Tasting Fear (19 page)

She shivered. Then again, maybe not. Just knowing how to use a gun meant nothing. She had to be willing to point it at someone and pull the trigger. And that tasty, cheerful reflection propelled her straight to her broom closet–sized office, to call Vivi’s cell phone. For comfort.

Since Nancy’s adventures, she’d secretly begun to consider getting a cell phone, but she was still hesitating, after having made such a big fat deal of how much she hated them to her sisters all these years. After all her pompous tirades on the risk of brain tumors, how sinister it was that a person couldn’t have privacy, how aggravating it was that one was constantly on call, etc., etc. She’d feel like a fool with her tail between her legs if she caved now.

But pride and privacy had so lost their charm lately. When evil stalkers with unknown agendas lurked in the shadows, looking foolish didn’t seem so bad. It was comforting, when things got weird, to be an electromagnetic frequency away from the people you cared about.

Vivi picked up promptly. “Hey, baby. All’s well?”

“Nobody’s abducted me lately,” Nell said. “How about yourself?”

“Still working. Busy day. I’ll wrap it up in about an hour. Then my breakdown, and I take off tonight straight for Wilmington after I grab a bite. I feel weird staying in one place for too long. I want to be a moving target. Sound stupid?”

“Hell no. Drive carefully. Did you talk to Nancy?”

“Yeah, she’s with Liam. Still in Denver, with his dad. They’re coming back tomorrow, I think. Thank God we don’t have to worry about her, at least. That guy of hers is like a Doberman lunging at the chain. Got a customer, darling. Gotta go.”

“Okay, later.” Nell hung up, stared at the flyer again, and dialed.

“Burke Solutions, Inc., can I help you?”

“Yes. May I speak to, um”—she consulted the tag—“Duncan?”

“May I ask what it’s regarding?”

“It’s regarding the writing job.”

“Oh. Just a sec. Hold on.”

Nell drummed her fingers and fretted until a deep, resonant, oddly familiar voice came on the line. “This is Duncan.”

“Hello. My name is Nell D’Onofrio, and I’m a grad student at NYU. I’m interested in the writing job.”

“Do you have writing and editing experience? Do you know anything about poetry?”

She was taken aback by his brusque tone. “Of course. I’m writing my thesis on nineteenth-century women poets. I lead a discussion section for a summer poetry lecture course, and my graduate seminar focused on Christina Rossetti.”

“Ah.” There was a thoughtful pause. “I’m supervising the creation of a computer game,” he went on. “A mystery quest, with clues encoded in maps, books, poems, etc. I need a writer for the texts.”

“Sounds good,” Nell said. “The flyer says flexible hours. How flexible?”

“I don’t know yet.” He sounded irritated. “I’ve never done this before. It’s actually my brother’s project. I have meetings all afternoon, so come to the office tomorrow at six, and I’ll interview you.”

His master-and-commander tone pissed her off. “I’m free at seven-thirty,” she said crisply, although she could have probably done six, with a little switching and trading of shift hours. But phooey on him.

“That’ll work. Tomorrow, then. My receptionist will give you directions.”

Nell wrote down the directions. Strange, but interesting, even if Duncan seemed bossy and arrogant. And tomorrow was Friday. She had nothing better to do after her shift than to go home and jump at the shadows. She shoved a pile of midterm essays into her bag. That’d keep her too busy to work herself into a paranoid frenzy over every sound. Or climb the walls with futile lust, which was almost as bad. No, worse.

Nell armed the infrared alarm as soon as she went into her apartment. Any breach of the door or window would be instantly reported to the police. It made her feel safer as she heated and ate a dinner of leftovers. She cooked when Vivi was there, but didn’t bother when she was alone.

She was nibbling a stale Oreo that she’d found in the cookie stash when the ringing phone made her practically bounce off the ceiling. She had to concentrate hard to slow her breathing and control the shake in her voice as she picked it up. “Hello?”

“It’s just me,” said her sister Nancy.

Nell sank onto the futon couch, knees trembling. “Oh. Great. How are things? Viv told me you guys were still in Denver.”

