the COLLECTOR
CAMERON CRUISE

To my muse, Leila, and my anchor, Andrew.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Prologue

Your name is Dog.

You don’t find the name cruel, only ironic. When the kids first begin calling you Dog, you think of them as acolytes, unable or unworthy to say your name outright. They say it backward.

Dog.

God.

It’s been that way all your life. Few are worthy.

You remember all the names you were taught as a novice: Ra, Brahma, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, Odin. You close your eyes and whisper your own name, adding it to the list. Your skin feels on fire with your brilliance. In some corner of your mind, you understand that the sensation is really pain. This time, he beat you with his belt.

You give a secret smile. The pain brings with it the power of knowledge: you’re the one in control now, pulling the strings.

Bloodletting, you were taught, is an important ritual, one that has endured through the ages. Druids would kill a man by slicing open his midsection to divine the future from the convulsion of limbs and the pattern of blood. India’s Thuggee cult, followers of Kali, Hindu goddess of death, mutilated their strangled victims by stabbing the eyes and ripping out the intestines. Centuries ago, Aztec priests reached into the chest cavity to pull out the still-beating heart, the life force flowing from the altar, nectar for the gods.

You, too, require your sacrifice.

At this late hour, it isn’t difficult to get by security, if that’s what they call the dozing guard with his chair propped against the chain-link fence. You pass roped-off mosaic tiles and ancient stones and statuary that look like so many Tinker Toys, broken pieces bravely pieced together like something precious. Each day, lines of tourists worship here with their cameras and their guides, but you covet something very different.

Walking down the limestone path, you pass two coeds speaking in hushed tones in what sounds like German. You will yourself invisible, just another student no one will remember come morning. The girl with shining blond hair slips a glance your way with a smile, giving the greeting, “Grüezi.” Swiss, then. You can’t help it. You smile back.

The full moon shines down on the ruins like stage lighting. You know the exact moment the play begins because you follow the main characters here. You don’t miss even a second. You know he will take her somewhere safe, somewhere deserted. There is no one but you to stand as audience.

She follows willingly for the moment, but you expect her to put up a fight.

From the shadows, you watch them argue. She makes a slashing gesture with her hand, letting him know her answer. No. Absolutely not! That’s when he makes his move.

He grabs her by the hair, shoving her forward. He strikes her, over and over. She bleeds from her mouth and nose, but she is a strong woman; she doesn’t falter. She swipes her clawed fingers across his face, at the same time kicking wildly. Only, by now he has the rope around her neck.

He pulls her down to the ground. Sadly, you are reminded of cattle being branded rather than a religious ceremony. You had hoped for better.

You have extraordinary hearing and take in the music of her death as her breath begins to gurgle deep in her throat. You can’t see her face—he is hunched over her, blocking her from view—but her legs and arms flail in drumbeats on the ground.

You know his vision is merely to kill her and take his prize. He is quick—too quick. Her death doesn’t do her justice. You want to scream in frustration. Not like this! you plead silently, knowing that she deserves a much grander homage to her life and work.

When she finally stops moving, he releases his grip on the rope and falls back on the ground beside her, winded as if he’s fought some great battle. But soon enough, he rises to his knees. He searches frantically through the pockets of the windbreaker she’s wearing, finding his treasure. You wonder how he convinced her to bring it here. He cradles the stone against his chest in relief.

After he leaves, you approach in complete silence. Standing over her, you see the rope he used to strangle her, still around her neck. Sloppy.

Her skin reminds you of the moonlight reflecting off the ancient marble surrounding you. You kneel down, stroking the blood from her bottom lip with your thumb. There’s not enough light to give her much color. The blood looks like a dark stain on her white skin. You suck the blood off your thumb. It tastes like an old penny.

You know what you want, picturing her blue, blue eyes. But you also need to be careful.

Suddenly, you hear a wheezing breath. You watch her chest rise as she chokes in a lungful of air. Her eyes open. The fingers of her right hand spasm to life. That’s when you move in like a spider racing across its web.

You grab the rope by both ends. There’s no time to act on any of your grand plans; the idiot before you made sure of that. Standing over her, you know the exact moment she recognizes you. The knowledge of her fate is there in her startled gaze.

As she struggles, you hum to yourself a childhood favorite.

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.

Perhaps she’ll die….

You smile, knowing that, in the end, they all die.

1

Trisha Tran, soon to be Trisha Chance, tried not to be annoyed. She glanced nervously at the digital clock built into the dashboard.

She was going to kill her mother. Stuck in Tommy’s sweltering Honda Civic—the air-conditioning was out again—she waited for the light to change at the intersection. She had her windows down, and cast an anxious look at the homeless man standing on the corner just a few feet away. He was jabbing his finger in the air, debating some invisible adversary, his sunburned face twisted in the heat of the one-sided argument.

She turned away just as the guy caught her staring. She could feel her heart begin to race. Great, just great.

It didn’t matter that here in the paradise of Orange County the homeless were a daily sight. Just about anything had Trish jumping out of her skin today. Gawd, she hadn’t seen Aunt Mimi since the last death day celebration.

The light changed and Trisha roared the Honda into the intersection, earning a glare from the diminutive woman seated in the passenger seat. Her mother reached for the radio and dialed in yet another Vietnamese station. Trisha allowed herself a long sigh. What a waste of time.

Trisha didn’t have a lot of time to waste. She was graduating summa cum laude from Chapman University and had a wedding to plan. The last thing she needed was to indulge one of her mother’s silly superstitions. But here she was, negotiating the traffic jungle of Little Saigon to see a fortune-teller.

The worst of it—her fear that Aunt Mimi might say something bad. Then she and Tommy would really be hosed. It had practically killed her parents when Trisha had introduced her blond-haired, green-eyed fiancé. She hadn’t even let on that she was dating a white guy until Tommy proposed. She didn’t think her parents could handle any more bad news.

Suddenly, the car next to her swerved across two lanes of traffic. Trisha slammed on the brakes, just missing the guy’s bumper. The idiot came to a complete stop in the turning lane. She tried to shut out the obvious—the whole Asians-are-bad-drivers thing. But the man behind the wheel proved to be some old Jewish guy wearing a yarmulke. Beside her, her mom chanted a soft prayer.

Trisha wondered if it wasn’t some sort of a sign. Turn back! Like maybe it wouldn’t be such a great idea to sit for a reading with Aunt Mimi.

She gave herself a mental scolding. Stop being so melodramatic! She concentrated on the road ahead. Trisha knew the wide boulevard lined with industrial parks and strip malls was a far cry from what a tourist would expect exiting the 22 Freeway and its promise of “Little Saigon.” She remembered the first time she’d brought Tommy here. She could tell he’d been disappointed. Tommy was from San Francisco, where Chinatown was a thrill ride of colorful storefronts and throngs of tourists.

Here in Westminster, California, Little Saigon was low-lying and spread out, dotted with auto body shops and trailer parks. Only strategically placed storefronts displayed some of the architectural details once found in old Saigon: tiled and curved roofs, the old French colonial charm, doors positioned according to the principles of feng shui. Trisha had read somewhere that one of the malls designed to be a tourist attraction was going to be razed to make room for track homes.

She reached over and turned down the music blasting from the radio—she swore her mother was going deaf—earning another disapproving look from Má.

Tommy, Trisha’s fiancé—just about everyone called them TNT—was always telling her she needed to be more patient with her parents. He didn’t see how going to a fortune-teller to pick a date for their wedding should be such a big deal. He didn’t understand the Vietnamese way, that fortune-tellers and astrologers had insane amounts of influence. God forbid a man born in the year of the Tiger marry someone born in the year of the horse.

That’s what had Trisha worried, of course. That her mom would use Aunt Mimi in some power play to stop Trisha from marrying Tommy. Depending on what Auntie said, her mom could sputter on about doom and gloom and bad luck, maybe even take to her bed. The next thing you know, Trisha’s marriage dishonored the spirit of her ancestors. Then everyone would get on board with Má. She could be pretty cagey that way, her mother. Definitely manipulative.

Trisha bit her lip and wondered if it wasn’t too late to turn back. But they had already passed the Asian Garden Mall with its Happy Buddha statue extending welcoming arms to shoppers ready to drop some cash. The two-story building housed some of the largest jewelry stores in Southern California. Her father said there were big bucks behind a project to expand the mall, an attempt, her cousin claimed, to turn Little Saigon into a sort of Bermuda triangle for tourists, Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm being only a few miles away.

Her cousin, of course, saw any such attempts as “cultural imperialism.” At family gatherings she would rant about the evils of being “othered” and what she called fundamental questions of “commodification” and “objectification” of their culture—whatever that meant.

Trisha didn’t worry about stuff like that. It wasn’t her mission in life to change the world for the Vietnamese immigrants who had made their home here in California. Right now, all she wanted was to get her mother off her back.

She clutched the steering wheel, telling herself everything would turn out okay. Heck, if she could get her father to accept Tommy, anything else should be a piece of cake—even a visit to Aunt Mimi.

She turned into the familiar housing track, focusing on just that. She was in touch with her Vietnamese side, sure, but she wasn’t obsessed with it. Whatever happened today, she knew in her heart that she and Tommy were meant to be.

The track homes lining the street didn’t look like much. Most were modest single-family dwellings. Only, in the crazy real estate market that was SoCal, these houses could be worth close to half a million dollars.

Aunt Mimi’s house didn’t stand out in any particular way, just a single-story ranch-style in cream stucco with a composite roof. You had to step inside to see just how lucrative the fortune-telling business could be. Mimi had clients all around the world. Trisha had once overheard Má say that Auntie could charge several thousand dollars for a reading.

Mimi wasn’t really her aunt. She was part of their sprawling extended family, some second cousin of her father’s. But she was probably the most powerful member of the Tran family. Trisha had tried to explain to Tommy how it worked. In Little Saigon, a fortune-teller wasn’t like those psychic hotlines advertised on cable television. There wasn’t a neon sign of a palm flashing outside Auntie’s door. Mimi was well known and highly respected, a high-class clairvoyant. Unlike a lot of astrologers and fortune-tellers in the area, her influence stretched beyond the immigrant community. Mimi often bragged about her prestigious clientele, many of whom were Westerners.

Trisha pictured Auntie in her head. Mimi favored St. John suits and gold jewelry. Lots of it. Trisha remembered one family gathering during Tet, the Vietnamese festival for the New Year. Tet was the most important celebration of the year and took weeks of preparation. For the Vietnamese diaspora in Little Saigon, Tet marked the arrival of spring and the day every man, woman and child grew one year older. At just such a gathering, Trisha had admired a heavy emerald cuff on Mimi’s wrist. Má had told Trisha the bracelet clocked in at close to $10K.

Trisha wondered about that sometimes. If it was really okay to make that kind of money off people’s fears and dreams…Not that she’d ever say anything bad about Aunt Mimi. No way.

She pulled up in front of the house and took a deep breath. But her heart kept hammering in her chest. She tried to channel some of Tommy’s faith. It’s going to be okay, Trish….

She helped Má out of the Honda, then hurried ahead to open the wrought-iron gate. Her mother wasn’t getting around so well these days. Arthritis, the doctor said.

Opening the gate, Trisha noticed with surprise the heavy iron bars over the windows of Aunt Mimi’s house. She frowned. Those are new.

The courtyard smelled of jasmine. The lush tropical growth covered the fence, practically hiding the white stucco house from the street. White ginger as high as Má was tall bloomed across the entry like a fragrant screen. Trish wondered if the plants were an attempt to shield clients from nosy neighbors.

She held her mother’s arm as they climbed the two short steps to the front entrance, pretending with a nod of her head to listen to her mother’s stream of advice on how to act and what to say. Má used Trisha’s Vietnamese name, Tuyen, which meant “angel.” All Vietnamese names meant something.

Tommy had started calling her that lately, after he’d overheard her parents use it. Trisha was her middle name, her Anglo name. Tommy said it made him feel special to call her Tuyen, and he did make it sound romantic with his American accent. But then Tommy could make just about anything sound sexy.

She smiled. Sometimes he just called her Angel.

She helped her mother sit down on the wooden bench set against the wall of the brick entry. She rang the doorbell and was a little surprised to find a thumb-size camera lens staring out at her from beside the door. She didn’t remember Aunt Mimi having some mega security system—not that it didn’t make sense. Mimi lived alone and she had tons of expensive stuff to protect inside.

Trisha sat down next to Má on the wood bench in the entry, hoping they wouldn’t have to wait long. The place was all decked out for visitors. A lion, believed to be an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, as well as a symbol of the power of the king, drib-bled water from a toothy grin. Baskets and planters overflowed with florescent pink impatiens and fuchsias. It was a pleasant place for Mimi’s desperate clientele to wait. Trisha figured Mimi was really part seer, part therapist. People were willing to pay for advice on just about anything.

Trish reminded herself she had come for Má’s sake. Some of Trisha’s earliest memories were of her mother lighting the joss sticks that smelled of sandalwood, and setting out a bowl of sweet rice alongside fried melon seeds and sugarcoated strips of coconut dyed pink, yellow and green. The meal was meant for the departed spirits of her ancestors. Somehow, in her mother’s mind, ancestor worship didn’t conflict with Catholicism.

Like many Vietnamese, her mother’s life revolved around thay boi, oracles hired to divine wedding dates, burial schedules, store openings and just about anything else. Every autumn Má bought moon cakes; every New Year she tended to Bà’s grave in preparation for Tet.

Trisha frowned. Hadn’t she challenged her parents’ beliefs enough with her decision to marry Tommy in the first place? She didn’t want them to think that she was giving up who she was just because she was marrying a Caucasian.

Only, when her mother launched into what was sure to be another long-winded lecture, Trisha glanced at her watch. Gawd. How long is this going to take? She excused herself and stood to knock on the door.

To her surprise, when she banged the door knocker, the door drifted open, unlocked.

Which was pretty weird. Why the camera and the bars over the windows if Mimi was going to leave a door open? Trisha looked back at her mother, who rose slowly to her feet. Suddenly, Má pushed Trisha aside and rushed through the door, calling out Mimi’s Vietnamese name.

Má’s barging in didn’t surprise Trisha one bit. Her mother and Mimi were pretty tight. Mimi came to the house for tea all the time. Usually, she gave Má pretty good advice. There was only this one time she had Má in tears. Má never said what Mimi had told her, but two weeks later, Bà, Trisha’s grandmother, passed away. Weird.

