Chapter 49. Luca, the Mastermind
Luca, the Mastermind
PRESENT DAY
“How?” The question was out before Luca could think.
The ancient name. The name of the ghost. She opened her mouth to tell Grey that Daisy was dead, but she bit her tongue. If anyone deserved to hear the story, it was Alice’s little sister.
Grey’s face lit with triumph, but she kept her voice even.
A cool customer. Luca loved that in a woman.
“There were pictures taken of you and Alice the night you disappeared. They lived in a private collection for twelve years. A few days ago, they made their way into my hands. It took me hours of studying the pictures to get even the faintest hint.” The detective’s eyes trailed over Luca’s face.
“You look so different now. More than just the passing of time.”
The question hung between them.
“It was the surgeries,” Luca said softly.
“Several, starting the day I was found. They told me later it saved my life.” She could remember the doctor sitting down beside her in the hospital, warning: The face you’ll see in the mirror is going to come as a shock.
We had to do it, given your injuries. Please remember: You’re lucky to be alive.
Lucky.
Luca cleared her throat. “I’d been working at the Serpent Room for a couple of months when I got wind that there were these rich men who’d come in and take care of the bottle service girls as long as we treated them well.
Tipped above and beyond. And if they really liked you, they’d ask you to party with them and offer to pay you for your time—the kind of money it would take weeks to make at the club.
There were rumors they played rough, but I was too young and dumb to think twice.
I felt invincible, you know? I thought my biggest problem was money, for me and my mom.
” She shook her head. “The night they finally sat in my section, I thought I’d hit the lotto.
I begged Alice to work the table with me. ”
The word scraped out of Grey: “Why her?”
Luca felt the old hatred rise—the most potent hatred of all, the one she felt for herself. “Because Alice was the prettiest, most fun girl in the room. I thought if she worked the table with me, we’d get an invite to party for sure.”
“And you did,” Grey said. “You convinced her.” Luca hadn’t noticed it before, but now she saw that Grey’s eyes were rimmed in red, the smallest tell.
“Alice would’ve denied it, but she was a daddy’s girl.
That’s why it was so hard for me to picture her leaving with someone she didn’t trust. She liked to have a good time, but she wasn’t as wild as she wanted people to believe—she had a good head on her shoulders.
She was a cop’s daughter. But I understand now.
” Grey tilted her head. “She did it for you. So you wouldn’t be alone. ”
It was almost enough to start the never-ending stream of thoughts that haunted her: It’s my fault, I did it to her, I will pay for the rest of my life. But Luca couldn’t make this about herself.
Grey wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Where did they take you?”
“The desert.” Luca knew to say the next part fast, deliver it as bluntly as possible.
It was too ugly to sit with, and yet she’d been stewing in it for years, all alone.
“That’s all I knew. We’d been drinking so much, and I was doing MDMA with them, being stupid.
By the time we got to the house, I could barely see straight. ”
“What happened?”
Even after all of these years, after all the self-acceptance she’d preached, Luca’s cheeks flamed.
“They wanted lap dances. Things like that. Alice wouldn’t, but I was eager to please.
I think that’s why I lasted longer.” She swallowed.
“We got separated. I was with Reese. I don’t know how much time passed before I heard the scream and knew it was Alice, knew something had gone terribly wrong.
I tried to leave, but Reese wouldn’t let me.
We fought, and the last thing I remember is Gabriel and Easton running into the room, and Gabriel swinging at me. ”
The truth was, Luca didn’t know if that was what had happened—Gabriel and Easton appearing in the doorway, screaming at her, slick with blood, and then Gabriel, the devil himself, lunging—or if her mind had supplied the flash of memories from context clues. But the next part was unquestionable.
“The next thing I knew, I was waking up and choking. I couldn’t breathe.
” Again, Luca forced the words to come out matter-of-factly.
“They thought they’d killed me, so they buried me out in the middle of the desert, in the sand.
Somehow, I clawed out. Pure panic, I think.
The adrenaline. Those memories aren’t clear either, because I was in so much pain.
” Unconsciously, she touched her jaw, the side of her face, the places the injuries had been worst. “There was no one around. There was only a second mound of sand where they’d put Alice. ”
Grey made a sound deep in her throat, as if she herself had been buried and was struggling to breathe.
Luca waited a moment, but when Grey didn’t speak, she continued.
“For hours, I crawled across the sand with a broken arm and a broken leg and no shoes. I thought I was going to die from the heat. I was so thirsty I started hallucinating. When I made it to a highway, I was so relieved I put my head down on the asphalt and fell unconscious.” She should be dead, Luca knew that.
