Marcello shrugged. “The atmosphere of this place is depressing, yes, but I fear the manifestations are figments of your imagination. If you did not drink so much…” This was touchy ground. Marcello expected his words to trigger anger and defensiveness.
Instead Trick shot him a rueful smile. “Really been feeling sorry for myself, haven’t I? Poor Trick. Wrecked his race car and his dreams all in one fell swoop. But honest to God, Marcello, those sobs are no drunken fantasy. They’re real, though I admit I’ve been using the alcohol to try to drown them out.”
Trick believed what he was saying, but Marcello wasn’t convinced. “And Nevada White,” he said. “How does opening your home to a woman with a dubious past aid the situation?”
“She’s not the villain. She’s the victim, and she needs my help,” Trick said as if that were the ultimate in unassailable arguments.
Marcello wasn’t sure he trusted the woman, but he had to admit she had the helpless waif act down pat. Or maybe Trick was right. Maybe it wasn’t an act. And even if it was, did it really matter? Regardless of her motives, Nevada White was having a positive effect on Trick. For the first time in a long time, he was acting neither angry nor depressed. Nor was he wallowing in self-pity. For the first time in a long time, Trick Granger was thinking about someone besides himself.
THREE
Alittle after nine, Trick was awakened by the sounds of scraping and thumping overhead. He smiled grimly to himself. Marcello had no doubt thought it amusing to set Nevada White loose on the rooms directly above his bedroom. Alarm clock and cleaning lady all in one.
He showered in lukewarm water—apparently Ms. White’s cleaning orgy had already taxed the mansion’s ancient hot water heater to its limits—then shaved, dressed, and made his way downstairs to the kitchen, where Marcello sat at the table, systematically working his way through a stack of paperwork.
“You are up early,&rdq Norkuo; Marcello remarked, feigning surprise.
“Think you’re quite the comedian, don’t you, Bellini?”
Marcello frowned. “I do not understand.”
“Of course, you don’t. What’s for breakfast?”
“We have plenty of cold cereal. Unfortunately, Ms. White used the last of the milk.”
“Any croissants left?”
“No, I finished them off earlier. We have eggs, though, and bread.”
“Bacon? Cheese?”
“No bacon. I think there might be a piece of cheddar.”
“Omelet,” Trick decided. Omelets and steaks on the grill defined the parameters of his cooking prowess. And since they didn’t have any steak…
He was grating cheese when someone knocked twice on the back door.
“Come in,” he and Marcello chorused in unison.
The door swung open and former Olympic skier Britt Petersen rode in on a stiff spring breeze. With her wind-tossed blond hair and elegant, long-limbed body, she could have made a fortune as a runway model. Instead, she owned and managed the Lakeshore Lodge, a high-end resort that bordered Trick’s property. “Your pine boughs washed up on my beach,” she told Marcello by way of greeting. “I told you not to pile them so close to the water.”
“Consider them a gift,” Marcello said without looking up.
“I’m making an omelet,” Trick said. “Are you hungry, Britt?”
“No, thanks.” She turned back to Marcello. “You’re an ass. You know that, right?”
A smile twitched at the corners of Marcello’s mouth. “She wants me,” he said in Italian.
“Wants to kill you maybe,” Trick answered in the same language.
Britt scowled. “Speak English already!”
“He said he’ll be over to clean up your beach as soon as he finishes paying bills.”
Britt studied Trick’s face. “I suspect that’s a rather loose translation.”
He grinned. “I may have taken a liberty or two.”
A loud thump sounded overhead. Britt gave a start. “What was that?”
“The ghost,” Marcello said—in English this time.
“Ghost?” Britt shot him a funny look. “You must be joking.”
“He is,” Trick told her. “We hired a woman to clean the place. I suspect she’s moving furniture.”
“So you took my advice and found someone in Tahoe.”
“Actually—” Marcello started, but Trick cut him off.
<%">
“Yes,” Trick said. “Thanks for the tip. Sure I can’t interest you in some breakfast?”
