1
“Beware embossing. It often heralds formal gowns and rubber chicken.”
Tori Karacis, words to live by
Tori Karacis
Los Angeles, CA
The Feds and my cousin Tina’s wedding invitation blew in on the same ill wind. Truth be told, one came in bearing the other. It couldn’t be harpies or banshees or even, hell, desert scorpions. Oh no, those I could probably have handled. But it didn’t seem terribly good form to use my gorgon mojo on guys who could lock me up and lose me in the system without needing much in the way of probable cause.
Not that I was paranoid. I mean, two weeks ago I’d faced down a few gods from the old neighborhood trying to drop LA into the ocean just to announce their second coming. In theory, a couple of mere mortals shouldn’t be too much of a problem—assuming they weren’t here to cart me off to some super-secret government lab to explore my more unusual attributes from the inside out.
“Mizz Karacis?” asked the one I was already planning to dub Little Wooden Boy simply because he reminded me of a two-thirds scale model of Al Gore.
“I hope so, I’m wearing her underwear.”
“Very original,” he answered with no discernable trace of sincerity. “I’m Special Agent Eric Holloway and this is Special Agent Ben Rosen from the FBI.” His partner, the one not holding my mail hostage, flashed a badge that I supposed was meant to be good enough for the both of them. “We need to ask you a few questions.”
And there it was … the other shoe. I’d been waiting for it to drop ever since Internal Affairs had started harassing Detective Armani … or, as I called him now, Nick. I understood why—an officer dead, Armani’s partner disappeared—but that didn’t mean I liked it. He couldn’t very well tell them the truth—that his partner, Detective Lau, had flown off on the back of a dragon who’d been awakened by a seismic blast caused by Greek gods run amok. Not unless he was willing to earn himself a trip to a padded cell on a psychiatric visa. I still wasn’t fully convinced of my own sanity, and I’d seen it all with my own eyes.
But my inquisitors loomed, awaiting an invitation to enter. I said a wistful goodbye to the idea of getting to the beach before all the good spots were taken. It was unseasonably warm for late March, and my air conditioning just wasn’t cutting it. If I was going to bake, it might as well be to a nice golden brown. Instead, I sighed. Heavily.
“Sure, come in. Thanks so much for bringing my mail,” I replied wryly.
I held out a hand to relieve Holloway of the burden, but he walked right past me without giving it up. His gaze skimmed my sunny yellow bathing suit cover-up and flip-flops, noted the mesh bag containing my paperback and tanning supplies, and moved on to the small condo I was housesitting for Armani’s AWOL partner. My own apartment had fallen prey to Zeus’s pyrotechnic wrath. I’d packed away Detective Lau’s desiccated sea life—dried up starfish, sand dollars, sea urchins and the like—because they creeped me out. Otherwise, the place was pretty much as she’d left it, aside from the dirty dishes in the sink and a centimeter or so of dust. I wasn’t much on the housekeeping front.
“Cozy,” commented Rosen with that same lack of inflection his partner had mastered. No doubt they’d been at the top of their academy class for dry delivery. Their mothers must be so proud.
Rosen had Charlton Heston’s sandy abundance of hair, but that’s where the resemblance ended. Beyond that he was unremarkable. Dark suit, crisp white shirt, conservative striped tie, eyes that couldn’t decide what color they wanted to be—green or brown. Blending into the woodwork was probably not a bad thing for a federal agent.
I gestured them toward the relatively uncluttered conversational grouping in the living room.
“Can I get you anything?” I asked, just to be polite.
They exchanged a look that might have said yeah right before declining in stereo.
I shrugged and took a seat, after which they took theirs, barely sinking into Lau’s militantly firm couch. Stiff, just like the missing lady herself.
“Ma’am, we need you to tell us everything you can about the events of March 6th of this year.”
Oh, crumb. “March 6th? My schedule is at the office, so you’ll have to give me a second.” I pretended to think before answering. “I was probably checking the mail for my tax refund. I e-filed early, you know, thinking I’d speed things along, but I guess I’m just a cock-eyed optimist. Speaking of mail, can I have mine?”
Holloway eyed me keenly before handing it over. “There’s no refund check. There is a wedding invitation. At least, that’s what it looks like. Will you be bringing Detective Armani?”
