Desired by a Dangerous Man

by Cleo Peitsche

  Rolling my eyes, I retrieved my backpack from under the seat.

  “Don’t forget your book,” Rob said. It was a paperback zombie novel that Corbin had bought me. The first time I’d flown somewhere without him, he’d put together a similar goody bag. That one had included a spy device to mess with Henry’s phone. Back then, Henry and I had been almost friends.

  This time, the goody bag was nothing but snacks and reading material. I didn’t know when Corbin had put it together. It made me think he kept a stash of zombie novels on hand, just in case.

  The man was nothing if not prepared.

  I thrust the book into my backpack. Rob had collected my satchel-duffel—a gift from Corbin, forced upon me after I’d packed my things for a weekend trip in a paper bag.

  It was too bad Corbin wasn’t with me. I was happy to have Rob along, but a third set of critical eyes would probably come in handy.

  The moment we stepped off the plane, Rob was hurrying away. I had to trot to keep up.

  “What’s the rush?” I asked testily. I was still groggy from my nap, still resentful of the way in which I’d been woken.

  “Traffic. I programmed all our destinations into my phone’s GPS,” Rob said. “But traffic will be getting worse in about twenty minutes.”

  Once we were in the car—a red convertible, heaven help me—I learned just how thorough my brother’s planning had been. Using traffic patterns, he’d decided we should start with the hotel where JD’s murder had taken place.

  From there, we’d go to our hotel—which was technically a motel—check in and drop off our stuff. After that, we’d undertake the longer drive out to JD’s apartment, where we’d have a solid two hours before Sara’s arrival.

  LA hadn’t changed much since I’d last visited. It was loud, beautiful, and lushly green when least expected. Maybe I was too used to our city nestled at the foot of majestic mountains, but I already wanted to go home.

  Rob turned into the hotel’s parking lot.

  I’d seen photos of the hotel, but it wasn’t what I’d been expecting. It was only three levels, and the pink and white facade was offset by the towering palm trees and energetically robust bushes.

  “You’d never guess that this place runs five hundred bucks a night,” Rob said, and I made a sound of agreement.

  When Massimo had told me about the hotel and the murder, I’d assumed it was seedy, or at least budget. After all, he was broke, and he’d had his own room. Plus it sounded like JD had been a bit of a partier.

  The hotel was, in fact, quiet. Classy.

  “Kat said she’ll have copies of JD’s financials soon,” I said.

  “Martin’s working on it,” Rob corrected. “He’s pulling stuff for Massimo and Neil as well.”

  “But I assigned it to Katrina,” I said stubbornly.

  Rob grinned as he brought the car to a stop. “But because Corbin’s not around for a bit, Dad said Martin would be supervising the investigation.”

  That annoyed me. Both Corbin and Martin had their PI licenses, but Corbin, at least, was helping in significant ways, and only when I asked. Martin’s license had lapsed, though he’d renewed it at Dad’s request.

  “As long as he stays out of my way,” I muttered, though I knew he would.

  “So what’s the plan?” Rob wanted to know as we got out of the car. He’d left the top down. Our luggage was in the trunk, but I grabbed my backpack from the backseat. I knew better than anyone that criminals were opportunists. No point in letting someone make off with my zombie paperback.

  “Follow my lead,” I said.

  We entered the lobby. The receptionist was busy checking in a guest. She didn’t even look at us as we walked to the elevators.

  The murder had taken place on the second floor, but when we reached it, I merely stuck my head out. The hallways were empty.

  We continued to the third floor. Rob fussed with his red hair in the elevator’s slightly reflective chrome paneling.

  I stepped off the elevator, looked left and got lucky; a maid’s cart sat in the hallway.

  “This way,” I said to Rob. A quick glance at his face showed he knew exactly what I was up to.

  As we drew closer to the open hotel room door, I took note of the rosary hanging from the cart’s handle and the laminated photos of two smiling children.

