Date with the Devil (Crimson Romance)

by Jessica Starre

“I knew Elene from high school,” Victoria said into the strained silence. Unfortunately, the story sounded thin and insubstantial to her ears even though it had seemed solid when she was in the elevator talking it over with Michael.

  Connie raised his head, tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes. “St. Agnes’s?” he said.

  Taken aback, she shot a glance at Michael, who had told her the name Sacred Heart. He shrugged. Always the man you wanted in your corner when things started off badly.

  “No,” she said, bravely hoping that the newspaper had at least gotten this small detail right. “Sacred Heart.”

  “That’s right,” Connie said with a nod. “St. Agnes’s was elementary school.”

  She eyed him briefly. Could he have been testing her? After a moment’s hesitation, she plunged ahead. “Elene and I haven’t been in touch much recently, but when I heard the news — I’ve been traveling a lot — I just wanted to come by and tell you how sorry I am.”

  Connie turned to her, the lines of anguish etched deep on his face. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without them. They were everything to me. Everything.” His voice broke at the end. He took a shuddering breath and said, “I don’t want to go on without them.” He buried his face in his hands.

  Victoria closed her eyes against the unexpected wave of emotion. A long time ago, she had taken that next breath, the one between Before and After, and wished she never had.

  • • •

  The redhead, Gianetta, didn’t let Connie remain distraught for long, Michael noticed. After a moment’s calculation, she perched on the arm of the sofa and stroked Connie’s back with her hand.

  “You know we’re here for you,” she said, her voice soft and furry. Michael could see the obvious attractions of the woman. Hell, he wouldn’t mind being comforted by her in a time of need. But he couldn’t help feeling a little revolted. Connie had just lost his wife and son and Gianetta was moving in on him already. Giving the man a little time and space seemed only decent. Besides, how did she know he wasn’t the murderer? Maybe Victoria was right and he’d killed his wife and son. It would be smart to wait and see. But people didn’t do the logical thing.

  You know it has to be you or Jasmine.

  Connie produced a watery smile, straightening up and turning, giving the redhead a grateful look. She took his hand. “Thank you, Gianetta,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. All of you.”

  Connie’s friends murmured various responses to his comment, then fell quiet. The strained silence grew. Victoria, Michael knew, would just wait out the discomfort because she might learn something if she did.

  He was used to asking whatever question he wanted the answer to, accustomed to having the authority of the shield, with the weight of the law behind him. Victoria had never had that luxury. What it would be like to give up the law and the authority? By the time this case was over, he’d probably have plenty of opportunity to find out.

  The phone rang, breaking the stillness and making at least three people jump. With an apologetic glance at his guests, Connie got to his feet and went into the bedroom to answer it. A moment later, Michael heard the murmur of his voice and the creak of the bedsprings as he sat down, settling into a conversation.

  Of course, Victoria seized the moment. With the man she wanted to talk about out of earshot, she leaned forward and asked his assembled friends, “Do the police have any idea what happened? Any leads?”

  The balding man — he’d been introduced as Donald Young — looked at the two matronly women as if they might have answers, then, when they offered nothing, spoke up. “As far as we know, they haven’t made any progress.”

  “They’re hassling Connie a lot, though,” Gianetta said spitefully, glancing at the slightly open bedroom door. “The poor man has enough grief — ”

  “They’re just doing their job,” Donald interjected.

  “Anyone can see they should be looking into Father Theoctisus’ background, not Connie’s,” Gianetta flared, her mouth grim.

  “I’m sure they’re doing that,” one of the matronly women said. Michael couldn’t remember her name.

  “Have they been asking you about Father’s habits and his enemies?” Gianetta snapped. “Of course not. They’re asking about Connie. What was Connie’s relationship with his wife? Did Connie have money problems? And yet everyone in this room has been offended by Father Theoctisus.”

  The silence that had been broken by the ringing phone returned, heavy and uncomfortable.

  “Now, Gianetta,” Donald said, playing peacemaker, giving an agonized glance in Victoria’s direction. “Now, Gianetta.”

  “Didn’t he remove you from your duties as treasurer?” Gianetta demanded, folding her arms across her chest. At her question — statement, really — Donald fell silent. Then she turned to the two women and dragged them into it, too. “And you. He denied you the sacraments because of your relationship. And,” now she rounded on Kevin, who stopped her with a glare and said, “That’s enough, Gianetta. Enough trouble. If you think the police don’t know all of that, you’re mistaken. And if you think airing your nastiness here will accomplish anything, you’re even more mistaken.”

  Michael had to give the nut job credit. Standing up to a woman like Gianetta when she as in full spate took a certain amount of self-confidence.

  “I suppose you told them everything,” Gianetta said, lifting her chin and managing to appear sulky rather than defiant.

  Kevin glared at her. “So what if I told them what I know? I want to see the person who did it go to jail. I want to see him punished.”