I forced myself not to react as I flipped through my mail—junk, junk, flier, another bill, embossed card-stock envelope. “I haven’t decided yet.”
Rosen’s hand slammed onto the table, so suddenly and untelegraphed it made me jump. “Let’s cut the crap. Last night, several people turned up dead under mysterious circumstances at the lip of a crater caused by an explosion that took place two weeks ago. Exactly two weeks ago, you made a 911 call that led to the arrest of three incapacitated men at the Le Brea Tar Pits who are believed to have been involved with the explosion. Your voiceprint is unmistakable. You can start telling us what you know or we can haul your ass in.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if the rest of me could come too when I registered what he’d said. “Wait—what? More bodies?” That explosion—that had been the old gods raising a ruckus, but this was new.
The Feds exchanged another expressionless glance. “Show her,” Holloway ordered his partner.
Rosen reached into the same jacket pocket from which he’d pulled documentation earlier and snapped a sheaf of papers down in front of me so that they fanned out across the table. I wish I could have said they were grainy or blurred, but …
“Excuse me.” I choked, racing for the sink.
I tossed my cookies, every last one from Yiayia’s special snickerdoodle care package. They weren’t nearly as good coming up with a chaser of bile. I ran water down the drain and grabbed some in my cupped hands to rinse out my mouth. I wished my mind was as easy to scour, but it would take the world’s most impressive roll of mental floss to rid myself of those scream-scene images.
“Gum?” I heard from behind me.
I whirled on them. “Oh yeah, that’ll make it all better.”
“It’s for us,” Rosen said, “so we don’t have to smell your breath while we talk.”
What the hell do you say to that?
“Sit,” Holloway ordered. “It’ll pass.”
I sat, but only because my body told me it was a damned good idea. I was shaking and my knees had gone to Jell-O. “Those people weren’t just killed, they were shredded,” I said.
“Yup,” Rosen agreed. “Holloway lost his lunch, same as you. That’s how I knew to bring the gum. You ready to talk to us now?”
Well, hell, they’d already seen the contents of my stomach, what more did I have to hide? I told them what I knew. Oh, not the god part of it. The way I spun it, Zeus, Poseidon and Hephaestus, under their street names, of course, were domestic terrorists whose activities I’d stumbled upon during one of my private investigations. I didn’t know what in the world had possessed them to plant explosives at the tar pits, and I claimed no knowledge of what had caused Mount Lee to explode, knocking the H from the Hollywood sign. Based on their questioning, I guessed that was where the bodies had been found. In life, the newly deceased had been seismologists and volcanologists monitoring the equipment they’d set up to explain a magma-free eruption of a previously docile peak.
“This investigation that led you to the terrorists, that would be …” Holloway consulted his BlackBerry, “the Circe Holland murder?”
I agreed that it was.
“According to the police report, you described her assailant as green around the gills, kind of scaly.”
Uh oh. Now it got dicey. “If you know that much, you probably know that a body fitting that description was fished out of the water under the Santa Monica pier. Case closed,” I answered, like it was an everyday occurrence.
Rosen tapped on the table until I returned my attention to him. This back and forth of theirs was going to put a crick in my neck.
“Yes, we’ve examined the body. Very strange, wouldn’t you say? Like something out of legend.” His eyes held mine. And held. And held. He wasn’t blinking.
I had a moment’s concern about how I would play it before my natural smartass stepped in. “Wait, this must be some kind of new reality show, right? Like X-Files meets Main Street Mysteries?” I pretended to look around. “Where’s the camera? Which one of you is Scully?”
He still wasn’t blinking or smiling. “So you don’t think it’s strange?” he asked, refusing to be put off track.
“Is this relevant to those bodies on Mount Lee?”
Holloway jumped back into the fray, “We’re not at liberty—”
But Rosen cut him off. “The bodies on Mount Lee—or rather the parts found—had been gnawed. Forensics hasn’t matched the bite marks yet, but I think there’s a good reason for that. They seem too large to belong to any currently living carnivore.”
