Naked Came The Phoenix

Chapter Eleven

CAROLINE'S EARS WERE RED WITH anger, and the blood pulsed through her temples with such force that she thought her brain might explode, shooting shrapnel out through her eyes. As long as some of it went through Douglas's heart, she didn't much care.

Detective Toscana was standing on the patio by the swimming pool, a glass of something brown in his hand. He waved through the pool fence at her, but she ignored him, stalking past with her head down, eyes firmly on the ground. The image of him, peering through the bars of the fence like a big brown bear in the zoo, stuck in her mind. That's how he'd like to see her mother, no doubt-behind bars, waiting for her daily mammal biscuit!

Out of sight of the detective, she hesitated. Her mother would be in their cabin, and she wasn't in any mood for company, no matter how sympathetic. She didn't think she could stand even the soothingly professional attentions of the spa staff.

What she did want was her cello-a stormy workout with Zeller to exorcise the worst of her fury, then half an hour of Bach. JSB could calm the most aggravated spirit with the beauty of his singing logic.

The fingers of her left hand twitched, aching for the throb of the metal strings, the solid mellow wood of the cello's neck. But the cello was in the cabin with her mother, and she wasn't fit to be near another human being right now. She glanced around, desperate for a refuge, someplace out of sight of everyone.

Wind stirred in the branches of the trees behind the main building, bringing her the sharp, clean scent of pine resin, a faint olfactory echo of her cello. Mind made up, she turned toward one of the paths that led beyond the compound and marched off, into the beckoning green depths of the wood.

"I'd say that lady isn't very happy with her husband, eh, Detective?" Emilio Constanza rocked back and forth on the soles of his spotless white sneakers, tray balanced negligently on one hand. "What do you figure all that was about?" He nodded toward the scene of the recent argument, to which he and the detective-to say nothing of the maintenance man cleaning the pool filter-had been unwitting-but certainly not uninterested-observers.

"You got me." The sun was hot, and the metal bars of the pool fence were warm on Toscana's face; he pulled back and took a deep, meditative sip of the iced tea Emilio had brought him. "Ooh, that's good."

The waiter smiled. "Special recipe. Phoenix sun tea, brewed with orange pekoe, green tea, ginseng, and ginkgo. A dash of papaya enzyme, a drop of kiwi nectar, and Bob's your uncle!"

"You don't say?" Toscana squinted into the depths of his glass, sniffed suspiciously, then shook his head. He nodded toward the lawn where Douglas Blessing still stood, spine stiff with anger. His aide had popped up out of nowhere-that lady reminded him of some kind of mosquito, the way she was always appearing out of nowhere, whining in somebody's ear-but Blessing was ignoring her, fists clenched by his sides as she murmured urgently to him, one hand on his rigid arm. Toscana drained his glass and set it back on Emilio's tray.

"Tell you what, pal. Why don't you go tell the congressman I'd like to see him for a minute? Bring some more a that up to the office, huh, maybe bring the pitcher and two clean glasses?"

"Clean glasses," Constanza said gravely, inclining his dark shock of hair. "I'll make a special note of that, sir."

Karen McElroy was searching through the leaves of the planter full of English ivy that lined the wall of her tiny manicurist's studio, when she saw a pale face rise up behind the glass-brick wall above the ivy. Big eyes bulged in a ghostly face surrounded by something that looked like water weed, and the mouth opened in a soundless fishy gape.

"Ahh!" She jumped back, sending the trolley with the hot-wax burner rocketing across the room, spraying a metallic rain of cuticle nippers, sanding blocks, and callus graters in its wake. The door opened.

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygod." Karen pressed a hand to her ample bosom, as though to keep her heart from leaping out of her chest and going splat in the aloe-citrus lotion bath. "I thought you were a ghost!"

"I'm sorry." Ondine hesitated in the doorway, looking almost as scared as Karen. "I didn't mean to startle you. Are you… could you… well, never mind, I mean, it's not important…"

"No, no! Come in, come in!" Karen clasped Ondine by the wrist, relieved to find her warm. The poor thing looked just like a living skeleton, but the important word was "living," after all. "I was just lookin' for my gargoyle, when I come to catch sight of you through that glass. I just come from the lounge, where they was talkin' 'bout that lady what fell in the lake. I was thinkin' of that, and then I saw you right there, all white-faced and your hair all-" Karen made a vague gesture at her own neat blonde pony-tail, indicating Ondine's floating cloud of hair. "Thought you was drowned, I surely did."