“I’ve got to get back to the lodge,” she said. “I’m scheduled to take a group on a hike up to Midas Falls in about fifteen minutes, that is if they don’t cancel on me after last night’s wolf scare.”
Trick glanced quickly at Marcello, who kept his nose buried in his paperwork. “Wolves? Around here? Seriously?”
“That’s the buzz,” Britt said. “The story’s been all over the radio this morning. I’m betting it’ll make the front page of today’s Nugget, too.”
“So what happened?” Trick asked.
“An anonymous caller contacted the cops last night to report some truck driver who’d been mauled to death. Then maybe ten minutes later, one of the cooks at the Stop ’N Go discovered a second body behind a Dumpster. Denise Jackson. One of the waitresses.”
A second victim? What the hell?
“Had her throat ripped out. The speculation is that wolves were responsible.”
“But wolves in the Sierras? Since when?”
“Ridiculous, huh?” Britt said. “I figure it must have been wild dogs…or maybe coyotes. I know they’ve had problems with coyote attacks around Lake Tahoe.”
Nevada waited until the tall blond woman left before entering the kitchen. “Two bodies with their throats ripped out?” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t the men who’ve been following me after all.”
“Maybe not,” Trick Granger said, “but despite the bite marks, I don’t see how the trucker could have been killed by a wild animal. When Marcello and I found him, he was inside the cab of his truck with the windows rolled up. How would an animal have gotten to him?”
“And it is reasonable to assume the two men talked to the truck driver sometime shortly before his death,” Marcello said. “Otherwise, how would they have known we picked you up?”
“Ripping someone’s throat out is a pretty strange way to shut them up,” she said.
“Not if you’re a vampire.” Trick laughed at his own joke, then smiled directly at Nevada.
And it was a great smile that made her feel warm and tingly but…“Two murders in one night is not a joking matter,” Nevada said.
“No,” Marcello agreed. “It is not. But if the men tracking Nevada were, indeed, responsible for the trucker’s death, why would they have murdered Denise Jackson? Her death makes no sense.”
“Denise Jackson,” Trick repeated. “That’s the blonde who always flirts with you.”
“She likes my accent,” Marcello admitted.
“ Sh="dthLiked your accent,” Nevada said. “Past tense. The woman’s dead. Someone murdered her.”
“But made it look like a wild animal attack to disguise the fact it was murder.” Trick smacked his hand on the counter for emphasis.
“Only why kill the waitress?” Nevada frowned. Could they be talking about the same waitress she’d seen flirting with her pursuers? “Tell me. What did Denise Jackson look like? Was she a blonde in her forties, thin, average height?”
Trick frowned. “How did you know?”
“When I stepped inside the truck stop restaurant, I saw the two men who’ve been following me talking to a woman who fits that description.”
“Maybe they were asking if she knew anyone who drove a Jeep Wrangler,” Trick suggested.
“And they killed her so she couldn’t point a finger at them later,” Nevada guessed, “in case they had to dispose of you and Marcello, too.”
Marcello looked thoughtful. “If that is, indeed, what happened, th
en it is most fortunate, Trick, that your mention of Sacramento distracted them.”
“You’re positive she’s here in Sacramento?” State representative and gubernatorial hopeful Daniel Snowden scowled at the two men he’d sent to track down his half sister, Whitney.
Sarge Collier chewed on his lower lip. “Now that she’s no longer wearing the tracking device, we can’t be positive, no, but that’s what we believe.”
Billy Branson nodded agreement.
“So Appleton screwed up. He swore she doesn’t know who she is, that she wouldn’t remember the past, but if she doesn’t remember, why was she so determined to come here?”
The two hired guns made no reply, no doubt figuring—rightly—that his question was rhetorical.
Sarge stepped forward. “We were able to retrieve the tracking device. Found it on the floorboards of the logging truck’s cab. My guess is, she lost it in a tussle with the truck driver.” He handed Daniel the gold amulet that hid the bug.
