by Lori Foster
It was still a little startling to see Amos circulating with polite society. Wyatt was rightfully wary of him, and Mercy was fascinated by him. For his part, Amos didn’t quite know how to deal with either of them—though he had no problems relating to Cameo. Already the two of them had formed a very special bond.
Brax liked having Amos around, finding assurance that he wasn’t yet a lost cause.
And Cameo … well, she amazed him more each day. Flitting from one relative to another, serving drinks and hors d’oeuvres, she made a beautiful hostess. He couldn’t look at her without wanting her, but he did his best to temper his need when in polite company.
After her ordeal she’d had several sleepless nights, and though more than two weeks had passed, faint bruises remained on her delicate body. Brax still trembled whenever he thought of how close he’d come to losing her.
To help her put it in the past, Brax had seen to the removal of all reminders. It had cost him extra for the rush job, but his office was not only repaired but remodeled. All smoke damage had been removed from inside his home, and damage to the lawn and landscaping caused by Bradley’s fallen body had been spruced back up. Now, only the horrible memories remained, but Cameo was strong, one of the strongest people he’d ever met.
As if she knew his thoughts, she set aside the tray and came to him with a knowing smile. Brax straightened from his relaxed posture against the mantel. The love in her eyes never failed to set his heart racing.
When she reached him, she straightened the collar of his polo shirt, smoothed her hand over his chest, and then went on tiptoes to kiss him. “You’re showing remarkable restraint, Brax.”
He curved his hand around her waist and growled low, “You have no idea.”
“I love you, so yes, I have all kinds of ideas.”
“God, woman, what you do to me …”
“Tonight,” she whispered, “you can show me.” She patted him. “But don’t forget that tomorrow morning you have a meeting with the press to talk about your new benefit.” And with that, she left him to mingle again.
Brax smiled with incredible pride. Cameo had gone through hell because of his special ability, and she still declared her love for him.
She was the perfect personal secretary, the perfect hostess. The perfect woman—for him.
UNDEAD MAN’S HAND
ERIN MCCARTHY
ONE
SAMANTHA Keller knew she was going to die.
She was fighting it, but it was harder and harder to keep her eyes open, and her defensive kicks and blows were getting weak, ineffectual. Her body felt paralyzed, the sharp sting in her neck pinning her against the wall, the dizziness rolling over her in waves, the pain mingling with fear, regret, horror.
Funny how she had only meant to help. It would have been cruel to walk away from those pleading, innocent eyes. Even as her legs shook and her fingertips went numb, her brain couldn’t quite wrap itself around the irony of what was happening. This couldn’t be the end, but she knew it was.
As an agonizing pain ripped through her abdomen, she tried to scream but couldn’t, her voice frozen, even as the high-pitched voice laughing rolled around the alley and in Samantha’s pain-soaked consciousness.
Hearing the gurgle that came from her own mouth, she closed her eyes and waited to die.
“ OReveryseason there is a purpose, and in Vegas it’s murder.”
Jordan Waters stifled a groan as Shawn Marshall, another detective on the Metro Police force, slapped a file down on her already overburdened desk. “Thanks for that daily inspiration. You going to put that on stationery? How about a calendar?”
“I should. Three hundred sixty-five days of death in the desert.”
Exhausted from yet another night crawling through a crime scene, Jordan could only offer Shawn a heavy eye roll. “Brilliant. It will be an Internet hit.”
“You going to open the file I gave you?”
“Nope. I can’t deal with another victim. I haven’t even gotten lab reports back on the first three, and I’m ticked that Thomas left and dumped this in my lap.” It was Jordan’s first serial killer case and it was kicking her ass. The sick bastard was draining women of their blood and then displaying their bodies in the gruesome pose of being nailed to the ground with a stake.
“This isn’t your boy’s work. We’ve got ourselves a male victim, body found in the lot behind the Venetian hotel, head found in the Dumpster. Witnesses say he fell of the roof, but that doesn’t explain his missing head.”
