Unscrewed Read online

  “‘Like a Virgin’!” I gritted, and tossed the empty ice-cream carton in the trash.

  Ten minutes later I was chugging up the 210, systematically berating myself the whole way. From what I had heard, Rivera’s relationship with his father was prickly at best. I should give them a chance to work things out. On the other hand, I wasn’t intending to interfere. I was simply going to see if he was there.

  Relatively comfortable with that justification, I followed my trusty MapQuest directions and turned onto the 405, then merged onto the I-10 and traipsed northwest along the Pacific Coast Highway. During daylight hours the spectacular view can take your breath away. At night it’s more likely to take your life. Fog was just beginning to creep in from the bay, flowing like tattered, gauzy sleeves toward the rugged bluffs.

  My thoughts were just as threadbare, worn at the seams, frayed at the edges.

  The fact that Rivera was willing to lend a hand when his father called was a good sign, I reminded myself. A sign of healing, perhaps. As a therapist and a friend, it would be wrong of me to resent his efforts. In fact, when next I spoke to him I would commend him for his attempt to mend familial fences and…

  A police cruiser streaked up behind me, flashing lights cutting through the ragged mists, siren sounding eerie in the muffled night. I checked my speed. Seventy miles an hour in a sixty-five zone. Damn it to hell. I worked up a full head of steam as I crunched onto the shoulder of the road. Wasn’t like I was stealing old ladies’ life insurance policies or—

  The cruiser zipped past, taking Sunset Boulevard and heading west.

  I wilted with relief and gave myself a mental shake. There was no need to rush. Nothing to worry about. The wheeling lights had already disappeared by the time I turned onto Los Liones, but I could still hear the siren.

  Or another siren. I glanced in my rearview mirror. The cop car behind me barely slowed for the turn, careened around me, then sped into the encroaching fog.

  I scowled. Seemed like an awfully good neighborhood for such goings-on. But maybe some rising starlet was serving pretzels and Heinekens, incurring the rush.

  It was difficult to see my directions even with my interior light on. I missed a turn, made a U-ey in a cul-de-sac, and took a right onto Tramonto Drive. An ambulance pulled in behind me.

  Something balled up in my stomach. It might have been the Freaky Deaky, but Edy’s and I have a working relationship. I keep the company in business, and it doesn’t mess with my gastric system.

  Up ahead, it looked like Christmas. Red and blue strobe lights were rotating in their plastic casings atop cop cars. A tall, rough stucco house was caught in the crisscross beams of the cruisers, the terra-cotta roof scalloped against a blue velvet sky, the front door open as if to invite all comers. Apparently, Senator Rivera lived in a hopping neighborhood.

  An officer in blue stepped into my headlights, hand raised as he walked toward me.

  I managed to brake before plowing him down like roadkill. My curiosity was roiling as I powered open my window. “What’s going on?” I asked, giving him a smile and a glimmer of cleavage.

  He bent slightly at the waist, but he was either gay or distracted, because he barely noticed the display. I gave him a quick appraisal. Good-looking, young, attractive in a narrow, academic sort of way. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, his voice amazingly devoid of emotion despite his age or lack thereof, “you’ll have to turn around here.”

  But I had almost reached my destination. In less than a minute I would know whether Rivera’s Jeep was parked in front of his father’s manse. And if it was, well, then I could get on with that trust thing, couldn’t I?

  “I’m afraid I’m unable to do that, Officer,” I said, lowering my tone an octave and trying to imbue it with sincere intelligence. I retracted the smile and wished I could do the same with the cleavage, but the cleavage was pretty much out there. “I have an appointment. But it will only take me a—”

  “I’m sorry,” he interrupted. I hate being interrupted more than I hate Brussels sprouts. But growing up with three perpetually adolescent brothers can do that to a girl. “You’ll have to come back—”

  “That’s impossible.” Interrupting other people, however, doesn’t bother me in the least. “But I can park here, if you prefer, and walk—”

  “Like I said, ma’am, you’ll have to turn around.”

  I also hate being called “ma’am.”

