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Priscilla Brandt hesitated at the bottom of the grand stairway and visually swept her living room with the acuity of a young, hungry bird of prey, missing nothing. The house was perfection, even to her critical eye. Fresh-cut irises stood in tall crystal vases, satin pillows were plumped and the Brazilian-cherry floors gleamed. Just the faintest whiff of lavender oil pleasantly stimulated her senses, along with the rippling piano runs of Mozart’s Adagio in H Minor.
If you want your guests to think well of you, treat them well. If you want them forever in your debt, spoil them rotten and send them home with expensive gifts. If you have no money, cook exquisitely.
It was one of the many bits of wisdom in her sassy new etiquette book, currently at the top of the New York Times nonfiction list. Quite the coup for a former hash-slinger from the San Fernando Valley. Of course, the hash-slinging was how she’d put herself through college, but still, she had no real pedigree like the other mavens of manners, and at twenty-six she was a mere upstart compared to icons like Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt.
Lineage matters only if you have nothing else of interest to offer.
She plucked an imaginary speck from the sleeve of her cashmere twinset and walked to the mirror over the fireplace to check her long chestnut waves for fullness and vitality, all signs of a healthy female libido, which was crucial in today’s market, no matter what you were selling. She couldn’t very well be outwardly sexy in her profession. She had to leave that impression in other ways, such as the slim, side-slit skirt and the snug fit of her sweater set, all belying the propriety of her cultured pearls. This was a lady, yes, but a tramp, as well, to anyone lucky enough to know her that well.
Feminine wiles are all about promise, ladies. Delivery is an altogether different matter.
Another of Priscilla’s pointers. And within the hour she would be sharing more of her advice on national television. Another coup for the poor relation. The TV crew would be here soon to set up in the garden where she would be having tea with none other than national morning-show anchor Leanne Sanders, and Priscilla had made sure the grounds of her leased home in the Santa Monica hills were as perfect as the interior.
The trick was to be perfect without being perfectly boring. She had to be just witty enough, just tarty enough, to catch and hold the interest of a fickle public. But with impeccable manners, of course.
For Priscilla the payoff was more than book sales. She was in discussions for her own afternoon talk show, and it was with the very network about to interview her. So far the only stumbling block was the snot-nosed executive producer, who couldn’t have been more than twelve, if his acne was any indication. Right in front of the network brass, he’d said he just wasn’t “feeling” an etiquette show in the era of shock jocks and reality TV. Her material wouldn’t be edgy or opinionated enough. The only thing he hadn’t done was yawn. Pris would have had a breath mint ready to cram down his throat if he did.
She walked to the living room windows, pride swelling as she anticipated the beauty of the wisteria-covered arbor. The smile died on her red-matte lips as she looked out. “What the fuck?”
The crazy squatter was back and he’d turned her beautiful garden into a tent city! His crude cardboard shelter blighted the wisteria arbor where she’d created the perfect English garden for her outdoor tea. He’d been sneaking onto her property for weeks now, and she’d made the mistake of giving him money to get rid of him. Well, no more payola. She was going to kick his grungy butt off the property herself, not that she had much choice. She didn’t trust the hired help not to rat her out to the tabloids.
She grabbed her cell phone from the writing desk in the hall and marched to the front door at a military clip. Someone had been giving the tabloids information about her, and she was going to put a stop to that, too. The rags had labeled her Ms. Pris, but now they were questioning whether it should have been Ms. Hissy Fit, simply because she’d taught a reckless teenage tailgater a lesson by letting him pile into the back of her new Mercedes. She’d publicly assailed him for riding her ass all the way to Burbank, and a gathering crowd had cheered her on, which seemed vindication enough. But there’d been no applause the following week when she’d made a waitress cry for serving cold food.
Okay, Ms. Pris had a temper. She was working on it. But this squatter was different, a clear violation of her rights. The porous greenbelt that ran from the house’s car park to the garden forced her to walk on the tiptoes of her shoes to keep the high heels from sinking in. When she was done with this guy, she would go change into flats and freshen up again. She had time, twenty minutes—and she had another tip for her next book. Never wear high heels at lawn parties!
As she neared the cardboard tent, she saw a pair of grubby bare feet poking out the bottom and a pile of beer cans and trash next to them. She also saw something that made her blood boil. He’d been using her beautiful lawn for a toilet.
