Vendetta (18 page)

And then the lake house rose into view like an island.

Gabe was used to magnificence, but the lake house was a work of art. Illuminated by powerful exterior lights, it was built of timber and half of it hung suspended in mid-air over a frozen expanse of a vast lake. All the surrounding trees and vegetation were coated in sparking white snow, also illuminated. Gabe looked up to see if he had missed rising smoke from the immense stone chimney, but there was none.

Celeste typed in a code on a keypad beside a gate, which then pulled back. There was no guard gate here, and no onsite security staff. Celeste told him that the property was protected by state-of-the-art security that included several lasers activated both by motion and heat. She assured him that she had disarmed them.

“The garage is around back,” she said.

Gabe drove in a semicircle to a concrete outbuilding decorated with stamped pine designs. Celeste typed in a code and one of several garage doors rose, allowing them to enter. Gabe guided in their borrowed car among a trio of exquisite classic cars: a Bugatti, a Rolls, and a beautiful old Morgan.

All this time Celeste had been dialing her father’s number. Her left hand was a knot against her thigh, bloodless. As the sedan cooled down, the engine ticked.

She took a breath and whispered, “I’m scared.”

“Maybe you should wait here.”

“No. Pop the trunk. I’m not going in unarmed.”

He did as she asked, grabbing his Beretta but wondering why he was bothering when she had enough weaponry to outfit the army of a small country. She handed him an Uzi submachine gun as before, put on a belt holster, and slid her Glock into it.

“For luck,” she said, and kissed him.

She took point, guiding him not to the ostentatious main entrance of carved wood and stained glass, but toward a door that blended in seamlessly with the timber exterior. She ran her hand across a space beside the door and a rectangle slid up, revealing a keypad, and she punched in a code. He memorized the sequence of numbers.

The door opened and she crept into a mudroom containing duck boots, fishing tackles, and a pair of waders on a hook. On the wall was a photograph of Celeste wearing a toothless grin as she held up a tiny fish on the end of a line.

“Daddy?” she called. She hit a panel and lights came on.

She moved from the mudroom into a broad hall papered in hunter green, then down the hall into a sweeping living room, its walls were decorated with abstract canvases and its cathedral ceiling stretched at least thirty feet in the air. An octagonal skylight capped the planes of the ceiling.

And beside Gabe on the wall was
not
a modern art painting but a cloud of blood and brain matter stuck to the wall. In an instant Gabe went for the floor, dragging her down with him. As she fought him, she threw him off balance. He pitched forward, falling onto his chest.

His face pressed against what was left of Cavanaugh Ellison’s head.

He covered her mouth to keep her from screaming and rolled on top of her to shield her. She jerked and fought and he knew he had maybe three seconds before she did serious damage to him. He whispered into her ear, “They may still be here.”

She fought him like a madwoman, flinging him off, but he grabbed hold of her and jerked her off her feet. She fell hard; her momentum knocked him down and he threw his arms across her chest. She threw back her head and screamed the most inhuman shriek he had ever heard spring from the mouth of someone who was not a beast. She kicked and flailed and Gabe had no idea how he hung onto her, but he did.

Horrible as it would have been for her to touch her father, Gabe had an ulterior motive: he didn’t want her to disturb the crime scene. His lawyer’s mind was already trying to parse whether he should call this in and if so, how he could explain why they had come up to the lake house.

Celeste thrashed against him like a Fury from a Greek myth. She clocked him with a knife hand jab under the jawline, forcing him to let go of her. The back of his head hit the edge of a coffee table and the world blazed gray and yellow. When next he could move under his own steam, Celeste was cradling what was left of her father. Gabe had seen many awful things in his day, but this was one of the worst. Her black sweater was covered with gore and her cheeks and forehead were coated with her father’s blood.

Then above them the skylight exploded. A red laser centered on Celeste’s chest but as she leaped out of the way, her father’s corpse was torn apart by bullets. Gabe aimed his Uzi upward, spraying the glass octagon with bullets. Celeste was screaming and sweeping up, down, everywhere with her submachine gun. She was as likely to hit Gabe as any invader.

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” he bellowed. Something boomed and shook the walls and then he couldn’t hear. Glass and wood plummeted, chunks of timber and steel slamming into the floor like bombs. Gabe reached for her but the room was filling up with smoke. His eyes began to water and his nose and throat burned, closed up. Tear gas.