“We are, with Liam’s dad, and his dad’s lady friend. I have news. Remember when Liam’s friend Charlie Witt told me about that eighty-year-old guy with the designer clothes? The one they found in Jamaica, with his throat snapped?”

“The one they called the clotheshorse? That was just after Lucia died, right?”

“Right. The time of death they determined was roughly the same time that Lucia died.”

Nell doubled over, pressing her hand against the nervous twisting in her stomach. “So? What about him?”

“Well, after what happened to me in Boston, Detective Lanaghan decided to take this a little more seriously.” Nancy’s voice had an edge. “She had his prints compared to the ones found on the coffee cup in Lucia’s apartment. As I suggested they do weeks ago.”

“And they match?” Nell asked.

“They match,” Nancy echoed quietly. “She just called me.”

The sisters were silent. Nell forced out a shaky sigh. “It’s Marco,” she said, with absolute conviction. “Lucia’s long-lost husband.”

“Yeah,” Nancy said. “It must be. He came to find her and got murdered that same night. By the same person who killed Lucia.”

Nell squeezed her eyes shut, and pressed her hand against her forehead. It felt clammy. “That poor old guy. How awful.”

“At least they’re together now,” Nancy pointed out, her voice soft. “I think, probably…that she loved him. To the very end.”

“You could look at it that way,” Nell agreed. “If you believed in love and eternity and all that good stuff that’s dusted with sparkly haze.”

“And you don’t?”

“Not right now,” she admitted, her voice cracking. “You’re madly in love, Nance. You’ve got sparkly haze happening by the bucketful. But in the real world, it’s actually a pretty rare commodity.”

Nancy paused for a long, painful moment. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was just trying to cheer you up.”

Nell felt guilty. Scrooging on her poor sister, whose only crime was in getting lucky in love. “Don’t be,” she said. “I’m glad for you. Really. So did you tell Detective Lanaghan about the letter in the picture frame?”

“Yes, and she said it’s a great lead, but since all we have is the guy’s first name and the name of his town, it’s going to take a while. She has to contact the local police in Italy, find an interpreter, et cetera. So I started to think, in the meantime…since you speak Italian…”

“You want me to call the cops there?”

“Would you?” Nancy asked eagerly. “Just to facilitate things?”

Nancy looked up at the clock, calculating time zones. “I can do it tomorrow morning, before I leave for work,” she said.

The sisters went through their now obsessive routine of admonishing each other to be careful. When they finally hung up, Nell stared at the wall for a long time, her hand pressed against her mouth.

She was grateful for a job to do. Something that might help, a move that might actually yield some answers. But whatever answers she might find were not going to be comforting. This thing kept getting scarier and scarier. But dwelling on that fact would not help matters.

Nothing to do now but get her ass busy.

A thick sheaf of essays later, she rubbed her eyes, stretched, and flopped onto her bed with a groan. The surface of her bed was covered with books. There was just a narrow strip the size of her body to sleep in. It made her smile, grimly. What a perfect metaphor for her life. She could never take a lover. Where would she put him? Between her complete
Riverside Shakespeare
and her twenty-pound annotated Dante’s
Divine Comedy
?

The black-haired man popped into her mind, predictably enough. He was her default mode, whenever she wanted to avoid an uncomfortable thought. She pondered him, wondering why she was so pathetically obsessed with the man. It was weird. She wasn’t the type.

Probably because he was so clueless. Emotionally inaccessible to the point of being practically autistic. What could be safer for a coward like herself? She knew nothing about the guy, except that he had a stunning capacity for concentration, and he really, really liked strip steak. And thinking about him was more fun than thinking about that poor old guy, still lying in the morgue in Jamaica. Nameless, unclaimed, unmourned. The cold, stark loneliness of it made her roll over onto her belly and shove her hot face against the pillow.

Maybe tomorrow, she could put a name to the old man who may or may not have been Lucia’s husband. Recognition, the dignity of a name. The best she could hope for.

Her eyes started to close, and sometime later, she woke from a dream of the black-haired man. In her dream, weirdly enough, he was smiling at her. A really beautiful smile. His face practically shone.

She’d never seen the guy smile in real life. As she drifted to sleep again, she wondered if he even knew how.

