“Where was he found?” Paige asked.
Covering the phone’s speaker, Cole whispered, “Some bar in U City?”
She nodded and left the kitchen.
“How soon can you get here, Mr. Warnecki?” Detective Shin asked.
“I’ll leave right now. Where’s the station?”
She gave him the address and expressed her condolences, but Cole didn’t accept them with more than a few grunts as he scribbled the important information on the closest pad he could find. He hung up, nodded at Daniels’s stunned face and went after Paige. He expected to walk into a meltdown, but only found her standing in the living room with her arms crossed and her eyes fixed upon one of the house’s many shelves.
“I’ll go to the cops and see what they know,” Cole offered. “Maybe it’s not even him.”
“Find out as much as you can, and if you run into any trouble, call me. If they won’t let you call me, call Stanley Velasco. You have his number?”
“Yeah. It’s in my phone.”
“If Rico calls, don’t tell him anything. Don’t even answer the phone. Let me tell him.” She wrapped her fingers around the eyedropper bottle as if she would never let it go. “Ned used to go to a bar in U City called the Keyhole Tavern. I know where it is. Rico and I will check it out.”
Now that he’d stood with her for a few moments, Cole could tell she wasn’t just staring at the bookshelf. Paige was looking down at the cement frog that sat on the edge with its legs crossed and hanging over the side. It was one of the most putrid pieces of random decoration Cole had ever seen, but seemed perfectly at home among all the dusty books, obscure manuals, and specimen jars. He put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her closer. “Maybe you should stay here. There’s probably not much to see.”
“We’ll check it out.”
“The cops said there was a robbery, Paige. It could be that Ned was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
She turned on him and snapped, “Ned wouldn’t have been killed in a robbery. It’s just not possible. He could probably take a bullet or get stabbed and not die with all the serum in him.”
“The serum didn’t help his eye.”
“That’s different, Cole. God damn it, just trust me! The Nymar Rico and I cleaned out of this city could never have killed Ned. Not on their best day, so there’s no fucking way some robber got that lucky. The only Nymar Ned and I saw in Sauget were either killed or too sick to do much of anything. Malia’s pack is too scattered to worry about him. That leaves Henry and Lancroft. This could be payback for chasing him out of that club or just something to distract us from coming after him again. I don’t give a shit what happened, this can’t go unanswered.”
Chapter 23
Rico tore up Hanley Road as if he was trying to break the sound barrier. “It was only a matter of time before those gutless fucking Nymar came for payback after getting their asses chased from this town.” He parked with one front tire on the curb and jumped out with his Sig Sauer in hand.
“Put that away!” Paige said.
Bits of glass and cigarette butts stuck to the concrete, announcing the Skinners’ steps with a muffled crunch. The humid Missouri air hung around the bar, making the Keyhole seem even more isolated from the world of the living.
Rico’s eyes were fixed upon the front of the bar and he made it all the way to the entrance without noticing the place was closed. “Or it could be those motherfucking Mud People,” he snarled while holstering the .45 so he could pull at the door. “They found him once and they must have found him again. It’s not like Ned tried to shake up his routine or anything. He must come here three times a week. I told him not to be so goddamn predictable, but did he listen? Fucking cops probably wrote this place off without even bothering to look for anything.”
Paige tipped her head back and put a drop into each eye from the bottle she’d taken from Ned’s. “Before you get too worked up, let’s see what we can find in here.”
There wasn’t much to see from the parking lot. Most of the windows were covered by shades yellowed from age and overexposure to daylight, but a few were uncovered. Looking in at the bar through one of them, Rico didn’t see anything but shabby furniture and old arcade cabinets.
“Ned was here,” she said as she studied the waves of Skinner scent drifting within the bar. “From what I can see, there were no Nymar.”
“Can you be sure about that?”
“No.”
“Then keep lookin’.”
After letting the drops soak in, Paige picked up even more of the Skinner scent within the place. “I think there may have been another Skinner in there with him.”
“What makes you say that?”
She looked at the scent left behind by herself and Rico and compared it to the traces inside. “Because Ned doesn’t move around enough to lay down that much scent. Even if he did laps inside of that place, his scent would have had to dissipate by now, right?”
“You’re the one with the funky vision,” Rico grumbled.
Compared to the fresher scents they had left, the trails drifting inside the bar were like wisps of stubborn cigar smoke. The longer she stared through the window, the more wisps she picked up. “Looks like it’s concentrated at the bar. There’s so much. My gut’s telling me there’s too much in there to have been left by just one of us. Did anyone else come here?”
“Any other Skinners? Not that I know of.” Rico’s expression took on a cold, steely edge. “Hasta be Lancroft. That old fuck got to Ned.”
Paige’s phone rang. When she answered, Cole immediately told her, “It’s him.”
“You saw the body?”
“I saw a picture of it. I met with Detective Shin. She had a picture on her laptop, and yeah,” he repeated with a sigh, “it’s Ned all right.”
“Are you alone?”
“Nope,” Cole replied in a forced conversational tone.
“What do the cops know about how he was killed?”
“The bar was robbed. They found the owner with a broken neck and Ned’s throat was cut. There wasn’t much by way of security at that place, so they’re going with the robbery.”
“Then meet us at The Emerald. You remember the address?”
“I got it.”
“Good. Any problems, give me a call.” She snapped the phone shut and turned on her heels so she could walk up the sidewalk to Rico. The big man got some amused looks from passersby, thanks to his deathly stare and patchwork leather jacket, but he wasn’t concerned with any of that. He clenched a cigarette between his teeth and expelled smoke as if trying to spit it into the world’s face.
“You wanna hear something stupid?” he asked.
“I’ve spent enough time with Cole to make me immune to stupid.”
Rico’s eyebrows flicked up as one choppy laugh pushed the rest of the smoke out of his throat. “Damn! And here I thought you liked the guy.”
She lowered her head and stuffed her hands into her pockets while walking away.
“I knew it,” Rico grumbled as he fell into step beside her. “So have you two…?”
“I thought you had something stupid to tell me.”
He watched her for another second, took the cigarette from his mouth and said, “I actually thought Ned was safe. Not like I didn’t think anything would ever happen to him, but just that so much shit already has. He was the only one to walk out of Miami after all those other Skinners got ripped to shit. We thought we lost him in the Everglades while he was off chasing Lizard Men.”
“Squamatosapiens,” Paige corrected. “The proper term is Squamatosapiens.”
“Right. Then he loses an eye and comes here to watch over an empty city. The old buzzard could handle himself, but he also did a damn good job of laying low. He dealt with the troublemakers and kept everything in line. I mean, I really thought he was safe.”
“You’re right. That is stupid.”