Bad Blood

  Dedication

  To my husband, Peter Wheeler, who teases me that I never mention him by name, but who’s part of every hero I write.

  Chapter One

  “Stake-out: a mind-numbing, bladder-busting exercise distinguishable from stalking by the ID you’re able to flash when the police come tap-tap-tapping at your Camaro door.”

  —Tori Karacis, Karacis Investigations

  I needed a shrink and a ladies’ room—not necessarily in that order. I was still new enough to early mornings spent staring at storefronts to have downed a double espresso without considering the consequences. Not so long ago I’d left the circus to join Uncle Christos, the other black sheep of the family, in his PI business. More recently he’d run off to find himself, having taught me everything I know, which is, unfortunately, not everything he knew. And so I came to be muddling through my first solo stake-out, seriously questioning my sanity, not to mention my stick-to-it-iveness.

  Not that this was a stake-out exactly.

  Okay, I was illegally parked near a hydrant watching my quarry disorder the staff at Renee’s by showing up a half hour late for her nail appointment and, it appeared, expecting instant service. As soon as she was captive to her wet nails I’d be on the move, springing to present her with my client’s proposal. If I could wait that long. If only she’d been on time, I wouldn’t be in such dire straits.

  Circe, high-powered Hollywood agent—and nigh-immortal enchantress, at least according to my eccentric grandmother—was not an easy person to pin down. No amount of charm or subterfuge had gotten me past her legion of hangers-on. ’Course, I never had accepted defeat easily.

  I’d chosen my target—one of Circe’s administrative assistants whose shoes seemed a little less spit-shined, whose hair had a tendency to frizz as though she couldn’t afford the really high-end shellac that served the others—and culled her from the herd. Okay, so I’d followed her to the ladies’ room and bribed her with a good chunk of my retainer, but it had bought me Circe’s schedule for the next day.

  Finally, Circe chose a clichéd blood red and turned herself over to the manicurist. I waited until her delicate digits were soaking in some solution before sauntering into Renee’s as casually as possible, sweeping a speculative eye over the displays as if I were an interested customer, and heading for the restroom.

  Circe didn’t know me from Adam—or anyway, Eve—as I’d not been able to get within spitting distance yesterday. Dressed in one of those spiffy black work-out suits with racing stripes matching the hot pink sports bra underneath, I blended in with ninety percent of the women in L.A.—actresses, aspiring or otherwise, running to and from the gym, and the fitness professionals who catered to them. Nothing about me should have raised a red flag. It should have been safe enough. And yet…

  When I emerged from the bathroom a minute later, Circe’s seat was empty and the back exit was closing with a soft snick. I didn’t know what had spooked Circe—surely not me!—but I wasn’t about to lose her now.

  I bolted for the exit, cursing as I ran. The one minion Circe’d brought along headed to intercept, but I froze him with a look. Not enough gorgon in my blood to turn man or woman to stone, only enough to give them pause. Or, as I chose to believe, the family tales were hokum and I was just that scary.

  I couldn’t have been more than seconds behind Circe, but they’d been crucial. When I burst out into the alley, Circe was already fighting for her life, backed up against a rusted-out dumpster, clawing at the hands that gripped her. Her assailant looked like something straight off Hollywood Boulevard, dressed like a famous screen character come to life to gouge tips from photo-mad tourists. A brown fedora was pulled low and his trench coat collar raised high to shadow his face—Mike Hammer, maybe, or some other hardboiled PI gone over to the dark side. Something was wrong with the hand bruising Circe’s throat, but there was no time for analysis. I was far more concerned with the hand I couldn’t see, the one that thrust into Circe’s chest, unleashing a tide of blood to spill over his cuff and down her silk shirt.

