Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  “I thought we had this conversation earlier this morning, you know, long before the sun came up, Charlie. And you had filed an official complaint with the Bureau. We did have that conversation, right? I didn’t dream it, did I?”

  Cordoba huffed and puffed like the big bad wolf, but buildings didn’t topple, roofs didn’t fly off. He seemed, in fact, pathetic and powerless. “I didn’t get any satisfaction from you then and it’s obvious I’m not getting it now.”

  “I’ll give you satisfaction, Charlie, but with one condition.”

  “Fuck your conditions.”

  “Then no satisfaction and you don’t get beyond the lobby.”

  He whipped off his shades. Pursed his mouth. His eyes narrowed to small, dark slits. “What’s the condition?”

  “That you take your orders from me.”

  “Yeah, right.” He gave a quick, clipped laugh. “And exactly why would I consent to that?”

  Sheppard slipped his cell from his pocket, brought up the text message, and held it close to Cordoba’s face. “That’s why. He got Mira. He hid in her store last night when he fled the woods. That makes it my game. So you either play by our rules, or you’re out of the loop for good.”

  Cordoba went through his usual facial contortions, but knew Sheppard had him. “Okay, we’ll play it your way.”

  “Even if our next stop is interrogating Paul Nichols?”

  Cordoba’s eyes widened, questions swirled through them. But he had the sense not to protest or to ask what the hell was going on. “Even that.”

  It had taken him hours to crawl out from under the mother migraine that had struck him down. But he’d done it. He’d gotten to the other end. Now the shadows against the balcony were longer, the rain came down harder, and there were probably a hundred messages from Eden on his cell phone.

  First things first, right? So the very first thing he had done was send Sheppard the text message from Mira’s phone. Let the poor schmuck’s imagination run wild.

  Now he loaded up the cooler and carried it down the hail to Adam room.

  Finch set the cooler down in front of the door to the room, raised the lid, and scooped his weapon off a container of strawberries. He didn’t intend to take any more chances at this point in the game. Mira had nearly escaped once and he didn’t intend to let it happen again. The clip was loaded, the safety disengaged.

  He shut the lid and turned the cooler so that one end rested against the door. He didn’t hear any sounds inside the room. It could be a trick, the two of them waiting for him behind the door, ready to tackle him, knock him out, something. He pressed the button on the remote-control clicker, heard the telling click as the lock disengaged, and shoved the door open with such force that it slammed against the wall.

  No one was hiding behind the door, but the reverberation tugged at the last vestige of his migraine, a small pulsing knot at his temple. He pushed the cooler into the room with his foot, so that it would hold the door ajar, and slipped in behind it, back to the wall.

  He nearly laughed out loud at his commando antics. Neither of these two would ever be a physical threat to him.

  The woman lay stretched out on the bed, a cloth covering her eyes and forehead. The kid was at the computer, playing Free Cell. A rollicking duo.

  “Adam, bring the empty cooler over here.” He gestured with the Walther. “And then push the new cooler over to the wall.”

  The kid swiveled around in his chair, his face expressionless, except for the burning hatred in his eyes. “I ran outta food.” He got up. “My clothes are dirty. This room stinks. And then you bring her here. What’s wrong with you anyway? You don’t know what you want, what you’re doing. You’re losing it big-time.”

  “Shut up and do what I told you to do.”

  Adam folded his arms across his chest and sat down. “Go fuck yourself.”

  Goddamn shit. Finch’s arm snapped to the right and he fired at the bathroom door. It blew a hole in the center of it and splinters of wood flew away from it. Mira snapped upright, Adam wrenched back, and Finch turned, aiming the gun at the woman. “She takes the next one, kid.”

  Adam raised his hands like shields. “I’m exchanging the coolers.”

  “Very wise.” Finch kept his eyes pinned on Mira, who looked as if she had swallowed a softball and might, at any second, choke to death on it. The entire right side of her face was swollen from where he’d hit her when his arm had become a club. But her eyes were as clear and bright as glass and never left his face.

