by Nancy Bush
I hate them.
I hate them all.
But as they disappear into a hazy forever where they can never hurt me again, I keep their treasures close to me.
Now, as I stand in quiet reflection, naked, eyes closed, sensing a fire smoldering in the secret core of myself, I crush the envelope in my hand and feel a sexual thrill at its resistance.
There are hazards ahead. Annette was brazen and stupid. She talked and talked and talked. She took one of my treasures.
And Coby Rendell found it. Looked inside. She heard more than she should have. She sees more than she lets on.
She knows too much already.
In my mind there is a list of names.
Coby’s has risen to the top like a cresting wave.
Something will have to be done.
Something soon.
Fucking. Bitch.
Chapter 10
The power came on at 4:37 A.M. and blasted the house with light and the rumble of the electric furnace. Coby’s eyes flew open and she nearly blinded herself. She’d unwittingly left the light on in the den.
Throwing back the covers, she struggled to her feet. She’d fallen asleep in her jeans, blouse, and socks; she had no other clothes except what she’d worn to work.
Her father poked his head into the hall as she came from the den. They stared at each other a moment. His eyes were red-rimmed and the skin on his face sagged. Was his hair grayer? Because of Annette’s death? Or had she simply not noticed until now?
“I’m just going to turn the lights off,” she told him.
He nodded. “Thanks, Bug.”
He closed the door behind him as Suzette appeared in the hallway, shivering in a nightgown, her hands clutching a short Windbreaker close, using it as a robe. Galen came out of the bedroom as well, in jeans and an unbuttoned shirt, his dark hair tousled.
Juliet’s door opened next. She looked out solemnly. “Coby?”
“Turning off the lights,” she told them all, heading for the living room, which was only illuminated by a floor lamp, then the adjunct dining room, which was flooded by can lights. She snapped off the switches and walked through one of the two archways into the kitchen where plates were stacked, some rinsed, some not, and the disposable aluminum pans that held the lasagna had been rinsed, crushed, and balled up, ready for the recycle bin. What was left of the cake had been moved to the table in the nook and now the blue icing flowers looked unnatural and artificial. Some had been smashed and smeared into the frosting.
Everything looked used and forgotten.
The coffee urn was on a side shelf. Coby checked it. Half-full from before the loss of power. It was decaf and had no punch, but she poured herself a cup and put it in the microwave for a minute, watching the timer run down the seconds.
Jean-Claude suddenly appeared in the aperture. “Got any more of that?”
“It’s decaf.”
He shrugged and Coby readied another cup. When hers came out of the microwave, she inserted his. When the microwave dinged again, she handed him his cup and they both sat down at the nook table, facing the wilting cake.
Jean-Claude’s normally dark skin had lost color. Grayed. Like her father’s hair. Tragedy. Shock. They could physically affect people. Coby briefly wondered what she looked like, then decided she didn’t want to know.
“What happened?” he asked, but it was a rhetorical question.
Coby cupped her mug with her hands, absorbing its warmth. “Are you the only one who got up?”
He nodded. “I haven’t slept.”
Coby wanted to ask if Yvette had even stirred but decided against it. What did it matter. Yvette had a preteen son who might have witnessed his aunt’s dead body, and she needed to do whatever was best for Benedict.
“I’m sorry,” Coby said, inadequately.
“I talked to Nicholette for over an hour. I was trying to console her, but I think she was consoling me.” His smile was heartbreaking. “I have five daughters, and Nicholette’s a father’s dream. Smart, assured, a lawyer at your firm.” Jean-Claude faintly smiled. “Juliet’s always been focused and I think she’s the prettiest, though I’d never say so in front of her. She kinda likes the boys.”
Coby nodded. He needed to talk and she had no problem listening.
“Suzette’s the sweetest. The youngest and the sweetest. The most naive,” he conceded as if Coby had posed the thought. “Yvette’s determined. She can do anything she wants—and does. I always thought she could blast through a mountain by sheer personality, y’know?”
