The Taken (11 page)

“What?” Kit asked.

Marin flipped the screen her way. “Please tell me you don’t know him.”

Kit rocketed to her feet, pointing at the screen. “That’s the guy who attacked me!”

Nodding, Grif straightened, too. Marin cursed, then pulled the screen back around, scrolling down. “Lance Arnold Schmidt, forty-two years old, born in L.A., moved here when he was twelve. Divorced, no kids, and . . .” She looked away from the computer, into Kit’s eyes. “Vice sergeant in charge of the sexual crimes division.”

Shit.
Kit looked at Grif. “He’s a cop.”

H
e’s the cleaner,” Grif said, earning a steely, considered look from Marin, and causing Kit to stare. The image of him flying from the corner of her bedroom flashed through her mind. He’d emerged like a dark knight to beat back a murderer—a
cop—
and he hadn’t been scared then. Even with this new knowledge he didn’t look scared. “Dirty cop,” he muttered darkly, shaking his head.

“He could be the one organizing the prostitution ring,” Marin added, thoughts flashing so quickly across her face it was like reading a ticker tape. “But he’s not calling the shots.”

“How do you know?” Kit asked.

Marin leaned back in her chair. “The powers-that-be don’t dirty their own soft palms. Those who can afford it pay for distance from their crimes.”

“Let me see that,” Kit said, coming around to Marin’s side of the desk. Lance Schmidt’s hard face, looking into the camera lens so directly, caused an involuntary shudder to run through her. “I’m going to call Dennis.”

Marin looked up sharply. “You sure? He’s a cop, too.”

Kit reached for her purse. “He’s a friend.”

Grif was beside her so quickly she jumped. His hand was hot on her arm, his fingertips like wires. “No heat.”

Glaring, Kit jerked away. “I told you. He’s a friend, and there’s no way he’s in on something like—”

“I don’t care,” Grif said shortly. “Schmidt is getting away with this, so he ain’t working alone. It’s like a web. Something touches one corner of it, and the reverberations are felt across the entire network. So no cops.”

Kit finally nodded. No cops for now. She leaned back over the desk. “Let’s dig deeper, then. But I don’t want him to know we’re looking.”

Marin looked up at her. “You mean the family archives?”

It wouldn’t erase their e-tracks entirely, but there was nothing to be done about that. The police had resources.

But Kit had Aunt Marin, who wasn’t only the editor-in-chief of the
Las Vegas Tribune,
she was an information magpie. Every story by every reporter in the last thirty years had been meticulously archived, whether it ended up running in the paper or not. There were plenty of reasons the latter might happen—political sensitivity, timeliness, speculation that couldn’t be corroborated—but Marin believed knowledge should be preserved, even prized.

Reporters had learned over the years to capitalize on her insatiable appetite for information. A small bit of gossip, properly dated and vetted, could earn a free lunch or a plum assignment, in addition to a byline. A tiny fact, woven in with others, might be rewarded at bonus time. As for the undocumented tips and reports, Marin called those “potholders”—something a preschooler could cobble together and not particularly valuable, but damned handy when the kitchen got hot.

Some journalists called her a gossip, a scandal addict who hoarded secrets and held them over the heads of the powerful and wealthy in order to gain personal favor and exclusive stories. But Marin had never blackmailed anyone, and was the least political person Kit knew. Besides, she knew what others couldn’t . . . her aunt came by the habit honestly, learning it from
her
grandfather, who began the secret archives when he took over the paper. Yet no one would ever suggest the honorable Dean S. Wilson, who had a school and a street and a day named after him, was a slanderer. But Marin was a woman, and Marin was in charge. Those inclined to find fault would do so for those reasons alone.

For Kit, Marin’s info-hoarding meant only two things. First, she wasn’t the one who had to buy everyone lunch. And second, she had access to a treasure trove of information in the family archives that went all the way back to the paper’s inception in 1932.

“It’ll take time, but a cop isn’t squeaky-clean one day and then running flesh the next,” Kit said. “Not in an operation of this size. I bet there were rumors. There had to be other lists his name popped on first.”

Marin considered it. “My sources at Metro have been a little tight lately, but they were flush ten years ago, about the time Schmidt hit the force.”

