Sacrificial Muse (A Sabrina Vaughn Novel) (8 page)

EIGHTEEN

The elevator doors slid
open on the ground floor. Sabrina stepped into the lobby and took a look at her watch. It was just after ten; Anderson had to be there. She headed straight for the information desk, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw his dark-blond head poking up from behind the counter.

She rapped her knuckles on the counter. “Hey, Anderson. Got a minute?” she said as soon as he looked up.

He smiled at her and stood. “Sure, what can I do for you?”

She pulled the envelope from her back pocket and slid it across the counter. “Have you seen this before?”

Anderson stared down at that envelope for a few seconds before shaking his head. “No. What is it?”

“You sure you don’t recognize it?” Disappointment weighed heavy in her gut. “I found it in the bag you brought up to Homicide yesterday.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Most of the envelopes that come through here for you are standard white, legal-size.” He tapped the red square against the counter. “I doubt this can be bought in the prison commissary.” Anderson seemed to realize what he’d said because he looked as if he’d regretted his words. “Not that only cons write to … I didn’t mean—”

She waved him off. “It’s fine. Could someone have dropped it off without you noticing?”

“Sure, I guess. You know how busy it gets around here sometimes,” Anderson said.

“Are you the only one back here?” Maybe someone else working the counter would know something useful.

“Yup, just me.”

The disappointment spread into her bones, turning them to stone. “You ever duck out?”

Anderson shrugged, sliding the card across the counter in her direction. “Only long enough to take a piss or get a cup of coffee.”

More than enough time for someone to drop the card, unseen. Which meant she had no real way of finding out who slipped the card into the bag.

He smiled. “Are you sure it was even meant for you? It’s addressed to someone else.”

She looked down at the envelope. The name
Calliope
written in carefully drawn letters. Thought of the word—
mox
—and symbol that lay hidden within its folds. “Yeah, I’m sure.” She looked up at him and forced a smile. “Thanks, Anderson. If you can think of anything else, let me know.”

She turned and started for the elevator but stopped when another question occurred to her. “Hey, you ever see that reporter from
The Sentinel
lurking around down here?”

“You mean Jaxon Croft? Sure, he’s here most days, sitting in one of those chairs, like he’s waiting for something to happen. Why?” Anderson said, nodding his head toward the few dozen chairs grouped together in the middle of the lobby.

She looked. A few people scattered here and there, but none of them were Croft. “No reason. Do me a favor—you got my cell number?”

“I do,” he said, holding up the fat contact binder that they kept behind the counter.

“Great. If he shows up, call me right away,” she said, waiting for him to nod before she turned and headed for the station lot. It was a long shot. She had no idea if Croft was even involved, but he was as good a place to start as any. She was going to find him, and if he knew anything, he was going to give her some answers.

NINETEEN

The Sentinel
billed itself
as the one San Francisco newspaper that still fought for truth in a city filled with political back-scratching and First Amendment oppression. It’d started out in a cramped rental space above a liquor store in the Haight-Ashbury district, but having your star reporter’s pet project go national pulled in a lot of revenue. They were still in the Haight, but
The Sentinel
was fighting for free speech in relative style these days.

Sabrina pulled up in front of
The Sentinel’
s brand-new ground-floor offices and fed the meter a few quarters before doing a quick scan of the cars parked nearby. None of them belonged to Croft. She briefly considered heading back to the station, but what was there for her to do? Pack up her paperclips? Instead, she crossed the sidewalk and pushed the door open, stepping into the belly of the beast.

“Can I help you?” the receptionist said, only half turned away from the computer screen she was glued to.

“Yeah, I’d like to speak to Jaxon Croft,” Sabrina said, taking a perverse sort of pleasure when the woman finally looked and saw who was standing in front of her.

“Jax—Mr. Croft isn’t here,” the woman said, her brown eyes sharpening with alarm. Picking up her phone, she pressed a button and cupped her hand around the receiver, murmuring something into it before setting it back down.

Sabrina stared down at the squirming receptionist while footsteps snapped down the hall. Someone cleared his throat, and she looked up. “Mornin’, Ms. Vaughn, I’m Jared Little—”

Seriously?
Sabrina looked at the man in front of her. He easily weighed three hundred pounds. “Don’t care. I want to talk to Jaxon Croft.”