I noticed the look his partner threw him, the first genuine expression from Little Wooden Boy. Okay then, so Rosen was Mulder.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“I’m saying that it’s possible Circe Holland’s killer isn’t the only abnormality out there.” I so wanted to start humming the X-Files theme, but I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket with both hands. Rosen was apparently a true believer. And that made him dangerous as hell.
“Speaking of which,” Holloway said, leaning in as if to relegate his partner to the background, “did you happen to encounter any evidence of biological terrorism during the Holland investigation?”
I narrowed my eyes at him, wishing I had some kind of useful power, like mind reading. Biological terrorism? Dead and dismembered bodies? What could they possibly think I knew?
“Like what?” I asked.
Holloway was warming to me. Really, I could tell from the dead stare. “Vapid doesn’t play well on you, Mizz Karacis.”
“Possibly because I’m not playing.” Wait, that hadn’t come out quite right.
They fired a few more questions at me before finally giving up, threatening to be in touch and showing themselves to the door. I followed so that I could throw the deadbolt behind them, then leaned against the door for good measure, still shaking, legs feeling about as supportive as Silly Bandz. But it wasn’t all the Feds’ fault, and I knew it. I hadn’t been the same since—But no, one crisis at a time. I had my hands full with this one right now. I kept hoping that if I ignored the other it would just go away.
My first thought was to call Armani—Nick—but what in the world would I say … And could I trust that Internal Affairs wouldn’t be listening in?
I trudged back into the living room and collapsed into a chair—to the extent it allowed anyway—to do some thinking. In a way, it was comforting to know that no human was suspected of what had been done to those bodies. The kind of carnage in those pictures … it would have taken a madman. Not that they were exactly in short supply in my world.
The crime scene photos were gone, but my mail still sat in the center of the coffee table, taunting me as only inanimate objects can. It’s hard to win a staring contest with unwanted responsibility. It never blinks. And kickboxing your mail was wholly unsatisfying. My cousin Tina was a whole other matter. Drop-kicking bridezilla would be a hoot and a half—only I didn’t suppose I’d ever make it back into the family’s good graces that way.
As if I didn’t already have enough to chew on, there was the catch that came with the wedding invitation. I had to find Uncle Christos, Tina’s godfather and my absentee mentor, so that he could give the bride away. Her own father was six feet under and therefore unavailable. Truth be told, I was starting to get a bit concerned about Christos myself. His sabbatical from the PI business had now taken on Odyssean proportions and no one had heard from him since the beginning. But as the fellow black sheep of the family—one of the few not to go the circus route—I felt compelled to support his decision to go walkabout. He was a big boy. He knew how to take care of himself. It warred with my innate nosiness not to pry, but I’d thus far given him his privacy. If I wanted back into the family fold, that was going to have to change. Yiayia’s snickerdoodles had been a bribe for me to give in to the family’s request. I wondered if the fact that I hadn’t kept them down voided the implied acceptance of having eaten them to begin with. But really … Yiayia’s snickerdoodles … what other choice had there been?
On some level, I realized I was off on a tangent. That had been happening a lot lately. Focus was a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a while. But I tried. The vision of those poor dead scientists gave me something to hang on to. It was hard, in fact, to look away, even in my mind’s eye.
No one had hired me to investigate. No doubt Rosen and Holloway would be happier if I didn’t, but I needed something to take my mind off my tremors and a new case would be just the thing. Plus, I couldn’t not help, just as I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen.
Research was definitely in order, and that meant the office. My old place might not have had enough furniture for a conversational grouping, but at least it’d had DSL. Lau’s place had bupkis, unless you considered dialup, which I didn’t. She didn’t even have decent Wi-Fi in her area that I could piggyback onto.
My hands shook as I used the arms of the chair to help myself up. Only through sheer force of will had I kept them relatively steady throughout the interview with the terrible twosome, but I would not consider that the weakness was getting worse. I was also not thinking about pink elephants, Elvis sightings or that growing feeling of need, pining for something no multivitamin was going to supply. It would pass. Ambrosia addiction had been known to kill mere mortals, but I had it on good authority that I wasn’t … or not entirely. So, I wasn’t thinking about withdrawal or the sexy god who’d dosed me with the stuff in the attempt to save my life. First one’s free, little girl.
Nope, I was Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.
