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She watched his feet moving stealthily across the floor and into the bathroom.
He would find her there beneath the bed. He was bound to.
Knowing she had no choice, she rolled out from beneath the bed, and carefully, silently, on bare feet, hurried to the door to the hallway. She looked out and saw no one, so she slipped out, hoping to find someone else alive, hoping to find something with which to save herself.
Nothing. No one. She raced along the hall to the stairway. Ochre light filled the living room at the foot of the grand stairway.
Red spilled out across the marble there, too.
Red spelled a message on the wall.
Death to defilers!
There was a picture in red, as well… .
A strangely shaped hand drawn in blood.
She sensed movement behind her and turned to look. Brad Angsley, Victoria’s college-age cousin, was staggering out from one of the other bedrooms, holding his head. She rushed toward him.
“He’s right behind us!” he cried.
“Move!” she insisted, and helped him stagger down the stairs. As they reached the great entry with its double doors, she dared a quick look back.
Someone was coming after them, another man in black, with some kind of knapsack or canvas bag over his shoulder.
Which killer was he?
Were there more ahead? What would happen when she opened the door? Would another killer be waiting there?
She had no choice but to find out. She struggled briefly with the lock, then threw open the doors and raced out, with Brad clinging to her shoulder. They made it down the long gravel path to the driveway and had almost lost themselves amidst the collection of BMWs, Audis and beat-up cars that belonged to the average kids who had made their way here.
Behind them, closing in on them, she could hear pounding footsteps.
They turned together, and she could see the knife gleaming in the moonlight, the blade dripping blood.
She leaned Brad against a car and grabbed a statue of Poseidon. It was heavy, but she barely noticed its weight as she wrenched it from the ground and swung it with both arms.
She caught their pursuer on the side of the head. He staggered back, and she let out a scream that seemed to last forever, until she realized that Brad had broken into the car, setting off its alarm.
Lights suddenly blazed, illuminating the driveway. Chloe saw Victoria stagger from the trees bordering the drive, holding tight to Jared Walker, who appeared to be unharmed, though his face was ashen.
Victoria was waving a cell phone as she yelled, “Hang on! Help is coming!”
Thank God for technology, Chloe thought.
The lights were coming from the cop cars that were swarming onto the property.
Chloe stared at her attacker, praying that he would fall, that he wouldn’t come after them again before the cops could take aim and fire.
The man stared back at her, his mask torn where the statue had caught it, and she felt as if she was staring into the face of pure evil.
Her heart stopped, and she prayed.
But he didn’t come closer; instead, he took one look at the approaching cops, then turned and ran.
As if on cue, the moon slipped behind a cloud, and the killer was lost in the deep shadows beside the house.
Cops and paramedics began rushing onto the property. Someone took Brad; someone else grabbed Chloe, and she opened her mouth to scream.
“It’s all right,” a man’s voice assured her, and she found herself staring at a policeman. “You’re hurt. You need help.”
“I’m not hurt,” she said, then lifted her hands and realized that they were bathed in blood.
Crimson with blood.
Red-shot darkness descended on her, and she slipped into oblivion.
It was over, and yet not over.
In the days and months that followed, she saw them all again. Her friends, with their good traits and their bad, who never had a chance to mature and become good people or selfish assholes.
They haunted her dreams.
She saw them dead, where they had lain on the floor in spreading pools of red.
Yes, she saw them in her dreams. Or were they dreams? She would simply open her eyes to see them there, surrounding her bed, looking at her.
Asking her for help. Begging her for help.
“How can I help you …? Tell me,” she asked aloud more than once.
But they never answered.
Of course not. They weren’t real. They were symptoms of her own psychological stress and trauma.
They were dreams. Bad dreams. Nightmares.
And in the therapy that followed, she was convinced at last that she didn’t see them, that they were symptoms of survivor’s guilt that haunted her heart and soul, and that only time could ever begin to heal such a wound.
Finally, like mist, silver and gray, they slipped away, and she learned to live.
ONE
Ten years later
The old Branoff mansion on the beach was exquisite. Built at the dawn of the area’s first age of sophistication, it was over eighty years old and elegant in the Mediterranean-slash-Spanish style of the mid-1920s. It wasn’t far from a similar house where, not so many years before, Gianni Versace had been gunned down, and tourists often passed on their way to gawk at the murder scene, establishing their right to say they had been there.
The less notorious mansion, now the local HQ and informal models’ dorm for the famed Bryson Agency, sat on an acre of land, with a formidable front lawn, now alight in a rainbow of colors. The gardens and walks were elegant, and the ornate iron gates that controlled access past the ten-foot stone wall that surrounded the villa weren’t locked this evening. But access still wasn’t easy. The beautiful people were entering tonight for the latest agency party. Mainly beautiful women. The kind of women who, if they didn’t already personify absolute perfection, could be airbrushed to get there.
