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  “Where is Bo—Officer Clark? I thought you guys were partners.”

  He scowled at me for almost being over-familiar with an officer of the Cleveland Police Department.

  “There aren’t so many traditional partners anymore. Clark’s young, about two days up from rookie. I look after him when I can, and we ride together on some shifts. Not always. It depends on who’s available. We get split up sometimes. Staffing is getting thin.”

  How reassuring. Back to the five deaths we were talking about.

  “Are you counting Ulysses and Renata as murders now?”

  Because I sure am.

  I wondered if Valerio knew about Renata being MIA somewhere between the hospital basement and the ME’s slab, and I saw Margo with candlelight playing over her face. There’s a killer out there tonight you both should be very afraid of.

  Was I talking to him right now?

  But I knew for a fact Valerio didn’t kill Ulysses.

  Unless I’d miscalculated somehow. Or. Unless it was poison.

  He lowered the brow at me. “What do you think? I don’t know about the immediate cause of Renata’s death. But getting beat up and dying two days later is murder of some kind, that’s for sure. We’re still waiting on the autopsy report on both her and Ulysses. But the others—”

  Okay. He didn’t know Renata was not where she was supposed to be. Or maybe he knew exactly where she was. I was having this schizophrenic moment in which I could see Valerio as both an adversary and a fellow traveler. A guy who had the exact same questions I did.

  Someone to trust.

  Or not to trust.

  I needed to be very careful here.

  “Ulysses told me on the phone the night he died that you should check the ballistics on the shootout,” I volunteered.

  “Yeah. So you said. He was right. To all appearances Felix Tequila shot Muff and Frank, and Frank somehow lived long enough to shoot Felix. It’s possible, I suppose. Everybody down there has a gun or two, even the little old ladies, and about one in every twenty-seven is registered. There had to be ample weapons at the scene. Could have been a couple right on the table for all I know. Muff and Frank were both shot with one with Felix’s prints on it.

  “But here’s where it falls apart some. Frank had two. The one that killed Felix—the one with Frank’s prints on it—was on the floor next to his chair. Right side. Under his right hand. And another one—little—strapped to his left ankle. Unfired. Unnoticed, I assume.”

  “You’re telling me Frank was left-handed and the person who set him up as the one who shot Felix didn’t know that.”

  If Valerio was the shooter, why was he telling me all this? Stay awake, Alice.

  “Looks that way to me.”

  “So maybe Felix didn’t shoot Frank and Muff either.”

  I fell back in. Dismissing the possibility, for the moment, that Officer Valerio might be describing his own crime, trying to draw me out. “I feel better about that interpretation.”

  “Feel better how?”

  Oops.

  I remembered again. Reminded myself that the further I backed away from this whole sorry affair, the safer, maybe alive-r, I’d be. But I was committed now. I plunged ahead.

  “It’s—” I faltered. “Felix shooting Frank and Muff? That doesn’t add up from what I’ve heard. You called him ‘Felix Tequila?’ That’s the perfect nickname for a guy Tom and I met in the elevator on Mondo Night. You did know him.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Everybody knew Felix. And everybody made fun of his name. About how he had to be under the influence when he changed it. He got around. Petty stuff. Sold crack and meth here and there when he could round some up. I’m sure there was heroin in there, too. It’s everywhere around here now. He gambled. Stole what he could. He was a loser, Felix. It was tough to pin anything worthwhile on him because he was so incredibly small-time.”

  “But he wasn’t a killer.” There I went again. “That’s what Margo said. That he thought about killing her, but didn’t. Even though she could have identified him. Lucky for her. But stupid on his part. I’d guess Muff and Frank were about all the friends he had.”

  “So…” He was gazing at me. Appraising. “What do you think happened to those guys?”

  I could see it, but I didn’t want to tell Valerio. Especially since at this moment, I’d at least temporarily cast him in the starring role. So not yet. Probably not ever. I stalled. “Where did it happen?”

  “They were in a small room on the first floor, down the hall from the common area where you found Ulysses’ body.”

  That long, dim corridor. The door crime-scene-taped shut.

