Sacred

  29

  We walked over to Central Avenue and headed north toward a cabstand the duty officer had grudgingly told us about.

  “Cheswick said they’re going to come back on us with gun charges, discharging firearms within city limits, shit like that.”

  “But nothing that’ll stick,” she said.

  “Probably not.”

  We reached the cabstand, but it was empty. Central Avenue, or at least the section we were on, didn’t look like a real friendly place. Three winos fought over a bottle or a pipe in the garbage-strewn parking lot of a torched liquor store, and across the street, several mangy-looking teenagers eyed potential prey from a bench in front of a Burger King, passed a joint, and gave Angie a once-over. I was sure the bandage around my shoulder and the sling under my arm made me look a bit vulnerable, but then they took a closer look, and I locked one of them in a weary stare until he turned his head and concentrated on something else.

  The cabstand was a Plexiglas lean-to and we sagged against the wall in the liquid heat for a moment.

  “You look like shit,” Angie told me.

  I raised an eyebrow at the cuts on her face, the half shiner beside her right eye, the gouge in her left calf. “You, on the other hand…”

  She gave me a weary smile and we leaned against the wall for a full minute of silence.

  “Patrick.”

  “Yeah?” I said, my eyes closed.

  “When I got out of the ambulance on the bridge, and they walked me to the cruiser, I, ahm…”

  I opened my eyes and looked at her. “What?”

  “I think I saw something strange. And I don’t want you to laugh.”

  “You saw Desiree Stone.”

  She came off the wall and slapped me in the abdomen with the back of her hand. “Get out of town! You saw her, too?”

  I rubbed my stomach. “I saw her, too.”

  “You think she’s a ghost?”

  “She’s no ghost,” I said.

  Our hotel suites had been trashed while we were gone. At first I thought it had been Trevor’s men, maybe the Weeble and Cushing before they came after us, but then I found a business card on my pillow.

  INSPECTOR CARNELL JEFFERSON, it read.

  I refolded my clothes and placed them back in my suitcase, pushed the bed back into the wall, and closed all the drawers.

  “I’m starting to hate this town.” Angie came into the room with two bottles of Dos Equis and we took them out to the balcony and left the glass doors open behind us. If the room was bugged by Trevor, we were already high on his shit list anyway; nothing we said was going to change his mind about dealing with us the way he’d dealt with Jay and Everett Hamlyn and was trying to deal with his daughter, who didn’t have the decency to die easily. And if the cops had bugged the room, nothing we said would change what we’d told them at the station because we didn’t have anything to hide.

  “Why does Trevor want his daughter dead so badly?” Angie said.

  “And why does she keep popping up alive?”

  “One thing at a time.”

  “Okay.” I propped my ankles up on the balcony rail and sipped my beer. “Trevor wants his daughter dead because somehow she found out he killed Lisardo.”

  “And why did he kill Lisardo in the first place?”

  I looked at her. “Because…”

  “Yes?” She lit a cigarette.

  “I don’t have a clue.” I took a hit off her cigarette to quell the adrenaline that had been chewing through my blood since I’d shot from the car twenty hours ago.

  She took her cigarette back and looked at it. “And even if he did kill Lisardo and she found out—even if—why kill her? He’d be dead before a trial, and his lawyers would keep him free till then. So what’s the big deal?”

  “Right.”

  “This whole dying thing, too…”

  “What?”

  “Most people are dying, they’re trying to make their peace—with God, with family, with the earth in general.”

  “But not Trevor.”

  “Exactly. If he really is dying, then his hate for Desiree has to run so deep it can’t even be measured by most human minds.”

  “If he’s dying,” I said.

  She nodded and stubbed out her cigarette. “Let’s consider that for a second. How do we know for sure he’s dying?”

  “One good look at him.”

  She opened her mouth as if to argue, then closed it and lowered her head to her knees for a moment. When she raised her head, she flipped the hair back off her face and leaned back in her chair. “You’re right,” she said. “Dumb idea. The guy’s definitely got one foot in the grave.”

  “So,” I said. “Back to square one. What makes a guy hate anyone, but particularly his own flesh and blood, so much that he’s determined to spend his last days hunting her down?”

  “Jay suggested a history of incest,” Angie said.

  “Okay. Daddy loves his little girl way too much. They have a conjugal relationship, and something gets in the way.”

  “Anthony Lisardo. Back to him again.”

  I nodded. “So, Daddy has him whacked.”

  “Not long after her mother died to boot. So Desiree goes into her depression, meets Price, who manipulates her grief and enlists her in the theft of the two million.”

  I turned my head, looked at her. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would Price enlist her? I’m not saying he wouldn’t want her along for the ride for a bit, but why would he let her in on the plan?”

  She tapped her thigh with her beer bottle. “You’re right. He wouldn’t.” She raised her beer and drank. “God, I’m confused.”

  We sat there in silence and chewed on it as the moon bathed Tampa Bay in pearl and the fingers of rose in the purple sky faded and eventually disappeared. I went back in and got us two more beers and came back out onto the patio.