  While the kid exchanged the coolers, an odd thing started happening to Mira’s face. The ugly bruise began to fade, turning a lighter blue, then a sickly yellow. The swelling seemed to go down. He thought it was a trick of the light or of perception, that the migraine continued to impair his vision. He blinked, but the bruise still seemed to be fading.

  “Something’s happening to your face,” he blurted out.

  Her hand went to the side of her face, sliding along the skin, as if feeling for what he knew was happening to it. And then she spoke, her voice soft, quick. “May 16, 1975. You were—what? Five? Six? You and your mother were living in the house on Mango Hill. The house where Adam lives now. A man came to the house, knocked your mother unconscious, set fire to the room where she lay, and kidnapped you. Her name was Joy Longwood. She died from burns and smoke inhalation. I wish I could tell you that your father was completely responsible for damaging you beyond repair, but it just isn’t true.”

  Horror seized him, paralyzed him. He couldn’t swallow, couldn’t blink, couldn’t control the trembling of his hand. The hand that gripped the weapon. And she knew it, saw it. Glaring at him, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and when she spoke again, her voice rose in pitch until she was shouting. “And if you shoot that gun again, if you threaten Adam, if you don’t get out of here now, I won’t tell you another goddamn thing.”

  Her shouts echoed, stabbing at his skull, waking up the remains of the beast that had crippled him hours ago. He stood there for what seemed like forever, his temple throbbing, and struggled to put what she’d said into some sort of context. But it didn’t fit logically into what he knew about himself, didn’t fit in a reasonable, linear way. And yet… it resonated. In some strange and inexplicable way, he felt the rightness of what she said.

  And it infuriated him.

  He lurched across the room, grabbed her by the hair, jammed the gun up under her bruised jaw—even now that bruise is fading, going away, impossible, what the hell is this woman?—and leaned in close to her, hissing, “You want me to shoot the kid? Is that it? Is that what it comes down to? You tell me the rest, you tell me or…”And his arm snapped upward again and he fired and the shot took a chunk out of the wall. “Or there goes Adam’s head.”

  Instead of cowering, she made a sharp, strangled noise, her eyes rolled back in her head, she went limp. He let go of her hair and she toppled sideways against the mattress. He didn’t know if she had passed out or if she was faking it.

  Finch leaned over her, tapped her cheek. “Hey, Mira. Cut the skit. I know you’re…”

  “You killed her!” the kid shrieked. “You killed her!”

  As he spun around, the desk chair slammed into his legs, sending shoots of pain through his kneecaps, and Adam tore toward the open door. Finch shoved the chair away and stumbled after him. Adam leaped over the cooler with the nimbleness of a deer and Finch, not far behind him, pulled the cooler out of the way, so the door would shut behind him, and raced down the hall.

  By the time Finch reached the kitchen, Adam was scrambling frantically around like a cornered rat, jerking on the handle of the remotely controlled front door, racing from window to window, struggling to get one of them open. Finch fired at the floor in front of him and the kid whipped around, eyes the size of hubcaps. He backed up to the door and pressed against it as though he hoped he might melt right through it.

  “Go ahead, just shoot me!” Adam shouted. “Get it over with. I’ve seen y
our face, I know what you look like, so just get it over with!”

  “Shut the fuck up!” And his arm became a club and the club slammed into the side of Adam’s head, knocking him sideways into the couch. After a moment, the upper part of his body slipped off the couch to the floor.

  “Christ.” Finch tucked the gun into the waistband of his shorts and hurried over to the kid. Crouching, he touched his neck, seeking a pulse. Strong, steady. Good. He wasn’t ready to get rid of Adam yet.

  Finch picked him up, carried him down the hall. Remote control out. Click and the door unlocked. Just in case Mira planned to ambush him, he kicked the door open and it banged against the wall as before, allowing him to see the entire room. Mira stood by the bed, startled, but no more a threat now than earlier. Finch carried Adam over to the bed, set him down.

  “My God, what the hell did you do to him? He’s bleeding.”

