Witchy Woman - Book 2 - The Necromancer

by Pamela M. Richter

  When the doctor left, Omar hummed a song he’d heard from somewhere, ‘You can’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you get what you need.’

  Chapter 8

  Heather felt woozy from lack of sleep. She would have been happy if Michelle wasn’t mysteriously missing. Staying up half the night left her groggy as a bad, after-morning, hangover. She needed a caffeine fix.

  First though, she grabbed her cell phone from the bedside table and punched in Michelle’s number for about the thousandth time. When the robot voice asked her to leave a message she hung up.

  Her wake-up happy delirium stemmed from the fact that Mike was still in her apartment. He insisted that he’d be comfortable on the couch, for the second night in a row. The gentlemanly act would wear off soon, but she appreciated it just the same. He was very smart, indicating she was more than just a simple, roll-in-the-hay, play toy.

  Considering Mike’s looks, appeal and charisma, he’d probably had lots of women throw themselves at him. Added to his charm and attractiveness was his recognition as a celebrity personality on TV in Hawaii. Few people knew how smart he really was, but that was his most important attribute. Besides his sexiness and fun, of course, which might just outweigh all the other plus-stuff she liked about Mike.

  Heather stopped for a few moments of pure self-indulgence to watch Mike sleep on her couch in the living room. His feet overlapped the end of the couch and he had an arm bent over his eyes, hiding from the morning sun coming through the curtains behind the couch. Heather admired him for a while before going into the kitchen to make coffee. She mixed instant coffee stirred into ice water and took a few sips to wake up. Then she started on her daily list of things to do in a notebook.

  She was half way through the FIND MICHELLE list when she knew with a prickling sensation Mike was looking over her shoulder. She hadn’t heard him get up and walk barefoot into the kitchen.

  “Why the question mark after ‘call Bobby?’” Mike asked.

  “I don’t want to worry Michelle’s brother unnecessarily,” Heather said, enjoying the warm feel of his breath on her skin when he spoke. “Instant coffee is on the counter.”

  “Thanks. I think you should call him. Not her parents, of course. A little premature to worry them. But someone in her family should know.”

  Heather nodded and felt his arm go around her shoulders to give a strong, comforting squeeze.

  “The littlest general,” he said. “Good list.” He let go and she could hear him microwaving water for his coffee.

  “I have a telescope so powerful you can see the craters on the moon,” Mike said.

  Heather looked up. “So?”

  “We can see if that guy in Omar’s apartment is really a double, impersonating him.”

  “The angle is all wrong,” Heather said.

  Mike shook his head. “Those floor to ceiling windows go around the whole penthouse. We can’t see inside from the front, because there are no buildings there, just the ocean, but there are buildings behind it.”

  Heather smiled. “You have a devious mind.”

  Mike nodded, “I need to get on the roof of one of them. There are several that would be perfect. My telescope will see right inside Omar’s place. I have a camera with this neat, ultra-powerful, zoom lens, too. With the date and time stamps we can prove that guy isn’t Omar.”

  “Yeah, but Omar could say the guy was just visiting him,” Heather said.

  “A guy who looks just like Omar, an almost perfect replica, suddenly appears in his apartment? I think people would question that. It’s a start, anyway.”

  “Yeah. Let’s do it right away,” Heather said, nodding eagerly.

  Mike drank his coffee quickly and put the cup in the sink. “I’ll go get the camera and telescope and check out the buildings. I’ll tell the building managers that I need scenic shots for TV.”

  Heather smiled, “That’ll get them. A chance for their building to be featured on your newscast. I appreciate..” was as far as she got. He kissed her hard and fast, lips still hot from the coffee.

  He grinned wickedly, winked and left. Then he stuck his head back in the door, “I’ll email pictures from the roof. This should be fun. Turn your computer on.”

  Heather was smiling as she continued writing her list. The first call she made was to Guy Thorner, who owned a small private airport and flying school. Omar used Thorner’s place to park his helicopter and rented his plane services occasionally to take him to the outer islands.

