The Thief by J. R. Ward
"What do you think happened to your brothers?" de la Cruz asked quietly.
"I do not know." Her eyes went to the floor. "I truly do not."
"Are you aware that your brother Ricardo may have been involved with drug dealing?"
Vitoria whipped her head up. "I beg your pardon. He is a dealer in art. That is his business."
"I don't mean to offend you." The man put his hand up. "But I'm not sure you're aware of everything he did here."
Vitoria went to get up, but her thigh muscles spasmed in an uncoordinated way. As she lurched to one side, de la Cruz ran over and caught her arm.
"My brothers were good men." Or at least Ricardo was. Eduardo had always been a bit of a flake. "I won't have their memories darkened with conjecture."
"You're speaking about them in the past tense again."
She pushed herself away from the detective and stumbled as she went over to the windows. There was nothing to look out at particularly, no vista. Just the row of 1920s-era storefronts across the four lanes of Market Street.
"Listen, Ms. Benloise, I didn't mean to upset you." There was a pause. "I just think it's time you know more, if only in case they get in touch with you. What you don't want is to get sucked into this."
"I know nothing of any other kind of business." She pivoted back around and straightened her Escada jacket. "Is there anything else I may help you with?"
"Actually, yes. Since it appears as though you've taken over operations here on behalf of your brothers, I'd like your permission to view any and all security camera footage from the premises."
Vitoria blinked. And kept the curse in her native tongue to herself.
This was the mistake she had made.
She hadn't thought about any cameras. How in the hell could she not have thought about searching the security feeds? And what could be on them?
In rapid succession, her brain ran through the various angles. If she said no, they might force her to give them access by some kind of court order--although how they would get permission for that, she wasn't sure, as Margot had worked here, but had not been murdered on the premises. More to the point, if de la Cruz was indeed aware of her brothers' endeavors in the drug trade, the police might well use whatever was on the feeds as a way to...
To what? she wondered. Ricardo was dead. Eduardo had to be as well. And she had no official knowledge of the goings-on. Her only ties thus far were with the frustrated suppliers back in South America, and there was no way they would give her up: The American authorities couldn't reach that far, for one thing, and anything that incriminated her would incriminate the suppliers.
But if she granted de la Cruz access, maybe he could do the work for her. She had no idea how to run computers or isolate footage--she wasn't even sure where the feeds were kept. But both her brothers had been notoriously secretive. There wouldn't be cameras in places there shouldn't be.
Like up here, she thought as she glanced around the ceiling and saw nothing even remotely camera-like.
And given that Eduardo tracked the illegal money, there would be absolutely nothing in his office, either.
How was she going to explain her meeting Streeter after hours, though? Except...no, there was nothing illegal about her seeking out an associate of her brothers' once she got to the States. It was not illegal to meet a man at the gallery--although if they could prove Streeter was into the drug side...
Then Streeter might implicate her.
Vitoria straightened her spine. "I would love you to look at the footage. I don't know where it is, though?"
"Is there a security room here?"
"I don't know." She nodded toward the door they had come through. "Let's go find out."
As she walked over to the exit, de la Cruz followed her--and he stopped her before she opened things.
"I am very sorry about all of this. I know this has to be hard on you."
She made sure to picture Ricardo in that cellar of death. And as the sadness rolled off of her, she said in a voice that cracked, "I am, too. My brothers were very traditional, and that could get stifling for a sister. But they loved me very much, and the feeling was mutual. I really...at the end of the day, I just want to know what happened."
De la Cruz nodded. "I lost someone once. My old partner. One of the best men I ever knew, although he had a lot of demons. Big demons." Those deep brown eyes grew unfocused, as if the detective were reliving scenes from his own life. "One day, he just disappeared, and no matter where I've looked, who I've talked to...I've never gotten an answer and it eats me alive still."
"So you know how I feel."
"I know exactly how you feel. And I don't care whether or not your brothers were drug dealers. If they were murdered, if that's the reason they're not around, I will find out who did it and I will make sure justice is served. Do you understand? And if they were involved at the level of deals we think they were? Then they were very exposed, and it doesn't look good for bringing them back alive. The kind of people making those sort of moves put a very low value on human life, and if they're threatened in any real or imagined way, things get ugly quick."
Vitoria put her hand to her mouth and closed her eyes.
The image of her brother did not have to be summoned this time. It came forward like a specter, haunting her.
"I hate the idea they would be hurt in any way," she said roughly. "Especially Ricardo. I owe him so much."
"I'm not going to let you down."
"Thank you." She opened her eyes. "Does this mean Margot could have been...I mean, if there was anything bad going on--which I cannot believe my brothers would be a part of--could Margot have been in it with them?"
"We're not ruling anything out right now."
She put her hand on his forearm. "Will you please tell me if you find out anything?"
"I will, ma'am." He nodded grimly. "You have my word."
THIRTY-SEVEN
As the sun began to lower over Caldwell and early rush-hour traffic flooded the downtown streets and highway ramps, Jo Early sat at her desk at the Caldwell Courier Journal with her aching head cradled between her thumbs and forefingers.
