40 Souls to Keep, page 21
Weren’t they all? Lucas toed the stack of papers. “What are the chances we’re going to find anything useful in this mess?”
“I don’t know,” Jase admitted. “But if the police were focused on a drug connection, then something innocuous might have slipped under their radar.” The flashlight swung in a wide arc as he swiped at the sweat on his forehead. “Just keep an open mind.”
Hilarious, but since he’d yet to pin down exactly when Jase was serious and when he was teasing, Lucas kept his smart-ass remark to himself.
In the end, the camp yielded nothing. Enough nothing to make Lucas suspicious. “Where are all her mom’s things?”
“Right here.” Jase pointed to a plastic milk crate of clothes and shoes, mostly bright prints and florals.
“Not the clothes,” Lucas said, turning in a circle. “I mean the girly things. You know, the bath salts and perfume and makeup.”
Jase eyeballed the crude camp. “You really think she’d have that stuff? Or continue to buy it when they were this bad off?”
“You’d be surprised.” Lucas backtracked through the breakfast nook into the kitchen. “Vanity outlasts everything. When being pretty is all that’s left, some people cling to it.” He’d never seen Macy’s mother, not even a picture, so the vanity angle was a stab in the dark. But he’d also been witness to his fair share of evictions. He’d seen women leave everything from cribs to televisions on the side of the road, while carting their beauty products away in suitcases.
A short hall, flanked by pantry cupboards, led off the kitchen, and light poured out from underneath a closed door at the end. Lucas cocked his head. One of the cops left a light on. Then he remembered—no electricity.
Jase grabbed his arm when he moved forward. “Wait.”
“It’s fine.” They hadn’t exactly been subtle about their entrance. If someone was in there, they knew by now that they had company. Lucas gripped the handle, took a deep breath, then pushed. Sunlight poured over them both.
“Just an old butler’s pantry,” Lucas said, mentally removing the “old” when he saw the black granite countertops and rows of glass-front cupboards. High in the far wall, morning sun poured in through a half-moon window. A butcher block sat in the middle of the room, and while the granite and cupboards lay under a coating of grime, the table had been wiped clean recently. Lucas counted three stools surrounding it. At one end, a jumble of papers and crayons sat in untidy piles. The topmost picture showed a modest peach-colored house shaded by date palms. At the far end were several more piles of papers, none of them pictures. Jase clicked off the flashlight and stepped around to look.
“Resumes, mostly,” he said, flipping through them. “Want-ads. Applications.”
Lucas ran a finger through the dust, tracing an M on the granite. “Sounds like a guy looking for a legitimate job.”
“Exactly.” Disgusted, Jase tossed them aside. “How did the police miss this?”
“Maybe they didn’t. You said yourself they were happy with the drug-dealing theory.”
Idly opening and closing cabinet doors, Jase shook his head. “I never liked that theory.”
Playing devil’s advocate, Lucas shrugged. He wasn’t keen on it either, but one of them had to stay objective or they’d feed each other’s fantasies until they’d twisted the facts the way they liked. He saw it happen all the time. So far, Swift’s “drug deal gone bad” hypothesis held the most water.
“So these must be Macy’s,” Lucas said, fingering the crayon artwork. He flipped through the pictures. The level of detail was impressive.
“She’s good,” Jase said, coming to stand behind him. “I know adults who can’t draw like that.”
Not she was good. Jase was holding on to his hope. Another part of Lucas’s heart became his.
“Yeah.” No question about her budding talent. She hadn’t mentioned the pictures, or that she’d like to draw, but then she’d barely talked about anything, so no telling how important they were to her. Lucas went on a hunch and gathered them into a neat stack. “We’ll take them. You see any rubber bands over there?”
“Hmm.” Jase turned to a column of drawers. In the smaller top two, he found nothing, but the third one down held two treasures. The first was a small faux-leather-bound journal and the second was a half-empty bottle of vodka.
