Her Secret Spy. Cindy Dees
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up her easel and wrestled it out into the main room.
Max leaped to his feet to rescue the easel from her. “Where do you want this?”
“Over by the lamp. I’ll need the light.”
“Drawing something, are you?”
Crap. She couldn’t admit she wanted to capture the face she’d seen in her attacker’s mind as he’d attacked her. “It’s, umm, therapy. Helps me calm down when I’m upset.”
“You’re an artist, then?”
She shrugged. “Not really. I’m just a dabbler.”
She pulled a stool over in front of the easel he set up for her. In a few minutes a face started to take shape. She turned out to be a pretty girl, not unlike herself in features and overall coloring. Which was frankly creepy. Was her attacker a serial killer, maybe?
Once she’d captured the girl’s initial bone structure, she pulled out the pastels and really brought the face to life, drawing quickly and surely from memory.
“Who’s that?” Max eventually murmured from directly behind her.
She jumped, startled. She’d been concentrating so hard on the picture that she’d forgotten he was there.
“I have no idea.”
“It’s just a random sketch?”
There was no way she could explain it without sounding like a crazy woman, so she didn’t even try. Instead she lied. “Yes, it’s just a face.” And if she were a normal person, that was all it would be. Right, then. She’d determined to be normal; therefore, this was just a face.
Except why did the girl’s eyes stare out at her from the paper beseechingly, following her as she shifted right and left, checking the sketch’s perspective and making tiny corrections to the features?
It. Was. Just. A. Face.
Max moved in close behind her to study the sketch. “She’s pretty. You have a good hand for portraiture. You’re sure you’ve never seen this person before?”
Rather than answer his question, Lissa leaned forward to release the sheet of paper from the easel’s clips. “Here. Lay this on the floor in the corner and spray it with the fixative in the can over on the end of my work table while I put my art supplies away.”
It physically hurt Lissa to deny the girl’s fear and pain coming off that sketch. She had to get away for a minute and catch her breath. You poor, poor thing. Lissa jammed her pastels and pencils in a drawer in her dresser and slammed it shut. She wasn’t a psychic anymore. She didn’t listen to dead people anymore, and she didn’t draw the faces of murderer’s victims anymore. She was just a regular person living a normal life.
If only her gift didn’t seem to be tied to violence. Maybe she would have been able to live with predicting the sex of babies and telling people when to ask for a promotion at work. But her visions were, almost without exception, tied to death. She saw dead bodies. Sensed killers. Heard dead people. Saw death moving in to claim people. With a sigh, she returned to the main room.
Abrupt exhaustion swept over her. It was as if her psyche had held all her reaction to the earlier attack at bay until that sketch was out of her system. Now she felt on the verge of collapse.
“Are you okay?” Max asked quickly. The guy was pretty perceptive himself.
“I’m a little tired all of a sudden.”
He nodded knowingly. “Aftermath. The adrenaline drains away, and you feel like death warmed over.”
“Yes. That.” She sighed.
“Did your aunt leave a working bathtub in this wreck?” he asked.
Normally she would take offense at him calling her place a wreck. Even if it was true. She preferred to think of it as a work in progress. “Aunt Callista left the tub. Probably because it’s cast-iron and weighs a ton. I couldn’t even move it to scrape the linoleum from under the claw feet.”
“Then I suggest you go take a nice, long soak in a hot bath and go to bed.”
“Thanks for everything you’ve done for me. If you don’t mind, I’ll let you see yourself out. You’ve been more than kind, particularly since we’ve never met before tonight...” She trailed off, tilting her head to one side and staring at him as a little voice inside whispered that he knew her better than she could possibly imagine.
What was that all about?
She moved into the master bedroom and closed the door. Callista had not messed with the apartment’s original cast-iron claw-foot tub, and Lissa planned to take full advantage of that tonight. A bath was just the thing for quieting the voices rioting in the back of her head, clamoring more loudly than usual for attention.
* * *
Max waited until after the light went out under Lissa’s bedroom door to get up from the silly Victorian sofa and ease down the stairs. He avoided the step he’d registered as the squeaker on the way up and crept downstairs to the shop. Now to have a look around and see if he could figure out where Callista might have put her complete customer list.
Surely the woman had kept such a thing. Based on the criminal clientele he’d been told she served, she’d have been insane not to keep the names tucked away somewhere for self-protection, if nothing else. Of course, if she’d had a decent dead man’s switch in place based on such a list, Callista probably wouldn’t be dead now.
He reached the shop floor and looked around in dismay. How did a person even begin searching this maze? He started at the back corner and worked his way around the edges of the surprisingly large space. His mind boggled at the variety of odds and ends. He felt a little like Alice must have when she’d first fallen down the rabbit hole.
He examined an exquisite collection of small enameled boxes. As an art dealer, he would pay double what Lissa had them marked for, and he would mark them up even more for resale. He made a mental note to mention it to her in the morning.
Oh, wait. He couldn’t say anything about her merchandise pricing, lest she figure out he’d been snooping.
He refocused his mind on the client list and resolutely ignored a pair of actually quite nice landscape paintings hanging on the far wall from the stairs. They were oil paintings, the technique modern, and the sensibility for light and movement was top-notch. He would love to take a closer look at them in full daylight. If the color held up to bright light, the paintings and the artist could be quite a find.
But he wasn’t an art dealer anymore. At least not until he cracked the Russian crime syndicate that had swallowed his entire family whole.
Callista’s list, dammit.
He moved to the counter and made a cursory search of the cabinets there. Surely Lissa had already searched this, the most logical place to look for her aunt’s business records.
No surprise, he had no better luck than she’d had at locating Callista’s books. He looked around the store in the darkness. Where would he hide if he were a ledger, journal or notebook of some kind?
Something shifted in a corner near the ceiling, and he did a double take. For a second there, he thought he’d seen a faint movement. Or maybe a flash of light. Hell, if he didn’t know better, he’d say he’d seen a ghost. However, he did know better, and he didn’t buy any of that woo-woo stuff. It must have been cast from a passing car or something.
He glanced around behind the counter and spied a short door tucked back under the stairs to Lissa’s apartment. Hmm. A closet perhaps? He opened the door and was surprised to see another set of stairs, this one leading down. Nobody in New Orleans had basements. The place was built on a swamp, prone to flooding and gradually sinking even farther below sea level than it already was. A waterproof basement would be prohibitively expensive to build, the sort of thing only a bona fide nutball would even attempt.
But