Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  “This is amazing,” she breathed.

  “This is just the beginning,” he said with an amused smile. “The archives are back here.” They went down a wide hall painted in eye-popping psychedelic colors and decorated with dark wood carvings. The hall curved gently to the right and ended at a pair of steel doors. “We could take the stairs, but let’s do the elevator.” Blake slid a plastic card into the slot, the light on the panel turned green, the doors opened to an elevator. “Now we go thirty feet down.”

  The doors clanked shut and the elevator plunged downward so fast that her stomach was left up where they’d started. Seconds later, they emerged in a windowless room the size of a three-car garage. Rows of filing cabinets and bookshelves filled half the room; high-tech equipment and desks took up the rest of it. The scent of fresh roses and gardenias, arranged in a hand-blown glass vase on the conference table, perfumed the cool air. Music played from one of the smaller rooms off the archives.

  “This is where most everyone at the colony rode out the hurricane,” he explained, then called: “Hey, Lydia, you’ve got company.”

  The music stopped, a door opened, and a tall black woman hurried out, her short, wiry hair threaded with gray, a pair of granny glasses riding low on the bridge of her nose. She looked to be about sixty. A sleek black cat darted out ahead of her and curled between Suki’s legs.

  “You don’t need to be yellin’ down here, Ross. I’m not deaf yet, you…” Her eyes settled on Suki. “Holy shit,” she whispered. “You’re…”

  “Suki Nichols, this is Lydia Santos,” Blake said.

  “Oh, my God, I am so deeply sorry about your son.” She took Suki’s hand and held it in both of hers, patting it. “But honey, believe me, Shep, Mira, my buddy Ross… they’re the best. They know what they’re doing.”

  “I know they do. Thanks.”

  “You devil,” she said to Blake. “You didn’t tell me you were going to bring a movie star here.”

  “You wouldn’t have believed me.”

  “You got that right.” She peered at them over the rim of her glasses. “So let me get this straight. You think there’s a connection between the kidnappings of Spenser and Adam?”

  “Actually, Lydia, we think Joy’s son took Adam.”

  Her dark eyes widened. “Spense? I used to stay with him when Joy had faculty meetings or a date. He seemed like a regular kid. Sort of quiet and solitary, though. And he liked to fiddle with gadgets.”

  “The evidence points at him,” Blake said.

  Lydia, now seated across from them, spoke softly, as though she were afraid she might be overheard. “I’d like to say that it’s because his old man ruined him. Ray Connor, that was his name back then. Bastard sadist, ex-cop from up north somewhere. I think he used to beat up on her. She was always looking over her shoulder, the way abused women do, you know what I’m saying? No telling what the hell he did to Spenser after he took him.”

  Lydia stabbed her long finger at the air. “But I don’t buy that horseshit that the childhood environment sculpts the person. If it were true, I’d be out there murdering people right and left. So if Spenser grew up to do what was done to him, then it’s because there was some evil within when he was born and whatever he endured with his old man just made it blossom. So let’s see what, if anything, like that shows up, huh? I’ll show you what I found down here in the archives.”

  “Who was Joy dating?” Suki asked, her eyes following Lydia as she stood.

  “Don’t know. She confided some things, but not that. You got to understand. In those days, I was the cleaning lady around here. Only reason Joy and I got to know each other is because I was cleaning up the photography lab one afternoon when she was in the darkroom. She showed me some photos she’d taken of her son, the house, and we got to talking. After that we’d have lunch or dinner together, and then I started staying with Spenser when she was going out. Let me get this stuff. Be right back.”

  Suki’s phone rang. She slipped it out of her back pocket, saw Paul’s number, and didn’t answer it.

  “The signal won’t be strong enough down here anyway,” Blake told her, as if he knew it was Paul and was trying to make her feel less guilty about not taking the call. “Not only are we underground, but the walls are probably twenty feet thick, solid concrete with reinforced steel.”