  Peering around the cart, I noticed a skinny woman, her face deeply lined, in the process of ripping sheets off of a bed.

  “Hi,” I said. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

  She didn’t acknowledge me and instead gathered up the soiled sheets and hauled them to the cart, stuffed them into the hamper. When she was done, she looked up at me, her brown eyes devoid of any curiosity.

  I fished out my bounty hunter’s badge. It was meaningless, a prop, basically, but flashed quickly enough, it seemed official.

  “I’m Audrey, and this is my partner Rob.” Thank goodness that our coloring was nothing alike, that we didn’t look the least bit related. “Were you working Labor Day Sunday?”

  The maid looked even less impressed as she shook her head. Already she was angling her body away, anxious to return to her work. She probably had a predetermined amount of time to change the room.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Has the room been cleaned yet?”

  She nodded. She didn’t need to ask which room I was talking about. “It’s busy season,” she said.

  In other words, guests had been staying there. The thought sent a mild shudder through me. “Can you show me an empty room that has the same layout?” I asked.

  After a moment, she nodded, pushed her way past the cart, and used her master key to enter a room several doors away.

  “Don’t make a mess,” she barked, and went back to her work.

  Rob closed the door. “Would you want to sleep in a room where someone had been murdered just a few weeks before?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not.” I paused. “I wonder how they got the blood out of the carpet.”

  “They probably cut it out. Hotels keep extra carpet on hand for emergencies. Extra everything… mattresses…” He looked at me.

  “Extra ironing boards?”

  “Curtains,” he said. “Did the curtains get splattered?”

  I shrugged and turned my attention to the room, which contained two queen beds. Everything was clean, with well-maintained furniture, though not especially fancy.

  “JD’s body was found here,” I said, indicating the foot of one bed with the toe of my sneaker. “He was attacked on the bed. He was sitting, then fell forward. Most of the wounds were on his back.”

  “And Neil?”

  I stepped over the imaginary body and pointed to the floor. “He was slumped there. I don’t think the attacker meant to kill him, or he would be dead. After all, JD was stabbed enough times to kill an elephant.”

  “Neil was cut up. The attacker might have been interrupted.”

  “By Massimo. Yeah, I thought of that, but I don’t know. Why leave a witness?” Massimo had returned to the room to say goodbye to Neil and JD. He’d heard muffled sounds and had assumed they were having sex. I’d gotten the impression that he’d left without bothering to knock on the door, but that didn’t mean his presence had gone unremarked.

  On the other hand, attacking someone who was fighting back was loud, messy work. Someone shuffling up to the door might not have been noticed. Too bad I didn’t have access to Massimo, couldn’t ask him. Maybe that could be arranged.

  Rob crossed to the window. The outer light-blocking curtains were already tied back. He pulled aside the sheers and slid back the balcony door.

  “JD’s room should be down one level and over one,” Rob said.

  I followed him onto the concrete platform. He quietly moved the yellow metal chairs away from the slatted wood railing, and we both peered over the edge.

  To my surprise, a man wearing nothing but swimming trunks was lounging on the balcony of the room where the murder had taken place
. A food service tray in disarray sat next to him. He looked up at us, then went back to the newspaper he was reading.

  “If JD and Neil went for a swim, hung their wet clothes on the balcony, they might not have bothered to lock the door,” I said.

  “Or it was someone they knew, someone they let in.”

  “Or that,” I agreed. “Do you think someone could have climbed up there?”

  Rob and I both stared at the balcony, and we both nodded.

  In other words, anything was possible. Too bad. It would have been nice to narrow down some details—any details—of the crime.

  When we were back in the car, I tried to convince myself that we hadn’t just wasted fifteen minutes.

  We checked into our motel. It was hard to know which was thinner: the walls or the towels. I’d had Rob book it because I hadn’t trusted Corbin’s agent not to put us up somewhere expensive. To cut costs, Rob and I were sharing a room—though Corbin had approved of this because he felt it was safer.

