Sacred (21 page)

“Nice gun,” I said. “Did you pick it because it matches your outfit, or was it the other way around?”

She came out onto the patio, the gun shaking slightly in her hand, pointing somewhere into the space between Angie’s nose and my mouth.

“Look,” Desiree said, “in case you can’t tell, I’m nervous, and I don’t know who to trust, and I need your help, but I’m not sure about you.”

“Like father like daughter,” Angie said.

I slapped her knee. “Stole my line.”

“What?” Desiree said.

Angie took a sip of her beer, watched Desiree. “Your father, Miss Stone, had us kidnapped so he could talk to us. Now you’re pointing a gun at us, ostensibly for the same reason.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“We don’t like guns,” I said. “The Weeble would tell you that if he was still alive.”

“Who?” She stepped gingerly around the back of my chair.

“Graham Clifton,” Angie said. “We called him the Weeble.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” I turned my head as she edged along the balcony rail, finally came to a stop about six feet
from our chairs, the gun still pointing at a space between us.

And good God, was she beautiful. I’ve dated some beautiful women in my time. Women who based their worth on their external perfection because the world judged them by pretty much the same standard. Lithe or lush, tall or petite, achingly attractive women around whom men forgot how to speak.

But none of them could come within a country mile of Desiree’s radiance. Her physical perfection was palpable. Her skin seemed to have been lathered onto bones that were both delicate and pronounced. Her breasts, unencumbered by a bra, swelled against the thin material of her dress with every shallow breath she took, and the dress itself, a simple, unstructured peach cotton affair designed to be functional and loose, couldn’t do much to hide the tight cords of her abdomen, or the gracefully hard cut of muscle in her thighs.

Her jade eyes sparkled, and seemed twice as bright because they were sheened with a dewy nervousness and set back against the sunset glow of her skin.

She wasn’t unaware of her effect, either. During our entire conversation, she’d glance back and forth at Angie when speaking to her, her eyes skipping across her face. But when she spoke to me, she’d bore into me with those eyes, lean forward almost imperceptibly.

“Miss Stone,” I said, “put the gun down.”

“I can’t. I don’t…I mean, I’m not sure—”

“Put it down or shoot us,” Angie said. “You have five seconds.”

“I—”

“One,” Angie said.

Her eyes welled up. “I just want to be sure—”

“Two.”

Desiree looked at me, but I gave her nothing back.

“Three.”

“Look—”

“Four.” Angie turned her chair to her right and the metal made a short screech against the concrete.

“Just stay there,” Desiree said, and the wavering gun turned toward Angie.

“Five.” Angie stood up.

Desiree pointed the quivering gun at her, and I reached up and slapped her hand.

The gun bounced off the railing, and I snatched it from the air before it could drop to the garden six stories below. Lucky, too, because when I peered over the side, I saw a couple of kids, grade school age, playing on their ground-floor patio by the garden.

Look what I found, Ma. Boom.

Desiree’s face dropped into her hands for a moment, and Angie looked at me.

I shrugged. The gun was a Ruger .22 automatic. Stainless steel. It felt light in my hand, but that’s deceptive when you’re holding a pistol. Guns are never light.

She’d left the safety on, and I ejected the clip into my sling, pulled it back out, and placed the gun in my left pocket, the clip in my right.

Desiree raised her head, her eyes red. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Do what?” Angie pulled another chair over. “Sit down.”

Desiree sat. “This. Guns and death and…Jesus Christ, I can’t do it.”

“Did you rip off the Church of Truth and Revelation?”

She nodded.

“It was your idea,” Angie said. “Not Price’s.”

A half nod. “His idea. But I pushed him toward it after he told me.”

“Why?”

“Why?” she said as two tears coursed her face, dropped off her cheekbones and landed on her knees just below the hem of her dress. “Why? You have to…” She sucked up air through her mouth and looked up at the sky, wiped at her eyes. “My father killed my mother.”

I never saw that one coming. I looked at Angie. She hadn’t either.

“In the car accident that nearly killed him?” Angie said. “Are you serious?”