“What is she doing now?”

The sharp tone, loaded with tension and implied criticism, made John Esposito flex his fingers until his knuckles popped. Bloody, murderous fantasies flashed through his mind, red tinged and wet.

He carefully did not turn his head from the monitor, and kept his voice very flat. “She appears to be reading papers,” he said.

“Reading? Reading what papers?” Ulf Haupt came hobbling over, his cane tap-tap-tapping against the floor. He leaned down to peer over John’s shoulder. John had a fantasy of jabbing an elbow into the decrepit asshole’s gut. Hard enough to cause internal hemorrhaging.

“Students’ essays,” he said, with grim patience. “She’s a teacher.”

“Essays?” Haupt leaned lower, his head bobbing far too close to John’s face, and he leaned away to keep his space.

“Keep watching,” Haupt snapped. “She might get another phone call. You must let nothing slip through the cracks. Nothing. Tomorrow, she will make that call to Italy, and identify Barbieri’s corpse. This is already a disaster, John. A disgrace.”

The old man’s shrill, accusing tone put John’s teeth violently on edge. “Why?” he demanded. “It’ll tell them nothing. I need to take a piss. The stupid bitch hasn’t moved in four hours. Watching her is about as relevant as watching water evaporate.”

“I’m not paying you to be entertained,” Haupt shot back. “Keep your eyes on this one. Since you lost the other two.”

“I did not ‘lose’ the others!” John said, stung. “I know exactly where they are at all times. The youngest one is in Pennsylvania, working at a crafts fair, and the older one is with her fiancé in Denver. If you want me to take the young one, I could drive down to—”

“No. Stay here, where I can direct you, blow by blow. I do not like the results when you are left to your own devices, John.”

John bit back what he wanted to say. He loathed having someone look over his shoulder. By the end of this gig, he might just cut the whiny old bastard’s throat and punish the D’Onofrio sisters for no recompense at all. Just for having been such pains in the ass.

He stared at Antonella as she tossed the essay in a pile and grabbed another. He was staring almost at the top of her head, the camera being hidden in her smoke detector. A great angle for cleavage, of which she had a goodly amount. She was chubbier than her sisters, with tits and ass to match. He liked that. Something to grab and shake.

The pendant he was supposed to take from her sparkled from that beautiful plump cleft of pale flesh that bulged from the neckline of her gray tank. She had peeled down to loungewear. Gray cotton stretch shorts over her hips. Taut, pinchable nipples poking through her tank.

He thought of her older sister, the one who had eluded him twice. Rage grabbed him deep, and twisted. He glared up into Haupt’s eyes. “I’ll go get the dumb bitch right now, if you like,” he offered. “She’s alone in her apartment. I have the code to disarm her alarm. And then she won’t make that call to Italy.” Anything to get this goatfuck moving.

“No,” Haupt said coldly. “You will wait. They will identify Barbieri anyway, now. It’s only a matter of time. Discipline, John. She’s finally getting back to her normal schedule and back in her own apartment again. And once you take her, you will have to move fast for the other sister.”

“I have backup for that. And for following Antonella tomorrow.”

“I hope they will prove more competent than that idiot you hired before. I want this done without mistakes that end up on the evening news,” the old man lectured. “We lost weeks waiting for the noise to die down. Keep watching.” He hobbled out of the room.

John looked back at the screen. Antonella was stretching, tossing her head back. That strong, curvy, flexible body, mmm. He could feel it in his grasp, writhing desperately. He licked his lips. She massaged her temples, a tiny frown between her brows. A headache. Aw. Poor baby. Working so hard. She needed Big John to give her a neck rub.

After which, he would rip those cock-teasing panties off her, stuff them into her mouth, and make her forget all about her poor head.

It was the least he deserved, after all this fucking aggravation.

“G
razie
for the telephone call, Signorina D’Onofrio,” said the
inspettore
, Osvaldo Tucci, the person at the
comissariato
who had finally fielded her call. “I do not believe that we have any pending missing-persons reports from Castiglione Sant’Angelo, and to be sincere, without a surname for reference, it will take a long time to—”

“But that’s just my point,” Nell argued stubbornly. “If he got on a plane for New York weeks ago, why would it have ever occurred to anyone to declare him missing? Perhaps you can cross-reference. I know he was a resident of the Palazzo de Luca. And I know that he was married to Lucia de Luca, sometime between 1957 and 1964, I think. Doesn’t that help?”

