Obey Me (2 page)

A cocktail napkin meant bar, or nightclub, maybe a restaurant. But I’d never heard of a place called Il Piccolo Morso. Still, it was a clue, so I filed it away in the back of my brain and started the car. Raynor and Daniels had said there were other mysterious deaths in the last weeks, but I hadn’t heard a peep from any of my competition, which meant for once the police must be keeping their lips sealed. That was both a good thing and a bad thing for most reporters. No one else had the story…and no one would.

But me? I don’t play by those rules. I headed for the police station. With any luck I’d be in and out before my new detective friends finished with the crime scene and returned to their office. Some people aren’t as easily suggestible the second time around. I didn’t know if that was true of either of the detectives, and I didn’t want to find out.

Apparently the front-desk sergeant remembered me. “Oh, no. No. You just turn yourself around and march on outta here,” he said when he saw me walk though the station doors.

“Aw, c’mon, Sergeant Keech,” I said in my sweetest, lil’-ol’-me voice. “Why’d you wanna be like that?”

“Why?” His blond, nearly transparent brows flew high on his forehead, wrinkling his skin all the way back to his receding hairline. He stood, making him a full four feet taller than me—

seeing as how the front desk was raised for that nice intimidating affect. “Because every time you come in here you convince me to do shit that ten minutes later I can’t remember why I agreed to do.”

Okay, so I had used my power for evil a few times—had a couple speeding tickets disappear, and convinced him to send the paperwork on a restraining order to the wrong department. Hey. I was
not
stalking that Yorkie breeder. I was just trying to uncover a price-gouging operation. Seriously, fifteen hundred dollars for a dog that could fit in my shoe? That’s just wrong.

Sergeant Keech was one of those people who could be suggested twenty times a day and I could still make him drop his pants in the middle of the squad room and cluck like a chicken. I didn’t. But I could. He never seemed any worse for wear. So why not, right? I could make him obey just using the latent power flowing naturally through my body. Some people are like that. It took next to nothing. The guy didn’t stand a chance.

Power tingled at the back of my neck. “Okay, fine. Then why don’t you just show me the files on the deaths that Detectives Raynor and Daniels are working on, and I won’t say another word.”

Sergeant Keech blinked, his brows tightening over blue eyes. A heartbeat later he visibly relaxed and let a smile hint at the corner of his mouth. “No. I’ll tell you what you’re gonna do. The file should be in their active pile on their desks across the squad room. You can talk all you want from there and I won’t even hear ya. So get. Raynor’s and Daniels’ desks face each other in the far corner. And not a word. You hear me?”

I did the zipper with a lock-and-key mime across my mouth, and Keech buzzed me into the squad room. Poor guy. I’d send him a cake or something.

The file was on Daniels’ desk. It was thick, full of bureaucratic paperwork, autopsy reports and crime scene photos, including a shot of each of the matching neck tattoos. Maybe it was some new fad. Weird.

I flipped through the file stopping each time I spotted photos and crime scene descriptions. There were three other victims. All had been drained of blood just like Raynor said, with no visible wounds to explain it. When he’d said they were posed, he wasn’t kidding. The first definitely tipped the scales on my weird-o-meter.

I stared at the photo of a girl sitting in the backseat of a cab. Her eyes were open, her lips parted, her hands in her lap. Her skin was a bluish-white, like Elmer’s glue, and she was dressed for a night out on the town.

The cabby said the girl seemed fine when he picked her up. She was quiet during the twenty-minute drive to White Oak. It wasn’t until they’d arrived at her home that the driver realized she was dead. He’d made no stops from pick-up to drop-off except for traffic lights. There was no way someone could’ve gotten in and out between stoplights and killed her without being seen.
Creepy-weird…on toast
.

The report said the cabby had picked her up on the corner of Eighteenth and Smallman Street. The same street Primanti Brothers Restaurant was on, but at the river’s end. That same corner was only a building’s width away from the alley where they’d found the girl tonight. Why would these girls be at that end of the street dressed the way they were? There was nothing down there but parking spaces and warehouse entrances.

