Buried Secrets (11 page)

“Besides,” he added, a touch less strident, “She hasn't noticed anything wrong with the
vibrations
around Almanuevo, and even the other flakes can sense that much.”

Jo cocked her head for a moment. “Okay.”

“Not to mention—” Zack paused, confused. “Okay?”

“Yes. You made your point.”

“I did?” Huh. Well, he believed her.

“So which of the other ones did you think were flakes, and which seemed legitimate? In your professional opinion?”

She really couldn't tell? “Crystal's a flake, and Sirus the mummy guy. The massage therapist knew his stuff—I can see why he and Vanderveer are buds—but I'd tag him as a health professional more than a magic user. Seriously,” he added, in case Jo thought he was being sarcastic. “The slacker coven—”

Jo slanted a warning gaze at him, like it was her job to defend the world from verbal slights.

“Fine, that group of Wiccan twenty-somethings who happen to hold jobs in food service or low-level retail, they were earnest enough. But they're short on training, discipline and connections—they have no idea how big their own occult community even is. Did you hear them going on about being such a minority?”

Jo shrugged. “Point taken.”

“Now the
Bruja,
the Gardnerian and Faerie Wicca high-priestesses, the Thorsons, our silent Santero and our friend the voodoo queen—they might just be legitimate.”

“Vodoun,”
Jo corrected him.

“Tomayto, Tomahto,” he warned.

She just shook her head, coaxing her truck into the parking lot of the Soul-Food Bistro. “So who's this fellow we're meeting here, again? Is he into magic?”

“Apparently not. My partner's been putting out feelers over the Internet, looking for other area disappearances. This guy wanted to talk in person, despite not being local.”

“Someone came all the way out to Almanuevo to talk to us?”

“To talk to me.” He unlatched his lap belt—no wimpy shoulder harnesses or airbags for Jo. The belt didn't retract.

“Tomayto, Tomahto.” She killed her engine. It coughed a few times before accepting death. They should have taken the Ferrari.

The Soul-Food Bistro tried to be cutting edge, with all its neon spirals and twinkly light stars and synthesizer music. But the multiply pierced hostess had a Texas tan that all the black clothes and makeup in the world couldn't return to Goth. When Zack gave her his name, she led them to a row of private booths off the main room. A particularly well-dressed stranger stood beside one, seriously eyeing both Zack and Jo before finally shaking their hands.

Zack took one look at the guy—the suit, the ring, the quiet, dangerous attitude—and had to rethink his small-town stereotypes. He also wished he'd rethought bringing Jo.

What the hell kind of business did the
mob
have in a New Age resort town?

B
y the end of their lunch appointment, Jo had gotten an intriguing new look at Zack Lorenzo. By nighttime, despite the distraction of their less-than-normal investigation, she still hadn't gotten over it.

“That guy was really a
mobster?
” she asked again as they carried plastic bags of Chinese take-out to his motel room. After a week together, it seemed silly to fear the room—except for how cavelike and close it felt. Jo really didn't like caves.

“Speak up,” Zack suggested. He seemed to have something against his door key. “But this time, make sure to clearly say his name, so it gets reported back to the right family.”

She watched as he ditched his bags on the shadowy table, then went immediately to the window and pulled the drapes. Him and drapes. “It's just so…
Sopranos.
”

“You watch
The Sopranos?
” His delivery was what she'd come to think of as classic Lorenzo—dry, low and just a touch condescending. The way he adjusted the drapes before flipping on the light switch seemed both automatic and out of place.

“Well, no. But I read magazines.” She entered the room a little more cautiously. They'd been seeing snakes only at a dis
tance over the past few days—not counting Angelique Dupres's boa constrictor. But after her experience on the rocks, Jo didn't want to take chances. Even at a distance, it seemed like a
lot
of snakes. “It's just that…this isn't exactly Chicago, you know?”

“Really? Musta slipped past me.”

“We don't get a lot of mobsters around here.” She moved paperwork off his table, trying to stack it in staggered piles so nothing that wasn't mixed would mix. It was a lot of paperwork.

“I told you,” said Zack, taking the papers from her. His hands were much bigger than hers. “It's wiseguys. Not mobsters, not gangsters. When you talk like that, I expect to see men in fedoras carrying tommy guns. And don't act like Chicago's got a lease on organized crime. It's a good city.”

“No offense meant.” She began to pull at the knot tying the closest bag of Chinese food. “Texas has its crime problems too. The Big Bend Park, a couple hours south of here, has to deal with drug runners across the border.”

He grunted, less than satisfied.

She looked up to where he'd moved his papers onto the huge, neatly made hotel bed. “Do you suppose that's why there were
wiseguys
here in the first place? Drug running?”