  “Some friend you are. You’re sitting here like you’re Connie’s best buddy. But we know what you think about him,” Gianetta said, sweeping the group with a glare from narrowed eyes, challenging any of them to deny the truth of her statement. “You had to go tattling to the cops about your nasty suspicions and lies — ”

  “He was always accusing her of having affairs,” Kevin interrupted, and yet instead of becoming angrier as he argued with Gianetta, he seemed to become calmer. He was still visibly agitated, but his words came out quietly and somehow more believably because of that. “That made me so mad. She wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “Some men are unreasonably jealous,” Victoria said then, her voice soft and authoritative. Michael knew it was a gamble for her to step into the conversation but she probably thought if Kevin believed she was on his side he might spill a few of the juicier details.

  Which he did. He turned to her, more passionate than he’d been with Gianetta. “He does that, accusing her of such filth, and now he acts like she was the most treasured person in his life. When he treated her like that!”

  Victoria nodded, as if this confirmed every bad thing she knew about the man. “What did he do when he heard?” she asked. “Were you with him that day?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Kevin said. “I didn’t hear about it until the next afternoon.”

  Michael had no reason not to believe him. But that wasn’t what he remembered hearing from the housekeeper.

  Kevin looked at Victoria and said, “I never heard Elene talk about a Vickie Fairfax. And she and I worked together quite closely at the Altar Society.”

  • • •

  “So?” Michael asked as Victoria slid the key card into her hotel room door lock and pushed open the door. She didn’t invite him into the room but he came in anyway.

  They’d stayed at Connie’s place longer than she’d intended and she felt empty and hollow, almost as if she’d known the dead wife and son and mourned them.

  “I didn’t enjoy that,” she said, as if she were defending herself against a charge. Not sure what she was being charged with. She didn’t want him to think she liked lying to people. Just that there was no other way for her to get the information. Was it her
fault if she happened to be good at it?

  “I know,” Michael said, which could mean anything.

  She kicked her shoes off and sat down on the bed. She rubbed the sole of her left foot, then her right. One of the reasons she liked running a martial arts school was she never had to wear shoes. Why couldn’t he have left her alone to get her ribs kicked at the Phoenix? Why did she have to be here, with other people’s grief, other people’s problems? She had plenty of her own problems.

  Michael stayed by the closed door as if he didn’t dare come any closer, his fingers lingering on the door handle, the better to make a quick escape. Fine. She preferred it when he stayed the hell away from her, especially when she was upset. How many times had he put his arms around her to comfort her and the next thing she knew she was flat on her back? For some reason he thought consoling her required complete nudity. Maybe he was remembering, too, because he didn’t offer a shoulder.

  “Connie seemed like a standup guy,” he said. She knew it was a trial comment to see where the conversation went, not a true indication of his opinion. His hand stayed on the door handle in case the conversation went badly wrong. Did he think she would punch him?

  “Sure,” she said. “That’s what they all say after some guy shoots up an office building because he didn’t get his way.”

  She waited for him to respond — she wouldn’t have minded a loud, air-clearing argument — but to her disappointment he didn’t say anything. He just looked at her, leaning his shoulder against the door as if he were casually relaxed and not immediately prepared to flee. His posture would have been more convincing if his fingers hadn’t kept fiddling with the door handle. He was standing there, waiting for something. Waiting for her to make an effort.

  He had made an effort, so she supposed it was only fair for her to do so, too. “Lots going on under the surface,” she tried. “Everyone in that group had a motive. Minor, maybe, but a motive. Do you suppose Donald was embezzling funds?”

  “Hard to say. Maybe he was just incompetent.” Michael relaxed enough to let go of the door handle. She wondered how fast he’d move if she made a feint in his direction.

  Repressing a smile of pure malice, she said, “None of them seemed particularly off-balance enough to murder the priest over their problems.” That didn’t mean they hadn’t. She was just sharing impressions, the way some people shared small talk. Michael liked to do it, so what the hell. “That Kevin was a little too quick for my taste, though. He seemed a little weird.” His comment about never having heard of Victoria had halted the conversation pretty quickly, though Victoria had tried to laugh it off — how often did reminisces of high school friends come up during ordinary conversation?

  “Yeah, he wasn’t buying your story,” Michael said. She noticed how it had become her story. If they’d met with stunning success, it would have been their story. Or his.

  “He almost blew it for us with all his damned questions.” She leaned back on the bed, then checked to make sure she was fully clothed. Eternal vigilance, that was her motto whenever Michael entered the picture.

  “Kevin knew Elene for a long time,” he said. “Old friends can be possessive. He wanted to make sure everyone knew that he was the trusted old friend who’d seen her through thick and thin.”

  “I bet he had the hots for her,” Victoria said, knowing she had strayed into the devil’s territory of speculating without any factual basis whatsoever. “Maybe he’s your murderer. He found out she was having an affair with the priest and killed her over it.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe,” she said. She didn’t expect men to act logically and consistently. She didn’t expect anyone to act logically and consistently. “I could have done without him, though. Planting doubts in Connie’s mind. I’m going to have to do something to get him on my side.”

  “Just — be careful,” Michael said.

  “I’m always careful.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re not. You’re aggressive, stubborn, forceful, and occasionally unpredictable. But you are not careful.”

