Nada. What the hell?
For her part, Lissa laughed and scooped up a...
Son of a bitch.
A cat. Small and black. With one white front paw that looked just like a feline glove. “Mr. Jackson, I presume?” he said drily, lowering his fists to his sides.
“Would you like to pet him? Although I don’t know if he likes men or not. You’re the first one I’ve seen him around. I inherited him with the store.”
“Along with this disaster zone?”
“I prefer to think of it as a project with unlimited potential.”
A cold knot of suspicion started to form in his gut. Had she actually, literally, inherited the place? From whom? And how recently? He’d been under the impression that the store’s namesake would be returning at some point. “Exactly how long ago did you inherit this place?”
“Let’s see. It’s been almost a month.”
He closed his eyes in chagrin as acid frustration ate its way through his gut. A month. The past few weeks of grueling round-the-clock surveillance had been for naught. She wasn’t the person he was supposed to be following. She wouldn’t have any contacts. She was useless to him. Worse, the trail had gone cold, then.
“Who owned this place before you?” he asked in resignation.
“My aunt. Callista Clearmont. She willed it to me right before she died suddenly.”
His one and only link to the next level of hierarchy in the mob he was infiltrating was dead? A stream of violent swearing erupted inside his head.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he murmured automatically. Crap, crap, crap. How was he going to track down Callista Clearmont’s mob connections if the woman was dead? Why hadn’t anyone told him?
Unless the niece had inherited the mob contacts, as well...
Lissa turned away. Her shoulders gave a suspicious heave, and she sniffed loudly. Oh, no. Not more female tears. He had no defense against them. They scared him to death. Frantic to distract her from launching into full-blown waterworks, he asked quickly, “You said she died suddenly?”
His question did the trick. Lissa turned back to face him, another one of those delicate frowns of hers puckering her creamy brow. “She called me. Told me she was going to die any minute and that she’d willed everything she owned to me.”
“Was she sick a long time?”
“Oh, no. She was in perfect health. We all thought she was going to outlive the rest of the family.”
His internal antenna wiggled abruptly. Could it be? Had the mob or one of its enemies killed her? “What were the circumstances of her death, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“She died in her sleep, supposedly. A customer found her after she didn’t come downstairs for an appointment to do a reading.”
“A reading?”
“She was a psychic. I think that customer had asked for a crystal ball scrying. She also read palms very well. The last time I talked to her, she claimed she’d had a vision. That a spirit told her she was going to die within a day or two and to put her affairs in order.”
A spirit, huh? More like a mob informant, perhaps? “Who were your aunt’s clients? Did she keep a list of them?”
“I suppose so. I haven’t found it if she did keep one, though. Her business papers are, well, a little disorganized.”
If the shop downstairs was any indication of how the woman had done business, any kind of organized client list was probably a long shot. With a list, though, he could maybe identify Callista’s mob contact and find the next level of hierarchy in the secretive Russian gang he’d spent the past two years infiltrating.
“Are you hungry?” Lissa asked, startling him out of his train of thought.
“You don’t have to feed me. I’ll grab something on the way home.”
“It’s the least I can do for you after you saved my life.”
“I wouldn’t go that far in describing what I did. I only interrupted a mugging. Any passerby could have done the same.”
“They could have, but that doesn’t mean they would have. He was going to kill me.”
How did she know that? Was she a psychic, too?
“I was just planning to heat up some leftovers. Let me fix you a plate.”
“Can I help, umm, prepare it?” He eyed the hot plate and metal washtub askance.
“Nah. I bought a Monte Cristo sandwich earlier and I’ll just pop it in the microwave. It’s a lot more than I can eat alone. I’ll split it with you.”
“Sure. If you’ll let me buy the next meal.” The words were out of his mouth before he stopped to think about them. There couldn’t be a “next meal” for the two of them. She was an innocent, not mixed up in her aunt’s mess and of no use to him. He would deliver her to Bastien in the morning, and then he would get the hell out of her life and never look back.
CHAPTER 2
Lissa’s hands still shook a little as she handed a paper plate with the batter-dipped, multilayered, fried ham-and-cheese sandwich to “Max Smith.” Which totally wasn’t his name. It didn’t take special powers to hear the evasion in his voice when he’d given her the name.
She was more rattled by tonight’s attack than she wanted to let on, even to herself. Thank God this stranger had been there to swoop in and save the day. She didn’t want to think about what would have happened had he not come along.
Speaking of which...“I’ll be right back,” she blurted. “There’s something I have to do.”
Max looked up at her in alarm. “You’re not leaving, are you?”
“Heavens no.” She ducked into what would have been the spare bedroom had her aunt not gutted it and dug around in her big trunk of art supplies for a sketch pad, pastels and her set of drawing pencils. Tucking that under her arm, she scooped up her easel and wrestled it out into the main room.
Max leaped to his feet to rescue the easel from her. “Where do you want this?”
“Over by the lamp. I’ll need the light.”
“Drawing something, are you?”
Crap. She couldn’t admit she wanted to capture the face she’d seen in her attacker’s mind as he’d attacked her. “It’s, umm, therapy. Helps me calm down when I’m upset.”
