Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 2 - Stellium in Scorpio (30 page)

"Can't
be," I said.

"Why
not?" she replied.

I
wanted to say because priests were good, and they were men of God, and they
were carefully selected, and they were trained, and they were the men I trusted
from my childhood, but I knew that was the idealist, the child, the Believer in
me rationalizing.

"There
just has to be another answer," I said.

"You'd
better find it, then," Callie said sadly. "The ring is the marker.
You said it yourself. It's how they know who can order the boys for them. Who
would know more young boys than a priest? Brownlee goes through Loomis, so
she'll know what room they go to; that's what I'm getting. Then Loomis has to
contact someone who knows the boys."

"She
gets them from the theater. She doesn't call the priest, for God's sake. Jesus,
I don't want her to be calling the priest!" I said like some disillusioned
child.

Callie
and I wandered across the lobby of the Desert Star, deep in thought. I was
still troubled over the sight of a priest wearing that ring. I was also fixated
on the money that Giovanni said went to the ghost.

Suddenly
Callie stopped as if something had beamed in on her at that exact second.
"The bogus cop who handed us the ticket said ring the vault. But we don't
know which ring. I doubt they all have rings that open the vault. Then you said
that Sophia was fingering her Scorpion necklace like a rosary, like she was in
church. The Eighth House is the house of death. The cemetery is where they
place the dead. Maybe she was trying to tell us that the priest's ring is the
one that matters. It's the one that opens the vault," she said.

"Okay,
how can you deduce that from that?" I stared at her.

"I
don't know, I just do. I didn't say I was right."

"The
priest comes to the casino?" I asked, incredulous.

"No,
the vault is in the church," Callie said with surety.

"The
church spooks me out. I don't want to go there until you have something more
concrete than a crazy string of deductions."

We
walked across the lobby toward the elevators. To my left through the arches I
could see Karla sitting at a table in the bar. I pointed her out to Callie, and
we headed in that direction. An older, attractive woman was leaning over,
bracing herself with her hands on the edge of the table, and whispering in
Karla's ear, making her laugh. On closer inspection, the woman was none other
than Manager Barbara Loomis. Karla was having a private chat with her
stepdaughter, and Loomis seemed to be in an excellent mood for a woman whose
daughter was missing—but then, maybe she didn't know it yet. Upon spotting us,
Ms. Loomis waved. "Mr. Elmo!" she said jovially. "Are you
enjoying the Strip?"

"If
the Strip were a sirloin, he'd love it," I joked. "Good to see you
again, Karla!"

She
raised her glass in an exaggerated but mute hello.

"The
front desk told us you no longer work here," I said to Loomis.

Loomis
looked at Karla and registered mock surprise. "Is there something you
haven't told me?" she asked Karla, who made a derisive sound that
dismissed the entire staff as uninformed.

"Well,
good. Now that I know I still have a job, I will go do it and leave you to talk
to the guests," Loomis crooned.

"And
what questions do you have for me today?" Karla tilted her head like a
large bird. "Because you never come just to talk; you always have
questions."

"We're
writers," I said. "Nosy by nature, inquisitive by occupation."

"You
might be a writer, but you're also an ex-cop," Karla said smoothly and
then turned to Callie. "And you're the psychic who did the hotel ceiling.
I knew it from the first day I met you. You two don't think I've stayed alive
in this town by bein' stupid, do you? I got more people feedin' me information
than NASA. Don't forget that, huh?" She gave me a penetrating stare and
held her empty glass in the air.

A
waiter nearly vaulted over the top of the bar to get to her as quickly as
possible. It was obvious that as the deceased boss's main squeeze, she held
sway.

Callie
leaned in and spoke softly. "Karla, Rose Ross is missing, and now, her
friend Sophia is missing too. Who would know something about that?"

"How
the hell would I know?"

"You
know every important person in this town, and you know who is most likely to
have taken those girls," Callie said.

"Listen,
cutie." Karla's voice was cutting. "This is a town of high stakes.
You come here, you roll the dice. You get in the way of the game, and somebody
removes you from play. It's a big boy's town. The women know that, the ones who
make it."

"What
if someone were so naive that she didn't know she was causing trouble, or
getting in the way of the game, wouldn't there be room to save that
person?" Callie asked.

"The
only person I care about savin' is me." Karla laughed. There was a brief
moment when I thought she might say something more, but instead she rose from
her chair unsteadily. I moved to help her, but she jerked her arm away as if
she wanted nothing more to do with us either mentally or physically. We watched
her, drink in hand, stagger across the lobby, acknowledging employees with a
nod or a wave, like royalty, heading for her waiting limo.

As
Karla's limo pulled away, Callie approached the front desk and leaned over to
talk discreetly to Loomis.

"What
did you say to her?" I asked when Callie rejoined me and we headed for the
elevators.

"I
told her that we know that Mo Black is her father and that Sophia is her
daughter and that Sophia is missing. I told her we can't help unless she points
us in the right direction, that we need some serious guidance. We don't know
who to trust."

"What
did she say?"

"She
couldn't have said less if she were a figure in the wax museum," Callie
said and sounded discouraged.

Callie,
Elmo, and I entered our room and all three of us plopped into bed. I missed
touching Callie more than I missed anything I could ever remember. I cuddled up
to her, wrapping my arms around her soft middle, trying to forget that we had
no future together beyond this trip. I missed her too much to care. Callie
hesitated a moment and then embraced me. We both felt the electricity between
us, but we tried to act as if nothing unusual was happening.

"Feels
like a dead end," Callie said.

