He took another appreciative sip of his coffee. “The new boyfriend comes with so much baggage they wouldn’t let him on a seven forty-seven, even if he was flying up front. As in he’s married with three children and more than the swing vote on the local town council. And he won’t admit to having seen her in the last two weeks.”

  He felt his voice beginning to rise and cut himself off, taking another deliberate pull at his coffee. “All I know is she’s missing,” he said, “and nobody I talk to knows or will say where she is.”

  “You’re that concerned over a girl you haven’t even met?” There might have been pity in her voice, although it might equally have been contempt, or maybe it was a combination of the two.

  “You knew she wasn’t in her car,” he said. “You didn’t even blink when I told you the cops found it. So where is she, Ms. Williams?”

  Her face closed up again. No sale. The silence stretched out between them.

  “She’s just a kid,” he said.

  “She’s not just a kid,” Athena Williams said. “She’s never been just a kid. But she’s smart—smartest child I ever took care of—because she had to be.”

  She looked annoyed, more with herself than with him, probably for volunteering information.

  “Seems like somebody ought to be looking out for her,” he said mildly, “and nobody is.” He thought of Nicky, and again he felt the oppressive guilt of the absentee father press down on his shoulders. But his ex, Noreen, wasn’t Julia Drusilla, thank God, and he wasn’t Norman Loki.

  “I looked after her,” Athena Williams said.

  The words wrenched themselves out slowly, one phrase at a time. “I looked after her as best I could. As best as they would let me.”

  He kept his own voice low and without expression. “How did you come to be Angelina Loki’s nanny?”

  “A woman with my education, did you mean?” But she closed her eyes on a sigh, and for a moment only looked her age, and tired. Her eyes opened again, and the moment was gone. “I got my degree from Brown University. And then my mother got sick.” Her smile was twisted. “It turns out that a professional nanny, especially one with a master’s degree, earns a lot more than a high school history teacher. Angel was my fourth job.”

  “How long were you with her family?”

  “From the week Angel was born,” she said, “until her graduation from high school.”

  “So you spent time with her after the divorce?”

  “Yes. Mama died when Angel was eight, and I could have quit, but by then . . . ” She shrugged.

  He looked around the well-appointed room. “You’re retired now?”

  She followed his train of thought with no difficulty. “I have feathered my own nest nicely, haven’t I?”

  He thought of his employer, the thin, bitter matron in her big, sterile penthouse on Park Avenue. “I have no doubt you earned every penny twice over, Ms. Williams.”

  She almost looked over her shoulder and stopped herself, but not before he noticed. “Only the best butter, Mr. Christo.”

  Again, he wondered who else was in the house. “I’m not asking you to betray any confidences, Ms. Williams,” he said, raising his voice a little. “When I find Ms. Loki, if she doesn’t want me to, I won’t tell anyone I have.”

  “I thought that was what you were paid to do.”

  He smiled. “I didn’t say I was any good at it.”

  She did smile this time, reluctantly.

  “At this point, I’d be happy to know she was all right. And if I can help her, I will.”

  He pulled out his wallet and extracted a card. “You can call or text me twenty-four/seven at that number, or e-mail me at that address.”

  She took the card gingerly, as if merely by holding it between finger and thumb meant that an agreement of some kind existed between the two of them, and she was far from willing to accept anything of the kind. “I haven’t seen her,” she said, and this time even she could hear the lack of conviction in her words.

  “When you do,” he said.

  He stood on the doorstep and took a deep breath. The air pollution in Brooklyn wasn’t as bad as it was in Manhattan, and you could still smell the ghosts of the roses of summers past. He looked down the street both ways, and saw the curtain at the first-floor window across from 354 fall hastily back in place.

  That could account for the feeling that he was being watched. It would not account for the tail he’d shaken that morning, or the uncomfortable feeling that he hadn’t so much shaken the tail as the tail had done a better job of following him the second time.

