“Back at Basilisk I sneaked a bottle of Zom-Be-Fresh perfume that Brondon Morris was showing off around the club, but when I tried the stuff, it gave me a horrible allergic reaction—I had hives all over my skin, and they itched like crazy. I was miserable, and I told Brondon he shouldn’t leave dangerous chemicals lying around.”
“Funny, he just told me about that last night. If you stole the sample, he didn’t exactly leave it lying around. And if you didn’t follow the directions—”
She grimaced. “I know it’s not designed for or marketed to humans, but JLPN is peddling that stuff all over town. I sure was sorry I tried it!”
I let out a wistful sigh. “Your skin looked just fine during our night together.”
Sheyenne laughed. “It was dark, and the rash was mostly gone by then.” We both paused for an awkward moment, reminiscing.
She turned her attention back to the chem analysis. “Brondon was panicked about a PR debacle, slobbered apologies all over me, but I sent the sample off to a lab anyway.” She looked up at me, her eyes bright. “I had connections at the university through the med school.”
I looked down at the sheet again. “These numbers make about as much sense to me as rap music. What does it mean?”
“Nothing.” She frowned. “The perfume is perfectly harmless. No hazardous substances whatsoever.” She drifted behind her desk, and with a poltergeist harrumph scattered some of the other envelopes, letters, and bills that she had placed there.
I wanted to wrap my arms around her waist, let her rest her head on my shoulder and stay that way for about an hour . . . which is tough to do when you can’t touch the other person. “At least now you know there was nothing to worry about.”
“I would have pestered the lab about it, but I was too busy with other things . . . like dying in a hospital bed.” She hung her head.
“Sorry,” I said, not really sure what I was apologizing for, but just generally sorry about everything that had happened. Even though I can see her ghost every day, the pain is still fresh, a sick burning in the center of my chest like the indigestion after eating three chili dogs and two pepperoni pizzas.
“Thanks, Beaux,” she said. “That was a rough time.”
“An understatement.”
After we met at Basilisk, we spent more and more time in each other’s company, growing close, and then we had our one night together. It should have been a lot more than that.
We’d gone back to her apartment. She and I each had that unspoken hunger, the magnetism that almost never happens, where two people click with a spark that both can see but nobody else notices. Pulse increasing, throat dry, accidental touches and then not-so-accidental ones, and a rising heat where you both know that this might not be the smartest thing in the world to do, but it’s best not to ask too many questions.
I’ve had one-nighters before. In my line of work, you bump into a lot of desperate people, and more than half the time they’re women. Sometimes they’re pulling strings to encourage me to work harder on their cases; other times the ladies want to show their gratitude in some way besides just paying the bills.
With Sheyenne, though, it wasn’t like that. Usually, when I hooked up with someone, client or otherwise, I’d have a queasy feeling afterward. Not guilt, really, just a general disappointment in myself. What I had with Sheyenne did feel good afterward—good enough that I didn’t want to ruin it. Something that could have been a real relationship.
And so I did the instinctive thing, the male thing . . . the wrong thing.
I knew that Sheyenne’s parents were killed when she was just a teenager by a man in a business suit talking on a car phone, having an argument about a Chinese to-go order. She’d had to be strong, raise herself. She got a succession of jobs, always learning, never giving up on the chance to make something of herself. She seemed to take her independence as a badge of honor.
When I asked whether there was anyone who could have helped her out, she had said, “Problem is, when somebody helps you, they think you owe them. I wanted to avoid that.”
So I didn’t want to scare her off by being clingy and obsessive, didn’t want her to think I had fallen head over heels for her, because surely that would spook her. So I retreated and kept myself busy, trying not to think of her too much. I stayed away for four days.
How could I not realize that she must have assumed I’d abandoned her, brushed her off—“Slam bam, thank ya, ma’am. Don’t worry about breakfast in the morning.”—when of course I thought about her every moment for four days?
When I thought I had waited long enough, I called her, but I got the unexpected message that her phone had been disconnected. Bad sign. I stopped by Basilisk, and Fletcher Knowles said that Sheyenne hadn’t shown up for work in two days. Ivory insisted she hadn’t seen the girl, suggested that she must have run off somewhere. The big vamp singer didn’t seem terribly disappointed.
Finally, I went back to Sheyenne’s apartment. Though no one answered my knocks, neither the polite one nor the louder one, I thought I heard a groan from inside. Using an old private investigator’s trick, I pulled out the lock-picking tools I always keep in my pocket. I fiddled with the lock, but she had installed heavy dead bolts for additional security (a good idea, considering the part of town), and the reinforcement was too much for me. So I tried another PI trick and threw myself against the door, attempting to break it down. I nearly dislocated my shoulder, but I couldn’t smash the dead bolts.
By now, I was positive I’d heard another groan, a weak cry for help inside the apartment. So I turned to my last and best trick and went down to the manager’s apartment, slipped him a twenty, and talked him into letting me inside. He didn’t seem convinced about any emergency, wasn’t happy with Sheyenne at all. Apparently, she’d been late on her last month’s rent.
I made him get his priorities straight.
After he used his key to unlock her door, I pushed my way inside to see Sheyenne lying on the floor, already on death’s doorstep. Her skin was pale and grayish, her eyes half-open, her breathing heavy and wet, her pulse thready. She had vomited several times. I could see she had tried to crawl across the floor, but couldn’t get anywhere.
“Call an ambulance!” I yelled to the manager, who seemed more worried about the mess on the floor than about the dying young woman. I picked Sheyenne up and carried her down the stairs and out the front door to the sidewalk. The paramedics arrived a few minutes later and rushed her to the hospital.
She’d been poisoned—a high concentration of the alkaloid toxin distilled from the “death cap” toadstool, Amanita phalloides. Even if the poisoning had been caught early, the mortality rate was greater than 50 percent . . . and no one had found Sheyenne in time, because I was stupid and stayed away to give her space. By now the toxin had done its work: severe liver damage, renal failure . . . nothing the doctors could do to save her.