A Dark Homage, page 25
And it wasn’t the good kind.
Damn. The bastard had a gun. Barb wasn’t armed. Natasha surely was. If only Barb could tell her that Mr. Clean wasn’t the only one out there. She shot Natasha a text, warning her, and hoped like heck that Natasha checked her phone. Then Barb slung her bag over her shoulder and jogged out to the alley way to retrieve her bike. She said a silent thanks to God when she saw it, still propped behind the dumpster.
She hopped on the bike, ignoring the stink of garbage. Circumstances required speed over caution. A bald man holding a sign that said “The end is near! Repent!” blocked her path on the first intersection. She yelled for him to get out of the way. He wouldn’t move and for a heart-stopping moment, Barb lost sight of the newest stalker. Then she saw him again, walking quickly down the street, hugging the inner edge of the sidewalk. He glanced surreptitiously to his left, then his right, before ducking into a parking garage.
Barb pedaled faster. There was nowhere to hide her bike, so she tossed it inside the heavy door that led to the garage’s internal stairway and hoped for the best. She took off after the new guy on foot.
The parking garage was dimly lit and smelled faintly of gasoline and car exhaust. She couldn’t see the man, but if she employed the same listening technique she employed when eavesdropping on her daughters, she could hear the quiet flop when his sneakers hit the concrete. His footsteps stopped on the fourth floor.
Afraid to give herself away, Barb stayed still. She listened for the sound of voices, a gunshot, anything that would tell her what was happening.
For a few minutes, the garage stayed chillingly silent. From somewhere below, Barb heard a car start. The sound gradually faded, until the driver pulled out of the parking garage. Barb let out a breath. Then she heard another engine start, closer by. This one revved, then stopped, revved, then stopped. Odd.
Barb moved forward with each revving, using the obnoxious sound to mask her own noise. After the fourth rev, the engine turned off. Silence again. Then some sort of scuffle.
Barb ducked and ran toward the sound. Barb turned the corner, her solid body curled tightly against the parked vehicles, and caught a glimpse of Mr. Clean standing in the shadows. Surely he saw her, but his blank expression gave nothing away. She froze, surprised. Then she followed his gaze to Natasha’s red Toyota.
And the man who stood next to it, holding a gun to Natasha’s temple.
Okay, you’re out of your element now, Mama. Barb forced her breathing to slow down. Get yourself together. She’d been a security guard. Heck, she’d been a gym teacher with inner city kids. This was nothing compared to that. Think.
Problem was, she didn’t know what Mr. Clean was doing there. Was he a partner to the thug holding Natasha? Were two parties involved in this mess? And where was Anders? Barb would have given her washer and her dryer for a gun right about now.
Darn, she’d settle for a wrench or a screwdriver. Something she could throw at the man.
Throw! Yes, that was it. She needed to distract him.
Barb still had the element of surprise on her side. She snuck a quick glance at Mr. Clean. He still hadn’t moved. She dashed across the aisle so that she was diagonal from Natasha and the thug. She crouched down next to a Chevy Tahoe, using the vehicle for cover. Quietly, she opened her suit jacket and tugged off her belt, hoping the metal buckle would do the trick.
Barb watched Natasha take the boot off the car wheel, the gun still pointed at her head. When Natasha stood, the thug grabbed her hair and pulled Natasha’s head back. He shoved her toward the driver’s seat and whispered something in her ear.
Natasha reached for the car door.
Never get into the car with a stranger. How many times had Barb told her daughters that? It’s better to be injured fighting off an attacker than to get into that car with him. And the stats proved that to be the case. Once you were in the car, you were at his mercy.
Natasha opened the door and squatted to get into the sedan. Now.
And it all happened at once. Barb flung the belt across the aisle with all the strength she could muster. The metal buckle landed on a windshield, cracking glass. The thug looked back. In a flash, Natasha had a knife out. She buried it in his right arm. The gun fell to the floor. Barb ran from her hiding spot and picked up the gun. She pointed it at the man.
