Evil to the Max (26 page)

“Tell me everything.” He’d switched gears from sexy hunk to alert cop. His mind became a mental notebook as she described it all, minus a few prurient details, of course.

She finished with a bang. “It’s a premonition of Nadine’s murder.”

“Premonition?”

“Yeah.”

But they were too late. Nadine Johnson was already dead. Max was sure of it.

Chapter Twenty-Three

They’d taken time for quick showers. Separately, of course. Then they’d climbed into his big Dodge Ram. It hadn’t given Max quite the charge it usually did. Witnessing a murder, even if it was only on disk, tended to put a damper on some things.

She drummed her fingers on the armrest. “Did it occur to you that Nadine could have been one of those women in the video?”

Witt rolled his eyes. “Duh, Max,” he mocked. “Surprised you didn’t say that last night.”

“The thought crossed my mind as I was falling asleep.”

“A little slow on the uptake, aren’t you?”

“You’re still mad I went to Traynor’s alone.”

He flashed her a quick glance before turning back to the road. “Couldn’t be I’m worried about keeping your pretty, idiotic little neck out of jail.”

“Thanks. You think I’m pretty?”

“Trust you to pick up on that instead of the idiot part.”

She put the banter aside. “I had to do what I did, Witt. I’m the only one who knows what Bud Traynor is capable of.”

Even in hindsight, she wouldn’t change a thing. If Witt had known of her plans ahead of time, he’d have nixed them. Call it obsession, call it drive, a quest for justice—she’d had to get into Traynor’s house. She had to be the one to bring him down.

Witt waved a hand in the air. “Let’s agree to disagree, okay. I get too close to committing bodily harm whenever you open your mouth to argue with me.”

It was barely light by the time they got to Nadine’s. On a Saturday morning, there wasn’t much activity.

If she’d hoped to catch Jake Lloyd in an illicit act, she was disappointed. His truck wasn’t there. But neither was Nadine’s Mustang.

Max felt it again, that horrible tug of dread. She opened the door of the truck and slid to the ground. Lights still burned in the parking lot. A dog barked somewhere. A door closed, the sound audible in the still morning. A male jogger ran down the steps and sprinted across the road.

Witt rounded the hood to stand beside her. “What’s wrong?”

She stared up at Nadine’s front door. “Her porch light isn’t on.”

“Maybe she’s still asleep.”

She should have told him Nadine had the sleep of the dead ahead of her. But she wanted to be wrong. “Her car’s gone. I don’t think anyone’s home.”

She walked down the path and headed up the stairs. Witt was two steps behind her when she knocked on Nadine’s door, letting her fingers linger on the wood a moment. Nothing. No sensations, no visions, and no one answered the door. She moved down the front landing and knocked on the window. The curtains were closed. Nothing stirred.

Witt put his hand on her arm. His touch was warm, but it didn’t kill the chill that had settled into her bones. “She’s dead, isn’t she, Max?”

She bit her lip. “I don’t know.”

“Max.”

“I’m cold,” she whispered. She wore a sweatshirt, but the brisk morning air had crept beneath the ribbed hem and cuffs. She looked down at her fingers, the nails tinged with blue.

“What’s the matter?”

“Something terrible.” The air around her was fetid. She couldn’t breathe without gagging.

“How can I help you?”

“It hurts.”

He rubbed her arms, then brushed his fingers across her temple. “There, I’ve made it go away. You’re okay now.”

If only it was that easy. “Still hurts,” she whispered.

“I’ll take care of you.” He wrapped her inside his jacket, cuddled her in his big arms. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of his shave cream. Solid. The real world. She fisted her hands in his shirt and burrowed closer to him. Breathe in. Breathe out.

When she could, she looked up at him. His blue eyes had turned gray with concern. “She’s dead,” she whispered. “I just don’t know where. Or when. Or who did it. I didn’t see it this time.”

“That’s a good thing. For someone who’s never actually witnessed a murder, you’ve seen your share. Come on.” He kept her bundled against him as he walked her back down to the truck. She’d climbed into the cab before she realized it wasn’t cold outside at all.

But it was in the place where Nadine Johnson’s body lay.

* * * * *

The salon was a madhouse when Max arrived at a little before nine in the morning.