  Thorner said he had refused Omar’s request to take him to California in one of his Lear Jets. Heather could hear his anxiety when he spoke, “I didn’t want to anger Omar, but really, I know he’s forbidden to leave the island while he’s out on bail. I can’t break the law for a client, even one as good as Omar. I don’t want to lose my business license. I did give Omar the name of some other private pilots who might be a little on the shady side.”

  Heather’s mind was whirling. Omar wanted to go to California? “Could you give me the names of those pilots?”

  “Why sure,” Thorner said. “Sammy Thompson and Jim Persol. I have their private numbers if you’d like.”

  Heather hit pay dirt on her first call to Sammy Thompson. “Yeah, I took Mr. Satinov and his girlfriend to California. Told him I couldn’t take him into Mexico, though, like he wanted me to, so he took a flight from there with a friend of mine who owns a private Lear jet.”

  Mexico? “Do you know where he planned to go in Mexico?”

  “Guadalajara,” Sammy said.

  “Ah, just one more question,” Heather said. “Did he have any unusual baggage?”

  Sammy laughed. “Yeah, now that you mention it. He took a large crate. Strange as hell. Looked just like a coffin. With his looks I’d almost think Omar was Dracula, with that big box. Took two of my men to load it. Heavy as hell. Omar said the content was composed of glass, and breakable, so we handled it gently. He oversaw the whole process and was pleased with our service.”

  “And his companion? Dark hair.”

  “Pretty girl. Hawaiian, I’d say. Short, with black hair to her waist.”

  Heather thanked him and huffed some hair out of her face as she wrote down the name of the pilot Omar used to take him to Guadalajara.

  Omar’s companion on the trip definitely wasn’t Michelle. She was almost six feet tall and Sammy said the girl with Omar was short. It was probably Leilanie, one of his witches and a companion who stayed at Omar’s penthouse. Heather had seen Leilanie many times with Omar around the condo and in the pool area.

  Heather was glad Sammy was friendly and talkative. The box that he said looked like a coffin was scaring her, though. It was a shot in the dark that she had asked him about strange luggage.

  The next call was to Rod in Japan. It was late evening for him, but he told Heather he would take the Heroshi Company Jet to Hawaii to come help find Michelle. He would arrive in about five hours. He, too, was very concerned when she told Rod that Omar was probably in Mexico and had transported a coffin-shaped box on the jet he rented.

  Heather’s phone beeped and she saw a text from Mike: “Lookie Here!”

  Heather punched on the photo app. She squinted at the minuscule picture that he had taken from one of the roof-tops behind Omar’s place. It was a little too dark to see very well, so she turned on her computer and went into her email. There she saw the picture clearly.

  The guy inside Omar’s apartment didn’t look so much like him up close. The picture showed him wearing jeans and no shirt, in Omar’s living room. This guy was shorter, with definite Asian features and an almost pug nose, it was so short and straight. But his hair was styled perfectly like Omar’s, with the silver strands interwoven into the black hair. He could have been a dead ringer from far away. What was missing was Omar’s musculature. Omar worked out incessantly and was a master in many of the Martial Arts. This guy was slim, like Omar, but lacked muscle definition.

  Heather called Mike’s cell.
“You did great! That guy sure isn’t Omar.”

  “Uh-oh,” Mike said. “Things are heating up.”

  “You get caught peeping?”

  “Ah, no, but it looks like there’s going to be some kind of orgy right there in the living room. Two—no three girls—are stripping naked and taking off the guys clothes. I better stop looking now.”

  “No,” Heather said, laughing. “Take more pictures. We’ll send them to Omar’s cell phone, wherever he is. I bet he didn’t count on his double and pet witches taking advantage of his absence like that.”

  “You’re incorrigible,” Mike said. “This really is a peep show.”

  “Well, don’t enjoy it too much,” Heather said tartly. “Send me some. I want to see, too.”

  Mike was laughing. “Coming right up. Give me Omar’s cell address. I’ll bounce the mail around before I send it, so he can’t tell where it came from.”

  “You’re the ‘jack of all trades.’ Porno photos and sending anonymous email.”