Or half-full, depending on how one called it. Pessimism had been the default outlook around here, though, and he bet Macy’s mom or dad—or both—had savored every swallow, paying more attention to how fast the level of the liquid dropped rather than the pain it blunted.
“Don’t judge,” he told Jase when he stood staring at the bottle for several seconds.
“Not my style. I’ve been there, remember?” Jase replaced the bottle but kept the journal. Lucas craned his neck for a look before Jase closed the drawer.
“What else is in there?”
Jase peered inside. “Girly stuff. Are you going to tell me how it sucks to be right all the time?”
“It does suck.” The smell from the main part of the house had started to trickle in. Lucas swung the door shut, then jabbed at the painted window latch until it gave. Hot, moist air poured into the room. Better. “Well?” he asked, turning to watch Jase flip through the journal.
“It’s Macy’s mom’s.” Jase closed it and handed it to Lucas.
He accepted it gingerly. “You want me to invade her privacy?”
“She’s dead, Lucas. She’s got all the privacy she’s ever wanted.”
Nice. Jase had a habit of saying things that made all the hairs on Lucas’s arms stand on end.
“I just thought since this is your area, so to speak, you might see something I won’t.”
“Enough with the logic. You’re killing me.” Lucas sank onto the closest stool, shifting the journal between them when Jase came to stand alongside, pressing close. The intimacy relieved a measure of his stress.
“How are you doing?” Jase asked quietly when Lucas didn’t open the book right away. His hand found the back of Lucas’s neck, fingers stroking away the last of the tension.
“Better now,” Lucas said.
The diary was one of those trendy scrapbooks that could be purchased anywhere these days. It came complete with a thick satin ribbon place-marker and gold embossed lettering across the front. My Journal it said—for forgetful shoppers.
Lucas skipped to the end, like he did with every book he read. He had the patience of a gnat for mysteries, and this one was a doozy. Maybe the answers they were looking for would be laid out on the last page of Amanda Pearl’s journal. Hell, maybe the murderer had left a confession.
Disappointed, he read, “‘More rain today. I feel like we’ve stowed away on an ark and will float away at any minute. At least I don’t have to make up excuses for Macy to stay inside.’”
He flipped back one day. “‘Gordon has the interview at the Ritz today. There was a brand-new suit hanging in the closet upstairs that fit him perfectly, the tags still on it. I didn’t think twice about cutting them off. Some days I can’t even look at myself in the mirror. Macy keeps us together. Macy keeps us sane.’”
“Children are resilient,” Jase mumbled.
But not bulletproof. People counted on that resiliency far too much, in Lucas’s opinion. He started when Jase reached forward and peeled his fingers from where they’d clenched around the pages.
His lips brushed Lucas’s temple. “Okay?”
“Fine.” Lucas wet a finger and turned the page, traveling further back in time. “‘I hate lying to Macy. Mostly because she knows I’m lying, but is too kind to call me on it. I’m convinced we’re playing a twisted game of house. She’s the parent and Gordon and I are the naïve children. She sees things differently than most people. I can’t wait to meet the woman she’ll grow into.’” His voice caught. “Shit,” he said, pressing his palms against his eyes.
Jase slid the journal away from him. He skipped back another page, then frowned. “‘I took Macy back to the playground on the south side of the property. They never finished it, and the canal floods that part of the development sometimes, but there’s enough there to keep her happy for hours at a time.’” He stopped to glance at Lucas. “‘Our friend was there again today. We talked about Gordon’s never-ending job hunt. Nothing’s getting better, only worse.’”
Despite the warm, heavy air, Lucas shivered.
Jase continued without being prompted, skipping back until he stopped at a page overflowing with words. “‘There was a man at the park today. Macy and I walked over after lunch. We took the paths across the canals instead of the streets, because I think those people at the end of the block suspect us. The man seemed very nice, willing to listen to me vent even though I’m sure he had problems of his own. I’m lucky I found someone to talk to.’”
