Dark Paradise (68 page)

circumstances. Sometimes Bryce offered the hunt at no charge if his

"friend" was reluctant. Bryce's game was to videotape the event and then

hold the tape as security to ensure future favors from businessmen,

politicians, Hollywood players. He didn't blackmail them outright, he

simply kept the tape. He didn't need their money. Lucy doubted he needed

their loyalty. What he really wanted, what he really cherished, was the

power.

I enjoy the game with Bryce. He's a player. He knows the rules. He

appreciates another player of equal talent and I really don't think he

minds me making money off his friends. He believes in survival of the

fittest. The careless have to pay for their mistakes. It truly is a game

with us. The game of life. All this and great sex too - not as good as

with the cowboy, but certainly more . . . adventuresome. . . Cousin

Creepella doesn't like sharing him with me. I'd say fuck her, but she

would probably take me up on it. . . .

There were more details. Lucy told without a hint of conscience how she

had managed to get a copy of Townsend's hunt tape and how she had

tormented him with threats of mailing it to CNN. She told of her

escapades at Bryce's parties, the things she had seen and heard and

profited by, the weaknesses she had preyed upon, the money she had made.

Marilee closed the book with shaking hands and set it aside. Her friend,

her drinking buddy, had been a blackmailer. A despicable, parasitic

blackmailer. Thousands of dollars. Tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe

more. Extorted from the rich and the famous and the powerful.

They had paid handsomely for the tenuous promise that their dirty

secrets would be kept. According to the notes, there were half a dozen

men - and several women - who would gladly have seen Lucy dead.

"Oh, God, Lucy," Marilee muttered, rubbing her hands over her face. She

felt dirty and sickened. Through a haze of tears she looked around the

room of this pretty log house she had inherited and saw nothing but

filth. It was tainted, all of it, the house, the land, the cars - bought

with dirty money. She wanted to run away from it, burn it to the ground,

take a long, hot shower.

You need a life pal. I'll give you mine. . . . The line from Lucy's

final letter came back to her, and everything inside her rejected the

implication that she could take up where Lucy had left off. How could

Lucy have thought that?
 
Had the decadence of her life here warped her

so badly that she saw everyone as corrupt, or was corruption so

commonplace in her world it had become the norm?

Marilee shook her head and cried a little, mourned for the lost soul of

her dead friend, a soul lost long before she had died. She tried to

reconcile the Lucy who had been comrade and comforter with the Lucy who

had been blackmailer and seductress. The images wouldn't mesh, and she

knew she would forever think of them as two separate people, one she had

known and liked and one she would rather never have met, even

posthumously.

On the TV in the background, Eldon the painter made a pithy remark and

the audience laughed like hyenas while Candice Bergen looked disgusted.

Then June Allyson came on to extol the virtues of disposable underwear

for women with bladder control problems.

Just another day in paradise. Sitcoms and stupid commercials.

Blackmailers and libertines. Beauty and beasts.

Incompatible worlds inhabiting the same time and space.

Surrealism in motion.

"And you're caught smack in the middle of it, Marilee," she muttered.

Her brain whirled with all the information, the possibilities, the

questions. She now had proof of many things, but no proof of who had

actually murdered Lucy.

She thought she might have enough to get the case reopened, but she

wasn't so sure Quinn would agree. Lucy was dead, Sheffield had been

punished in the eyes of the court. If Townsend had killed her, what did

it matter - he was dead too. But there were other suspects.

Everything tied to Bryce. According to Lucy's notes, he arranged the

hunts. He made the tapes. He held the strings of a dozen powerful

people. The puppet master.

He seduced his friends into the hunt, deftly turning the tables so they

became the ones in the cross hairs. Not because he needed their money or

the favors they could grant him, but because he loved the game.

Bryce stood to lose the most by Lucy's enterprise.

Maybe the stakes had outstripped the enjoyment he took from playing with

her. Maybe she had overstepped a boundary line. Maybe Bryce was the man

for whom Sheffield had taken the fall. Or maybe her death had nothing to do

with Bryce. Maybe Kendall Morton had acted alone. Or maybe all the

theories were bullshit and Sheffield had accidentally shot her.

Marilee didn't know what to do. What she needed was someone to

corroborate the evidence, at the very least someone who would be willing

to listen to her as she tried to sort it all out. Drew came immediately

to mind.

Uncertainty came immediately after. Was this what he knew and wouldn't

talk about - Bryce's little hunt club?

If he knew, why hadn't he done something about it?
 
Because he was

guilty too?
 
Like a faded dream, she could just barely remember the

argument Drew and Kevin had fallen into that first day she had stopped

into the Moose.

They had fought about the ethics of hunting, and it was obvious that was

not the first time the subject had been the source of contention for

them. For all she knew, this could have been the fight that had sent

Drew storming away from the lodge the previous night.

You think you know someone and then suddenly you look at them and you

don't know them at all. "Ain't that the truth," she muttered.

