“Well, duh, sweetheart.”
She swung an arm through the air, heard his sputtered oomph, and smiled haughtily. Even if it was just a game. “Dammit, why did you let me waste my time?”
“I wanted you to try to do it.”
“Bastard,” she muttered without much conviction, pulling the box of labels out and slamming the lid.
“Was it a waste, Max?” His voice followed her as she mounted the curb and turned the corner back to the salon.
No, it wasn’t. But she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting it.
“It wasn’t a waste because you learned that you can do it.”
“Blah, blah, blah.” But again, as usual, Cameron was irritatingly right. She knew Tiffany hadn’t been stuffed in that car.
“And you liked playing with your gift.”
She rolled her eyes in answer. Best to say nothing at all, then flat out agree with him. It always went to his head. But yeah, it had been kind cool and less frightening this time.
“You were disappointed you didn’t feel her, weren’t you?”
She’d known almost immediately that Tiffany hadn’t been in the trunk of Miles Lamont’s car. She had faith in her own psychic abilities.
Scary.
“And you know what that means?”
“Will you quit with the twenty-irritating-questions act.”
“Come on, baby, what does it mean? Pretend we’re in bed, and we’re talking dirty.”
She puffed out an exaggerated sigh. “Your mind is in the gutter, but all right.” She closed her eyes and said the words as if reciting a line from a parapsychology text. “It means I can only pick up things through Tiffany, places she’d been. Or Wendy Gregory. Depends on which murder happened this week.” Her lids snapped open. “Oh jeez, Cameron, you don’t think this vision stuff is going to go on indefinitely, do you?”
“Wherever there’s injustice, my love,” he quipped.
Disgusted, she shook her head. “There’s a connection. I know it.”
“The connection is you.”
“Dammit, something else, something they both have in common. But what?” she murmured as she headed up the front walk.
Balancing the box on her hip, she twisted the door knob and sidled in with her burden, plunking the labels down on the counter next to the printer.
She had one more errand. Taking Tiffany’s boxes of personal items out to her car. After her little revelation, Ariel had shrugged and told Max to do whatever she wanted. The woman had even drawn a little map to Nadine’s. How helpful. Max stacked the three boxes one on top of the other and carried them out.
When she got back, the phone rang several times, but she managed to check the number of records in the database. Over eight hundred. But they couldn’t all be current clients. How many mailers did they do, anyway?
She entered a few keystrokes. Ariel had already run the address file on Saturday and all Max had to do was start the label feed, for which she did not need Pippa’s help. Presto, bingo, the printer ran. There was another box on the floor filled with stacks of blue flyers. Max would have to fold them, address them, staple them, and run them through the postage meter. Between phone calls, charge slips, snide comments, and temperamental stylists.
If Pippa Louise Lamont expected everything to be done before day’s end, she was crazy.
Max folded blue pages, smacked them with the stapler, then slapped on the labels as they rolled off the printer. The Three Stooges ignored Max, foregoing even their usual snipes in case she got it into her head to ask them to help. Hell, she was making great headway without them.
She yawned. Then, the printer screeched, hiccupped twice, spat out a couple of crumbled labels, and died.
“Damn,” she muttered, stuck her tongue between her teeth, and popped open the top.
Her heart skipped a beat. Maybe two. And then it pounded, drumming in her ears, like a head rush when she stood too fast.
She believed in ghosts.
She believed in divine intervention.
She didn’t believe in coincidence.
The printer had stopped on the name of her nemesis, the man that haunted her nightmares.
Bud Traynor.
Chapter Sixteen
Holy shit.
Max punched the name into the computer, and a screen error popped up. No Existing File.
But the damn label print program had him in there, and it was run off the client database. So what the hell—
Ariel had run it on Saturday. Before Tiffany died. Before Miles had gone into the database and changed all the client-stylist designations.
Before someone had deleted Bud Traynor’s file.
It was a prophecy. It was a divine revelation. It was her vindication.
Bud Traynor was evil incarnate, and he’d been here in this very shop. Max knew it. The fine hairs stood up on the back of her neck. She knew in her gut he’d been one of Tiffany’s clients, more than a client. And he’d had a hand in her death.