“I do,” Coby said.
“But Annette was my girl.” His voice faded to a ragged whisper. “I could count on her. I knew her thoughts because they were mine, too. Did you know that she ran everything at Lovejoy’s? Everything. The personnel. The reservations. The tearoom. The books. There was no part of it she didn’t oversee. Who’s going to do that now? Nobody can. Not like Annette.”
Coby placed one hand over his. She could have told him that since both Suzette and Juliet already worked at Lovejoy’s, maybe one or both could step up to the overseer position. She could have mentioned that though Faith worked at a title company, she wasn’t exactly married to her job and had always served in managerial roles. She could have offered her own services, temporarily, if need be.
But Jean-Claude was just talking. Rambling. Beginning to grieve. So instead, she just sipped her coffee and kept quiet as he went on about Annette, coming up with moments from her childhood, little scenarios that he wanted to share with someone, and Coby was the only one about.
About an hour into his reminiscing he suddenly stopped short. “Oh, my God. I haven’t even thought of Miriam. I need to call her. She is their mother.”
It was almost six. The rising sun was lifting the darkness by degrees and the wind had slowed to a steady breeze. Rain still fell from the heavens but it was coming down in a drizzle rather than a downpour, at least for the moment. Not exactly the calm after the storm, but close.
Jean-Claude left to find his cell phone and returned a few moments later, holding it aloft for Coby to see. “No signal now.”
“Would you like to use mine?” Coby asked. “It’s pretty good here, usually.”
“Do you mind?”
For an answer she went to retrieve her cell, glad to see that she had both battery life and a moderate signal. She handed it to Jean-Claude, who stood for a moment by the living room windows, staring through them in silence. Then he made a sound of discovery and punched in the phone number. “I hardly know it by heart,” he explained to Coby as he waited for Miriam to answer. “The problem with a call list.”
“I know.” Thinking he might want privacy, she retreated to the kitchen and reheated another cup of coffee. As she waited for the microwave to do its thing, she noticed the shade over the window that looked over the back deck and hot tub was once again lifted. Probably happened after Annette’s body was discovered. Someone wanted to look out.
She wondered why it had been pulled down. It hadn’t been that way when she first arrived. And she was pretty sure it was up when Benedict was in the hot tub; Yvette would have kept a close eye on him. For all her faults, she loved her son and she wasn’t the type to trust him to be safe. Jean-Claude had called her determined. Coby kinda thought she was a control freak, but then so was Genevieve, and maybe she suffered a little from that herself.
She heard Jean-Claude click off, and he came into the kitchen and handed her the phone, his expressive eyes looking bruised. “She is hysterical,” he said in a clipped voice. “I wish I could be kinder, but it’s mostly drama. Her own daughter’s death is just another excuse to be a drama queen.”
“Maybe it’s how she copes,” Coby said, trying to soothe.
“I wish.” His faint smile again.
Her father came into the room and glanced around, as if everything were unfamiliar to him. Slowly he focused on Coby’s cup of coffee, though he didn’t say anything.
Squaring her s
houlders, she prepared herself for what was going to be a long day and said, “Let me make a fresh pot of regular,” and she got up from the nook table.
Danner stood on the balcony of his room at the Dunes in his brother’s jeans and nothing else, facing the ocean. He was pretty much sand-blasted and rain-scoured by the elements, and the precipitation soaked him to the bone. The sun had risen in the east and the western horizon’s curtain of night was just beginning to lift. Today was going to be one of those dark ones, like the kind that came in the dead of winter.
Well, it was almost that already.
He walked back inside and slammed the sliding glass door shut. He could feel sand mixed in with the water on his skin. The Dunes overlooked dunes all right, and what were dunes but just big mounds of sand?
It hadn’t been the smartest move to stand outside; he didn’t have any extra pants. But he didn’t really give a damn.
Stripping down, he ran through the shower, turning the water as hot as it would go, but of course the hotel had one of those temperature regulators so he couldn’t scald his skin like he wanted to, like he often did when his mind was full of too many questions with too few answers.