Only the beautiful made it past the guards with the guest list, only the most elegant.
And, of course, those with the most money. This was, after all, the ritzy area of Miami Beach.
As he walked to the gates, displaying his invitation and fake ID to the tuxedoed men on duty, Luke knew he fell into the “rich” category—at least for the evening. Thanks to the fact that he spent the majority of his life in cutoffs and T-shirts, his few ensembles with designer labels were in excellent repair. And thanks, he commended himself dryly, to his tall-but-not-too-tall, just-right build, he was able to disappear into any crowd full of said labels. Despite the age of the clothing, it—and he—fit right in. He wasn’t a cop, but he was undercover. He had to fit in.
He didn’t usually wear sunglasses at night. But with this crowd, he had surmised that he might look more as if he belonged by wearing them than not. He hadn’t been mistaken. Even the guards at the gates checking IDs and invitations were wearing shades. Though in the colorful but soft light bathing the place, he was surprised that they could read anything.
Maybe they didn’t read. Maybe they just knew. Or perhaps the rumor circulating among the less fortunate was true and exquisite beauty got you in, with or without an invitation. He noticed that the guards were only scrutinizing the IDs of the “regular” people, and then only if they didn’t recognize and approve of the labels being worn.
He thanked the two burly men at the gate who stepped aside after eyeing him carefully. He had the height to match them, but he’d never been built like a bulldog, though he worked out enough each day to keep up the muscle he needed. He supposed, however, that for this evening, his appearance of being tall and lean worked well, and it made the clothes fit better, anyway.
Once across the lawn, as he neared the house, he noticed a bevy of beauties on the porch. They were sipping cocktails and posing. Perched on the railing, seated at the edge of a chair, legs folded just so, elegant and certainly provocative. They weren’t being overt about anything—these girls weren’t looking for careers as porn stars. They were shooting for the big leagues, for uberstardom. Swimsuit issues and the covers of fashion magazines.
They must have seen instantly that, though his features were attractive, he wasn’t young, and he was far from model perfect. In their world, that meant he was money.
He was welcomed with a cascade of hellos and smiles, a few of them more obvious than the rest. He smiled in return and made sure to look like a businessman with a personal interest in the modeling business. The Bryson Agency, with offices not only across the country but around the world, was one of the most reputable in the business, known for creating some of the most highly paid celebrity models of the century, women far above the sleazy sex-for-a-swimsuit-spread trade-offs that were common at the low end of the profession, though he suspected some girls would certainly be more willing than others to engage in a little extracurricular activity to achieve the goal of stardom.
But that was different, of course. Or was it?
But as to the agency being legitimate …
It was so aboveboard, in fact, that only her family and friends had even looked twice at the agency when a girl had disappeared on a shoot. Bryson hired beautiful girls and offered them the world; the disappearance of one would-be model was not enough to keep the star-seekers away. Two months ago, Colleen Rodriguez—a typical young Miami woman whose Cuban and Irish-American genes had combined to create a green-eyed, raven-haired beauty—had disappeared while on a shoot for the agency in the Keys. Both the Monroe County and Miami-Dade authorities had been mystified, with some believing the girl had been the victim of foul play, while others believed that though she had been seeing a man named Mark Johnston, she was young and impressionable—and ambitious—and might have run off with someone who could offer her a bigger career and the promise of big money. Alive and well or dead and gone, Colleen had been over twenty-one when she had taken the job and sailed off to the shoot on the privately owned island. With no body and no evidence of foul play, she was officially classed as a missing person, and her case remained open.
Luke didn’t think she’d left of her own volition, though. Her best friend, Rene Gonzalez, was listed through the agency, as well. Rene was avoiding her parents, certain that their overprotective instincts in the wake of Colleen’s disappearance were going to cost her a career, so whether she really believed it or not, she was insisting that Colleen had disappeared on purpose. And so he was here, suddenly an up-and-coming designer, to find a way to speak with Rene and see what she knew that could help him discover the truth about Colleen.
“Hi there.” A lissome blonde uncrossed long legs and stood as she saw him coming, then offered him a perfectly manicured hand. “I’m Lena Marconi. And you’re …?”
Luke produced a card. “Jack Smith, Mermaid Designs,” he said. “A pleasure to meet you.”
“Mermaid Designs?” Lena asked, her gray eyes smoldering. “Beach clothing?”
“Exactly, women’s beach clothing,” Luke said. “Bikinis, tankinis—'inis’ of all kinds.”
“How wonderful,” Lena gushed.
