You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) (13 page)

He glanced at me, and then returned for a longer, direct look. Then he put down the pen and gave me his full attention. Not the case. Me. “Let’s get a few things clear. I have only three rules for how I do my job.” He held up one finger. “Never decide whether or not the client’s guilty. That’s not my problem.” He held up another finger. “The job is always about the government’s case, not the client’s merits, so I pick my battles carefully.” He held up a third finger. “And lastly, never fuck a client. No matter what. So you can stop, now. We don’t have time and it’s not going to happen.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Did I offend your delicate sensibilities?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I’m sure you would have, if I had any.” Then I leaned toward him. “Did you say ‘fuck a client’ or ‘fuck over a client’?”

He laughed. “Fucking someone over is just part of the job description. So I guess we’re in agreement.”

“We are? About what?”

“You let me do what I do best, which means you stop making my job that much harder for me.”

He stood up. We were done.

Nathaniel opened the door to the reception area. “You have any more ideas about who might have killed your husband, give them to me. Don’t be stupid and decide to find out for yourself. The cops are already looking for a good reason to arrest you. Don’t make it easier for them.”

I passed him, and then stopped short in the middle of the doorway and turned around. He nearly walked into me and our sudden closeness disconcerted him, exactly the way I’d wanted it to. “Tell me, Counselor. Those three rules of yours? How many have you broken so far?”

He backed up to put a little more space between us. He didn’t seem in the slightest bit surprised I’d asked that question. Maybe he’d been waiting for it. “All three.”

“All at once or individually?”

He shook his head and smiled, sadly. “It was a long time ago. Which is why I take them very seriously.”

“Oh. Pity. I’d like to meet her.”

“Why, so you can compare notes?”

“So I can give her hell for ruining you for the rest of us.”

He stared at me for a few seconds before he looked away. “Keep your cell phone on. The police are going to want to talk to you.”

I started to walk away and then looked back over my shoulder. “Do keep me abreast of what’s going on, Counselor.”

He went back into his office.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

IT WAS THE middle of the afternoon by the time I was ready to return to Stevie. I felt as though I’d been working in the brickyard all day. I drove up to the house, drumming my thumbs on the steering wheel and running through what I was going to tell her about my visit with Roberto.

Stevie was not stupid. She could guess my family wasn’t going to welcome her with open arms. I like to avoid hysterics whenever possible, and that goes double with my little sister. So I would go with my usual approach and say nothing. If she asked, then I’d tell her. But not until.

Knowing my lawyer probably thought I was guilty wasn’t even the worst thing that had happened so far that day. Roberto’s decree was all I could think about. On the upside, I’d have no worries. I’d have the family’s protection. I could use my real name again. And Stevie could get all the medical care, physical and mental, she could use.

The downside is I could never see if it was working for her.

Damn it, my mother could hold a mean grudge. It wasn’t Stevie she didn’t like—she didn’t even know Stevie. My mother was still furious that her first husband, the one she’d married against her parents’ objections, had knocked up a ski instructor, which humiliated her and led to a horrible divorce. I think I first loved Stevie so much because she made my mother so crazy.

Ah, Stevie. What in the hell was I going to do?

Since I hadn’t called within the past four hours, she must have become somewhat concerned.

When I walked in, my sister was nowhere in sight and the inside of the house was darker than the outside. “Stevie!” I called and I dropped my keys on the counter.

No response. The TV wasn’t on. No noises from upstairs of her running down to greet me. Which was strange, because where else could she be? She wouldn’t have left. She had to be somewhere in this house. “Stevie?” I yelled in my loudest, angriest voice. “Sweetie, where are you?”

Stevie does sleep like a stone from time to time, but she always responds to that tone. Always.

No answer.

The combination of Colin’s murder and my having to see Roberto had frightened her but come on, I’d been in worse predicaments. True, I couldn’t think of one at the moment, but that was only because I was worried, not because I didn’t have a raft of possibilities to choose from.

