Wicked Game (18 page)

Mr. Ready jumped to flagpole attention and Glenn reached a hand to take care of things, but then the import of the card wilted his desire like a bucket of cold water never could.

Was Jessie
alive
?

She had to be!

“Mr. Stafford?” A light knock on the office door. Glenn instantly adjusted himself, stuffed the card back in his pocket, then pulled open the door. Amy, one of the newest employees who wasn’t yet eighteen, regarded him with her usual deer in the headlights look. “Mr. Pascal’s here but he’s talking to a policeman? He told me to come get you.”

“I’ll be right there,” Glenn told her. Policeman…? McNally! Had to be. Damn the man. Did he
have
to come to their place of work?

Glenn checked his appearance in the mirror by the door, sucked in his gut, promised himself he would cut down on the pasta intake. He headed out the door, walking steadily and with confidence toward the front of the restaurant even though he felt a quivering worry growing inside his gut.

Sure enough, there was that cop. Older now. But Jesus, really better looking than before, the bastard. How was that possible? He’d been in his mid-twenties before, now he was in his mid-forties, and it looked like he hadn’t lost one goddamned hair off his head. And the hair was still dark brown, the temples only faintly silver. McNally gazed at Glenn through light hazel eyes that pierced like steel. He looked fit and hard and just as mean as he had twenty years earlier.

Scott was smoothing his bald pate with one hand in a gesture that could mean anything between nervousness and amusement. He lifted an eyebrow at Glenn. In a gently mocking tone, he said, “Detective Sam McNally’s paying us a call.”

“Probably not a social one,” Glenn said shortly, trying to temper his tension with a smile. He hoped he wasn’t gritting his teeth. “Let’s all go back to my office.”

Amy and some of the other employees watched them head down the hall, wide-eyed. Glenn wanted to smack each of their avid little faces.

Repositioning himself behind the desk, Glenn noticed his hands were shaking ever so slightly. Damn it all. He placed one over the other on his desk as Scott propped himself against the wall and McNally accepted one of the club chairs, sinking into it as if he were there for a very long stay.

“I called you,” he said, looking at Glenn.

“Yeah—I—I’ve kinda been buried.” Crap, what was the guy asking? “I couldn’t find time to meet with you.”

Scott broke in, “We’ve both been busy. I just got back in town not half an hour ago. Glenn and I have another restaurant just outside of Lincoln City—Blue Ocean—which we’re just getting going.”

“I’m not planning to waste your time,” McNally said. “You know about the remains found at St. Elizabeth’s, I’m sure. I believe they’re Jezebel Brentwood’s, and I want to run over your statements at the time of her disappearance once more.”

“But you’re not sure they’re Jessie’s,” Scott stressed gently. “No corroborating DNA evidence yet.”

Glenn felt his anxiety notch up.
No corroborating DNA evidence yet
. The card in his pocket felt as if it were on fire, burning up. Should he mention it? Let them know Jessie could very well be alive? And what did it mean? What did she want from him?

True to his word, McNally didn’t waste time. He went over the sequence of events prior to Jessie’s disappearance, and Glenn was kind of surprised at how detailed his notes were. But then, McNally had put them through the wringer twenty years ago. The man knew more about what had happened than Glenn could ever remember.

“I knew Jessie, we all did because of St. Elizabeth’s, but I was really into sports, didn’t much pay attention if it wasn’t anything to do with jocks,” Scott said when McNally finished and looked from one to the other of them, waiting for someone to speak up. “Jessie, she was good-lookin’, yeah, but really, she was just a girl who dated one of my friends. I didn’t really know her, and neither did Glenn. We said the same thing then, and nothing’s changed.”

“That’s right,” Glenn said, suddenly glad for Pascal’s glib tongue.

“Have you seen any of your group since?” McNally asked.

Glenn’s heart clutched and he looked to Scott for guidance. There was no crime in it, for God’s sake, but he didn’t want to fall into some kind of trap by shooting off his mouth when he shouldn’t.

“Mitch is a good friend,” Glenn blurted out.

Scott threw him a dark look. He’d always objected to Glenn’s friendship with Mitch and sometimes, just because he could get a reaction, Glenn liked to remind Scott that he wasn’t the end-all be-all of good friends. Sometimes Scott Pascal wasn’t a friend at all.

