Ghosts & Echoes (38 page)

“Alex—” Sylvie said.

“I can pull up all recent deaths, comb through their pasts for hints of murder, but hell, this is Miami.”

“
Rich
people,” Sylvie said. “The two Hands we’ve identified are both rich, or should have been, and in the twilight of their lives. I’d start there.”

“And you’ll be—”

“Taking a look-see at Odalys’s condo, though I don’t expect it to pan out. Condos aren’t really necromancy-friendly. The neighbors tend to complain about the smell. Defective or not, these Hands have been cured.”

Wright’s lips curled up in distaste and understanding. “Once,” he said, “we rousted a guy who’d killed his girlfriend but couldn’t figure out where to stash the body. He bled her out in his bathtub and hung her up to dry. It was a cold winter, but . . . yeah, you can’t hide that smell.”

Alex made the “ew” face, so vivid on a girl with a tongue stud and bright lipstick. “Speaking of . . . take those Hands with you. The bell will drive me crazy otherwise.”

SYLVIE HUNG BACK WHEN THEY REACHED THE CONDO; WRIGHT AND Demalion had spent the ride double-teaming her, seamlessly working together, arguing about police procedure, about stealth, about catching flies with honey, until her head spun listening to the cadences of their voices flip back and forth, watching Wright’s wiry body lock up as if its nerves couldn’t keep up with the conflicting impulses the two minds sent it. Wright’s hand, resting on his thigh, twitched and trembled as if it were attached to a live wire.

All of that effort just for a discussion about which of them should approach the doorman.

“Stop talking about it and do it,” Sylvie snapped, reaching across and jerking the passenger’s-side door open. She brushed against him, recoiled at the fever heat roiling off his skin. He looked over at her, face immobilized by that same strange nervous-system lockdown; she wasn’t sure which of them was listening, if either. “Go, but first decide who’s doing the talking, or the doorman’s likely to call the cops. Maybe an ambulance. And Christ, give it a rest. I mean, I’m glad you’re making nice and all, glad you found some way to communicate, but Wright’s body looks about one step from a heart attack; and then where would you be?”

Wright’s body jerked, one of them wresting command enough to get out from under the spate of her aggravation. She was betting on Demalion; he’d been on the rough side of her tongue more often than he appreciated. She leaned out to shout something after him, but her phone rang, and she snatched it up without even looking at the number.

“Shadows, what the hell is going on?”

“Lio? Everything go all right with the evidence recovery?” Sylvie said.

“Forget that,” he gritted out. “Isabella Martinez just walked out of the hospital morgue. What’s going on!”

“She’s not dead?” Sylvie said. “But she was dead.
You
said so.”

“The goddamned doctors said so, too, but what do they know, because Bella went home this afternoon, walking on her own two feet.”

Sylvie’s brain blanked utterly. Suarez continued to harangue her, but she was made of sterner stuff than Demalion or just more wrapped up in her thoughts. Bella had been dead.

You didn’t see it,
her voice suggested.
Always best to verify the facts yourself.

But she had seen the girl clammy, desperately ill, corpse-pale, one step from death. Wales had said the Hands were defective, dangerous; the one, at least, had tried to devour Sylvie whole.

“Are you even listening? Tell me what’s going on, or I will bring you down to the station, and I will keep you there for as long as I can throw charges at you.” The fury in his voice was a thin thing, a veneer laid over fear, reminding her that he was new to this type of blatant magic.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I really don’t know what’s happening. I know what killed Bella, how Jaz and her boys were robbing the stores, and I know who started them on that path. But I don’t know about Bella’s death and resurrection. People just don’t come back from the dead.” This even while she watched Wright/Demalion speaking with the doorman in her peripheral vision, sweet-talking his way through.

Without wanting to, she remembered Wales’s comment that no good ever came of mingling life with death. While she wanted to be thrilled that Bella had recovered, it only raised sick dread in her stomach. “She taking visitors?”

“Ask her lawyers,” Suarez said. “She’s sure not talking to me. It seems to be a common thing these days. Me asking questions and getting shut out.”

“You can’t unknow things,” Sylvie said. “Sometimes aphorisms are right. Ignorance is bliss.”

“My son died. His killers have vanished. You tell me they transformed, which means nothing to me. And all the help I get from the bosses is a warning to drop it. I’ve got teenage cat burglars from high-class families waltzing through walls and alarms, dropping dead and coming back to life. Tell me, Shadows, how is this bliss?”

“Knowledge obligates you to do something about it,” she said. Across the parking lot, the doorman stepped back, allowing Wright entrance. “Gotta go, Lio.” She disconnected to his “Wait!” and hastened across the asphalt, nodding briefly to the doorman as she joined Wright.

The condominium apartments stretched tall and narrow, and the glass-sided elevator that they rode in gave them a wheeling, sunlit view of the bay. The doorman rode with them in wary silence until they reached nearly to the top floor. Odalys wasn’t a penthouse dweller, lived three floors below that lofty space, but Sylvie bet that she wanted to be. It was part of what made Odalys hard for her to figure.

Sylvie had dealt with voodoo kings who wanted power via infant sacrifice, succubi who wanted revenge, werewolves who were hungry for territory, and, of course, Lilith, who wanted to unseat her god. What she hadn’t dealt with was someone who was utterly money-oriented.

Magic-users often started out trying to gain wealth through magic—witness Zoe—but all too soon they traded that desire for more magic, ever more, until working it became as consuming as any addiction. Sylvie supposed it might be heady, finding that you had the ability to bend reality to your will, to push back the line between the probable, the possible, and the previously inconceivable. But humans weren’t innately magical, not like the natural denizens of the
Magicus Mundi
, and it always, always went wrong.

If Odalys was truly using magic only as a means for profit . . . Sylvie wasn’t sure if that was more dangerous or less.

