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Brandt spoke, as if in answer to her silent thoughts. “Moved him to the head of the list. No one’s going to notice while Mayo is lying in state.”
Barrie thought that a revealingly cynical remark. Even for a studio head, Mayo had a lot of ill will swirling around him.
She approached the table and looked down at the young shifter, so pale on the slab. They always looked so much smaller in death. She felt tears prickling her eyes again. Such a smart, cheeky kid. Such a waste. Such a crime.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered to him, and touched his hand. It was cold, and she shivered. If she’d only tried harder, followed up sooner…
Brandt was watching her. “You knew him, then.”
She set her jaw, trying to compose herself. She wasn’t going to do Tiger any good by falling apart now.
“Who caught the call?” she asked Brandt.
He named a couple of homicide detectives in the Hollywood Division. “They didn’t think it was important enough to involve Robbery Homicide,” he added.
Robbery Homicide was a special division in the LAPD, the most coveted assignment. It handled the highest-profile murders. Certainly Mayo would have been moved there instantly. The haves and have-nots again.
“Is there any chance it was suicide?” Barrie didn’t think so, but she had to ask.
“Oh, this was no suicide.” She tensed up in every muscle. “Why?”
“He didn’t die in that alley. the body was moved. That’s clear from the patterns of livor mortis.”
Barrie knew that livor mortis meant the settling of the blood after death due to gravity. It appeared as bluish, blotchy discoloration of the skin where the blood had pooled. She listened closely as Brandt continued, indicating regions of Tiger’s body with a short metal pointer as he spoke.
“Lividity does not appear anywhere that the body has been in direct contact with the ground. He was found sitting up, slumped against a wall, but if you look at the pattern here, you’ll see there is no lividity in the relevant parts of his legs. He died lying down on his back. He was positioned sitting up at some later time.”
Brandt loved to expound, and she was grateful for it; she picked up all kinds of useful information from his mini-lectures.
“Now ask me what else is interesting about this,” he said.
Barrie tensed up. “What else is interesting about this?” she asked softly.
He held her eyes with his piercing ones. “I’m not entirely sure, but it looks to me like the unfortunate young man may have had some help.”
“Some help dying?” Barrie stammered. “So, he was murdered?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, fair Rosalind.” There weren’t many people Barrie allowed to call her by her real name, but Brandt was one. It was his Shakespearean quality; everything he said sounded vaguely Elizabethan. “But these bother me.” He aimed the pointer at some faint purple circles at the top of Tiger’s arm. They looked almost like—
“Fingerprints?” she asked, feeling a prickling at the back of her neck. “You think he was held? Forced?”
“Could be. On the other hand, it’s common for addicts to help each other shoot up. And an addict bruises easily, so it may mean nothing. I am merely pointing it out as an anomaly, and in fact…I never said it. But it’s something to keep in mind.”
“Now, moving a body is a crime, but it’s not necessarily murder. If he was shooting up in a gallery and someone didn’t want the cops around, they may just have dumped him. But I don’t think so. I think someone wanted this kid dead. He definitely didn’t stick that needle in his own arm.”
“Murder…” Barrie said, her thoughts far away. And she knew exactly where to go to find out what she needed to know. “I have to go,” she mumbled.
Brandt raised his impressive eyebrows. “I’m cutting him in a half hour. You don’t want to stay?”
Barrie shuddered. True, she regularly worked with the undead, but the actual dead were a different story. And she had no desire at all to see Brandt slice into Tiger.
“I need to get out to Hollywood to see someone. Can I check back with you about the tox screen and whatever else you find?”
“Of course. And I’ll make sure your soon-to-be-cousin knows.”
Barrie had to blink to understand that Brandt was referring to Brodie McKay.
“Thanks. And, Tony…” She had to swallow to get the words out. “I’ll claim the body if no one else does. I’ll make sure the Council gives him a proper burial.”
He smiled at her sadly. “You’re a good kid, kid.”
Barrie was both buzzed and depressed as she left the coroner’s building. She could feel the adrenaline rush of a mystery, the thrill of the hunt; at the same time she was grieving Tiger’s death and the possibility of evil intent behind it, which kicked her protective Keeper instincts into high gear.