He put his hand over his mouth as he coughed. He stumbled, reaching for Celeste, seeing nothing in the murk. He wouldn’t leave her here.

Then someone had a hand around his forearm and they were dragging him somewhere. He couldn’t see. The
pop-pop-pop
of gunfire penetrated his muffled hearing and he decided his best course of action was to allow himself to be pulled along. He hoped Celeste was doing the pulling.

He was yanked outside into the frigid, clear air. Then, as he tried to get his bearings, someone pushed him hard and he sailed out into nothingness. He couldn’t make a sound, could only cough and retch, and then he hit the snow face first. Everything hurt. The air was knocked out of him and he couldn’t move.

Celeste
, he thought, and then
Catherine.

And then he passed out.

T
urntable.

Cat met Tess at her apartment, to find Tess wrapped in a bathrobe, her hair up, and nearly every item of clothing she owned strewn on her bed. Misty perfume hung in the air.

“Tess, this isn’t a date,” she said.

Tess gave her a look. “I can’t hide my feelings for you any longer, Catherine Chandler. Every stakeout, every canvass… they’ve been like dates to me.” She dimpled. “J.T. said he’ll meet us there and introduce us around. We won’t just be the cops. We’ll be the friends of a regular.”

Cat liked that plan. “As my dad always said, ‘You catch more flies with honey.’”

“Speaking of your family, does Heather know any of this stuff? About Reynolds being your birth father?” Tess asked her as she picked up a turquoise top then put it down and examined a white blouse.

Cat picked up a red satin blouse with black inserts. “You should wear this. You look good in red. And no. When she moved to Florida, I knew it would make my life easier, if emptier. But that was back when the only secret I had to hide was that Vincent was a beast. I can’t imagine juggling all my other secrets, too, if she was still living with me.”

“Then maybe they shouldn’t be secrets,” Tess said. “Next time you get together, maybe you should tell her.” After a beat, she added, “I told J.T. about his coffee.” Cat raised her brows. “And?” Tess lifted up one of the piles of clothes and extracted a burgundy gift bag. Inside the bag was a box, and inside the box was a French press.

“He’ll be thrilled.” Cat was sincere.

“I know, right?” Tess said. “A present from a hot babe.” She put the press back in the box, the box in the bag.

“I think this is the first time either one of us has brought a present to an investigation.” Cat nodded approvingly as Tess modeled the red blouse. “It’s perfect.”

* * *

J.T. checked the time on his phone. Tess and Cat were supposed to meet him at 9 p.m. and it was nearly 9.03. Rationally, he understood that three minutes was a trivial amount of time to wait, but ever since Vincent had lost his temper and beasted during the blackout, he had felt a little needier about connecting with the people who mattered to him. And those people were Tess.

9.04.

“They are…
wow
,” J.T. said.

Tess and Cat sailed into the busy club together. He could tell that his eyes were actually bulging. Tess looked so beautiful that his knees gave way. Red was her color. But black was nice too. Also white. And blue. And… no colors. Flesh color. Turntable was lit with dozens of candles on a score of tables. The warm glow made Tess look radiant. She was so
hot
.

Tess gave him a wave and he really wanted to walk over to meet them but he had momentarily forgotten how to walk. Or breathe. A warm rush of happiness pushed a little grin across his features as he waved back.

He stumbled, then manfully wove his way among the tables and reached Tess’s side. She smiled at him and he thought about kissing her but she was on duty. So near and yet so far.

“Hey,” Tess said. She kind of ducked her head and smiled her bashful smile, which was the one that signaled she was feeling awkward about their relationship in the presence of someone she knew. The smile no longer offended him. He had categorized all her smiles—after all, he had eight units of psych under his belt from grad school—and then he had quantified their implementation on a spreadsheet. During any typical week, Tess smiled
at
him 11.72 times more than she smiled
about
him, either awkwardly or positively. The odds were in his favor. And besides,
she
had called
him
to suggest he join them. That meant she knew his schedule, that he had no classes to teach tomorrow and so he would stay up until all hours working on Cat’s bogus footage, seeking a way to crack the case, and doing whatever he could think of be a useful member of the team.

