The Private Concierge. Suzanne Forster

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      And then what had she done but trash herself on those streets?

      Rick paced the room, feeling like he was in a cage, but maybe he needed the confinement right now. Where would he go if he wasn’t hemmed in by these L-shaped walls? He might head south and never stop. South to the border. Run, don’t walk. Go, Rick, go. Get the holy hell out of here. Have some semblance of a life while you can. Meet a woman, fall in love for ten minutes. Give your heart away. It’s the only thing you have left of any worth.

      Lane Chandler.

      He slowed up and let his thoughts roll back a decade and a half. She was Lucy Cox. What a dangerously precocious kid that one had been, a real handful, the Jodi Foster of her time. Rick had picked her up for street prostitution—an open-and-shut case, given that she’d propositioned him. Blue-eyed and bold, she’d actually made him wish she was fifteen years older—and that had never happened before.

      He’d been working juvenile vice since he’d signed on with the force, and dealing with drugged-out street urchins was enough to make any normal man want to put them in a straitjacket so they couldn’t hurt themselves or someone else. They were sad, angry and desperate. Too often they ended up dead. But she wasn’t one of them. She was something else, an underage madonna, luminous enough to light up skid row. The courts had put her in juvie, and Rick had helped make sure she didn’t get out until she was legal, eighteen.

      Rick walked to the window and stood there, shirtless, in the rising beam of light, letting it warm him. Jeans were all he’d bothered with this morning. There wasn’t a woman around to complain about his bare chest—or appreciate it, for that matter. Hadn’t been for quite a while. His last long-term relationship, and only marriage, ended ten years ago, for the same reason most law enforcement marriages ended. Criminal neglect. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her. He just didn’t have the time or energy to love her the way she needed it. Couldn’t blame her for that. He shouldn’t have married in the first place, but he’d been young—and probably just selfish enough to want someone around on those interminable nights of soul-searching, someone to ease the loneliness.

      The slam of a neighboring door brought his attention back to the view. His cubby was a converted storage room, and its only window looked out on the alley behind his house, exposing the back sides of a half block of badly weathered beach houses. The alley had little to recommend it, except bower after bower of glorious red and orange bougainvillea. Rick loved the stuff. It festooned the courtyard out front, too, and as far as he was concerned, it made his beach cottage look like a small palazzo.

      Lane Chandler. God, he didn’t want to go back there. It wasn’t going to help anyone to dredge up that muck, least of all Ned. And there were so many other reasons not to pursue this investigation. A case like this could take months, years, even for a seasoned homicide detective, which Rick wasn’t. You needed the right resources, computer databases, labs and technicians to investigate a murder. He had access to none of that, and he was running out of time. Everything pointed to murder-suicide. The police had already written it off.

      But foremost among the reasons to let this investigation go was her, Lucy Cox, all grown up and running her own concierge service. Why didn’t that surprise him?

      He walked back to his desk, swept up her card, crushed it in his fist and dropped it in the trash. And then he left the room.

      He got as far as the living room, as far as the doors to his beloved courtyard, before a realization stopped him. Like a bomb it hit him. What were the odds of so many seemingly disparate things converging on that one night at Ned’s place? Rick had found Ned and his girlfriend dead, the package missing and Lane Chandler’s card stuck to Ned’s desk, all within the same time frame. Or what appeared to be the same time frame. The package could have been missing awhile, but Rick didn’t think so. Ned would have mentioned it. And Rick suspected the card was recent, too. Ned wouldn’t have let that slip, either. But maybe that was what Ned had been trying to say the night he showed up at the cabin.

      What Ned didn’t know, what no one knew except Rick, was that Lucy Cox was connected to that missing package. She was the catalyst for what had happened fifteen years ago—and the reason Rick had left the force.

      If she really was Lane Chandler now, Rick questioned whether it was a coincidence that Ned had come across her somewhere. Had she approached him because she wanted the package herself? Why? He could think of people who might want to get their hands on it, but why her? Blackmail, most likely. And how did she know that Ned had it?

      He turned and slammed back through the house, swearing to himself. He nearly took the door off the hinges as he entered his office, and the first thing he did was pick up the trash can. Now, where the hell was that card?

      5

      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 СКАЧАТЬ