I spared one more wistful thought for the beach before changing into black slacks, sandals and a teal top—business casual on the off chance a client wandered into the office while I was there. I’d take as many distractions as I could get.
On the way, I stopped off for a triple shot latte worth every inflated cent. By the time I reached the office, at least I had a reason for the shakes. My stomach was dancing the jitterbug, threatening revolt.
The Karacis Investigations office was located in old Hollywood—the part that held classic theatres like the Orpheum and Rialto, many of which had since been turned into discount stores or offices. The buildings were antique, the rooms small and the rent relatively cheap. It was the only reason I could afford to stay. Certainly, I wasn’t rolling in the dough. Hollywood stereotypes aside, no one had yet come through my door asking for help finding a Maltese falcon or stolen diamonds and offering to share the award. Yet being the operative word. I lived in hope.
I rode the creaking elevator up to the third floor rather than take the stairs on shaky legs. At my door with the peeling paint and semi-discreet gold plaque bearing our company name I had to focus to get the key into the lock without further scratching the paint. I’d just made it and was about to turn the knob when something behind the door went thump, loud enough to be heard over the gurgle of my insides. I froze, listening intently, waiting for the sound to repeat to be sure I’d heard anything at all and hadn’t just entered some auditory hallucination phase of withdrawal. But there it was again—the sound of something rubbing against something else. Friction, like of desk drawers poorly fitted or our closet doors sliding on their tracks.
Someone was in there. Good, well, at least I’d mastered the obvious.
Quietly, I set down the last of my overpriced coffee and removed the key from the door to get to the canister of pepper spray I kept attached to the chain. I thumbed off the safety, then slowly, silently turned the unlocked knob. As soon as it unlatched, I slammed the door open with my shoulder. The door didn’t bounce back at me, and no one instantly pounced. That didn’t mean the coast was clear.
Holding my pepper spray like a gun, since my actual weapon was helpfully locked in my desk, I moved through the office. Entryway—empty. No tingle of my god-given early warning system as I approached the coat closet. Still, I chose one side and slid the door back as quickly as it would go. Nothing. I could see to the other side of the equally intruder-free closet. There were only three other rooms besides the entry foyer where my assistant Jesus (pronounced Hey-Zeus) greeted clients and dealt commentary with every sniff, eye roll and pointed riposte—my office, Uncle Christos’s office and the bathroom.
A little ripple of tension shot through me at the thought of Christos’s office. So, I had my direction, but also an extra kick of adrenaline because this was new. My scant precognition had only kicked in before when something was coming at me. It had never before given me directional signals.
No time to think about that now. I crept toward Christos’s office as if I hadn’t already broadcast my presence with the slamming and sliding doors. I stopped just short of entering. His door was ajar. I planted one foot on the floor and gave a “ki-yah!” as I blasted a sidekick at the door, blowing it in to hit anyone who might be hiding behind it in ambush. The door didn’t get far before meeting an immovable object and rebounding toward me. I was out of range of a knob to the ribs, but not bullets if they were the next thing coming at me, so I whirled to the side to put a wall between me and the intruder.
I would have been content to wait him out until he was vulnerable coming through the doorway, but there was another way out of that office, through the connecting door into mine. I was torn—guard the exit into the hallway or go in after the intruder and hope he wasn’t fast enough to do an end run around me. The first was probably the sane, sensible choice, since it seemed a good bet he hadn’t planned an escape route out my third-floor window in broad daylight in downtown LA.
Problem was, I was riding a caffeine and adrenaline high. Every neuron was screaming go, go, GO. I went, aiming another mighty kick at the door. This time it nearly jumped out of my way. A frisson of alarm rippled through me, warning of the blow a second before it landed. I ducked and rolled, catching it on the shoulder, but I only knew because of the force. I was feeling no pain. Unfortunately, neither was I still in possession of the pepper spray.
I came up in a crouch and swept one leg out to knock the guy off his feet, but he jumped it, suddenly past me with a running start toward the outer office door, a blur in basic B&E black. I leapt to my feet and ran after, catching his shoulder just as his hand stretched for the knob. His elbow missed my ribcage by centimeters, but my kidney punch arched his back and caused a grunt of pain. It didn’t keep him from turning the knob and hotfooting it toward the staircase.