  “Just your basic nerd. And I’m a little too nerdy to keep watching this. I’m going to pack up and leave before someone sees me. I took plenty of explicit shots.”

  “That should upset Omar, knowing his double was blown by an anonymous person who might show the pictures to the HPD. Or publish them on a porn website.”

  “I’ll see you back at your place soon.”

  Wow, Heather thought as she slid through the new pictures on her computer. Mike wasn’t kidding. This stuff was hot. It occurred to her that someone could make a mint selling the photos, because Omar’s witches were very beautiful and very naked.

  When she looked at her watch, she decided to go over to Michelle’s place and feed Lucifer. He was used to getting an early breakfast. Michelle always got up at the crack of dawn.

  Heather took her address book and phone with her. When she got to the door she gave her usual knock, wishing that Michelle would answer and all the worry was for nothing. But when she got inside her apprehension only intensified. She was sure something terrible had happened.

  Lucifer jumped into her arms again and she was so busy catching him that she stepped right into a plate of food next to the door.

  “Ah, yuck,” Heather exclaimed when she looked down at her bare foot and saw icky cat food stuck to the bottom on of it.

  Lucifer was yowling in her ear again, but he wasn’t attacking. Quite the opposite, he seemed friendly as he settled down and started purring, licking her chin and patting her cheek. She could really get to like this little feline, Heather thought, as she hopped one-legged into the kitchen and cleaned the mess off her foot.

  Heather knew she was the only person who had a duplicate key to Michelle’s apartment. So someone had used Michelle’s own key to try to feed Lucifer. That person knew that Lucifer would attack, so they had pushed the food just inside the doorway and left.

  As far as Heather was concerned, it was proof that Michelle was gone—probably abducted. But someone wanted to keep the cat alive. Someone who knew that the cat was valuable because of its prior training as an attack animal. That someone could only be Omar.

  Considering the amount of food in the plate, Lucifer hadn’t eaten much, if anything, Heather thought, when she went back and looked inside the dish. She was thankful that it wasn’t gross, bloody meat, but regular cat food. When Omar had the cat he had fed him human body parts, Heather knew. Evidently Omar thought the special food led to demonic abilities.

  Michelle’s boyfriend, Rod, had identified a human liver and heart as part of the food Lucifer was eating. Heather didn’t know where Omar got Lucifer’s food and preferred not to.

  While she watched Lucifer growl, shake each piece of meat, scoff it down, and then clean his paws, Heather called Heroshi Corp, where Michelle worked. The receptionist, Susan, said that Michelle had called in sick for a few days. She had the flu and didn’t want to spread her germs around.

  Someone had given an alibi for Michelle’s absence, so no one would look for her. When Heather asked Susan if she had talked to Michelle, Susan said a voice message was left for the president of the company on the Heroshi answering service late last night.

  Heather had known immediately that something was really wrong when Michelle was missing last night. Now evidence was mounting that whatever happened had been carefully planned, probably long in advance.

  Her next call was to Professor Vincent Middleton in California. She was bounced around at Stanford University and finally got him between classes. When she brought him up to date on Michelle’s disappearance, he told her that detectives in the Hawaii Police Department wanted him to come to Hawaii and give a deposition about how he and Michelle had been dumped into the ocean near the island of Kauai from Omar’s helicopter.

  Vincent said he’d been putting them off, but decided to come in on the next available flight. He’d call Heather back to tell her when he would arrive. He said he had a pretty good idea about where Omar had taken Michelle, and why. Heather was curious about his idea of what Omar was up to, but he had to get to a meeting and hung up abruptly.

  When Heather left Michelle’s apartment, she was pondering about what to do next to find her friend. There were heart-breaking, sad, Lucifer yowls as she went down the hallway, mimicking how she felt.

  She couldn’t stand it and turned back.