A dark-haired woman rose with a fluidity that might have been spellbinding if it hadn’t been so practiced. “A bathing-suit designer! How perfect. They’re just starting to plan the next agency swimsuit calendar, you know,” she said as she offered an elegant hand. “Maddy Trent, late of Amarillo, Texas, and quite fond of South Beach. A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Smith.”
“Likewise,” he assured her.
There were two more women sitting on the porch, both blondes. The first, very light, with huge blue eyes and a look of friendly amusement about her, rose. “Hi there, Mr. Smith. I’m Victoria Preston. Please, come in. I’ll introduce you to Myra—Myra Allen, the head of the Miami office—and see that you get something to drink.”
The fourth woman, seated on a gently swinging wicker love seat, didn’t move, though she looked at him assessingly. There was a touch of red in the smooth fall of blond hair that curled around her shoulders. Her eyes were green, lime-green, almost like a cat’s eyes. She continued to survey him thoughtfully, without speaking. Strange—she didn’t look as if she was trying to appear cool and aloof; she was just more interested in studying him than introducing herself.
Interesting.
“Chloe?” Victoria Preston said quietly.
“Oh, of course.” The woman with the sunset-streaked blond hair rose. She was tall, five-nine, maybe, hard to tell. She was wearing sandals with small, weirdly shaped heels, probably the newest thing. She wasn’t the most classically beautiful of the four—that title would have gone to Victoria—but she was the most intriguing. It was her eyes. They were light colored, but also large and well set, and just slightly tilted, giving her a look of mystery. She had a wide smile and full lips, perfect white teeth. A necessity, he imagined, in her business. She wasn’t quite as thin as the others; she looked more like an athlete or a runner.
She offered him a hand at last. “Chloe … Marin,” she said.
It was a strange hesitation, as if she didn’t really want to identify herself. The first name came easily, the surname not so much. Maybe it was a model’s equivalent of a pen name because she had a tongue twister of a last name with twenty syllables or six consonants in a row. Awkward to say. Schwartzenkopfelmeyer or Xenoskayanovich or something.
Or maybe, instinctively, she just didn’t trust him.
“Chloe, nice to meet you,” he said.
“You’re a designer?” she said.
He nodded.
The ghost of a smile played over her lips, and skepticism touched her eyes.
“Chloe, let’s introduce Mr. Smith to Myra,” Victoria urged.
“Oh, look who’s coming!” Maddy drawled. “It’s Vincente!”
“Vincente … who?” Lena asked.
“Vincente. Just Vincente,” Maddy said. “There was just a huge article on him in GQ!“
Luke tried not to laugh out loud; he had just become dog chow as far as Maddy from Amarillo was concerned.
“Come on in, Mr. Smith,” Victoria told him, and led the way. Chloe followed them.
The house was even more elegant inside than out. They had barely stepped into the travertine entry-way before a uniformed server was there to offer him champagne from a silver tray. He accepted a glass with thanks, noticing that the women didn’t follow suit.
Maybe it was the expensive stuff, reserved for clients and the other guests.
They kept going, to a living room with mile-high ceilings, a curving white staircase and white marble flooring covered with expensive rugs. The house boasted a huge fireplace and mantel, though he was sure the fireplace hadn’t been used in decades.
Three pairs of French doors led to a massive patio with a pool and adjacent hot tub. They stepped out and headed for a tiki bar set up at the south end of the pool, weaving past small groups of extravagantly dressed people on their way.
“That’s Myra,” Victoria said, pointing out a woman to the left of the bar. She was speaking with two women who appeared to be in their early forties, attractive in simple black dresses, short black hair and medium black heels. “She’s talking to the women from Rostini. You’ve heard of the label?”
Not before today, when he had crammed on the fashion industry. “Rostini,” he said, nodding. He felt Chloe watching him, and sensed that she was suspicious.
Of what?
“They make a lovely couple. When you think that they met at college and have lasted longer than a lot of marriages … They’re the name in cocktail dresses, if you ask me,” he added.
Myra looked up from her conversation just then and saw the three of them drawing near. He’d met the woman once before, to set up his invitation for the evening, but he kept his gaze bland, as if he’d never seen her before.
She smiled, and waved them over, her own expression a match for his. He might only have met her once, but he found her fascinating. Myra Allen had once been a supermodel herself, until shooting a commercial on the beach had left her with a scarred cheek. She had accepted an administrative job with Bryson Agency while she convalesced, and she had also accepted a nice settlement from the client’s insurance company. Rather than accept plastic surgery or rely on makeup and go back to work in modeling, she had risen swiftly in the company and now managed one of their most lucrative locations, the Miami Beach mansion.
She was still a beautiful woman. Tall, slim and capable of turning on a warm smile.
“Mr. Smith,” she said. “You’ve made it. I’m delighted.”
