Ghosts & Echoes

6 Information Retrieval

DIFFICULT TRAFFIC TO THE BEACH, NOW THAT IT WAS CLOSER TO EIGHT, helped her to narrow her focus. Forget about Wright for the moment. Forget the whys and hows of Demalion’s return. Forget about Zoe and her problems. Forget about her dislike of Lisse Conrad. Concentrate on the simplest things. Driving without accident. Hunting down her leads on the burglars. Compartmentalization was the key here.

She slued the truck into the alley between the bar and her office, taking quick advantage of a gap between cars. She had to stomp on the brake to avoid hitting the Dumpster, left a quick yelp of burned rubber, and rocked herself in the seat. But hey, another perfect parking job. She’d recovered enough of her composure to actually feel a tiny smidge of pride.

The bar’s alley door opened; Etienne poked his head out, all tousled dark curls and a faceful of piercings over a pale green beater tee. Dragonfly tattoos decorated his bare shoulders, black wings on black skin, and a blurred image of what she presumed was Jesus or a saint stretched the length of his forearm. He yawned, propped himself on the mossy stucco, and said, “’Sup, Shadows? Coffee in a mo’.” He turned around, not waiting for a response. That was Etienne, all over, slow-moving but inexorable.

Sylvie watched him go, decided she really had been out of the neighborhood loop if Etienne was sleeping in the bar as a deterrent to burglars. Confrontation was a dangerous tactic at the best of times; in this case it was likely to be a useless one if her experience was anything to go by.

She squeezed out of the truck, pushing the door open the whole eight inches available—parking in the alley did tend to leave precious little space—and dropped to the sand-coated asphalt, just as Etienne reappeared with two paper cups in his hands. An unbuttoned guayabera had been slung over his tee: business wear, Miami bar casual.

“Kinda busy,” Sylvie warned, even as she took the first cup. The heat went straight to her bones. She warmed her hands around the cup as if it were thirty degrees outside and not a damp eighty-five. She inhaled the deep roast, popped the lid to see the oily shimmer of serious caffeine, and thought she could make the time for a single cup’s worth of conversation.

He grinned, white slash of teeth. “You’re always busy, and I’m not looking to chat.” He pressed the second cup into her hands, sweet-scented even through the lid. It was a WASP-SPECIAL, mocha plus hazelnut, double cream and sugar: candy bar in a cup. She popped the lid; no jimmies, at least.

Sylvie looked down at it with more disapproval than the concoction really warranted. It wasn’t the coffee so much as what it foretold: Her plan for a quick in-and-out raid on Alex’s computer for that list of homes had just been squashed flat as a conch fritter. Her fault, completely. She’d been in such a hurry to avoid . . .

The scene of the crime? her little dark voice suggested slyly.

. . . the explanation she owed Wright that she’d left the list behind.

Her nerves jittered without her taking a single caffeinated sip. Alex was a minefield of potential questions, and Sylvie wasn’t ready to answer anything that might touch on Demalion’s inexplicable return.

“Thanks,” she said, lifting herself from the side of her truck, where she’d been slouched against the warm metal, tipping the coffee cup in Etienne’s direction.

“De nada,” Etienne said. He disappeared back into the bar on a waft of air-conditioning that mingled spilled alcohol with the cloying, chemical bite of Freon.

She sidled around the truck, slurping at her own coffee, scalding her tongue as always, but hell, impatience was a familiar flaw. The front door was locked; she kicked at the metal surround, rattle and clang, and shouted, “Alex!”

Alex popped the latches, a series of clicks and snaps one after another, and said. “Dammit, I knew you’d be in. I could have been sleeping.”

Sylvie waved the coffee cup, and Alex’s attention derailed. She pounced on it, and Sylvie said, “So, I’m a bad boss, made you get up early, and asked you for info that kept you up. You got anything useful?”

“List’s on the desk,” Alex said. “Organized for driving ease since there’s nothing much else to go on. All the neighborhoods are nice, no one reported a car stolen, and none of the owners have criminal records. How’d it go with Wright?”

Sylvie considered telling Alex exactly how it had gone, down to the little groan he’d made when her nails grazed his throat. Then she imagined the result: an impromptu lecture on the psychology of grief-driven behaviors as seen on Oprah, and god help her, but probably some type of client-employee counseling as scripted by Alex. Instead, Sylvie bit it all back, and said, “About as you would expect.”

Alex looked down at the murky froth of her de-lidded coffee, and said, “Jimmies, this needs jimmies,” and disappeared into the kitchenette with suspicious alacrity.

