Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, good luck figuring it out.”

  She jerked the bike up from the ground, hopped on it, and pedaled madly downhill, the bike’s wheels banging against roots, rushing through pine needles and leaves.

  Chapter 11

  The DVD

  The early afternoon heat shimmered against the black asphalt and beat down against Finch’s head, heightening his awareness of the tiny, hard ball of discomfort at the base of his neck. A remnant of the migraine. A reminder, he thought, that at any moment an explosion of pain could bring him to his knees. Under the baseball cap, his scalp was sweating. Beads of perspiration rolled down the sides of his face. Another half hour out here, he thought, and he would look like he’d gone swimming with his clothes on.

  He pedaled his bike along Mango Hill Road, aware that he was doing exactly what experts contended that criminals often did—returning to the scene of the crime. But he had something to deliver. The DVD rested snugly in one of this pockets. That aside, he enjoyed wading into the swelling throngs of press and paparazzi that swarmed across the road, sharks in a feeding frenzy because of something he had done. It made him feel like a god, something he’d never felt in Hollywood.

  In the unlikely event that he ran into anyone he knew, he doubted he would be recognized. He looked like a nerd out for his constitution. Baseball cap, sunglasses, olive-green shorts, a pale green T-shirt with a Chinese symbol on it that meant Go with the flow. Early on, he had learned the art of disguise—how to look and behave like a good kid, a model student, a preppie, whatever a situation required. When you changed schools every several months, you learned to act in order to survive.

  For as long as Finch could remember, his old man had sold used cars and hadn’t been able to hold down a job longer than four or five months because of his excessive drinking. So whenever he got fired, they would pull up stakes and hit the road again to the next town and the next and the next. And at each place, Finch would attend a new school, if he attended school at all. He rarely made friends. What was the point of friends when you knew that in a few months you would move on and never see them again?

  By the time they reached Seattle when Finch was fourteen, he had lost count of the schools and towns and was largely self-educated. At fifteen, he took the GED, passed it, and enrolled part-time at a junior college. He worked thirty hours a week in an electronics shop, saved his money, and bought his first used Radio Shack computer for a thousand bucks and his first car for another thousand. He refurbished it, rebuilt the engine, and for a year after that, he and his old man shared little more than living space in the trailer.

  His old man hated Finch’s independence, hated that his old tactics for keeping Finch in line no longer worked. His verbal abuse rolled off Finch without touching him. On the rare occasions when his old man had come after him with fists, Finch had stood up to him. And because he was taller, heavier, and no longer afraid, his father had backed down. When Finch was sixteen, he moved into an apartment with a friend. His old man had threatened to report him as a runaway, but he never had. He was glad to be rid of him.

  Six months or so after he’d moved out, he returned to the trailer one night to pick up the rest of his belongings. Unfortunately, his old man was there, blasted, and had come after Finch with a broken bottle. He was so drunk that when Finch had leaped to the side, his old man had stumbled and knocked himself out. Finch set fire to the trailer and never looked back.

  Fire: the universal purifier.

  He felt a sharp flare of pain at the base of his neck, vestiges of the migraine, a warning. Finch cut off thoughts about his old man.

  In the eighteen years since the migraines had started, Finch had become something of an expert in the affliction. Migraines affected more than twenty-five million people in the U.S. alone, tended to run in families, and were three times more common in women than in men. They could last from several hours to several days, often began during adolescence, and certain triggers could bring on an attack. Fatigue. Stress. Foods containing nitrites or MSG, aspartame, chocolate, aged cheeses, and alcohol. Caffeine withdrawal, menstruation, and weather changes were also blamed.

  His major triggers were stress, chocolate, and weather changes. During Danielle, when the barometer had fallen so precipitously, he’d been reduced to a throbbing, blurring mass of pain for at least ten hours. The onset of a severe thunderstorm could do it, and so could sudden temperature extremes. But the biggie was stress, always stress. Sometimes, the migraines came on suddenly, with no aura or warning at all. He would be brushing his teeth, for instance, and his peripheral vision would vanish. He would be unable to see the hand that was brushing his teeth and one entire side of his face would disappear from his vision.

