Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  Will call.

  Can’t call.

  Can you meet me in Miami?

  Stop pressuring me!

  Am horrendously busy.

  Did Adam know? Had he poked around in Paul’s computer?

  Probably. Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.

  She suddenly felt like taking a bat to the monitor, the tower. Smashing them, destroying them. But her practicality kicked in. Her attorney would want to see these e-mails, the first tangible evidence of Paul’s infidelities. They could save her millions in the divorce.

  Suki went into his password folder, counted five email addresses under five different names. Five. Why did he need so many? Was he conducting multiple affairs? Visiting porn sites? What? She clicked through them, copying the folders onto her memory stick, one after another, until she had copied everything. Then she printed out dozens of the most lurid e-mails, stapled them together, and put them in a folder.

  She poked around some more and found another curious item. The networking box was checked. Was it checked on her computer too? Was he monitoring her e-mail? Her files? She unchecked it, then poked around some more, looking for other anomalies.

  Suki was so involved in what she was doing that she didn’t realize Paul had come home until he was standing in his office doorway, his face bright red, shiny with sweat, as if he’d been running.

  “What the hell are you doing in my office?” he demanded.

  She pocketed the memory stick, picked up the folder, stood. “What I should have done a long time ago.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Rage seeped up from the center of her being, then rushed into her chest, her neck, her face. And when she finally met his eyes, he must have seen it because he flinched. “I wish I could write something cool,” she said, reciting from one of the c-mails. “But I still feel you inside me. Hot and wet and forever.”

  Blood drained from his cheeks, he opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  “Jesus, Paul. So what number is she? Eight or eighteen? Paradise.” She spat the word. “That’s who you were with the night Adam was taken. So go be with her.”

  Suki started past him, but Paul grabbed her arm. “Suki, wait. Please. Hear me out.”

  She spun around. “Hear you out? Again? Is that all you can say? What do you want me to listen to? How you whispered sweet nothings to this woman and then came home and fucked me?” She nearly choked on her own words. “I’m outta here. And when I come back, I want your stuff gone. Do you understand? Gone. I told you last night that I wanted you gone, but you didn’t get it. From now on, we communicate through our attorneys.”

  “You can’t throw me out,” he snapped. “This house is also mine.”

  “There’s one name on the deed, Paul. My name. It was paid for in cash, from my accounts.” With that, she wrenched her arm free of his grasp and the folder that contained the c-mails slipped from her hand and hit the floor. The sheets of paper scattered across the den.

  Paul stared at them. Suki crouched and quickly gathered them up and stuck them back in the folder. “You printed my e-mails?” he burst out. “My God, what kind of…”

  “Evidence, Paul. You fucked around, I’m divorcing you, getting full custody of Adam, and you won’t get a cent.”

  She slammed the study door as she left and ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time, the folder tight in her hand now. In the bedroom, she shut the door, locked it, leaned against it, and squeezed her eyes shut, the folder tight against her chest.

  Please return my son to me….

  She opened her eyes. Muted light spilled through the windows and across the king-sized bed. It cast long, narrow shadows against the floor and the movie posters on the walls. She stared at the posters, trying to make sense of them.

  In the poster for Acid Trip, a solitary woman in hippie clothing moved down a country road, where a pewter sky hung low with thunderheads. In the poster for Connections, where she played a healer, a pair of silhouetted hands against bright light looked magical, ethereal. She didn’t have a clue what it told about the story, but the image was compelling. That box office take had been the best until she’d won the Oscar.

  In a third poster, for American Dream, she and her movie children looked like the American dream, bright and smiling and beautiful. And yet, the image had nothing to do with life as most people lived it. It was a lie. It disgusted her.