He snarled.
“Finally,” Natasha said to Barb.
“Nice to see you, too.”
“What do we do with him?” Natasha gestured toward the thug.
Barb considered this. “Get the knife out of his arm. Evidence.”
Natasha nodded. She pulled the weapon out of the man’s arm and watched the blood flow against bare skin, staining cotton and denim. The man snarled again. He took a step toward Natasha. Barb took a step toward him, the gun steady and pointed right for his temple.
Barb said, “Don’t think about it.”
The man growled.
“Police?” Natasha said.
Barb shook her head. “Feds.”
Natasha gave her a look that said she understood. She reached into her jeans for her phone, holding the thug’s gaze with a look of pure hatred. Eyeing that knife wound, which still gushed blood, Barb knew she’d never want to be on the other end of Natasha’s hate.
“Get the number from Lila,” Barb said. Barb glanced discreetly in the direction of Mr. Clean, waiting for him to come to this guy’s rescue. But the shadows were just that: empty shadows. He’d disappeared.
As Natasha held the phone to her ear, a car horn blared. The guy took advantage of the split second’s distraction and pushed Natasha at Barb. He ran. Barb aimed the gun at his back. A silver Prius wound silently around the corner. The man sprinted behind it. Before Barb had a clear shot, he was out of sight.
“Put down the gun,” Natasha hissed.
Barb looked up in time to see an elderly woman staring at her from behind the wheel of the hybrid. Barb smiled and lowered the weapon. The woman gave a worried smile back.
Only in New York.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Not much had changed about Miriam’s Chestnut Hill house. This time, though, Delilah didn’t have the luxury of a key. But breaking in through the back door was a simple matter of wedging a pocketknife between the jam and the door. The old lock gave way instantly.
Once inside, Delilah took a quick look around the downstairs. Everything seemed roughly as she had remembered it. Delilah took the steps to the second floor two at a time. After watching the sex tape for the umpteenth time, she felt a niggling sense of something gnawing at her gut. Her mind kept coming back to the three deaths: DeMarco, Ahmed, and Miriam. Two similar, one different. There are no coincidences.
And there’s always a beater.
That damn sex tape. Where did the tryst fit in? Or did it? She thought she knew the answer.
Intuition told her that Cashman was hiding something. Logic told her that Cashman and Patel were the two men in the tape. Clearly, Miriam Cross was involved in more than novel-writing. She had not only been helping through Women NOW but had been on the brink of blowing the whole ring wide open. Was that the reason she was murdered? Simplicity said yes. But Delilah could not rid herself of this feeling that there was more to it. She believed a love triangle, a twisted one, at that, to be at the core of Miriam’s murder. But how to prove it?
And, more importantly, how to prove it quickly. Lucinda’s life hung in the balance.
Delilah walked through the second floor, peeking into bedrooms as she went. Nothing seemed out of place. She scanned the hallway ceiling for the trap door that led to the attic steps. She found it next to the bathroom entrance. After two hard tugs, the steps floated down. Delilah stood still for a moment, listening closely for sounds that said she’d been followed. Satisfied, she pulled a flashlight from her pocket, clicked it on, and crept up the steps.
The stairs creaked. The small tunnel of light thrown by her flashlight cast shadows against the walls. Like many old houses, this attic was a place of quiet rustling and imagined ghosts. Delilah smelled mothballs and dust and, beneath that, the sweet smell of rot. She picked her way through old furniture and neat stacks of newspapers and a few boxes, their contents littered about like the remnants of a yard sale.
But Delilah knew what she was looking for. She had seen it on her first visit, which felt like months ago but had been only days. At that time, she thought nothing of a box of books. Miriam was, after all, an author. And weren’t most authors voracious readers?
But as facts emerged, Delilah’s curiosity sharpened. Why were these books in the attic, packed away and hidden when Miriam’s house brimmed with shelves of books? At first glance, she’d figured they were simply old and irrelevant. But now she had to wonder.