Another F-bomb rolled off her tongue. “Pack up your things and get out of here,” she demanded.
He didn’t respond and she kicked at the refrigerator box with the pointed toe of her heels. “Did you hear me?”
The box lifted off him and as the man roused and rolled toward her, Priscilla saw that he wasn’t the transient she’d been paying off. He was much younger and fitter, with bright blue eyes shining through his shaggy brown hair—and he might not be so easily handled.
“This is private property.” She brandished the cell phone. “You have two minutes to get your things and leave, or I’ll call 911.”
“Fuck off,” he muttered, grabbing the box and giving it a shake, as if she’d soiled it. He turned his back to her and collapsed under his cardboard canopy, apparently intending to sleep off the rest of what was probably a liquid breakfast.
Somewhere in the base of Priscilla’s brain, two wires touched, white hot. A circuit shorted out, sparks erupted and she began to tremble. There was no chance to curb the impulse. It was swift and lethal, animal rage. Her fists clenched, and her upper lip curled back, baring small, sharp incisors. Delicate nostrils flared, and a snarl rattled in her throat, as savage as anything heard in the jungle.
How dare he turn his mangy freeloading back on her! Counting to ten wasn’t an option when some asshole was about to destroy the opportunity of a lifetime. Her lifetime. She dropped the phone and picked up a sculpture of an iron crane from the garden bed, her only thought to wale on this guy. She didn’t even care if the crew arrived and saw her. He needed to be taught a lesson.
That snot-nose executive producer wanted edgy? Ha!
But as she raised the sculpture over her head like a club, a tiny voice of sanity—or maybe it was opportunity—intruded. There might still be some way to salvage this. If she could hit him just hard enough to knock him out, she could roll him onto the cardboard box and drag him out of here, an Indian carry. That way he couldn’t fight her.
The horrible crunch of iron against skull bone made her wince, and just as quickly as rage had flared, it was gone. Fear flooded her, dropping her to her knees. Whenever she had these insane episodes, she was devastated afterward, shaken, afraid and deeply humiliated at what she’d done. This had to be her worst outburst ever. Had she killed him?
She pulled off the cardboard to find him slumped and unresponsive but still breathing. He was out cold. If she could get him onto the cardboard, she might still be able to drag him into the bushes where he couldn’t be seen, but she had so little time left.
Moments later, bent over him and struggling to catch her breath, she realized it was no use. She couldn’t even roll him over. He weighed as much as ten men. She sank onto the ground next to him, sobbing and furious. She should have killed him. Look at what he’d reduced her to.
Desperate, she searched for the cell and found it in the grass. She speed-dialed her manager, but got voice mail. Her publicist didn’t pick up, either. Didn’t these people ever answer their damn phones? Why the hell was she paying them twenty percent of her hard-earned money?
Seconds later, she had Lane Chandler on the line, and the sound of her soft, melodious voice worked miracles. It calmed Priscilla like a dip in cool lake water.
“Priscilla, are you all right?” Lane asked. “How can I help you?”
Priscilla begged Lane to call the segment producer for the morning show and reschedule the taping. “Please,” she implored, “do it now. Tell them I’ve had an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
Priscilla assured her it wasn’t serious, just horribly embarrassing.
“I’ll take care of it,” Lane said. “Now, please, take a deep breath and calm down. Are you sure you’re all right? I could call one of our concierge doctors if you need medical care. It’s completely private.”
“No! No doctors. I’ll be fine. Just call the segment producer and get the taping rescheduled. No one else needs to know about any of this, all right?”
She clicked off and dropped the phone in horror, unable to believe what had just happened. Everything had been so perfect. It had felt like fate, the stars aligned. She’d never felt more poised or ready for anything. This was supposed to have been her shining moment. And he’d ruined it. This was all his fault.
She began to sob and swear and beat on the unconscious man, oblivious to the video camera trained on her. It was held by a silent, shrouded figure who was concealed by the same thicket of bushes where she’d been planning to drag the body. Priscilla may have dodged one bullet this morning, but there was another gun aimed straight at her.