Ondine's look of alarm hadn't noticeably faded as a result of this explanation. "Gargoyle?" she asked.

"Yeah, you know, one a them little stone guys? Sits on top of churches?" She waved upward, indicating some imaginary Gothic edifice, ringed with stone guardians. "One of my clients brought him to me from France. He's from Notre-Dame, like in that hunchback movie," she said proudly. "I keep him up there"-she waved at the edge of the planter-"cuz he looks so cute, hidin' in the leaves. He keeps fallin' in, though. The guy who does the plants don't see him and knocks him off when he does the watering. But that don't matter none, I'll find him later. Can I do somethin' for you?" She smiled, dying to be helpful.

Ondine smiled back, charmed, as guests always were, by Karen's eager kindness and West Virginia drawl. "Well, I don't want to bother you, it's just…" She extended one long, pale hand, showing one of the rosy nails snapped off short. "Do you think you could fix that for me?"

"Bother me? Lawdy, what you think they pay me to do 'round here?" Karen laughed heartily and waved Ondine toward the padded cream-leather chair behind her mirror-topped worktable. "Sit down, honey. I'll take care of that in no time."

She set to work at once, removing the rose-colored polish with businesslike dispatch. Besides the broken nail, two more were split; one of those had a chunk taken out of the side. Karen clicked her tongue over the damage as she took out the brushes, powder, and acrylic liquid.

"Mercy, girl, what you been doing there?"

A faint pink rose under Ondine's skin. She wasn't what you'd call pretty, Karen thought, but she sure Lord did have fine skin. Except for that little bit of discoloration near her eye, not a freckle, not a mole, not a single pore in sight. The blush-if you could call it that-looked just like a white rose blooming, thought Karen, pleased at the poetic thought.

"I caught my hand on a piece of gym equipment," Ondine said. "It got away from me and snapped that nail right off." She waggled the injured finger in illustration.

"Oh, yeah, I see that kinda thing all the time." A quick dip into the liquid, a tiny ball of powder, and a beautiful smooth surface spread over the split nail, sealing the tear and hiding it immediately. " 'Specially on the Pilates thing, but… oh! But you wouldn't have been usin' that."

Karen shook her head, appalled at the memory of what the other staff had told her about that poor, poor man who got strangled in that contraption, the one with the name that reminded her of melted cheese-fondue, that's what Momma called it, but it was just warm Cheez Whiz to Karen. No big shock there; Karen was only surprised accidents like that didn't happen more often.

"Oh, no," Ondine said. "No, of course not."

Eyes focused on her work, Karen couldn't see Ondine's face, but she sounded shook up, Karen thought, and no wonder. She frowned slightly, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration as she wrapped and shaped an artificial tip to repair the torn-off nail.

Momma had been on the phone every half hour since the news of Mrs. de Vries's death came out, wanting Karen to quit and come home. When Mr. Cheez Whiz got choked, Granny McElroy started in to calling, too. She'd finally unplugged the phone, so as she could get a little work done, but Karen would admit that she'd had her doubts about staying. She jumped whenever she heard a sound behind her, and she had a feeling all the time like mice were crawlin' up her spine.

But whatever in heck was going on at the spa, Karen couldn't see how it might have anything to do with her. And this was the best job she'd ever had; it paid like three times as much as doing nail-tech work in the city, and it wasn't but half the work, either. And besides, she'd told Momma and Granny both, the police were right there. That nice detective walked through her building now and then, and waved and smiled. He wouldn't be letting any killers bother her, she was sure.

"There." She admired her repair work; all the nails were once more long, smooth ovals, gently shaped and glossy. "You got such nice hands, honey. Those long fingers, and nice long nail beds, too-see, that's the part of the nail's attached to your hand, that's what you gotta have for elegant nails. Mine are so short." She waggled her free hand briefly in illustration. "Even if I put long tips on, they're never gonna look great, but yours… you know, I could swear I seen hands just like yours someplace lately. Not quite the same, but real close. Now, you want to pick you out a nice color? How 'bout I do you a pedicure, and we can put it on your toes, too?"

Leaving Ondine mesmerized in front of a wall rack filled with dozens of bottles of custom-blended Phoenix nail polish, Karen went into the small alcove where the thronelike pedi-spa, her pride and joy, sat in splendor under a cool blue light, designed to make the client feel as though she were a mermaid sitting at the bottom of the sea, with reef fish nibbling at her toes and the soothing scents of kelp and sea salt all around.

