Dead to the Max (2 page)

She didn’t have to say any of those things aloud. He knew her thoughts, lived in her mind, her soul. He knew
her
.

“What a pair we are, Max. You’re slowly dying. And I’m already dead.” He shed his tears for her in his voice, in his words, in the pitiful cry of the cat outside.

His voice in her head was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because even in death he’d never left her, a curse because her life had stopped that night in the 7-Eleven market. She’d been there. She would never block out that memory. She would always live with it.

She knew she had to let him go one day, yet every night she prayed he’d still be there in the morning. She couldn’t imagine what life without him would be like, didn’t
want
to imagine it.

Max tested her legs, almost surprised to find that enough feeling had returned to support her.

Grabbing her short robe from the straight-back chair beneath the window, she pulled it on, skirted the bed, and headed to the bathroom. Her studio apartment was small. With five steps, she was there.

The interior of the bathroom was dark except for Cameron’s phosphorescence. After two years, she should have been used to the way he moved faster than her eye could follow.

Max flipped on the light, and his glow vanished.

Like a bad omen, a crack, running the length of the medicine cabinet mirror, bisected her face. Dark pouches clung beneath her eyes, fine red veins traced through the pale skin of her cheeks. Her dilated pupils almost obliterated the brown irises. Her dark hair stood on end. Party hair. Or fright.

“You’ve lost more weight, Max.”

He was right. She looked worse than if she’d pulled an all-nighter on a tricky audit. She rubbed beneath her bloodshot eye, then moved to one side of the mirror’s fissure.

Holy hell. Long reddened furrows, just short of bleeding, stood out on the flesh of her neck. She started to shake from the inside out.

“Cameron?”

“Yes, my love?”

She ran a hand down her throat, the phantom roar of jet engines in her ears. “If that dream was real”—staring at her injured throat, she realized that wasn’t such a big
if
—“then the woman’s body is somewhere in the long-term parking lot at San Francisco Airport.”

* * * * *

“I don’t know why we’re going on this wild goose chase.” Max wished she’d never mentioned the airport. The eensy-teensy bit of alarm she’d felt had faded with the morning sunlight. She’d relegated her “vision” back to the dream realm. But Cameron wouldn’t let it alone until he’d gotten her into her car.

“Guess an eensy-teensy bit of
alarm
is why you wore a turtleneck on a warm day to cover the marks on your throat. How about trying the word
panic
?”

Max ran a hand through her short, no-fuss hair as she took the airport exit. Okay, so she had felt a touch of panic. She was better now.

It was early, a little after six a.m., but traffic around the airport boxed her in like peak rush hour. Two yellow taxis honked as they vied for the same spot in the right lane, and the thunder of jets overhead rattled the frame of her red Miata. Cameron had bought the convertible for her the year she’d made manager at KOD; Kirby, O’Brien, and Dakajama. The year before he died, when she was on the fast track and life was still normal. Before KOD meant Kiss of Death.

“You have a psychic gift you can’t ignore.”

“If anyone is psychic around here, it’s you.”

He laughed. “I’m dead. Psychic is all that’s left. But you’re the one who hears ghosts.”

Which was only another indication she was just plain crazy. “Well, you’re the one who acted weird right before you—”

“Died?”

It should have gotten easier to say it aloud, but the word still tied up her insides. “For days before, maybe even weeks, you acted strangely.”

“I can’t remember.” According to Cameron, he couldn’t remember anything. Except that he’d died. That he’d loved her. That he still did.

Her heart contracted with not being able to see or feel him next to her. She’d brought this uncomfortable conversation on herself. “Maybe, subconsciously, you knew something was going to happen to you.”

“Maybe that’s why, when it finally happened, I couldn’t leave you. We’re tethered, Max. I can’t get more than twenty feet from you without feeling like I’ve ceased to exist even in this insubstantial form.”

Max bit her lip, but the small pain didn’t cure the much larger ache of losing him. “I’m going to be late for my interview,” she muttered, hoping to end the subject she should never have brought up in the first place.

As easily as that, Cameron let it go, as if his death was as painful for him as it was for her. “You didn’t want that job anyway,” he snorted, a ghostly resonance absorbed into the vinyl liner above her. “You hate working for a temp agency, and you hate accounting.”