“We all met here at the restaurant a couple weeks ago,” Scott told the detective, and Glenn relaxed slightly. Of course. No reason to worry. Just tell the truth. Let his partner do the talking. But leave out the nursery rhyme…“We heard about the bones being discovered, so we got together.” Scott glossed over the meeting—just a bunch of concerned friends worried that tragedy had befallen one of their own.

Glenn ignored his drink, the ice cubes melting, the aroma of bourbon in the air of the closed room.

McNally was noncommittal. Did he buy it? Glenn couldn’t tell and it made him nervous. He eyed his drink, caught the slight shake of Scott’s head from the corner of his eye, and let the bourbon sit.

McNally ran over a few more questions about Jessie and her relationship to all their friends. From Glenn’s point of view, it was all very banal and he had the suspicion that Mac was simply getting a feel of them. He couldn’t wait for the detective to leave so he could talk to Scott.

Eventually Mac did just that. He’d written down some notes, chicken scratchings from what Glenn could tell, then flipped the small notebook shut and placed it in a pocket of his black leather jacket. Seeing that, Glenn wondered if the card in his own pocket was visible, outlined like some kind of scarlet letter. It was all he could do not to reach up and touch it.

As Mac got up to leave Scott said, “You’ve mellowed out over the years.”

McNally paused, giving Scott a long look. “Have I?”

Scott met his gaze. “Maybe not.”

A moment passed between them. Glenn’s pulse began a slow, hard beat through his veins. He managed to walk with Scott to show the detective out, but as soon as they were alone, they headed back to the office and Scott closed the door behind him.

“What is it?” Scott asked tautly.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re white as a ghost. McNally scared you. What the hell’s going on?”

“He didn’t scare me.”

“If I saw it, he saw it,” Scott assured him. “Come on. Give.” He beckoned his fingers in an impatient c’mere gesture.

“We’ve got goddamned problems, okay? The money’s just pouring out of this place. I don’t know where it’s going. Maybe someone’s stealing from us? One of the wait staff? Or they’re embezzling somehow?”

“You keep everything locked up, don’t you?”

“Of course. I’m not an idiot.” Glenn’s teeth ground together. Scott had a way of pissing him off and the cop…Oh, shit, he’d never been comfortable around cops, always thought they were after him.

“Then we’re just short,” Scott was saying. “Income isn’t what it should be, and expenses are out of control.”

“I’ve got ’em under control,” Glenn snapped, miffed. Scott was always so quick to blame him.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The two partners stared hard at each other. Scott seemed to be thinking very, very hard, and Glenn realized reluctantly that he wasn’t as immune as he would have liked the detective to believe. He was tense, too, and kind of spooked. So Glenn decided to come clean. “All right, look. Something happened,” he said.

He could see Scott brace himself.

“Nothing about the restaurant,” Glenn assured him. “It was this.” He pulled out the card and handed it to Scott, who seemed reluctant to accept it. Reading it over, Scott drew his brows together and seemed lost in a world of his own.

“How’d you get this? Where’d it come from?” he asked after a long moment where Glenn’s nerves were stretched tight as guy wires.

“It came in the mail, to my house, addressed to me.”

“What the hell does it mean?”

“I don’t know, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell McNally.”

“Christ, we have to call The Third. What kind of game is that bitch playing?” Scott said, shaking his head. “She’s alive. God. She’s alive…
so who’s in the grave
?”

Glenn lifted his hands to ward off that thought. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Whipping out his cell phone, Scott suddenly stopped himself in the middle of punching out a number. “What if it’s not Jessie who sent this? What if it’s someone trying to freak us out?”

“Who the fuck would do that?”

“I don’t know, but…oh, shit. Someone who’s just messin’ with us.”

Glenn nodded rapidly. He liked that idea better. “But why?”

Scott drew a breath. “Hell if I know.” He flopped into the chair so recently vacated by the detective. “It’s dumb. It’s a dumb joke.”

“It’s no joke,” Glenn assured him. “God, I could use a drink.” He picked up his watery bourbon and drank it down.

Scott was still tossing things over in his mind. “Why would she contact you? Jessie? If she were alive?” His face was a knot of confusion. “She wouldn’t, so it’s a joke.”

Glenn ground his teeth together. In the back of his mind he’d been asking himself the same question. Jessie had scarcely noticed him. That singsong nursery rhyme had been something she’d teased The Third with, or Zeke, maybe even Jarrett. It wasn’t something she’d used on him. He’d been wallpaper to her, nothing more.

