Unforgettable (21 page)

“Now we know why there are no vampires in Italy,” Greg said.

Vampires? All that came to mind was a vague image of a black cloak and an incredible set of teeth.

“What’s a vampire?” she felt free to ask him. So many questions had come to mind this evening but she’d restrained herself, not wanting to appear stupid in front of his friends. But Greg knew her the way no one else did and realized she had so much to relearn.

“Vampires are just a myth—a fairy tale.”

“Like the girl with the hood?”

He chuckled. “Yeah. Like Little Red Riding Hood. In the islands we have stories about the
menehune,
the little people. They’re like the leprechauns in Ireland.”

Lucky stopped, the warm surf rushing over her toes, curling around them and then retreating, sucking the sand out from beneath her feet. “Ireland. I can visualize it. Near England, right? And they’re always fighting?
”
she asked, and he nodded. “But I can’t think what a mena-who looks like or a leprechaun.”

“Men-ee-who-nee,” he e
nunciated each syllable. “They’r
e small
…
very small people.”

A word hovered in her mind; it was a second before she remembered it.
“Midgets.”

“Smaller than that, actually. Hey, this is a fantasy. They don’t exist except in people’s minds, but there are lots of stories about them.” Greg pointed to the vast expanse of dark water. “See the moonlight on the waves? According to legend, sparkling water means the
menehunes
are dancing on it.”

“How sweet,” Lucky commented, but inside she was more than a little disturbed. Not only was there a real world she had
to relearn, but a vast imaginary world as well. Was there no end to the things she’d forgotten? “Tell me about the vampire. I’m thinking big teeth here.”

“I was trying to make a joke,” he explained. “Vampires are supposed to be men with fangs. They pounce on unsuspecting women—usually late at night when they’re sleeping—and suck blood from their necks.”

“Oh, yuck!
”
She tried to imagine someone’s teeth embedded in her ne
ck but saw Rudy’s teeth instead.
Lucky hastily slipped her hand into her pocket and touched the shark’s tooth. “What do vampires have to do with Italy?”

“Garlic protects you from vampires. You know about garlic?”

“Sure,” she said without hesitation. “Every cook knows about garlic, but how does it protect you from vampires?”

“It’s just a silly story.” Greg seemed to be watching her intently, his gaze focused on her lips. “I was trying to make a joke. There are no vampire myths in Italy because they use so much garlic. It’s supposed to ward off vampires. Tonight the pasta had enough garlic in it to kill a pack of vampires, but since we both had some, it doesn’t matter if I kiss you.” He lowered his head and, too late, Lucky raised her hands to keep him from kissing her. Her palms hit his chest as his mouth closed over hers and his arms circled her waist. In an instant she was engulfed in heat. His or hers? She couldn’t tell.

The warmth of his body was so male, so comforting. She arched against him, opening her mouth to accommodate him and accept the moist thrust of his tongue as it mated with hers. Beneath her hand, still pinned against his torso, his heart thundered. Lower, she felt the jutting hardness against the soft folds of her skirt. Oh, my, she thought. Anticipating.

Breaking the kiss, Greg whispered, “Pretend I’m a vampire.”

Lucky recognized the teasing laughter in his voice and almost responded by giggling. Until his lips found the sensitive spot at the curve of her neck. She’d never felt anything quite like
this. He nipped, a gentle tap of his teeth, and heat shot through her all the way to her toes, until they curled into the sand.

“There’s some truth to this vampire stuff,” she murmured.

He stopped kissing her neck and gazed down at her. Unable to help herself, Lucky reached up and unbuttoned his shirt. They were quite a ways from the restaurant now and it was dark except for the full moon, but she could see his tanned chest as she shoved the panels of his shirt aside, aware of him watching her every move.

She longed to put her lips on his bare skin, feel him stiffen, then respond as her lips blazed a trail across those taut muscles. Letting out her breath in a soft rush, Lucky allowed her fingertips to nudge through the springy hair and caress his raised nipples.

A surge of desire like a swift-rising tide, even more potent from all the times she’d resisted temptation, returned full force. Each encounter took more strength of will, wearing her down until they both knew it was only a matter of time.