  The cat jumped in her arms when she opened the door. “You don’t want to be left all alone, do you?” Heather said. She went into the kitchen and got cat bowls and food and put them in a bag. Heather looked around the apartment and picked up a tall, surprisingly heavy scratching post to take with her. She didn’t want Lucifer tearing up her furniture while he trimmed his nails during the time she was cat-sitting. She saw some rings and balls, Lucifer’s toys, and put them in the bag with the food and started carrying the cat, cat tree and bag back to her apartment.

  As she went down the hallway she remembered an important missing item. Lucifer needed his potty paraphernalia. She went back to Michelle’s and bagged the sand-box in a garbage bag and added a bag of kitty sand to carry to her apartment.

  As she staggered down the hallway, with Lucifer purring in her ear, she saw Mike sitting in front of her door. He was laughing as he took the bag and cat tree from her. She handed him her key to open the door.

  “You’re such a softie. I see you’ll be boarding a tiny kitty for a while,” Mike said. “He sure has a lot of personal stuff for such a little guy.”

  Heather tried to act dignified. “He was lonesome.”

  “Anthromorphism,” Mike said.

  “What?”

  “Assigning human emotions to an animal,” Mike said. “But you’re totally justified. I heard him crying from all the way down the hallway when you left Michelle’s apartment.”

  Heather smiled; she didn’t have to explain anything to him.

  They went inside her apartment and set everything up. Dishes of food and water for the cat in the kitchen, toys and cat tree in the living room. As they were completing the tasks, Heather told Mike that Michelle’s boyfriend, Rod, would be arriving to help them and that the famous professor of the occult, Vincent Middleton, would also come as soon as he could get a flight from San Francisco to Honolulu.

  They watched Lucifer prowl the apartment as they talked. Much to Heather’s relief, Lucifer was ignoring Mike as if he didn’t exist. At least he wasn’t attacking every stranger now. Maybe Michelle had a calming influence on the little animal.

  A curious cat, evidently. He covered every room and seemed to pause and sniff at anything he found interesting. He leaped on the kitchen counter and noisily crunched on some kibble.

  “I sent the pictures of the orgy in his penthouse to Omar’s phone,” Mike said. “I almost wish I didn’t have to do it anonymously. I’d be interested to see how he’d respond.”

  “As long as he doesn’t go into a rage and take it out on Michelle,” Heather said.

  “You sound pretty sure he really has her. It’s a very seri
ous crime if she went unwillingly.”

  “I wish this was something easy, like a kidnapping. Then all we’d have to do is wait for a ransom call and pay the greedy bastard. But if Omar’s got Michelle, you can be sure she didn’t go willingly, and that he has something much more devious in mind than a simple payment to release her.”

  Mike nodded, “Doesn’t seem like he’s hurting for cash. I agree, money is not his objective.”

  Chapter 9

  Michelle was aware of bright lights that seared, even though her closed eyelids, as she came slowly to consciousness. She attempted to turn on her side, away from the glaring light, but was unable to move. Her arm was attached to something and she jerked it, still half asleep, and felt a sharp intense stab of pain from her inner right forearm.

  That abruptly woke her. She slit her eyes open just a bit, because the overhead lights were intense, and found herself lying in bed in a small room that was all white. White walls, a white ceiling, and blindingly bright fluorescent lights above her.

  Her eyes went to the arm that was stinging. A needle was inside the vein, held there by transparent tape. It led to a tube, which went up to a bag of fluid on a stand, dripping medicine in her arm. She could feel the cold liquid seeping from the needle into her vein. She wondered with alarm if she’d been in an accident. This was obviously a hospital.

  She could hear laughter outside the door and the movement of wheels squeaking. Her throat hurt when she called out, “Hello?”

  After Michelle had been raped and badly hurt a few years ago, she’d had an operation. The intense thirst, wake-up disorientation, and sore throat were all familiar sensations, exactly how she was feeling now, probably because they put a breathing tube down her throat during an operation. So she reasoned that she’d had some medical procedure done recently. Especially since she was freezing. Hospitals were always cold.

  That thought scared her. She quickly moved her arms and legs to check and make sure she wasn’t missing anything vital. Everything seemed intact. Her toes and fingers responded to her command to wiggle. She let out a breath of relief and called out again.