by J. D. Robb
She circled again. “Still . . .”
“We’re late!” Mavis bounced in on thigh-high platform boots as red as Rudolph’s nose. Her hair, a twisting, curling, corkscrewing mass of sunshine covered with silver glitter, tumbled around a face that lasered out smiles.
She danced over, a high-on-the-thigh skirt of Christmas green scattered with silver stars fluttering as she tossed her arms around Roarke, then Eve for hugs.
“I’m totally juiced you thought of get-together time, because we haven’t—just us—in a while. Leonardo’s down with Bella, but you said I should come up, Dallas. The house looks ultra mag Santa time. Bellamina’s seriously dazzled. And—”
She broke off, frowned at Eve’s board.
“Work. I was just finishing up. I just wanted to ask you a couple questions about street life, girl packs, street packs, flops, chain of command. Anything I can get.”
“It’s work,” Mavis said slowly, in an un-Mavis-like tone. “The girls in the building on the West Side. Their bodies, in the old building. I turned off the screen because I didn’t want to hear about it.”
“Sorry, but I wanted to pick your brain a little,” Eve began.
“They’re all dead, these girls? All of them?”
“Yeah.” Eve didn’t like the way the rosy glow in Mavis’s cheeks died to sickly white. “Let’s go downstairs and talk about it.”
“A case. Your case. But I knew them. This one, and this one. This one, too.”
“What?” Eve gripped her shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“I knew her.” She gestured to Shelby. “And her.” Now Mikki. “And her.” And lastly LaRue Freeman. “I knew them, Dallas. Before you. I knew them before you.”
She turned her face to Eve’s with tears shimmering. “They were friends of mine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. You don’t forget . . . They’re dead. They’ve been dead all this time. That’s why they never came back.”
“Came back where?”
“To The Club. That’s what we called it. They never came back.”
“Mavis.” Eve took her by the shoulders, shifted a little to block the photos on the board so Mavis would look at her instead. “When did you know them?”
“Before. Before I met you. I told you how it was before.”
“Yeah.” But she’d given Mavis a lot of leeway on details. No point pushing for them when they could make you wonder how many times you could arrest your best friend on prior bad acts.
“I’m going to need you to tell me more now.”
“I need . . . a minute. It’s all still there. You think it’s not. You figure you’ve dumped it, or at least packed it all away. But it’s all still there.” She leaned on Eve a moment, all the bright clothes and hair. “You know.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“We were just kids, Dallas. They were just kids.” She shuddered, eased back. “I want Bella, for a minute. I want Bella and Leonardo.”
“We’ll go down,” Roarke said. He brushed off Eve’s protest before it happened, simply giving her arm a squeeze as he drew Mavis away. “You could do with some wine, darling, and a bit of time to gather your thoughts.”
“I guess. I’m upside down, or inside out. Maybe both. I thought they took off.” She leaned on him now as they went downstairs. “A lot of us did, or got picked up, swallowed up. But a lot just took off. People don’t always stay, even when you want them to.”
“They don’t, no.” He led her into the parlor where Leonardo and Summerset, with equally besotted smiles, watched Bella bang enthusiastically on some sort of colorful plastic cube. One bang and it played a rapid guitar riff, another trumpets blasted like New Year’s Eve on Zeus.
While it riffed, blasted, drummed, tweeted, Bella laughed like a loon and shook her hot pink ruffled butt.
“Look what Summerset gave Bella.” Beaming over the cacophony, Leonardo, a glittering silver vest flowing over a sapphire shirt, rose from the sofa. “She has your musical talent, moonbeam.”
His smile faded as he focused on the sheen in her eyes. “What’s the matter?” He started toward her, but she shook her head, glanced down at Bella.
“Oh, that’s just mag!” Mavis dropped down by Bella to poke the image of a keyboard. “It’s the total ult. You can play backup for Mommy! Thanks, Summerset.”
“I thought she’d enjoy it. Music’s in the blood.” Though his voice held as much cheer as Summerset’s ever did, the amusement had gone out of his eyes.