He shook his head and watched her work the plastic knot. “You do realize, right, that you're having a harder time adjusting to the reality of the Mafia than you are to the idea that one of their associates may be among the walking dead?”

“That's an exaggeration.” The comparison. Not, sadly, the walking dead part.

He came back to her side, solid and
there,
took the bag from her hands, and simply tore the plastic apart, lifting out Styrofoam boxes and little paper sacks. “I'm just saying, here.”

Jo went to work on the second bag's knot. “Maybe it's because I'm, oh, a sheriff? As in, law enforcement? Organized crime, a possible mob hit in my neighborhood…”

“Not your jurisdiction,” he reminded her, sing-song. When he reached for her bag, she snatched it back from him.

“Take that one,” she ordered, pointing at the third sack, unknotted, with colas and such from a gas station food-mart.

“It's just plastic.” He reached for her bag again.

She lifted her chin to better glare up at him. “And I want a few bags whole to put trash in. Can we open the blinds?”

“No.” Okay. Zack started carrying colas to the minifridge of his kitchenette. “Anyway, Capelli was talking to me off the record, so he has client privilege,” he said over his shoulder. “I knew as soon as we walked in that I shouldn't have brought you. I
really
shouldn't have told you what he was, later.”

“I think I would have figured it out.” She lowered her voice, a little raspy, to mimic their lunch appointment.
“‘I, too, had an associate. Word reached our administration that he had met an unfortunate end near Almanuevo. Then we hear conflicting reports. This disturbs us.'”

“You don't sound like Capelli,” warned Zack, grinning. “You sound like Marlon Brando's and Kathleen Turner's love child. Or my Uncle Maury. Eat.”

Jo sank into a plastic chair and peeked into Styrofoam containers until she found her beef-with-snow-peas. It had been refreshing, ordering Chinese with Zack Lorenzo. Her extended family, when they all got together, usually ordered the strangest things offered. Sometimes they attempted to do it in Mandarin. In contrast, she and Zack both went with the simplest dishes they saw. “What, your Uncle Maury's a wiseguy too?”

Zack leveled a plastic
spork
—half-spoon, half-fork—at her. They'd both ignored the chopsticks. “Do not even joke about that,” he warned. “Just because we're Italian doesn't mean we're connected. We're a cop family. Straight cops, not meat-eaters.”

She raised an eyebrow at his almond chicken.

“Meat-eaters means corrupt cops,” he clarified.

“Oh. Well, some people think all Texans own horses.”

“See?”

She certainly could picture him as a police officer. He had that air of competent authority that so many people in law enforcement attempted, and not all of them managed. Not that he made a bad private detective, either.

After their visit with Capelli, they'd driven out to the
Tierra del Oeste
Resort and Dude Ranch, which had cancelled their most recent rattlesnake roundup and some of their “vortex
tours” because of all the snakes. The resort offered them a spa treatment—including aura cleansing and chakra realignment—but they'd begged off. If it was possible to know this supernatural stuff without actually being a follower or practitioner, Zack Lorenzo was the go-to guy. Though how he'd gone from police officer to collecting rumors about the walking dead….

“So why'd you quit the force?” she asked. It had been four days since she'd risked a personal question.
Live a little.

Zack looked up from shoveling in mouthfuls of food, seemingly more surprised than annoyed. “Hunh?”

“You said you come from a cop family. I'm guessing you were a cop yourself. Why'd you quit?”

Zack sat back in his chair, considering her for a long, serious moment—then shrugged one shoulder. “People can't exactly file reports against most of the things I'm after now.”

“So you quit going after the everyday bad guys to track the otherworldly bad guys?”

“Something like that.” He folded his arms, and it still looked more impressive on him. “You had to have been a cop before you took the job in Spur, right? At least for academy training.”

He was a private investigator, all right. “Albuquerque,” Jo agreed. “I thought it would help me feel more in control.”

He snorted at that likelihood—and it was true that Jo had never realized how much crime surrounded them every day until she took up city police work. In control? Hardly. And yet…

“I did really well at first. I was kind of driven, pretending so hard that the cave-in hadn't happened—not all of it, anyway—that I'd about convinced myself. But…”

He waited, eyes intense despite his casual posture.

But, given the statistical probabilities, she'd been partnered with men on the force. Good men. She'd found it impossible to trust her partners to not foolishly risk themselves to protect her. That constant fear made her jumpy, and jumpy cops were dangerous cops. She was so unwilling to risk another man dying for her, she'd gotten in their way trying to stop them.

“Spur was a better opportunity,” she finished weakly, then frowned. “And how did this conversation get to be about me?”

He grinned.
Don't investigate the investigator.

She wanted to ask again why he'd quit the force—he'd admitted to wanting to fight evil, but not to what opened his eyes to it in the first place. But she'd asked once. That was clearly her quota on personal questions for the week.