Since she could remember, Trisha had studiously avoided the woman she called “Auntie.” Mimi used Tarot cards, and some of her readings could be eerily accurate. Like the thing with Bà, and the time Mimi warned the family to beware of the “friendly snake.” A couple of weeks later, they found out her father’s business partner was embezzling a bunch of money. There were a ton of stories like that about Mimi. Really, it gave Trisha the willies to think that someone could see her future.

She felt a cold, hard ball in her stomach as she stepped inside the foyer, her high-heeled mules making a staccato sound on the marble tile. The house seemed strangely quiet.

It bothered her, this growing fear. She wanted to shut out her mother’s voice inside her head. What if Tommy isn’t the right one, Tuyen? Or more likely, what if Mimi told the family he wasn’t? Could Trisha really elope as she’d threatened?

She frowned, finding herself face-to-face with the most gawd-awful painting. The enormous oil took up half the wall in the living room and showed a squat, grinning demon sitting happily on a heavenly throne. Mimi had told her the story behind the image. It came from a Buddhist text, about a demon who fed off the anger of others. A heavy red mist oozed from his scaled body, forming a bloodred aura.

Aunt Mimi collected all sorts of demon paraphernalia. She’d told Trisha her little demons protected her. Walking past the canvas, Trish glanced nervously away from the bug-eyed figure in the painting, thinking, Right…

Aunt Mimi had a really posh setup. Furniture made of exotic tropical hardwoods stood on beautiful Oriental silk rugs. A huge mirror hung over the fireplace, with an intricately carved Chinese frame depicting a phoenix. At the other end of the room stood a beautiful lacquered screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl and seashells. Four mythical creatures had been painted onto the individual panels: a dragon, a turtle, a unicorn and a phoenix. The four often came together to form a superpower of prosperity, luck, love and strength.

Trisha followed her mother into the den, admiring the juxtaposition of modern, white leather sofas bracketing the traditional rosewood table. A black vase at the center held several wicked-looking leather shadow puppets from Bali. The figures were believed to have great spiritual power. They were “brought to life” during special ceremonies performed by a puppet master. Supposedly, the puppets portrayed good and evil, but this collection steered heavily toward the dark side. But then Trisha figured that, if you already knew the future, you could probably sleep pretty well in a house full of demons.

Her mother walked past an altar cabinet holding an impressive stone Buddha. There was a small china plate piled with oranges as an offering. Incense burned alongside, giving off a hint of sandalwood. An enormous plasma screen dominated the wall on the opposite side of the room.

But along with the incense, Trisha smelled something else—something not so pleasant. She wrinkled her nose, following Má into the kitchen.

Really, it was freaky quiet. Trish lived in an apartment off campus, with four other girls. Someone was always up making noise at just about any hour of the day or night. For a minute she thought maybe Mimi wasn’t home, and she could skip the whole ordeal.

Only, that was another thing that didn’t make sense. They had an appointment, and Mimi was nothing if not professional. And the door swinging open like that—no way Mimi would have left her house unlocked if she was out.

Inside the kitchen, Trisha watched her mother open the door to the garage to show that—yes, indeed—Mimi’s white Beemer was still in residence. Again, Trisha smelled something strange mingled in with the sandalwood. It reminded her of Brillo pads. Or the heavy iron skillet they kept on the stove back at the apartment. She looked around to see if maybe Mimi had left something out, some meat that might have gone bad. But the kitchen looked pristine.

Her mother closed the door, for the first time appearing alarmed.

“Maybe we should wait outside?” Trish ventured, hoping that they could just forget the whole thing and leave.

No such luck. Her mother called out again for Mimi in Vietnamese. Trisha could tell her mom thought something was wrong. And maybe it was. She knew Mimi kept a fortune in jewels here at the house.

Leaving the kitchen, Trisha remembered another reason why the quiet house struck her as odd. Mimi had a bird. A small parrot called a conure. She kept it in her office. Every time Trisha had come to visit, that screeching bird had driven her half-crazy. It was like some sort of freakish guard bird, going off every time Mimi let anyone in the house.

From down the hall, Trisha heard her mother scream.

“Má!”

She raced toward her mother’s screams for help. She found her back in the den, standing in front of the altar cabinet, her mouth gaping as she faced the Buddha.

Trisha saw the bird immediately. Or what was left of it.

She hadn’t noticed it there before. It was a small bird. A sun conure, she remembered. The coloring blended in with the oranges, almost disappearing there on the plate with the offerings. The dead bird had been placed before Buddha, a sacrifice.

The head was missing.

Her mother covered her mouth with both hands as if to hold in her screams. Trisha backed out of the room, her eyes still on the Buddha and its strange offering. Her back hit the doorjamb. She let out a small mewling sound.

Má turned to look at her. The expression on her mother’s face, how she stood so still, reminded Trisha of a deer catching scent of something.

Má whispered Mimi’s name under her breath before calling it out louder and louder. She pushed Trisha aside and ran back into the hall.

They found Mimi on the floor of the room she used as an office. She wore one of her beautiful white St. John suits. Where her aunt had been stabbed, the blood blossomed like some crazy Rorschach test over the white knit.

Her eyes were empty, bloody sockets. And there was something stuffed in her mouth.

It was the bird’s head.

This time, Trisha screamed right along with her mother.

2

No one ever gets used to death.

It could stab you through the heart or spray your guts across the wall with a bullet. It could slam into you on the sidewalk and knock you right out of your shoes.

Quick. Clean.

Or it could be a dark business. Strange and wicked. Bent.

Detective Stephen “Seven” Bushard watched his partner walk around the victim’s body. The woman lay dead on a canvas of her own blood, her arms and legs posed as if captured midrun. The white suit seemed almost like an accent, as if maybe there’d been some attempt at a pattern. White carpet, red blood—white suit, red blood. A pebble dropped on a quiet pond.

Seven’s partner, Erika Cabral, knelt alongside the victim to examine her face.

“The parrot’s head in the mouth is a nice touch,” she said.

“Looks like Polly got more than just a cracker.”

Erika rolled her eyes at him, never big on his jokes. Seven’s partner was dressed in a simple corduroy jacket and jeans, her thick chestnut hair pulled back in a messy topknot. On anyone else, the outfit wouldn’t turn heads. But the fit of the jeans, the slight peek of cleavage…If she wasn’t such a ball buster, his Latina partner could lead half the force by the nose.

“You ask me,” she said, “someone didn’t like what the vic had to say.”

“Could be,” he admitted.

“Ever heard the expression, don’t kill the messenger?” Erika asked.

Tran was a well-known psychic, a woman paid to see the future.

The crime scene tech, Roland Le, had already taken video of the scene and had moved on to stills. He snapped photographs in a carefully choreographed dance they knew all too well. Seven had seen it a hundred times, death. But he’d never get used to this.

Whoever killed Mimi Tran was a grade-A whack job.

The victim had been sixty-one, information delivered by the officer who had first arrived on the scene and secured the premises. He’d interviewed the two women, relatives of Tran, who’d been unlucky enough to step into this nightmare. The medical examiner would set the time of death, but Seven could take a stab at it just by the smell in the room. Another blazing day in sunny California and the place reeked of death.

Mimi Tran liked the color white: white carpet, white leather couch, white lacquered Italian office furniture. The color choice made a stunning contrast to the blood.

He knelt down to examine the near-black splatters on the carpet. Teardrop shapes led toward the door, then, abruptly—almost as if she’d been spun like a top—the trail turned in on itself, bread crumbs leading back to where the victim had fallen. Mimi Tran looked to be about five feet nine inches tall, approximately 160 pounds, no easy pickings. And still, someone had tossed her around like a rag doll.

There’d been no signs of a forced entry. The vic had an elaborate security system that had been disarmed. Both facts indicated the victim knew her killer.

Seven stared at the blood on the walls and the white sofa. However it had gone down, Mimi Tran had put up a fight.

The body now lay on the floor, bloody sockets where her eyes should have been and a bird’s head shoved inside her mouth. The blood where she had been stabbed flowered across the white wool of her suit like some flashy pattern by those designers his sister-in-law loved so much. Chanel or Gucci. Tran still wore some impressive jewelry—diamond studs the size of fat peas, gold bangles shining from her wrists, a dragon pendant with fiery rubies for eyes—taking robbery off the list of motives.

On the wall, there appeared strange markings, like maybe someone had dipped a finger in Mimi Tran’s blood and started to paint some weird wallpaper design, then changed his mind. There were exactly fifteen marks, each no bigger than a man’s palm. To Seven, they looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Or maybe one of those cave paintings you see in museums. The tech on the scene had already tested the stuff and made a preliminary determination. It was blood.

“My best guess?” Roland said. “He used a feather from the bird. You know, like a paintbrush.”

Erika came to stand next to Seven. Still staring at the body, she asked, “You okay?”

She said it like it was nothing, just a little chitchat between friends. But he knew what she meant.

Of course she’d ask.

He shook it off. “Just tired of this shit.”

They didn’t often get cases like this. Gang shootings, traffic accidents, domestic disputes gone bad—the everyday stuff, sure. But this was different, like some sort of ritual killing.

“I want a couple of close-ups of the markings on the wall,” Seven told the tech.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Just the same, Roland knelt down to take the stills.

They’d dusted for fingerprints and interviewed the relatives. They’d confiscated Tran’s laptop and PDA. Every nook and cranny of the scene had been documented. Pretty soon, the coroner’s office would remove the body for autopsy.

And then they’d have to figure out what the hell it all meant.

Seven stepped closer to one of the bloody symbols painted on the wall. He frowned, staring at the marks, trying to make them out. Two horizontal lines curved around a small circle…an eye? Made sense, given the condition of the body. Taking out a pen and notepad from inside his jacket pocket, he made an attempt to copy the image.

He tried to figure out what it might mean. Someone was watching—all-knowing and all-seeing—lording his omnipotence over the now blinded victim?

“Roland? These make any sense to you?” Seven asked, pointing out the bloody images on the wall.

The tech shook his head. “It’s not Vietnamese, if that’s what you’re asking.” He looked over at the body. “Neither is that.”

But Seven might argue with him there. No one was immune to this kind of violence.

“The niece said she had an appointment to pick a lucky day for her wedding,” Seven said, moving on to the next symbol, a shaky copy of the first.

“Not my gig,” Roland said. “Fortune-tellers, that’s more old school. When Wendy and I got married, we went to the Buddhist temple to pick a date.”

“Old school or not,” Erika said, “business wasn’t hurting. Did you get a load of that Beemer in the garage?” She gave a wistful sigh. “A 735i. My dream car.”

“Never too late to marry for money,” Seven kidded.

“Yeah. Because I meet so many rich guys on the job.” Erika flashed her best smile, the kind that could sell toothpaste.

Erika was all of five feet, two inches tall, maybe 105 pounds soaking wet. But she carried herself with the confidence of a woman who wore a badge and could regularly put men in their place on the firing range. She had the classic good looks of many Hispanic women. Her clothes didn’t flaunt her curves, but you could see she was proud of her figure just the same.

She turned back to the victim’s desk and slid back the top page from the desk calendar using the eraser end of a pencil. “It’s like my mami always told me, Seven. A woman needs a man like a bull needs tits.”

“Right. And I’m sure she said it just like that, too.”

Seven had met Erika’s mother, an elegant woman born in Cuba who looked as if she might still wear a veil to church on Sundays. But he had to admit, Erika’s mom wasn’t exactly the poster child for happily-ever-after. Just last year, Milagro had moved on to husband number three.

Getting his attention, Erika motioned Seven over to the desk. Three wooden statues stood on the desk lined in a row like good soldiers. They were old, maybe even museum quality. They had monstrous heads, and their bodies appeared to be covered with hair, looking like some sort of incarnation of Bigfoot.

“What do you think these little guys are?” she asked. “Some kind of idols?”

“It’s definitely not your everyday table decoration.”

She glanced back at the body. “Could be a ritual killing.”

“That, or the killer was one sick fuck.”

That was the problem, of course. If they’d come in and found some poor vic with her throat cut and her diamonds gone, the job would get chalked up to a home invasion gone bad. Asian communities were ripe for the picking when it came to burglary. A deep-seated distrust of banks usually meant a lot of cash stuffed under the mattress.

But this was different. Already, a crowd had gathered outside, neighbors whispering about the bizarre circumstances surrounding Mimi Tran’s death. Nor would the colorful nature of the victim’s trade help to keep things low-key. Soon enough, reporters would be buzzing around the story like flies on shit.

And then the speculation would begin: was this a one-time deal or just the beginning?

There’d already been a leak. While the cop who’d arrived on the scene had done a decent enough job, one of the witnesses, the victim’s niece—a coed from Chapman University—had kept her trusty cell phone in hand. Her fiancé was just outside, champing at the bit to see her. Seven understood the beginnings of a small memorial had already been erected for Mimi Tran, complete with incense sticks, bowls of rice and fruit, and a framed photograph of the victim covered with flowers.

“Let’s go with the obvious first. Mimi Tran is a psychic,” Seven said, thinking out loud.

“The kind that likes St. John suits,” Erika said, naming the designer of her outfit. “And a few other things. Patek Phillipe watch, Daniel Yurman necklace, Shelly Segal shoes. Not cheap.”

He gave her a look. “Aren’t you the little fashionista.”

She shrugged, sending him a flirty glance as she batted her eyelashes. “I’m a girl, aren’t I?”

The family was Vietnamese, but swore that nothing at the crime scene had anything to do with custom or religion. No one had ever threatened Mimi Tran as far as they knew. She was well liked and respected in the community.

“Too bad we’re not just up the road,” he said to his half-Cuban partner.

“Santeria?” Erika asked, naming a religion comparable to Voodoo that flourished in Cuba. She again rolled her eyes at him. “Because I’m such an expert on the stuff?”

In Westminster, their turf included the largest population of Vietnamese living outside of the motherland, with a hodgepodge of Cambodian and Korean immigrants mixed in. But just up First Avenue would be Santa Ana, an area dominated by Hispanics. Seven could definitely see Santeria, or something like it, mixed up in this.

Still, whatever had happened in this room, he imagined no one was an expert.

Seven stepped around the blood splatters, coming closer to the body. He was careful not to disturb any evidence. She’d been stabbed in the back, chest and abdomen, a trinity of vital organs: heart, lungs and stomach.

Only, something about the blood didn’t strike him as right. He remembered when he’d first entered the room. Blood and the smell of it appeared to be everywhere. But now that he looked closer, there didn’t seem to be enough of the stuff. Almost as if someone had strategically spread out splotches of red to make it look like there was more.

These houses were built on slab, usually with a layer of linoleum under the carpet, which was Berber—not a lot of absorbency. Any liquid from the body would spread out through the fibers of the rug.

