Low Blow: A Kira Brightwell Novel

Chapter 5

5

Kira tugged her favorite Nine Inch Nails T-shirt straight over the waistline of her jeans as she approached the living room. Hathor padded along behind her with her tail held high. She liked to curl up on top of the toilet when Kira showered for reasons only another cat might understand. The ritual also involved a meowing session that sounded like scolding when Kira got out to dry herself. Kira had learned to accept it as a common occurrence in the past several weeks since Hathor had started living with her.

She worked her arms through the sleeves of a hoodie and pulled her long wet hair out from under the collar to get it off the back of her neck. Trevor was already standing and looking at his watch as she entered. He gave her a strange look.

“What?” Kira frowned at him. “I made it under ten minutes, didn’t I?”

“No, it’s... well, your hair.”

Kira looked over her shoulder to give her damp locks a cursory look. She hadn’t had time to do more than run her fingers through them, but they looked fine to her. She looked back at Trevor feeling confused.

“It’s not in a ponytail,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“I don’t tie it back when it’s soaking wet. Problem?”

“I don’t know. You just seem... naked somehow without your ponytail. I know I saw it like that at Traversa’s, but that was when you were dressed up like Laura Stirling.” Trevor gave a helpless shrug.

Kira looked at him in askance. “I was down here only ten minutes ago in shorts and a bra top. This,” she gestured to her hoodie and jeans, “is not what most people would call naked.”

Trevor’s face seemed to flush slightly. “Forget it.”

Kira walked past him to the kitchen. She was relieved Rob had decided to keep his mouth shut. Then again, maybe that was because he was glued to his laptop screen again, his fingers tapping against the keyboard at a blistering pace. She opened the fridge and called back to Trevor over her shoulder.

“You want pizza? There’s some left over from last night. I’m starving.”

“Ah, no, thanks. I ate before I came here.”

Kira couldn’t blame him. Between Rob never leaving the apartment, and her own aversion to grocery shopping, the contents of their kitchen were often sketchy at best. She put a couple of slices of pepperoni pizza on a plate and grabbed a bottle of Gatorade. She brought them back to the living room and sat down on the couch, eating the pizza cold. She followed her first few bites with a long swallow of Gatorade. Her initial hunger made it easier to ignore Trevor’s unblinking stare.

“Well?” he finally asked after she had worked her way through half of the first slice. She noticed Rob’s tapping fingers had also gone silent. Both men gave her expectant looks.

Kira swallowed. “Right. Ah, there’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, ever since we wrapped up the Traversa case.” Her gaze traveled from Rob to Trevor. “It has to do with a piece of evidence I found.”

“You want to tell him?” Rob shot her a meaningful look.

Kira shrugged. “You really think we can keep him out of it? He’s over here all the time. Besides, I think I’m ready to do something about it.”

“What are you talking about?” Trevor demanded. He looked from Kira to Rob and back again. “What evidence?”

“After Traversa finished torturing me and left for that big party he was hosting, I escaped,” Kira said. She did her best to block out the surge of painful memories that involved a madman and a Taser.

“Yeah, I know that.” Trevor’s voice was impatient.

Kira gave him a pointed look and pressed on. “While Traversa was torturing me, he admitted he had been performing his own covert investigation on the Procurer. Even though he had been one of the Procurer’s clients, he knew nothing about his identity. That didn’t sit well with him. Anyway, Traversa said he had found something.”

Trevor leaned forward. “Did he tell you what it was?”

Kira shook her head. “No, but after I escaped, I went looking.”

“Meanwhile, I had been taken hostage by Traversa’s thugs,” Trevor said. He gave a wry smile. “And here I thought you had come rushing to my rescue.”

Kira gave him a flat look. “I did rush to your rescue. You were too passed out to notice. As I was saying... I almost ran into someone ransacking Traversa’s safe. I hid before they could see me. The intruder took something out and ran it through the shredder before setting it on fire. It looked like they left everything else behind—including my phone and the brooch I had been hired to find.”

“You think it was the Procurer,” Trevor said.

Kira nodded. “We know he was there. Traversa had already gone downstairs, and I had dealt with Laura Stirling.”

“So what was this thing he wanted to destroy so badly?”

Rob uttered a sigh and reluctantly pulled out a thick piece of paper from a manilla file folder sitting on the dining-room table. He passed it to Kira, who handed it to Trevor in turn. The details of the image reconstructed from the charred and shredded remains were already etched in Kira’s memory.

“A missing person poster?” Trevor frowned as he inspected Rob’s handiwork. “This girl looks familiar. Where have I seen her before?” The sixteen-year-old girl in the photo stared back with brown, doe-like eyes, and long blond hair cascading over her shoulders.

“You probably haven’t,” Kira said in a low voice. “She went missing back in the eighties in Nevada.”

Trevor shook his head. “But I know I’ve seen her somewhere...”

“That’s because she’s practically a dead ringer for Clarissa Hunt,” Rob said. He rotated his laptop to show Trevor a newspaper photo.

Trevor got up to take a closer look. “You mean that girl who was abducted with you?” He gave Kira a questioning look.

Kira took a steadying breath. “She was the only one of us who hadn’t been taken for a specific client. I believe the Procurer took her for his own entertainment.” She pushed away the memory of Clarissa’s tortured screams as she spoke.

“But she couldn’t be the same girl as this Nadine Parker person from the poster,” Trevor said. “Clarissa’s too young. Are they related maybe?”