Having allowed herself this much, she couldn’t turn back. She explored the hard contours of his chest. One inch at a time. Returning again and again to those intriguing male nipples and the whisk of hair between them, savoring the virile masculinity of his body.

“Angel,” he said, manacling her wandering hand at the wrist. “You want me. Why deny it?”

In her heart she knew he was right, but she refused to admit she was this weak, this easy. Yet she couldn’t have pushed him away if her life depended on it. His hand closed over her breast, hot and ruthless like the flare of passion in his eyes.

“We can’t keep our hands off each other. Why fight it?”

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t push his hand away either as his thumb found her taut nipple and caressed it through the thin fabric, making it throb. And beg for more. He lowered his head again, kissing her, pressing his lower body against hers. Hot and hard.

A burst of laughter from somewhere up the beach brought
Lucky to her senses. They were on a public beach, for heaven’s sake! Some distant part of her brain told her that if she didn’t stop right now, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She pulled back, staring at him, trying to catch her breath and wondering what
to say.

“Come on, angel. Let’s go home and hop in bed.”

“No,” she mustered the strength to say. “I’m sleeping alone.”

He went still, gazing at her with heavy-lidded eyes.
“
How many times do we have to go through this?”

“
I
want to be someone special.” She tried to explain what she was feeling, but it wasn’t coming out right. Working with Abbie today, Lucky had begun to regain some measure of self
-
esteem. But she wasn’t quite there yet. She didn’t want to slip back and become a woman who relied on sex to get what she wanted. “I keep seeing that face in the mirror. I don’t want to be a tramp with blonde hair. I don’t want to behave the way I did that night in the tent.”

Greg didn’t respond. Instead, he took his time and slowly buttoned his shirt. He was angry with her, and she couldn’t blame him. She was angry with herself. This had been a perfect evening, her first date. The beginning of a new life. So what had she done? Ruined it.

He tucked in his shirt. “You are special. I just don’t know what it’s going to take to convince you.”

“I feel better than I’ve
felt… s
ince the accident,” she said, not adding that today for the first time she’d felt almost
normal. Like a real person, living her own life, not like some freak.

Greg started to walk, still heading down the beach away from the restaurant. Lucky cursed her stupidity. Why did she keep doing this? She couldn’t blame him for being angry. Silently, she walked beside him, wondering what she could possibly say to redeem herself.

“How did it go with that doctor? I didn’t get a chance to ask you.”

“Great,” she replied quickly, thankful that he didn’t sound angry but realizing that he didn’t exactly look like a happy camper either. “I didn’t like him at first, but then I warmed up to him.”

“Really? Why?”

“He explained a lot of things about Hoyt-Mellenberger that I hadn’t understood.”

They had reached an outcropping of lava rocks that separated the beach into two sections. Greg leaned against one of the boulders and Lucky stood nearby, but she didn’t make the mistake of touching him.

“Some faces I see are familiar, but I can’t seem to put a name to them. Now I know why. Some victims can never ever remember a face,” she rushed on, describing the condition known as masking.
“
I’ll have to relearn faces like the president and Elvis.”

Greg nodded thoughtfully, but she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“It disturbs me that there are so many things I don’t know. Every day there seem to be more and more. I think I was doing better right after the accident. I actually seemed to know more then.”

“Not really. Your world was small then, encompassing little more than a hospital room, then the jail. Now you’ve broadened your experiences, so you’re discovering more and more that you’ll need to relearn.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead, a quick, friendly peck. “Don’t worry about it, angel. It’ll come with time.”

She wanted to share his confidence but couldn’t. Some dark, forbidden memory, like an elusive wisp of smoke, drifted through her mind, vanishing before she could get a fix on it. There was something sh
e should remember. Something…

“I need to talk to you,” Greg said, and Lucky immediately sensed
that this was not good news. “
There are lots of people who will want to take advantage of you. Be very careful whom you confide in.”

“Sarah and Nomo have been wonderful.”