Sylvie eyed the computer, thought about her list, and followed Alex. Alex had her head buried in the cabinets, hunting candy toppings they didn’t have, and Sylvie leaned up against the counter. “Something you need to say, Alex? About Wright’s case?”

Alex pulled her head out of the cabinet, wiping a stray cobweb from her hair. “We’ve got to clean—”

“Alex.”

“Is he possessed?”

“You had doubts, and you force-fed me the case anyway?”

Alex slumped against the counter. “I did a search on him before I said yes to his case. No red flags. Cop right out of high school, wife in insurance, apartment, kid. A few small commendations for the job, but he’s looking at beat cop for a while longer. I couldn’t see any reason he would lie; it’s not the right type of lie for a cop, but you always say to look for real-world reasoning first. And I might have skipped that step.”

Alex poked morosely at the foam on her coffee, the better to flavor the fingernail she began to chew. “He was just so desperate, I guess I got caught up in his fear, then in selling him to you. I didn’t start worrying until later.”

“You lucked out,” Sylvie said. “He’s possessed.” As soon as the words, sure and decisive, left her mouth, she grimaced. Red flag to a bull.

“Oh, good!” Alex said, then backtracked. “I mean, bad. For him. Good I didn’t waste your time with galloping PTSD or a really special case of dissociative identity disorder. So what’d you find out? What’s up with the ghost? What does it want?”

“I’ll catch you up later,” Sylvie said. “I just came by for the list. Since you’re in, can I assume that you’ve added useful facts to my info?”

“C’mon, Syl, I’ve never seen possession before.”

“It’s not a game or a collectible card,” Sylvie snapped. “It’s a man’s life.” Two men’s lives. Her breath tightened in her chest again.

Alex went white, set down her coffee, and passed Sylvie the list. It had grown in her hands, gone from sketchy information to a page-long dossier on each car and owner.

Sylvie tucked the sheets into her jacket, the slick denim reminding her—“Zoe come back yet?”

Alex shook her head, still silent. Still upset.

“Crap,” Sylvie said, wondering where her sister had washed up. Bella’s? Not likely, given their apparent spat, but teenage fights healed as fast as they happened. Jasmyn? Ariel? “She’s probably hanging out at one of the princess pack’s homes. Or off bumping uglies with Raul—”

“Carter, I think,” Alex offered. Her voice was small, uncertain.

Sylvie felt guilt sting her. She let out her breath, and said, “Drink your coffee before it gets cold. And it’s not Carter. It’s Carson. God help us all. Basically she could be anywhere.” Sylvie shook her head. A sulking Zoe could disappear for days, staying with one friend or another. She’d done it before. But she’d be back soon enough for her stuff. The material girl wouldn’t go far without her phone. The burglars, on the other hand, needed finding, preferably before the cops blundered in and scared them into hiding, or worse—caught them and made all Sylvie’s hours unbillable.

She patted the list in her pocket, snagged a handful of candy from the kitchenette, and headed back out with a final admonition to Alex. “If Zoe comes wandering back? Keep her here.”

Alex nodded, then said, “What about Wright’s case? You want me to see if I can get a line on an exorcist?”

Sylvie froze midstep, her heart racing. It made it hard to keep her tone level, but she managed. “Exorcists hunt demons exclusively. We’ll have to think of something else.”

“I could call Val Cassavetes. Even if she’s still licking her wounds, she’s a smart witch. She can—”

“She’s not answering our calls, remember? Shadows Inquiries is x-ed right out of her little black book.”

“But this is different,” Alex persisted. “It’s not a favor to you; it’s to help—”

“Leave it,” Sylvie said, and fled the office before Alex could really dig in and start working the angle Sylvie didn’t want to think about. Getting rid of the ghost would mean getting rid of Demalion, and that turned her stomach, made her shake.

This is trouble, the little dark voice said. Real trouble.

She slammed into her truck, reversed gears, and slipped back into morning traffic with only two horns going off and one person insulting her parentage. Sylvie just waved a hand in a vicious salute, thinking they had no idea.

The list blew on her dash, its edges dancing in the air-conditioning, and she put a hand on it. First stop? The beach and the Audi.

She found the house easily, but the cops had beaten her there, were speaking to a woman who looked more than displeased to be explaining herself to them. Even at a distance, Sylvie could see the stacked gold bracelets on her arms flash as she told the two uniforms exactly what she thought of them, with plenty of emphatic gestures and a shrillness that carried in the early-morning air.