“I am not familiar with all the
palazzi
of the noble families in Castiglione Sant’Angelo,” Inspettore Tucci said, his voice heavy with professional patience. “There are many of them, and I did not grow up here myself. I was transferred here from Calabria. But I assure you, we will look into this, and get in touch with the Detective Lanaghan as soon as possible.”

They closed the call with a polite round of pleasantries, and Nell hung up, frustrated and unsatisfied. Not that she’d expected anything to be easy, or obvious. But it would have been nice.

Lunch prep at the Sunset was as busy as ever, and she was glad. It kept her too frazzled to dwell on poor old Marco’s sad fate. Or wonder, uneasily, if Lucia had been forced to witness her husband’s murder.

The thought chilled her to the bone.

At three-fifteen, Nell felt a familiar tingle in the nape of her neck. She looked up from the banana kiwi smoothie she was blending. It was him.

Thank God. She welcomed the little thrill gratefully. Her drug of choice. A scary analogy, but damn it, she didn’t have much to thrill about these days. She’d take what she could get.

He was frowning at his favorite table, which was occupied. He chose another, pulling out his laptop. Monica jerked her chin in the direction of his table, even though the man had seated himself in her section, not Nell’s. Oh, God. Even Monica knew.

Norma tapped her shoulder. “Get that strip steak ready pronto, Nelly. That guy looks hungry.”

“I don’t want to give him the strip steak,” Nell said rebelliously. “Always the same damn thing, every day. It can’t be good for him. To say nothing of the nutritional implications and saturated fats, a person needs stimulation, variety, change! Or else they’re as good as dead!”

“You’re a fine one to talk, sweet cheeks. I have a suggestion for you. Go tap him on the shoulder and tell him he needs a change. Like the tofu cashew stir-fry. Or the curried chickpeas. Or dinner with you.”

“You’re crazy,” Nell said, aghast. “He doesn’t know I exist!”

“Whose fault is that? You’d be take-your-breath-away gorgeous if you played yourself up a little bit! Go get the man some coffee!”

Nell stomped out onto the restaurant floor, tired of being lectured, hounded. She set the coffee on the table beside the black-haired man with more force than necessary, slapped a menu down, and whipped out her order pad.

“What would you like? The usual?” she demanded. Monica passed with a tray of sundaes and made audible smooching sounds. Nell glared at her.

The black-haired man frowned into his screen. “Why do you even ask? You know exactly what I want.” He sounded irritated.

Nell braced herself. “Good question. One to which I have perhaps given more thought than it deserves. I’m prepared to answer, however.”

His fingers slowed their tapping on the keyboard, and then stopped. He reached slowly for his coffee. “Go on.”

Nell’s heart thumped. “Although I know you want the strip steak, the one day I don’t ask will be the day that, out of sheer perversity, you decide you want the bulgur pilaf.” She tried to sound breezy.

“Not likely.” He looked up. For the first time, she had his full attention. It was dizzying. He looked into her face, eyes narrowed. They were dark, penetrating. Gorgeous. He had unbelievably long lashes.

“Therefore,” she continued, “by saying, ‘the usual,’ I’m killing two birds with one stone. I’m acknowledging that you have a relationship with us, and that we will gladly cater to your preferences. But the fact that I ask at all pays homage to the fact that life is full of surprises—and people do change.” She poised her pen over the pad. “Your order?”

He stared at her for a long moment. Blinked. She waited, belly fluttering. “The usual,” he said.

Nell scribbled and fled.

Back behind the counter, Norma gave her cheek an approving pinch. “Good start! Not what I told you to say, but he sure took notice! No, don’t look now. He’s still looking. Practically staring! For goodness’ sake, look nonchalant. Look busy!”

“Yeah. Like, play it cool,” Monica advised.

“Leave me alone. You’re embarrassing me to death. Monica, would you take over his table? I can’t face him again,” Nell begged.

