White Hot

by Elise Noble

  “Does he scare you?” Lyle asked.

  Scare me? No. Jay just pissed me off. Looking back, I could see it had been the idea of dating a rich and successful man I’d liked rather than Jay himself, especially as my friends managed it so successfully. Deep down, I was still little Daniela, the child desperate for approval and blinded by success.

  I shook my head, trying to get rid of my demons as much as answering Lyle’s question. “He’s human, just like anybody else.”

  “Do you think? You know his nickname’s ‘the cyborg,’ right? Jay Skinner’s only lost one case in the last three years.”

  I was well aware of that, and that case was still a sore point for him. But what I really, really wanted was for him to lose another. The biggest of his career.

  “Don’t think about him. Just think about the Ghost.”

  “Because that’s so much better?”

  I had little comfort to offer Lyle, so I opened the nearest file and began to read instead, hoping that I’d spot something new or that the second time around, the details wouldn’t be as bad. Two hours later, I vowed never to borrow a car from Emmy again. Not her Viper, not her Corvette, not even the beat-up Ford Focus she occasionally used on surveillance.

  “Wanna get drunk with me tonight?” I asked Lyle.

  He looked up from his own stack of paper, adjusting the black-framed glasses he’d put on to read. “It’s hopeless, isn’t it?”

  Yes, but I didn’t want to be the reason Lyle stepped off the edge of a really tall building.

  “We’ve got some work to do. White remembers nothing?”

  “So he says. The doctors thought the bang on the head he received in the accident could have caused memory loss.”

  Yeah, I’d read that report. The Ghost had been unconscious when he was found, breathing shallowly and suffering from mild hypothermia. A close-up photo of him being removed from the car showed his eyes closed with purple bruising around them, and blood had crusted onto his face before the cut on his cheek scabbed over. He’d been trapped for a while. The next picture showed him on a stretcher, wearing a pair of indigo jeans and a T-shirt that had once been white but not anymore. Instead, it had become a macabre reflection of a girl’s death, her lifeblood the logo plastered across his chest.

  Except nobody knew that at the time.

  The police had traced his car by the licence number, and a pair of officers was dispatched to his home, a large but nondescript two-storey on the edge of town. They’d been hoping to find a relative, but what they got was a closed door. According to the report, the Ghost’s bloody handprint on the doorjamb gave them grounds for entry.

  Christina Walker’s body lay where she died, on the bed in the master bedroom. From her liver temperature, the ME estimated she’d breathed her last twenty-three hours before she was found.

  I fingered the corner of one of the pictures of the victim, sliding it closer. Murder scenes always got to me. I didn’t want to look at them, but at the same time, I felt compelled to. My job. It was my job. At least, that’s what I always told myself.

  Emmy would look at those pictures too, but for her, it was a technical study. A lesson. How had the killer snuffed out that spark? Was it quick? Was it painful? And, most importantly, could she learn from it?

  For me, it was all about the why. Why, on that particular day, at that particular time, had one person chosen to remove another from this earth? Was it an accident? A crime of passion? Convenience? Or merely a business transaction?

  Death also hit me on a deeper level. It reminded me that I was alive.

  “Do you think White’s telling the truth?” I asked Lyle.

  He shrugged. “Who knows? He spent most of the visit staring at the wall.”

  So, not a lot of attorney-client privilege to break, then.

  “Has he seen a psychiatrist?”

  “He refused to.”

  What was White like as a person? Nobody was an average Joe one day then a raging lunatic the next. There was always a build-up and then a trigger.

  What was his?

  Had there been any signals he was about to snap?

  “Have you talked to his friends? His family?”

  “I’m still trying to find them.” Lyle twisted his hands in his lap. “You can probably tell I’m not very good at this. I’ve only ever worked on one murder case before.”

  “What happened to that guy?”

  “He got life.”

  I almost felt sorry for the Ghost. He was screwed.

  That little revelation called for a drink. Despite the vodka bottle calling my name, I poured us both coffee and gasped as it scalded my tongue. Stupid.

