Out of Sight (18 page)

P
oppy chose not to accept the invitation to be at the Millet’s meeting about what she and Sykes had found the night before.

He had not been pleased when she left.

She would always be independent and if he couldn’t accept that, their road ahead would be rocky.

A black Mercedes limousine stood at the curb in front of Fortunes.

Poppy stopped in the act of turning down the alley that led to the side entrance she used. Limousines were rare at Fortunes—she couldn’t remember the last one she had seen there.

Curious, she went through the vestibule and pushed open one side of the double blue doors into the main part of the club. The house band noodled on the stage, the pianist, fedora tipped over his eyes, rocked his head in time to rapid riffs.

Bart Dolan, Ward’s PR guy, was the first person she noticed. He shouted at Otis across the bar, “Do what I goddamn tell you to do, and get her here.”

Otis saw Poppy at the same time and continued polishing a glass at a measured pace, holding it up to the light from time to time.

“Shit,” Bart said with a lot of feeling. “Am I supposed to believe this?” He looked at other customers at the bar, who all kept their eyes on their drinks.

“Look,” Bart said, puffing with the effort of trying to calm down. “I know you’re probably busy. Perhaps one of Poppy’s brothers is available.”

Much as she would have liked to watch the show a little longer, Poppy didn’t want Liam or Ethan disturbed, if they were in, and Otis needed a break.

“Looking for me?” she said brightly, walking toward the bar. “You’d better watch your carbon footprint.”

“Huh?” Bart said, and she wondered how good a PR man he was. Looking like the all-American golden boy went just so far.

She laughed. “Sorry. Did you come in the limo outside?”

“Uh-huh,” Bart said.

Poppy shrugged. “Forget it. What can I do for you, Bart?”

“Ward wants you at his place. He sent me to get you.”

The faintest curl of annoyance attacked her stomach. “I’m not free right now. A business like this takes some running.”

“There’s three of you and you got plenty of help,” Bart said, sounding irritated, petulant and pushy. “Ward wants you. He had me bring the limo for you. Special.”

Poppy didn’t go around reading the auras and brain waves of everyone she met but there were times when something caught her attention and she concentrated. Bart Dolan was no Einstein, she decided, but he was determined. Blue dots coalesced, interspersed with gray and they trembled. Bart was the kind of man who followed directions to the letter and expected others to fall in with whatever he needed to please his authority figure.

“Sorry,” she said, irritated. “Can’t do it now.”

“But—”

“Did you put in that order for liqueur glasses, Poppy,” Otis said. “No problem if you didn’t, I’ll phone it in myself.”

“It went in,” she told him.

Bart walked close to Poppy. He shook his head, sighed and looked at his feet before staring her dolefully straight in the eyes. He lowered his voice. “Ward isn’t doing so well.”

“I thought he’d gone out of town.”

“He got back this morning. The talk about the murders isn’t doing him any good. You know how it goes. Once they read bad publicity in a paper or see it on TV, they convict.”

Poppy wasn’t sure who “they” were. “There’s absolute proof that Ward had nothing to do with that.”

Bart shuffled a bit. “He needs to tell you about it himself. I hate to see a man with his potential cut off in the prime of his career.”

“It won’t be,” Poppy said. She made up her mind, “Okay, I’ll come with you but I can’t stay long.” And she would prefer if Sykes never found out, or her brothers.

It wouldn’t be fair not to let anyone know where she was going.

“Otis,” she said, as offhand as possible. “I’m going to visit a friend, but I’ll be back shortly.”

Otis grunted and gave Bart a hard look.

Riding in the back of the stretch limousine felt ridiculous, especially when they weren’t going far.

On St. Louis Street, Bart drew up in front of a pink-washed house next to the one where Poppy had been to the party. He got out and opened her door. “The boss is in here today. The cops still keep running in and out of the other place.”

He let her into the very pretty building and led the way through rooms furnished primarily in overstuffed but well-done Victorian style to a conservatory at the back of the house. A small but elegant garden was visible through the windows.

“Poppy, you came!” Ward leaped out of a white wicker chair with green cushions and strode to meet her. “I’ll call if I need you,” he told Bart.

“Hi,” she said.

Ward took her by the hand and studied her face for so long her awkwardness swelled to painful proportions. What he wanted from her she couldn’t give but she needed inspiration to make him get the message.

“I came back early. I missed you.”

“Bart said you ran into trouble,” she responded without thinking.

“Yes. Let’s go into the garden.” He took her by the hand and led her outside. A path of broken stone went between lawns and flower beds. The surrounding walls were covered with blooming creepers and climbing roses.

“This is lovely. Why do you have two houses next to each other?”

“I like the idea of privacy. I own the one on the other side, too.”

He withdrew his hand and put the arm around her shoulders. “You are such a gentle thing.”

He didn’t know her well.

