Tasting Fear (51 page)

Jack’s relief at finding her alive was undercut by growing fear. Her face was so white, her eyes so shadowed. She couldn’t stop shaking, kept falling down. She could hardly speak. When they finally crawled onto the asphalt of the highway, he picked her up.

She protested, weakly, but her voice was slurred.

He sped to town, squealed to a stop outside the emergency room at the hospital. They caused a big stir, and things moved with gratifying speed as the EMT techs got Vivi squared away. He was annoyed, afterward, to find some of the EMT techs wanted to fuss over him, too. Fucking waste of time. He’d prefer if they left him alone and concentrated on Vivi.

He begged a cell phone off one of the EMT techs, and called a guy he knew in the local cop shop. “Hey, Tim? It’s Jack Kendrick.”

“Holy shit, man!” Tim exploded. “Where the hell are you?”

“Later for that. That son of a bitch who was lying in Unit 42 of Evergreen Acres. Do you guys have him in custody?”

Tim hesitated. “Uh…are you okay, Jack?”

“I’m fine. What about the guy in Unit 42? He’s a serial killer.”

“There was no guy in Unit 42,” Tim said. “Just a trashed room, blood on the floor, and a bunch of bullet holes. Whatever happened in there, we missed it. Would have been really helpful if you’d been around to clue us into the serial killer thing, because he didn’t hang around, either. And the chief was unthrilled with you for fucking off before you could give a statement. What were you thinking?”

Jack blew out a long shuddering sigh, feeling the cold sink more deeply into his bones. “You have no idea,” he muttered.

He hung up, passed the phone back, and ripped the IV needle out of his arm, ignoring the shouts and scolding lectures. He grabbed a chair and situated it outside the curtained cubicle where Vivi lay, a vantage point that gave him a clear view of both ends of the corridor plus the lobby entrance. Almost hoping the guy would make a move.

So he could fucking finish this, already.

Vivi drifted in and out of consciousness on the drive into Portland. She shifted in the seat, keeping her eyes closed. She didn’t have the nerve to talk to Jack and ask him how he felt. What it all meant. If he had changed his mind about the two of them, or if he was just being righteous and heroic. A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do, yada yada and all that. His grim, taut face discouraged confidences.

He’d bullied the hospital into letting her leave after only twenty-four hours, and there had been a big kerfuffle. Lots of shouting about security and danger and attackers. The angry doctors made her sign a waiver accepting responsibility, which she’d been glad to do, though her fingers barely felt the pen, as she floated in a Demerol cloud. Even stoned out of her mind, she knew which side her bread was buttered on. When it came to the Fiend, EMT techs and nurses weren’t enough protection, not by a long shot. Jack Kendrick was the man. Hands down. She’d stick with him.

Margaret had come by that morning, bringing Jack some clothes, and one of her own warm-up suits for Vivi. Eggshell blue, spattered with yellow daisies. Wow. Very special. But still, she was grateful.

“I’m flying to New York,” she announced, bracing herself.

“That’s the last place you should go!” Jack exploded. “John told you he’d hired an army. We’ve warned your sisters and their men. Do you want to face an army? Those guys weren’t enough of a challenge?”

“It’s not that,” she said. “I can’t live like this. I have to resolve this thing. No matter what. You do what you want. I’m flying to New York.”

Jack muttered something foul under his breath.

The earliest flight they could find with seats available left the following morning. Too long to wait, but no choice. They checked into an airport Ramada. When they were locked in their room, Jack laid his pistol on the kitchenette counter. “I’m taking a shower,” he announced. “I’m still cold, from that river. You all right out here?” He waited for her nod, his eyes still doubtful. “Don’t open the door to anyone,” he added.

As if. She rolled her eyes. He disappeared into the bathroom.

She felt like a puppet with the strings cut. Limp, now that she didn’t have his hot, vital energy to struggle against. She curled up on the bed and thought it through.

She had to be realistic. She had nothing to offer Jack except a crushing burden of danger, financial drain, and constant, grinding stress. He’d already risked his life. Dodging bullets and knives, diving into wild water. A man couldn’t marry a risk like that. Or have children with her. She’d be stupid to demand promises from him now.

