Beneath the Skin (16 page)

“I canceled our flight.” Murphy flipped the newspaper over to the next section. He wasn’t even dressed. He had on a pair of gray flannel pajama bottoms and a black t-shirt with some sort of Celtic design on it. Or maybe it was an abstract tree. “I figured we could read all these files and make plans just as easily from this suite as we could from my cottage in Belfast.”

“But it wouldn’t cost a thousand dollars a day in Belfast.” I pulled out a regal-looking dining chair upholstered in nubby cream fabric.

“But I couldn’t show you Paris from Belfast, could I?” He gave me one of his boyish grins and dared me with his eyes to protest.

I reached out for one of the omelets--the one with the vegetables. I had a feeling Murphy intended the one with meat and cheese to be his.

“Hey, is that ketchup?” When I saw the porcelain bowl full of a thick, reddish substance that looked remarkably like ketchup, I felt a surge of supreme happiness.

“Ordered specially for you. It helps this hotel caters to Americans.” Murphy pushed the bowl closer to me and I doused my omelet liberally. He watched and I couldn’t tell whether he was fascinated or revolted. I put a huge amount of ketchup-soaked omelet on my fork and raised it to my mouth. Bliss. Pure, American-tasting bliss.

“How about the Eiffel Tower? You want to go to the top with me? Race you up the stairs if you think you can do it.” He reached out for the pain au chocolat and took a big bite while I washed the omelet down with orange juice.

“Can we read files on the top of Eiffel Tower?” I debated whether I wanted the remaining pain au chocolat on the white doily on the china plate.

“If it’s not too windy, sure. You can do practically anything on the top of the Eiffel Tower, Constance. There’s a restaurant, a gift shop and even a movie theater.”

“Are there benches? Because if I’m going to read, I’m going to want to sit down.”

Under the table he nudged my shin with his bare foot.

“Always so practical. That’s one of the things I like about you, you know that?”

“Nice to know there’s something,” I murmured and he laughed. I was beginning to like his laugh.

I’d known it was tall, but I took one look from the bottom of it and declared I was not taking the stairs, no way in hell, and so we took an elevator that was more like a cage, squashed in with a bunch of tourists. Most of them were German, and I wondered how long it would be before I could hear a German voice and not think of Rudi.

I cursed him, which was selfish of me, but I’d gone years and years living in America and hardly ever hearing German voices and now I lived in Europe and would hear German voices a lot, and I didn’t want to think about him.

Murphy took me into the gift shop where I flirted with the idea of buying a beret, but in the end settled on a keychain with a tiny little Eiffel Tower charm on it. Murphy pronounced it the most goddamn touristy thing he ever saw and I shook it in front of his face, and said, “I am a tourist, Murphy. I am allowed to buy touristy things.”

I clipped the keychain to one of the belt loops of my jeans, which made him threaten to throw his pendant into the Seine and disavow all knowledge of my existence, but I just laughed.

We found a bench and sat together armed with cups of coffee and two of Allerton’s

damned files.

While the rest of the people on the Eiffel Tower acted like tourists and looked down at city rooftops and the sweep of the river, Murphy and I read about dead members of the Great Pack. It didn’t seem fair somehow.

My file contained the bare facts about a stockbroker named Grace Applebury, a member of a British pack in London, England. One Friday night six months ago, she’d gone to an upscale wine bar in Knightsbridge, had a few glasses of sherry, gone home to bed and never woke the next morning. She’d been thirty-eight, which in Pack terms meant she’d looked in her mid-twenties. She’d been autopsied and her blood screened by pack members and the results had been interesting. She’d had severe hemorrhaging in her cranium and a small contusion had been found at the back of her head.

Witnesses at the pub said she’d complained of dizziness and they’d thought she’d been drunk, but it was surmised that somewhere along the way from her home to the pub--she’d walked--she’d fallen and hit her head just hard enough to kill herself, but not hard enough for her to think she needed medical attention.

Had she been pushed? Knocked over the head? If so, why hadn’t she said anything?

