The Business of Strangers Read online

  “So, you don’t remember the guy. What about the tat? Does it look like one of yours?”

  But the prisoner didn’t look back at the photo. Instead, he stared steadily at Ria. “You know, Sheriff, we never did talk about what this conversation is worth to you. You wouldn’t think a guy like me had expenses, but I do. Got me a girlfriend in Mobile with a kid. Plus I ain’t been able to work. They don’t pay us hardly nothin’ anyway, but it keeps me in cigarettes, you know?”

  She gave a telling smile. “You want to know what this is worth to me? How about my goodwill, Larry? From the sounds of your last few weeks, you could use some of that, couldn’t you?”

  From what Warden Udall had said, Stanton had recently been the victim of a brutal attack. He’d been near dead when a correctional officer had interrupted the assault. Once he’d been released he’d requested, and received, protective isolation. But according to the warden, that treatment was rapidly approaching an end.

  His gaze centered somewhere in the vicinity of her chest, he said, “Your goodwill ain’t gonna cut it. Like I said, I got expenses.”

  “You’ve also got someone wanting you dead.” Her knowledge of his situation had his gaze swinging to hers. “At least that’s what you keep telling the warden. But he’s ready to release you back into the general population, isn’t he? No way of knowing how long you’ll survive there.”

  “I got someone working on that,” he muttered, but his expression was worried.

  “I can help. At the very least, I can buy you some time. If I tell the warden you’re helping with an ongoing investigation, your life takes on new value. It’ll buy you more time in protective isolation, anyway.”

  Stanton appeared to be mulling over the offer. “I need a couple more months there, for sure.”

  “I’ll do everything I can to see that you get it,” she promised. It was quite possible that she’d want to interview him again— dependent, of course, on what kind of information he divulged.

  “Okay.” Stanton smiled, revealing a set of stained and crooked teeth. “You got yourself a deal, do— Sheriff. Like I said, that work there is mine.” He tapped one of the photos with his index finger. “It’s a Pegasus. You know, like in them Greek stories? A flying horse. Supposed to do the work of some god or something.” His shrug said the history was of little importance to him. “Lots of tattooists do different designs of it, but the detail in mine sets them apart. See, the smaller the image, the harder it is to get the detail included. But me, I’m a genius at that. I once did this real complicated flower on a woman’s nipple. Work of art, I’m telling you.”

  “I’m only interested in the Pegasus design.” Ria brought him back on topic impatiently. “How many have you done?”

  From his wrinkled brow, it appeared that the memory search was painful. “I dunno. Fifty or sixty maybe, altogether.”

  The number acted as a cold dash of water on Ria’s hopes. Trying to trace that many individuals would add months, possibly years to her search. And tracking them might prove impossible if he hadn’t kept records.

  His next words had her emotions swinging back again, like a pendulum. “Not all of them were like this one, though. Most folks want something larger, with a big wingspan on the horse. I once did one that covered a guy’s entire back. Took me three days. This one here was a special design. And I made an agreement that I’d never use it again. Never did, either,” he said, with a quick glance toward her. “An artist is only as good as his rep. And I got paid for making this design special.”

  Excitement rose, nearly choking her. Struggling to keep it from her voice, Ria asked, “What makes this one special?”

  “Well, the guy wanted it small. And I had to add lightning bolts to it. Not easy, see, because if you don’t do it right, it would look like they were coming right out of the wings, which would be stupid. It took a lot of time to make it seem like the horse is carrying the bolts—”

  “What guy?” she interrupted impatiently. “Do you remember a name? Did you keep records?”

  Stanton shook his head. “He paid me not to. Got a nice fee for the design, and for overlooking certain, ah, regulations. Closed my place down for the evening and just did him and his friends.”

  Everything inside her went abruptly, completely still. For an instant, she imagined she could feel every beat of her pulse. Taste every particle of oxygen stopped up in her lungs. Her nerves quivered at a heightened sense of readiness that felt nearly painful. “His…friends?”

  Rubbing his nose, Stanton answered, “Yeah, there were six of them. Or was it seven?” He frowned. “Seems like there were five guys. But there might have been six. Only one woman, though. I am sure about that.”

  An hour later, Larry Stanton was lying on the lone bunk in his cell, hands behind his head, staring up at the cracked ceiling. Worst thing about isolation was, well, the isolation. No one to talk to but the guards, if one of them was of a mind to be sociable. Nothing to look forward to but the crap served as meals. No exercise privileges. No library visits.

  Staying alive didn’t come without a price.

  But his visitor today had sure been a change from the usual boredom of his days. Yes sirree, the lady sheriff had been the best looking piece he’d laid eyes on in years, even in that butt ugly tan-and-brown uniform she’d been wearing.

  He fantasized about what had been under that uniform, and felt himself hardening. He’d never much fancied redheads, but then, he’d never been overly fussy when it came to the female persuasion. He’d been an equal-opportunity kind of guy. If he were to get a few minutes alone with her sometime, he’d pull her hair free from that braid she had it scraped back into, and wrap his hands in it while he pounded himself into her.