If a shifter had been murdered on her turf, there was going to be hell to pay.
Chapter 3
There were two main east-west Boulevards that ran through the district called Hollywood: Sunset Boulevard and iconic Hollywood Boulevard itself. Despite the tourist trappings of the day, at night the Boulevards had a shadowy, sleazy side. Between those thoroughfares every conceivable taste could be serviced: girls, boys, top, bottom, pain, pleasure…and some tastes inconceivable to most human beings.
This no-man’s-land was where Tiger’s body had been found, and where Barrie was headed next. She knew Tiger ran with another young prostitute who called himself Phoenix, and he would be her best bet for information. The street kids often banded together for protection and community; Tiger and Phoenix had cribbed together, sometimes in one of the appalling motels that lined the side streets of Hollywood, sometimes on the stoops of shops or warehouses late at night. Whether the boys’ intimacy translated to actual sex was an open question; Barrie suspected the two had been lovers as well, in some ambiguous way, but drugs often killed any real sex drive. Phoenix was a shifter, too, but nowhere near as skilled as Tiger was. She reflected that it was a talent a bit like acting, in a way. Some had a little; only a very few were stars. Tiger had been a star. Not that it had helped him, apparently.
She found Phoenix in a foul but atmospherically lit alley where she knew a lot of the street kids congregated in between tricks to recover, dose and socialize. He was sitting on a dirty stoop, smoke from a cigarette curling around his head. A perfectly cinematic shot, if not for his obvious agony. He was ravaged with weeping, and broke down again when he saw Barrie. All he managed was “You heard,” before his words dissolved in tears.
She had delivered Phoenix to the Out of the Shadows shelter at the same time as she’d taken Tiger there; the two youths were joined at the hip, so to speak. She’d suspected at the time that Phoenix, by far the weaker of the two, would be back on the street in no time. She’d had higher hopes for Tiger.
She sat beside him and rubbed his back lightly as he cried, careful not to touch too hard, too much.
“He was working again?”
“Not the street!” Phoenix said defiantly. “He was moving up. Building a real list.”
Barrie bit her lip to suppress an outburst, considering that a “list” was basically a collection of sexual predators. What there was about prostitution that could be considered “moving up” in any way was so far beyond her that she couldn’t even begin to process it, but she didn’t want to insult or alienate Phoenix. She wasn’t about to denigrate any bit of pride the boy could take in his profession. And pride was what Phoenix was expressing, as his words spilled out about his friend.
“Tiger was good. He could do anyone. Jimmy, Kurt, Jim, Heath, Johnny. He was goin’ places.”
Phoenix meant that Tiger could change his appearance to look like the dead stars Phoenix named. Barrie realized with a shiver that they were all stars who’d died tragically young, either from addiction or their own reckless behavior, shooting stars who burned out too fast on their talent and lifestyles: James Dean in a car wreck at twenty-four, Kurt Cobain a suicide at twenty-seven, Jim Morrison of a heroin overdose (hotly disputed) at twenty-seven, and the youngest of all of them, Johnny Love, a sixteen-year-old movie idol who in the 1990s had burned up the screen in cult classics like Race the Night and Youngbloods and then died shooting up a lethal speedball at sixteen, just after the huge success of his last movie, Otherworld.
Barrie thought uncomfortably, and not for the first time, how chillingly easy it was to become what you pretended to be. Now Tiger had joined the list of his dead idols.
She shook her head and tried to focus on the boy beside her. “Was he working for someone?” She avoided the word “pimp.”
Phoenix straightened his shoulders, clearly proud of his dead friend. “He was doin’ it himself. He hooked up with someone big. Real big. He had a regular date with someone in the movies, really connected, who was into shifters big-time. And he was paying big money for Tiger to shift.”
Barrie’s heart started beating faster. “Someone in the movies? Do you know who?”
Phoenix shook his head. “Someone who was going to do things for him. Get him parts. Tiger was really high about it.”
Could it be? A connection between Tiger and Saul Mayo? Barrie had the strongest feeling, an almost psychic hit, that she was on to something. Maybe something huge.
“A producer? Director? Actor?” she asked, trying to be casual.
“Tiger didn’t say much.”
“Did you ever actually see this guy?”