  “I have an important engagement with—”

  “What kind of—”

  “It’s a private matter.” I could feel my adrenaline start to blend with the estrogen in my blooming system. It mixed a heady brew. “Between myself and my client.”

  His brows lowered a quarter of an inch. “Are you counsel?”

  Counsel? I let the question swirl around in my head. “Mr. Rivera’s expecting me,” I said. “His house is just up ahead. If you’ll let me…”

  There was a moment of terse silence, then, “Did he call you?”

  Umm. “Yes.” Sometimes the truth’s as good as a lie, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

  “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “McMullen.”

  He glanced toward the house, impatient. “Pull over to the curb. Wait in the car,” he said, then strode purposefully toward the front door of the stucco castle.

  Weird. Backing up a little, I cranked the Saturn’s wheels toward the lawn. Maybe I should just turn around and go past Rivera’s house from another direction, I thought, but in that moment I caught the number written in black metal scroll against the pale stucco—3430, Senator Rivera’s address. A little bit of vertigo struck me.

  The car door seemed to open by itself. There was a mob standing on the sidewalk, five men and two women crammed together like people do in times of tragedy and excitement.

  “What happened?” My voice sounded hoarse.

  “Don’t know.” The guy who turned toward me was pure yuppie. Perfect hair, perfect teeth, and a perfectly ironed dress shirt in mandarin orange. If I could have seen his hands I was pretty sure his nails would have shone with a fresh buffing. “The police showed up about half an hour ago. But they won’t say what’s going on.”

  “Somebody’s dead.” The second guy was a few pounds heavier but just as yuppie.

  “You don’t know that, Dave,” said Mr. Perfect.

  “It happens just like this on CSI and somebody’s always—”

  “This isn’t—”

  My mind tuned them out as my attention wandered toward the street. And there, parked across Tramonto Drive, was Rivera’s Jeep. A wave of nausea curdled my stomach.

  And something hit me in the back of the head. It might have been a thought. Or a premonition. Sometimes they come at me like disoriented bats.

  “You Ms. McMullen?”

  I turned.

  A man in a tan tweed jacket and blue jeans strode partway down the winding stone walkway that led toward the house, the officer who’d stopped me at his elbow. Their heads shifted together. A few words were spoken. Maybe they were too quiet to hear. Maybe it was the swelling waves in my head that kept the world at bay.

  “You Ms. McMullen?” he repeated. The suit was medium height, square-jawed, no-nonsense. I lurched back in time, to another place, another crime scene, another officer. I felt off balance. Maybe it was the three-inch heels.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Detective Graystone. Officer Bjorklund said you had an appointment with Mr. Rivera.”

  “What happened?” I asked. Dread was a greasy ball somewhere just south of my esophagus now.

  “We’re still attempting to determine that, ma’am.” His blond hair was thinning and gleamed in the wheeling lights. “At approximately what time did the lieutenant call you?”

  The lieutenant! They weren’t looking all grim-faced and hard-eyed about the senator at all. They had assumed I was there on the younger Rivera’s behalf. Why? The possibilities made me feel dizzy, sick. “I have to talk to him,�
�� I said.

  Graystone grinned, but his eyes were hard. “Now, here’s something new, Bjorklund. They don’t usually lawyer up before they’re charged. When did you last speak to him, Ms. McMullen?”

  “Listen,” I said, “I know my rights.” I didn’t really, but I was starting to consider reading up on that. “And I’m fully aware that I don’t need to address any questions until—”

  “When?” he gritted, and stepped up close. His eyes were silver blue in the eerie lights of the cruisers. Fog shivered past. The crowd behind me seemed eons away, leaving me alone in a sea of uncertainty.

  “Just a couple hours ago,” I said.

  His expression didn’t waver, but his eyes flashed in the surreal lights. “Bjorklund!” He grabbed the younger officer’s arm, drew him close, murmured something short and quick.

  “But—”

  “Get your ass in there and do it.”

  Then Bjorklund was gone.

  “Is someone dead?” My words came by themselves. No thought processes involved.

