Sizzle and Burn (31 page)

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Zack held up a small glass vial. “You and I need to talk.”

Forty-nine

M
ayor Joanne Escott parked her Mercedes sports car in a no parking zone in front of Incognito shortly before noon and rushed inside. Calvin did not appear to be paying much attention but Raine was sure she caught a whisper of power. He had jacked up his senses when Joanne flew into the shop, assessing her with his hunter talent.

Joanne stopped short, removed her dark glasses and gave him a blatantly appraising look.

“New employee?” she asked, brows rising with unconcealed interest.

“This is Mr. Harp, a freelance costume designer,” Raine said before Calvin could respond. “He brought in some sketches for me to look at.”

Joanne’s interest faded immediately. “Oh. Probably gay, then, hmm?”

Calvin gave her his sunny smile.

Raine cleared her throat. “Calvin, this is Joanne Escott, our mayor.”

Calvin inclined his head, gravely polite. “Your Honor.”

“Do you live here in Oriana?” Joanne asked brightly.

“No, ma’am. I’m from out of town.”

“I see.” Assured that Calvin was not a potential voter, Joanne rounded on Raine. “I’ve only got fifteen minutes for my fitting,” she announced, checking her diamond-studded watch. “I have an appointment with my stylist at twelve forty-five. I don’t dare be late. Roger is so temperamental and I absolutely have to get my hair done for the fund-raiser tonight.”

“Your costume is finished,” Raine said. She held the red velvet curtain aside. “It won’t take long to try it on.”

Joanne gave Calvin one last regretful glance, and then, with a tiny sigh, she dropped her dark glasses into an oversized purse and followed Raine.

Calvin rose from his chair in a seemingly leisurely fashion and ambled after them. He lounged just inside the doorway, arms folded.

Raine brought the Cleopatra gown out from behind a long row of costumes and started to remove the plastic covering.

“We took the hem up another two inches and tightened the bustier,” she said.

Joanne watched, pleased, as the finished gown was revealed. “It looks fabulous.”

She reached into her purse. Raine assumed she was going to take out another pair of glasses. Instead she removed what looked like a milky white jar.

Power jumped. Calvin moved so quickly, Raine didn’t even realize he had left the doorway until he seized Joanne’s right wrist.

But Joanne, serene and unruffled, had already dropped the jar. It shattered on the floor. White smoke erupted in a foggy cloud of vapor.

Hand grenade
, Raine thought.
We’re all dead
.

Instinctively she dove for the floor behind a rack of costumes, bracing for the inevitable shock wave and the flying bits of metal, knowing there was nothing she could do to shield herself.

But there was no shock wave. No metal bits pierced her body. There was only the cool, white smoke. It roiled through the room, filling the small space with a familiar herbal scent.

Joanne stared at the swirling vapors, frowning in baffled confusion.

“What in the world?” she said.

She crumpled, unconscious.

A torrent of voices rose out of the swamp of nightmares inside Raine’s head. Familiar screams of rage, agony and hellish panic smashed across her senses.

“Get down,” she shouted to Calvin.

He seemed to comprehend but he did not follow her instructions. Instead, he lashed out with one foot, kicking the smoking canister beneath another rack of costumes. Then he backed toward the door, fumbling for his phone.

But it was too late. He had been standing virtually on top of the canister when it struck the floor. Raine knew he had taken the worst brunt of the initial explosive blast of smoke. It was amazing he had remained upright as long as he had. There was no telling what effect the drug might have on a powerful hunter whose parasenses had been running wide open when the herb-laced fumes hit them.

Calvin coughed but managed to punch in a number on his phone.

“Get out of here,” he roared to Raine. “Back door. Now.”

Then he went down. The floor shuddered when he landed. He did not move again.

The phone landed on the floor beside him. She had no way of knowing whether he had managed to punch in 911. Her own phone was in her purse in the other room.

Breathing shallowly, she yanked her shirt out of the waistband of her pants. The smoke was thickest in the center of the room. She did not dare try to crawl through it to get to the safety of the front part of the shop. The alley door was closer.

