You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) (26 page)

She kept staring at me. “Oh my God.”

“Like Penelope and her mother. The whole setup might have been sweet little Penny’s idea—”

“Jesus Christ. She was a kid. It wasn’t her idea. It couldn’t have been.”

Kids can be so damned gullible sometimes. Like if you tell them you love them, right up until they hit a delayed puberty, so you get disgusted and turn to their little sister. “Could have been made to think it was her idea.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“Anne, Eileen’s job was to say, no, that’s a terrible, horrible, no-good idea. And she didn’t. She failed as a parent. She failed as a human being. Makes me furious.”

“I’m sure it does,” Anne said quietly.

“Annie, this is not about me.” Her question made me think about the other avenue of this murder I had been avoiding. Mostly because all hell would break loose if there was anything to my suspicions.

Penelope did make an excellent suspect. In fact, in my heart of hearts I wanted her to have done it. But I had another suspect in mind, too, someone who would have been very, very unhappy to find out a minor Vegas magician was married to his stepdaughter.

I needed more information. And I couldn’t ask Anne for help. All I had to do was mention the name “Roberto Montesinos” and she was going to be painted on that story like a bikini on a supermodel.

“I need to get my car at your house.”

“Have you talked to anyone about this?”

I looked at her. “Will I need to get a taxi?”

She drove.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-O
NE

HOW IN THE hell had my savior, Nathaniel Ross, showed up right when I needed him? The only reason Roberto would have hired him was because he already knew about the murder, and he could only have known about the murder if he had had a part in it. Thinking of Roberto as a suspect didn’t fill me with glee. It made me angry. Because if it were true, he’d get away with it.

Penelope was going to get away with it.

My father was going to get away with it.

Hell, even
I
was going to get away with what I’d done.

Everyone was going to walk away scot-free.

First, I checked the phone calls I’d made from my phone that night. I must have found Colin’s body around midnight, judging by when I called Stevie.

Then I called Nathaniel from my car. “I have a quick question.”

“Tell me you are not investigating Colin’s murder.”

“No, not about that. I’m wondering about Monday night. When you…got hired.”

“What about it?”

“How did that happen? You get a phone call to the Batcave or something? Because you were at Colin’s apartment awfully quickly.”

“My service got a call from our mutual friend and they told me to get the hell out to Hollywood.”

“What time did
they
get that call?” I asked.

“What? Who cares?”

“Can you check, please? It’s actually important.”

“Go home and drink a margarita or something, would you?”

I did the next best thing. I started my long return drive to Pacific Palisades. There is no quick way to cross the west side of Los Angeles, so I had plenty of time to think. An hour into the traffic, Nathaniel called me.

“You first,” he said. “Why do you want to know?”

“I found Colin’s body at midnight. I called Stevie a few minutes later.”

“The service called me at twelve thirty-eight. I’m sure they’d gotten the call no more than five minutes before that. It was top priority.”

After
I’d found Colin’s body. Not before.

Not a chance would Roberto have cut it that close if there was a remote possibility I was going to be found with the body. He was much too savvy for that. He would have kept me away from Colin’s apartment. Or had Nathaniel on standby.

Roberto hadn’t killed Colin, and he hadn’t subcontracted the job.

“If I don’t talk to you in an hour, come on out to Sir Gareth’s house.”

“Why?” Nathaniel asked.

“Because I might be about to commit a murder,” I said, and I hung up.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
WO

STEVIE LOOKED UP from her book when I walked in. She marked her page with her finger and smiled. “You’re back! You’re never going to believe what I’ve found out!”

I leaned against the doorframe between the living room and kitchen and didn’t say anything.

The enthusiasm drained off her face. “What is it?”

When was the last time I had seen my sister? Seen the person she’d grown into over the past eleven years? Stevie was small and girlish, but it was time to stop thinking of her as my eleven-year-old sister. She hadn’t been that girl for, well, eleven years. She’d been my auxiliary, the person who did stuff because I told her to. But you couldn’t have a brain like the one she did and keep being a child. You’d explode or something. So at least I’d taught her something.

