Alibi Island Read online

  How wrong could she have been?

  There was hope. There was a way out.

  As she slipped back into sleep, she squeezed Rosa’s hand. It was the most at peace she’d felt in her life.

  So much so that she almost didn’t feel the pop of skin as the stiletto in Rosa’s other hand slid through Macy’s ribs and sliced into her heart.

  Rosa walked into the semi-circle of men; Macy’s eyeless and opened body was draped floppily in her arms.

  The men licked their lips, their eyes were wet with lust.

  “You call yourself hunters?” Rosa spat.

  The men shuffled uneasily, but didn’t take their eyes off the body.

  “Don’t make me have to clear up after you again. Clear?”

  “Yes, Owner,” they intoned quietly.

  Rosa threw Macy’s body into the dirt, pulled a smartphone from her pocket in the waistcoat beneath her cloak, and took a picture of the girl’s broken frame and dead eyes in her lolling head. She checked the picture, and uploaded it to the island’s intranet. Then she addressed the men, her words hissing like snakes. “Make sure you cook her thoroughly all the way through. There’s poison there that needs to be neutralized.”

  Then Rosa turned and walked back into the Enchanted Forest as the men moved in on Macy’s body.

  Macy was eighteen years old.

  1

  Passion Valdez was tired to the bone.

  The huge Houston sky through the window of her hotel room was clear as the Pope’s conscience and blue as Billie Holiday, Passion was rolled into a ball on the bed—naked and wanting the room to cool down and her head to stop throbbing. The air conditioning hadn’t been triggered in the room before she checked in because of Global Warming or Earth Love or International Day of the Tree or something, and although Passion held no animosity towards the environment per se, should could have done without it turning her room into an oven that was cooling so slowly, she could have stuck a fork in her ass and shouted I’m done a good half an hour ago.

  The shoot had lasted all night, and as she’d only landed from Manila yesterday—well, Istanbul in reality—the 34-hour flight had an eight-hour stopover in the Turkish capital. This dogleg to her journey had allowed no sleep, just a gritty bath in iron-colored water that had been the best the no-star hotel had offered. Passion didn’t like to waste money on frivolities, and so as she’d booked that hotel herself, she didn’t feel she had the right to complain.

  She wanted to sleep. But the heat and the blue sky—combined with Houston’s higgledy-piggledy skyline etched on her retina by the harsh midday light—conspired to keep her awake.

  The shoot had been a bore too. The ‘tog had been an oily fuck who was a throwback to another time. Too touchy, too feely, too full of himself. It would have been the work of a moment for her to have taken him out back to the warehouse where she was modeling a new line in street couture for Zing! Fashions. They were clothes that she wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing in real life, which is why she resented so much being alive in them.

  Yes, it would have been so easy to take the oily fuck out back on the promise of a blow job and then kick his fucking head in; but she hadn’t, tempting as it was. Being a model, albeit a reluctant one, was an excellent cover for a woman in Passion’s line of actual work, and so all she’d done was tear open his throat with her eyes.

  The oily fuck had taken the look as encouragement, got down behind the camera muttering, “Mine tonight darlin’. Mine tonight.”

  God, how she hated the English.

  Passion realized that she wasn’t going to get any sleep at all today. There was no work tonight, so she may as well just battle through these hollow hours of jet lag and exhaustion until sundown and get to sleep then.

  Passion sat up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She’d already decided against a shower in case it woke her up more, but it seemed like a good idea for exactly the same reason.

  She hadn’t moved three steps from the bed when her cellphone rang.

  Sighing like a teenager, she went back and picked it up.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have the TV on?”

  It was Bryan.

  “Bryan, I don’t even have any clothes on.”

  “I know.”

  “If you have me under surveillance again…”

  “I don’t. Don’t worry. Put the TV on. Any news channel.”

  Passion had to crawl across the bed to get the remote. She flicked on the TV to a channel that was apparently Houston’s News Leader.

