Sacred

  “And he wants to kill you because you know that,” Angie said.

  “Yes,” she said and it came out as a hiss.

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “After she died, when he got back from the hospital, I heard him talking with Julian and Graham. He was enraged that the three killers had been arrested by the police, instead of dealt with. The best thing that ever happened to those three kids was that they got caught with the gun on them and confessed. Otherwise, my father would have hired a top lawyer to get them off, bought a judge or two, and then had them tortured and killed as soon as they hit the street.” She chewed her lower lip for a moment. “My father is the most dangerous man alive.”

  “We’re starting to hold that opinion ourselves,” I said.

  “Who got shot in the Ambassador Hotel?” Angie said.

  “I don’t want to talk about that.” She shook her head, then brought her knees up to her chin, placed her feet on the edge of the chair, and hugged her legs.

  “You don’t have a choice,” Angie said.

  “Oh, God.” She laid her head sideways on her knees for a moment, her eyes closed.

  After a minute or so, I said, “Try it another way. What made you go to the hotel? Why did you suddenly think you knew where the money was?”

  “Something Jay said.” Her eyes were still closed, her voice a whisper.

  “What did Jay say?”

  “He said Price’s room was filled with buckets of water.”

  “Water.”

  She raised her head. “Ice buckets, half filled with ice that had melted. And I remembered the same thing at one of the motels we stayed in on our way down here. Price and me. He kept making trips to the ice machine. Just a little ice each time, never filling the bucket. He said something about liking the ice in his drinks to be as cold as possible. Fresh from the machine. And how the ice at the top was best because hotels never replace the dirty ice and water at the bottom of the machine. They just kept chugging ice in on top of it. I remember knowing he was full of shit, but couldn’t think why, and at the time I was too exhausted to care. I was also starting to get frightened of him. He’d taken the money from me our second night on the road, and wouldn’t tell me where it was. Anyway, when Jay said that thing about the buckets, I started thinking about Price in South Carolina.” She looked at me, gave me her sparkling jade eyes. “It was under the ice.”

  “The money?” Angie said.

  She nodded. “In a trash bag, laid flat under the ice in the machine on the fifth floor, just outside his room.”

  “Ballsy,” I said.

  “Not easy to get to, though,” Desiree said. “You have to move all that ice; your arms are pinned in through the small door of the machine. That’s how Price found me when he came back from his friends’ house.”

  “Was he alone?”

  She shook her head. “There was a girl with him. She looked like a prostitute. I’d seen her with him before.”

  “Your height, your build, same color hair?” I said.

  She nodded. “She was an inch or two shorter, but not so you’d notice unless we were standing side by side. She was Cuban, I think, and her face was very different from mine. But…” She shrugged.

  “Go on,” Angie said.

  “They took me in the room. Price was stoned on something. Flying and paranoid and raging. They”—she turned in her chair, looked out at the water, and her voice dropped to a whisper again—“did things to me.”

  “Both of them?”

  She kept her eyes on the water. “What do you think?” Her voice was ragged and thick now. “After, the woman put on my clothes. Sort of to mock me, I guess? They put a bathrobe around me and drove me to the College Hill section of Tampa. You know it?”

  We shook our heads.

  “It’s like Tampa’s version of the South Bronx. They stripped the bathrobe off me and pushed me out of the car, drove off laughing.” She raised a quaking hand to her lips for a moment. “I…managed to get back. Stole some clothes off a line, hitched a ride back to the Ambassador, but the police were everywhere. And a corpse with the sweatshirt Jay had given me was lying in Price’s room.”

  “Why’d Price kill her?” I said.

  She shrugged, her eye wet and red again. “I think because she must have wondered why I was going through the ice machine. She put two and two together, and Price didn’t trust her. I don’t know for sure. He was a sick man.”

  “Why didn’t you contact Jay?” I said.

  “He was gone. After Price. I sat in the shack we had on the beach and waited for him, and the next thing I know he’s in jail, and then I betrayed him.” She clenched her jaw and the tears came in streams.

  “Betrayed him?” I said. “How?”

  “I didn’t go to the jail. I thought, Jesus, people have probably seen me with Price, maybe even with the dead girl. What good would it do if I went to visit Jay in jail? All it would do is implicate me. I flipped. I lost my mind for a day or two. And then, I thought, the hell with it, I’m going to go get him out of there, have him tell me where his money is so I can post bail.”

  “But?”

  “But he’d left with you two by that point. By the time I caught up with all of you…” She pulled a pack of Dunhills from her purse, lit one with a slim gold lighter, sucked the air back into her lungs, and exhaled with her head tilted toward the sky. “By the time I reached you, Jay and Mr. Cushing and Graham Clifton were dead. And I couldn’t do anything but stand around and watch.” She shook her head bitterly. “Like a brainless asshole.”

  “Even if you had caught up with us in time,” Angie said, “there wouldn’t have been anything you could have done to change what happened.”

  “Well, we’ll never know now, will we?” Desiree said with a sad smile.