I folded my arms across my chest. “How did you start off the conversation with Roberto? ‘The good news is, you don’t have to worry about your son-in-law causing a public relations hassle. The bad news is, you still have to worry about you-know-who causing one.’”

She put the book down beside her, page forgotten. She didn’t fool me, though. We’d been together too long, and I knew her tells. She was about to deflect. Stevie doesn’t lie so much as she skirts around the issue. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t do this. Please don’t do this, Stevie. I’m trying to talk to you and not…lose my temper.”

Her only response was to pinch her lips more.

“You called Roberto, didn’t you? You’re the one who told him where we are. Say it! How could you do that?”

She curled up further into herself and leaned a little away from me. After a few seconds, she nodded.

What the hell did she have to look so miserable about? She wasn’t the one Roberto and Jane were going to happen to.

She had made that call. I couldn’t let myself believe it for certain until I saw her face. She had told him where we were and made sure that I was going back to…well, to whatever it was they had lined up for me. After all of these years together, she was the one who said, that’s it, game over, we’re done.

“How could you not have told me you did that?”

“You’d be angry,” she whispered.

“You got that right.” I ran my hands through my hair, pulling it, messing it up. “Why? Why did you do it?”

The tears in her eyes were making the dark blue irises even larger than normal. “I was afraid you were in serious trouble this time.”

“You thought I’d killed him.”

“No. I didn’t, Drusilla, honest and truly. But I couldn’t go through it again. I can’t lie and run and hide and start all over again. Not anymore.”

I dug my toes into the carpeting, pushing them against the floor until they started to hurt and at last I felt something. We had been on the run for eleven years, me because of what I’d done, her because I was her only family in the world. And she didn’t know any other way of living, but she knew she didn’t want to do this anymore. Maybe it was this house. The power of having a soft bed at long last.

What the hell. Tell her everything. “Roberto gave me an ultimatum. I will go home to New York, get all my money, and live really, really well. You, on the other hand, have to go away somewhere, far away, and I have to agree to never see you again.”

“Why?”

I had been asking myself that question over and over since Roberto had laid the situation out for me. My first explanation was that my mother hated Stevie. And while that was still true, that wasn’t the reason. Not deep down. No, my family’s much more pragmatic than letting a little thing like emotions rule their behavior. They’re playing a bigger game than that.

“They’d have a hostage to ensure my good behavior.”

Stevie nodded. Of course.

“You’d be very comfortable. Probably be able to get anything you could want.”

“Except see you.”

I nodded. “So that’s where I am, Stevie. I don’t want to do this anymore, either. I want to go back to New York and do piles of cocaine and party every night and not give a good goddamn about anything. I can’t do that here. I can’t do that—”

“With me.”

My toes dug into the flooring again.

“And what if you don’t agree?”

“Roberto kidnaps me and takes me back, I suppose. Or worse, he simply reveals who I am. Without the family’s resources to protect me. And when Daddy finds me, I’m dead.”

“They wouldn’t do that to you.” She sighed and pulled on her ponytail. “It’s much more psychologically effective to have you make the decision. And alive.”

That’s my sister. Analytic to a fault.

“I can’t believe you called him.”

She glared at me. When had Stevie learned to start glaring? “You’d be in jail, Dru. If you rang me right now, I’d do it again.”

I nodded. We were screwed, no matter how we looked at it.

We sat in silence for a while. Half an hour. An hour. I wasn’t sure. My mobile phone rang. Nathaniel asked if I had, in fact, killed anyone. “No, not yet. Sit tight, though. The night is young.” I hung up. “You were going to tell me good news when I walked through the door. What was it?”

“Guess what the name of the security coordinator on
The Night Glen
is.”

Twenty questions. My least favorite game. I shrugged.

“Mike Behar.”

I sat up straight. “Would he happen to be Vin’s brother?”

She nodded. “He would.”