  “Felix and those two used to play cards. Gin rummy. For pennies. All night sometimes. Ulysses, too. Maybe he’d been playing with them then. There was an empty space at the table. We even checked Ulysses for GSR. That’s gunshot—”

  “Residue. I know. I watched the CSIs like everybody else.”

  He winced. “Pain in the ass. Wannabees.”

  “Yeah.” I could see his point. “But you didn’t find any. GSR.”

  “No. And he denied ever having been there. But of course he would. His prints were there, of course, like two hundred other guys’. So what do you think?”

  I closed my eyes and pictured the small room. Muff and Felix in folding chairs. Frank and Ulysses rolled up to the table. Ulysses leaves. Maybe a bathroom break. Muff, Felix, and Frank are sitting around, waiting, idly shuffling the cards, drinking some beers. Frank, just coasting his way through another endless night. Muff. Who’d ever know what he’d been up to? Felix. Something of a player, who earlier in the evening had probably helped Muff beat up Renata and then terrorized Margo in her house.

  Maybe someone—I think I’ll call him, oh, say, Anthony Valerio—comes to the game room early Wednesday morning for the information—or the ticket—that Muff and Felix had gone to Renata’s and Tom’s—and Felix had headed on down to Margo’s by himself—to get. Maybe that person is already thinking he’s made a big mistake involving anyone else in his plans. Or maybe hadn’t authorized any of it. Maybe just said, “Check around and let me know.”

  Or maybe he’s there to see what they’re up to and realizes he’s tipped his interest in Tom’s money by walking into that room. Or he’s said the wrong thing to the wrong, stupid, untrustworthy guys with their big flapping mouths. Maybe, right there, on the fly, he decides he needs to do some tidying up.

  The person maybe has a gun but he doesn’t have to use it because there’s an abundance of weaponry handy right here.

  He gets his answers, which are something like, “Hey, man. No luck. But we’re partners, right?” Or, “Hey, man, what you doing here? Still looking for that ticket guy? Heh, heh.”

  Cold. Deadly. He picks up a spare gun, walks around behind Frank, and shoots Felix, and then—while the other two watch, frozen—Mutt, heavy and slow, Frank, stuck in his chair. Both unable to process, in the second or two of living they have left, what’s about to happen. He walks around behind Felix and grabs the gun Felix maybe used to terrorize Margo and shoots them both. He wipes his prints off, presses the appropriate prints on. Places both guns in their reasonable positions. And walks away. Fast. In case someone who’s awake at three a.m. hears the shots and comes running.

  But maybe one of them wasn’t quite dead yet. I’m thinking Frank. Frank was a good friend to Ulysses. No matter that Ulysses had expressed doubt about Frank’s trading in his wheelchair for angel wings. Maybe Frank had used his last moments to scrawl a note warning DIRTY!!! For Ulysses to wheel back in and find.

  The note on a lined pad. For scorekeeping? The note with brown smudges everywhere. I shivered. That crumpled note which at this very moment was in the inside zipper pocket of my purse. Which I’d brought with me and had put on the floor of the squad car. Here. At my feet.

  My phone ra
ng. “Blind Love.” Tom. Calling my heart. I switched it off.

  I hurried back to my mental construction of the killer. DIRTY!!! I empathized with the overuse of exclamation points. I would have forgiven Frank for at least six or seven more.

  I’d been staring down at the worn seat cover, rubbing my fingers over it as if it were the scene of the crime. In a couple of seconds I was going to have to come back up and meet Valerio’s eyes. Did I suspect him? Sure. Why not? I tried one last time to connect with the part of my brain that kept saying NO!!! against all logic, but I couldn’t. Quite. I looked up. Shook my head.

  “Sorry,” I shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. It seems very—complicated. I have absolutely no idea.”

  Wannabees. What do we know anyway?

  He shrugged right back, the look in his eyes an accusation. Or maybe a threat. I scooched back against the side door. Waiting for him to pull out his regulation police weapon and shoot me.

  He shrugged again.

