Superstition (20 page)

“So we got ourselves a woman-killer around here now?” the fat guy asked, looking at Joe and shaking his head. “A hell of a thing for business.”

The dull ache that the bad coffee had almost gotten rid of was back, pounding behind Joe’s temples.

“Frank, you watch my tables for a minute,” the waitress said. “I gotta go call Pammy—that’s my daughter”—that was an aside to Joe—“and tell her to be sure and lock her doors. Her idiot of a husband always leaves them unlocked when he heads off to work.” She started for the back, then paused to lay a hand on Joe’s arm. “Honey, you catch him quick now, you hear?”

“I hear,” Joe said, hoping he sounded less sour than he felt. Then, with Dave on his heels, he slapped some money down on the counter and beat a hasty retreat, thinking,
So much for a peaceful life.

9

T
HE NEXT FEW DAYS were some of the most difficult of Nicky’s life. She flew back to Chicago on Monday. On Tuesday, she went in to work, where the atmosphere was a weird dichotomy of the somber—because of Karen’s death—and the jubilant—because of the buzz the show had generated. On Wednesday, she flew to Kansas City, which was Karen’s hometown. On Thursday morning, she, along with a whole contingent from
Twenty-four Hours Investigates,
attended Karen’s funeral. By Thursday night, she was alone again, back in her apartment in Chicago.

There, at ten minutes before eleven, exhausted and wrung out with emotion, she was wearing a pair of ratty old sweatpants, a baggy T-shirt, and thick, gray sweatsocks—her favorite sleeping gear—with her hair twisted into a haphazard knot on the top of her head and her face shiny with the intensive-moisturizing pack that she sometimes used to fight the skin-damaging effects of too much air travel. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of her queen-sized bed with her laptop balanced on her knees, checking what was almost a week’s worth of e-mail.

With every light in the place blazing. Since Sunday night, she hadn’t been able to stand being alone in the dark. When she wasn’t getting creeped out about a monster who wanted to kill her lurking in the shadows, she was hearing the whispers of a chorus of faceless ghosts.

She was safe in her apartment, she knew. The door was double-locked and chained, the security system was on, and the house of horrors, as she had come to think of it, was roughly a thousand miles away.

None of it could touch her here. And even her memories could be held at bay—as long as she kept the lights on.

She had received hundreds of e-mails, most of them from fans of
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
who had gotten her e-mail address from the show’s website. Nicky scrolled down through them with one eye on the screen and one eye on the TV, on which one of the many incarnations of
Fear Factor
was playing. She wasn’t really paying attention to it; she didn’t even particularly like the show. She just had the TV on because, for one of the few times in her life, she needed its noise, along with the illusion it provided that she wasn’t alone.

Her apartment was a cozy—okay, make that tiny—one bedroom on the twelfth floor of a way-too-expensive high-rise that
almost
had a view of Lake Michigan. Sometimes on a clear day, if she rode up to the exercise club on the top floor and used a little imagination, she thought she could see the flinty blue waters of the lake. Other times, she wasn’t so sure. At any rate, she’d sublet the place, furnished, for the allowed minimum of one year, because TV was an iffy business and by the time August rolled around again, she might well be out of a job, or working on a TV show that was based somewhere other than Chicago.

At any rate, the apartment had all the essentials: a comfortable bed in a bland, white-walled bedroom that was just about big enough to hold it; a white-tiled bathroom; a galley-sized kitchen; and a white-carpeted, white-walled, white-draped combination living-dining area sized so that parties of maybe a dozen or less could crowd into it if they stood really, really close together. Not that she ever had parties. Unless she was attending a work-related function—and she went to a fair number of those—she was strictly a late-to-bed, early-to-rise working girl.

