Velvet Haven Page 3

  Mairi grinned at the department’s secretary. “Nah, I’ll let her figure that one out for herself. All part of the learning curve.”

  “So, got yourself another one of those books, eh?”

  Mairi flushed. “Yeah.”

  “Pretty girl like you should be getting herself a man.” Mairi groaned. She really didn’t want to have this conversation again. Thankfully the phone rang and the secretary reached for it, allowing Mairi to go back to her manuscript. She’d collected the beautiful books for years, and this little gem was a prize. She’d found it hiding behind some books at the bottom of the antique rosewood bookcase in the library of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Opening it, she realized it wasn’t just an ordinary manuscript, but some kind of diary. It was ancient, written in a language similar to Old English. Mairi knew as she held the worn leather book in her hand that she had to have it. Just to borrow, she had told herself.

  The book had spoken to her. Like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, she would have stroked it and called it “my precious” if one of the nuns hadn’t walked by, forcing Mairi to bury it in her work bag.

  And since that day she’d been all but consumed by it, by the need to translate the story and understand it. And since that day in the library, not only had the book come into her life, but a strange dream had as well.

  “I’m gonna go for break,” Mairi called to Louise, the charge nurse for the shift. “I’ll be in the sleep room if you need me.”

  Stuffing the book into her bag, Mairi picked up her coffee mug and headed to the back room that housed a twin bed and a bunch of extra equipment. The shift was relatively slow and she planned to take advantage of it.

  The sleep room door creaked open and Mairi dropped her bag on the bed before flopping down onto the lumpy mattress. Digging out the book, she opened it to the page that contained the image of a Celtic triscale. Below it, in fancy gilt lettering, were the words “And so shall come the divine trinity, their numbers the sacred, elemental root of nine warriors.”

  With her finger, Mairi traced the exquisite work and the brilliant colors of the triscale as she mulled over the words. This was the fun of collecting manuscripts—deciphering them. Normally they were chivalric or biblical stories, but this book, this was far more interesting. From what Mairi could gather, it was written by a woman who was some sort of ancient seer. She had received a vision of the coming Dark Times of her world.

  And there will be black magick and the resurrection of the Dark Arts. There will be sorrow and despair until one of the nine will emerge, either Destroyer or Savior.

  Definitely the best reading she’d ever found. Most people thought she was a nerd to be getting a rush from old, dusty books, but Mairi didn’t care what people thought of her, or her hobby. It was probably why she had few close friends.

  Oh, she was friendly enough with the people she worked with and even went out the odd time with them for dinner and a few drinks, but she wasn’t close to them. She had a hard time getting close to people. Trust wasn’t something that came easily to her.

  Checking her watch, Mairi realized she had only a half hour left on her break. She closed the book and placed it carefully back in her bag. Removing her stethoscope from around her neck, she hung it from an IV pole and kicked off her shoes. Man, she was exhausted. Too many late nights working on the book, and too many nights of interrupted sleep from those weird dreams she kept having.

  With a yawn she fell backward and was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

  “Hey, MacAuley, Dr. Stud says he’s got a stiff one for you in trauma three.”

  “Tell him if that’s what he’s dangling for bait, I’m not biting,” Mairi grumbled from beneath the flannel blanket she had stolen from the warming cupboard in the hospital supply room.

  “C’mon, you’re not telling me that Pretty Boy Sanchez doesn’t do it for you?”

  “Look, Louise, I’m on break.” Man, she had just fallen asleep.

  “Get yer ass up, MacAuley. I need you.”

  Mairi groaned. Speak of the devil. “I’m on break!” she snapped, covering her head with a pillow as the room burst into a blast of halogen light. “You ignoramus! Turn the light off.”

  The husky male chuckle from the door made her teeth grate. She so didn’t get the whole Sanchez mystique. The guy was an asshole, and a mediocre ER doc at best.

  “Vicky is covering me for break. Tell her to go.”

  “Yeah, the thing is, the cops aren’t asking for Vicky.”

