You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) (18 page)

I held up the pictures. “These?”

“Get rid of them and pretend you never saw them.”

“What happened to the man who thought that this was the mostest and bestest fun ever?”

He didn’t smile. “This isn’t a game. You are dealing with heavy-duty shit here. Get rid of them. Walk away.”

“Where is this sudden concern coming from?”

“You’re involved with murder and blackmail and who knows what else.” His hands curled into claws. “And you’ve brought it into my house.”

Half an hour before it had all been a giant lark. Before that, contrite. Before that, raging.

“You’re bipolar, aren’t you? You’re supposed to be taking medications and you’re not.”

The startled blink was all the response I needed.

“This up-and-down behavior—you’re rapid cycling.”

He gritted his teeth. “Get the hell out of my house.”

“Oh, I will. Not right now. But very soon. I need something else from you first.”

“For the love of Jesus,” he yelled. “What is it now?”

“First off, I want you to start taking your meds. You have them for a reason. Take them. For another thing…I need to find a good psychologist immediately. Go ask your friends. Someone has a recommendation.”

“For you?”

“For Stevie. Any names you can get, I’d be most grateful.”

“You will get out of my house.”

I smiled. “Of course I will. But you’re going to have to put out first.”

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

GARY DISAPPEARED AFTER my little interaction with him. Was he calling the police to have me removed? Or asking his friends for the name of a reputable psychologist? Did he have any friends?

I couldn’t worry about our erstwhile host right now. My thoughts were about Stevie.

I had sent her off without much thinking about what she was probably going through. I’m not the most sensitive person in the world, but I try to make up for it by showing what concern I can feel.

In the guesthouse, Stevie was staring at a computer screen, her eyes focused really hard on the screen. Working hard was her version of counting backwards. I put my hands on her shoulders and pulled her away from the computer. “Hey,” I said. “Do you want to talk?”

“Wikipedia is an extremely useful resource,” she said.

I brought the laptop’s screen down and the computer shut off.

Stevie stared somewhere over my shoulder.

“Can I do anything?” I asked.

She shook her head, still staring off at things that weren’t there. “I’m fine.”

You’d think having me around as a role model would have taught my sister better skills at lying. Or at least a few flashy head fakes.

“Why don’t you take a break from this?” I said.

“Because I like keeping my mind occupied.”

I brushed her bangs off her face. I needed to take her to get a haircut. I needed to take her clothes shopping. I needed to make everything all better. I couldn’t do any of them. “This can wait. There’s plenty of television that needs watching.” I took her by the hand and led her out to the living room, where I sat her on the sofa and put the blue cashmere throw over her.

A quick sweep through the thousand channels brought up a direct feed from Sky TV. One of those detective shows set in the Lake Country. Starring a much younger Liam Bishop in some kind of cosmic coincidence. Aphrodite’s hair, he was a good-looking bastard.

After a minute or so of the main character tramping around in the mud, my sister rested her head against my shoulder. “It doesn’t really bother me,” she said in a quiet voice.

“It doesn’t?”

“Because I know I’m safe.” She pulled back and looked up at me. “Sometimes I wonder if you ever feel safe.”

I snorted. “I always feel safe, Stevie. The sharks and the polecats spend their time worrying about me.”

She nodded, her eyes moving back and forth as she studied my face. Then she said, “This show was one of the only ones produced by Quaid/Hallett Television.”

My jolt backward into the sofa was completely involuntary, I assure you. Quaid/Hallett Television was the initial joint venture, a small test. Before Quaid Media and the Hallett Group merged the companies entirely, creating a worldwide media conglomerate. Before I scotched that deal, and hard.

After I recovered my breathing, I said, “They kept the name?”

“This show’s eight or nine years old. The company’s been broken up since then. I’d like to watch something else, please.”

I may have dropped the remote control once or twice while trying to figure out how to change the channel.

“Today upset you, too,” Stevie said.

I shook my head. “It can upset me when I have time.” I left the television tuned to some tennis match in Australia and grabbed my phone. “Until then, I have things to do.”