Mimi Tran was no small woman. If she’d bled out, here on the carpet…

He was thinking about the blood on the rug, examining the crime scene, putting the pieces together when suddenly, it all changed in his head. Just like that, he was staring at a different body, experiencing a different crime.

He closed his eyes against the memory, trying to block it out. Before he knew what he was doing, he backed away from the corpse, almost tripping.

Shit.

He forced his eyes open, telling himself to be here, in the present. He held perfectly still as the room came back into focus. He took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm down. All he needed was to screw up by trampling on evidence.

He took a few more steps away. Best to let the crime scene guys finish up. He told himself he was just giving Roland a little space, ignoring the fact that Erika had no such qualms.

He didn’t want to admit that it could be something else. That suddenly murder had become personal.

With her sixth sense, Erika was instantly there beside him.

“I’m fine,” he said, a bit more gruffly than he’d meant to. “Really,” he added, softening his tone.

She was just worried about him. But that was the problem. He didn’t want her concern, didn’t want anyone to connect the dots and figure out that a homicide detective didn’t have the stomach for the job anymore, couldn’t come in close and stare at those bloody holes where her eyes should have been, dissecting the situation like a professional.

So he kept to the markings on the wall, focusing there.

The killer had been in a hurry. Maybe even caught in the act by the relatives who found the body. At first, Seven had thought it was some sort of calligraphy, the kind you see on storefronts or painted on shop windows. But up close, it didn’t look so much like writing. Despite his question to the tech, he was pretty familiar with the different calligraphy in the area.

He put in a call to the security system guys. He had some passing knowledge about the system in the victim’s house, his brother having installed something similar. Ricky liked to brag about all the bells and whistles.

From what Seven could see, Tran’s system was heavy-duty, just like Ricky’s. Nothing you would expect in this neighborhood.

“It was disabled,” Erika said, coming up from behind. “Maybe by the perp.”

“Or the victim,” he said.

“Whoever did it,” she answered, “they knew the code.”

“Which probably means the victim let them inside. Someone she knew?”

“A client maybe?” Erika asked.

“A client? So whoever she’d let in would be here for a reading?” He looked at his partner. “Guess she didn’t see it coming?”

“Funny,” Erika said. “Really, Seven, you should take it on the road.”

Just then, his cell phone went off. It was a special ring, one he had set up just recently. He could feel his guts twist at the familiar tone, a neutral arpeggio.

Erika looked up. She recognized the ring and knew what it meant. “I can take care of things here,” she said.

He wanted to ignore the call. He didn’t want his life to interfere with his work. He wanted to escape, run away from his own drama and disappear into the facts of the Tran murder.

He didn’t want to see that other dead body in his head.

“Don’t be stupid,” Erika said, reading him. “Go.”

He fumbled with the cell phone, but didn’t take the call. Erika shook her head, walking away, making it clear she was washing her hands of him.

The ringing stopped. But he knew she would call again.

Turning for the door, homicide detective Seven Bushard went to deal with his own ghosts.

3

Seven sat in his car, staring at the LCD screen on his cell phone. Three missed calls, all from the same number.

Beth was nothing if not persistent.

He slid back against the headrest of the Jeep Cherokee, the unkind thought ringing with guilt. After eight months of this crap, he knew the drill: Beth couldn’t handle the giant slice of reality being shoved down her throat. Not alone.

And he was Ricky’s brother. Nick, his nephew, depended on him. Beth was family. End of story.

This time, when the phone rang, Seven picked up.

“I’m fifteen minutes away, Beth,” he said, starting the Jeep.

He drove past the crowd gathered around the Tran place and headed out of the housing track. Beth had recently been diagnosed with panic disorder. Seven shouldn’t have let it go to the forth call.

Only, he couldn’t help wondering if maybe Erika was right about his relationship with his sister-in-law.

If you just let Beth get through the damn panic attacks by herself—without stepping in and making it all better…

Erika thought Beth needed to learn to stand up for herself. What the hell had she called it? Some psychobabble about him being an enabler?

“It’s just guilt, Seven. Pure and simple,” he could almost hear Erika saying in his head.

Getting off the freeway ten minutes later, he was still wondering how much longer he could keep dropping the ball into Erika’s lap. The chief had told Seven to take more time. As long as you need… But Seven needed to get back to normal, and that meant work.

He was lucky to have Erika covering for him, that was for damn sure. There’d been a lot of carping about how fast she’d come up the ranks to detective. Some finger-pointing about the fact that she was a Hispanic woman, as if somehow she’d hit the job lottery being a double minority. But all that mattered to Seven was that she was a good cop—the best damn partner he was likely to have.

Unfortunately, he’d messed up there, too. After a night of tequila shooters, he’d gotten a little too familiar with that gorgeous body. It was a testament to their partnership that they’d made it through the morning—and months—after.

Going south on Bolsa Chica, he headed toward Huntington Harbor. His brother lived in a posh neighborhood where half the homes were on the water. He’d heard about this list on one of the news shows. Huntington Beach was number eight in the country when it came to homes selling over a million dollars.

Ricky had made a killing on the place, buying it when the market had taken a dip. A million-dollar teardown. Now the place was worth well over five million. Not that it mattered. Ricky had it all leveraged. Beth would probably lose everything.

Seven tried not to imagine her reaction when she discovered that the one thing she’d relied on from Ricky—money—was gone.

Well, they’d manage. Seven had some money put away. By summer, Beth and Nick could move into the rental property Seven had bought with his dad some years back. He did the mental math, moving the pieces of their lives around like chessmen. Imagine, the family fuck-up in charge, while Ricky, the “good son,” the plastic surgeon, did time. It was freaking biblical.

The whole thing sounded too damn much like a soap opera. Ricky having an affair with his male nurse at his plastic surgery practice. The affair going sour—Scott wanting Ricky to leave Beth.

Ricky offered money, undying love. It wasn’t enough. Scott wanted it all. The fights grew more abusive. Scott started making threats, tailing Beth. He knew where Nick went to school, that sort of thing.

It was made to look like a car accident. Only Ricky had done a pretty lousy job of covering his tracks. It was clear from the blood evidence that Scott had been dead before the crash. There had been a curious L-shaped blood spatter on the window. Apparently, Scott’s blood had splashed against it long before the car came to an abrupt stop. Momentum kept the blood slipping across the glass.

When faced with the evidence, Ricky confessed. He’d put a full two hours on tape with homicide in Laguna, where the “accident” took place, before asking for counsel.

Seven remembered it almost as if the whole thing happened yesterday. Erika had called bright and early.

Sit down, honey. This is going to be bad….

You knew it was something when tough-as-nails Erika tossed around words like honey.

The cherry on top? Laurin, Seven’s ex-wife, also got in touch…right after Ricky hit the six o’clock news. Here he was in the middle of hell, and his ex-wife calls to tell him, Jesus, Seven, I’m so sorry…. Is there anything I can do? And by the way, she’s expecting twins with her new husband. Twins, for God’s sake. Seven took the news like two shots straight to the head.

He was happy for Laurin, sure. But he couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for himself. Like he’d been left behind because Laurin, bless her heart, had moved on. She was leading this totally normal life with a real family…while he fought to keep the pieces of his from slipping through his fingers like sand.

Seven punched up the music, The Beatles belting out the end of “Hey Jude.” He reminded himself this wasn’t about him. It was about the people he loved. Nick and Beth.

When he turned up Ricky’s street, he saw Beth was waiting for him out on the driveway. She was wearing a baby-blue sweater set and ankle-length pants. She had on ballet slippers and her shoulder-length blond mane was held back by a black hair band. She hugged her arms across her chest as if trying to hold everything inside.

They’d made a pair, she and Ricky. Both blond and blue-eyed, they looked like god and goddess. If the brothers stood next to each other, no one could imagine they were related. Just under six feet, with brown hair and hazel eyes, Seven was everyman to his brother’s golden boy.

Out on the cul-de-sac, Nick played basketball. Looking just like his father, the kid put everything into his hook shot.

Seven slowed down, just watching what, for all intents and purposes, was the perfect picture of domestic bliss. Ricky had installed the hoop on the curb last year. Just eight months ago, Seven had been working up a sweat with his brother on the drive, giving as good as he got.

As soon as he pulled up and stepped out of the Jeep, Beth came up to him, throwing herself into his arms.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t call when you’re at work. But I just couldn’t deal anymore.”

He could smell the alcohol on her breath—not that he blamed her. Beth had been self-medicating with alcohol for a while now. Seven watched his nephew over her shoulder. Nick just kept bouncing the ball, pretending Seven wasn’t standing just a few feet away, trying to hold his mom together as she fell apart.

That’s how Nick was getting through the crisis. Pretending.

Abracadabra. Nothing’s wrong. I don’t feel a thing.

Seven felt a rare surge of anger. He wished Beth could be stronger for Nick’s sake. The kid was hurting, too.

But it didn’t help to start throwing around blame. That’s why he wanted to get back to work. Investigations like the Tran case took a dispassionate observer. He could crawl inside this cool place he’d carved out in his head, where nothing but the evidence mattered.

He wouldn’t have to think about Ricky and the shit he’d dumped on the family. Wouldn’t feel his guts getting ripped out every time he saw his ten-year-old nephew and thought about what the future held.

“I was making this pact with God,” Beth said, still clutching him. “If everything turned out okay, I promised I’d be stronger.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Seven said, putting his arm around her and steering her back toward the house. “You got some coffee?”

She nodded, wiping her tears. Inside, Ricky had one of those espresso bars. The man loved his coffee.

“Hey, Nick,” Seven called out to his nephew. “You okay?”

“I’m okay,” he answered, sending up a three-point attempt that went wide.

Seven followed Beth inside, knowing it was a lie. The fact was none of them were okay. On the television crime shows, it was all about the victim’s family—their loss, their quest for justice. But Seven, the homicide detective, had seen the other side, how one unforgivable act could affect a family.

His brother had killed a man. And it wasn’t just Ricky who was paying for it.

Erika stared at the woman’s mouth. Mimi Tran had thin lips and a bad overbite, as well as a penchant for dark lipstick. Erika would have suggested a lighter shade.

She walked slowly around the body, getting to that place in her head where all other considerations melted away and she focused right here, right now.

There were three basic methods of determining time of death. Rigor mortis usually set in three hours afterward, beginning in the facial muscles, then slowly spreading to the extremities. Approximately thirty-six hours later, the process reversed itself and the body became supple again. To Erika’s trained eye, Mimi Tran appeared stiff as a board.

As well as assessing rigor, the medical examiner would take a temperature reading. A number of factors, including Tran’s size and the hot room, would determine a possible time of death, but the process was far from exact.

Then there was lividity, during which red blood cells eventually leak into the body from the capillaries, making a permanent color change on the skin where the blood settles like sediment in a muddy pond. With her pen, Erika pulled back the collar of Tran’s St. John suit to expose the skin where one shoulder blade pressed against the carpet. The skin was a deep wine-red, showing the body hadn’t been moved since the heart stopped.

With her latex-gloved hand, Erika pulled out a magnifying glass from inside her jacket pocket. She knelt down. The bird’s head stuffed inside the victim’s mouth…it was elemental, almost primitive. Definitely something religious or sacred.

Erika was all too familiar with these sorts of rituals. She’d grown up in Santa Ana, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant married to an American of Mexican descent. Her mother was an educated woman, but still, Santeria had been part and parcel of her upbringing.

Even for a seasoned homicide detective, the sight of those bloody, empty eye sockets might prove too much. But Erika didn’t pull away from the grotesque image. That wasn’t her style. She fell into it, trying to see where it could lead her.

Like any good investigator, Erika had a healthy dose of intuition. With time, she’d come to realize hers was sharper than most. Seven called her ability “uncanny.” Her mother had a different name for it. El don de la doble vista. Only, Erika wasn’t buying that sixth sense crap. Her job required a sharp eye and tedious hours gathering evidence. That’s what got convictions in the courtroom. If good instincts and a little imagination helped, well, hell. Why not?

She cocked her head in thought. The victim was a psychic. A successful one, judging from the posh surroundings and the high-end jewelry.

So, this was about power. But what kind? Money? Prestige? Warring factions in the occult world here in Little Saigon?

Or was this about something more sinister? Had Mimi Tran been searching for a darker power?

Erika frowned. She had experience with the damage that sort of struggle could cause. The need for miracles. The lies behind the desire to control.

She turned her focus to the victim’s hands. Defensive marks. Mimi Tran had put up a fight. But the missing eyes…it seemed almost a cliché. The idea that, as a psychic, Mimi Tran had “the sight.”

“So what’s the connection to the bird’s head?” Erika asked herself.

Taking out a penlight, she pointed the beam into the victim’s mouth. With the magnifying glass in her other latex-gloved hand, she peered closer.

Something there? Inside the bird’s beak?

“Hey, Roland?” She motioned over the tech.

She had him take a couple of close-up shots. She pulled out an evidence bag and a pair of tweezers from her jacket pocket. With the penlight held between her teeth, she knelt carefully over the body.

She remembered a game she used to play with her brother as a kid. Operation. The goal was to use tweezers to remove tiny plastic game pieces from a body without touching the sides. Her brother and mother always messed up, but not Erika.

Slowly, she pried loose the object from inside the tiny bird’s beak. In the beam of the flashlight, the thing glowed a rich sapphire-blue.

It looked like a glass bead. Or maybe more like a crude gem?

“Holy shit,” the tech said, snapping more pictures. “What is that?”

Erika carefully placed the bead in the plastic evidence bag. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

She put away the penlight and held the plastic bag up to the ceiling light. Suddenly, the glass bead turned a bloodred color.

Erika glanced upward. The lights in this room were fluorescent…

Shielding the bead with her body, she again reached for the penlight. As soon as the incandescent light struck the bead, the color of the gem changed back to a dark blue.

And something else. Something inside the bead flashed white. The gem appeared to catch the light, like one of those star sapphires. Only, in this case, a single white stripe appeared, making the thing look like a cat’s eye.

“Weird,” the tech said, snapping a few more pictures for good measure.

Erika glanced back at the blinded body of Mimi Tran.

She told Roland, “Looks like it’s an eye for an eye.”

4

David Owen Gospel II felt the woman stir beside him on the bed. The fact that she was still asleep irritated him just a little bit. But he held back any reprimand. It was still early.

He reached and stroked the black sleek hair, admiring her lovely naked back. He considered himself a collector, and this woman was one of his finest pieces.

Her name was Velvet. He was certain that wasn’t her real name. Most likely, it was the translation of her Vietnamese name. In Vietnam, many first names had special meanings, like Kim for gold, or Tam for heart.