  “He tried to escape.” Now that he was closer to her, he realized that the bruise on the right side of her face was almost gone. But that was impossible. Either his vision had been wacked earlier or there had been shadows on her face.

  “He’s bleeding a lot.” She grabbed the pillow and pressed it to the side of Adam’s head. “He needs a doctor.”

  “Sure, I’ll get right on it. Maybe I can find one who’s discreet and makes house calls.” His cell rang. He ignored it. “Those things you said…”

  “I don’t remember what I said.” She removed the pillow from the side of Adam’s head. “He’s still bleeding. Can you at least get me a first-aid kit?”

  “In the closet, top shelf. You won’t find anything inside that you can use as a weapon, though. How can you not remember what you said?”

  “That’s how it works.”

  “Well, it’d better start working differently once you’ve got the kid fixed up. You’re going to read for me. You aren’t unplugged. That was all lies.”

  “I can’t read on demand.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Look, I’m going over to the closet to get the first-aid kit.”

  He brought out the Walther. “Go ahead. You read for people when they come to your store. How’s this any different?”

  “You’re a smart guy. It should be obvious.”

  “Explain it.”

  She picked up the first-aid kit in the closet and turned. “You really don’t get it, do you?” She opened the kit, checked the contents, snapped it shut. “Okay, Spenser, I’ll spell it out. I’m in a hostile situation, with a wounded boy, and the kidnapper is holding a gun on me. And that’s just for starters. The psychic part of me turns off.”

  “I don’t believe you. You said plenty of stuff before, you were reading me then.”

  “I was telling you what I know about you. What I learned from research.” She set the kit down on the bedside stand, opened it, removed what she needed. “And since you’re such a computer whiz, why didn’t you do a search on the Mango Hill house? You could have found out what I just told you.”

  He didn’t have an answer other than the fact it hadn’t occurred to him. It suddenly seemed that he might not be such a meticulous planner after all, and that pissed him off. Who was she to point out weaknesses in him?

  “The only psychic things I’ve seen are what happened to you the day you were kidnapped in 1975,” she went on. “And I saw that the day I was out for a walk and found Gladys’s body.”

  “You know what? I think you’re a fraud. I don’t think you’re any more psychic than I am.”

  “Whatever.”

  He hated that she now ignored him and fussed over the kid. He fired at the floor less than a foot to her right and her head snapped up. It gave him enormous satisfaction to see the fear coiled in her eyes. “Tell me something about myself that no one else knows.”

  “I already have. I told you about the redhead.”

  “That doesn’t count. Tell me something else.”

  “I can’t. I can’t do it while you’ve got a gun on me.”

  He turned slightly to the right and aimed the gun at Adam. “Okay, now the gun is on him. Go ahead. Tell me something.”

  “You cell is about to ring. It’ll be the redhead.”

  “You have to the count of three to tell me any single fact about myself that no one else knows, Mira. Otherwise I shoot the kid in the foot. Next time, I’ll shoot him in the knee. And after that…”

  His cell rang. Mira just stared at him.

  Finch reached into his pocket, glanced at the number, turned off the phone. “That’s hardly psychic. She calls every two seconds.”

  “You went into your father’s trailer one night and soaked him with lighter fluid and held a match to him.”

  It was as if she had punched him in the stomach. Air exploded from his mouth, his eyes flashed dry, drums pounded inside his skull. “He… he was drunk and… and came after me. I had to defend myself.”

  “He was passed out on the couch. You got pissed that he’d gone through the boxes of your things. You found lighter fluid, soaked a crucifix with it, squirted the stuff all over your father, lit the crucifix, and set him on fire.” She paused, then rushed on. “You have a selective memory. You remember yourself as a victim, so that it justifies what you do and—”

  “Shut up!” he screamed, and fired at the floor again.

  Mira wrenched back. Finch, breathing hard, stepped toward her, the gun still aimed at Adam. “You want me to shoot him, Mira?” The words hissed from his mouth. “Is that it? Is that why you’re lying? My old man was a vicious sadist. He—”

  “Yeah, he was a sadist. But the night you set him on fire, he was just an old guy who’d passed out from too much booze. Defenseless. And you were playing God again.”