  “How about you?” Lyle asked. “Have you worked on a murder case before?”

  Yes, from all the angles—defending, prosecuting, and committing. Best not to admit to the third one, though.

  “A few.”

  “Did you solve them?”

  “About ninety percent.”

  I’d always been proud of my record. Sure, there were a handful of cold cases on Blackwood’s books, but we never gave up on them. Never. Only last month, we’d retrieved a missing child from the wilds of Canada, five years after his father snatched him in Mississippi.

  Lyle yawned and stretched his arms over his head. “Well, thank goodness one of us knows what we’re doing.”

  “If you’re going up against Skinner, you’ll have to change your attitude. If he smells blood, he’ll eat you alive.”

  “Do you have to remind me?”

  “Yes.”

  I dropped Lyle back at his apartment with an instruction to get some rest while I headed into the office. Not that I didn’t need sleep too, but I had cases to catch up on where the clients were paying in something other than dubious quality demo tapes.

  With no new developments on Sunday, I went to the gym, then to Emmy’s place. She had a shooting range out the back, and I took the opportunity to put a few hundred rounds through my guns, imagining her face on the target every time I pulled the trigger. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

  “So how’s the new case going?” she asked. She’d come out to join me for a bit of sniping practice.

  I gave her my best glare. “I’m holding a gun.”

  “I have a bigger one.”

  So she did. I set my Sig Sauer on the table in front of me and sighed. “Skinner’s prosecuting.”

  She gave a low whistle. “Ouch.”

  “Tell me about it. It’s a high-profile case, and he wants the glory.”

  Jay had always been ambitious. He didn’t so much step up the ladder as clambered over the pile of bodies he left behind, their careers in tatters and their spirits broken.

  Emmy grinned at me. “I’m putting fifty bucks on you.”

  And that was why she was my best friend, despite her reluctance to overlook my small prang in her beloved car. No matter how long the odds, she always believed in me.

  “The thing is, I’m not sure I want either side to win. There’s a hell of a lot of evidence against the Ghost, and if I can help to get him off on a technicality, do we really want him on the streets?”

  “Has his attorney considered an insanity plea? That way both sides lose,” Emmy said.

  “He figures White’s got a screw loose, but the dude hasn’t let a shrink near him to find out for sure.”

  “Are you gonna see him?”

  “I’m trying, but he won’t even talk to Lyle at the moment.”

  “We could always break in. It would be an interesting challenge.”

  “You should put in your own insanity plea.”

  “Just sayin’.”

  “I think I’ll exhaust the conventional routes first.”

  On the way home, the county jail popped up in my mind—the location, entrances, exits, and known security. Stop it, Dan. Damn Emmy and her crazy ideas.

  Lyle had said he was going to visit the Ghost first thing on Monday, and by noon, I’d shredded the stress toy Bradley had left on my desk
and clicked my pen so many times Emmy’s husband had stomped over and replaced it with a pencil. The second my phone display flashed with Lyle’s number, I snatched it up.

  “Well?”

  “Uh, good morning. How are you?”

  “It’s afternoon now.” By five minutes. “What happened?”

  Life was short enough without wasting it on small talk.

  “Don’t get excited. It was the same as before.”

  “Nothing?”

  “He asked how long he could stay in solitary, that’s all.”

  “He’s scared?”

  Usually, solitary confinement was a punishment, not a choice, although the Ghost did seem to be a loner.

  “Hard to tell, but I don’t know why else he’d want to be there.”

  “And what was your answer?”

  “The whole time. They’re transferring him to Redding’s Gap tomorrow. Segregation’s the norm there.”

  They were what? Redding’s Gap was a super-max prison with the worst reputation in the whole of Virginia. When a man went to Redding’s, he came out one of three ways—as a monster, as a broken man, or dead. That was if he got out at all.

  “How the hell is he going there before he’s even been convicted?”

  “The jails are full. The county did a deal with the state, and one wing at Redding’s Gap is housing remand prisoners. It’s supposed to be temporary, but with crime rates rising the way they are, I don’t see it being reversed. Rumour has it Skinner brokered the arrangement.”