  The salon door flew open as I launched myself at the grappling pair. Behind me, Circe’s minion yelled, his cry cut off a second later as the attacker’s head whipped around and a gale-force wind arose from nowhere to hurl me into him. Pain blossomed across my back as I hit the rock-solid body at speed then exploded as we crashed to a sudden stop against the wall. The alley rang with the sharp crack of the minion’s head against the brick face. I landed atop him in a tangle of body parts and twisted my head enough to see that he still breathed, but it was all the time I could spare from Circe. Already her body had gone limp and the light in her eyes was flickering out.

  I fought the pain as I gathered my legs beneath me for another offensive. The attacker was distracted with the effort to free his hand from Circe’s chest cavity. I swallowed the bile burning up my throat and flew into action, closing the distance just in time to watch Circe fall to the ground, the gaping hole in her chest leaking gore and an equally noxious liquid starting to seep through her skirt.

  I grabbed the arm of her assailant—killer—as he turned to run and froze as my brain suddenly registered what I was now seeing close up. The hands were scaly, clawed and blue-green. He turned on me with a look of malicious madness, ran his tongue over teeth that were again simply wrong and wrenched himself out of my grip.

  He was gone in the second it took me to get a hold of myself. I was torn between pursuit and seeing to the victims. I wish I could have been certain that I chose the latter out of something more noble than fear, but I couldn’t. My faculties were falling all over themselves trying to come up with some plausible denial for what I’d seen.

  A choked-off cry from the direction of Renee’s spun me around. Several women had appeared at the back door, jockeying for a position that allowed maximum viewing with minimum exposure. The pack leader actually squeaked as my gaze, probably still feral, met hers.

  “W-we’ve called 9-1-1,” she said, as if in threat.

  “Good,” I answered, consciously relaxing my body posture even though I felt anything but relaxed.

  I wondered when they’d appeared and what they’d made of what they’d seen. Hopefully enough to cast me in the right role—would-be rescuer rather than psychopath. Unfortunately, there was no telling what mental aerobics their brains, like mine, would perform to account for the inconceivable. Most people had no context for Mickey Spillane meets Creature from the Black Lagoon. Hell, I came from a long line of circus freaks—literally—and I had no context. Illiad, Odyssey, and centuries of cultural and family history aside, I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

  Slowly, so as not to spook anyone, I adjusted my disheveled sweat suit and approached the minion, who was still slumped against the building’s blackened brick face. I willed him to live, not only for the obvious humanitarian reasons, but because he was my best hope. As one of Circe’s adherents, chances were he’d seen the unexplained enough that fish-face’s appearance wouldn’t have thrown him for a loop. If I had to explain to the police that I’d fought off an oversized misfit with a skin condition, I wanted backup. The police still weren’t too happy with me over the Cruikshank affair.

  Luckily, the minion moaned and started to stir upon my approach, though his eyes, when they opened, wouldn’t focus. Concussion then, at the very least.

  “Ambulance on the way?” I called to the gaggle in the doorway.

  The woman who’d answered before nodded. “And police.”

  Clearly, I hadn’t made her hit parade.

  I pushed down on the minion as he started to rise. “Don’t move,” I suggested firmly, hitting him with the full force of my stare. The fact that he subsided could have been sheer coincidence. I was tempted to collapse right down besi
de him now that my adrenaline rush was wearing off and my muscles were going shaky on me, but checked the impulse. First, the alley was ripe with the acquired grime of lifetimes going tacky in the rising heat and redolent of sour milk and the sickly sweet smell of death. Second, while this job was caput, since there was no possible way short of a trip across the river Styx of presenting my client’s proposal to the dragon lady, I was an inveterate snoop and there was sleuthing to be done.

  Still moving slowly, hands in plain sight of my audience so that I couldn’t possibly be accused of tampering with evidence, I turned to survey the scene. It took a minute to look beyond the all-too-human expression on Circe’s face—shock mixed with irritation, as if death was a wrinkle she didn’t have time for—and note the details.

  The dragon lady would have been horrified to see herself, head cocked at an unnatural angle by the dumpster she wouldn’t in life have touched with someone else’s ten-foot pole, legs splayed, skirt of her power suit riding up nearly to her waist, chest pried open, broken ribs poking through the gaping hole. Irreverently, I marveled that a missing heart would put down a Hollywood agent. I’d thought that came standard.

