Tempted by Fate (4 page)

Just like today’s scene.

It was a sensation in his gut. His grandmother would call it
el sexto sentido
—the sixth sense. He chalked it up to years of experience in Homicide.

So when his gut told him there was something similar between today’s scene and the Byrnes homicide, he listened. Even if it made absolutely no logical sense.

“Hell.” He raked his hair back and opened a new e-mail to his contact at the state department to make sure no one by Chin’s description had reentered the country. He’d also run a check to see if there were any women wanted with long white hair. A long shot, considering how easily hair could be manipulated.

“Ricky, answer the phone, or I swear I’ll make your life hell when your granny gives me hives.” Taylor pushed his belly out of the chair. “I’m going home to May. Maybe she’ll make me breakfast in bed. Pancakes.”

“May?” He snorted in disbelief. In his opinion, May was scarier than his
abuelita.
She ruled his partner with an iron skillet. Though his partner—not to mention his partner’s stomach—was happy to be ruled by her.

“She will when I tell her I want to use her body as my plate.” He winked and shrugged his suit coat on. “See ya later. Don’t forget to answer the phone.”

Shaking his head, he reached for the receiver and pressed line two. “Inspector Ramirez.”

“
Hijo,
I had a vision.”

He groaned. “Lita, can’t this wait until I get home? I’m leaving shortly.”

“My vision was about you,
hijo.
”

Something in her tone made goose bumps rise on his skin.

Ridiculous. He shook himself. He was just tired. If he’d had a few hours sleep, her pronouncement wouldn’t have fazed him. It wasn’t as though it was unusual for her to have
visions.
“Lita, I’m coming home now. Maybe you can tell me after I have some sleep.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Then she said, somewhat ominously, “I’ll see you when you get home.”

Great. He hung up and closed his laptop. Now he not only had two dead bodies to deal with but a portentous Latina grandmother. The bodies had to wait—his
abuelita
wouldn’t.

Ramirez was so tired, he drove home with special care. Fortunately, he lived minutes from the station, at the other end of Bryant Street in the Mission.

He’d grown up in the Mission, but back then, it hadn’t been the fashionable party district it was now, dotted with hip restaurants and bars. Back then, the Mission had been the city’s slum. He and his grandmother had lived in a tiny apartment, with windows that didn’t open and carpet that reeked of cat piss. He’d slept on the couch in the living room and Lita had the bedroom, which she also used as her office—her term. When he was a kid, he’d called it the voodoo room.

Not to his
abuelita
’s face, of course, though she probably knew. But the opaque jars of herbs—and other things best left unidentified—looked like something out of a horror movie.

Tools of a
curandera,
she always said.

Some people thought a
curandera
was nothing better than a witch doctor, but as skeptical as he was about everything, Ramirez knew better. Elena Ramirez was a gifted healer of physical ailments. Some people claimed of spiritual ailments, as well.

He wasn’t sure he believed in the woo-woo aspect. He was too grounded for that. But he had great respect for his grandmother as a healer. Her knowledge of herbs—and people—was vast.

Vast enough, and sought after enough, to support him as a kid. He’d done what he could to help out, especially once he was old enough to contribute.

There was an open spot on the street a couple houses down from his. He parked and headed home.

Fifteen years ago when he’d bought the house, it’d been a dump. The first thing he’d done was remodel the lower level into an apartment for Lita, complete with a storage room for her herbs, a large sunny bedroom, with windows that opened, and a lush garden out back. He lived in the two stories upstairs, close enough that he could watch over her without stepping on her independent toes. She was spry, but she was in her eighties, and he was a realist.

Lita was in the backyard, shovel in hand, kneeling in a bed of dirt, when he got home. Just where he thought she’d be. Ramirez let himself into the side gate and walked up the stone path he’d laid for her. “Lita, I wish you’d let me hire a gardener for you.”

“My plants are my babies,” she said without looking up. “I’d no sooner have someone else care for them than I would have hired a babysitter for you.”

Plants were different than children, and she was
decades older now, but he knew better than to point out either fact.

“You look tired,
hijo.
”

He smiled faintly as he unbuttoned his coat and sat on a stone bench. “How would you know? You haven’t looked at me yet.”

She glanced at him for a brief moment, her gaze piercing, before returning to her weeding. “I don’t have to look to know, Ricardo.”

She only called him by his name when she was worried. Great. She hadn’t had a vision about him in a long time, but the last time she’d made him wear a sachet with some foul-smelling herbs around his neck. She’d insisted that it was going to save his life. The guys at the station hadn’t let him live that one down for months.

The sachet
had
saved his life, however. In apprehending a homicide suspect, the man pulled out a knife. Ramirez would have been stabbed in the heart; except as he moved, the herb pack flew out and hit the perp in the eye, throwing off his aim. Ramirez had ended up with only a scratch along his ribs.

But that was just a fluke.

He sighed, wondering what he was going to have to wear this time. He hoped whatever it was, it wouldn’t make him reek. Or smell girly. “Aren’t you going to tell me about your vision? It had to have been important for you to call me at work.”

Lita said nothing. The
schtck-schtck
of her spade scraping against hard dirt resonated between them.