Something dark—my inner adrenaline junkie maybe—screamed at me to pursue, but I fought it down. There was no guarantee he’d been the only intruder. If I gave chase it left his partner free to ransack the office.
Besides, I didn’t trust my compulsion to pursue. The fight had been over way too quickly, and it bothered me that I felt like that was a bad thing. Fighting had always been a means to an end—fitness, primarily—never something I craved.
I forced my mind to turn down more productive pathways and began by taking stock of the damage. Jesus’s desk was no longer obsessively neat. A first smile of the day teased at me when I imagined his upcoming hissy fit. I peered into Christos’s office and found the personal mail we’d been saving for him scattered to the four winds, the contents of his desk drawers littering the floor …
Definitely time to give Armani a call.
What I didn’t expect was his barked response—“Call property crimes”—and subsequent hang-up. I was still staring in shock at the phone when the one on the desk rang. My heart twisted, knowing it wasn’t Nick ringing back to apologize but hoping all the same.
I was too curious to worry about destroying evidence like prints. But I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t use my shirt to pick up the receiver, exposing the bottom of my bra to anyone who might have stuck around, and nearly giving myself a Charlie horse as I contorted to make it work.
“Karacis Investigations,” I answered.
“Tori, thank God I caught you.” It was a woman’s voice. Husky, familiar, but I couldn’t immediately place it. “It’s Beverly Simon—uh, Detective Simon. I’ve heard from Christos.”
Detective Beverly Simon, Christos’s poker buddy … and, I suspected, something more. Not that he’d ever said as much.
“Speak of the devil! Do you know where he is? Tell me he’s all right.”
My heart sank at her hesitation. “I’m not so sure. I’d like to come by and talk to you.”
“Well, that’s a coincidence. I was about to call you. We’ve had a break-in here, and it seems the perp was pretty interested in Christos’s office.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
“Don’t touch anything. I’ll be right over.” A click indicated the line had gone dead.
She probably expected me to step outside the office, close the door behind me and leave well enough alone until she arrived, but … I was only (mostly) human after all. Snooping was like a siren’s song I was powerless to resist. Besides, I needed to be sure the intruder hadn’t started a fire somewhere or set a bomb to cover his tracks. The fact that I didn’t smell anything burning in the first case and didn’t know what I could do in the second didn’t stop me. Logic was just a tool—twisty as a garden hose.
Which sent my brain off on one of the tangents it’d been so fond of lately. The hose put me in mind of snakes, maybe the poisonous kind that could be left to lie in wait. Other scenarios played out in my head—deadly spiders, anthrax, Barry Manilow mix tapes. I tried to reel in the paranoia, but the fear had taken on a life of its own. I needed a reality check. I needed—gods help me—Jesus.
I yanked my cell phone from its belt holster and hit speed dial. At my retelling of events, Jesus gasped in horror—probably at the idea of disarray rather than at my brush with danger—and promised to be right over. My dark thoughts seemed to melt away. With Jesus assuming all of the drama, it was hard to maintain it myself. Begin with Monk, the obsessive-compulsive detective, pass Top Model on the way to diva, take a left turn at Albuquerque, and you might hit Jesus. Maybe. If he wasn’t feeling ornery. I was calmer already.
Now there was nothing to do but wait, a four-letter word if ever there was one. Mentally, I ran back over the details of the break-in, so I’d have them straight for Detective Beverly. What I kept coming back to was the contradiction of the intruder himself. I mean, basic black head to toe to break into a place in downtown LA on a beautiful morning when most people were in tank tops and sandals? Not that any kind of affectation was exactly unheard of in La La Land. Everything had happened so quickly that I couldn’t remember if the guy had been wearing gloves or not. It seemed likely, though, especially since he’d taken the B&E cliché to a whole new level, which screamed amateur. On the other hand, he certainly knew how to fight, jump a kick and take a punch, which said he wasn’t completely without experience.
If only I’d gotten a decent look at the guy’s face, I might not only have a good description for the police, but the man himself, frozen in his tracks by my gorgon glare. As it was, I’d seen only enough to mark him young, twenties at the latest. Medium brown hair, medium height, average build. Helluva description.