South Beach, Sylvie thought, turning her truck around at the intersection, where women put their jewelry on before their clothes. The cops would be a while yet; the morning sunlight and the woman’s white-silk robe did little to hide the skin beneath, and ogling her was a more pleasant way for them to begin their shift than rousting drunks.

She left them to it and headed across the water to the Grove, home to a silver Navigator.

At ten o’clock in the morning, Coconut Grove was peaceful and pristine. The sun glazed the stucco, greened the trees, dusted the Mexican-tiled roofs with gold. The air was still and lazy, and Sylvie’s battered diesel truck rumbled through the streets like sluggish thunder. For once, her truck wasn’t out of place; all around her, the street grew battered trucks, bringing men and their machines to work: lawn mowers, pool cleaners, window washers, house painters, coming to get the job done before the peak heat of the day. Coconut Grove was a mecca for laborers, full of homeowners too busy to maintain their houses themselves, well-off enough to hire someone to do it, and penny-wise enough to want it done cheaply.

Sylvie imagined that if she yanked drivers and registrations out of all the trucks, she’d find a good half were “hand-me-down” businesses, moving from a cousin to an uncle to a brother or brother-in-law, all using the same state ID.

The legality of their employees didn’t matter to the homeowners, not when their grounds showed the results of their efforts. Every house sported smooth lawns and curving drives studded with palms, poincianas, air-plant-laden Florida oaks. Plush green grass swept up and around drives, its tender blades so closely trimmed it looked like the houses were emerging from velvet. No doubt the pools in back were crystalline blue, untouched by algal growth or fallen leaves.

Sylvie thought of her own apartment’s maintenance man. Told to spruce up the place by distant landlords, he installed random statuary and fake topiary. She passed Kwan-Yin to get to her apartment, walked by the David to pay her rent, and swam under the eye of a laconic ceramic alligator and a St. Francis that doubled as a bird feeder. Coconut Grove was a different world.

Sylvie cruised slowly down the street, pausing to verify that house with the unfortunate pink stucco peeking though the coconut palms was Zoe’s ex-friend Bella’s house. She’d thought the neighborhood looked familiar. Maybe, after she talked to the Navigator’s owner, she’d knock on Bella’s door, take a quick gander to see if Zoe had crashed there.

The Navigator’s house was four doors down from Bella’s—a modest home, with a drive that curved only once instead of three times, with a street view of the house and gates that were ornamental rather than functional.

The Navigator rested in the opened maw of the two-car garage, the foggy silver behemoth that had been out at Bayside Mall the night before. More, the lady of the house, blue jeans, silk blouse, and wedge heels, stood beside it, keys in her hand. There was a puzzled stillness about her that suggested she’d been standing there for more than a minute or two; the shift of her hips suggested indecision.

Sylvie drew her truck to the curb and walked over, belatedly glad she was wearing Zoe’s overpriced gift jacket. In this neighborhood, it gave her that much more time to ask questions. She wouldn’t be dismissed as just another laborer looking for work.

Pity she hadn’t had time to get her nails done. A good manicure was better than a secret handshake for a quick test of who was exactly who, and whether she was someone worth knowing.

As it was, the woman barely looked up when Sylvie’s shadow crossed onto her lawn.

Foolish, the little dark voice said. The wolf comes in many guises.

Including a woman wearing a heavy leather jacket on a warm day. Sometimes Sylvie thought wearing a jacket was more blatant than strapping a gun to her thigh.

But Meredith Alvarez—according to Alex’s file, the second wife to Andreas Alvarez, homemaker, and personal shopper for a certain subset of other homemakers—was obviously more concerned with her car.

“Mrs. Alvarez,” Sylvie said, “may I ask you a few questions? It won’t take long.” Always the awkward part, asking for information from someone who had no need to give it to her. But Sylvie could be—catastrophically pushy, Alex said—determined.

“I already talked to the police,” Meredith said. “It wasn’t my car. My car’s been here all night.” She sounded fierce; either the uniforms had given her a hard time, or she wasn’t sure she had told them the truth.

From the hesitation with which she viewed the car, the remote slipping through her fingers, Sylvie knew which way she leaned. Given a hard time, Meredith should be spitting mad, storming down to her husband’s law office.

Staring at the car . . .

Sylvie took a couple of steps closer, stopped in the shade of a bright poinciana, watched a corn snake slip away through pine-bark mulch. She glanced at the Navigator, at the fine beach-sand grit dusting the wheel well and sifting onto the garage floor, sand and pulverized shell.