  There was a media scrimmage on the steps of an official looking building, a man Passion half-recognized, who was then helpfully identified by the ticker chyron as Prospective Senator Huey Ralston (REP).

  Next to Ralston was a woman identified as his wife, Brenda. Ralston was an early fifties politico clone with a good suit and even better hair. He was just about holding it together. Brenda, behind huge sunglasses and recently arranged hair, held herself as if she’d been emptied out by horror and tears.

  As Ralston spoke, his voice was tight with emotion, and the wide angle on the news camera caught his fist flexing and relaxing, almost in time with his words. “Alaina, if you’re watching this darling, please come home. You’re not in trouble. Whatever happened can be fixed. We just want you to come home so we can be the family we have always been again.”

  The words stilled in Ralston’s throat and Brenda just shook her head and buried her face in her husband’s shoulder.

  The moment of silence was then destroyed by a thousand foam topped microphones being thrust towards Ralston’s face, followed by a thousand questions.

  A shark-faced suit with slicked back hair and skin the texture of pages from an old Bible, side-stepped in front of the couple, holding up his hands. “One at a time ladies and gentlemen. One at a time.”

  The news chyron flicked from Stephen Crane, PA to Huey Ralston. The microphone onslaught calmed a little, and Crane—scanning the crowd of reporters—said, “Mary?”

  “Mr. Ralston, do police have any idea when your daughter went missing or where she might be?”

  Ralston leaned into Crane’s ear and whispered. Crane nodded. “Prospective Senator Ralston and his wife last saw Alaina yesterday morning before they left for their offices. Alaina was due to spend the day at the residence before going to the Jantell-B concert at the Astrodome tonight with friends. At some point during the day—before Mrs. Ralston returned to the residence at four—Alaina left the home to go to an unknown destination. She left the house alone according to staff, and once she walked out of the compound her cellphone was turned off, and she was not picked up by any cameras in the vicinity. Garth?”

  “That’s all you need.” Bryan again, in Passion’s ear.

  She flicked off the TV. “Same M.O. as Manila.”

  “Yup, exactly. Rich kid. Phone switched off the moment she left the home, not seen since. No ransom. Dead trail.”

  Manila had been a bitch.

  Passion had been there three days before the family would even consider seeing her. In Timberland Heights above Quezon City, the mansion residence nestled beneath blue skies was backed by mountains and was on the surface all about beauty. But the stink of bad money infected it, and it had infected the people who lived there.

  The father had more pies than he had fingers and wanted a piece of them all. So when his daughter Bianca went missing—an 18-year-old studious girl with hair the color of night, a complexion as fair as it was beautiful, and an attitude to match—he’d been absolutely reluctant to involve the authorities in case any investigation into the disappearance of his daughter led to exposure of his nefarious business dealings. That was Bryan’s assessment, and Bryan was usually right about these things.

  Bryan’s intel was right on the money.

  Passion—again undercover away from a hastily arranged modeling gig under her agency name Jennifer Durant—approached the father through his office in the city. Bryan had given
her an in when he slipped her the contact info. The father, he said, liked…no…wanted beautiful women. Passion was, of course, entirely that.

  When “Daddy” realized Passion was there to talk about his missing daughter and not to offer him a place in her bed, he had refused point blank to take the meeting.

  It was only his wife, broken by the loss of their daughter, who had eventually persuaded her husband’s secretary to give up the information that the Agency had been in touch.

  “Can you find her?”

  “I’ll try Mrs. Andrada. I make no promises.”

  “You’ve found children before?”

  “Yes, yes I have. Not just children, but we have the skills needed for this delicate operation.”

  “You look too pretty to be a detective.”

  Passion would normally dress down when she went on Agency business. But the meeting with Mrs. Andrada had come unexpectedly; Passion was made up, with hair to kill and a Rodeo Drive ensemble to die for. Her work uniform was jeans, a blouse, and long hair savagely back in a simple ponytail. To look at Passion, or “Jennifer the detective” on the runway, you would swear they were two different women. They say that cameras never lie, but that’s exactly what they were for. Passion only modelled to keep the undercover part of her life plausibly mobile; to go where she was needed by the Agency.

