Fallen Angels 01 - Covet (34 page)

But no, Mark had had eyes only for Marie-Terese. And he'd made that clear when she had been seated at his elbow and Sarah had been left to fend for herself.

Mark and his two associates, as he had referred to the pair of suits who were with him, had been nothing but gentlemen that night, buying drinks, talking, being attentive. There had been a lot of kissing dice and shiny chatter, the kind of thing that made you, when you were young enough to believe in glamour, feel like a celebrity.

It had been the perfect start to the weekend: To be twenty-one and in the exclusive part of the casino, surrounded by men in expensive suits, was everything that she and her friends had hoped for, and after three or four hours, they'd gone up to the suite Mark owned. Not the brightest move, maybe, but there had been four girls and three men, and after they'd all spent time together on a collective winning streak, the illusion of friendship and trust had been created.

But nothing bad had happened. Just more drinks and chatter and flirtation. And Sarah ending up in a bedroom alone with the taller of the two “associates.”

At the end of the night, Marie-Terese had gone out onto the balcony with Mark.

She could still remember the feel of the dry, hot air blowing over the sparkling view of the Las Vegas strip.

It had been ten years ago, but that night was still as clear to her as the moment it had become memory: the two of them out on that terrace, high above the man-made city, standing side by side. She had been looking at the view. He had been staring at her.

Mark had swept her hair aside and kissed her on the nape of her neck...and in that soft contact given her the best sexual experience of her life.

That was as far as it went.

The next evening had been much of the same, except Mark had taken them all to see a Celine Dion concert and then they had gone back to the tables. Glittering. Fancy. Exciting. Marie-Terese had soared on the heated gusts of promise and romance and fairy tale, and at the end of the second night, she had gone back to that suite and kissed Mark on that terrace again. And that was it.

She'd been disappointed he hadn't wanted more, although she wouldn't have been able to sleep with him. She wasn't hard-wired like Sarah, capable of meeting a man and going to bed with him hours later.

How ironic she'd ended up where she had.

The next morning, they'd had to leave and Mark had had his limo take them all to the airport. She'd been crushed, assuming that was the end of it: a fun forty-eight hours—just what the travel agen had promised and exactly what they had paid for.

As she and her friends had been driven away from the hotel, she'd hoped Mark would come running out and wave them to a stop, but he didn't, and she'd guessed that the last she'd ever see of him was him kissing her hand at the hotel room she and her friends had all stayed in together.

The crushing weight of back-to-normal had brought tears to her eyes.

Compared to Las Vegas, her life at home, with her job as a secretary and her night school for college, had seemed like a kind of death.

When the limo had pulled up to the terminal, the driver had gotten out and opened the car door as a redcap had come along and started unloading their nothing-special luggage. Marie-Terese had stepped out onto the curb and turned her face away from the others because she didn't want to be razzed about being sad.

The chauffeur had stopped her. “Mr. Capricio asked me to give this to you.”

The box had been about the size of a coffee mug and done up in red tissue with a white bow—and she'd opened the thing right then and there, litter-bugging the wrapping paper and the length of satin. Inside had been a delicate gold chain with a gold pendant in the shape of an M. There had also been a slip of paper, the kind you'd find in a fortune cookie. The message had read:
Please call me as soon as you
get home safe.

The number had been instantly memorized and she'd beamed all the way back to home.

Such a perfect start. There had been no signs in the beginning of the way things would go— although looking back on it, she saw that the M pendant had been a mark of ownership, a kind of human dog tag.

God, she'd worn that necklace with such pride—because she'd wanted to be claimed back then. As a woman who had grown up with a harried mother and a father who wasn't around, the idea that a man had wanted her had been magical. And Mark hadn't been some middle-of-the-road, middle-class type—which would have been a step up for her anyway. No, he was the VIP section, whereas she was more like the janitor's closet.

