Chameleon's Challenge (Chameleon Assassin Series Book 3) Read online

  Chapter 2

  That evening, Nellie and I took the bus down to The Pinnacle and found Richard waiting for us. He quickly pulled Nellie into the back office, leaving me to talk to Paul, the bar’s manager and my other best childhood friend.

  “How are you doing?” Paul asked as he poured me a shot . “I heard you discovered the body.”

  “Is it all over the news already?” I tossed off the shot.

  “Of course not,” he said. “But Carleton is one of the big bosses. Internal gossip travels fast.”

  Entertaincorp owned The Pinnacle chain of high-end nightclubs, among a lot of other businesses. Paul’s father was a senior vice president, like Carleton Weeks, and Paul’s older brother was a marketing manager. Paul wasn’t as ambitious as the rest of his family, and managing a bar suited him fine. The corporation also owned Nellie’s recording contract. Since my two best friends were always there, I spent a lot of time at the bar.

  “Was it bad?” he asked.

  “Worse than bad. Really, really, ugly bad.” I glanced around and leaned close. “Don’t tell Nellie. He must have tortured her for hours. Her bones were broken, and he cut off pieces of her. He raped her with…” As I remembered Olga’s corpse, the images I had avoided thinking about flooded in. I tasted bile, clapped my hand over my mouth, and scooted off the barstool so I could sprint to the washroom. Paul poured more whiskey in my glass, and I tossed it in my mouth. The burn of the whiskey chased the bile back into my stomach. I braced myself against the bar, and a shudder ran through me. I started shaking and sweating, and the room seemed to blur.

  Then Paul was on my side of the bar, his arms around me as he helped me down from the barstool. He steered me to a low chair next to a table. After some time, I managed to pull myself together, then downed the glass of whiskey sitting in front of me.

  “I think I should get you a ride home,” Paul said.

  “No, I have to wait for Nellie. She’s staying with me.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll talk to Richard.”

  “What are you going to do for a band?” People were filtering in, expecting to hear a live band and Nellie sing. “No, I’ll be okay. It’s okay.” I was feeling numb from the whiskey and a little distant from the world. And distant from my memories of Olga, which was a good thing. “Maybe I just need something to eat. And no more booze.”

  Paul nodded and got up from his seat. He came back a minute later and set a large glass of water in front of me, then went away again.

  About ten minutes after that, a waitress set a plate of poutine in front of me as Richard and Nellie came out from the back office and headed toward me.

  Richard and I were civil to each other, but to call us friends would be a stretch. He considered me a bad influence, but I’m sure he would have denied it. I don’t think he’d ever tried to articulate his feelings. I made him uncomfortable. I grew up in his social class—or maybe on the fringes of his social class—but declined to follow its conventions. If my mother wasn’t such a wild child, or if she had married my father and settled down, I might have turned out differently. Of course, Richard wasn’t aware that I mostly made my living as a criminal. I did confuse him, and he didn’t like to be confused. He was used to being in control.

  The other problem was Nellie. I didn’t think she spoke to him about our relationship, but he might have suspected we were more than just good friends.

  They sat down and Nellie picked up my fork to spear a fry. Richard did a double take, then looked at me and said, “I’ll send a car over tomorrow to collect Nellie’s things.”

  “Oh? The police said they were going to have things closed up for a few days.”

  “I’ll get her a hotel room.”

  I considered my response. What I wanted to do was rip his jealous face off.

  “So, you know who killed Olga, and why he did it?”

  “Well, no, of course not.”

  “Then why do you assume Nellie wasn’t the real target?” I asked. “Nellie’s the one who’s famous. Who knew Olga?” I leaned forward. “Richard, we don’t know who killed Olga or why they did it. Maybe Olga was the target, but it could have been someone else. What if the guy showed up and Olga wasn’t home, but Nellie was?”

  His brow furrowed and he sat back in his chair. Richard wasn’t a stupid man, and I could see him consider what I said.

  “I have her at a MegaTech safe house.” I shrugged as if it didn’t make any difference to me. “If you feel more comfortable making arrangements with Entertaincorp security, I can understand that. But, Richard, I do security for a living. The guy who killed Olga scares the hell out of me. There’s a madman out there.”

  To his credit, he turned to Nellie. “Do you feel safe where you are?”

  “Yeah, I do. I mean, I can meet you at a hotel when you want, but you’re not around all the time.”

  Nice job, Nellie. I knew that Richard usually spent two or three nights a week at her place when he was in town, but he traveled a lot. Corporate executives at his level often worked eighty- to hundred-hour weeks in exchange for their million-credit salaries.

  One of the band members setting up on the stage called for Nellie to come up and check her microphone. Richard and I watched her go.

  “Richard, I talked to the inspector in charge of the investigation. He’s expecting more of these murders. I hope you have good security at your home, because at this point, no one knows how that sicko picks his targets.”

  His startled expression told me that he’d never considered that. He naturally assumed Olga’s murder was a city thing that happened to lower-class women.

  I didn’t sleep well. Even when I could manage to banish the images of Olga’s ravaged body, I still saw her horrified face staring at me. Normally, I would have got up and done something rather than lie there, but I didn’t want to disturb Nellie. She slept like the proverbial log, snuggled right up against me. I was glad when the sun came up.

