The Cursed (24 page)

* * *

Hannah didn’t even have to look at Kelsey to know they were in agreement. She opened the door wider and let Valeriya in.

Valeriya was still sobbing, so Hannah led her into the kitchen, sat her down at the table and quickly found a box of tissues for her.

“Tea?” Kelsey suggested.

“Sure. And the Jameson’s might be good, too,” Hannah said.

It took them a few minutes and a big mug of tea laced with whiskey to get Valeriya calmed down. “Thank you,” she said, then winced. “Someone is watching. Someone is always watching. If they see me crying, it will be even worse.”

Kelsey was seated across from Valeriya. “You have to tell us what happened. Who’s threatening you and why?”

“Last night,” Valeriya said, huge tears welling in her eyes again, “I went to take the trash out. Suddenly he was there. He could have killed me then. He is a big man. Strong—powerful.”

“What did he look like?” Hannah asked, then looked at Kelsey, pretty sure she already knew the answer.

“I don’t know!” Valeriya wailed. “He grabbed me from behind. He—he was strangling me, but then he told me what to do and let me go. He said I had to get back here, back in the house, to find something. He thinks there’s something here. Something valuable. I told him you wouldn’t let me back in, but he said I had to make you. He said if I didn’t get in and look for this...this
thing,
he’d kill my baby and my mother. He said if I try, even if I die, then at least my baby would still live.”

“What is ‘it’?” Kelsey asked.

Valeriya shook her head. “I don’t know. And I don’t think he believed me when I asked what he was talking about. I am so frightened! I don’t know what to do. We don’t have money. I can’t just go away.” She laid her head down, sobbing again.

Hannah and Kelsey exchanged a look, and then Hannah said, “There, there. We’re going to make sure you’re safe.”

“We just need to know everything that you can tell us about this man,” Kelsey said. “Have you been threatened before? Did anyone ever ask you to look for something in this house before?”

Valeriya looked up, wiping her cheeks, a frown creasing her face. “Oh, God,” she whispered.

“What?” Kelsey asked.

“He knows me,” Valeriya said. She turned to look at Hannah. “And he knows
you.
He knows this house.”

“How do you know that?” Hannah asked. She felt rivulets of ice creep along her spine.

“Because he left me money once—here. In a room in this house.”

* * *

Billie Garcia’s boat was an old fishing rig refitted with a diving platform. It was a twenty-two-footer with a small tower and smaller cabin. There were slots, four on each side, to hold dive tanks.

Her name was
Original Sin.

Logan headed off to find out if anyone had seen who had taken the boat out and brought it back in, and when.

Dallas stepped from the dock to the deck and took a look around. There were no tanks in the slots now. The boat had been hosed down. There wasn’t so much as a speck of dirt on the deck.

He headed up to the helm. There was no radio, no GPS, nothing that would allow them to trace the boat’s movements. He headed down into the small cabin. It held a table that converted into a bed, a small head—complete with a shower hose positioned right over the toilet—and a small galley. There were cabinets above the sink; opening them, he found some basic supplies: canned goods, mac ’n’ cheese, and cereal and other nonperishables.

He didn’t think the cabinets would yield anything useful, but he moved cereal boxes around anyway, looking behind everything.

He gasped when he moved the corn flakes and found the treasure he’d been seeking.

There was a knife. His heart quickened. Of course, it could be any knife.

But it wasn’t. It was a bowie knife.

It had a nine-inch blade, the handle was polished wood, and it was about fifteen inches total in length. It had been washed clean.

But...

That didn’t mean that it wouldn’t yield something. If Jose had cut his attacker deeply enough, blood could be soaked into the wood or lurking in the slot where the blade was attached. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible.

“You down there?”

He heard Logan shouting to him from the deck, and a moment later, Logan appeared on the steps that led down to the cabin. “Anything?” he asked.

Dallas produced the knife.

Logan whistled softly. “We need to get that to a lab quickly.”

Dallas nodded. “Agreed. What about you?”

“Big guy brought the boat in yesterday. Wearing, of course—”

“A hoodie,” Dallas finished for him.