She’d been part of a triad with two men, who both professed to love her dearly, and neither one of them had a history of knocking her around.

Sobered, I sipped my coffee and tried not to let the November wind make me shiver too much.

Murphy moved closer to me on the bench, and lent me his body warmth. He didn’t look up from his file until he’d finished and we traded. We didn’t talk.

The second file concerned a forty-six-year-old petrochemical engineer from a pack in Sweden. A year ago, he’d apparently been drinking and ice fishing. He’d fallen asleep in his car and subsequently frozen to death overnight.

The only real mystery was that his blood alcohol level was not elevated very high. There was no reason to explain why he hadn’t woken, or why he’d fallen asleep in the first place. Tox screens were inconclusive. He and his bond mate had been together for twenty years and were devoted. Despite the pleas of the pack to join a duo and become a triad, she’d left the pack and no one was sure she would ever return.

“Twenty years,” I murmured, and set the file down on the bench beside me. I drank the dregs of my coffee. It was cold. “Can I have some money, Murphy? I want more coffee.”

He fished in his pocket and handed me a fistful of one and two-euro coins.

I went into the small café near the gift shop and bought us both more coffee, as well as a ham sandwich to share. We’d had a huge breakfast, but that had been hours ago.

Murphy sat slumped on the bench, legs stretched out, looking at the back of the
Musée
d’Orsay,
or maybe the sky when I sat beside him. I handed him half the sandwich and one of the coffees and he flashed me a brief smile of thanks.

“
Le Cinq
tonight, or do you want to go out somewhere?” He took a swallow of coffee and closed his eyes briefly, as if pleased at the sensation of warmth in his throat.

“
Le Cinq
would be fun,” I said, but I was okay with either. “Even room service. We can read more files if we order in.”

“We’re taking a break from reading files tonight.”

And we did. We went back to the hotel after we finished our coffee and we read more files, but I had time to take a hot bubble bath and put on my black dress with the rhinestone straps. I accessorized with a pair of black patent leather pumps with rhinestone-encrusted heels and put my hair up.

While Murphy dressed I read a file about a twenty-seven-year-old computer programmer from Scotland who’d been in a car accident--drove into a tree. His bond mate had been paralyzed in the crash and had petitioned for and received permission from the Council to commit assisted suicide. One of the grandmothers from her pack had administered a painless but fatal poison and sat holding her hand as she died.

Pack didn’t handle handicaps very well. People who were lucky had bond mates who

cared for them, but if they didn’t, they left the pack and looked after themselves. It was harsh and I hated it, but it was our way.

Pack could and often did commit suicide under those circumstances. Again, if they were lucky, they were assisted by their pack.

Murphy saw my face when he walked into the room and took the file away from me.

“That was a bad one. I was going to keep that one aside. I’m sorry, Constance.”

“I can handle this shit,” I barked, but I wasn’t sure if that were true. How many horrible, tragic stories did I have to read, and what was I supposed to get out of them afterward?

We didn’t speak again until we left the room.

“What are the similarities you’ve noticed?” I asked Murphy in the elevator as we

descended to the restaurant level.

He looked young and modern in a pair of gray pants and a darker gray jacket. His

pendant was beneath a black shirt and black and gray tie.

I’d put mine on my evening chain. Peridot and pearl was not a combination normally

seen. I saw Murphy studying my pendant in the elevator, but when I spoke, he said, “No. We are not going to talk about this subject during dinner. We’re going to have a nice dinner, Constance.

Promise me?”

I had zero problem with that.

We were placed at a prominent table in the restaurant, probably because we were staying in one of the larger suites, and treated like celebrities. I’d never had such an attentive waiter in my life.

We ate pheasant and foie gras and escargot in a deep dish pastry drizzled with herbed butter and we drank lots of wine.

Halfway through my crème brûlée and coffee, I leaned back in my chair, wondering if my dress was going to split at the seams. “Murphy, you know something, I like eating with somebody else at the table. I’d forgotten how much fun it is.”

We’d laughed and joked all through dinner. He had a wicked sense of humor, Murphy

did. The wine made his Irish brogue appear and I liked it.