They still had files to look over, maps to chart, theories to advance. Jo was looking forward to seeing what kind of ideas a man who'd been tracking evil for a couple of years would offer. Why complicate matters?

She'd worked too hard, since he'd rescued her—

Since he'd drawn her back into life and safety, since she'd sprawled on top of him, since the
Bruja
had advised her to “lead him from his darkness.”

—to lose the easy working relationship they'd built for any but the best of reasons. Her top priority, like his, had to be uncovering what kind of evil had set up residence here.

Because almost everyone they'd talked to, including Capelli, had in large ways or small somehow confirmed it.

There was some kind of supernatural evil in Almanuevo.

And it was getting stronger.

 

Zack had avoided inviting Jo back into his motel room since that first morning together, but it wasn't as uncomfortable as he'd feared. Within an hour of finishing dinner, they had food containers stuffed away—in knotted plastic bags—and paperwork spread again across the table for both of them to study. An area map lay spread across the bed, too. It would've been easier to tack the thing up, but Jo defended the fuzzy wallpaper—flocked, she called it. Apparently it was older than they were, and pinning the map up there would be like vandalizing a museum.

A butt-ugly museum, to his way of thinking, but still.

Besides, it kept the bed as focused on work as they were. And just in case Zack started to forget that Jo James was just a colleague—instead of, say, watching the nape of her neck—sharp pushpins bristled from the map in four separate colors.

In blue they'd marked the general location of almost every known death in town over the past year. Red tacks marked the deaths for the six people who were rumored to either have van
ished or been seen alive afterward, including the presumed resting place for Mr. Capelli's “associate.” Yellow tacks marked the area that two dead people had been glimpsed walking.

Zack hoped these zombies, or whatever they were, weren't like cockroaches—that when you saw one or two, you knew there must be hundreds. That could be really, really unpleasant.

Jo, beside Zack, stared down at the map. “This is so sad.”

“You don't think,
disturbing?
” Zack wished they had one more confirmed report of a walker; with three, they could triangulate. He'd used green pins to mark a handful of reports about strangers wandering aimlessly through the desert, but there wasn't enough connection to the missing bodies yet.

“Not just that,” admitted Jo, hooking thumbs in her belt loops. “That this many people die at all. Heart attacks, illness, accidents. I hate to see it all mapped out like this.”

For a year's yield, the town didn't seem to be doing all that bad. Not compared to a city. But Zack understood.

“When you're a kid,” he said, “you get this idea that if you're good enough, everything will work out in the end. Blame fairy tales, or sitcoms, or Sunday school. Whatever. You think you're gonna get one of the happy endings. Then something blindsides you, and along with everything else you're feeling—”

Grief. Shock. Fear that it could happen again or might never stop. More feelings than even an enlightened man could admit to, and Zack had never considered himself enlightened.

Jo said softly, “Along with everything else…?”

“Part of you just wants to yell like a kid that it isn't fair. Like if you yell loud enough, and long enough, they'll give you back your ball. You know?”

She didn't look at him, which was a relief. But she nodded.

Like anything in life was fair. He and Gabriella had been young, seemingly healthy,
in love
—and she'd died. Murder or not. Evil or not. The real horror was mostly that she'd died.

Things weren't supposed to work that way.

“My parents were killed when I was sixteen,” admitted Jo, her calm uneven. “A car accident. I was home with my little
brother when we got the call, and he
did
yell. He said I was lying, then he yelled that it wasn't fair.”

“Did anyone give him back his ball?” asked Zack, sliding his gaze toward her.

She shook her head. In that moment, Zack wanted to hold her more than ever. He wanted to make her hurt better. Hell, he wanted to give her back her parents, while he was at it. Surprise. It wasn't going to happen.
No happy endings.

He looked back at the map. “Let's cross-reference whatever we have on the vanished bodies with the reports of people seen wandering the hills,” he suggested. “There's got to be at least one match. I want a third positive sighting.”

“As positive as any of them are,” Jo reminded him, boosting herself easily onto the bar, but she picked up the obits folder all the same. Was it his imagination, or did she look relieved?

They went back to just working together, Jo reading and Zack pacing around the bed, searching for a pattern in the push-pins. The center of all this—if there was one—was in the desert. But this whole damned country was desert. That didn't say much.

Jo's cowboy-booted heels thumped against the wall of the bar beneath her. “Wait a minute…”

Zack turned to her. “You found something?”

He already knew how pretty she was—and honestly so, without makeup or hair gel or anything helping. That was a given, by now. But if she found something, she'd be beautiful.

Jo lifted her gaze from the folder balanced on her blue-jeaned knees, and her eyes were bright. “Kathy Hurd, the tourist who dropped dead of the heat last July? She had a record.”