“If they are, I couldn’t find a record of it,” Rob said. “Granted, it was tough to find anything at all, considering when Nadine went missing. No Internet, no electronic files... All we know is that she was a student in the area where she went missing, and that she was never found. Several other girls around the same age also disappeared around that area during the same year, but the others were all runaways from out of town.”

“So what are you thinking?” Trevor asked Kira.

Kira put her plate aside and got up to start pacing. “It’s too much of a coincidence that the two girls look so much alike. And why did the Procurer go to so much trouble to destroy the poster? There must be a connection. Either the two girls are related somehow or...” She stopped.

Trevor looked up at her. “Or what?”

“Well, what if Nadine Parker is one of the Procurer’s first victims? Maybe even his very first? We have no idea how old he is, or where he came from. If he took Nadine for himself, it would have had to be personal—nothing like this abductor-for-hire game he’s been playing at.”

Trevor shrugged. “What would any of that have to do with Clarissa?”

“We know Clarissa was different,” Kira said. “What if the Procurer took her because she reminded him of Nadine?”

“You mean for sentimental reasons?”

Kira shivered at Trevor’s choice of words. As Kira knew firsthand—the only thing she knew about the Procurer—was that he enjoyed whistling ‘Sentimental Journey’.

“It’s not impossible, or even unlikely,” Rob said, reading Kira’s discomfort. “It’s how lots of violent criminals choose their victims—transference.”

“So why don’t we just go talk to Clarissa then?” Trevor asked. “She could tell us whether she’s related to this Nadine person, or whether the Procurer ever mentioned her.”

Rob rolled his eyes. “She’s dead, remember? Killed herself before the police could get a statement out of her.”

“Or at least that’s what someone wants us to think,” Kira muttered. “Clarissa was the only person who might have actually seen the Procurer, and then she ends up with her wrists slashed.”

“Right,” Trevor said, looking chagrined. “I forgot. Sorry.” He perked up in his seat. “But at least her parents would know if she were related to Nadine, right?”

“Yes, I’d already thought of that,” Kira said. “But I wasn’t exactly eager to drop in on them to ask questions about their dead daughter, based on nothing more than a hunch. But now...”

Rob shot her a piercing look. “What’s changed?”

Kira bit her lip for a moment, suppressing a wave of guilt. “Well, I was at the gym with Nick—”

“Ah, yes,” Trevor said with a look of distaste. “And how is your precious police detective?”

“Still trapped in the friend zone, as far as I can tell,” Rob muttered.

Kira flushed, but ignored them both. “I had an idea that maybe if the Procurer had been using Clarissa as a substitute for Nadine, maybe I could find something in the crime scene photos to support that theory—something the police would have missed. After all, they have no reason to link Clarissa to Nadine at this point.”

“You mean, you didn’t show Nick the poster?” Trevor gaped at her. “And he just let you look at the photos without an explanation?”

“I haven’t shown Nick the poster yet,” Kira said, flushing once more. “And he knows me well enough not to pester me with questions. I’m going to tell him everything as soon as I’m ready.”

“You mean as soon as you’ve figured everything out for yourself,” Trevor said with a knowing smirk. “Can’t say I blame you for not wanting the police to butt in.” He seemed immensely pleased to learn Nick was out of the loop.

“And?” Rob asked. He wasn’t about to be sidetracked. “What did you find in the photos?”

Kira took another steadying breath. “Well, it might just be a coincidence...”

“You seemed pretty skeptical about coincidences just a few minutes ago,” Trevor said with a snort.

Kira shot him a silencing look. “I looked at the photos of the room where Clarissa was kept. I found something scratched into the headboard of her bed. It wasn’t deep. Someone probably used their fingernails.”

“What was it?” Rob prompted.

Kira met his gaze. “One word: Nadine.”

All three of them fell silent. Trevor was the first to speak.

“So, what now, boss?”

Kira pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “Now I steel myself for going to talk to Clarissa’s parents.”

She had also been holding off on this because she had been worried it might tip off the Procurer. He had called her twice before, and he always seemed to have a good idea of what she had been up to, warning her to stay away. He knew she had been in Traversa’s mansion when he was there to destroy the poster. If he found out she had recovered it and was after him... She shook herself.

I’ll just have to be careful.

Turning matters over to the police or letting the Procurer continue to slip away were not valid options as far as she was concerned.

Trevor started walking toward the hallway. “I’ll drive.” Kira gave him a dubious look. “What? You hate driving anyway.”

She was torn. On the one hand, she wouldn’t mind having someone drive her, and she could use a little moral support facing Clarissa’s parents, but Trevor... Well, he could be a tactless, walking disaster at the best of times. The last thing she wanted was to inflict him on Clarissa’s parents, especially when she was trying to get information. She straightened her shoulders.

“Fine,” she said. “But you can wait in the car.”

Trevor looked for a moment and shrugged. “Fine by me.”

Kira shot a wondering look at Rob, but he was already back on his laptop.

Trevor was in the hallway, peeling off his socks to put on his sandals. Kira pocketed her keys and phone in her hoodie and pulled on a fresh pair of sneakers. She fell against the wall as Trevor jostled her aside in his apparent eagerness to get out the front door.

“Come on,” he said with a grin over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Kira rubbed her squashed arm and followed in his wake with a vague frown.

Is it just me, or was that far too easy?