I flipped to the next victim. This girl had been left at a bus stop at Penn Avenue and Seventeenth Street. A block down from Primanti. The photo showed her as they’d found her, leaning against the lamppost, arms crossed over her belly. Rigor mortis held her in place, but it wouldn’t have lasted long. The discovery of the body was phoned in so the police would find her before she dropped. Just like the other two, the girl was pretty, albeit a little blue, with bleached blonde hair cut pixy style and wearing a sexy red dress that hugged her young body and showed off her long shapely legs.

The third victim was found in the driver’s seat of her car, engine running, eyes open, hands on the wheel. She was attractive like the others, with short, ink-black hair and dark eyes, I think. They looked kind of dead-fish-gray in the photo. She was wearing a tight low-cut blouse and a frayed blue-jean miniskirt, with black six-inch fuck-me heels. Had she been on her way home and only made it as far as her car? I didn’t want to think about it. I checked the address of the crime scene—Smallman Street, near the corner of Seventeenth Street.

Her car must’ve been parked only a few hundred yards down from the alley where they’d found the girl tonight. My mind did that slow motion freeze it does when something passed my notice that shouldn’t have. I glanced at the map of the city on the wall between the interrogation rooms and found the Strip District before I crossed the distance.

I snagged some pushpins stuck at the bottom of the corkboard and plunged one at the address in White Oak where the first girl was found in the cab. The next pin went where the second girl had been propped up at the bus stop. The third I stuck roughly where the idling car would’ve been. And the last went in the alley next to the warehouse.

I stepped back. There was a pattern. Maybe. Each death seemed to occur closer and closer to the Strip District, to that section of Smallman Street where the last, un-posed victim was found. But there was nothing there. Even the cops were double checking the area tonight, rattling chained doors big enough to fit a Mack truck through, and checking wire-reinforced windows and bolted human entrances. There wasn’t anything there. Unless there was.

“Hey, lady, who let you in here?” I glanced over my shoulder at the uniformed officer lumbering my way.

Time to go
. “Hello, Officer,” I said, summoning my power. “Why don’t I just leave now, and there won’t be any need for questions.”

The officer blinked, then followed my suggestion exactly.

Chapter Two

I couldn’t feel the mark on my neck, but every time I looked in the mirror my eyes went straight to it. It looked good. Exactly like the ones on all four of the victims. I grabbed my black eyeliner pencil and went over the closed “X” symbol one more time.

“Good enough,” I said to my reflection. I’d hair-sprayed my short wavy hair to a solid mass, but that didn’t stop me from trying to turn a curl this way or that. It looked okay though, provided no one touched it, curling just past my ears and bangs brushing my eyebrows. The color, a black-cherry red, suited my fair skin tone, though as a kid I’d hated it. While the other teenage girls sunbathed for that perfect bronze glow, I had to slop on sunscreen to fend off third-degree burns and freckle infestation. The upside was my big green eyes always stood out against the washed-out skin and blaring red hair. Upside being a relative term.

I checked the knot on my black halter-top for the gazillionth time and tugged the low “V” neckline trying—and failing—to cover more of my boobs. I wasn’t obscene or anything, but I had definite boob curve showing. I’m a comfortable C-cup so flashing cleavage is no small matter. I wasn’t so concerned with the flash of belly the top exposed. I’m in good shape, swim twenty laps at my fitness club every day. The mini skirt though, was wigging me out a bit.

I’m a jeans and T-shirt, jeans and blouses, jeans and sweaters, jeans and… You get the idea. And don’t think I didn’t consider shoving on my favorite pair of faded blues under the tiny black leather skirt. Can’t even remember what possessed me to buy the tight leather tube in the first place.
Whatever
. It’s a good thing I had, otherwise I’d never look the part. If I wanted to figure out where those girls had been, why they were all down on Smallman Street, I had to put myself in their shoes—or clothes, that is.

Half-past midnight I grabbed my tiny purse, big enough for my driver’s license, my black eyeliner—for touch-ups to the fake tattoo—and my change purse. No other makeup. I didn’t have much on to begin with and if it didn’t last the night…tough.