Daniel cradled the antique pendant in his palm. A Gypsy charm, according to his first stepmother, Whitney’s real mother. She’d claimed it had come down through her family from a distant forebear. A good luck charm, she’d called it, though it hadn’t prevented her from dying in childbirth. Hadn’t done much to protect her daughter, either, during the years she’d been institutionalized.
His forethought in planting the tracking device had served him well, though. His men had had little trouble following Whitney, at least until she’d lost the amulet. He frowned. Was Sarge right? Had she lost the amulet in a struggle with the truck driver? Or had she deliberately gotten rid of it, somehow having discovered that he was using it to track her?
“How much did you tell the truck driver? I don’t want him putting two and two together.”
Sarge and Billy exchanged Sillant a look that raised the hairs along Daniel’s neck.
“What did you do?” he demanded.
“Took care of it,” Sarge said. “You don’t need to worry about the truck driver.”
“What did you do?” Daniel repeated.
“It was night. No one around. We were hungry. What do you think we did?” Sarge shrugged.
Billy laughed.
“Fools,” Daniel said. “I’m surrounded by fools.”
Sarge bristled. “Who are you calling a fool?”
“What’s going to happen if the media pick up the story? Did you give that a moment’s thought? You might as well send out an SOS to every demon hunter in the country. Of course, chances are a single body with bite marks on its throat will fly under the radar.” Glancing up, Daniel caught the look that passed between Sarge and Billy. “What?” he demanded.
Billy did his best to avoid Daniel’s gaze.
Daniel narrowed his eyes. “Don’t tell me you left more than one body.”
“The truck driver told us someone in a red Jeep Wrangler had picked up the girl, but there’s a hell of a lot of red Wranglers in California. Got lucky while we were talking with this waitress at the truck stop. Turned out one of locals owns a red Jeep. She identified him for us, told us where he lives,” Sarge said. “But if we’d had to take out the Jeep’s owner, she’d have been a liability. We couldn’t risk her talking to the cops.”
“So why not just shoot her?”
Billy gave him a reproachful look. “And waste all that blood. We were still hungry.”
“You couldn’t have found a stray dog or two?”
Billy muttered something Daniel didn’t catch.
“What was that, Branson?”
“I said stray dogs have fleas.”
Daniel glared at the pair of them. “You two morons have no self-control whatsoever. I should stake you here and now.”
Sarge’s nostrils flared, but he held his tongue.
A wise decision. Daniel hadn’t been joking about staking them. He tamped down his anger and marshaled his thoughts. “I doubt Whitney has much cash at her disposal. She won’t be able to afford anything too pricey, so you’ll probably have the best shot at tracking her down if you hit every cheap motel in town. Keep the body count down this time, though. Understood?” He glared at the two incompetents. “Just concentrate on your primary goal. Find her.”
“And when we do?” Billy asked.
Daniel smiled. “Then she’s all yours. Play with her to your heart’s content. Suck her dry if that’s what makes you happy. I want her out of the picture. Permanently. All I ask is that you don’t leave the body lying around to be identified. I don’t need that kind of publi S kintlcity.”
“No problem,” Sarge said. “We won’t let her screw up your campaign.”
The campaign was the least of Daniel’s worries, but he didn’t bother to set Sarge straight. The fewer people who knew the truth, the better.
Nevada stood in the shabby dining room, eyeing a wall of framed photographs, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. And every single one needed to be cleaned. Grubby gilt-trimmed frames draped in cobwebs surrounded faded images nearly obscured by a heavy layer of dust. Cleaning the wall of photographs promised to be both time-consuming and tedious. Not to mention creepy.
She’d never believed in ghosts, but she had to admit the Granger mansion had very bad vibes. No matter which room she worked in, she always felt as if she were under observation. In fact, right this minute she could almost swear hostile eyes were lasering the back of her neck. A nasty sensation. Almost like being back at the Institute.
She gave an involuntary shudder.
“Problem?” Trick Granger said from behind her.