  Suki rubbed her hands over her face and pushed away from the door. She forced herself to cross the room, to go into the closet, to pull down a small gym bag from an upper shelf. She dropped it on the floor at her feet, jerked clothes off hangers, scooped up shoes, dug out an extra cell phone charger. She went into the bathroom, grabbed essentials, stuffed them down inside the bag. She slipped the folder down inside it, zipped the bag shut, slung it over her arm. She would go to the bookstore, find Mira, stay with her.

  Ironic. Out of all the people she knew, her trust lay with a woman she barely knew, whom she had hired to find her son. Yes, there were plenty of people she could call who would listen, sympathize, offer to hold her hand. But most of them would want something from her in return. Most of them were like the flight attendant on the plane who had lent Suki her cell. Her face, her name, her presence, represented an opportunity, a doorway, nothing more.

  Banging on the bedroom door. Paul shouting at her to open it. She vaguely wondered what the feds monitoring the phones thought of it.

  She glanced quickly around the room for her cell phone, didn’t see it. Had she left it downstairs? She patted the pockets of her shorts. There. Back pocket. She wasn’t quite as out of it as she’d thought. Encouraging.

  Suki pulled out the cell, punched out her home number. The answering machine came on. “This is Suki Nichols. I’m calling from my bedroom. My husband has become violent and abusive. Could you please restrain him until I leave the house?”

  Click, click, then a hushed voice: “This is Agent Ellis, ma’am. Please stay in the bedroom. Well restrain Mr. Nichols. Are you, uh, pressing charges?”

  “I just want to get out of here.”

  “We’re on it, ma’am.”

  She snapped the cell shut and stood at the door, waiting. Within moments, all hell broke loose on the other side of the door. Paul shouting. The agents threatening. Then Ellis’s voice: “You can open the door, Ms. Nichols.”

  She unlocked the door, cracked it open, peered into the hall. The two agents held Paul against the wall. His nostrils flared. He looked homicidal. But he wasn’t about to argue with guns and a pair of feds.

  Suki slipped out into the hall and hurried down the stairs and out onto the back porch. She raced into the woods on foot, the gym bag banging against her ribs, the rain pouring over her.

  It didn’t take her long to reach Mira’s bookstore. Only a few people were out and about in the rain, umbrellas hiding their faces. Now and then, a car sped past her or someone whizzed by on a bike, hunched over the handlebars. With her baseball cap pulled over her face, the rain pouring over her, she was just another pedestrian.

  The front door of One World Books was locked. Suki hurried to the loading dock and walked quickly up the ramp to a dry spot under the eaves, where Mira kept the generator. It was silent. The door to her office wasn’t shut all the way and when Suki nudged it with her foot, it swung open slowly, creaking on its hinges.

  “Mira?” she called, and slipped inside.

  Light seeped in through the open door, a thin, pale stream that flowed across the floor, strewn with dollars bills and loose change, like vestiges of a rich kid’s broken piñata. Farther along, near the door to the rest of the store, she spotted a pearl earring. She started to pick it up, thought better of it, and called Mira’s name again, her voice echoing. She quickly crossed the office and went out into the rest of the store. The empty shelves. The smell of new wood. The cacophony of the rain against the roof tarps.

  The money on the floor. The earring.

  Frowning, she whipp
ed out her cell, called Mira’s number, reached her voice mail. Suki didn’t leave a message. She disconnected, turned slowly, and looked around, goose bumps rising on her arms, the skin on the back of her neck tightening.

  Wrong, wrong. Something had happened here.

  She punched out Sheppard’s number.

  Chapter 18

  Unplanned

  Finch felt trapped on the ferry. The van was wedged tightly in a middle row on the lowest deck, all exits blocked until the ferry stopped and people drove off the other side. Despite the steady rain, the inside of the van was hot, muggy. He couldn’t run the AC; every engine had to be turned off once the ferry got under way. Even if he ran the AC off the battery, it wouldn’t cool the car enough to make a difference.

  If he lowered the windows, it would be too easy for Mira to shout for help. If she shouted, he would have to shoot her, then fire randomly into the crowd to create enough chaos so he could escape. The only escape route lay over the side of the ferry and into the water.