“I’m not with the police,” Sylvie said. “I don’t report to anyone.” The woman’s gaze dropped from hers, studied the smooth concrete as if judging whether the tree shade was an oil shadow. Sylvie bit back frustration. There was always a password in the computer that was the human brain. Hit it right, and all the information you could want came pouring out. But it took trial and error, and the risk of potential lock-outs.

“But you work for someone, right? Or do you just follow the police around, looking for trouble?”

“Wrong way round,” Sylvie muttered. When she had Meredith’s attention again, she said, “The people I work for don’t need details. They only care about results.”

Still nothing, though Meredith bit at her lip, gnawed at it as if she could swallow the words that wanted to erupt back.

Sylvie said, “I was there, last night.”

Sometimes all she needed was to poke people in their curiosity. Meredith knew something was wrong; she just didn’t know what.

“What happened?” Meredith asked. A weight of desperation laced her voice, all her fears surfacing at once. The remote dropped to the driveway with a click that she ignored, stepping over it to take Sylvie’s arm, shaking it. “It wasn’t a hit-and-run; it couldn’t have been a hit-and-run. There’s no damage. There’s never any damage.”

Sylvie latched onto the interesting word in the babble. “Never?”

Meredith pulled back, her face a giant billboard for “oh crap.”

Sylvie let her breath out, slowed the urgent voice that wanted her to shake the information out of the woman. This was a mostly nothing case. Theft, a little property damage, and a sleeping spell or two did not make for strong-arm tactics.

Easy does it, she reminded herself. Self-control. And smile. The woman smiled back, but it was tentative.

Reassurance wouldn’t go amiss here, but only a little. Too much, and the woman might stop talking. Just because the case wasn’t life-and-death didn’t mean Sylvie wanted to waste man-hours, especially since she had a bitch of a case on hold in her apartment.

“It wasn’t a hit-and-run,” she said, patting the woman’s forearm. “No one got hurt.”

Meredith started to relax, then her back stiffened, her jaw came up. Sylvie short-circuited the woman’s dawning indignation with a steely, “This time.” She firmed her grip on the woman’s arm, and said, “Whatever’s going on has nothing to do with you—” A gamble, but the woman just didn’t seem the sort, didn’t twig any of Sylvie’s very well-tuned senses. “That doesn’t mean you can’t help.”

Meredith took a breath, and said, “I didn’t say anything to the police because I knew they wouldn’t believe me. My husband doesn’t believe me. Why would a set of strangers?”

“Sometimes a stranger is the only one who has the luxury of being able to,” Sylvie said.

Meredith fumbled through her purse for a cigarette. “You have a light?”

Sylvie reached into her pockets to show willing and was surprised to have her search pay off. She passed the pale pink lighter over, and remembered, Oh yeah, Zoe smoked.

Meredith looked at the lighter, and her tense brow relaxed. She handed it back to Sylvie, and Sylvie added Chanel lighters to the list of “items to soothe suspicious Grove women.”

Meredith smoked her cigarette halfway, then pinched it out, the automatic habit of a woman who’d spent most of her adult life in financial difficulties. Then she hesitated and dropped the rest of it, and Sylvie thought, Yeah, she married up but is having a hard time adapting.

“I don’t understand it,” Meredith said, turning and drifting toward the open garage. She paused on the lip, visibly waiting for Sylvie to catch up.

Once inside the dim garage, Meredith hit the door button, sealing herself and Sylvie in. Sylvie rested her hand on her gun. She didn’t think that Meredith was a part of the burglary ring, but caution rarely hurt.

Meredith shrugged. “The neighbors are curious enough about the police coming here. I don’t want to give them any more gossip.” She opened the driver’s-side door, climbed up, and gestured for Sylvie to come closer, until she was practically on top of the woman, could smell scented shampoo and the faint line of sweat at her hairline. The woman was honestly afraid. Of her car. Or of what it was being used to do.

“I noticed it when I kept needing to get gas, nearly twice as often as usual. Andreas thought someone might be si-phoning it off, so I started keeping it locked in the garage at night.”

“But nothing changed,” Sylvie said.

“What was I supposed to tell the police? That someone’s breaking into our locked, alarm-protected garage and borrowing the car on a regular basis without my knowledge? My husband doesn’t believe it. But right here!” She tapped the odometer with an agitated fingernail. “Forty miles just last night while we slept!”

Sylvie dropped back out of the car, took in the clean lines of the garage, the gap where the second vehicle should be, and said, “Your husband, Andreas? He’s not borrowing it?” It didn’t seem likely, not when he was making suggestions on how to stop it, but people played mind games for all sorts of reasons.