Phoenix shook his head. “I saw his car once. A limo.”
Not helpful. Every third car in this town was a limo.
“If that person—or anyone—comes around looking for Tiger, can you let me know?” She gave Phoenix a card; he looked down at it listlessly and shrugged. Her heart tore. “Phoenix, I can drop you at Out of the Shadows. You know Lara would be glad to have you.”
His eyes grew hooded. “Maybe I’ll cruise over later.”
She sighed. It was so hard to get the kids out of the life. It was abuse, but for them it was abuse on their own terms. She touched his arm.
“You call me if you need anything, Phoenix. I’m so very sorry about Tiger.”
Mayo’s body had been discovered at the Chateau Marmont. The hotel was a Hollywood institution, built in the 1920s and modeled after a French castle, with one elegant old main building towering over a spread of luxury bungalows that fairly dripped old film studio elegance. It was known for its beautiful views, ornate turrets and tiny wooden elevators, the junglelike pool area, and the young celebrity clientele populating the hopping cocktail bar.
Barrie pulled into the side alley where the front entrance was tucked away and looked up at the Gothic palace on the hill. Its aura had been paid for in blood, the hotel being the site of several legendary tragedies: John Belushi’s death from a drug overdose, and the near death of Jim Morrison, who used to joke that he used up the eighth of his nine lives when he fell headfirst onto a garden shed while trying to swing from a drainpipe to his window at the Chateau.
And tragically, sixteen-year-old Johnny Love.
Barrie recalled uneasily that Phoenix had said Johnny was one of Tiger’s favorite shifts.
And Johnny Love had died of an apparent overdose in his teens.
Just like Tiger, Barrie thought. So much like Tiger.
It was not much more than the cruel chance of Hollywood that one had ascended to iconic superstardom and the other had died anonymously in an alley.
She frowned as something prickled at the edges of her consciousness, some fact that she knew was important but that she couldn’t quite get to.
As she was grasping for the thought, she was distracted by the sight of a hearse pulling up, a Hollywood Ghost Bus loaded with tourists out to see “the darker side of Tinseltown.” Barrie grimaced; it was all oh-so-edgy and cool from the outside, but tonight she couldn’t see anything even resembling humor.
And now, she realized, the movie mogul Saul Mayo would be part of the tour, maybe even more of a celebrity in death than he had been in life. It was outrageous, enraging. And so very, very Hollywood.
Barrie breathed in to calm herself. Then she gave up her Peugeot to a valet and walked into the hotel through the side alley entrance.
As she entered the dim, elegant, edgy lobby, her mind was going a mile a minute. She knew she was going to have to play this carefully. She was bound to run into other journalists digging up dirt on Mayo’s death, and she didn’t want anyone else, not anyone, picking up on a possible connection between Mayo and Tiger.
Least of all Mick Townsend. But here he was, larger than life, strolling around the sunken, tiled lobby, looking irritatingly suave and baronial in the lush surroundings that came complete with grand piano, heavy velvet drapes and candelabra. He seemed not just at home but as if he owned the place.
“Gryffald,” he said, apparently unsurprised to see her. “Selling out and going for the Mayo story after all?”
“Just like you, I guess,” she retorted, but she was secretly glad he’d jumped to that conclusion. It would save her the trouble of making up a story to keep him from guessing the real trail she was on.
“So, how’d he die?” she asked. If Townsend was going to be so damned chummy she could at least get some information out of him.
“OD,” Townsend said shortly. “Some exotic drug cocktail. Coke, heroin and belladonna.”
Belladonna? Barrie thought, startled. Coke and heroin was a common combination, called a speedball, among hard-core drug users. Adding a hallucinogen, particularly one with such an occult history as belladonna, was more Other territory than human, although in Hollywood Others often started edgy trends that humans then adopted without knowing the Otherworldly source.
Mick continued, “Of course, we’re not allowed to report that. Total blackout until it’s confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt—or lawsuit.”
He circled the piano, stopped to run his fingers lightly and expertly over the keys. She recognized the opening of an old jazz standard, one of her dance favorites.
Damn, he could play the piano, too. Perfection was so annoying. Barrie felt a warmth spreading through her and was alarmed to find herself wondering what it would feel like to have him run those skilled fingers over her body.