Caroline's long, thin, neatly manicured fingers twitched unconsciously against the leg of her jeans, her left hand fingering the reaches as she played the allegretto of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre in her mind. She was some way beyond the spa buildings now; the sea of leafy green had closed over the slate-tiled roofs like a cleansing flood, as though the place had sunk like Atlantis. Good riddance.

Her pace slowed, and she wandered aimlessly, summoning up bits of her long-neglected repertoire, pleased to find that the music came back effortlessly. She knew it wouldn't be that easy to reach performance level with the actual instrument, but it was both a thrill and a relief to find how much she remembered, how instinctively her fingers flexed and reached for the notes that thrummed in her inner ear.

She left the path, and her feet shuffled through layers of crumbling dead leaves, damp with the residue of summer rain. The light filtering through spruce and beech wood was a soft blue-green, and the susurrus of branches in the wind could have been the sound of distant surf. But these were quiet woods sounds and made no interference with the music in her head.

Dum, da-da-da-da dum, da-da-da-da dum, dum, dum, dum… The music conjured images, as it always did: imps, dancing with unholy glee, tossing things into a magic cauldron, leaping back as the contents erupted in a shower of firework sparks.

Dee, deedle-deedle dee-dee-dee, dee, deedle-deedle dee-dee-dee-She stopped abruptly, as she realized that the high-pitched violin part was not coming from her inner ear but from someone singing it, near at hand.

She swung around, hands half raised in instinctive defense.

"Deedle-deedle, dee-dee-dum!" Phyllis Talmadge finished and bowed, with a smile of fulfilled performance. "I knew you wouldn't forget," she said, straightening up. She was still smiling, though with a look of remoteness in the back of her eyes, as though she was looking at something beyond Caroline.

Caroline was at once startled and flustered by the intrusion. Finding no words to protest, she said rather weakly, "Forget what?"

"What?" Phyllis's wispy gray brow lifted. "Your music, of course. I used to watch you, you know, when you played with the symphony. Even as part of the orchestra, you played with such… such life! And in the solos, you were simply magnificent, my dear." She shook her head, sighing.

"You heard-oh." Caroline was still flustered but undeniably pleased at this echo from her past. "I didn't know you were a music aficionado. Do you play, yourself, or did you just know the violin part from performances?"

The older woman had started to walk, and Caroline fell into step naturally beside her.

"Oh, I play a bit, but I'm not up to your level, by any means." She flipped a dismissive hand.

"Neither am I, anymore," Caroline said, a little wistfully. "Maybe again, but not yet. Not until all this"-she waved a hand in the direction of the spa buildings-"is settled." She cleared her throat suddenly aware that Phyllis had herself been attacked, or evidently attacked.

It occurred to her that they were quite alone here. Caroline brushed a hand casually across her thigh, reassured by the weight of her cottage key with its heavy ornamental fob. It wasn't much of a weapon, but she was younger, taller, and stronger than the elderly psychic.

"Uh, are you sure you're feeling all right, Ms. Talmadge? Should you be out walking?"

Now that Caroline took time to notice, she saw that the older lady was in fact looking very pale and insubstantial, her skin nearly the same gray as her hair. Phyllis paid no attention to the question, though, instead focusing her eyes intently on Caroline. "It's very important that you play," she said. "That's what I came to tell you. Don't let anything that happens here stop you."

"What do you mean?" Caroline's initial startlement at the psychic's sudden appearance was rapidly giving way to distinct uneasiness. "What's going to happen?"

The psychic tilted her head to one side, almost as though she were listening to someone-or something.

"You don't need to know that," she said.

"What? What do you mean, I don't need to know that?"

"Things will happen," Phyllis said mysteriously, "but you'll be all right. Some people close to you"-she turned her head, wearing the listening expression again-"people very close to you," she amended, "may suffer harm. But you'll be all right."

"Who? Who do you mean? My mother? Is something going to happen to my mother?"

This is ridiculous! Caroline thought. Absurd! If asked half an hour previously, Caroline would have expressed complete skepticism of the concept of psychic ability and profound disinterest in anything said by anyone professing to have any. Now, the first inkling of some personal relevance, and she was agog as any caller to the Psychic Hot Line.