“Decapitation? Nice.” Jordan picked up the file and shoved it back at Shawn. “So take this back, then. We can’t take on another case, you know that.”
“Tell that to the chief, girlfriend. It’s you and me on this one.”
Now she did groan. “No, I’m not doing it.” There weren’t enough hours in the day to handle her workload, not that she had much choice, really. It was a token protest and she and Shawn both knew it, but it made her feel better to bitch.
Shawn continued like he hadn’t heard her. “The victim has been identified by the name of R, thirty-five years old, a Russian émigré.”
“R?” Despite her exhaustion, that made Jordan look up with a smirk. “Like the letter? Since when is that a name?”
“I guess it’s some kind of Russian gang thing. I don’t know. No one seems to know his last name, and no one in his little circle of pals seems cut up that he’s dead. It looks like a straightforward retaliation kill.”
Shawn was rocking on his heels, his hand in the pocket of his ugly dress pants. Why he insisted on wearing pleated pants, Jordan would never understand. Not that she had any room to talk. Being knee-deep in death every day didn’t exactly call for high fashion, and it had been months since she’d gone shopping or gotten a manicure. It didn’t look like she would be doing so anytime soon, either.
“So you deal with it, Shawn. I haven’t been to bed in two days and I have a crazy bastard out there who is shortening his time between kills that I want to catch.” Which was why she had no life, and why it had been a year since she’d had sex, not that she was keeping track. It was a brutal combination, being surrounded by death with a total lack of intimacy and sexual release in her life, and Jordan knew she was getting edgy.
But she couldn’t stop murder, and she couldn’t pull a man out of her desk drawer. God help the poor guy if she could, because she would probably wear him out and use him up before she was finished with him, she was wound that tight.
Since a male distraction wasn’t going to appear anyway, she stared at the glossy crime scene photos spread on her desk and tried to get into the mind of a killer. Three women, all in their thirties or forties, successful and attractive in life. Yet all three gruesome, pale, and waxy in death, sightless eyes wide open in shock, their chests gored from the impact of a wooden stake, their arms and legs askew as they lay in their macabre crucifixion. The last victim, thirty-three-year-old Samantha Keller, had thick long hair, and it had been caught by the violence of the stake and jammed into her abdominal cavity, pulled taut from the impact and forcing her head to tilt at an odd angle, as if she were puzzled. A ribbon of dried blood from internal bleeding trailed from the corner of her mouth to her chin.
When you laid the photos side by side, you could see that as the killer’s confidence grew, his impact of the stake was lower and lower. The first kill had the stake right through the heart, with instant death. Each subsequent kill was farther from the heart, and presumably the coroner’s reports would show they had lived for several agonizing minutes while the killer enjoyed their suffering. Jordan had seen a lot of murder, but never like this, never in this sick display of twisted humor, this utter revelry in the power of torture. It made her gut burn and her palms sweat. God, she wanted to catch this bastard.
“Well, it sucks to be you,” Shawn declared. “I haven’t slept either, you know. And don’t you think it’s strange that we have yet another homicide in such close proximity to a casino? That makes vi
ctims found at the Ava, the Bellagio, and the Venetian in how many months?”
Jordan rubbed her temples, trying to ease the tension that was on the verge of tripping off a migraine. “Yeah, but you just said this isn’t our serial killer’s work, so it’s just a coincidence. Our sicko’s victims are all female.” Another puzzling point. A few months prior, there had been a series of murders with the same curious result—all the victims’ blood had been drained from their bodies. But those had all been men, and the killings had stopped as quickly as they had started. Neither she nor the detective who had been on that case could decide if they were related to the current body count or not.
There was a knock on the door and Jordan called, “Come in.” If it was news of another murder, her head was going to explode.
It was Detective Andrew Baldwin, and thank God, he was waving a piece of paper in his hand. “We got an ID on the kid the kitchen lady told us about.”