  Mairi sat up and shoved her hair back from her face. The light was bright and she squinted. “What’d you say?”

  “The cops. They want to see you.”

  Great. What the hell could they possibly want with her? Maybe it was the overdose she’d helped with at the beginning of the shift. Or the suspected wife beater who’d taken his bruised wife home three hours ago. Bet that was it: The wife was dead. Whatever it was, it was damn rude interrupting her on break. A night at St. Michael’s in which you even got a break was rare, and one to be savored. Obviously, she wouldn’t be savoring this one.

  Her gaze shifted to her bag, and suddenly she felt ill. Maybe the nuns had somehow discovered that she’d taken the book? Maybe it was a priceless artifact and now Mairi was going to be arrested for art theft.

  Ah, hell!

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” she grumbled, wiping her face with her hands. What the hell was she going to do? What was she going to say if they knew she had the book?

  “Need a sponge bath?” Sanchez asked with a leer. “It’ll wake you up.”

  “Like a physician’s ever given a sponge bath.”

  He shrugged, watching her with his dark brown eyes as she tossed the flannel aside and reached for her shoes. “Hey, I can play nurse if you wanna play patient.”

  “Not in this lifetime,” she mumbled as she swept past him. Maybe all the other nurses fell for Dr. Sex, but she wasn’t one of them. There was something about the guy that irritated the hell out of her. He was cocky, self-absorbed, and emotionally void. Perfect attitude for a trauma doctor. Horrible for relationships.

  Not that she’d done any better. The guys she attracted were all the wrong sort. Besides, she wasn’t into relationships. Based on what she saw rolling into the ER, it was better to stay single and wear out sex toys than get tangled up with the wrong man.

  Out in the hall, two uniformed cops were waiting for her and she suddenly forgot all about sex and the irritating Dr. Sanchez. By the look on their faces, they meant business. Serious business. And Mairi had the sinking feeling that somehow she’d been found out. Hell, maybe the nuns had put a security camera in the library.

  “You Mairi MacAuley?” the older officer asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Detective Morris wants to see you.”

  Mairi followed them through the busy ER to the back, where their largest trauma room sat across from the ambulance ramp. A trail of blood streaked across the floor from the sliding doors to a cubicle where the curtains were drawn.

  “What’s this about, Officer?” she asked. “I’m not in trauma tonight. I’m assigned to DVSA.”

  “DVSA?”

  “Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault,” she clarified.

  The curtain suddenly pulled back and a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit stood before her. “I’m pretty sure you’ll agree that this qualifies.” The detective glanced down at the laminated name badge that hung from her lanyard. “Mairi MacAuley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In here.”

  One of the cops moved her forward and Mairi froze, unable to step inside the cubicle. “What in the hell—”

  “Hell was, indeed, the last thing she saw,” the detective murmured. Mairi swallowed hard when she felt bile rise up her throat. “So, Miss MacAuley, you know this woman?”

  She shook her head, unable to take her eyes off the naked body. Her torso had been used for a canvas, her skin marked with knife wounds. Symbols were carved in her skin, and he
r wrists, neck, and ankles displayed bloodstained rope burns.

  In a pile on a chair next to the stretcher were a hot pink leather dress and a pair of shiny black thigh-high stiletto boots. The detective followed her gaze to the chair. “The clothes were lying beside her. Her purse was there too. Inside was this.”

  He handed her a crisp white business card. Mairi MacAuley, RN, Crisis Worker, St. Michael ’s Hospital.

  Shit.

  “You remember her now?” the detective asked. Shaking her head, Mairi approached the gurney, taking in the macabre artwork on her skin, noting the black wax that had been dripped onto the girl’s breasts and mons. The stench of burning skin and hair made her want to gag, and she looked away, to the face that Mairi knew she would see in her nightmares.

  Her eyes were open. She hated when they died like that. And the endotracheal tube that was sticking out of her mouth told her that she hadn’t been dead when she arrived. She’d been alive, and . . . suffering.

  “Well?”