  I checked my brain before it could babble on along those lines and forced myself to keep processing the scene. I’d just about kill—damn, bad wording—to get a look at the briefcase that had slid halfway across the alley to rest in what appeared to be a puddle of motor oil. In the time I’d watched Circe, waiting for my moment, it had never left her side. She used it to body-check persistent supplicants who managed to get too close, stop doors from closing when a hanger-on failed to anticipate her need and, presumably, kept her secrets within. If I wanted access, I was going to have to play nicely with the boys in blue.

  Detective Nick Armani—no relation—tried to stare me down from the other side of the tiny vanity table cum desk in Renee’s office, which had been temporarily appropriated. He was tall, dark and none too happy to see me. I had to admit the glower was effective, with those brows in desperate need of taming lowered to shade pale blue eyes. I didn’t think he’d be gratified to find that the effect on me was anything but intimidating, especially with his knees bumping the girly desk every time he shifted. It should have been comical—probably would have been if I weren’t still having flashbacks to the wet sound of the fish-man yanking his hand from Circe’s chest—but it also emphasized his fairly impressive proportions.

  “Tori Karacis,” he said, just as the silence was starting to get interesting. “Why is it that I always seem to find you at my crime scenes?”

  “Yours, detective? Do you have something to confess? I’d be glad to make a citizen’s arrest, especially if you’ll let me borrow your cuffs.”

  Damn. My brain and mouth always seemed to disconnect in the detective’s presence. No wonder he glowered.

  And yet, I thought I might almost have detected a twitch of the lips. Play nice, I reminded myself.

  “No such luck,” he answered, rocking backwards on Renee’s spindly chair. “If there’s any restraining to be done—”

  The office door opened, interrupting whatever he’d been about to say—and dammit, I wanted to hear. No surprise the impeccable timing had been brought to us by none other than Armani’s esteemed partner Detective Helen Lau, who from our first meeting acted as though she’d despise me if only she could work up that much enthusiasm.

  “I’ve got Officer Jennings doing a ride-along in the ambulance with the male vic. We’re still waiting on the ME. Learned anything so far?” she asked.

  I couldn’t help myself. “You’re just in time. Detective Armani was about to break out the rubber hoses.”

  Lau finally deigned to look my way, but couldn’t be moved to put on an expression, let alone respond. Damn, I wanted to rattle her cage. This whole more stoic than thou thing—and hello, I wasn’t even in competition—freaked me out. Of course, that might have been why she did it.

  Armani gave me a quelling look, but I’d had years of Yiayia’s evil eye to draw on. I was nigh unquellable.

  “Actually,” he said, heading things off before they could get ugly, “Tori was just about to volunteer what she knows. We’re good here. Why don’t you begin on the customers so they can be released? You might want to start on the one with the really piercing voice so we can all hear ourselves think.”

  Lau’s eyes flickered to me and back to Armani before she nodded. “Call if you need me.”

  He nodded back and again we had the room to ourselves.

  Sighing heavily, he thumped the dainty chair back down onto four legs, dropped his elbows onto the surface of the desk and began rubbing his temples. He speared me with a look as I shifted on my own chair.

  “Why do you do that?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “She makes me crazy.”

  “What do you mean makes?”

  I watched him rub his temples. I knew a killer pressure-point hand massage that would clear that headache right up, but even if I were foolish enough to offer it, the thought of Detective Lau walking in on such a scene would put the kibosh on the temptation.

  “Anyway,” I continued, ready to cut him some slack, “you wanted to know everything, right?”

  His head came up out of his hands. “Just like that?”

  “Well, now you’re expecting the smart-ass comments. I don’t want to be predictable.”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “Fair enough. Mind if I record?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Armani drew a mini-cassette recorder from his inside jacket pocket, gave the details on the interview, asked me to state my name and set it down between us.

