Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) (8 page)

She’d had to take a cab back to Long Island after the Uber she’d summoned drove right past her when they’d realized who she was. She didn’t even bother to review them badly, because what was the point? She took a cab and ignored the rearview mirror attentions of the driver, who seemed to be trying to figure out why her face was so familiar.

She got out in front of her Long Island mansion just before dark. She’d spent most of the day in the company of the NYPD, answering questions about that lousy sonofabitch Joseph Tannen, and her utter lack of connection to him, over and over, with a few gentle inquiries about the charges she already had pending. References to her lawyer had turned those back fairly quickly, and fortunately she’d been out of there after wasting only the entire day.

This was the shit she had to deal with now, she thought as she walked toward the front door in her bare feet, Manolos over her shoulder, one with a broken heel, the sound of the cab squealing away behind her. She was living under a cloud of suspicion until this all went away, and it was suffocating her, dulling her mind and turning her attention away from what she ought to be doing—making money.

Then there was the other thing. That stupid Gravity cow and her insufferable snideness. Nadine was still burning from that, and it had been hours. She’d seen the replays while waiting to leave the precinct. The news was having a field day with the superheroine telling off the fallen Queen of Wall Street, lecturing her on virtue, like some sort of mother scolding her child in the middle of a supermarket. Nadine recognized the stunned look on her face in the playbacks; she was sitting there silently, horrified, like her FBI interrogations had been made public.

They hadn’t, fortunately, but it was probably just a matter of time before she’d have to deal with that humiliation, too.

She fumbled with the keys while unlocking the front door, checking the bushes to make sure nobody was ready to leap out at her. That had happened recently, and the dumbass had gotten a key right to the face before he ran off into the night. She opened the tall, heavy front door and slipped through, shutting it and locking the deadbolt behind her.

She drew a few quiet breaths in the darkness, just listening. She wouldn’t put it past some lunatic parasite to break into her mansion and wait, after all. This was what the crazies did, followed people like her, trying to attach themselves to the nearest luminous object like moths.

She waited a minute in the dark, then two. She heard nothing, smelled nothing out of the ordinary, and finally turned on the light to find the room exactly as she’d left it—tastefully appointed with fine wood furnishings, a grand piano in the corner (she didn’t even play), and not a soul to greet her. The cook and the gardener had been fired when her assets had been seized. She didn’t really miss their presence, but she did miss ready access to warm meals and a plush, perfectly manicured lawn.

Nadine dragged herself into the kitchen, looking carefully around as she walked. Someone could still be hiding here, after all, though it was a lot more likely that the FBI was listening to her as she made her way through her home. She hadn’t seen a van on the street, but then, she hadn’t cared to look either, and the street was separated from her estate by a ten-foot-high wall. Her estate backed onto Long Island Sound, though there was a decent amount of real estate between her and the water. Enough that she couldn’t hear the water clearly at night, but she still had the view.

She browsed the fridge with disinterest, mentally counting the minutes. She was almost positive the FBI didn’t have video surveillance on her in her house, but it still gave her pause. They’d searched the place relentlessly when they’d first arrested her, and while her lawyers had seen the warrant, they’d told her it was entirely possible that the FBI had another that allowed for wiretapping and video surveillance, so she was extra wary when she knew she was stepping outside the law.

She tossed her heels and walked across the tile floors toward the master suite. She ignored the messy bed, though it drove her a little crazy, avoided kicking the clothes and shoes she’d left on the floor—Manuela, who used to pick up after her once she’d left for the day, was gone now—and walked into her bathroom, leaving the light off.

She stood in front of the mirror in the darkness, letting her eyes adjust. If they had an infrared camera in here, she was done for no matter what. But if they did, they hadn’t tipped their hand to it yet, so Nadine slipped off her clothes and stepped into the enormous tile shower, her feet cold now that she couldn’t pay for the cost of the floor heat to run anymore.

