She frowned. “I’m not broke, you know. And my insurance will cover most of the damage in here.”
“I believe you. But truly, it makes my life easier if you have a secure front door.”
She glanced at him, perplexed by his comment. But then he added, “I suppose you could kiss me by way of a thank-you.”
“Ha! There it is. The hidden motive. My mother always told me to be wary of men who come bearing gifts.” She wagged an accusing finger up at him.
He grabbed the offending finger and kissed the tip of it before turning away quickly to survey the damage in the rest of the store. Her heart skipped a beat at the brief flirtation.
“Was anything stolen, or was it straight-up vandalism?” he tossed over his shoulder as he looked around at the wreckage formerly known as her shop.
“As far as I can tell, stuff was just busted up. Although I think I’m missing an ugly African fertility statue. It was stone and I doubt it would have been broken by a baseball bat. An arm might have come off, but the bulk of it should have stayed intact.”
Max turned to face her. “Anyone show any interest in it recently?”
“Funny you should ask. A man came in yesterday to look at it. He said he would have his grandson come in and look at it today.”
“And has the grandson shown up?” Max asked quickly.
“Not that I’m aware of. But then, I’ve had a closed sign in the window all day while I cleaned up. He could have come by, seen the sign and left without me ever knowing it.”
A heavy frown knit Max’s brow. Heavy enough that she refrained from asking about it and just let him think out whatever quandary had so arrested his attention all of a sudden.
“Was the statue hollow?” he bit out.
She frowned. “Yes. The head screwed off so shamans could put talismans inside it specific to whomever the statue was supposed to help be fertile. Is that important?”
Max smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “It’s nothing. I just saw a fertility statue once that came apart.”
“Where did you see a fertility statue?”
“I happen to have a professional interest in art, in case you forgot.”
She might have scoffed, except he sounded serious. So many secrets this man kept. It was enough to make her a little crazy. “I guessed I pictured you as a European old masters kind of guy and not an African fertility statue kind of guy.”
He opened his mouth to respond, but his cell phone rang just then, silencing him. He pulled it out to see who was calling. After glancing at the caller ID, he said, “I’m sorry—I have to take this call. I’ll stop by later to check on you.”
She watched his broad shoulders and athletic frame retreat from her store, which suddenly felt empty without his magnetic presence. With a sigh, she got back to work sorting through the rubble.
* * *
“Yo, Bastien. What have you got for me?” Max strode down the street and around the corner. He ducked down a side street and toward the back entrance to his hidey-hole.
“Two things. First, that woman you asked about—Callista Clearmont—donated her body to science upon her death. It was taken to Tulane University so her brain could be studied. Apparently, she was some famous fortune-teller. Anyway, they’ve still got her corpse. You want me to order an autopsy on whatever’s left after they sliced and diced it?”
Color him shocked. “Yes. That would be great.”
He slipped into an alley one block over from the curiosity shop and jogged up the long stairs to his surveillance blind. He unlocked the door and let himself inside as Bastien continued, “And about that suggestion your girlfriend made—”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“So then you won’t mind if I make a move on her? She’s hot. Sweet little tushy, and those big do-me eyes. And that head of hair of hers—I bet she’s a wildcat in bed—”
“You stay the hell away from her, LeBlanc. She doesn’t need some idiot loving her and leaving her just now. Her life’s in enough turmoil without you—”
Bastien broke into laughter in his ear, and Max cursed him out soundly.
Eventually, the cop quit chuckling long enough to say, “Yeah, well, your non-girlfriend’s suggestion to look for young women who’ve disappeared recently having matching descriptions to her turned out to be a good one. We’ve had two more petite, dark-eyed redheads disappear in that part of town. One about two years ago, and one almost exactly a year back.”
Max frowned, seeing where this was going. “So Julio G. was after her for her appearance and nothing else?”
“No, man. He had plenty else in mind besides her appearance. We put a police informant in a holding cell with him, and he got to bragging to our guy. Bastard claimed to have done some seriously twisted stuff to a couple of girls. He didn’t confess to killing any of them, but NOPD’s psychiatrist thinks we’ve got ourselves a serial killer.”
In a weird way, that was good news. He would actually rather have Lissa victimized by a serial killer—now in custody—than have her be the target of some power play by a rival gang to the Bratya.
Bastien was speaking again. “We got our best interrogators making a hard run at Julio. I’ll let you know if he cracks.”
“If the cops don’t break him, are you going to give it a try?” He knew full well that Bastien’s SEAL training included what the military liked to refer to as EIT—enhanced interrogation techniques—and then some.
“One step at a time, bro. In the civilian world, we have to keep an eye on how we get confessions out of perps. I’d hate to have this jackass get off on a pesky technicality.”
One corner of Max’s mouth turned up. He’d had the same interrogation training that Bastien had. Max sighed. “Keep me informed, will you?”
“You got it, bro.”