“You’re an artist, then?”
She shrugged. “Not really. I’m just a dabbler.”
She pulled a stool over in front of the easel he set up for her. In a few minutes a face started to take shape. She turned out to be a pretty girl, not unlike herself in features and overall coloring. Which was frankly creepy. Was her attacker a serial killer, maybe?
Once she’d captured the girl’s initial bone structure, she pulled out the pastels and really brought the face to life, drawing quickly and surely from memory.
“Who’s that?” Max eventually murmured from directly behind her.
She jumped, startled. She’d been concentrating so hard on the picture that she’d forgotten he was there.
“I have no idea.”
“It’s just a random sketch?”
There was no way she could explain it without sounding like a crazy woman, so she didn’t even try. Instead she lied. “Yes, it’s just a face.” And if she were a normal person, that was all it would be. Right, then. She’d determined to be normal; therefore, this was just a face.
Except why did the girl’s eyes stare out at her from the paper beseechingly, following her as she shifted right and left, checking the sketch’s perspective and making tiny corrections to the features?
It. Was. Just. A. Face.
Max moved in close behind her to study the sketch. “She’s pretty. You have a good hand for portraiture. You’re sure you’ve never seen this person before?”
Rather than answer his question, Lissa leaned forward to release the sheet of paper from the easel’s clips. “H
ere. Lay this on the floor in the corner and spray it with the fixative in the can over on the end of my work table while I put my art supplies away.”
It physically hurt Lissa to deny the girl’s fear and pain coming off that sketch. She had to get away for a minute and catch her breath. You poor, poor thing. Lissa jammed her pastels and pencils in a drawer in her dresser and slammed it shut. She wasn’t a psychic anymore. She didn’t listen to dead people anymore, and she didn’t draw the faces of murderer’s victims anymore. She was just a regular person living a normal life.
If only her gift didn’t seem to be tied to violence. Maybe she would have been able to live with predicting the sex of babies and telling people when to ask for a promotion at work. But her visions were, almost without exception, tied to death. She saw dead bodies. Sensed killers. Heard dead people. Saw death moving in to claim people. With a sigh, she returned to the main room.
Abrupt exhaustion swept over her. It was as if her psyche had held all her reaction to the earlier attack at bay until that sketch was out of her system. Now she felt on the verge of collapse.
“Are you okay?” Max asked quickly. The guy was pretty perceptive himself.
“I’m a little tired all of a sudden.”
He nodded knowingly. “Aftermath. The adrenaline drains away, and you feel like death warmed over.”
“Yes. That.” She sighed.
“Did your aunt leave a working bathtub in this wreck?” he asked.
Normally she would take offense at him calling her place a wreck. Even if it was true. She preferred to think of it as a work in progress. “Aunt Callista left the tub. Probably because it’s cast-iron and weighs a ton. I couldn’t even move it to scrape the linoleum from under the claw feet.”
“Then I suggest you go take a nice, long soak in a hot bath and go to bed.”
“Thanks for everything you’ve done for me. If you don’t mind, I’ll let you see yourself out. You’ve been more than kind, particularly since we’ve never met before tonight...” She trailed off, tilting her head to one side and staring at him as a little voice inside whispered that he knew her better than she could possibly imagine.
What was that all about?
She moved into the master bedroom and closed the door. Callista had not messed with the apartment’s original cast-iron claw-foot tub, and Lissa planned to take full advantage of that tonight. A bath was just the thing for quieting the voices rioting in the back of her head, clamoring more loudly than usual for attention.
* * *
Max waited until after the light went out under Lissa’s bedroom door to get up from the silly Victorian sofa and ease down the stairs. He avoided the step he’d registered as the squeaker on the way up and crept downstairs to the shop. Now to have a look around and see if he could figure out where Callista might have put her complete customer list.
Surely the woman had kept such a thing. Based on the criminal clientele he’d been told she served, she’d have been insane not to keep the names tucked away somewhere for self-protection, if nothing else. Of course, if she’d had a decent dead man’s switch in place based on such a list, Callista probably wouldn’t be dead now.
He reached the shop floor and looked around in dismay. How did a person even begin searching this maze? He started at the back corner and worked his way around the edges of the surprisingly large space. His mind boggled at the variety of odds and ends. He felt a little like Alice must have when she’d first fallen down the rabbit hole.
He examined an exquisite collection of small enameled boxes. As an art dealer, he would pay double what Lissa had them marked for, and he would mark them up even more for resale. He made a mental note to mention it to her in the morning.
Oh, wait. He couldn’t say anything about her merchandise pricing, lest she figure out he’d been snooping.
He refocused his mind on the client list and resolutely ignored a pair of actually quite nice landscape paintings hanging on the far wall from the stairs. They were oil paintings, the technique modern, and the sensibility for light and movement was top-notch. He would love to take a closer look at them in full daylight. If the color held up to bright light, the paintings and the artist could be quite a find.
But he wasn’t an art dealer anymore. At least not until he cracked the Russian crime syndicate that had swallowed his entire family whole.
Callista’s list, dammit.