David thought the name suited her. Her skin, her dark, liquid eyes and waist-length hair, all of it felt rich and smooth.

He always gave her jewelry. He liked that best about Velvet. She was high-class, never grasping for his money. Jewelry seemed so much more civilized an exchange. And he knew she found him attractive; many women did, liking that air of power that could only come with age and experience. And David kept himself fit. Velvet had often complimented him about his gray eyes and silver hair. She didn’t have a problem with the age gap—almost forty years—between them.

As soon as she felt his touch, she turned and kissed him, gracing him with that lovely perfect smile as she caressed his face. But Velvet knew her business. Quickly, she slipped out from beneath the silk sheets. Donning a robe he’d bought her, an artistry of lace from a particularly fabulous lingerie shop in Paris, she hurried off to the kitchen.

Over a breakfast of jackfruit Danish and Vietnamese drip coffee, he read the paper. His beautiful Velvet sat across from him in the condo’s jasmine-scented courtyard, reading some tome on corporate taxes. Velvet was finishing her law degree at Whittier. He looked forward to hiring her on as in-house counsel for Gospel Enterprises, a privately owned development company that made more than the gross national product of most small countries.

It wouldn’t be easy to lure her in—she’d have many lucrative job offers. David anticipated that Sam Vi, Velvet’s thug of a cousin, would be his chief rival. David smiled against his coffee cup. He knew work at Gospel Enterprises would appeal to Velvet’s imagination. What could she really do for Sam other than keep his ass out of jail?

Of course, she’d have to get over the whole sleeping-with-the-boss issue. That’s one of the things he found tantalizing about Velvet. She had scruples.

Today, she would find a beautiful pair of ruby earrings waiting for her on the bedside table—he’d bought them just last week. They were antiques, presumably worn by Marie Antoinette herself, although he wasn’t naive enough to pay a premium for something so improbable. But Velvet would like the story.

He reached for the newspaper, thinking of what Velvet would look like wearing the earrings and nothing else. Suddenly, the image of her naked and reaching for him vanished.

David sat up, staring at the newspaper on the table. The smile faded from his face as he read the headline: Vietnamese Fortune-Teller Murdered in Ritual Killing.

There was a photograph of Mimi. A publicity shot by the looks of it, taken some years ago. He felt his body go numb.

“What’s the matter, David?”

Velvet didn’t have a hint of an accent. Though her parents had immigrated, she’d been born in Orange Country and was American through and through. She looked at him anxiously. Her eyes dropped to the newspaper.

“Oh, my God!” Her law book fell to the floor as she stood. “Oh, my God. I have to call Sam.”

David closed his eyes, hearing Velvet’s bare feet on the kitchen tile as she raced for the phone inside. His whole life wasn’t just crashing down around him, he told himself. It wasn’t.

He didn’t wait for Velvet to get off the phone. He wasn’t going to fight Sam for her attention, not now. Back in the bedroom, he dressed quickly. Within a few minutes, he was driving like a demon, weaving through traffic on the 55 Freeway to reach the empty carpool lane. He was alone in the vehicle, but didn’t worry about being pulled over in the black Aston Martin he drove at breakneck speed. David Gospel paid for posh dinners at fund-raisers for important candidates to local and state office. He didn’t pay for anything as mundane as a speeding ticket.

When he arrived home, he found his wife waiting in the front room. Meredith rose to her feet from the sofa, a mousy woman who looked as if she were trying to make herself disappear, she was so thin. On the glass coffee table, she had the morning paper opened to Mimi Tran’s photograph.

“It’s not what you think,” she said in that whisper of a voice.

Over the years, David had come to realize it was her voice he hated most—more than her Bible-thumping or her thinning brown hair, or even that stick figure she preserved like some prima ballerina. Her voice grated in its softness. It seemed to say, Don’t pay attention, I’m not here, I won’t disturb.

“David?”

He ignored her, instead heading for the stairs. The house had been designed around its fabulous view of the main channel and a sweeping staircase with its railing made entirely of Lalique crystal. But the beauty was lost to him now as he headed for his office, his wife at his heels.

“Listen to me, David. You’re wrong! You’ve been wrong all along! Please, David—”

He shut the office door in her face. His wife made some feeble attempt at a knock, but even in anger she couldn’t manage the strength for a decent pounding. Him, he would have used both hands. Knock the fucking door down!

There’d been a time when Meredith could give as good as she got. But that all changed after she found God. These days, his wife was nothing more than a dried-up Puritan of a woman. A fanatic.

He grabbed the remote control off his desk and gunned it at the mirrored wall across the office, punching in the code. Immediately, a section slid open, revealing a hidden room behind the glass.

Gospel Enterprises had many businesses under its corporate umbrella, including a security company specializing in safe rooms or “panic rooms,” a place sealed off from the rest of the house where clients could wait out a home invasion until the police or on-site security arrived on the scene to save the day.

David’s room had a very special purpose. The place was more like a giant walk-in vault. Inside, he could control temperature and humidity. Hell, he could house the fucking Mona Lisa here if he had to, probably under better conditions than the Louvre and its conga line of tourists.

Inside the vault room, he punched in yet another code, this time using a keypad on the wall just above the built-in wooden cabinetry, one of five such keypads in the room. A velvet-lined drawer slid open, the kind often used to house expensive jewelry. David’s held a much different collection.

He stared down at the clay tablet written in a script adapted from cuneiform, one of the oldest written representations. This particular tablet dated back to the seventh century B.C., but the story from ancient Sumeria was far older. The Epic of Gilgamesh was, in fact, the oldest written story on Earth.

There was a heated debate in archaeological and linguistic circles concerning whether the epic was composed of eleven or twelve clay tablets. Many translations didn’t include the twelfth tablet, considered by some to be an independent story, or perhaps more of a “sequel.” But David knew better. He was staring at a missing thirteenth tablet, one he had purchased for his collection through the efforts of people like the now very dead Mimi Tran.

A necklace lay to the right of the tablet. It was a beautiful piece, the unstrung beads placed in a half circle around a central crystal, jewelry purported to have belonged to the goddess Athena herself. In this light, the gems appeared a deep blue. But he knew how easily the crystals could change to a bloodred.

The central stone, the Eye, looked more like a milky, raw diamond the size of a peach pit. In the low light, it had a lovely blue sheen. Like flaws, bits of metal floated, trapped inside. Several strands of wire had been wrapped around the crystal, creating a pendant that could hang from a necklace. It stared up at him, clouded and unseeing.

He felt himself shaking. There was little in this world that David feared. Normally, it was matters beyond the physical realm that held his imagination. But his son—Owen’s capacity to completely fuck up—could grab David by the throat and bring him to his knees.

Leaving the drawer open, he stepped out of the vault. He dropped onto the leather couch of his office and stared at the mirrored opening, the remote still in his hand. Inside that vault waited some of the greatest treasures the world of the occult had to offer. Precious pieces he’d carefully brought together, willing to meet the price of the greediest tomb raider.

David was not a young man. It had taken forty-two of his sixty-plus years to gather his collection. The tablet, of course, was the centerpiece, a map that had led him to the Eye of Athena. In Mimi’s hands, he’d seen that dead crystal glimmer to life. And there were other treasures mentioned in the thirteenth tablet, gifts that, according to legend, had been given to Gilgamesh by the wild man Enkidu, magical objects Mimi Tran, with Sam Vi’s connections in the illegal trade of artifacts, had vowed to help David find.

But now Mimi was dead.

“Fucking Owen,” he said, cursing his son.

The problem, of course, was that this had all happened before. Another woman, a psychic, just like Mimi. Seven years ago, the police had come to David’s door with a search warrant. They’d turned the place upside down, looking for their evidence, finding nothing. David had made damn sure of it….

Owen had been eighteen years old—old enough, David had hoped, to cover his tracks. But no. He had found Owen sitting next to the spa in back of their Newport home, acting for all the world as if nothing was wrong.

Only, the kid had been licking blood off his fingers.

Instinctively, David knew the blood wasn’t Owen’s. Unfortunately, there’d been a hell of a lot of it. The asshole had tracked it through the house…his car had been filthy with it. The cleanup had been a bitch.

Luckily, David had discovered his idiot of a son before the cops could get their hands on him.

Seven years ago, David had thought he was in the clear, siccing his bulldog lawyers on the city, threatening to sue whoever had the balls to point the finger his way. Shit, he’d brought down more than one career in that battle.

And now the nightmare was starting all over again? No way. No fucking way.

There came another tap at the door, the sound so meek he would have missed it if the room hadn’t been perfectly quiet. With a sigh, he punched in the code to shut the mirrored door to the vault.

“Come the fuck in, Meredith.”

Like a good servant, she opened the door and let herself in, leading with her offering: a tray holding a martini glass and shaker. Jesus, the woman had timing.

She gave him a nervous smile. “I thought you might like a drink.”

“Really.” His wife didn’t drink, but she was good at peddling the stuff. Especially at times like this. She was the family’s anesthesiologist, dispensing her drugs to numb away the world.

She moved soundlessly to put the tray down on the glass coffee table before the leather sofa where he sat. She poured the martini from the shaker into the glass and sat down, leaving plenty of space between them.

“You’re wrong about Owen.” She smoothed the skirt of her dress over her knees and folded her manicured hands neatly on her lap. In another life, Meredith had sported designers like Prada. These days, her simple print dresses looked more like something she’d picked up at Wal-Mart.

“Owen has made mistakes,” she continued, “but we’re his parents, David. We need to forgive and forget. He’s different now, a changed man since his missionary work.”

She didn’t dare look at him as she spoke. Instead, she stared ahead, giving him a view of her profile. His wife had a perfect nose, courtesy of a plastic surgeon. Again, another life…the one they’d lived before Owen.

David knew all parents wanted to believe the best of their child. He himself had fallen into that trap. He’d given Owen every advantage, right? What more could he have done?

But then comes the day when a parent realizes the truth. Their world falls apart, and the truth hits them square between the eyes.

For David, a master collector, that day had come long ago. The day he’d finally realized that his son, his perfect and beautiful little boy, had started a collection of his own.

Owen had been ten years old. It still turned David’s stomach, a thought of those bloody bits and pieces he had found buried in the tin box out in the rose garden. When he’d confronted Owen, the kid had just stared up at him with those strange, unblinking eyes.

Even after that, David made excuses. He told himself it was just some silly mistake, those bloody pieces. He had tried to share a few stories, and the boy had become confused. David and Meredith discussed the situation with Owen’s psychiatrist, someone they could trust to keep a secret. The doctor had concurred. His son wasn’t dangerous. Just misguided.

Dr. Friedman explained that David’s temper didn’t help. But there David might disagree. Beating the crap out of Owen may not have helped his son’s condition, but is sure as hell made David feel better.

For a while, it seemed as if things were going to be okay. Until the day Owen turned eighteen and the cops showed up at their door asking about Michelle Larson.

“Where is he?” David asked now, not touching the drink.

Meredith kept staring straight ahead. “I don’t know.”

“Hiding. Like a coward.”

Her head snapped around. She gave him a venomous look. Only for Owen did she ever dare put up a fight. “Owen is working. You should know—he does work for you, doesn’t he?”

“I don’t keep track of every employee, Meredith.”

Of course he’d called the Newport Beach offices. It was the first thing he’d done on the drive home. According to his assistant, Owen was conveniently out. An art opening for some friend down in Laguna.

David remembered throwing the cell against the dashboard, losing it. He could still see that image of Mimi in his head, her photo in the paper bringing back thoughts of Michelle and her death.

When they’d first started taking Owen to Dr. Friedman, he’d explained how Owen had somehow gotten it all mixed up in his head, the collection thing. Because of the stories David had shared with his son. Apparently, the world of the occult did not make for good bedtime conversation.

Owen had been too young to understand where his dad was coming from. In his sessions, he kept talking about the Moon Fairy. When Dr. Friedman asked David what that meant, he’d feigned ignorance. But he knew.

The Moon Fairy was one of several bedtime stories that David had shared with his son. Like Gilgamesh, the Moon Fairy was about a man’s quest for immortality. In the tale, a magician offers to make an elixir for the king that will make him immortal. For his potion to work, the magician would need 999 of the youngest and most beautiful children of the kingdom. The magician assures the king of the elixir’s success if the king also includes his own daughter. But the girl’s mother, the Moon Fairy, saves her by turning the girl into a rabbit and taking her to the moon.

David didn’t have a clue what the big deal was, but he’d kept quiet, knowing that Dr. Friedman would probably start blaming him again for all the kid’s problems. Like it was some kind of child abuse to tell Owen a story?

David knew he’d made mistakes, sure. Losing his temper and punishing Owen. And maybe he had kept the kid a little on edge with his tales about the occult, sometimes using his knowledge as leverage to put Owen in his place. How was that any different than the stories parents told about the Bogeyman? But Dr. Friedman explained how that, too, had messed with Owen’s psyche. Funny thing, how it was always the parents’ fault.

That’s when David realized Dr. Friedman was just like everyone else, completely full of shit. Back then, they hadn’t made the connection between Owen’s eyes and any psychological condition. Still, David had his own theories about his son’s twisted behavior and how to handle it.

Up until this morning, he’d thought he’d done just that. Neutralized the threat. David clenched his jaw. How could Rocket have let him down?

“Don’t you want the drink?” Meredith asked.

For a moment, he’d actually forgotten she was there. He took a long, hard look at her, the mother of his child.

He tried to remember who she’d been all those years ago. A feisty and elegant woman educated at Smith College back East, she was the consummate diva, the only child of Judge Martin Wescott, a man who held more than a little influence in this town.

David had never loved Meredith, true, but he’d respected her. Back then, he’d believed she was a great choice as a life partner, someone who could reign supreme among the pseudo society of Orange County, the famed OC.

Well, he couldn’t have been more wrong. And God, did he hate her for it.

He picked up the martini and ceremoniously placed it in front of his teetotaler wife. “You drink it,” he said, leaning forward menacingly. “You’re going to need it, darling.”

It was all he had to say. Almost a silent boo! Meredith jumped to her sensible Cole Haan loafers and slid the martini glass back onto the tray. She sloshed vodka over the sides of the glass the whole way to the door.

“My wife,” he said, almost laughing out loud. How many other things had she fucked up in his life?

He closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted to the core. He needed to regroup, call Rocket, his right-hand man, and get him back on the job with Owen. David didn’t have the luxury to sit here and feel sorry for himself.