This, however, did not mean she was going to deny herself the comfort of his body. Life was short and uncertain.

She listened at the bathroom door to the shower hiss. She caught a glimpse of herself, in the prim, daisy-spattered warm-up suit, and sputtered with laughter. Whoo-hoo. Seductive. She stripped it off, and waited for the shower to stop, shivering in the air-conditioned chill.

When she opened the door, his startled face made her smile, catlike. She laid the gun on the counter by the bathroom sink. The room was a fragrant fog of steam. The bruises on his face were taking form.

Maybe she was presuming too much. Maybe he was too stressed, too injured and exhausted—or, um…maybe not. His cock was pointing straight at her, in seconds flat. “What’s this, Viv?” he asked.

She touched the dripping, gleaming contours of his body. “Just living in the moment.”

He flinched. “Don’t throw that in my face. We need to talk.”

“No, we don’t,” she said quietly. “No past. No future. Just now.”

He looked worried. “How long do we have to play this game?”

“How long is irrelevant, when you’re in the moment,” she said. “Only now exists. You should know that. Aren’t you the expert?”

He stared at her. “You’re a real hard-ass, Viv D’Onofrio.”

“I’ve had tough teachers.” She gazed into his face, and relented. “Look, if I ever have a normal life again, with no axe hanging over me, and you still want to have a conversation about our future, we can have it. Until then…” She reached out, stroked his cock.

“Until then, you just want to fuck me?”

Her mouth twitched at his sulky tone. She sank gracefully to her knees. “I ask it…respectfully,” she purred, trying not to smile.

He vibrated with laughter and pleasure as she swirled her tongue around his cockhead. “Oh, God. I’ve never gotten respect like this.”

“It’s about time,” she murmured, then sucked him into her mouth.

With difficulty. He was so thick and broad and hard, but she was inventive, and hungry for his every shudder and gasping sigh. She used her hands, her tongue, and, bit by bit, pulled him deeper into her throat, long suckling strokes that made him quiver and groan.

She kept him trembling on the brink until the ache of her own yearning grew too sharp to bear, and then rose and turned to face the mirror. She parted her legs, arching her ass so he could see everything. How gleaming wet and eager she was for him. “Take me,” she said.

He seized her hips. “I don’t have condoms.”

“I know. Of course you don’t. You’ve been busy saving my life.”

He looked worried. “But if you want to…Viv, this is exactly the kind of thing we need to talk about. I think we should—”

“No talk,” she said. “Give it to me. Now. Before I start screaming.”

He eased his penis past the initial resistance, sliding it around in her lube, and drove deep. She clutched the counter, staring at her own flushed face, whimpering at each slick, slamming stroke. They held each other’s gaze in the mirror as if the fate of the universe depended on it. He reached around and toyed with her clit, building her up to a wrenching climax. When she had the strength to prop herself up, he was still waiting for his own release, his face tight with self-control.

“I want to come inside you,” he said.

She thought about it for about half a second, and nodded.

His eyes widened. “You’re sure? You’re okay with that?”

“I want it all,” she blurted. “Everything you have to give me.”

His eyes flashed, and he gave it to her. One last shove, and he exploded. She hung over the counter, limp and soft. Light as air, soft as a cloud. One thought floating all alone in her mind, in a perfect bubble.

Of how much she would love to make a child with him.

Jack set the shower running again, and washed her tenderly, with great, sensual thoroughness. That interlude ended as one might have expected, with herself pinned against the wet tile wall, her legs draped over his elbows, sobbing with delight as he nailed her, deep and hard.

Not a thought about bad moments in her past. Not a thread of panic, of nausea. No “danger keep out” signs. Her old phantoms were gone. They could not withstand the bright light of Jack Kendrick.

Afterward, glowing and relaxed, Vivi sat naked on the bed and stared at the necklaces she’d retrieved from Ulf Haupt’s briefcase. She laid them out on the bed, fiddling with them. Staring at the white gold lacework that decorated the top of each pendant.

Something about them tickled her mind. The lacework was different on each pendant. On her own, there were open spaces in the swirling coils of gold. On Nell’s, the lacework was flat, and protruding on each side. Nancy’s was more like her own, but with the protrusions extending toward the opposite side. A strange choice, for Lucia, whose taste in jewelry had run toward the classic. That asymmetrical, random element. More like something she herself would do. Angular, quirky.

