One Hot Mess (28 page)

“The bath, it is empty.”

I wiped the sweat off my face with a wilty sleeve and focused on Ramla Al-Sadr. She was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, dressed in enough clothes to ensure modesty and heat exhaustion.

“Would you like to use?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, “I'm afraid I haven't learned anything useful about your sister yet.”

“That is to be expected,” she said, expression troubled yet stoic. “These things they take the time.” She wrinkled her nose. “But you cannot forgo the bath until she is here.”

By the time I was drying my hair, Ramla was nowhere to be seen. I slunk across my yard and into my own house before I had to face her and my failure again.

Finally, late and despondent, I headed off to work.

My life felt disjointed. I saw five clients, then swilled down a burger at an In-N-Out on the way home and ended the day in my home office. After scribbling down all the information I could find regarding the four victims, I stared dismally at my wall, but there wasn't much there. I had the least amount of info on Bunting. According to what the senator had told me, he had never married. In
fact, he'd lived with his parents off and on for most of his life. But Solberg had learned that since their deaths eighteen months earlier, he'd resided in Europe.

The next couple of days were filled with quiet frustration and overt craziness. Still, there was no good explanation for the ensuing phone call, other than the fact that my wall was covered with the flotsam of unresolved deaths. Well, maybe my dark mood had some effect, too. True, I'd been on more dates in the past week than even my rich fantasy life usually offered, but I felt a sort of off-center loneliness. Ramla's stoic sorrow gnawed at me, while my sense of not belonging seemed magnified by the looming holidays. I'd sent off gifts to Christianna and the others, but the gesture felt empty. All the same, there was no supportable reason for my current lapse in sanity.

“Rivera.” I clutched the receiver in white-knuckled fingers. I was trying for convivial and coolheaded. Instead, I may have sounded breathy and a little high. I'd experimented with a half dozen other salutations in my mirror earlier in the day, but “Hello, darling” seemed a little Zsa Zsa and “Yo” sounded kind of ghetto coming from a woman whose skin tone was a shade lighter than skim milk. “Do you have a minute?” I asked.

There was a brief delay, during which I imagined the lieutenant narrowing his eyes, bitter-sharp mind churning. “Slow night for you, McMullen?” he asked.

It was after eleven o'clock. I'd spent the past seven hours trying to talk myself out of calling him. If I'd had my druthers I would have been asleep for a gerbil's lifetime by then, but the previous night had been a doozy Usually the dead and the nocturnal me have a good deal in common. But it was the dead who had kept me awake.

In fact, it was Kathy Baltimore herself who consistently reappeared in my dreams. She asked me what day it was. I told her it was Friday. At which time she began singing hymns, but she had no mouth, and only one arm.

Creepy as hell. It's times like those that make a girl kind of wish she had someone to talk to in the wee hours of the morning. Someone sans tail and collar.

“No sleepovers?” Rivera asked. His voice rumbled through my sleep-hungry system like dark rum, but I fought the effects. There were other fish in the sea. Who cared that none of them resonated in my humming place? They didn't try to bait me with every spoken word, either. Which was exactly what he was trying to do. Still, I kept my tone as sunny as a kindergartner's. “Just me and Harley and a carton of yogurt,” I said.

“Didn't like the way Curly Top looked when he got down to his skivvies?”

I could only assume that Curly Top was Donald Archer, but I smiled at his poor attempt to rile me. “Not everyone can be a fifteen-year-old supermodel,” I said.

“Isn't that the shits.” I could hear him easing into a chair and imagined him leaning back, probably smugly post-coital. The idea made my guts knot up like pretzels. Still, I shouldn't have mentioned his latest conquest. I chided myself silently, remembering belatedly that I didn't need him. Didn't care who he coitaled. Nevertheless, I spoke again.

“Is she there now?” I asked. “Or is it past her bedtime?”

He chuckled. I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes to my own snowballing stupidity, and tried a more mature tack.

“Listen, Rivera, I didn't call to start a pissing contest.”

“Wouldn't do you any good, anyway.” He sighed, proud. “I have a bigger dick.”

“You
are
a bigger—” I began, then yanked myself up short, took a deep breath, tried again. “I was hoping to speak to you.” I closed my eyes. My hands were shaking. Stupid. So stupid. “Possibly without spewing acrimony?”