Closing his eyes, he waited. There was no rushing her, even when he hadn’t had sleep in over thirty hours.

“The white witch is coming.”

He reopened his eyes.

“The white witch is coming,” she repeated. “In her heart is darkness.”

For some reason,
white witch
made him think of the woman skulking away from the murder scene last night. He pictured her tall form and long, billowing hair, and he tensed.

“Terrible darkness and sorrow.” Lita’s eyes filled with tears, as if she felt this so-called witch’s pain. “But you have to trust that she is good.”

Good? In his gut, he knew she had something to do with the two deaths.

“She
is
good, underneath,” Lita said, as if she had heard his thoughts. She stared at him with searing intensity, her knuckles white around the spade’s handle. “Promise you’ll have faith in her.”

Faith.
That wasn’t something he’d ever subscribed to. It implied that you trusted something intangible—something that didn’t exist. Elena believed in God. Ramirez had been raised Catholic, too, but he’d only ever seen religion as a means for people on power trips to control the weak.

His grandmother knew it, too. It’d been a contentious topic between them for as long as he could remember. But when it came to her visions, she believed implicitly. She pointed the tool at him. “You must trust fate, Ricardo—”

“Fate is what we make it.”

“—because your fates are entwined.”

That
he could believe. “Because she’s tied to my current case.”

“Because she’s tied to your soul.”

He scrubbed a hand over his eyes. “Lita, I’m tired. Can this wait until later?”

She grumbled under her breath in Spanish. She always reverted to her native language when she was upset. Then she shook her head and tried to get up. “This cannot wait. This is life or death. If you don’t have faith in her, your heart will be lost.
You’ll
be lost.”

He stood and helped her up by the elbow. He’d be lost if he didn’t solve another case. The captain was breathing down his neck about the number of unsolved murders on his plate. But the only thing he needed right now was his bed, not a debate. “I’ll take it under consideration, Lita.”

“So stubborn.” She clutched his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. “I worry,
hijo.
You see only black and white, but sometimes the two mix and form shades of gray. Not everything is clear-cut, especially your white witch.”

“She isn’t
my
white witch.” Yet. “But I promise to think about what you said.”

His grandmother watched him with that gaze that saw everything. “Thinking is not the same as believing. In this, you need to believe.”

He believed, all right—that the white-haired woman was knee-deep in murder.

Lita threw her hands in the air. “
Ay, por Dios.
” Shaking her head, she wandered into her apartment, muttering to herself.

Ramirez waited until she was inside before ascending the back stairs. He loved his grandmother with his whole heart. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. But when she got one of her ideas in her head, his frustration knew no bounds.

He let himself into his house. The back door opened to
the light, airy kitchen. The first level also had a large living room, his media room, and a bathroom. Upstairs was the master suite and a spare bedroom and bath.

Ramirez locked the door and trudged up to his room. He’d done much of the remodeling himself, which meant it’d taken him forever. Usually when he came home, he felt a sense of peace and cleanliness. Today he felt nothing but fatigue.

Undressing, he only put his clothing away by force of habit. He took a moment to brush his teeth—another habit—and splashed water on his face. His limbs heavy, he pulled the heavy drapes, which he’d bought specifically for the times when he didn’t get to sleep before dawn, and climbed into bed.

It took him longer than he expected to fall asleep, Lita’s white witch prominent in his thoughts. But finally he dozed off, the sad strains from a flute echoing in his mind.

S
wirling the cognac in the tumbler, he eyed the liquor. One-hundred-forty-year-old Louis XIII—one of the finest cognacs in the world. But he couldn’t enjoy it, because it reminded him of Lani’s eyes.

Frustration gnawed at him, dark and roiling, just like it always did when he thought of her. Ungrateful bitch. He’d offered her the world—
his
world. All he’d asked for was that she share hers. But she’d thrown it back in his face. She’d withheld the most important part of herself from him: the powerful part. The Guardian part.

Then she ran away. Bad enough, made worse when he found out she was pregnant.

His
child. His daughter.

Not for the first time in thirty years since he’d discovered her existence, he wondered about her. He had reports, the occasional blurry photo, but it wasn’t the same as knowing her. Lani took that away from him.

He threw the crystal across the room. The sound of it shattering should have brought some satisfaction but didn’t.

“Really, Edward. I know you have more money than God, but Baccarat crystal is fine enough for respect even from you. Not to mention that I’m sure the hotel will take exception to destruction of their property, no matter how much you’re paying for this suite.”

He glanced at Deidre. “A glass is easily replaced.”

“Are you insinuating that I’m disposable, too, darling?” She stirred from where he left her limp on the couch, stretching her alabaster limbs with a feline purr. “It certainly didn’t seem that way half an hour ago.”

He gazed down her naked body, at the bite marks he’d left. “You have your uses.”

She laughed. “My connections or my charms? Or perhaps both?”

It was through Deidre’s connections that he was able to track Willow. It galled him to know he’d spent twenty years pursuing her with no results. But it made him proud, too—his daughter obviously had something of him in her if she could successfully evade him for two decades.

Yes, Deidre had proven to be useful in more ways than one. He stared at her now. “Come here.”