“I feel as if I have to handle you like porcelain or you’ll break. Maybe that’s because you’re good, and I feel that in you.”

The water was getting deeper.

“Let’s sit on the bench, on the other side of the rose beds.”

The bench was of ornately carved white marble. Ward stood and so did Poppy. He kept on standing and looking at her until she gave up and sat down.

Today she was into auras. Ward’s showed he was intelligent, but she already knew that. And that he believed he had a right to get what he wanted.

That revelation unnerved her.

But he wasn’t completely certain of himself.

A jagged yellow pulse, just one, surprised her. Had
she seen it before? He sat beside her and she kept looking at him, waiting for the pulse again. It didn’t come. Perhaps she had imagined it.

She stopped reading him. Getting out of here without hurting him was the only thing she wanted—that and making sure he didn’t keep pursuing her.

“It’s been hard,” he told her quietly. “Sometimes the biggest disappointments come from people you thought you trusted.”

Poppy felt trapped. She crossed her feet, fiddled with her fingers in her lap.

Ward sighed. “My folks sent word for me to put in an appearance. That’s where I went.”

“Where do they live?”

“It doesn’t matter. Not anymore. I’ve embarrassed them.”

Impulsively, she took his hand in both of hers. “I don’t see how. You haven’t done anything wrong. They should be proud of you.”

He smiled slightly. “You would say that because it’s the way you think. You don’t know my folks. They don’t want to see me again unless I’m elected to the senate. They figure that if I am, it’ll prove they don’t have to be embarrassed anymore.”

Appalled, Poppy moved closer to him. She inclined her head and felt tears of sympathy well in her eyes. “You probably misunderstood, you know. Sometimes we hear what we expect to hear. Are your folks pretty tough on you, usually?”

“They always have been.”

“There, you see. They couldn’t have been as blunt as you think.”

He put a palm against her cheek, threaded his fingers into her hair. “I don’t care about them. No, I don’t mean that. I won’t let myself go into mourning over this. Either they’ll come around or they won’t. If I’ve got you on my side I don’t need anyone else.”

Her stomach took a dive and she glanced away.

“You are on my side?”

“Of course I am.”

“This is for you.” He put a square black box into her hand. “Open it.”

Horrified, she did as he asked and almost fainted with relief when she looked down on a gold pin set with large diamonds. W. W. “I…I …”

“Put it on. You know how much your support means to me.”

“This pin would buy a lot of campaign pamphlets,” she said and immediately regretted her words. “I mean, it’s too much. Gorgeous but outrageous.” There had to be four or five carats of stunning white diamonds in the thing.

Ward took the box from her, removed the pin and attached it to the neck of her dress.

She looked down at it, amazed and uncertain what to do.

“Remember the little gold ones we gave out at the meeting?”

“Yes,” she said. “One of those would have been fine.”

He laughed. “‘Win With Ward’? I knew you’d think that’s what yours meant. Wrong. ‘Ward’s Woman.’” He held her hand again, kissed her fingers. “The only woman I’ll ever want in my life.”

“I’m not what you need, not good enough.” She hadn’t meant to say that. “I mean you need a woman from a different background than mine.” Preferably someone who wasn’t paranormal, not that he knew about that apparently.

Ward laughed. He was irresistible when he laughed. “You need a course in self-esteem, my darling. Better yet, you need me. You are incredible. With you I can do anything. I’ll do it for both of us.”

Coming had been a mistake but she had hoped she could make him understand. “Please, Ward, wait—”

He kissed her softly, cutting off what she’d been about to say, but the kiss was light, quick and undemanding.

From a pocket he took another box, this one navy-blue velvet. She tried to latch on to some hope because it wasn’t square.

“If you don’t like these, I’ll have someone come in and bring you more to choose from.”

Her hope dwindled.

This time Ward opened the box and the glitter from inside sent shafts of light in all directions. Rings, an engagement ring and two wedding rings. One for her and one for him.

Poppy had never seen a canary diamond as large as this one. Huge, princess cut, the band was studded with deep-set white and canary diamonds. It was a beautiful thing. The woman’s wedding band was plain platinum, as was the man’s.

“You like them,” he said quietly with a smile in his voice. “You don’t know how relieved I am.”

She couldn’t speak. With her fist to her mouth, she couldn’t stop tears from falling. She hated doing this to anyone who was sincere.

Ward removed the engagement ring, took her by the finger and began to slide it on. “Marry me quickly, darling. I can’t wait for you any longer.”

Poppy jerked her hand back and put it behind her back. “Ward. I can’t.”

“Of course you can. I love you.”

“And you deserve someone to love you back.”

She took off running and glanced back only once when she heard him behind her. Driven by a kind of mad need to escape, she closed and locked the door behind her. Her throat burned and she heard her own sobs.

A last look at Ward showed his face twisted with confusion.

And she saw the single, crooked yellow pulse—just once—again.

