Open Season (10 page)

“Most of it, though, is just practice, and learning not to use too much.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Makeup’s easy; I can show you that in less than an hour. What else are you planning to do?”

She felt her face heat up at having to catalog her faults. For goodness’ sake, weren’t they obvious? “Well, my hair. I was thinking about having Wilma put in some highlights—”

“Good God, no!” he exclaimed, horrified.

Daisy sighed. “That was pretty much the same reaction I got from my family.”

“Listen to them,” he advised. “They know whereof they speak. Wilma hasn’t kept up with the trends or the new developments in chemicals. I doubt she’s been to a hair show since she got her license forty years ago. There are some good stylists in either Huntsville or Chattanooga who won’t burn your hair off at the scalp.”

Daisy shuddered at the mental picture of herself bald. Todd lifted a strand of her hair and fingered it. “Your hair’s in good shape,” he said. “There’s no discernable style, but it’s healthy.”

“It doesn’t have any body.” Now that she had gotten started, she was determined not to leave out the slightest flaw.

“That’s no problem. Getting some of this length cut off will help, and there are some marvelous products available now to give hair more body and make it more manageable, too. Lightening it will give it more body, too.” He studied her again. “Forget highlights. I think you should go blond.”

“B-blond?” she squeaked. She couldn’t even picture herself as a blonde. She could barely conceive of how she would look with a few highlights in her hair.

“Nothing brassy,” he said. “We’ll have the stylist put in several shades, so it will look natural.”

For someone who had never even put a temporary rinse on her hair, bleaching her hair to several shades of blond seemed at least as difficult as putting a man on the moon. “H-how long would that take?”

“Oh, several hours, I’d think. Your hair will have to be double-processed.”

“What’s that?”

“Your own pigment will have to be bleached out, then blond pigment streaked in to replace it.”

Well, at least that made sense. She didn’t know if she’d ever have the nerve to do anything that drastic, but it was an option she could consider. “I’ll think about it,” she said dubiously.

“Think hard,” he said. “What else?”

She sighed. “My clothes. I have no sense of style.”

He looked at the skirt and blouse she wore. She had changed out of her pants as soon as she got home, because she couldn’t stand another minute of worrying about whether or not people were looking at her butt. “Actually, you do,” he drawled. “Unfortunately, it’s all bad.”

Her cheeks turned red, and he laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said kindly, extending a hand to help her to her feet. “You just never learned how to make the most of yourself. You have a lot of potential.”

“I do?”

“You do.” He made a circling motion with his finger. “Turn around. Slowly.”

Self-consciously she did so.

“You have a good figure,” he said. “You should show it, instead of hiding it inside those old-lady clothes. Your skin is excellent, you have good teeth, and I like those odd eyes you have. I’ll bet you’ve been embarrassed by your eyes all your life, haven’t you?”

She almost squirmed, because as a child she’d been hideously aware of her different-colored eyes and always tried to blend into the background so no one would notice them. “For God’s sake, play them up,” Todd said. “They’re different, special. It isn’t as if you have one brown eye and one blue, which would really look weird, and I don’t know if it’s genetically possible anyway. You’ll never be a ravishing beauty, but you can definitely be very, very nice to look at.”

“That’s all I want, anyway,” she said. “I don’t think I could handle ravishing.”

“I’ve heard it’s a burden,” he said, smiling at her. “The best light is in my bathroom. So step into my boudoir, if you dare, and let’s get started on this transformation.”

Daisy extracted a small bag from her purse. “I brought my makeup.”

“Let’s see what you have.” He took the bag from her and opened it. He didn’t make a
tsking
sound, but she got the feeling he barely refrained. “That will do for a start,” he said with kind forbearance.

He lead the way through his bedroom to the bath, and if Daisy had ever harbored any doubts about Todd’s sexual affiliation, his bedroom settled it. It was exquisitely furnished in Chippendale, with a huge four-poster bed that was swathed in graceful swags of netting, and with huge, lush potted plants artistically arranged around the room. She wished her own bedroom looked half as good.

My goodness, even his bathroom was decorated. He’d done it in green and white, with touches of peach and dusty blues. She’d never been in a man’s bathroom before, she realized. She was faintly disappointed to see an ordinary toilet, though of course there was no reason for him to have a urinal hanging on the wall. Besides, it wouldn’t have gone with the decor.

