The Death Dealer
The Death Dealer
Heather Graham
The Poe Killings: A string of homicides is mirroring the author's macabre stories. And Genevieve O'Brien's mother is next. Genevieve knows all about nightmares. She herself survived two months as a psychopath's prisoner. And now this new menace stalks the city.Spooked by the bizarre slayings, she turns to P.I. Joe Connolly, her past rescuer, friend and… hopefully something more, if he would just quit avoiding her. At first Joe isn't even sure there is a case. But the body count rises, and it's clear that a twisted killer is on the loose.Even more unsettling is the guidance he starts receiving from beyond the grave. People he knows to be dead are appearing, offering him clues and leads, and warning of some terrible danger ahead. But can even the spirits stay the hand of a madman bent on murder?
Praise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author HEATHER GRAHAM
“A sinister tale sure to appeal to fans across multiple genre lines.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Death Dealer
“Mystery, sex, paranormal events. What’s not to love?”
—Kirkus Reviews on The Death Dealer
“The intense, unexpected conclusion will leave readers well satisfied.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Dead Room
“An incredible storyteller.”
—Los Angeles Daily News
“A seamless plot and diverse characters…a tasty serial killer subplot.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on The Dead Room
“Graham peoples her novel with genuine, endearing characters.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Séance
“Graham’s rich, balanced thriller sizzles with equal parts suspense, romance and the paranormal—all of it nail-biting.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Vision
“Another top-notch thriller from romance icon Graham.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Island
“There are good reasons for Graham’s steady standing as a best-selling author.”
—Booklist on Ghost Walk
“Graham builds jagged suspense that will keep readers guessing up to the final pages.”
—Publishers Weekly on Hurricane Bay
HEATHER GRAHAM
THE DEATH DEALER
To the New World School of the Arts, especially Ms. Graham, teacher of creative writing and English, who knows enthusiasm is the biggest part of the game; and Mr. Jim Randolph, “The God of Theater,” who keeps himself and his kids real, who knows there’s a big bad world out there but keeps a thumb on caring.
And for Beth Fath, a parent with quiet dedication; and Debbie Benitez, who has helped keep me sane and informed on more than one occasion!
Quoth the raven, “Nevermore!”
—Edgar Allan Poe
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
INTERLUDE
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
It’s not easy being a ghost.
You would think that it would be the most natural thing in the world. There you go—you’re dead. Live with it.
But it’s far more difficult than you would ever imagine.
It begins with why?
Oh, we all know the theories. A death by violence. Something left undone. Someone to be protected, someone to be warned—someone to be avenged.
Vengeance? Once you’re a ghost? Great stuff.
But that wasn’t my situation. My killer perished split seconds before the light of life faded from my own eyes. It wasn’t that I hadn’t loved life—I had. There were those left behind whom I cherished deeply.
The great love of my life, Matt Connolly, had gone before me, however. And he was there to greet me when I arrived.
“Crossed over,” as they say. Except there’s the thing—you haven’t actually crossed over. You’re existing in a vague and shadowy world where, often, you see something truly horrible about to take place—and you don’t have the power to stop it.
I’d known something of what would occur. I had almost died before. I had felt the power of the light that beckons—an invitation to heaven? I don’t know the answer to that yet.
Because that time I lived. And this time I stayed.
As a ghost.
And I know that I’ve remained behind for a reason, though I haven’t a clue as to the specifics. But at least, unlike some, I’m pretty sure I do have a purpose.
I’ve come across many of my kind who are far more lost than I am, having had a strange relationship with them after my near-death experience and before I departed the life of flesh and blood. There’s Lawrence Ridgeway, Colonel Lawrence Ridgeway, a charming fellow, with his perfectly trimmed beard and mutton-chops.
Sadly, he can’t accept the fact that the Civil War has been won. He was a brave soldier who came to New York during the terrible draft riots of the eighteen-sixties. No matter how often I try to explain things to him, he’s forever keeping guard over his long-gone prisoners. Matt, too, has tried to point out to him that there are no prisoners present, but poor Colonel Ridgeway simply can’t accept that fact. I’m afraid he’s doomed to haunt one particular hallway here in Manhattan’s historic Hastings House forever, a sad and tragic figure who’ll never find closure.
Marnie Brubaker died in childbirth. She’s a sweet and charming creature, and she loves the children who pass through the house. Children tend to be more open than adults to visits from my kind. Marnie likes to play games with the little ones. When they’re falling asleep on a parent’s shoulder, she sings lullabies. Every once in a while, one of them gets scared by her presence and screams bloody murder, which puts her into a funk for weeks to come. All she wants is to offer is love and comfort, but some people, even kids, just don’t want solace from a ghost.
There are those, like Colonel Ridgeway, who will go on repeating their last action over and over again. Then there are those who learn to move around the physical worlds. Passing through walls. Appearing and disappearing at will. Moving objects. The truth of it is, we ghosts can learn to do all kinds of things, so long as we have the will, the patience and the stamina.
I was the victim of a killer who first took the lives of others, before he took mine. But there’s no pain in my world, especially not for me. Because Matt’s here with me, and that’s really all that matters. He died the night of my almost-death, and he stayed behind to warn me. To save me. But my salvation wasn’t to be. In the end, I died to save Genevieve O’Brien. And so far, at least, I’ve been successful. But as a social worker, she’s one of those people who won’t rest in her quest to help others, and that can put her in danger sometimes.
Then there’s Joe Connolly, Matt’s cousin. He’s a private detective and a super guy. A tough guy.
But no one’s so tough that he can defy death. Life’s not like the movies. Most of the time, the bad guys can aim, so Joe can use some protection, whether he knows it or not.
I believe Matt and I have stayed on because of either Joe or Genevieve. Or maybe both. It’s our job to make sure they—and maybe others—stay safe.
Nope, being a ghost isn’t easy. In fact, it’s damn hard work protecting people when most of the time they can’t even see you and don’t think they need protection, anyway.
Take Joe. He has a thing about going to the graves of the people he couldn’t save—including Matt’s and mine. Sometimes he brings flowers. Sometimes he just sits in deep thought. And sometimes he talks. Then he looks around, hoping that he hasn’t been overheard. I imagine that it would be difficult to obtain new clients if word got out that he was insane. But everyone out there has his own way of coping with loss. For Joe, it’s talking to people at their grave sites.
That’s how we became involved in the Poe Killings.
And that’s how Joe became involved with Genevieve again.
She was a child of privilege, but even after she’d almost lost her own life, she couldn’t stop herself from investigating problems.
Including murder.
CHAPTER 1
The crash occurred on the FDR. Strange thing, Joe had just been driving along Manhattan’s East Side and thinking it was amazing that there weren’t more accidents on the busy—and outdated—highway when, right in front of him, a crash caused the car a few lengths ahead of him to slam into someone else. The sounds of screeching tires, shattering glass, grating steel and several massive impacts were evidence that the domino effect had come into play. Someone almost stopped in the aftermath of the first collision, but then that car was pushed into the next lane, and the driver coming up didn’t have time to stop. He slammed into it hard and careened into the next lane. The car that hit that driver bounced over the median and into the oncoming traffic going south.
Joe somehow made it off to the side, threw his car into Park and hit 9-1-1 on his cell phone. He reported what he saw and his position, dropped the phone and hurried out to help.
The car that had caused the initial crash was fairly far ahead of him, but there was a line of disabled vehicles stretching back from it almost to where he was.
The people in the car closest to him were fine, and so were the people in the next vehicle, and the driver of the third probably had nothing more than a broken arm.
The smell of gas around the car that had hopped the median was strong, though—a bad sign.
People had stopped all around, talking, shouting, while other drivers were trying to get around the wreckage no matter what.
“Hey, it’s going to blow up!” someone called to Joe as he approached the car. He lifted a hand in acknowledgment but kept going. He wasn’t a superhero, he’d just worked lots of accident scenes when he’d been a cop, and an inner voice was assuring him that—death-defying or not—he had time to help.
The car was upside down. There was blood coming from the driver’s head, which was canted at an awkward angle. The man’s eyes were closed.
“Hey. You have to wake up. We’ve got to get you out of there. I’m going to help you,” Joe told him.
“My niece,” the man said. “You’ve got to help my niece.” He grabbed Joe, his grip surprisingly strong.
“Trish,” the man said.
Then Joe saw the little girl. She was in the back. Not really big enough for the seat belt, she had slipped out of it and was on the roof—now the floor—with silent tears streaming down her face.
Joe said with forced calm, “Come on, honey. Give me your hand.”
She had huge, saucer-wide blue eyes, and she was maybe about seven or eight and just small for her age, he decided. “Trish,” he said firmly. “Give me your hand.”
He sighed with relief when she did so. He managed to get her out, even though she had to crawl over broken glass on the way. As soon as he had her in his arms, someone from the milling crowd rushed forward.
“Get the hell out of here now, buddy!” the man who took the child told him. “The car is going to blow.”
“There’s a man in the car,” Joe said.
“He’s dead.”
“No,” Joe said. “He’s alive. He talked to me.”
Joe was dimly aware that the air was alive with sirens, that evening was turning to night. He was fully aware of the fact that he didn’t have much time left.
Flat on his stomach, he shouted to the man who had taken the child from him. “Get them back—get them all back!”
“Trish?” the man in the car said.
“It’s all right. She’s out. She’s safe. Now, get ready, because I’m releasing your seat belt. You’ve got to try to help me.”
He did his best to support the guy’s weight after he released the seat belt, but it was a struggle. An upside-down crushed car didn’t allow for a lot of leeway, especially when it was about to explode.
But he got the man out. He could only pray that he hadn’t worsened his pain or any broken bones.
“Help me!” he roared, once he had the man away from the car.
The same Good Samaritan who had taken the child came rushing up. Together, they started to half drag and half carry the man from the wreckage.
Just in time.
The car exploded, flames leaping high over the FDR. They would have been easily seen over in Brooklyn, and probably even halfway across Manhattan.
The blast was hot and powerful. He felt it like a huge, hot hand that lifted him, the victim and his fellow rescuer, and tossed them a dozen feet so that they crashed down hard on the asphalt.
Joe rolled, trying to take the brunt of the impact, knowing he was in far better shape to accept the force than the victim of the crash.
For a moment he didn’t breathe, since there was nothing to breathe but the fire in the air.
Then he felt pain in almost every joint, and the hardness of the road against his back. He became aware of the screams around him, which he hadn’t heard before; the blast had sucked all the sound out of the air along with the oxygen.
“You all right, buddy?” he asked the man who had helped him.
“Yeah—you?”
“Fine.”
The next thing he knew, there was a young EMT hunkered down in front of him. He tried to struggle up.
“Take it easy. Don’t move until we’re sure you haven’t broken something, sir,” the med tech said.
“There’s nothing broken. I’m good,” Joe told him. “The guy who helped me—”
“He’s being taken care of.”
“The man in the car—I think he was hurt pretty bad,” Joe said.
“We, uh, we got it,” the med tech told him. “And,” he added gently, “the girl is fine. Everyone’s already talking about how you saved her life.”
“Great, good,” Joe said. “But the man needs—”
“Sir, I’m sorry to tell you, but he’s dead.”
“I thought he had a chance.”
The med tech was silent for a minute. “You did a good thing,” he said very softly. “But that man…he died on impact, sir. Broken neck.”
“No—he talked to me.”
“I think maybe you hit your head, sir. That man couldn’t have spoken to you. I’m sure his family is going to be grateful you got the body out, but he’s been dead since the first impact. Honest to God. It was a broken neck. He never suffered.” As he spoke, the med tech got a stethoscope out; apparently he wasn’t taking Joe’s word that he was okay.
Joe had his breath back. He pushed the stethoscope aside and sat up, staring at the med tech. What did the kid know? He wasn’t the coroner.
“He was alive. He spoke to me. I wouldn’t even have seen the girl if he hadn’t told me she was in the car.”
“Sure.”
Joe knew damned well when he was being humored. “I’m telling you, I’m fine.”
He knew the EMT was all good intentions, but he was just fine—except for this kid trying to tell him that the man had died on impact.
“Sir, let me help you,” the med tech said.
“You want to help me? Get me the hell out of here,” Joe told him. “Fast.”
“Just let me get a stretcher.”
“Sure,” Joe said, figuring anything that would get the guy out of the way was fine.
As soon as the med tech went off for a stretcher, Joe took a deep breath and made it to his feet. Damn, it hurt. Well, he’d been pretty much sandblasted when he skidded down on the roadway, and he wasn’t exactly eighteen anymore.
He saw that there was no way in hell he would be leaving the scene in his own car. But it wasn’t blocking anyone, so the thing was just to start walking, to get away.
He did. It was easier than he’d imagined, but then, he was walking away from a scene of chaos, and everyone’s attention was on the wreck, not on one lone pedestrian. He could hear voices—most alarmed and concerned, some merely excited—surrounding him as he escaped the scene. More and more cop cars and ambulances passed him.
He headed south along the shoulder, and at last he followed an entrance ramp down to the street, where he hailed a taxi. The driver didn’t even blink at his appearance. Hey, this was New York.
He suggested a route to Brooklyn that didn’t involve the FDR.
He got home eventually, where he showered and changed, then went out into his living room and turned on the television, looking for the local news.
The accident was center stage.
“Twelve were injured and are being given care in various area hospitals,” the attractive newscaster was saying. Her face was grave. “There was one fatality. Adam Brookfield was killed when his car flipped over the median. The medical examiner reports that Mr. Brookfield died instantly, though a heroic onlooker, who fled the scene, carried the man’s body from the automobile just instants before the car exploded. That same man rescued Mr. Brookfield’s six-year-old niece, Patricia, who is doing well at St. Vincent’s Hospital, where her parents are with her.”
The woman shifted in her chair to look into a different camera. The somber expression left her face. She smiled. “This weekend, we welcome the All American Chorale Union to Kennedy Center, and for those of you with tickets, remember that tonight’s the night for the special showing of ancient Egyptian artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All those pricey meal tickets will pay for more archeological research right here in New York. And now…”
Joe no longer heard her. He was irritated.
That man, Adam Brookfield, had been alive; he had spoken to Joe. It was bull about him dying on impact. He couldn’t have spoken if he’d been dead.
Joe glanced at his watch. It would be hours before he could reasonably go for his car, which meant it would probably be towed anyway. Screw it.
He had been on his way to attend tonight’s fund-raiser at the Met when he’d gotten sidelined by the accident, but now he decided he no longer cared. He was heading to Manhattan and a bar that had become one of his favorites.
“Congratulations, she’s just beautiful, Senator,” Genevieve O’Brien said to Senator James McCray and his wife. They had been showing her pictures of their new grandson, Jacob. She had done the right thing, “oohing” and “aahing.”
Frankly, the baby looked like a pinhead at the moment. As bald as a buzzard. Squinched up and…newborn.
But the senator was a supporter of the Historical Society, and had a paid great deal for his meal and a walk through the museum. Naturally she was going to say all the right things about his grandchild. Of course, if she’d met him on the street, she still would have said the same things, she realized.
She damned digital cameras.
The senator had not had just one picture but at least a hundred.
“You need to get married and have children yourself, young lady,” James McCray said.
His wife elbowed him. She’d suddenly gone pale.
Genevieve sighed and tried not to show her feelings in her expression, but she was so weary of this. Anything that so much as hinted of sex was considered taboo around her. She’d been the victim of a maniac who’d been stalking New York’s streets and targeting prostitutes, the same prostitutes Gen worked with. Everyone knew what she’d been through and that it was a miracle she was alive.
She had stayed alive because she had realized quickly that her attacker was actually incapable of sex. She had played on his own psychological makeup, providing the bolstering and ego boosts that he needed, and though she had been a prisoner and abused, she wasn’t suffering as shatteringly from the experience as the world seemed to think she should be. If she faced an inward agony, it was knowing that someone incredible, her friend Leslie MacIntyre, had died.
“I would love to have children one day, Senator, Mrs. McCray,” she said cheerfully. “When the right person to be a dad comes along. You enjoy that beautiful baby. But now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to see to a few things.”
Yes, she needed to see to an escape.
She walked quickly into a side hall, opened only for the convenience of the Historical Society, which was hosting the event. There was a bench, and she sat on it.
He hadn’t shown.
She let out a sigh, wondering why she had even thought Joe would show up. He was a fascinating guy, intrigued by almost everything in the world. He hadn’t come from money, but if anyone out there knew that money really wasn’t everything, it was her. Joe was one of those people who lived life, and he’d done well enough for himself. He could look like a million dollars in a suit. Definitely a striking guy.
And her friend, she thought.
When he wasn’t avoiding her.
She smiled to herself. If she was in trouble, if she needed rescuing, he would be right there. Thing was, she didn’t need rescuing. And she didn’t want to need rescuing, either.
Her smiled faded.
She did want help.
She had hoped he would show tonight because she wanted to ask him about the current worry dogging her life.
A murder.
The media had dubbed it the Poe Killing, because the victim, Thorne Bigelow, had been president of the New York Poe Society, a readers and writers group whose members studied the works and life of Edgar Allan Poe, and called themselves the Ravens, and the killer had left a note referring to the famous author.
She looked around the room. Most of the members were involved with things that were considered either literary or important educationally in the city of New York. There were several of the Ravens here tonight; like her own mother, they also supported various groups interested in history and archeology. Among them she noticed newspaper reporter Larry Levine, who had come to cover the event. Then there was Lila Hawkins—brassy and outspoken and very, very rich. Quite frankly, she was obnoxious, but she did do a lot of good things for the arts in the city. Just a few minutes ago, Gen had seen Lila with Barbara Hirshorn, another Raven and the complete opposite of Lila; Barbara was so timid, she had difficulty speaking to more than one person at the same time.
She had noted that even Jared Bigelow had made a brief appearance with Mary Vincenzo, his aunt, on his arm. He was gone now, and she hadn’t had a chance to speak to him. He had shown up just to support the cause tonight; he was still in mourning for his father.
From her seat on the bench she could hear the booming voice of Don Tracy, the one Raven who’d taken Poe to the masses. He was an actor, a good one, even if he’d never become a household name. He loved the stage and had performed Poe’s works on numerous occasions.
None of them seemed to be frightened by the note that had been found with Thorne’s body.
Thorne Bigelow had been a very wealthy man. A well-known man. And though murder happened all too often, it was the sad truth that a murder with a hook—like a victim who was regularly in the headlines and a mysterious note making reference to a long-dead storyteller and poet—intrigued the media more than most deaths did.
It was only happenstance that Thorne Bigelow had been a very rich Raven. The Ravens didn’t demand that a member be wealthy, published on the topic of Poe’s life and works or world-renowned, though sometimes they were. Thorne Bigelow had written a book on Poe that was considered to be the definitive work on the man. Bigelow was honored far and wide for his knowledge.
And he had been poisoned. Poisoned with a bottle of thousand-dollar wine.
He loved wine, perhaps even to excess. And he had died of it.
À la Poe.
“The Black Cat.”
Or perhaps “The Cask of Amontillado.”
The killer didn’t seem to have been too precise about which story he meant Bigelow’s death to parallel. He had made his intentions clear in the note he’d left at the scene, though.
Quoth the raven: die.
The police were pretty much at a standstill, though why the media were harassing them so strongly about the case, Genevieve wasn’t certain. Thorne Bigelow had only been dead a week. She knew from personal experience that bad things could go on for a very long time before a situation was resolved. If it hadn’t been for her family’s wealth and her own disappearance, the sad deaths of many of the city’s less fortunate might have gone unsolved for a very long time.
But Bigelow was big news.
“My darling, there you are!”
Genevieve looked up. Her mother—it was still strange to call Eileen Mother, when she had grown up believing that she was her aunt—was standing before her. Eileen, only in her early forties now, was stunning. Her love for Genevieve was so strong—not to mention that without her persistence, Genevieve would surely be dead now—that it was easy to forgive the lies of the past. Especially since Genevieve knew what family pressure was like, and that her mother had been far too young to speak up for herself when Gen had been born.
But Eileen Brideswell had finally decided that a New York that embraced reruns of Sex and the City would surely forgive her a teenage, unwed birth. What she might once have been damned for now passed without notice by most in the city.
And after all, Genevieve had loved Eileen all her life.
“Here I am,” Genevieve said cheerfully.
“He didn’t show,” Eileen said.
“No.”
Eileen hesitated. She was very slim, and had classic features, the kind that would make her just as beautiful when she turned eighty as she was now. But at the moment, her expression was strained.
“What?” Genevieve asked, suddenly worried by what she saw in her mother’s eyes.
“There was a terrible accident on the FDR.”
Genevieve leapt up. “When? Joe uses—”
“About an hour ago. The reports are just coming out now. One man was killed—don’t panic, it wasn’t Joe—and a number of other people were injured.”
Genevieve sat back down and fumbled in the pocket of her black silk skirt for her cell phone. “That bastard better answer me,” she muttered.
“Joe Connolly,” came his voice, after three rings.
She could hear music in the background. An Irish melody. He was at O’Malley’s, she thought.
“Joe, it’s Genevieve.”
“Hey. You still at your big soiree?” he asked.
“Yes. I thought you were coming.”
“I couldn’t make it past the traffic.”
She let out a sigh. All right. That might be a legitimate excuse.
“Ah.”
“I’m at O’Malley’s.”
“Yes, it sounded like O’Malley’s.”
He was silent. It felt like an awkward silence. Was she being too clingy? Good God, did she sound disapproving, as if she were his wife or something?
Stop, she warned herself. She had to be careful of expecting too much from him. It had seemed, after she was rescued, after Leslie had…died, that they were destined to be close. The best of friends, needing one another.
But then it was as if he had put up a wall.
She gritted her teeth. She needed him now. Cut and dried. Needed his professional help. He was a private investigator. Finding people, finding facts, finding the truth. That was what he did. And she needed to hire him. She wasn’t asking any favors.
“Well, have fun,” she said.
She clicked the phone closed before he could reply.
Eileen looked at her. “Don’t worry, dear.” Her mother sat down beside her and patted her knee. “It’s all going to come out fine.”
“Mom…” The word seemed a bit strange, but Genevieve loved to use it. “Mom, I’m worried about you now. You’re a Raven, and…”
Eileen sighed. “Oh, darling, don’t worry. I’m a fringe member, at best. Poor Thorne. I like being a member, I love all the reading and discussing we do, but…honestly, I’m just not worried.”
“Mom, he was murdered.”
“Yes.”
“By someone who apparently wasn’t impressed with his work on Poe.”
“And I’ve never written a book,” Eileen assured her.
Genevieve sighed, rising. “But you are a Raven.”
“Along with many other things.”
“Can’t help it. I’m worried about you. Henry is driving you home, right?”
Eileen frowned. “Yes, of course. What about you? Are you leaving, too?”
“I’m going to drop by O’Malley’s.”
“Oh.” Eileen frowned worriedly.
“I’ll be all right,” Genevieve assured her. “I’m in my own car, but I know where to park. I’ll let security see me out and I won’t leave O’Malley’s without someone to walk me to my car. Okay? I’ll be safe, I promise. Hell, I think they ask your approval before they hire anyone at O’Malley’s.”