“Not in a million years,” Monica said, heartless. “All yours, babe.”

“I’ll dip up his coleslaw,” Norma said in a businesslike tone. “Put the roll in the grill, and tuck that hair behind your ears. Monica, get a bowl of soup, and pass me those veggies!”

Norma and Monica smartly assembled his lunch and passed the tray into Nell’s nerveless hands. The black-haired man pushed his computer to one side of the table and watched as she laid the dishes down. His gaze on her face made her skin tingle and burn.

Nell straightened her spine and forced herself to look into his eyes. “Will that be all?” Her voice was embarrassingly tremulous.

His eyes traveled down her body. Slow, cool, assessing.

She wished desperately that she hadn’t called his attention to herself. If he kept looking at her like that, she was going to melt, burn, fly into a million pieces.

“For now,” he said simply.

She fled again, and behind the counter, Norma and Monica hooted and cheered in whispers. “He’s eating you with his eyes, honey! Don’t look! Get the coffeepot and do a round of refills,” Norma directed.

“Yeah, chica, you did good. Tomorrow wear something sexier. Say, like, a tight ribbed turtleneck. Sleeveless, ’cause you got good arms. If you don’t have one I’ll lend you one of mine,” Monica offered.

“Ladies, do you mind?” Nell hissed, grabbing the coffeepot. She did as Norma suggested, refilling coffee cups to steady her nerves.

She didn’t really have much experience with men. She’d dabbled in college, but this guy was in another league from the unthreatening, callow literary types she’d discussed poetry and philosophy with.

It was embarrassing. Such a brief, inconsequential encounter, but look at her. She’d almost had a seizure.

The moment he had finally taken notice of her, a primitive emotion stabbed through her, part excitement, part naked fear. She couldn’t tell if the feeling was pleasurable or not. She had never felt so vulnerable, or so female. And all he’d done was ogle her.

Oh, no, no, no. She would be hopelessly out of her depth with this man. She was backpedaling. Like the dithering scaredycat coward that she was.

She went back to the counter to refill the coffeepot and assayed a sidelong peek. Yup. Still looking at her. Fixedly. Hungrily. Scorching dark eyes. Her stomach jumped up and crowded her lungs. Oh dear.

Norma presented her with a plate of apple crumb pie with vanilla ice cream. “You’ve got to see it through,” she said sternly.

“Norma, I can’t. I just can’t.”

“You must, or I’ll fire you,” Norma threatened.

“Go ahead. Do your worst,” Nell said, putting the coffeepot on the warmer and putting her hands over her very pink cheeks. “I don’t care.”

“Chica, if you don’t do it, I’ll start talking real loud about how you have this huge crush on the guy by the window. I swear. I’m not kidding,” Monica said, her voice rising perceptibly in volume.

Nell shot her a furious look and took the plate. She approached his table and laid it carefully beside his computer.

“You didn’t ask if I wanted the usual dessert,” he said. His resonant voice sent a shudder of excitement down her spine.

“I’ve taken enough risks today,” she said, gathering up dishes. “I haven’t given up hope of persuading you to try the pecan fudge brownies, though.” She scurried, feeling his hot gaze against her back.

He got up, dropped a banknote on the table, and walked out. When the door closed behind him she exhaled and sank down onto a chair.

Monica punched her shoulder. “Good job, chica. That’s some flirting to be proud of.”

“I wasn’t flirting!” Nell dropped her face into her hands. “I tried to persuade him to order something new and failed.”

“Right. If it was no big deal, how come you’re hyperventilating?” Monica asked.

“Because I’m stupid, okay?” Nell yelled back. “Is everybody on board with that assessment? Anybody need more clarification?”

“Calm down, Nelly.” Norma bustled over and patted Nell’s cheek. “Monica’s right. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. He is obviously intrigued. Come in early tomorrow and let me fix your hair.”

“Norma, please!”

“Oh, honey, indulge a fond old lady, do!”

“I’m gonna bring that shirt tomorrow. And I’m gonna put some makeup on you, too,” Monica said, looking her over with a critical eye. “You need a new look. What’s your shoe size? Got any spike heels?”

“For waitressing?” Nell asked, aghast. “You’re insane!”

