Body of Shadows (15 page)

“We’ll go tonight,” Renn-Jaa added.

A pause.

“Sure.”

“Bring bribe money.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know. A thousand?”

“
A thousand?
Are you kidding?”

“I don’t know. Just bring as much as you can and we’ll try not to use it all. All I’m saying is that we need to have enough to get the job done. Do you have a thousand laying around?”

“I wouldn’t call it laying around,” she said. “I’ll have to make a run to the bank.”

“Fine. Get fifties or smaller.”

“Okay.”

Ten minutes later
Grayson Condor walked into her office, closed the door and settled into one of the chairs in front of her desk.

“How you holding up?”

“Fine.”

“Are you sure?”

Good question.

She smiled.

“Petty sure.”

“
Pretty sure
,” he said. “Well that’s better than I would be. What do you think about having a bodyguard, at the firm’s expense? I’ve made a few calls. There’s an outfit called Personal Security Specialists. They’re actually in our building on the tenth floor. They have a female on staff named Lea Skye, she’s an ex-Marine with a long list of credentials. She looks like a lifeguard. She could sleep on your couch. You wouldn’t have to feel weird about having a man in your place.”

Pantage exhaled.

“Can I think about it?”

“Sure. Go down and talk to her. If you decide to go ahead, just let her know. The firm’s already made arrangements.”

She nodded.

“I’ll talk to her.”

“Good. If you need any time off—”

She shook her head.

“No, thanks, really I appreciate it, but what I need more than anything right now is just to have my posterior firmly planted in this chair.”

He understood.

Enough said.

Ten minutes later
her phone rang and the voice of the California investigator, Aspen Gonzales, came through. “I have some news for you. It’s not particularly pretty.”

Pantage braced.

“Let me have it.”

44

Day Three

July 20

Wednesday Morning

Kelly was an animal
, a dirty filthy little sex-starved animal who screwed Drift like a pack of wild banshees, then slumped down on her sweaty back and panted.

“Damn,” she said.

Drift got his pants situated.

“You’re going to have some ’splaining to do, Lucy. You were pretty loud.”

“I was?”

He nodded.

“Trust me.”

“I don’t care,” she said.

By the look on her face she was telling the truth.

Drift was back
on the street within minutes, passing women, able to sense the ones who were animals. A raven-haired beauty approaching from the opposite direction held his gaze longer than appropriate, almost as if daring him to seize the moment.

“How you doing?” he said.

“Fine.”

They passed.

“Hey,” he heard over his shoulder.

He stopped and turned.

The woman approached. She wore an aqua tank that rode three inches above cutoff jeans. A flat little belly button peeked out. She pulled a tissue out of her purse and wiped lipstick off Drift’s mouth, then shoved the tissue in his shirt pocket.

“There, all better,” she said.

“Thanks.”

She smiled for a heartbeat then walked off.

When he arrived
at the office, Sydney got in his face and said, “I watched the Tequila Rose surveillance tapes this morning. The guy that Pantage eventually left with, the gladiator, was checking her out long before she knew it.”

Drift filled a disposable cup with coffee.

“I would have been too,” he said.

“Not like that,” she said. “More like in a creepy way.”

“He was stalking her?”

“They didn’t meet by accident,” Sydney said. “He got in her space. Outside, he arrived fifteen minutes after her. It’s possible he tailed her there.”

Drift took a sip.

“Was he with anyone?”

“No, alone.”

“Is any of his left ear missing?”

“Unknown,” she said. “His hair’s always over it.” She grabbed a napkin and dabbed at the corner of Drift’s ear, then held it up to show him.

It was lipstick.

“Kelly’s or Pantage’s?”

A pause.

“Kelly’s.”

“Jeez, Dent, that fast?”

He shrugged.

“I guess so.”

“What about Pantage? She’s out?”

“No.”

“So she’s in?”

“Nobody’s anywhere. Things are just happening, that’s all.” He took a sip, filled her in on the information Kelly gave him about the Michael Northway sighting and said, “Coordinate with our counterparts in New York. See if you can sweet-talk them into rounding up surveillance tapes.”

She frowned.

“On the list of a hundred things I need to do, where do you want me to put this one?”

“At the top. Oh, call Leigh Sandt and fill her in too. She’s always complaining I don’t keep her in the loop.”

“You don’t.”

“Loops take time,” he said.

“So does coffee.”

“Yeah, but coffee trumps.”

He raked his hair back with his fingers.

It immediately flopped back down.

“Time to do some gladiator work.”

45

Day Three

July 20

Wednesday Afternoon

Yardley awoke
in her bed Wednesday afternoon to the sound of someone knocking on her door. Deven was soundly asleep next to her. A strong Colorado sun muscled its way through the window coverings. She grabbed the gun, released the safety and walked barefoot across the loft, pausing and listening at the door before finally saying, “Who’s there?”

“Madison Elmblade, the lawyer.”