  Despite the valiant efforts of the two lightbulbs, the place was dark, a little musty. Rather than endanger my bag by setting it on the comforter, I hooked a hanger through one of the handles and hung it up in the rickety wardrobe. Rob scoffed at me, but he did the same.

  We set out for JD’s place. This time, I drove.

  “You know,” Rob said, “I might have to backpedal a bit about the PI work. Shitty motel aside, this beats hanging out in trailer parks and slinking around the ghettos. Did Corbin talk to you about his new real estate venture?”

  It was a clumsy segue, but I was surprised he’d waited even this long to bring it up. “Yes.”

  “And?”

  I shrugged. “He’s excited about it.”

  “He and Dad signed the papers this morning.”

  I almost swerved off the road. “They did?”

  “Yup. The problems with our building are now Corbin’s problems. He did it through a larger corporation. I looked them up online, and they own a bunch of high-profile real estate. So I don’t think the sheriff’s department will get far by trying to push them around.”

  The knowledge that Corbin owned a real estate corporation shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I was a bit put out that he hadn’t mentioned it.

  “Did you overhear anything about the architect’s plans for the extension?” I asked.

  Rob shook his head. “No, and I don’t think Corbin told Dad, either, but I have a guess or two.”

  I looked sharply at him. “Please share.”

  “I think he wants to build up. I also think he’s buying the lot next to ours.”

  “Really?”

  Rob nodded.

  “That seems excessive,” I said.

  “He’s got plans, and he doesn’t seem the type to do anything halfway.”

  “Yeah.” That was putting it mildly.

  I caught a red light. There were car dealerships on three of the four corners, and three of the four corners had people wearing sandwich boards walking back and forth, their faces shiny with perspiration.

  The light changed. I stared a moment at the gleaming stretch limo that had pulled up alongside me. LA, city of extremes.

  I made the right that the GPS ordered me to.

  Chapter 9

  I hadn’t seen photos of JD’s apartment, but the converted warehouse wasn’t what I was expecting. The building itself was certainly imposing, but it sat on a landscaped stretch of land that included artificial ponds and carefully cultivated flowers, bushes and trees.

  His rent had to be several times mine.

  Maybe my mistake was thinking of JD as a starving artist who occasionally had sex for money and sometimes sold drugs. Maybe he’d really been a prostitute and drug dealer who made art on the side.

  I knew from my own research that he’d been living at this place for a few years, so it pre-dated his relationship with Congressman Bowlst.

  Bowlst Me Over, I thought. It was the nail polish color that had been modeled on the congressman’s striking blue eyes, and whenever I heard his name, I couldn’t help thinking about it. It tended to stick in my head like an annoying pop song.

  At the moment, Bowlst was my prime suspect. My only suspect. Maybe not Bowlst himself—it was impossible to imagine him violently stabbing anyone—but he might have hired someone to get rid of JD.

  Bowlst had been popular for some time, and he didn’t have a looming reelection. I couldn’t figure out motive unless JD had been threatening to go public or something.

  Still, my gut told me Bowlst was involved. He was married to his high school sweetheart.

  I’d done some digging through her background, trying to figure out if she was the type to hire a hit man to teach a lesson to her husband’s lover. She seemed sweet, if a little stupid, though maybe I was imagining that. Maybe she knew that Bowlst preferred men, and maybe their relationship suited her aims, too.

  Corbin had looked into Bowlst, but he hadn’t been able to turn up anything juicy. Even the inner circles didn’t know about his secret life.

  I parked in the area reserved for guests and located the key that Sara had given me the evening we met.

  “Shouldn’t we be jotting down the time or something?” Rob asked as we walked to the front door.

  “I don’t know. Should we?”

  “So that Neil knows where his money is going.”

  The front door was locked. I unlocked it and swung it open. Rob caught the door and held it so I could enter the air conditioned lobby first.