On the other hand-a ripple of unease snaked down her spine-she knew she hadn't been humming aloud, and yet Phyllis Talmadge had come in with the violin part, precisely in the right spot. Danse Macabre, indeed!

"That," said Phyllis enigmatically, "is up to you. But you must play your cello. It's very important."

Caroline closed her eyes in momentary frustration and drew in a deep breath through her nose. "Now, look," she began, in a determined tone of voice, opening her eyes, "you can't-"

But she stood alone in the middle of a small grove of oaks. The glossy leaves rattled faintly in the breeze, and an acorn tumbled down through the branches, rolling to a stop at her feet. Nothing else stirred.

"Ms. Talmadge?" she said, and her voice sounded weak to her ears. She cleared her throat and called again, louder. "Ms. Talmadge!"

No one answered. The wood stirred gently around her, but the solitude was no longer soothing. It was only as she turned to make her way back toward the spa that she recalled. Hadn't they said that Phyllis Talmadge had been taken to the hospital following her attack? Had she been released, or had Caroline just met a…

"Nonsense!" she said aloud and, turning on her heel, strode determinedly back toward the spa.

Karen turned on the taps of the pedi-spa and dumped a handful of sea lavender-scented bath salts into the swirling water. Leaving the basin of the footbath to fill, she went back toward the door to the studio, pausing on her way to pick up a cuticle nipper that had fallen to the floor when she'd been startled earlier.

"Forget it!"

She was startled again, this time by Ondine's voice, pitched low but furious. A male voice answered, also low, and grimly commanding.

"Oh, no, baby. I'm not about to forget it. And neither are you. Where is it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about!" There was a scuffling sound, then a sharp intake of breath from the girl. "Let go! Howard had it. Now he's dead, and it's gone. Somebody took it."

"Yeah? Well, if 'it' is what I think you mean, then you're the most likely person to have taken it! Ow!"

Holy shit, Karen mouthed silently to herself. What was "it"? Drugs, maybe. Mr. Cheez Whiz sure looked like he was taking something. And if he had enough for somebody to kill him for, he was maybe a pusher, not just a user. If it was Ondine, a coke habit would sure explain how she kept so skinny!

She craned her neck to one side, trying to see the man who was talking to Ondine, but couldn't see anything save a few wisps of the model's hair against the curtain of ivy, as she tossed her head, hissing at her companion.

"Let go! I'll call for help!"

"No, I don't think so. You can't afford to do that." The man's voice was low and self-assured but not loud enough for Karen to say for sure who it was.

Call for help. Karen licked her lips and glanced into the shadowy blue alcove. There was a phone there, back around the corner where she kept the canisters of sea salt scrub and peppermint lotion. Wiping her sweaty hands on her pale-blue uniform, she took one stealthy step toward the phone. One more, careful not to let her gum-soled shoes squeak on the white marble floor.

She could call the main office. If the man heard her talking, he'd be scared off, but that was okay. Ondine could tell the detective who he was, and then…

Her hand closed over the receiver. She held it to her ear for a long, heart-stopping moment of silence before she remembered that she'd unplugged the phone earlier. Fingers trembling, she fumbled for the phone jack, her hands sweaty with fear. The voices had gone silent for a moment. Was the man gone?

Someone else spoke, a different voice, one she knew, but-The dial tone sounded loud in her ear. It was a cordless phone; she huddled as far as she could get into the cupboard alcove, close to the wall, back turned to the studio. She punched the three-digit number for the office and pressed the receiver tightly against her head to muffle the sound of ringing. Ring… Ring… Ri-

A white light bloomed inside her eyes, and the receiver fell from her hand, bouncing and clattering off the slick white marble. There was a sound of dragging, a splash, and Karen McElroy's blonde ponytail fanned out waving gently in the blue-green water of the footbath like some exotic seaweed.

"Hello?" said a tinny voice from the fallen receiver. " Phoenix Spa. Hello?"

A finger poked the Off button on the phone, and it fell silent. Then the switch for the pedi-spa. The whirling water spun slowly to a stop, a few final bubbles of lavender scent bursting to the surface. Tiny tendrils of crimson unfurled in the silent water, but the surface lay still and blue over the manicurist's submerged face.

On the white tile by her hand, a small gray stone gargoyle grinned through jagged teeth.