But for Bella, still shy of her first birthday, the world was bright lights and music.
She spotted Eve and Roarke, squealed with boundless joy.
“Das!” As fast as her chubby legs could manage, she toddled over to Eve, and her pretty face glowing with desperate love, lifted her arms. “Up!”
“Oh, well, I—”
“Up, up, up! Das.”
“Okay, okay.” Flustered, Eve reached down. Bella took it from there, all but climbing into Eve’s arms, then clapping both hands on Eve’s cheeks while she jabbered in the foreign language of baby.
“’Kay? ’Kay?” She made an exaggerated mmmm! sound as she pressed her lips to Eve’s.
“Yeah, sure.” It was hard not to grin around a kid just that pretty and happy, but the timing . . . But when Eve tried to set her down again, Bella clung like a burr, dropped the foreign tongue to a hissy whisper in Eve’s ear. Then laughed deep from the belly at the joke only she knew.
And with a bounce, she twisted in Eve’s arms, gave Eve a hot moment of sheer panic before she tried to fly across to Roarke.
“Ork!”
“Good idea. Great idea.” Mentally swiping sweat from her brow, Eve shoved Bella at Roarke.
He received similar treatment—hands, jabber, kiss—and his reaction slid along the same lines as Eve’s, until Bella tilted her head to one side and batted her lashes like a pro.
Despite it all, he laughed, found she seemed less likely to slip out of his hold when she settled on his hip. “And look at you now, quite the flirt already.”
She smiled, just a little sly, played with his hair.
“Men are her playthings.” Mavis’s voice trembled a little before she sipped the wine Summerset offered her.
“Perhaps she can keep me company for a while.” Stooping, Summerset picked up the toy.
“She’d like that,” Mavis began. “If she gets in the way—”
“Pretty girls are never in the way.” Smoothly, Summerset plucked her from Roarke, balanced her on his bony hip with an ease of motion that baffled Eve. Bella launched into a fresh spate of babbling, feet cheerfully kicking in fuzzy pink boots.
“I think that can be arranged,” Summerset told her as he carried her out.
She patted his cheek, said something that sounded like “some shit.” Eve found herself puzzling over it, until she put it together.
Shum shit. Summerset.
Now that she could appreciate.
Bella grinned over his shoulder, waved a hand. “Bye-bye! Bye-bye!”
“Someshit—that’s her name for him. You gotta love it. Did he actually understand her?” Eve wondered.
“She was flirting for cookies,” Mavis said, then just sat, closed her eyes.
“Mavis, what happened?” Leonardo sat beside her, cuddled her as he would a child. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“The girls. We heard the media blast, remember? All those girls. Roarke’s building. They said it was your building.”
“Just recently, yes.”
“I think, sometimes, I think maybe it’s all a big, wicked loop. Who you know, what you do, where you are. I knew some of the girls, Leonardo. Some of the girls they found in Roarke’s building. The girls on Dallas’s dead board upstairs. His building, her case. My friends, from another life.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He pressed his lips to her hair, rocked her.
“I don’t know why it’s screwing me up like this. It was a million years ago, and I hardly thought about them, ever. But . . . seeing them, and knowing, and they looked like they did. Mostly like they did.”
“What can you tell me about them?” Eve began, and Roarke put a hand on her shoulder.
“Eve.”
“Look, I’m sorry.” Instead of taking a chair, Eve sat on the table directly facing Mavis. “I know it’s rough, but if you knew them, even a million years ago, something you know might help me find who killed them, and why.”
“They wouldn’t get you. I did. Do you ever wonder why? I got you, almost from the bounce—or the bust. You were so official, and so grumpy in your uniform.”
Those hard black cop shoes, Eve thought. God, how she’d hated them. She probably had looked grumpy.
“And you looked like some kid playing fairy princess dress-up, even with your hand in that mark’s pocket.”
“I didn’t even have his wallet yet.”
“And tried to tell me you were just trying to get his attention. Bogus.”