In fact, it reminded her of a sculpture she’d done back in art school, one of the pieces that had been mangled in the Fiend’s second break-in. Three female figures, made of motley chunks of glass, pebbles, and bits of plastic, all wired together. But their stylized hair swirled out like halos, hooking and tangling together. Linking the three figures.

She had entitled it
The Three Sisters.
Lucia had loved it. Had displayed it proudly, right next to her priceless bronze Cellini satyr.

Vivi placed the pendants side by side. Nancy, Nell, Vivi. She felt a strange, dreamlike feeling as she slipped the lacework of Nell’s pendant into the open space in Nancy’s. A push, and
click
, the openwork linked together. Seamless swirls of gold. Her heart pounded.

“Jack,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “Come look at this.”

He looked. His eyes widened. “The other one? Does it fit, too?”

“Let’s see.” She slid the protruding part of Nell’s pendant into the openwork of her own.
Click.
The pieces were all united.

Jack held out his hand, and she passed the thing to him. He manipulated it, putting pressure on every point. One of the protruding bits on Vivi’s pendant moved. At first she choked off a cry, thinking he’d broken it, but then she saw that it was a lever, moving smoothly down—

Click
, once again, and something snapped out of the bottom of the three pendants. Three fine, shining sheets of white gold, flush to each other, as narrow and sharp as a razor blade. They leaned closer.

Something was written on them, in letters so small, she could not make them out. Jack dug into his pockets and pulled out a pocketknife with a multitude of attachments, one of which was a small magnifying glass. He held the thing up under the lamp and peered through it.

“Salve Regina Mater Misericordiae,”
he read slowly. He turned it over and studied the back.
“Primus Modus Doricus.”
He looked up at her. “Latin, right? Can you make anything out of that?”

She shook her head. “No, but Nell could! She knows Latin!” She pressed her hand to her mouth. It was too soon for tears of joy, but finally, a window had opened up. A ray of light, at last. “This was the part that I was supposed to figure out,” she said, with conviction.

Jack raised his eyebrows. “How’s that?”

“In the draft of the letter we found, Lucia said it was our love of art, music, and literature that would solve the puzzle. I don’t know the first thing about music or literature.” Vivi thought about
The Three Sisters,
and tears sprang to her eyes. “But this part was just for me.”

It felt almost as if Lucia had sent her a message. A wave of love, faith, and encouragement to her youngest adopted daughter.

“Oh, God. I’m losing it,” she whispered. “I miss her so much.”

“Go ahead,” Jack said quietly. “You’re entitled.”

He stroked her hair while she hid her face in her hands. She raised her face after a moment. “I want to call my sisters,” she blurted.

“It’s three a.m., New York time,” he said gently. “We’ll be there tomorrow. We’ve waited this long. Can’t you wait a few hours more?”

“Okay,” she said, sniffling. “I guess.”

Jack laid the united necklaces on the bedside table next to the gun, and slid between the sheets. He held the covers up. “Does being a hard-ass broad permit cuddling in bed?” he asked, warily.

“Duh,” she said, sliding between the sheets and into the hot, lovely rush of his tight embrace. “I may be a hard-ass, but I’m not an idiot.”

She let his warmth relax her for a few moments, and then stirred, to look into his face. “Thank you for coming back to save me,” she said.

He gazed back. “Thank you for still being alive,” he replied.

Tears prickled in her eyes, but if she gave in to them again, they might drown her.

D
uncan and Vivi’s sister Nell met them at the airport. Nell was horrified when she saw the battered-looking, hollow-eyed Vivi and insisted on sitting in the back with her little sister and holding her hand while Jack and Duncan debriefed.

At one point, Jack looked back and found Nell’s eyes sparkling at him. “So what does the Latin phrase mean, anyhow?” he asked hastily.

“Hail queen, mother of mercy, first Doric mode,” Nell told him.

“Does that mean anything to you?”

Nell shook her head regretfully. “Not anything particular, no. It’s just a common phrase from the Catholic liturgy.”

