Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3 (7 page)

I stared at the screen as Brody pounded on the keys. A new image came up. Then a second. Then a third. All of them of Viktor, all of them in places I’d never seen before, except one.

“Brody.” My breath stalled in my throat. “What’s…that?”

Viktor Dal stood smirking in front of a wall lined with brass drawers.

“About three weeks after you disappeared, Viktor Dal became a person of interest in the kidnapping case. He was outraged, then obstructive. He would send us pictures of himself standing next to grave sites and funeral homes. Places like that.” Brody tapped the screen. “This one, he’d bought an entire mausoleum wall, filled six of the drawers with ash and bones from a local pet crematorium, and sent us the keys.”

I stared at him. “A
pet
crematorium? You’ve got to be joking me.”

“All of it was fake. We had to investigate it anyway. By then, of course, Viktor was well and truly in the wind.” He punched up more screens. “We dug deeper and eventually learned that he’d been a German money launderer, drug dealer, and sex trafficker. He’d only been at the school district one semester before the children went missing. We were certain that he’d expanded his market to child trafficking, but nothing ever came of that. We couldn’t pin anything on him. Eventually, he drifted away. Back then, we hadn’t thought beyond the few missing kids. Back then, I hadn’t known about the international Connected community, or that something called ‘Connecteds’ existed. Other than you, anyway.”

I let that go. “And now?” I gestured to the screen, still unable to get past the image of Viktor smirking in front of those brass drawers. They’d held animal ashes.
Animal.
Had Armaeus known they were fake? If so, why hadn’t he told me?

“Hasn’t been active for years, at least not at the level that would gain attention from Interpol. If he’s been a bad boy, he’s covered his tracks well.” Brody glanced at me. “No other kids were taken from Memphis with the same unique characteristics after that job either. And believe me, there were plenty of psychic kids in the city, or kids who fit the profile in other ways. I’d thought he’d moved on, but maybe he did simply…stop.”

“What about these other kids?” I asked sharply. “You said they were different. Different how? And were any of them found?” I stared at the children’s faces.

“Different in that they hadn’t shown any psychic ability. But hell, they were six and seven years old.” He pulled up a new screen. These recent posters list them as Memphis being the site of their abduction,” Brody said. “The original posters are these. Notice the differences.”

“The cities, the numbers,” I murmured, scanning the images. “What am I missing?”

Brody sighed. “The dates. They’re all the same date, Sara, in the revised posters you found yesterday. The day of the explosion. The day you left Memphis.”

I blanched. I hadn’t noticed that.

“What the hell is this about?” I reached out and touched the age-progressed image of Mary Degnan. She’d be seventeen years old this year, her wide smile and sunny eyes somehow making it worse. “You think he has these kids stashed somewhere? These pictures…” Hope shot through me again, despite my best efforts to shut it down. “They look so healthy. So real.”

“They could be alive, Sara. But probably not. Not after all this time.” Brody’s words were gentle, but I couldn’t look at him. Could only look at the tattered posters he had lined up on the table. “The kids weren’t abducted in scenes of violence. They simply were—gone. Disappeared from parks, school playgrounds, the mall. Parents not three feet away in some cases. That’s why you got involved in the first place.”

I nodded, forcing myself to recall the details of the abductions. I didn’t have to work too hard. The memories were baked into my brain. The cards had represented the abductor as the King of Swords—cunning, intelligent, cold. His positioning card had him being all about power. It had been the Emperor, which showed that his command base had been sound and his financial support robust. His focus had been children, as evidenced by the Six of Cups.

Back then, I hadn’t mastered using the cards to pinpoint locations. I could get close, though, and that was why Brody and I had made such a great team. I’d narrow down the search area, and Brody would go door-to-door gathering details. But we never got close enough for those three kids. The best I could get was the Two of Wands. That had indicated a long journey.

Once Brody’s captain had heard the words “long journey,” they’d rolled up the case to the FBI.

Neither Memphis PD nor the FBI had ever found the abductor.

I thought of the Valkyries choosing who would live and die. The three Memphis kids had been chosen too, in their way: marked for death because of their psychic abilities. But the appetites of child traffickers were not easily assuaged, not then, not now. I knew that all too well from my work with Father Jerome.