  Other times, he was free of migraines for weeks. During his first several years in Hollywood, he’d had a migraine maybe once every eight or nine months. In the six years he’d worked in Silicon Valley, he’d had three straight years without a single migraine.

  During those years, he’d loved his job, made a lot of money, felt successful, and had a stable relationship with a woman who also worked in the computer industry. Then she ran off with her married lover and the migraines started up again. Since he’d started watching the Nicholses a year ago, the migraines had gotten worse. A pretty clear message, but he didn’t want to think about it.

  Before he rounded the curve in Mango Hill Road, he saw the first of the press vans, their satellite dishes glimmering in the hot light. They were lined up on either side of the road, one after another, extending along the curve and then beyond it, nearly as far as he could see. Hundreds, he thought. People congregated, some of them filming news segments, others just standing around with their bottles of Perrier and Evian, waiting for whatever might happen next.

  For a moment, a kind of wild urge came over him and he felt like waving his arms and shouting, Hey, morons, I’m in your midst!

  As he neared the Nicholses’ home, the vans and cars multiplied like rabbits. He figured there were at least seventy-five people jockeying for space on the sidewalk directly at the bottom of Mango Hill, all of them with video equipment aimed at the house. Waiting for the next sighting. Salivating for the big bonus, the big promotion, the treasure at the end of the rainbow.

  No one paid any attention to him. He simply navigated his way up the street.

  Just beyond the house, a man stood outside a van with TELEMUNDO written across the side in bold blue. His tripod and camera, set up on a patch of grass in front of the van, were aimed at the house. Finch leaned forward on the bike as he passed, making sure that he was well below the camera, and stopped on the other side.

  “Hey, man, what’s going on?” he asked.

  “You haven’t heard? Suki Nichols lives there.” He had a slight Hispanic accent. “Her son is missing, the housekeeper was murdered.”

  “Yeah, I know all that. But my God, there’re hundreds of people here.”

  The guy laughed. “She’s big news. This is big news. The rags pay major bucks for close-ups on shit like this. Then you toss in cable news, network news, Internet blogs. Everyone’s scrambling for the inside dope.”

  “You know anything about the woman who found the body?”

  “Local businesswoman, Mira Morales, supposedly a psychic.”

  “I hear she’s the real thing. But I’m still wondering how she found the body. I mean, what was she doing in the house? Is she, like, a friend of the family or something?”

  “Don’t know. There’re a lot of questions about all this and everyone out here’s looking for the answers.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve been in that house. I know the layout. And the weakest point is that utility-room door. That’s how the intruder got in.”

  The man suddenly took a renewed interest in Finch. “You live on the island?”

  “Been here for years.”

  The man stuck out his hand. “Enrique Ruiz, with TELEMUNDO. Good to meet you,
Mr…

  “Jones. Jim Jones.”

  “You’re kidding. Jim Jones? Like the Kool-Aid guy?”

  Shit, bad choice of names. “Blame my mother.”

  “Well, my mother named me Punto Ruiz. Try going through life with that name, right? Point. I finally changed Punto to Enrique, which got whittled down to the English version, Ricky.” He stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Jim. So you know the Nicholses?”

  “Just socially. I used to install security systems in houses, right? And that utility-room door of theirs was vulnerable from the get go. Couple that with no power, no parents at home, an aging housekeeper, no ferocious guard dog, most of the perimeter fence down… anyone could get in there.” And do what l did.

  “So are the rumors true?” Ruiz asked, leaning closer to Finch. “That Paul Nichols screws around?”

  Finch laughed, a low, conspiratorial laugh. “What do you think? Guy like that, tons of money, famous director, women around him all the time…”

  “Yeah, but c’mon, man, if you have Suki Nichols in your bed, you don’t need to look any farther. They said there hasn’t been any ransom demand, so what do you think this guy wants?”