6
Darwin LeMaster couldn’t remember how to answer his cell phone. It was his own damn phone, too, the one he’d designed, patented and turned into a revolutionary new communications system, according to technology reporters. It came with one-touch concierge access, a GPS system, biometric fingerprint recognition and the ability to make not only secure, but untraceable, calls. The Darwin phone had made him a twenty-eight-year-old man of means and a phenom, whatever that meant, in the field of electronic networking.
BFD. He still couldn’t answer it.
Right now, it was playing “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath at high volume, the equivalent of getting kicked in the head by a donkey, which was what it took to get Darwin’s attention most of the time. But this was no ordinary call. From the moment he’d seen the incoming number in the digital display—her number—his brain had vapor-locked. What good was an IQ at the genius level if you couldn’t take a phone call from a steaming-hot woman?
The noise stopped, and he breathed a sigh of relief. The call had gone to voice mail. But he also felt a body slam of recrimination. What kind of man was he? Sometimes he wondered if he even had a penis.
All around him in the cavernous, cluttered office that his coworkers called Command and Control Center 1, electronic equipment whirred, interrupted by mysterious intermittent beeping. The aroma of stale coffee sullied the air, wafting from the dozen forgotten plastic cups that were stranded wherever he’d set them when an idea hit. This morning’s breakfast, a glazed doughnut with one bite out of it, had been abandoned to a napkin on the file cabinet next to his desk. Mostly he forgot to eat, but even when he remembered, he couldn’t seem to gain weight.
He picked up the doughnut and bit a hunk out of it, chewing absently. Women worried about men who couldn’t gain weight. It brought out the mother in them—and while his boss and longtime friend, Lane Chandler, didn’t openly bug him about putting on poundage, she’d brought the doughnuts by this morning.
She had openly bugged him about sprucing up the command center, said it was the nexus of the entire concierge service and a selling point for prospective clients. She’d suggested professional organizers and decorators, but he’d been putting her off.
He rose and stretched, imagining a cat as he rippled the vertebrae of his spine. This was his lair, and he didn’t feel like conducting tours. He’d been chided for being reclusive and secretive with his pet projects, and maybe his critics had a point. He had actually boarded up the office windows, preferring the eerie phosphers of LCD screens to natural light.
He could run the world from here. On the wall opposite his desk, several large GPS grids, glowing with red dots and streaming arrows, covered the most populous areas of the country. The electronic maps meant Darwin could locate any of their forty-five members with a Premiere Plan and a fully featured Darwin cell, as long as they were within range and their phone was on.
He had also designed the circuitry necessary to scramble signals. If a Premiere member called in and requested a secure line, Darwin could hook them up with a couple clicks of his mouse, at which point the call could not be intercepted or recorded. Well, except by Darwin, of course. Any system was only as secure as the person who created it.
But no one worried about Darwin. He didn’t have a penis.
He kicked a box of old circuit boards out of the way and dropped to the floor. “Give me twenty, you pussy,” he grunted.
The homophobic drill sergeant who rented space in Darwin’s brain got exactly seven military-style push-ups before Darwin collapsed. While he was lying there on the floor, surrounded by boxes of high-tech detritus and thinking about all the ways he needed to overhaul his life, the revolutionary cell phone sounded again. Sharp staccato bursts, each one more imperative than the last. The hotline.
He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Thank God, a crisis. He didn’t have to face the terrifying prospect of inviting a woman—make that the ultimate sexual-fantasy woman of the new millennium—to dinner and then maybe to his place, and then maybe to something approaching the sexual realm, like his bed?
A one-man Pluto shot would have been more realistic.
“Darwin, you have voice mail,” said a come-hither female voice.
The phone was giving him a reminder, just as he’d programmed it to. If it had had legs, it would have jumped off the desk and strolled over to him. He would have to work on that feature.
He pushed to his feet, grimacing as he limped over to the desk, grabbed the phone and thumbed the Talk button. “What is it, Lucy?” That was her name from the old days when they lived together on the streets.
“Please, Dar, call me Lane,” she said. “I need you. Can you come to my office right away?”
Lane unbuttoned her suit jacket and flapped the lapels to create a breeze. She liked to think that she’d come by her reputation as a cool customer deservedly, although right now she was anything but. Her face was flushed and her cleavage damp. Why did women always perspire there first? She really should plan for that when she was deodorizing in the mornings.
