You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) (22 page)

Did he? That was going to be interesting. My hand started shaking, so I concentrated on steadying the muscles holding my cup. “Can’t imagine what you’d find in any of them. Not to mention use what you’d get out of any of them. Legally.”

He shook his head. “Came up with nothing. Mostly.”

I tensed up even harder. Because if it were a simple case of finding out my real name, he would have handled this whole conversation much differently.

I fought the urge to get up and run as fast as I could, away from him and away from that paper. Six-minute miles, I could make it back to Stevie in twelve, maybe fifteen minutes, tops. We could be gone before anyone arrived.

He smoothed the paper out over his thigh. “Kind of baffling what came back, though. Wanted to ask you about it.” He handed it to me.

I didn’t look down. “We probably need to do this with my lawyer present.”

He shrugged. “Okay. You don’t have to say anything.”

Only then did I look down at the paper. The first thing I noticed was the empty gray box in the upper lefthand corner. Where a photo ought to go, but there was none there. Might be lots of reasons there might not be a photo. Then I glanced at the upper righthand corner, where I expected a name to be. Instead, I made out the words NAME WITHHELD.

Okay, that was interesting. My fingerprints connected to a nameless record.

Even more interesting, underneath the name said DECEASED.

“How long have you been dead?” Detective Gruen asked me. He took the paper from me, looked at it, and then handed it back. “I guess it says right there. You died seven years ago.” He looked me up and down. “Have to say, you look great for a dead woman. All that running keeps you in shape.”

Seven years ago. Which would make it four years after I disappeared.

Holy Zeus in a chariot, Mama and Roberto had wasted no time. Once I was out of the picture, they wanted to make it very hard for me to get back into it.

I concentrated on the flower arrangement in the concrete planter across the way from us. “You know what they say, Detective. Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse. I’m doing my best.”

“You’re not in Witness Protection. You have no record. You’re dead and you have no name. How did you manage that? Who are you?”

Whoever said you can’t go home again had nothing on me. I couldn’t go home, because I didn’t fucking exist anymore. I’d been erased, quietly and officially. No wonder Stevie hadn’t seen many stories online about me in the past few years. What was Stevie going to say when I told her about this? Had she known this already? No, I couldn’t believe she would have seen something like this in the news and not told me.

Gruen studied me like we were in Interrogation Room One. Then he did something I didn’t expect. He smiled. “You didn’t know about this.”

After a minute, I trusted myself enough to put the coffee down before I spilled it all over my lap. “You figured that out all on your own?”

“The badge says Detective.”

Why would this federal database have a record for me that was, essentially, a non-record? It contained no useful information. Anyone running my prints wouldn’t know anything more about me after getting this record than before.

I stood up and dusted myself off. “Lucky you, Detective Gruen. You will undoubtedly be getting a visit from Ed and Fred, your friendly neighborhood feds. Soon. Maybe this morning. What will you say when they ask where you got my fingerprints?”

“I’m going to tell them.”

“I don’t suppose you’d ring me when they showed up, would you?”

He grinned and shook his head. “I don’t suppose I would.” He finished his coffee and crumpled the cup. “You planning on leaving LA?”

“That’s going to depend on Ed and Fred, isn’t it?” I threw my cup at the nearest trash bin: a perfect shot, with a short wave of coffee cresting over the top. “Thanks for the chat, Detective. It’s another work day. Why don’t you find out who killed my husband?”

He tossed his cup, hit it off the rim, and watched it drop into the bin. “So what did you do?”

What the hell. If I was right about that record setting off any number of alarms, my time here was going to be very short, one way or the other. “I haven’t done anything illegal in the city of Los Angeles or any of its environs.”

“You sure about that?”

I shrugged. “The day is young yet.” I gave him my standard flirtatious grin, but I sure wasn’t feeling it. I was wondering why in the hell I’d ever left somewhere safe and homey and loving like Las Vegas to come here. “Let’s talk again soon. I have to run.” Before he said a word, I took off running down the Promenade, turning onto the sidewalk at Wilshire Avenue, heading toward the beach and then the guesthouse and maybe an FBI “Welcome Home!” party. Or worse.