“One must suffer in order to be beautiful,” Monica intoned.

Nell jumped to her feet. “I’m going out for a cigarette break.”

Monica looked perplexed. “Uh, you don’t smoke.”

“If I did, I would take a cigarette break now.” Nell marched out the back door without taking off her apron and walked down the street through the blaring traffic, her face feverishly hot.

How could she be so susceptible, so flustered? She was almost thirty. All she’d done was serve him lunch. Imagine if she and he actually ever…no. Better not to imagine it. She felt faint already.

It had been years since she’d had a relationship. The more time that passed, the harder it got to contemplate. Her sister Nancy at least got out there and tried. She’d been burned miserably three times before she finally landed a winner in Liam. Grit and persistence had paid off.

But Nell hadn’t had the stomach to run that kind of risk. She wasn’t willing to face the chill, the sad ugliness she knew was waiting if she made a wrong move. Getting used. Getting hurt. Ugh. Brr.

Elena, Nell’s birth mother, never had any fear of men. Elena Pisani had been a beautiful woman. She’d used her beauty as currency, being a practitioner of the world’s oldest profession. She’d always looked perfect, no matter what the circumstances. Sexy clothing, makeup, and hair, those were the tools and weapons of her trade. Probably that was why Nell had always avoided makeup and wore baggy dresses and nerdish glasses, she reflected. Dressing down blurred her startling resemblance to her mother.

Nell herself had been an unpleasant surprise to Elena, a pregnancy that her mother had unaccountably decided to bring to term. For the first ten years of Nell’s life, she’d watched her mother being kept by a series of rich men in various lavish apartments around the country. When it was convenient, Elena brought her daughter along. When it was not, she stayed in a series of boarding schools.

Nell had just been old enough to start to understand the nature of her mother’s arrangements with this long string of “uncles” when Elena died suddenly, of an undiagnosed brain tumor. It had taken ten days, from the onset of the crushing headaches to her death under the surgeon’s knife. There were no relatives. No life insurance. Her mother had not had any friends to speak of. Her lover had swiftly disappeared from the picture.

Nell had entered the foster system. She’d been ten years old.

Three very dark years followed, years that she tried hard to forget, before Lucia found her. Those years, and having watched her mother ply her trade—they were reasons enough to be reticent about romance.

Not that she was fishing for an excuse. She flinched away from self-analysis. She vastly preferred to study books rather than herself, books being so much more interesting. One thing was for sure, though. Her childhood trauma had forged her into a hopeless romantic. Book junkie. Poetry addict. Her choice had been simple: romantic escapism or brutal cynicism. Romance was better. It was comforting to wallow in the highest, purest sentiments of which human hearts were capable. So what if it was all blather and bullshit. It was beautiful blather and bullshit, and she would dedicate her life to reading it, studying it, and teaching it. To hell with them all.

There was only one problem with that scenario. A real, live guy with all the warts would never fit in with her ivory-tower ideals. Particularly not a guy with no manners, no imagination, and dark eyes that burned with lust.

She didn’t want it to be about just lust. Call her stupid, but she’d seen what sex just for sex’s sake looked like. It had chilled her blood.

Although, oddly, the dark-haired man’s scorching gaze had not.

She couldn’t handle this kind of emotional voltage. She had a career to forge, rent to pay, the Fiend to stay alert for. Look at her, wandering the streets without even paying attention to her surroundings. She had to sharpen up, or she’d find herself stuffed in the trunk of a car.

After her shift, Nell changed into her suit and dabbed on lipstick, staring doubtfully in the mirror. She twisted her hair into the tightest knot she could, with all that curly volume. It was the best she could do.

The receptionist’s directions to her interview were easy. It was a twenty-minute walk through Midtown. She entered the lobby of a large office building, took the elevator to the sixteenth floor, and found a door marked “Burke Solutions, Inc.”

It was a big, well appointed office. The receptionist was a young man with bulging eyes and a bow tie. He smiled as she approached.

“Can I help you?” he asked, hanging up the phone.

“I’m here for an interview with Duncan Burke,” she said.

“Another poet?” He regarded her as if she were a rare bug.