Madison Elmblade.

She was the bait Cave was supposed to take last night.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

Yardley opened the door far enough to where it got snagged by the chain, found things as the woman said and let her in.

“I’ve left you ten messages,” she said. “Why haven’t you called me back?”

“I’ll explain,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”

She got the coffee pot going, splashed water on her face at the kitchen sink and dried it with a paper towel.

“Cave came for you last night,” she said. “I was the one who fired the shots.”

“That was you?”

Yes.

It was.

“Why?”

She explained.

The more she told the story, the more Elmblade paced. At the end the woman said, “So that’s great that Deven’s safe, but what do you think happens now?”

“Simple,” Yardley said. “Cave will contact me sooner or later. I’m going to explain to him how I could have killed him ten different times but didn’t do it. I’m going to tell him we’re even. He needs to go his way and me and Deven are going ours.”

The lawyer wasn’t impressed.

“Do you really think that’s going to work?”

“I has to, it’s all I got.”

“You got nothing,” Elmblade said. “Less than nothing. What you got is Cave biding his time and figuring out a way to get both you and Deven tied up tighter than tight in his next little lair. You got nothing until he’s dead. Then you have everything.”

Yardley’s chest tightened.

She already knew deep in her bones that what Elmblade was saying was a possibility. Hearing the words out loud gave them a bigger proportion.

She poured two cups of coffee, handed one to the woman and said, “So what do you propose?”

“We kill him.”

She said the words and let them hang.

Yardley pictured it.

It wasn’t pretty.

She frowned and shook her head.

“To be honest, I don’t think I’m cut out for that,” she said.

The woman wrinkled her brow.

“I need you to be the bait. We need to lure him somewhere where I can do it and not have to worry about a thousand witnesses. Then we need to dispose of the body where it will never be found.”

Yardley shook her head.

“There’s no such place. Not in this day and age.”

“Wrong, there are a million places and I know at least ten of them,” Elmblade said. “That’s not the issue. The issue is whether you’ll be the bait. You are already, whether you admit it or not. The only question is whether you want me in the shadows waiting for him when he comes.”

“Lovely picture,” Yardley said. She flicked hair out of her eyes. “If I help you, Deven needs to stay out of it. I don’t want her to play any part whatsoever. I don’t want her involved even an inch.”

“That’s fine. You can stick her on a plane to Greenland for all I care.”

46

Day Three

July 20

Wednesday Afternoon

When the California investigator
said she had news and it wasn’t particularly pretty, Pantage braced but not hard enough.

“Okay, the woman you asked about, London Winger, was an attorney here in Malibu,” she said. “She was friends with the other woman, Chiara de Correggio.”

“Okay.”

“One day, both of the women mysteriously dropped off the face of the earth,” she said. “Well, that’s a slight misstatement. They didn’t disappear on the same day. Chiara disappeared on a Tuesday and London disappeared the following day, Wednesday. Chiara just vanished; she didn’t cash out a bank account or anything like that. London, on the other hand, did cash out a bank account. The following week, Chiara’s body was found at the base of a cliff just south of Big Sur. She’d been dead for several days.”

Pantage’s heart raced.

“The police came up with a theory that the two women had a falling out. London killed Chiara, dumped her body and then went on the run before the walls closed in.”

Pantage swallowed.

“How’d Chiara die?”

“I don’t have that yet,” she said. “The detective on the case is a man named John Maxwell. He’s a no-nonsense alpha-type. He found out I was snooping around and actually called me. He wants to know what my interest is in all this.”

“What’d you say?”

“I told him no interest at all, just curious.” She exhaled. “Like I said before, I don’t know what your interest is in all this and I don’t want to know. I’ll tell you this, though. If you’re mixed up in any of this, I’d back down and do it fast.”

Pantage considered it.

“Find out how Chiara died,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, but remember, it’s against my advice.”

“I understand.”

She hung up
and looked out the window.

She was a murderer.

She killed Chiara.

Why?

She had no memory, not a spark.

There was no question that she was London Winger. That was clear from the driver’s license and photographs from her closet.

How did she end up in Denver?

How did she become Pantage Phair?

Her phone rang
and Drift’s voice came through. “According to Sydney, your gladiator friend from Friday night had you in his crosshairs the whole evening,” he said. “When you bumped into him, it wasn’t a real bump. It was something he staged.”

“I know,” she said. “I saw the same thing in the copy you sent me.”

“When you left, you went to his place not yours, right?”

“Right.”

“Where was that? Do you remember?”

She did.

He wrote it down.

Then he said something. She heard the words and knew he was talking but a sudden dark thought wouldn’t let her focus.

Maybe her past life as London Winger was somehow connected to what was happening here in Denver. Maybe Jackie Lake was dead because of something in Pantage’s past.

“Hey, you there?”

“Yes.”

“You left me.”

“Sorry.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“No.”

“I said, you should spend the night at my place tonight,” he said.

“Okay.”