Something didn’t fit.

“You mean to tell me
no one
was isolating psychic kids after that? I find that hard to believe.”

“Not in Memphis. And not in any other major city for the next few years, at least in a way that the pattern was easily definable. And believe me, I looked. I spent half a decade searching for anything that could help explain what went down that day.”

“It’s not all that complicated.” My tone turned flat. I’d relived that day so many times, I finally had most of the answers. Or at least the answers as I knew them. “I upset…well, this Viktor Dal, apparently.” After all this time, I had a name, a face. My pulse slowed, my body stilled, every sense pricking as I focused on the grinning image of Viktor Dal. “Mom paid for it. My house was blown up, and I ran.” The curling anger shifted deep inside me, turning my stomach sour. “After I ran, the kidnappings stopped, the killing stopped. The explosions stopped.” At least outside of my own head, anyway.

“We’ve never discussed it, you know. Not in depth.” Brody was staring at the screen too. The images of the kids scrolling through, the parents, the data. But I could tell he wasn’t really paying attention to the flow of images. He was slave to the same kind of internal picture show I’d been feeding myself for the past ten years. Except he had more pictures to fill out his catalog. Many more. “There’s never been a good time to discuss it. But if Viktor Dal is out there, targeting you again…”

“What do you mean, again?” I jerked out of my reverie. “I wasn’t his target back then. I was a roadblock. A roadblock he effectively removed.”

“So why is he back?”

I thought about that. My campaign to save the Connected children was laudable, I supposed, but I was only one woman. Despite the assistance of Father Jerome and the network he was building in France, we could save only so many from the dark practitioners. It added up to not so many that someone would want to knock me out of the game, I was sure of it.

“There’s been no evidence that he’s currently an active child trafficker, right? Connected or Unconnected, if he’s still moving children, he’d be on someone’s list.”

“True.” Brody blew out a long breath. “Okay, so he’s not trafficking children. He’s definitely trying to get your attention, though.” He jabbed his thumb at the posters. “Those were a plant. The shooters were expecting you—you, not Nikki. Why? Why now?

“I don’t know.” I stared at the posters as well. “I’m not a big enough deal, and my acquisitions work isn’t that exciting. I’m thinking Viktor isn’t a Connected, at least not anyone I’ve ever heard of. And I would have heard of him.”

A small, niggling doubt cropped up, even as I said the words. I’d been surprised when I’d learned about the Arcana Council a year ago. So maybe Viktor had slipped through the cracks as well, and yet…how? Especially if he was targeting children.

My adrenaline ratcheted down another notch, my heart rate slowing, my fingers beginning to tingle. The fog of anger lifted as a cold, hard truth assaulted me.

I knew that Armaeus could hide himself from the Council. Was Viktor so strong a Connected that he could hide himself from the entire Connected community?

Worse…did the Council know about him?

Brody’s voice pulled me back from that dangerous thought. “Six children missing, maybe all of them psychic, all under the age of ten, and he never goes after another kid? Why?”

I shrugged, looking at the screen, mesmerized by the double set of faces. “Maybe he needed those particular kids.” I discarded that thought as quickly as it formed. “Except some of their psychic abilities hadn’t manifested yet, you said. And the arcane black market had its basis in Europe, not the US. Ten years ago, I don’t think there was much of a US market for kids.” I didn’t need Brody’s glance to take my mind down the next path. “And of course, I was in Memphis. But they didn’t target me. They targeted Mom.”

Brody tapped the last poster, the one with my face on it. I swallowed again. “Fine. Maybe they knew about me.”

“Viktor did, anyway.” He rocked back on his heels. “The woman who picked you up, the RVer. You’d never met her before? She didn’t know you or your family?”

“Hardly.” I smiled, thinking about the old woman, her hair flying, her sun-roughened skin transformed by her easy grin. “She was a retiree with a soft spot for runaways, nothing more.”

“Maybe.” He nodded, and the tone of his voice made me glance at him.

“What? You don’t buy I’d get picked up that fast?”