Jase paused. He tapped his fingers against the scrawled words, then continued. “‘There’s an opening at the Ritz-Carlton on the island. Gordon’s overqualified, but then isn’t everyone these days? The most we can do is keep our fingers crossed and pray.’”
Another page further back: “‘I stole a can of soup today.’”
Another: “‘I had a nightmare last night. Gordon didn’t hear me crying but Macy did. She held my hand in the dark and promised me that things would get better.’” Jase took an unsteady breath. “‘I’m not fit to be this child’s mother.’”
Lucas reached over and closed the book. “Enough.” The thought of opening the door and making his way back through the house made his mouth dry. Ghosts hovered all around him. He could’ve helped these people, but he hadn’t known they existed. No one had known. Jase’s fingers rubbed across his skin, his body a comforting warmth, but Lucas couldn’t stop shivering.
The fingers on his neck coiled around his hair and pulled, tilting his face back. “You can’t save them all,” Jase said before kissing him, lingering over the contact. Lucas came away dizzy.
Neither can you.
Jase needed to hear it, but their morning had reached its quota of harsh reality about two journal entries ago. Jase’s lips blazed crisscrossing paths across his face until Lucas slipped off his stool and rolled to press him against the heavy table, happy to do nothing but kiss and rub leisurely as long as Jase kept his arms locked around Lucas’s back.
But the ghosts on the other side of the door would keep quiet for only so long, and soon the itch to escape overcame everything else. “I think we were lucky to find as much as we did. Let’s get out of here,” Lucas said, nuzzling into Jase’s hair.
Jase nodded. He swept up the resumes and want-ads, placed the diary on top of the pile, and hefted it into his arms. Lucas did the same with Macy’s pictures.
They picked their way over the broken glass and back into the dead forest, coming onto the lanai just as a strong wind swept through, crackling through the dull brown canopy and twisting the fallen leaves into mini tornadoes. Lucas clutched Macy’s pictures to his chest.
Superstitions he hadn’t entertained since childhood had been making a comeback these past few days. Jase’s company notwithstanding, the myths and mysticism that he often disparaged in front of his kids and colleagues became more real by the second. He’d never believed in haunted houses, scoffing at cold spots and doors that slammed by themselves, but he began to wonder now if the very air inside a place could be so corrupted with pain and despair and death that it could contaminate a person’s soul. Was that what it had been like for Macy, even before the murders?
Jase curled a hand around his elbow and they came around to the entryway. “Let me drive.” He dug into Lucas’s pocket for the keys.
Lucas climbed in, then locked the door. Jase didn’t comment, just backed out of the driveway, turning the car toward the open end of the cul-de-sac. “Where to?”
Lucas’s thoughts spun in circles, like dead leaves. Focus, for Macy. “Macy’s dad went for an interview at the Ritz.”
Jase grunted his agreement.
“Wonder how that went?” Lucas mused. He slammed his fist against his window. “I feel like we’re running in circles.”
“It’s only been a few hours.” Though Jase’s voice held an edge all its own. “We can try our luck at the hotel. Remember I can get anybody to talk to us.”
Lucas hadn’t forgotten. He’d half considered just driving out to the Riverwalk marina and having Jase ask around until they got some sort of lead on who was trafficking what, and what they might know about two murders and a young, frightened girl. His healthy sense of preservation kept his mouth shut. How many people could Jase influence at once? They could get in over their head in a matter of seconds, be dead in minutes, if things got out of hand. What help would they be to Macy then?
He nodded. “I’m game.”
“Point me, boss,” Jase said, scooting under the security gate. “What’s this island she mentions in the diary?”
“There’s only one Ritz on an island that I know of. Head back toward the highway, then turn south.”
“Which exit?”
“The last one before the land of brush fires and alligators. That would be the Everglades for you nonnative types.”
“Where does it go?”
“Marco Island.”