  He checked his watch, not quite ten thirty, as he came down the steps and turned left to head for his car.

  “Mr. Christo! Mr. Christo, please wait!”

  He turned and saw the girl from the photograph standing on Athena Williams’s front step.

  His first feeling was relief that the first time he saw her in person she wasn’t looking up at him from a body bag.

  His second was the sudden realization that whoever was following him could have followed him right to Angelina Loki’s hiding place.

  15

  VAL MCDERMID

  The photographs had been no preparation for the reality. The full impact of Angel’s beauty was available only in the flesh. Perry was so occupied with scanning his personal database for comparisons he lost all sense of urgency and just stared.

  It soon came to him. The impossibly young Lauren Bacall of To Have and Have Not, but without the carefully constructed coiffure. Angel’s toffee-blond hair had a tousled, bedhead look that the prudish Hollywood studios could never have tolerated. But the feline eyes, the full-lipped mouth with the tilt of a smile even in this moment of distress—all of it a dead ringer for Bacall at her most vulnerable.

  She’d stopped short a couple of feet from him after shouting, “Wait,” in a frantic voice just the right side of a scream. She drew her breath in sharply, emphasizing the full breasts beneath her skimpy black T-shirt. She had a coat on, but she’d only draped it over her shoulders. She folded her arms across her midriff, but not so fast that Perry didn’t notice the tremble in her long fingers. She tucked her chin down and gave him the up-slanted look that Bacall had made her own.

  “Angel?” Perry knew it, but he couldn’t quite believe it. There had been something dramatic, almost film noir, about the places this commission had taken him so far. He usually dismissed high-flown romantic ideas like that as idle fantasies designed to make him feel better about the routine repetitiveness of the job. But being confronted with a woman who could have stepped out of the pages of Dashiell Hammett was deeply unsettling.

  And it was Hammett that came to mind, not Chandler. This girl—no, make that this woman—was bristling with raw sexuality. Her photograph had attracted him; her physical presence mesmerized him.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. “Who are you really?”

  “Like I told Athena, my name is Perry Christo. I’m a private eye. Your mother hired me to find you.” He didn’t have to work at injecting his voice with warmth.

  She shuddered, and it wasn’t just from the cold, her arms folding even more tightly round her slim body. “Are you the one? Is that what this has all been about? My goddamn mother finding me?”

  He couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. Was he so dazed by her beauty? “I don’t know what you mean. Am I the one? What one?”

  She unfolded her arms and ran a hand through her hair. Even in the gray light of an overcast day, it shimmered bright gold against the dull green of the garden’s evergreen foliage. “The one who’s been stalking me,” she said impatiently.

  “Stalking you? Someone’s been stalking you?”

  She gave him the haughty stare that youth reserves for the dim adult world. “But I don’t suppose you’d call it that, Mr. PI.” Her top lip curled in a sneer.

  “I’ve not been stalking you, tailing you, following you, or anything that might come under that heading.” He took a step backward and spread his arms out in a placatory gesture. “Swear to God. I’ve been trying to find you, sure. But today’s the first time I’ve clapped eyes on you, Angel.”

  Angel frowned, her cat’s eyes narrowing, her expression considering. “I don’t know . . . You look like you’re telling the truth. But somebody’s been stalking me.”

  “Is that why you took off from Montauk?”

  She drew back, her arms clamping against her midriff again, jittery as a stand-up comic waiting to go onstage. “How did you know that if you’re not the one?”

  “I told you. I’ve been looking for you. All I had to go on was what your mother knew. She sent me to your father’s house, but all he could tell me was that you’d taken off. He pointed me toward your buddy, Lilith. And that’s how I found out about you and Randy going on the run.” Perry shook his head, desperate to impress her with his truth. Usually, he didn’t give a damn what the targets of his investigations thought of him. But Angel was different. He wanted her to think well of him, and that made him uncomfortable.