Holding the edge of her shirt over her nose and mouth, she wriggled awkwardly on her belly toward the rear door. The smoke was doing what it was supposed to do according to the laws of physics: rising. The air near the floor smelled strongly of herbs but the vapors were not as thick as they were a few inches higher. She knew she was still taking in a lot of the drug, however. The demonic cacophony in her head was getting steadily worse.

The costumes around her began to come alive. She was suddenly in the midst of a nightmarish masquerade ball that was taking place in a room filled with funhouse mirrors. Capes and gowns swirled, making her dizzy. Malevolent eyes peered down at her through the empty sockets of the masks. Panic drenched her senses. The urge to leap to her feet and make a run for the door was overpowering.

It’s the drug. Ignore it. Stay low.

The voices were changing. Some of them seemed to be coming from the mouths of the masks.

“…Kill her. Torture her. Burn, witch, burn….”

She told herself that she was making progress through the ranks of dancing costumes. She could see the rear door but to her smoke-warped vision it kept shifting position. The masks were closing in around her.

“…Hurt her—hurt her—make her suffer…”

A bell chimed somewhere in the distance. She dimly recognized it. Pandora returning with the pizza. Thank God.

Then she heard more voices, not the ghostly cries inside her head.

“They should all be unconscious by now,” Cassidy Cutler said.

“We’ve got to be careful.” Niki Plumer sounded worried, as usual. “That smoke is very strong. If it gets to us, we’ll be in trouble.”

“We’ll give it a couple of minutes to clear. Lock the front door and turn over the closed sign. We’ll take her out the back.”

Fifty

“S
he set you up,” Zack said.

“This doesn’t make any sense.” Bradley reached the end of the living room, turned and paced back in the reverse direction. “She’s Cassidy Cutler. She’s written four books.” He stopped in front of a bookcase, yanked out a copy of
Cruel Visions
and showed Zack the back cover. “Her picture is on every damn one of them.”

“I’m not saying she stole Cutler’s identity, although it’s a possibility. I think it’s more likely that she really is Cassidy Cutler.”

Bradley shoved the book back into the case. “Why in hell would she want to hurt Raine?”

Zack chose his words carefully, sticking to the truth as much as possible.

“My agency believes that she’s involved with a crowd that manufactures and distributes exotic designer drugs,” he said.

Bradley dropped down onto one of the chairs, eyes narrowing. He knew drug dealing and the crimes associated with the business. “Okay, let’s say for the sake of argument, you’re right. What does she want with Raine?”

“Raine’s father was a brilliant chemist.”

“Yeah, I know. She told me.”

“When Raine was a little girl, Judson Tallentyre worked for my firm’s client, a company that invented and patented a unique psychotropic drug.” Zack slipped easily into the familiar cover story, blending truth and fiction into a seamless whole. “The company abandoned research and shelved the drug after initial trials revealed that it was extremely dangerous. But Tallentyre suspected that the formula would be worth a fortune on the black market. It needed some tweaking, however. There were some extremely serious side effects. He left the company and took the formula with him. He continued to experiment on his own.”

“Raine said he died when she was little. Traffic accident.”

“That’s right. The company he worked for investigated and concluded that the secret of the formula died with him. That was the end of the matter until a few weeks ago, when another researcher named Lawrence Quinn suddenly disappeared. The client called in my agency again. We discovered that Quinn had been doing unauthorized research on the same proprietary formula that Judson Tallentyre had stolen. We traced Quinn here to Oriana.”

“Yeah? Where the hell is he, then?”

“Disappeared. Based on what I’ve been able to piece together, I strongly suspect that he’s dead. I think he came here to interview Raine’s aunt, Vella Tallentyre. After he got the information he wanted from her, he vanished.”

Bradley was starting to look interested. “You think he was murdered by someone who wanted whatever it was he got from Vella Tallentyre?”

“Yes.”

Bradley held up a hand, palm out. “Let’s go back to Vella Tallentyre. Got any proof that she was murdered?”