His jowls shook with indignation as he hitched up his pants. “Look here, Inspector—we’re well within our constitutional rights to print—”

“Still don’t care. I just want to talk to Croft. That’s it,” she said, already bored with the conversation. Croft wasn’t here. She didn’t know much about him, and she liked him even less, but she was certain that the man who had the balls to confront her in her own kitchen wouldn’t send this walking coronary to fight his battles.

Little straightened his neck, forcing his double chin to clone itself. His watery pig eyes darted toward the front desk. “You didn’t tell her?”

The receptionist shrugged, dividing a confused look between the two of them. “No. You said if anyone came looking for Mr. Croft, to call you … so I called you.”

“Tell me what?” Sabrina said.

Little looked at her, a pudgy hand rubbing the back of his fleshy neck. “Croft quit about a week ago. He came back from that trip to Texas, waltzed in here, packed his shit, and left.”

Sabrina stared at the man in front of her for a moment. “You mean the trip he took to my hometown to dig up more dirt on me?”

Little’s face went as red as his hands. “Look, I didn’t even know he was going. Anyway, he came back and said he was through. Told me to take his last paycheck and shove it up my ass. Haven’t heard from him since.”

“You got a new reporter following me?”

“For now it’s just Heather and me. Can’t afford to hire another reporter.” He cleared his throat again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

She didn’t wait to hear more. “If you hear from Croft, tell him I’m looking for him,” she said on her way out the door.

She didn’t get it. If Croft quit, why was he still chasing the story of her abduction? Was he working for another paper, or was there another reason he was following her?

Lost in thought, Sabrina got her car door unlocked and opened before she saw it.

A red square envelope, sitting on the front seat.

TWENTY

Sabrina took a step
back, driven by instinct to preserve evidence. She heard the blare of horns a fraction of a second before she felt the weight of someone’s hand drop on her shoulder and yank her out of the path of oncoming traffic.

Instinct took over again. Her left hand shot upward, closing around a wrist, anchoring it to her shoulder. Her right hand balled into a fist and swung hard and fast into his stomach, collapsing his diaphragm. Air whooshed out of his lungs and he doubled over, throwing out a hand to block the assault, but it was too late. Switching her grip from his wrist to his hair, Sabrina drove her knee into his face. The constant hum in her thigh ignited into a symphony of pain, crashing down on her, singing over every bone and muscle. She drove her knee into his face again before she let him go, just to prove a point.

Croft lay in the street between two parked cars, a stunned look on his bloodied face. “
It’s just me
,” he shouted when she took a step toward him.

“I know who it is.” She glared down at him, fists clenched at her sides, ignoring the small throng of rubberneckers her kicking of Croft’s ass had drawn. She could feel them watching her, and she stifled the urge to hide the badge clipped to her waistband. Instead she looked up at
The Sentinel
’s offices just beyond the crowded sidewalk. The walking coronary and the receptionist were staring at her through the window. The corner of her mouth quirked into a half-smile. In return, Little reached over and locked the office door.

“How long have you been following me?” she said, glaring down at Croft while he pulled himself up to sit on the curb. He didn’t answer, just hung his head between his splayed knees, letting blood drip from his nose and mouth, splashes of bright red against the gray of the gutter. Sabrina unbuttoned her shirt, revealing the tank she wore beneath it. Pulling the shirt off, she tossed it at Croft. He caught it.

“Thanks,” he muttered before using it to mop the blood from his face. “Where’d you learn to fight like that?”

“An old Japanese maintenance man for the apartment complex I lived in as a kid taught me how to defend myself.” She gave another quick look around, spotting a couple of beat cops, drawn by the small crowd they’d gathered. The situation had officially just gone from bad to worse.

Croft glared at her around the wad of Oxford pressed to his face. “Did you just beat the shit out of me and blame it on the plot of
The Karate Kid
?”

“Yup.”

The uniforms wove their way through the crowd, headed straight for her. She lifted her hip, putting her brass on display. “It’s alright, guys. I’ve got it,” she said, hoping her badge was enough to slow the tidal wave of shit that kicking Croft’s ass in public threatened to bury her under. One of the two officers looked down at Croft for a moment while the other surveyed the gathering crowd, giving her time to do the same. Almost every single bystander had a camera phone aimed at her and Croft. And to top it off, she could see Little, still standing at the window scribbling notes like crazy.