“A dark hoodie. And he kept his head down. They noticed because they know the boat belongs to Billie Garcia.”

“And this knife,” Dallas said, “could—with any luck—be another piece of evidence tying Machete to this boat
and
Jose’s murder.”

* * *

Machete was still watching. And waiting.

And watching a house—even Hannah O’Brien’s house—was, frankly, boring.

At least he had different hiding places from which to watch. Buildings, the alley, sometimes under trees. And he was the one person who could get away with being where he was. He was perfect. Maybe the Wolf had known that from the beginning. But in the beginning it had been fun. It had been thwarting the police and riding the waves and finding treasure, tricking people, tricking governments.

Then it had been killing. But killing those who needed to be killed. It had been exhilarating. And it had been justified.

But then the Wolf had become obsessed. And Machete’s job had turned into watching. It strained the eyes, cramped the body....

Toyed with the mind.

Except for those rare times when something happened.

And now, finally, things
were
happening. This was it.

Valeriya Dimitri was in.

But even while he was pleased, he was also worried. He’d thought Valeriya was one of them, at least in a way. He’d thought that, now and then, he’d heard the voice of a woman speaking softly in the background when the Wolf spoke to him. And he’d thought that woman was Valeriya.

He’d heard her often enough, knew her voice. And she was in the house the Wolf considered the key to the treasure. It had made sense that she had a connection to the Wolf.

He’d even left her money once, because of that. He’d told the Wolf that he’d left money for the housekeeper, and the Wolf had been pleased with him.

Now he wondered.

A mistake. A major mistake. You couldn’t make mistakes in the Wolf’s world. Then again, the Wolf had been pleased when he left the money, so what did that mean?

There had been a time when it had been easy to slip into the house. He was a neighbor, liked and respected, and no one had been afraid. It was a bed-and-breakfast—people came and went.

He’d left her the money and the note, thinking she was part of the gang.
Thank you for all you’ve done for us—and all that we know you will do when we ask.

Whether she was part of the Wolf’s team or not didn’t matter. Because she was doing what he’d told her to do, and that was what mattered.

She didn’t know she was looking for a treasure. But she would be looking for anything valuable, and that was good enough.

Just a little more waiting. And watching.

He knew what he had to do. And the time was coming.

Soon. Very soon. In fact, he suddenly decided, he’d had enough waiting and watching. The time was now.

Machete walked across the street, waving to the cop in the patrol car. He walked over to the window and leaned against it, as if he just had a friendly question to ask.

It was so easy....

* * *

Dallas couldn’t help but think about what Billie Garcia had said to him: that the police themselves might be involved. The thought worried him. No one knew who the Wolf was, and no one knew who else might work for him.

He didn’t want to believe the Wolf had law enforcement in his pocket, but he had to acknowledge the possibility.

While he and Logan were in the car, taking the safely bagged knife to the lab, Dallas’s phone rang. It was Dirk Mendini.

“You’re going to want to get up here,” the M.E. told Dallas.

“What’s going on?”

“I heard you were looking for a young Hispanic woman, the sister of your man Rodriguez. I have a woman here who fits the general description. She was fished out of the water off Grassy Key. No ID. She’s pretty bloated. I’m thinking she’s been in the water at least a week. She may have nothing to do with your case, but...you might want to take a look.”

“Yeah. I didn’t know Jose’s sister, but...yeah, I’ve seen her face in the file photo. We’ll be there,” he told Dirk.

When he hung up, he started to recap the call, but Logan had overheard.

“She might not be Alicia,” Logan said. “Odds are against it. Alicia disappeared months ago.”

“I know, but hell, we’re heading north anyway,” Dallas said. “And,” he added, “whoever she is, she was someone’s daughter, lover, friend.”

* * *

“You know how people tip me sometimes for cleaning the rooms?” Valeriya said to Hannah. “You told me that the tips were mine to keep, that I didn’t need to share,”

“I’m not worried about people leaving you tips,” Hannah told her. “I’m trying to figure out how a guest leaving you a tip meant that you were somehow being threatened.”

Valeriya let out a breath and looked at them, realizing how stupid she’d been in her eagerness to accept the money.