Meredith shook her head, confident in that at least. Sylvie said, “Pop the doors.”

When the side door opened, Sylvie grabbed a flashlight off the wall hook, crawled into the car, and began an inch-by-inch search. “Anyone overly interested in your daily routine? Who’d know when they could borrow the car at times you wouldn’t notice?”

“My husband has enemies; he’s a criminal lawyer—”

“No,” Sylvie said. “They’ve made hash of your alarm code. If they wanted in your house, wanted to harm you or him, they’d have done so already.”

A new quality of silence reached her, and she glanced up. Meredith had blanched. Sylvie mentally reran her last words, judged them too blunt. Too scary. Too pragmatic.

Her little dark voice chimed in. Too bad. Truth is brutal.

“Look,” Sylvie said, “this isn’t about you or your husband. This is about your car being convenient.” It had to be the burglars, the glory-seeking teens. It was one thing to sleep through your car being stolen when it was parked on the street, when the engine sound could be mistaken for a neighbor leaving—most of them had upper-range SUVs also. It was another thing to sleep through a locked garage door rising, a car being backed out and driven away. Homeowners had twitchy nerves for out-of-place sounds.

Either the Alvarezes were heavy nighttime drinkers, Ambien poppers, or they’d fallen prey to Sylvie’s sleep-spreading burglars. Sylvie bent her head back to the search, pleased. It was always nice when she was on the right trail.

“So—” she prompted. “Any nosey parkers, gawkers?”

Meredith said, “I don’t know what you want to know.”

“Who pays attention to you? Have you seen anyone lurking?”

“We have the neighborhood watch,” she said.

Sylvie let out a frustrated breath. “Work with me, Meredith. You’d call the cops if strangers were nosing around. What about locals? They keep taking your car. It’s not ’cause of the spiffy paint job. People are lazy by nature. They want easy. They want close.”

Meredith fiddled with the strap of her purse, ran her fingers up and down the snakeskin. “Isabella asked me once if it was a stick or an automatic, and her boyfriend asked me if the rear seats came out.”

“Isabella?” Sylvie asked, dropping flat to her belly and worming forward for a better look. Something glittered from beneath the third row of seats. She scrabbled for it, collecting carpet fluff beneath her short nails, and the ever-present limestone sand.

“Martinez, the neighbor’s girl. She said she was going to be car shopping.”

“Yeah, like her mother’d buy her a car with her grades—” Sylvie jerked her head up, her brain catching up with what her mouth knew. “Bella Martinez. High-school girl? Ittybitty bleached blonde, a fondness for shiny clothes and cheap cigarettes?”

“Yeah,” Meredith said. She gnawed her lip, her brow furrowing. Really thinking for the first time; even upside down, Sylvie could see the gears clicking slowly away in the woman’s mind. “That was . . . before the trouble started.”

“Great,” Sylvie muttered. “Just great.” Zoe was mad at her already; wait until she questioned her friends. A disturbing idea took tentative root: If Bella was involved in these burglaries, did Zoe know? When Sylvie had mentioned the burglaries, Zoe had looked sick; Sylvie had chalked it up to worry and distaste, but it could have been more personal for Zoe.

Her fingers finally closed on the bright spark beneath the seat, and all the hairs on her body rose in defensive spikes. Cold washed over her in a painful wave. Sylvie’s mouth dried; nausea roiled; she jerked her hand back and dropped the item on the carpet before her face, setting off a broken duet between her own thoughts and the shrieking of the little dark voice, woken to full alert with a single touch.

A fingernail—

Bad—

Not a fake, a—

Bad magic—

—real human fingernail, ridged and furrowed keratin, an old woman’s fingernail, a shred of flesh still clinging to the base, as sere as a mummy’s. The nail was painted, a gloss of silver, a layer of rainbow sparkle, and a tiny ornament dangling from the curled tip—a diamante heart. Sylvie somehow doubted the—

Dead—

—woman had chosen the colors. Decorated after death was . . . worrying. Decorated after death was The Silence of the Lambs.

Belatedly, she heard Meredith holding forth, really getting into it, the indignation that had been stifled by fear erupting now that she had someone to blame.

“. . . Isabella and her delinquent friends. I don’t care that they’re in designer clothes. They’re more than spoiled; they’re . . .”

Sylvie dragged her head out of the SUV, delicately dropping the fingernail into her pocket with a shudder. She interrupted, “You ever find anything unusual in the SUV . . . ? Oh, you did.” Meredith’s face told her as much; her rant broke off, and her eyes angled away, over, anywhere she didn’t have to meet Sylvie head-on.