  Forget chaos. All he wanted to do was get home, tend to the kid, put Mira somewhere safe. In with Adam? Probably. Adam’s room was secure. He would let her rest, eat, commiserate with the kid, and then he would demand that she read for him. What’s in my immediate future? Tell me about my early years in the Mango Hill house. Are the Nicholses suffering as much as I did? Or do I need to kill Adam to really bring the point home?

  It occurred to him that maybe none of these questions mattered, that maybe it all boiled down to what Mira had said earlier—the kick, the unmitigated power. Perhaps that was the best psychic information she could offer him. She’d claimed she wasn’t plugged in when she’d told him this, but how did he know if she was telling the truth?

  She sat behind the wheel, her head resting against the seat, eyes closed, fingers flexing against the steering wheel. “So what do you want from me, Spenser?”

  “I want you to sit where I’m sitting. We’re going to trade places.”

  “Besides that.”

  “We’ll discuss it later.” He squeezed back between the bucket seats and kept the gun on her as she moved into the passenger seat. The child locks were engaged, he’d made sure of that, so she couldn’t lunge suddenly out the door. He slipped into the driver’s seat, suddenly grateful for the rain, a kind of curtain between them and the rest of the cars on the deck. He pulled her seat belt over her, snapped it into place, then unzipped his pack and brought out a roll of electrical tape.

  He tore off a long strip, wrapped it several times around her wrist, then around the seat belt. He repeated this with her other arm. He grabbed a wrinkled beach towel from the backseat and spread it over her hands, covering them.

  She didn’t say anything. She just stared at him, beads of sweat rolling down the sides of her face.

  “I’m going to lower the back windows, so we can get some air in here,” he said. “If you shout, if you try anything at all, I’ll shoot you.”

  “And then what? You don’t have a silencer on that gun. Everyone would hear it.”

  “Except you. At point-blank range, a bullet in your side would tear through your chest cavity, puncture your heart and lungs, and you would die before the noise of the shot even registered.”

  “But you’d be fucked. You’d have to fire into the crowd, inciting chaos so you could dive over the side of the ferry.”

  “Actually, Adam would be fucked. See, I would leap over the side and I might or might not survive it. Even if I survived, I’d be in a world of shit and wouldn’t be able to go back to my place. Right now, Adam is in a sealed room. He can’t escape. There’s a cooler with some food in it, but how long will that last? Before he’s found, he would die of hunger. In the end, the kid you’ve been hired to find would die and it would be your fault.”

  Her expression didn’t change; she was good at keeping her face impassive. But her eyes revealed what she felt and he knew he’d won this round of repartee. She recognized that everything he had said was possible. Threatening Adam would keep her in line.

  “So it’s better for Adam if you don’t make trouble, Mira.”

  “Have you sexually abused him?”

  “Jesus, what kind of question is that? I’m not a pervert.”

  “You nab a kid, kill an old woman, burn down a trailer…” She shrugged. “I figure sexual perversion isn’t such a stretch.”

  He was starting to hate her and struggled not to shout at her, to reveal the depth of his rage. It’s a role, he reminded himself, so when he spoke, his voice held only a sharp edge. “You don’t know shit about me. How could you? You had a perfect childhood. Ms. Popularity. Cheerleader. Prom queen. Straight A’s in college. Had every advantage. Born with the proverbial silver spoon. Mira Morales, perfect citizen.” He snorted. “You don’t have a fucking clue how it is for other people.” People like him.

  “Cheerleader? Prom queen? Ms. Popularity?” She burst out laughing. “Try class nerd, introvert, bookworm. In elementary school I was so sensitive to other people’s energy that for a long time I couldn’t sit in the cafeteria filled with kids without taking on their symptoms, their moods, their bullshit. And if by silver spoon you mean money, Spenser, we were comfortable, but not rich. My parents worked all the time. I was raised by my grandmother. And, good thing for me, she understood what I was about. So you don’t know shit about me either.”