  Angie gave her a sad smile in return. “No, I guess we won’t.”

  She had no place to go and no money. Whatever Price had done with the two million after he’d killed the other woman and blown out of the Ambassador may have died with him.

  Our interrogation seemed to have worn her out and Angie offered Desiree her suite for the night.

  Desiree said, “Just a quick nap, I’ll be fine,” but when we passed through Angie’s suite five minutes later, Desiree was flopped on her stomach, still dressed, atop the bedcovers, as deep in sleep as anyone I’ve ever seen.

  We went back into my room, shut the door on Desiree, and the phone rang. It was Devin.

  “You still want to know the name of the dead girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Illiana Carmen Rios. A working girl. Last known residence, One-twelve Seventeenth Street Northeast, St. Petersburg.”

  “Priors?” I said.

  “She took ten or so falls for hooking. On the plus side, she probably won’t have to worry about doing any jail time in the near future.”

  “I don’t know,” Angie said as we stood in the bathroom with the shower running. If the room was bugged, now we had to worry about what we said again.

  “Don’t know what?” I said as the steam rose in clouds from the tub.

  She leaned against the sink. “About her. I mean, every story she told had a fantastic quality to it, didn’t you think?”

  I nodded. “But none any less so than most of the stories we’ve heard in this case.”

  “Which is what bothers me. Story upon story, layer upon layer, and all of it either complete or partial bullshit since this thing began. And why does she need us?”

  “Protection?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. Do you trust her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t trust anyone except you.”

  “Hey, that’s my line.”

  “Yeah.” I smiled. “Sorry.”

  She waved her hand at me. “Go ahead. Take it. What’s mine is yours.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” she said and turned her face up toward mine. “Really,”
she said softly.

  “Feeling’s mutual,” I said.

  Her hand disappeared in the steam for a moment, and then I felt it on my neck.

  “How’s your shoulder?” she said.

  “Tender. My hip, too.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. And then she bent to one knee and tugged up my shirt. When she kissed the skin around the bandage over my hip, her tongue felt electric.

  I bent and wrapped my good arm around her waist. I lifted her off the floor, sat her on the sink, and kissed her as her legs curled around the back of mine and her sandals dropped to the floor. For at least five minutes, we barely came up for air. These last few months, I hadn’t just been hungry for her tongue, her lips, her taste—I’d been weak and light-headed from wanting.

  “No matter how tired we are,” she said as my tongue found her neck, “we don’t stop this time until we both pass out.”

  “Agreed,” I murmured.

  Somewhere around four in the morning, we finally did pass out.

  She fell asleep curled on my chest as my own eyelids fluttered. And I found myself wondering, just before I lost consciousness, how I could have thought—even for a second—that Desiree was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

  I looked down at Angie sleeping naked on my chest, at the scratches and swollen flesh on her face, and I knew that only now, at this exact moment and for the first time in my life, did I understand anything about beauty.

  31

  “Hi.”

  I opened one eye and looked into the face of Desiree Stone.

  “Hi,” she said again, her voice a whisper.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You want coffee?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Sssh.” She put a finger to her lips.

  I turned, saw Angie sleeping deeply beside me.

  “It’s in the next room,” Desiree said and left.

  I sat up in bed and took my watch off the dresser. Ten in the morning. I’d had six hours’ sleep, but it felt like about six minutes. The last time I’d slept before last night had been at least forty hours previous. But I guess I couldn’t sleep through the day.

  Angie seemed to be giving it a good bid, though.

  She was curled into the tight fetal ball I’d become accustomed to during her months on my living room floor. The sheet had risen up to her waist, and I reached over and pulled it back over her legs, tucked it in at the corner of the mattress.

  She didn’t stir or so much as groan when I got off the bed. I put on jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt as quietly as possible and headed toward the door adjoining the suites, then stopped. I came back around to her side of the bed and knelt by her, touched her warm face with the palm of my hand, and kissed her lips lightly, breathed in her smell.

  In the last thirty-two hours, I’d been shot at, been thrown from a speeding vehicle, had cracked my shoulder blade, had taken innumerable shards of glass into my flesh, had shot a man dead, had lost about a pint of blood, and had been subjected to twelve hours of hostile questioning in a sweltering cinder block box. Somehow, though, with Angie’s face warming my palm, I’d never felt better.

  I found my sling on the floor by the bathroom, slipped my dead arm into it, and went next door.

  The heavy dark curtains were drawn against the sun and only a small light on the nightstand provided any illumination. Desiree sat in an armchair by the nightstand, sipping coffee, and appeared to be naked.

  “Miss Stone?”

  “Come in. Call me Desiree.”

  I squinted into the near darkness as she stood up, and that’s when I saw that she wore a French-cut bikini the color of roasted honeycomb, about a shade lighter than her flesh. Her hair was slicked back off her head as she came to me and placed a cup of coffee in my hand.

  “I don’t know how you like it,” she said. “There’s cream and sugar on the counter.”

  I flicked on another light, went to the kitchenette counter, found the cream and sugar beside the coffee maker.