  “Okay. But here’s my advice to you, girlie. Watch yourself. Maybe this thing has played itself out. Now that you’ve turned in the ticket and this kidnapper has been killed and made the news. Maybe not. Good luck, is all I have to say. You’ll need it.”

  That was it. Valerio told me to go on back to my car.

  I went.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Doggone. I’d taken a very big risk and paid a steep price to comfort the little girl inside me who kept whining, “But I want to go home.” And to get my puzzle-piece of plaid, of course. The one scrap of evidence I had a legitimate, non-felony, claim to. No way was I giving up, even though the lucid, non-obsessed section of my brain said what I ought to do was hang a U-ey and beat it straight back to the Marriott.

  Tom would be expecting me by now. Before now. And worrying some. Make that a lot. This worried me, too. A lot. He’d called. But I didn’t want to call him back and have an argument long-distance. I could be much more persuasive if I could put my hands on him. Anyway, the rental car turned left all by itself.

  I checked the rearview to see if Valerio followed me down my street, but he passed by the intersection. Slow. But going. Did that mean I was safe?

  Or vulnerable and on my own?

  Margo had never mastered the “leave a light on” strategy of burglary prevention. A glance told me nobody was home.

  Way to go, Margo. And you told me I should “brain up.”

  Princess was lying sprawled out on the driveway. When I got out of the car and said, “Hey, Princess.” she heaved her head up, blinked a dim recognition, yawned, and slapped out hello on the pavement with her tail a couple of times. Barkly’s Princess Vespa was steadfastly—or maybe lazily—maintaining her post.

  In the fading daylight, my cottage looked drab and neglected. A week of monsoon had given the grass and weeds a fantastic boost. Shrubs by the house had bulked up and were rustling ominously in the breeze coming off the lake.

  I let myself in. The lamps we left on were shining, but I didn’t feel welcomed. They cast an unflattering glare on my cherished things. The kitchen smelled mustier than I remembered. I could tell Margo had come back to remedy some of the effects of my ransacking, but still.

  Everything felt different. Hollow and strange. Lonely.

  Dammit, Allie.

  I had missed the point on the most embarrassingly clichéd of all platitudes. This wasn’t my heart’s home anymore. Tom had changed its address.

  I picked up my now insignificant, what-was-I-thinking? plaid puzzle piece from its lonely sill. Rushed upstairs, grabbed a large-size bottle of Jo’s Pomegranate Noir and one of Lavender & Amber, headed back down and out through the kitchen, locked the door, didn’t look back.

  But then, hearing the splash and play of waves, I hesitated. Gulls keened. My soul was attuned to gull keening. My lake was calling to me. I stood still, giving it its due for a long second, gazing out at sun dissolving in water. Chiding myself that no matter where my true heart resided, I should never ignore the coming of twilight into a glorious world.

  That’s when he grabbed me.

  “You,” he rumbled, low and angry. “You miserable bitch.”

  Panic froze my body while my mind shrieked, “No! No-no-no-no-no-no-no!”

  This was a large man, tall and bulky, with a substantial belly. Big. Strong. Close behind me, pinning my arms down at my sides with his meaty hands. He smelled funky—a smoker and none too over-bathed. He gripped tight and shook me. The bottle of Pomegranate Noir slipped from my fingers and smashed on the stones of the walk, enveloping us in a lush, overpowering wave of sensual fruit and spice. This didn’t faze my attacker. He gave me another shake and shouted again, “You bitch! You stole my money!”

  That tore it. The adrenaline I’d been producing for a good, old-fashioned scream got diverted straight on into rage. I’d been scared way too many damn times in the last forty-eight hours. I didn’t care if this idiot killed me, as long as I got to hurt him a lot first.

  “What? What? What money? What the fuck are you talking about? Let go.” I thrashed as much as I could given the iron grip, but he had size and strength on me so I went still again, casting a hopeless look at Margo’s house.

  Even darker and more obviously empty than before.

  Another dizzying shake. This time something in my left shoulder let go, unleashing a stab of agony and a flash of white light behind my eyes. I yelped like a puppy. He ignored me and kept shaking.