“I love working for Sunny. She’s wonderful, and the temp jobs are great.”

“You’re lying to yourself.”

“Accounting pays the bills.” And had been well on the way to giving her an ulcer before the age of thirty. Now, at thirty-two, Max had learned you did some things for the money and turned the rest off when the clock hit five.

“I can pay the bills if you let me,” Cameron whispered somewhere near her left ear, the sound whooshing away as if it came from outside the car. “Use my life insurance money.”

She bit down on the inside of her cheek. So he wasn’t letting the subject drop, just coming at it from another direction. “Blood money. You didn’t die so I could pay the rent.”

She belatedly realized she’d said the dreaded word, and her teeth clamped together.

“It’s been in precious metals for two years. Use the income.”

She’d somehow escaped the devastation of the economic downturn. “In-bred blood money. I still won’t touch it.”

Because touching it made his death final. Something she’d avoided for two years simply by closing her eyes, listening to his voice, and seeking his ghostly touch, as if he were beside her, flesh and bone.

“So what do you plan to do if we find a body?” She preferred any subject, even murder, to talking about the blood money.

Thankfully, this time Cameron let her steer the conversation away. “I think we ought to figure out who killed her, don’t you?”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve had that little strategy up your sleeve the whole time.”

“Max, Max, Max. I don’t have sleeves. I’m heavenly.”

Life with Cameron
had
been heavenly. Sunday afternoons spent scouring used book stores for old mysteries. Long motorcycle rides in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Sex in a secluded mountain meadow, once without even removing helmets or leather jackets. There’d been something erotic about it, definitely kinky with an element of risk that had made it all the more exciting.

She’d sold the Ducati a month after Cameron’s funeral.

Max took the turn for the long-term airport parking, the subtle scent of Cameron’s cigarette drifting by, muted by time and fading memory.

“If we keep this under eight minutes, I won’t have to pay,” she said, punching the button and pulling out a ticket.

“You need to call to check that flight 452 from Boise actually existed.” He referred to the number their unknown lady had written on the green note. “If you got yourself a new computer, you could just do it right there on the Internet.”

Her old laptop had blown its motherboard or something, and she’d never replaced it. She didn’t need e-mail or the Internet. She didn’t need to be
connected
.

“Calling will work just fine.” She’d told Cameron the whole dream sequence, from the woman’s arrival at the airport, her anticipation, the fear her lover evoked because she hadn’t stuck to the plan, then to the parking lot, and finally, to the dying. But some things were missing. Whole chunks. Exactly whose hands had been at her throat? Why had the woman welcomed Death, as if she deserved it? Max’s dream psyche seemed to have done a big fast forward, leaving the answers behind in that missing footage.

The parking lot was packed, empty spots scarce, cars circling the aisles. “Which way?” Cameron prodded.

Without thought, Max turned to the right and headed slowly out to the south end of the lot, bits of last night’s dream sifting through her head. “Something just came to me.”

“A name perhaps?”

“That paper, the one with the flight number on it. She threw it away in the airport before she went back to her car.”

“Maybe it was a different note.”

“It wasn’t.” She rolled her lower lip between her teeth. “Someone put it back in her car. Even she knew it was out of place—or something.” Exactly what
had
the woman been feeling about that paper being there? Shame. That was all Max could remember.

Cameron interrupted her thought. “Someone?”

“It had to have been her killer.” The windows were up, the morning warm, but Max shivered as if a cool breeze had passed over her. She hadn’t phrased it as a question. “She was followed.” Stalked. Hunted.

The feelings went a long way in suggesting that the man who’d made love to her wasn’t the one who’d killed her.

“Does it?”

“He couldn’t have known where she threw out the note or even that she’d written down the information.”

“Maybe
she
retrieved the piece of paper.”

“No. I don’t think so. And there’s the condom. They—she and her airport lover—didn’t use one because they were in such a big hurry.” Her clitoris tingled with palpable memory, the heat, the need, the rush. “But there was an opened wrapper on the floor of the car. Someone else
must
have been there.”

“Maybe they did it again, and that time they used one.”

“No. I’d remember.”