  “Maybe we should keep a log,” I said. It made sense, though neither Corbin nor Martin had mentioned anything about it. I didn’t have anything against the idea of keeping a log, but I didn’t want to get into a situation like we had with our father, where we had to take careful notes, and if we didn’t, he’d withhold our paychecks. “You can be in charge of that.”

  Rob frowned. “We’ll remember what we did. We’ll write up a report later if the urge overcomes us.” He looked around. “This place is nice.”

  “I know.”

  We were standing in the center of an open space that seemed better suited for the entrance of a trendy restaurant, the kind serving a hundred different beers from obscure microbreweries. The burnt sienna brick was in perfect condition. I found the architecture overly masculine. All those exposed beams and girders. If the building had been a car, it would have been either a muscle sports car or a desert-grade, off-road SUV. I couldn’t decide if it was showy and pretentious or simply functional.

  An enormous skylight over the center of the space kept the entrance from being gloomy.

  The building was only two levels, and while we didn’t see an elevator, we clearly didn’t need one. JD’s unit was on the second floor, in the back.

  Rob and I walked up the steps, which were wide, a high-gloss type of steel. They had holes in them. I didn’t know what the design was called, but it was the sort of construction I associated with external fire escapes.

  The building was… masculine. It felt hostile toward women; if I’d been wearing stilettos, I would have had to walk on my toes to avoid snapping off the heels.

  The second floor was carpeted in a dark brown. It could have been tacky—maybe was tacky—but I thought it fit nicely with the building’s decor.

  There was a Welcome To My Home mat in front of JD’s door.

  I stared at it.

  The man who’d put the mat there wouldn’t be coming home. Up until now, JD had been an abstraction. What I did know about him was mostly couched in terms of “the victim” and “the deceased.”

  Even meeting Sara hadn’t made him real. Her pain was acute, and I’d had to wall myself off from it. Especially when she asked if I had a brother. I hadn’t even been able to answer the question.

  Rob took the key from my hand and unlocked the door. He pushed it open, stepped through first.

  “Damn,” he muttered, moving to the side. “Where’s the furniture?”

  I entered.

 
The apartment, which was a loft, was in total disarray. Clothing, bedding, paper… It was everywhere.

  No furniture, though.

  Nudging a pile of artsy magazines with the side of my foot, I cursed my luck. Whoever had taken the furniture had simply dumped the contents. If JD had kept something important hidden in the back of a drawer or under a mattress, we’d never be able to find it in this mess.

  I dug out my phone and dialed Sara. She didn’t answer, but a moment later she rang back from a different number.

  “I was just about to call you,” she said in a breathless rush when I answered. “Something’s come up. I’m not going to be able to leave San Francisco tonight.”

  My heart sank. “You can’t come down at all, or you’ll be late?”

  “I’m really sorry. What did you need?”

  The sigh I choked back hurt my throat. “All of JD’s furniture is missing.”

  “The building manager is going to sell it for me,” she said. “I can put you in touch with the handyman.”

  “You don’t want any of JD’s things?” I watched as Rob knelt beside a stack of mail and began flipping through it.

  “No. JD and I have… had very different aesthetic preferences.” She sounded choked. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  It didn’t seem there was much more to say, and while I was dying to know what had come up that was so important, clearly she didn’t want to share, and I couldn’t force her to tell me. “That would be fine.” I hung up.

  Rob twisted on the balls of his feet to look up at me. “Did she cancel?”

  “Apparently some things are more important than finding her brother’s murderer.”

  “In fairness,” Rob said as he dropped the mail and stood, “it’s unlikely that we’ll find anything useful here.”

  I shot him a dirty look. “If I believed that, I wouldn’t have come.” I pushed past him, toward the steps leading to what was likely the bedroom. Underneath the loft’s platform was what I assumed to be the painting studio. There weren’t any paintings visible from my current angle, but a drop cloth covered with tubes of paint, plus the large easels, seemed conclusive enough.