  “Beats me.” He thumbed the air over his shoulder. “One of your buddies down there a ways asked me to give this to the guy at the Telemundo van.” He slipped the DVD from his pocket, held it out.

  “What is it?”

  Finch shrugged. “He didn’t say. Hey, maybe it’s that lottery ticket photo, right? Good-bye Telemundo, hello Tahiti.”

  Ruiz laughed. “Then no one in this crowd would pass it along. Can you point out who gave it to you?”

  Finch craned his neck, pretending to scan the crowd. Ruiz’s cell purred, saving him the pretense.

  “Excuse me,” Ruiz said.

  The moment he turned his back to take the call, Finch pedaled away, smiling to himself, then laughing out loud.

  The afternoon heat seemed to bear down against Sheppard like some massive, invisible hand. The quicker he tried to move along the line of cars that snaked from Old Post Road into the dock’s parking lot, the greater his need to find an air-conditioned room, a cold shower, even a patch of shade. The breeze that usually blew in off the bay between Tango and Key West had died twenty minutes ago. The air stank of exhaust from the fifty or sixty press vehicles that idled in line, waiting to turn in their passes and be cleared for the ferry trip back to Key West.

  Sheppard and one of Cordoba’s men worked the line for the four-thirty ferry, and Goot and another Cordoba lackey worked the line for the five o’clock ferry. There would still be two more lines for two more ferries before the six P.M. curfew for the press. He didn’t know if he could stand it that long. Let the mayor get out here and do this. Better yet, bring Cordoba out.

  As each press pass was returned, the names were checked off on an alphabetized list that had been issued by Mayor Dawson’s office. Invariably, people griped about the bureaucratic red tape and asked where they were supposed to pick up tomorrow’s passes. All the hassle, Sheppard thought, would put a dent in tomorrow’s press turnout and that could only be a good thing, especially for him and Goot.

  A man with a press pass around his neck trotted over to Sheppard, huffing and puffing, his face bright with sweat, his cheeks flushed from the heat. He looked like he was on the verge of a stroke.

  “Excuse me. Are you Agent Sheppard?”

  “Yeah.” Sheppard glanced at the man’s press pass—Enrique Ruiz, Telemundo—and figured him for one more guy looking for special privileges. “What can I do for you?”

  “I, uh, need to pass along some information.”

  “About what, Mr. Ruiz?”

  “A guy named Jim Jones.”

  “Jim Jones.” Yeah, okay.

  “Not that Jim Jones,” Ruiz said quickly, and his story spilled out.

  As soon as Ruiz related that “Jim Jones” had said the intruder had gotten into the Nicholses’ place through the utility-room door, Sheppard’s internal alarms went off. That fact intentionally hadn’t been released to the press. Suki’s statement about Adam being taken out of his bedroom window implied the kidnapper had entered that way too, a deliberate ploy on their part to keep certain facts hidden. How would an alleged local resident know about the utility-room door without inside information? Sheppard could count on his fingers the number of people who knew it—half-a-dozen law enforcement personnel, Tina Richardson, the Nicholses, and Mira. None of them would release that kind of information to the press.

  “Would you be able to describe this man, Mr. Ruiz?”

  “Sure. But…”

  “To a police artist?”

  “Absolutely. Except for his eyes. I never saw his eyes. He wore really dark sunglasses. “What I wanted to tell you is that—”

  “What would you say is this man’s most distinctive physical feature?”

  Ruiz’s expression hardened. “Hey, can I have a couple seconds here before you bombard me with more questions?”

  “Uh, yeah. Of course. Let’s sit in my car, where it’ll be cooler.”

  Once they were inside the Jetta, Sheppard turned the AC full blast. Ruiz brought out a portable DVD player and a DVD. “This Jones guy said one of the other press people asked him to give this to the Telemundo guy.”

  He turned on the DVD player and Sheppard stared in horror at the little screen, his mind racing, sucking in the details. The lighting. The music. The voices. Neither he nor Ruiz said a word until the sequence ended.