  Since food and my kitchen were virtual strangers, and I didn’t think taking Nellie out in public was safe, we rode my cycle over to Mom’s for brunch. The place was packed, but we got a table in the reserved employee section of the dining room.

  Mom had bought an old hotel and fixed it up. She turned the top floors into apartments for her girls and boys. They used the rooms on the lower floors to entertain their clients. The ground floor had a dark, plush lounge—perfect for meeting clients or mistresses after work—and Dominik’s restaurant. The restaurant had dark wood paneling, red velvet-covered chairs and booths, crystal chandeliers, white linen tablecloths and fancy tableware—the elegant atmosphere matched the elegant, mouthwatering food.

  The waitress gushed over Nellie, and sneered at me. I should have used my Lizzie persona, the one that looked like a young Mom. The service for Lizzie was always better than for Libby. Usually when I showed up as myself, I was in a hurry, frazzled, hurt, or exhausted, so they didn’t see me at my best. I made sure to leave a large tip.

  After brunch, we stopped by a place down the street that sold ice cream, and then rode over to the orphanage.

  Amanda Rollins was Nellie’s aunt, and she ran a home for mutant and disabled children in an old school. I’d supplied support to the orphanage since I first met her. The kids she took care of were at the bottom of the social ladder. Mostly mutants, they were so disfigured or disabled that even the outcasts abandoned them. She had raised them in the worst of Toronto’s slums, feeding them from garbage that she collected in the alleys behind restaurants.

  When I bought the old school with money from a jewelry heist, I didn’t realize it was in a neighborhood where Amanda had family. That led to a number of unexpected consequences. Nellie had actually gone to school there before it closed, and after Amanda moved in, the neighborhood scraped together enough money to pay a couple of teachers and restart a school in part of the building. Providing a facility for the neighborhood to have a school also created an opportunity for the mutant orphans to meet and interact
with normal children, as well as giving them a chance at attending classes if they were able to. The ability to read and write was the first step to escaping poverty, but it was too expensive for most kids in the ghettos.

  We pulled up out front, and the mob of kids hanging around erupted into a frenzy.

  “Miz Libby!”

  “Miz Nellie!”

  “Miz Nellie, will you sing us a song?”

  Before I could barely put the kickstand of the cycle down, we were swamped with kids hugging us and asking what we’d brought for them. Amanda came out and rescued us, and we handed her the sacks of ice cream.

  After we settled all the kids in the cafeteria, Nellie and I pulled Amanda aside and told her about Olga’s murder. Since the school had become the center of the neighborhood, I could be sure that telling Amanda about a monster on the loose, the news would soon spread.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a lycan or some radical mutant?” Amanda asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but in that neighborhood, someone who didn’t look like a normal human would attract attention. Amanda, it really didn’t look like a lycan attack. I mean, I didn’t spend much time studying the body, but it didn’t look as though she had any bites.”

  Nellie’s phone rang, and she stepped away to take the call. When she returned, she said, “We need to go. Richard wants us to meet him.”

  We rode over to The Pinnacle, and although the bar was open, only a few patrons were there in the middle of the afternoon. Richard met us in the main room and led us upstairs to the mezzanine.

  Without preamble, he turned to us and said, “Carleton Weeks’s family was slaughtered last night.”

  Nellie gasped. I felt a numbness settle over me.

  “What about Mr. Weeks?” I asked.

  “He was out of town. On business in Vancouver,” Richard said. “When he couldn’t reach anyone at home, he went out there from the airport when he flew in this morning.”

  “How long had he been in Vancouver?”

  “He flew out there on Friday.”

  So, that removed Weeks from the list of suspects. Nellie had seen Olga on Saturday.

  “Slaughtered?” I asked.

  “The security men were shot, as were the housekeepers and the cook. Moreen and the girls were butchered. Carleton said there was blood in almost every room.”

  “So, he found the bodies?”

  Richard nodded.

  “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,” I said.

  Richard bit his lip and gave me the most sympathetic look I’d ever received from him. “The doctors have Carleton sedated. The police couldn’t even interview him.”

  “How did you—” I started to ask.

  “He called me, and I called the police. If I hadn’t known about Olga, I wouldn’t have had a clue what he was saying. I drove out there, and the police filled me in.”

  He dropped into a chair and looked up at us. Nellie also took a chair.

  “Libby,” he said, “I have a really bad feeling about all of this.”

  The way he said it made me pay attention.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Doesn’t it sound as though someone is targeting Carleton?”

  “Well, yeah. I think that’s obvious, unless there’s a lot of this kind of murders we don’t know about.”

  Richard fell silent for several minutes. I got tired of standing and sat down, too. He raised his eyes and said, “I think it has something to do with work.”

  Assassinations in the corporate world were fairly common. A business might gain a major advantage by eliminating key personnel of a rival. They were also a way for someone to move up the corporate ladder a little faster.

  Carefully, I said, “Assassination is one thing, but I’ve never heard of something like this. Normally, executives’ families are off limits. Children are definitely off limits. This strikes me as something personal.”