“She left a note for Raine. We found it last night among her things. It was written on the night of her death. In it she said she’d had a visitor that day who gave her an injection. She knew she was dying and wanted to warn Raine. The description of the visitor that we got from the hospital fits Lawrence Quinn.”

“What did Quinn want from her?”

“We don’t know but we suspect it had something to do with the formula for the drug that Judson Tallentyre stole all those years ago.”

Bradley looked thoughtful. “You think Quinn intended to re-create the formula and set himself up in the illegal drug business?”

“Yes. But it looks like he didn’t get what he wanted from Vella Tallentyre. In her note to Raine, Vella said she didn’t trust him and lied to him. Presumably she gave him some kind of false data about the drug.”

“But Quinn figured he had the answer he wanted so he got rid of her. Then he tried to make a deal with some bad guys. It did not go well. That’s it?”

“That’s it. Except that I’m sure Cassidy Cutler is one of the bad guys. Niki Plumer, too.”

“Any others?”

“I think she had some muscle with her when she first came to town,” Zack said. “The guy tried to take me out in the alley behind a local jazz club, but he managed to get hit in an intersection. Never made it to the hospital.”

“Heard about the hit-and-run when I got back from Shelbyville. Meant to talk to you about it. They’re still trying to ID the victim. You’re telling me you think Cassidy killed him, too?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Probably because he failed to get rid of me.”

Bradley eyed the little bottle of clear fluid sitting in the ice bucket on the table. “You really believe she left that stuff here to implicate me, don’t you?”

“She knows I’m in town. She needs to point me in another direction. You were convenient. She was already using you to get close to Raine. Guess she figured you for a dual-purpose tool.”

Bradley’s mouth curved in a sour grimace. “Why use me? Why not approach Raine directly?”

“Think about it,” Zack said. “Raine’s a very private person. Her inner circle of friends is small and tightly knit. It’s not easy breaking into it.”

Bradley hesitated, then nodded once. “I see what you mean. But Raine’s no research chemist. Neither was her aunt. Besides, according to you, Cassidy and her crowd already have this drug you’re talking about. What the hell did they expect to get from Vella Tallentyre? What do they want from Raine?”

“I’m still working on that angle. What I know is that there are some serious problems with the current version of the drug. Someone may have been convinced that Vella Tallentyre knew something important about her brother’s version that would be useful. Now that she’s dead, those same people may think that Raine has the information.”

Bradley shot back to his feet and resumed pacing. “You’re making me look stupid here, Jones.”

“No,” Zack said. “Stupid would be refusing to believe the facts when they’re put in front of you.”

Bradley looked at him. “If you want me to arrest Cassidy Cutler and Niki Plumer, you’re going to have to give me some hard proof.”

“I don’t have a lot of that,” Zack admitted. “But you could start with her SUV.”

“What about it? She’s driving a rental.”

Zack raised a brow. “The same one she had a couple days ago?”

“No. She said the heater wasn’t working on that one. She had to exchange it.”

“Got a hunch it never made it back to the rental agency. It’s probably been abandoned in one of the big mall parking garages. She didn’t have a lot of time to get creative.”

“You think she used it to run down that guy who attacked you?”

“Yes. Probably wiped it clean but she may have missed something. You never know.”

Bradley reached for his phone. “I’ll have someone contact the car rental agency.”

Zack smiled slightly.

“What?” Bradley asked, brows bunching.

“Raine told me you were a good cop,” Zack said.

An electrifying sensation shivered across his parasenses. Adrenaline splashed through him.

He was on his feet before he had made a conscious decision to move, heading for the door.

“What the hell?” Bradley yelled after him. “Where are you going?”

“Raine. She’s in trouble. Get someone to her shop. Now.”

His phone rang. He yanked it out of his pocket as he opened the door and ran toward his car.

One ring. Calvin’s code appeared on the small screen. Then silence.

Fifty-one

T
he poisoned smoke was dissipating but the masks still taunted her and the costumes still swayed to music only the ghostly dancers could hear. The room whirled around Raine. Her stomach roiled. She could not be sick. Not now. She had to get out of there before Cassidy and Niki decided it was safe to enter the room. The alley exit was her only chance.