He hung up and moved over to the window. From this third-story vantage point, he had a clear view into the curiosity shop, which, up until now, had been his main focus. Now he adjusted two of the cameras to look into Lissa’s trashed apartment. He pointed one at her living room and another at her bedroom. It wasn’t that he wanted to be a voyeur and spy on her private life. But he was determined to keep her safe, and that meant having eyes on her at all times.
He turned on the video cameras and set them to record anyone coming or going from the store. Then, he moved to the table in the corner and settled into the Zen patience of a surveillance operative.
Except the usual waiting calm would not come today. It felt wrong to be sitting there spying on Lissa Clearmont. He knew what she smelled like. What she felt like in his arms. Hell, he wanted to know a lot more than that about her. This was wrong.
But not wrong enough that he stopped. He was closing in on the bastards who had killed his mother, and they would pay. Nobody, not even Lissa, was stopping him from catching them. If he had to be a disgusting Peeping Tom and invade her privacy in the most unspeakable ways, he would do it. He’d devoted most of the past decade to uncovering the identity of his mother’s killer, and he wasn’t about to stop now.
* * *
Lissa looked up from the pile of debris, arrested by an image in her mind’s eye.
A dark night. Raining. Skid marks barely visible on the wet pavement. A broken guardrail. Way down a ravine, the undercarriage of an overturned car visible. Faint moaning filled her ears, even though she was too far away to hear it coming from that car. And the whimpering of a frightened child. She couldn’t tell if it was coming from the crashed car or somewhere else in her vision.
A blonde woman terribly injured, more dead than alive, frantic about her own survival, but even more panicked about her daughter’s safety. Someone had run them off the road, the blonde woman was certain of it. And she couldn’t seem to move any of her limbs. She would not be able to protect her daughter if the wou
ld-be killer came down to finish them off.
Horror at the thought of watching them murder her daughter in front of her was worse than the thought of dying herself. A thousand times worse. And her son. So much responsibility already had fallen upon his young shoulders as he struggled to become a man...
Hot, silent tears ran down the woman’s cheeks as life faded from her broken body.
Panic rushed through Lissa. She couldn’t tell if it was her own reaction to the horrifying scene or someone else’s panic being projected to her. Were she with the FBI, she would merely relay to them the word panic.
A replica voodoo doll slipped out of her fingers and thudded to the floor. The sound startled Lissa out of the disturbing vision and back into the curiosity shop.
She’d never noticed until today the series of small shelves mounted around the shop about seven feet up, mostly tucked behind the tops of cabinets and stuff hanging from hooks in the ceiling. They hadn’t been disturbed in the break-in, and she found herself staring at one of the shelves now. A large chunk of some clear rough-cut stone sat on the shelf. Quartz maybe.
Her gaze slid along the wall to the next small shelf, where she spotted the two halves of an amethyst geode resting side by side. The next shelf on the adjacent wall held a magnificent piece of fluorite with shards of blue and purple and green flecked throughout it. The next shelf held a bloodstone, more rust colored than red and deeply veined with black.
The entire store was set up as a ritual circle, ringed with magic-enhancing crystals. Huh. And then there were those lines she’d found. Today’s cleanup had forced her to slide many of the big display units and antique cabinets aside, revealing a network of faded lines painted on the floor. They looked as if they’d been there for decades. Now that she thought about it, they formed a circle edged with some sort of intricate knot-work pattern.
Even the lamps in the store were carefully placed at the eight compass points of a ritual circle. Son of a gun. No wonder her psychic talent went crazy whenever she stood in the exact center of the store like she was doing now. The whole space was a focused ritual circle pointing at that one spot.
The more she learned about her deceased aunt, the more secrets she uncovered. And that worried her. What other secrets had Callista been keeping all these years?
Other questions had crowded forward today, too, disturbing ones that Lissa had spent most of her life trying to ignore. Like why had her mother left New Orleans as a teen and never, not once, come back to her hometown? Even after being attacked as a newly arrived girl in New York, why hadn’t her mother ever come back here? What had driven her completely away from her own family? For that matter, why had the rest of the family moved away from New Orleans, leaving only Callista behind?
* * *
Max intently watched the image on his monitor of Lissa, turning around slowly in the middle of her shop. What was she doing? It was as if she’d suddenly realized she was lost and was trying to get her bearings. As he stared at the computer screen, the image fuzzed out, replaced by a memory of his father abandoning him in the middle of a bayou with nothing but a knife and his wits, and telling him to find his way home or die.
He’d been blindfolded in the car, and they’d driven for hours, whether in circles or hundreds of miles from home, he’d had no idea. It had been dark and scary as hell. There’d been bugs and snakes, which he ate; alligators, which he ran from; bogs, quicksand and swarms of mosquitoes that he’d been convinced before the end of the ordeal would make him lose his mind.
God, he’d hated his father for that trip into hell and back. The man had driven him relentlessly, never cut him any slack. Always he’d been training Max, cramming information down his throat. And all the while, he’d spewed hateful things about the United States, criticized democracy, forecast its failure, propagandized and bullied and harassed Max into saying that he despised America and that the government needed to be taken down.
He actually hadn’t figured out that his old man was a spy for Mother Russia until he was about fourteen. The same age his sister had been when she and their mother had been in the car accident that paralyzed her mother and eventually claimed her life.