  “Went for a swim?” I came back over by her.

  “Just to clear my head. It’s better than coffee really.”

  It might have cleared her head, but it was making mine awful fuzzy.

  She sat back in the chair, which, I noticed now, was protected from the dampness of her skin and bikini by the bathrobe she’d removed at some point while sitting in it.

  She said, “Should I put this back on?”

  “Whatever makes you most comfortable.” I sat on the side of the bed. “So, what’s up?”

  “Hmm?” She glanced at her robe, but didn’t put it back on. She bent her knees, placed the soles of her feet on the edge of the bed.

  “What’s up? You woke me for a reason, I assume.”

  “I’m leaving in two hours.”

  “For where?” I said.

  “Boston.”

  “I don’t think that makes a whole lot of sense.”

  “I know.” She wiped at some perspiration on her upper lip. “But tomorrow night my father will be out of the house, and I have to get in there.”

  “Why?”

  She leaned forward, her breasts pressing against her knees. “I have things in that house.”

  “Things worth dying over?” I sipped my coffee, if only so the inside of the cup would give me something to look at.

  “Things my mother gave me. Sentimental things.”

  “And when he dies,” I said, “I’m sure they’ll still be there. Get them then.”

  She shook her head. “By the time he dies, what I’m going to get might not be there anymore. One quick trip into the house on a night I know he’ll be away, and I’m free.”

  “How do you know he’ll be away?”

  “Tomorrow is the night of the annual stockholders’ meeting of his biggest company, Consolidated Petroleum. They hold it every year at the Harvard Club Room at One Federal. Same date, same time, rain or shine.”

  “Why would he go? He’s not going to be able to make it next year.”

  She leaned back, placed her coffee cup on the nightstand. “You don’t understand my father yet, do you?”

  “No, Miss Stone, I guess I don’t.”

  She nodded, used an index finger to absently wipe at a bead of water sliding down her left calf. “My father doesn’t honestly think he’s going to die. And if he does, he’s going to use every resource he has left to buy himself immortality. He’s the chief stockholder in over twenty corporations. The hard copy of his diversified portfolio for his United States interests alone is thicker than the phone book for Mexico City.”

  “That’s some serious thick,” I said.

  Something flashed through her jade eyes for a moment, something incensed. Then it was gone.

  “Yes,” she said with a soft smile. “It is. His final months will be spent making sure each and every corporation allocates funds for something in his name—a library, a research lab, a public park, what have you.”

  “And if he dies, how’s he going to make sure all this immortality-making gets done?”

  “Danny,” she said.

  “Danny?” I said.

  Her lips parted slightly and she reached for her coffee cup. “Daniel Griffin, my father’s personal attorney.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Even I’ve heard of him.”

  “About the only attorney more powerful than your own, Patrick.”

  It was the first time I’d heard my name pass from her lips. It had a disconcertingly sweet effect, like a warm hand pressed to my heart.

  “How do you know who my attorney is?”

  “Jay talked about you once.”

  “Really?”

  “For almost an hour one night. He looked on you like you were a little brother he’d never had. He said you were the only person in the world he truly trusted. He said if anything ever happened to him, I was to come to you.”

  I had a flash of Jay sitting across from me at Ambrosia on Huntington, the last time we’d seen
each other socially, and he was laughing, a heavy Scotch glass half filled with gin held up in his manicured hand, his perfectly coiffed hair darkening one side of the glass, exuding the confidence of a man who couldn’t remember the last time he’d second-guessed himself. Then I had another flash of him being carried from Tampa Bay, his skin puffy and bleached white, his eyes closed, looking no older than fourteen.

  “I loved Jay,” I said, and the moment the words left my mouth, I didn’t know why I’d said them. Maybe it was true. Or maybe, I was trying to see what Desiree’s reaction would be.

  “So did I,” she said and closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet. “And he loved you. He said you were worthy of trust. That all sorts of people, from every walk of life, trusted you completely. That’s when he told me Cheswick Hartman worked pro bono for you.”

  “So what do you want from me, Miss Stone?”

  “Desiree,” she said. “Please.”

  “Desiree,” I said.

  “I want you to, I guess, watch my back tomorrow night. Julian should be with my father when he goes to One Federal, but just in case anything goes wrong.”

  “You know how to bypass the alarm system?”

  “Unless he’s changed it, and I doubt that. He’s not expecting me to try something this suicidal.”

  “And these…heirlooms,” I said for lack of a better word, “they’re worth the risk?”

  She leaned forward again, grasped her ankles in her hands. “My mother wrote a memoir shortly before she died. A memoir of her girlhood in Guatemala, stories about her mother and father, her brothers and sisters, a whole part of my family I never met and never heard about. The memoir ends the day my father came to town. There’s nothing in it of any great importance, but she gave it to me not long before she died. I hid it, and it’s become unbearable to think of it still lying in that house, waiting to be found. And if my father finds it, he’ll destroy it. And then the last piece of my mother that I have left will die, too.” She met my eyes. “Will you help me, Patrick?”