  “Black is white,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “You said it yourself. Black is white. Up is down on this case.”

  “True. Definitely true.”

  “You ever see Rashomon?”

  “Sounds like a movie about a guy’s athlete’s foot.”

  I looked at her from under hooded eyes.

  “Sorry,” she said lightly. “No, Patrick, I never saw Rash-o-whatever.”

  “Japanese film,” I said. “The whole movie shows the same event told four different times.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it’s a rape and murder trial. And the four people who were there tell four completely different accounts of what happened. And you watch each version and have to decide who’s telling the truth.”

  “I saw a Star Trek like that once.”

  “You need to watch less Star Trek,” I said.

  “Hey, at least it’s easy to pronounce. Not like Rash-aweed.”

  “Rashomon.” I squeezed the top of my nose between my index finger and thumb, closed my eyes. “My point, anyway.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is that we might be looking at this all wrong. Maybe,” I said, “we accepted too many things as truth at the beginning and were wrong.”

  “Like thinking Trevor was an okay guy and not a homicidal, incestuous nutbag?”

  “Like that,” I said.

  “So what else have we accepted as truth that we might be looking at from the wrong angle?”

  “Desiree,” I said.

  “What about her?”

  “Everything about her.” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and looked through the bars of the railing at the bay below, at the three bridges cut across the placid water, each one fracturing and distorting the shafts of moonlight. “What do we know about Desiree?”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “Right. How do we know that?”

  “Oh, jeez,” she said. “You’re turning Jesuit on me again, aren’t you?”

  “Humor me. How do we know Desiree is beautiful?”

/>   “From pictures. From even a short glimpse on the bridge last night.”

  “Right. Our knowledge, seen by our own eyes, based on our personal experience and contact with the subject and that one aspect of her. And that’s it.”

  “Come again?”

  “She’s a beautiful woman. That’s all we know about her, because that’s the only thing we ourselves can testify to about her. Everything else we know about her is hearsay. Her father tells us one thing, but he feels completely different. Doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “So is what he originally told us true?”

  “About the depression, you mean?”

  “About everything. Lurch says she’s a beautiful, wonderful creature. But Lurch works for Trevor, so we can pretty much figure he was full of shit.”

  Her eyes were lighting up now. She sat forward. “And Jay, Jay was obviously wrong when he told us she was dead.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So all his perceptions about her could have been wrong.”

  “Or blinded by love or infatuation.”

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If Desiree didn’t die, whose body was that with Jay’s sweatshirt and a shotgun blast to the face?”

  I grabbed the phone from the room, brought it out to the balcony, and called Devin Amronklin.

  “You know any cops in Clearwater?” I asked him.

  “I might know someone who knows someone.”

  “Can you see if they’ve ID’d a female shooting victim found in the Ambassador Hotel four days ago?”

  “Give me your number.”

  I did, and Angie and I turned our seats until they were facing each other.

  “Assume Desiree’s not all sweetness and light,” I said.

  “Let’s assume even worse,” she said. “Let’s assume she’s her father’s child and the acorn never falls far from the tree. What if she put Price up to the robbery?”

  “How’d she know the money was even there?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll deal with that one later. So she puts Price up to the robbery…”

  “But Price figured after a while, ‘Hey, she’s a bad seed. She’ll screw me over as soon as she gets the chance,’ so he ditches her.”

  “And takes the money. But she wanted it back.”

  “But didn’t know where he hid it.”

  “And Jay comes along.”

  “A perfect foil to put some pressure on Price,” I said.

  “Then Desiree figures out where the money is. But she’s got a problem. If she just steals it, not only will her father be looking for her, but so will Price and Jay.”

  “So she has to get dead,” I said.

  “And she knows Jay will settle up with Price.”

  “And probably go to jail for it.”

  “Could she be that devious?” Angie said.

  I shrugged. “Why not?”

  “So she’s dead,” Angie said. “And so’s Price. And then Jay. So, why show herself to us?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that.

  Neither did Angie.

  But Desiree did.

  She stepped out onto the balcony with a gun in her hand and said, “Because I need your help.”

  30

  “Nice gun,” I said. “Did you pick it because it matches your outfit, or was it the other way around?”

  She came out onto the patio, the gun shaking slightly in her hand, pointing somewhere into the space between Angie’s nose and my mouth.

  “Look,” Desiree said, “in case you can’t tell, I’m nervous, and I don’t know who to trust, and I need your help, but I’m not sure about you.”

  “Like father like daughter,” Angie said.

  I slapped her knee. “Stole my line.”

  “What?” Desiree said.

  Angie took a sip of her beer, watched Desiree. “Your father, Miss Stone, had us kidnapped so he could talk to us. Now you’re pointing a gun at us, ostensibly for the same reason.”

  “I’m sorry, but—”

  “We don’t like guns,” I said. “The Weeble would tell you that if he was still alive.”

  “Who?” She stepped gingerly around the back of my chair.

  “Graham Clifton,” Angie said. “We called him the Weeble.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?” I turned my head as she edged along the balcony rail, finally came to a stop about six feet from our chairs, the gun still pointing at a space between us.

