself to be thus escorted was in large part due to the discovery I’d made after I had dialed 911 and tied a tourniquet around Bixby’s wrist but before the ambulance had arrived.
Namely, the body was not my mother’s.
At least, I was reasonably sure it wasn’t my mother’s after I helped myself to a sneak peek of a mostly unscorched cell-phone holder/billfold a couple of feet from the body. The full significance of whom the driver’s license inside belonged to didn’t quite register until I had stopped gagging from relief.
Carla Malfi, Valentine’s mistress-shrink.
“He’s in shock,” I said above the ambulance’s howl. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“Oh, yes, I do. I want her out of here. Now.”
The female paramedic, brusque, middle-aged, and brimming with efficiency, palmed Bixby’s bicep and retrieved a blood pressure cuff of a larger size. “You know we can’t stop the vehicle, Officer Bixby.”
“Who said anything about stopping?” Bixby glanced at the back doors, a small, feverish smile tweaking a dimple into his cheek as he presumably imagined my ejection at full speed.
I dragged a hand to my chest, feigning hurt. “Just because we don’t agree on the wedding venue doesn’t mean I don’t still care about you, Steve.” I tenderly pushed a dark lock of hair from his forehead, which was clammy with sweat.
“My name is not Steve, and we’re not engaged, goddamn it.”
“Could he have traumatic amnesia?” I asked, giving the male paramedic my best concerned-spouse expression. “I’ve heard that’s a thing.”
“Possible,” he allowed, his eyes widening as he shucked an IV port from its sterile packaging and examined Bixby’s good arm.
Lifting had given Bixby veins like a porn star had tits.
A damn shame that he probably wouldn’t be lifting anything more than hospital Jell-O for quite a while.
“I do not have amnesia.” Bixby’s knuckles were as pale as milk on the stretcher’s side rail. “You left the bar, I followed you, I got shot.”
“But I found your fingers. Doesn’t that count for something?” I lifted the cooler in which four-fifths of Bixby’s left hand—his thumb was still attached—currently enjoyed a refreshing ice bath. I had my doubts about whether they’d be able to reattach it, as what I’d picked up from the construction rubble mostly resembled a rawhide chew that had been gangbanged by a pack of pit bulls.
“If it weren’t for you, my fucking fingers would still be on my fucking hand!”
“Please, try to stay calm.” The female paramedic glanced at me over her shoulder. “We just gave him something for the pain. Maybe it would be best to let him rest for a while?”
“Of course.”
Something for the pain.
I watched Bixby’s eyelids sag, feeling an irrational stab of jealousy.
Would that they could do the same for me.
Cold, hard facts were arriving at a speed faster than the shrieking ambulance could escape.
Someone had wanted me to find Carla’s body.
Someone had wanted me to find Carla’s body at Valentine’s building site.
Someone had wanted me to find Carla’s body at Valentine’s building site so they could fire a bullet in my general direction, but Bixby had reached out to get my attention at the last mi
nute.
Shepard hadn’t texted me since I’d abandoned my position on the corner of Wynkoop and Sixteenth Street. The radio silence wasn’t like him.
Someone had some explaining to do.
“We have a tentative ID on the body.” Paul Gladstone, a.k.a. P-Ripple, seated himself next to me in the emergency room waiting area, the scent of rain and smoke riding in on his coat. His voice carried an edge I didn’t remember. A hardness underscoring his native warmth.
“Carla Malfi?” After an hour of going over and over everything I had seen with a homicide detective from Bixby’s unit and omitting this one particular detail, I was too tired to pretend.
Surprise stripped a decade off Paul’s face. It was an expression I could imagine my mother finding endearing. “You know her?” he asked.
Ice water replaced the blood in my veins, numbing me from head to toe. “I interviewed her earlier today as part of Valentine’s divorce proceedings.”
A coldness crept into Paul’s weathered features at the mention of Valentine’s name.
I found myself pausing, deciding how much information I wanted to part with, given how little Paul had been willing to offer to me so far. That Carla claimed my mother had threatened to expose her and Valentine’s relationship, I didn’t feel especially compelled to mention. “She was his therapist. And his mistress.”
“What did she say about him?” Paul asked.
“Mostly that she didn’t believe Valentine to be the violent psychopath his hideous dragon snatch of a wife claimed him to be.”
“Maybe she was wrong. If being a private investigator has taught me anything, it’s that people are willing to believe all kinds of things about someone they love.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“You were afraid it was your mother?” It wasn’t so much a question as a statement. “Is that why you copped a look at the ID before the police showed up?”
I didn’t ask Paul how he knew. For the moment, I wasn’t nearly as concerned about that as I was about what he knew. And why he hadn’t bothered to tell me.
“You think I should have waited for a comparison to dental records we both know my mother doesn’t have?” I had thought of a dozen more elegant and subtle ways to mine information, but all of them seemed to have evaporated in favor of a ham-handed segue. The sure thing. “Why didn’t you tell me that there aren’t any public records for my mother?”
The reflection of white linoleum cast an eerie glare over Paul’s cold coffee eyes. “How did you find out?”
“Bixby told me before I left the bar. He also had some interesting things to say about Shepard.”
Paul examined his battered knuckles as if the answer might be hidden among the scars.
“I knew about your mother’s records, or lack thereof, before you and I even met.”
“Did she know that you knew?”
He nodded. “I asked. She didn’t elaborate. I didn’t push it.”
“What about Shepard’s criminal record? Did you know about that when you made him my armed babysitter?”
“Combat twists you in a lot of ways. Shepard is twisted in ways I can accept.”
I folded my arms and turned toward Paul to give him my full attention. “I’m listening.”