The sound of a key rattling in the office door derailed that train of thought, and a millisecond later Jesus breezed through, breathing as if he’d powerwalked the five blocks from his apartment. He air-kissed the space beside my cheek as he brushed past me, headed toward my office. He looked like a man on a mission.
“We’re not supposed to touch anything!” I called after him.
He waved me off with a fluttering hand over his shoulder. I followed behind him like a puppy and watched as he used his pinky to pull open a side drawer of my desk. He gingerly removed two sets of the cheap sandwich bag type gloves we kept around for handling evidence we intended to turn over to the police.
“Now why didn’t I think of that?” I asked, taking the pair he held out to me.
Jesus straightened and raked his gaze over me. “Because you are shaken up. Literally. Chica, how much caffeine did you have?”
I smiled, the Jesus effect. “Too much. The intruder was in Christos’s office when I caught him. Let’s start there.”
Jesus went right for the files, so I squatted on the floor to look over the debris scattered there. Paper clips, staples, sticky notes, pens, pencils, lightly-used napkins, binder clips—the usual desk drawer detritus—lay among fliers, credit card offers and the occasional piece of personal mail. I didn’t want to touch anything, so I just stared, first taking note of each individual piece and then trying to see some kind of pattern—what was missing, what had been flung farthest afield. I knew there was something …
“Jesus?”
“Yeah.”
“I think our visitor made off with Uncle Christos’s bank statements.” The sound of flipping folders halted.
“Qué?”
“Well, unless you’ve been filing or forwarding them, they seem to be missing. I haven’t been paying attention to what’s been coming in, so I can’t account for every piece of junk mail he’s received, but the accounting statements are pretty noticeable in their absence.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. It’s easy enough to request new ones.”
“Maybe the intruder wasn’t trying to keep us in the dark so much as access the information for himself.”
Jesus sniffed. “Must be why you’re the highly paid detective, while I’m a lowly office clerk. You’re the one with the theories.”
I wasn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole.
The intercom chirped. Jesus’s gloves disappeared into a pocket, but I kept mine on to buzz up Detective Beverly.
“Been investigating on your own?” she asked, looking pointedly at my hands as she stepped through the doorway.
Jesus leaned casually against his desk, one butt cheek propped on the edge. “Not quite on her own,” he answered.
Great, an admission of sorts. I shot him a look, which he ignored.
Beverly’s lips thinned, but she wisely saved her breath on the admonishment. “Guess you’ll be able to save me a little time then. Tell me what’s missing.”
“My phone message pad,” Jesus said, surprising me. “And bank statements.”
“Anything else?”
“Not that we’ve noticed so far, but when you see Christos’s office, you’ll know why we can’t be sure yet,” I answered.
Something flashed behind Beverly’s eyes, a mixture of anger and determination, and she went to see for herself.
“Check the computer files yet?” she asked from the entrance to Christos’s office.
Jesus and I exchanged a look. We hadn’t gotten that far.
“The monitor light is blinking, like someone did an incomplete shut down,” she explained in the face of our silence.
Then she took a harder look at me. “You feeling all right?”
I let my lip curl just a bit. I’d always hated that question. By the time anyone asked it, it was usually pretty clear that you weren’t. Either that or you were holding it together just fine and resenting the hell out of the implied criticism.
“Fine,” I said, hiding my hands out of sight behind my back. “Still a little jittery with adrenaline overload, but I’ll live.”
She gave me that cop look, the one that said she could see right through me, but she let it go. “The crime scene techs should be right behind me. I want to talk to Tori, get her description of the intruder, but there’s no reason for you to stick around on a beautiful day like today.”
Jesus bristled at the clear dismissal, and I jumped in to head off the collision I could see coming between my drama king of an assistant and the detective who’d dare to muck up his kingdom with her fingerprint powder.
“Jesus will be as good as gold. Won’t you?” I asked him pointedly. To Beverly, “He’s an aspiring actor. I’m sure he’d just like to get a firsthand look at the way things are done, in case it’s ever useful to him.”
“I’m sure we could arrange a ride along or something later in the week,” she countered. “For now, I need him out.”
Jesus huffed in response and shot me a martyred look. “Fine. I am going.”
“But,” he said, still looking at me, “do not expect me to clean up the mess.” Heaven forbid.