They headed to Nancy and Liam’s place, and Jack bucked up his depleted social energy to meet two new people. Fortunately, they seemed mellow and sensible. Liam was intelligent and canny, the older sister, Nancy, likewise. Besides being just as easy on the eyes as her two sisters. He felt at ease with both of them immediately.

Liam had prepared a juicy, appetizing pot roast with a mountain of gleaming potatoes and vegetables, and Jack dug into it gratefully. Afterward, they gathered in Liam’s workshop, around an unfinished dining room table, upon which he had set the safe.

“So?” Nancy asked briskly. “Do we try just keying in the letters of the phrase? In Latin, or in English?”

“Try them both,” Vivi said.

“You’re sure it won’t explode in our faces if we get it wrong?” Duncan asked nervously.

“Only if we try to crack the safe,” Nancy reassured him.

Duncan looked far from reassured, but Nancy just got to it, frowning down at the keypad as she keyed in the long sequence.

The little button flashed red. The door remained locked.

“In English, then,” Nancy said, undaunted. She keyed in the new sequence. The light flashed red again. “Nope.”

They stared at the safe, discouraged. Nancy held up the linked pendants. “Hail queen, mother of mercy,” she repeated softly. “I’ve seen this translation. First Doric mode is a musical term. This was sung, not…oh. Oh, my God.
Yes.
”

“What?” they all cried out, in ragged chorus.

“Just a minute. Let me get something.” Nancy leaped to her feet and scurried out. She came back moments later, a CD in her hand.

“Novum Gaudium!” she said. “The Gregorian chant choir that I represent! I took Lucia up to see their concert last Christmas, at the Cloisters Museum concert series. She loved it! She even bought the disc.” Nancy pried out the liner notes. “Let me see…it’s a Marian antiphon. The phrase ‘hail queen, mother of mercy’ is the incipit. This is in Doric mode. I wonder if she meant for us to…but how?”

Jack spoke up, his voice hesitant. “I don’t know about music,” he said. “But could the tune have some sort of numeric correspondence?”

Nancy’s eyes lit up. “Sure it could. In relation to the Doric mode, you bet it could. Liam, give me that CD player on the workbench.”

The tall, laconic carpenter unfolded himself, grabbed the player, and plugged it into the wall socket near the table. She selected the track. A haunting tune began. Men’s voices, deep and reverberant, in perfect unison. The sounds rose and fell in ancient patterns that sounded somehow familiar. Nancy listened to a fragment of the piece, brow furrowed. She hit “stop” after a few moments, and let it play again. And again. And again, scribbling numbers after each time.

Around the eighth time, she held up a scrap of paper with a long sequence of numbers. “Twenty-five digits,” she announced.

“Try it,” Vivi urged.

Nancy keyed it in. They held their breath. The light flashed red.

Nancy sagged. “Hell,” she said, dispirited. “I’m all out of ideas.”

“Try adding PDM for
Primus Modus Doricus
,” Duncan suggested.

Nancy shrugged, and punched in the numbers again. “Okay, guys. Here goes nothing. P…M…D,” she concluded out loud.

The light flashed green. The door of the safe popped open.

Nobody could quite believe it. They stared at the thing, almost afraid of the thin seam of dark behind the crack of its opened door.

Liam touched the door with his finger, and swung it wide. There was only one thing inside. A piece of yellowed paper, in a plastic sleeve. Thin, limp, covered with cramped script. Nancy took it out.

“It’s in Latin,” she said. She passed it to Nell.

Nell put on her glasses and peered at the thing. “This must be Marco’s treasure map,” she said quietly. “A bunch of what look like flower names. Instructions that say to move from this flower to this flower, et cetera, et cetera. At the end, it says to go down into the ground four hand spans and turn three times counterclockwise. No wonder Marco thought the treasure was in the palace gardens. The gardener at the Palazzo de Luca said that they had to dig up the garden more times than he could remember.”

She sighed, and laid it down. “Well, phooey. We’ve exchanged one puzzle for another. And I, for one, am burnt out on puzzles.”

Liam got up. “I’ll go get dessert,” he said, sounding resigned.

Vivi got up to stretch her legs and wandered around Liam’s workshop, touching various items with her fingertip. She turned to Jack.

