Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) (9 page)

I made my way back down the stairs, then slipped out without speaking to the barmaid again. Back out in the car I checked my phone and saw missed calls from both Laura and Gaines. I wasn’t ready yet for the conversation with Laura, so I called the boss.

“Hey—”

“There are two bodies.”

“What?”

“On the radio, it said fire crews have found two dead bodies in the hotel.”

“What the fuck?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying.” She paused. “Look, Eoin, I need to know— fuck it, did you actually get rid of the bodies last night?”

“Ronny, I promise, I’m not lying to you.”

“So the two they’ve found aren’t the two we knew about?”

“No.”

“Fuck.”

She hung up.

She was right—

Fuck.

Two dead bodies. My gut usually tells the truth, and when it twisted on me I knew what it was saying. I was looking for two people who were nowhere to be found—and two dead bodies had turned up in the burned-down wreckage of The Hound. I don’t believe in coincidence. The blood in the pub opened up more questions, but I re-focused my blurry mind back on the hotel. What the hell had I missed? I’d taken Maria at her word and believed that she’d killed Jelly. She’d then vanished and Tony had turned up dead. She’d given me her real name, so she hadn’t been planning on anything beyond that moment. She hadn’t seen a future in which protecting her identity mattered.

Shit.

There was something—or someone—else at play here. And I’d let the trail go cold. Maybe I’d been wrong to dismiss Dodge as the threat. I needed to know for sure who the two dead bodies at the hotel were, but all I could do was wonder whether it might be the pub owners. Knowing for sure was out of my hands for now. Leave that one to the police. It did change the game, though, because the police investigation would overlap with mine, putting me in their sights, and a clock was ticking. I had to focus on something I could control. Change track, back to—

Jellyfish.

What did he have?

How did he get it?

How was Jelly linked to Craig and Maria?

I checked the address on the business card Pepsi had given me and drove out to Wednesbury. I’d lived there a couple of years before. It was a small market town and almost nothing exciting had happened there in a thousand years. Hardly the location for a booming film studio, but then again, this was porn we were dealing with. From other investigations over the years, I’d realized that the business address of a porn company usually lead to nothing more than a cheaply furnished suburban home with a camera in the bedroom and a computer in the spare room for editing footage. That’s why I was slightly surprised when the address belonged to a storefront photography business on the high street. My former flat had been on the same block as this store, just a few doors up. If there had been a pornography studio on my street when I’d lived there and I hadn’t known, I clearly wasn’t making the cut as a man.

It was a sleek and shiny storefront. The window was decorated in the same style as the website, with lots of black and silver, and across the top a sign written in large letters, saying,
S
TUDIO
31 P
ICTURES
. The message was very different than the implied sleaze of the website, though. There was an old-fashioned camera in the center of the window surrounded by photographs of families, young women, and pets. Through the glass I could see a reception area decorated in the same style as the window, looking like a budget version of an Art Deco film studio.

There was nobody in the reception area, but the lights were on and the door was unlocked. I stepped in and stood by the low black desk, waiting to be noticed. At the back of the room was an open door, but the space beyond was dark. I tried to imagine Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall stepping out and asking me what I wanted, full of moxie and spunk, but what I got was an elderly man in a suit. He was a few inches shorter than me, probably topping out around five eight, and his hair was silky, a silver crown pushed back from his face. His frame was slight, almost skeletal, and his movements were small and considered. His suit was more an architectural masterpiece than an item of clothing, with sleek dark lines that looked expensive. Something in me turned over at the sight of him, and my skin crawled as I fought the urge to back out the door. The same sense that tells you to step away from certain people in public places was now telling me to find a machine gun and take aim.

“Hello.” Did his voice carry an accent? It was hard to tell with one word.

“Hi. I was looking for,” I took a second, trying to think of Jellyfish’s name, “Jeremy?”

He nodded, small and gentle. “Aren’t we all.”

There was an accent to his words, but I couldn’t place it as anything other than “not English.” Whatever it was, it carried a cold and sterile edge. His features didn’t give a clue either. His skin was a few shades darker than white, but nothing that couldn’t be earned by relaxing weekends in the sun.

“He’s not around?”

“I’m afraid not. We’ve been waiting for him to come back.”

We? That set off a twist of spidey-sense panic in my stomach. The doorway behind him seemed to grow a little larger, and the dark shadow beyond it took on a more solid, menacing form.

“Are you a friend of Mr. Fish?” He took a step forward. “Perhaps you can help us?”

“Oh no.” I noticed nerves touching the edges of my own voice. “I wouldn’t say we were friends.”

“Business partners perhaps?”

He stepped forward, and his face sparked a little as he mentioned business, something igniting briefly in his eyes. For the first time I noticed his hands. They’d been behind his back when he’d first stepped into the room, but now they were at his sides. His left hand was turned away, trying to conceal what it held—

A handkerchief.