“When you’re downrange, you learn things. Things you can’t forget just because you come back.”
“Such as?”
“You have enemies. Shepard served in the sandbox, where those enemies looked just like everyone else. Mothers. Children. Anyone and everything with a heartbeat is a potential threat.”
“He was a sniper?” I asked, finally giving voice to my suspicion.
“Is a sniper.” Intensity sharpened the dark wells of Paul’s eyes. “That training doesn’t go away just because he’s no longer wearing the uniform.”
“I see.”
“I’m not sure you do.” Paul sat forward on the waiting room chair, his ponytail a wolfish silver beneath the fluorescents. “After Vietnam, the Department of Defense did some math and figured out that they were spending about nine thousand dollars in bullets for every kill. So, they started training soldiers who could actually eliminate a target with a single bullet. One.” He paused, holding up a finger. “Sometimes a sniper has to go days before pulling the trigger. Watching. Waiting. Civilians who have never been in that situation can find that kind of focus a little overwhelming.”
“I can see where he’d be well suited to surveillance.”
“Exactly,” Paul said. “In all his years working for me, he’s never lost a target. Until you.”
“Ahh.” I cleared my throat, making room for the crow I’d inevitably be ingesting. “I’ll acknowledge that my lack of cooperation may or may not have contributed to his particular difficulties.”
“You left a man who won’t even sit with his back to the door naked and handcuffed to a bathroom fixture.”
I sank down an inch or two in my seat. “Perhaps not the most considerate thing I’ve ever done.”
“And dropped his four-hundred-dollar earpiece into a water glass.”
“An insensitive gesture on my part.”
“And that’s to say nothing of entering a restaurant so you could—”
“Yes. Okay. I get it. I’m a dick!”
“You’re not a dick. But you are your mother’s daughter.”
I sighed, heavy of heart and spirit. “I don’t even know what that means anymore.”
“It means you’re not so good at letting anyone help you.” Paul dropped his big warm hand over mine, the palm leathery and comforting against my knuckles as he squeezed. “But it also means you’re stronger, smarter, and braver than just about any other woman I know.”
Treacherous tears welled in my eyes. Stupid fucking compliments and kindness. “Where is she, Paul?”
“I’m doing everything I can to find her. But if you’re determined to help, we need to work together.”
“Does that mean you’ll tell me what you know from now on?”
“That depends.” Paul searched my face, perhaps looking for similarities to the woman we both loved. “Can I trust you not to lie to me?”
“Me?” The hyena/buzz saw laugh and I had a spontaneous and unwelcome reunion. “What would I lie about?” And on this episode of Stupidest Questions Ever Asked in the History of the Universe . . .
“You lied about being friends with Melanie Beidermeyer.”
“Says who?”
“Says you. I saw how you looked at her at the bar tonight.”
This was an unwelcome revelation. Paul had seen me—and at fairly close range—but I hadn’t seen him.
“How did I look at her, exactly?” I tried for wide-eyed innocence but felt my face tipping perilously toward manic surprise.
“Like you wanted to smash her face and make a meat collage from the pieces.”
I silently added this to the list of creative ways I’d come up with to end Melanie’s unholy dominion upon the earth. “Maybe a little bit,” I admitted.
“I need to know that I can trust you with information. And that you trust me with information if and when you find it.”
Oh, I was going to find it all right. Beginning with Carla Malfi, whose life I intended to turn inside out like a bag of doughnuts. I’d scrape the metaphorical frosting off with my teeth if I had to.
And not just because metaphorical frosting didn’t make my ass wobble.
“Listen, P-Ripple—may I call you Paul?”
“Makes no difference.”
“I can’t always control the first thing that comes out of my mouth, Paul. But I promise you that the second thing will always be the truth.”
“Deal.” He offered his hand and we shook on it.
“Mrs. Bixby?” A nurse stood at the double doors leading back to the intensive care unit.
“Here,” I said, shooting up from my chair.
Paul raised a dark rectangular brow at me.
“That one doesn’t count,” I insisted. “It
happened before you got here.”
“Fair enough.” Paul pushed himself to his feet. “Do me a favor?”
“If I can.”
“Call Shepard to pick you up when you’re done.”
I hesitated in the doorway, the nurse impatiently shifting her weight as the automatic security timer buzzed.
“Do I have to?”
“I’m sure he’ll have mostly cooled off by then.”
Shockingly this failed to reassure me.
Just as shockingly, Bixby didn’t want to see me. Not even when I explained to his closed door how one of his detective friends had come to the emergency room and I had disgorged everything I knew about the crime scene, so really my having hitched a ride with the ambulance wasn’t a bad thing at all in terms of the investigation.
It was about this time that something crashed against the other side of the door in the general vicinity of my head, so I elected not to belabor the point.
I did, however, offer to bring back to Bixby whatever it was he’d thrown at me.
My offer was roughly rebuffed with an abrupt verb and an even shorter personal pronoun.
I was on the point of politely declining his suggestion owing to a lack of flexibility and the principles of physics when a hand closed over my elbow and spun me around.
Shepard.
And he didn’t look especially pleased with me.
“Walk.” The order was paired with a not-so-gentle squeeze of his fingers on the flesh of my upper arm.
The soles of my shoes squeaked as he marched me down the empty hallway, panic setting in as my brain reeled.
If I ran, he’d catch me.
If I screamed, he’d stop me.
If I fought, he’d win.
And so, I walked.
A door opened behind me. Closed.
Together, we sank into the dark.
Chapter Eighteen
“You see how easy it would be?” Shepard’s body was punctuation, final and unyielding as he jerked me against it. His words were hot silk filling my ear—a smaller blackness within the larger one.
Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Page 16