  I gave him the whole song and dance, blushing a bit as I ’fessed up to the pit stop, and ending with the getaway. Unfortunately, Armani picked right up on the details that were glossed over along the way.

  “I don’t understand. If the killer was busy with the vic, how did he manage to knock you back against the wall?”

  Damn, the man was too sharp. “I don’t know—had to be something in his hand.”

  “Like what?”

  “Hell if I know, I was too busy flying through the air.”

  “Okay, we’ll come back to that. Your client’s proposal—you have it on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I see it?”

  I weighed the pros of cooperating with authorities against the cons of invading my client’s privacy. “Not unless you’ve got a warrant.”

  “How can I have a warrant when I didn’t know a damned thing about it until just now?”

  I took that as a rhetorical question.

  His glower was back. “Do you have something to hide?”

  “‘Not I,’ said the cat. My client’s another matter. Whatever he had to say to Circe was private. For her eyes only. Even I don’t know what’s in the envelope.”

  “You didn’t sneak a peek?”

  “It’s sealed.”

  “Seals can be broken.”

  I gave him Yiayia’s fish-eye, which he ignored. “Remind me never to ask you to pick up my mail. Anyway, I’m not a snoop.”

  Armani quirked an eyebrow at me.

  “Not that kind of snoop anyway,” I huffed.

  “So you only invade people’s privacy for money.”

  Okay, that was uncalled for. And totally untrue. Truth was more like I only respected privacy when bound by confidentiality or the laws of California. I couldn’t speak to what curiosity had done to the cat, but I did know what it had done to my familial relationships. I’d also learned through painful experience that the truth wasn’t likely to set us free. Sometimes it was about as welcome as a cockroach in the soup. It was one of the reasons—beyond the debilitating fear of heights that kept me out of the family acrobatic act—that the Rialto Brothers Circus had been just as happy to see the back of me as I’d been to split.

  I shoved those oh-so-happy thoughts back into their little black box. “Something like that.”

  “We can subpoena your records.
”

  “Uh huh,” I answered, unconcerned. Since I hadn’t completed the job, there was no report on file for the client. There’d been no notes to take and I’d be giving the envelope back to my client as soon as possible. “So then I’m free to go?”

  “As long as you come by the station later to sign your statement and look at mug shots.”

  There was no good way to tell him that would be an exercise in futility. Still, later sounded sufficiently vague.

  “Later then,” I answered, already halfway to the door.

  Armani let me go, but I could feel his eyes on me all the way out. I was tempted to peel off the jacket to give him a real show, my sports bra ending well above the waistline of the pants, but the envelope sat in the special inside pocket of the jacket and I wasn’t sure I was smooth enough not to send it flying. Besides, I wasn’t all that certain to be a crowd-pleaser. A shortly thereafter ex-boyfriend had once described me as “good enough for television”, which in this town was a slap in the face. It meant that with my unruly black hair, dark eyes and slight build, I probably wouldn’t break the camera but neither would I carry a show on the big screen.

  Unless, of course, it was the sideshow I’d just embroiled myself in.

  Chapter Two

  “Sometimes when you look a gift-horse in the mouth you get bit—and sometimes you get that green slobber all over your hands that comes from them eating grass all day. I’m not saying don’t do it. Just be prepared.”

  —Uncle Christos

  There was nothing I wanted more than to find a highway and drive, fast and furious. Not that I could outrace my thoughts, but having every last wit focused on hazards and speed traps ought to put them on hold—at least until the near-death experience of the whole thing snapped them into perspective. Unfortunately, I’d mistimed my escape to coincide with rush hour. The slow crawl was enough to drive me out of my mind.

  By the time I reached my office, I was literally shaking—arms, legs, hell, brain cells all doing the jitterbug. Shock had set in or maybe worn off. Had I really just been all flippant with the police practically over Circe’s dead body? What the hell was wrong with me? I’d heard of gallows humor, but this was the first time I’d participated—assuming that anything I’d said could remotely be accounted humorous.