Twenty minutes later he pulled on his briefs and his brother’s wet pants again, making a face as the thick, wet denim chilled his skin. Jarrod’s pants were wet, but they weren’t as bad as his own. Those were stuffed in his duffel bag, thoroughly soaked and smelling of chlorine.
Jarrod’s shirt was still okay and he yanked it over his head, running his hands through his hair and looking at himself in the mirror. Dark hair. Five o’clock shadow. Blue eyes that regarded him soberly.
He didn’t like the way this was going. Annette accidentally dying in the hot tub on her thirtieth birthday? He was going to wait for the facts, but his skepticism was huge and he half believed already that foul play was at work here.
But then, he was a homicide detective. He felt that way a lot.
Currently, there was a case at work; several, actually, that were tugging at his attention all the time. They hung below the surface of his consciousness and popped out a thought every once in awhile. Sometimes that thought was like a kapow! An answer to some niggling issue he couldn’t resolve. More often the thought was just another question. Questions upon questions upon questions. The kinds with no answers, and maybe no rhyme or reason.
The case that had been his primary focus was a home invasion where the wife and daughter were killed in an attempted robbery and extortion gone bad. The husband had been tied up in the basement and knocked out cold. Persons unknown had escaped without being seen and there was no DNA evidence, not much evidence at all, actually. When the husband came to, he admitted being forced to take money out of their savings account to pay off the two men who had held them hostage. There was no sign of the money, no sign of the getaway car, no sign of anything.
The two women were killed by bullet wounds to the head. The mother with a blast to the back of the skull. The daughter suffered two shots. One in the neck, one closer to her crown. Neither woman had been tied up and they fell where they were shot. The gun was a 9mm Glock owned by the husband and used . . . on the spur of the moment? It was nowhere to be found now and the husband said the doers had taken it with them.
The case bothered Danner because it just didn’t hang together. The wife was not sexually abused. She didn’t struggle. Had simply turned her back to the doer and let him blast a bullet into her head. She was shot first, in the bedroom. Then the daughter must have appeared at the house unexpectedly and walked in on something. She’d been grocery shopping, and there was produce scattered across the floor, celery and carrots and a couple of avocados. She’d walked through the front door, seen something, then turned on her heel and sprinted. She was shot at a full run.
The wife’s murder looked premeditated. The daughter’s an unfortunate moment of bad timing.
Danner had examined all the evidence and he just didn’t like it. Why them? Why their house? They didn’t have a lot of money. They weren’t high profile. They were a nice, middle-class family in a two-story house that was starting to get that worn-down look.
The husband had taken out their life savings and given it to them. About three thousand dollars total. There was a bank video that showed him nervously taking the money. He said there were two men, one in his twenties, one more like forty-five to fifty.
It was an awful lot like the Petit case in Connecticut a few years earlier. Maybe too much . . .?
And there was no evidence anywhere. No footprints, fingerprints, pieces of fabric, saliva, whatever the hell the CSI team wanted.
Could the husband be lying?
All the pieces ran through his head as he shaved, but he couldn’t scare up anything new that on second or third or fourth examination might seem odd or new. His thoughts were at that second level of consciousness still. Nothing was really surfacing. No kapow.
Of course, his brain was more involved with the events of the night before. Annette’s death. Lucas Moore’s death about a decade ago with all the same players.
Coby Rendell.
His jaw quirked in the semblance of a smile. Okay. She was in his thoughts. Pushing a lot of other stuff aside, stuff he really needed to get to. Was he really going to try again? He wanted to. No question about it.
He had images of her stuck in his mind: the way she bent her head to listen to something Jarrod was saying, the tilt at the corner of her eyes, the green-brown swirl of color in their depths, the serious mouth and self-deprecating smile. Her slim body and firm breasts. Her even teeth and a nose with a decided bump, the result of a fight with her sister where Faith threw a handheld phone receiver at her and it caught her just wrong. A flaw she’d worried about but that Danner thought added character. Something he’d told her once; something she didn’t believe.