She wasn’t in the living room or the downstairs bathroom or the laundry area. Or the coat closet. I ran upstairs, two steps at a time. She wasn’t in either neatly-made bed. She wasn’t in either bedroom closet, her usual place to find solace when she was alone: dark, cramped, easy to hide in. There weren’t even any clothes on the floor for her to hide under. She’d spent some of the day tidying up.

Hide under. Of course. We hadn’t had beds that were set off the floor in donkey’s years.

I picked up the bed skirt of the bed in the larger room. Nothing. I went to the other bedroom and picked up its yellow bed skirt.

Empty. And dust-free. Good housekeeping.

Could she have left the house by herself, agitated and afraid because I might be in trouble? Had she run into Gary or some other stranger? Had she feared that I might not return from seeing Roberto?

Not a chance. Not even that level of fear could get her to leave this house voluntarily.

I went into the bathroom to see if there were any clues there. Her bath towel was damp, so she’d showered. The shower stall was empty. The linen closet: shelves full of towels and bed sheets and not a bit of my sister.

The only place left in the house I hadn’t checked was the attic, and I wasn’t even sure there was an attic, or how you’d get into it. If Stevie were panicked, the attic wouldn’t have been an option anyhow.

Think
, I told myself. Check every possible space she could wedge herself into.

Across from me was the built-in sink and vanity. Two sinks, each with a cupboard underneath and three columns of drawers flanking them.

I pulled open the doors under the sink: tile cleanser and toilet bowl bleach.

But there was another sink, a bigger sink.

I raced downstairs to the kitchen. There, under the kitchen sink, curled up in a tight ball, was Stevie, fast asleep.

Looking at her, my first thought was that the wrong one of us had learned to squeeze ourselves into the narrow spaces of a magician’s coffin.

Relief washed over me, together with an urge to slap her silly for scaring me so badly. There was my sister, curled up around the sink pipe, her head tucked into her shoulder, her other arm at an unnatural angle to make herself fit into the cramped space, and she was asleep.

One doctor—in Vienna, naturally, because why not go to the source—tried to explain away Stevie’s behavior as post-traumatic stress disorder. I had argued with him, saying that she’d always been a little strange, even when she was a toddler, sucking her thumb and doodling in Latin. At least, I think it was Latin; I know I couldn’t make heads or tails of the writing and it wasn’t Greek, because that uses a different alphabet. The doctor had asked, “Was her home life unusual?” and that shut me right up. He then asked if there was any particular event she might have found especially stressful. We left his office.

I put my hand between her head and the wall of the cabinet, leaned in close, and then screamed, “Stevie!” right in her ear.

Her head banged backwards, against my fingers, and her eyes flew open. Her feet kicked against the wall of the cabinet and one knee slammed into the drainpipe.

She was awake now.

She looked at me with eyes wide with terror, until she processed what she was seeing and realized it was me. She squirmed, trying to get herself out of the contortions she had gotten her body into. I grabbed her under the knees and behind the back and pulled her out. Not the easiest stunt in the world—my sister, though slight, still weighed eighty-five or ninety pounds—but one I’d had enough practice with. She served as my main weight set, as I’d found it tough to work out at a gym on a regular basis.

I plopped her onto the limestone counter. “Mind telling me what that was all about?”

She gave me a wide-mouth smile and then threw her arms around my neck. “You’re here! You’re all right!”

I gave into the hug for a moment before pulling away as much as I could, given that her fingers were digging into my upper arms. “I’m more concerned about you at the moment. This is a new one, even for you.”

“You’re here.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

She had been expecting me not to come home. She’d been afraid that once Roberto had me in his sights, I was going to disappear and she would be alone.

Which was the general idea, yes. But one thing at a time.

I moved her curling bangs out of her eyes. “Everything’s going to be okay.” So much for telling her the truth. I’m a terrible sister. “But you’ve got to tell me why you were under there.”

She hopped off the counter and immediately sank to one knee. “Ow, my foot.”

“Sit. Your circulation’s probably iffy.” I filled the kettle for her and put it on the stove. Stevie and her cup of tea. Even made properly—and it so rarely is, especially in America, where people tend to make tea with water not quite hot enough poured over stale leaves and left steeping for much too long—I thought tea was a waste of good water.