  Angel sneered again. “ ‘I thought he’d, like, protect me?” Her voice rose at the end of her sentences. It was her generation’s habit to make the most commonplace statement sound like a question. Her generation, Perry reminded himself. She’s hardly more than a child, and you’re a man heading straight down the slope toward middle age. Get ahold of yourself.

  “And he didn’t?”

  Angel looked sideways. “I got scared. I was sure someone was on my tail, but Randy, all he cared about was . . . Well, you know. He just blew me off, told me I was paranoid. I figured if he wouldn’t take me seriously, I was better on my own.”

  Perry remembered his own uneasy sense of being followed—and it was more than paranoia, he was sure about that. Still, it was easy to succumb to paranoia when you were out on the edge. He knew that from living with his eyes on the rearview mirror. It saddened him that this beautiful young woman was already prey to such fears. Quickly, he scanned the street. Seeing nothing suspicious, he focused on Angel again. It wasn’t exactly a hardship. Perry chastised himself for the thought and forced his mind back to the job in hand. “So you took off again?”

  She nodded. “I figured I’d be safe with Athena. The one person in my life who never betrayed me.” She sighed and gave him a half smile. “And then you showed up.” For a moment, she brightened. “You think maybe the person who was stalking me was another PI my mother hired?”

  Perry shrugged. He didn’t think Julia Drusilla was a belt-and-suspenders kind of client. “It’s possible,” he hedged, trying to keep the doubt out of his face and his voice. “She’s certainly keen to find you.”

  Angel unfolded her arms and put her fists on her hips. It was an attempt at taking control of the conversation. Attempt being the operative word. Whatever subterfuges she’d learned over the years, hiding her feelings hadn’t been among them. He could read her body language as easily as the morning headlines. He could see anxiety in the tightness of her stance and the rigidity of her features. “Did she tell you why?”

  Perry smiled, trying to reassure her. “There are some papers you need to sign so you can both claim an inheritance. It’s money your grandfather left in trust for you. You can’t access the money until you’re twenty-one, but you both have to sign the papers.”

  “Did she tell you how much money?” Angel’s chin came up. Perry thought she was trying for assurance, but she just came off like a defiant little girl.

  “Let’s just say she made it clear that the stakes were high. For both of you.”

  Angel shook her head in disgust. “I’ll say they’re high. High enough for her to want me dead so she can get her claws on all of it.”

  It was a melodramatic moment. Perry had long years of experience watching families tear themselves apart, and it wasn’t the first time he’d heard an accusation like this against a parent. But no matter how often a child spat out such words, it still cut him like a blade. All those broken relationships started in the same place—the innocent eyes of a newborn gazing into the face of someone who owed them a duty of love and care. And they’d all taken a journey down a twisted highway littered with shattered dreams and broken hearts to a place from which there was no retreat. If Angel truly believed this about her mother, there was no way Perry’s mission was going to have a happy ending.

  Just as well, he thought, happy endings are for Pixar.

  “You don’t really believe that,” he said.

  Angel snorted. “All she cares about is money. She tried to stop me from finding out about the inheritance. She hid the papers and letters, anything about them. I only found them by accident when I was . . . ” Her voice trailed off as she tried to figure out a way to make herself the good guy. Inspiration lit her face. “When I was looking for my birth certificate so I could apply for a passport.”

  The lie didn’t come anywhere near fooling him. But why lie? “That doesn’t mean she wants you dead,” Perry said firmly.

  “You don’t understand.” She cast a quick, nervous glance around her and put a hand on his arm. “Look, let’s go someplace we can talk properly about this. I’m cold.”

  Perry moved away from her touch. “We could go inside to Athena’s.”

  Angel shook her head. “I don’t want to burden her with this. She doesn’t deserve to have this shit in her head.”

  He wanted to suggest his car. Sitting side by side, so close he could smell her, an intimacy impossible to ignore. “There’s a coffee shop on the corner,” he said, his voice gruff.

