Call Me Killer (22 page)

“I know who you are,” Silas Marks said.

“Yeah, I figured that out last night when you used my former name. I changed it legally, you know.”

“Have you told O’Malley yet?”

Instead of answering, I asked, “What the hell do you want from me?”

“You interest me. You’re smart and you use your initiative. Going to the mat for the one guy in town everybody hates takes guts. I’m thinking of offering you a job.”

I burst out laughing. In a day filled with surprises, this was perhaps the wildest yet.

“I’m serious.”

“I’m still in school.”

“You’re graduating. If you’re trying to decide between grad school and working. I recommend you work for a couple a years. You can always do a Ph.D. program later.”

The throbbing in my head escalated. Finlay had obviously scraped up every trace of information available on me and turned it over to Silas Fucking Marks.

“Do you typically offer jobs to people who hate your guts?”

“How you feel about me personally is irrelevant.” He was lounging back in his comfortable seat and gazing at me through half closed eyes. “I’m always on the lookout for the brightest of the bright.”

“To do what?”

“To work with other smart people like yourself. Using your considerable talents to do some good in the world. More details would require an NDA.”

“Doing good in the world? That’s some line, coming from a self-proclaimed expert in erotic asphyxiation. Hadley might be alive, but how many girls have you killed and buried under the mansion, Marks?”

He ignored that. “Your final semester expenses, whatever they are, will be paid by my firm. Your college loans will also be repaid by me as soon as you start work. Your salary for your first year will be...” He named a figure that would have made me gasp if I hadn't controlled my breathing.

“I’m not for sale,” I managed. Was this how he employed people? Even given how I felt about him, a tiny part of me was flattered. Of course he’d checked me out. He probably knew as much about me now as I knew about Griff. It would actually be cool to work for an employer who valued brains and initiative. But he was an arrogant prick. He probably expected his workers to wear his collar and call him Master.

I was thinking fast. “I don’t want to work for you. But maybe it’s a good thing you picked me up, because I’ve got a proposition for
you
.”

Now he looked amused.

“Two weeks from now is the anniversary of Hadley’s disappearance. That means the press will be sniffing around Griff again. That town cop said the investigation is confidential. That they’re not releasing what they know. But she’s alive, and I want him cleared.”

“He will be. It just might take some time.”

“I want an announcement from the local police, the FBI, the DA, and whoever else was involved in the case that it’s over. Tell them whatever you want about Hadley. I don’t care. But exonerate Griff. Completely. Not in some half assed, well, we-just-don’t-have-enough-evidence way. Make it clear he didn’t kill her. That she’s not even dead. You have enough influence to orchestrate that, I have no doubt.”

“Why should I?” Marks asked in a dangerous voice.

“Because if you don’t, I’ll spill the whole fucking story to my contacts in the press. Your involvement. Finlay’s. The whole thing. Along with the pictures I took inside the Reef Hill Club. I’m sure the tabloids will be very interested in those.”

‘You didn’t get any pictures.” Marks sounded dead sure of that.

He was right, too. I’d tried, but my phone had been wiped clean when I’d come out of there. I’d been impressed with that.

“Please,” I said with a certain bravado. “Your security is tight, but I doubt you’d have offered me a job if you didn’t suspect I could beat it. I did get us an invite, after all.”

There was silence. At length he said, “So. I offer you a job any other nerd your age would drool over and you turn around and try to blackmail me. What’s to stop me from burying you in the same grave with the other women you think I strangled?”

Yeah, good point. I tried not to let my fear show. Maybe I’d pushed it too far. I couldn’t read these guys—not Connor Finlay, the ex black ops interrogator and certainly not Silas Marks, the billionaire sadist.

I wanted Griff.

“Tell you what,” Marks said after what seemed like an interminable pause. “You go back to school, finish whatever is unfinished, and graduate. Meanwhile I’m going to email you some stuff I’m working on that I think might interest you. Puzzles that need solving. Do them, if you can, and send your solutions back to me. If you can’t do them, fine. I’ll be a bit disappointed in you, but that’s a cross I have to bear daily in my dealings with the people around me who don’t measure up.”