The congressman's aide was a mosquito, Toscana decided, and just as hard to swat. She kept insisting that she had to be with the congressman, she must sit in on the interview, after all, this wasn't really official, was it? And the congressman would need advice, she'd call his attorney…

Toscana thought he maybe should have asked Constanza to bring a can of Raid, instead of the pitcher of Phoenix sun tea, but he succeeded at last in keeping the pesky aide out and the congressman in.

"Sit, sit," he said, waving Blessing to a seat. He picked up his glass and gestured invitingly at the sweating pitcher. "A little tea?"

Blessing waved away the tea impatiently. From his earlier behavior, Toscana expected him to start cutting up rough again, but no, not a bit of it. To his surprise, the congressman sat down, leaned across the table, and said, "Detective, you have to help me! Please!"

Sheer astonishment prevented Toscana from saying that no, the congressman hadn't quite grasped the situation here-he was the one supposed to be helping. Instead, he set down his glass of tea, carefully, to avoid splashing any on the polished granite, and sat down at the table across from Blessing.

"Help you, huh? What with?"

"With my… with my wife." Blessing was looking pretty strange. Red one minute, white the next. His hands were clenched into fists on the desk, and the knuckles stood out like the joint on a drumstick.

"Your wife," Toscana repeated carefully. "Well, see, Congressman, it's like I told you. Nobody can leave here until-"

"That's not what I mean!" Blessing's features contorted, his teeth gritted, his eyes squeezed into slits. He looked like a politician who'd taken the lid off his garbage can and found a National Enquirer reporter nestling inside.

Toscana stole a look at the pitcher; it looked like a big chunk of glass, heavy enough to conk somebody. Was it, though, or was it some of that plastic stuff that just looked like glass?

Before he could put a casual hand on the pitcher to check, Blessing got control of himself. He breathed like a marathon runner coming down the stretch, and his face went from red back to white, but at least he'd quit shaking.

"I'm sorry," he said, and his voice was so quiet Toscana had to strain to hear it. "I didn't think it would be this hard."

"Don't you worry," Toscana assured him, with one eye on the pitcher, just in case. "Police officers hear all sortsa stuff."

A ghost of a smile crossed Blessing's face. "You aren't going to tell me it goes in one ear and out the other, are you, Detective?"

Toscana contented himself with a shrug and a noncommittal murmur, but it seemed to help. Blessing sat slumped in his chair, exhausted. Toscana-who really had heard almost everything imaginable in his career-knew when to talk and when to listen. This was a time to keep still and wait. At last, Blessing nodded, like a man making up his mind.

"I'm being blackmailed," he said.

At this point, the news came as no big hairy surprise to Toscana, but he felt his heart jolt in his chest anyway. A break! Goddamn, was he finally going to get a solid break in this case? "Yes, sir?" he said politely. "What about?"

Blessing's long, muscular throat moved as he swallowed. "I was adopted as an infant," he said. "I had no idea who my birth parents were and no reason to think it mattered. But then…" His jaw clenched involuntarily, and he had to force it open to get the words out. "I met Claudia de Vries at a fund-raiser last year. She seemed interested in the issues…"

Toscana snorted, by reflex, and Blessing's head shot up. "Yeah," the detective said, waving a hand in dismissal. "Issues. Yeah, that too, I'm sure. So?"

Blessing's jaw was bulging again. "So," Blessing got out, "I met with her… now and then. She made contributions to my campaign fund, large contributions." Toscana made a casual note on his pad: check the congressman's other contributors, just in case.

"Illegally large?"

"Certainly not!" Red, white, red again. The man could get a job as the flashing light on a caboose, Toscana thought. He went back to the noncommittal grunt.

"I wouldn't countenance anything of the kind," Blessing said. "And that's what… well, eventually, she started conveying… messages. From other contributors. About things they'd like to have happen, votes they'd like to go a certain way."

"So Claudia was fronting, huh? Who for?" Toscana was more than interested and didn't bother trying to hide it. Blessing had made up his mind to talk, and he was going to do it, if he had to fight himself every inch of the way.

"I don't know. I have guesses, but I don't know." Blessing gave a grimace that might have started life as an ironic smile. "The Mob? Is there still such a thing?"

"Oh, you better believe it," Toscana assured him. "Though a few of 'em have gone uptown." Hoo-boy. Well, that would explain a few things, wouldn't it? He drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. If you had a lot of dirty money-a chronic problem for anybody connected-a spa had certain advantages as a laundry. A little more class than a garbage company, a great front for funneling funds to political targets, and maybe, just maybe, cover for a few other illegal activities. You could hide a heck of a lot of things under a layer of mud and an herbal wrap.

