Stripped (20 page)

“Like your father,” Serena said.

Claire pursed her lips. “Yes, like my father. Am I supposed to be impressed that you know about him? It’s not a secret.”

“But you don’t advertise it.”

“No, I don’t. He probably likes it that way, too. Is that why you’re here? To talk about Boni?”

Serena nodded. “In part.”

“What’s the other part?” Claire asked, taking a drink of water.

“To tell you that you might be in danger.”

“That’s intriguing,” Claire said. “Will you be the one to protect me?”

“This isn’t a joke. Two people are dead.”

Claire nodded. “I never said it was a joke. But why would anyone want to kill me? Because I’m Boni’s daughter? We may be estranged, Serena, but someone would have to be a fool to do that. I know my father, and you’re a cop, so I guess you do, too. Boni would eradicate them. Torture them. They’d wind up in a cornfield like Spilotro.”

“I don’t think whoever is doing this cares about that.” Serena explained about the deaths of Peter Hale and MJ Lane, and the connection that had brought the detectives back to the forty-year-old death of Amira Luz. She added, “Have you ever heard of Amira?”

“No” Claire said. “Boni never mentioned her. But I wasn’t born until later that year.”

“How about Walker Lane?”

“I know of him, of course, but that’s it I wouldn’t have been able to tell you he had anything to do with my father.”

“Why are you and your father estranged?” Serena asked.

Claire didn’t answer. She put her bottle of water between her lips and drank again. Then she took one of Serena’s hands in hers and turned it over, palm upward. Serena didn’t pull away. Claire used her middle finger to lightly trace a line down along Serena’s palm to her wrist. Claire’s finger was moist from the condensation on the bottle.

“I can read palms, did you know that?” she said, with mischief in her voice.

Serena played along. “What do you see?”

“Well, we already know you’re tough.”

“Rights”

“You’re a cop, so I’m going to hedge my bets on your life line. Your love line is broken, I’m sorry to say.”

“Is that so?”

“Definitely.”

“I can also see that you had a passionate affair with another woman when you were young.”

Serena yanked her hand away. “What the hell is this?”

Claire raised her own hands in surrender. “Easy, okay? It was a joke.” She added, “But methinks I touched a nerve, Serena”

Serena realized her heart was pounding. “No, you just surprised me.”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” Claire replied smoothly. “I was reading my own palm. That’s my story. I’m gay, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Did Boni not approve?”

“That’s part of it”

“But only part?”

Claire sighed. “I spent my first twenty-eight years with Boni running my life, like he runs everything around him. I’m his only child, and he wanted me to follow in his footsteps. I went to UNLV, got a master’s degree in hotel administration, all so I could take over the business whenever he was ready to hand it over. That’s what I wanted, too. He bred all his ambition into me.”

“So what happened?” Serena asked.

Claire’s face was emotionless. “He had to make a choice between me and the business. The business came first. Big surprise.”

Serena guessed that she was covering something up. “What about your mother?”

“She died giving birth to me. It’s always been just me and Boni. At least until I walked out. I decided I wanted to be my own person, not some clone of my father.”

“You sound pretty tough, too,” Serena said.

“I told you, I was reading my own palm. Anyway, that was more than ten years ago, and we’ve hardly spoken since. He makes overtures from time to time, but I’m on my own now. I don’t want him to buy me. It drives him crazy. I’m the only person in the world he hasn’t been able to dominate.”

Serena felt sure that Claire must be very much like her father. Stubborn. Dominant. She imagined that they must have had titanic fights over the years. It impressed her that Claire had stood her ground. That was what she had had to do herself, along the rocky road from her mother to Deidre. People who promised to save her and then betrayed her.

“You’ve made it hard for me to ask what I wanted to ask,” Serena admitted.

Claire shook her head. “Not at all. Ask me anything. I may ask for some of your secrets, too.”

“I need to talk to your father. We think he may know what’s going on, and why. If it involves what happened to Amira, he’s the only one who may be able to put the pieces together.”

“And you want me to call him,” Claire said.