  “My 550 million dollars, is what. My lottery ticket. That I bought with my dollar. He stole it. That blind Mondo bastard. I want it back.”

  Okay, there was my answer. Big fat lying idiot.

  A huge, dangerous, fucking, lying dumb-ass was bruising my upper arms with his filthy hands and breaking my shoulder away from the rest of my body like a chicken wing.

  No fucking way.

  I focused all the energy from my entire weak, trembling, furious body into my right elbow and drove it into this guy’s jiggly solar plexus as hard as I could. My right hand sprang open. The bottle of Jo Malone Lavender & Amber hit the rocks. We were in tear gas territory now.

  The guy howled, “Aaaag!” Released his grip long enough to cuff me smartly on the side of the head and then grabbed hold of me again.

  I wasn’t having any of that. I kicked back at his shin as hard as I could, stomped on both his feet, and screamed, “Stop it, you filthy creep. Get your disgusting paws off of me.”

  Paws?

  Oh, yeah. Now there was a magic invocation.

  Because…

  Out of the gathering darkness, trailing the ghosts of thousands of her ancestor dogs, and emitting the mighty bell-like, gut-wrenching roar that is the battle cry of her breed, The Princess Vespa came forth to kill my dumb-ass.

  And, really, her roar got the job done. The guy dropped his hold on me and stumbled every which way, sounding the loser bellow of his own kind as he ran.

  Amazing. I was alive. Shaking. Drenched in a blend of fragrance in a quantity neither Nature nor Jo Malone ever intended. My head spinning. My shoulder on fire…

  But alive. I fell to my knees in front of Princess, sobbing with gratitude and residual terror. I meant to hug her but she swayed her jowls at me and backed up. I got it. I let her go.

  And then, to cap it all off, my heroine and I were engulfed in a wash of headlights. Margo. She pulled to a stop outside my gate and gazed at her dog and me for a long, speechless few seconds.

  “Allie? Princess? Where’s Tom? Who was that guy? And what the fuck is that smell?”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Margo called the police. But did we get “the police”? Oh, no. Of course not. That would have been too easy. We got Valerio.

  In the time it took him to show up, the big lying doofus had vanished. All he’d left us was a trail of trampled underbrush and a cloud of
fragrance. And my sore shoulder, of course. It wasn’t so bad, unless I moved too quickly. Or breathed too deeply. I sat very still. Valerio stared at me. Made no comment in a manner that was itself an extremely unkind comment. Took my statement. By the book. Sniffed his disapproval. And left.

  As he was going, though, he gazed at me for a moment, thinking his Valerio thoughts, and favored me with one parting question.

  “Seriously?”

  ***

  I gave up and called Tom. On the one hand, I couldn’t wait to hear his voice. On the other, I was scared of what he would say. It didn’t help that I’d forgotten I’d turned my phone all the way off. When I turned it back on, I’d missed seven calls from him.

  His “Hello?” was ragged with fear. His first “Allie!” was ecstatic with relief. His second “Allie” was one degree down from white hot rage. After that, he said a few things about what he thought of me.

  “Tom.” I kept saying “Tom…”

  All my tried and true, smart and sassy defenses were trashed. Whatever this was going to be, I had it coming, but I needed it face-to-face. If he was planning to kick me out of his life for demolishing the ground rules, I wanted him to kick me out in person. If this it was going to be goodbye, I was going to be present for it.

  “Tom,” I broke through at last, “stop. I get it. Listen for one second, will you? Please?

  “I’m listening. Go ahead.”

  “I’m coming ho—back to the Marriott. I screwed up tonight. I don’t have any excuse. Nothing. You can say whatever you want. Do whatever you need to. But, Tom…” My voice shattered. “I need to see you.”

  “Fine.” His tone was cold. “I’ll be in the bar.”

  We’d been sitting in Margo’s kitchen while I made the call and Margo hadn’t budged through any of it, watching me with troubled eyes.

  “It’ll be okay, Al. Mad is the top layer of scared. He’ll get over it. You’ll see.” She paused and sniffed a couple of times. “Would you like to maybe use my shower before you go? He relies on his senses a great deal….”