Blessing cleared his throat, and Toscana came out of a rose-tinted dream of men in tailored suits and wing tips being herded en masse into the paddy wagon.

"So," Blessing said, with renewed determination, "when I made it clear that I couldn't be bought, Claudia smiled and went away-and then she came back, with the record of my birth mother's name. Hilda Finch."

"Hil-" The pitcher clattered to the floor, in a flood of ice cubes and sun tea. So it was plastic, Toscana thought dimly. "But Hilda Finch is…"

"My wife's mother. Yes, exactly." The deep lines still furrowed Blessing's brow, but he seemed relieved to have got it out.

"Oh, Jeez."

Blessing's mouth actually twitched slightly at that.

"Very eloquent, Detective. So you do see, I hope, why I need your help. I have to divorce my wife-or rather, make my wife divorce me."

Toscana was recovering from the shock. He flicked an ice cube off the table with one finger, eyeing the congressman.

"Yeah? I didn't hear everything you guys said outside, but I heard enough. Sounded like you were doing everything you could to make sure she stayed married to you."

"If it sounded like that," Blessing said shortly, "then I did a good job."

"What do you mean?"

The congressman exhaled, shoulders slumping a little. "Claudia may be dead, but whoever she was fronting for isn't." He straightened up, with a sharp glance at Toscana. "Bear that in mind, Detective. I knew there was someone behind her, and that someone certainly knew the secret of my birth-and my marriage. Killing her wouldn't have helped me. It's put me in a much more difficult position," he added, with a nod toward the door.

The position was simple. When he had discovered the truth about his marriage, he had been overcome with horror. Unwilling to believe it at first, he had finally accepted Claudia's claim. Records could be forged, but there was something else.

"Look." He stretched his hands out on the desk. They were neatly manicured, the nails buffed and glossy, long-fingered and graceful. "When you get a chance, look at Caroline's hands. They aren't identical, but the shape of the fingers is damn close. And then there's this." He held up his hands, palms toward the detective. The fingers of the right hand lay together; on the left hand, the little finger stuck out at an angle, with a space between it and the ring finger. "Caroline has it, too. It isn't obvious enough that anyone would notice unless he or she was looking." He folded his hands abruptly. "There are half a dozen other tiny things; that's just the most obvious."

All doubt erased, he had been confronted with a wracking dilemma. "I love her," he said softly, looking down into his lap, where his fists lay on his thighs. "I couldn't bear to tell her, to have her look at me with disgust, to recoil from me. But likewise, I couldn't…" He shrugged, helpless. "I couldn't…"

"Well, I can kinda see how that would be," Toscana said slowly. "But what you said? About being a good actor?"

Blessing nodded and took a deep breath. "Whoever was behind Claudia, he-they-wants me to stay married. It helps the image"-he made a slight, instinctive grimace-"and more important, it keeps me under control. So I couldn't divorce her, they wouldn't have it. The only thing I could do was to try my best to make Caroline divorce me." He swallowed. "She might hate me, but at least she could remember having loved me. If I… if she knew the truth, she couldn't ever think of me without wanting to throw up."

He sighed. "So I did my best. I went off to the cabin with Miranda to make it look like we were having an affair"-he nodded toward the door, where his aide presumably still buzzed-"and gave that masterful performance outside." He looked up with a faint smile. "It might have sounded to you-and to Miranda-like I wouldn't let her divorce me. But Caroline's a proud woman. Being told, and told in brutal, shaming terms like that, nothing would drive her away faster."

Toscana pursed his lips, nodding. "What about those photos? Method acting, huh?" He quirked a brow at Blessing.

"Faked," the congressman said shortly. "You know there's nothing easier than to doctor photos."

"Yeah," Toscana agreed amiably. "Look at the National Enquirer. Elvis don't even look dead half the time. So, Ms. Mosquito-I mean, your aide, there-you think she's in with the people who were controlling Claudia?"

Blessing grimaced. "I don't know for sure. It might be just devotion to duty, but I think she's spying on me for them. She never leaves my side. It was a heaven-sent chance when you called me in and wouldn't let her come with me."

He leaned forward, dark eyes intense. "So now you know. And now you see, Detective? I have to have your help, to make my wife, to make my sister"-he paled slightly at the word-"divorce me."