He stood and punched the code into the remote once again. He walked back inside the vault as the door whooshed open. Maybe he’d always known Owen wasn’t cured. That it was all an act, Owen showing up from his travels abroad all repentant and asking for another chance.

With a sigh, David braced himself over the opened drawer, staring at the tablet and necklace housed there with such loving care, realizing that he’d need to start over now that Mimi was dead. Which meant calling Sam.

“Shit.”

He was about to close the drawer, lock up tight and take Meredith up on that martini, when something caught his eye. The pattern of the beads circling the Eye, the central crystal…he hadn’t realized it before.

He looked closer now, his heart stopping, just stopping.

There, at the back of the necklace. Was a bead missing?

He looked closer, counting quickly. He knew exactly how many beads should be circling the Eye: twelve. Only, no matter how many times he counted, he came up one short.

Shit. Shit!

He couldn’t catch his breath. He thought of Mimi Tran’s last prediction. All that crap about the danger of invisible things or something like that. He hadn’t paid the least attention, focused only on that slight glimmer of life she could bring to the Eye when she held it.

Like a blind man, he patted the black velvet liner, as if indeed the missing bead had somehow become invisible. It had to still be there, safe and waiting.

The floor seemed to drop out from under him. His knees hit the carpet as he grabbed for the open drawer to stop himself from careening face-first to the ground. His chest felt tight and hard and heavy, like cement. He thought he might be having a heart attack.

That which is invisible is always the most dangerous.

Those had been Mimi’s last words to him, he was almost certain of it. Like all of her prophecies, it was cryptic, something that would require careful interpretation.

That’s what he’d paid Mimi to do. See the future. Help him in his quest to find that precious path to immortality.

Only, Mimi was dead now and a precious piece of the Eye was missing. Soon enough, the police would come a-knocking, a deadly distraction when he needed all his concentration.

The fact was, David Gospel didn’t fear anything as mundane as the police arriving with a search warrant.

If only….

5

The precinct in Westminster wasn’t much. After the clock tower and its Tudor splendor—a tribute to the city’s English namesake—the landscape degraded into utilitarian government offices. Seven and Erika worked for the Crimes Against Persons unit.

With a population just under ninety thousand—nearly forty percent Asian—the city averaged two murders a year. Seven and Erika were the only homicide-robbery detectives. Given the city’s budget, they didn’t have the luxury of limiting their caseload to murders like Mimi Tran’s. Homicide-robbery shared space with family protection and the gang enforcement unit, the idea being that, during major investigations, everyone came together to work as a team.

Which didn’t usually include the mayor. Unless, of course, the case landed on the front page, with the potential of being there for a nice, long stay.

Currently, the post of mayor was held by a woman with the unfortunate name of Ruth Condum-Cox—Dr. Ruth (with a nice long roll of the R, just like the sex therapist and talk-show personality), but only when she wasn’t around to hear that quaint little sobriquet.

Seven had often thought that if your name was Condum, you should probably have the presence of mind to steer clear of a man named Cox. But not Dr. Ruth. She’d taken it to the next level and hyphenated.

But then what did he know? Memorable name like that? It might just work on a campaign poster.

Ruth Condum-Cox had a face that said she should lay off the plastic surgery. Hard to tell her real age, but she was simulating her late fifties pretty well. She’d made her money in real estate and favored power suits. She’d run on a tough-on-crime platform, giving her more than a few friends on the force, including the chief of police. Chief Flagler now hovered over Seven, acting like the Tran case was one hot potato he wanted served on someone else’s plate.

“The last thing we need is to let a case like this put Westminster on the map,” Condum-Cox said, jabbing her finger at the newspaper. “Look what Scott Petersen did to Modesto, for Christ’s sake. Not to mention Michael Jackson and that fiasco. Jesus, the overtime alone will kill us.”

Seven looked over at Erika. Day two into the Tran investigation and they were already getting heat from the brass to wrap things up?

“Mimi Tran had no gang affiliations that we know of.”

This scintillating piece of good cheer was provided by Detective Harold Pham, a new face to the family protection unit. Pham was half American, half Vietnamese, and liked playing Johnny on the spot. Given the audience, he wasn’t likely to miss his shot.

Condum-Cox jumped on it. “We need to follow up on just that sort of thing. What else do we have?”

Seven looked at the chief, wondering how long he was going to let the game of Let’s Play Detective roll along. Since when did the mayor’s office lead an investigation?

“No weapon, no motive…nada,” Erika said, flipping through the file. “The autopsy is scheduled for later today.”

Condum-Cox frowned—or at least she made an attempt. Not much got past the Botox. “Autopsy? But I thought the cause of death was obvious. She was stabbed, right?”

“Multiple times. But we still need the medical examiner to confirm she bled out,” the chief said.

Condum-Cox nodded. Suddenly, she stiffened. She turned a wide-eyed stare on Seven, as if just realizing something.

“Detective Bushard, your brother was recently convicted of murder.”

It wasn’t a question.

Seven felt himself flush. “He pled guilty to second degree, yes, your honor.”

Seven could see the gears turning in the mayor’s head. A lead detective with a colorful background like Seven’s wouldn’t help her cause, not if she wanted to keep the networks off their backs.

The look she gave the chief was priceless.

“Detective Bushard and Detective Cabral are our most seasoned investigators. They have a top-notch record,” the chief said, coming late to Seven’s defense.

Not to mention they were the only two detectives in homicide for the city of Westminster—with a caseload that made Seven more than once wish he could clone himself.

Of course, none of that mattered at the moment. The long hours he’d put in; the tremendous responsibility he’d shackled on like a ball and chain, costing him his marriage. Hell, what was personal happiness compared to bad publicity for the city? He could almost hear fifteen years on the force being flushed down the crapper.

“Chief, I hate to interrupt, but—” Erika tapped her watch “—Detective Bushard and I have an interview with a vital witness for the Tran murder.” She glanced anxiously at Seven. “No promises, but this could be the break we need.”

Suddenly, all worries of a 60 Minutes segment vanished from the mayor’s porcelain face. “Well, goodness gracious.” Condum-Cox attempted a smile. “Proceed, of course.”

Seven grabbed his jacket, following Erika’s lead. “This might take a while.”

“Not a problem,” the mayor said. She waved them off, turning to the chief and the crestfallen Pham, who would be staying behind.

Outside, the sun felt warm on Seven’s face. “So,” he asked Erika, knowing full well she’d just bailed his ass. “What’s our hot date?”

She pulled on her Christian Dior sunglasses. They weren’t even fakes. She said spending money on shit like that made her feel rich.

“Starbucks.” Looking more like a starlet than a homicide detective, she headed for the car, a tan Crown Victoria. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a latte.”

Erika ordered a vanilla latte—nonfat, decaf, sugar-free.

“What’s the point?” Seven asked, grabbing his double espresso from the barista.

“A girl’s gotta watch her figure.”

“Right,” he said, holding the door open so that they could sit outside. “What are you, a size two?”

“Puhleeze!” She sat down at one of the cement benches. “Size four. That size two shit is for anorexic models with boob jobs.” She leaned forward, showing a hint of cleavage exposed by her button-down shirt beneath her jacket.

She cocked a single brow and lowered her voice to theatrical huskiness. “These babies are real.”

“No kidding?” He held back a smile, trying not to give her the satisfaction of cracking up.

She winked. “I figured you’d know the difference, cowboy.”

This time he did laugh. Ricky had been a plastic surgeon in Newport Beach before the AMA suspended his license. He’d had stories. The fact was, a boob job here was about as ubiquitous as a Lexus or a Mercedes on the 405 Freeway.

Seven took a sip of his espresso. “What’s going to happen when there’s no secret-weapon witness that we conveniently had to interview? Urgently? The chief is going to chew your ass.”

She rolled her eyes. “Give the man some credit. The chief knows what’s up. Dr. Rrrruth—” she rolled the German R “—may pull the strings, but that doesn’t mean the chief has to like it.”

Seven shook a finger at her. “You know, for someone who rocketed up the ranks by strategic ass-kissing, you sure don’t know what’s good for your career.”

“The key is strategic. I’m no Pham.” She wrapped her hands around the latte. “The sad fact is, he’d actually be a good cop if he wasn’t so busy climbing over bodies to score points.”

Seven took a minute, focused on the espresso, waiting for the levity to dissipate. Eventually, he told her, “I wish you hadn’t put it on the line like that with the mayor.”

Again, she gave a roll of her eyes. Erika had an arsenal of facial expressions, like a sexy raised brow or a killer smile. “But I did, so let’s forget it, okay? Now, help me come up with something the chief will like.”

He’d been thinking about the case all night, unable to get that image of Mimi Tran out of his head. He and Erika had been going over their notes from the witness interviews, the mother and daughter who had found the body, as well as neighbors. That’s when, like some celebrity evading her paparazzi, the mayor had made her entrance, the chief in tow.

“It’s a blank slate right now,” Seven said.

“Yeah?”

Erika grabbed a notebook from her purse, one of those mailbag types that could carry the kitchen sink if she needed. He’d seen smaller suitcases.

“Blank slate,” she said, slapping down a pen on the notebook for good measure. “At your service.”

He shook his head and picked up the pen. That was the problem with him and Erika: their curious meeting of the minds. They were a good fit.

He gave her a hard stare. “I wasn’t kidding. I don’t want you going down with the ship, okay?”

Which was exactly what would happen. He wasn’t fooling anyone. Since Ricky hit the six o’clock news, Seven’s own life had gone upside down. And he wasn’t near getting his act together. Now, murder and the mayor had landed on his doorstep for good measure.

“I said forget it. Now here—” she placed a dot at the center of the page and wrote “Tran” over it like a label “—is our murder victim.”

She drew several lines radiating outward and labeled the first one “occupation—psychic.”

“We start with Mimi Tran’s client list.” She drew several more lines radiating from there, each presumably representing possible clients and suspects. “We have her laptop and her PDA.”

“There was also a desk calendar back at the crime scene.”

“Exactomundo.” Erika tapped the page. “So we find out who saw her last and why.”

Going back to the center, she drew another line. In capital letters, she wrote “BLACK ARTS.”

“The bird?” he asked.

“It wasn’t exactly a scene from a Disney movie, now was it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You ever see Snow White?” He gave an exaggerated shiver. “That queen.”

He drew his own line and wrote “Fucking Bizarre.”

She smiled. “That, too.”

“Maybe we look for someone who thinks Mimi Tran shouldn’t be dispensing doom and gloom.”

“She gives some really bad mojo to a client. They begin to think they can erase the prophecy by getting rid of Tran.”

“As good a motive as any,” he said.

Erika drew another line and put a big question mark at the end. “The bead inside the bird’s beak. It was weird. When I held it up to different light sources, incandescent or fluorescent, it changed color. Like somebody turned on a switch, blue to red. No blurry transition, like those mood rings in the seventies. And then there was this sharp white line down the center, making it look like a cat’s eye.”

“Remember the symbols on the wall?” Over her question mark he wrote “All-seeing Eye.”

Erika cocked her head. “Could be.”

Hurriedly, he drew another line radiating out from the question mark, now in the mode. “And those wooden idols on the desk, they looked old. Museum quality. Maybe the bead is some sort of artifact?” He wrote the word as he said it, in capital letters.

“Something looted from an archeological site? Maybe sold by dealers on the black market?”

“Like the Getty.”

Just recently, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles had hit the headlines. And not in a good way. There’d been quite a brouhaha concerning the Italian government’s claim that the Getty’s newest collection of masterpieces had been looted from ancient ruins and laundered—just like drug money. Most controversial were pieces like the Morgantina Apollo. The black market made it almost impossible to ascertain the history of these important pieces because, by necessity, the laundering process destroyed evidence about the origins of the artifact.

Museums like the Getty were credited with stimulating the illegal trade in antiquities. In an unprecedented move, the Italian government had filed criminal charges against one of the curators, claiming collusion with the dealers who’d sold the museum the collection.

Seven reached for his notebook and flipped to the hand-drawn symbols he’d copied from the crime-scene walls. He turned the notebook for Erika to look at.

“So there’s eyes painted on the wall, and the bead has a cat’s eye thing going.”

“And the victim is missing her eyes. Maybe it’s not so complicated,” he said. “Putting it in her mouth like that. Drawing the image with blood on the wall. Could be a warning of some kind. She was in on this looting deal and double-crossed someone?”

“Maybe.” Erika took a sip of her latte, looking out toward the street. “Ever heard of the evil eye?”

He finished his coffee and tossed the cup into a nearby trash can, making the rim shot. “The evil eye? Come on. I thought you said you didn’t believe in that stuff?”

She shrugged. “But I grew up with that stuff. From the day I was born, I didn’t go out in public without my azabache,” she said, holding up her wrist. She wore a gold bracelet from which hung a piece of jet.

Seven knew she wore the bracelet out of nostalgia. It had been a gift from her mother. Erika explained about how el mal de ojo, or the evil eye, was usually transmitted inadvertently by someone who was envious or jealous. The story would go that a mother would take her new baby into town and a childless woman would say something like, “Oh, what a pretty baby.” Next thing you know, the kid has a fever or is vomiting. An azabache, or piece of jet, protected its wearer from the evil eye.

“Look,” Erika said, dead serious, “lots of cultures believe in this stuff. But the fact is, in this case the only person who needs to believe is the perp.”

He shook his head. “I think I’ll go with what’s behind door number two.” Seven drew another line on the paper radiating out from the central dot.

He wrote Greed and underlined the word twice.

“So it’s just some sort of camouflage, the bird and the bead?” She looked at the diagram, the lines radiating out from the center, letting it sink in.

She smiled and tapped the word. “Greed. I like it.”

He glanced at his watch. “You think it’s safe to go back to the station? Take a look at what’s on the victim’s PDA?”

She stood, grabbing the notebook and her purse. “Are you kidding? Dr. Ruth is long gone. It’s lunchtime. Prime fund-raising hours. By the way, how did it go yesterday with Beth and Nick?”

He shrugged, knowing she would eventually get to that. “How does it always go? She took a Xanax and I took Nick to Taco Bell. I stayed a couple of hours, put them both to bed.”

Out in the parking lot, he opened the door to the Crown Vic and got in. He kept waiting for the lecture, knowing it was there on the tip of her tongue. But Erika just started the car.

He looked over at her profile. He could see she was trying hard not to say anything. She made no move to back out of the parking space, just let the engine run.

“I can feel the disapproval beaming back at me from across the car, Obi-Wan,” he said.

She pressed her lips together, as if maybe she’d hold back. But then she let out this sigh and turned to him. “I’m sorry, but it’s been over eight months. How long are you going to sacrifice yourself on the altar of Ricky’s sins?”