“Just like you remember whose hands were at her throat?”

He had a point. There were so many pieces missing. But... “It’s a
feeling
. Just like your feeling that we had to come here this morning, couldn’t wait, had to be
now
.” Cameron’s urgency had thrummed through her. “What is it
you
know?”

“Feelings can’t be explained, Max, they’re just there. Like visions. You go with the flow, do what they tell you. Mine told me to be here. Yours told you which way to turn in the lot, where to go.”

Max cruised the last aisle. The light post ahead sported a dulled, gray section sign. She’d seen that identifying section letter, too, out of the rear car window. Surrounding the pole, yellow barrier tape flapped in the wind.

Oh Jesus. There really was a car.

A silver Maxima. New. Dealer’s plates still on it, black smudges by the door handles, the windows. A black and white had parked on the opposite side as if on guard, the officer in the front seat blowing steam off a cup of coffee. When had they found the woman? Couldn’t have been too long or the car itself would have been gone.

“Drive slowly.”

“That cop’ll get suspicious.” Still, fascinated, she pulled closer to the line of parked vehicles and took her foot off the accelerator until the car slowed to a crawl.

“What do you feel?”

“I can’t believe this is real. And I don’t feel anything.”

“Way too quick, Maxi.”

“You know I don’t like it when you call me that, Cameron.” He’d always goaded her with the nickname, using it to push her to do what he wanted.

He ignored the comment. “What do you sense?”

Once she let them in, feelings swamped her. “Pain. Anger. Despair,” she whispered, then closed her eyes and put her foot on the brake. “She was incredibly alone.”

“Guess you’ve accepted it was a vision, huh, Max?”

Given no choice, she had. The long-term shuttle lumbered up behind her, its engine vibrating in her chest. The vehicle pulled alongside, then passed her, its windows coated with years of dirt, neglect, and black exhaust.

She wouldn’t have seen the face at the back window if the man hadn’t raised a hand to swipe at the grime built up on the inside. She couldn’t make out his features beyond a set mouth in a long, narrow face, but his intense stare pierced her body.

He shifted his gaze to the dead woman’s car and focused on it as if nothing else existed. One hand pressed against the dirty window as the bus pulled away.

She punched the accelerator.

“What do you feel?” Cameron demanded, hushed excitement animating his voice.

It wasn’t a sight or a sound or a smell. It was something inside her. She knew that man, knew his eyes, pale yet intense eyes, drilling straight through to her inner organs. She could lose her sense of right and wrong in that gaze, lose herself in wanting him, needing him.

Oh my God...the woman wasn’t
dead
dead. She was living inside Max’s head. All those feelings were
hers,
not Max’s.

Cameron didn’t comment, asking instead, “Who is he?”

“Her lover,” Max whispered, as much to herself as to Cameron. It wasn’t attraction she felt for the mystery man, nothing so trivial as desire or a man-woman thing. It was as if he knew her every secret, inside and out. And she knew his.

The victim had been with him in the back seat of that Maxima. So had Max. She’d seen it in detail, lived it exactly as that woman had lived it. Everything else about the vision seemed to have gone hazy, but not this, not him. She felt him between her legs, inside her, tasted him on her tongue.

The bus sped up in a cloud of exhaust. For a moment she lost sight of the man, and when the haze dissipated, he’d turned his head away from the dead woman’s car.

“Follow him.” Cameron urged.

Almost at the same moment she said, “You knew he was going to be here, didn’t you? That’s why we had to come.”

“I told you I didn’t know what we’d find. I just knew we had to come.”

She didn’t know whether to believe him. Sometimes...sometimes she thought he kept things from her, that he knew more and remembered more than he admitted. No time to analyze that now, though.

Since they’d been at the far end of the lot, the shuttle was on its return to the terminal. She got snagged at the entrance with one car in front of her while the bus skated through its own gate. A tow truck entered a side entrance and turned south toward the dead woman’s car. Max’s head felt like a ping-pong ball as she flashed glances between the truck and her quarry. The bus hit the road. She inched forward, rolled down her window, held out her under-eight-minute ticket, and the attendant waved her on. Three cars were now between her and the bus on the frontage road as they headed toward the freeway.