Eileen laughed, but there was a slight edge to it. “I do not tell them who they can and can’t hire. I’ve simply always enjoyed the place, and I’m a friend of the owners.”
“And I’m safe there,” Genevieve said very softly.
Eileen still appeared worried, Gen thought. Then again, these days she was worried every time Genevieve was out of her sight.
But Genevieve had gone back to living in her own apartment. Not that she didn’t adore Eileen or love the mansion. She just loved simplicity—and her independence.
It was sadly ironic that they both seemed to be frightened for each other these days, just when they had become so close.
She couldn’t help worrying about Eileen in the wake of Thorne’s murder, though. Eileen was a Raven, and though the police discounted the idea, it seemed to Gen that Thorne had been killed specifically because he was a Raven, not just because he was a published Poe scholar.
Admittedly, it was quite likely the book that had brought him to the killers attention, and it was true that Eileen had never written a book. She had way too many charities and women’s clubs to worry about to devote much time to being a Poe fan.
Still, the connection made Genevieve uneasy, and she wanted Joe involved.
That was it, cut and dried.
Or was it so cut and dried?
Maybe she was lying to herself; maybe she wanted to see Joe for personal reasons, too. God knew there was enough about him that was easy to see. He was intelligent, funny, generous and a little bit rough around the edges. Sexy and compassionate. A hard combination to resist.
And he was in love with a dead woman.
She tried to dismiss the thought. She and Joe were just friends precisely because of what had happened. They had seen one another through the hard times and come away good friends.
Yes, she had a multitude of emotions raging within her where Joe was concerned. But what was becoming a growing fear for her mother’s safety was the driving force in her desire to see him now.
She rose, kissing her mother’s cheek. “I’ll be at O’Malley’s. I’ll call when I’m leaving, and I’ll call when I get home, all right?”
Eileen flushed, then nodded. “Did you enjoy the exhibit?”
Genevieve nodded. “I think we raised a lot of money. I think Leslie would have been happy.” Leslie, who had been either gifted or cursed with extraordinary powers, had been an archeologist. She had loved history; she had revered it. Tonight had been planned in her honor, and they were going to use some of the funds raised this evening to respectfully reinter some of the bones Leslie had dug up on her last dig, the one that had ended up costing her life.
Genevieve dropped another quick kiss on her mother’s cheek, then hurried out.
The night was a little cool, making her glad she had chosen a jacket rather than a dressier stole. Not so much because it was warmer, but because it would fit in a hell of a lot better at O’Malley’s.
The attendant brought her car, and in minutes, she was taking the streets downtown. As she drove, she turned on her radio.
She was in time to catch the news, and the topic was that evening’s accident on the FDR, which was still being sorted out. There were brief interview snippets with several of the survivors, and Gen sat up straighter, alarmed, at the sound of one name.
Sam Latham.
CHAPTER 2
Sam Latham.
Another Raven.
Coincidence?
How many millions of people were there in the city?
Gen frowned as the newscaster went on to talk a bit about the man that had been killed, though she was relieved to hear that his young niece had been saved by a man who had left the scene after rescuing the little girl and pulling her uncle’s body from the car moments before the explosion that had destroyed it.
Joe?
How many millions of people in the city? she taunted herself.
No way.
That would be too much of a coincidence.
But Joe should have been on the FDR right around that time, on his way to the Met.
As she neared O’Malley’s, she noticed a number of people on the streets and was grateful to see that the lights in the area were bright. Maybe she was more spooked by what had happened to her than she’d thought. She parked, pleased to find a spot right outside the bar.
At the door, she hesitated.
She’d been coming here what felt like all her life. It was an authentic Irish pub, and her family was authentic New World Irish. This was pretty much the first place she had come after she was rescued, and it was one of the few places where she had felt truly comfortable, one of the few places where people hadn’t stared, where she hadn’t felt as if she needed to describe her ordeal in detail, so that people would save their pity for the dead women and not waste it on her.
She wasn’t uncomfortable about going into O’Malley’s.
She was uncomfortable about confronting Joe.
What if he was with a woman? He might not have skipped the Met just because of traffic.
Then she would sit at the bar, have a soda and chat with the bartender. She didn’t know who was on, but whoever it was, she would know him. Just as she would know a dozen of the old-timers who came here. Guys who had long since retired. Perhaps they had lost their wives, perhaps they’d never been married, but they liked to come to O’Malley’s. It was comfortable. The beer was good, the food was tasty and the prices were reasonable.
No matter what was up with Joe Connolly, she would be fine.
She pushed open the door.
Joe wasn’t with a date. At least, she didn’t think so. He was leaning against a bar stool, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened.
“Hey, Joe.” She walked over to him.
Joe was a regular at the pub, too. She knew that he spent a lot of time here because he liked it. Because the beer was good, and the food was tasty and the prices were reasonable. But it was still more her place than his, she told herself. Even if he fit in just fine.
He was playing darts with Paddy O’Leary and Angus MacHenry. Regulars. Neither one of the octogenarians really drank much. She usually found them drinking soda, water or tea—hot Irish breakfast tea, always with sugar and milk.
She greeted both of them as she got closer.
The older men paused to kiss her cheek and offer her giant smiles. “Y’ doin’ okay?” Angus demanded.
“On top of the world,” she assured him.
“Y’ sure, lass?” Paddy demanded, searching out her eyes.
“I’m just fine.”
She’d been saying the same thing for a year now, but with Angus and Paddy, it was all right. They asked after her every time they saw her, took her word that she was doing fine and moved on.
Joe threw his dart. It was just shy of a bull’s-eye. He walked over, and also offered a hug and a kiss on the cheek. It was awkward, though. As if he were simply going through the expected motions.
They were friends, she told herself. Like she was friends with Paddy and Angus.
Except that Paddy and Angus could have been her great-uncles, while Joe was young and straight and pretty much the perfect man.
Too damned perfect.
“Aren’t you supposed to be up at the museum, girl?” Paddy asked.
“I was at the museum,” she said. “Now I’m here.” She smiled to take any sting out of the words.
“Ah, a great night, eh?” Angus asked, rubbing his white-bearded chin.
“It was a very good night,” she agreed. Then she hesitated. “I need to speak with Joe,” she said. “I don’t mean to mess up your game or anything.”
“Ah, don’t be silly, child,” Paddy told her.
“Get on over there with the girl, Joseph Connolly,” Angus said cheerfully. “Ye can knock the socks of the both of us old geezers later.”
Joe arched a brow, but he didn’t complain; he just reached for his jacket and said, “Certainly, gentlemen. I’m delighted to speak with Genevieve. At any time.”
His words were polite, almost gallant, but then, Joe was always polite. It seemed to come naturally to him.
But he seemed distant. He indicated an empty booth, and she took a seat. He sat across from her and ordered “another beer” as soon as the waitress arrived. Gen asked for a soda and frowned. Joe had apparently had a few drafts already.
“Are you driving?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “Nope. Don’t worry. I came by subway. You know me.”
Do I? she wondered.
“So how was the party?” he asked her.
“Great. I actually think you would have enjoyed it.”
He shrugged. “I’m sorry. I intended to come.”
She nodded. “My mother wanted to see you.” Oh, that was horrible. Laying a guilt trip on him when she knew how much he liked Eileen.
“How is she?”
“Fine. Not as worried as I think she should be.”
He arched a brow. “Ah. The ‘Poe Killing.’”
“You don’t appear to be too concerned, either.”
Again, he shrugged. It bothered her that he seemed so distracted. “I wish I could lose sleep over every terrible thing that happened, but I can’t. We all need to keep a certain distance. It’s the key to sanity and survival.”
“I want you to take the case.”
He drummed his fingers on the table for a moment. “Gen,” he said softly, giving her his attention at last, “your mom isn’t one of the key players in that organization. She doesn’t write about Poe. Hell, she belongs to a zillion clubs, most of them trying to make the world a better place. I can’t see her as a target.” His argument was rational, and the same one Eileen had given her.
“You can’t know that,” Genevieve said.
He inhaled, looking off into the distance. “Gen, I’m thinking about heading out to Vegas.”
She was stunned, and upset that his sudden announcement hurt her so badly. Sure, he was tall. Rugged, handsome. Frigging charming, even.
But she had led a life that didn’t include a lot of wild dating, and that was by choice. If she had wanted…well, there had been plenty of willing men out there, if for no other reason than that she was rich. She had just thought that…
She shook her head. “Fine. Move to Vegas,” she said with a shrug. “But take this case first.”
“Gen, I’m willing to bet this murder was committed by someone who just wanted to kill Thorne—the Poe angle was just a convenient smoke screen.”
“Prove it.”
He looked away for a moment.
She leaned forward urgently. “Joe, did you know that Sam Latham was driving the first car that got hit in that accident on the FDR today?”
“What?” He looked at her with a frown.
“Sam Latham. He’s a member of the New York Poe Society, another Raven.”
“And I’ll bet that at least two-thirds of the other people involved were all members of some society or other. We’re social creatures. Usually,” he added.
She shook her head, irritated. “Joe, the New York Poe Society is not a huge group. The local membership is pretty small. Both Thorne Bigelow and Sam Latham are…were on the board. As is my mother.”
For a moment, at least, that seemed to pique his interest.
“Joe, there are only nine other board members, and two are Bigelow’s family members. Jared, his son, and Mary Vincenzo, his sister-in-law. Then there are Brook Avery, Don Tracy, Nat Halloway, Lila Hawkins, Larry Levine, Lou Sayles and Barbara Hirshorn. There were twelve in all, but Thorne is dead. And now Sam is in the hospital.”
“Genevieve…it was an accident. I’m sure I don’t know Poe’s stories as well as the Ravens do, but since he died in the middle of the nineteenth century, I don’t think any of his characters murdered anyone with a car. Somebody was probably driving recklessly, might have been drunk, might have been an asshole, but it was an accident.”
“Or maybe the driver was pretending to drive recklessly, but he was really trying to hit Sam.”
“No,” he told her firmly. “I saw it, and it was an accident.”
“You saw the whole thing?”
He hesitated. “I saw a lot of it.”
“A lot of it?”
He didn’t answer her at first. It was as if he hadn’t even heard her. He was frowning, as if he were deep in thought. “Joe?”
“I told you, I saw most of it. And before that…before that, I saw the guy who probably caused it. He could have hit any car on that highway. He was driving like a maniac.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
“A saw a car weaving through traffic, and my instinct was to stay the hell away from it. Genevieve, I’m not a traffic cop.”
He was irritated, which surprised her.
“What did the car look like?” she asked.
He shook his head, still looking irritated. “Some kind of sedan. Black, dark blue, maybe dark green.”
She wasn’t sure why, but she was certain he was angry with himself, and not with her.
Because he should have noted the car. He should have known the exact color, make and model. He should have gotten the license plate. He was an ex-cop, and in his own mind, he thought he should have done all those things, because the driver had ended up killing someone.
“It was you!” she exclaimed suddenly.
“What?”
“It was you.” She knew it beyond a doubt, without need for verification. Oh, yeah. It sounded just like Joe, saving a life, then walking away. The man hated the limelight.
“I was not driving drunk!” he said indignantly.
“I’m not talking about the driver,” she said.
A curtain seemed to drop over his eyes, along with a lock of his wheaten hair.
“What was me?” he asked warily.
“The missing hero.”
He waved a hand in the air, his gray-green eyes as expressionless as steel.
“What are the odds? I’m not sure myself. Eight million who live in the city, how many million more when the work force is at its peak? During rush hour—”
“It was you,” she said. “There were eyewitnesses, and you’ll be identified eventually.” She saw his hand where it lay on the table and grabbed it. He winced. She turned it over. There was a big scrape mark on his palm.
“Look, I really don’t want a media frenzy. You understand that.”
“Yes, I do,” she said quietly. Life could be so odd. She had met Joe when he and Leslie MacIntyre had discovered the horrible pit in the subway tunnel where she had been taken after she’d been kidnapped by the monster who’d been stalking the streets of Lower Manhattan. His other victims had wound up dead. Leslie had been killed in the showdown.
Joe had been devastated.
But that day he and Genevieve had formed a certain bond. Maybe because they were both broken in a way.
Genevieve wasn’t certain if she had made it through because she had been smart, because she had stroked the killer’s ego or only because her instinct for survival had been desperate and strong. She had relied on herself in the awful days when she had been a prisoner, and in the aftermath she had created a block against those memories.
What had been harder to handle had been the press. Finding the right words to say at all times. Her uncle—who had raised her as his own child—had been a fierce taskmaster. She had been born to privilege, and he had taught her to be responsible. He had made her tough, had expected her to work hard and then harder.
After the rescue, she had been treated as if she were as fragile as a thin-shelled egg, though she had told the truth about her ordeal. Even so, rumors had found their way into the press that were more horrible than anything she’d been through, and for much too long she had been an object of pity. She appreciated that people could be compassionate, but she loathed being pitied, loathed the possibility that she might end up in the papers again.
She looked at Joe. “But it was you, on the highway, who saved that child, right?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Joe, my voice is down.”
“I won’t be able to work if this gets out. Come on, please. Don’t say anything to anyone.”
She lowered her head, smiling. Leave it to Joe. It was all about the work. She forced the smile to go away. “Take this case, Joe.”
He groaned. “Are you blackmailing me?” he demanded.
Her smile deepened. She hadn’t thought of that, but it wasn’t a bad idea. “Maybe. Now, come on, I’ll drive you home. It’s late.”
“No, but I’ll see you home.”
“Joe, you’ve had a few.”
“I meant that I’ll drive with you to your place and take a cab from there.”
“I’m okay, Joe. I carry Mace now, and I can take care of myself,” she said firmly.
Hmm. She was touchy, she realized. Friends saw friends home all the time.
Maybe being defensive was a good thing if he thought that he needed to look after her. She definitely didn’t want his pity or to have him as a guardian. She was tough enough to take care of herself. She had proven it. She had survived. And she meant to keep doing so. She had thrown herself into self-defense classes, and she spent hours on a treadmill, getting fit.
Running.
As if she could outrun the past.
“I know you can take care of yourself, but I’d still like to see you to your place. And I’d like you to promise you’ll keep your mouth shut about me helping out at the accident,” he said firmly.
“Joe, I’ll keep my mouth shut. And you can see me home,” she told him gravely, “if you promise to take on the case.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so afraid, Gen. Really. I simply don’t believe your mother is a target.”
“Joe…” She hesitated. She didn’t know herself why she was so concerned. Her mother hadn’t been a close friend of the dead man. Eileen and Thorne had been casual acquaintances, at best, brought together only by their membership on the board.
But she was scared. Bone-deep frightened. It was something that had just settled over her, and she wouldn’t be comfortable until the killer was caught.
“Please. The cops aren’t getting anywhere.”
“Give them time.”
“In time,” she told him, even though she herself had been thinking earlier that the press should cut the cops some slack, “somebody else could die.”
He lifted his hands, staring at her, shaking his head.
“Eileen hasn’t been threatened in any way, has she?”
“No.”
“Genevieve…” He lowered his head for a moment, then shook it again. “Gen, it’s only been a week, which is no time at all. You’ve been watching too much television. A murder like Thorne Bigelow’s isn’t solved in a one-hour episode.”
“I know that,” she said sharply.
“Then…”
“Joe, this is what you do for a living. I want to hire you.”
He sighed. “I’d be stepping in where people are hard at work already. I don’t know that I could find out anything new.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe you could do something. Before somebody else gets killed. That’s just it, Joe. Someone else could die.”
It was strange, but just then Kathryn, their waitress, came by, her eyes wide. “Man, what a night for the bizarre!”
“Why? What happened?” Genevieve asked.
Joe was studying Kathryn with apprehension.
The waitress shook her head. “There’s always one in every crowd, you know? Someone who just has to stick their nose in and make a tragedy worse.”
“What are you talking about?” Joe asked.
“The psychic,” Kathryn said.
“What psychic?” Joe demanded.
“Go look at the television,” Kathryn said disgustedly. “There’s a reporter talking to her right now, actually. Just turn around and you can see. It’s that Robert Kinley, and he’s with some so-called psychic named Lori Star, who claims that some guy named Sam Layman or Latham or something was supposed to die in the accident, and that it was the Poe Killer behind it.”
“How could she know that?” Joe asked, his expression darkening.
Kathryn shrugged. “She said she just knows it. And she says she knows more, too.”
“See?” Genevieve said.
“Oh, please!” Joe said.
“Joe, I’m telling you, it makes sense. That’s why I’m afraid,” Genevieve pressed.
“She is convincing,” Kathryn admitted. “She says that in a few days, someone else will die.”
“A Raven?” Genevieve breathed.
“She didn’t say. Just go watch. All she said was that the Poe Killer will murder someone else.”
Genevieve slipped out of the booth first, but she was quickly followed by Joe.
The woman, who was at the accident scene talking to the well-known anchor, was attractive enough. She just seemed to be slightly…rough around the edges. Her voice was clear, though, and her grammar was good. She didn’t have an identifiable accent.
She also seemed to know how to play to the camera. She was direct and dramatic, without overplaying her cards. “It’s true,” she whispered to the camera, wide-eyed.
“Most people would say that’s impossible,” the anchor told her. There was slight scoffing in his voice. Nothing direct. He was too professional for that.
“It was as if I were there,” the woman said. “As if I were driving.”
“And you said that you felt heat and anger?”
“Yes. It was as if I were someone else, and I could feel that person’s feelings.”
“Were you a man or a woman?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But as I said before, I do know this. It was the Poe Killer. And I know this, as well. He, or she, intends to kill again—soon.”
“Thank you, Miss Star.” The anchor turned his full attention to the cameras. “Truth or fiction? What’s in store for New York? Well, first things first. The police are busy cleaning up the FDR, and it’s going to be a long ride home for anyone on that highway tonight.”
Another anchor picked up from the studio, and Genevieve turned to look at Joe, but he was already turning away.
“Kathryn, I’ll take another beer, please,” he called.
CHAPTER 3
Before he even opened his eyes, Joe winced.
His head was pounding.
What in the hell had made him drink so damned much beer? He hadn’t even gone for the hard stuff, which he should have. No, he had just started inhaling the beer because of…
The accident.
It was ridiculous. He’d seen lots of accidents. He should have felt good; a little girl had been saved because of him.
But he didn’t feel good.
He felt unnerved.
Because a dead man had spoken to him.
And things hadn’t gotten any better after that.
A psychic. A self-proclaimed psychic solving the whole damned thing while somehow not solving anything at all.
Lori Star? Like hell. She might as well have called herself Moonbeam.
He went ahead and groaned, thinking that voicing his pain might make him feel a little better. It didn’t.
Hell, no. Because he’d awakened thinking.
And all he could think about was the fact that a dead man had spoken to him, and then, as if that hadn’t been bad enough, the news had dragged a damned psychic out of the woodwork. She knew, she just knew, that the driver of the car had been after Sam Latham.
No, they hadn’t dragged her out of anywhere. She’d come forward, claiming to be eager to help the police.
She couldn’t identify the car, of course. Because it was as if she had been the one driving it. She had been in his would-be head as he—or she—went after Sam Latham’s car. And then she’d finished up with the dramatic revelation someone else would be murdered within days.
Later newscasts had delved into the truth about the woman, but too late for him. Genevieve had looked at him with her huge blue imploring eyes. And he’d known right then that he was on the case.
Though he dreaded it. Dreaded it. And he didn’t know why, other than that it had something to do with that freakin’ psychic.
It had turned out that Lori Star was an aspiring actress, as well as a supposed psychic. No wonder she’d been so good in front of the camera. But there would be those out there convinced that it was no act, that she was right, that the accident had been no accident.
Even if she was right—and he sure as hell didn’t see how she could be—he was sure that all she had done was look at a few facts and take a lucky guess. She was definitely not a psychic. She just wanted her fifteen minutes of television fame.
And he was so angry because…
Because he had known Leslie. And he hadn’t believed in her at first, when she claimed to talk to the dead. But she had been legit.
And this girl sure as hell wasn’t.
He opened his eyes. He wasn’t at home, but he already knew that. He was at Genevieve’s. She hadn’t let him take a cab; she’d insisted he stay on her couch. Lacking both the will and the physical coordination to find a cab willing to go to Brooklyn at that hour, he had shrugged and agreed. And fallen asleep. Or passed out. One or the other.
He’d been doing all right last night, considering what he’d gone through with Leslie and her ability to commune with the dead, until that damned psychic had shown up on television. And then he’d started calling for the beers hard and fast.
Now, of course, he was ashamed of himself. Only cowards drank because they’d been spooked. And what a fool he’d been, besides. As far as talking to a dead man went, there was surely a logical explanation for what had happened. One, maybe the EMT had simply been wrong and Brookfield hadn’t died on impact. Or maybe, as Freud might have suggested, Joe had created the man’s voice as a tool to tell him to look for survivors in the car. There. That made sense—so long as he didn’t think about the fact that his inner voice had known the girl’s name.
And the fact that Lori Star was an annoying fraud seeking the spotlight. Well, hell, that made sense, too. She was just trying to get work.
So here he was, having had way too much to drink, sleeping on Gen’s sofa. It was a nice one, too. Antique, but restuffed and reupholstered. She loved things that were old and had a story. She and Leslie would have been great friends.
The thought made him wince and shut his eyes.
When he opened his eyes again, his face lined with tension, she was there.
Gen, not Leslie.
Thank God he was seeing the living, at least.
That caused a moment’s guilt to trickle down his spine. Leslie…I would love to see you. Your face…
But that wasn’t really true. He didn’t want to see ghosts.
No problem. This was Gen in front of him, and she didn’t seem to be judging him for his night of imbibing, even if she probably didn’t understand it.
He didn’t intend to explain.
Let her think that it was because he had been a witness to such an awful accident, or because he could have died when the car blew up.
“Good morning,” she said gravely, handing him a glass and a couple of aspirin.
He looked at her, arching a brow.
“Trust me,” she said. “They work for a hangover.” She shrugged. “And no, I don’t spend my life fighting hangovers. A lot of people thought I’d wind up on drugs or alcohol after the kidnapping, and this was a tip my doctor gave me.”
“Thanks,” he said briefly, swallowing the pills with the glass of water she’d provided.
He didn’t really want to look at Gen. He felt too much like the dregs of humanity to want to face her.
There wasn’t anything not to like about her, of course. Genetics had made her beautiful—Eileen, at forty-plus could still turn heads. Gen had the same perfect features, perfect skin and more-than-perfect build. She had rich auburn hair that looked more lustrous than silk and more wicked than sin. And her eyes…
Just saying they were blue didn’t do them justice. They were the blue of the infinite sky, the blue of the deepest sea. Blue that could hint at darkness, blue that spoke of wisdom, even though she was only twenty-odd years old.
They were eyes that had seen a lot. The child of privilege, she had wanted to help those who hadn’t been born with silver spoons in their mouths. She hadn’t jetted around the globe, hobnobbing with the rich and useless. She had gone to school, gotten a degree and gone into social work.