Nevada jumped, nearly dropping her rags and bucket of soapy water. “Don’t sneak up on a person like that!”
“Sorry.” He gave her a questioning look. “You’re shaking.”
“Not much.” She frowned, angry at having betrayed weakness.
“Any more and you’d be registering on seismographs all over the state. Why so jumpy? Did you think the Granger ghost was about to trail chilly fingers down your spine?”
“No.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, maybe. The atmosphere in this house…” She shrugged.
“Tell me about it. Two parts eerie to one part creepy as hell. And that’s hell in the literal sense. All except for the kitchen. No weirdness there, probably because that part of the house was remodeled back in the thirties. Marcello just brewed a fresh pot of coffee, by the way. Why not take a ten-minute break in the ghost-free zone?”
She shook her head. “I really need to get started on this wall of photographs.”
“The stable, you mean.”
“What?” She hadn’t even made a dent in the mansion, and already he wanted her to tackle the stable? “I thought I’d leave the outbuildings until last.”
Trick laughed. “Not that kind of stable,” he explained. “Silas’s girls. That wall you’re about to attack is a pictorial record of every whore who ever worked for Silas Granger back when the house was a brothel.”
“Really? All these women were…” Whores seemed harsh. “…prostitutes?” She examined the photographs more closely. “No wonder none of them are smiling.”
He laughed again. “People seldom smile in old photographs. Didn’t you ever notice that? Back in those da Sck h="ys, the cameras took a while to capture an image, and it’s hard to hold a smile for any length of time.”
Nevada set her bucket down, wondering if it would be more efficient just to take down all the photographs first, scrub the wall, then clean each frame before re-hanging it. She probably wouldn’t get every picture back on its original hook, but did that really matter? The girls were long dead. No one knew one girl from the other anyway, let alone the proper order of the photographs.
“Why were those two men so determined to catch up with you?” Trick asked suddenly.
Caught off balance, she glanced up in surprise. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I wish I did. The truth is, I’m not sure who they are or who they’re working for. I don’t even know wh
o I am.” Drug-induced amnesia. That’s what Yelena had called it. “They experimented on me at the Institute.” She stared fixedly at the rag in her fist.
“Experimented?”
“With various drug regimens and other…treatments. They erased my memories, destroyed all my links to the past.” She frowned at him. “And the scary part is, I don’t even know if the memory loss was the point or merely a side effect.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding as if he meant it.
“Yeah, me, too.” Tears sprang to her eyes, but she blinked them away.
Trick Granger moved a step closer. He didn’t touch her. Even so, his sympathy wrapped itself around her, as warm and soothing as a quilt on a cold, winter night.
Neither of them spoke for ten long heartbeats. Then, “So your mother wasn’t really a hippie-turned-blackjack dealer?” he said.
“I doubt it, but who knows?” She shrugged.
“And your name’s not really Nevada White?”
Her smile faded. “Subject 111,” she said bitterly. “That’s the only name I remember. It’s what they called me at the Institute. All except…” She fell silent.
“Except?”
Nevada met his gaze, and her heart gave a little jolt. Why did he have to be so understanding? Cruelty, she could endure. Viciousness, heartlessness, even indifference, but the tenderness in his gaze stripped away all her defenses. I will not cry. I will not cry.
“Except?” he said again.
She shifted her gaze so he couldn’t see the glassiness of her eyes. “Except Yelena,” she muttered.
“A fellow inmate?”
Nevada shook her head. “A member of the cleaning staff. My only friend. She’s the one who christened me Nevada White.”
“An odd choice of names.”
“Yelena’s idea of a joke. Nevada means snowy. So Nevada White is a twisted variation on Snow White, fitting since she referred to the head of the Institute as Dr. Poison Apple.”
“Because he put you to sleep,” Trick guessed.
“In a manner of speaking.” She frowned.
“Dr. Poison Apple put you to sleep, but the prince never showed, and you finally got tired of waiting for him,” he said.
Wicked is the night Page 4