I checked some cupboards. “Didn’t we buy some wine?”

She opened the drawer with the kitchen towels in it. I took a towel and the bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon she’d hidden there. Then she opened another drawer and without even looking into it reached in and pulled out a corkscrew. “You said you would call after…”

I used the towel to wipe off the neck of the wine bottle. “After I saw Roberto. Right. My bad. Sorry, I’ve been distracted today.”

“I started to get scared. Like maybe you wouldn’t return. And then…” She seemed as though she were searching for the right words to say it. “And Sir Gareth came to the door. Rang the bell.”

Oh Lord. That would have frightened her to death. Especially after this morning. I wondered what Gary wanted.

She pulled down a teapot from its spot in the glass-fronted cabinet. “He was calling your name.”

“Like this morning?”

She shook her head. “No, completely different. He sounded contrite. He said, ‘I’m sorry, please come out.’ It was…” She shook her head. “He heard me moving around in here. So I hid. I picked somewhere no one would look.”

“And you fell asleep.”

She ran hot water into the teapot and shook it around.

“I called your name several times.”

Her mouth made a small
o
. “I must have been quite tired.”

“Must have been.” We didn’t say anything for a few moments. The only noise was the water in the kettle revving up. Stevie had to be thinking about the same thing I was. Was she on the verge of another catatonic attack? Or was she catching up on twenty-two years of getting little to no sleep? And did she have to do this right now, when we might need to vacate the premises at a moment’s notice?

Okay, there was little chance she was thinking that last one. But I certainly was.

While I opened the bottle, she went to the glass cabinet, pulled out a delicate wine goblet (perfect for an aromatic red), washed it, dried it, and handed it off in time for me to pour. For all of her faults, Stevie makes an excellent companion: cook, washerwoman, and sommelier rolled into one.

The kettle whistled and Stevie took it off the burner to let it cool down to the proper temperature for the best cup of tea. “Tell me what happened today.”

I gave her the short version of my visit to Roberto, surgically removing both his offer of money for Stevie no longer being in my life and how relieved I had been to see him after all these years. I mentioned how surprised I felt to see pictures of my new little brother and sister. Then I told her about Vin Behar’s showing up at the Peninsula and his blackmail attempt.

“He followed us from Las Vegas.”

That reminded me. I needed to check the car for a sensor. Then I filled her in on what Nathaniel Ross, criminal defense attorney extraordinaire, was like. I took a large swig of the excellent Cabernet. It was fantastic. Stevie loathed anything stronger than 2% milk, but boy, had she read up on her wines.

She poured the tea from the pot into her cup, letting it pass through a strainer. “So what is your plan?”

“I think I need to talk to Anne da Silva. Find out what Colin was doing that he somehow dragged me into.”

Stevie added the proper amount of milk—not cream, never cream, cream was for cretins—to her cup of tea. I sometimes mused we should move to Japan, so Stevie could study their tea ceremony in depth.

“How are you going to talk to her? Introduce yourself as Colin’s wife?”

“That is an excellent question.” And I didn’t have one damned idea.

Sometimes exercise helps clear the cobwebs, so I went outside and searched the car for an hour, looking for some kind of device Vin Behar could have used to track us to Los Angeles. Nothing. Dammit.

I showered and then lay on the living room sofa, listening to Stevie knit and wishing I could nap like a normal human being.

“What you could do,” Stevie said, needles clicking in perfect rhythm, “is use one of the posters from the show.”

I saw where she was going with that. “We’ll need to go to an art store.”

“You agree this will work?” she asked.

“It’s a brilliant plan, Stevie.”

She gave me another wide-mouth smile. “Thank you. I know,” she said with perfect sincerity.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

ANNE DA SILVA,
People
magazine celebrity journalist extraordinaire, was the renter of record on Colin’s apartment, though clearly he—or someone else—had been giving her the money every month to cover the rent. However, she lived somewhere else, a house in Beachwood Canyon. Which was nowhere near the beach, of course. Beachwood Canyon was the Hollywood Hills, not far from the Hollywood sign, and a few miles from Colin’s place.