One of the uniforms smirked. “Got your ass handed to you, huh, buddy?” he said before shifting his look toward her. “Want us to haul him in for you, Inspector? Our car’s parked around the corner.”

The prospect of having Croft arrested for assaulting a police officer was tempting but a hard sell, considering he was dribbling blood like Lotta’s fountain. She shook her head. “No. That’s not going to be necessary—”

The crowd started to grumble. More than a few of them had seen the entire thing, which meant there were witnesses to a seemingly unprovoked SFPD beatdown. Their attention grabbed, both uniforms turned toward the people gathered behind them.

She looked down at Croft. He was watching her from behind the shirt he kept pressed to his mouth, his head cocked to the side, eyes alight with the opportunity she’d just delivered him. He was good—good enough to blackmail her without saying a word.

“It was totally my fault, officers,” Croft said, giving his face a final wipe before pulling her shirt from his face. “I made the mistake of grabbing her.” He said it loudly, quieting the masses.

Both uniforms shot her a look before one of them started laughing. “You grabbed her?
Her
? Buddy, I’d sooner grab a grizzly hopped up on PCP.”

“I almost got clipped by a car—he was just trying to keep me from getting hit.” She took a step forward and held out her hand, offering Croft help up. “It was an involuntary response, and I apologize,” she said, her tone as sincere as she could make it.

He hesitated for a moment before taking the hand up, the faintest smirk playing across his swollen features, giving Sabrina her first good look at his face. His nose sat crooked on his face, swelling bigger by the second. A cut under his eye and a fat lip to match, all covered in a thin smear of quick-drying blood. Someone in the crowd gave a low whistle, and Croft returned it with a wincing smile. “It’s alright, Inspector—apology accepted and lesson learned. I never should have grabbed you without announcing my intentions,” he said, looking directly at the cameras aimed at his face before he turned to address her. “Could I trouble you for a ride? My car’s parked a few blocks away.”

She’d rather eat a shit sandwich, but she nodded and smiled. “Of course,” she said. What could she do? Refuse? Leave Croft here to play victim for the masses. Brushing past him, she stepped onto the curb and unlocked the passenger-side door. “Your chariot awaits.”

TWENTY-ONE

Croft smiled and came
forward. She skirted around the hood of the car, throwing the uniforms and crowd a curt wave. “Thanks for the help, guys.”

“You sure—”

“I’m sure. You two have better things to do than schlep my mess around,” she said, softening her refusal with a quick smile. Waiting for a break in traffic, she opened her door to see Croft leaning over the driver’s seat, his blood-stained hand hovering over the envelope that waited there.

“Don’t touch it.” She kept her voice low, but his head snapped up and he moved back in his seat. The uniforms weren’t going to leave until she did, and neither was the impromptu film crew gathered on the sidewalk. Shit, even Little was still standing at
The Sentinel
’s window, waiting to see what she’d do next.

She looked down at the red square resting on her seat and weighed her options. The envelope that showed up at the station had been handled and shuffled from counter to bag to box by multiple people before it reached her. Even if there had been prints or trace evidence on it, she’d had little to no hope of gathering any of it. This one was different. It was in her car. The only person who’d touched it so far was the one responsible for leaving it there. She needed to bag it, but there was no way she could preserve the evidence without doing so in full view of everyone watching her.

She dug a glove out of her back pocket and pulled it on. “Get a paper bag out of my glovebox,” she said to Croft. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t ask—just opened the compartment in front of him and pulled out a bag. She snapped it open and dropped the envelope inside it before folding the top of the bag over. Sliding behind the wheel, she twisted around and placed the bag on the back seat before she started the car and pulled into traffic.

“That envelope. Does it have anything to do with what you asked your roommate last night about the word
mox
?” Croft finally said.

She shot him a look. “Why would you think that?”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

Sabrina pulled into the first parking lot she found and slammed on the brakes before throwing the car into park. “Did you put it in my car?”

“No.” Croft looked her in the eye when he said it. He was either telling the truth, or he was a fabulous liar—God knew she’d been fooled before.

“But you’ve been following me all morning.” It wasn’t a question, and Croft was smart enough to know he’d been caught.