  It was the most she had said to him—and certainly the most personal information she had related about herself— since she’d found him in her office. And yeah, okay, so she hadn’t been a cheerleader or a prom queen. She still didn’t know what it was like to have lived his childhood, with his old man.

  She rested her head against the back of the seat, closed her eyes. Shut him out. He sat there and stewed. His head began to ache. He couldn’t tell if it meant another migraine was headed his way or if it was just an ordinary headache. He gobbled a couple of meds anyway.

  After a few minutes, she said, “So let me get this straight. Because you had a shitty childhood with an abusive father, your psyche is warped, so you do to others what was done to you? Does that about cover it? Is that what this is about? I think there’s more. I think the whole goddamn thing is about revenge. But for what, Spenser? What did these people do to you that could possibly warrant kidnapping their son?”

  If they weren’t trapped on the deck of the goddamn ferry, jammed among other vehicles, with so many people nearby who might, at any second, peer through the van’s windows, his arm would become a club and that club would smash her nose back into her brain. Instead, he leaned toward her and slipped his arm around her shoulders, like a man about to nuzzle his lover’s ear. He curled his fingers through her hair and jerked hard, forcing her head to tilt toward him.

  “I could just maim you. Remember that.”

  He released her hair, shoved her away from him. Tears rolled from the corners of her eyes. Good.

  The ferry churned its way toward Key West. The air got warmer, the rain came down harder, the inside of the van grew more and more uncomfortable. The meds he’d taken nibbled at the ache in his head but didn’t banish it. He needed food, a shower, sleep, silence.

  The theme song to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid suddenly burst from the pocket of his shorts. His cell. He dug it out, saw Eden’s number in the window, turned off the phone. Later. He would deal with her later.

  “A woman,” Mira said.

  “What?”

  “On your cell.”

  None of your goddamn business.”

  “Actually, it’s very much my business. When you broke into my store, it became my business. When I first read for Suki, her stuff became my stuff. That’s how it works, Spenser.”

  “Shut up.”

  “She’s a redhead.”

  His chest tightened.

  “Since the beginning, I’ve been puzzled about how you knew when to make your move for Adam. How you knew he was there alone with the housekeeper. The redhead is the connection. It makes sense.
You watched the Nicholses, followed them, so you knew about Paul’s lady friend and thought maybe you could use her to keep tabs on the family. Something like that. Then it became a sexual relationship. That must be really difficult for you, Spenser. Trying to maintain a relationship when you’ve got so many secrets.”

  “You talk too goddamn much.”

  “You helped saw up the trees on her property after the hurricane.”

  Shit.

  “Thing is, if I figured it out, the cops will too.”

  He suddenly hit the lever at the side of her seat and it snapped back, into a nearly reclining position. She made a startled noise, but shut up. He unzipped his pack again, brought out the roll of electrical tape, and used his pocket-knife to slice off a length of it. He pressed one end to the door of the glove compartment.

  “You say another word and I tape your mouth.” Mira looked at the tape, at him, then turned her face toward the door.

  The silence that followed was somehow worse, a subtle torture in which her words replayed themselves a thousand times in his head. If I figured it out, the cops will too.

  As the car splashed through puddles, Finch’s head pounded and ached. Sharp pains stabbed through his eyes. He kept leaning forward toward the windshield, swiping at the foggy glass with his hand, trying to clear enough of it so that he could see where he was going. It had been one goddamn thing after another—the bad weather, the tardy ferry, the snarled traffic out of Key West, and now the rain and wind sweeping across the two-lane highway with a ferocity that shook the van.

  Where had the traffic come from? Were tourists pouring into the Keys? Were conches finally evacuating Key West for places that had electricity? What the hell was going on? He felt as if the universe were conspiring against him.