I think my mouth may have dropped open. What a dick!

But he’d set the hook cleverly. I wanted to see his damn puzzles—of course I did. And he knew it.

“You already offered me a job. Now I need to prove myself? Doing things backwards, Mr. Marks?”

“Do the tests and I’ll see that you get what you want vis a vis O’Malley. I can’t say what the authorities will be willing to release about Hadley. I don’t have any control over that. But I’m pretty sure Connor can get his brother to exonerate Griff now that the local police know she wasn’t murdered.”

“So Connor Finlay works for you, right?”

“As a contractor. He has his own company.” He glanced over at me and grinned. “He’s smart, but he couldn’t solve all my puzzles. Hell, I’m not even sure I could solve them myself if I didn’t already know the answers.”

My eyes must have narrowed. Was I crazy or was he actually starting to seem a tiny bit human? Had he just made a self-deprecating joke?

As if he read my mind, Marks said, “I’m not the bad guy, Rory.”

“Then who is the bad guy?”

“There’s no simple answer to that question.”

Silence fell. I couldn’t think of anything more to say.

“You want a ride back to the house?”

I shook my head. Rain was gently striking the roof of the car now, but I’d had enough of this. It was too intense.
He
was too intense. Griff still wanted Hadley. I needed to think.

“Let me out. I want to finish my walk.”

“You’ll get wet.”

“I won’t melt.”

“Do we have a deal? You do the puzzles, keep your mouth shut, and I get your boyfriend off the hook with the cops and the press?”

I nodded. “Yeah. We have a deal.”

The car door open and I jumped out into the rain.

Griff

Connor Finlay was still hassling me. Lecturing me. And refusing to answer my questions. No, he claimed, he didn’t know where Hadley was. Or who she was with, if anybody. She’d agree to speak to me on the condition that none of us would ever try to contact her again.

“Look, I'm sure this is hard,” he said, “but you're not the only one affected. Hadley has a father. A family. A lot of good friends. I know you got fucked over in the newspapers for being a suspect, but it's not about you anymore. You weren't even that serious with her, right? She had other lovers. You've got to let this go, man.”

It's not about you anymore
was
right
.
Hadley had made that clear.

“Hadley’s dad has the money and the influence,” Finlay continued. “He’s been using it all year, searching for her, chasing down every dark alley. But he never got far. At least her family will know now that she’s not dead. The investigation has you and your hacker chick to thank for that.”

Yeah. Even if Hadley never came home, the airport pictures would clear me with the authorities. The cops and the feds would leave me alone.

“So where do you suppose she went?”

It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Rory. My head cleared as if I were coming out of a trance. Where the hell
was
Rory? Given how eager she had been to find out what had happened to Hadley, why had she ducked out? Had she really gotten upset when I’d talked about finding Hadley and bringing her home?

“I guess she went for a walk.”

“You'll have to silence her, dude. She can’t blab about this.”

“Okay. She’s smart. She’ll understand.”

“I don't know. Girl like her, she’d probably love the publicity.”

What the fuck? I thought about hitting him. I wanted to knock that sneer off his face. I had to remind myself that this wasn't about him. My emotions were roiling for other reasons altogether.

He didn't let up, though. “I'm amazed she's still here when she could have jetted off to Hollywood for some serious partying. You must be showing her a real good time in there.” He nodded toward the bedroom.

“Right,” I snorted. “I can just see Rory in Hollywood.”

He gave me an odd look. “You do know who she is? I mean the two of you sure seem cozy. And she knows jack-all about you.”

I was beginning to feel queasy. “She's a student at MIT.”

He laughed. A hard, unpleasant laugh. “Yeah, amazingly enough, she is. At least, when she’s not flitting around the country on a private jet.”

“Sure, Finlay.” I couldn’t imagine Rory on a private jet.

“She's a damn fine hacker, I'll give her that. Who knew? She must have stood out like the freak she is at Beverly Hills High.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Sorry, man.” He gave me a faintly superior look. “I thought you knew. She's searched out stuff about you in every public database on the planet, and God only knows how many private ones. You telling me you haven't even Googled her?”