He shrugged. “Just like any other day, right?”

“So, if you didn’t leave it, you saw who did.”

His eyes narrowed before he took a quick look at the bag behind him. “No, I didn’t. I figured out where you were going before you got there, so I parked and made a few phone calls before I followed on foot. By the time I got there, you were already at your car.”

Truth or fabulous liar—she still couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter. “Fine. You don’t know anything useful? Get out of my car.”

Croft settled deeper into his seat. “Maybe you just aren’t asking the right questions.”

Mox
… it’s Latin. It means soon.
For some reason, Croft had drawn an immediate connection between that word and the envelope left on her seat.

“The word—the
name
—written on the front of the envelope. Is it Latin?” she said, every word sticking in her throat. Asking Croft for help was a painful thing.

“No, but you’re right, it’s a name. What do you know about Greek mythology?” he said, the corners of his mouth hugged tightly against the words as if he didn’t want to let them go.

“Zeus. Thunderbolts. Mount Olympus … ” she said, trailing off impatiently. He just sat there, staring at her. “Look, Croft. Playing with me—not a good idea for anyone. For you, even less.”

“I want to know what
really
happened that day in the woods.”

She’d known it was coming, but hearing him say it made her want to break his nose all over again. They stared at each other for a few seconds. “Forget it,” she said, reaching across his lap and opened his car door.

He shut the door. “You just beat me up.
Me
—the reporter who took your very private and very painful story national—in front of a newspaper office, not to mention several outraged citizens with camera phones.”

“What does it matter? You don’t even write for
The Sentinel
anymore.” Her voice sounded whiny and complaintive. It made her nauseated.

H
e ignored her. “
Answers
, Sabrina. Not just one. I want as many as I ask for, and I want the honest truth to every question I ask,” he said, his eyes boring into hers.

She sat back, glaring at him. “Or you’ll write a story about how I attacked you, unprovoked in the middle of the street. That I’m unhinged and should be locked up, is that it?” After what’d happened to Sanford—found dead in his truck, face caved in with a baseball bat—and the connection she had to his death, it would be as easy as breathing to convince the public that she was an unbalanced threat to society.

“That’s exactly it. I may not write for
The Sentinel
anymore, but I’ve got plenty of freelance contacts.” His tone was hard. “A story about you finally losing your shit would be an easy sell.”

She’d be lucky if they let her write parking tickets after Croft was through with her—and he’d do it, even if he didn’t want to. She’d just had her career in Homicide yanked out from under her. That was more loss than she could stomach for one day.

“Okay.”

Croft’s mouth flopped open, but he recovered quickly. “Yes? You’ll talk to me. Just like that?”

“You just successfully blackmailed me, Croft. Try not to sound so surprised.” She didn’t look at him, instead staring through the windshield, her hands wrapped around the steering wheel. He was quiet for a few moments. Sabrina wanted to believe that his guilt was getting the better of him, but she knew better. Croft had been waiting months for an opportunity like this. Exclusive interviews from her far outweighed any regret he might feel over how he got her to cooperate. She finally looked at him. “The envelope—”

“Calliope is the name of one of the nine daughters Zeus fathered with the titaness, Mnemosyne. They were given to the nymph Eufime and Zeus’s son Apollo to be raised,” Croft said. “They grew to be known as the Nine Muses. Calliope was the superior muse. Protector of justice. Said to be the lover of both Apollo and his brother Ares, god of war. Conflicting stories had her bearing both of them sons.”

She reached back and plucked the evidence bag off the back seat, putting on a fresh pair of gloves before opening it. Removing the envelope, Sabrina paused for a moment.

Wait. Take it back to the station. Have it processed properly.

She pulled the wax seal from the paper, slipping the card from its sheath before flipping it open. Inside, in the same beautiful lettering, was another message:

In mortem, et est soror tua.

Sabrina turned the card in Croft’s direction. “What does it say?”

He glanced down at the card, his mouth going flat for a second before it turned downward. He looked at her. “My Latin is way rusty. I can’t be sure that—”

“Tell me,” she almost shouted, her voice bouncing off the windows.

He sighed, his hands still wrapped around the shirt she’d given him. “
In mortem, et est soror tua …
as best I can tell … it means, ‘in death, she is your sister
’
.”