“I know, but there are people like Fenton Bewley who only want to make
money off your problems. You’
ve read his articles in the
Tattler.
You—”

“I haven’t spoken with him. Someone at the institute must have told him—”

“True, but if he tries to talk to you, don’t say anything.” Greg hesitated, gauging he
r for a moment. “Don’t have any
thing more to do with Carlton Summerville, either.”

“Why?”
she asked, alarm bells sounding. “Dr. Summerville helped me. He explained a lot about Hoyt-Mellenberger.”

“I know, and I’m glad he made you feel better, but he’s not with any research institution. He’s not helping people who’ve suffered head trauma. He’s writing a book. It’s going to be all about you.”

Lucky swallowed hard, trying
to hide her shock and disap
pointment. Why did everyone want to use her? Couldn’t they
just leave her alone?

20

L
ive Bait’s parking lot was full when Cody pulled in, driving the police Bronco. He parked next door at the Clean Rite Laundry, where a constant plume of steam shot
into the sky from the round-the-
clock shifts washing hotel linen. He jumped the low wall separating the commercial laundry from the bar that attracted the island’s lowlifes.
Mokes.
Paradise’s version of Hell’s Angels. And a handful of good guys, laundry workers sweaty after hours tending steaming vats.

Jesus! Scott Helmer could sure pick meeting places. Cody was dreading seeing the punk from the FBI again. After the call from Greg less than an hour ago, Cody knew he’d screwed up—big time.

Cody shouldered his way through the swinging doors and stopped inside the bar. The joint was dark, the only light coming from the Silver Bullet sign hanging behind the bar. Peanut shells littered the floor beneath square wooden tables covered with red and white checked vinyl tablecloths.

The cork walls had been haphazardly nailed in place. Someone had taken a hot poker and seared a message into the soft
wood: “You can’t kill a man bo
rn
to hang.” All around the sign customers had tacked up condoms—some new, some designed for horses or bulls, some interesting colors not usually seen in the south forty.

To further enhance Live Bait’s ambiance, old Don Ho songs blared from a secondhand jukebox. Overhead a ceiling fan wheezed, circulating air rank with stale beer, cardboard pizza, and bodies in need of a shower. Christ, what he wouldn’t give to be on his way home to Sarah.

Cody’s eyes adjusted to the lack of light, and he scanned the room jammed with the five o’clock crowd having a few brews before heading home. Despite his uniform, no one looked at him twice. People didn’t find the police as intimidating as they did on the mainland because the cops took it easy on tourists. No reason to give paradise a bad rap by harassing visitors. Fair was fair, so they gave the locals the same break. Sometimes he felt like a baby-sitter, not a cop.

Across the room Cody spotted Helmer ordering from a waitress in gold lame shorts cut so high that her cheeks hung out. Helmer fit right in with the crowd. He looked like a dropout from the mainland who spent his days surfing and did pickup construction work when he fell behind in the rent.

Cody walked over, saying hello to a few men he recognized and smiling at those he didn’t. He ordered a Primo, although he figured he would need something stiffer than a beer when Helmer heard what he had to say.

“Your office is bugged,” the punk informed Cody before he could lower himself onto the wooden stool opposite the agent.

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope,” Scott assured him. “Nothing at your house or in any of the squad cars, though.”

“You were in my house?” Jesus! He hated this, feeling violated somehow.

“Yep.” Helmer took a swallow of Red Dog, then pointed
at him with the beer bottle. “Your brother’s clean, too. Just the one bug in your office right under the edge of your desk.”

“On the side with the visitor’s chairs?”

“Exactly. All anyone had to do is walk into your office and stick it there.”

Cody remembered the people who’d come about Lucky. Fenton Bewley. That doctor wearing a suit. Tony Traylor. Even the hypnotherapist. Any of them could have planted the bug. “So where’s the receiver? If they’re listening, someone’s recording, right?”

Helmer took a swig of beer. “Who knows? It’s a brand-new model with a half-mile range. It could be anywhere in Kahului—even right here. We can’t find it, but that’s okay. This way we feed them the info we want them to have.”