“God, you Catholics. The drama.” He stared out the window, having nothing new to add to the debate.

But Erika was a bulldog. “First, your French-Canadian self is just as Catholic as me—practicing or not—so don’t be throwing my religion in my face. Look, I know you have Nick to think about. But here’s the thing. So does Beth. That boy should be her primary concern.”

Her tone said it all. As long as he was holding Beth’s hand through the crisis, she wouldn’t step up.

Erika gripped the steering wheel, her jaw set. She looked to be bracing herself.

“Okay,” she said, plunging in. “I’m going to say it. It’s a mistake but here goes. Beth wants in your pants and she’s not stopping until she has you, ring on the finger and all.” His partner turned to look at him. “Face it, Seven. She wants to replace one brother with the other.”

“Give me a break,” he said, completely disgusted by the idea. “Her life is falling apart. Hooking up with me is about the last thing she needs right now.”

Erika shook her head. “You don’t know women, Seven.”

“Oh, so because my marriage goes south—a marriage that I was way, way too young to take on—I’m a total loser when it comes to women?”

“And don’t we sound a tad defensive? What’s the matter, partner?” she asked. “Are you worried that because you fucked up once you don’t deserve to be happy? Is that what your life is about for the next twenty years, while Ricky does time? Stick around and fix your brother’s mess?”

Before he could respond—and dammit, he wanted to—Erika’s cell interrupted. She picked up with a frown.

After a minute, she glanced over to Seven with a look of surprise. He braced himself. It took a lot to surprise Erika.

“You are not going to believe this.” She slapped the phone shut and put the car into Reverse. She pulled out of the parking space. “That was Pham. We’ve got a live one.”

Again, that radar between partners. “A witness?”

Erika peeled out. “In the flesh.”

6

Most days, Paul Rocket had a kick-ass job. He’d wake up to Pink Floyd’s The Wall pulsing on the Bose sound system and do a set of push-ups right there on the cabin floor. Afterward, he’d head into the galley and blend up a protein drink. He liked Ultra Megaman. That shit put on muscle like nobody’s business.

Rocket wasn’t into steroids. He’d seen too many guys go nuts on the stuff. Why the hell take the risk when he could get the same results with diet and exercise? Hell, he’d read just about every book printed on nutrition. Not to mention the stuff on the Internet.

Oh, yeah, Rocket was living the life. He’d watch the sunrise on the deck of his fifty-five-foot schooner, dialed in to CNN on his laptop while powering down his drink. The sun sparkling on the water in Newport Harbor—now that was something. Imagine, Paul Rocket—ex-Special Forces, ex-mercenary—enjoying this slice of paradise. Afterward, he’d hit the gym. He had a membership at Gold’s. All courtesy of Mr. David.

Mr. David was a great man. Travel, money…hell, anything Rocket ever wanted, he just had to ask.

Like he said, most days, Paul Rocket had a kick-ass job.

Today wasn’t one of those days.

He stepped into the art gallery and looked around at the bizarre shit hanging on the walls. The black-and-white photographs showed a bunch of naked bodies twined together so that you couldn’t tell where one started and the other ended. Looked like a bunch of dudes, too. People actually paid money for this crap?

As he crossed the open room, men and women scurried out of his way like so many rats. At six foot four and 265 pounds, Rocket was used to that. His father had been a huge Samoan asshole who’d left his mom when Rocket was only five and his younger brother still in diapers. But at least he’d passed on his gene pool. Rocket had a tattoo of a cobra on the back of his shaved head but he preferred Armani suits and Bruno Magli shoes. People didn’t expect that, a man like Rocket dressing with class.

He looked around at all the rich boys and girls. This was the OC. To these folks, Rocket was an alien life form.

The thing was, today Rocket wasn’t the muscle. He was the babysitter.

He saw Owen leaning over some babe in the corner of the room. This one was skinny and blond and could barely stand despite the noon hour. Shit, was that dress made of red rubber? And there was Owen, getting an eyeful.

Rocket couldn’t figure the kid out. He looked so normal, charming even. But Rocket knew better.

He could tell the exact moment Owen knew he was coming up behind him. The kid had radar for that sort of thing. Rocket wondered sometimes if he had superhearing or something because of his eyes. Sometimes nature did things like that—took a little in one area and made up for it in another.

Rocket had been in Special Forces before he’d fucked up in Nicaragua and gotten his ass kicked out of the military. He’d been working for Mr. David ever since. Important people like Mr. David needed security, and Rocket was the best. Only—despite all his training—the kid had gotten the jump on him a time or two.

He’d mentioned it to Mr. David once. How quietly the kid could move. Mr. David had only laughed, saying that Owen was just like his creepy mother.

Mr. David didn’t care much for his wife. It was the only thing Rocket couldn’t respect about the man.

For Rocket, family was key. His mom lived with his baby brother, Anthony. Anthony was a cop and had a great wife and two daughters. Mom loved looking after those girls. They lived in Cincinnati, and Rocket always made a point to fly out and visit whenever he could.

He sent money, too, Mr. David making it possible for him to help out. Those girls, they were going to college. Rita, the oldest, she could probably go to Stanford or some shit like that. The kid had brains.

That’s why Rocket could understand what Mr. David was doing, protecting his son. A man had to take care of his own, right?

When Owen had first started acting weird, Mr. David pulled Rocket off security and asked him to start watching the kid full-time. Rocket was a little ashamed that he hadn’t always gotten the job done the way Mr. David meant. Sometimes the best Rocket could do was make sure the kid didn’t get his ass thrown into one of those foreign jails.

But those seven years roaming the globe…Mr. David had been happy with the kid’s progress. And Owen did seem different since they returned from his “missionary work” abroad, especially around Mr. David. But that only made Rocket suspicious. He wondered if it was all an act.

If maybe he should warn Mr. David.

But then things had quieted down. Mr. David had Owen working in the family real estate offices—if you called what the kid did work. And Rocket had his schooner docked in Newport Harbor.

He just hoped this didn’t turn out like that time in Nicaragua.

Owen smiled now, his eyes zeroing in on Rocket through the yellow lenses of his sunglasses.

Owen was tall, with blue eyes. Handsome, even. And he dressed like a million bucks. Every once in a while, he even gave Rocket a little fashion advice.

But there was something in that face. It had to do with his eyes. The boy didn’t blink. Some weakness in some muscle…he wore sunglasses all the time because his eyes could get damaged from outside dust and debris. He had to constantly put in drops to keep his eyes lubricated.

But it always struck Rocket as a little creepy how he could just stare and stare at you. Like now.

Sometimes, he’d get this expression on his face. Rocket had seen that look before. In Nicaragua, he’d worked with mercenaries, soldiers willing to work for just about anybody if the money was good. There’d been this one guy, the kind that liked the blood and gore a little too much.

Rocket knew some of the things the kid had done. Mr. David had filled him in when he’d first asked him to look after Owen, not wanting Rocket to go into this thing blind. They’d had the kid seeing a psychiatrist and taking pills. But Mr. David told Rocket he was the extra peace of mind. So Rocket stayed at the kid’s side while they’d toured around the world, working for different religious organizations.

His opinion? You could stuff that kid in a fucking monastery for the next ten years and Owen would still come out all wrong.

But then, maybe Mr. David knew what he was doing. The boss was smart. Hadn’t he graduated from some big-name school? Mr. David had made Gospel Enterprises what it was today, taking the family company to the next level. He knew what he was up against with Owen. And people could change, right?

“Rocket, my man,” Owen said. “I didn’t think art was your thing.”

“Mr. David needs you back home.”

Whenever he talked to Owen, he never called Mr. David “your father” or “your dad.” It was always “Mr. David.” Rocket made a point of it.

“Really? How incredibly boring.” He turned back to the blonde in the wild dress. Really, the only thing holding that girl up was tight rubber and the wall. “Sorry, darling. Looks like I have business to tend to.”

“Come on, Owen.” She played with his tie, using it like a leash to pull him closer. “I thought we could have some fun together.”

Rocket had an idea of what Owen thought was fun. He didn’t know what kind of shit the girl was into, but she should be happy if Owen gave it a pass.

“Next time, sweets,” he said, giving her a light peck on the lips.

Owen sauntered ahead, leaving Rocket to follow. Rocket didn’t mind. Actually, he preferred never turning his back on him.

Owen stopped in front of one of the photographs near the gallery entrance. It took Rocket a minute before he realized the woman in the photo was the girl still holding up the wall, the one in the rubber dress.

Only, in the photo, she wasn’t wearing clothes. She was wrapped in cellophane.

In the photograph, she held one end under her foot as the plastic twined around one of her thighs and up her torso, just like a snake on a branch. She was holding the other end over her face, with her tongue pressed against the cellophane as if she were licking it.

Rocket turned away. He’d seen a man killed in just such a way, suffocated with a plastic bag over his head.

“What do you think?” Owen asked, staring up at the photograph. When Rocket didn’t respond, he laughed. “Not to your liking?”

Owen reached out and traced a finger over the girl’s mouth, where her lips pressed against the plastic wrap. “I bought it for my office. Spent a bloody fortune on it.”

Standing behind Owen, Rocket looked at the photograph again and shook his head.

What a piece of shit.

It’s just like he’d thought this morning when Mr. David called: this was going to be one hell of a day.

7

Pham had the witness set up in the interview room. He was practically falling over himself in his rush to hand her on to Seven and Erika. Not a good sign.

It didn’t take long to figure out why.

Gia Moon was movie-star beautiful. Seven had always had this thing for Jennifer Connelly, and it was almost as if the actress had walked into the precinct to pay a visit—swear to God, the woman could be her twin. Long swan neck, black shiny hair, skin to die for, as Erika would say. And those blue, blue eyes. Definitely Oscar-worthy.

Yup, Gia Moon was something. She was also a couple of fries short of a Happy Meal. At least that was Seven’s take on things after listening to her story.

They hadn’t bothered videotaping the session once Pham filled them in on the witness’s special talent, just Erika taking her statement.

“So let me get this straight,” Erika continued. “You didn’t know Mimi Tran?”

“That is correct.”

She spoke using this precise diction. He could see she was irritated, as if she’d already gotten wind that they weren’t buying what she was selling. Still, he couldn’t help staring. There was something mesmerizing about her face and its near-perfect symmetry.

She was dressed simply in jeans and a T-shirt. No makeup—didn’t need it, in his opinion. But there was paint on her hands, like maybe she’d been fixing up the den and dropped the paintbrush in her hurry to run on over to the precinct and tell her story.

“When I read the article in the paper,” she said, “I realized I had to contact the police.”

Erika took a moment. Seven recognized that carefully controlled expression on his partner’s face. Erika didn’t like people wasting her time.

“Because you had a dream?” she prompted.

“I thought it was a dream, Detective. But after I read the article in the paper, I knew it was more than that.”

“You’re talking about a premonition?”

“Yes.”

“But you called it—” Erika pretended to check her notes “—a vision?”

Gia Moon didn’t answer right away, but he could see the tension in her shoulders. She wasn’t enjoying the attention. In fact, she looked ready to bolt…which was unexpected. Usually the crazies who showed up with important “evidence” after a story like Tran’s hit the paper couldn’t wait to have their say.

“You can call it whatever you wish, Detective,” she said.

Erika didn’t even glance up from her notes. “Actually, I’m using your words, Ms. Moon. In your vision, you saw Mimi Tran being murdered in her home?”

“No. It wasn’t clear like that. It never is. It’s like a dream, subject to interpretation. I saw a woman in danger. I saw blood—or at least the color red.”

She seemed to be making an effort to remember—or perhaps edit her words now that she knew she would be held accountable. She glanced down at her fingers.

There, under her nails, the color of the paint. Red.

“When I read the story in the paper,” Gia Moon continued, “certain things from my dream suddenly fell into place, making me think it was Mimi Tran’s murder I saw.”

“You have these often?” Erika asked. “These…visions?”

Moon frowned. “I don’t see why that would matter, but yes. I often have visions of this sort.”

He liked that schoolteacher tone. Not many people took on Erika. Seven had to admit it was a bit of a turn-on. Really, it was a shame about the batty part.

“But this is the first time you’ve contacted the police?” Erika pressed.

Seven caught a slight hesitation before Gia answered, “Correct.”

“Why is that, Ms. Moon?” he asked, seeing an opening.

She turned to look at him. Her smile—shit, he felt it right down to his toes. But he kept his eyes steady, knowing that was one of his talents. Intense interest…the kind that got people to open up.

“I think that would be obvious, Detective,” she said, still with that devastating smile. Like it was a joke between them. “The police don’t exactly invite my kind of input.”

“In your dream, Ms. Tran was killed by a demon?” Erika’s tone said it all. And why would we?

“As I explained, that doesn’t mean she was literally killed by a demon. It could be a representation, a symbol for the killer. He could have a tattoo or it could be a piece of jewelry he wore.”

“Really?” Erika said. “How very mysterious…and vague.”

Seven almost cringed before he pulled up a chair and sat down, giving it a shot. “Can you describe the demon?”

Gia Moon closed her eyes, as if getting a bead on the thing with her “inner eye.” He almost smiled, but stopped himself.

“Scales,” she whispered. “Red mist. Black, protruding eyes.” She opened her eyes and stared at Seven. “Very large teeth.”

Seven glanced at Erika. Gia Moon had just given a fair description of the painting in the entry to Tran’s house.

Which didn’t necessarily mean shit. Scales, big teeth, protruding eyes—sounded like your basic demon, right? The newspapers had mentioned the victim was Vietnamese and a fortune-teller. It could be a common enough image given the culture.

On the other hand, the description of the painting might indicate that Gia Moon knew the victim…that she’d been inside her house.

“Go on,” he said.

“She felt fear. All-consuming fear,” she said. “She was terrified. At the same time, there is something familiar about this demon. I think she had encountered him before—but never the violence. The attack confused her. She hadn’t expected the attack. That’s why she invited him inside.”

“She invited the demon inside?”

There had been no signs of a forced entry—information that Seven knew hadn’t been printed in the papers.

“She fought him.” Now Gia wrung her hands, almost as if washing them in the air. “There’s blood coming from her hands.”

The victim had had defensive marks. But anybody who watched CSI regularly could come up with that much.

“He was…so hungry.” Now her eyes looked unfocused, as if she were again slipping into some scene only she could see. “He fed off her fear. There was a lot of blood, but he wanted more. He liked it when she tried to run away. But then she died. Too quickly. He didn’t like that.”

It was almost as if she was speaking in a trance. Jesus, he thought, if this was an act, she was good.