I did not have much time left to find out what Colin had gotten me into.

When this was all over, I was changing my name for the last time, moving to New Zealand, and living out the rest of my life on a sheep farm. Alone.

#

Stevie was putting a tray of little somethings into the oven when I burst through the door into the guesthouse.

“Did you know I’m dead?”

“Again?”

“Legally dead. I’m serious. Gruen ran my fingerprints through the FBI. Or something. According to the federal government, I am deceased. I have been declared dead. I am an ex-parrot.”

I put the paper he had given me on the kitchen counter, and Stevie scanned it. Her brief but sharp intake of breath told me she hadn’t known I’d been declared dead. If my family were like some others, my demise would have been pitched to the celeb magazines as a heart-wrenching story of a family’s loss. But Mama kept things private, and with very few exceptions celebrity magazines don’t go where they’re not wanted. Whenever you see a magazine cover, it’s almost guaranteed at least one PR person was involved in making that happen. No way would the media outlets risk incurring my family’s wrath. Their publishers spent too much time at the same parties on Saint-Tropez as my mother did.

It was, after all, how my father had met her all those years ago. When she was seventeen and stupid and he was thirty-four and wily.

“When did Detective Gruen give this to you?”

“When he coincidentally ran into me during my morning run.”

She tapped the kitchen counter. “You should call Mr. Ross about that.”

“Stevie, let’s focus on me being dead.”

She folded the paper back up. “Dru, I had no idea. This hasn’t been in the papers.”

“That’s how Roberto broke the trusts. Can’t hold money in trust for a dead woman. So I have to do whatever it is he wants me to do to get that money back.”

I couldn’t look Stevie in the eye as I said that, because she had to guess what the deal was: her or the money. And better than that, she knew me better than anyone, and she’d know I hadn’t fully made my decision yet.

“Or it’s worse than that,” she said. “This record is to notify someone else when your prints were run.”

“Roberto.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Maybe.”

Oh God. Maybe that record was in the database so that my father could find me. If that were true, I had about twelve hours to live, tops.

Stevie sat at the kitchen table with her computer and said, “Hm,” a lot.

The buzzer on the oven went off and Stevie didn’t bat an eyelid, so I slipped on the silicone potholders to take out the tray of what turned out to be mini-quiches. I wondered why she needed to make mini-quiches at seven thirty in the morning, but I never ask that sort of thing out loud. She might become self-conscious about her cooking and then never make these little hors d’oeuvres again. And that would make me cry.

“Seven years ago,” she said. “They did it on the QT too, it looks like. Someone would have had to go looking for the declaration using your formal name.” The ugly full-length version of my birth name that nobody ever used. I think the only place it had ever been printed was on my birth certificate. The first time someone had laughed at my name was kindergarten, and that was the teacher.

I finished chewing the spinach mini-quiche I’d snagged. Stevie took the moment to count the remaining morsels and then glare at me. I drank some water. “Don’t they have to wait seven years before declaring me dead?”

“It’s only three in New York.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes darting around as she searched her data banks for the answer. “Do you think that’s important? Should I research that?”

“No. No, don’t. I’m dead? What happens to…everything I owned?”

“Gets divided up amongst family members, most likely.” She shrugged. “Maybe Roberto did something else with it. Or your mother, perhaps.”

“They have to give it back, right?”

She shook her head again. “If a person’s dead…that’s it. I guess you could try suing, but…”

Holy Zeus. I was disinherited. Unless I behaved myself. And even then it wasn’t guaranteed, was it?

And if my father was looking for me, I was so screwed.

I picked up the nearest glass and threw it as hard as I could toward the kitchen door, where it shattered and flew in a million different directions. Stevie sat there and looked at me, while all I wanted to do was smash more and more things, as though that would make things all better. “I need to go shower,” I said.

“I’ll clean that up,” Stevie replied.

