“Yes?”
“My name is Stéphane Gregoire. I am the ma?tre d’ of the Respite.”
The Respite was a French themed restaurant, very tasteful, very exclusive, catering to an elite clientele. When the movers and shakers of Houston wanted to have a private lunch to discreetly discuss business, they went to the Respite. None of them knew Linus secretly owned it.
“We’ve met,” I reminded him. “What can I do for you?”
“There has been a murder,” Mr. Gregoire said. “I’ve attempted to reach Prime Duncan, but he is not answering.”
“Who was murdered?”
“Luciana Cabera.”
Oh shit.
“Who else knows?”
“You are the second person I called. I was instructed to reach out to you if the Warden was unavailable.”
“Sit tight. Close the restaurant. I’ll be right there.”
I hung up and dialed Linus. One ring, two, three . . .
Linus always took my calls. Night or day, anytime, he picked up on the second ring.
Four, five . . .
He always warned me if he expected to be unavailable. Alessandro and I had a meeting scheduled with him tonight. I hung up and opened the door.
Matilda and Ragnar blinked at me.
“Get the Dabrowski family out of here and find that expensive, stressed out, scared spider before she bites someone or lays eggs.”
I took off down the hallway toward the exit, dialing Alessandro. He’d left this morning to hunt down Dag Gunderson. He answered instantly.
“Where are you?”
“Pulling up to the gates.”
“I have an emergency,” I told him.
“We’ll take my car.”
I cleared the building and ran out into the sunshine, dialing Leon as I walked to the gates.
“If this is about the spider . . .” Leon started.
“Spider later. Linus isn’t answering his phone. I need you to drive out to his place.”
“On it.”
“Call me when you get there.”
Alessandro’s silver Alfa Romeo streaked through the gates and slid to a stop in front of me. I got in and we U-turned and sped down the driveway.
“Where to?” Alessandro asked.
“The Respite. The Speaker of the Texas State Assembly has been murdered.”
Chapter 2
The Respite occupied a handsome two-story building on the corner of Milam and Anita, in Midtown. There were places in Houston that glittered. This area wasn’t one of them. It was a place of generic apartment complexes, karaoke bars, bistros and take-out joints. Chipotle and Starbucks lived here and enjoyed heavy foot traffic from young professionals stopping in on their way in or out of the steel and glass towers of Northeast Midtown.
The Respite masqueraded as an average midlevel restaurant. Built with red brick, it boasted large arched windows on the first level, and if you were to walk through its front door, you’d find a satisfying menu of Texas staples with a hint of French flair. Special clients didn’t enter through the front door. They took the side entrance and were led up a narrow staircase to the second floor. There they had a choice of a spacious dining room with tables set far apart to ensure privacy or the patio, an open-air dining space enclosed on two sides by a wall of plants and on the third, by a stone feature wall, offering art with Old West themes, framed antique maps, and black-and-white frontier photos in case the visitors somehow forgot they were in Texas.
Luciana Cabera hung off that wall, between a group shot of some cowboys and a dreamy Dawson Dawson-Watson original of a field awash with bluebonnets.
A two-foot metal spike pinned her to the stone through her chest. A second spike protruded from her open mouth. In life, she had been a slender woman with short curly hair she styled in a modern haircut, a sly nod at male politician hairstyles. She’d smiled easily, talked with her hands, and her eyes sparkled with life.
The thing that hung on the wall was her pale, lifeless imitation. Blood drenched her beige suit. Her trademark glasses with dark green frames lay on the ground. Her dark pumps had fallen off, and her bare feet, suspended six inches above the floor, dangled limp. There was something so disturbing and vulnerable about her feet with pale green nail polish on her toes. I had never seen her without shoes. It felt wrong. I couldn’t explain it, but it made my throat squeeze itself into a hard clump.
In the first few months of working for Linus, I kept telling myself that eventually I’d become desensitized to the sheer brutality of magic combat, but it’d been almost two years. I knew better now. The urge to run away, the disturbing sensation of a sinking stomach, and throat gripped in an invisible fist when I saw another body savaged by someone’s power would stay with me. Always. But I had gotten better at sidestepping it so I could do my job. The gloves helped. When I put on gloves before entering a scene, some part of me took it as a signal that it was time to put away personal anxiety and fear.