Suddenly, she focused back on Seven, waking up. She took a deep breath and stood. She shouldered her purse.

“I felt compelled to come here and tell you about my vision. For what it’s worth, of course.”

“Hold on.” Seven stood, as well, taking her arm to try and stop her from leaving.

Only, the instant they touched, static electricity—coming hard and fast and unexpectedly—shocked the two of them apart. They stood there, staring at each other.

Moon was petite, maybe five foot three. Seven was just under six feet. She had to look up to meet his gaze.

But those eyes, they could zing right through a man.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

The way she said it, she was apologizing for something very different than that silly shock between them.

“A woman is dead, Ms. Moon,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “We take any information that you may provide very seriously.”

“All right.”

He watched as she sat down again. He could see she was just as shaken as he. She took a moment to steady herself.

He sat down beside her, but Gia Moon turned to Erika, addressing her. “You’ll want a test, of course. Something that lets you know I have information never leaked to the press.”

Erika glanced at Seven. Is this chick for real?

“There were eyes everywhere,” Gia Moon said. “And there was something in her mouth.” She spoke as if tired of jumping through hoops. She was searching for the quickest way to cross the finish line. “Something very old—very powerful. And small. Blue. No, red. Perhaps made of glass. I would start there.”

Seven felt the blood freeze inside his veins. Holy shit.

“Seven, why don’t you start the videotape?” Erika asked.

“I’m on it.”

His partner leaned forward, now completely focused. “What do you mean, start there?”

“With the object. This blue or red piece,” she elaborated, with another tired gesture. “It’s—” she seemed to struggle for the right words. “It’s very old. Museums. Private collections. It might be a gem of some sort. Whatever it is, it’s missing. Someone is looking for it. He wants it back.”

Nothing she’d just told them had been reported to the press. Even if she’d managed somehow to speak to the two witnesses who had found the body, neither of them knew about the blue bead.

“Go on,” Seven said.

Gia Moon again stood, the motion part of her story rather than an attempt to leave. “She invited him inside. She punched in the alarm code, disarming the security system.”

Gia acted out the gesture, stabbing her finger in the air as if punching in the numbers herself. Seven noticed that her hand was at the same level as Tran’s actual keypad.

“It was a horrible death. But she didn’t die the way you think.” It was almost as if she were reading some script in her head. She opened her eyes. “And he isn’t near done.”

“You’re talking about another victim?” Seven asked, standing as well.

She nodded. “The demon. He’ll kill again. And if my dream is correct,” she said, speaking as if it were nothing to her, what she was saying, “I’m next.”

Mimi Tran wasn’t worthy. Her death lacked finesse.

You prefer to remember another time. Another woman. A better experience.

Puerto Rico.

You smile. You never forget your first time.

You’re in San Juan, the night of the festival. At midnight, everyone will walk backward into the ocean, dreaming of love.

You make a wish. There is nothing wistful about your dreams.

The palm trees on the beach are permanently bent from the sea breeze. At that moment, the sky above doesn’t threaten, as it has all day. As the music pumps the bikini-clad crowd into a frenzy, you watch families, children, lovers, on the beach, all preparing for their ritual baptism.

You feel their energy pulse with the beat of the conga drums from the salsa band. They walk around as if the party never stops. You, on the other hand, know exactly when this party will end. You’re in control.

Security is tight. There are armed police in Kevlar vests everywhere. Some convention of elected officials is in town, your only bit of bad luck. But you don’t care. You have the power of life and death. You’re not afraid. You’re God.

Tonight’s festival is a pagan ritual. Every man, woman and child will walk backward into the ocean and throw themselves into the sea, cleansed of their sins. Only, you know that it’s you who will do the cleansing. You look forward to it.

Palm tree trunks glow with artificial light on the manicured grounds. A band performs on a floating stage set up in the shallows of the private beach. Three women dressed in white sway their hips in a motion as old as time.

The crowd doesn’t need encouragement. Grandmas dance on the shore with toddlers, husbands stare adoringly into the eyes of their wives as they salsa knee-deep in the ocean. On the floating stage, men and women wearing cowboy hats follow along in a dance with the natives—a contingent from Texas.

You stare at the ramparts of an ancient fortress dating back to when this was an important military post, its shores decorated with cannons, the walls built to keep out the English Armada. The fortress is lit up tonight. Lightning flashes in the distance.

The women at the Bacardi booth keep the rum flowing. Every other man or woman carries a plastic cup, laughing and drinking. The cups are stamped with the Barcardi emblem: a bat. Here, the bat is a symbol of good luck.

As midnight approaches, the pulse of the party revs up. Couples once dancing poolside become part of the mass migration to the beach. Suddenly, the crowd converges. You stand body to body with strangers, getting drunk on their alcoholic stupor, but your eyes follow only her. You were at dinner when she and her boyfriend fought. You’ve learned women take all sorts of shit from men, but now, she’s alone.

One of the singers in the band explains the ritual for the tourists. People grab hands and begin wading backward into the warm water.

You come to stand alongside the woman. Like everyone else, she wears a barely there bikini. You’ve been waiting all night for this moment.

She takes your hand and smiles. She’s blond with blue eyes. You hear her slur her words as she tells you how amazing this all is. Like New Year’s, she says. You hear a touch of the South in her voice. Texas, then.

Beach balls are tossed into the ocean by hotel staff as the crowd counts backward. Ten, nine, eight…The girl squeezes your hand. She tells you her name is Mary.

Like the Virgin, you think, squeezing back.

At the count of five, you take Mary’s hand to your mouth and kiss the back of her fingers. She has beautiful hands, soft and slim. Mary giggles. You can see she likes her Barcardi.

The crowd is thick now. You stand practically on top of each other, trying to make room for all. You throw yourselves backward into the ocean. The tradition requires you do it twelve times, giving more than enough opportunity.

Mary never comes back up.

No one notices as she fights, kicking her legs. Her struggle blends with the ritual dunking. You’re tall for your age. And very strong. The crowd is throwing balls and dancing in the water. Fireworks light up the sky and the sound of the band covers her fight for air. Slowly, you feel the life slip away as her body grows limp. You submerge alongside her and bring her fingers to your mouth once again. You taste blood with the saltwater.

You lift her into your arms like a lover. You lower her one more time in the water, sending her adrift.

You slip out of the sea and across the sand, exhilarated.

Back by the pool, a giant TV screen shows the NBA finals. Tourists take photographs of loved ones, cataloging the moment.

You don’t need a camera. You will never forget this night.

Kids slide into the pool, screaming. Spanish and English mingle in the warm, muggy night. Off in the distance, the skies now threaten a downpour, while the pool bar glows neon blue. Striped towels are handed out freely; no need for a card key tonight.

The sand poolside feels warm between your toes. You look out toward shore, where people still dance in the water. There are hammocks between a few of the palm trees, as well as striped cabana chairs. You slip into one. Again, you reach into the pocket for your souvenir. Dark clouds drifting in the night sky begin to blur the stars.

You marvel at how well it went. You were careful to slip in at the last second and take Mary’s hand in yours. No one will remember you standing with her. It was dark. That helps.

You head back to the hotel entrance. At the pool bar, an armada of bartenders flip bottles to the rhythm of a song you don’t recognize. They dance and concoct their magic potions for the women smoking and swaying to the music on the submerged concrete seats. You notice a tattoo on the small of the back of one lady, but don’t linger. You’re not greedy.

You slip inside the hotel, passing the emergency personnel scrambling by. They will try to revive Mary. They will not succeed.

They will find the tip of one of her pinkies missing where you bit it off. Not what you want for your treasure, but it will do.

Your heart is racing as you make your way to the hotel gardens. A television shows a newscaster reporting that the festival on the beaches is going well. He reassures viewers that security is tight. It’s safe, folks. Come on down and enjoy.

You enter the gardens. No one is around. Everyone is back at the pool and beach.

You listen to the frogs. They’re famous here, making a soft, coo-kee noise. It sounds like there’s hundreds just here. You open your mouth and take out the tip of Mary’s pinkie.

Now you know why they call this the island of enchantment. It’s beautiful and surreal, listening to the frogs sing.

You look down at the finger piece settled in the middle of your palm. It’s small, only to the first joint, but you did like her hands and there wasn’t a lot of time.

You’re in paradise and now you have a part of Mary. All your wishes tonight have come true….

You open your eyes, returning to time present.

Mimi Tran wasn’t nearly so nice. But she had a purpose.

The eyes, her life source, are yours now.

That’s the way it has to be from now on. You kill with reason. It’s kill or be killed. You are God and you serve a higher purpose.

And you already know who is next.

8

Gia Moon stared at the six-by-four-foot canvas. She’d come home from the police station and headed straight for her studio, dropping her purse on the concrete floor at the entrance.

She’d started work on the painting at one o’clock that morning. That’s when she’d woken from her dream.

She hadn’t woken gently, slowly easing to the surface of wakefulness. That’s not how it happened, these visions. She’d sat up abruptly, gasping for breath, horrified by the images still burning so brightly inside her head. Her daughter had uncharacteristically slept in her own bed that night, a godsend.

In her bathroom, Gia had splashed water on her face. Grabbing a robe for warmth, she’d headed for her studio in the garage.

This is what she did; it was who she was. The woman who painted nightmares.

Her mother had warned her once. You’re so strong. Be careful. Dark spirits are always attracted to the strong.

“No kidding, Mom,” she said, staring at the painting of the demon who had killed Mimi Tran.

That morning, she’d taken only a short break from painting for coffee—it wasn’t her day to drive carpool, another lucky break. She’d had more than enough time for her vision to become almost fully realized on the canvas before she’d read the article in the paper, making the connection.

Gia reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out the detective’s card. When she’d gone to the precinct, she’d wanted to blurt out her story and leave. Mission accomplished.

She propped the card up on the easel.

They hadn’t believed her. She’d expected that.

She took a long breath and stared down at her hands. They were shaking. She balled her fingers into fists.

I’m next.

It had been a bold declaration, one she hadn’t planned on making. But she had a temper, and she’d let herself get pushed.

Not good, Gia.

Sometimes, she could understand what had driven her mother all those years. People wanted proof, something tangible. They wanted the world to make sense. Things needed to add up, like a mathematical formula. Forget about dreams and visions and the kooks who claimed to have them.

Erika Cabral was one of those skeptics. The kind of person who thought Gia only wanted to scam the desperate out of their money.

The interview had been surprisingly nerve-racking. Gia didn’t like the spotlight. She required anonymity. To the outside world, she was an artist, a painter whose pieces some claimed showed a glimpse into another world. But it was all below the radar. Those few souls who managed to find her never asked for more than peace of mind. In exchange for connecting with lost loved ones, they kept her secrets.

Now, that might not be possible.

“Wow. That is one ugly mother.”

Hearing her daughter, Gia turned toward the door. She had no idea how long she’d been standing there. She had a habit of “losing time” when it came to her paintings. Past three o’clock, she told herself, if Stella was home from school.

Her daughter walked into the garage studio, popping her gum, a vile habit she well knew her mother despised. Gia figured that was the point. Stella dropped her backpack in the middle of the floor. Gia didn’t comment on that, either.

The girl came to stand next to her and immediately fell into the painting.

That’s what Gia called it: falling in. It happened all the time with Stella. Gia watched as her daughter’s eyes grew unfocused. That was the problem with Stella’s gift. She was too sensitive, didn’t have strong enough defenses. She hadn’t learned how to guard herself—and, in complete denial of her gifts, she wouldn’t allow Gia to teach her.

Stella took a step back, away from the painting. In complete silence, she reached out and slipped her hand in her mom’s.

Gia pulled her little girl into her arms. At twelve years old, Stella was still under five feet, small for her age. Gia kissed the top of her head. Stella had Gia’s black hair and blue eyes. But the curls—those riotous curls brushing the tops of her shoulders were all her daughter’s.

“Okay,” Stella said, pushing back to once again look at the painting. “I already hate it. What is it?”

“I don’t know, baby. A demon of some sort.”

“It killed somebody, didn’t it?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” Gia said. “Maybe lots of somebodies.”

Gia didn’t bother to try to hide things from Stella. She’d learned a long time ago the futility of that—nor did Stella appreciate her efforts at protecting her. Gia chose instead to try and explain what her daughter saw. But even then, she fell short. Half the time it was Stella who told Gia the meaning behind her art, such was her daughter’s talent.

The painting didn’t show Mimi Tran’s lifeless body. Gia rarely painted death, choosing instead to objectify such things.

Mimi’s symbol was the red eye. It faced the beast, ready to do battle. But the monster proved too powerful. Part of the eye melted down the side of the canvas, the heavy red paint flowing like a river of blood off the edge.

Gia used her paintings to make sense of the images that came to her in dreams. Sometimes it worked, other times she just had macabre works of art to show for her efforts.

“They didn’t believe you, did they?”

“The police? No, darling,” she said. “They didn’t.”

She didn’t ask Stella how she knew about the police. Gia hadn’t told her about her trip to the precinct or the conversation she’d had with the detectives there. Her daughter preferred to pretend her ability was a fluke, or a figment of their imagination. She did the ostrich thing, getting angry whenever her mother pointed out the obvious.

I don’t want to be a freak like you! That’s what she’d screamed the first time her abilities came shining through.

There’d been a time when Gia, too, had said those very words to her own mother.

Stella gave a sigh that sounded much too old for her years. “I don’t know why you even try.”

“Because I was supposed to.”

“Your guides,” Stella said, in the voice of a supreme skeptic.

In the world of psychic phenomena, often times guides from the other side would help a medium make contact. They served almost as an umbilical line to the dead spirits trying to communicate. While many had names, Gia’s own guides chose to remain anonymous.

She bit her lip and stared at the simple business card propped on the easel. Detective Seven Bushard. City of Westminster. Homicide.

She remembered the electric shock of his touch.

She’d felt his sadness like a blow to her chest, making it difficult to breathe. She’d seen his story like a movie in her head. His brother and the man he’d killed. The vision had been dark and murky and without a lot of details, but grisly nonetheless.

From the moment the detective had walked in to that interview, he’d been watching her with an almost hungry stare. Gia knew what it meant to have people want something from her.

You say you had a dream?

That was the other detective. The woman, Erika Cabral. Gia recognized that tone. The freak…the nut job. It only made her smile, because she could clearly see an entity standing next to Erika, shedding a protective white light.

Gia never argued with a disbeliever. Sometimes she wondered if that’s not what she wanted. Don’t believe me. I did my duty. My conscience is clear. If you don’t make use of my knowledge, that’s not my concern.