  Pressing a hand against his crotch, he daydreamed for a few minutes more before a single thought nudged through the porn-rated fantasy.

  He hadn’t had any luck getting a promise of money from the cop, not that he’d held out much hope of one. But he could think of someone who might want to know about her visit. Some tattoo he’d done eight or nine years ago didn’t have a thing to do with Enrico Alvarez, but Jake Tarrance might like to know that he wasn’t the only one interested in ol’ Larry Stanton. He might even get more money out of him in return for the information, although he’d have to be careful how he played that. Tarrance wasn’t the kind of man it was smart to piss off.

  Larry knew he wasn’t exactly NASA material, but he took his time thinking things through, and being careful usually paid off for him in the end. So he studied the angles in his mind for some time before reaching the conclusion that Tarrance was probably going to learn about this visit himself even if Larry didn’t tell him.

  Dismay filled him as his hopes for turning the information into cash vanished. The man seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere. Larry was going to have to tell him before someone else did, unless he wanted to take his chances of drying up the cash cow that allowed him some measure of comfort in this hellhole.

  He swore silently, cracking his knuckles in frustration. No use putting it off, either, because it just didn’t pay to hold back from Jake. Not about anything.

  Morosely, he sat up, swung his legs over his bunk. Something about all those questions the sheriff asked had other memories crowding in, and he shook his head impatiently. It wasn’t like she had been the first one to be interested in that damn tattoo. There had been another guy a long time ago who had tracked him down about it.

  What had it been—five years ago? Six? Since Stanton didn’t feel like taxing his brain, he let the question go. Like he’d told the sheriff, he didn’t recall guys too well, so he wouldn’t recollect a name even if the man had given one. What he did remember was that this fella had offered him a whole lotta money to let him know if anyone had come asking ’bout that tattoo.

  The thought of money took his mind off the ache in his groin as excitement of another kind grew. Even though it had seemed a long shot, the amount of cash involved had convinced him it
would pay to keep the number he’d been given handy.

  With a broad grin, he clenched his fists. Although he’d embellished the tattoos on his knuckles over the years, anyone who looked closely at them would see that at the center of each was a single digit. He held his fists in front of him, side by side, and gave a cackle. If’n that number was still in service, Larry Jay Stanton just might be about to become the richest inmate in Alabama.

  Chapter 4

  Ria went through the motions of catching up on the afternoon’s activities once she was back at the office, but her conversation with Stanton was never far from her mind. It was nearly eight before she left for the evening, but she headed home without sparing a thought for the fact that there would be nothing edible in the house. Food wasn’t even close to a priority.

  She wanted to get to her computer files.

  It was useless to issue a cautionary reminder that she could be embarking on yet another wild-goose chase. Numerous times over the last half-dozen years she’d thought she was just this close. Had believed she was on the verge of discovering the information that would divulge her identity, and that of Luz’s killer. Each time, she’d had to deal with the crushing disappointment that accompanied a dead end.

  But this time might be different.

  Because it was useless to try to dampen her excitement, she tried to harness it and think logically. The word of a lowlife like Stanton wasn’t much to go on, but he had little reason to lie. And the details he’d given about the tattoo made a chilling kind of sense. He’d said he’d been in Georgia when he’d done the group’s designs, and that was the home of thirteen different military bases. Had she and the group been stationed at one of them?

  She’d tried to follow that line a couple times over the years, each time losing confidence in it. Despite the changing social climate, the U.S. military was still staunchly paternalistic. A woman might be allowed to gain the kind of training Ria had obviously had, but she never would have been selected for any type of special operation.

  At any rate, there had never been a way to narrow down a specific military branch. Without names to go on, all she could do was get lists of individuals on active duty at the time she was shot, or those reported missing in action six years ago. The sheer volume of information had been overwhelming, and without a direction, had yielded very little.

  Now, though, she had direction. Ria turned her sheriff’s car into the lane that led to her house. They may not have been special ops at all, but miscreant misfits that had been gathered up and given individual training and narrowly defined assignments? And if that were the case, who had been calling the shots?

  The question was abruptly dismissed when she saw the car pulled up behind her personal vehicle.

  A burst of adrenaline surged through her and she brought her car to a halt. She didn’t have visitors. Not ever. And she sure as hell hadn’t invited this one.

  Reaching for the radio, she called in the Georgia license plate, but she really didn’t need the dispatcher’s answer a few minutes later to guess at the owner of the low slung sports car. Mouth flattening, she swung out of her cruiser and slammed the door, heading up to the house with long strides. Her front door was slightly ajar, as if to mock her with the ease with which her security had been circumvented.

  Withdrawing her gun, she released the safety and entered the house carefully, in search of her unwelcome visitor.

  She found him in the small living room, ensconced in the recliner in front of the TV. Its sound was muted, and he had a newspaper spread out in his lap. “Funny.” Her voice said it was anything but. “I’ve never had trouble with vermin in this house before.”