  The eyes were familiar, but she couldn’t recall counseling a young woman with fluorescent pink hair. She reached for the bangs and pulled the nylon wig off. A cascade of blond hair toppled out of a bun, and the wig fell from her hands.

  “Lauren Brady,” she rasped, recalling her meeting with the girl last week, right after Mairi had found the manuscript and stolen it.

  “Remember anything about her?”

  “Seventeen. No parents. Ward of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow.”

  “The home for troubled girls?” the detective asked as he flipped open his notebook and began writing.

  “Yes,” Mairi whispered, closing Lauren’s eyelids so she wouldn’t have to see the vacant stare. The action made the elastic cuff of her lab coat ride up, revealing the pale, jagged scars on her inner wrist. Nonchalantly, Mairi pulled it back down, securing it by curling her fingers around the elastic.

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Thursday afternoon. I volunteer at Our Lady once a week. She was my last appointment of the day.”

  The detective grunted as he wrote down everything she told him. “So St. Mike’s has an outreach program or something with Our Lady?”

  “No.”

  “No? You do this pro bono? You a saint?”

  Mairi felt her face flush with anger. “There’s still some charity in the world, Detective.”

  “Yeah? I ain’t seen it in years.” He looked her up and down, his eyes narrowing. “Our Lady had problems with narcotics last year. Know anything about that?”

  “You don’t have to work in a hospital to get your hands on narcotics. Besides, the days of a drug cabinet and a set of keys are long gone. The dispensing is all computerized. No chance I’m signing out two Percocets and taking a handful, if you know what I mean.”

  He nodded, and Mairi knew he was just fishing, trying to bait her. Jackass. “So you go to Our Lady once a week. Why there? Why not some other place, in a better part of town?”

  She shrugged. “The sisters were good to me and my mother. So I return the favor.”

  His shrewd gaze landed on her left arm, where her fingers still clutched the cuff of the lab coat. He’d seen them—the scars.

  “Were you one of those troubled girls, Miss MacAuley?”

  Damn it. She didn’t want to go into this.

  “I don’t see how that’s pertinent.”

  His gaze shifted to the gurney. “Maybe she’d think it important.”

  Mairi tried desperately to look anywhere but at the mottling body beside her, but it was like trying to look away from a train wreck. God, why would someone do something so sick?

  “Miss MacAuley?”

  Mairi shook herself, trying to focus on Detective Morris and not the satanic symbols that had been drawn on Lauren’s body, or the scars that marred her own wrist. “My mother was a cook there, and when my father took it into his head to beat the crap out of her, the nuns let us stay with them till he came around, begging for forgiveness.”

  The detective stared at her with knowing eyes. “Did he do that a lot?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes it’d be months and we’d be thinking he’d reformed. Then the hammer would drop.”

  His gaze once more dropped to her left hand. “And your world would collapse?”

  She really hated cops. Detectives most of all. Far too perceptive. “Look, the nuns fed us, clothed us, and they helped pay for my education. I think I can give them back a day a week, Detective.”

  He nodded and dropped his notebook onto the bedside table. “Did you examine her last week?”

  “Yes. And she didn’t have the artwork. I would definitely have remembered that.” Her gaze traveled over the pale skin that was marked so cruelly. “Who the hell would do something like this?” She’d seen a lot of shit in her career as an ER nurse, but this topped the list.

  “Someone with a lot of time, and a place where he knew he wouldn’t get caught.”

  “Where’d you find her?”

  “On Sanctuary, in the middle of the road. The guy who nearly drove over her with his minivan stopped and called 911.”

  “Was she dressed?”

  “Nope. She was lying on the ground, spread-eagle on an inverted pentagram that had been drawn on the road in chalk. Her belongings were dumped on the sidewalk.”

  Mairi pressed her eyes shut. “And she was still alive.”

  “Barely.”

  Exhaling, she looked at the young girl’s body. “I write a report and file it every time I counsel the girls. You’ll find my report at Our Lady.”

  He nodded, reached in his pocket, and unwrapped a piece of gum. “Do you remember offhand what you talked about?”