“Jesus—” Stevie’s grunt of annoyance shut me up. I invoked some other deity and then told her what had happened that day, with Anne, with Eileen, with Ian Jack.

Stevie got that heavy-duty look on her face that meant her brain was analyzing. “So, after a break-in at her mother’s house last May, she needs someone with a very specific skill set to help her. She definitely wants someone to…”

“Seduce her mother and steal the photos,” I added, trying to be helpful. “She talks to her security guy, who calls his brother in Las Vegas, who says, ‘I know somebody.’” A huge rush of tension left my body, now that we had found that association. Everybody is connected to everyone else on this planet, some more than others. “Although why Colin would have done any kind of deal with Vin Behar, I have no idea.”

She shrugged. “Perhaps there was the money? By the way, Mike Behar has a juvenile record for violence. Amateur boxing gone wrong. Sealed, but…”

Mike Behar wailing on Colin could fit, but I had the same problem with that scenario as I did with his older brother Vin killing Colin: there was no way in hell Colin would have turned his back on either of them that night in his apartment. I shook my head. “Penelope gets her photos, or at least she thinks she does. She gets the photos from Colin and then wants to shut him up. So why doesn’t she just take out a gun and shoot him?”

Stevie raised an eyebrow at me.

“Come on. It’s the American way. But she doesn’t do that. She says she’s going to tie him in with the blackmail, only she doesn’t have the right photos.”

My sister shook her head. “What I’ve wondered is, why did Colin give her the wrong pictures? You said he sounded scared on the phone. Why would he be scared if he’d done that? He would know he had her over a barrel. He would have all the power.”

The answer was obvious. “Because Colin didn’t know he had the wrong pictures.”

“Someone switched the pictures on him.” Stevie leaned toward me. “You know what you should find out?”

“When did Penelope find out the pictures were fakes?”

Stevie nodded.

If Penelope found out before midnight, most likely she killed him in a rage. If it was after midnight, she had the wrong photos and Colin was already dead.

My lawyer was going to kill me for investigating, but I simply had to know.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
HREE

I CALLED PENELOPE and left a message saying I had her lost items. She called me back within twenty minutes and said she was still on set, in some hellhole called Reseda, but she would meet me at her condo at ten p.m. I told her that Pacific Palisades was closer and she should come to me. I didn’t fancy being cornered in her condo if things went south.

“Where do I go hide?” Stevie asked.

I waggled a thumb over my shoulder. “There’s space under the kitchen sink.”

She snorted and flushed a little.

“Is there a football match on anywhere in the world that you might want to watch?” When she nodded, I asked, “Would you feel okay watching it in Gary’s house? Without me? He might or might not be there while you are.”

After a second’s hesitation, she nodded. But it was the least sincere nod I’d ever seen. She wasn’t that thrilled by the idea. I considered calling Anne, but by the time we parted that afternoon, it had finally dawned on me that getting cozy with a journalist who might be very interested in my past could prove detrimental to my health. So I called the only other person who had a vested interest in me and Stevie walking away from this in one piece. Or rather, in two separate yet still alive pieces.

“Are you kidding me?” Nathaniel said.

“The beautiful thing is, you get to charge your hourly rate and all you have to do is drink beer.”

The noise he made indicated the money was the least of his problems with this plan. “Why are you talking to Penelope at all?” he said.

 
“You make an excellent point. You should come here and stop me.” I hung up on him and looked at Stevie. “Let’s go see how Gary is with this plan.”

We walked from the guesthouse, passed the tennis court and the pool cabana, and walked through the outdoor living room to the French doors into the back of the house. Inside, the only lights on were the low-level mood lighting that was probably controlled by a computer somewhere.

“He’s not home,” Stevie said.

I took out my set of lock picks. “That’s not a problem.”

Stevie reached out and turned one of the antique pewter handles on the door. It was unlocked.

“You’re good,” I said.

“You never start with the simplest possibilities,” she told me.

We walked into the house and I called out, “Gary!”