And over the next couple of months, he'd played her perfectly, seducing her carefully and with calculation. He'd even told her he didn't want to have sex before they were married—so he could introduce her to his Catholic grandmother and mother with a clean conscience.

They were married five months later, and things had turned on a dime after the ceremony. As soon as she'd moved into that hotel suite with him, Mark had controlled her as tightly as a fist. Hell, when her mother had died, he'd insisted his chauffeur accompany her back to California and be at her side from the second she stepped off the plane to the moment she put her foot back in the suite.

And the sex-before-marriage thing? Turned out that hadn't been a big sacrifice for him because he'd been sleeping with his various mistresses—and she'd learned this when one had turned up with a belly the size of a basketball about a month after the ink was dry on the marriage license.

Coming back to the present, she got to her feet with the rest of the congregation and sang words from the hymnal that Robbie held in his hands.

Considering what the past had taught her, she worried about the fairy tale she'd spun in her head about Vin.

Optimism wasn't for the faint of heart. And daydreams could get you in troubnle.

***

He sat behind her and she never knew it. Which was the beauty of disguises. Today he was wearing his churchgoer one, which meant blue contact lenses and wire-framed glasses.

He'd waited in the back of the church for her to come in with the son, and when the two didn't show up, he'd figured they were missing the service for once and still back home. He'd left and gone to his car, but as he'd been driving away, he'd seen the two of them on the sidewalk, talking intently. Circling the block, he'd watched them talk together until they had run into the cathedral and disappeared through the big doors.

By the time he'd reparked his car, he'd missed half the service, but he'd managed to sit right behind her and the son, slipping from the shadows and lowering himself into the pew.

She spent most of the service staring up at the frescoes that were being cleaned, her head tilted to the side so that the angle of her cheek was especially lovely. As usual, she was dressed in a long skirt and a sweater—today they were a deep maroon—and she had a pair of pearl earrings on. Her dark hair was coiled up in a loose bun and she was wearing light perfume...or maybe it was just that laundry detergent or those dryer sheets she used?

He'd have to go to the supermarket and sniff the Tides and Cheerses and Gains and Bounces, to see which one it was.

Sitting in the pew, she looked like such the Good Mother, helping her son find the right pages in the hymnal, bending down from time to time when he had a question to ask her. No one would even have used the word
slut
within hearing distance of her...much less apply it to her: She seemed to be one of those women who had immaculately conceived her child.

It made him think about the guy he'd beaten with the tire iron. Not the part about killing him, although evidently that hadn't gone as planned, as the fool was just in a coma—another reason disguises were so very necessary. No, he thought about the expression on the man's unbusted face as he'd come out of that dirty, filthy bathroom at that dirty, filthy club.

What a lie her illusion was.

Rage boiled in him, but it was so not the right time for that, and to distract himself, he stared at the delicate muscles that ran up the nape of her neck. Soft curls formed around the gentle curve, and more than once he found himself leaning forward as if he would touch them...

Or maybe wrap his hands around her throat.

And squeeze until she was his and his alone.

He could just imagine what it would be like to subdue her struggles and claim her as his...could picture the rapture in her eyes as she died.

As he got wrapped up in the future, he nearly acted on his impulse, but fortunately, the singing parts of the service helped to break his furious concentration and occupy his hands. He also looked over at the son from time to time to keep his obsession from locking on her in a place that, if things got away from him, he'd lose everything.

The son was so well behaved. So grown-up. A little man of the house, no doubt.

She never released him to go with the other children to Sunday school, keeping him instead right by her. Which was a little frustrating, although she was wise not to let him out of her sight. Very wise.

But she shouldn't worry. The little boy was going to be with his Father very soon...and she was going to be with her forever husband.

The perfect future was mapped out for them all.

Vin walked through the door to the duplex, closed himself in, and felt like someone had kneed him in the gut. From the hall, he stared at the ruined living room, and could not believe what he was looking at.