“About?”

I had been considering how best to phrase this for hours and had come up with some elegant phraseology. I took a deep, quiet breath and tried my knockout punch. “I've given the situation due deliberation.” I paused, maybe for effect, maybe to round up any remaining brain cells that might still have a flicker of life. Rivera tends to scramble my mind like an eggbeater. “And I believe someone intends to kill your father.”

There was a moment of absolute silence.

And then he laughed.

I gripped the receiver with Amazonian bonhomie and waited for his fun-loving jocularity to subside. “Tell me the truth,” he said finally. “Is it me?”

My hands had quit shaking and the ghoulish images of the past few nights receded. Anger, it seems, is something of a panacea for me. “I'm certainly thrilled to entertain you,” I said. “But this is not amusing.”

“Lots of things aren't.” His chair creaked. I heard him stand, listened to his footfalls bluster across the floor, and wondered if he wasn't, perhaps, quite as postcoitally content as he had first seemed.

I drew a deep breath and took the plunge. “I need you to take a look at something.”

The pacing stopped with abrupt finality. “It's been a hell of a day, McMullen.” His tone had gone from dark rum to fermented grog. “If it's not you in a black negligee, I'm not interested.”

My lungs considered exploding. My heart surged a little and my scalp tingled dangerously From his drawer beside my bed, Frangois growled an affronted-Frenchman challenge, but I kept my tone watermelon cool. “I don't own a black negligee.”

Floorboards creaked restlessly. A couple of still-flittering brain cells suggested that he was pacing again. “White'll do,” he said.

I gave his words sage consideration for a fraction of a second. In fact, I would have considered longer, would have taken hours,
days
to come up with a scathing response, but my lips spoke up without permission.

“All right,” they said.

“What's that?” Nothing squeaked or moaned or moved. In fact, the world seemed absolutely incapable of doing anything but waiting in breathless anticipation.

I gripped the receiver tighter. “I said all right.”

There was a pause for five and a half seconds, then: “I'll be there in half an hour.”

I didn't bother to remind him that in L.A. it takes longer than that to cross the street, but, as it turned out, it was lucky I didn't waste the time, because he arrived in just over twenty minutes.

I had spent the first five telling myself he was just yanking my chain and wasn't really coming at all. The next… oh, twenty-seven seconds I was busy blathering on about how it didn't matter what I wore; this was just my ingenious ploy to get him to listen to me. The next quarter of an hour I hustled around like a panting virgin with the pre-honeymoon hives.

By the time I opened the door I was wearing a silk nightgown with matching robe.

He stood on my stoop, looking like a world-weary warrior, hair tousled, eyes burning, muscles tight with tension and man juice. He stepped inside without an invitation.

I swallowed any good sense that might still be hanging around and shut the door. Harlequin did a wiggly-worm dance around his legs.

“Can I get you something?” I asked. Smooth. Dark-jazz smooth.

He stared at me, thunderstorm eyes blazing. “You back on the menu, McMullen?”

I lifted my chin and refrained from jumping him like a hound on a rump roast. I didn't need him. I had Officer What's-His-Name and the guy with the curly hair. And Frangois! I mustn't forget Frangois. But, good God, his eyes burned me like a blowtorch. He circled me a little, as if I were prey.

“My old man worth whoring for?” he asked.

A couple dozen nasty zingers whizzed through my mind like flaming arrows, but I kept them firmly locked between my teeth and turned away, sauntering hip-crazy to my office. I stood there, not looking back, waiting. It took a moment, but finally he came up behind me. I could feel him gazing over my shoulder, staring at the board.

I didn't say anything, just stood waiting, tense and breathless.

“All you need is a deerstalker and a pipe and you're ready for supersleuthing,” he said finally.

I turned from the tagboard. I was dead on my feet and bubbling with frustration, but I had my temper in a stranglehold. “The first murder took place on a Monday,” I said.

He scowled, as if thinking against his will, and nodded at the names on the board as if familiar with them. “Ortez?”

“Yes.”

“How was she killed?”

I fudged a little. “Arson.”

He nailed me with his eyes. “Proven?”