“This is all Lucia’s stuff,” she told him. “Things that Liam and Nancy were able to salvage from when John trashed her house.” She fingered a mangled thing made of glass, pebbles, plastic, and bent wire. “This is one of mine.
The Three Sisters
. I think Lucia meant for me to think of it, so it would occur to me to put the pendants together.” She petted the twisted knot of materials and wire. “I’m going to restore this. In memory of her.”

“Excellent idea. Liam’s doing that with Lucia’s
intaglio
table, too,” Nell said. She laid her hand against the plane of a beautiful carved oak table that lay on the workbench. It was cloven in two splintered pieces.

“This is the famous table Duncan told me about?” Jack asked Vivi. “The one from the Renaissance that had the hidden drawer?”

“Yeah.” Vivi traced some brutal scratches on the surface with her fingertip. “These marks were carved on it by the SS men, during the Nazi Occupation. Colonel Haupt’s men.”

Jack leaned down to take a closer look. “Amazing detail. I can tell in a glance what all these plants are. Common wildflowers, and whoever carved these spent hours looking at them. Look.
Centaurea scabiosa.
Here’s
Achillea millefolium,
and
Linaria vulgaris
, and
Senecio jacobea
—”

“What did you say?” Nell demanded.

Jack looked at her, embarrassed. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. I meant, knapweed, yarrow, toadflax, and ragwort. And this one here is—”

“No, not that! Repeat what you said in Latin!”

“Oh.” He was taken aback by the sharp, almost frightened look on her face. “Ah, let’s see.” He glanced down at the table for reference. “I just said
Centaurea scabiosa, Senecio jacobea
—”

“They’re in it! They’re in Marco’s map!” She turned toward the door. “Duncan! Liam, Nancy! Get in here!” She collected the map in its plastic sleeve. Liam, Duncan, Nancy, and Vivi gathered around the splintered table, wide-eyed and breathlessly silent, to watch.

“The first one on the map is
Senecio jacobea
,” she said. “Ragwort, did you say?” She waited for his nod. “It says to go from there to the nearest
Knautia arvensis
. Do you see that?”

Jack studied the table, and pointed. “Right here,” he said. “That’s scabious, in English. There are others, but this is the closest one.”

“Okay.
Achillea millefolium,
then,” Nell said.

Jack’s finger moved down a few inches. “Yarrow.”

A breathless tension was building. Jack was almost starting to feel scared by it himself.

“Do you see anything named
Anagallis arvensis
?” Nell asked.

“Scarlet pimpernel,” he said, scanning the table. “Right here.”

“And
Trifolium repens
?”

“Clover,” he said. “Here it is. Down at the corner.”

Nell frowned. “And this is where it says to turn to the earth, and go down four hand spans.”

Jack looked at her. “Go down the table leg,” he said simply.

Vivi looked at him, wide-eyed, and leaned over to give him a kiss on the jaw. “How’d you get to be so smart?” she teased.

“See if I’m right, first,” he said dryly. “Then reward me.”

“Count on it,” she murmured.

Vivi’s sisters exchanged winks and nudges at that interchange, but Liam was already at work examining the carved table legs that lay on another work surface. “I labeled them when I removed them,” he said. “Relative to the direction that the flowers are growing, this one is the front left leg. Right under that clover.” He laid it gently on the table.

Nell leaned over it. “Four hand spans,” she said. “Let’s assume they’re a man’s hands. Liam, measure four, please.”

He did so, and his hand finished up right next to a carved knob adorned with a relief of climbing vines and morning glory flowers.

Liam looked up at Jack. “I’ll hold it steady,” he said. “Three full turns, counterclockwise. Want to do the honors?”

Jack seized the smooth knob, felt the texture of the morning glory vines beneath his hand, and applied pressure. It did not budge.

He tried again. Still nothing. “I’m afraid of damaging it,” he said.

“It’s been sixty-five years,” Vivi said. “It’s bound to be stiff.”

He applied pressure, and felt a crack, a squeak. The leg began to turn. One time, two, three. Fragments scattered, but it came free.