  And good God, was she beautiful. I’ve dated some beautiful women in my time. Women who based their worth on their external perfection because the world judged them by pretty much the same standard. Lithe or lush, tall or petite, achingly attractive women around whom men forgot how to speak.

  But none of them could come within a country mile of Desiree’s radiance. Her physical perfection was palpable. Her skin seemed to have been lathered onto bones that were both delicate and pronounced. Her breasts, unencumbered by a bra, swelled against the thin material of her dress with every shallow breath she took, and the dress itself, a simple, unstructured peach cotton affair designed to be functional and loose, couldn’t do much to hide the tight cords of her abdomen, or the gracefully hard cut of muscle in her thighs.

  Her jade eyes sparkled, and seemed twice as bright because they were sheened with a dewy nervousness and set back against the sunset glow of her skin.

  She wasn’t unaware of her effect, either. During our entire conversation, she’d glance back and forth at Angie when speaking to her, her eyes skipping across her face. But when she spoke to me, she’d bore into me with those eyes, lean forward almost imperceptibly.

  “Miss Stone,” I said, “put the gun down.”

  “I can’t. I don’t…I mean, I’m not sure—”

  “Put it down or shoot us,” Angie said. “You have five seconds.”

  “I—”

  “One,” Angie said.

  Her eyes welled up. “I just want to be sure—”

  “Two.”

  Desiree looked at me, but I gave her nothing back.

  “Three.”

  “Look—”

  “Four.” Angie turned her chair to her right and the metal made a short screech against the concrete.

  “Just stay there,” Desiree said, and the wavering gun turned toward Angie.

  “Five.” Angie stood up.

  Desiree pointed the quivering gun at her, and I reached up and slapped her hand.

  The gun bounced off the railing, and I snatched it from the air before it could drop to the garden six stories below. Lucky, too, because when I peered over the side, I saw a couple of kids, grade school age, playing on their ground-floor patio by the garden.

  Look what I found, Ma. Boom.

  Desiree’s face dropped into her hands for a moment, and Angie looked at me.

  I shrugged. The gun was a Ruger .22 automatic. Stainless steel. It felt light in my hand, but that’s deceptive when you’re holding a pistol. Guns are never light.

  She’d left the safety on, and I ejected the clip into my sling, pulled it back out, and placed the gun in my left pocket, the clip in my right.

  Desiree raised her head, her eyes red. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Do what?” Angie pulled another chair over. “Sit down.”

  Desiree sat. “This. Guns and death and…Jesus Christ, I can’t do it.”

  “Did you rip off the Church of Truth and Revelation?”

  She nodded.

  “It was your idea,” Angie said. “Not Price’s.”

  A half nod. “His idea. But I pushed him toward it after he told me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” she said as two tears coursed her face, dropped off her cheekbones and landed on her knees just below the hem of her dress. “Why? You have to…” She sucked up air through her mouth and looked up at the sky, wiped at her eyes. “My father killed my mother.”

  I never saw that one coming. I looked a
t Angie. She hadn’t either.

  “In the car accident that nearly killed him?” Angie said. “Are you serious?”

  Desiree nodded several times.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “Your father sets up a fake carjacking. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “And pays these men to shoot him three times?”

  “That wasn’t part of the plan,” she said.

  “Well, I’d hope not,” Angie said.

  Desiree looked at her and blinked. Then she looked at me, her eyes wide. “He’d already paid the men. When everything went wrong and the car flipped—that wasn’t part of the plan—they panicked and shot him after they killed my mother.”

  “Bullshit,” Angie said.

  Desiree’s eyes widened even further and she turned her head to a neutral point between the two of us and looked down at the concrete for a moment.

  “Desiree,” I said, “there’s enough holes in that story to drive a couple of Humvees through.”

  “For instance,” Angie said, “why wouldn’t these guys, once they were arrested and tried, tell the police everything?”

  “Because they didn’t know my father hired them,” she said. “One day, someone contacts someone and asks that a woman be killed. Her husband will be with her, this someone says, but he isn’t a target. Just her.”

  We thought about that for a minute.

  Desiree watched us, then added, “It’s all chains of command. By the time it got down to the actual killers, they had no idea where the order came from.”

  “So, again, why shoot your father?”

  “I can only tell you what I said before—they panicked. Did you read up on the case?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, if you did, you’d see that the three killers weren’t exactly rocket scientists. They were dumb kids, and they weren’t hired for their brains. They were hired because they could kill someone without losing any sleep over it.”

  I looked over at Angie again. It was coming out of left field, and it definitely had an outlandish quality to it, but in a twisted way, it made some sense.

  “Why did your father want to kill your mother?”

  “She was planning to divorce him. And she wanted half his fortune. He could fight her in court, and she’d drag out all the sordid details of their life together. Her being sold to him, his raping me when I was fourteen, his continuing to assault me over the years, plus a thousand other secrets she knew about him.” She looked at her hands, turned them palm up, then down again. “His other option was to kill her. And he’d exercised that option with people before.”