“That’s right”

“I’m sorry, Serena. I’m not ready to do that. If it puts me in his debt, I won’t do it”

“I understand. But lives are at stake. Maybe yours, too.”

“Do you really think I’m in danger?” Claire asked.

“Yes, I do.”

Claire nodded. “I need to think about this,” she said. A moment later, she added, “I can’t give you an answer now, okay?”

“Don’t take too long,” Serena urged her. She found a card in her pocket and handed it to her.

Claire took it and tapped the card lightly on the table. “You tell me something,” she said.

Serena smiled. “Okay.”

“Was I right?”

“You mean about me?” Serena knew exactly what she meant. The affair. Touching a nerve. “That’s none of your business.”

“I forgot, you’re tough.”

Claire stood up and stretched her arms languorously over her head. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said.

Serena scraped her chair back along the linoleum and began to stand up. “I’ll go.”

“No, it’s okay.” Claire waved her back to her seat. “We can keep talking.”

She took the few steps to the dressing room door and turned the dead bolt, then began unbuttoning her blouse. When she was done, she left her blouse hanging open, her cleavage and midriff on display.

“Do you sing?” Claire asked Serena.

“Me? No. I clear the room on karaoke night.”

“So how do you express yourself? You must have something.”

“I take pictures,” Serena said. “Desert photos.”

She watched Claire carefully remove her earrings, using two hands as she unhitched the gold hoops. Claire put the earrings on the table, then ran her hands back through her hair, gently separating the strands.

“I’d like to see them,” Claire said.

Claire nudged the blouse off her shoulders. The silk rubbed up along her skin, then separated and fell down her back. Her breasts were bare, perfect white globes with erect red nipples. She gently tugged the sleeve off each wrist and turned away to hang the blouse on the clothes rack. Her spine rippled, dipping into the hollow of her back.

“Would you like to have dinner?” Claire asked, without turning around.

“Sorry, I can’t.”

Claire slid a zipper down the side of her black pants. She pushed them down over her ass and past her thighs and then bent each leg to step out of them. She was now wearing only a black thong. She turned back. “Too bad.”

Serena knew she had an opportunity to say something, to make a joke, to leave. When Serena sat there, not moving, not even breathing, Claire stripped the thong off her body, exposing her auburn mound, which was trimmed to leave only a wisp of curly light hair. She stood there for a brief moment and then disappeared into the bathroom. The water in the shower began running.

Serena got out of the chair. She looked at the locked door to the dressing room and knew she should simply leave. Then Claire returned, a towel slung around her neck, reaching low enough to cover her breasts but not the rest of her naked body.

“The water takes forever to heat up,” she said.

Serena nodded and tried to moisten her lips with her tongue, but her mouth was dry.

Claire walked up to within a few inches of Serena, too close for comfort. “You could join me.”

“No. I couldn’t do that”

“You’re very beautiful,” Claire told her.

“So are you,” Serena admitted, before she could stop herself.

“I’d like to see you again.”

“I’m not gay,” Serena said.

“Does that matter? I’m attracted to people. I don’t care whether they’re men or women. I’m attracted to you.”

“I’m involved,” Serena said. She added, “With a man.”

“But you’re attracted to me, too.”

Serena wanted to deny it, but she didn’t. “Look, this isn’t going to happen.”

Claire reached out and touched Serena’s face with the back of her hand. “Don’t hide it from him. You’re keeping a secret now.”

“I’m sorry.” Serena pulled away. “I sent the wrong signals.”

“They weren’t wrong. You want me so bad you can taste it. What’s wrong with that?”

Serena’s cell phone rang. She backed up as if the room had caught fire and dove into her pocket to retrieve it. She heard Stride’s voice, and she felt a wave of guilt crashing over her. She couldn’t believe what she was doing, what she wanted to do.
Not since Deidre
, she thought.

“What is it?” she asked, and she hated herself because her voice was husky with arousal.

Stride brought her down to earth.

“There’s been another murder,” he said.