As he walked into the space, all he could do was shake his head. The couches were overturned and the silk pillows were trampled and a number of statues had been knocked off their stands. The rug was ruined over by the bar, stained by liquor that had bled from broken bottles, and the walls were going to have to be repainted and repapered because it looked as if a couple of Bordeaux wines had been thrown at them.

Taking off his coat and tossing it on a ransacked sofa, he wandered around the once perfect space. It was amazing how all those priceless things had been turned into trash so quickly. Shit, add a layer of grime and some food garbage and you had a Dumpster.

Bending down, he picked up some shards that had broken loose from a Venetian mirror. The thing had been struck with something that vaguely resembled a human back, the center of the piece smashed in a long, torso-like column.

The fine spray of white powder all over it seemed to suggest that the police had gotten busy dusting for fingerprints.

Man, someone sure as hell had been thrown around the room.

Vin went over to the bar and put the jagged pieces of mirror next to some of the busted bottles. Then he resumed the search for exactly what the cops had no doubt been after.

No blood that he could see. But maybe they had already removed the things that had been marked by it.

Besides, bruises bled under the skin, so it wasn't as if a lack of the stuff here was necessarily going to help him.

While the CPD had been in the building, undoubtedly they'd questioned the lobby guard—except it wasn't like the guy could testify to Vin's not being in the apartment. After all, residents could take the elevators up from the parking...garage.

Vin went over to the phone and called down to the front desk. When a male voice answered, he didn't fuck around. “Gary, it's Vin—did you give the police access to the security tapes of the elevators and the stairwells in the building?”

There was absolutely no pause whatsoever. “Jesus, Mr. diPietro, why'd you do it—”

“I didn't. I swear. Did the CPD get those tapes?”

“Yeah, they got everything.”

Vin exhaled in relief. There was no way he could have gotten to the duplex without showing up in one of those recordings. In fact, what they were going to prove was that he'd left the building that morning and not returned until after midnight.

“And you were on camera,” the guard said.

Vin blinked. “What?”

“You came up in the garage elevator at ten o'clock. It's on the tape.”

“What?'
That would have been impossible—at the time he'd been in the car, driving to the Woods with Marie-Terese. “Wait, you saw my face. You actually
saw
my face.”

“Yeah, clear as day. She came through the front doors and went up to the duplex, and then twenty minutes later you came in through the garage. You had on your black trench coat and you left like a half hour later, with your Boston Sox cap pulled low.”

“It wasn't me. It—”

“It was.”

“But...1 didn't park my BMW in my spot—it was gone, and my other car was there. I didn't use my pass card to get through the gate.

Explain—”

“You got a ride, then, and came in through the pedestrian door. I don't know. Look, I got to go. We're running a test of the fire alarm.”

The line went dead.

Vin hung up the receiver and stared at the phone, feeling like the whole fucking world had lost its damn mind. Then after a moment, he went over to the couch, arranged the cushions into some semblance of order, and all but fell on his ass.

As the alarm system in the building started to go off and strobe lights flashed from the fixtures out in the front hall, he felt like he was in the dream he'd had, the one where Devina fell upon him like something out of
Night of the Living Dead.

Chess pieces were being arranged around him, blocking his moves, boxing him in.

You 're mine, Vin. And I always take what is mine.

As he heard those words in his head again, the sound of the alarm was the perfect accompaniment to the panic burning through his veins.

Shit. What the hell did he do now?

From out of nowhere, Jim Heron's voice cut through Devina's:
I'm
here to save your soul.

Ignoring that summarily unhelpful cue, Vin got up and went to his study in search of something far more likely to chill him out. Over at the intact liquor bottles, he poured himself a bourbon, drank it, and then refilled the squat glass. The television had been left on, but was muted, and as he parked it behind his desk, his eyes latched onto the local news.

When a photograph appeared next to the anchor's blond head shortly thereafter, he could not say he was surprised. With the way things were going, it would take a dirty bomb set off in downtown Caldwell to get a rise out of him.