At any rate, she’d just run a crazed segment producer off at the pass and narrowly averted some kind of crisis. She didn’t know what kind because Priscilla Brandt had hung up on her before Lane could ask. But at least Ms. Pris would get another shot at success.
Congressman Carr and Simon Shan might not.
Ned Talbert certainly would not.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
Lane looked up to see Darwin shambling into her office, tall and floppy as an Olympic pole-vaulter, his mop of dark curls bouncing, and his baggy, worn jeans hanging on his narrow hips. He was nearly thirty, but he really hadn’t changed all that much in the fifteen years she’d known him, except that he was a millionaire now instead of a juvenile delinquent—and so was she.
“Shut the door, Dar. Lock it, too.”
His dense, expressive eyebrows lifted. “We have a receptionist out there,” he said. “Why don’t I tell the gray angel that we don’t want to be disturbed.”
The gray angel was their vibrant seventy-year-old receptionist, Mary O’Dell, who could have stalled a tactical squad of marines, she was so good. But TPC had an open-door policy, and anyone really determined to see Lane was unlikely to be stopped for long.
“I don’t want Val barging in on us,” Lane explained.
Darwin shut the door and locked it. Val Drummond had started in the mailroom and his fortunes had risen with the company’s. He ran the administrative arm, but he was also handling concierge operations now that Lane was busy with the company’s new expansion plan. But Val’s promotion hadn’t eased the tension between him and Darwin. Val was like the solid and steady but less gifted younger brother with a bad case of sibling rivalry. He was competitive with Darwin for Lane’s time, and he seemed to resent that she and Darwin were much more than just the creative spark behind TPC. They were close friends with a bond that almost defied explanation, even to them…although, oddly, Darwin himself had been cutting ties with Lane lately.
But maybe it wasn’t odd at all, Lane allowed. He had his eye on a sweet young thing he’d met at a comic-book convention. Seems they’d been friendly for a while, but now they were getting closer, and as much as Lane missed Dar’s company, she knew it was good for a recluse like him to have someone in his life besides her.
Lane slipped off the jacket to her pantsuit and undid a button at the neckline of her blouse, still too warm to relax. It was time to tell him. This business was Dar’s life, too, but it went beyond that. She trusted and confided in him as she did no one else.
“Well?” he said, perching on the arm of the high-back leather guest chair. “Are we going to end the suspense any time soon?”
She held him off a little longer, taking a detour behind her desk to the console that smelled of freshly quartered limes. She always had some there in a crystal bowl, as much for their tart essence as for the drinks. She poured a glass of ice water and held up the pitcher, offering him some, too. He shook his head, and she pressed the glass, cool and moist, to her check, aware that he seemed perplexed by his normally unflappable partner.
“You’re going to say I’m crazy, but hear me out,” she said at last. “I think we could be in trouble.”
“You and I?”
“No, the service, TPC. Dar—” She was actually hoping he would laugh at her. “Do you think someone might be trying to damage this company, even to bring it down?”
He frowned. “You are crazy.”
“Yeah, probably. I hope so.” She took a drink, swallowing some ice chips with the water. The cold streaming into her chest cavity was almost painful. Maybe she was overreacting, but the planned expansion into two more major cities had her spooked. She’d borrowed a small fortune to finance the move, and everything depended on being able to capitalize on the service’s growing reputation. It had been relatively smooth sailing until recently.
Quickly, she brought Dar up to speed on what had happened. He already knew about Shan and the congressman, but he didn’t know that Ned Talbert had signed on the dotted line the day he committed what was being called first-degree murder and suicide.
By the time she was done, Dar had fallen into the guest chair, apparently in surprise. “So, Ned Talbert was a client?” he said. “Wow, what is that now—three of our top clients?”
“Three in three weeks, and one of them is dead. It’s surreal, a nightmare. But, listen to me now. I did something, well, rash. No one knew that Ned Talbert had signed, so I shredded his application.” She hung her head at Darwin’s disbelief. “Don’t look at me like that. I panicked. I handled his credit-card transaction myself because Mary was out of the office—and then I forgot to give Talbert his copy of the contract, so I had all the paperwork.”