  “Was this intended as a bunker or something?”

  “That’s my guess. It was built right around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

  Lydia returned with half-a-dozen legal-size folders and lined them up side by side on the conference table. Suki saw that five of the folders were neatly labeled JOY LONGWOOD and covered a period from February 1970 to late April 1975, shortly before the fire that had killed her. The last file was labeled SPENSER LONGWOOD, 1972-1975.

  “This was everything I could find. In the early days, people who were interested in studying here had to audition to get in. The board was real picky. The people who got chosen lived in the cottages for next to nothing and in return, they agreed to give the colony copies of their work so we could stock the archives. Joy never interned here, but she gave me copies of her stuff and asked me to get it into the archives. Then she asked me to keep Spenser’s best things too. For the longest time, I kept this stuff in a box under my bed.” She gestured at the folders. “Go ahead, take a look.”

  Suki and Blake opened Joy’s folders and fanned the photos across the table in vertical rows, arranged by year, with the left row the most recent. It struck Suki that their minds worked in a similar fashion, seeking a pattern in what amounted to random chaos. As Blake stood to get a better look at everything, she opened Spenser’s folder.

  No photographs, mostly finger paintings, watercolors, awkward charcoal sketches. The paper was now decades old and had begun to yellow. Even so, the age of the paper didn’t diminish the violent colors, the odd shapes and textures, the strangeness of his young mind. Most of the time, she didn’t know whether she was looking at a house or a field, people or an upside-down sky. Everything was exaggerated, too large or too small, swirls of brilliant color overwhelming shapes or shapes overpowering texture. No balance. Some of the finger paintings reminded her of Rorschach inkblots, thick with meaning that she couldn’t decipher.

  Joy’s photos, taken in an era before digital technology, had that same surreal quality, filtered through senses that didn’t see the world in the way that other people did. A wet road lit up by streetlights became an exercise in terror when you realized that the lone silhouette in the foreground belonged to someone who pursued a solitary figure in the background. A field of bright purple Mexican heather was broken up by a massive, amorphous shadow over the field. Was it a thundercloud? A jet? An extinct bird? A UFO?

  Suki turned this photo over to see if an exact date had been printed on the back. No date, just a faint scribbling in pencil. “Something’s written on here in pencil. It’s almost too faint to read.”

  Lydia handed her a magnifying glass. “See if that helps.”

  Suki tilted the photo to the right, so that it caught the light, and held the magnifying glass over it. “I think it says, This is how Spenser makes me feel at times.”

  “Like a big shadow,” Blake said. “Maybe this is why.” He picked three photos out of the middle row.

  They looked as if they’d been taken within moments of each other, with a telephoto lens, through the glass of the sliding patio doors at the house. They had captured Spenser watching a toad, then hunched over it, then trapping it against the ground and tearing off its legs.

  The horror of it seized Said viscerally. The toad became her son and the boy torturing the toad became the man who had taken Adam. The evil within, as Lydia had said. But equally horrifying was that Joy Longwood had stood at the sliding-glass doors and shot the sequence of photos as her son had tortured the toad.

  “Jesus,” she whispered. “I’m going to be sick.” She shot to her feet and stumbled toward the nearest door. Instantly, Lydia was
beside her, hurrying her to the next door, turning on the light, and then holding her head as she threw up in the toilet.

  Her head spun, everything in her peripheral vision went fuzzy. The next thing she knew, she sat against the wall, with Lydia holding a cold towel to her forehead and another to the back of her neck. “Breathe,” she said. “Breathe real deep.”

  Suki breathed. Her hands went to the towels, holding them in place. She kept her eyes shut.

  “What do you need, Lydia?” Blake, his voice coming from the doorway.

  “In my office. Second shelf. A dark blue bottle.” Lydia crouched next to Suki. “What you saw in those pictures happened thirty years ago, girl. Don’t go thinking he’s doing that to your son, okay? He needs your boy alive.”