“Oh, I buy it, but to be picked up by someone who managed to hide you not only from the police but from what seems like a very bad man with a penchant for psychic kids and the money to track them down? That takes some skill. Some would say some intervention.”

“Wrong tree.” I shrugged. “You’d have to have met her. She was an ordinary woman. A nice woman, yeah. But I wasn’t the first orphaned runaway she ran into. I doubt I was the last.”

“And you never thought to go to your mother’s relatives?” Brody’s voice was eerily cop calm, but I was too strung out to figure out why.

“Um, that would be negative, Brody. Since my mom had no relatives.” I glanced at him. His face was as placid as his voice, which didn’t seem good either. “I told you that. My mom was an orphan by the time she was sixteen. Runaway by seventeen, working in Memphis as a waitress by eighteen. She was lucky.” I grimaced. “At least until I came along.”

Brody stared at me for a long minute.

“What?” I finally asked.

He released a deep sigh that sounded more like a groan. “That’s…not exactly true, Sara.”

With another wave of his hand, the screen changed, and the obituary for my mother appeared, next to a picture of her that brought a pang to my heart, her disheveled good looks and big smile going straight through me. She looked young—too young, but I recognized her, of course.

“Oh, man,” I muttered, plunging into the usual wave of emotion where my mother was involved. “She looks good there. When was that taken? Before I was born?”

“We think so. It was a dating site profile picture, the last photo she allowed to be taken of her until you started to become famous as Psychic Teen Sariah. By then she was drinking a fair amount. Her tox screen showed a complement of recreational drug use as well, so she probably wasn’t thinking too straight.”

“She didn’t like having her picture taken. It was a thing with her.” I couldn’t help moving closer to the screen, trying to imprint my mother’s memory on my brain. How long had it been since I’d seen any picture of her? I couldn’t remember. “To me she always looked good, at least till the end. And then, she didn’t look bad, just—tired.”

Brody started to say something, then appeared to change tack. He went for a question instead. “Did anything else specifically change in the weeks leading up to her death? Did you have money problems, anything like that?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Money, for whatever reason, was never a problem. We didn’t live well, far from it. But there was always food, and there was always enough money for Mom to go out, for clothing and whatever. I didn’t know where she got it, but she had a job.”

Brody hesitated. “She did have a job, yes,” he said at length. “Taking care of you.”

I smiled. “I mean beyond that, Brody. She had a job, job. She made money waitressing. I don’t know how we did it, but we managed.”

“You more than managed.” Brody looked a little queasy, and I stared at him more sharply. “Your mom’s bank account had money in it,” he said. “A fair amount of money. In the months prior to her death and your disappearance, at least thirty thousand was added. The house you lived in was paid for. Same for your car.”

“Well, neither of those were impressive examples of high living.” Something about Brody’s tone bothered me on a soul-deep level, like dirt being shoveled off a long-buried axe. “But thirty thousand dollars? No way. We definitely didn’t have that kind of cash.”

“At the time of her death, her account had five hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars in it.”

I stared at him. He was still talking, but the words coming out of his mouth weren’t making any sense anymore. “Five hundred and—no.” I barked a short laugh. “No. That’s not possible.”

Brody continued inexorably. “Sara, the woman in that picture wasn’t your mother. She was a paid caretaker, as best we can identify.”

“A what?” I wheeled around. “What are you talking about? That was my mother! My—”

Brody rocked back on his heels, but his face was set. “No,” he said. “Sheila Rose Pelter ran away from home at age seventeen and started waitressing in Springfield, Tennessee directly after. About a year later, she moved to Memphis, purchased a home, a modest car, a new wardrobe…and baby supplies. She began waitressing again as soon as you were old enough to leave with a sitter, but most of her first few years, she spent at home. About five years after you were born, she began corresponding with family back in Alabama, though she never once mentioned you and she resisted all suggestions that her relatives visit Memphis. From what we were able to piece together in the months after her death, Sheila visited her hometown twice, giving large cash gifts both times. Her mother had no idea where the money had come from, and refused to spend it until after Sheila died. Her visits home stopped when you began working with the Memphis Police Department, and the family lost contact with her again.”