For the first time, Nicky wondered if maybe she was missing something. In Chicago, she had neighbors with whom she exchanged good mornings or good evenings, depending on the time of day when they ran into each other in the halls or elevators, and the occasional piece of misdirected mail; work friends; dozens of acquaintances; and a couple guys she’d gone out with once or twice before deciding that the relationships weren’t going anywhere and were, in fact, more trouble than they were worth. She had lots of friends scattered about the country from other places she had lived, other places she had worked; a fair number of ex-boyfriends, some of whom she actually still spoke to; and more family than any one human being could reasonably be expected to cope with for any extended period of time.

That was her life. That was how she liked it. Neat, uncomplicated, focused on work and getting ahead. Money put away for a rainy day. A substantial enough income—at least as long as
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
stayed on the air—so that she could actually live on it and have money left over.

In other words, it was the exact opposite of the chaos in which she had grown up. Her father had died when she was seven years old. From that time on, the household had been as volatile as Leonora herself. “The gift,” as they all called Leonora’s psychic ability, was a capricious master. It tended to manifest itself without warning, and when she felt it speaking to her, Leonora was liable to forget mundane things, like daughters who needed to be picked up from school or dinner cooking on the stove. Strangers were constantly coming to the house for readings, or, nearly as often, Leonora was being called away to assist with this or that investigation. As young girls, Nicky and Livvy had never known, from one day to the next, if they were going to be spending the night at home with their mother or at Marisa’s house across the island, or at Uncle Ham’s in Charleston. Boyfriends and husbands had moved in and out of Leonora’s life on what was practically a revolving-door basis; Nicky and Livvy had learned not to get too attached to them, because one morning the girls would wake up and the latest man in their mother’s life would be gone.

Money had been a constant problem as well. The other thing that no one seemed to quite get about being a psychic was that it didn’t come with a regular pay-check. Sometimes, as when Leonora had her TV show, money had been plentiful. Other times, it had been a struggle just to keep the utilities on. If it hadn’t been for Twybee Cottage, which Leonora and Ham had inherited from their parents and which, through all the turbulent years, had served as Leonora’s base, many times they might not even have had a home. Leonora had never been less than a loving mother, and Nicky was devoted to her. But wherever Leonora was, turbulence reigned, and Nicky had discovered years ago that turbulence was just not her thing.

So she’d done her best to construct her life so that it held as little turbulence as possible, occasional visits to her mother notwithstanding.

Before tonight, she’d never felt even the tiniest bit lonely.

But now, sitting on the bed in her clean, neat, orderly apartment with only her computer and the TV for company, suddenly she did. She didn’t know what it was, exactly. Maybe Karen’s untimely death and the knowledge that except for the vagaries of fate, her own life could have ended then, too, had suddenly made her conscious of how short life really was. Maybe what she was feeling were the reverberations of that night’s fear, lingering like a bad aftertaste once the danger was over. Maybe she had just been exposed to one too many ghosts. But for whatever reason, she was feeling un-characteristically on edge.

It would have been nice to have somebody to talk to, she reflected—somebody to discuss the e-mails with, for example, or to share the shock and fear and grief of the last week, or even just to keep her company.

Somebody special.

What she was missing, she concluded as she thought about it, was some kind of significant other in her life. A steady boyfriend. A live-in lover. A
man.

She imagined someone tall, lean, and muscular, black-haired, totally hot . . .

Joe Franconi.

She made the ID in an instant. Then, annoyed at herself, she banished the image from her mind.

Maybe, she thought wryly as she focused on the e-mails with renewed determination, she should get a cat.

“. . .
love
the show,” gushed the e-mail she was reading.

Smiling a little, Nicky scrolled down to the next.

“. . . think Leonora James is
amazing.
Where can I get in touch with her?”

That one she would forward to her mother—or, rather, to Marisa, as Leonora didn’t do e-mail.

“. . . do more shows like that? Paranormal stuff is so
in
.”

Glad you think so,
Nicky thought, and clicked on the next message.

Never forget the rule of three
Three times will death come to thee
Three who were connected in daily life
Will walk close together into death’s dark night.

Nicky blinked and read the e-mail again. Slowly.