The TV went off. “I’m going to go upstairs and lie down for a bit,” she said.

Excellent idea.

Stevie was right: I was upset. Any thinking human being would have been upset, seeing what Penelope had gone through. In addition, I now had a better idea of what had gotten Colin killed.

Now my most pressing question was: what did I do with these pictures?

The obvious answer was that I should get them out of my house and into Nathaniel Ross’s safekeeping. But I wondered if I should.

Yes, I knew they depicted a crime. Was there a statute of limitations on what Penelope had gone through? And yes, it was almost crystal clear that the pictures had to do with Colin’s murder.

Almost, but not quite.

God only knew what would happen to me if the police found me with those things in my possession. I needed advice, and I needed it now.

I called his office and within a minute had him on the line. Roberto’s money bought courtesy and promptness. I missed that part about having money. It would be oh-so-easy to get seduced back into it. Which is what Roberto was counting on, of course.

“We need to talk as soon as possible,” he said.

“When will you be here?”

He hesitated a fraction of a second too long. “Look, Drusilla—”

I brought out my bitchiest Oxbridge. “
Mr. Ross
, you are not being paid a small fortune so that I can conform to your schedule.” Shed-jewel. Two distinct words.

“Christ,” he muttered. “Okay. I will be there in two hours.”

“Make it ninety minutes.” I hung up. Then I took the opportunity to nap, since at the rate things were going I had no idea when the next time I’d get sleep would be.

Nathaniel entered the estate two hours later. He could claim it was the traffic or last-minute business at the office, but we both knew better: he worked for me, and I was raised to be the one who ordered other people around. While I hadn’t had much practice at it during the past eleven years, you don’t forget that sort of attitude. It’s bred in the bone.

Nathaniel walked into the guesthouse, and he moved straight to the sofa without so much as a hello or a handshake or whatever it was lawyers usually did to greet people. He hitched up the knees of his trousers and swung the briefcase up on the coffee table.

“Would you care for something to drink?” I asked. “It’s cocktail hour already.”

He ignored the pleasantries and snapped open the briefcase. “Here’s a problem I’ve run into. You said you married Colin because he needed a green card and he was willing to pay?”

“And his visa was running out. Yes.”

He tossed a packet of stapled papers at me. He wasn’t being paid a fortune so that I’d have to start reading things. I tossed the papers back at him. “Summarize the issue.”

Nathaniel grinned. “In LA it’s, ‘Give me the logline.’ The short version is that Colin didn’t need a green card. He had one already.”

A herd of dancing goats could have wandered through that living room at that moment and I wouldn’t have noticed. “That’s insane.”

He pointed to the photocopy of an ID card. “Permanent residency. He’d been here long enough.”

“No.” I shook my head. “He showed me the papers. They were expiring soon and he needed to get married.”

“He got permanent residency in late June of last year.” He put the papers down and folded his hands. “And you met him when, precisely?”

I felt as though I’d gotten a kick in the stomach. “Beginning of July. We got married two weeks later.”

“And he got permanent residency before he met you, and he still paid you for it? The cops are going to have questions about that.”

I had questions, too. Who were we going to ask? He was dead.

Nathaniel nodded, reaffirming what he’d just said. “You look like you could use that drink.”

“I don’t get it. This can’t be true. Why would he pay me ten thousand dollars for a marriage he didn’t need? Because he was a nice guy who wanted to help me out of some money troubles?”

Yeah, that sounded pretty unlikely to me, too. But Colin’s weakness for women extended beyond his need to romance each and every one. When he was on an upswing in his mood, anything was possible and doing anything he could for a woman—saving each and every one—was perfectly reasonable. He knew I needed money. Did he think I wouldn’t accept it without the marriage? The marriage worked well in his favor, too, of course. It was great publicity for the show. I wished he were there, so I could beat the answer out of him. After crying for joy that he was still alive, of course.

Hades. This wasn’t even the worst development of the day.