The waitress slammed Cody’s Primo onto the table, along with another Red Dog for Helmer and a bowl of crack seed. She sashayed away, wiggling her fanny for the
mokes
at the next table. Cody took a handful of crack seed, the island’s version of Trail Mix, and munched on it.

“You haven’t told anyone about ID
-
ing the hiker, have you?”

Cody shook his head, then downed half the bottle. How was he going to tell this kid that he had screwed up?

“
Let’s keep it to ourselves until we want whoever’s listening to know.” Helmer put both palms around the beer bottle and wiped off the condensation. “The producers of
Missing!
are going to run the story on the blonde.”

“Really?” Cody perked up. Getting rid of Lucky was his number one priority.

“We talked to them. Told ’em to do it,” Helmer said. “Talk about the show in your office for the bug. That way whoever is listening will have something meaningless to hear. The program will air in two weeks.”

“That long?” He kicked back the rest of his beer, figuring by then Lucky would be Sarah’s best friend and so much a part of his brother’s life that nothing short of a nuclear blast could separate them.

“They’re only on once a week. It takes a while to produce a show.”

Cody tried to signal the waitress for another beer, but she was playing kissy face with a tableful of
mokes
who worked for Tony Traylor. That reminded him:
“Anything on Traylor?”

“We’re working on it.”

The way Helmer shifted on his stool told Cody that he probably had a whole lot on the creep but wasn’t going to share it with him.

“Any chance Lucky’s one of Traylor’s babes?”

Helmer nodded. “Possibly. He’s got a thing for cheap blondes with big tits.”

“I found out something interesting about that hiker today,” Cody began, forcing himself to confess. “When the coroner examined Thelma Overholt, he found two unusual bugs—you know, insects—in her hair.”

Helmer shoved the second empty Red Dog aside. “I didn’t see that in the report.”

“It didn’t make it to the report,” Cody explained. The kid looked like he’d just been told aliens were running the coroner’s office.
“
Hey, this is paradise. We don’t have a full-time coroner. We rotate bodies between the three funeral homes on the island. If anything serious comes up, we ship the body to Honolulu. This looked like an accident—”

“It was no accident.” Helmer ground out the words, and Cody couldn’t help wondering if the punk would have told him had he not brought up the bugs. “The cause of death was a blow to the head, caused not by the fall, but by a sharp instrument. They’re still working on the details. We’ll know more later.”

“Murder. I knew it.” And Lucky was involved. This could be the way to get her out of Greg’s life. Link her to a homicide.

“Don’t tell anyone. Not a soul, understand?” Helmer said, and Cody mumbled his agreement. “Back to those insects. What about them?”

“Alan Dunbar, he’s a friend of my brother’s—examined
them this morning. He says that they are rare. I mean,
really
rare. There’s only one place on earth with bugs like these—”

“Wait a minute! You didn’t send them to Qua
ntico with the body? Why not?”

There was steam coming out of the kid’s ears, and Cody couldn’t blame him. There was no excuse for something like this. “The bugs weren’t sent because they weren’t with the evidence. The coroner picked them out of the woman’s hair and took them over to the Society to Preserve the Hawaiian Wildlife Habitat thinking they’d come from the rain forest and needed to be cataloged.”

“Fucking A! It’s a good thing you remembered these bugs.”

Now was not the time to admit he hadn’t remembered the
bugs. He’d told Greg about them just after Lucky had been found, when Cody had been desperately trying to talk to his brother.
“
Turns out the bugs come from a place called Jinghong. It’s in southern China on the Mekong River, just over the border from Laos.”

“No way the woman was in Singapore one minute, then China, then here, without purchasing an airline ticket or passing through a passport checkpoint somewhere.” Helmer waved to the waitress, putting up two fing
ers. “I want those bugs. We’ve
got a forensic entomologist at Quantico. Let him examine them.”

“Really? An ent
o
mologist on staff, huh?”

Helmer looked at him as if Cody’s shoe size was larger than his IQ. “Sure. We had several before the budget crunch. Insects can help establish time of death or tell us whether drugs were involved. Often they’re the key to knowing if the body was moved.”