Rather like you might ever so carefully keep a bomb with an impact detonator cushioned from any possible impact.
She had been getting headaches over the last few weeks, and they were growing more intense. This one, in fact, was presenting her with a new level of agony, the light-sensitivity, pressure at the base of her neck, and roiling nausea a triple threat she could totally do without.
Closing her eyes, she came to a conclusion: As much as she prided herself on being a logical person, it was very clear she had a tumor.
Or, as Arnold Schwarzenegger called it in Kindergarten Cop, a toomah.
Kidding aside, maybe it was an eyestrain thing. Ever since she'd taken this job as online content editor for the CCJ, she'd been spending long periods of time in front of a computer screen. Back when she'd been a receptionist for that real estate office, she'd done scheduling and stuff on them, but this new position was exclusively computer work--
"Do you need some Motrin?"
As a familiar male voice pierced into her ear as if it were an ice pick, she almost told the man who had gotten her this job to pipe down there, Pavarotti. But she had a feeling it was her, not him.
Opening her eyes, she stared up at Bill Elliot's earnest, hipster face. "I swear, I cannot shake this migraine."
"Do you need to get your eye prescription checked?"
"I don't have glasses."
"Maybe you need them?"
Yup, Bill was the reason she had gotten this job, and he and his wife, Lydia, had opened themselves and their home up to Jo even though they were only in their mid-thirties. Then again, marriage and a mortgage were far greater separators between age groups than a couple of calendar years here or there.
It was like the difference between an eleven-year-old who hadn't yet gone through puberty and someone who was fourteen and going on th
A lifetime.
"I'll make an appointment." She sat back and rolled her shoulders. "You leaving for the day?"
"Almost. Do you want to go check out that warehouse with me tonight or no?"
"I would love to." She looked at her monitor--and then promptly glanced down at her desk as the thumper in her skull got worse. "But I'm in no shape to go anywhere."
"Troy might come."
"I wish I could."
Bill pulled on a coat and then tied a red scarf around his neck. "Let me know if I can get you anything?"
"I will. And if you find something at that site, call me."
"You got it." He smiled. "I hope you feel better."
As the guy walked off, Jo got to her feet and looked around. The open newsroom was nearly empty, phones no longer ringing, people gone from their cubicles, everything grinding down.
How had the day passed so fast? she marveled as she headed for the ladies' room in the far corner.
The Caldwell Courier Journal's headquarters had recently gone through an extensive remodel--or so she had been told by every single reporter she'd met on her first day on the job. The multi-storied brick building, which had housed the paper since 1902, had had a total redo, although not for any good reason as far as the staff felt.
Like a lot of dailies in medium cities, the CCJ was dying, its page count and ad revenue getting smaller, its stories growing shorter, its middle section now USA Today instead of any content generated in Caldwell itself. In the previous year alone, two senior editors, seven reporters, and all three proofreaders had been let go, and the renovations had been done so that the footprint of the newsroom could be shrunk accordingly, with the freed-up space being rented out to--surprise!--a technology start-up.
The mood around the place was grim, and the fact that Jo had been hired at all had been a miracle. Still, they had wanted someone cheap and young to take care of their online stuff, and she fit the bill. Her degree in English Lit from Williams had been a nice little bonus for them, something her superiors might have boasted about if anyone had cared what newspaper people thought anymore. Which they evidently did not.
As she went across the newsroom, she decided that at least the decorators could have chosen a different color than gray. Sure, that was the hue of the decade, but with the layoffs and the one-foot-in-the-grave-other-on-a-banana-peel vibe, being surrounded by carpeting the color of asphalt, cubicles done in old porridge, and walls that matched a corpse left in the cold was only adding to the depression.
In the bathroom, which was done--surprise!--in gray, she splashed her face with lukewarm water and couldn't decide whether it was a good or a bad decision. After she dried the water off, she looked at herself in the mirror, half expecting one of her pupils to be dilated. Or half her mouth to be on a droop. Or maybe some kind of twitch to be working out an eyebrow.
Nope. She was the same as she always had been with her red hair and her green eyes and her pale skin. But she felt wrong. She felt all...wrong.
Over the past few weeks, her body had started to betray her on all kinds of levels. Night sweats. These headaches that made her flinch at light and sound. Hunger for weird things at strange times, like bacon and chocolate at three a.m.
Of course, the good news was that she lived with a bunch of stoners, so not only did they have Oscar Mayer and Hershey's Syrup on lock, but they thought the combo was an inspired idea.
Underneath all of the odd symptoms, though, what troubled Jo most was a growing restlessness, a gnawing, tied-to-nothing, but totally imperative metronome of can't-keep-still.
Looking back on how she'd quit her job at the real estate company, she saw that that had been an expression of the impotent urgency. And maybe all the stuff with Bill and the vampires, too--
A sharp shooter went through her frontal lobe and made her gasp.
Cursing, she wobbled her way out of the loo and returned to her desk. Logging off her computer, she put her coat on, said goodbye to Tony, who was her next-door neighbor, and headed out the back to the dark parking lot. Her VW Golf was parked close to the exit because she tried to get to work early every day, and as she got in, she hoped she was going to be able to drive.