  “How long have you been his attorney?”

  My attention snapped to him. The lights on the cruisers turned crazily. The world whirled with it. “What?”

  He narrowed his eyes, a freight train slowing down, taking stock. His gaze didn’t shift, but he seemed to assess me just the same: the filmy blouse, the ridiculous skirt, the heels. He gave me his friendly face and drew a careful breath. “What’s your given name, Ms. McMullen?”

  “Christina,” I said. What had happened? Where was Rivera?

  “And your relationship to Mr. Rivera, Christina?”

  Good question. Excellent question. “I’m a psychologist,” I said, straightening to my full height, just over six feet in the silver-bowed Guccis. “I’d like to see him.”

  “You’re his psychologist?”

  I had a friendly face, too, but I wasn’t about to waste it on him. “Is he in trouble?”

  “Has he ever spoken to you of a Ms. Martinez?”

  The name rang a tinny little bell in my brain but I couldn’t recognize the tune. “Not that I can recall.”

  “She was…” He paused a second. His eyes gleamed as they skimmed toward my cleavage. “…a friend of his, too.”

  The world felt suddenly cold.

  “She was also the senator’s fiancée,” he added.

  “I don’t…” Reality was a hard glacier pressed up against the world I wanted to have. “Was?”

  Something feral gleamed in his eyes. “Was,” he repeated.

  The earth seemed to be dropping away from me.

  His gaze slipped lower, down my exposed legs to the little bows at my ankles. “Were you on a date, Christina?”

  “What’s going on?” It was all I could manage.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions if—” he began, but at that instant hell exploded inside the house. Something shattered. Someone yelled.

  And suddenly Graystone had a gun in his hand. He spun around and sprinted up the walkway to the house.

  I went with him. I don’t remember ascending the front steps. Don’t remember passing the threshold. But suddenly I was there and no one stopped me. Like a feather on Graystone’s coattails.

  The air smelled of taut nerves and melted chocolate.

  The entry seemed hollow and empty. Marble clattered beneath my heels. The living room was vaulted, arched stucco doorways, Persian rugs, crowded with people. Lieutenant Jack Rivera lay facedown on its pale hardwood floor. Two men dug their knees in his back. His forehead was bleeding, a bright stain of crimson over crusted black, but he never saw me. His eyes glowed with rage. Veins stood out like swollen tributaries in his dark forearms.

  I didn’t realize until sometime later that I had pressed my back up against the rough plaster of the wall behind me.

  “Get the hell off me,” Rivera snarled, like a wild animal netted but not yet tranqed.

  “Calm down. Just calm down.” The nearest standing cop had a gun trained at Rivera’s head. There was a bruise developing over the officer’s left eye. Another uniform was wiping blood from his nose with the back of his hand.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” A man entered beside me. I cranked my head to the right, taking him in in strange blurps of frozen time. Big man. Black. Huge hands. Tired eyes. “Graystone?” he queried.

  The blocky suit stepped forward. “Dispatch got a call at nine-twelve. Said there was trouble at this address.”

  “Who called?”

  “Don’t know that yet, sir.”

  “Christ!” The big man’s gaze, thunderbolt-fast and midnight-dark, snapped to Rivera’s.

  “Get these assholes off me,” the lieutenant snarled.

  “Shut the hell up!” ordered the officer in charge, but his eyes were beyond tired when he turned them back to Graystone. “What time did we arrive?”

  “Nine twenty-eight, sir.”

  “Who came?”

  “Tebbet and Irons.”

  The big man’s gaze swung sideways, probably to the two officers in question, who were standing out of my line of vision. “And?”

  “Front door was open when we arrived, Captain Kindred.” The man who stepped forward to answer was short and squat, back straight, expression cranked tight, just starting to perspire. “We knocked. No one answered. House was quiet. I announced us. LAPD. Tebbet notified base of our intentions to enter said residence, then we went around back.” He swallowed. “The light was on in the hallway, as was the light in the kitchen. Unsure whether there were lights—”

  “Get to the damned money shot,” growled the captain.

