“No, I just resemble a human on the outside.” He frowned. “Tell me about Mozart. He was the one who hurt you?”
“I’d never actually met him in person until he kidnapped me. The communications with him are all done through screens and VPNs. I was getting close, so fucking close. But he found me out because . . .” She took a deep breath. “I think someone in my own department tipped him off about me. Another officer, who was undercover like me, was killed—and right before he was, he tried to warn me. That was the night I met you.”
“Jesus.”
“Which was why I can’t go back to Caldwell. I don’t know who to trust—but I can’t let Mozart win. I just can’t.” She closed her eyes. “Even if it’s the last thing I do, I just want—”
“To kill him?”
Rio shook her head. “I want to jail that bastard. He’s everything I’ve ever worked against. He’s murdered so many people, and I just . . . I’ve spent eighteen months closing in on him. I want him to go to prison for the rest of his natural life.” She lifted her palms. “After that, I can retire. I’m finished in this racket anyway. My cover blown, my life a mess.”
They stayed there long enough for a shooting star to pierce the blue velvet of the night sky . . . and travel all the way across the visible plane of the universe.
“You know, you’re still as easy to talk to as ever.” She smiled a little. “I mean, this is remarkably unweird for being totally bizarre.”
“That’s because it has always been, and still is . . . me.”
Rio looked down at her hands and remembered running them over his body. And the way it had been to make love with him. And the connection she felt—and still did.
“You know,” he said, “I could help you.”
She lifted her head up. “How?”
“I can help you get to Mozart.”
“But . . . how?”
Luke tapped the side of his head. “We have tricks, remember. If you want to find Mozart, I can help you.”
“But why . . . why would you do that? If the drug deal supports the . . . the prison . . . if that money is needed to feed and clothe and—”
“You don’t have to worry about all that. You just have to ask yourself if you want to get Mozart bad enough . . . to work with a wolvenvampire cross to get the job done.”
Rio shifted her eyes to him—and focused on his face. All of the features were achingly familiar, exactly the same as they had always been.
“We’re survivors, remember,” he said in a low voice. “We stay in the present because it’s all we have. But survivors also settle scores. In the right way.”
Captain Stanley Carmichael’s home was a Cape Cod, set way back on a lot that could have handled a much bigger structure. As José eased to a halt on the back left-hand corner of the property behind the house, he put his unmarked in park.
Stan had pulled up to his garage, turned off his car, and gotten out. He was now walking down the long asphalt driveway to the mailbox—like he’d been so distracted as he’d driven in that he’d forgotten to grab the day’s allotment of bills, flyers, and bullshit.
José glanced around to make sure there was nobody nosy checking out where he was. That was a nope. The other houses were separated by equally large parcels of land, the neighborhood being more farm country than suburban, regardless of its proximity to the Northway.
As Stan started the return trek up the drive, José thought back to when the guy had moved all the way out to the edge of the city limits. It had seemed like an impulse move after the divorce, and not a bright choice for a guy who had never been a cook or a cleaner, and was no doubt going to settle down with someone else right afterward.
Or at least try to.
Stan had cleared up the mystery about a year later. The place was apparently the spitting image of the house he’d grown up in. So that was the drill. Emotions and real estate were frequently linked together.
As José watched the man walk along, he had a realization that he was waiting for his mind to change its conclusions: Surely there was another explanation to all this, one that reconciled the man he knew with the kind of monster who could murder an innocent civil servant for the purpose of one of two things.
It was either extortion because Stan knew that Stephan Fontaine was a fucking drug dealer crook . . . or because Stan was on the take and delivering on a deal he’d brokered.
Either way, Stan had been the one to compromise Rio’s cover.
And perhaps she’d had something to do with that murder scene under that dealer Mickie’s apartment. Fortunately, it appeared she was still alive, so she could give her own testimony about that.
As soon as it was safe for her to do so.
Stan stopped next to his car and looked at the sky. Like he was searching for some grace or something.
Or for possibilities of where the wallet and the cell phone might have gone.
“Time to go to work,” José muttered to himself as he turned the lights of the unmarked on and put the car back in gear.
Hitting the gas, he went around Stan’s acreage, and then he pulled into the driveway. As his lights swung around, they picked his old friend out of the darkness, spotlighting him. The guy looked old, with his graying hair, and exhausted, with his wrinkled suit, as he lifted his arm to shield his eyes from the glare.
José put the unmarked in park and opened his door. As he got out from behind the wheel, he said, “Hey, Stan.”
There was a pause. And then the chief of the Caldwell Police Department slowly lowered that arm of his.
“José. What are you doing here?”
“I think you know, Stan. I think you know exactly why I’m here.”
Downtown Caldie was hopping, people all over the streets, going in and out of bars and clubs, eating and drinking indoors because it was too cold to be in the open air. As Rio stared out of the Monte Carlo’s smudged-up window, she still wasn’t sure this wasn’t all a dream. And yet it seemed so real.
Down to Luke’s cologne. Or . . . scent.
“Where are we going?”