The bottom part in his hand was hollow. Threads had been carved into it, caked with ancient, blackened wax. He tilted it, and a cylinder of parchment dropped out of the hollow. Ancient paper, yellow and brown at the corners. He held it gingerly in his hand, and passed it to Vivi.

“Here,” he muttered. “I’m afraid to hold the thing.”

“All this time,” Nancy whispered. “Right here. In Lucia’s table.”

Vivi accepted it and laid it on the table, gently loosening the roll. The pieces of paper were not large, but very brittle, threatening to crack. Vivi widened the flat space, pressing them against the table as she unrolled them. She stared for a long moment. When she lifted her face, her eyes were huge. “Oh, you guys,” she said. “This is…I think that this might actually be…oh, God, this is scary. I’m getting dizzy.”

“What?” Jack snapped. “Out with it, goddammit!”

“The big
L
,” Vivi said, staring first at Nell and then at Nancy. “Just look. At this sketch, of the angel. Look at that face. And look at this, the writing below it. That script. Backward.”

Nell and Nancy gasped. “No way,” Nancy whispered.

“I can’t believe it.” Nell’s voice choked off into a squeak.

“Who the fuck is the big
L
?” Jack roared, maddened.

Nell turned to him. “
L
as in Leonardo. As in, da Vinci.”

“Oh.” Jack closed his mouth abruptly.

There was a moment of dead silence. “I need a drink,” Liam said, turning toward the door.

“Bring the bottle back with you,” Duncan called after him.

A few restorative swallows of fine single-malt Scotch took the edge off their collective freak-out, and a half hour later they were all sprawled on the couches grouped around the coffee table in Liam’s living room, still stunned. Staring at the roll of parchment that sat in the middle of the table, as if it were an unexploded bomb.

Which, in a sense, it was. After all. It had almost gotten all six of them killed, at one time or another.

“We have to tell the press,” Nancy said. “Get it on AP. All over the Internet. If the sketches are no longer secret, and that bastard knows that it’s in the hands of experts getting authenticated, there’ll be no more reason for him to attack us. No profit to it.”

“Wrong,” Vivi said, regretfully. “That would be true if you were dealing with normal, reasonable criminal buttheads, but John is special. He’s totally over-the-edge insane. I don’t think John even cares about the money anymore. He’s just pissed. He wants payback. He wants blood.”

“So we’ll be looking over our shoulders for the rest of our lives?” Nancy flared. “I am so sick of it!”

“One thing’s for sure,” Liam said. “I will not have that thing in my house overnight. I’ve lost enough sleep lately.”

“It’s been in your house for weeks of nights,” Nell reminded him.

Liam gave her an eloquent look and tossed off another swallow.

“I’ll take it,” Vivi offered. “My friend Jill has a big rare-book and antiquarian gallery in the city. She’ll be able to tell us how to take care of it and get it authenticated. And how to find a safe place to store it. Somebody lend me a phone. I’ll call her.”

Vivi wandered into the kitchen to make her call, and Jack listened to the animated rise and fall of her voice as she told her librarian friend the crazy tale. He felt beaten down, exhausted. Scared. Impressed about the famous art and the big
L
, for sure. Very cool, zowie and all that, but only a tiny part of him really gave a shit. It was only paper, after all.

He was far more focused on the danger that bastard John posed to the living, breathing, beloved Vivi. And her sisters, of course.

Vivi came bouncing out, and tossed Nell’s phone back to her. “It’s all set up. Jill about had a stroke. She’ll make arrangements for us for authentication, and she can store the sketches in her rare-book vault.”

“The sooner you get rid of them, the happier I’ll be,” Liam said.

Nancy gave him a soothing kiss. The guy looked unsoothed.

Vivi was holding up the necklace to her sisters. “Should we detach these again? Do you want your necklaces back now?”

Nell and Nancy looked at each other. Nell took it from Vivi’s hand, flipping the lever to retract the three planes with the miniscule writing. “Not yet,” she said. “Let’s stay united. When this is sorted out, we’ll get the chains fixed and wear them again. For now, you keep it, okay? Like a talisman.”

There were tears, at that point, and group hugs. Jack averted his eyes, until Vivi’s voice caught his attention. “Nancy, can I borrow your Jetta to drive into the city?” she asked.