She had survived for weeks in the underground lair of a psychotic killer.
She was strong. She was…
She was alive because Leslie had taken the bullet meant for her.
He pushed that thought from his mind. Genevieve sure as hell hadn’t wanted that to happen, and he knew it. And Leslie had been gone nearly a year now. He liked to think that she was back with Matt, at last, but he didn’t really believe it. He could have sworn that he had once seen them together on a little rise in the cemetery where they were both buried.
Again, Freud would have helped him out.
He had seen them there because he wanted to see them there.
“You should feel better soon,” Gen told him, breaking into his morose thoughts.
Better than he deserved, she might have said.
But of course, she didn’t.
He leaned back, studying her. She was already up and showered, smelling both fresh and subtly exotic, rich tendrils of her amazing hair curling over the casual black sweater she was wearing over jeans. He noticed her hands—delicate, refined, manicured, but not fussily so; she kept her nails filed and polished, but at a reasonable length. And she wasn’t encrusted with jewels; she wore a simple claddagh ring on her left middle finger, gold studs in her ears and a plain cross around her neck.
She could easily have covered herself in furs and diamonds. Instead, she didn’t even buy designer sunglasses; he knew because she had laughingly told him once that she seemed to lose a pair a week, so it made sense to buy them off the street vendors.
And in fact, she knew the streets.
Once upon a time she hadn’t been regularly recognized. Despite her family’s wealth, she’d kept far from the public eye and worked for a pittance helping to get prostitutes off the streets.
What the hell was not to like about her? he asked himself silently, wondering why the question left him feeling so irritable.
“I’m all right,” he said gruffly.
She grinned, looking away. “Right. Real men don’t get loaded on too much beer.”
He groaned aloud and started to rise.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Look, I know that what you saw must have been really terrible. I can’t even imagine,” she assured him.
Couldn’t she? he wondered.
Dead was dead.
Did it matter if death came with gallons of blood, mangled steel and mangled flesh? Or a neat little bullet hole that left a person looking as if she were at peace, merely sleeping.
She had seen enough, he thought.
And she had somehow risen above it all.
He felt even more like a lout, if that were possible.
“You have every right,” he agreed.
“That woman was a jerk,” she said. “Lori Star? I doubt it. I don’t know where she was getting her information, but I’m sure she’s not in touch with helpful spirits or anything like that.”
The way Genevieve looked at him, he knew that she was thinking about Leslie, too. She had known that her kidnapper had been determined to kill Leslie; she’d been at the top of his list.
Because Leslie had known things. She had seen things. He wasn’t certain that psychic was the word to describe her, but whatever she’d been, she’d been for real.
He waved a hand in the air. “Hey, I was a horse’s ass last night, and it was inexcusable,” he said.
“No, once you weren’t so angry, you were kind of cute.”
Kind of cute? Great. Just what he’d always wanted to be. A kind-of-cute drunk.
“Well, thanks for your forgiveness. And your couch.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“I need to get going.”
“Joe, there’s a meeting tonight,” she informed him, her eyes somber.
“A meeting?” Heaven help him, did she think he needed AA?
“Of the—the Ravens.”
He looked at her quizzically. “On Saturday night? Date night?” His tone was mocking; he was stalling her, he knew. “Must be a wild bunch,” he said.
“Joe, we’re going.”
“No.”
“Joe, you promised last night that—”
He lifted a hand. Damn, she was persistent.
“I said I’d take the case,” he told her. “And I’ll go to the meeting. But you aren’t going.”
“Of course I am!” she said indignantly.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Genevieve—”
“My mother is going to be there, Joe. There’s no way I’m not going to be there, too.”
He fell silent. What the hell was the matter with these people? If they all believed that Thorne Bigelow had been killed because he was a Raven, wouldn’t anyone sane think that perhaps they shouldn’t meet until the killer had been apprehended?
“It’s just stupid for them to be meeting,” he snapped.
“Stupid or not, it’s happening,” Genevieve said. “Besides, you’re the one who said that the whole Poe thing is a smoke screen.”
“I said it could be a smoke screen.”
“That…woman said that another Raven would be dead in a matter of days.”
“Gen…” He winced, lowering his head. He wasn’t sure if he was feeling the temple-pounding headache of a killer hangover, or a sense of mixed anger and dread. Gen was surely the most stubborn human being he’d ever met. She was like pit bull on behalf of the underdog or any cause she believed in. She rushed in where the sane wouldn’t go.
But he wasn’t angry with her, only upset that people liked to play so casually with the fears of others by claiming to know the future.
He lifted his chin, eyes on fire, and pointed a finger at her. “I said I’d take the case, and I will. But you’ll listen to me.”
“I always listen to you, Joe,” she said softly. That unnerved him.
Oh, yeah, she listened, in a perfect case of point noted—and rejected.
“Joe, honestly, I have to go tonight.”
“And you think the Ravens are just going to discuss some favorite masterpiece by Poe?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure they’ll talk about the murder.”
“We’re not members. Are you sure they’ll let us in?”
“Members are always free to bring guests. It’s simply a matter of paying for their meals. And can you imagine anyone trying to tell my mother that she’s not welcome to bring her daughter and a friend?”
Gen had a point. Eileen had the power to open a lot of doors.
He stood up. The world didn’t rock. A shower would fix him, he decided.
“All right, I’m going home, but I’ll be back in time to go to the meeting with you. And you’ll stay here until I come back for you.”
“Joe…” She said his name in a soft whisper, accompanied by a weary sigh. “I am not a hothouse flower. I’ve been taking care of myself in the city for some time now. I do not intend to stay cooped up in my apartment all day.”
He arched a brow. “It’s a really nice apartment.”
She flushed. It was a nice apartment. She lived here because of Eileen; the building was supposed to have the best security system in the city.
“Joe—”
“Give it a rest, Gen. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Depending on traffic,” he added dryly, wondering how long it would take to reclaim his car at the impound lot.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. If we’re going to this meeting, let’s do a little Poe research first, huh?”
She stared back at him, a slow smile curving her lips, a light entering her eyes.
Damn, she was a beautiful woman.
“Oh, Joe, that’s great!”
She leapt up and threw her arms around him. Her scent was intoxicating, and the feel of her warm body as she crushed herself against him was like a taste of heaven.
He unwound her arms and stepped back. “You, uh, you stay here till I get back, promise?”
She looked at him with a frown.
“Just this morning, Gen, please? Until I get a handle on this.”
“I’m not a Raven. It’s my mom we’re worried about, remember?”
“Gen?”
“Yes, fine.”
He started out.
“Joe? You don’t have your car,” she reminded him. “You can take mine. It’s in the garage.”
He was certain that the garage fee in this building was probably more than most Americans paid for an apartment. But he couldn’t take her car. It was time to rescue his own.
“I’ll just grab a cab for now.”
“I can call you a car—”
“And I can run out to the street and snag a cab. I’ll be back soon,” he promised.
Genevieve didn’t mind spending a few hours in the apartment. In fact, she loved the apartment and liked killing time there. What she did mind was being told that she needed to stay somewhere, anywhere, even though she knew that she should be grateful she had friends who cared.
At least he intended to involve her in the investigation, although he definitely wasn’t happy about how things had played out last night. He was never happy if he wasn’t in control. Not so much of others, but he was the kind of man who wanted to be in control of himself at all times, and getting drunk was anything but.
Restlessly, she paced the room. The morning would go slowly. She was sure of it.
She put a call through to her mother, just to say hello and tell her that she and Joe would be taking her to the meeting that night.
“I’m afraid it won’t be much of a meeting,” Eileen warned. “All they’ll do is talk about poor Thorne.” She hesitated at the other end of the line. “I suppose a lot of them are frightened, after what that psychic said.”
“But you’re not,” Genevieve chided.
“Of course not.” There was another slight silence, then a gasp. “Oh, Genevieve! Perhaps you shouldn’t come.”
“Mother, stop.”
“But, darling, after all you’ve been through, do you really want to be around a bunch of people talking about murder?”
“After all I’ve been through, I take great delight in going wherever I choose to go.”
“But—”
“We’ll pick you up at six-thirty,” Genevieve said.
“Genevieve, I can get there by myself.”
“We’ll pick you up at six-thirty,” Gen repeated.
“At least you’ll be with Joe,” Eileen said.
“Right. At least I’ll be with Joe,” Genevieve agreed, though she was more than a little irritated by her mother’s words. Even her own mother felt she needed protection.
Genevieve rang off and wandered over to her desk, where she brought the front page of the paper up on her computer, curious to see if anything new had been written about Thorne’s murder.
The headline and the main story were on the accident that had taken place on the FDR. She read the story, then clicked a link and watched the video that had been taken by a chance onlooker. Unfortunately, nothing in the story or the video told her anything that Joe hadn’t.
Genevieve drummed her fingers on the desk. Sam Latham had been in that accident.
And so had Joe.
She hesitated, then picked up the phone again. This time she called St. Vincent’s.
Sam was in a regular room and able to see visitors.
Again she hesitated. Then she glanced at the clock. She could get to St. Vincent’s and back in plenty of time. She wouldn’t take her own car. She would have Tim, the morning security guard, call for car service, and the driver could just wait for her while she was at the hospital. She could be back in no time.
Even as she made the arrangements, she felt guilty.
She told herself that she didn’t owe anyone anything, that she was a free woman who could come and go as she pleased. Even so, she felt guilty.
After all, she’d promised.
But it was broad daylight, and she needed to see Sam Latham.
But she had promised.
As her mind warred with itself, the phone rang. She was going to let the machine get it, but she heard Joe’s voice and picked up.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he returned. “Listen, I forgot I had an appointment. I’ll be a few hours longer. Is that okay with you?”
“I’m sure I can fill the time somehow,” she told him.
“Okay. Let’s say I’ll be back around two or two-thirty.”
“Perfect,” she told him.
Okay, so she still felt guilty. But, really, the promise had been made during the last conversation, when he wasn’t going to be gone nearly so long. That had to make it null and void. She had said that she would find a way to fill the time, and she would.
She left her apartment, making sure to lock up, and hurried to the elevator.
If he’d been blindfolded, he would have known where he was.
No matter how much antiseptic was used, no matter what kind of air filtration was in place, a morgue smelled like a morgue.
Even in the entry rooms.
Joe was grateful to be in good standing with the police. He didn’t even need to show his credentials when he arrived; Judy, at the desk, knew him well.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he said.
“Hey, handsome.”
“You’re too kind.”
She was a big woman, round and rosy-cheeked, fiftysomething and always pleasant. She was the perfect person to meet the public in such a place.
“Hey,” she said, laughing. “The living always look handsome to me.”
“Ah, shucks, be careful or all these compliments will go to my head.”
“Better be careful—your head could swell up like a balloon if I really got going,” she teased. “But you’re not here to flirt.”
“No. Judy, ’fraid not. I need to know who was on the Thorne Bigelow autopsy.”
“Oh, that was Frankie.”
Not many people could have used such a casual reference. Frankie was Dr. Francis Arbitter, one of the most renowned members of the medical examiner’s office. He was a down-to-earth guy, but his expertise had earned him a reverence over the years that made most people speak of him with awe.
“Is he available?”
“I’m sure he’ll see you.”
A phone call sent him through the double doors and down the hallway to autopsy room number four.
Francis Arbitter was alone. There was a corpse on a Gurney, but a sheet covered the torso and limbs. There was a huge gash on the head of the middle-aged, bearded man who lay there, but there was no sign of blood. The body had been washed for the exam that was about to take place.
Frank was at his desk, munching on what appeared to be a ham and cheese on rye. “Joe!” he called with a smile, and he rose. He was a tall, well-muscled man who looked like he should have been playing fullback instead of solving mysteries at a morgue. But his tousled, thinning hair and Coke-bottle glasses gave him a little bit of the mad-scientist look that was more befitting to his chosen calling.
“Sit, sit,” he said, drawing up a chair from behind one of the other clinically clean desks in the room.
Joe took a seat. He’d been in plenty of morgues, but he never became as accustomed to working with the dead as Frank, who got right to the point.
“If you just wanted to shoot the breeze, you’d have called to meet for a beer somewhere. So what’s up? I’m guessing it’s the Thorne Bigelow murder.”
“Good deduction,” Joe said.
“Well, speaking as Dr. Watson here, I’d have to say I learned something from Holmes,” Frank said shrewdly. “You’ve worked for Eileen Brideswell before. She knew Thorne, so I assume she intends to use her resources to help the police find the murderer. After all, she has a lot at stake.”
Joe decided not to correct him and explain that he wasn’t working for Eileen but had been pretty much forced to take the case by Genevieve. He wasn’t surprised that Frank had made the assumption that his appearance had to do with the case, but he was surprised that Frank seemed to think that Eileen had a lot at stake.
He nodded, watching Frank. “Yes, I’m here about Bigelow.”
“His son picked up the body the other day. Personally. What with the Bigelow money, he certainly didn’t have to do it, but the kid came in here crying like a baby. Well, hell, he’s not a kid, really. He’s got to be about thirty.”
“I guess you never get so old that you don’t feel the loss of a parent.”
“No.” Frank shrugged. “I talked to him. He’s on the warpath himself, wants to know who killed his father, and why.”
Joe stared at Frank, and Frank grinned and shrugged.
“Okay, you and I both know that the Bigelow money and power drew lots of enemies. But, hey, I’m not a cop. I turn over my findings, and the cops take it from there.”
“And what did you find?”
“That the man’s love for a good glass of wine did him in.”
“So his wine was definitely poisoned?”
“Definitely. He hadn’t eaten in hours. From the timing, I got the impression he was probably about to go out for dinner. That it was the aperitif before the meal.”
“What was it?”
“Rosencraft 1858. A very rare burgundy,” Frank said.
Joe almost smiled. “I meant the poison.”
“Arsenic.”
“I thought arsenic poisoners usually dosed their victims more slowly?”
“Arsenic poisoning was popular in the past. Centuries ago. People got sick, and eventually they died. But a large dose is just as effective—and quicker.”
“Was there anything else? Any sign of a struggle? Bruises, gashes, defensive wounds?”
“Not a thing,” Frank told him.
Joe was silent. Frank shrugged. “‘Quoth the raven—die.’”
“There’s nothing about poisoning in ‘The Raven,’ is there?”
“No, but there is in both ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’”
“I do the autopsy, Joe. That’s it. After that, I let the cops do their work.”
“Who caught the case?” Joe asked.
“Raif Green and Thomas Dooley. They’re both good guys. Neither one is green. They’ve been working murders together for almost ten years.”
“Yeah, I know them both,” Joe said. He knew them well, and he liked them both. That was a relief. Neither was the type of hothead to get antsy because a P.I. was on the case. They were both workhorses who had come up through the ranks, seen everything, grown weary and kept at it anyway. Good cops, they were constrained by the department’s budget and tended to be pleased when someone like him could throw some private citizen’s funds at a case.
“There’s a break for you,” Frank said.
“Yeah, thanks, I’ll give Raif a call. I know him best,” Joe said as he rose. “We’ll have to grab a beer soon, Frank. I don’t want to keep you from your work now, though.”
“Don’t worry. Old Hank isn’t going to get any deader,” Frank told him.
Joe glanced over at the body on the Gurney. If it weren’t for the gash, “Old Hank” could have been sleeping.
“A fall?” he asked skeptically.
“Oh, yeah. You bet. He fell right into his buddy’s broken-off whiskey bottle.”
“Sad,” Joe said.
“It’s always sad,” Frank said. “That’s the thing—death is sad. Except…”
Curiously, Joe turned back to him. “Except?”
Frank shrugged. “Every once in a while, I get someone in here who was dying of cancer or something. I cut them open, and it’s horrifying what disease does to them on the inside. But on the outside, hell, sometimes it’s as if they’re actually smiling. Like death was a release from god-awful pain.” He shrugged. “You get used to it. Then again—hell, you should know this—you never get used to it. And if you did, you’d suck at your job.”
“Dr. Arbitter?”
A young woman was standing in the open door.
“Connie?” Frank said.
“They need you in reception.”
“Be right back,” Frank told Joe.
Joe started to protest. He needed to get going. But Frank had already gone to see to whatever business had summoned him away.
Joe looked over at the body, and suddenly the corpse’s head turned, and the grizzled old man opened his eyes. Hey, you. Yeah, you, buddy. You can see me, and you can hear me. You tell Vinny I said fuck you! You tell him he’s going to get his. He can get that crack-freak friend of his to pay his bail, but he’s going to go down out on the streets. You tell him. He ain’t going to have a moment’s peace. You tell him, you hear me? Damn you, you hear me?
Joe felt frozen, staring at the corpse.
This was bullshit.
It was all in his mind.
Hell, he must have had even more to drink last night than he’d thought.
The door behind him swung open again. He spun around. Frank had returned, muttering. “With all today’s technology, these clerks still can’t spell. Who the hell mistakes the word breast for beast?”
Joe looked back at the body.
It was just a corpse again.
Old Hank couldn’t get any deader.
“Joe? You all right?” Frank asked. “Hell, man, you’re as white as if you’d seen a ghost.”
Joe forced a laugh. “Like you said, Frank. Old Hank can’t get any deader. I take it the cops have whoever did this to him?”
“Dead to rights. A low-life drug dealer. Not that Hank was your model citizen. He bought it during a barroom fight with a guy named Vincent Cenzo.”
He’d just had to ask, Joe thought.
“So, Joe. I’m sorry, where were we?” Frank asked.
“Finished,” Joe said, offering his hand.
“Beers are on me,” Frank said as they shook.
“Sounds good. See you soon.”
“You bet. You need anything else, don’t hesitate to call.”
Call. Yup. Next time, he would just call.
“See you, Frank. Thanks.”
He felt like a swimmer who had seen a shark and needed to stay calm. He tried like hell not to go running out of the autopsy room.
He managed to push his way through the doors like a normal person, then walked quickly down the hall. He even managed a goodbye and thanks for Judy at the desk.
Then he burst out into the light of day and joined the throng of people rushing around in the Saturday afternoon sunshine.
He was almost running…
And then he stopped.
Because there was no way for a man to run away from his own mind.
What a beautiful day.
He walked and walked, wishing he had a hat to tip to passersby. It was nearly summer, but the usual heat and humidity weren’t plaguing the city today. No rain clouds marred the heavens. No unhealthy miasma hung around the buildings, and a pleasant breeze swept through the giant forests of concrete and steel. It was simply a perfect day.
He visited St. Mark’s Square, where he paused, thinking that politicians, stars, geniuses, men of letters, heroes, patriots and enemies of the state had once walked this way. He closed his eyes and imagined a long-ago city.
What a beautiful, beautiful day. It was just good to be out. To love New York. To love the world.
To bask in pleasure.
Someone walked by him with a boom box blaring, gold chains making a strange clanking sound against the plastic casing. The man’s arm sported a tattoo.
Ah, yes. The gangs of New York. Ever present. Then and now.
A little Yorkie passed him, yapping shrilly. He was tempted to kick the tiny beast into the traffic. Instead, he paused and said something complimentary to the dog’s pudgy owner, who blushed and chatted. He moved on quickly then, afraid she was going to try to give him her phone number.
He passed a police officer strolling his beat, and nodded a greeting. The officer nodded and smiled in return.
As he walked at a leisurely pace, he passed an electronics store. A giant plasma screen took up most of the display window. The news was on, so he paused to watch.
His heart was filled with glee. He longed to laugh aloud. Instead, he watched gravely as other people grouped around him on the sidewalk.
The entire city was still pondering the death of Thorne Bigelow.
Philanthropist.
Icon.
Brilliant man of letters.
Like hell!
Bastard. Braggart. Glutton. Idiot.
“What a horrible way to die,” someone said.
“It’s that book he wrote. He was killed because someone didn’t like his book on Poe,” a young woman said solemnly.
Her boyfriend slipped an arm around her shoulders. She was hugging something that looked like a mop. Maltese, Pekinese, some kind of “ese.” What was it with people and their obnoxious little dogs ruining his Saturday morning?
“It could have been anything,” the boyfriend said. “I mean, the man was a billionaire.”
The man was a bag of hot air. Gas. He was one big fart.
“Tragic,” he said aloud.
The boyfriend was shaking his head. “Did you know that one of the guys who got hurt in that pileup on the FDR was some friend of Bigelow’s?”
The girl shivered. “And that psychic said somebody else is going to die.”
“Think psychics really know the future?” he asked, turning to the couple.
“Oh, yes,” the girl said, and turned to look at him. Maybe a little too closely. “There are real psychics out there. People who see things. Who knows if that woman, that Lori Star, is really one of them, though. I mean, I never heard of her. She hasn’t written a book or anything. Anyway, it’s all so tragic, don’t you think?”
“Tragic,” he repeated, shaking his head.
And he moved on somberly, his head lowered.
His grin wide.
Yes, it was a beautiful day.
His grin suddenly faded.
It was bull. There weren’t really people out there who could see the future, who had second sight, who could share experiences as if they were in another person’s body and just…know things.
Were there?
He kept walking, pensive.
Maybe it wasn’t such a beautiful day after all.
CHAPTER 4
“Thanks, guys, for taking the time to meet me,” Joe said.
They were at Gino’s Salads and Sandwiches, near One Police Plaza.
Times had changed. Once upon a time, Raif Green would have been wolfing down a hamburger anywhere that served up hot, greasy food. Tom Dooley would have chosen corned beef on rye.
But, as he had discovered when he called Raif, Tom Dooley had suffered a heart attack two years ago. No doughnuts for these cops anymore.
Raif had opted for the Greek salad, while Tom was nibbling his turkey, low-fat Swiss, lettuce and tomato on wheat, as if by taking small bites he could make the sandwich last longer.
Thomas Dooley was a big man. He’d lost weight since Joe had seen him last, but he was still six-four and just shy of three-hundred pounds. Raif wasn’t really all that small or thin—five-ten and one-eighty, maybe—but next to Tom Dooley, he looked like a midget.
Both men were in their early forties.
Both still had their hair.
They were like Laurel and Hardy in size and appearance, but there was nothing comedic about the work they did.
“Hey,” Raif said. “It’s Saturday, we should be off, but here we are—working. You know, this may be a democracy but Joe Schmo in the streets gets knocked off and it’s nine to five. Bigelow…well, he was a big cheese. No one is off until we solve this one.” He cast Joe a crooked grin. “At least we can eat light and fit, with you picking up the tab. There’s the problem with heart-healthy. It’s expensive.”
“I’d kill for a fry,” Tom said. His round face was deceptive. He looked so amiable, but in an interrogation room, he was about as amiable as King Kong on steroids.
“So, one day, order some fries,” Raif said.
Tom shook his head. “My wife would kill me.”
“Is your wife here, Tom?” Raif demanded.
“I swear, that woman should be the detective. She’s got surveillance everywhere,” Raif said, shaking his head. “Hell. She’s got eyes in the flipping lettuce, I swear.”
“We’re getting old. Talking about food,” Raif said to Joe.
“The way of the world,” Joe assured him. “Your wife just wants you alive, Tom.”