I walked out of the kitchen before things started to get ugly. Roberto was right; I didn’t want to live this way anymore. I didn’t want to take care of Stevie, I didn’t want to wonder where we were going next, I didn’t want to spend one more second figuring out how to get us new identities and then burying the old ones six feet deep. I wanted to go home and live on Easy Street. Or, more specifically, Park Avenue in the 80s.

And if I hadn’t fallen to the place in my life where ten thousand dollars became an absolute fortune instead of, well, nowhere near a fortune, I wouldn’t be in this damned mess.

Of course, Stevie would have been long dead by this point, too.

There was a downside to damn near everything, wasn’t there?

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

EVERY HOUSE IN LA has a sign in the front telling you which security company they subscribe to and a sticker in the window warning would-be evildoers to stay the hell away. The problem for many people is, of course, nothing bad happens for the longest time, so they stop setting their alarms. Which makes it easy for someone like me to use the side gate to enter the cement-paved back garden, and once there, undo the latch on the sliding glass door into the kitchen. The broom handle that should have been wedged next to the door, preventing anyone from opening it, was up against the wall. Sloppy and dangerous. I decided I should have a chat with Anne about safety issues.

The coffee machine burbled and I was spreading the last of Anne’s strawberry jam on a piece of toast when she walked down the stairs at nine a.m. She wore a pair of yellow-and-green striped flannel men’s pajamas—men’s pajamas are a fashion disaster that should die out for all women, right this minute—and had one finger under the rim of her glasses, rubbing the sleep out of one corner of her eye, when she walked into the kitchen. She stopped after passing the refrigerator and stared at me.

“Care for anything to eat, or will coffee be enough?” I asked.

“What the hell are you doing in my house?”

I tilted my head toward the sliding door. “It was open. Your side door was also unlocked, but I’ve since locked it and put on the deadbolt.” I used my left foot to push one of the kitchen chairs out from the table and into her way. “Why don’t you sit down and join me?”

She started to reach for the nearby phone. “I’m going to call the police, thanks.”

I slid one of the pictures of Penelope and Anne’s Uncle Ian Jack into my hand. Anne’s voice trailed off. “Feel free to call after you and I have a bit of a chat.”

Her face showed the progression from disgust at seeing some kind of pornography, to recognition that she knew one of the people in the photo, to horror that she knew both of the people.

Anne backed into in the chair I’d pushed at her and the phone stayed where it was. I put the photo in front of her and she pushed it away, not wanting to spend a second more looking at it. “Where did you get this?” she asked.

“I was hoping you could help me with that,” I said.

The shock on her face was unmistakable. She’d never seen them before. She’d had no clue.

Perhaps prompting might help. “Turns out Colin had it.”

She kept wrinkling her forehead, which was going to give her serious lines in a few years. “What?”

I picked up the picture, glanced at it, and then put it face-down on the pile. “You can understand my confusion.”

She spread out the pile face-down. Maybe she was counting them. “There are others?”

I nodded and showed her. She glanced at the first few before covering her mouth. I turned the pictures back over.

“He had those?”

“He told me he was in trouble with Penelope. I think I now know why.”

Anne looked at me as though I were deeply stupid. “Who are you?”

I shrugged. “You first. When did you meet Colin?”

“About two months ago,” she said. “A little less.”

I nodded. “Right after he disappeared from Vegas. He knew Penelope at least eight months ago. Before he knew me, in fact. She knew him well enough to give him fifty thousand dollars then, ten of which he then turned around and gave me. And in case you’re wondering, that’s not my story, that comes straight from the cops. How did you meet him?”

She ran a hand through her hair, which was barely mussed enough to be called bed head, her eyes focused on her memories. “We met…we met at a club one night.”

“A club you usually go to?”

Her fingers pinched the bridge of her nose so hard she left fingernail impressions in the skin. “No. No, I was there to cover a band. I did a story on them for the
Weekly
.”

“Did Penelope know you’d be there that night?”

“You think she sent him there to meet me?”

I nodded. “I think that’s precisely what she did.”

Anne snorted. “Right. Because it’s so easy to guess how I’d react.”