It was tough. Once she was on the road, the headlights of other cars were so bright, she had to put her sunglasses on and did not dare take the highway even though that cut about five minutes off her twenty-minute commute.
As she slowly progressed through the stop-and-go of the surface roads, she thought about Bill and that warehouse invite. The two of them had first bonded over a strange interest in vampires--
"Goddamn it," she muttered as the pain ramped up on her again.
Shaking her head to try to clear it, she refused to be derailed, as if the agony were an obstacle. So yes, she and Bill had bonded over the vampire thing, the two of them visiting spots around Caldwell where rituals or fights had taken place. She'd even started a blog about--
For a moment, her thoughts trailed off into the pain. But she forced them back on track, the terror that she was losing her mind giving her a preternatural focus.
Anyway, for a while, she had reposted stuff online about bizarre happenings and sightings in the city that other people had been talking about, but she'd had to abandon that. For one, it was a waste of time--
No, it wasn't, some part of her argued. It was not a waste of time.
"Whatever."
She had given all that up, though. And kind of deserted Bill, as well. Not that she didn't hang out with him and wasn't grateful for the push he'd given her for her job. It was just vampires...didn't hold much fascination for her anymore. Why should she worry about something that didn't exist--especially when she felt like crap, had started a new position, and was confronting the reality that, as much as she loved Dougie and his boys, she was going to have to move out of that apartment of theirs.
They were still living the college life.
Whereas she was trying to get where Bill and Lydia were. Eventually.
As Jo came up to yet another red light--why were they all red tonight?--she thought about her parents. Make that "parents." She was hard-pressed to imagine that she was going to be able to afford a place of her own on a salary like the one she had, but she would rather live around secondhand pot smoke for the rest of her life than go to Chance and Phillie Early for anything.
She had been adopted by them not as a child they'd wanted to raise, but more as if her mother had told her father she liked the little doggie in the window, and the pair had taken Jo home as they would have a new toy.
They'd have done better with something they could have put on a shelf in their mansion and pointed at when they'd wanted to show it off.
Real children didn't work that way.
But it was all good. She'd gotten her college education paid for by them, and then she'd gone her own way, leaving all the money, pretension, and loneliness behind.
Better to be on your own than in bad company. Besides, she had never felt like she fit in with them. Actually, she had never fit in anywhere.
When Jo finally got to the converted house her apartment was in, she had to drive around the block a couple of times to get a space. And then the walk to the front door was an exercise in mind over snow matter.
Hell, at least the near-zero-degree weather helped numb things.
After checking their cheap mailbox, she hit the stairs to the second floor and opened the way into a mess that made her want to cry. The living room was awash in pizza boxes, bongs, and Mountain Dew, and Dougie was asleep sitting up on the brown padded sofa that she had always thought belonged in a Febreze commercial--as the before-treatment example. God only knew where the others were.
She didn't leave the mail on the counter. That never went well. She took it to her bedroom with her, closed herself in, and went over to the bed. Her sit-down quickly became a fall-back, and then she stared at the ceiling.
As her head pounded and a sickly sweat
Something was very, very wrong with her.
THIRTY-EIGHT
As Vishous materialized onto the lakeside porch of Rehvenge's Great Camp, he took a minute to look out over the frozen water. With the mountains rising on either side, and the randomly spaced islands in the far distance, the shit reminded him of a model train set, only life-sized: Somewhere in the picture-perfect landscape, there just had to be a lineup of old-fashioned cars, with a red caboose and an engine that let out little poofs of smoke, traveling on a rail that snaked in and out of various vintage-looking outposts that had been constructed of balsa wood and Elmer's glue.
He and Jane were going to come back here, he decided. The next time he was off rotation, and she was out of the clinic, they were going to spend a day and night together here and it was going to be fucking fantastic. They were going to eat too much, and then get under some homemade quilts, and he was going to fuck her twelve different ways to Sunday. And after they were done, they were going to fall asleep with her on his chest--and then he was going to wake up halfway through the day to find himself handcuffed to the headboard.
Whereupon they were going to do things that were still considered illegal in some Southern states--
The door creaked as it opened behind him, and Phury came out with a smile. "V, my brother. Glad to see you."
The pair of them clapped palms and slapped each other on the shoulder.
"You coming in? You want to eat?"
As Phury indicated the way inside, he was looking hopeful. Like he'd been worried about all that shit with Jane saving his life, and couldn't believe he'd been granted an opportunity to reassure himself on that front.
"Ah, yeah." V shrugged. "I'm not real hungry, but sure."
They went in together, and Phury shut things up tightly. The hearth in the main open space was roaring with a great fire, and on the far side, through the entryway into the kitchen, V caught sight of a roasted turkey just out of the oven.
His stomach grumbled so loudly, Phury laughed. "You sure you're not hungry."
"Yeah, I might be rethinking that hard line, my brother."
"Come on, I'll make you a plate."
The old house's floorboards groaned under their weight, and they had to file into the kitchen one after the other to fit through the jambs.