Sumaira points to a large dark stain on the floor beneath a string of Christmas lights taped to a blood-spattered living room wall. “Daughter was there. Mother was in the bathroom.”
“Same time frame?”
“No. Probably a few hours apart, the mother first.” She gestures at a couch littered with food wrappers, a pizza box, and laundry that isn’t likely clean. “You want to sit?”
“I don’t even want to breathe. How are you eating in here?”
“Starvation and desensitization.” She swallows the last of her cookie, crumples the empty bag, and balances it on top of a heap of garbage in a kitchen can. Then she takes a small notebook out of her coat pocket, clicks a pen, and looks at Barnes. “Tell me what you’ve got.”
“I knew them.”
“The Harrisons?”
“Not well. But you’re never going to believe this . . .”
She jots notes and asks questions as he fills her in. For now, he leaves out Perry Wayland, Cuba, Stef, and the dirty money—not for his own sake, but for his daughter’s. Reopening the Wayland cold case would be a complex, expensive bureaucratic task and most certainly stall the investigation. It might also bring his own ugly secret to light, sidelining him with complications and repercussions.
He can’t let that happen. His priority is to locate Charisse and find out who’d murdered those two women. Common sense would indicate that Wayland and Gypsy Colt have nothing to do with this.
“But what is your gut telling you, Stockton?” Wash asks in his head.
The exact opposite.
“Tawafuq,” Sumaira comments.
“Excuse me?”
“In my faith, that’s what we call synchronicity others might consider coincidence. Your finding a ring in 1987, giving it to your baby mama, and then thirty years later, her friend’s daughter returns it to the original owner . . . tawafuq.”
“Two things about that. One, she didn’t return it to Amelia. She just showed it to her.”
“Really? I wonder where it is, then? We didn’t find anything but costume jewelry here, and believe me, we looked, because the daughter was wearing an expensive necklace and bracelet. What’s the second thing?”
“Please don’t call Delia my ‘baby mama.’ I haven’t seen her since 1987. Two strangers, one drunken night. That’s all it was.”
“What about Amelia?”
“She never met her.”
“No, I mean, you said she’s single. Are you two—”
“I said her marriage fell apart over the last few months.”
“Isn’t that the same thing? Are you seeing her?”
“No, and no.” He scowls. “How is this relevant?”
“You’re ornery today.”
“Sorry.” Barnes rubs the burning spot between his shoulder blades. “I haven’t eaten or slept in—”
“I get it. Believe me. Anyway . . . tawafuq. Every incident has meaning. You and Amelia were meant to come together.”
His phone vibrates. Ah, tawafuq sparing them both his ornery reply.
Or is it?
Amelia is asking him to give her a call when he gets up.
Gets up?
What is that woman thinking? Does she know anything about police work?
No, she does not. Because she isn’t a cop. But that doesn’t mean he wants to date her, or that her texting him in this particular moment has some kind of cosmic significance.
Ignoring the text, he thrusts the phone back into his pocket, apologizes to Sumaira, and asks her what happened to the Harrisons.
“Close range double taps, back of the head.”
Double taps—two bullets, rapid fired to get the job done with maximum efficiency.
“No signs of forced entry, robbery, a struggle,” she continues. “No known enemies.”
“So we’re looking at premeditated, execution-style?”
“Yes.”
“Who found them?”
“Relatives from Connecticut. The victims were due up there Friday for a family party, but they didn’t get off the bus and no one could get ahold of them. Saturday, a cousin came to check on them and found them. No evidence so far of drugs, gangs, organized crime. But the cousin said the daughter had a new boyfriend. Older, and with big bucks. We’re following that lead.”
“It would tie in with the fancy jewelry.”
“Yes, and something else. Here, I’ll show you.”
She opens the door to a tiny bedroom, and he smells a familiar floral perfume wafting with squalor and death.
Sumaira points to a nightstand. A large etched crystal vase rises above the clutter. It’s filled with delicate white blooms. “From a florist, and not cheap. They’re lilies.”
Not just any lilies, Barnes knows.
White ginger mariposa—the national flower of Cuba.
Gypsy takes an unsatisfying sip of coffee and plunks the cup back on the room service tray beside half-eaten toast and grapefruit. Measly American substitutes for café con leche, ripe guava, and thick, butter-slathered Cuban bread.
But New York City does many things better—bagels, pizza, cloaks of anonymity. Here, no one cares who or what she is.
Almost no one.
Stockton Barnes had been assigned to investigate Perry Wayland’s disappearance back in 1987. The tabloids had a field day speculating about the suicidal tycoon until that story was eclipsed by a copycat killer who’d nearly succeeded in finishing off the four females who’d survived the Brooklyn Butcher back in 1968.
Gypsy and Perry left the country to await Judgment Day in Baracoa, one of the most remote places on earth. Nearly three decades later, they were still waiting when Barnes showed up in their tiny island community. A coincidence, he claimed. But her father always told her that coincidences are signs. She’d been so caught up in interpreting that one that she’d overlooked something more significant.
A storm of biblical proportion was barreling toward their island paradise, precisely as foretold in Isaiah 28:2: “A destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing . . .”
Having spent the days leading up to Hurricane Matthew fixated on the detective’s presence, she belatedly herded her followers to her mountainside retreat as opposed to the government-ordered shelters. There was no decision to be made. She was not their dictator, but their leader, their savior.
Feverishly flipping through her Bible as the storm blew in, she’d settled on Kings 19:11. “Go forth, and stand upon the mount.”
If only—
Someone knocks on the suite door.
The housekeeping staff starts at nine, but they wouldn’t ignore the Do Not Disturb sign. Nude, she climbs out of bed, ignoring the plush white robe and slippers. Her feet are cold on the marble floor, but she’ll be back in bed momentarily, and this time, not alone.
Unless . . .
“Who is it?” she calls through the door, thinking of the detective who’d turned up on that remote New England coastal island and a far more remote Cuban one.
“Who do you think?”
“Just making sure.” She flips the security lock, greets her visitor with a passionate kiss, and leads him to the bedroom.
The city that had snoozed well past dawn on New Year’s yesterday has resumed humming with hyperactivity. Amelia shoulders her way off a rush-hour subway wearing last night’s hoodie, jeans, and sneakers under a puffy parka. Unpresentable, yes, but she has no client appointments until this afternoon, and can dash home to shower and change at lunchtime. Right now she’s on a mission so pressing that she skips her morning latte, barely breaking stride to buy mucky coffee-cart brew as she hurries toward her office.