“So anything from then ’til now,” Kit said, then remained hunched over the computer as she peered up at Grif. “Meanwhile, since I’m operating in shades of gray, you might as well gimme one of your names.”

Grif backed up a step. “What, now?”

Marin honed in on his reticence like a circling hawk. “What names?”

“He’s working on a cold case,” Kit said quickly, defending Grif though she didn’t know why. “He needs our help.”

Marin’s gaze narrowed. “Why can’t he go to the cops?”

Kit pointed to the obvious, Detective Schmidt’s face on the screen. “He. Saved. My. Life.” She turned to Grif. “Name?”

Looking down, he shifted his weight, hands shoved deep into his pockets. After a moment, he lifted his eyes and stared at Marin.

Marin huffed and rolled her shoulders. “I’m going to Starbucks. Text me if Mr. Shaw here happens to save your life again while I’m gone. Or if anything pops on Schmidt.”

She walked out without looking back.

Grif shifted his eyes. “Breath of fresh air.”

“Minty,” Kit agreed, settling herself in Marin’s still-warm chair. “Name?”

“Evelyn,” he said at last. “Evelyn Shaw.”

Kit typed it in, aware that he’d grown unnaturally still after moving to stand behind her.
Shaw,
just like him. Was it a sister? Or a wife? Kit wondered as she scrolled through the search results. She’d caught the way his eyes tightened at the corners, which had her automatically leaning toward the latter, and which meant she’d have to put even brief thoughts of his full bottom lip out of her mind.

Yet there was only one hit, and it was from fifty years earlier. Brows raised, she leaned back. “You weren’t kidding when you said it’s an old case.”

Evelyn Shaw, age twenty-four, had died in a casino robbery. The Marquis, one of the oldest, had also been the ritziest in its time. It’d since been demolished, of course. Newer was better, or so the thought went . . . all the way up until it wasn’t. Las Vegas had lost much of the glitter and kitsch that’d made it shine, and the unfinished, unfunded white elephant that now stood in The Marquis’ stead was proof enough of that.

The article Kit pulled up was just an old police blotter, there had to be more, but the caption alone had her riveted. “Starlet Dies in Botched Bungalow Robbery.” And linked to it was a photo. “Wow. She was beautiful.”

Slim in a way Kit could only dream of, Evelyn Shaw was also bright-faced and beaming, unaware at the time the photo was taken that her life would be short. And her end was brutal. An attack in one of the hotel’s courtyard bungalows that had been so fashionable back then. No witnesses, no leads.

God, Kit thought, looking at the poor woman’s dainty features, had someone killed this man’s beloved grandmother?

Grif’s silence and unnerving stillness prevented Kit from asking, but she wanted to know more—and yes, to help him, too. She did so in the only way she could. Fingers flying over the keys, she said, “Let me go deeper.”

But a ping sounded, a flash from Marin’s search, and Grif let out a long exhale behind her. Later then, she thought, sensing his relief. Right now, Schmidt . . .

“Ah, so you’ve had your hand slapped before,” she said, as Schmidt’s face lit the screen again, less jarring this time. It wasn’t solid intelligence, which is why Marin hadn’t found it in the official search, just some hearsay by a reporter who’d befriended some runaways and, Kit noted, who transferred to a newspaper in the Midwest shortly after. “Schmidt was forced into paid leave when he was on patrol. A motorist filed a civil suit against him.”

“For what?”

“Misconduct of a public officer, coercion using physical force, and oppression under color of office.”

“Let me guess. The motorist was female.”

Good guess. “Charges were dropped, his patrol term was up, and he requested transfer to the sexual crimes unit.”

“Where he used his position to coerce and oppress women who make their living off the streets . . . at least until you and your girlfriend decided to play Nancy Drew.”

Kit couldn’t even work up ire at the jab. Schmidt’s idea of coercion was alive in the bruises on her flesh. “And now he’s after me.”

Grif jerked his chin at the computer. “Cross-reference the names. See if there’s a connection between Schmidt and any of the others.”

“Good idea.”

“I know,” he said drily.