“Yeah,” he said sheepishly. “Man, this is rabbit food, though.”
Joe nodded sympathetically, and asked, “What’s your take on the Poe angle? Motive or smoke screen?”
“So far?” Raif wiped his mouth with his paper napkin. “So far, we don’t have a hell of a lot to go on. What you saw in the papers is pretty much what we have. I wanted to conceal the note, but there was a leak—not a big surprise, there were uniforms all over the place before we got there. The crime-scene guys had a nightmare, trying to figure it all out. First the son gets there and gets hysterical, then the sister-in-law…and the butler, to boot. Everyone decides they’re going to save him. People calling 9-1-1, med techs all over. It looked like he’d had a heart attack or something.”
“What’s the deal on the butler?” Joe asked.
Raif shook his head. “You think it might be as easy as the butler did it? I don’t think so. He’s a skinny old English guy, and he was totally shaken. His name is Albee Bennet. He was in tears when we interviewed him, and he didn’t know a thing. He has his own little apartment in the building, and he was there napping when it happened. Never saw or heard anything.”
“You believe him?” Joe asked.
“Yes,” Raif said.
“I believed him, too. You know, it’s that sixth sense you get about people after doing this job for so many years,” Tom said.
“So, he was there. And the son?”
“First one on the scene. He’d been out. But he lived there—came and went all the time,” Tom told him.
“What’s your take on him?” Joe asked.
Raif shrugged. “His tears seemed real, too. Young guy, early thirties. We asked around, and it seems he and his dad didn’t have any major problems.”
“The sister-in-law?” Joe asked.
“Mary Vincenzo. His late-brother’s wife,” Tom said.
“You’ll interview her, I’m sure,” Raif said dryly. “But I don’t see it. She’s real thin, one of those nervous types. Wealthy in her own right. The brother left her part of the family fortune already.”
“You should have seen them wiping their lips when they heard it was poison,” Tom commented, shaking his head.
The concept of poison didn’t in the least deter him from his enjoyment of his sandwich.
“Sorry, I just want to hear it beginning-to-end. The med techs were there? How soon did they discover that it was a crime scene, if everyone thought it was a heart attack?” Joe asked.
“Pretty darned quick, thanks to one of the bright boys with fire rescue,” Raif informed him. “He stopped them from moving the body when he noticed it was cold. But, actually, they were right to think it. I mean, say your grandmother or someone in your house dies in the middle of the night, and you call 9-1-1. They’re taught to try mouth-to-mouth. Even if you’re sure they’re dead. Anyway, the body is cold, and this kid is bright. And because it’s an unexplained death, he tells the head guy on his team that they need the cops. The cops come, and then the medical examiner’s office gets out there. Doc Arbitter is on, and he figures out it could be poison in the wine. So at least there’s photo documentation of just about everything. Everything after the family and EMTs have moved everything to hell and gone.”
“So was the note found?”
“Right on his desk. Just one piece of paper among a bunch of others—no one even noticed it at first. Looked like—and forensics proved—it had come right out of his own printer. Computer was dusted, of course, and there weren’t any prints, so it had been wiped down,” Tom told him.
“What was the timing? And why did the sister-in-law show up?” Joe asked.
“The son showed up first to tell his dad it was time to go. And he’d already been to get his aunt. They were all going to some dinner party. The butler didn’t come out until after the son and sister-in-law arrived,” Tom explained.
Raif continued the report. “When the son walked in, it looked like the old man had been drinking his special vintage wine, and then just keeled over.”
“There was just one wineglass?” Joe asked.
“Just one,” Raif said.
Tom waved what was left of his turkey-and-Swiss in the air. “In a nutshell, we think Bigelow was alone. He was due at that dinner party at eight, and he’d been dead about an hour when he was found. He had a visitor earlier, though. He last spoke to the butler around five and told him someone was coming before closing himself into his office. But whoever it was must have come and gone, because Bigelow was drinking alone.”
Joe shrugged. “Either that, or the killer took his wineglass with him. Anyone check to see if a glass was missing?”
Tom flushed and looked at Raif.
“I don’t know,” Raif admitted, reddening.
“No one saw anyone come or go?” Joe asked.
“No one. The chauffeur was waiting for them out in the garage, sleeping behind the wheel, by his own admission,” Tom said. “And, yes, we canvassed the neighborhood. No one saw anything.”
“What about the—the other Ravens?” Joe asked.
“We’ve spoken with them. They all claim to have alibis, but we have a lot of legwork to do, checking them all out.”
“Anything you can tell me about the family?” Joe asked.
Raif looked at Tom.
“Come on, you know I’m licensed, and I’ve been hired by an interested party,” Joe said.
“Yeah, okay. We’ve got some files on the rest of the board. I’ll fax ’em to you,” Raif said. “I’d just as soon you not mention it around, though. Some guys on the force aren’t all that fond of outside interest, you know?”
“I do know. And thanks,” Joe told him. He hesitated, then asked. “What do you think about that woman on TV, the one who claimed to be psychic?”
Raif and Tom exchanged glances again.
Joe groaned softly. “Oh, Lord. You two believed her?”
Tom laughed softly.
Raif’s lips twitched.
“What?” Joe demanded.
“Jerry Grant in vice has picked her up at least three times,” he said.
“For fraud?” Joe suggested.
“Hell, no,” Raif said. “Vice doesn’t handle fraud.”
“He picked her up for prostitution,” Tom said. “I noticed that last night she was going by Lori Star. When the cops picked her up, she was going by Candy Cane.”
“She did say she was an actress,” Joe said dryly.
“Yeah. She’s put on a few innocent acts at the station, all right,” Raif said. “Still, we’re going to talk to her.”
“When?”
“Now, as soon as Tom Turkey here finishes his sandwich,” Raif said.
“Mind if I tag along?” Joe asked.
“What the hell, we’re on your dime today,” Tom said.
Raif was staring at him. “You don’t think it would bother you?” he asked. “Your cousin’s fiancée…that Leslie MacIntyre. She was supposed to be the real deal.”
“I should definitely go. I’ll know the real thing when I see it.”
Sam Latham was an all-around good guy. Thirty-six years old, married and the father of two young children. He worked in the editorial department of one of the major publishers, and he simply loved books, especially mysteries, and joined scholars everywhere in considering Edgar Allan Poe to be the father of the detective novel. Genevieve had met him through her mother, and though she couldn’t say she knew him well, she had always liked him, his wife and their kids, Vickie, eleven, and Geoffrey, fourteen.
When she arrived at the hospital, she expected something more than what she found: a quiet hallway; Dorothy, Sam’s wife, in the room with him; and a woman who introduced herself as his mother, Stella, returning with coffee from the hospital cafeteria.
No cops in the hallways, no one on guard.
Because apparently no one believed that Sam had been the intended victim of a killer. Despite the so-called psychic.
“Genevieve!” Sam said with pleasure, seeing her at the door. He had a cut below one eye, and the bruising that accompanied it, but other than that he appeared to be fine, though the sheets could have been covering other injuries.
“Sam, Dorothy…Mrs. Latham,” she said after introductions were made.
His mother was probably around sixty-five. She had stunning silver hair styled to set off her tiny features. She immediately looked apologetic. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know Sam was expecting visitors. I could have gotten you a coffee.”
“It’s all right, but thank you so much for the thought,” Genevieve said. She’d stopped downstairs for a flower arrangement, which Dorothy came forward to accept.
“How are you?” Genevieve asked Sam, as Dorothy added the flowers to the others filling the room.
“Fine,” Sam said.
“He’s such a liar,” Dorothy said, distressed. “He goes into surgery tomorrow. For his leg.”
“Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry,” Genevieve said.
His mother cleared her throat. “Are you going to be here for a while, dear? I thought Dorothy and I might go grab something to eat.”
“They won’t leave me alone,” Sam said with a groan.
Genevieve glanced quickly at Dorothy, who tried to appear impassive. Apparently Dorothy was more worried than the police were. Maybe she’d seen the psychic on TV.
“I’ll be happy to stay and chat with Sam until you return,” Genevieve said.
His mother flashed her a grateful smile; Dorothy gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Sam,” Dorothy asked, “will you be okay?”
“Honey, go eat. Genevieve will guard me. She has a black belt now.”
Gen didn’t have a black belt. But she didn’t contradict him.
The other two women left, and Genevieve took the chair by the bed. She looked at the IV drip, and the various tubes to which he was attached.
“Well, other than the hardware, you do look good,” she told him.
He showed her a little clicker which had been hidden in his hand. “Morphine,” he said, with a dry grin.
“Wow, Sam, I’m so sorry. It must have been a horrible accident.”
“Yeah. A horrible accident,” he repeated.
“But it was an accident,” she said. “Right?”
He looked at her, as if suddenly realizing she had come for more than a simple visit. “I guess,” he told her. “Genevieve, I didn’t see anything. I was driving along, thinking about a new manuscript we’d just paid a small fortune for, and then…”
She could have chatted a while, talked more about his kids, pretended. But Sam wasn’t about to pretend, so she wouldn’t, either.
“Then…bang.”
“Yep. Then…that sound. That awful impact,” he said, shaking his head.
She inhaled deeply. “Well…you look good,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.
He shook his head. “Genevieve, you’re full of bull. I look like shit. And you’re a nice person, and I’m sure you’d visit me no matter what, but you’re worried because of Thorne Bigelow. You think someone wants to kill all the Ravens. Including your mother.”
She didn’t attempt to deny it. “What do you think?” she asked him.
“I don’t know what to think,” he said. “A couple of people reported a car driving erratically. The cops wanted to know if I had seen it, too.”
“And did you?”
“I didn’t. I was driving, then…wham. I was out. The air bag saved my life—that’s why the bruises. But I was knocked out. The next thing I knew, I was on a stretcher with a microphone in my face while I was being stuffed in an ambulance. And they were shooting stuff into me, and I was grateful, because I managed to break a leg, despite the air bag.”
She nodded, reached for his free hand and squeezed it. “I’m so sorry, Sam.”
“I’m having a tough time seeing how anyone could have planned to murder me on the highway like that. He couldn’t have any idea who he might kill, and he obviously didn’t succeed in killing me, if that was even his plan.”
“That’s true.” She hesitated. “But what if…?”
“What if…what?” Sam pursued.
“What if he didn’t care if he killed a dozen other people at the same time?” she asked.
Lori Star. Candy Cane.
She lived in a rent-controlled building in Soho. When she opened the door to their knock, she kept the chain on as she looked out. Her eyes were wide, hopeful.
“Are you with another news station?” she asked.
Raif shook his head solemnly, showing his badge. “Sorry.”
“Cops,” she said with annoyance.
“Yeah, cops,” Tom supplied.
She stared at Joe. “But you’re not a cop,” she said. Her voice had changed. It had turned low and sexy. Candy Cane, not Lori Star. How did she know? he wondered. Was she really psychic? Was it his manner? Or just a wild guess?
“Mr. Connolly is a private investigator, and he’s with us,” Raif said.
Joe blessed the fact that he’d managed to keep a great relationship with the NYPD.
The woman still had the chain on the door. “I didn’t do anything illegal,” she said defensively.
“We haven’t come to arrest you,” Raif said.
“Then you should go away,” she suggested, and started to close the door.
Joe put out hand to stop it. “Miss Star, we really need to talk to you. Just for a few minutes.”
He was convinced that she didn’t have any extraordinary talents—not paranormal talents, anyway—but he still very much wanted to talk to her.
She stared at him with wide, powder-blue eyes. Then she sighed, closed the door most of the way and undid the security chain.
“Come in,” she told them resignedly.
She was a small woman, thin, but cosmetically “enhanced” in the breast department, and pretty in a hard-edged way. She wasn’t exactly a high-class hooker, but it didn’t look as if she’d hit bottom yet, either. She had blond hair—enhanced, too, but decently done—and small, sharp features. As she let them in, he saw that she was wearing a silk kimono, but beneath it she had on sweatpants and a Mötley Crue T-shirt.
“Sit down, I guess,” she said, indicating a sofa and two chairs in the living area, which was also the dining area and was connected straight to a typical studio kitchen.
He chose one of the chairs across from where she sat on the edge of the couch. Raif took the second chair, so Tom was left to sit next to her on the couch, perching uncomfortably a few feet away. She picked up a pack of cigarettes, shook one out and lit it.
“Do you mind?” she asked. “Say no—this is my apartment, and I can smoke here if I want to.”
“It’s your funeral,” Raif said with a shrug.
“I still like the smell of smoke,” Joe told her, smiling.
She flashed him a smile in return.
“How long have you been a psychic, Miss Star?” he asked politely.
She hesitated, a strange look on her face. “I’m really an actress,” she said.
Tom made a choking sound. She flashed him a cold glare. “I’ve been an extra in three movies now,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” Tom asked. “Did you play a hooker?”
Joe shook his head, tempted to put a bag over the man’s head. Tom was too used to interrogating suspects with whom it was necessary to take a hard line.
In this case, though, a hard line wasn’t what was called for.
“Miss Star, please, we need your help,” he said. He had been ready to dismiss the woman’s claims himself, but something about the way she had looked when he’d asked her how long she had been a psychic had given him pause.
After all, who the hell was he to doubt anyone? He’d thought a corpse had spoken to him from a Gurney at the morgue.
She hesitated, looking at him. “Honestly?” she asked. And at that moment, there was something raw and young and vulnerable about her features that got to him.
She was scared.
“Yes, honestly.”
She looked around at the three of them. “This is off the record, right? You guys have to keep what I say between us.”
“If you know anything about an attempted murder…” Raif began.
She shook her head. “I don’t know anything about an attempted murder. Except for what I saw. In my mind.”
A shadow seemed to pass over Raif’s eyes. From now on, he wasn’t going to believe her. Tom seemed to have withdrawn, as well.
“What did you see, in your mind’s eye, and how did it all happen?” Joe said quickly, before either of the other men could say anything to shut her down.
“I was here. At home. Getting ready for the night.”
Tom made a choking sound again.
Joe flashed him a frown. “Were you here alone?” he asked.
She nodded. Then the words suddenly started spilling out. “I sat down here. Right here. On the sofa, like I am now. I lit a cigarette, and I was going to watch some TV before I went to change clothes. But then…it was so weird. All of a sudden it was as if I was in a car. As if I were really there. I could see the traffic in front of me. I was someone else. And I was gunning for a car. A green Cadillac. I knew the car. I knew where it was, because I’d been following it. It was as if I was me, but at the same time I wasn’t me. It was as if I was a passenger in someone else’s body. Oh, God, it was awful. As if I could feel all this hatred…I—the me that wasn’t me—knew not to hit the car myself, but I’m—he’s—a good driver and could make people swerve and stuff. So I…he…she…I don’t know which…did, and then…wham. Crash. There was metal and glass, and a word in my head….”
She stopped speaking. She was trembling, her face ashen. Either she really deserved her shot at Hollywood, or the fear she was feeling was real.
“Miss Star?”
She looked at him, as if she had forgotten that he was there.
“And the word? What was the word?” Joe persisted gently.
“Nevermore,” she said.
CHAPTER 5
“I’m going to the meeting tonight,” Genevieve told Sam. “No matter what’s going on. I can’t help it—I’m worried about my mother. About all of you.”
“Because of Thorne’s murder,” Sam agreed.
“I know he made plenty of enemies, and the Poe angle could just be the killer’s way to throw people off track, but…well, what did you think of his book?”
“I think it was a good book,” Sam said. “The man could write.” He looked past her for a moment, then turned back to her and asked, “I take it you saw that ‘psychic’ on TV?”
She nodded.
“You believe in psychics?”
“I don’t know what I believe.”
She heard a sound then and turned around.
Joe was there, leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest as he watched her. She swore silently.
“Joe, hi. Come on in,” Sam said.
She rose uneasily. “You two know each other?” she said.
“We met years ago,” Sam said. “Joe and Matt Connolly were cousins.” He stared at her. “But I guess you knew that.”
“I never knew Matt,” she said.
“Oh, right,” Sam said uncomfortably. “Anyway,” he said, “Joe and I actually go way back.”
“A long way,” Joe agreed pleasantly. “So how are you doing?”
“Hanging in,” Sam said. He must have noticed the way Joe looked at Genevieve—as if she had committed a sin—because he looked curiously from one to the other.
She hoped she wasn’t looking guilty. She shouldn’t feel guilty. She hadn’t actually lied to Joe.
As if trying to diffuse the tension, Sam asked her, “So Joe is working for you, right?”
“Yes,” she said, meeting Joe’s eyes.
“She’s an amazing woman. She hires me, but she still likes to do all the work herself,” Joe said dryly.
She forced a tight smile. “I thought I’d drop by to see a friend,” she told him. “You did say you’d been held up.”
“So I did.”
“Hey, Joe, do you know if they’ve questioned all the drivers, trying to figure out who hit me?” Sam asked.
Joe nodded. “Not that it did much good. Apparently, if you’re a crook in this city, you find a dark sedan with mud on the license plate so no one can read the number. A lot of people noticed a dark sedan driving dangerously. Some say it was blue, others say it was forest-green, and one man is positive it was black. What do you say?”
“No idea. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful,” Sam said. “Really sorry.”
Joe moved farther into the room to stand by the bed. “Sam, do you think the driver might have been gunning for you?”
Sam had nice brown eyes. They were intense as he stared at Joe, then Gen. “I’m praying not. I’m praying that someone else didn’t die because of me, and that a dozen people aren’t laid up in a hospital like I am—because of me.”
“Do you think the Poe Killer is after more members of the society?” Joe asked.
“Hell if I know,” Sam said bitterly, shaking his head. “That psychic says so, huh?”
Genevieve expected Joe to say something derisive, but he didn’t. He just waited for Sam to go on.
“My wife is afraid it’s true, though,” Sam said. “Really. Afraid…Oh, God. I’m sorry, Genevieve, I shouldn’t be talking to you about fear.”
There they were. Back to her ordeal once again, she thought. Why wouldn’t people let it rest?
“Sam, please,” she said awkwardly, avoiding Joe’s eyes. She knew he was angry with her for leaving the apartment.
Too bad. He would just have to get over it.
“There are many kinds of fear,” she said to Sam. “And I’m afraid, too. Afraid for my mother.”
“The police haven’t said anything about needing to protect you, right?” Joe said to Sam.
“No. But Dorothy has decided that she wants to hire off-duty officers to guard my room,” Sam said, shrugging. “I honestly don’t know what I think, but God knows, I have time here to try to figure it all out. But if it’s going to make Dorothy happy, I guess it’s fine to bring in some security.”
“That’s never a bad idea,” Joe said, to Genevieve’s surprise. Had he changed his mind on his conviction that Bigelow’s murder had nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe and the Ravens?
Dorothy and Sam’s mother returned just then. They both greeted Joe and spoke with him about hiring private security. He put through a call to a friend, and before he and Gen left the hospital, an off-duty officer was sitting in the hallway.
“I thought you were going to wait at your apartment for me,” Joe said a few minutes later, as they got into his car after dismissing Gen’s driver. He looked at Genevieve and saw that she was blushing slightly. Whatever she said, it would be an excuse, he knew. She obviously felt guilty. But then her chin lifted.
Guilty and defiant, he amended. Ah, yes, that was Genevieve. Then again, that defiance was part of what had saved her life.
“I was staying in and waiting, but then you called and said you’d be late. And I told you I’d find something to do to fill the time.”
“Good one,” he said.
“Hey, Joe, you’re the one who said the whole Poe thing was a smoke screen.”
He groaned. “Whether it is or isn’t, don’t you think you should be a little bit careful for a while?”
“It’s my mother I’m worried about,” she said. “She’s the Raven, not me.”
“Still…”
She gazed at him sharply. “What changed your mind?” she asked.
He was driving, but the traffic was light enough that he was able to look over at her before turning his attention to avoiding a kid on a skateboard who had just swerved into the street.
“Nothing has changed my mind,” he said, knowing it was what he wanted to believe, rather than the truth. To accept the fact that he believed a two-bit hooker—actress—had experienced a genuine psychic vision was more than he was ready to admit.
And yet it appeared, even to him, that it might be true.
After so many years prying into the lives of others, he had a good sense for whether people were lying or not. And Candy Cane, or Lori Star or whatever her real name was, hadn’t been lying.
Not only that, she was scared.
“So…” Genevieve asked, “where are we going?”
He cast a quick glance her way, a slight smile curving his lips. “I thought we should take a self-guided Poe tour. Just a pleasant walk around a few places our long-gone poet might have haunted. What do you think?”
She looked back at him, smiling quizzically herself. “You’ve acquired a new appreciation for the literary life and times of Edgar Allan Poe?”
“Don’t be silly. I’ve always been an aficionado,” he assured her.
Ten minutes later, he found a garage where he could park for a few hours without spending half a month’s rent, and they started walking.
There was something special, almost magical, about Lower Manhattan, he thought. It had nothing to do with Wall Street and all the money that changed hands there, or even the vibrancy of the people who were always rushing around following their own agendas.
Maybe it was magical, he thought, because he had learned to see it through Leslie’s eyes.
New York wasn’t just Wall Street and big bucks, or the egos of celebrities and business moguls. Nor was it any longer the huddled poverty of the thousands of immigrants who had made their way here, first via Ellis Island and now via Kennedy Airport.
It was both, and it was more.
He and Genevieve walked. They toured the area around Lower Broadway, pausing at Trinity Church, looking toward the empty place where the World Trade Towers had once stood, which gave them both pause.
Finally they moved on.
“Are we actually on a thinking tour?” she asked him, curious and amused.
“I’m sorry. Does it feel like I’m just dragging you around aimlessly?” he asked her.
“Hey, I like to walk. Just so long as we’re not walking because you don’t want me going home by myself,” she said.
He couldn’t help but ask, “Is it so bad for someone to be worried about you?”
She looked away. “I don’t want to spend my life being a burden, being someone others have to worry about all the time.”
“Hardly a burden,” he said gruffly.
And so they kept going.
“This has been my home my whole life,” she said, “and I still love being here. I love to go into Trinity and St. Paul’s. I love to go in and look at George Washington’s pew, and wonder what it might have been like when we were a country fighting for its independence.”
He flashed her a smile. “Yeah, cool, huh?”
And amazing.
They were near Hastings House, in fact, near the area where she had been held prisoner underground. He saw no deep-seated bitterness or fear in her eyes, and she had just told him that she had moved on, that she loved this part of town.
Was it true?
Whether it was or not, Lower Manhattan, the area around St. Mark’s, and his small cottage up in the Bronx, were places where Poe had spent time when he was in New York.
“‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne the best I could,’” he quoted aloud.
Genevieve arched a brow at him. “Is that word-for-word?”
“I think,” he said with a shrug.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/heather-graham/the-death-dealer/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Heather Graham
The Poe Killings: A string of homicides is mirroring the author's macabre stories. And Genevieve O'Brien's mother is next. Genevieve knows all about nightmares. She herself survived two months as a psychopath's prisoner. And now this new menace stalks the city.Spooked by the bizarre slayings, she turns to P.I. Joe Connolly, her past rescuer, friend and… hopefully something more, if he would just quit avoiding her. At first Joe isn't even sure there is a case. But the body count rises, and it's clear that a twisted killer is on the loose.Even more unsettling is the guidance he starts receiving from beyond the grave. People he knows to be dead are appearing, offering him clues and leads, and warning of some terrible danger ahead. But can even the spirits stay the hand of a madman bent on murder?