That was the best news Jordan had heard in two days. The Bellagio had security cameras sweeping the service alley where Samantha Keller’s body had been found, and they had seen several staff members from the hotel smoking out there on the video throughout the night of her death. The entire kitchen crew had been questioned. Everyone claimed not to have seen anything suspicious, and as far as Jordan could piece together, no staff had been outside alone, but had always had at least one other person with them. But two different women had mentioned that frequently a kid was playing in the alley at night, unsupervised, and had suggested that maybe if there was a murderer on the loose, his parents should keep him inside.
While initially it had seemed like the kid could be a potential witness, no one seemed to know who he was, and it had quickly become another dead end.
“You did? How the hell did you do that? And who he is?”
“One of the busboys said the kid is the cousin of a blackjack dealer at the casino named Katie, and that he thought maybe the kid’s dad was a security guard. We found the dealer named Katie, who denied the kid would be outside at night by himself, but she gave us the dad’s name, who agreed to let us talk to the kid, as long as he’s with him.”
“Excellent. When can we do this?” Jordan was standing up, sore muscles, growling stomach, and fatigue all forgotten.
“I said you and Shawn would be there at ten tonight, so in an hour. Only don’t get your hopes up. Chances are the kid didn’t see anything, and even if he did, I have my doubts about how reliable he’ll be.”
Andrew was frowning, and Jordan didn’t like the look of that.
“Why?”
“Because the kid’s autistic.”
Jordan stopped groping in her drawer for her car keys and stared at him. “Oh, shit, you’re kidding me.”
“Afraid not.”
“How high functioning is he?” She knew there was a massive range for autism and she prayed this kid fell on the lower end of the spectrum.
“I have no idea, I didn’t see him. I guess you’ll find out, though.”
“How old is he?”
“Thirteen.”
At least that worked in their favor. Too young to be devious and lie to them to cover his own butt, and old enough to know what he saw and be able to communicate it. In most cases.
But who knew what they’d get out of this kid. “What’s his name?”
“Peter Stolin. The father’s name is Nikolai Stolin. They’re Russian immigrants.”
“Really?” Jordan looked at Shawn. “Like your retaliation kill. What a coincidence.”
And Jordan didn’t like this many coincidences.
TWO
NICK Stolin glanced at his watch. He turned to Ringo Columbia, the other bodyguard who had been assigned to patrol the casino with him while Mr. Donatelli played the tables. “I have an appointment, can you cover for me for thirty minutes?”
Ringo eyed him from under his stringy dark hair, sucking hard on his cigarette before removing it from his mouth and blowing the smoke in Nick’s direction. “What, like out of the goodness of my fucking heart? I don’t think so.”
God, Nick hated Ringo. He was a waste of oxygen, a slimy, selfish cesspool of a human being, or vampire, in this case. Working with Ringo every night taxed Nick’s patience and made him constantly question if it wasn’t time for a career change. But after a hundred years as a guard, Nick wasn’t sure what else he was qualified for.
“I’ll give you fifty bucks.” It should be a good incentive, enabling Ringo to sneak off and buy his special drink of choice, blood laced with heroin, and then finish it off with a cocaine chaser. By the time Nick came back from talking to the cops, he had no doubt Ringo would be flying.
Even though it wasn’t his problem, he couldn’t say he liked aiding and abetting an addict, but Nick knew he should cooperate with the police. Let them talk to Peter and see they weren’t going to get any information out of him, and be done with it. That was a key rule to being a vampire. If you appeared on mortals’ radar, deal with it swiftly and calmly, then let them forget about you.
“Done,” Ringo said. “Where are you going anyway?”
Nick cast a steady eye around the casino floor, making sure there were no vampires or any outward signs of danger before he left. Donatelli hadn’t moved from the blackjack table, and he had a blonde hovering near his left arm. Everything looked status quo.
“I’m going upstairs to check on Peter.” Not the whole truth, but not a lie either.
Ringo’s eyes narrowed. “My wife is watching Peter, you don’t need to check on him.”
Kelsey Columbia’s ability to truly monitor Peter was dubious at best, but since babysitting for vampires was hard to come by, even in Vegas, Nick had settled on the arrangement with her. “I just need to discuss something with Peter.”