She sighed and looked up, beseeching him to understand. “I didn’t know what else to do. When the Burton and Shan stories broke, that sleazy gossip Web site reported that they were our clients. How would it look if they found out about Talbert?”
“Like all our clients are jinxed? Like we’re the kiss of death?”
“Exactly.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before this?”
Thank God, she thought. He understood her impulse to save the company. He was a street kid, too, thinking with his wits, thinking survival. “I didn’t want to believe it. I told myself I was being paranoid. Am I being paranoid, Dar? Two clients, maybe, but three? Can that be a coincidence?”
It raised a question that Lane didn’t want to ask. Who would be next? She hadn’t told him about Priscilla, but she was hoping that would turn out to be nothing. She was hoping it all would turn out to be nothing, just a figment of her overwrought imagination.
She walked to the windows that looked out on Century City and beyond that, the Pacific coastline, continuing to cool herself with the frosty glass and the sharp scent of lime. It was a bright fall morning with a hint of crispness in the air, but the weather wouldn’t get chilly for another month, and at least half the people on the streets below wore shorts. This was southern California, land of perpetual flip-flops.
Darwin spoke over her thoughts. “Considering everything, you’re one of the least paranoid people I know,” he said, “and if anybody had a right to be, it’s you, given where you’ve been and what you’ve done.”
“Yeah, thanks for reminding me.” He was trying to say she’d come a long way, baby, all the way from her distant, sordid past. She and Darwin had been runaways on the street when they met, both of them cold, hungry and sick. Darwin had needed medical attention. As his condition worsened, Lane had been forced to make some desperate choices. Although now she wondered if there was a choice when someone’s life was at stake. The only people who knew about that time in her life were Darwin and the cops who put her in jail and threw away the key.
Darwin propelled his long frame out of the creaking chair and walked over to her, quietly relieving her of the ice water. She relinquished the glass without a word.
“Maybe it’s bad luck and bad timing,” he suggested. “Most celebs have a self-destruct mechanism that gets triggered just seconds after they hit it big. We’ve seen that happen.”
She nodded, wanting him to be right. He wasn’t as driven as she was—and didn’t even want the expansion. It was Val who was pushing her to grow the company. She and Val were alike in that way, hungry, if that was the right word. But it was Darwin who had her heart, and her allegiance.
She fought the urge to brush doughnut crumbs from his T-shirt—and lost. He dodged her questing fingers. “Listen to me,” she said. “Even if everything we’re talking about is coincidental, we have to be on our toes—you and me. I’m not discussing this with anyone else, obviously. But the service’s reputation is at stake.”
He held the glass against his cheek as she had, apparently curious about the sensation. “Why would anyone want to bring this company down? And why would they go to such extremes to do it?”
“That I don’t know, but we are a concierge service, and we take care of our clients. That includes protecting their privacy and their safety, if it comes to that. We can’t ignore anything that could put them at risk.”
“True, but it doesn’t make sense. A competitor wouldn’t want to hurt our clients. They’d want to steal them.”
She shrugged. “So, maybe it’s the paparazzi. Jack the Giant Killer. He’s the one breaking all the stories—and no one seems to have a clue who he is. Why hasn’t someone exposed him by now?”
Lane was angry about that. So far JGK had operated in total anonymity. Even Seth Black, the owner of Gotcha.com, swore he didn’t know who JGK was, but despite that, Seth had been willing to give Jack his own byline and publish his exposés. Everything was done electronically, of course, to protect Jack’s anonymity.
Dar seemed to be considering Lane’s idea. “I suppose it could be some kind of payback, especially since Val and Seth Black tangled earlier this year over Judge Love. But even if Black and his henchmen are targeting us, how much damage can they do? What are the odds that our clients are going to keep screwing up on a grand scale?”
Again, Lane hoped he was right. But Trudy Love was another TPC client—and a perfect example of screwing up on a grand scale. She was an ex-judge who’d officiated over a divorce-court TV show and had made her name excoriating cheating spouses. Lane could do nothing to save her career once she herself had been caught double-dipping, a phrase Trudy had made a household word.
“Jack destroyed Judge Love’s career with those pictures of her and that burly, tattooed biker who wasn’t her husband,” Lane reminded Darwin. She cocked her head. “And then Val tried to scare off Seth Black with a bunch of empty legal threats.”