Praise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author HEATHER GRAHAM
“A sinister tale sure to appeal to fans across multiple genre lines.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Death Dealer
“Mystery, sex, paranormal events. What’s not to love?”
—Kirkus Reviews on The Death Dealer
“The intense, unexpected conclusion will leave readers well satisfied.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Dead Room
“An incredible storyteller.”
—Los Angeles Daily News
“A seamless plot and diverse characters…a tasty serial killer subplot.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on The Dead Room
“Graham peoples her novel with genuine, endearing characters.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Séance
“Graham’s rich, balanced thriller sizzles with equal parts suspense, romance and the paranormal—all of it nail-biting.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Vision
“Another top-notch thriller from romance icon Graham.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Island
“There are good reasons for Graham’s steady standing as a best-selling author.”
—Booklist on Ghost Walk
“Graham builds jagged suspense that will keep readers guessing up to the final pages.”
—Publishers Weekly on Hurricane Bay
HEATHER GRAHAM
THE DEATH DEALER
To the New World School of the Arts, especially Ms. Graham, teacher of creative writing and English, who knows enthusiasm is the biggest part of the game; and Mr. Jim Randolph, “The God of Theater,” who keeps himself and his kids real, who knows there’s a big bad world out there but keeps a thumb on caring.
And for Beth Fath, a parent with quiet dedication; and Debbie Benitez, who has helped keep me sane and informed on more than one occasion!
Quoth the raven, “Nevermore!”
—Edgar Allan Poe
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
INTERLUDE
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
It’s not easy being a ghost.
You would think that it would be the most natural thing in the world. There you go—you’re dead. Live with it.
But it’s far more difficult than you would ever imagine.
It begins with why?
Oh, we all know the theories. A death by violence. Something left undone. Someone to be protected, someone to be warned—someone to be avenged.
Vengeance? Once you’re a ghost? Great stuff.
But that wasn’t my situation. My killer perished split seconds before the light of life faded from my own eyes. It wasn’t that I hadn’t loved life—I had. There were those left behind whom I cherished deeply.
The great love of my life, Matt Connolly, had gone before me, however. And he was there to greet me when I arrived.
“Crossed over,” as they say. Except there’s the thing—you haven’t actually crossed over. You’re existing in a vague and shadowy world where, often, you see something truly horrible about to take place—and you don’t have the power to stop it.
I’d known something of what would occur. I had almost died before. I had felt the power of the light that beckons—an invitation to heaven? I don’t know the answer to that yet.
Because that time I lived. And this time I stayed.
As a ghost.
And I know that I’ve remained behind for a reason, though I haven’t a clue as to the specifics. But at least, unlike some, I’m pretty sure I do have a purpose.
I’ve come across many of my kind who are far more lost than I am, having had a strange relationship with them after my near-death experience and before I departed the life of flesh and blood. There’s Lawrence Ridgeway, Colonel Lawrence Ridgeway, a charming fellow, with his perfectly trimmed beard and mutton-chops.
Sadly, he can’t accept the fact that the Civil War has been won. He was a brave soldier who came to New York during the terrible draft riots of the eighteen-sixties. No matter how often I try to explain things to him, he’s forever keeping guard over his long-gone prisoners. Matt, too, has tried to point out to him that there are no prisoners present, but poor Colonel Ridgeway simply can’t accept that fact. I’m afraid he’s doomed to haunt one particular hallway here in Manhattan’s historic Hastings House forever, a sad and tragic figure who’ll never find closure.
Marnie Brubaker died in childbirth. She’s a sweet and charming creature, and she loves the children who pass through the house. Children tend to be more open than adults to visits from my kind. Marnie likes to play games with the little ones. When they’re falling asleep on a parent’s shoulder, she sings lullabies. Every once in a while, one of them gets scared by her presence and screams bloody murder, which puts her into a funk for weeks to come. All she wants is to offer is love and comfort, but some people, even kids, just don’t want solace from a ghost.
There are those, like Colonel Ridgeway, who will go on repeating their last action over and over again. Then there are those who learn to move around the physical worlds. Passing through walls. Appearing and disappearing at will. Moving objects. The truth of it is, we ghosts can learn to do all kinds of things, so long as we have the will, the patience and the stamina.
I was the victim of a killer who first took the lives of others, before he took mine. But there’s no pain in my world, especially not for me. Because Matt’s here with me, and that’s really all that matters. He died the night of my almost-death, and he stayed behind to warn me. To save me. But my salvation wasn’t to be. In the end, I died to save Genevieve O’Brien. And so far, at least, I’ve been successful. But as a social worker, she’s one of those people who won’t rest in her quest to help others, and that can put her in danger sometimes.
Then there’s Joe Connolly, Matt’s cousin. He’s a private detective and a super guy. A tough guy.
But no one’s so tough that he can defy death. Life’s not like the movies. Most of the time, the bad guys can aim, so Joe can use some protection, whether he knows it or not.
I believe Matt and I have stayed on because of either Joe or Genevieve. Or maybe both. It’s our job to make sure they—and maybe others—stay safe.
Nope, being a ghost isn’t easy. In fact, it’s damn hard work protecting people when most of the time they can’t even see you and don’t think they need protection, anyway.
Take Joe. He has a thing about going to the graves of the people he couldn’t save—including Matt’s and mine. Sometimes he brings flowers. Sometimes he just sits in deep thought. And sometimes he talks. Then he looks around, hoping that he hasn’t been overheard. I imagine that it would be difficult to obtain new clients if word got out that he was insane. But everyone out there has his own way of coping with loss. For Joe, it’s talking to people at their grave sites.
That’s how we became involved in the Poe Killings.
And that’s how Joe became involved with Genevieve again.
She was a child of privilege, but even after she’d almost lost her own life, she couldn’t stop herself from investigating problems.
Including murder.
CHAPTER 1
The crash occurred on the FDR. Strange thing, Joe had just been driving along Manhattan’s East Side and thinking it was amazing that there weren’t more accidents on the busy—and outdated—highway when, right in front of him, a crash caused the car a few lengths ahead of him to slam into someone else. The sounds of screeching tires, shattering glass, grating steel and several massive impacts were evidence that the domino effect had come into play. Someone almost stopped in the aftermath of the first collision, but then that car was pushed into the next lane, and the driver coming up didn’t have time to stop. He slammed into it hard and careened into the next lane. The car that hit that driver bounced over the median and into the oncoming traffic going south.
Joe somehow made it off to the side, threw his car into Park and hit 9-1-1 on his cell phone. He reported what he saw and his position, dropped the phone and hurried out to help.
The car that had caused the initial crash was fairly far ahead of him, but there was a line of disabled vehicles stretching back from it almost to where he was.
The people in the car closest to him were fine, and so were the people in the next vehicle, and the driver of the third probably had nothing more than a broken arm.
The smell of gas around the car that had hopped the median was strong, though—a bad sign.
People had stopped all around, talking, shouting, while other drivers were trying to get around the wreckage no matter what.
“Hey, it’s going to blow up!” someone called to Joe as he approached the car. He lifted a hand in acknowledgment but kept going. He wasn’t a superhero, he’d just worked lots of accident scenes when he’d been a cop, and an inner voice was assuring him that—death-defying or not—he had time to help.
The car was upside down. There was blood coming from the driver’s head, which was canted at an awkward angle. The man’s eyes were closed.
“Hey. You have to wake up. We’ve got to get you out of there. I’m going to help you,” Joe told him.
“My niece,” the man said. “You’ve got to help my niece.” He grabbed Joe, his grip surprisingly strong.
“Trish,” the man said.
Then Joe saw the little girl. She was in the back. Not really big enough for the seat belt, she had slipped out of it and was on the roof—now the floor—with silent tears streaming down her face.
Joe said with forced calm, “Come on, honey. Give me your hand.”
She had huge, saucer-wide blue eyes, and she was maybe about seven or eight and just small for her age, he decided. “Trish,” he said firmly. “Give me your hand.”
He sighed with relief when she did so. He managed to get her out, even though she had to crawl over broken glass on the way. As soon as he had her in his arms, someone from the milling crowd rushed forward.
“Get the hell out of here now, buddy!” the man who took the child told him. “The car is going to blow.”
“There’s a man in the car,” Joe said.
“He’s dead.”
“No,” Joe said. “He’s alive. He talked to me.”
Joe was dimly aware that the air was alive with sirens, that evening was turning to night. He was fully aware of the fact that he didn’t have much time left.
Flat on his stomach, he shouted to the man who had taken the child from him. “Get them back—get them all back!”
“Trish?” the man in the car said.
“It’s all right. She’s out. She’s safe. Now, get ready, because I’m releasing your seat belt. You’ve got to try to help me.”
He did his best to support the guy’s weight after he released the seat belt, but it was a struggle. An upside-down crushed car didn’t allow for a lot of leeway, especially when it was about to explode.
But he got the man out. He could only pray that he hadn’t worsened his pain or any broken bones.
“Help me!” he roared, once he had the man away from the car.
The same Good Samaritan who had taken the child came rushing up. Together, they started to half drag and half carry the man from the wreckage.
Just in time.
The car exploded, flames leaping high over the FDR. They would have been easily seen over in Brooklyn, and probably even halfway across Manhattan.
The blast was hot and powerful. He felt it like a huge, hot hand that lifted him, the victim and his fellow rescuer, and tossed them a dozen feet so that they crashed down hard on the asphalt.
Joe rolled, trying to take the brunt of the impact, knowing he was in far better shape to accept the force than the victim of the crash.
For a moment he didn’t breathe, since there was nothing to breathe but the fire in the air.
Then he felt pain in almost every joint, and the hardness of the road against his back. He became aware of the screams around him, which he hadn’t heard before; the blast had sucked all the sound out of the air along with the oxygen.
“You all right, buddy?” he asked the man who had helped him.
“Yeah—you?”
“Fine.”
The next thing he knew, there was a young EMT hunkered down in front of him. He tried to struggle up.
“Take it easy. Don’t move until we’re sure you haven’t broken something, sir,” the med tech said.
“There’s nothing broken. I’m good,” Joe told him. “The guy who helped me—”
“He’s being taken care of.”
“The man in the car—I think he was hurt pretty bad,” Joe said.
“We, uh, we got it,” the med tech told him. “And,” he added gently, “the girl is fine. Everyone’s already talking about how you saved her life.”
“Great, good,” Joe said. “But the man needs—”
“Sir, I’m sorry to tell you, but he’s dead.”
“I thought he had a chance.”
The med tech was silent for a minute. “You did a good thing,” he said very softly. “But that man…he died on impact, sir. Broken neck.”
“No—he talked to me.”
“I think maybe you hit your head, sir. That man couldn’t have spoken to you. I’m sure his family is going to be grateful you got the body out, but he’s been dead since the first impact. Honest to God. It was a broken neck. He never suffered.” As he spoke, the med tech got a stethoscope out; apparently he wasn’t taking Joe’s word that he was okay.
Joe had his breath back. He pushed the stethoscope aside and sat up, staring at the med tech. What did the kid know? He wasn’t the coroner.
“He was alive. He spoke to me. I wouldn’t even have seen the girl if he hadn’t told me she was in the car.”
“Sure.”
Joe knew damned well when he was being humored. “I’m telling you, I’m fine.”
He knew the EMT was all good intentions, but he was just fine—except for this kid trying to tell him that the man had died on impact.
“Sir, let me help you,” the med tech said.
“You want to help me? Get me the hell out of here,” Joe told him. “Fast.”
“Just let me get a stretcher.”
“Sure,” Joe said, figuring anything that would get the guy out of the way was fine.
As soon as the med tech went off for a stretcher, Joe took a deep breath and made it to his feet. Damn, it hurt. Well, he’d been pretty much sandblasted when he skidded down on the roadway, and he wasn’t exactly eighteen anymore.
He saw that there was no way in hell he would be leaving the scene in his own car. But it wasn’t blocking anyone, so the thing was just to start walking, to get away.
He did. It was easier than he’d imagined, but then, he was walking away from a scene of chaos, and everyone’s attention was on the wreck, not on one lone pedestrian. He could hear voices—most alarmed and concerned, some merely excited—surrounding him as he escaped the scene. More and more cop cars and ambulances passed him.
He headed south along the shoulder, and at last he followed an entrance ramp down to the street, where he hailed a taxi. The driver didn’t even blink at his appearance. Hey, this was New York.
He suggested a route to Brooklyn that didn’t involve the FDR.
He got home eventually, where he showered and changed, then went out into his living room and turned on the television, looking for the local news.
The accident was center stage.
“Twelve were injured and are being given care in various area hospitals,” the attractive newscaster was saying. Her face was grave. “There was one fatality. Adam Brookfield was killed when his car flipped over the median. The medical examiner reports that Mr. Brookfield died instantly, though a heroic onlooker, who fled the scene, carried the man’s body from the automobile just instants before the car exploded. That same man rescued Mr. Brookfield’s six-year-old niece, Patricia, who is doing well at St. Vincent’s Hospital, where her parents are with her.”
The woman shifted in her chair to look into a different camera. The somber expression left her face. She smiled. “This weekend, we welcome the All American Chorale Union to Kennedy Center, and for those of you with tickets, remember that tonight’s the night for the special showing of ancient Egyptian artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All those pricey meal tickets will pay for more archeological research right here in New York. And now…”
Joe no longer heard her. He was irritated.
That man, Adam Brookfield, had been alive; he had spoken to Joe. It was bull about him dying on impact. He couldn’t have spoken if he’d been dead.
Joe glanced at his watch. It would be hours before he could reasonably go for his car, which meant it would probably be towed anyway. Screw it.
He had been on his way to attend tonight’s fund-raiser at the Met when he’d gotten sidelined by the accident, but now he decided he no longer cared. He was heading to Manhattan and a bar that had become one of his favorites.
“Congratulations, she’s just beautiful, Senator,” Genevieve O’Brien said to Senator James McCray and his wife. They had been showing her pictures of their new grandson, Jacob. She had done the right thing, “oohing” and “aahing.”
Frankly, the baby looked like a pinhead at the moment. As bald as a buzzard. Squinched up and…newborn.
But the senator was a supporter of the Historical Society, and had a paid great deal for his meal and a walk through the museum. Naturally she was going to say all the right things about his grandchild. Of course, if she’d met him on the street, she still would have said the same things, she realized.
She damned digital cameras.
The senator had not had just one picture but at least a hundred.
“You need to get married and have children yourself, young lady,” James McCray said.
His wife elbowed him. She’d suddenly gone pale.
Genevieve sighed and tried not to show her feelings in her expression, but she was so weary of this. Anything that so much as hinted of sex was considered taboo around her. She’d been the victim of a maniac who’d been stalking New York’s streets and targeting prostitutes, the same prostitutes Gen worked with. Everyone knew what she’d been through and that it was a miracle she was alive.
She had stayed alive because she had realized quickly that her attacker was actually incapable of sex. She had played on his own psychological makeup, providing the bolstering and ego boosts that he needed, and though she had been a prisoner and abused, she wasn’t suffering as shatteringly from the experience as the world seemed to think she should be. If she faced an inward agony, it was knowing that someone incredible, her friend Leslie MacIntyre, had died.
“I would love to have children one day, Senator, Mrs. McCray,” she said cheerfully. “When the right person to be a dad comes along. You enjoy that beautiful baby. But now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to see to a few things.”
Yes, she needed to see to an escape.
She walked quickly into a side hall, opened only for the convenience of the Historical Society, which was hosting the event. There was a bench, and she sat on it.
He hadn’t shown.
She let out a sigh, wondering why she had even thought Joe would show up. He was a fascinating guy, intrigued by almost everything in the world. He hadn’t come from money, but if anyone out there knew that money really wasn’t everything, it was her. Joe was one of those people who lived life, and he’d done well enough for himself. He could look like a million dollars in a suit. Definitely a striking guy.
And her friend, she thought.
When he wasn’t avoiding her.
She smiled to herself. If she was in trouble, if she needed rescuing, he would be right there. Thing was, she didn’t need rescuing. And she didn’t want to need rescuing, either.
Her smiled faded.
She did want help.
She had hoped he would show tonight because she wanted to ask him about the current worry dogging her life.
A murder.
The media had dubbed it the Poe Killing, because the victim, Thorne Bigelow, had been president of the New York Poe Society, a readers and writers group whose members studied the works and life of Edgar Allan Poe, and called themselves the Ravens, and the killer had left a note referring to the famous author.
She looked around the room. Most of the members were involved with things that were considered either literary or important educationally in the city of New York. There were several of the Ravens here tonight; like her own mother, they also supported various groups interested in history and archeology. Among them she noticed newspaper reporter Larry Levine, who had come to cover the event. Then there was Lila Hawkins—brassy and outspoken and very, very rich. Quite frankly, she was obnoxious, but she did do a lot of good things for the arts in the city. Just a few minutes ago, Gen had seen Lila with Barbara Hirshorn, another Raven and the complete opposite of Lila; Barbara was so timid, she had difficulty speaking to more than one person at the same time.
She had noted that even Jared Bigelow had made a brief appearance with Mary Vincenzo, his aunt, on his arm. He was gone now, and she hadn’t had a chance to speak to him. He had shown up just to support the cause tonight; he was still in mourning for his father.
From her seat on the bench she could hear the booming voice of Don Tracy, the one Raven who’d taken Poe to the masses. He was an actor, a good one, even if he’d never become a household name. He loved the stage and had performed Poe’s works on numerous occasions.
None of them seemed to be frightened by the note that had been found with Thorne’s body.
Thorne Bigelow had been a very wealthy man. A well-known man. And though murder happened all too often, it was the sad truth that a murder with a hook—like a victim who was regularly in the headlines and a mysterious note making reference to a long-dead storyteller and poet—intrigued the media more than most deaths did.
It was only happenstance that Thorne Bigelow had been a very rich Raven. The Ravens didn’t demand that a member be wealthy, published on the topic of Poe’s life and works or world-renowned, though sometimes they were. Thorne Bigelow had written a book on Poe that was considered to be the definitive work on the man. Bigelow was honored far and wide for his knowledge.
And he had been poisoned. Poisoned with a bottle of thousand-dollar wine.
He loved wine, perhaps even to excess. And he had died of it.
À la Poe.
“The Black Cat.”
Or perhaps “The Cask of Amontillado.”
The killer didn’t seem to have been too precise about which story he meant Bigelow’s death to parallel. He had made his intentions clear in the note he’d left at the scene, though.
Quoth the raven: die.
The police were pretty much at a standstill, though why the media were harassing them so strongly about the case, Genevieve wasn’t certain. Thorne Bigelow had only been dead a week. She knew from personal experience that bad things could go on for a very long time before a situation was resolved. If it hadn’t been for her family’s wealth and her own disappearance, the sad deaths of many of the city’s less fortunate might have gone unsolved for a very long time.
But Bigelow was big news.
“My darling, there you are!”
Genevieve looked up. Her mother—it was still strange to call Eileen Mother, when she had grown up believing that she was her aunt—was standing before her. Eileen, only in her early forties now, was stunning. Her love for Genevieve was so strong—not to mention that without her persistence, Genevieve would surely be dead now—that it was easy to forgive the lies of the past. Especially since Genevieve knew what family pressure was like, and that her mother had been far too young to speak up for herself when Gen had been born.
But Eileen Brideswell had finally decided that a New York that embraced reruns of Sex and the City would surely forgive her a teenage, unwed birth. What she might once have been damned for now passed without notice by most in the city.
And after all, Genevieve had loved Eileen all her life.
“Here I am,” Genevieve said cheerfully.
“He didn’t show,” Eileen said.
“No.”
Eileen hesitated. She was very slim, and had classic features, the kind that would make her just as beautiful when she turned eighty as she was now. But at the moment, her expression was strained.
“What?” Genevieve asked, suddenly worried by what she saw in her mother’s eyes.
“There was a terrible accident on the FDR.”
Genevieve leapt up. “When? Joe uses—”
“About an hour ago. The reports are just coming out now. One man was killed—don’t panic, it wasn’t Joe—and a number of other people were injured.”
Genevieve sat back down and fumbled in the pocket of her black silk skirt for her cell phone. “That bastard better answer me,” she muttered.
“Joe Connolly,” came his voice, after three rings.
She could hear music in the background. An Irish melody. He was at O’Malley’s, she thought.
“Joe, it’s Genevieve.”
“Hey. You still at your big soiree?” he asked.
“Yes. I thought you were coming.”
“I couldn’t make it past the traffic.”
She let out a sigh. All right. That might be a legitimate excuse.
“Ah.”
“I’m at O’Malley’s.”
“Yes, it sounded like O’Malley’s.”
He was silent. It felt like an awkward silence. Was she being too clingy? Good God, did she sound disapproving, as if she were his wife or something?
Stop, she warned herself. She had to be careful of expecting too much from him. It had seemed, after she was rescued, after Leslie had…died, that they were destined to be close. The best of friends, needing one another.
But then it was as if he had put up a wall.
She gritted her teeth. She needed him now. Cut and dried. Needed his professional help. He was a private investigator. Finding people, finding facts, finding the truth. That was what he did. And she needed to hire him. She wasn’t asking any favors.
“Well, have fun,” she said.
She clicked the phone closed before he could reply.
Eileen looked at her. “Don’t worry, dear.” Her mother sat down beside her and patted her knee. “It’s all going to come out fine.”
“Mom…” The word seemed a bit strange, but Genevieve loved to use it. “Mom, I’m worried about you now. You’re a Raven, and…”
Eileen sighed. “Oh, darling, don’t worry. I’m a fringe member, at best. Poor Thorne. I like being a member, I love all the reading and discussing we do, but…honestly, I’m just not worried.”
“Mom, he was murdered.”
“Yes.”
“By someone who apparently wasn’t impressed with his work on Poe.”
“And I’ve never written a book,” Eileen assured her.
Genevieve sighed, rising. “But you are a Raven.”
“Along with many other things.”
“Can’t help it. I’m worried about you. Henry is driving you home, right?”
Eileen frowned. “Yes, of course. What about you? Are you leaving, too?”
“I’m going to drop by O’Malley’s.”
“Oh.” Eileen frowned worriedly.
“I’ll be all right,” Genevieve assured her. “I’m in my own car, but I know where to park. I’ll let security see me out and I won’t leave O’Malley’s without someone to walk me to my car. Okay? I’ll be safe, I promise. Hell, I think they ask your approval before they hire anyone at O’Malley’s.”
Eileen laughed, but there was a slight edge to it. “I do not tell them who they can and can’t hire. I’ve simply always enjoyed the place, and I’m a friend of the owners.”
“And I’m safe there,” Genevieve said very softly.
Eileen still appeared worried, Gen thought. Then again, these days she was worried every time Genevieve was out of her sight.