By every right, she should no longer exist. The years she had been granted beyond the desert were simply an extension of time with which she was meant to even the scales.
“The next time I regained consciousness, I was in an emergency room. They told me I’d been dumped by a good Samaritan. ”
“You don’t know who drove you there?”
Luca shook her head. “The hospital didn’t get them on camera. They didn’t want the attention, I guess. Or the mess.”
“Why didn’t you immediately go to the police?”
“Immediately?” Luca laughed bitterly. “I was hanging on by a thread. And then when I wasn’t, I was terrified of Gabriel and the others coming back, what they’d do to me once they realized I hadn’t died like I was supposed to.
I begged the doctors not to call the police.
I didn’t tell anyone—not even my mom. It didn’t matter, anyway.
By the time I left the hospital and came home, she was so far gone she barely recognized me.
I spent the next two years like the walking dead.
I felt I didn’t deserve to be alive. And then my mom died, and one day, I was sitting in our house wishing I’d never clawed my way out of the sand and I saw one of Gabriel’s campaign ads on TV.
His stupid slicked-back hair and white teeth.
” Luca’s voice steeled. “This switch flipped. All my fear turned into fury. He was out there living so loud, and I was so small. I decided I’d survived for a reason. ”
“You went to Harvard.” Grey shook her head, like she couldn’t fit the pieces together. “You worked in DC. You put it behind you.”
“Never,” Luca swore. “Not a day of my life. I regrouped. Reinvented myself. I wasn’t Daisy anymore—I didn’t even look like her, after all the facial reconstruction.
They made me a new person, but I got to choose my goal.
And I decided if it was the last thing I did, I was going to go back to that hell on earth and find Alice.
” Her voice broke. “And I would make them pay.”
A familiar light animated Grey’s eyes—the glow of obsession. “You’re trying to find her?”
“The last thing I promised Alice was that I wouldn’t leave her alone.
” Luca gritted her teeth. This was it, the truth at the center of her second life as Luca.
She’d gotten dumped outside the Desert Valley Hospital with a shattered jaw, a broken arm and leg, her head caved in and face disfigured, and she’d never once felt like a victim.
Only a villain. She was the reason Alice Holloway was dead.
“I will do anything to keep that promise.”
Grey wiped her eyes. “Have you gotten close?”
They’d arrived at dangerous territory. Luca took a deep breath.
Grey could sense her hesitation. “Please,” she said. And that was it, all it took. A single word with a world of meaning.
Luca knew what was inside that please: Please, I loved her so much. Please, it’s killing me. Please, I won’t rest until I turn over every stone, stomp every scorpion hiding underneath.
Luca had been a woman at the end of her rope for twelve years. She couldn’t resist another.
“I made friends with a former assistant of Knox’s,” she admitted.
“I figured finding someone who used to work for him might be the only way. I’d tried tracing his property records, but rich men like Knox can hide assets in labyrinths of shell companies.
It was painstaking work, getting her to trust me.
Months and months of friendship, and then one night, she told me over drinks: Gabriel owned a house out in the Mojave that he and his friends liked to use when they wanted to really cut loose.
They would pick up women, she said, and take them out there, and then sometimes she would have to pay cleaners a lot of money to take care of the results.
She complained about the annoyance of it.
That’s what it was to her. Work. I knew immediately that house was where they’d taken us.
I begged for the address. Or at least for the woman to tell the police where it was and what the house was used for. ”
Grey said nothing, but her face went taut with pain.
“But when she was sober,” Luca continued, “she tried to take back what she’d said. She refused to go to the cops. I don’t know if she was more scared of being charged as an accomplice or of Gabriel finding out.”
Grey straightened. “The assistant who talked—it was Elizabeth Drake, wasn’t it? She used to work for Knox, before they traded her to Reese.”
Luca gave her a level look. “It was.”
“So Drake was a traitor because she refused to give up Knox. And Simon Markham was going to whitewash him with his documentary, make him out to be a hero, someone fit for the presidency. You of all people knew how powerful a pipeline the entertainment industry can be to the Oval Office.”
Goose bumps lifted the hairs on the back of Luca’s neck. Careful now, a voice whispered.
“That’s why Simon was a liar,” Grey continued. “But Rosie, I still don’t get. She was writing a story on your disappearance. Wouldn’t you want that? Why did she have to die?”
There was no more guessing what Grey did or didn’t know. Luca gave her an assessing look. “I don’t think you’re here as Alice’s sister anymore, Detective.”