“W
hat is this?” Sykes called to Nat who paced back and forth outside the morgue. Gray had been summoned to come, too, and they both needed to be at Millet’s.

“The shit’s hit the fan,” Nat said succinctly when they reached him. “Must have. Look at that lot.”

Sykes and Gray followed the direction of Nat’s finger. Every coroner’s van and medic vehicle in town must be parked beside the building.

“What the hell,” Gray said. “What happened that we didn’t hear about?”

“Come on,” Nat said, walking into the building. He stopped just inside the door, and Sykes hopped sideways to avoid walking into him. “Will you look at all this?”

The corridor teemed with activity, technicians in scrubs, boots and rubber aprons hurrying to and fro but oddly, no talking.

“I’ve never seen more than a couple of people here,” Gray said. “Have we had a disaster or something?”

They advanced, staying close together, until a door on the right opened to spit out Blades. Sykes frowned. The man actually seemed agitated.

“You three,” Blades said. “Come with me.”

“Good evening to you, too, Dr. Death,” Gray muttered.

Nat glared at him. “Inappropriate.”

“How do you know?” Gray came back. “So there’s a lot of people around. Doesn’t have to mean the sky’s falling.”

Blades swept through a swinging door, and Sykes barely caught it before it would have hit him in the face.

“Nice,” Gray whispered, to no one in particularly.

Nat actually gave a lopsided grin. “Some things never change,” he said.

This wasn’t the usual autopsy room Blades used. It was much larger with two rows of steel tables.

Most tables bore a sheet-covered body—or partially sheet-covered in some cases.

“Oh, shit,” Nat said.

“Is that your word of the day?” Sykes said, but his insides clenched. Blades hadn’t called them just to see how the place looked when it was crowded.

“They started arriving late last night,” Blades said. He went to a far corner and stood with one rubber-booted foot crossed over the other.

“You’ve got a lot of help.” Gray nodded to the people at work in the room.

“This takes more than one pathologist, if we want the job done before the stench gets a lot worse.”

“Where did they come from?” Sykes asked. He engaged his third eye and realized there were no drifting shadows of people passing. “That’s not normal,” he muttered.

Blades looked at him sharply. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing.”

“They showed up in different places all over the Quarter. Mostly just dropped in the street. We’ve got twelve so far.”

Sykes worked his jaw.

“Anything to link them together?” Nat asked.

“Take a tour first,” Blades suggested. “Get familiar with our corpses.”

“Fun,” Sykes muttered, but he started down one row of tables at once, pulling sheets from any faces that were covered. “So? Or do I have to look at the whole bodies?”

“We’ll get to that. The faces will do for now.”

Sykes looked up and caught Nat’s eye. The detective stood between two tables and went back to looking from the face on the left to the face on the right before moving to the next two.

Settling in to get the job done, Sykes found himself starting to compare the victims.

“I’m damned,” Gray said. “Do you see what I see?”

“What do you see?” Blades asked.

Gray didn’t answer. He raised his brows and looked to Sykes and Nat.

They returned to the corner they had left and Blades joined them.

“It’s strange,” Nat said. “They all look so similar.”

Blades nodded. “They’re ordinary. Not one of them stands out. You wouldn’t look at them twice. The first ones who came in—right after the woman—they were distinctive and we know who they were.”

“What does that mean?”

“Not one of these people has been reported missing.”

Nat inclined his head. “If you don’t know who they are, how do you know if someone’s looking for them?”

“In the last twelve hours we’ve had one missing person report and it turned out the woman who made the call killed her husband and set fire to his car with his body in it. There haven’t been any other calls.”

“So what are you thinking?” Sykes had very bad feelings.

“Take a look at this.” He pulled two sheets down from male bodies to expose the genitals.

“My God,” Gray said. Sykes took a quick look and turned away.

“Do they all look as if they were mangled in a big sharpener of some kind?”

“Yep. And the women are the same as Sonia. Deliberately lacerated inside.”

Sykes crossed his arms and tried not to feel sick. “So what do you think it means, Doc?”

“Embran,” Blades said. “Mass attack this time.”

Sykes nodded. “That’s what I think, too. And they want us to know they’re here, so they devise another of their sick killing methods.”

“We’re running more tests,” Blades said. “If my hunch is right, Embran are killing Embran. What I don’t know is why. Unless they think they can throw us off by having these…these…” He waved a hand. “These whatever they are left lying around.”

Sykes looked at the rows of bodies. “You mean they may be Embran?”

“I mean they may have been Embran. They don’t know much about the way the human body works. They might as well be nothing now.”

“Just a minute.” Sykes turned back and took another look at one of the last two bodies he’d seen. He stared at the face. “Look at this one.”

“What is it?” Blades moved fast to look at the body with Sykes.

“We’re going to have to check with Poppy and Liam about the man they identified on the tape. I think this is the one who killed the singer.”