She turned on one of the eight different jets and looked up and around in the cavelike darkness of her shower. Her mansion was old, the latest renovation a decade past. She’d thought about doing another, it had been on her list, but she’d been hesitant for one reason—she didn’t want to expose the house’s last great secret, the one that the previous owner had made sure didn’t show up during the last renovation. When he’d sold the place, he’d told her about it only after they’d signed on the dotted line. He’d died alone a few months later, luckily for her, which meant—hopefully—she was the only one who knew that the shower held a panic room.

She pushed at the loose tile to her left and it opened just enough to reveal a keypad. It was outdated by any modern standard, but it made a satisfying clicking noise as she punched the code. Squares of tile yielded to her touch after that, the door swinging open as she stepped out of the darkness of the shower and into a deeper darkness inside the panic room.

She shut the door behind her, finally daring to breathe. Her skin was wet from the shower, her hair dripping, but she didn’t care. She kept a towel just inside the door, and retrieved it and the robe she left on the hook, drying off and putting her wet hair over her shoulder.

She slipped into the seat in front of her. An old computer console sat there, with emergency phone line access, its green, phosphor-lit screen the height of seventies technology. In the top corner of the room, there was a blinking light where the previous owner had installed a cell phone repeater with an antenna drilled through the steel so he could get reception. It, too, shone in the darkness. She ignored it, instead reaching into an old shoebox to the left and retrieving a burner phone, one of a dozen secreted away in here, and dialed a number on it.

It hadn’t been built as a panic room. Solid metal all the way around, it was a fallout shelter, designed to withstand the predicted nuclear holocaust that everyone had feared in the days of the Cold War. Nadine smirked at that thought, at the casual idiocy of those who’d come before. It was lucky they’d planned for this, though, because now she had her own little secret lair, cut off from the rest of the house, where the FBI couldn’t get to her. Hell, if she’d known they were coming, she would have hidden out in here, waiting until they’d left, and then chartered a private plane and ditched the country. She could have come back later, after her name was cleared, instead of having to wade through this hell up to her neck.

“Abner,” she said when he answered on the other side. “It’s me.”

There was a pause and Abner spoke in his cool tones, inflected with just a suggestion of worry. “I saw what happened on the news. I was putting together a response when—”

“It’s good you didn’t have to act,” Nadine said, a sense of relief filling her. “I’m sure the NYPD would have wondered—”

“Pre-paid bodyguarding services,” Abner said, precise, as he always was. “A standard preparation in the world of finance. I have a team standing by in case this happens again.”

“Hopefully it won’t,” Nadine said, sagging against the chair, letting it spin lazily as she regarded the steel ceiling by the dim fluorescent light. “How goes the progress?”

“I am making inroads,” Abner said. “The evidence they have against you at the SEC is … strong. The FBI’s case is less so, and easier to sabotage.” She could imagine him, sitting at his desk, his wire-frame glasses catching the overhead light, his long fingers running over a list that he’d written in an innocuous code only he could understand. She’d watched him read it once, and to her it had looked like a simple to-do list: get groceries, pick up the kids from school, buy a hammer to address the nail pop in the bedroom.

But Abner wasn’t the sort to deal with minor things, and he certainly wasn’t the kind to wield a hammer on a simple nail.

“How long do you think it will be?” Nadine stared at her fingernails; they looked atrocious from her steady efforts to bite them down. Usually a manicurist would fix them, but that was another allowance cut.

“Soon,” Abner said. “You know it’s best if I don’t talk timetable. And it would be better if you didn’t call me, even from a burner phone until—”

“I know,” she cooed, intending to give him a thrill and nothing more. “I have to look like I’m innocent, like I’m standing here helplessly while the FBI and the SEC tear me apart every way they can.” Her face hardened, and the amusing idea of making Abner twitch with lust across the river evaporated in her anger. Another idea occurred to her. “If you saw what happened, does that mean you saw what Gravity Slut said to me?”

Abner’s hesitation was obvious, though she wasn’t sure whether it was because he was still pondering her offhand come-on (which she meant nothing by except to tease him) or because he had some inkling of where she might go with this thought. “I saw,” was all he said.

“I don’t like how she spoke to me,” Nadine said, bringing her thumbnail up to her lips and working it between her teeth, weakening it. She hated thumbnails, they were the worst, the hardest to sever. She usually worked on them for days before finally popping them loose between her teeth. “Like she was better than me.”