Desiree nodded several times.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Your father sets up a fake carjacking. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“And pays these men to shoot him three times?”

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” she said.

“Well, I’d hope not,” Angie said.

Desiree looked at her and blinked. Then she looked at me, her eyes wide. “He’d already paid the men. When everything went wrong and the car flipped—that wasn’t part of the plan—they panicked and shot him after they killed my mother.”

“Bullshit,” Angie said.

Desiree’s eyes widened even further and she turned her head to a neutral point between the two of us and looked down at the concrete for a moment.

“Desiree,” I said, “there’s enough holes in that story to drive a couple of Humvees through.”

“For instance,” Angie said, “why wouldn’t these guys, once they were arrested and tried, tell the police everything?”

“Because they didn’t know my father hired them,” she said. “One day, someone contacts someone and asks that a woman be killed. Her husband will be with her, this someone says, but he isn’t a target. Just her.”

We thought about that for a minute.

Desiree watched us, then added, “It’s all chains of command. By the time it got down to the actual killers, they had no idea where the order came from.”

“So, again, why shoot your father?”

“I can only tell you what I said before—they panicked. Did you read up on the case?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, if you did, you’d see that the three killers weren’t exactly rocket scientists. They were dumb kids, and they weren’t hired for their brains. They were hired because they could kill someone without losing any sleep over it.”

I looked over at Angie again. It was coming out of left field, and it definitely had an outlandish quality to it, but in a twisted way, it made some sense.

“Why did your father want to kill your mother?”

“She was planning to divorce him. And she wanted half his fortune. He could fight her in court, and she’d drag out all the sordid details of their life together. Her being sold to him, his raping me when I was fourteen, his continuing to assault me over the years, plus a thousand other secrets she knew about him.” She looked at her hands, turned them palm up, then down again. “His other option was to kill her. And he’d exercised that option with people before.”

“And he wants to kill you because you know that,” Angie said.

“Yes,” she said and it came out as a hiss.

“How do you know?” I said.

“After she died, when he got back from the hospital, I heard him talking with Julian and Graham. He was enraged that the three killers had been arrested by the police, instead of dealt with. The best thing that ever happened to those three kids was that they got caught with the gun on them and confessed. Otherwise, my father would have hired a top lawyer to get them off, bought a judge or two, and then had them tortured and killed as soon as they hit the street.” She chewed her lower lip for a moment. “My father is the most dangerous man alive.”

“We’re starting to hold that opinion ourselves,” I said.

“Who got shot in the Ambassador Hotel?” Angie said.

“I don’t want to talk about that.” She shook her head, then brought her knees up to her chin, placed her feet on the edge of the chair, and hugged her legs.

“You don’t have a choice,” Angie said.

“Oh, God.” She laid her head sideways on her knees for a moment, her eyes closed.

After a minute or so, I said, “Try it another way. What made you go to the hotel? Why did you suddenly think you knew where the money was?”

“Something Jay said.” Her eyes were still closed, her voice a whisper.

“What did Jay say?”

“He said Price’s room was filled with buckets of water.”

“Water.”

She raised her head. “Ice buckets, half filled with ice that had melted. And I remembered the same thing at one of the motels we stayed in on our way down here. Price and me. He kept making trips to the ice machine.
Just a little ice each time, never filling the bucket. He said something about liking the ice in his drinks to be as cold as possible. Fresh from the machine. And how the ice at the top was best because hotels never replace the dirty ice and water at the bottom of the machine. They just kept chugging ice in on top of it. I remember knowing he was full of shit, but couldn’t think why, and at the time I was too exhausted to care. I was also starting to get frightened of him. He’d taken the money from me our second night on the road, and wouldn’t tell me where it was. Anyway, when Jay said that thing about the buckets, I started thinking about Price in South Carolina.” She looked at me, gave me her sparkling jade eyes. “It was under the ice.”

“The money?” Angie said.

She nodded. “In a trash bag, laid flat under the ice in the machine on the fifth floor, just outside his room.”

“Ballsy,” I said.