“No,” she said, and Sylvie sighed.

“C’mon, Meredith, I’m on your side, remember? I believe you. Just tell me what you found, and I’ll get out of your hair. As a bonus? Your car won’t take road trips without you anymore.”

Originally, she had planned to find the vehicle and follow it to see if she could catch the people behind the burglaries. But with that little bit of dead flesh in her pocket, her plan had changed. High-schoolers or not—and Sylvie was inclined to believe the connection, tenuous as it was—they needed to be stopped immediately if they were messing around with magic like this.

Meredith fidgeted, and Sylvie said, “What was it?”

“A piece of jewelry.”

“Show me,” Sylvie said.

Meredith shook her head. “I gave it away. It was just some ticky-tacky skinny dog pin. It wasn’t even gold.”

Sylvie sighed. The brooch was on the list that Conrad had given Alex: one antique art deco silver greyhound. Gone faster than a real one round a track. Still, confirmation was confirmation. “Let me out. I’ve got things to do.”

“You said you’d stop them from stealing my car,” Meredith said.

“Do you have to be anywhere today?” Sylvie said.

Meredith shook her head. Sylvie’s first instinct was to shoot out the tires, but Meredith seemed the kind of woman who might be . . . upset with such black-and-white practicality, might react by calling the police. Sylvie had had enough of them for one day.

Self-control, Sylvie remembered. Taking it easy. She’d forgotten how to interact with ordinary people, with people she wasn’t trying to intimidate or kill.

“My suggestion? Park it elsewhere—your husband’s workplace—or if you’re feeling hard-core? Let the air out of the tires and call AAA when you need to get going. They’ll move on to easier marks, ’cause these kids—it’s all about easy.”

“What good is it if it’s not ready the minute I need it?” Meredith scowled, unhappy with Sylvie’s solution, but she coded in the release for the garage door. It rose smoothly, letting in warm sunlight and the green scent of newly cut grass, all the more pleasant for having been in a space that smelled of oil, metal, and corruption.

Sylvie shrugged as she stepped out. “Your decision, either way.”

“I could get my husband to sit up, hire a security service. . . .”

“I wouldn’t,” Sylvie said. “Best not to corner people you know nothing about. If you can divert their attention, that’s good. Confronting them? You won’t like where that ends up.”

It might end with her husband or the security guard passed out on the garage floor. It might end with someone steering the SUV over their unconscious bodies. Sylvie didn’t know how deep the sleep was, whether its victim could wake, but given the way she and Wright had gone down, poleaxed into unconsciousness, she could easily imagine the worst, that this magical sleep was deep enough that there’d be no fighting back.

She waved Meredith off, said, “I’m going to go talk to Bella Martinez now. Move the car. If you don’t, you’ve no one to blame but yourself if it goes wandering again.”

Meredith turned with a huff. The garage door rolled down after her. Another person ignoring perfectly good advice.

Sylvie rolled her shoulders, flapped the edges of her jacket, dispersing the heat trapped against her skin. A man, scraping grass clippings into the mower, froze, and Sylvie dropped the back of her jacket down over the gun. She waved at him and kept moving. Nothing to see here. Just a girl with a gun, common enough. Though maybe not in the Grove.

Sylvie walked up the long drive to Bella’s house, scuffing her feet in the gravel, enjoying the shade, and dawdling. There wasn’t going to be any good news here. Even if she hadn’t been darkening the Martinezes’ door, hunting glory-seeking burglars, she’d still be bearing the bad news of Bella’s pharmaceutical forays.

She climbed the limestone stairs to a shallow, tiled porch, framed by wrought-iron pillars wound about with jasmine, and rang the doorbell. She didn’t have to wait long; the Martinezes’ housekeeper opened the door, an old frown on a young face. She had always looked worried on the occasions Sylvie had seen her, so she tried not to feel responsible.

“I’m Zoe’s sister,” Sylvie said. She tested names in her head. Surely she could remember one woman’s name—this was her job, to recall the details that others forgot. Something old-fashioned. Ethel, Edwina . . .

“She’s not here.” Her voice carried a tinge of an accent, vaguely French, and Sylvie smiled. She remembered now. Eleanor. Haitian, working her way through med school at UM after her scholarship ran out. Eleanor’s dark fingers curled around the door, her arm a polite bar.

“That’s all right,” Sylvie said. “I really just wanted to have a word or two with Bella.”

“She’s sick.”

“Hungover?”

“Sick,” Eleanor repeated.