Abner held his silence for long enough that Nadine was about to ask if she was still there when he finally spoke. “Would you … like something done about that?”

“Can you do it without it looking like I was behind it?” She asked, then listened for the answer, canines clenched on that stubborn thumbnail.

Abner cleared his throat. “She has accumulated … enemies … in the public eye. She’s a presence in the city—”

“I don’t just want her public presence hit,” Nadine said, her voice rising uncontrollably. “She’s someone when she’s not this self-righteous ho-bag. She probably even has friends, or people who care about her. Not a boyfriend or husband, because she shows all the signs of needing to get laid, but … probably at least one person that cares about her.” For some reason, that thought burned Nadine.

“Then you don’t want her Gravity Gal persona destroyed?”

Nadine took the thumbnail out of her mouth and pushed at it with her index finger. “Of course I want it destroyed. But that’s not all.”

“Oh?”

“No,” Nadine said, and a small hint of perverse glee bubbled up at the possibilities. “I wouldn’t have stopped there for any other enemy, and I’ll be damned if I’ll stop there for her. Yes, I want you to destroy Gravity Gal. I want you to make it so she can’t show her masked face anywhere in this city. And then I want you to find out who she is when’s she not wearing that mask—and ruin her damned life.”

I was pretty well starving by the time we defeated New York traffic and reached the precinct. I hadn’t even made it to my hotel yet, but it was after dark and I was ready for some food and, surprisingly, an early night. Flying on a plane takes it out of me, though I suppose not as much as doing it under my own power does.

“I’ve got the video over here,” Welch said, directing me toward an office in the corner of a bullpen that was pretty sedate. My guess was that the night shift was mostly out on the town, doing their thing, because I only saw a half dozen guys milling around, a couple clustered in a corner with their heads put together around a computer screen. I got a couple looks, but they’d seen me come through before, so it was nothing out of the ordinary for them by now.

The precinct smelled like a thousand other old public buildings that had seen better days. It had that aroma of hard use and old paint, an air conditioning system that probably needed a good flushing, or bleaching, or whatever it is they do. The walls weren’t peeling, but even without Cassandra powers I could tell that would happen in the near future.

Welch eyed me as I looked over the precinct. I had been here before, but it blurred together with all the other cop shops I’d visited in the last few years. “Try not to destroy the place in an epic battle,” he quipped. “This isn’t Chicago; we look dimly on that sort of thing here in New York.”

“Honestly, would you even notice?” I asked, nodding at a portrait of Fiorello LaGuardia that looked like it might have been hanging on the wall since the man himself was actually in office. It had the weathered look of the Grace painting that hung in the house of every Lutheran in Minnesota.

“I expect the city would notice when the insurance company refused to pay their claim,” Welch said, halting in place, hands on his hips. “‘Acts of gods,’ right?”

“So sexist,” I mused lightly. “They really ought to change that to ‘Acts of goddess’ just for me. I mean, I’m like the O.G. of destroying property—hotels, police precincts, subway trains, stadiums, public parks, museums. You probably shouldn’t stand close to me.” He gave me the stinkeye, and I frowned like I was thinking it over. “I hope my hotel doesn’t get destroyed this time, actually. I’m getting really tired of that.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m the one who hired you,” Welch said, “but I guess I don’t find this line of thought all that amusing. Fears of a darker future, you know.”

“Relax, I try and keep my chaos to a minimum,” I said reassuringly. I kept back the part about how my plans rarely seemed to do much to hold back the tide of mayhem in my wake, though, because, duh, that’s not very reassuring. “Let’s watch this video.”

He ushered me over to a computer and pulled something up on YouTube. I almost scoffed that I could have viewed it on my phone while getting a burger, but felt like I’d done enough to annoy my employer for the day, so I just sat back and watched the clip, which was titled, “GRAVITY GAL DESTROYS CAPTAIN FROST!!!!” I didn’t know who wrote that headline, but I felt like they probably needed a change of undies after all those exclamation points.