Only, she couldn’t really say that now. Mimi Tran was different. This time, Gia wasn’t the uninvolved observer.

She might very well be responsible for that woman’s death.

She looked back at the card, remembering Seven Bushard’s words on parting.

“Call if you have another…dream,” he’d told her.

“The man. Is he going to hurt you, Mommy?”

The question came from nowhere, as they often did. Gia always forgot how connected she was to her child.

She’d been thinking about the detective when her daughter asked the question. But Stephen Bushard wasn’t who she feared.

She answered, “No, sweetie.” She kissed her daughter again, giving them both the pabulum. “I’ll be fine. We both will.”

9

The county coroner’s office was located in Santa Ana, a city that touted itself as the financial and political center for Orange County. It was over seventy-five percent Hispanic, originating with a Spanish land grant—seventy acres of which had been purchased from the Yorba family by William H. Spurgeon. Driving up the road from Westminster, Seven was always amazed how quickly the signs changed from Pho 54 to Taqueria.

Seven had grown up in nearby Huntington Beach, graduating from Marina High School. Go Vikings! With Little Saigon so close, the school’s Asian population was double that of the state average.

Even back then, there was this idea that Asian students were ruining the public school system, making it too hard for your red, white and blue American to succeed. How could Patty or Jake compete against someone who lived in the library, for God’s sake, tanking up on Top Ramen and green tea for another all-nighter of studying?

Whenever he heard someone spouting that crap, Seven always asked if maybe Asians were inherently more intelligent? No? So it’s all about good old-fashioned hard work? Well, there you go.

People made choices. They sacrificed. So quit bitching and just compete, right? God knows Ricky, his brother, hadn’t been the hit of the party scene. That had been Seven’s job in life.

Back in high school, Seven managed to get into enough hot water that his mom had threatened military school. It was a kind of periodic thing, like Easter or Christmas. Military school, Seven. I will do it! Once, she’d even taken him to tour a couple of places. Seven smiled at the memory, because the tactic had actually worked. Suddenly, he was passing all his classes.

But Ricky…it was the sweat of his brow that got him a full-ride scholarship to the college of his choice.

Still, Seven had to admit, the county coroner, Alice Wang, was the poster child for the Asians-are-hard-to-beat argument.

Alice was in her early fifties. She wore glasses and styled her hair in a sensible pageboy—Alice wasn’t spending a ton of time in front of the mirror. She had places to go, people to cut open.

Alice had a gift. Best damn medical examiner he’d ever worked with.

Mimi Tran lay on a metal table with paper draped strategically over her lower body—an attempt at dignity sabotaged by the fact that half her insides were on display and a tag hung from her big toe like a Christmas present.

Your average Joe didn’t know that it was the smells you remembered most from your first autopsy: body odors and the scent of half-digested food. Seven figured Alice and her crew must be used to it. Him, he was breathing through his mouth.

Alice Wang stood over the body of Mimi Tran. With the scalpel, she’d made a Y incision, from shoulder to shoulder and down to the lower abdomen. She’d already removed the breastplate using the circular saw waiting with other instruments next to the body, exposing the internal organs, which had all been weighed. The quickest way to know if there was something wrong was through weight.

Now she was in the process of ladling the stomach contents into a plastic container, like soup. She used tweezers to examine the particulate matter.

Apparently, Mimi Tran had had a light lunch before dying.

“Jellyfish,” Alice said, holding up a rubbery string with the tweezers.

“Not the sort of thing you keep in the fridge from the local deli?” Seven asked.

“I’m guessing not this time,” Alice said, pulling up a small, brown lump with her magic tweezers. “Escargot.”

“Jellyfish and snails?” Erika made a face. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“This from a woman who has no doubt tickled her palate with the likes of calves’ brains and cow tongue?” Alice asked, making Seven wonder how many stomach contents from the local taqueria Alice had examined.

“Calves’ brains.” Erika stuck out her tongue in disgust. “Mi abuelita made me eat them. But now tongue isn’t half-bad when it’s prepared right.”

“Well, the Vietnamese love their French food,” Alice said. “You’d be surprised how many Vietnamese view the hundred-year French occupation with fondness. Go to any expensive Little Saigon restaurant or club and you’re going to hear French music or see pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe hanging on the walls. Ever been to La Veranda?”

Seven had heard of the place. It had the reputation of being one of the best restaurants in Little Saigon. “Haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Marble pillars, sparkling fountains…looks like a plantation right out of the colonial past. They serve escargot and frog legs right alongside pickled daikon, nuoc mam and rice paper. But I think what the victim ate was less traditionally prepared, a more innovative kind of fusion.”

“Who knew you were such a foodie, Alice?”

“Everette and I have been members of the same gourmet club for years.”

Seven tried to imagine. Maybe if you studied enough stomach contents, food became a hobby.

“Three hours after eating, ninety-five percent of your stomach contents will end up in the small intestine,” Alice continued. “The process stops at the time of death. Given what I’m seeing here—” she nodded toward the plastic container “—I’d say a power lunch at some chi-chi restaurant just before she died. I’d look for something high-end. That was a real nice St. John she had on.”

“Ah, come on, Alice,” Erika said. “We know you have a closetful of those. Isn’t Everette an anesthesiologist?”

“With three kids to put through college,” Alice reminded her. Then, looking thoughtful, she added, “The victim was a psychic?”

“Well-known, from what people in the area say,” Seven stated.

Alice nodded. “Not that it’s relevant to the cause of death, but I found some unique cell damage in the prefrontal cortex of her brain.”

“You want to dumb that down for my partner, Alice?” Erika said, managing to keep a straight face.

“The prefrontal cortex, that’s the area just behind your forehead. It has the ability to control activity in other parts of the brain. Think of it as a kind of volume-control switch. When I examined the victim’s brain, I saw significant atrophy in the prefrontal cortex. The tissue samples I looked at under the microscope showed axonal damage.”

“English, Alice,” Erika reminded her. “English.”

“Cell damage, necrosis. The victim’s brain had an old injury.”

Seven frowned. “Not that I believe in this stuff, but are you saying she was damaged goods? That she couldn’t have psychic ability because her brain was messed up?”

Alice shook her head. “Quite the opposite. I’m saying our victim might have thought she was psychic because of the damage to her brain. There are studies that show religious beliefs reside in the temporal lobes, the part of the brain near your ears. When a temporal lobe is stimulated, the person can experience a presence associated with God or a spirit, depending on their personal beliefs. Some researchers in the area claim that humans are programmed for spiritual experiences.”

“But in our victim, you said it was the prefrontal cortex that was damaged, not the temporal lobe,” Erika said, confused.

“Exactly,” Alice declared, as if she’d just made her point. “The part that controls activity in the temporal lobe was damaged. It’s a leap, but I wonder, what if the injury in your victim’s brain caused the temporal lobe to become excited, giving her what she thought were psychic experiences?” When Erika and Seven stood in confused silence, Alice added, “There’s a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy. The seizures stimulate the temporal lobe.”

“The part that experiences religion?” Seven asked.

“Correct. During a seizure, the patient experiences smells and sees things that aren’t there—they hallucinate. She was a psychic, right? I wonder if the damage to her brain caused the temporal lobes to become excited, just like those of an epileptic. Your victim could very well believe she was having a psychic occurrence, when in fact she was having seizures.”

Erika looked at Seven. Neither knew what to make of the new information.

“But again, I digress,” Alice said. “You’ll be more interested in the cause of death.”

“That seems pretty obvious,” Erika said.

Alice smiled. Not something you saw every day, the coroner smiling.

“So you would think—the cause of death, exsanguinations. But that’s where it gets interesting.”

Alice leaned over the body, motioning the detectives closer. Like any good M.E., Alice didn’t have any problem with the dead.

She lifted the torso. “Here, she was stabbed from behind. Probably while she was running away, given the angle.” She let the corpse settle back on the table, and glanced up. “We know from the defensive wounds on her hands that she tried to fight off her attacker. And the eyes, they were removed cleanly, using something very sharp. Have you found the murder weapon?”

“Not yet.”

“It’s a seven-inch blade. Very sharp. I’m thinking one of those Japanese chef’s knives.”

“Weapon of opportunity?” Seven asked. “We’ll check the kitchen to see if anything is missing.”

“I prefer the Santoku myself,” Alice said. “Those things are a dream for mincing and dicing.”

Again, Seven held off a shudder, trying not to think about the coroner preparing food items. He glanced back at the Y incision, imagining Alice with a chef’s knife instead of her scalpel.

“And here—” she pointed to the next wound, at the victim’s side “—here the knife didn’t penetrate as deeply. She managed to get away. But this one?” She pointed to the heart. “That would have been fatal.”

“Would have?” Erika asked. “She looks pretty dead to me, Alice.”

“Not the point. She didn’t die from her wounds.”

Erika glanced at Seven, both remembering the words of the psychic, Gia Moon. She didn’t die the way you think.

Again, Alice flashed that elusive smile. “Along with the damage to the brain, your victim had a heart condition. Probably undiagnosed. Happens a lot with women. She had a ninety percent occlusion to the left coronary artery, the main pump to the heart,” Alice explained. “For someone like that, if the heart starts beating faster, the blood flow is insufficient to feed the muscle. Basically, her heart stopped before she could bleed out.”

Alice looked up at both detectives. “She had a heart attack. Given the circumstances, I’d say something scared your victim to death.”

In the parking lot, Erika was carrying on like a hamster in distress.

“It’s bullshit, Seven, and you know it. ‘She didn’t die the way you think,’” she said, repeating Gia Moon’s prediction. “If she didn’t do it, Gia Moon knows who did—and not because she had some woo-woo vision, like she wants us to believe. You ask me? She’s looking awfully good for the murder.”

“You don’t think you’re jumping the gun just a little here, Erika? What do we really have on this psychic?”

Erika crossed her arms and gave him that look—right between the eyes.

“Of course.” She slapped her palm to her forehead as if to say, What was I thinking? “She’s just a really good guesser. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong—”

“And that name, Gia Moon. Come on! Sounds like a freaking X-Files episode.”

“I admit the name is a little too cute.”

“Cute? Did you know Gaia is one of several names used for the Earth Goddess?”

“Okay, sure. But—”

“Gia Moon. Earth—moon. She freaking made it up.”

“So I have a cousin who her changed her name to Comedy, for God’s sake. Jesus, Erika. She’s a psychic. Maybe that’s what they do. Become Madam Zelda or Sunshine. She came down to the station. Why would she do that if she’s involved?” he asked. “She wants to get caught?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe she needs the attention? Or suffers from a guilty conscience? Only she tries to cover up with her hocus-pocus crap.”

“Hocus-pocus crap?” He grabbed his partner’s wrist, showing the gold bracelet with its jet stone. “Sounds kind of harsh coming from a woman who carries an ass-your-watch-it.”

“Azabache,” she corrected, talking about the amulet. “And it was a gift.” She twisted her hand away. “It’s just a silly superstition. This chick wants us to believe she’s in touch with the powers-that-be. That some demon killed Mimi Tran and now she’s next.”

Erika stepped right up to him. It still surprised him how someone five foot two could look so intimidating. But Erika had it going on, the stance—the stare.

“Are you tell me that you’re buying her story?”

“You know how this goes down, Erika. Once you start believing you know who the perp is, that’s when the righteous work stops. You lead the evidence rather than letting the evidence lead you. So maybe I’m not ready to slap on the cuffs just yet.”

He started toward the car, forcing her to do the same.

Truth be told, he didn’t know what to make of Gia Moon. At first, sure, he’d chalked her up as another nutcase. It happened all the time at the station. A provocative case such as the Tran murder brought out the crazies like a full moon.

But what his partner said was true. The stone in the bird’s mouth, the fact that she knew it changed color, the painting in the foyer. And now, the cause of death. She didn’t die like you think…It was a little close to the mark.

Walking to the vehicle, he could still see Gia clearly in his head. He had a good memory for things like that, but this was different. He pictured her eyes, so blue in contrast to her sleek black hair. How alluring she looked in just a plain T-shirt and jeans. During the interview, she’d seemed almost resigned to the fact that no one would believe her. She was doing her duty, coming forward like a good psychic citizen…knowing all along she’d be ridiculed. He remembered how badly he’d wanted to tell her she was wrong, that no matter what, he’d give her a fair shot.

He opened the car door and sat down on the hot passenger seat, waiting for Erika to start the engine. He just couldn’t imagine Gia involved in the bloodbath he’d seen…and maybe not for the reasons he’d given Erika.

Because Seven had another reaction to Gia Moon. One he hoped his partner hadn’t tuned in to with her Latina sixth sense.

He told himself he was vulnerable. Hell, the last few months, he didn’t know where his head was at—that night with Erika being a prime example of his lack of judgment.

And that call from his ex, Laurin. The breakup of his marriage hadn’t exactly been a high point. Talking to Laurin only reminded him of past mistakes. Big ones.

He hadn’t been paying attention, hadn’t noticed the changes in Laurin. And maybe that’s why she left. He’d made her feel invisible, when another man made her feel loved.

She’d left a note: I don’t love you anymore, Seven.

Short and sweet.

Maybe that’s when he’d felt the big slap across the face. That call from Laurin about her shiny new life. And here he was, stuck in a spot where time stood still, because his brother had changed the rules.

Bad guy—good guy. Seven couldn’t tell anymore.

“Look, the case is bizarre enough,” he told his partner as they made their way down Bolsa Avenue. “Let’s just play this one straight, okay? Cross our t’s and dot our i’s.”

“Oh, sure. Sit around and wait for a suspect to fall into our laps? Or, God forbid, wait for someone else to die.” She kept her eyes on the road. “Come on, you haven’t thought about it? The whole serial killer scenario?”

Like his partner, he stared straight ahead, watching Little Saigon pass in a wash of color. Red-tiled roofs, Vietnamese signs, painted shop windows in strip malls advertising supermarkets, nail salons and gift stores. A rice rocket—a Honda Civic tricked up with fancy spoiler and audio equipment—cruised past.

A serial killer. Of course he’d thought about it. Everything about the death of Mimi Tran evoked the possibility of a twisted mind.

“I’m betting our little Miss Moon knows more than she’s letting on,” Erika said. “Like that stuff about checking private collections and museums. She gave me an idea.”

“Museums?” He shook his head. “I’m moving around the rabbit ears, Erika, but I’m still not getting any reception.”

“Meaning,” she said, “we need to do a little research. You in for a drive, partner?”

This, as she flipped on the turn signal and headed for the on-ramp for the 22 Freeway.

He was thinking, Like I have a choice?

He said, “Lead on, Drummer.”

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