All right, that has to stop now.
Townsend pushed back abruptly from the piano, grimacing. “The story’s already jumped the shark. It’s not enough that Mayo died of an OD at the Chateau Marmont. There’s some genius of a bellhop insisting that he checked into a bungalow with a young guy who was the spitting image of Johnny Love. Ghosts, for God’s sake,” he said, disgusted.
Now it was adrenaline Barrie felt racing through her, accelerating her thoughts.
A bellhop saw Johnny Love?
Phoenix said Johnny Love was one of Tiger’s favorite shifts.
Tiger had a powerful Hollywood client who paid big money for shifting.
Tiger’s body was moved from somewhere else into that alley.
She’d been right. There was a connection between Mayo and Tiger.
She was very still, letting none of her thoughts show on her face. In fact, she used a little glamour—a temporary illusion, a very unstable form of shifting that her father had taught her when she was just a little girl—to keep her expression neutral, a trick a shifter or shifter Keeper could do to make sure she wasn’t giving anything away.
It was a huge lead. What if Tiger had died here, with Mayo? What if—
Her breath momentarily stopped at the next thought.
What if they both had been killed here? Together?
She had to contact Brandt right away.
She swallowed to be sure her voice was steady and said, “That’s ridiculous. The ghost of Johnny Love? The hotel must be getting a kickback from the ghost tours.”
Townsend laughed, a rich, genuine sound that made Barrie’s face suddenly flush warm. “I bet they are.” Then he looked at her, a long look that made her even warmer. “I think we should have dinner and talk about it.”
She was caught totally off guard. “It’s almost two in the morning,” she pointed out.
“Breakfast, then,” he said. “Brunch. Cocktails. Whatever your body clock has in mind.”
She was itching to get to Brandt, which was why she responded without thinking. Really without thinking. “All I have in mind is bed.”
Townsend half smiled, but even his half smile sizzled through her whole body. “Even better.”
“I meant sleep,” she mumbled.
“Sleep is always good,” he said seriously. “Eventu-ally.”
Feeling completely out of control, Barrie said, “‘Eventually’ won’t work for me. Have a good night.” She turned and walked out of the lobby with whatever was left of her dignity, and immediately ducked into the ladies’ to avoid running into Mick again. She sat in front of one of the makeup mirrors and was extremely annoyed to see the red in her cheeks.
“You look like you’re in heat,” she muttered. But looking in the mirror gave her an idea. She put her hands flat on the top of the vanity, and as she stared into her reflection in the mirror, she slowed her breathing and concentrated on her auric body, the energetic field that a shifter manipulates in order to shift. As her eyes bored into the mirror, she began to see the faint outline of light around her own reflection. She pushed with her mind…and slipped on a different kind of glamour, what she thought of as a beauty spell, that would at least temporarily make her devastatingly attractive to anyone who looked at her. She closed her eyes, and felt the glamour float over her head and settle delicately over her entire body, like a gauzy dream of a dress, a sexy and intoxicating softness… .
She opened her eyes. …
The woman who looked back at her from the mirror had her features and coloring, but magically enhanced: a classic Hollywood goddess, too beautiful to be real. In this moment she could have given Lauren Bacall or Myrna Loy or Rita Hayworth a run for her money.
Barrie breathed in, feeling the pure power of that beauty. Then she stood and went out in search of the bellhop.
With the glamour on all she had to do was smile at the young male desk clerk and say she would just love to talk to the man who’d seen the ghost. The clerk pointed her toward the bell stand with a felled-by-lightning sort of look on his face.
The bellhop was in his late twenties but still had the gangly awkwardness of adolescence, and looked equally starstruck to see Barrie coming toward him.
“M-may I help you?” he stammered.
She gave him a dazzling smile. “I hope so. Did you really see the ghost of Johnny Love?”
“I’m not supposed to talk to any more reporters,” he said without much conviction.
“Good thing I’m not a reporter, then,” she said, and watched him waver, captivated by her false loveliness.
He glanced around to see if anyone could overhear them and then leaned toward her. “It wasn’t a ghost, it was a real person. He just looked exactly like Johnny.”