“You’re not running up there to fuck my wife, are you?” Ringo asked, raising his cigarette to his lip and smiling with a feral menace Nick found disturbing. “Because I will kill you.”
Nick had zero interest in Kelsey, who was arguably the female version of Peter—erratic, vague, a poster child for bipolarism in vampires. But he wasn’t about to let Ringo think he could intimidate him. “You mean you’d try to kill me,” Nick told him calmly. “You’d never be successful.”
He outweighed Ringo by seventy-five pounds, had a century of training, experience, and blood drinking behind him, and he would kill before he was killed. No questions asked. “But no, trust me, I have no interest in your wife. I would never think to interfere in your unique relationship.” Unique was a good word to describe a couple that alternated between abusive behaviors and obsessive all-consuming devotion to each other.
Nick was no expert on marriage, and unfortunately couldn’t even precisely recall the last time he’d had a woman, vampire or mortal, in his bed, but he knew he didn’t want that mess Ringo and Kelsey called love in his life.
“Good.” Ringo’s shoulders relaxed a little. “How’d you get stuck with that kid anyway? He’s one weird little dude.”
As if Nick would ever tell someone like Ringo the story of the night he had turned Katie and Peter. The crying, the gunshots, the blood, the instant decision to save the two young adults who had haunted Nick every day since. It was a private tale of horror that he told no one, least of all a self-absorbed junkie.
“Of course he’s odd,” Nick said, evading the question. “He is technically over a hundred years old and yet he resides in a thirteen-year-old boy’s body.” The consequences of which had never occurred to Nick in those spontaneous seconds when he had chosen to try and save the little duke and his sister. Futile to worry about it now—it was what it was.
Ringo shook his head. “Yeah, that would fuck you up. Think of all the twenty-five-year-olds you’d want to bang, and you look like a kid to them. That would suck … your only choice would be, like, fourteen-year-olds who don’t know what the hell they’re doing or some pervy older woman who wants to mother you and molest you all at once.”
And on that note, Nic
k was leaving. Someone like Ringo would never understand that sexual frustration was relevant and part of Peter’s problem, yes, but it was a small piece of a complex puzzle of emotional issues. Nick didn’t even come close to understanding Peter himself, though, so there was no reason Ringo would or could.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Thanks.” Nick adjusted his suit jacket and turned to head for the elevators.
Ringo’s hand closed around his arm.
When Nick gave him a pointed look, Ringo just smiled. “Payment up front, my friend.”
“Friends, we are not,” Nick told him with a hint of steel, shaking Ringo’s arm off. He didn’t like to be touched. But he did pull out the money and hand it to him. “Don’t let anyone kill Donatelli while I’m gone.”
Ringo laughed, pocketing the cash. “Don’t worry about it. You may be the big brawny silent Russian who looks scary, but trust me, I am scary.”
“Then we are the perfect partnership,” Nick said sarcastically and walked away. He didn’t want to be associated with someone like Ringo, and yet, that was his destiny, this was his life. He was a vampire and a bodyguard, who had made a career of working for amoral men.
The thought made his blood breakfast burn in his gut.
It was with relief for the distraction from his thoughts that he spotted Katie and her fiancé, Michael, coming toward him on the casino floor. Saving Katie had never given him a moment’s regret. The story they gave everyone was that she was Nick’s niece, even though nothing was further from the truth since she was royalty and he was the son of a serf. She had taken his last name for simplicity after her turning, and for a century he and Katie had gotten along, even as she had chafed at the restrictions he had tried to put on her over the years. She was a normal, witty woman who was glowing with happiness now that she had been reunited with her girlhood lover.
“Hey, where are you going?” she asked as she reached out and gave him a hug.
Katie was one of the few people Nick didn’t mind being touched by, but sometimes even her easy invasion of his space unnerved him. He forced himself to hug her in return, then took a step back. “Up to my place. The cops are coming to talk to Peter.” He shook Michael’s hand as he greeted Katie’s fiancé. “How’s it going?”