“I was pretty good at the lift, even though I mostly ran cons. But now and again you’d see some tourist just asking for it, you know? You know?” she repeated to Roarke.
“I know very well.”
“You ever think about that, Dallas? Your man and your best girl, thieves and grifters.”
“Night and day.”
With a watery laugh, Mavis leaned her head against Leonardo’s arm a moment. “My moonpie here, he knows it all, all the way back. When you love somebody, they’ve got to know who you are, even if you’re not exactly who you were. Did she tell you about me—back then?”
“No,” Roarke said, “not, I think, all of it.”
“You wouldn’t.” Mavis looked at Eve, and saying nothing told her she, too, kept her friend’s secrets. “Some’s in the bio. It plays okay, former grifter, turns it around and scores on the music charts. The before that? Wouldn’t ring so sweet, so I twisted it around some.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” And on that, too, Eve had kept her silence.
“We do what we do, right? Let me spread it all out, okay, so we’re all up on it. And maybe it’ll help settle the jumpies.”
As Mavis was beginning to sound more like Mavis, Eve nodded, then rose to take a chair and the wine Roarke handed her.
“Start wherever you want,” Eve told her.
“Okay, well, big entrance. My mother was a drunk and a junkie. She’d drink, smoke, pop, and stick anything when she was rolling. The father wasn’t around much, then not at all. I don’t remember him very well, and I don’t think she did either. We lived mostly around Baltimore. Sometimes she worked, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes we’d skip out on the rent in the middle of the night because she’d snorted it up. It made her crazy, but when she was using she mostly left me alone. It was better when she was using.”
She paused a moment, seemed to gather herself. “But she’d get busted, maybe I’d get shuffled out unless I slipped the leash. Then we were in the rehab cycle, and when she was in that mode, she’d get religion. The kind where she’d have me by the neck twenty-four/seven, preaching weird stuff, not your basic God stuff, the hellfire crap.”
She sighed a little, nuzzled into Leonardo. “I don’t get why some people want God to scare the shit out of you. Anyhow, she’d throw out all my things—my clothes, my discs if I had any, the lip dye I’d probably shoplifted. Everything. “New broom sweeps clean,” she’d say, and make me wear these dresses—always brown or gray, high neck, long-sleeved, even in the summer. And—”
She stopped to swallow, to breathe out. “She’d cut my hair—shorter than Dallas’s—especially when I started to bud some. She’d whack it off, so it wouldn’t tempt men. If she caught me at anything she didn’t like, she’d take a belt to me, beat out the devil kind of thing. And I’d have to fast, no food for however long she figured.”
Saying nothing, Leonardo shifted her just a little closer. And that, Eve thought, said everything.
“Then she’d start using again, and it was better. Until it wasn’t. Round and round, you never knew who she was going to be on any given day. Am I taking too long? It’s a messy memory lane deal.”
“You’re not.” Roarke topped off her wine, brushed his fingers down her cheek, then sat again.
“It’s just—I was afraid, for a long time, it was like passed down. Like the whole gene thing. I was never going to get totally about a guy or have kids.”
Her voice broke, and while she struggled to control it, Leonardo pulled a blue hankie with silver snowflakes out of his pocket, dabbed at her eyes himself.
“As if I could help it,” she added, “once I found you. But it wasn’t the gene pool thing. She’d messed herself up, fried her brain, fucked it up good. So one night, she woke me up. Middle of the night, middle of the winter. She was using again, but it was different this time. It was like the worst of both ways she could be. Hellfire and beat the devil, and that dead look in her eyes. She . . . Dallas.”
“They were living in a flop,” Eve continued. “Junkie flop. She had a couple of guys hold Mavis down while she cut her hair off again, and sold Mavis’s clothes for junk. The others used her like a slave, and some of the men wanted to use her for something else. The mother didn’t give a shit, and when she got offered some Zeus one of the fuckers claimed to have coming for Mavis, the mother made the deal, said it would be Mavis’s initiation.”