Not a ghost, then. A shifter, Barrie thought, and felt her pulse spike. Was it Tiger?
“And he checked in with Mayo?” she asked.
“I’m not supposed to say that,” the bellhop said, still enraptured.
“Good thing you didn’t, then.” She twinkled at him. “It will be our little secret.”
As she was turning away from him, she heard footsteps and an already achingly familiar voice speaking behind her. “Ah, there you are…darling.”
Darling? And what’s with the British accent?
As she turned, Mick Townsend was at her side, taking her hand, lifting it to kiss her fingers.
Whoa!
Even as desire rushed through her bloodstream at the feel of his lips on her skin, Barrie was reeling with confusion. What is this?
Mick gave her a look that sizzled through her to her toes as he spoke. The British accent was perfect, one of her perpetual downfalls, as intoxicating as catnip to a kitten. “I’ve just been telling this gentleman about our dilemma, and he’s been kind enough to find us a suite for the night.”
Barrie realized that the desk clerk was hovering behind him, and from the look he gave her it was clear the glamour she’d put on was still working.
She tried to focus and sort out what was going on. Our dilemma? A suite? Even as she wanted to rip into Townsend for whatever game he was playing, her intuition was telling her to go along with him, at least until she knew what was going on.
“It’s a bungalow, darling,” Mick said pointedly, and stroked her cheek, making her pulse skyrocket. “Pool-side.”
Bungalow. Mayo died in one of the bungalows. Her eyes widened, and although she kept her thoughts to herself, she saw Mick give her the barest nod. Can he really have talked his way into Mayo’s suite?
“That’s so very lovely of you,” she told the desk clerk, smiling as sweetly as she could. “We were—”
“—not looking forward to spending our wedding night at the airport,” Mick finished for her smoothly, his fingers now tracing an erotic pattern on her forearms.
Wedding night? Now, that’s just too much. She shot Mick a blistering look, and he smiled at her with mock adoration. “I explained all about the flight delay, our bags being held hostage. But none of that matters tonight. We have this beautiful place, we have each other… .”
He bent suddenly and kissed her. A lingering, promising, maddening touch of that full, firm mouth. Barrie felt the ground cartwheel beneath her.
Mick drew slowly back, his eyes on hers…then slid his fingers down her arm to take her hand and turned her so they both faced the desk clerk. “May we see it?”
Mick steered her after the desk clerk, and Barrie followed along in shock, down an abbeylike hall toward a set of heavy wooden doors. “He’s really putting us in Mayo’s room?” she whispered to Mick. It was a crime scene, or at least under investigation. She couldn’t imagine how he’d managed it.
“Not exactly,” he said, barely moving his lips.
She opened her mouth again, and when he put a finger on her lips to silence her, she could feel the tingle start from somewhere in her core. He nodded toward the desk clerk, and she went along in silence.
The clerk held the door open for them and they stepped outside into the junglelike plaza. The landscaping of the Chateau was lush and tropical—with tiny lights sprinkled in the trees for a fairy-tale glow—and designed for maximum privacy; as they followed the clerk, Barrie could barely see the outlines of the bungalows down the paths that curved off into the foliage. She was hyperconscious of Mick’s hand closed warmly around hers, his thumb stroking her fingers with a light, sensual touch…and hyperconscious that he was one of the most beautiful men she had ever seen. He carried himself like a rock star. She might have put on an artificial glamour, but there was a natural glamour about him that was almost hypnotic. She felt like the mistress of some exotic celebrity, suddenly transported into a Hollywood fantasy.
Ahead, the shimmering water of the pool glowed blue and inviting in the center of the buildings. The lights, the softly rippling water, the light breeze on her skin, the heat coming off the gorgeous man beside her…Barrie was having all kinds of ideas she didn’t want at all. Mick glanced at the pool and then at her face, and she suddenly had the uncomfortable feeling he knew exactly what she was thinking.
They had turned down one of the pale curving paths, and the desk clerk stopped in front of a bungalow that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. There was an arched door with windows on either side completing the curve, white roses and lilies in the planters beside it wafting an intoxicating scent. “Here we are,” the clerk said, and glanced at Barrie. Mick nudged her, and she gave the clerk a big smile.