  Irons nodded snappily. “The lieutenant was lying just to the left of where Tebbet is standing. He seemed unconscious.”

  “Fucking hell.” Kindred ran his fingers through nappy hair cut short. “And the girl?”

  All eyes turned toward something I couldn’t see. The captain took a step forward. The crowd parted like grains of sand, opening my view like a panoramic picture.

  And then I saw her—sprawled on her back, half in the living room, half in the hall. She was barefoot. Her toenails shone bloodred against the hard marble tile and matched her long, tapered fingernails to perfection. A white satin bathrobe was belted at her waist. Her head was turned just so, her lips as red as her nails, her smooth ballerina’s neck flawless, flowing gracefully into her shoulders and half-exposed breasts. Her eyes were wide and staring, liquid amber, shocked and unblinking as she gazed through a sable net of glossy hair. It flowed like a blue-black river over the slick fabric of her robe and onto the blond basswood floor beneath.

  She was extremely beautiful, I thought, and found myself sliding down the wall onto my near-naked ass, legs spread wide and head reeling.

  Extremely beautiful and absolutely dead.

  4

  In my experience, “what the hell” is generally the most interesting decision.

  —Eddie Friar, who had agreed to Chrissy’s brainstorms more times than most

  I WAS RUNNING, running and falling. Crying and screaming. But I couldn’t get away. Death was squeezing my lungs, stealing my breath. I thrashed wildly, trying to break free.

  “Mac? Mac.”

  I heard my name through layers of cotton batting. I jerked, found I was free, sat up, and blinked. My heart was hammering at my ribs. It was dark all around me, but light streamed from some sort of opening. An apparition stood in the center of it.

  “Mac.” The apparition rushed at me. A horse thundered along beside it. I scrunched back in terror. “Are you all right?”

  I think I shook my head. My bumbling thoughts cleared a little. “Laney?” I guessed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Her palm felt cool against my forehead. “What happened?”

  I blinked, tried to take a deep breath. The horse morphed into a dog the size of a Hummer. It licked my hand.

  “Are you okay?” Laney pushed the hair back from my face. Her fingers felt soft against my cheek. The dog’s tongue w
as rough. Harlequin. His name was Harlequin. Where was I? “I tried to call you after you talked to Jeen.”

  Jeen. Solberg. A few more facts filtered lethargically into my cranium.

  “But you didn’t answer your phone. Or your cell. You must have let the battery run down again.”

  “Battery,” I said. The filtering was pretty slow going. I can’t dance worth crap, and I’m like the anti-Christ in the kitchen, but I’m a world-class sleeper. I’m not quite such a champion at waking up, however.

  “Mac, what happened? Are you high? Did Rivera drug you or something?”

  “Rivera.” The filtering turned to a sudden flood: Shock on a dead girl’s face. Rage in Rivera’s eyes. “Laney.” I snapped my gaze to hers and grappled for her hand. “I think he killed her.”

  “What?” The question came from the doorway. I jerked in that direction. Solberg jittered there, short, skinny, bespectacled. I hoped this wasn’t my bedroom, considering his presence.

  “What are you talking about?” Laney was holding my hand between both of hers, squeezing gently. “What’s going on?”

  “The senator was dating his ex.”

  “Slow down.”

  “Creepy.” I shivered. “And she was…” I felt breathless, shaky. “So beautiful. Like the statue of Madonna in Father Pat’s office. You remember?”

  She nodded, but she might have been humoring me. I’ve noticed that people do that with the mentally deranged.

  “Her skin…” I shook my head. My memories were vivid. Her skin had looked flawlessly smooth, as if she’d never suffered a day of acne. Never struggled through manic brothers and adolescent boyfriends. But it was her eyes that snagged me. Eyes wide with shock and dismay, wondering how her perfect life had come to this. “I think she called him. Not his father,” I rambled. “But from his house. ‘Like a Virgin.’ Dead. And I thought—”

  “Jeen, turn on the light, please.” Laney’s voice was firm but soft.