Chapter Fifteen
The sixteen-mile drive to the Marco Island bridge added nothing new to Jase’s ever-growing impression of Naples. The landscape was a checkerboard of tiled roofs and strip malls, with a listing fruit stand every few miles. The variation died once they crossed the Trail. The four-lane road that spanned the final eight miles was pretty enough, with landscaped medians, but even the most skillful landscaping couldn’t hide the water lapping gently at both sides of the road. Mangrove trees arched up and over each other, tangling their branches and roots in the brackish water. Herons splashed in the shallows by the road, but beyond that, the trees closed in. Lucas said the rains had been heavy that summer, and here was the proof. Water reached the top of the road in some places.
“It used to flood at the drop of a hat,” Lucas said in a sleepy voice. His head was tipped against his window, eyes closed. “Then they spent a gazillion dollars to widen and raise the road. Now it only floods every other hurricane.”
“Charming.” Water wasn’t the problem. He was a strong swimmer. It was what lived in it beyond the tangle of mangroves that set his nerves on edge. What could possibly be out here to attract tourists? Then they shot around a bend onto a straightaway, and the Marco Island bridge rose in front of them, a graceful arch, and beyond it, a postcard-perfect island paradise.
“Wow.”
Lucas grinned. “It does impress, doesn’t it?”
Jase coasted over the bridge at the posted 35 mph and dropped down onto the island. No sign of economic problems here. Boats crammed the marina at the base of the bridge—bright, shiny and sporting names like Dana’s Toy and Livin’ Large. The houses lining the main drag covered all the pastels in the rainbow, their lawns trimmed to laser-level perfection, their palm trees pruned and symmetrical. In the distance, a line of high-rises rose up in a neat row, each its own piece of architectural art.
“That’s the beach side of the island,” Lucas said. “There are a couple of large resorts—the Ritz is the biggest—and the rest are condos. Ten years ago, or so the old-timers tell me, you could get a decent two-bedroom beachside unit for about $250,000. Now they go for about a million.”
“I can see why.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s adorable.”
Subtle sarcasm wasn’t a strength Lucas could ever claim. Jase hid a smile. “You don’t like it?”
Lucas shrugged. His sleepiness had faded as soon as they crossed the bridge. “It’s no different than anything else, really. Built with a lot of corruption that nobody wants to talk about, with a core community that smiles at you to your face and curses you behind closed doors.”
“That kind of dynamic can be ripe for trouble.”
Lucas laughed and crossed one leg over the other, tapping the dash with his sneaker. “I don’t see that happening here. There are one or two developers that have the local government by the balls. Everyone else jockeys for a slice of whatever pie is leftover.”
Jase considered his words. “Is the local drug trade tied up in the pecking order?”
“I’m sure. But probably not to the extent that it is in Naples,” Lucas said offhandedly, then sat up straighter. “You think there’s a connection?”
“It’s something I think we should consider.”
They spoke little after that, except for Lucas to guide Jase across the island to the Ritz. He ignored the suggestion to park by the tennis courts and pulled up the steep hill of the main entrance, finding a spot under the crowded portico. “Please leave our car here,” he told the valet. “We’ll be back for it soon.”
“Of course, sir.” The kid tripped over himself to do Jase’s bidding.
“I know you don’t like to hear this.” Lucas led them through towering glass doors and into an opulent, air-conditioned lobby. “But you’re handy to have around.”
Jase swallowed a sardonic smile. He would have preferred to walk a mile than bend a mind to his will, but time was their enemy. Lucas wasn’t declaring his undying love; his tone was more mocking than sincere. But it had held a definite undertone of honest appreciation, something Jase appreciated considering how his power left a bad taste in his mouth.
Registration had a line ten people deep, so Lucas detoured to the concierge’s desk to inquire on the whereabouts of the human resources department.
“Let me draw you a map,” she said.
“Seriously?” Lucas frowned as she ripped off a piece of stationary and plucked a pen from her drawer.