But Genevieve had gone back to living in her own apartment. Not that she didn’t adore Eileen or love the mansion. She just loved simplicity—and her independence.
It was sadly ironic that they both seemed to be frightened for each other these days, just when they had become so close.
She couldn’t help worrying about Eileen in the wake of Thorne’s murder, though. Eileen was a Raven, and though the police discounted the idea, it seemed to Gen that Thorne had been killed specifically because he was a Raven, not just because he was a published Poe scholar.
Admittedly, it was quite likely the book that had brought him to the killers attention, and it was true that Eileen had never written a book. She had way too many charities and women’s clubs to worry about to devote much time to being a Poe fan.
Still, the connection made Genevieve uneasy, and she wanted Joe involved.
That was it, cut and dried.
Or was it so cut and dried?
Maybe she was lying to herself; maybe she wanted to see Joe for personal reasons, too. God knew there was enough about him that was easy to see. He was intelligent, funny, generous and a little bit rough around the edges. Sexy and compassionate. A hard combination to resist.
And he was in love with a dead woman.
She tried to dismiss the thought. She and Joe were just friends precisely because of what had happened. They had seen one another through the hard times and come away good friends.
Yes, she had a multitude of emotions raging within her where Joe was concerned. But what was becoming a growing fear for her mother’s safety was the driving force in her desire to see him now.
She rose, kissing her mother’s cheek. “I’ll be at O’Malley’s. I’ll call when I’m leaving, and I’ll call when I get home, all right?”
Eileen flushed, then nodded. “Did you enjoy the exhibit?”
Genevieve nodded. “I think we raised a lot of money. I think Leslie would have been happy.” Leslie, who had been either gifted or cursed with extraordinary powers, had been an archeologist. She had loved history; she had revered it. Tonight had been planned in her honor, and they were going to use some of the funds raised this evening to respectfully reinter some of the bones Leslie had dug up on her last dig, the one that had ended up costing her life.
Genevieve dropped another quick kiss on her mother’s cheek, then hurried out.
The night was a little cool, making her glad she had chosen a jacket rather than a dressier stole. Not so much because it was warmer, but because it would fit in a hell of a lot better at O’Malley’s.
The attendant brought her car, and in minutes, she was taking the streets downtown. As she drove, she turned on her radio.
She was in time to catch the news, and the topic was that evening’s accident on the FDR, which was still being sorted out. There were brief interview snippets with several of the survivors, and Gen sat up straighter, alarmed, at the sound of one name.
Sam Latham.
CHAPTER 2
Sam Latham.
Another Raven.
Coincidence?
How many millions of people were there in the city?
Gen frowned as the newscaster went on to talk a bit about the man that had been killed, though she was relieved to hear that his young niece had been saved by a man who had left the scene after rescuing the little girl and pulling her uncle’s body from the car moments before the explosion that had destroyed it.
Joe?
How many millions of people in the city? she taunted herself.
No way.
That would be too much of a coincidence.
But Joe should have been on the FDR right around that time, on his way to the Met.
As she neared O’Malley’s, she noticed a number of people on the streets and was grateful to see that the lights in the area were bright. Maybe she was more spooked by what had happened to her than she’d thought. She parked, pleased to find a spot right outside the bar.
At the door, she hesitated.
She’d been coming here what felt like all her life. It was an authentic Irish pub, and her family was authentic New World Irish. This was pretty much the first place she had come after she was rescued, and it was one of the few places where she had felt truly comfortable, one of the few places where people hadn’t stared, where she hadn’t felt as if she needed to describe her ordeal in detail, so that people would save their pity for the dead women and not waste it on her.
She wasn’t uncomfortable about going into O’Malley’s.
She was uncomfortable about confronting Joe.
What if he was with a woman? He might not have skipped the Met just because of traffic.
Then she would sit at the bar, have a soda and chat with the bartender. She didn’t know who was on, but whoever it was, she would know him. Just as she would know a dozen of the old-timers who came here. Guys who had long since retired. Perhaps they had lost their wives, perhaps they’d never been married, but they liked to come to O’Malley’s. It was comfortable. The beer was good, the food was tasty and the prices were reasonable.
No matter what was up with Joe Connolly, she would be fine.
She pushed open the door.
Joe wasn’t with a date. At least, she didn’t think so. He was leaning against a bar stool, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened.
“Hey, Joe.” She walked over to him.
Joe was a regular at the pub, too. She knew that he spent a lot of time here because he liked it. Because the beer was good, and the food was tasty and the prices were reasonable. But it was still more her place than his, she told herself. Even if he fit in just fine.
He was playing darts with Paddy O’Leary and Angus MacHenry. Regulars. Neither one of the octogenarians really drank much. She usually found them drinking soda, water or tea—hot Irish breakfast tea, always with sugar and milk.
She greeted both of them as she got closer.
The older men paused to kiss her cheek and offer her giant smiles. “Y’ doin’ okay?” Angus demanded.
“On top of the world,” she assured him.
“Y’ sure, lass?” Paddy demanded, searching out her eyes.
“I’m just fine.”
She’d been saying the same thing for a year now, but with Angus and Paddy, it was all right. They asked after her every time they saw her, took her word that she was doing fine and moved on.
Joe threw his dart. It was just shy of a bull’s-eye. He walked over, and also offered a hug and a kiss on the cheek. It was awkward, though. As if he were simply going through the expected motions.
They were friends, she told herself. Like she was friends with Paddy and Angus.
Except that Paddy and Angus could have been her great-uncles, while Joe was young and straight and pretty much the perfect man.
Too damned perfect.
“Aren’t you supposed to be up at the museum, girl?” Paddy asked.
“I was at the museum,” she said. “Now I’m here.” She smiled to take any sting out of the words.
“Ah, a great night, eh?” Angus asked, rubbing his white-bearded chin.
“It was a very good night,” she agreed. Then she hesitated. “I need to speak with Joe,” she said. “I don’t mean to mess up your game or anything.”
“Ah, don’t be silly, child,” Paddy told her.
“Get on over there with the girl, Joseph Connolly,” Angus said cheerfully. “Ye can knock the socks of the both of us old geezers later.”
Joe arched a brow, but he didn’t complain; he just reached for his jacket and said, “Certainly, gentlemen. I’m delighted to speak with Genevieve. At any time.”
His words were polite, almost gallant, but then, Joe was always polite. It seemed to come naturally to him.
But he seemed distant. He indicated an empty booth, and she took a seat. He sat across from her and ordered “another beer” as soon as the waitress arrived. Gen asked for a soda and frowned. Joe had apparently had a few drafts already.
“Are you driving?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “Nope. Don’t worry. I came by subway. You know me.”
Do I? she wondered.
“So how was the party?” he asked her.
“Great. I actually think you would have enjoyed it.”
He shrugged. “I’m sorry. I intended to come.”
She nodded. “My mother wanted to see you.” Oh, that was horrible. Laying a guilt trip on him when she knew how much he liked Eileen.
“How is she?”
“Fine. Not as worried as I think she should be.”
He arched a brow. “Ah. The ‘Poe Killing.’”
“You don’t appear to be too concerned, either.”
Again, he shrugged. It bothered her that he seemed so distracted. “I wish I could lose sleep over every terrible thing that happened, but I can’t. We all need to keep a certain distance. It’s the key to sanity and survival.”
“I want you to take the case.”
He drummed his fingers on the table for a moment. “Gen,” he said softly, giving her his attention at last, “your mom isn’t one of the key players in that organization. She doesn’t write about Poe. Hell, she belongs to a zillion clubs, most of them trying to make the world a better place. I can’t see her as a target.” His argument was rational, and the same one Eileen had given her.
“You can’t know that,” Genevieve said.
He inhaled, looking off into the distance. “Gen, I’m thinking about heading out to Vegas.”
She was stunned, and upset that his sudden announcement hurt her so badly. Sure, he was tall. Rugged, handsome. Frigging charming, even.
But she had led a life that didn’t include a lot of wild dating, and that was by choice. If she had wanted…well, there had been plenty of willing men out there, if for no other reason than that she was rich. She had just thought that…
She shook her head. “Fine. Move to Vegas,” she said with a shrug. “But take this case first.”
“Gen, I’m willing to bet this murder was committed by someone who just wanted to kill Thorne—the Poe angle was just a convenient smoke screen.”
“Prove it.”
He looked away for a moment.
She leaned forward urgently. “Joe, did you know that Sam Latham was driving the first car that got hit in that accident on the FDR today?”
“What?” He looked at her with a frown.
“Sam Latham. He’s a member of the New York Poe Society, another Raven.”
“And I’ll bet that at least two-thirds of the other people involved were all members of some society or other. We’re social creatures. Usually,” he added.
She shook her head, irritated. “Joe, the New York Poe Society is not a huge group. The local membership is pretty small. Both Thorne Bigelow and Sam Latham are…were on the board. As is my mother.”
For a moment, at least, that seemed to pique his interest.
“Joe, there are only nine other board members, and two are Bigelow’s family members. Jared, his son, and Mary Vincenzo, his sister-in-law. Then there are Brook Avery, Don Tracy, Nat Halloway, Lila Hawkins, Larry Levine, Lou Sayles and Barbara Hirshorn. There were twelve in all, but Thorne is dead. And now Sam is in the hospital.”
“Genevieve…it was an accident. I’m sure I don’t know Poe’s stories as well as the Ravens do, but since he died in the middle of the nineteenth century, I don’t think any of his characters murdered anyone with a car. Somebody was probably driving recklessly, might have been drunk, might have been an asshole, but it was an accident.”
“Or maybe the driver was pretending to drive recklessly, but he was really trying to hit Sam.”
“No,” he told her firmly. “I saw it, and it was an accident.”
“You saw the whole thing?”
He hesitated. “I saw a lot of it.”
“A lot of it?”
He didn’t answer her at first. It was as if he hadn’t even heard her. He was frowning, as if he were deep in thought. “Joe?”
“I told you, I saw most of it. And before that…before that, I saw the guy who probably caused it. He could have hit any car on that highway. He was driving like a maniac.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
“A saw a car weaving through traffic, and my instinct was to stay the hell away from it. Genevieve, I’m not a traffic cop.”
He was irritated, which surprised her.
“What did the car look like?” she asked.
He shook his head, still looking irritated. “Some kind of sedan. Black, dark blue, maybe dark green.”
She wasn’t sure why, but she was certain he was angry with himself, and not with her.
Because he should have noted the car. He should have known the exact color, make and model. He should have gotten the license plate. He was an ex-cop, and in his own mind, he thought he should have done all those things, because the driver had ended up killing someone.
“It was you!” she exclaimed suddenly.
“What?”
“It was you.” She knew it beyond a doubt, without need for verification. Oh, yeah. It sounded just like Joe, saving a life, then walking away. The man hated the limelight.
“I was not driving drunk!” he said indignantly.
“I’m not talking about the driver,” she said.
A curtain seemed to drop over his eyes, along with a lock of his wheaten hair.
“What was me?” he asked warily.
“The missing hero.”
He waved a hand in the air, his gray-green eyes as expressionless as steel.
“What are the odds? I’m not sure myself. Eight million who live in the city, how many million more when the work force is at its peak? During rush hour—”
“It was you,” she said. “There were eyewitnesses, and you’ll be identified eventually.” She saw his hand where it lay on the table and grabbed it. He winced. She turned it over. There was a big scrape mark on his palm.
“Look, I really don’t want a media frenzy. You understand that.”
“Yes, I do,” she said quietly. Life could be so odd. She had met Joe when he and Leslie MacIntyre had discovered the horrible pit in the subway tunnel where she had been taken after she’d been kidnapped by the monster who’d been stalking the streets of Lower Manhattan. His other victims had wound up dead. Leslie had been killed in the showdown.
Joe had been devastated.
But that day he and Genevieve had formed a certain bond. Maybe because they were both broken in a way.
Genevieve wasn’t certain if she had made it through because she had been smart, because she had stroked the killer’s ego or only because her instinct for survival had been desperate and strong. She had relied on herself in the awful days when she had been a prisoner, and in the aftermath she had created a block against those memories.
What had been harder to handle had been the press. Finding the right words to say at all times. Her uncle—who had raised her as his own child—had been a fierce taskmaster. She had been born to privilege, and he had taught her to be responsible. He had made her tough, had expected her to work hard and then harder.
After the rescue, she had been treated as if she were as fragile as a thin-shelled egg, though she had told the truth about her ordeal. Even so, rumors had found their way into the press that were more horrible than anything she’d been through, and for much too long she had been an object of pity. She appreciated that people could be compassionate, but she loathed being pitied, loathed the possibility that she might end up in the papers again.
She looked at Joe. “But it was you, on the highway, who saved that child, right?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Joe, my voice is down.”
“I won’t be able to work if this gets out. Come on, please. Don’t say anything to anyone.”
She lowered her head, smiling. Leave it to Joe. It was all about the work. She forced the smile to go away. “Take this case, Joe.”
He groaned. “Are you blackmailing me?” he demanded.
Her smile deepened. She hadn’t thought of that, but it wasn’t a bad idea. “Maybe. Now, come on, I’ll drive you home. It’s late.”
“No, but I’ll see you home.”
“Joe, you’ve had a few.”
“I meant that I’ll drive with you to your place and take a cab from there.”
“I’m okay, Joe. I carry Mace now, and I can take care of myself,” she said firmly.
Hmm. She was touchy, she realized. Friends saw friends home all the time.
Maybe being defensive was a good thing if he thought that he needed to look after her. She definitely didn’t want his pity or to have him as a guardian. She was tough enough to take care of herself. She had proven it. She had survived. And she meant to keep doing so. She had thrown herself into self-defense classes, and she spent hours on a treadmill, getting fit.
Running.
As if she could outrun the past.
“I know you can take care of yourself, but I’d still like to see you to your place. And I’d like you to promise you’ll keep your mouth shut about me helping out at the accident,” he said firmly.
“Joe, I’ll keep my mouth shut. And you can see me home,” she told him gravely, “if you promise to take on the case.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so afraid, Gen. Really. I simply don’t believe your mother is a target.”
“Joe…” She hesitated. She didn’t know herself why she was so concerned. Her mother hadn’t been a close friend of the dead man. Eileen and Thorne had been casual acquaintances, at best, brought together only by their membership on the board.
But she was scared. Bone-deep frightened. It was something that had just settled over her, and she wouldn’t be comfortable until the killer was caught.
“Please. The cops aren’t getting anywhere.”
“Give them time.”
“In time,” she told him, even though she herself had been thinking earlier that the press should cut the cops some slack, “somebody else could die.”
He lifted his hands, staring at her, shaking his head.
“Eileen hasn’t been threatened in any way, has she?”
“No.”
“Genevieve…” He lowered his head for a moment, then shook it again. “Gen, it’s only been a week, which is no time at all. You’ve been watching too much television. A murder like Thorne Bigelow’s isn’t solved in a one-hour episode.”
“I know that,” she said sharply.
“Then…”
“Joe, this is what you do for a living. I want to hire you.”
He sighed. “I’d be stepping in where people are hard at work already. I don’t know that I could find out anything new.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe you could do something. Before somebody else gets killed. That’s just it, Joe. Someone else could die.”
It was strange, but just then Kathryn, their waitress, came by, her eyes wide. “Man, what a night for the bizarre!”
“Why? What happened?” Genevieve asked.
Joe was studying Kathryn with apprehension.
The waitress shook her head. “There’s always one in every crowd, you know? Someone who just has to stick their nose in and make a tragedy worse.”
“What are you talking about?” Joe asked.
“The psychic,” Kathryn said.
“What psychic?” Joe demanded.
“Go look at the television,” Kathryn said disgustedly. “There’s a reporter talking to her right now, actually. Just turn around and you can see. It’s that Robert Kinley, and he’s with some so-called psychic named Lori Star, who claims that some guy named Sam Layman or Latham or something was supposed to die in the accident, and that it was the Poe Killer behind it.”
“How could she know that?” Joe asked, his expression darkening.
Kathryn shrugged. “She said she just knows it. And she says she knows more, too.”
“See?” Genevieve said.
“Oh, please!” Joe said.
“Joe, I’m telling you, it makes sense. That’s why I’m afraid,” Genevieve pressed.
“She is convincing,” Kathryn admitted. “She says that in a few days, someone else will die.”
“A Raven?” Genevieve breathed.
“She didn’t say. Just go watch. All she said was that the Poe Killer will murder someone else.”
Genevieve slipped out of the booth first, but she was quickly followed by Joe.
The woman, who was at the accident scene talking to the well-known anchor, was attractive enough. She just seemed to be slightly…rough around the edges. Her voice was clear, though, and her grammar was good. She didn’t have an identifiable accent.
She also seemed to know how to play to the camera. She was direct and dramatic, without overplaying her cards. “It’s true,” she whispered to the camera, wide-eyed.
“Most people would say that’s impossible,” the anchor told her. There was slight scoffing in his voice. Nothing direct. He was too professional for that.
“It was as if I were there,” the woman said. “As if I were driving.”
“And you said that you felt heat and anger?”
“Yes. It was as if I were someone else, and I could feel that person’s feelings.”
“Were you a man or a woman?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But as I said before, I do know this. It was the Poe Killer. And I know this, as well. He, or she, intends to kill again—soon.”
“Thank you, Miss Star.” The anchor turned his full attention to the cameras. “Truth or fiction? What’s in store for New York? Well, first things first. The police are busy cleaning up the FDR, and it’s going to be a long ride home for anyone on that highway tonight.”
Another anchor picked up from the studio, and Genevieve turned to look at Joe, but he was already turning away.
“Kathryn, I’ll take another beer, please,” he called.
CHAPTER 3
Before he even opened his eyes, Joe winced.
His head was pounding.
What in the hell had made him drink so damned much beer? He hadn’t even gone for the hard stuff, which he should have. No, he had just started inhaling the beer because of…
The accident.
It was ridiculous. He’d seen lots of accidents. He should have felt good; a little girl had been saved because of him.
But he didn’t feel good.
He felt unnerved.
Because a dead man had spoken to him.
And things hadn’t gotten any better after that.
A psychic. A self-proclaimed psychic solving the whole damned thing while somehow not solving anything at all.
Lori Star? Like hell. She might as well have called herself Moonbeam.
He went ahead and groaned, thinking that voicing his pain might make him feel a little better. It didn’t.
Hell, no. Because he’d awakened thinking.
And all he could think about was the fact that a dead man had spoken to him, and then, as if that hadn’t been bad enough, the news had dragged a damned psychic out of the woodwork. She knew, she just knew, that the driver of the car had been after Sam Latham.
No, they hadn’t dragged her out of anywhere. She’d come forward, claiming to be eager to help the police.
She couldn’t identify the car, of course. Because it was as if she had been the one driving it. She had been in his would-be head as he—or she—went after Sam Latham’s car. And then she’d finished up with the dramatic revelation someone else would be murdered within days.
Later newscasts had delved into the truth about the woman, but too late for him. Genevieve had looked at him with her huge blue imploring eyes. And he’d known right then that he was on the case.
Though he dreaded it. Dreaded it. And he didn’t know why, other than that it had something to do with that freakin’ psychic.
It had turned out that Lori Star was an aspiring actress, as well as a supposed psychic. No wonder she’d been so good in front of the camera. But there would be those out there convinced that it was no act, that she was right, that the accident had been no accident.
Even if she was right—and he sure as hell didn’t see how she could be—he was sure that all she had done was look at a few facts and take a lucky guess. She was definitely not a psychic. She just wanted her fifteen minutes of television fame.
And he was so angry because…
Because he had known Leslie. And he hadn’t believed in her at first, when she claimed to talk to the dead. But she had been legit.
And this girl sure as hell wasn’t.
He opened his eyes. He wasn’t at home, but he already knew that. He was at Genevieve’s. She hadn’t let him take a cab; she’d insisted he stay on her couch. Lacking both the will and the physical coordination to find a cab willing to go to Brooklyn at that hour, he had shrugged and agreed. And fallen asleep. Or passed out. One or the other.
He’d been doing all right last night, considering what he’d gone through with Leslie and her ability to commune with the dead, until that damned psychic had shown up on television. And then he’d started calling for the beers hard and fast.
Now, of course, he was ashamed of himself. Only cowards drank because they’d been spooked. And what a fool he’d been, besides. As far as talking to a dead man went, there was surely a logical explanation for what had happened. One, maybe the EMT had simply been wrong and Brookfield hadn’t died on impact. Or maybe, as Freud might have suggested, Joe had created the man’s voice as a tool to tell him to look for survivors in the car. There. That made sense—so long as he didn’t think about the fact that his inner voice had known the girl’s name.
And the fact that Lori Star was an annoying fraud seeking the spotlight. Well, hell, that made sense, too. She was just trying to get work.
So here he was, having had way too much to drink, sleeping on Gen’s sofa. It was a nice one, too. Antique, but restuffed and reupholstered. She loved things that were old and had a story. She and Leslie would have been great friends.
The thought made him wince and shut his eyes.
When he opened his eyes again, his face lined with tension, she was there.
Gen, not Leslie.
Thank God he was seeing the living, at least.
That caused a moment’s guilt to trickle down his spine. Leslie…I would love to see you. Your face…
But that wasn’t really true. He didn’t want to see ghosts.
No problem. This was Gen in front of him, and she didn’t seem to be judging him for his night of imbibing, even if she probably didn’t understand it.
He didn’t intend to explain.
Let her think that it was because he had been a witness to such an awful accident, or because he could have died when the car blew up.
“Good morning,” she said gravely, handing him a glass and a couple of aspirin.
He looked at her, arching a brow.
“Trust me,” she said. “They work for a hangover.” She shrugged. “And no, I don’t spend my life fighting hangovers. A lot of people thought I’d wind up on drugs or alcohol after the kidnapping, and this was a tip my doctor gave me.”
“Thanks,” he said briefly, swallowing the pills with the glass of water she’d provided.
He didn’t really want to look at Gen. He felt too much like the dregs of humanity to want to face her.
There wasn’t anything not to like about her, of course. Genetics had made her beautiful—Eileen, at forty-plus could still turn heads. Gen had the same perfect features, perfect skin and more-than-perfect build. She had rich auburn hair that looked more lustrous than silk and more wicked than sin. And her eyes…
Just saying they were blue didn’t do them justice. They were the blue of the infinite sky, the blue of the deepest sea. Blue that could hint at darkness, blue that spoke of wisdom, even though she was only twenty-odd years old.
They were eyes that had seen a lot. The child of privilege, she had wanted to help those who hadn’t been born with silver spoons in their mouths. She hadn’t jetted around the globe, hobnobbing with the rich and useless. She had gone to school, gotten a degree and gone into social work.
She had survived for weeks in the underground lair of a psychotic killer.
She was strong. She was…
She was alive because Leslie had taken the bullet meant for her.
He pushed that thought from his mind. Genevieve sure as hell hadn’t wanted that to happen, and he knew it. And Leslie had been gone nearly a year now. He liked to think that she was back with Matt, at last, but he didn’t really believe it. He could have sworn that he had once seen them together on a little rise in the cemetery where they were both buried.
