Black As Night (Quentin Black Mystery #2) (7 page)

“No.”

I fought with warring emotions. Not like I wanted to contemplate the idea of my ex-fiancé, Ian, killing and lighting children’s bodies on fire, but at least it would have confined the crazy to a single person––a known quantity, as it were. I truly never wanted to see Ian again, in any context, but I also didn’t want him out there killing
other
people, simply because I’d managed to escape dying by his hand.

“That’s why you’re here?” I said, glancing up. “Because someone is killing kids?”

Black nodded, once. “Yes.”

“Did someone hire you?”

Black made a noncommittal motion with his hand, somehow evoking a bird’s wings tilting in flight. Like a lot of his gestures, it was weird but I got the idea.

“More or less,” he added, somewhat unnecessarily.

Frowning, I let the newspaper fall to the table. “Do I even want to know what that means?”

“You’ll find out today,” he said. “I was going to bring you to meet a few people.”

I nodded, feeling my frustration rise at the vagueness of his answers.

My eyes kept wanting to return to the newspaper and the burned body of what I now knew to be a child. A boy, one they believed to have been kidnapped from a village outside Bangkok. He’d been called “Mii” by his parents and three siblings, which meant “bear” according to the paper. He’d been nine years old. In death, his arms had been spread, tied to the front of some kind of statue. I didn’t recognize the statue’s name, but the paper said it lived inside one of the famous temples in Old Town, so not far from where Black had been held by the police.

The open-armed position, the presence of a religious statue––it really did evoke the death of the girl Black and I found in that underground exhibit hall in San Francisco.
 

She’d burned eventually too, but a bomb had set her on fire.

Grimacing from the memory, I pushed the paper away from me.

I couldn’t believe that the manner of the child’s death could be a coincidence.

“It’s not,” he said. “I already told you that.”

Feeling him watching me again, I avoided his stare.

“So are you going to tell me?” I said finally, my eyes focused firmly on the pale blue water of the swimming pool. “...What I’m doing here, Black?”

He didn’t answer me at first.

When the silence continued, I gave up and turned. He still faced me, although I couldn’t see his eyes through the sunglasses to know if he was actually looking at me. I was about to speak again when the waiter came back, putting down a plate of fruit and sticky rice in front of me, which is about as much as I could handle right then, in terms of food. Even more welcome was the lemon smoothie and the tall glass of iced cappuccino that he set down next to my plate. I now had three drinks in front of me with those two and ice water, and truthfully, I would have been happy with three more, even without the mango and rice.
 

I felt like every drop of water had been sucked from my body between the plane and the hot breeze on top of the building.

The waiter placed a wooden platter covered in pork and chicken skewers in front of Black, along with a bowl of some other meat mixed with vegetables I couldn’t identify and a second beer.

I couldn’t help an amused smile that tugged at my lips.

“Hungry?” I grunted, watching him as he began pulling curried chicken off a skewer with his fork, presumably so he could eat it faster.

“You’re mad at me again, doc,” he said, his voice low.

I still couldn’t tell if he was looking at me with the sunglasses, but I suspected he was.

Sighing, I fought with another pull of that irritation.

Watching a twenty-something European woman with a perfect body saunter by in a blood red bikini, her eyes darkly fixed on Black’s chest with only a deliberate pause to aim a scathing glance towards me...didn’t help.

“Are you going to tell me why I’m here?” I said, biting back my irritation with an effort. “Because there are other places I’d rather be. Dead kids aren’t really my specialty.”

“I disagree.”

“Well, then it’s not something I want to work on,” I said, sharper. “Ask Nick. I hate these kinds of jobs. I really hate them, Black.”

“All the more reason to help me,” he said, without missing a beat.

I felt my jaw clench when the blond with the generous chest walked by us again, smiling deliberately down at Black on her way to the bar.

“Is it because of what I did?” he said.

If he noticed the blond in the bikini, I couldn’t see that either.

“...Just now,” he said. “In the room. Is that why you’re mad? Or is it something else?”

He paused long enough to stuff a forkful of chicken curry into his mouth. He really was hungry. That hunger practically radiated off him, making me hungry too, another something I wondered about, since that kind of echo-effect had happened with us before. I felt my face flush when I remembered the ways in which I’d felt that echo-effect the most intensely.

Forcing that from my mind, even as the memory mixed badly with the image of a burned child, I watched him chew. Even so, my face continued to warm as I felt his stare intensify.

I wondered if he was trying to read me again and I was picking up on that.
 

I also wondered if he was having any luck.

“Yes,” he said swallowing the last of his mouthful. “...and no. Not enough, doc. Not nearly enough. Enough to have a hard on. Enough to want to know more.”

I bit my lip, forcing my eyes off him again.

“How can you talk about hard ons right now?” I grimaced, motioning at the paper. “After looking at something like that? That’s pretty fucked up, Black...even for you.”

“I’ve been looking at that for weeks,” he said, taking another bite of the curried chicken and chewing energetically. He leaned back over he table. “You didn’t read down far enough, doc.” Reaching towards me, he tapped the paper with one finger, leaving a smear of yellow-colored curry on the newsprint.
 