Twelve forty on a Saturday night and Eighteenth Street was packed. It was nearly three when I’d stopped by last night, before they found the fourth body, and all the bars had already been closing. But now, tonight, they were just hitting their stride. I drove to the end of Eighteenth and turned left onto Smallman. I found a spot past the alley from last night, closer to Seventeenth Street. It worked for me. Smallman Street was where I wanted to be anyway.

I locked the car and started walking along the dimly lit warehouse-lined road, toward the alley they’d found the dead girl in last night. The sound of my black cowboy boots, with the silver toe-tips and heel accents, clomping against the asphalt, echoed off the metal walls and made it hard to hear anything else. I passed a set of cement steps that went sideways up to a door on one of the warehouses. The door was closed. The bare light in the rusted metal shade above flickered as I walked by.

My belly fluttered, the sensation of being watched tripping over my senses. I scanned behind me, to the sides and up ahead, keys laced between my fisted fingers, ready to gouge anyone who thought they could take me. Though truthfully, with my power, if I could talk, I could get out of any situation.

No one was around, but my skin crawled like a million ants marched down my back. First lesson in self-defense, always trust your gut…or your creepy-crawly skin.

Muscles along my shoulders tensed, my hands went clammy, dread twisting my stomach. Two more steps and I reached the alley where a girl was mysteriously drained of blood last night. I willed myself to stop—look.

Nothing special. No dead body. No monster of the night. Just a plain old alley. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I still flinched when a tall leggy blonde in a body-shaping black mini rounded the corner from Eighteenth Street.

“Hey,” she said as she walked by.

“Hey.” I watched her sashay toward the steps I’d passed, swinging what the good Lord gave her all the way up to the heavy metal door. Light shifted, or the man who suddenly appeared in front of her moved. I’m not sure which. He wasn’t there a second ago, but my mind couldn’t help thinking he was and I just hadn’t seen him. Like he’d been standing there the whole time and when she’d neared, he’d shifted his weight and that’s what finally caught my eye.
Weird
.

She handed him a small square paper, white with a splash of something red across it. A cocktail napkin. Was this the secret Il Piccolo Morso club I’d never heard of? My wicked-keen reporter senses tingled. I had to know.

By the time I reached the steps, the door was closing behind her. The guy under the rusted metal light-shade blocking my way didn’t look in the best of moods. Oh well. Not like that would stop me. He was tall. Tall enough he could’ve looked on top of my refrigerator without pushing up to his toes. Six foot something.
Tall
. He was built too. Bodybuilder built. Though wearing the snazzy gray suit over a pale green shirt gave him an air of sophistication most muscle heads lack. No tie, the first three buttons of his shirt were open flashing a brush of dark hair that matched the long wavy strands on his head.

The guy had better hair than me. It shone like silk in the bare bulb light overhead and brushed the tops of his shoulders. His eyes were dark, I’d say black but that’s not really possible. Right? He had a square face, not square-square, but square-ish, with a sharp jaw, defined cheekbones, and a wide full mouth. His nose was a narrow, straight line perfectly fitting the angular lines of his face, and it looked like he hadn’t shaved in a day or so.

As I reached the top step, he backed up and leaned his backside against the round metal railing behind him, hands finding the pockets of his slacks. He didn’t say a word, only stared.

“Hi,” I said, very chipper, very
don’t mind lil’ ol’ me
. “Uh…I guess I’ll get the door myself.” I glanced at the rusted metal and realized there was no handle. The door was one of those that could only be opened from the inside.
That sucks
.

“Do you have an invitation?” His voice was smooth, relaxed, as though my presence didn’t even rise to the level of annoyance.

I wanted to ask, an invitation to what, just to make sure I wasn’t stumbling into something totally weird, like a plushy fetish mixer or something, but thought better of it.

“I, uh…lost it.” Nerves had me tucking curls behind my ear. Stupid habit. His gaze tracked the movement, latching onto the fake tattoo on my neck.

“You’re Mr. Edmunston’s?” He pushed to his feet, reaching toward me as though he’d touch the mark or move my hair for a better view. I flinched away and he dropped his arm, his brow wrinkling tighter.

“That’s pretty dark. You shouldn’t be here. It’s not cool for one of the owner’s girls to be showing like that. Go home. Get some rest and something to eat. Come back in a couple days.” He leaned back against the railing again as though there was nothing more to be said.