The briefcase I’d taken out of Colin’s apartment was lying on the ground by the coffee table, reminding me I had called Nathaniel for a reason. “Believe it or not, I can top your news,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to the police yet. And I don’t think you’re going to want me to talk to them after I tell you about this.”

“That you couldn’t tell me over the phone?”

“Yes.”

Nathaniel picked up a pen and started clicking it. Click-click. Click-click. I wanted to rip it out of his hands and throw it across the room. Click-click.

“Tell me hypothetically.” He gave me a thousand-mile stare, looking through me, rather than at me.

“This is a real problem.”

“Give me the hypothetical version first.”

Ah. I got it. If he knew about whatever I was going to tell him, then he had to do something about that information. If it were only a story, then he and I were having a simple chat and no one needed to do anything.

“Hypothetically speaking…Monday afternoon I arrived in Los Angeles and went to Colin’s apartment. He wasn’t there. I found a briefcase. That had money in it.”

“How much money?” he asked.

“About fifty thousand. More or less.”

Nathaniel closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

I swung the briefcase up onto the sofa between us and opened it. “There was a false bottom.” I showed him how it worked. Then I snapped the case shut and pushed it over to him.

He swore under his breath. “Any idea what this money’s from?” he asked.

“None. I swear. The bills are non-sequential, though.”

“This isn’t good.”

“What if there were something else?” I said. “More than likely related to his murder?”

Nathaniel tapped that damned annoying pen against the coffee table in a slow, irregular beat. He shrugged. “In this hypothetical situation, are you certain this evidence is important?”

“Ninety-nine percent sure.” He glared at me, but I’ve been glared at by better. “How do I know? I’m not the one who did it. For the sake of this scenario, let’s say it is.”

He sighed. “What sort of evidence are you wondering about?”

“What if Colin had some photographs, let’s say, of a famous or semi-famous young actress in compromising positions?”

Nathaniel looked unperturbed by the idea. “Then she gets her own TV show on FOX.”

“What if they were taken when she was about thirteen years old?”

That earned a few taps of the pen against the table and a thoughtful expression on his face. “That’s bad.”

“What’s worse is who is—who might possibly be in the pictures with her.”

He clicked the pen a few more times. I wondered how he’d react if I grabbed the pen out of his hand. He’d look surprised, momentarily taken aback, and then he’d playfully try to swipe it out of my hand and I’d pull away, smiling devilishly, of course, and he’d come over to take it from me, and he’d throw it over his shoulder and say, “To hell with the pen” and then—

“How would Colin have them?” He leaned back on the sofa.

It took me a second to snap out of my on-the-coffee-table fantasy to pay attention to what he was saying. Clearly I hadn’t gotten enough sleep. “No idea yet.”

He sat up straight. “Tell me you haven’t been doing a little searching on your own.”

I said nothing.

“You haven’t, have you?”

“You told me not to tell you.”

“Stay out of it. Let the police chase down what’s going on. Jesus, interfering in an investigation will buy you so much trouble, you have no idea. Where are these pictures? Are they in here?”

That’s when I realized: I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hand the pictures over. I knew I would have to, eventually. I didn’t want them anywhere near me, not just because they depicted a crime and a reputation-destroying crime at that, but because they had the stench of murder around them.

But once they were out of my hands, Zeus only knew where they’d end up.

And Penelope would get violated again.

I shook my head. “I don’t know where they are.”

His brown eyes stared right at me.

“The actress in question thinks I have them. She thinks Colin had them. She’s very eager to get these photos back. She thinks I might have them, because…” I stood up and started to walk around, trying to work this out. “Penelope was at Colin’s the night he died. He gives her the photos…but he must not have, because the next day she comes to me looking for them.”

“He gave her fakes?”

I nodded. “He gives her photos, she tells him he’s fucked, he’s on the hook for blackmail, he calls me…and the next thing you know he’s dead. The real photos can’t be in Colin’s apartment, because the police would have found them. I mean, I assume they would. She contacts me, offers me fifty thousand to give them up.”

“If you don’t have these photos, how do you know what’s on them?”