“Tenth victim,” he added. “...Tenth they’ve found, anyway. There may have been more before they picked up on the pattern.”

“How could they
not
pick up on a pattern of burning children alive?”

“The kids are all poor,” he said, his voice holding more of an edge. “Well...until recently. A lot of them were connected to trafficking rings.” Clearing his throat, he tapped the paper again with a finger, smearing more sauce on it. “You really should read the whole thing, doc...”

“So why is the United States government involved?” I said. “What was Farraday talking about? Or can you not tell me that part?”

“You’re not listening to me, doc.”

“I
am
listening––”

“There’s a new kid missing,” Black said, cutting me off.
“Not
a poor kid.”

I frowned, hearing the meaning there.

My annoyance rose when he went back to eating, pretty much ignoring me all over again. Watching him, I felt myself weighing his words, in spite of myself. So, okay, I got the basics...or I thought I did. Poor kids go missing and it’s shocking and makes headlines, but no one is really up in arms. Then a rich kid goes missing, probably the kid of an expat, given the United States connection, and now the United States government was involved, and somehow they knew Black was working on the case, probably because he still did the odd job for them on the side.
 

That explained his get-out-of-jail-free card with the Thai police, but not why he got picked up in the first place. Nor did it explain why Black himself looked like a homeless drug dealer when I found him in that Thai police station.

Well, not unless he’d been infiltrating the trafficking rings, looking for the common denominator with the earlier missing kids.

Exhaling in irritation when it occurred to me that was probably
exactly
what he’d been doing, I folded my arms tighter across my chest, still nursing the lemon smoothie although it was making my fingers numb.

If I was right about even a quarter of that, it still didn’t explain what the hell Black expected me to do about any of it.

“Are you going to tell me why I’m here?” I said. “You don’t need me for this.”

“I do need you.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Why am I here, Black?”

He paused long enough to take another big bite of chicken and rice, then shrugged as he finished chewing, wiping his hand on a cloth napkin he’d draped over his lap.

“I brought you out here because I wanted you here,” he said.

I leaned back in my chair, biting back a sharp, almost unreasonable flood of annoyance with him. I knew some of it was my reaction to seeing the burned child, and my anger that he already had some part of my mind working the case for him. For some reason I wanted to blame both things on him entirely, even knowing I’d let myself get played by allowing him to suck me into coming here in the first place. Black apparently knew me a little too well already, if he could get me to fly all the way across the world with a single cryptic phone call.

Forcing the emotion out of my expression, I stared back at the pool, sipping at the lemon smoothie and trying not to think about either him or the case.

He didn’t say anything though, and eventually I found myself looking back at him.

I watched him eat for a few minutes more. After he’d finished chewing a few more bites and washing them down with the second beer, he glanced at me again.

“I wanted you here,” he repeated. “I wanted you to come. I would have thought that was obvious by now, given my reaction to having you here.”

It took a few more seconds for that to sink in.

Then I let out a disbelieving laugh.

“You brought me here for sex?” I said.

“I wanted you here,” he said, his voice harder. He paused in his eating, holding the fork and knife at either side of his plate. “I waited two months. And I meant what I said. I could use you out here...work-wise. Things have gotten...complicated. With the job, I mean. I want you to profile someone for me. Several someone’s, really.”

“Why can’t you just––”

“Without
using your sight,” he said, heading me off. “I want to make use of your clinical training, doc. I need this done quietly. No seer skills.” He motioned up and down at me with a fork. “They’re less likely to notice someone profiling them who looks like you. Especially if you dress like a tourist...and if I tell them we’re fucking.”

“Nice, Black. Really nice.”

“You know what I mean. Part of the job is misdirection. Don’t take it personally.”

I fought to untangle his words, still pulling apart pieces of what he’d said earlier. “You waited two months?” I said. “What does that even mean, Black?”

“Do you want to go swimming?” he said.

I blinked at him, then looked at the pool. Returning my gaze to him, I glanced down at the wooden platter. “Aren’t you eating?”

“I’m hot,” he said. “I want to go in. I want you to come with me.”

“You mean you want to gawk at me in a bathing suit,” I muttered.

I meant it as a joke, but a coil of heat left his light.

“Actually I want to fuck you on one of these lounge chairs,” he said, his voice hard. Pausing when I flinched, looking up at him in bewilderment, he subdued his voice, making it more polite. “But since that’s unlikely to happen, given your reaction to me in your room, I’d be content with a more low-key groping and yes, some very intent staring.”

“Black...” I said, my voice openly annoyed.

He rose to his feet, tossing his sunglasses on the table and flipping the shirt off his shoulders. I watched him hang the white shirt on the back of his chair, fighting hard not to gawk at him. Even though he’d lost weight from his stint at playing homeless Bangkok drug dealer or whatever the hell he’d been doing, he still had the sculpted body of an athlete. He looked tanner than I remembered, too.

As he moved with that odd, fighter-like grace of his, I found myself conscious again of the other stares aimed in his direction from lounge chairs scattered around the pool. I wondered how many of those staring would turn down his offer of public sex on their sunbathing towel.