Sylvie leaned against the doorjamb, wistfully thinking of the cooler air inside; if she could get past the door, Eleanor would have to offer her coffee, a seat, a chance to soak up the AC. “Eleanor, I really do need to talk to Bella.” She pulled the pill bottle out of her purse and shook it.

Eleanor swore, a long ripple of Creole, snatched the bottle from Sylvie’s hand, and headed back into the house, trailing a plaintive cry, “They’re going to get me expelled.”

Sylvie took inattention for invitation and followed, her sneakers soundless on the smooth Mexican tile. “Get you expelled?” she asked. Scuffling noises came from down the hall, so she headed that way, found Eleanor ransacking her own room, loosing her temper on the only things in the house that belonged to her. She finally threw a book across the room, sat down on the bed, and put her face in her hands.

“You’re not dealing to her,” Sylvie said.

“Does it matter where she’s getting the shit? There’s a poor med student in the house, and the daughter’s got pills enough to give away. Who will be blamed? Tell me.”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “I still need to talk to Bella.”

Eleanor waved her upstairs. “About the drugs? Always in trouble.” She speared Sylvie with a pissed-off expression. “But it’s Zoe who gets her there.”

“Bullshit,” Sylvie said. “It’s Bella—”

“Believe what you will. Why listen to the maid—”

“Bella upstairs?” Enough of this. She’d come with a purpose. She wouldn’t be sidetracked.

“You won’t listen; why will I tell you anything?” Eleanor shut the door in her face.

Left on her own, Sylvie wandered the cool hallway, looking in on an immaculate kitchen, a living room that had been in Homes and Gardens. She followed the gentle curve of the house, running her hand along buttery yellow walls, as warmly colored as Florida sunshine, and took the tiled stairs upward. Where did a spoiled princess sleep? In the tower room, of course.

The arched dome of the upper hallway had the hush of churches, and dried flowers in the vases only added to the impression. A shimmer of chlorine blue through the plate-glass windows sent dancing shards of sunlight cascading over her skin like spotlights.

Sylvie opened the door to Bella’s room, found it dim and cool, the very thing for an invalid. The blinds were shuttered tight, blocking out the sun. Left to her own devices, Bella would probably sleep past two o’clock.

A whimper reached her ears; the bundle of blankets on the bed thrashed for a moment.

Maybe not. Maybe Bella was going to greet the world after all.

As minutes passed, and all Bella did was groan and whimper, Sylvie lost patience. She leaned against the elaborate footboard, white, wrought-iron scrollwork, sharp and cold against her hands, and kicked the mattress. The bed billowed, startling Sylvie—water bed.

“Wakey, wakeys,” she said.

Bella jerked up, hands clenching tight on the edge of the mattress, panting. She focused on Sylvie with slow awareness—alarm, familiarity, recognition, relaxation. Irritation. Everyone always got to irritation.

“Sylvie? What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Need to talk to you.”

“Go away. I’m sick,” Bella said. She flopped back onto the mattress, tugged the blanket over her face.

Sylvie hopped down from the footboard, flipped on the overhead light-and-fan combo. Bella groaned but only hunched deeper into the covers against the sudden brightness.

In the moving air, Sylvie smelled Bella’s sour sweat, and sheets days past due for changing.

“C’mon, Bell—”

“No.”

Sylvie busied herself in the room, snooping openly, certain that would get Bella’s attention. She opened dresser drawers, found a pill bottle in the jeans drawers, another in her closet, a third under her bed, all nearly empty, all with their labels stripped off. She set them on the bedside table, kicked the mattress again. “Bella!”

The girl woke with a muffled shriek, a flailing hand, and Sylvie jerked back. She hadn’t really expected her to fall asleep again. They went through the whole panic-to-recognition cycle once more, then Bella scrubbed at her face with shaking hands. “Jesus,” she muttered. “I keep having the worst nightmares.”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Prescription drugs’ll do that to you. Especially if you’re taking them just for fun.”

Bella reached over, swept the bottles off the nightstand and into the Kleenex-riddled trash can with soft thumps and muffled rattles. “Happy now? Take ’em with you when you go.”

The girl did look sick. Bella hung over the side of the bed as if it were too much effort to lie back again; the arm propped against the side of the mattress frame shook, and her skin was greased with milky sweat; her eyes were dilated, the sclera nearly yellow.

Sylvie almost felt sorry for her, but the hand propping her up was capped by nails manicured in high-end silver gloss. The same shade Sylvie had found on the fingernail in the van. Another tick on the confirmation chart, another mark that moved Bella one step further from the “innocent” category.