“Marin will do it,” Kit decided, and set about writing her aunt a quick note.

“Why not you?”

“Because I need to do some creative thinking.”

Grif shook his head. “Which means?”

It meant her little story on prostitutes, johns, and the motivations of each had evolved into an editorial on a prostitution ring and a crooked cop. There was murder, attempted murder, and a list of politicians powerful enough to destroy a small principality.

And don’t forget the sexy stranger who’d assigned himself as your protector, she thought, with a glance Grif’s way. One clearly harboring secrets of his own.

“What do you mean?” Grif asked again, impatiently.

Blowing the bangs from her forehead, Kit tossed the pen and finally looked up. “It means, Mr. Shaw, that I need to get my hair pinned.”

Chapter Nine

I
t was a relief to get out of the office, and not only because of Kit’s aunt, the haranguer who seemed to know there was more to Grif than met her eagle-eye. Maybe she recognized him in a way Kit couldn’t. She’d lived through more decades, after all—the Age of Aquarius, the end of the Cold War. She’d probably dined as an adult at Windows on the World.

And she was sick, he could see it. Her outline didn’t spark with plasma like those being chased by death, but phosphor was burned around her in a permanent etheric sear, a static etching of how close she’d come to death.

But it was the computers beeping, the printers running, the phones constantly ringing—even in every damned pocket of the people walking by—that was really getting to him. It was nearly more overwhelming than the sensations that accompanied being wrapped in flesh.

What was it about this generation that they needed to be so
connected
? Wasn’t there something to be said for autonomy? For holding court in your own head? For putting your heel to the sidewalk and lone-wolfing it until you reached your own damned destination?

And now the word-hound he’d somehow found himself yoked to wanted to put the investigation—
his
destination—on pause so she could put rollers in her hair. God help him, she’d said it helped her think!

At least Marin was going to keep working on a connection between the listed men. Grif had also suggested getting a file going on any of the women Schmidt had busted, going back a couple of years. One of those might be willing to lure a nosy young reporter to her room in return for clemency.

“Here we are! Fleur Fontaine’s Beauty Boutique. The best pin-ups for pinups!”

Jesus, the way this woman could turn a simple sentence into bird chatter. He didn’t want to see her hurt or dying, but her constant need to look on the sunny side of every sullied coin made him want to punch a blue jay in the beak.

“You coming?” she said, poking her head back in the car when he didn’t move.

Grif stared straight ahead. “I ain’t hanging out in no beauty joint.”

“Aw, c’mon. I want to introduce you to Fleur.”

“I’m not going.” He should though. He was responsible for her being alive, which meant he was also responsible for keeping her that way. But since he was also responsible for her fated death, the reminder just made him cranky. He folded his arms over his chest.

“She moonlights as a burlesque dancer,” she said in the blue jay voice. “She can do things with tassels that will make your mouth water. I bet she’d show you if you asked nice.”

“You’re off your rocker, lady.”

Kit tilted her head. “Why are you mad?”

Why
aren’t
you? Grif thought, brows furrowing, which was when he realized he really was sore. “We’re supposed to be working a case.”

She shrugged. “Nothing to be done until Marin cross-checks those names. Come in where it’s warm.”

“What about Evelyn? You were supposed to help me find out what happened to her.”

“I will,” she said, but her softening expression, a mixture of pity and sympathy, hardened him further.

“When?”

“As soon as I don’t feel like Medusa.”

And at that, Grif climbed from the stupid, foreign, low-slung car and glared at her across the soft hood. “You’re supposed to be some modern-day woman, working hard for justice, doing a man’s job . . . but you’re going to stop to get your hair done?”

Kit tilted her head, then pursed her bottom lip so it looked like a soft pink pillow. Grif tore his gaze away. “Aw, Grif. You’re cranky again. Need a hug?”

“I’m a P.I.,” Grif replied through gritted teeth. “I need a lead.”

Kit fisted her hands on her bell-shaped hips, another part of her anatomy Grif was trying not to notice. Especially considering the subject matter. “Your Evelyn has been dead for fifty years, Grif. She isn’t gonna mind two more hours.”

But Grif damned well minded.