  “I’ll be careful,” she said, not wanting to argue with him. Forgetting that it only took one person to argue when that person was Michael. He leveled his sapphire gaze at her.

  “I have the sneaking suspicion that I’m going to have to rescue your ass sometime this project.”

  “Save it, Mephistopheles,” she said. “I wouldn’t rely on you for backup if you were the last cop standing.”

  • • •

  Michael would have had to leave anyway, because he had a meeting set up, but he hadn’t thought he’d leave so angry.

  He paced the sidewalk outside of the hotel, waiting for his contact, the FBI liaison to the NYPD on the case. If Gerard hadn’t gotten himself killed the way Alexis had, he’d be here in — Michael glanced at his watch — ten minutes ago.

  No need to panic yet. Gerard had no consideration for other people’s time. Or other people’s feelings or commitments —

  The pacing made him more restless, not less. He stopped and shoved his hands into his pockets. There was no convenient wall to lean against. The outside wall was surrounded by knee-high prickly bushes and the doorman had already claimed the doorway.

  She still knew how to push his buttons, dammit. Despite all of his solemn vows to himself that this time it would be different, he had fallen into his old habits.

  A cab pulled to the curb and a tall blonde man stepped out. Michael met him down the sidewalk away from the entrance to the hotel.

  “So?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Word is your friend has been spotted, and it’s believed she’s somehow involved.”

  Michael nodded. Everything was working out exactly as planned. So why did it feel like everything was going so very badly wrong?

  Chapter 11

  Wednesday morning, Victoria was on the floor of her hotel room doing crunches. If she stayed lazy too long, she turned into something resembling a sofa cushion. Michael was on the chair by the window. He didn’t have to work for his abs. Another of the many annoying characteristics he possessed.

  She finished fifty, panted for a minute. What would be wrong with resembling a sofa cushion?

  “Of the, what, six contestants we now have, who do you like for the crime?” he asked, tapping his fingers on the table.

  She did fifty more.

  “Victoria?”

  She closed her eyes. She could ignore him. What was he doing in here anyway? He wasn’t trying to solve the case — or maybe he was, but that wasn’t all he was doing. He was setting her up, but why?

  She did twenty and stopped, her abs burning. She needed to do thirty more, her minimum daily requirement, but she was tired and her ribs still hurt from getting slammed with a baseball bat.

  Ten more, she bargained with herself. Just ten more —

  Her cell phone rang and she gave up trying to stay in shape. She got up from the floor and snagged the phone from the nightstand where she’d tossed it earlier in the day, then sat on the edge of the bed, keeping an eye on Michael, making sure he didn’t get any closer. She might be sweaty, sore, and bad-tempered, but that had never stopped him from seducing her before. Maybe fearing for his life was a huge turn-on for him.

  “I got what you wanted,” Rosemary said without any small talk first, which meant she’d been laying off the weed.

  “Okay,” Victoria said, leaning over to the nightstand to retrieve the hotel notepaper and pen. “Shoot.”

  “The treasure has been lost since the Fall of Constantinople. That’s 1453. There have been reports of it resurfacing now and then but nothing confirmed. So I couldn’t find out much about it at all.” Rosemary spoke in a clipped voice, like she was reading from notes. “The person who commissioned the ritual objects was a Byzantine noblewoman named Simonis. T
he daughter of Andronicus II and Irene. They were the emperor and empress. She married Stephen Milutin, the Serbian ruler. After he died, she went back to Constantinople and became a nun.”

  “Okay,” Victoria said. The notepaper was blank. Rosemary hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know. What did she care about Simonis? It was the treasure she wanted to know about.

  “Simonis has a lot of admirers,” Rosemary said, her voice changing, sounding more interested, less like she was reading notes culled from a textbook. “It’s like a cult, you know. Listen to this, I got this from the Internet: Her name is Simonis Paleologina. In Serbia they call her Empress Simonida. I first encountered her when I was reading a book about the Byzantine church in the Middle Ages. Her story struck a sentimental streak in me that I try to keep buried, hidden from public view. Before I met Simonis, I knew little about the Byzantine Empire and cared even less. But Simonis spoke to me. I heard her across seven centuries. Seven centuries.”

  Rosemary cleared her throat and said, “That’s from a news release about this American man who founded an organization to raise money to restore the convent where Simonis lived during her final years.”

  So Simonis inspired insanity in some people. Good to know. Though not particularly helpful to the task at hand.

  “Thanks,” Victoria said.

  “She was five years old,” Rosemary burst out. “She was five years old when she was dragged from her parents’ home and forced to marry that dirty old man! He was so vicious, he consummated the marriage right away. She could never have children because of that. When her mother died — this was years later — she went back to Constantinople and tried to escape her husband, but her stepbrother betrayed her and she was forced to go back to Serbia.”

  Victoria didn’t know why Rosemary was telling her this, and it wasn’t helping, because all she could think was, How could a mother ever let that happen to her daughter? She could imagine the small lost face, the trusting eyes, the shocked look of betrayal as the child was taken away.