A small shadow crossed his face. “Me too, Constance,” he said and he looked so forlorn I was sorry I’d said anything.

I wanted to go back to the room. I wanted him to kiss me, and I wanted him to take my dress off and hold me flesh to flesh.

We did go to the room, but after he shrugged off his jacket and threw it neatly across the back of one of the dining chairs, he scooped up a pile of those damned files, and said, “Think I’ll take these to bed and read them before I fall asleep. Nice bedtime stories, huh? See you in the morning, Constance.”

He closed the bedroom door behind him and, sighing, I picked up the rest of the stack and took it to bed with me.

morning.

We’d walked by common consent. I wore a pair of gray plaid Chuck Taylors and thick

pink socks, so I was good to go.

The sky was overcast and heavy and we ducked into the café just ahead of the rain.

“So what do you think? What’s the common denominator, if there is one?” I questioned as I greedily gobbled a croissant spread with honey while Murphy tried to guard his from my questing fingers and insatiable appetite.

He surrendered after two bites, because I was relentless, and allowed me to take what remained off his plate. It never even made it to mine. It went straight to my mouth.

“They were all young,” he mused.

“How about their packs?”

“Small, medium, large. Some of them were popular members. Half a dozen of them were the Alphas, pretty equally spread between males and females.”

“There was always someone left behind,” I commented.

“It’s a pack. There’s always going to be someone left behind,” he pointed out. The rain made streaks down the window we sat next to and cast intriguing shadows across his attractive face.

“Were they rich?” I wondered. “It doesn’t say, but I remember thinking a lot of them had some pretty high-paying jobs.”

Murphy elevated an eyebrow as he considered that. He wrote something down in a

notebook propped open next to his coffee.

“The ones left behind, what happened to them?”

“A variety of things. Some of them made triads with existing duos, some of them left their packs, two duos and a triad were all killed together--the fire, the small plane crash and the carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“It was never blatant murder,” I said. “Even if it were an accident, the one who caused it was either killed or hurt badly. Except in my case. I walked away with a couple of scratches.”

Murphy frowned.

“Senseless accidents. Many of them preventable but none of them malicious.”

“They were all malicious if they were murders staged to look like accidents,” Murphy said.

“Why? Why would anyone do this? And how could one person be doing this and not

show up in the reports? Were there any of these that happened in the same pack? Or near each other?” The croissants felt heavy in my stomach and I wished I hadn’t eaten them.

“Several happened to packs near each other. It’s conceivable one person could have

staged them. And maybe we’re talking about someone who’s Pack but doesn’t have a pack. Free to move about invisibly. Nobody to care about him or her, or know where he or she is.” Murphy pushed his coffee cup aside and stared moodily out at the rain.

“Or someone who lost somebody in an accident and was kicked out of their pack

unjustly,” I whispered.

Murphy turned back from the rain to look at me.

“I’d suspect you, only the files go back for five years and your accident happened two years ago. So unless you can tell the future and had a premonition I don’t think I’ve solved the mystery quite yet.”

“Someone like me, maybe,” I pressed and he sighed.

“So what are we supposed to do, Constance? Ask Allerton to look through the Council files for a person or persons who lost their bond mates in tragic accidents and were somehow implicated and yet not convicted but still thrown out of their packs?”

“Why not?” I shrugged. “We’ve got to start somewhere. Give those Advisors who sit

around on their asses all day making coffee for the Council something to do.”

“Maybe what they’ll do is gather a huge amount of files and dump them all at our front door for us to sort through.”

I shuddered at the very thought.

The rain finally let up a couple of hours later and we splashed through puddles and took the Metro to the Louvre where we spent the entire afternoon not even thinking about those damn files.

We returned to the hotel just before dark.

That night I was all for room service, and while Murphy showered, I ordered it.

“Who was she?” I asked as we sat at the glass-topped dining table in our suite and ate steak and roasted potatoes with red wine. The bus boy had brought two crystal candlesticks with white tapers, and after he’d placed them on either side of a beautiful bowl of autumn flowers, he’d lit them.