Amanda choked back tears as she stared at the body of Tierney Dargon. It surprised her. She had steeled herself to death over the years, but the bodies she saw day in and day out were rarely people she had known when they were alive. They were corpses, flesh, wounds, devoid of personality. Amanda had seen Tierney so recently that she could remember her perfume and hear the girlish intonation of her voice. She had liked her. Felt sorry for her. Tierney was a decent kid lost in the Vegas high life. No more.

Now she was like MJ, eyes wide with shock and fright, trails of blood streaked on her face from the gaping bullet wound in her forehead. Dead in the foyer of Moose’s sprawling house, like Alice Ford in Reno, with no time to react or scream. Open the door, see the face of death, and bang. Her brain was gone before it had time to react. Instantaneous.

Amanda looked beyond the foyer into the mansion and realized that, even alive, Tierney would have looked out of place here. She was young, and this was a rich old man’s house. Moose had made it into a shrine to his past, with bookshelves filled with awards, decades-old posters advertising his shows, and dozens of photographs of Moose onstage. He was larger than life, and so was his estate, both of them gaudy and giantlike. The living room was decorated like a lavish casino, with tall Roman columns, gold trim, a grand piano, and—most impressive of all—a second-story indoor swimming pool with a translucent bottom, so visitors could look up and see the blue water. Moose had one of the prime locations in Lake Las Vegas, in the MiraBella development, hugging the golf course and the resort’s private man-made lake, with the moonscape of the desert hills stretched out in the distance.

No one would hesitate to open the door here, even to a stranger. Lake Las Vegas was located a few miles east of the city, over the mountains on the road to Lake Mead. There was only one narrow road into or out of MiraBella and the other south shore developments, with a guard station to keep out strangers and gawkers. If you made it in, you were safe.

But not this time.

Amanda wondered: How did the killer make it past the south shore gate?

“Where’s Moose?” she asked one of the uniforms on the scene. She saw the cop’s eyes cloud over with disgust and felt her hackles rise. Nothing ever changed.

“Guard at the gate said he left in the limo around eight,” he said. “I assume someone is tracking him down.”

“You assume?” Amanda retorted. The cop shrugged, and she added sharply, “Don’t assume. Find out, and let me know.”

“Yes,
sir
,” he replied acidly. Amanda felt her mood sour further as he left.

There was a large team on hand to work the murder. That was one advantage of getting killed in a place like Lake Las Vegas, which was usually immune to that kind of crime, unless it was a rich wife shooting a rich husband. A body out here got plenty of attention. The call had come in from a neighbor who heard the gunshot. He was a hunter and knew the difference between the report of a pistol and the crack of a target rifle, which wasn’t an uncommon sound in the desert hills. When he went to investigate, he found the door wide open and Tierney just inside.

Amanda’s cell phone rang. It was Stride.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I’m parked outside, next to your car,” Stride said. “I thought you didn’t use the Spyder at crime scenes.”

Amanda was puzzled. “Usually I don’t, but I love to take it on the mountain roads. So what?”

“Come out here, okay?”

Amanda swallowed back acid and felt a pit of worry in her stomach. She slapped her phone shut and headed for the front door. As she passed two of the crime scene techs, she heard a whispered comment and a laugh behind her. She wheeled around but couldn’t tell who had spoken. She gave them a fierce glare, then bolted past Tierney’s body into the warm air outside. The curving driveway was being scoured for evidence. She took a circuitous route through the garden rocks and passed the cluster of patrol cars on the edge of the crime scene tape. Beyond the house was the deep darkness of the lake and sparkling lights from the resort hotel on the opposite shore.

Stride was leaning on his Bronco, next to her Spyder, about twenty yards away. He was standing under a streetlight. His arms were folded over his chest. When she joined him, he nodded at the driver’s door of her sports car. Amanda saw it and swore.

The car was desecrated. Someone had chiseled the word PERVERT into the door of the Spyder in large letters.

“I didn’t want you to find this alone,” Stride said.

Amanda felt her emotions battling between rage and humiliation. “Fuckers,” she muttered. “It never stops. Thanks for telling me.”

“I asked around,” Stride said. “No one admits seeing anything.”

“Big surprise.” Amanda ran her fingers over the ruts in the paint. In some ways, it was like being raped. As if that were what they would do, if they got her alone.