“Hey, J.T.,” Cat said.

Cat looked amazing too, but he didn’t want to violate the bro-code by staring at her. She was Vincent’s to stare at. His current awkwardness around her was based on a completely different set of factors—he didn’t know if Vincent had told her that he had pretty much attacked his best friend. Vincent was trying so hard to prove to Cat that he had his beast side under complete control. Except… he didn’t.

“Okay, the person you want to talk to is Surfer Joe,” J.T. said. “He’s a co-owner and he can show you the security footage. He’s got forty-five more minutes of DJing to go and then he’ll come to you.”

Surfer Joe was J.T.’s favorite disc jockey at Turntable. He played the classics like the Beach Boys and the Ventures. Strangely, J.T. liked surf music. He’d never been on a surfboard in his life, but he could easily see Tess in a bikini.

“Oh, hey,” Tess said brightly as a waiter in a Hawaiian shirt approached. “We want alcohol for my man here.”

The waiter nodded. “The usual, Dr. Forbes?”

J.T. nodded.

“A light beer it is.” The waiter smiled pleasantly at Tess and Cat. “Surfer Joe wanted to let you know there’s a kid who’s been trying to audition as a DJ so he’s going to give him the rest of this set. He’ll be over in about five minutes.”

“Good,” Tess said. “Thank you.” She looked at J.T. “Oh my God. Light beer? What am I doing with you? What about a Sex on the Beach?”

“Light beer is fine,” J.T. told the waiter, who nodded and left. Then he said, “Cat, I’m making progress on your bogus footage. I found out that Rikers archives all their security footage in a database and I’ve gotten in through the Homeland Security system. I’ve isolated a batch of files from the dates you gave me and I’m going through them one by one.”

“Thanks, J.T.,” Cat said. “That sounds like a lot of work.”

“No,” he said, although it was. “I’m hoping it will lead us to whoever broke Reynolds out.”

“You’re so smart,” Tess said. She beamed at him. “Smartest ever.”

Cat’s phone rang, and by the way she lit up, J.T. knew it was their favorite beastie boy. She listened for a few seconds, and then she said into the phone, “In a way, the fact that there’s nothing is more telling than if there had been something. Okay, thanks.”

She hung up. “
V
just finished going through Claudia’s apartment,” she informed Tess and J.T. “He said it was like a hotel room. Very sterile. Her stuff was there, but
she
wasn’t. In other words, no personal items like notes or receipts, and no laptop. Also he couldn’t really scent her. He thinks she used some kind of olfactory dampeners, like Landon did.”

“So what does that mean?” J.T. asked.

“Remember how I scared Vincent back when I first met you guys and he just left?” Cat asked him, and of course he nodded. How could he ever forget? “He packed up anything that could be linked directly to him. I think Claudia packed up her past. And anything that could link her to our investigation.”

“We need to talk to her,” Tess said, and Cat nodded.

“I just wonder if she’ll talk to us. We haven’t heard from Bailey Hart, either. Robertson and Gonzales have a lock on them, I’m sure.”

Tess blew the air out of her cheeks. “Well, as a case, this sucks, but as a close call…”

“Hi, beach bums,” said Surfer Joe. Tall and thin, with bleach-blond hair, bronzed skin, a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, the DJ sat down at the table. “Dr. Forbes,” he said, with a nod. “I told the kid to spin you some Jan and Dean. ‘Surf City.’”

“That’s great,” J.T. said. Then he huffed as Tess gave him The Look. Meaning that he was supposed to go amuse himself elsewhere, because they couldn’t let him sit in on an official police investigation. She mouthed
sorry
and he forgave her at once because, after all, she had thought they would have a good solid forty-five minutes to hang out before her interview. And hopefully, they’d have some time after the detectives were finished with Surfer Joe.

J.T. moved off to another table while Cat, Tess, and Surfer Joe sat in a huddle. A different waiter walked up to him, lanky muscles, lots of blond hair, towering over him, and said, “Hey, cool cat, I’m Cowabunga Chris. Can I get you something? Curly fries? Nachos? We’re trying something new tonight: popcorn sundaes. Two popcorn balls infused with maraschino cherry juice, dusted with toasted coconut and then drowned in vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup.”