So he’d turned without another word, and left Kit calling after him on the cracked sidewalk. He wasn’t a patsy and he didn’t wait for women to tame their updos before working a case. Now, five blocks away—give or take five blocks—he was utterly lost. At least he had his map.

“That thing’s upside down, man,” said a young man in baggy pants.

“Mind your own business,” Grif snapped, and stared until the man scurried off. Then he flipped the map around. He needed a place to stay while slumming on the mudflat, and as sore as he was with Kit, with a rogue cop on her trail, she needed one as well. Problem was, fifty years gone meant most people his age were now dying of
natural
causes, and he hadn’t known all that many to begin with. Not in Vegas.

Though there was someone.

“Question is,” Grif muttered, squinting up at the street sign, “is the old wop still alive?”

W
ho’s the hottie?”

Fleur was standing at the plate-glass window when Kit entered the salon, and probably had been since Kit pulled her Duetto to a stop at the curb. It was earlier than normal business hours, so they had the place to themselves, the usual chatter and hum of hair dryers missing. Fleur held a steaming cup of coffee out to Kit, cradling a second in perfectly lacquered fingers, tips long and moon-shaped and as red as a stop sign. Her simple, scoop-necked dress matched, though its fishtail hem put Kit in mind of a bullfighter, appropriate as it spoke to Fleur’s Spanish heritage and it was how she faced every day—poised, engaged, and ready for anything.

“I don’t really know,” Kit said, and shook her head. Who
was
the man who’d saved her from death and, if her gut-check was right, rape? Who was this stranger who dressed like all her other rockabilly friends, in a fedora and loose-fitting suit, but one that fit him so authentically it could have been tailored for him?

Who was Griffin Shaw?

Fleur swung a hip, the bullfighter cape flaring, letting out a whistle as she turned away from the window. “Looks like Handsome and Exciting’s illegitimate love child.”

“More like Terse and Cryptic’s outlaw cousin,” Kit muttered, following.

Fleur raised a brow as she gestured to her chair. “Sounds like your type,” she said, though she didn’t say it like it was a good thing.

Kit made a face, but the tension left her as Fleur swiveled her around to face the mirror. Unfortunately, tension was the fundamental ingredient keeping her upright. Kit met her friend’s eyes in the mirror, and they both fell still. It was only the welling tears, but the mirror seemed like a water wall, reflecting all the grief Kit had dammed up just to keep moving.

“Nic loved this place,” she said, voice breaking.

She had, in fact, been the one to encourage Fleur to open it two years earlier. Fleur had been cutting and coloring their hair since junior high. She’d given Kit her first Middy haircut, and taught her how to do a proper Victory Roll. Making a living was incidental.

“I should pay my clients,” Fleur had protested, when approached by Nic and Kit with the idea of the salon. “They allow me to touch them in an intimate way. Lovers are allowed to touch a person’s hair and head. Parents and children. Other than that, it’s a social taboo.”

But Fleur’s passion for her art made it impossible not to think of her as an intimate friend. Even Marin softened under Fleur’s loving touch. Kit brought her aunt in after chemo turned the stubble from her once-blond hair to gray ash, and Fleur handled the new tufts like priceless china, saying each strand gleamed with wisdom and experience and strength. Marin sailed from her chair like she had wings of silver, and it was that intimacy and touch Kit needed today.

Too bad there wasn’t a way to explain that to Grif.

Leaning forward, Fleur wrapped her arms around Kit, so close to her neck that she tensed for a moment, remembering the violation of the night before. Then she relaxed, the embrace soothing her like a balm. “I didn’t want to bring it up first. You were besties. But, oh, I’m going to miss her.”

Kit rose at that, and they hugged hard. “Nic’s gone, and the whole world is worse for it.”

That was the real tragedy, the constant heartbreak that’d remained with Kit in the long night of her undreaming. So they wept in each other’s arms, in lieu of the friend they really wanted to hold, and while they did, Kit couldn’t help thinking it was their duty to fully embrace this life, if only because Nic no longer could.

And fight for her, too, Kit thought, pulling away and wiping at her face. She sniffled, and looked into Fleur’s no longer so-perfectly-powdered face. She sniffled again. “Nic would hate what I’ve done with my hair.”