He moved to the counter and made a cursory search of the cabinets there. Surely Lissa had already searched this, the most logical place to look for her aunt’s business records.
No surprise, he had no better luck than she’d had at locating Callista’s books. He looked around the store in the darkness. Where would he hide if he were a ledger, journal or notebook of some kind?
Something shifted in a corner near the ceiling, and he did a double take. For a second there, he thought he’d seen a faint movement. Or maybe a flash of light. Hell, if he didn’t know better, he’d say he’d seen a ghost. However, he did know better, and he didn’t buy any of that woo-woo stuff. It must have been cast from a passing car or something.
He glanced around behind the counter and spied a short door tucked back under the stairs to Lissa’s apartment. Hmm. A closet perhaps? He opened the door and was surprised to see another set of stairs, this one leading down. Nobody in New Orleans had basements. The place was built on a swamp, prone to flooding and gradually sinking even farther below sea level than it already was. A waterproof basement would be prohibitively expensive to build, the sort of thing only a bona fide nutball would even attempt.
But as sure as he was standing there, he was looking at stairs leading down. He pulled out the tiny LED flashlight attached to his key chain and pointed it into the dark. A dozen steps led into a low, cramped space that looked for all the world like some kind of vault. The walls looked like steel-reinforced concrete. He felt the nearest one and was startled to register some sort of thick sealant or covering on the surface. Windowless and stuffy, it felt like a prison cell.
Or a secret storeroom. Did the mob move contraband through here? Drugs, maybe? What in the hell was this place?
It was not nearly as cluttered as the shop was. Big wooden crates were stacked along one wall, and several old steamer trunks sat along the opposite wall. He moved to the crates first and was surprised to see everything from wrapped curios to bottles of wine. But not just any wine. This stuff was old, French and had a famous label that would fetch thousands at auction if the dates on the labels were real. The stuff had to be illegal. He was no great connoisseur of wine, but to his knowledge the vineyard itself was the only importer of this brand to the United States. Based on the amount of dust on the bottles, the wine had been there for some time.
He had a look in the nearest steamer trunk. Max opened the heavy lid and was gratified to see the thing filled to the brim with papers. Bingo. This was exactly the kind of place Callista might have hidden her client list. He picked up a fistful of papers and began to read.
A magic spell. A recipe for a love potion of some kind. A ritual for luck described in details. Seriously? C’mon, Callista. Give up your client list already. A chuckle sounded nearby, making him whip around in the dark, swinging his flashlight wildly back and forth.
And then he realized it was the furnace kicking on. This place really gave him the creeps. That haunting face Lissa had drawn must have gotten under his skin more than he wanted to admit. Those eyes—they watched him pleadingly, begging for help. Thank God he’d gotten to Lissa before that bastard had dragged her off to heaven knew where to do heaven knew what and put a similar expression in her eyes.
He shook his shoulders hard, trying to rid himself of the sensation of something or someone watching him. He was a professional, for goodness’ sake. Trained for most of his life in the art of covert operations. He was a man of cool logic and action. He did
not do ghosts, and he did not do supernatural. Period.
* * *
Lissa’s eyes opened drowsily as a hand caressed her forehead. She was too sleepy to bother pushing away the spirits tonight. “Is that you, Aunt Cal?” she mumbled to the room in general. “I’m fine—I promise. That lovely man, Max, or whatever his name is, took care of me. Did you send him to me?”
Another whisper of touch across her cheek. She would take that as a yes. “Thanks.” She sighed.
The ghost caressed her cheek again, this time beseechingly. It wanted her to listen. Reluctantly, she woke up more thoroughly, sitting up in bed and speaking directly to the invisible spirit hovering nearby. “Listen, Aunt Callista. About the whole psychic thing. I’m giving it up. I want to know what it’s like to be normal. To live like other people. Maybe find a nice guy and settle down. Have a family. I can’t keep talking to dead people and have a regular life. I know it’s selfish. But I’ve given my whole life to helping dead people. It’s time for me to live a little.”
The ghost of her aunt, if that was who’d woken her this morning, did not deign to answer. There were no more gentle, loving touches on her skin.
Lissa flopped back to her pillow, trying to enjoy the warmth of the morning sun streaming through her window. But that girl’s face from her attacker’s mind still lingered. She’d dreamed of her last night, too.
It had been awful having to endure the girl’s screams and cries for help. Help that had never come. Lissa shoved away the memory of her death, also dreamed about in vivid, high-definition color and surround sound. That was the worst part of dreaming. Lissa had no control over it, and the spirits seemed determined to take advantage of her weakness to torture her.
The nameless, but no longer faceless, girl was dead, and nothing would bring her back. The good news was that her killer was in custody and not likely to go free anytime soon. Lissa could let it go. Justice had been served. So the powers that be could just leave her out of the matter.
She sat up with conviction and threw back the antique quilt that had supposedly been made by a great-great-great-grandmother of hers. She had places to go and things to do. Determined to focus on those, she swung her feet to the cold wooden floor. This room needed a rug. A nice thick Persian one that she could dig her toes into.
Harlequin Romantic Suspense March 2016 Box Set Page 46