“That’s when I was scared, the most,” Mavis murmured. “That’s when I knew I had to get away, all the way.”
“Mavis was supposed to fast, purge, clean up—all this weird ritual prep. Instead she ran, grabbed whatever she could carry and she ran, all the way to New York.”
“I was always going to run—I mean once things got really bad, and the flop was really bad. I was hiding some money, stealing it mostly. I was just waiting for better weather, but the idea of her selling me to that guy? Time to book it complete. I was going to go south, follow the sun, you know? But there were a couple of cops at the transpo station, and it spooked me. I got on the wrong bus, ended up here.”
“Perhaps it was the right bus after all,” Roarke said quietly, and made her smile.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess it was. I did some sidewalk sleeping, changed my name. I did that legally—sort of—when I could, but I already had the name picked out. We had a neighbor once, Mrs. Mavis. She was nice to me. She’d say how she made too much food, and would I do her a favor and eat it, that kind of thing. And I just liked the way Freestone sounded, so I was Mavis Freestone.”
“It’s exactly who you are,” Roarke said and made her smile again.
“It’s who I wanted to be. I was scared for a while, and freaking cold, hungry. But I knew how to get by, and anything was better. I was doing some panhandling and pickpocketing in Times Square when I met a couple of girls. Not the ones upstairs, not then. They took me to The Club. I never told you much about that,” she said to Eve. “I wasn’t there that long really. Maybe off and on for a year, a year and a half.”
“Where was it?”
“We moved around. A basement, a condemned building, an empty apartment. Nomads, Sebastian called us.”
“Sebastian who?”
“I don’t know. Just Sebastian, and I never told you about him because, well, because. He ran The Club. It was like the street academy, a school, a club, a place to hang. He’d teach us the ropes—pocket picking, handoffs, drops, simple cons, most short cons. Crying Baby, Lost Girl, Duck and Goose, like that. He made sure we ate, were outfitted—and pooled the take, of which he took a cut.”
“Your Fagan.”
Eve frowned at Roarke. “Her what?”
“Fagan. A character from Oliver Twist. Dickens, darling, only Faga
n ran a gang of boys in London.”
“Sebastian figured girls got less of the cop eyeball, and pulled off the cons better than boys. That’s where I met Shelby and Mikki and LaRue. They didn’t stay—Sebastian called them day-trippers. But they ran with us, and Shelby made noises about starting her own club. Somebody was always making noises about starting something, going somewhere, being somebody.”
“This Sebastian, did he ever hurt any of you, go at any of you?”
“No. No!” Mavis waved a hand in the air. “He looked out for us—not your way, Dallas, but it worked. He never laid a hand on any of us, not any way. And if any of us got in the stew outside, he fixed it.”
“Forged documents?”
“He was pretty good at it, I guess you could say it was one of his specialties.”
“I’ll need you to work with an artist. I need his face.”
“Dallas.” Mavis just looked at her, waited a beat. “If you think he did that to those girls, you’re out of orbit. He’d never hurt any of them. Nonviolence all the way. No weapons—ever. “Wit and speed,” that’s what he’d say. “Use your brains and your feet.” Even after I went out on my own, I’d do jobs with him now and then.”
“I need to talk to him, Mavis.”
“Shit. Double shit. Let me talk to him first.”
Eve eased back a little, nearly goggled. “You know how to contact him?”
“Triple shit. He helped me out, Dallas, when I needed it. He taught me—okay, not what you’d like, but still. He’s sort of semi-retired. Sort of. Now I know why I never told you about him.”
“Twelve girls are dead.”
“I know it. I know it, and I knew three of them. Maybe it’s going to turn out I knew more of them. It makes me sick inside. I’ll talk to him, get him to talk to you, but you have to promise it’s, like, not in that sweatbox deal. That you won’t bust him for—just stuff.”
“Christ.”
“Please.”
“Set it up, but if it leans a frigging inch that he killed those girls, it’s over.”
Mavis breathed out in relief. “It won’t, so that’s a deal.”