Witt had taken her home, tried to coddle her like an invalid until she’d shooed him away. Go do some detecting, she’d admonished. And he had. She hoped.

There’d been a message on her machine from Miles Lamont. Could she please come to work by nine? The Saturday receptionist wasn’t going to make it. Or something. She hadn’t listened to the end, erasing him in mid-word. Spending the day sifting through conversational clues at A Cut Above would sure beat waiting for Witt to tell her they’d found Nadine’s body.

“Oh Max.” When she walked in, Miles grabbed her arm with both hands, cooing, “thank you, thank you, thank you. Someone booked Ariel with two highlights half an hour apart. Rochelle,” Larry, “is PMSing. Danny,” Curly, “just broke up with her boyfriend and she’s an absolute wreck, and Brenda,” who else but Moe, “turned Mrs. Graham’s hair orange.”

Max couldn’t believe those things were his major concerns in life, so she verbally deflated his balloon. “You forgot to mention that today is the one-week anniversary of Tiffany’s death.”

His features hardened for a split second, and his grip on her arm tightened, his fingernails digging into her like talons. Then his face fell. His jaw went slack, his jowls hung, his lips curved down in caricature of a frown.

But it was feigned. She knew it. He could be The Watcher. At the very least, he knew way more about Tiffany’s death than he’d told the police. But how to get it out of him without arousing his suspicion?

But did it even matter? If he was The Watcher, Jake would have told Miles about the accusations she’d tossed out. He should already be suspicious. He should already have fired her.

Why hadn’t he?

Too many questions, too few answers. For the moment, Max let Miles try to wriggle out of the embarrassing position she’d put him in. He cleared his throat. “I hadn’t forgotten that our dear Tiffany died a week ago. I do think it’s better to put these things behind us. I mean, murder, it’s ... ” He waved his hand in the air, searching for a word.

“Messy?” she supplied. “Makes you wonder if it could happen this close to home again.” She folded her arms across her chest and regarded him over her upturned nose. “Are you walking the girls to their cars at night?”

He looked at her a moment. His chin shifted subtly to the left. The conversation shifted with it, and Miles assumed control. She had the sense that up to now he’d been acting for her benefit. “Why, that’s an excellent idea, Max. Though of course, Tiffany wasn’t killed here.” His gaze slid from her eyes to the end of her nose, then down to her throat.

Max pursed her lips. “As I recall, the police don’t know where she was killed, only where her body was dumped.”

“But,” he raised his index finger, “she
was
seen at the Round Up that night. And her body
was
found behind the building.”

Max pushed on doggedly. “That doesn’t mean she wasn’t followed from here to the Round Up.”

“She went home first.” He ah-hummed, then added, “Or so the police said.”

For the life of her, she couldn’t say what the throat-clearing meant. She had no idea how to read the man. It had been that way from the beginning, and she was getting nowhere fast with her questions.

And why hadn’t he squashed her questions? Positions reversed, that would be the first thing she’d have done.

“Someone might have been stalking her.” Desperation crept into her voice. She tamped it down. “One of her clients. One of her old boyfriends. Did the police ask you if you’d seen anyone hanging around?”

“I don’t remember
what
they asked. Perhaps you should bring it up with them. You could call them.” He lifted his habitual black tunic to reach for his wallet, then flipped through wads of crumpled paper and one dollar bills. “I have a card here somewhere. The dark one. He definitely needed shaping to cover that receding hairline. Ahh.” He found it and handed it to her. “Talk to them. They need every bit of information they can get if they’re to catch our unlucky Tiffany’s killer.”

Max took the card. She just might use it, help Witt out in his quest to pump the detectives for information. “Luck had nothing to do with what happened to her.”

“Poor choice of words.” Fire sparked to life in Miles’s eyes. Stroking his chin, he said, “Now that you mention it, I do recall seeing a man. Quite a few times, in fact. Across the street at the liquor store. Outside the Jack-in-the-Box on the corner. By the barber shop.”

Yeah, right. “What did he look like?”

Miles gave her a wide, innocent look that said the little dumpling was getting ready to tell a whopper of a lie. Had he told the cops the same one he was about to tell her?

“Tall. Muscular. Quite good looking. Workboots and chambray shirt. I thought he might have worked on some construction project in the area.”

The slimy creature described his own possible accomplice, Jake Lloyd. “And you told the police?”