He dragged his thoughts to the home invasion case again, couldn’t keep his brain on it. Considered Annette Rendell and wondered if his brother’s wife had something there in her insistence that Annette’s death wasn’t an accident. Genevieve was loud and bullish by nature, but she wasn’t prone to flights of fancy. She had her feet on the ground, to a fault sometimes, maybe. She’d said it because she believed it. She and Annette were good friends, had become that way over the past few years. They shared things, and Gen, though undoubtedly sick with shock and grief, believed there was something about Annette’s death that warranted looking into. Not that it was Danner’s job. But something did feel off, and there was no question there were more than a few deaths within this small circle of friends.
He was curious as hell what the sheriff’s department would come up with.
And if they do determine her death wasn’t an accident?
Danner looked at his reflection in the mirror. If it wasn’t an accident, then maybe Lucas Moore’s wasn’t either. Maybe there was some kind of link.
He was just having a hell of a time believing it was all happenstance.
Kirk slammed his bag in his 4x4 and woulda headed out but a guy from the Seven’s office waved him over. Frowning, Kirk wondered what the hell this was. The room was a comp. That was the deal.
“Room twenty-three? Ya got some incidentals,” the guy told him. “And I don’t see no credit card.”
“I’m with Split Decision. The room’s a comp.”
The guy yawned hugely, showing teeth that needed a trip to the dentist’s office, tout suite. “But there was some pizza delivered and charged to the room.”
“No, there wasn’t.” Kirk denied it, but he remembered the box he’d seen outside the door of room twenty-four. Had Paul and Vic ordered it and then stuffed the evidence aside so Kirk wouldn’t notice?
“Yep. There was.”
Kirk stared at the guy. At least it wasn’t the girl with the black-rimmed eyes and no soul, but this guy was only a couple of levels higher up the “worthless pieces of shit” meter.
“Ya got a card?” the guy asked him.
Yeah, he had a cred
it card, but it was damn near at the limit and he needed a little bit of breathing room in case of emergencies. The band worked on the underground. Free this, free that, or a wad of crumpled bills. It worked for him and even Jarrod, who, though he liked to play by the rules, turned a blind eye.
“How much is it?” Kirk asked, reaching for his wallet and the cash inside.
“Forty bucks.”
“You’re shitting me!”
“Two large ones, man. Maximum Meat pizzas ain’t cheap. You can check with Bill.” He waved an arm over toward the nearby pizzeria, which looked tired in the gray morning light. “He brought ‘em over and put ’em on the room. It’s kind of a deal we got going with them.”
“My friends are still in the room,” Kirk snapped, shoving his money away. “They ate the pizza. They can pay for it.” Why the fuck had he tried to work this out anyway? It was their problem, not his.
“Old man Dyer ain’t gonna like it if they don’t pony up.” The kid gave Kirk a knowing eye.
Kirk couldn’t afford to piss off Dyer and break his relationship with the man. The Seven might not be much, but word got out if bands took advantage and/or cheated—and that word would hit the circuit, for damn sure—and that, as they say, would be the end of that.
And right there Kirk Grassi had an epiphany. He wasn’t living the life he was meant to. He was supposed to be somebody. Somebody famous and have a lot of cars and sex with blondes with big kahunas and drink really expensive shit and stuff. This penny-ante crap wasn’t for him. He needed more, before he ended facedown in some E. coli–infested hot tub at his next birthday.
“Fuck ’em,” he said as he threw down two twenties and stalked back to his truck.
Things were gonna change, starting today.
Coby went on automatic pilot, organizing breakfast, cleaning the house, helping her father contact the sheriff’s department and coroner’s office. She hoped to be on her way over the mountains by noon but knew that was a pipe dream unless her father surfaced from his fugue state of grief and recognized that everyone had a life to get back to, including him.