  Jake Tarrance raised his brows. “I’m not surprised. Do you realize there’s absolutely nothing in your kitchen to eat? Your fridge only has a couple moldy oranges and lettuce well past its prime.” Which didn’t explain, she silently noted, the imported bottle of beer in his hand. “If you had the fixings, I’d have had dinner waiting for you.”

  The harmless words were at odds with lethal air of the man uttering them. Today he was dressed in jeans and an open necked dress shirt the same color as his eyes. Neither his attire nor his matter-of-fact speech could distract from the aura of menace that was so much a part of him.

  “Just as well.” She entered the room, keeping her gun trained on him. “I would have had to check it for traces of arsenic.”

  He looked amused. The only light in the room came from the small television screen. He appeared at home in the shadows, one of Lucifer’s demons come above earth to bargain for souls. But there would be no bartering here. Ria had given him far too much already.

  “Point taken. But despite our serious trust issues, maybe you could lower your gun. You and I have some things to discuss.”

  She moved to a lamp and switched it on, all the while keeping Jake in her sights. “Sure. Just as soon as you shove that newspaper to the floor. Slowly.”

  A long moment stretched. She cocked her revolver, the small sound splitting the silence. Again, a flash of amusement skated across his expression, but with a tiny motion he had the newspaper falling to the floor, revealing the Glock in his hand.

  He shrugged. “I really did come to talk, but thought you might need convincing.”

  “The only convincing I need is a reason why I shouldn’t shoot you right now.”

  “Well, you’d most likely ruin your chair,” he pointed out. It didn’t escape her notice that his weapon was still aimed in her direction. “But given your choice in furniture, it wouldn’t be much of a loss. There is the problem of Fenton County’s new sheriff explaining a corpse in her house, but I’m guessing you could come up with plausible story.”

  “Like shooting an intruder who had broken into my home?”

  He ignored the caustic question. “I guess I’m just going to rely on the fact that you really really want to know what I’m doing here.” He paused, then added silkily, “Almost as much as you want to keep our relationship private.”

  His words fired her temper, even as it sparked flickers of concern. It would be easier to explain his dead body than the night she’d spent with the most notorious crime boss in the area. Her conversation that afternoon with the lead detective in the Columbus Bureau of Investigative Services had been illuminating. Among other things, Jake was suspected of running a highly lucrative multistate smuggling ring dealing with antiquities. But according to the detective, they’d never been able to collect enough evidence to make any charges stick against the man.

  “You’d be surprised at my creativity.” She circled him, her gun hand steady. “Any explanations I need to make will carry a lot more credibility than the word of a common criminal.”

  His expression was pained. “Common? You wound me, Ria, really.” He used his foot to swivel the chair slightly, to keep her in his sights. “Sit down, for God sakes. We may as well have our civil discussion. I’m not leaving here without answers.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss. I won’t drop the charges against Boster, or discuss a plea bargain. He’s one of yours, isn’t he?” The contempt she felt sounded in her voice. “Drugs are always a filthy business, but meth is lower than most. High addiction rate. Psychosis. Irreparable brain damage. Nice little sideline you’ve chosen.”

  The semblance of civility vanished from his face. Those pale blue eyes went icy, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. “Boster is an associate of mine, I won’t deny that. But I had no knowledge of his activities here. You won’t find me protecting him from the consequences. I assume you called the Columbus PD today after I left.” When she didn’t answer, he arched a brow. “Who’d you talk to? Edwards? Renard? Either one of them would tell you I’ve never been suspected of drug involvement.”

  Actually, what Detective Edwards had said was the only illegal activities Tarrance wasn’t suspected of were drugs and prostitution. Ria didn’t share the detective’s curiosity about that fact. It wasn’t really Jake’s choice of unl
awful sidelines that concerned her. It was the fact they existed at all.

  And that she’d made the excruciatingly poor decision of sleeping with the most disreputable man in the region.

  “So if you aren’t here about Boster, what do you want?” she asked bluntly. She rested her weight against the wall opposite him, without lowering the gun she had aimed his way.

  “What do I want?” he repeated slowly. She doubted he meant to imbue the words with an intimate heat that set her nerve endings quivering. Whatever else this man was after, it wouldn’t be a repeat of last night. “For starters, I’d like to know what brought you to my restaurant yesterday. Who sent you? And before you think about lying, you might want to consider that with one bullet I could shatter your gun hand and disarm you at the same time.”

  His threat had little effect on her. “You move toward that trigger and the bullet I fire won’t be going to your hand.” She shifted her arm slightly to aim at a much more sensitive portion of his anatomy.

  A second passed. Then two. Twin spikes of adrenaline raced down her spine as her breathing grew shallow. Instincts were roused to almost painful intensity as time crawled to a stop.

  And then, amazingly, he began to laugh. Rich with humor, the sound was darkly masculine. It crinkled his eyes, creased his face and made him all too appealing. “Damn, but I like you, Ria Kingsley. Did from the first. Before you’d given me your name. Before I knew you were a cop.” He managed to imbue the final word with a faint note of distaste that didn’t detract from the compliment. “Are you working with the Columbus PD? Some sort of multiagency task force?”