“It was a really big tip,” she said. “Two hundred dollars.”

Hannah’s brows shot up with her surprise. She held still a minute, willing her temper to cool before she spoke. She needed to keep Valeriya as calm as possible. She glanced at Kelsey, but her cousin was waiting for her to speak.

“Someone left a two-hundred-dollar tip and you didn’t think to at least mention it to me?” Hannah asked quietly.

Valeriya lowered her head. “I needed it. And there was a note with it.”

“What did the note say?” Kelsey asked.

“‘Thank you for your service, now and in the future,’” Valeriya said as if by rote.

“Do you still have the note?” Hannah asked her hopefully.

Valeriya winced and shook her head.

“Okay,” Hannah said slowly. “You got a two-hundred-dollar tip but you didn’t keep the note that came with it.”

“I threw it away as soon as I got it. I mean, it might not mean anything, but it...it scared me.”

“Valeriya,” Kelsey said, her voice low and controlled. “When was this? It’s important that you remember when it was.”

Valeriya shook her head. Her fingers were clenching her teacup so hard that her knuckles were almost a solid white. “I’m not sure. Maybe a month ago? Yes, before the first. I used it to help pay for my rent.” She looked at the two of them. “It’s bad that I kept it, isn’t it? I do get nice tips, though. Guests who only stay a night leave me twenty dollars sometimes. I thought maybe he had miscounted. Or he was really rich and the money didn’t matter to him. Or...”

Her voice trailed away, and she let go of her cup and looked at her hands. They were just shaking.

“What is it
that he wants so badly?” she asked.

“A treasure chest,” Kelsey said.

“A treasure chest?” Valeriya echoed. She frowned and looked at Hannah. “But a treasure chest is big. If there was a treasure chest here, we would have seen it.”

Hannah didn’t intend to tell her that while they hadn’t found a treasure chest—and she agreed that it would have been found if it had been in the house—they
had
found a key. “What should we do?” she asked Kelsey.

“First, we have to act as if everything is normal. Then we need to get someone over to Valeriya’s to keep an eye on her mother and her baby.”

“He’ll see. He sees everything!” Valeriya said.

Kelsey stood. “You’re right. So, we’ll make it look as if you’re doing exactly what he told you to. Let’s go up to my room. I actually think I’ve seen him standing by the banyan out front, looking up and watching the house.”

The three of them went upstairs.

“I’m going to slip into the captain’s room and watch from that window. I won’t let myself be seen,” Kelsey said.

Hannah nodded, then led the way into her room.

“You already made the bed,” Valeriya said.

“Yes, but...pretend to straighten it or something.”

“I will get the vacuum,” Valeriya said.

“Valeriya, we don’t really need—”

“I need to do something! I must.” She hurried downstairs to get the vacuum from the downstairs utility closet.

While Valeriya was gone, Hannah realized that she needed to call Dallas. They needed to make sure that someone was watching Valeriya’s house, so as soon as her mother left with the baby they could intercept her and get them somewhere safe.

She had just pulled her phone from her pocket and punched in Dallas’s number when she was startled by the sound of the doorbell.

She paused, frowning. The cop in the patrol car out front usually called to warn her before someone came to the door.

“Wait!” she called, aborting the call and shoving her phone back into her pocket.

But it was too late.

“Hello, how are you?” she heard Valeriya say, her tone surprised but friendly.

Hannah waited. Waited for someone else to speak.

Nothing.

Holding her breath, she walked to the landing, but she couldn’t see anything.

Kelsey silently joined her on the landing, frowning. She drew her Glock and motioned to Hannah to get behind her. Hannah obeyed, reaching into her pocket and feeling for the button that put the phone in silent mode. All she needed was Dallas calling her back and alerting whoever was at the door.

They went down the stairs slowly, cautiously.

“It’s just me, Hannah.”

She knew the voice instantly.

“It’s okay,” she told Kelsey, pushing past her as Kelsey slid her Glock back into her waistband.

But then they reached the foot of the stairs and saw Valeriya—saw why she hadn’t answered them.

Saw the massive knife that was pressing so tightly against her throat that a thin trickle of blood was already oozing slowly down her neck.