“She kinda took over my computer,” I said, knowing how lame the answer was. Why hadn't I looked her up anywhere? I'd meant to. “What's this crap about a private jet? She comes from a disadvantaged background.”

It was his turn to snort. “Disadvantaged my ass. You remember that picture I took of her with my phone? The one I said I’d run facial recognition on?”

I remembered Rory’s panic when he’d taken the shot. Her belated attempt to cover her face.

“So I ran it, and fuck me bloody if her mother didn’t turn out to be Nina McKenna. You've heard of her—famous movie star? Do-gooder humanitarian? She even won an Academy Award. The mom's getting a bit old for the good roles now, though. That's why she wants to turn our Lorelei into the next major ingénue.”

I was gaping at him. “Lorelei?”

“That's her real name. Lorelei McKenna. She calls herself Rory, and the McKay's obviously just a variation of McKenna, probably to give her a little distance from her mom.”

“You are fucking kidding me.” But I knew from the look in his eyes—there was amusement there, and maybe a flash of pity—that he was being straight with me.

Unlike Rory.

I knew who Nina McKenna was. Everybody did. She was famous for her violet eyes and her incredibly wide and fetching smile. Hadn't she started her career back in the 80s playing the proverbial prostitute with the heart of gold? In addition to being an actress, she was into various causes, like poverty and save the whales and global warming and shit. She wasn't exactly a genius, though. No way Rory had gotten her super smarts from Nina McKenna. “Who's her father?” I could barely hear my own voice asking.

“Don't know. Her mother's been married a couple times, but not when she was pregnant with Lorelei. But her brother Jesse is a rock star and her sister Lily is a supermodel.”

Her brother Jesse? Her big bro, the drug addict musician, was a fucking rock star? My brain was exploding.

“What is it about you, dude, that you attract all these rich chicks? Do they go for the bad boy type? That must be it.”

“I found her on the outskirts of Boston, running from some guy with a shotgun.” There was a sister, too? Rory hadn’t mentioned her. A supermodel? Holy shit. “Are you telling me that was all an act?”

“I guess you don't read
Variety
.”

I glared at him.

“Well, it's true that she's bright and that she goes to Geek-I-T. But she's also an actress, which is probably how she fooled you so completely. Last summer she made a small indie movie about a sex worker's kids who use their brains to learn math, get out of the life and go to college. Sort of a feminist
Good Will Hunting
. She wrote and directed the thing, using mommy's money. I think she sees herself as the next Lena Dunham.”

I was too dumbfounded to say a word.

“I don't think the film did very well, but she got good reviews. Supposedly your honey spent several weeks living on the mean streets of Roxbury, MA. That's where they shot the film. She made some friends there. Sounds like she may have gone back to visit some of those folks. But she got herself into trouble, and voila, you came along.”

Un-fucking-believable. I was getting a headache, which only happened when I was sick. I was remembering several things she'd told me that had struck me as off at the time. The expensive cell phone she'd disabled when she'd jumped into my car. LaVerle, the prostitute who was supposedly her mom, then not really her mom, then someone she'd met during a “project.”

The smooth, confident way she’d addressed and then lied to a billionaire. Her musician brother who was always on the road. Miguel the Mexican pool guy. The dead girl who had been found on the side of the freeway. We don't even call them freeways in Massachusetts. The girl's parents had been out at a big Oscar party…meaning, holy shit, the Academy Awards.

Big Oscar was
not
some dude in the ‘hood.

Fuck me backwards. I'd sensed that Rory had been evasive about some stuff, but I hadn't put the pieces together.

I could feel my stomach churning, my fingers clenching. I wasn't sure who I hated more—Finlay for telling me this, or Rory for lying to me. Hadley’s situation had gone clean out of my mind. All I could think of was Rory and how many lies she’d told me.

“So it was all a game? Right from the start, it was all just acting for her?”

“Probably. Except the hacking. That was real. And the info she fed me did lead to those pictures of your ex. She's wasted as an actress, if you ask me. She's nowhere near as gorgeous as her mother, anyhow. She needs to quit this film shit and do what she was born for. Hell, I might even offer her a job, if I thought I could tear her out of the arms of Hollywood.”