Almost against her will other fragments of thoughts came to mind. The

night she surprised the intruder in her hotel room. A man in black. Drew

standing in the room later, looking harried, wearing black.

"God, you're going conspiracy cuckoo, Marilee." She pushed herself away

from the desk to pace again and to run her hands into her hair. "Drew

isn't involved. Don't be crazy."

Crazy.

Del Rafferty was crazy.

I don't wanna know what happened to you!
 
I don't wanna know about the

tigers!
 
Leave me alone!
 
Leave me alone or I'll leave you for the

dog-boys, damn you!

Not didn't know, didn't want to know.

She had discounted the whole idea of Del helping on the basis of the

tiger remark. It sounded crazy. He had mistaken her for a corpse and

thought he'd seen a tiger.

There were no tigers in Montana. And what the hell were dog-boys?
 
The

guy was so far gone around the bend, he would never get back without a

guide. Or so she had thought.

But what if Del wasn't completely crazy?
 
What if he had seen one of

Bryce's hunts?
 
He might have thought himself that it was insane. But

Marilee had seen the tiger now too. She could assure him what he had

seen was real. That would give them something in common, and if she

could establish common ground, maybe he would tell her what - if

anything - he knew about Lucy's death.

I don't wanna know what happened to you!

Which implied that he did know.

The sheriff wouldn't like Del as a witness, and J.D. wouldn't like her

going up into his uncle's territory at all.

But she needed to find the truth and close the door on this ugly chapter

of her friend's life. Now more than ever she wanted it over and done

with, dead and buried. Mentally she told Quinn and Rafferty to go take a

flying leap, and went out to the barn to saddle her mule.

Del watched her through the Leupold lOx scope, the Remington 700 resting

comfortably against his shoulder. She looked a foot away. He could see all the

strange, subtle shades in her hair, the frown of determination curving

her little mouth as she talked incessantly to the mule. Beside him one

of the hounds whined. He gave the dog a hard squint and it lay down with

its head on its paws and a woeful look in its eyes.

He had tracked her up from the blue rock. She came boldly, brazenly,

riding that mule as if she already owned the mountain. The blondes would

try to take it away. He knew that. That was why they came at night - to

taunt him, to drive him away. And now she was coming back in the

daylight again. Bold as brass.

He could pick her off now. The air settled in his lungs.

His finger came back and took a little slack out of the trigger, but he

didn't shoot. He wasn't certain this wasn't part of the test. And he

could see that this was the little blonde. The talker, not the dead

blonde, not the blonde who danced under the light of the moon. J.D.

would be disgusted with him if he shot this one. He had said to leave

her be.

Del let the trigger out, but remained as still as if he were a rock or a

tree. Maybe J.D. didn't know that the blondes would take control. He was

under their spell, wasn't he?
 
Maybe that was their master plan and it

was left to Del to stop them from taking the Stars and Bars.

He would be a hero if he stopped them. His family could be proud of him

again instead of secretly ashamed. He could be proud of himself, and

that was something he hadn't been in a very long time. Since before he

could remember. Since before the 'Nam.

As silent as nothingness, he rose and started up the hill.

The blonde was heading for his cabin. She couldn't be allowed inside. He

would be there before her.

Marilee's boots scuffed in the dirt of the yard as she paced.

She switched her hands from the hip pockets of her jeans to the front

pockets and marched on, trudging slowly around the corral. The horses

watched her with idle curiosity. Tied to a post, Clyde closed his big

brown eyes and went to sleep.

Waiting had not been part of the plan. Somehow, it had never occurred to

her that Del Rafferty would not be here when she arrived. In fact, she

had fully expected him to take a shot at her long before his cabin came

into view. Her legs ached from gripping Clyde's sides in anticipation of

the mule bolting at the sound of the rifle shot.

But no shot came.

Not too keen on coming eye to eye with Del's reptilian doorman, she

hadn't gone up to the door of the cabin to knock. She walked around the

side and knocked on a window, but she couldn't see in because he had

covered the glass with muslin from the inside. She called his name and

tapped on the glass. The only answer she got was the ominous sound of

the snake's rattle as the noise roused it from its nap.

She checked her watch and sighed. Once Del showed, there was no telling

how long it might take to get him to talk - if indeed he would talk to her

at all. The sky remained heavy and lead-colored, threatening rain,

threatening an early nightfall. She didn't want to be caught riding down

the mountain after dark. It was dark enough in the woods during the day.

She wasn't familiar with the trail or with the mule. And there was

always the threat of a close encounter of the wildlife kind. Hadn't she

read that grizzly bears were nocturnal?

She leaned against the corral rail and made kissing sounds to entice a

buckskin mare away from the water trough. Her own throat was parched. It

hadn't occurred to her to bring a canteen or a Thermos. She had been in

too big a hurry to get to the truth. Stroking her fingers over the

mare's nose, she stared back at the cabin. There was a water pump in the

cabin and cans of Dr. Pepper on the kitchen shelf. There was no lock on

the cabin door.