“I don’t have a vanity chair, sorry,” he said, smiling again. “Men don’t sit down to shave.”

She’d never thought of it before, but he was right; shaving was something else men didn’t sit down to do.

“Okay, first get your hair away from your face. Do you have a headband or anything?”

She shook her head.

“Then tuck it behind your ears and brush it away from your forehead.”

She did as he said. That awful self-conscious feeling was back; her fingers were clumsy, unable to manage the simple act of tucking her hair behind her ears without fumbling. She suspected she’d stumble over her own feet if she had to walk anywhere right now.

He opened a drawer in the built-in vanity and took out a box, about ten inches wide and five inches thick. He flicked the clasp, raised the lid, and trays unfolded—trays filled with all sorts of brushes and lipsticks, arrays of colors for the eyes and cheeks all displayed in little containers. “My goodness,” she blurted. “You have more makeup than Wal-Mart.”

He laughed. “Not quite. This box brings back memories, though. I was on Broadway for a while, and you have to slather on layers of makeup to keep from looking like a ghost when the lights hit you.”

“That sounds like fun. I’ve never been to New York. I’ve never done much of anything.”

“It
was
fun.”

“Why did you come back?”

“It wasn’t home,” he said simply “Besides, Mother needed someone to take care of her. That’s the way it works: they take care of you when you’re young, you take care of them when they’re old.”

“Family,” she said, smiling, because her own was so close.

“Exactly. Now,” he said, his tone turning brisk, “let’s get started.”

Less than an hour later, entranced, Daisy stared into the mirror. Her lips parted in wonder. Oh, she wasn’t a raving beauty, but the woman in the mirror was attractive, and she looked confident, lively. She didn’t fade into the wallpaper. And most important, men would notice her!

The process hadn’t been painless. First Todd had insisted she pluck her eyebrows: “You don’t want Joan Crawford eyebrows, dear. She had one brow hair that grew to about three inches long, and she named it Oscar, or something like that.” But thankfully he hadn’t wanted her to have Bette Davis eyes, either, so she’d been able to limit the tweezing to a few stragglers.

Then he had walked her through the application of a full makeup job, and, to her relief, it wasn’t very complicated. The main thing was not to use too much, and to always have a tissue and cotton tip at hand to repair any mistakes or wipe off excess. Even mascara was easy, once she had used the tissue to blot most of the goop off the little brush before applying it to her lashes.

“Heathens,” she had muttered, surveying her lovely dark lashes in the mirror. There wasn’t a caterpillar in sight.

“Beg pardon?”

“Mascara makers. They’re heathens. Why don’t they just tell you to blot most of the mascara off the brush before you start?”

“Honey, they have enough to worry about warning people not to poke it in their eyes, or eat it. I guess they figure if you really want to wear mascara, you’ll learn how.”

Well, she had wanted, and she had learned.

“I did it,” she said numbly, staring at her reflection. Her complexion was smooth and bright, her cheeks softly flushed, her eyes mysterious and larger, her lips full and moist. It hadn’t been difficult at all.

“Well, honey, of course you did. There’s nothing to it; just practice and don’t go overboard with the color. Now, let’s think about style. Which would you rather shoot for: nature girl, old money, or sex kitten?”

Todd stood in his open front door and cheerfully waved a good-bye to Daisy. He couldn’t help smiling. This was the first time he’d ever spent any time with her, though of course he’d known who she was, and he really liked her. She was touchingly naive for someone her age, but fresh and bright and honest, without a jaded bone in her body. She had absolutely no idea how to make the most of her looks, but, thank God, he did. When he was finished with her, she was going to be a knockout.

He strode to the phone and dialed a number. As soon as the call was answered on the other end, he said, “I have a candidate. Daisy Minor.”

G
lenn Sykes was a professional. He was careful, he paid attention to details, and he didn’t let himself get emotionally involved. He’d never spent a day in jail; in fact, he even had a clean driving record, without so much as a speeding ticket to his name. Not that he hadn’t had a speeding ticket, but the driver’s license he’d presented had been in a different name, an alternate identity he’d prudently set up for himself some fifteen years previously.