  Why didn’t that surprise me?

  “You didn’t fight it?”

  “White wouldn’t. I asked if he wanted me to try for bail, and he shook his head. Besides, the detentions officer said White was going to end up at Redding’s eventually, so why postpone the inevitable?”

  What kind of man would choose to stay on his own in a cell if there was a chance, however small, of him getting out? Especially at Redding’s Gap, which would have been a perfect candidate had Dante ever needed a tenth circle of hell. Did the Ghost have money problems? I made a note to ask Mack, just in case, but my gut said that wasn’t the answer. The house in the crime scene photos hadn’t been flashy, but having spent the last decade around Emmy and Black, I knew understated elegance when I saw it.

  “Can White have visitors?”

  “Only if he agrees to see them.” Lyle’s sigh came through loud and clear. “I’ve never had a client so unwilling to defend themselves before. Every other person either swears blind they didn’t do it or wants to know how short I can get their sentence. I don’t understand.”

  “It’s guilt. He’s already convicted himself.”

  “Skinner’s gonna slay me. I’d better start drafting my obituary.”

  “No, you’d better start doing your job.”

  While I did mine.

  First, I reviewed my list of cases and delegated everything I could. I’d never admit it to Emmy, but I found the Ghost’s case kind of fascinating. What had caused him to turn like that?

  Then there was Lyle. Normally, the men in my life fell into two categories: those I wanted to fuck and forget, and those I became good friends with. Lyle appeared to be a previously unknown third type, a doleful puppy dog I needed to defend against a good kicking.

  And if I could stuff one of my size-five boots up Jay’s ass in the process, so much the better.

  Sorting out my caseload took the rest of the day, but at least that left me with relative freedom to work on the White case over the next few weeks. Emmy might have assigned it to me as a joke, but she didn’t realise how much time it had the potential to take up.

  After a day in the office, I couldn’t be bothered to cook—or rather, reheat—so I went to Emmy’s for dinner. Her house, Little Riverley, had just been rebuilt after an unfortunate incident involving a fourteen-man assault team and a fire, but I’d already moved a closet full of stuff over there. If the office was my second home, then Little Riverley was my third.

  As usual, I wasn’t the only person who’d decided to stop by. Every night was open house, and it was a rare evening that the place was empty. Tonight, Emmy had gone out, but Xav, a friend and colleague, was watching TV with his girlfriend, Georgia, and Emmy’s pseudo-sister, Tia, was slumped on a sofa nearby with her boyfriend, Eli.

  “What’s for dinner?” I asked.

  “Cannelloni,” Georgia told me. “Mrs. Fairfax left it in the oven.”

  Mrs. Fairfax was Emmy and Black’s housekeeper, and she’d been a fixture at Riverley for as long as I could remember. I helped myself to a plateful of Italian goodness and carried it through to the lounge. Having company sure beat dining alone.

  Baby Libi slept on Georgia’s lap, wrapped in a fleecy pink blanket. Motherhood suited Georgia. She’d been positively glowing ever since Libi’s slightly dramatic entrance to the world, and even Xav had embraced being a parent. I sometimes wondered whether I’d have made a good mom, seeing as I hadn’t exactly had the best role model. Once, I’d thought I’d have the opportunity to try, but fate had kicked me in the teeth. Or rather, the stomach. An emergency hysterectomy had followed, and now I’d never know.

  Today, I smiled through the pain that had once been almost impossible to bear. If Emmy hadn’t stopped me from doing something stupid, I’d have been with my son now.

  “She looks so peaceful.”

  “Oh, she does at the moment,” Georgia said. “Half an hour ago, she was wailing like a banshee. I thought we’d have to call an exorcist.”

  “Good thing I got stuck at the office, then.”

  “On that Ghost thing?” Xav asked.

  Wow, didn’t good news travel fast? “You heard about that? I thought you’d been too busy playing daddy to keep up with gossip.”