  A shiver caught her unaware and she couldn’t hide it before the detective saw. He was studying her as he popped the gum in his mouth.

  “We talked about a man she had met,” Mairi said. “She said his name was Aaron. She seemed . . . happy. She said he was nice. Treated her right. Took her out to dinner and bought her stuff.”

  “He was older?”

  “Yeah. But it’s common for these girls to look for older men. They want security. To know they can be taken care of.”

  He’s so hot. He’s a total gentleman, and, wow, is he good in bed. Way better than any guys my age are. He knows how to make me feel good, you know? His name’s Aaron . . .

  Mairi shivered again. The similarities were there: the same name, the same age. But Mairi had nothing more to go on, no proof that Lauren’s Aaron had been the same Aaron who had stalked and terrified the hell out of her friend Rowan two months ago. It could be coincidence that both Rowan and Lauren had met a man named Aaron. Still, Mairi found herself wondering if Lauren had met her Aaron while he was visiting his niece at Our Lady, just like Rowan had.

  The detective coughed, catching her attention. “Ah, she didn’t happen to mention anything about being into the kinky stuff, did she?”

  Mairi shook her head. “But I know she was into the rave scene. She and another friend used to sneak out of the house and down to the dockyards to the warehouse district. It’s only a block away from the home. I’m sure that’s where she met up with this guy.”

  “You ever seen this?” He was holding up what appeared to be a bud of some sort. Mairi took it, knowing right away what it was.

  “Thorn-apple. It’s a deadly narcotic, part of the nightshade family. It’s hallucinogenic and it apparently heightens sexual arousal.”

  “And how do you know that, Miss MacAuley?” the detective asked with a smile.

  “You wouldn’t believe the shit that crosses this threshold, Detective. I’ve seen just about everything, and drugs that get people off are the least of the weird. Trust me.”

  He laughed, then reached for his pad. “Do ravers use this?”

  “Along with neo-pagans, occultists, rich people looking for a rush, and kids trying to be cool by experimenting.” Mairi paused. “Any chance that goth club over in the East End might have something to do w
ith this? It’s close to Our Lady, and it’s the right sort of scene for drugs like this.”

  “Velvet Haven?” he asked, obviously surprised. “I doubt it. The owner, Rhys MacDonald, is careful to stay within the law. He gets raided regularly and we never find anything. Besides, she’s obviously underage. She’d never get past security there.”

  “She would if she was with a VIP member.”

  “Not at Velvet Haven she wouldn’t. I know MacDonald. He doesn’t want trouble. Customers who are VIPs are given that privilege because they don’t cause shit. VIP status isn’t bought like at other clubs. It’s given, by him. That’s how he keeps things in line.”

  “You hear stories,” she murmured, trailing off. “I just thought—”

  “Yeah, well. It’s just a bunch of freaks getting their rocks off playing dress up. There certainly isn’t any of this crazy shit going on,” he grumbled, waving his hand toward the body. “I can tell you that much.”

  Shoving his notebook into his pocket, he said, “I’m heading over to Our Lady in the morning to check her file. If I have any more questions I’ll be in touch. If you think of anything that might help us, anything she might have said, give me a call.” He handed her his business card, his brow arching when she took it with her right hand, leaving her scarred wrist safely out of grabbing distance. Thankfully, he didn’t comment or question her further; he just turned on his heel and left her alone with the dead body of Lauren Brady.

  God, what a waste. Mairi reached into the stainless-steel cupboard for a white plastic body bag. Pulling on a pair of gloves, she touched the cold, lifeless body, positioning Lauren so the bag could slide beneath her. Her exam glove rolled down slightly, and Mairi’s warm wrist touched Lauren’s cool chest.

  She hissed and jumped back. The body had . . . burned her. How was that possible? She looked at the symbol that had been carved between Lauren’s breasts and then at her wrist as she felt the burning give way to a painful tingling, like a bee sting. Her wrist was red, the scars as prominent as they had been when they were fresh.

  Louise poked her head around the curtain. “Want some help?” Mairi gasped and whirled around. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to freak you out.”