  “My associate Bryan Frain will transmit my bona fides to you immediately Mrs. Andrada. The organization I work for has a long track record in successful conclusions to these situations.”

  Two days later, in a backstreet Manila warehouse full of the stink of death and awash with blood, Passion had found Bianca’s thin, broken body hanging by electrical wire from a crossbeam in the ceiling.

  Passion had made good progress tracking down the men who had taken the girl. Timberland Heights was an exclusive area, and she’d got a break from CCTV from a neighbor’s gate entry system. The footage revealed two grainy frames of Bianca being pushed into the back of a Ford Raptor.

  Passion tracked the vehicle through Bryan’s secret contacts with the Manila PD, to a couple of petty felons who were trying to haul themselves up a few rungs on the underworld ladder.

  Only it looked like Bianca had gotten the better of them and hung herself in her warehouse room when the crooks were distracted.

  Brave girl.

  Stupid girl.

  If she’d waited six hours, Passion would have sprung her from the clutches of her kidnappers.

  The death of the girl was not the outcome anyone wanted, but what made it stranger were the kidnappers.

  They were dead too.

  One was still attached to a cattle prod by his penis. Both had their eyes stabbed out, their throats cut, and their intestines given the chance of a vacation outside of their bodies. Whoever had done a number on them had enjoyed their work.

  When Passion reached the warehouse, the kidnappers’ bodies were still fresh. Bianca had been dead a good few hours longer.

  To Passion it seemed the girl’s suicide had pissed off someone higher up the food chain. And when the discovery of the girl’s death had been made, there had been a swift and bloody retribution for the amateurs’ fuck-ups.

  Passion had arranged for Bianca’s body to be returned to her parents and sent the retainer she’d been given by Mrs. Andrada back too.

  The Agency worked on a No Find, No Fee basis. Although that didn’t apply to expenses, Passion hadn’t felt right about taking the money, even though Bianca’s father had behaved like such an asshole and was shady as fuck. Even assholes didn’t deserve to bury their own daughters.

  Passion hadn’t yet had the conversation with Bryan about the retainer and would put it off for as long as she could. Certainly until she was over this jet-lag and had a least one good night’s sleep.

  The mystery about the dead kidnappers was what maintained her interest. Bianca’s kidnap had been the fifth in the last year that Passion had investigated with the same M.O.

  The police were nowhere on it, anywhere in the world. In most cases the families, shady like Bianca’s daddy, hadn’t wanted to involve the police anyway. And although Passion had many other successes, she hadn’t yet managed to find a single one of the five girls. And now, right under her nose in Houston, it was happening again. Only this time the Ralston’s had gone public, big time.

  “Have you sent them a handshake?” she asked Bryan, sitting down on the edge of the bed, feeling her longing for sleep was getting sent further away down the tunnel of work.

  “Yes. Your contact will be Crane. I’m sending you his details now.”

  The phone’s email notification pinged.

  “Got it.”

  “And he’ll meet you at Ralston’s office in…45 minutes.”

  The phoned pinged again.

  “And that’s the address.”

  “Christ, Bryan I haven’t slept for nearly fifty hours.”

  “You want this case?”

  “Yes, you know I do.”

  “Then it’s yours. Oh and have a shower. I imagine you smell like a fox.”

  2

  Lainey Ralston hated being Lainey Ralston.

  Not the girl part; she enjoyed the girl part. She liked the way she looked, and pretty much loved her allowance. She didn’t even find school too infringing on her preferred modes of partying: dressing in Hot Goth Chic, sneaking booze out of the house and making sure she lived the fuck out of her life.

  No. All that was great. Supercharged fucking great.

  It’s just the Ralston thing.