He blinked at the monitor, and Lissa came into view once more, her sweet face rescuing him from the memory.
* * *
A boy. Naked. On his hands and knees. Taking a beating being given to him for no reason other than it taught him how to withstand pain. To show him how much pain he could take without passing out.
Lissa reached out for the boy to shield him and comfort him in her mind, but he looked up at her, his tearstained face defiant.
“No!” he shouted silently at her. “Leave me alone. I can do this. I must do this. If I want to be strong, I have to do this.”
Lissa shuddered at the madness of it. Her store swirled into focus once more. Was that a vision from the past, something happening now or a glimpse into the future? She couldn’t tell from that brief snippet. And who was that boy? She hadn’t gotten a good look at his face, and mostly she’d just noticed the tear-streaked cheeks and grim clenching of his jaw against crying out.
* * *
Max stared down at Lissa in her apartment. It was dark outside, and her living room was an island of light against the night. She looked exhausted. The poor girl had been working from dawn till dark cleaning up the shop for two days straight. She was making progress, but the sheer amount of inventory that had been stuffed into every nook and cranny of the shop was mind-boggling.
Her shoulders started to shake. She was crying. He swore aloud at being forced to sit and watch her suffer and do nothing to help her. His father might have made him torture animals and kill them by all kinds of horrible means, but he’d never stopped being secretly sickened by what his father made him do. Sickened at his father for demanding it of him, and sickened at himself for doing it.
It felt like that now, letting Lissa cry without reaching out to help her. He ought to call her. Distract her and make her laugh. Offer her a little understanding and human compassion. But instead, he sat, paralyzed by his own self-hatred.
He was a monster. Maybe not of his own creation, but a monster nonetheless. He’d let his father turn him into this. He’d been a willing participant in being trained as an undercover operative of the worst kind. He was honest enough with himself to admit that he’d wanted to be like this once upon a time. He’d thought it would be cool. That he would end up like James Bond. But it hadn’t turned out to be sexy and exciting and sophisticated. It had turned out to be brutal and soul sucking and humanity robbing.
Lissa was better off without him. As miserable as she might be down there right now, sobbing alone and hugging herself like a lost child, she was still better off.
After all, what kind of person spied on another one and reported on her to an employer who would kill her without a second thought if she accidentally got in his way?
* * *
Kill me, please. I’m begging you.
The blonde woman from the car accident lay in a hospital-style bed that looked out of place in a regular bedroom. The woman’s limbs were oddly shrunken, the muscles atrophied away to nothing, and the woman lay unnaturally still. Only her head and face seemed to move. Paralyzed. The word burst into Lissa’s mind. The woman was paralyzed from the neck down. She looked up at Lissa pleadingly, begging silently for release from her private hell. Or maybe the woman was not looking at Lissa, but at whoever’s mind this vision had come from.
“I can’t take this anymore,” the woman wailed. “I can’t take what it’s doing to you, how I’m ruining the lives of everyone around me. Put me out of my misery and end my suffering. Please. I can’t do it myself. I’m too weak and too afraid. But you’re not. You’re strong. I know you know how to kill. Use your knowledge for good. Kill. Me.”
The woman’s agony was so intense that if fel
t as if Lissa’s insides were being torn out and tossed on the floor. Or maybe that was the agony of the person whose memory this was—a caregiver to the crippled woman. Either way, it was unbearable.
Lissa gripped her middle desperately, holding in the suffering as tears streaked down her face. Her tears or the woman’s tears or the watcher’s tears, she had no idea. They were all one and the same she supposed.
Where on earth were all these terrible images flooding in from? Whose were they? Not once had she seen a face she recognized. The visions came without a time context, without a call to action. The spirit sending her these images didn’t seem to want anything from her at all, which was a first.
Normally dead spirits wanted their bodies found, wanted their killers brought to justice, wanted revenge. Others wanted to find closure. To let go of something preventing them from leaving behind their mortal existence and resting in peace.
But the source of the flood of images from the past several days remained elusive, not revealing himself or herself, not asking for anything. It just poured out, vision after unwelcome vision.
Maybe it was leftover visions stored in the magic circle of the shop. Perhaps as she cleaned out the stock, she was cleaning out old ghosts. Except they didn’t feel old. If she were still into that stuff, she could do a séance to actually contact the spirits hovering so close. She could ask them directly where they came from and what they wanted from her.
In the past, she would have led an FBI team to a hidden grave and helped the spirit find peace enough to move on to wherever spirits went. No more, though. She’d given up that life. The work itself had been too stressful, and the impact on her personal life had been catastrophic. Everyone in seemingly the whole of New England had known her as the crazy girl who found dead people.
She no longer spoke to ghosts. She’d embraced the normal. But apparently it had yet to embrace her. Maybe if she just ignored the visions and spirits, they would eventually give up and move on. After all, she couldn’t possibly be the only person in this mystically charged town who could see and hear them.
Harlequin Romantic Suspense March 2016 Box Set Page 50