Fleur pursed pinup lips. “Yes. She would.”

They laughed, without humor, before falling silent, each feeling the moment moving away, but neither wishing to leave Nic’s memory behind. But that was life, wasn’t it? It went on.

Or, sometimes, it was interrupted by Buddy Holly’s “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”

Kit wiped her face as she pulled her cell from her leopard-print bag. Fleur leaned over her shoulder, and Kit caught the distaste on her friend’s face in the mirror. “Well, now the ringtone makes sense.”

Kit shook her head sadly as she sat again, silencing the call and erasing Paul’s accompanying picture at the same time. “I actually used to like that song.”

She’d picked it for him because it’d annoy him if he ever heard it, a virtual impossibility but a pleasing idea all the same. It also reminded her of the cool, gradual way he’d let Kit—and the rest of the world—know how important he planned to be. Only a few summers ago had they listened to it and other rockabilly songs in what Kit had begun thinking of as the beginning of the end of their relationship. They’d driven down the Strip in her convertible, the hot night whispering against their soft skin, smiling as they ignored the sweat because sweat was what they did back then.

But by Christmas everything had grown cold, and he was telling stories that rarely included her, and making plans that never did. They drove down the same stretch of asphalt with the top up, and he spent the whole time pointing out the things he intended to leave behind, mostly places and memories they’d shared. Then it was on to talk about a law appointment he felt entitled to, a potential summer internship with a political candidate she already found suspect, and a disdain for her clothing, her alternative lifestyle . . . her.

Kit knew he thought he was sharing his dreams with her, but by then it could have been anyone riding alongside him in that car.

“Ah, he loved you,” Fleur said unconvincingly, when Kit shared these thoughts with her.

“Please,” Kit said, tossing the phone back into her bag. “The only bone in my body he ever loved was his.”

“Shh. Not so loud.” Fleur held her scissors to the side as she leaned close, voice melodramatic. “Contact shame.”

“Was he really that bad?” Kit asked, though what she was really wondering was, Was I really that blind?

“Don’t worry, honey,” Fleur said, scissors flying like she could snip away Kit’s worry along with her split ends. “We’ve all had judgment lapses that had us tiptoeing toward our own personal apocalypse. Besides, Paul started out all right. Then he was tainted by the lure of zeroes in his bank account.”

“A need for obscene wealth is just a symptom of his disease.”

“Which is?”

“A profound lack of self-worth.”

Fleur snorted. “That’s because deep down he knows he gets through life on white male privilege and looks rivaling Narcissus. I mean, what kind of man looks over his shoulder just to see who’s watching him?”

Kit thought about the way Grif had walked away from her—back ramrod-straight, steps even and unhurried and sure—never once looking back. “Yeah, well you know Paul. He wants to give the appearance of being ‘fiscally sound.’ ”

“Fiscally sound?”

Kit held up her palms. “His words, not mine.”

“I’m fiscally sound,” Fleur declared after a moment. “I’m a sound thousandaire.”

Kit snorted. “I’m potentially wealthy, but totally unsound.”

“And he loved you because of the first part of that sentence.” Fleur smiled through the mirror. “The rest of us love you because of the last.”

“Unsound is a good adjective. Unfortunately, Paul has other adjectives for me.” Stubborn. Irresponsible. Strange.

Sensing the serious turn, Fleur cleared her throat. “Enough about Paul. He’s so fake he should have ‘Made in China’ stamped on his ass. Tell me about Mr. Tall, Dark, and Dangerous. Let this old married woman live vicariously through you.”

Kit rolled her eyes—Fleur was both younger than her
and
insatiably hot for her rocker husband—but she went with it, spilling everything about the previous night, how she’d been nearly dead on her feet—too sad, exhausted, and outnumbered to do much more than flail when she’d been attacked in her own home. “One guy was a cop, we think. I’m sure he had some part in Nic’s death. I don’t know about the other, but Grif drove both of them away.”

Fleur, who’d fallen utterly still at the beginning of the telling, came to life, waving her scissors and comb around so wildly
she
looked homicidal. “But you have to go to the police!”