One of the reasons he was successful was that he didn’t draw attention to himself. He wasn’t loud, he seldom drank—and never when he was working, only when he was alone—and he always kept himself neat and clean, on the theory that law-abiding people were more likely to keep an eagle eye on anyone hanging around who looked dirty and unkempt, as if dirt somehow
translated into shiftiness. Anyone who saw him would automatically categorize him as Joe Average, with a wife and a couple of kids, and a three-bedroom house in an older subdivision. He didn’t wear an earring, or a chain, or have a tattoo; all those, however small, were things that people noticed. He kept his sandy brown hair cut fairly short, he wore an ordinary thirty-dollar wristwatch even though he could afford much better, and he watched his mouth. He could and did go anywhere without drawing undue attention.

That was why he was so disgusted with Mitchell. The dead girl wasn’t anyone important, but her body, when it was discovered, would still draw attention. The resultant investigation probably wouldn’t amount to much, and he’d been careful to make certain the cops wouldn’t have anything to go on, but mistakes happened and even cops got lucky occasionally. Mitchell was jeopardizing the entire enterprise; Sykes had no doubt that if Mitchell was ever arrested in connection with those girls’ deaths, he’d drop every name he’d ever known in an effort to strike a deal with the D.A. Mitchell’s stupidity could get every one of them a prison sentence.

The hell of it was, if Mitchell couldn’t get it up with a conscious woman, there were other ways to do it. GHB was a crap shoot; you might take it one time and be okay, with just a gap in your memory. The next time, it could shut down your brain. There were other drugs that would work; hell, booze would work. But, no, Mitchell had to slip them GHB, like he was getting away with something and no one would notice when the girls didn’t wake up.

So Mitchell had to go. If Mayor Nolan hadn’t given the word, Sykes had already decided it was time for him to be moving on, before Mitchell brought them all
down. But the mayor, for all his southern-fucking-gentleman manners, was as cold and ruthless as anyone Sykes had ever met; he didn’t pretend that he couldn’t sully his hands with murder—though Sykes didn’t exactly call killing Mitchell
murder.
It was more of an extermination, like stepping on a cockroach.

First, though, he had to find the bastard. With a cockroach’s talent for self-preservation, Mitchell had gone to ground and hadn’t turned up at any of his usual haunts.

Since Mitchell was already spooked, Sykes decided to play this low-key. While it would have been satisfying to simply walk up to the bastard’s trailer and put a hole between his eyes as soon as he opened the door, again, things like that tended to attract attention. For one thing, Mitchell had neighbors, and in Sykes’s experience neighbors were always looking out the window just when they shouldn’t. He could dispose of Mitchell in far less dramatic ways. With luck, he could even make it look like an accident.

Mitchell knew his car, so Sykes borrowed one from a pal and cruised through Mitchell’s neighborhood, if you could call two ramshackle trailers and one dilapidated frame house, surrounded by junk, a neighborhood. They were the types of places inhabited by women with frizzy hair who wore tight, stained tank tops that showed their dirty bra straps, and by men with long, straggly hair, yellowed teeth, and an unshaken belief that life had done them wrong and owed them something. Sykes didn’t openly look at any of the three places as he drove by; with his peripheral vision he searched for Mitchell’s blue pickup, but it wasn’t there. He’d drive by again after dark, see if any lights were on, but he didn’t really expect the cockroach to turn up again so soon.

Seeing how Mitchell lived always reminded Sykes of how narrow his own escape had been. If he hadn’t been smarter, made better decisions, he might
be
Mitchell. Now, that was a scary thought. But he came from the same trashy background; he knew exactly how Mitchell thought, how he operated. In his work that was a plus, but Sykes never wanted to actually live that way again. He wanted
more.
Hell, Mitchell probably wanted more, too, but he was never going to get more because he kept making those stupid decisions.

With an eye to the future, Sykes salted away every dollar he could. He lived simply, but cleanly. He had no expensive habits or vices. He even played the stock market a little, with conservative stocks that didn’t perform spectacularly, but nevertheless always posted a gain. One day, when he had enough—though he wasn’t certain exactly how much was enough—he would walk away from everything and move where no one knew him, start a small business, settle down as a respected member of the community. Hell, he might even get married, have a couple of rugrats. His imagination couldn’t quite conjure up that picture, but nevertheless it was possible.