  “I haven’t said a word to anyone about this, Agent Sheppard. I’ve got kids. I know how I would feel if this boy were mine.”

  How differently this might have turned out, Sheppard thought, if “Jim Jones” had given the DVD to a reporter who lacked scruples. “Look, Mr. Ruiz. I appreciate what you’ve done, coming forward like this, and I know what you’re thinking right about now, that here goes your story. I’m asking you to keep all of this confidential and in return, you’ll be the first person I call with tips on progress in the investigation. We’ll put you up for the night and cover your expenses.”

  Sheppard quickly called Goot to let him know what was going on. “I’ll get one of Charlie’s men to fill in for you,” he said. “And I’ll meet you at forensics in an hour.”

  Once they were en route to the forensics building, Sheppard dug his cassette recorder out of the glove box, turned it on, and asked Ruiz to relate everything that had happened. It was immediately apparent that Ruiz had an excellent memory for details.

  “I thought the whole thing was pretty strange and on impulse, I turned my camera around and taped him as he pedaled on down the road.”

  Sheppard leaped on this. “You still have that?”

  “Sure. I didn’t get much, just his back.”

  “That’s great.” Better than great. No telling what sort of magic Tina and her people would be able to conjure. “We’ll run it through forensics.”

  “And I get it back, right?”

  “When we’re done with it.”

  Ruiz suddenly snapped his fingers. “I just remembered something else. He asked me about the woman who found the body and said he’d heard that she’s good, as a psychic, right? But he was wondering how she’d found the body—in other words, how she happened to be in the house.”

  Ever since the press conference this morning, Sheppard had wondered how the press had gotten Mira’s name. But he’d been so insanely busy that he hadn’t had a chance to think about it. Now here it was again and he knew he had better pay attention. The people who knew that Mira had discovered Gladys’s body were the same group who had known about the utility-room door. But there were some probable additions to the list—like Ace and Luke. They revered Mira, though, and wouldn’t do anything that might harm her. So forget them, forget everyone, he thought, except for Charlie Cordoba and Paul Nichols, the two people he trusted the least in all of this.

  A few minutes later, Sheppard turned into the parking lot of the forensics building. He let
Ruiz off in front, then drove off to find a parking space. As soon as he was alone, he called Mira’s cell number. When he got her voice mail, he hung up and called Ace.

  “Yeah, man,” Ace said. “What’s happening?”

  “Ace, are you interested in a part-time job?”

  “Right now part-time is my full name. What do you have in mind?”

  “Sticking to Mira like Velcro.”

  Ace snickered. “So now I’m Elliot Ness?”

  “Only if you still have a permit to carry a gun.”

  “Still got it. Define Velcro.”

  “CNN identified Mira as the woman who found the housekeeper. A supposedly random guy on a bike got into a conversation this afternoon with a reporter from Telemundo and Mira’s name came up.”

  Silence on the other end, then: “You’re asking for a quantum leap here, Shep, but if I’m hearing you right, you think this random guy is the guy and may be looking to have a little chat with Mira?”

  “That’s the gist of it.”

  “C’mon, you know what you’re asking me to do here, Shep? It’d be easier to stick to the dog like Velcro than to Mira. She won’t even accept my offers of a ride to the store. I try to stuff food down her throat so she’s not so skinny and she complains that she’s going to die of obesity. Please. And when she, Luke, and me are together, weird shit happens and we all get freaked. I don’t know if I can do this. Besides, she’ll pick up that I’m hiding something from her.”

  “What weird shit?”

  “Poltergeist weird shit. Last night. In the trailer. And on top of it, Tom supposedly paid her a visit. You know, dead hubby Tom. That Tom. And he took her to see Adam, so she could see the kid was alive. Then Suki Nichols shows up and hires her for six figures.”

  Sir figures? Mira never had been paid that kind of money for her psychic work. Never. Talk about pressure. It explained why Mira had said what she had when they were out in the woods. I’m working for her, not you. “Just do the best you can, Ace. Drop by the office tonight so I can pay you.”