  “Okay,” she said. They set off down the street. Perry kept a couple of feet between them, fearing and distrusting the attraction he felt. He eyed the cars parked on the other side of the street, checking that they were empty.

  But it wasn’t the parked cars that were the problem. As they reached the end of the street, Perry picked up the high note of an accelerating engine behind them. He swiveled in time to see a black sedan racing up the street toward them. Dimly, he heard Angel scream as the car mounted the sidewalk in a screech of rubber. The rest was a blur of movement and color.

  Afterward, Perry reconstructed what had happened. He’d known exactly where Angel was, and he’d jumped straight backward, knocking her off her feet and over the low iron railings of the last house on Washington and St. James. Then he’d thrown himself sideways to land painfully on his hip beside her. He’d struggled to his feet, but the car had already been lost in traffic. Worst of all, none of the nearby pedestrians seemed inclined to break step in their busy day to offer support or witness. Nobody even started yelling about the damage they’d done to the shrubs. So much for a friendly neighborhood.

  Angel scrambled to her feet and threw her arms around Perry. “Now do you believe me? Now do you get it? She’s trying to kill me. She wants me dead so she can steal all the money.” She was quivering in his arms like a frightened animal. Which, he supposed, was exactly what she was. And she certainly provoked all his animal instincts.

  Gently, Perry tried to pry her free. But she wasn’t ready to let go. “You have to help me,” she pleaded. “You’re the only one who’s taken care of me. If I’d been with Randy, I’d be dead right now. Please, Perry, I need you.” She planted a kiss on his cheek, her smooth skin soft against his weathered cheek.

  Perry caught himself feeling he could be a hero. He would be the one she could depend on, the one she trusted, the one she wanted to wake up with. Then his better self kicked in, and he reminded himself he was a sorry sack of a middle-aged man seduced by the needs of a beautiful—and terrified—young woman. The oldest story in the book. He should know better than that. Hell, he was better than that.

  He unpeeled her arms from his body and stepped back over the railings onto the street. A line of wrought-iron spikes was just what he needed between them. “I believe you, that somebody is trying to kill you. But I don’t think it’s your mother. Whoever was behind the wheel of that car had to be waiting for an opportunity. He or she knew just where you were. If your mother knew that, she wouldn’t have needed to hire me.”

  Angel pushed her tousled hair away from her face and climbed over the railings. “Maybe she bugged you. Maybe she’s got a trace on you. Like in that movie.”

  Perry had no idea which movie she meant, but he didn’t care enough to ask. “We need to go to the police.”

  She shook her head. “No way. As soon as that happens, I’m public property again. I’m going back to Athena. I’m safe there. She won’t turn me in. And she’ll protect me till you find out who’s behind this.” She angrily tapped his chest hard with her index finger. “And I guarantee you it will be my evil, fucking mother. And then we’ll go to the police.” Then she smiled, that slow, feline Bacall smile. “You and me. Together.”

  Angel’s shift from fury to seduction was as smooth as a jaguar, and possibly quite as lethal. She ran the tip of her tongue over her upper lip and smiled again.

  This time, it didn’t work. Because this time, Perry’s brain was working harder than his hormones. He knew who was to blame for what had nearly happened. He didn’t believe Angel’s crazy notion that he’d been bugged. But he knew he’d been followed. He should have figured out what was going on, who was on his tail, before he led them straight to Angel. Instead, he’d been so puffed up with his own ability to track a fugitive that he hadn’t covered his back the way he should have. And a young woman had almost died as a result.

  “You have to promise me you’ll stay out of sight at Athena’s. No rushing down the path to chase the next guy who shows up looking for you.” He took her elbow and marched back down the street to Athena’s place.

  “I promise,” Angel said breathily. “Whatever you say, Perry. You saved my life. I’m going to do whatever you tell me from now on.” She paused on the path leading to the front door, stood on tiptoes, and planted a kiss on his surprised mouth. Then she was gone, the door closing behind her with a sharp click.