  “You aren’t unplugged.” He now stood less an arm’s length away from her. “So read me. My future.”

  “I have to touch something you’ve touched or I have to touch you in order to tune in.”

  “You weren’t touching me seconds ago.”

  “I picked all that up earlier. I have to touch you.”

  The expression on her face made it clear that touching him appealed to her about as much as touching a tarantula. “When you do, notice my aim, Mira. Notice the tension in my arm, my hand, my fingers. If you try anything, I shoot first and think about it later. The way I figure it, the shot will enter Adam’s left foot and tear upward through his leg, probably severing an artery. It’s a hollow point, you know what that means?”

  “No, but I have a good imagination, Spenser.”

  She brought her hands hesitantly to his shoulder. A light touch, barely a touch at all. He heard the shift in her breathing, then a gasp, and when he stole a glance at her, he saw that her eyes were shut and her eyeballs rolled from side to side beneath the lids, as if she were dreaming.

  “I’m… I’m a computer whiz. Everyone loves me.” She spoke quietly, evenly, in an odd voice. “I fix problems. I create and develop software. I’m incredibly good at my job. I have a lover, a redhead.” She paused. “She thinks you’re brilliant.”

  Holy shit.

  Moments ticked by. Adam sat up, one hand holding gauze against his bleeding temple. He watched silently, warily, listening.

  “I’m young,” she finally said, reverting back to the first person, as though she were seeing the scene from within someone else. “Three, maybe four. Mommy tells me what beautiful teeth I have. She shows me how to floss, to brush, and when I smile for her, it’s always a big smile, so she can see how I take care of my teeth.”

  Jesus God.

  “I’m a little older now,” she went on. “Five or six. There’s a toad on the patio, jumping toward the water. I don’t like toads. Mommy tells me I shouldn’t hurt any living thing, but toads are disgusting. Mommy is inside the house on the phone. She can’t see me. I trap the toad and it squirms under my hand and I hate the way it feels, all damp and bumpy and sticky. I want to hit it with something, but I can’t find anything close by, so I pull off its legs and…” />
  Mira made a harsh, choked sound and wrenched back from him, her eyes bright with horror.

  Something stirred deep inside Finch—and a crack opened in his memories, widening just enough to let an image surface: of a young boy on the patio of the Mango Hill house, crouched down with a toad trapped under his hands. The memory was so real he could smell the hot air, the freshly mown lawn, the chlorine in the swimming pool.

  “Go on. Tell me more.”

  Mira shook her head. “I can’t.” A whisper. “It’ll make me sick.”

  “Stop doing that,” he snapped. “You’re looking at me like I’m a monster.”

  You are a monster; her eyes shrieked; then she leaned over Adam again and pressed two Band-Aids over the gauze at his temple. She didn’t look at him, didn’t speak.

  “Hey, all kids do shit like that,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “Get off your moral high ground, Mira. I’m sure that even you held lit matches to ants’ nests when you were a kid.” Silence.

  “Hey, I’m not a monster,” he said. “I’m not Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer or Richard Speck or Hitler or…”

  “If I were you, I’d give plenty of thought as to why you chose those people as your measurement for monsters.”

  “Don’t you dare judge me. I…”

  “Kismet.” She spun around, eyes wide, pupils as large and shiny as wet, dark stones. “And bluff. That’s what your God game is all about.”

  Startled that she was still tuned into him, that she had found the two words that unlocked the biggest failure of his life, he stammered, “You… you…”

  “Kismet was the name of a production company my parents had,” Adam burst out. “And Bluff… that was the antiwar film they did. It…”

  “Shut up,” Finch hissed.

  Mira rushed on. “The lost years. Between 1993 when you left Seattle and 1999 when you left Silicon Valley, you were in Hollywood, Spenser. That’s what none of us could figure out. Where you’d been. C’mon, give me your hand, Spenser. Or let me touch your shoulder again. Let me get the rest.”