Again, Freud would have helped him out.
He had seen them there because he wanted to see them there.
“You should feel better soon,” Gen told him, breaking into his morose thoughts.
Better than he deserved, she might have said.
But of course, she didn’t.
He leaned back, studying her. She was already up and showered, smelling both fresh and subtly exotic, rich tendrils of her amazing hair curling over the casual black sweater she was wearing over jeans. He noticed her hands—delicate, refined, manicured, but not fussily so; she kept her nails filed and polished, but at a reasonable length. And she wasn’t encrusted with jewels; she wore a simple claddagh ring on her left middle finger, gold studs in her ears and a plain cross around her neck.
She could easily have covered herself in furs and diamonds. Instead, she didn’t even buy designer sunglasses; he knew because she had laughingly told him once that she seemed to lose a pair a week, so it made sense to buy them off the street vendors.
And in fact, she knew the streets.
Once upon a time she hadn’t been regularly recognized. Despite her family’s wealth, she’d kept far from the public eye and worked for a pittance helping to get prostitutes off the streets.
What the hell was not to like about her? he asked himself silently, wondering why the question left him feeling so irritable.
“I’m all right,” he said gruffly.
She grinned, looking away. “Right. Real men don’t get loaded on too much beer.”
He groaned aloud and started to rise.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Look, I know that what you saw must have been really terrible. I can’t even imagine,” she assured him.
Couldn’t she? he wondered.
Dead was dead.
Did it matter if death came with gallons of blood, mangled steel and mangled flesh? Or a neat little bullet hole that left a person looking as if she were at peace, merely sleeping.
She had seen enough, he thought.
And she had somehow risen above it all.
He felt even more like a lout, if that were possible.
“You have every right,” he agreed.
“That woman was a jerk,” she said. “Lori Star? I doubt it. I don’t know where she was getting her information, but I’m sure she’s not in touch with helpful spirits or anything like that.”
The way Genevieve looked at him, he knew that she was thinking about Leslie, too. She had known that her kidnapper had been determined to kill Leslie; she’d been at the top of his list.
Because Leslie had known things. She had seen things. He wasn’t certain that psychic was the word to describe her, but whatever she’d been, she’d been for real.
He waved a hand in the air. “Hey, I was a horse’s ass last night, and it was inexcusable,” he said.
“No, once you weren’t so angry, you were kind of cute.”
Kind of cute? Great. Just what he’d always wanted to be. A kind-of-cute drunk.
“Well, thanks for your forgiveness. And your couch.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“I need to get going.”
“Joe, there’s a meeting tonight,” she informed him, her eyes somber.
“A meeting?” Heaven help him, did she think he needed AA?
“Of the—the Ravens.”
He looked at her quizzically. “On Saturday night? Date night?” His tone was mocking; he was stalling her, he knew. “Must be a wild bunch,” he said.
“Joe, we’re going.”
“No.”
“Joe, you promised last night that—”
He lifted a hand. Damn, she was persistent.
“I said I’d take the case,” he told her. “And I’ll go to the meeting. But you aren’t going.”
“Of course I am!” she said indignantly.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Genevieve—”
“My mother is going to be there, Joe. There’s no way I’m not going to be there, too.”
He fell silent. What the hell was the matter with these people? If they all believed that Thorne Bigelow had been killed because he was a Raven, wouldn’t anyone sane think that perhaps they shouldn’t meet until the killer had been apprehended?
“It’s just stupid for them to be meeting,” he snapped.
“Stupid or not, it’s happening,” Genevieve said. “Besides, you’re the one who said that the whole Poe thing is a smoke screen.”
“I said it could be a smoke screen.”
“That…woman said that another Raven would be dead in a matter of days.”
“Gen…” He winced, lowering his head. He wasn’t sure if he was feeling the temple-pounding headache of a killer hangover, or a sense of mixed anger and dread. Gen was surely the most stubborn human being he’d ever met. She was like pit bull on behalf of the underdog or any cause she believed in. She rushed in where the sane wouldn’t go.
But he wasn’t angry with her, only upset that people liked to play so casually with the fears of others by claiming to know the future.
He lifted his chin, eyes on fire, and pointed a finger at her. “I said I’d take the case, and I will. But you’ll listen to me.”
“I always listen to you, Joe,” she said softly. That unnerved him.
Oh, yeah, she listened, in a perfect case of point noted—and rejected.
“Joe, honestly, I have to go tonight.”
“And you think the Ravens are just going to discuss some favorite masterpiece by Poe?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure they’ll talk about the murder.”
“We’re not members. Are you sure they’ll let us in?”
“Members are always free to bring guests. It’s simply a matter of paying for their meals. And can you imagine anyone trying to tell my mother that she’s not welcome to bring her daughter and a friend?”
Gen had a point. Eileen had the power to open a lot of doors.
He stood up. The world didn’t rock. A shower would fix him, he decided.
“All right, I’m going home, but I’ll be back in time to go to the meeting with you. And you’ll stay here until I come back for you.”
“Joe…” She said his name in a soft whisper, accompanied by a weary sigh. “I am not a hothouse flower. I’ve been taking care of myself in the city for some time now. I do not intend to stay cooped up in my apartment all day.”
He arched a brow. “It’s a really nice apartment.”
She flushed. It was a nice apartment. She lived here because of Eileen; the building was supposed to have the best security system in the city.
“Joe—”
“Give it a rest, Gen. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Depending on traffic,” he added dryly, wondering how long it would take to reclaim his car at the impound lot.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. If we’re going to this meeting, let’s do a little Poe research first, huh?”
She stared back at him, a slow smile curving her lips, a light entering her eyes.
Damn, she was a beautiful woman.
“Oh, Joe, that’s great!”
She leapt up and threw her arms around him. Her scent was intoxicating, and the feel of her warm body as she crushed herself against him was like a taste of heaven.
He unwound her arms and stepped back. “You, uh, you stay here till I get back, promise?”
She looked at him with a frown.
“Just this morning, Gen, please? Until I get a handle on this.”
“I’m not a Raven. It’s my mom we’re worried about, remember?”
“Gen?”
“Yes, fine.”
He started out.
“Joe? You don’t have your car,” she reminded him. “You can take mine. It’s in the garage.”
He was certain that the garage fee in this building was probably more than most Americans paid for an apartment. But he couldn’t take her car. It was time to rescue his own.
“I’ll just grab a cab for now.”
“I can call you a car—”
“And I can run out to the street and snag a cab. I’ll be back soon,” he promised.
Genevieve didn’t mind spending a few hours in the apartment. In fact, she loved the apartment and liked killing time there. What she did mind was being told that she needed to stay somewhere, anywhere, even though she knew that she should be grateful she had friends who cared.
At least he intended to involve her in the investigation, although he definitely wasn’t happy about how things had played out last night. He was never happy if he wasn’t in control. Not so much of others, but he was the kind of man who wanted to be in control of himself at all times, and getting drunk was anything but.
Restlessly, she paced the room. The morning would go slowly. She was sure of it.
She put a call through to her mother, just to say hello and tell her that she and Joe would be taking her to the meeting that night.
“I’m afraid it won’t be much of a meeting,” Eileen warned. “All they’ll do is talk about poor Thorne.” She hesitated at the other end of the line. “I suppose a lot of them are frightened, after what that psychic said.”
“But you’re not,” Genevieve chided.
“Of course not.” There was another slight silence, then a gasp. “Oh, Genevieve! Perhaps you shouldn’t come.”
“Mother, stop.”
“But, darling, after all you’ve been through, do you really want to be around a bunch of people talking about murder?”
“After all I’ve been through, I take great delight in going wherever I choose to go.”
“But—”
“We’ll pick you up at six-thirty,” Genevieve said.
“Genevieve, I can get there by myself.”
“We’ll pick you up at six-thirty,” Gen repeated.
“At least you’ll be with Joe,” Eileen said.
“Right. At least I’ll be with Joe,” Genevieve agreed, though she was more than a little irritated by her mother’s words. Even her own mother felt she needed protection.
Genevieve rang off and wandered over to her desk, where she brought the front page of the paper up on her computer, curious to see if anything new had been written about Thorne’s murder.
The headline and the main story were on the accident that had taken place on the FDR. She read the story, then clicked a link and watched the video that had been taken by a chance onlooker. Unfortunately, nothing in the story or the video told her anything that Joe hadn’t.
Genevieve drummed her fingers on the desk. Sam Latham had been in that accident.
And so had Joe.
She hesitated, then picked up the phone again. This time she called St. Vincent’s.
Sam was in a regular room and able to see visitors.
Again she hesitated. Then she glanced at the clock. She could get to St. Vincent’s and back in plenty of time. She wouldn’t take her own car. She would have Tim, the morning security guard, call for car service, and the driver could just wait for her while she was at the hospital. She could be back in no time.
Even as she made the arrangements, she felt guilty.
She told herself that she didn’t owe anyone anything, that she was a free woman who could come and go as she pleased. Even so, she felt guilty.
After all, she’d promised.
But it was broad daylight, and she needed to see Sam Latham.
But she had promised.
As her mind warred with itself, the phone rang. She was going to let the machine get it, but she heard Joe’s voice and picked up.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he returned. “Listen, I forgot I had an appointment. I’ll be a few hours longer. Is that okay with you?”
“I’m sure I can fill the time somehow,” she told him.
“Okay. Let’s say I’ll be back around two or two-thirty.”
“Perfect,” she told him.
Okay, so she still felt guilty. But, really, the promise had been made during the last conversation, when he wasn’t going to be gone nearly so long. That had to make it null and void. She had said that she would find a way to fill the time, and she would.
She left her apartment, making sure to lock up, and hurried to the elevator.
If he’d been blindfolded, he would have known where he was.
No matter how much antiseptic was used, no matter what kind of air filtration was in place, a morgue smelled like a morgue.
Even in the entry rooms.
Joe was grateful to be in good standing with the police. He didn’t even need to show his credentials when he arrived; Judy, at the desk, knew him well.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he said.
“Hey, handsome.”
“You’re too kind.”
She was a big woman, round and rosy-cheeked, fiftysomething and always pleasant. She was the perfect person to meet the public in such a place.
“Hey,” she said, laughing. “The living always look handsome to me.”
“Ah, shucks, be careful or all these compliments will go to my head.”
“Better be careful—your head could swell up like a balloon if I really got going,” she teased. “But you’re not here to flirt.”
“No. Judy, ’fraid not. I need to know who was on the Thorne Bigelow autopsy.”
“Oh, that was Frankie.”
Not many people could have used such a casual reference. Frankie was Dr. Francis Arbitter, one of the most renowned members of the medical examiner’s office. He was a down-to-earth guy, but his expertise had earned him a reverence over the years that made most people speak of him with awe.
“Is he available?”
“I’m sure he’ll see you.”
A phone call sent him through the double doors and down the hallway to autopsy room number four.
Francis Arbitter was alone. There was a corpse on a Gurney, but a sheet covered the torso and limbs. There was a huge gash on the head of the middle-aged, bearded man who lay there, but there was no sign of blood. The body had been washed for the exam that was about to take place.
Frank was at his desk, munching on what appeared to be a ham and cheese on rye. “Joe!” he called with a smile, and he rose. He was a tall, well-muscled man who looked like he should have been playing fullback instead of solving mysteries at a morgue. But his tousled, thinning hair and Coke-bottle glasses gave him a little bit of the mad-scientist look that was more befitting to his chosen calling.
“Sit, sit,” he said, drawing up a chair from behind one of the other clinically clean desks in the room.
Joe took a seat. He’d been in plenty of morgues, but he never became as accustomed to working with the dead as Frank, who got right to the point.
“If you just wanted to shoot the breeze, you’d have called to meet for a beer somewhere. So what’s up? I’m guessing it’s the Thorne Bigelow murder.”
“Good deduction,” Joe said.
“Well, speaking as Dr. Watson here, I’d have to say I learned something from Holmes,” Frank said shrewdly. “You’ve worked for Eileen Brideswell before. She knew Thorne, so I assume she intends to use her resources to help the police find the murderer. After all, she has a lot at stake.”
Joe decided not to correct him and explain that he wasn’t working for Eileen but had been pretty much forced to take the case by Genevieve. He wasn’t surprised that Frank had made the assumption that his appearance had to do with the case, but he was surprised that Frank seemed to think that Eileen had a lot at stake.
He nodded, watching Frank. “Yes, I’m here about Bigelow.”
“His son picked up the body the other day. Personally. What with the Bigelow money, he certainly didn’t have to do it, but the kid came in here crying like a baby. Well, hell, he’s not a kid, really. He’s got to be about thirty.”
“I guess you never get so old that you don’t feel the loss of a parent.”
“No.” Frank shrugged. “I talked to him. He’s on the warpath himself, wants to know who killed his father, and why.”
Joe stared at Frank, and Frank grinned and shrugged.
“Okay, you and I both know that the Bigelow money and power drew lots of enemies. But, hey, I’m not a cop. I turn over my findings, and the cops take it from there.”
“And what did you find?”
“That the man’s love for a good glass of wine did him in.”
“So his wine was definitely poisoned?”
“Definitely. He hadn’t eaten in hours. From the timing, I got the impression he was probably about to go out for dinner. That it was the aperitif before the meal.”
“What was it?”
“Rosencraft 1858. A very rare burgundy,” Frank said.
Joe almost smiled. “I meant the poison.”
“Arsenic.”
“I thought arsenic poisoners usually dosed their victims more slowly?”
“Arsenic poisoning was popular in the past. Centuries ago. People got sick, and eventually they died. But a large dose is just as effective—and quicker.”
“Was there anything else? Any sign of a struggle? Bruises, gashes, defensive wounds?”
“Not a thing,” Frank told him.
Joe was silent. Frank shrugged. “‘Quoth the raven—die.’”
“There’s nothing about poisoning in ‘The Raven,’ is there?”
“No, but there is in both ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’”
“I do the autopsy, Joe. That’s it. After that, I let the cops do their work.”
“Who caught the case?” Joe asked.
“Raif Green and Thomas Dooley. They’re both good guys. Neither one is green. They’ve been working murders together for almost ten years.”
“Yeah, I know them both,” Joe said. He knew them well, and he liked them both. That was a relief. Neither was the type of hothead to get antsy because a P.I. was on the case. They were both workhorses who had come up through the ranks, seen everything, grown weary and kept at it anyway. Good cops, they were constrained by the department’s budget and tended to be pleased when someone like him could throw some private citizen’s funds at a case.
“There’s a break for you,” Frank said.
“Yeah, thanks, I’ll give Raif a call. I know him best,” Joe said as he rose. “We’ll have to grab a beer soon, Frank. I don’t want to keep you from your work now, though.”
“Don’t worry. Old Hank isn’t going to get any deader,” Frank told him.
Joe glanced over at the body on the Gurney. If it weren’t for the gash, “Old Hank” could have been sleeping.
“A fall?” he asked skeptically.
“Oh, yeah. You bet. He fell right into his buddy’s broken-off whiskey bottle.”
“Sad,” Joe said.
“It’s always sad,” Frank said. “That’s the thing—death is sad. Except…”
Curiously, Joe turned back to him. “Except?”
Frank shrugged. “Every once in a while, I get someone in here who was dying of cancer or something. I cut them open, and it’s horrifying what disease does to them on the inside. But on the outside, hell, sometimes it’s as if they’re actually smiling. Like death was a release from god-awful pain.” He shrugged. “You get used to it. Then again—hell, you should know this—you never get used to it. And if you did, you’d suck at your job.”
“Dr. Arbitter?”
A young woman was standing in the open door.
“Connie?” Frank said.
“They need you in reception.”
“Be right back,” Frank told Joe.
Joe started to protest. He needed to get going. But Frank had already gone to see to whatever business had summoned him away.
Joe looked over at the body, and suddenly the corpse’s head turned, and the grizzled old man opened his eyes. Hey, you. Yeah, you, buddy. You can see me, and you can hear me. You tell Vinny I said fuck you! You tell him he’s going to get his. He can get that crack-freak friend of his to pay his bail, but he’s going to go down out on the streets. You tell him. He ain’t going to have a moment’s peace. You tell him, you hear me? Damn you, you hear me?
Joe felt frozen, staring at the corpse.
This was bullshit.
It was all in his mind.
Hell, he must have had even more to drink last night than he’d thought.
The door behind him swung open again. He spun around. Frank had returned, muttering. “With all today’s technology, these clerks still can’t spell. Who the hell mistakes the word breast for beast?”
Joe looked back at the body.
It was just a corpse again.
Old Hank couldn’t get any deader.
“Joe? You all right?” Frank asked. “Hell, man, you’re as white as if you’d seen a ghost.”
Joe forced a laugh. “Like you said, Frank. Old Hank can’t get any deader. I take it the cops have whoever did this to him?”
“Dead to rights. A low-life drug dealer. Not that Hank was your model citizen. He bought it during a barroom fight with a guy named Vincent Cenzo.”
He’d just had to ask, Joe thought.
“So, Joe. I’m sorry, where were we?” Frank asked.
“Finished,” Joe said, offering his hand.
“Beers are on me,” Frank said as they shook.
“Sounds good. See you soon.”
“You bet. You need anything else, don’t hesitate to call.”
Call. Yup. Next time, he would just call.
“See you, Frank. Thanks.”
He felt like a swimmer who had seen a shark and needed to stay calm. He tried like hell not to go running out of the autopsy room.
He managed to push his way through the doors like a normal person, then walked quickly down the hall. He even managed a goodbye and thanks for Judy at the desk.
Then he burst out into the light of day and joined the throng of people rushing around in the Saturday afternoon sunshine.
He was almost running…
And then he stopped.
Because there was no way for a man to run away from his own mind.
What a beautiful day.
He walked and walked, wishing he had a hat to tip to passersby. It was nearly summer, but the usual heat and humidity weren’t plaguing the city today. No rain clouds marred the heavens. No unhealthy miasma hung around the buildings, and a pleasant breeze swept through the giant forests of concrete and steel. It was simply a perfect day.
He visited St. Mark’s Square, where he paused, thinking that politicians, stars, geniuses, men of letters, heroes, patriots and enemies of the state had once walked this way. He closed his eyes and imagined a long-ago city.
What a beautiful, beautiful day. It was just good to be out. To love New York. To love the world.
To bask in pleasure.
Someone walked by him with a boom box blaring, gold chains making a strange clanking sound against the plastic casing. The man’s arm sported a tattoo.
Ah, yes. The gangs of New York. Ever present. Then and now.
A little Yorkie passed him, yapping shrilly. He was tempted to kick the tiny beast into the traffic. Instead, he paused and said something complimentary to the dog’s pudgy owner, who blushed and chatted. He moved on quickly then, afraid she was going to try to give him her phone number.
He passed a police officer strolling his beat, and nodded a greeting. The officer nodded and smiled in return.
As he walked at a leisurely pace, he passed an electronics store. A giant plasma screen took up most of the display window. The news was on, so he paused to watch.
His heart was filled with glee. He longed to laugh aloud. Instead, he watched gravely as other people grouped around him on the sidewalk.
The entire city was still pondering the death of Thorne Bigelow.
Philanthropist.
Icon.
Brilliant man of letters.
Like hell!
Bastard. Braggart. Glutton. Idiot.
“What a horrible way to die,” someone said.
“It’s that book he wrote. He was killed because someone didn’t like his book on Poe,” a young woman said solemnly.
Her boyfriend slipped an arm around her shoulders. She was hugging something that looked like a mop. Maltese, Pekinese, some kind of “ese.” What was it with people and their obnoxious little dogs ruining his Saturday morning?
“It could have been anything,” the boyfriend said. “I mean, the man was a billionaire.”
The man was a bag of hot air. Gas. He was one big fart.
“Tragic,” he said aloud.
The boyfriend was shaking his head. “Did you know that one of the guys who got hurt in that pileup on the FDR was some friend of Bigelow’s?”
The girl shivered. “And that psychic said somebody else is going to die.”
“Think psychics really know the future?” he asked, turning to the couple.
“Oh, yes,” the girl said, and turned to look at him. Maybe a little too closely. “There are real psychics out there. People who see things. Who knows if that woman, that Lori Star, is really one of them, though. I mean, I never heard of her. She hasn’t written a book or anything. Anyway, it’s all so tragic, don’t you think?”
“Tragic,” he repeated, shaking his head.
And he moved on somberly, his head lowered.
His grin wide.
Yes, it was a beautiful day.
His grin suddenly faded.
It was bull. There weren’t really people out there who could see the future, who had second sight, who could share experiences as if they were in another person’s body and just…know things.
Were there?
He kept walking, pensive.
Maybe it wasn’t such a beautiful day after all.
CHAPTER 4
“Thanks, guys, for taking the time to meet me,” Joe said.
They were at Gino’s Salads and Sandwiches, near One Police Plaza.
Times had changed. Once upon a time, Raif Green would have been wolfing down a hamburger anywhere that served up hot, greasy food. Tom Dooley would have chosen corned beef on rye.
But, as he had discovered when he called Raif, Tom Dooley had suffered a heart attack two years ago. No doughnuts for these cops anymore.
Raif had opted for the Greek salad, while Tom was nibbling his turkey, low-fat Swiss, lettuce and tomato on wheat, as if by taking small bites he could make the sandwich last longer.
Thomas Dooley was a big man. He’d lost weight since Joe had seen him last, but he was still six-four and just shy of three-hundred pounds. Raif wasn’t really all that small or thin—five-ten and one-eighty, maybe—but next to Tom Dooley, he looked like a midget.
Both men were in their early forties.
Both still had their hair.
They were like Laurel and Hardy in size and appearance, but there was nothing comedic about the work they did.
“Hey,” Raif said. “It’s Saturday, we should be off, but here we are—working. You know, this may be a democracy but Joe Schmo in the streets gets knocked off and it’s nine to five. Bigelow…well, he was a big cheese. No one is off until we solve this one.” He cast Joe a crooked grin. “At least we can eat light and fit, with you picking up the tab. There’s the problem with heart-healthy. It’s expensive.”
“I’d kill for a fry,” Tom said. His round face was deceptive. He looked so amiable, but in an interrogation room, he was about as amiable as King Kong on steroids.
“So, one day, order some fries,” Raif said.
Tom shook his head. “My wife would kill me.”
“Is your wife here, Tom?” Raif demanded.
“I swear, that woman should be the detective. She’s got surveillance everywhere,” Raif said, shaking his head. “Hell. She’s got eyes in the flipping lettuce, I swear.”
“We’re getting old. Talking about food,” Raif said to Joe.
“The way of the world,” Joe assured him. “Your wife just wants you alive, Tom.”
“Yeah,” he said sheepishly. “Man, this is rabbit food, though.”
Joe nodded sympathetically, and asked, “What’s your take on the Poe angle? Motive or smoke screen?”