  “Everyone knows. Besides, I like to go to the office for a break.”

  That I could understand. “Yeah, a bit. Mostly shuffling my diary today, but tomorrow Ethan White takes over.”

  “I didn’t know,” Eli said. “You’re working the Ghost case?”

  Had he been locked away in a bunker? Oh no, silly me, he’d been with Tia. It was most likely a bedroom. They were still at that loved-up stage that left the bitter taste of saccharine on my tongue.

  “The one and only.”

  “I can’t believe he did it.”

  Not another one. “Evidence doesn’t lie.”

  “I get that. It’s just he never seemed the type. Most producers I worked with were arrogant assholes, but not him. He was always down-to-earth.”

  “Hang on—you met him?”

  Eli had spent his teens in the music business before retiring from all that hoopla at the grand old age of twenty. I should have thought to ask him about the Ghost.

  “A few times. Yeah, he used to wear that mask out in public, but apart from that, he was a normal guy. Shy, though. He hated having an entourage.”

  “Did you speak to him much?”

  “Only about music.” Eli stole a nacho off Tia’s plate and munched away. “Except one night when we broke for pizza. That was the last time I saw him, and he’d thawed out some by then.”

  “He was eating pizza? With his mask off?”

  Eli shrugged. “He didn’t make a big deal of it or anything. It was just us in the studio by then. Twelve hours, we’d been there, trying to get the last few lyrics right. The other guys in the band had given up and gone home, but Ethan stayed with me to re-record my part.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Cars, mainly. If I remember rightly, he was thinking of buying a Mustang.”

  Eli was the first person I’d come across, either in person or the police reports, who admitted to seeing the Ghost mask-less while knowing who he was. His manager must be another, I suspected, but so far, my attempts to speak to the elusive Harold Styles had failed. His PA kept giving me the runaround.

  “I talked to him as well,” Tia piped up.

  “Seriously?”

  Was I the only person in this ho
usehold who hadn’t? I raise an eyebrow at Xav, and he gave his head a little shake. Okay, that made me feel slightly better.

  “Yes, when I was in New York working for Ishmael. That time the Ghost did the music for his runway show.”

  “And what did you think of him?”

  “Nice, I guess. He didn’t say much. But his manager’s an arsehole. He sent this crazy rider for the Ghost—white this, white that, even a framed poster of a white flipping tiger for the wall—and berated me when I couldn’t get the right bloody candle. Then the Ghost showed up and said he didn’t care about any of it.”

  “Then why have the list in the first place?”

  “I reckon his manager liked the power trip. All the Ghost wanted was a bottle of water.”

  As well as the kids, that was three people I trusted who thought the Ghost was an okay guy. And one of those people was Emmy, whose judgement you could multiply by ten.

  Curiouser and curiouser. More than anything, I wanted to meet Ethan White and his manager myself and form my own opinions.

  The question was, how?

  CHAPTER 5

  LYLE HAD PROMISED to get me more information on the crime scene, but waiting for my requests to materialise was like watching a glacier melt. I got Mack to take another look, but as the cops were convinced the Ghost was guilty; they hadn’t put a rush on the forensics, and a lot of the samples were backed up at the lab. For a moment, I considered calling in a favour and having someone bump the testing up the line, but ultimately, I decided against it. Favours were like currency in my world, and I didn’t have many stored up with the forensics team. Better to save them for cases that weren’t open-and-shut and where the clients were actually paying us.

  Cases I desperately needed to catch up on, even with my efforts to delegate.

  Three days later, with my regular work on track once again and little hope of seeing those lab results any time soon, I cleared some time in my diary and dug deeper into the human aspects of the Ghost’s mess, starting with the man himself. Ethan White sure didn’t make that easy. His friends, if you could call them that, were split into two categories—the superficial acquaintances who’d gone running to the tabloids at the first sniff of money, and the true friends who’d kept well out of sight. The first group proved easy to find—I only had to open the trashiest news websites and there they were, spewing secrets that smelled more like lies. The second group? Ghosts, much like the man himself.