From the moment the doorman opened the door into Odalys’s condo, Sylvie knew they were on the wrong track. The apartment smelled stale, the air flat and unstirred by human warmth. Their footfalls, even on the tiled entryway, were absorbed into the silence like water into a dry sponge. Not only was Odalys not at home, but she hadn’t been there for some time. It took at least a week to get that particular dead-air taste, and—Sylvie discreetly brushed her fingers along the top of the leather couch—a thin layer of dust was beginning to bloom, invisible, but slightly sandy against her skin.

“She hasn’t been here for days,” Sylvie said.

The doorman bobbed his head, gelled hair never shifting. “That’s right. I haven’t seen her at all.”

Wright asked about visitors, anyone that the doorman might recognize. Sylvie kept an ear out, listening through the name-dropping. No one really important, a few corporate businessmen, a banker—she noted that name to compare to Caudwell’s money manager. It’d be nice if they were the same man, or at least part of the same firm, another data point to seal the connection between Odalys and the dead women.

She opened the refrigerator—emptied. Cupboards revealed china dishes and silver-plated utensils, but no food. Either Odalys ate out exclusively, or she’d cleaned herself out.

The bedroom was palatial, a wide expanse of space dominated by a luxurious bed overlooking the ocean. The room was color-muted, everything in tones of white and dust, and the drawers and closets, when she opened them, were emptied. Odalys had found somewhere else to live. And knowing her, she had traded up.

Sylvie gnawed her lip, wondering what Odalys considered more livable than an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo apartment with optional maid service and rooftop pool.

Something she doesn’t have to share,
her little voice said, always more tuned into the dark side of humanity.
Greed begets selfishness.

Someplace illicit also,
Sylvie thought. If it was all on the up-and-up, Odalys would have broken her condo lease or sublet it rather than leave it open for dust bunnies to colonize; the same mind that made defective Hands of Glory and found a way to turn a profit on them wouldn’t let real estate lie fallow.

Sylvie shook herself. She was getting ahead of herself. The condo hadn’t been empty for months, a bare week maximum. That was hardly time enough to make assumptions about Odalys’s living situation. Hell, Sylvie had been gone longer from her own apartment, and she hadn’t even stopped the mail.

“She picking up her mail?” Wright said in the background, as if he had been following along with her thoughts.

“She is,” the doorman said. “Though I haven’t seen her do it. But I only work the day shift.”

“How about just giving us a call if she shows up?” Sylvie suggested. Her hand delved into her wallet, short-circuited the “I can’t do that” expression, which turned acquisitive within seconds.

“Really?” she asked. The bills in her hand drew a frown from Wright—jealousy, she diagnosed, from the cop who had to get results the hard way.

“Well, I’m not supposed to—”

“I just want to talk to Odalys.”

The doorman, his eyes on the slide of green, didn’t look like he cared about her reasons. She counted out the money toward him, watched his fingers twitch when she hit two hundred dollars, and held it out to him.

“I do believe in value for my money,” she said. “If I give you this, and you don’t call, I’ll come and take it back.” She shifted her coat aside to show him the waist strap of her holster. She did so like working in Miami, where no one would mistake the nylon webbing for anything but what it was.

“What if I don’t see her?” He licked his lips.

“Look hard,” Sylvie said.

She left him with her card, corralled Wright, and headed out the door. He trotted to keep up with her, and said, “You sure you should be flashing that cash?”

“Might as well be useful,” Sylvie said.

“It’s stolen.”

“The guy’s dead. Not like he’ll object.” Her stomach was sour. Sooner or later, she was going to have to decide how much her sister was to blame for this. How much Odalys was.

“Demalion was dead. I was dead. Bella was dead. People come back,” Wright said.

A slow, evil grin found its way to Sylvie’s lips, chased away that indecision.
Bella.
She would know where to find Odalys, and since she’d died from taking Odalys’s advice, there’d be no protestations of loyalty. Bella, newly resurrected, was ripe for questioning.

SYLVIE PULLED THE TRUCK INTO THE GROVE AGAIN, FELT AS IF IT SETTLED into a groove that she’d been wearing through the city. Wright said, “You think her parents are going to let you just waltz in and talk to their daughter? She
died
yesterday. They’ll be keeping her close, dialing their lawyer, suing the hospital.”

Sylvie shook her head. “I’d lay money that Bella’s parents are still out of the country. By the time they got the call that Bella was sick to death, then dead, then alive again . . . They’re still traveling. We’ve got a few hours at least.”

“So you think the newly undead daughter of the house is just sitting in there by her lonesome? That’s taking latchkey to an extreme.”

“Nope. She’s not alone. Which is why you’re going to call, represent yourself as a pharmacist at the hospital, and tell Eleanor that Bella left without getting one of her meds.”

Wright eyed her sidelong, leaned up against the passenger’s-side door as if disassociating himself from her. “Fine. But it’s not going to work.”

“It will,” Sylvie said. “Eleanor wants to keep her job, and she didn’t call the doctors until it was too late. She’s going to be strung so tight . . . Bella’s going to get the best care imaginable. Otherwise, the moment her parents come home, Eleanor’s not only kicked to the curb, she’s the scapegoat for Bella’s entire lifetime of neglect.”

She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, and when he didn’t reach for her phone, she said, “Any day now.”

“You don’t think she’ll be suspicious?”

“I think she’s going to be so freaked-out once you start mentioning staph-resistant strains that she’ll forget.”

Wright shook his head. “So it’s not enough to misrepresent ourselves as hospital employees—which is a crime, you know—we’re going to make her think the girl’s in danger—”

“Just dial, dammit. You keep saying you want to be useful. Be useful! Or pass the body over to Demalion, who would not be giving me this kind of grief.”