“Not easy to get to, though,” Desiree said. “You have to move all that ice; your arms are pinned in through the small door of the machine. That’s how Price found me when he came back from his friends’ house.”

“Was he alone?”

She shook her head. “There was a girl with him. She looked like a prostitute. I’d seen her with him before.”

“Your height, your build, same color hair?” I said.

She nodded. “She was an inch or two shorter, but not so you’d notice unless we were standing side by side. She was Cuban, I think, and her face was very different from mine. But…” She shrugged.

“Go on,” Angie said.

“They took me in the room. Price was stoned on something. Flying and paranoid and raging. They”—she turned in her chair, looked out at the water, and her
voice dropped to a whisper again—“did things to me.”

“Both of them?”

She kept her eyes on the water. “What do you think?” Her voice was ragged and thick now. “After, the woman put on my clothes. Sort of to mock me, I guess? They put a bathrobe around me and drove me to the College Hill section of Tampa. You know it?”

We shook our heads.

“It’s like Tampa’s version of the South Bronx. They stripped the bathrobe off me and pushed me out of the car, drove off laughing.” She raised a quaking hand to her lips for a moment. “I…managed to get back. Stole some clothes off a line, hitched a ride back to the Ambassador, but the police were everywhere. And a corpse with the sweatshirt Jay had given me was lying in Price’s room.”

“Why’d Price kill her?” I said.

She shrugged, her eye wet and red again. “I think because she must have wondered why I was going through the ice machine. She put two and two together, and Price didn’t trust her. I don’t know for sure. He was a sick man.”

“Why didn’t you contact Jay?” I said.

“He was gone. After Price. I sat in the shack we had on the beach and waited for him, and the next thing I know he’s in jail, and then I betrayed him.” She clenched her jaw and the tears came in streams.

“Betrayed him?” I said. “How?”

“I didn’t go to the jail. I thought, Jesus, people have probably seen me with Price, maybe even with the dead girl. What good would it do if I went to visit Jay in jail? All it would do is implicate me. I flipped. I lost my mind for a day or two. And then, I thought, the hell with it,
I’m going to go get him out of there, have him tell me where his money is so I can post bail.”

“But?”

“But he’d left with you two by that point. By the time I caught up with all of you…” She pulled a pack of Dunhills from her purse, lit one with a slim gold lighter, sucked the air back into her lungs, and exhaled with her head tilted toward the sky. “By the time I reached you, Jay and Mr. Cushing and Graham Clifton were dead. And I couldn’t do anything but stand around and watch.” She shook her head bitterly. “Like a brainless asshole.”

“Even if you had caught up with us in time,” Angie said, “there wouldn’t have been anything you could have done to change what happened.”

“Well, we’ll never know now, will we?” Desiree said with a sad smile.

Angie gave her a sad smile in return. “No, I guess we won’t.”

She had no place to go and no money. Whatever Price had done with the two million after he’d killed the other woman and blown out of the Ambassador may have died with him.

Our interrogation seemed to have worn her out and Angie offered Desiree her suite for the night.

Desiree said, “Just a quick nap, I’ll be fine,” but when we passed through Angie’s suite five minutes later, Desiree was flopped on her stomach, still dressed, atop the bedcovers, as deep in sleep as anyone I’ve ever seen.

We went back into my room, shut the door on Desiree, and the phone rang. It was Devin.

“You still want to know the name of the dead girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Illiana Carmen Rios. A working girl. Last known residence, One-twelve Seventeenth Street Northeast, St. Petersburg.”

“Priors?” I said.

“She took ten or so falls for hooking. On the plus side, she probably won’t have to worry about doing any jail time in the near future.”

“I don’t know,” Angie said as we stood in the bathroom with the shower running. If the room was bugged, now we had to worry about what we said again.

“Don’t know what?” I said as the steam rose in clouds from the tub.

She leaned against the sink. “About her. I mean, every story she told had a fantastic quality to it, didn’t you think?”

I nodded. “But none any less so than most of the stories we’ve heard in this case.”

“Which is what bothers me. Story upon story, layer upon layer, and all of it either complete or partial bullshit since this thing began. And why does she need us?”