  Being the 18-year-old daughter of a politician, especially one as controversial as Huey Ralston, made being anonymous around town difficult. It made getting out into town difficult, and when she got there it made getting into places even more difficult, especially the places where one might want to be seen.

  Being Huey Ralston’s daughter was…problematic.

  Huey Ralston had a reputation to maintain, he had an entourage of political hangers-on and style-setters who didn’t need an 18-year-old kid fouling the pitch unless she was going to be completely tamed, civil, and on board.

  As a kid, Lainey had been fine about “being on board.” Being ten and going everywhere in a limo, walking out to explosions of camera flashes and getting whatever she wanted, had done wonders for her self-esteem. But as her mother Brenda had screamed at her during the last fight they’d had, Lainey knew the price of everything and the value of nothing!

  Lainey had screamed back down the stairs, “They’re the same fucking thing!”

  Lainey had been grounded for that.

  Not that being grounded meant much to Lainey. Jake was the one who suggested the best way to get around that particular restraint anyways.

  “All you gotta do is wait until they’re out. Then you can do what you like,” he explained.

  Lainey’s parents being Houston Socialites, Charity Stalwarts, and Political Glad Handers were out a lot.

  On the phone, Jake’s voice sent thrills through Lainey that she knew would lead to pleasurable explorations of her own body in the shower or bath later. She was amazed that Jake’s voice had the power to do that to her. Just his voice; they’d never met. It was an online and telephone thing. She’d seen his pictures on his profile of course. Jake had a face so sharp you could shave your underarms with it, eyes that spoke of distant galaxies, and skin the color of a warm pale dawn over the endless ocean.

  Jake was 19 and lived in Dallas. As soon as he could, he was going to come to Houston and they were gonna meet and play. Lainey was determined to lose her virginity to him. She wanted it so bad. Even though in the four months she’d been talking to him, he’d never once mentioned sex. He was the perfect gentleman, and that reticence made her all the hotter for him.

  The only time Jake had mentioned sex was to tell her how to get out of the house, even though she was grounded by her mom.

  “I can’t do that!”

  “Yes, you can!”

  “But…”


  “No buts, Lainey. You got this. Make it happen. If you wanna go out, you only have to say nine words to him…”

  The him Jake was referring was the Ralston’s butler-come-bodyguard Sven Wikström.

  Sven was a mile high, and a mile wide. Ex-Särskilda Operationsgruppen—Swedish Special Services—and he was built like someone had glued five Thors together into the one body. Men like Sven, when they left the special services, had a particular skillset which made them extremely sought after by the rich and powerful. Anyone could learn to be a butler, but not everyone could learn to be Special Services. So as personal bodyguards—with a sideline in running the household servants like a well-oiled military machine—Sven and his ilk were a godsend to people like the Ralston’s.

  Lainey had grown up around Sven, and although the mile-wide butler could be an imposing presence, he knew where the lines in the sand were drawn with Lainey. He would never tackle her bad behavior head on—if he caught her trying to break into Huey’s drinks cabinet or invited her friends over to party on a Saturday night when her parents were out of town—he wouldn’t make a fuss or go blabbing to her parents. No, not Sven. Being ex-military, he was someone who worked strategically.

  The next day, the lock on the drinks cabinet would be changed, and the key Lainey had managed to appropriate would be useless. When Lainey invited her friends over to party, the entry coder on the main gate would mysteriously break down and no one from the installation company would be available until the next morning to come out and fix it. In that time, Lainey would look like a complete spaz because her friends had been left hanging outside of the main gate, and Lainey hadn’t been able to get out to join them.

  Lainey was athletic and strong, but she wasn’t going to be able to climb the compound’s sheer walls, topped with broken glass and razor-barbed wire.

  She never knew for certain that it had been Sven beating her at this game of domestic chess, yet she never got any heat from her parents. Plus, any time she pushed the envelope too far, things would happen that would put a stop to her plans.