“No. I didn’t even think about it until you asked that brilliant question. You’re so intuitive, my dear.” His hand curled once again around her elbow, and he turned, drawing her back behind the counter. “You’re completely correct, I have to watch out for my girls.” His gaze traveled fondly about the noisy room. “And you can be sure I will.”

Jeez, who would he watch out for now? Ariel? Max remembered the way he’d touched the stylist, the way she’d
allowed
him to touch her.

“But right now,” Miles said, his mouth stretching in a phony grin, “I need you to straighten out some of the double bookings. I can’t for the life of me think who made all these mistakes.”

That was it,
finito
, end of conversation, but Max had learned something. Miles Lamont wasn’t interested in finding Tiffany’s killer. He was interested in diverting attention away from himself and had invented a bogus stalker, a ruse that pointed directly at Tiffany’s ex-husband. Just like Columbo’s suspects always did.

Goodness, she was getting good at this stuff.

Then Max remembered Nadine Johnson.

Good, but not good enough to prevent another death.

Are you sure she’s dead
? Cameron. Trust him to show himself when she couldn’t fight back.
You can’t see me
.

He had a lot to answer for after setting her up with that DVD last night.

You found out what happened to Tiffany, didn’t you? You remembered the full vision. That’s what you wanted all along
.

That’s what
he
wanted.
She’d
wanted Tiffany out of her head. What really pissed her off was that Cameron had been a Deputy DA, and he knew removing that disk from Bud Traynor’s house would make it totally inadmissible in a court of law.

Of course I knew it. But no one would ever think of searching his house. Face it, Max, stealing it was the only way
.

They’d never have discovered what was on it otherwise. Or that Bud owned a copy of his stylist’s snuff film. She always hated to admit when Cameron was right.

Gotcha,
he whispered. He fell silent, though his peppermint scent lingered.

She leaned over the appointment book, perusing Miles’s scribbled notes. Someone
had
screwed up the bookings. She couldn’t remember doing all that damage, and damn, she had a lot of phone calls and juggling ahead of her to straighten it out. Funny that no one had mentioned how well Nadine had handled the receptionist’s job.

She shifted, something crunching beneath her shoe. Paper. Wads of paper had fallen out of the trashcan beneath the counter. She leaned down. The damn thing overflowed. Jules hadn’t emptied it last night when he’d cleaned. That wasn’t like him, at least not in the few days she’d worked at the salon.

She pulled the trash bag out, twisted the plastic until it was tight enough to tie into a knot, then carried it down the back hallway to the outside dumpster.

Max stopped three feet from the metal container. Her heart raced at juggernaut speed. The dumpster glowed. Even when she closed her eyes, it formed a piercing blue outline against her lids. The heat from it seared her lashes, glued them to the flesh beneath her eyes, and scorched the tender skin of her cheeks and lips.

No, no, no. She wouldn’t look. But she knew suddenly why Cameron had made himself known. He knew she’d need him.

“You have to open it, my darling.”

No way.

“You don’t have a choice. I’ll stay with you. I promise.”

Moisture squeezed from between her lashes. “Why do you need me?” she whispered, her mouth parched, her lips dry and cracked. “Why can’t you do it yourself?”

“It’s your power, not mine. You see the glow, not me.”

She clutched the plastic trash bag to her chest. “I can’t.”

“You’ve seen worse in your dreams. Witnessed murders there. Witnessed murder on your TV screen. This is no different.”

“No different,” she gasped. It was getting harder to breathe. She gulped air. “No
different
?” Her panic was rising, choking her. “Videos and visions aren’t reality, Cameron.” They faded with time despite the fact that she told herself she’d never forget what she’d seen. “I won’t do it. I won’t touch that dumpster.”

Flies buzzed around the one-inch opening where the lid wasn’t quite sealed, like a black mouth with bad breath. A mangy cat meowed shrilly, then ran away with a scavenged bit of something in its mouth. Like vultures waiting for Max to open the container, pigeons cooed along the roof line. Days worth of garbage rotted inside, the odor rising up to the sliver of sun like puffs of smoke. It stung her nostrils, turned her lightheaded, and forced bile into her throat. Someone had used the alley as a urinal, the stink of human piss permeating the narrow lane behind the shop.