  Suki opened her eyes. “We still don’t know what he wants.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe that’s what he’s trying to figure out.”

  Blake reappeared. “Here you go, Lydia.”

  “Thanks, hon.” She unscrewed the bottle, filled an eyedropper, handed it to Suki. “Squirt this under your tongue. It’ll take care of the nausea.”

  “I heard about your alchemy.” Suki attempted a smile, squirted the stuff under her tongue. Tasteless, but cool. “How it saved Ross’s life. And Annie’s.”

  Lydia’s eyes widened. “Ross told you about that?”

  “She needed to know that the investigation is in good hands,” Blake said, as if defending himself.

  “Well, then you’re now a member of a very different club.” Lydia rocked back onto her heels. “Feeling better?”

  “Like it never happened. Thank you, Lydia.”

  “Then let’s get some breakfast and go back to work.”

  Blake reached out and pulled her to her feet. In the moments before he released her hands, something passed between them. She felt it, an electrical current, an attraction so powerful that it astonished her. Never mind that it was premature, that the timing was wrong, and that her life was too complicated to get involved with someone as genuine as Blake. It was just good to know she could feel anything like this at all.

  Chapter 16

  One World Books

  She woke to Sheppard nibbling at her ear like a small, hungry fish. “You awake?” he whispered.

  “Hmm. I am now.”

  Awake to the delicious sensations of his hand and mouth against her skin and the hard, insistent noise of the rain. Rain meant that no one would be working on her store today. It meant she could sleep in, that she and Sheppard could stay in bed all day and make love until her body ached.

  Well, not exactly.

  She rolled onto her side, facing him, and slid her fingers through his beard. “You may be the horniest guy I’ve ever met.”

  He laughed and linked his fingers through hers, pinning her hands against the mattress. “I’m making up for lost time.”

  His mouth burned a path from her throat to her breasts and belly, his tongue inscribing a trail of secret symbols that he could follow, like bread crumbs, through the wilderness and home again.

  The theme song from E. T brought her back. Sheppard’s cell ringing.

  “You’re kidding,” he muttered.

  “Don’t. Let it ring.”

  “Maybe it’s about Spenser.”

  She drew his face toward hers, kissing him hard, and felt the rapid beat of his heart against her. Suddenly, she saw the face of a plump man with liquid blue eyes and heard a now familiar phrase—car talk. “It’s him,” she said. “Kartauk.”

  Sheppard rocked back, slipped his cell out from under the pillow, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Agent Sheppard… Yes, Mr. Kartauk. Thanks for returning my call so promptly.”

  He walked out into the front room. Mira pulled the sheet over herself and watched the rain washing across the windows. Even without the workmen at the store today, she needed to be there to make sure the roof tarps weren’t leaking. To sift through her thick and messy files. To continue her inventory. She needed to read Suki’s house again, to sift through the material they’d collected, to earn the exorbitant amount she’d been paid. She was obligated to go to the end of the line with this. Or, as Key West conchs were fond of saying, all the way to mile marker zero.

  “Kartauk has a home here,” Sheppard said as he hurried back into the bedroom. “It’s where he comes when classes are out. He came down after Danielle to tend to repairs and broke his leg falling off a ladder. I’m going to meet him.”

  She pushed the pillows up against the headboard and sat up. “Damn, you look good without any clothes on, Shep.”

  He grinned and dived back onto the bed again. “I told him thirty minutes. Now where were we anyway?”

  Sheppard offered to drop her at the store, but it was still early enough to fill the van with gas before the station ran dry for the day. So they headed out at the same time, Sheppard promising to call her as soon as he left Kartauk’s.

  At the station, the line had formed already, but it wasn’t long yet. She waited, the engine on, and the windows shut against the rain. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth across the glass, an even, mesmerizing sound that acted like a drug on her brain, releasing endorphins or something else equally pleasant. This substance, whatever it was, seeped through her body until her relaxation was so extreme she thought she might fall asleep before she reached the pump.