Scott snorted, following Glenn’s thoughts. “Stop thinking about it,” he said dismissively. “That damn detective rattled me, too, but it’s all just routine stuff. Whoever sent this thing?” He tossed the card across the desk. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Jarrett or The Third, actually. Would be just like them. Trying to get your goat. We got more important things to worry about.”

“Like the business,” Glenn said, his eyes on the white square of paper.

“Like this fucking business,” Scott agreed. “I’ll bring you and me both a drink. Throw that thing in the trash.”

Glenn could have told him he had a bottle of Bushmills stashed in his desk drawer, could have offered him a drink, but he didn’t.

As Scott stalked out of the room, Glenn picked up the card. After a moment he grabbed a pair of scissors and shredded it and the blue envelope into slivers of paper, dusting them off his hands into the trash can. He closed his eyes then, consciously trying to put it behind him.

For a moment he thought he heard a girl’s giggling. Someone laughing at him. His eyes flew open and he glanced sharply around the room.

But he was alone.

Becca was working at her computer when the phone shrilled. She jumped like she’d been goosed, scrabbling to pick up the receiver of her land line.

Hudson
, she thought, a smile crossing her lips. She instantly had a mental picture of him lying in the darkness of his bedroom, his arms reaching out as she tried to slide from the bed. “You’re not leaving.”

“I have to. I have a dog at home.” His hand had grabbed hers and he’d pulled her back atop him. It had taken her another hour before she’d disentangled and made her way home.

“Hello,” she said now as she answered the phone, not recognizing the number from Caller ID. She glanced at the clock. Late afternoon and almost dark as pitch outside already. As if aware she’d noticed, the heavens suddenly opened up and spewed rain, then hail, a storm of precipitation blasting outside her window. It was awesome in its power but it just meant that the dog wasn’t going to want to go for a walk.

“Becca? It’s Renee.”

“Oh, hey.” She sat up straighter. Did Renee know about her night with Hudson? It had been just a few days since they’d tumbled together in his bed. Since that time they’d been on the phone several times a day. It was thrilling. Unbelievable.

“I’ve just been feeling so weird about all of this, I guess,” Renee was saying, echoing Becca’s own thoughts. “About Jessie and those bones and all. I just wish we’d find out once and for all if the body belonged to Jessie.”

“I know.” She thought about the presence she’d felt in the maze and wondered if she should tell Renee. At the time the pure, unfiltered evil had seemed all too real. Even now, goose bumps raised on her arms and she looked hurriedly over her shoulder.

“Have you heard that McNally—the cop that was so into Jessie’s disappearance years ago—has been interviewing the guys?” Renee asked, her voice sounding edgier than usual. “He stopped by Blue Note to talk to Glenn and Scott, then called The Third at his office downtown. McNally already left a message on my phone. I called back but missed him.”

Becca’s fingers tightened over her cell. “Then they know it’s Jessie,” she said. “DNA must’ve come back or some other proof that the body is hers.”

“That’s what I think, too. God…it’s hard to believe.” She paused for a second, then said, “I thought maybe we should get together again.”

“All of us?”

“The girls. Actually, I’m already meeting Vangie and Tamara at Java Man after work. Around seven.”

Another meeting? For what? Because the police were sniffing around? So what? It almost sounded as if Renee wanted them all to get their stories straight, which was ridiculous. No one had anything to hide.

Right?

“What about Hudson…and Zeke?” Becca asked. “Did they get a call from the police?”

“Not that I’ve heard, but I haven’t talked to Hudson in a few days and Vangie didn’t say anything about Zeke when I called her. I think she would have. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if they have or not. They’ve got to be on the list. I’m sure we all are.”

“List? As in suspects?”

“Or persons of interest, whatever you want to call it. So, about tonight…can you make it?”

“I’ll be there.”

Becca hung up, then clicked off her computer. She double-checked all the doors and windows, then changed into a red cowl-necked sweater and added some lip gloss. Glancing at her watch, she turned on the news, wasting another half hour before she headed out. There was talk about discovery of an unidentified woman’s body, and Becca zeroed in on the newscaster. But it appeared to be that this particular body had been thrown from her car following an accident. Nothing to do with Jessie Brentwood.