Sylvie said, “Nightmares, huh?” She hoped she could prompt the girl back into speech, that she hadn’t shut her down completely, but she couldn’t regret her first response, not if it took the drugs out of Bella’s hands.

And Zoe’s.

Still, there was a real likelihood that Sylvie had just found the decoy bottles, all close to empty, just there to make Bella’s mom feel like she was making progress. “Tell me about your nightmares.”

“Going to shrink me?”

“Might slap you,” Sylvie said. “You gave my sister drugs.”

Bella eyed her sidelong and sly, calculating her odds. “Is that what she told you? Such a bitch—”

Sylvie’s face must have done something really forbidding; Bella shut up all at once, then, when she decided to talk again, it was on the topic Sylvie had chosen.

“My nightmares are all the same,” Bella said, and if she started off belligerent, she faded to plain scared. “I’m doing something . . . horrible.”

Sylvie took a seat on the end of the bed. “Tell me?”

Bella dragged her knees up to her chest with much billowing and shifting of the bed. Her legs stuck out of the bottom of her Victoria’s Secret pj’s, skinny even for a girl who took fashion cues from Barbie dolls. “I keep killing a boy. A little boy.” She glanced up at Sylvie, added hastily, “In my dreams. It’s not real.”

“Didn’t think it was,” Sylvie said mildly. One of the regrettable truths of her job was that she met a lot of killers.

Bella was a lot of things—spoiled, vain, grasping—but Sylvie didn’t get a whiff of killer from her. Not yet. Sylvie knew how slippery a slope it could be.

“How does it happen? Always the same way?”

It was just a dream. It shouldn’t be important. Except . . . magic had a cost. The benign magics, or what passed for benign, cost the user effort, concentration, energy, time, left them drained, ready to eat a gator, burp, and take a nap. The bad stuff corrupted, unless the user was very, very careful, and had a whipping boy to soak up the worst of it. It was the sole reason power junkies like the Maudits took apprentices—not to share knowledge but to protect their own skins.

If Bella had screwed around with big, bad magic—and the fingernail argued that she had—she’d first feel the corruption in her soul, and one’s soul had its own way of making its complaints felt.

“I’m sitting by a pool in my chair, and this toddler comes wandering up to me, smiling, and I just . . . shove him. He falls into the pool, starts kicking, but he’s too little, y’know? Like water wings little.” Bella buried her face in her knees, her words, muffled, distorted, kept on. “He gets to the edge anyway, hanging there, and I push him off with the net until he doesn’t come up anymore; he’s red-faced, and trying to scream, but his mouth’s full of water. And his mom’s just inside the house, and she doesn’t have a clue what I’ve done. I wake up when I hear her scream.”

Ugly enough, Sylvie thought, for a one-time nightmare. As a recurrent theme? Yeah, that might make a girl . . . uncomfortable. Bella looked up at her expectantly, and Sylvie thought, Oh, analysis later. Comfort now. Bella wanted to be told it was all right, that she was all right, that everything was going to be fine.

Thing was, Sylvie was crap at that, and not sure her sympathies should be wasted on Bella anyway. After all, she was one of the most likely suspects for leaving her and Wright dead to the world last night.

Bella shifted, and her pillow shifted with her, giving Sylvie a quick glance at something in the bed with Bella. She pounced. Bella squeaked as Sylvie pushed her aside, yanked up the pillow, and recoiled.

She did slap Bella then. “You little idiot!”

Bella held her reddening cheek, gaining a hint of healthy color, and held her tongue, her eyes growing wary. As any girl might who was found sleeping with a severed hand beneath her pillow.

Sylvie wasn’t surprised, even as she was repulsed. She’d been anticipating something of the kind ever since she’d found the fingernail. While there was a disagreeably large number of spells that used human ingredients, she could think of only a few that would apply to the thieves’ needs: enabling burglary and removing witnesses.

The severed, withered hand on the white sheets, tucked neatly beneath Bella’s pillow like some horrifying offering to a fairy best not imagined, was missing a single fingernail.

The worst part, Sylvie thought numbly, wasn’t that it was there in her bed, wasn’t that it was a dead hand, gruesomely preserved, used to appease a bored girl’s bad-girl dreams, but that it had been decorated like it was of no more import than a cell phone or iPod. Besides the silvery polish, there were Cracker Jack rings forced over the dried knuckles, and little fake tattoos of thorns and hearts peeling from the pallid skin.

She seized Bella’s arm as the girl attempted to sidle around her, and the motion released the anchor on her voice. “Black magic and burglary not enough of a kick? You had to desecrate the dead?”