I hurried to the wall, robe flaring behind me. I was pretty sure I looked like Wonder Woman, cape flying, hair flowing in the mysterious breeze possibly caused by her wonder plane. “Kathy died on a Tuesday. Manny on a Wednesday. And …” I tapped the tagboard and turned.

He lifted his hot gaze from me and nailed it to the board. A muscle jumped in his jaw.

“Bunting on a Thursday,” he said.

I felt taut, breathless. “Yes.”

He stared at the carefully garnered information for a dozen heartbeats, then shifted his attention back to me with slow deliberation. “Just one problem.”

I waited.

“Baltimore's death was determined an accident.”

“So were the others.” It was meant as a challenge but sounded more like a weak-assed apology.

He focused on me fully, narrowing the world down to my face. “You could have just told me you were horny, McMullen.” The air was motionless between us. “No need for excuses. I could have probably made it here three minutes faster.”

Our gazes fused. I wanted to tell him to go screw himself, but if anyone was going to do the job I kind of desperately wanted it to be me. “How about you think with your head instead of your dick,” I said instead.

We glared at each other, tension brewing like a toxic potion, but finally he chuckled and turned away. Drawing a deep breath, he shoved his hands into the front pockets
of his frayed jeans. “Okay. I'll play along. Why do you suppose these people were killed?”

“Because they worked for your father.” I was suddenly excited. The fact that he was even considering my theory felt hopelessly exhilarating. The fact that he hadn't shot me yet was kind of a bonus. “That much is certain. But the rest is unclear. Is it because they were imperfect? Or maybe they slighted the killer. But look—every one of them was closely connected to your dad at one point, and none of them fits the Moral Majority's conservative ideal.”

He looked unconvinced. And ornery as hell. I hurried on.

I tapped the board again. “Wiccan, lesbian, alcoholic—”

“What about Bunting?”

I opened my mouth and shut it. “I haven't quite figured that out yet.”

He glanced at me.

“I just learned about his death.”

“Any living relatives?”

“Not that I've found. He never married. His parents died a year and a half ago.”

He was reading the information as I spoke it, but his brows were low. “At the same time?”

I opened my mouth to respond, but I didn't have the answer and I couldn't afford to look weak. “The point is,” I said, “people are dying. And more quickly now. Carmella was killed two months ago. Steve, in November. Five weeks apart. Then just three weeks between him and Kay, and only a day between her and Manny.”

“Only problem is…” He turned toward me. “The deaths were accidental.”

“Oh, don't be naive!” I snapped.

He stared at me, surprised. I stared back, angry.

“I've been called a liar, an ass, and a murderer,” he said, and, snorting, ran splayed fingers through his hair. “Been a while since anyone accused me of being naive.”

“How about stupid?”

The shadow of a grin flirted across his devil-may-kiss lips. “More recent.”

I drew a hard breath. “Listen.” I was hoping for cool. Struggling for sane. “I know it sounds far-fetched, but you know as well as anyone that the senator has enemies.”

He didn't agree, but he certainly didn't argue. “Why now?”

“I don't know. Maybe to keep him from becoming the leader of the free world.”

For a moment I thought he'd scoff, swear, and possibly self-implode, but he surprised me again. “That doesn't give us much to go on. Half the country would rather take a poker up the ass than see the senator in the Oval Office.”

“But the other half would cheer.”

“Probably because the left half has been pokered.”

I shook my head, trying to clear it of the image. “How many people know he's considering throwing his hat in the ring?”

“Maybe a better question is who would think it worth risking life inside to have him dead.”

“I don't believe the killer thinks he's at risk,” I said.

“What?”

“Think about it.” I was excited again. “No one's looking into the deaths. Everyone believes they're accidents. Even you,” I added.

“Well…” He raised a practical hand. “I'm naive.”

“Don't be an ass, Rivera.”

His lips twitched. “So it's finally come down to sweet talk.”

“Listen,” I said, “your father wants me to believe his campaigns were one big happy family, but I know there were problems.”

“You think?”

I ignored him. “Ortez was Wiccan. Manny drank like a fish. Kathy was gay. I'm not sure what Bunting's deal was, but I'm certain there was something. All flawed, but all allowed into the senator's inner circle. What if they knew something they shouldn't… the sins of another…”