  As she leaned forward to break her torpor, the gas station suddenly vanished.

  Wind drives the rain into her eyes like nails. She can barely see as she stumbles across a driveway toward a towering wooden gate. Her sandals are gone, she lost them somewhere, and the gravel slices into her bare feet. She doesn’t dare look behind, is terrified that if she does, she will realize how hopeless this is. She reaches the gate and frantically struggles to open it. But it’s too heavy and now it’s too late, her time is running out, she…

  “Hey, lady, move forward, you’re holding up everyone else!”

  An angry man pounded his fists against her window, his bulbous nose and the broken veins in his fat cheeks a testament to a lifelong problem with alcohol. She quickly lowered her window.

  “Calm down,” she snapped. “And while you’re at it, get your liver and heart checked. You’re about an inch away from a heart attack and even closer than that to cirrhosis. And by the way, your father-in-law won’t lend you the money for your business. Have a great day.”

  She raised her window, put the car in gear, drove up to the vacant pump, and got out. She was so irritated by the man’s behavior—and so puzzled by whatever had come over her—that she didn’t realize the man had marched up to her until he spoke. “You’re Mira Morales.”

  Mira, pumping her gas now, gave him a dirty look. “Sorry, pal, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

  “Nope.” He raised a digital camera and snapped pictures of her. “You’re working on the abduction of the Nichols boy.”

  Mira turned her back on him and finished filling her tank. But the man came around in front of her, still talking away and snapping photos, introducing himself as a reporter with a cable news channel and would she like to tell him where the investigation now stood?

  Mira looked as him as if he’d lost his mind. Then she snatched her receipt, got into the van, and the relentless reporter leaned in close to her window, snapping photos through the glass. She flashed him the bird and sped away, hoping that his need for a tank of gasoline was greater than his need to follow her.

  Psychic makes obscene gesture to reporter after refusing to answer questions. Great new cable fodder, she thought, and continued to check her rearview mirror. It seemed the reporter had chosen a full gas tank.

  Question: Why had she attracted that sort of confrontation?

  Sheppard would call it random. Her name and picture had been linked with the disappearance of a celebrity’s child, the reporter had Googled her name, found her photo, recognized her. Simple. But Mira knew better. Everything in her life was connected to ev
erything else. She thought it was like this for Nadine and Annie too, but didn’t have any idea how it was for other people. The confrontation, coming so quickly after her vision, was a warning.

  But about what? That she should back out of this whole thing and return Suki’s money? Frankly, she would like nothing better. Yet she felt obligated now—to Suki, and to Adam most of all.

  Her cell rang and an unfamiliar number in the 305 area code came up. “Mira Morales,” she said.

  “Mom. You sound so formal.”

  “Annie. I didn’t recognize the number.”

  “I’m calling from someone else’s phone. Nadine and I have been watching the stuff on the Adam Nichols disappearance. Is it true that you’re working on that?”

  “Why, did you place a bet with someone?”

  Annie laughed. “Yeah. Twenty bucks. I said you were. ’Cause a kid’s involved.”

  “You win.”

  “Is the house finished yet? The store? Is there electricity?”

  “No, no, and no.” Mira braked for a light.

  “Mom, when can I come back to Tango? It’s, like, so incredibly boring here. Nadine’s friends sit around and play bridge or dominoes all day or they do their weird Santeria rituals and everyone is asleep by eight at night and the cats are driving them crazy. One lady is allergic to them, and the other lady is afraid of them, and I’m starting to lose it big-time.”

  “Give me a couple of days, Annie. I’ll come up and get you.”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday. Can I take a bus then?”

  “No. We’re still under curfew, there’s only one gas station open and it’s dry before breakfast, and most of the kids you know have gone elsewhere.” And things with Shep have taken a new turn and I need some time. “We’re making progress on the Nichols case, honey. Just a couple more days.”