Of course, there could have been a myriad of reasons why they were tucked up in the attic. The books could have been distinctly not special. They could have been earmarked for a book sale or a donation. They could have been forgotten in a previous move.
Or they could relate, somehow, to the events that led up to Miriam’s death.
Delilah didn’t think the presence of Miriam’s box in Lucinda’s attic had been an accident, as Lucinda believed. Miriam had been purposeful. She knew she was in trouble and had hidden things, some of them in plain sight.
Delilah pushed aside an over-sized wall mirror. Behind it, on the floor, sat an open box of books, the contents arranged just as Delilah had left them. She knelt down and aimed her flashlight on the pile. Delilah’s cell phone buzzed. Somewhere below, a pipe gurgled. Fighting an uneasy sense of dread, Delilah glanced at the phone—just Barb with an update, she could get that later—and started sifting through the books, making a mental inventory, looking for patterns. She flipped through each text, looking for stray sheets of paper or notes that could be a clue.
Rosemary’s Baby. Robinson Crusoe. Three Elizabeth George novels. How to Grow an Herb Garden. Romeo and Juliet, the unabridged version. A textbook on plot from a class Miriam must have taught. The Complete Short Works of Anaïs Nin—interesting given Miriam’s erotic poetry, but not particularly telling in and of itself. She put that book aside.
Delilah piled the other books neatly between the box and the mirror. She dug further into the cardboard depths, feeling the sides as she went, hoping beyond hope that some piece of evidence lay inside. She was beginning to feel like a fool. Her employer had been kidnapped, the police were somehow involved, and instead of calling in the Feds like she should be doing, she was crouched in an attic pouring over a pile of discarded books.
Brilliant.
And then she pulled out the last three books. Two children’s works: Thumbelina and Charlotte’s Web. And a book called simply, Tantra.
It was this last book that Delilah paged through. It looked like a text on the secrets of Tantric sex. Her mind immediately flitted to Chhinnamasta. The book was filled with sketches of dark men in robes impaling naked women with their large, erect penises. These were interspersed with erudite text about the various schools of Tantric practice. It was a small book, no more than four by six inches, with tiny script and pictures drawn in a mixture of black and white and muted colors. About mid-way through, a page had been folded down. Delilah shined her flashlight onto the earmarked section, not surprised at what she saw. Chhinnamasta, the goddess without a head, stared up at her.
The book described her as the sixth Great Cosmic Power, able to transcend the physical, including the mind, to achieve the ecstatic. The book talked about this from a metaphorical standpoint. Someone—Miriam?—had underlined certain phrases, including discussion of the implications for modern people and the marriage of the masculine and the feminine, the physical and the divine.
Like the pages Margot had pulled off the Web, in this book Chhinnamasta was pictured standing over a fornicating couple, her decapitated head in one hand, a sword in the other, two goddesses standing watch on either side. Delilah felt a strange mix of fascination and fear growing as she read through the pages. The similarities to Miriam’s death, and the events in the months leading up to her murder, could not be ignored. It was like the murder was a dark homage to the goddess—and the author. There was the very cause of Miriam’s death: decapitation. The uncharacteristic sexual abandon Miriam displayed in the sex tape. And the erotic poetry and short stories Miriam had written in the months before her death.
Evidence of a sexual awakening?
Miriam must have felt a certain kinship with this goddess. But why and how that came to be, and what it had to do with her murder, remained a mystery.
Delilah hastily placed the other books in back in the box. She tucked Tantra into her satchel and, on impulse, grabbed the works of Anaïs Nin as well. This she paged through quickly again, looking for a bookmark. She found none. But toward the front, near where the publisher had placed its watermark, was a man’s script. Delilah aimed the dying flashlight on the words.
Come undone. For me. Love Always, J
Who was J? Jack? Jay? Someone else?
Delilah removed Tantra from her bag. She flipped to the section on Chhinamasta, her gaze falling on words that she’d read twice before but that only now made sense.