"Us
or the case?" I asked and she ignored my remark. "Maybe it's just a
momentary pause. Let's entertain ourselves." I produced the DVD I'd taken
from her suitcase. "I think we should look on the bright side—we would
never have a sex video of ourselves otherwise."

"You
can't be serious." Callie was shocked.

"Aren't
you just a little bit curious? It could be sexy, interesting,
educational."

"When
I think about it, I think of someone invading our privacy, violating us. I
don't see it as sexy."

"We
should see it, if for no other reason than everyone else in this city has seen
it."

"No,
we shouldn't. Our lovemaking will just be reduced to those images, the way the
camera caught us, not the way the cosmos sees us."

"But
now that we're not lovers, we don't have to worry about the way the cosmos sees
us, do we?" I verbally jabbed at her.
Besides, how can I not look at
it! How will we know how badly we've been violated unless we see what half the
hotel and the entire Vegas police force have seen?

She
crossed her arms and stared at me.

"If
you care for me at all, you won't look at it, and you will destroy it,"
Callie said emphatically, interrupting my mental monologue. "It's negative
energy. It's the product of someone's sick, stalking mind. Why would you ever
want to see it? It's not sexy. No one captures our love but us," she said.
That last sentence was a window opening, a small crack through which we might
reach out to one another again. I stared at Callie Rivers knowing this DVD
represented a leap from the fork of a twenty-foot tree into the arms of a
lover, a lover's fire walk, a blindfolded trip over hot coals, the consummate
moment of trust, and I could tell I only had seconds to make the decision.

"Have
you ever seen those wedding rings, where the bride's half fits exactly into the
groom's half, making a whole?" I asked, and then suddenly, I snapped the
DVD in two over my knee and handed her half. "I think I'll have my half
framed." I grinned.

She
stared at me for a long moment. "You're wonderful," she said, and
pulled me down onto the bed and kissed me so passionately that I knew for
certain I'd made a brilliant split-second decision. "You're an odd
combination, Ms. Richfield the honorable vigilante."

"Vigilante's
a good word," I said.

"Is
that what happened, you were a vigilante?" Her tone made me believe she
already knew what had happened when I was a cop but wanted to hear it from me.

"It
wasn't so much what happened, it's what I knew could happen," I said.

Callie
watched my body tense and my mind race. "Say it out loud," she urged.

"Two
men kidnapped a woman to rape her at knifepoint. She jumped out of a car doing
eighty miles an hour to save herself and hit the road face first. The highway
tore most of her face off. In court, her attackers got off because they hadn't
yet raped her, and the judge said it was her decision to jump. A woman was cut
up so badly that she looked like hamburger meat from the waist down, and she
begged paramedics to let her die. She did die and her murderer got twenty
years, paroled in six. When men invented the scales of justice, they tilted
them in their favor. I would kill someone rather than waste taxpayer dollars on
a system that sucks. If justice is random and one guy gets three years for
raping, torturing, and murdering a young girl, and another guy gets
twenty-three years for having marijuana in his possession, then my justice is
just as valid as theirs. And my justice would come quick and early and would
most likely land me in jail. So that's why I quit. So there you are. You don't
know everything about me either."

Callie
tightened her arms around me. "Yes, I do."

"I'm
too angry to be a good cop. For all my joking around, Callie, I'm pretty
angry."

"Really?"
she said. I ducked my head. "Stop being angry," Callie said sweetly
with her mouth curled into a slight smile, and she slid her hands up under my
shirt and held my breasts. "I'm going to help you wipe away that anger."

"It
might take more than one session," I said darkly.

"I
anticipate that," she said, kissing me and watching the tension fall from
my shoulders and the anger dissolve into lust.

At
that moment, I decided to trust again. The silver-haired man weighed on me. The
image of him so close to Callie tormented me, but one thing I knew: I could
choose to trust, or I could choose to distrust. The choice was entirely mine.
The feelings would be entirely mine. The experience would be mine. I would not
let it take away my love for her.

This
time our lovemaking was evenly paced. We were savoring one another like a
pleasure too long withheld. Her kisses were slow and warm and full. I let
myself go, completely dissolving into her, not caring if there was a moment's
breath after this moment, so long as I had her now. I marveled at how quickly
she turned me into a river of wanting and seemed only to want to swim endlessly
in me. When I was so wet I thought I would drift away, we slid into that mutual
number that is so intimate that there's no deeper intimacy one can ask. With eyes
closed and every other pleasure point pulsing and open, we were in one another
simultaneously, not knowing up from down, inside from outside, where I began
and she ended. We brought each other to climax and lay bathed in each other's
sweet smells and wet longings.

"I
can't live without you," I confessed.

"What
made you decide to trust me?" she asked, stroking my hair.

"Maybe
I just wanted great, impermanent sex with you and chose to ignore the other,"
I said, trying to recover my bravado after such an unguarded statement about
loving her.

"I
don't think so. You couldn't make love with that kind of emotion if you were
reserving a piece of yourself. You trusted me," Callie said.

"I
know." I put my head on her chest. "I just want to so much. I love
you."

"I
love you too, Teague. In fact, I'm
in
love with you, which is far more
serious," she whispered and kissed me.

Did
I hear that?
I thought beneath the
sensual warmth of her mouth.
Did she really say she was in love with me?
What does that mean? Does it mean the same for Callie Rivers as it means for
regular people? Does it mean she's mine in an ordinary sense or just in some
cosmic mumbo-jumbo sense?

"It
means whatever you want it to mean," she said, smiling at me.