“Your man can examine the bugs, but he’ll find the same thing. Dunbar’s the best entomologist in the country. He’s literally made millions with bugs.”

As usual, money talked, and Scott said, “Southern China? I don’t get it.”

Cody put both elbows on the table and leaned toward the
kid, relishing the moment. Helmer was baffled. “Here’s the
re-e-eally
interesting part. These little critters are found only on one special type of orchid plant.”

The waitress delivered their beers and Helmer grabbed his Red Dog, then began rotating the bottle between his palms. You could almost hear the kid’s brain crunching the facts. Cody took a long pull before delivering fee knockout punch.

“
It gets better. This particular orchid wasn’t even discovered until a few years ago when China opened up its jungles to Western travelers. It’s a rare, endangered species.”

“Who knows about this bug thing?”

“Dunbar, my brother, Lucky.” Cody thought for a moment. “Dunbar’s wife, I guess.”

“Shit! Why not put it on the six o’clock news?”

“I told my brother not to—”

“
I’m going to have everyone served with a special FBI order to refrain from discussing anything about those insects with anyone.”

Cody hadn’t heard of the order but didn’t doubt that it existed. “Before the American Express investigator arrived here, she must have been in southern China.”

“Impossible! Two days before she was found dead here, she met with one of our agents in Singapore. Thelma said she had a hot lead on the credit card counterfeiting ring. They planned to meet the next evening, but she never showed. That wouldn’t give her enough time to get to China. There’s got to be another explanation for those bugs being in her hair. I want those bugs in an overnight pouch to Quantico. They’ll give us an answer.”

W
hen Lucky and Greg arrived at the institute the following morning, a man from the FBI’s Honolulu office served them with an order not to discuss, communicate in writing, or by any other means with anyone about insects, living or dead, that they might have heard about, seen, or read about that could,
in any way, shape, or form, have been involved in a possible still-unsolved police case.

“What does this mean?” Lucky asked Greg when the man left.

“It means what Alan discovered is really important, and they don’t want it to leak out.”

“I won’t say a word,” she told him as she went out the door to check on Abbie, Dodger at her heels as he usually was.

Since their interlude on the beach, Greg had kept his distance. He didn’t seem angry or cold, but he’d stayed in his office, not checking on Abbie as much. Last night they’d had the Dunbars over for dinner, Greg had made sure not to be alone with her.

As she crossed the pool area and went into the nursery, Lucky reminded herself that this was what she wanted. But was it? She thought she could do this, she honestly did. Of course, she’d anticipated problems. She’d expected Greg to force himself on her yet again, but he hadn’t—not really. But just knowing he wanted her and all she had to do was to say the word was so tempting.

She was so confused that she often felt like screaming. Anger would suddenly well up inside her—for no apparent reason—and she had to fight to control it. Don’t be angry, she told herself. Things will work out.

She slipped her hand into the pocket of her shorts and touched Rudy’s tooth. For luck. Last night Cody had called to say
Missing!
was going to do her story. With any luck someone would identify her, and she could clear her name.

“Wait!” She bent over to pet Dodger. “I won’t just clear my name, I’ll have a
real
name. I won’t be Jane Doe or Lucky anymore.”

Dodger gave her a quick lick, studying Lucky with loving eyes, and she was amazed at how happy she felt. It wouldn’t be long before she had a past. She stood up and touched the shark’s tooth again.
Don’t let it be a bad past. Don't let me be the woman in the mirror.

She had a secret plan. Well, almost no one knew. She had
spent a lot of time talking to the animals. Dodger knew, Rudy knew, and now Abbie knew that if the news about her past wasn’t something shameful, she was going to stay right here in Maui and make a new life.

But she wasn’t free to start over until she knew the truth.

“Wark! Wark!” Abbie noisily greeted Lucky as they walked into the nursery, clapping her little flippers together, begging to be picked up.

“Okay, okay. Hold on.” She reached into the pen and lifted Abbie out. “Whoa! You’ve gained weight. I’ll bet you weigh seven pounds now.”