“No. Not a sign. Not a clue. Except they found a note she left in her bedroom. She ran away because of her dad and stepmom and everything. She mentioned me. I wouldn’t let her come live with me — ” Kaycee’s voice cracked on the last word.
“Hey, hey, stop. Don’t go blaming yourself for this.”
Sure, no problem.
Tricia blew out a breath. “What about her friends? She must have gone to one of them.”
“No one knows a thing.”
Silence spun out. Kaycee envisioned minutes, hours, days of the same hovering lack of words.
Please, God, send her home.
“Kaycee, hang in there. They’ll find her.”
“I know. I’m . . . fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I’ll manage.”
“How are you doing there in your house? See anything else strange?”
“Yes. But I can’t worry about that right now.” Right. Like the fear of being watched wasn’t doubling the panic within her.
“What did you see?”
“You know the camera and the picture of that dead man? Turns out they were real after all. The same dead guy blipped onto my computer screen this morning, then went away. So far he hasn’t come back.”
“Kaycee! Are you sure?”
“Tricia, I saw him. That makes twice now. And he’ll show up again. I think some lunatic ‘Who’s There?’ readers are trying to drive me crazy.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I have no idea.”
More silence. Dread rolled around in Kaycee’s gut. Double the panic or not, if it weren’t for Hannah, she’d be on the floor right now, catatonic.
Her thoughts skipped to the column she’d just written — that final trip to the dentist and what it had taught her. She needed that power now.
Kaycee glanced out toward the backyard. The day was sunny and warm. Utterly terrifying.
“Did you tell the police about this?” Tricia asked.
“No way. They’re all looking for Hannah. When she’s found, I’ll tell them.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Tricia sounded too easily convinced. As if she didn’t believe in the second photo any more than she believed in the first.
“Tricia?”
“Huh?”
“If something happens to me before Hannah’s found, tell Chief Davis everything. About the first picture and the second. And last night at your house I dreamed about it. It’s like I was in someone else’s body, seeing the dead man and all the blood. I heard screams and footsteps. And the floor under the dead man was dark yellow. Then guess what — the picture I saw this morning on my desktop? The dead man was lying on that very same floor. The one I saw in my dream.”
Tricia hesitated. “Really.”
“Really. Somehow I think they made me have that dream. Maybe they pushed the sights and sounds into my head, sort of like subliminal advertising. Then they sent a second photo onto my computer this morning, matching the details.”
Absolute deadness over the line.
Kaycee’s lips firmed. Okay, Tricia wasn’t buying any of this. Kaycee could picture that cynical expression of hers, one side of her mouth pulled up, neck arched back. And the raised left eyebrow.
“Tricia, I need to go now. I’m leaving to look for Hannah.” Before Tricia could reply, Kaycee clicked off the line.
She hung up the phone and closed her eyes. So she couldn’t talk to her best friend about this anymore. Fine. She didn’t need Tricia anyway. She just had to find Hannah.
Raising her chin, purse over her shoulder, Kaycee stepped out into the menacing day.
TWENTY-FIVE
Nico got the call to come in just before noon.
He was pacing the floor in his den in a rage. He’d swept liquor glasses and bottles to the carpet, kicked over the coffee table. Over and over in his mind ran that split second when he pulled the trigger — twice. Why couldn’t Giordano have just done what he was told? Nico should have kept his cool, fought the man, pistol-whipped him. Anything to keep him alive and get him into the car. Now cops were crawling all over that place.
Good thing Bear didn’t want the money out of there today. That one fact just might keep Nico alive.
He should have gone to the underboss and reported what happened right away. But he was too furious. Not a good frame of mind to be in when you met with Bear. Instead Nico burst through his own front door, shouting curses. In time he calmed down enough to send an associate to drive through AC Storage. Rizzo reported five police cars, some unmarked, and crime-scene tape around the apartment.
You could be sure the police had questioned those two renters Nico had driven by. They wouldn’t trace his unregistered Chevy. And he knew the one man who glanced up couldn’t have seen much of his face. But would Bear believe that?
After the associate reported, Nico got a call from Dom, one of his soldiers. Dom had heard from his friends on the police force that the homicide detectives were suspicious. Martin Giordano gets held up by a gun at night and shot to death the next morning? A little too convenient. The detectives were talking to the G-men investigating the robbery. Talk had even turned to whether the mob was involved. Did Giordano have any connections? Dom had insisted to his friend the Lucchese family had nothing to do with the heist.
“The cops can’t link Giordano to me,” Nico told Dom — not that he had to answer to any of his soldiers. “No way.”
“Sure, sure.”
“You hear anything about what the wife’s tellin’ the cops?”
“She ain’t tellin’ ’em nothin’. Said she was lyin’ on the bed with her little girl when she heard the shots. Then she was afraid to come out of the bedroom. She and the kid hid in the closet.”
So she hadn’t seen him. Or if she had, she wasn’t talking. “Thanks, man.”
“You bet.”
Nico hung up the phone and started pacing, trying to get his head on straight. You didn’t mess up with this much cash on the line and pay nothing. But he could still take care of things. Once the money was out of that rental, there’d be no way at all to prove a connection between him and Giordano.
He’d be okay with Bear. He’d be okay. As long as the boss didn’t start playing with the scar on his face. Nico had seen him do that maybe a dozen times. Every time somebody wound up whacked. A few times Nico had been sent to do the job.
The phone rang again. Nico knew who it was before he picked up.
“I want to see you,” Bear growled. The line clicked.
At the underboss’s house Nico did the only thing he could. He stuffed his rage at Giordano down in his gut and tried to play it cool.
“What’d you do?” Bear planted himself behind the massive cherry wood desk in his office. His arms were folded, the gray brows meeting over his eyes like one long thundercloud. On the wall behind him spread a leopard skin. Nico had never asked where he got it.
“He came at me, I had to shoot.”
“What, you can’t control your own guy?”
“My gun was out and he jumped me. I was still going to put him in the car and clean up, but I saw a cop car out the window and thought they were coming to question Giordano. I had to get outta there.”
“So now our money’s parked at a crime scene.”
Nico shook his head. “Don’t worry, the cops’ll be outta there tomorr — ”
“Don’t tell me what to worry about!” Bear smacked his palm on the desk. He pointed a thick finger at Nico. “I wondered about this guy from the beginning, but you vouched for him. Then you come back to me whinin’ he’s no good and how you’re gonna take care of it. I tell you how to do that. But you don’t listen.”