No salutation, no signature, nothing except the rhyme itself.

Then she looked at the sender’s name.

Lazarus508.

And felt her heart start to pound.

Lazarus—the dead man reborn. And 508 could only stand for May eighth—the day Karen had been murdered.

She realized it with a thrill of horror: The message almost certainly had been sent by the killer.

THE ONLY TIME when sleep steadfastly eluded him was when he desperately needed it. There was irony in there somewhere, Joe knew, but he was too damn tired to care. This was Thursday—a glance at the digital clock glowing from the cable box atop his TV, and he amended that to Friday, because it was now forty-three minutes past twelve—and since Sunday night, he had been working practically around the clock. Everybody was on his ass, from Vince growling at him to solve the case yesterday to little old ladies corralling him in the street to ask things like, “Do you think I should get a dog?” to reporters of various stripes and persuasions, who seemed to have seized Karen Wise’s murder with all its sensational aspects as an antidote to what must obviously be a slow news week. Tonight, he’d said to hell with it shortly after eleven, and had come home to fix himself canned chili and hot dogs, grab a shower, and roll into bed.

Fifteen minutes ago, fed up with lying there in the dark, counting possible killers instead of sheep, he’d rolled right back out again. Now he was sprawled on his couch, channel-surfing, hoping to clear his mind enough so that sleep would come.

The Tonight Show
. . .
Letterman
. . . a
Seinfeld
rerun . . . CNN (hell, no, the current state of the world was
not
conducive to sleep) . . . Comedy Central . . .

His cell phone rang. As it was in the pocket of his pants and his pants were draped across the chair in his bedroom, the sound he heard was more like a muffled bleating. He got up, hotfooted it in bare feet and boxers across the living room’s hardwood floor to the larger of the house’s two bedrooms, stubbed his toe on the jamb, and limped, cursing, to the far corner of the dark bedroom where his ancient Barcalounger reigned supreme. Grabbing his pants, he fished out the insistent phone and snapped it open.

“Joe Franconi,” he growled into it, pissed about his toe and his inability to fall asleep and the generally sucky turn his life had taken lately, and not caring if he sounded like it.

“Um, hi.” The woman on the other end of the phone sounded slightly hesitant. “Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”

“I was awake.” He was sitting in the Barcalounger now, his ankle resting on his knee as he massaged his sore toe. The only light in the whole house was the faint blue glow of the TV in the living room, and the corner where he sat was as dark as a cave. The tiny air-conditioning unit that he had personally bought and installed in the bedroom window—why no one on Pawleys Island seemed to have heard of central air was a continuing mystery to him—rattled nearby. “What can I do for you?”

“This is Nicky Sullivan.”

Nicky Sullivan. He’d been doing his best
not
to think about her since he’d left her mother’s house early Monday morning.

“Hey,” he said.

“I know you’re working on Karen’s murder, and I thought I ought to let you know that I just found a weird e-mail.”

He tried not to picture her—red hair, satiny skin, slim, supple body—and failed miserably. It was the middle of the night—she’d be dressed for bed. An instant image of her in a slinky black nightie with her hair hanging all smooth and shining to her shoulders and her full, red lips pouting at him popped into his head. It took the self-discipline of a Jedi master to banish it. Recalling that the only time he’d actually
seen
her ready for bed, she’d been wearing a ponytail and a granny robe in antacid pink should have helped. It didn’t.

The sad part was, she’d looked sexy, even in that.

“Oh, yeah?” he said.

“Yeah. Do you want me to read it to you?”

“Sure.” And never mind that the husky cadence of her voice made him think of about a hundred and one other uses for her lushly beautiful mouth.

“ ‘Never forget the rule of three/Three times will death come to thee/Three who were connected in daily life/Will walk close together into death’s dark night.’ ”

Joe straightened in the chair. His foot hit the floor. He’d been casting about for some way to get his mind out of the gutter, and she’d just supplied it.

“You want to read that to me one more time?”