  “Oh, I think it’s personal,” he said with a sigh. He glanced at Nellie, then turned his attention back to me. “I can arrange additional security for my family. Entertaincorp will do that. How much will you charge to protect Nellie?”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll protect Nellie.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “I don’t want any distractions or excuses. If I’m paying you, you can put additional resources on it, right?”

  I shrugged, then nodded. “Yeah, I can if necessary.” I thought about it. “My normal rates are five thousand a day. I’ll include a vampire who’s a corporate-trained security specialist, full time, in that rate. If I have to pull in additional resources, I’ll keep the rate the same. Twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Done. I’ll talk to Paul. I don’t want her exposed, so you’ll go backstage with her.” He turned his gaze on Nellie and said, “She’s precious to me, Libby.”

  “She is to me, too.”

  He looked back to me and said, “I know.”

  Chapter 3

  I talked with my mom, and then with Mike DiBlasio. He had helped me through a sticky situation in Chicago, and I trusted him. Mike was competent, smart, and as a vampire, far stronger and faster than I was. My father had trained us both, and we’d worked well together. For two thousand a day, he was happy to help. Mom paid him well, but not that well.

  I was a bit of a night owl, but Nellie’s schedule had her getting off work at three in the morning four mornings a week. Since Mike, as with all vampires, was nocturnal, we split up the shifts, with me taking most of the daylight hours. I put him in my spare bedroom so he’d be at hand if we needed him.

  Two days after Richard hired me, he called. “Carleton Weeks was killed this morning,” he said when I answered the phone.

  “Where? How?”

  “He was gunned down right in front of our offices.”

  “In broad daylight?”

  “Yes. An Inspector Donofrio is handling the case. Can you speak with him?”

  “The police aren’t too keen on telling independents about their investigations,” I said.

  “I’ll have our corporate security clear the way. Tell the cops you’re with us.”

  “I’d like to talk to your security people first.”

  “All right. Come around Entertaincorp headquarters in an hour and ask for Director Pong.”

  I roused Mike but left Nellie sleeping, and then I got dressed to deal with the police. I figured jeans and a tank top were unprofessional, so I dressed in a dark pantsuit with a white blouse to make me look more like a corporate representative.

  Director Pong was waiting for me and showed me into his huge, richly-appointed office. A bank of computer screens covered one wall, and I saw two larger rooms branching off on the other side of the room. One looked like a conference room, the other was what I would call a situation room.

  Pong Yejun was Asian, short and stocky, but he moved like he knew how to handle himself.

  “What can I do for you, Miss Nelson?” he asked as he poured me a cup of coffee from a carafe on his desk.

  “Thank you for meeting with me,” I said, accepting the coffee with a smile. “I assume you know that Vice President O’Malley hired me to provide security for a friend of his.”

  He nodded.

  “He also asked me to coordinate the police investigation with you. I thought that was rather unusual, so I wanted to make sure you were aware of it.”

  “Oh, yes, Richard checked with me. It is thoughtful of you, though.”

  “And, why don’t you provide someone to coordinate with the police?”

  Pong looked embarrassed. “Well, I happen to be rather short of staff at the moment, and when Richard said he’d contracted you, I was glad for the help. I’m aware of your reputation.”

  “Short of staff. You can’t bring people in from out of town?”

  He fiddled with a pen, then glanced at a computer screen, then looked out the window. When he looked back at me, he said, “Miss Nelson, I’m going to rely on your discretio
n.”

  I nodded. “Of course. Without discretion, I’d be out of business.”

  “We are on heightened alert providing additional security for all of our executives and their families.”

  “How many executives here in Toronto are we talking about?”

  “Including Mr. Weeks, Entertaincorp has three senior vice presidents, six vice presidents, and fifteen associate vice presidents working out of our various Toronto offices. There are also about thirty different directors of different functions.”

  I felt my mind starting to fuzz with an aversion to that huge a bureaucracy. “How many employees do you have in Toronto?”

  “About sixty thousand. Toronto is one of five regional headquarters in North America. We cover most of Canada and New England. Worldwide, Entertaincorp employs sixteen million people. The security alert we’ve put out is not just for Toronto.”

  With a sigh, I said, “Mr. O’Malley said that he thought the murders were personal, but connected to the business.”

  Pong nodded. I waited for him to elaborate. And waited. It took a while for him to get the hint.

  “Ah, yes. Well, we think that…I mean there’s a possibility…a disgruntled former employee…might…possibly…be involved.”

  I couldn’t get anything more out of him, so I took myself off to the police station.

  The constable at the front desk didn’t look very happy when I asked for Inspector Donofrio, but he was a virtual fount of joy compared to the attitude of the good inspector himself.

  “You were with MegaTech the other day, now you’re with Entertaincorp,” Donofrio said. “Exactly who are you and what do you want?”

  I handed him my card again. “I’ve been engaged by executives at Entertaincorp to assist with their security. They feel they have a personal stake in your investigation, and they want someone involved who can keep them informed.”

  “That is highly irregular.”

  “I understand that.” I handed him another piece of paper. “These are my references. You can also call Director Pong at Entertaincorp.”