“So far?” Raif wiped his mouth with his paper napkin. “So far, we don’t have a hell of a lot to go on. What you saw in the papers is pretty much what we have. I wanted to conceal the note, but there was a leak—not a big surprise, there were uniforms all over the place before we got there. The crime-scene guys had a nightmare, trying to figure it all out. First the son gets there and gets hysterical, then the sister-in-law…and the butler, to boot. Everyone decides they’re going to save him. People calling 9-1-1, med techs all over. It looked like he’d had a heart attack or something.”
“What’s the deal on the butler?” Joe asked.
Raif shook his head. “You think it might be as easy as the butler did it? I don’t think so. He’s a skinny old English guy, and he was totally shaken. His name is Albee Bennet. He was in tears when we interviewed him, and he didn’t know a thing. He has his own little apartment in the building, and he was there napping when it happened. Never saw or heard anything.”
“You believe him?” Joe asked.
“Yes,” Raif said.
“I believed him, too. You know, it’s that sixth sense you get about people after doing this job for so many years,” Tom said.
“So, he was there. And the son?”
“First one on the scene. He’d been out. But he lived there—came and went all the time,” Tom told him.
“What’s your take on him?” Joe asked.
Raif shrugged. “His tears seemed real, too. Young guy, early thirties. We asked around, and it seems he and his dad didn’t have any major problems.”
“The sister-in-law?” Joe asked.
“Mary Vincenzo. His late-brother’s wife,” Tom said.
“You’ll interview her, I’m sure,” Raif said dryly. “But I don’t see it. She’s real thin, one of those nervous types. Wealthy in her own right. The brother left her part of the family fortune already.”
“You should have seen them wiping their lips when they heard it was poison,” Tom commented, shaking his head.
The concept of poison didn’t in the least deter him from his enjoyment of his sandwich.
“Sorry, I just want to hear it beginning-to-end. The med techs were there? How soon did they discover that it was a crime scene, if everyone thought it was a heart attack?” Joe asked.
“Pretty darned quick, thanks to one of the bright boys with fire rescue,” Raif informed him. “He stopped them from moving the body when he noticed it was cold. But, actually, they were right to think it. I mean, say your grandmother or someone in your house dies in the middle of the night, and you call 9-1-1. They’re taught to try mouth-to-mouth. Even if you’re sure they’re dead. Anyway, the body is cold, and this kid is bright. And because it’s an unexplained death, he tells the head guy on his team that they need the cops. The cops come, and then the medical examiner’s office gets out there. Doc Arbitter is on, and he figures out it could be poison in the wine. So at least there’s photo documentation of just about everything. Everything after the family and EMTs have moved everything to hell and gone.”
“So was the note found?”
“Right on his desk. Just one piece of paper among a bunch of others—no one even noticed it at first. Looked like—and forensics proved—it had come right out of his own printer. Computer was dusted, of course, and there weren’t any prints, so it had been wiped down,” Tom told him.
“What was the timing? And why did the sister-in-law show up?” Joe asked.
“The son showed up first to tell his dad it was time to go. And he’d already been to get his aunt. They were all going to some dinner party. The butler didn’t come out until after the son and sister-in-law arrived,” Tom explained.
Raif continued the report. “When the son walked in, it looked like the old man had been drinking his special vintage wine, and then just keeled over.”
“There was just one wineglass?” Joe asked.
“Just one,” Raif said.
Tom waved what was left of his turkey-and-Swiss in the air. “In a nutshell, we think Bigelow was alone. He was due at that dinner party at eight, and he’d been dead about an hour when he was found. He had a visitor earlier, though. He last spoke to the butler around five and told him someone was coming before closing himself into his office. But whoever it was must have come and gone, because Bigelow was drinking alone.”
Joe shrugged. “Either that, or the killer took his wineglass with him. Anyone check to see if a glass was missing?”
Tom flushed and looked at Raif.
“I don’t know,” Raif admitted, reddening.
“No one saw anyone come or go?” Joe asked.
“No one. The chauffeur was waiting for them out in the garage, sleeping behind the wheel, by his own admission,” Tom said. “And, yes, we canvassed the neighborhood. No one saw anything.”
“What about the—the other Ravens?” Joe asked.
“We’ve spoken with them. They all claim to have alibis, but we have a lot of legwork to do, checking them all out.”
“Anything you can tell me about the family?” Joe asked.
Raif looked at Tom.
“Come on, you know I’m licensed, and I’ve been hired by an interested party,” Joe said.
“Yeah, okay. We’ve got some files on the rest of the board. I’ll fax ’em to you,” Raif said. “I’d just as soon you not mention it around, though. Some guys on the force aren’t all that fond of outside interest, you know?”
“I do know. And thanks,” Joe told him. He hesitated, then asked. “What do you think about that woman on TV, the one who claimed to be psychic?”
Raif and Tom exchanged glances again.
Joe groaned softly. “Oh, Lord. You two believed her?”
Tom laughed softly.
Raif’s lips twitched.
“What?” Joe demanded.
“Jerry Grant in vice has picked her up at least three times,” he said.
“For fraud?” Joe suggested.
“Hell, no,” Raif said. “Vice doesn’t handle fraud.”
“He picked her up for prostitution,” Tom said. “I noticed that last night she was going by Lori Star. When the cops picked her up, she was going by Candy Cane.”
“She did say she was an actress,” Joe said dryly.
“Yeah. She’s put on a few innocent acts at the station, all right,” Raif said. “Still, we’re going to talk to her.”
“When?”
“Now, as soon as Tom Turkey here finishes his sandwich,” Raif said.
“Mind if I tag along?” Joe asked.
“What the hell, we’re on your dime today,” Tom said.
Raif was staring at him. “You don’t think it would bother you?” he asked. “Your cousin’s fiancée…that Leslie MacIntyre. She was supposed to be the real deal.”
“I should definitely go. I’ll know the real thing when I see it.”
Sam Latham was an all-around good guy. Thirty-six years old, married and the father of two young children. He worked in the editorial department of one of the major publishers, and he simply loved books, especially mysteries, and joined scholars everywhere in considering Edgar Allan Poe to be the father of the detective novel. Genevieve had met him through her mother, and though she couldn’t say she knew him well, she had always liked him, his wife and their kids, Vickie, eleven, and Geoffrey, fourteen.
When she arrived at the hospital, she expected something more than what she found: a quiet hallway; Dorothy, Sam’s wife, in the room with him; and a woman who introduced herself as his mother, Stella, returning with coffee from the hospital cafeteria.
No cops in the hallways, no one on guard.
Because apparently no one believed that Sam had been the intended victim of a killer. Despite the so-called psychic.
“Genevieve!” Sam said with pleasure, seeing her at the door. He had a cut below one eye, and the bruising that accompanied it, but other than that he appeared to be fine, though the sheets could have been covering other injuries.
“Sam, Dorothy…Mrs. Latham,” she said after introductions were made.
His mother was probably around sixty-five. She had stunning silver hair styled to set off her tiny features. She immediately looked apologetic. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know Sam was expecting visitors. I could have gotten you a coffee.”
“It’s all right, but thank you so much for the thought,” Genevieve said. She’d stopped downstairs for a flower arrangement, which Dorothy came forward to accept.
“How are you?” Genevieve asked Sam, as Dorothy added the flowers to the others filling the room.
“Fine,” Sam said.
“He’s such a liar,” Dorothy said, distressed. “He goes into surgery tomorrow. For his leg.”
“Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry,” Genevieve said.
His mother cleared her throat. “Are you going to be here for a while, dear? I thought Dorothy and I might go grab something to eat.”
“They won’t leave me alone,” Sam said with a groan.
Genevieve glanced quickly at Dorothy, who tried to appear impassive. Apparently Dorothy was more worried than the police were. Maybe she’d seen the psychic on TV.
“I’ll be happy to stay and chat with Sam until you return,” Genevieve said.
His mother flashed her a grateful smile; Dorothy gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Sam,” Dorothy asked, “will you be okay?”
“Honey, go eat. Genevieve will guard me. She has a black belt now.”
Gen didn’t have a black belt. But she didn’t contradict him.
The other two women left, and Genevieve took the chair by the bed. She looked at the IV drip, and the various tubes to which he was attached.
“Well, other than the hardware, you do look good,” she told him.
He showed her a little clicker which had been hidden in his hand. “Morphine,” he said, with a dry grin.
“Wow, Sam, I’m so sorry. It must have been a horrible accident.”
“Yeah. A horrible accident,” he repeated.
“But it was an accident,” she said. “Right?”
He looked at her, as if suddenly realizing she had come for more than a simple visit. “I guess,” he told her. “Genevieve, I didn’t see anything. I was driving along, thinking about a new manuscript we’d just paid a small fortune for, and then…”
She could have chatted a while, talked more about his kids, pretended. But Sam wasn’t about to pretend, so she wouldn’t, either.
“Then…bang.”
“Yep. Then…that sound. That awful impact,” he said, shaking his head.
She inhaled deeply. “Well…you look good,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.
He shook his head. “Genevieve, you’re full of bull. I look like shit. And you’re a nice person, and I’m sure you’d visit me no matter what, but you’re worried because of Thorne Bigelow. You think someone wants to kill all the Ravens. Including your mother.”
She didn’t attempt to deny it. “What do you think?” she asked him.
“I don’t know what to think,” he said. “A couple of people reported a car driving erratically. The cops wanted to know if I had seen it, too.”
“And did you?”
“I didn’t. I was driving, then…wham. I was out. The air bag saved my life—that’s why the bruises. But I was knocked out. The next thing I knew, I was on a stretcher with a microphone in my face while I was being stuffed in an ambulance. And they were shooting stuff into me, and I was grateful, because I managed to break a leg, despite the air bag.”
She nodded, reached for his free hand and squeezed it. “I’m so sorry, Sam.”
“I’m having a tough time seeing how anyone could have planned to murder me on the highway like that. He couldn’t have any idea who he might kill, and he obviously didn’t succeed in killing me, if that was even his plan.”
“That’s true.” She hesitated. “But what if…?”
“What if…what?” Sam pursued.
“What if he didn’t care if he killed a dozen other people at the same time?” she asked.
Lori Star. Candy Cane.
She lived in a rent-controlled building in Soho. When she opened the door to their knock, she kept the chain on as she looked out. Her eyes were wide, hopeful.
“Are you with another news station?” she asked.
Raif shook his head solemnly, showing his badge. “Sorry.”
“Cops,” she said with annoyance.
“Yeah, cops,” Tom supplied.
She stared at Joe. “But you’re not a cop,” she said. Her voice had changed. It had turned low and sexy. Candy Cane, not Lori Star. How did she know? he wondered. Was she really psychic? Was it his manner? Or just a wild guess?
“Mr. Connolly is a private investigator, and he’s with us,” Raif said.
Joe blessed the fact that he’d managed to keep a great relationship with the NYPD.
The woman still had the chain on the door. “I didn’t do anything illegal,” she said defensively.
“We haven’t come to arrest you,” Raif said.
“Then you should go away,” she suggested, and started to close the door.
Joe put out hand to stop it. “Miss Star, we really need to talk to you. Just for a few minutes.”
He was convinced that she didn’t have any extraordinary talents—not paranormal talents, anyway—but he still very much wanted to talk to her.
She stared at him with wide, powder-blue eyes. Then she sighed, closed the door most of the way and undid the security chain.
“Come in,” she told them resignedly.
She was a small woman, thin, but cosmetically “enhanced” in the breast department, and pretty in a hard-edged way. She wasn’t exactly a high-class hooker, but it didn’t look as if she’d hit bottom yet, either. She had blond hair—enhanced, too, but decently done—and small, sharp features. As she let them in, he saw that she was wearing a silk kimono, but beneath it she had on sweatpants and a Mötley Crue T-shirt.
“Sit down, I guess,” she said, indicating a sofa and two chairs in the living area, which was also the dining area and was connected straight to a typical studio kitchen.
He chose one of the chairs across from where she sat on the edge of the couch. Raif took the second chair, so Tom was left to sit next to her on the couch, perching uncomfortably a few feet away. She picked up a pack of cigarettes, shook one out and lit it.
“Do you mind?” she asked. “Say no—this is my apartment, and I can smoke here if I want to.”
“It’s your funeral,” Raif said with a shrug.
“I still like the smell of smoke,” Joe told her, smiling.
She flashed him a smile in return.
“How long have you been a psychic, Miss Star?” he asked politely.
She hesitated, a strange look on her face. “I’m really an actress,” she said.
Tom made a choking sound. She flashed him a cold glare. “I’ve been an extra in three movies now,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” Tom asked. “Did you play a hooker?”
Joe shook his head, tempted to put a bag over the man’s head. Tom was too used to interrogating suspects with whom it was necessary to take a hard line.
In this case, though, a hard line wasn’t what was called for.
“Miss Star, please, we need your help,” he said. He had been ready to dismiss the woman’s claims himself, but something about the way she had looked when he’d asked her how long she had been a psychic had given him pause.
After all, who the hell was he to doubt anyone? He’d thought a corpse had spoken to him from a Gurney at the morgue.
She hesitated, looking at him. “Honestly?” she asked. And at that moment, there was something raw and young and vulnerable about her features that got to him.
She was scared.
“Yes, honestly.”
She looked around at the three of them. “This is off the record, right? You guys have to keep what I say between us.”
“If you know anything about an attempted murder…” Raif began.
She shook her head. “I don’t know anything about an attempted murder. Except for what I saw. In my mind.”
A shadow seemed to pass over Raif’s eyes. From now on, he wasn’t going to believe her. Tom seemed to have withdrawn, as well.
“What did you see, in your mind’s eye, and how did it all happen?” Joe said quickly, before either of the other men could say anything to shut her down.
“I was here. At home. Getting ready for the night.”
Tom made a choking sound again.
Joe flashed him a frown. “Were you here alone?” he asked.
She nodded. Then the words suddenly started spilling out. “I sat down here. Right here. On the sofa, like I am now. I lit a cigarette, and I was going to watch some TV before I went to change clothes. But then…it was so weird. All of a sudden it was as if I was in a car. As if I were really there. I could see the traffic in front of me. I was someone else. And I was gunning for a car. A green Cadillac. I knew the car. I knew where it was, because I’d been following it. It was as if I was me, but at the same time I wasn’t me. It was as if I was a passenger in someone else’s body. Oh, God, it was awful. As if I could feel all this hatred…I—the me that wasn’t me—knew not to hit the car myself, but I’m—he’s—a good driver and could make people swerve and stuff. So I…he…she…I don’t know which…did, and then…wham. Crash. There was metal and glass, and a word in my head….”
She stopped speaking. She was trembling, her face ashen. Either she really deserved her shot at Hollywood, or the fear she was feeling was real.
“Miss Star?”
She looked at him, as if she had forgotten that he was there.
“And the word? What was the word?” Joe persisted gently.
“Nevermore,” she said.
CHAPTER 5
“I’m going to the meeting tonight,” Genevieve told Sam. “No matter what’s going on. I can’t help it—I’m worried about my mother. About all of you.”
“Because of Thorne’s murder,” Sam agreed.
“I know he made plenty of enemies, and the Poe angle could just be the killer’s way to throw people off track, but…well, what did you think of his book?”
“I think it was a good book,” Sam said. “The man could write.” He looked past her for a moment, then turned back to her and asked, “I take it you saw that ‘psychic’ on TV?”
She nodded.
“You believe in psychics?”
“I don’t know what I believe.”
She heard a sound then and turned around.
Joe was there, leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest as he watched her. She swore silently.
“Joe, hi. Come on in,” Sam said.
She rose uneasily. “You two know each other?” she said.
“We met years ago,” Sam said. “Joe and Matt Connolly were cousins.” He stared at her. “But I guess you knew that.”
“I never knew Matt,” she said.
“Oh, right,” Sam said uncomfortably. “Anyway,” he said, “Joe and I actually go way back.”
“A long way,” Joe agreed pleasantly. “So how are you doing?”
“Hanging in,” Sam said. He must have noticed the way Joe looked at Genevieve—as if she had committed a sin—because he looked curiously from one to the other.
She hoped she wasn’t looking guilty. She shouldn’t feel guilty. She hadn’t actually lied to Joe.
As if trying to diffuse the tension, Sam asked her, “So Joe is working for you, right?”
“Yes,” she said, meeting Joe’s eyes.
“She’s an amazing woman. She hires me, but she still likes to do all the work herself,” Joe said dryly.
She forced a tight smile. “I thought I’d drop by to see a friend,” she told him. “You did say you’d been held up.”
“So I did.”
“Hey, Joe, do you know if they’ve questioned all the drivers, trying to figure out who hit me?” Sam asked.
Joe nodded. “Not that it did much good. Apparently, if you’re a crook in this city, you find a dark sedan with mud on the license plate so no one can read the number. A lot of people noticed a dark sedan driving dangerously. Some say it was blue, others say it was forest-green, and one man is positive it was black. What do you say?”
“No idea. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful,” Sam said. “Really sorry.”
Joe moved farther into the room to stand by the bed. “Sam, do you think the driver might have been gunning for you?”
Sam had nice brown eyes. They were intense as he stared at Joe, then Gen. “I’m praying not. I’m praying that someone else didn’t die because of me, and that a dozen people aren’t laid up in a hospital like I am—because of me.”
“Do you think the Poe Killer is after more members of the society?” Joe asked.
“Hell if I know,” Sam said bitterly, shaking his head. “That psychic says so, huh?”
Genevieve expected Joe to say something derisive, but he didn’t. He just waited for Sam to go on.
“My wife is afraid it’s true, though,” Sam said. “Really. Afraid…Oh, God. I’m sorry, Genevieve, I shouldn’t be talking to you about fear.”
There they were. Back to her ordeal once again, she thought. Why wouldn’t people let it rest?
“Sam, please,” she said awkwardly, avoiding Joe’s eyes. She knew he was angry with her for leaving the apartment.
Too bad. He would just have to get over it.
“There are many kinds of fear,” she said to Sam. “And I’m afraid, too. Afraid for my mother.”
“The police haven’t said anything about needing to protect you, right?” Joe said to Sam.
“No. But Dorothy has decided that she wants to hire off-duty officers to guard my room,” Sam said, shrugging. “I honestly don’t know what I think, but God knows, I have time here to try to figure it all out. But if it’s going to make Dorothy happy, I guess it’s fine to bring in some security.”
“That’s never a bad idea,” Joe said, to Genevieve’s surprise. Had he changed his mind on his conviction that Bigelow’s murder had nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe and the Ravens?
Dorothy and Sam’s mother returned just then. They both greeted Joe and spoke with him about hiring private security. He put through a call to a friend, and before he and Gen left the hospital, an off-duty officer was sitting in the hallway.
“I thought you were going to wait at your apartment for me,” Joe said a few minutes later, as they got into his car after dismissing Gen’s driver. He looked at Genevieve and saw that she was blushing slightly. Whatever she said, it would be an excuse, he knew. She obviously felt guilty. But then her chin lifted.
Guilty and defiant, he amended. Ah, yes, that was Genevieve. Then again, that defiance was part of what had saved her life.
“I was staying in and waiting, but then you called and said you’d be late. And I told you I’d find something to do to fill the time.”
“Good one,” he said.
“Hey, Joe, you’re the one who said the whole Poe thing was a smoke screen.”
He groaned. “Whether it is or isn’t, don’t you think you should be a little bit careful for a while?”
“It’s my mother I’m worried about,” she said. “She’s the Raven, not me.”
“Still…”
She gazed at him sharply. “What changed your mind?” she asked.
He was driving, but the traffic was light enough that he was able to look over at her before turning his attention to avoiding a kid on a skateboard who had just swerved into the street.
“Nothing has changed my mind,” he said, knowing it was what he wanted to believe, rather than the truth. To accept the fact that he believed a two-bit hooker—actress—had experienced a genuine psychic vision was more than he was ready to admit.
And yet it appeared, even to him, that it might be true.
After so many years prying into the lives of others, he had a good sense for whether people were lying or not. And Candy Cane, or Lori Star or whatever her real name was, hadn’t been lying.
Not only that, she was scared.
“So…” Genevieve asked, “where are we going?”
He cast a quick glance her way, a slight smile curving his lips. “I thought we should take a self-guided Poe tour. Just a pleasant walk around a few places our long-gone poet might have haunted. What do you think?”
She looked back at him, smiling quizzically herself. “You’ve acquired a new appreciation for the literary life and times of Edgar Allan Poe?”
“Don’t be silly. I’ve always been an aficionado,” he assured her.
Ten minutes later, he found a garage where he could park for a few hours without spending half a month’s rent, and they started walking.
There was something special, almost magical, about Lower Manhattan, he thought. It had nothing to do with Wall Street and all the money that changed hands there, or even the vibrancy of the people who were always rushing around following their own agendas.
Maybe it was magical, he thought, because he had learned to see it through Leslie’s eyes.
New York wasn’t just Wall Street and big bucks, or the egos of celebrities and business moguls. Nor was it any longer the huddled poverty of the thousands of immigrants who had made their way here, first via Ellis Island and now via Kennedy Airport.
It was both, and it was more.
He and Genevieve walked. They toured the area around Lower Broadway, pausing at Trinity Church, looking toward the empty place where the World Trade Towers had once stood, which gave them both pause.
Finally they moved on.
“Are we actually on a thinking tour?” she asked him, curious and amused.
“I’m sorry. Does it feel like I’m just dragging you around aimlessly?” he asked her.
“Hey, I like to walk. Just so long as we’re not walking because you don’t want me going home by myself,” she said.
He couldn’t help but ask, “Is it so bad for someone to be worried about you?”
She looked away. “I don’t want to spend my life being a burden, being someone others have to worry about all the time.”
“Hardly a burden,” he said gruffly.
And so they kept going.
“This has been my home my whole life,” she said, “and I still love being here. I love to go into Trinity and St. Paul’s. I love to go in and look at George Washington’s pew, and wonder what it might have been like when we were a country fighting for its independence.”
He flashed her a smile. “Yeah, cool, huh?”
And amazing.
They were near Hastings House, in fact, near the area where she had been held prisoner underground. He saw no deep-seated bitterness or fear in her eyes, and she had just told him that she had moved on, that she loved this part of town.
Was it true?
Whether it was or not, Lower Manhattan, the area around St. Mark’s, and his small cottage up in the Bronx, were places where Poe had spent time when he was in New York.
“‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne the best I could,’” he quoted aloud.
Genevieve arched a brow at him. “Is that word-for-word?”
“I think,” he said with a shrug.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/heather-graham/the-death-dealer/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Heather Graham
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: The Poe Killings: A string of homicides is mirroring the author′s macabre stories. And Genevieve O′Brien′s mother is next. Genevieve knows all about nightmares. She herself survived two months as a psychopath′s prisoner. And now this new menace stalks the city.Spooked by the bizarre slayings, she turns to P.I. Joe Connolly, her past rescuer, friend and… hopefully something more, if he would just quit avoiding her. At first Joe isn′t even sure there is a case. But the body count rises, and it′s clear that a twisted killer is on the loose.Even more unsettling is the guidance he starts receiving from beyond the grave. People he knows to be dead are appearing, offering him clues and leads, and warning of some terrible danger ahead. But can even the spirits stay the hand of a madman bent on murder?