She thought she knew who had killed Miriam Cross.
And she was pretty sure she knew why.
Delilah’s excitement was quashed when she listened to her voicemail messages. Natasha and Barb had a near miss. And Anders visited Domino. It’d been quite a day and it was only five-fifteen in the evening. What next?
Delilah called Barb. She told her to go home and stay there, everyone would meet first thing in the morning. Then she called Natasha and Margot and repeated her request. She knew it was time to call in the Feds, she now had the contact from Big Joe, but she was putting that off as long as possible. She couldn’t say why, but she had an awful feeling that if the Federal government got involved now, all bets were off. Whatever good Miriam was trying to do would be lost and Lucinda would be in deeper trouble. She promised herself she would call tomorrow. By then, she’d have answers. And if she didn’t…well, she couldn’t afford to wait longer than that.
Delilah finished her drive with a call to Anders. Surprisingly, he picked up right away.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said.
“Good afternoon to you, too, Delilah.”
“Barb told me you were at Domino today.”
“And now you’re spying on me?”
Delilah hated to lie, but she said, “Barb was following Patel. She saw you go in after him.”
“I wanted answers.”
“About?”
Silence. Delilah turned onto her street, waiting out Anders’s reluctance to share. Finally he said, “Are you home?”
“Almost.”
“Good. I’ll meet you there.”
Natasha’s head was pounding. She’d been home for almost an hour, but still she couldn’t get rid of the icy feeling of gun metal against skin. It had been a very long time since she’d been manhandled by a guy. Years. Really manhandled, not like the silliness in Center City or Jake’s ridiculous attempts to scare her. Today was a reminder of why she’d worked so hard to leave that life.
She sat at a stool next to the small kitchen counter in her apartment, her legs pulled up under her chin, and watched Sam and Amelia play chess. Sam was winning, although whether his victory would be real or a testament to Amelia’s reluctance to let him lose, Natasha wasn’t sure. But she was sure that this was a scene she’d like to see over and over, year after year.
And she’d risked it all today. Because of those motherfuckers. Whoever the hell they were.
Natasha climbed off the stool and walked over to her son and girlfriend. She put a hand on Amelia’s shoulder and was rewarded with a sly grin. She knelt down next to Sam and plopped a big, wet kiss on his cheek. He scowled and made a show of wiping it off, but Natasha could see in his eyes that he was pleased.
Then her cell phone rang.
Natasha put her head back and took a deep breath. She figured it was Barb again, with more details on tomorrow’s meeting. She wanted to feel annoyed by the intrusion on her private life, but Barb had been pretty fucking awesome today. Natasha had planned to stab the asshole before he could take her anywhere, but it was always risky to get into a car with someone. Looking again at her family, she was relieved she’d never had to chance it.
“Are you going to get that?” Amelia said. “Kid’s killing me here, and the phone is breaking my concentration.”
Natasha smiled. She reached for the phone, not bothering to check the caller ID first. She was surprised to hear Jake’s voice on the other end.
“You need to get the fuck out of town,” he hissed.
Natasha tensed. “Why?”
“They know who the fuck you are. You dumb bitch—”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Fucking aye, Natasha.”
Natasha put her hand over the phone. “Be right back,” she said to Amelia. Then, in response to her lover’s questioning look, she said, “Everything’s fine.”
But it wasn’t fine. It was distinctly, fucking not fine. Safely in the confines of her bedroom, door shut, Natasha said, “Speak to me, Jake. Now. Tell me what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“I’m risking my life making this call, Natasha. You could at least be nice.”
“I am being nice. I haven’t hung up on you. So talk.”
“You had a run-in with one of Franko’s men today. Some slob goes by the name Tank. In New York.”
“How’d you know that?”
“You know I hear things. Just listen, okay? For once?” Jake mumbled a curse under his breath. “Franko’s got it out for you. He knows who you are, where you live. Tank was the second of his men you stabbed, Tasha.”