Stained red.

I recalled the name Matt had given me. “Is Simon available?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid he’s not. He will be tied up for the foreseeable future.” The hand holding the handkerchief twitched slightly. “We’ve been unable to contact his girlfriend, I don’t suppose you have her number?”

“Uh, no, Sorry.”

I kept arriving at a scene to find blood waiting. My stomach was in a full-blown twist now, screaming at me to get out. I smiled at the old guy and mumbled something that I hoped sounded like a witty kiss-off. Then I turned and stepped out of the shop.

I walked back up the road toward where I’d left my car. I turned back briefly and the old man was standing in the doorway of the shop, watching me. His head was cocked slightly to one side. I thought for a second, with his hair pushed back and his head cocked, that he looked like a gecko in a suit.

I pulled my car keys from my pocket.

I got the hell out of dodge.

I calmed down as I drove, slipping my go-to CD into the slot and letting the voice of Paul Westerberg make me feel safe again. I’d gotten good at spotting dangerous people. I’d met gang members who had been ready to shoot me over territory, and I’d looked into the eyes of a psychopath who had cut me open with a knife. Once you’ve seen those eyes, you never forget them. The old man had those eyes, and they’d
set off a flight-or-fight response in me. My father had always told me, “If there’s trouble, be far away from it.”

But what kind of trouble was he? I’d never met him before, and I knew most of the local players, at least by sight. None of them scared me the way he had. Why was he in town? Who had hired him? There was something out there that connected him to Jelly and the Cartwrights, and all four of them to the fire at the hotel. Something or someone.

I hate mysteries.

I needed to slow down and think. And, as the nervous tug of my gut gave way to a rumble, I remembered I do all my best thinking in the kitchen. Or, if I’m lazy, over someone else’s cooking. Maybe eating a good meal was the best way to stop bouncing from mistake to mistake.

I followed my stomach and drove back into the city.

There were any number of places I could eat for free, but I headed to one where I usually had to pay, a spot called Cheapside Spice. It took its name from the street it was on, but there was nothing cheap about it. The kitchen did the best karahi in town, and lots of it. The Roma had originated in northern India, somewhere around modern Pakistan, and so the joke with Laura had always been that this was my spiritual food. I knew the restaurant’s owner; she had been a local radio celebrity who had been dragged through the press when a charity she worked with got mixed up with Gaines. She kept a lower profile these days, running a few restaurants and doing “consulting” work, whatever that was. She hated Gaines, but seemed to like me, so it was a place I could go and think, and avoid people who wanted to talk business.

It usually was, anyway.

I sat there after ordering, watching trays of food come out from the kitchen for other customers. My mouth watered at the sight of the heaping plates of balti, karahi, and curry, stacks of naan breads, and pints of Cobra Beer or mango lassi with beads of moisture down the side. The more I saw, the more my stomach told me how hungry I was. Finally my food arrived, but before I picked up my roti to dig in, Claire Gaines sat down at my table.

She was dressed in a sharp black business suit, of the kind her sister used to wear before she stopped trying too hard. Her hair was pulled back into some fancy style that I couldn’t name. I hadn’t stopped to notice how much she had grown up in the last two years. She looked every bit as scary as her sister used to, and everyone in the room noticed it. I saw them all look at her and then very quickly set about not noticing her, in the way you wouldn’t want to attract Joe Pesci’s attention in
Goodfellas
.

“You never texted me back.”

I said, “What?” But through my second mouthful of karahi it came out as, “Mwhaft?”

She pulled out her phone and read out the text messages as she flicked past them, like a court reporter reading back minutes, “Claire Gaines to Eoin Miller, ten thirty-two a.m., ‘You Are In The Shit, kiss kiss kiss.’ Eoin Miller to Claire Gaines, ‘Fuck you, I’m eating curry.’”

“I never sent that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but you’re thinking it now, bozo.”

“Right. Well, I didn’t need to reply, did I? Your sister told me what was up.”

She paused and eyed me for a second, and I couldn’t read what she was thinking. Had Veronica not told her any of what had happened? So what was Claire here for?

She grinned after I’d stewed long enough. Then she said, “No. Daddy wants to see you. Now.”

Claire stood up and stared at me. She took a step back and said, loudly, “You’re sleeping with my
brother?
How sick is that?” A smile split her lips in two as the other diners forgot their fears and turned to stare at us.

I looked up to her and then down at my food, and my stomach called me a traitor as I stood up. I dropped a twenty on the table and half-waved, half-shrugged at the waiter on my way out, following Claire to a black BMW idling at the curb. We both got in the back, and the driver pulled away.

Daddy wants to see you.

Those were not words I’d ever wanted to hear Claire say. For most any man, the thought of being summoned to see the father of the woman he was sleeping with was dreadful enough. But this was more.

Daddy.

Daddy was Ransford Gaines.

The boss.