“Check him,” Angelo told me, nodding at the corpse. “I’ll keep watch.”
I got to the target first. “Well?” Jack called from behind me. “Is it Greco?”
“It’s not him,” I said. I didn’t need much of a look to know it. Donnie Greco was a big man, thick and beefy, and even his time on the run hadn’t thinned him down any. This guy, whoever he was, was short and wiry. He was light-haired where Greco was salt-and-pepper.
“I’m gonna take a guess that this is your Bernardi guy,” I told Jack.
He was nodding already. “Yeah, that’s him. Ricky Fiori. It was his car I put the tracker on. But where’s his car, and more importantly…”
“Where’s the tracker,” I finished for him, and knelt down to check the corpse’s pockets. But as soon as I put a hand on him, I yanked it away with a noise of mixed surprise and disgust.
“Jesus, kid, if you want me to do it—” Jack began, but I shook my head.
“He’scold,” I said, forcing myself to put my fingers back on his neck to confirm it.
“Well, yeah,” Jack said as patiently as though he were speaking to a child. “He’s dead. That’s what happens, Flynn. Plus temperatures drop overnight out here.”
“Not like this,” I said grimly. There was no point feeling for a pulse; his face was frozen in a rictus of death.
Literallyfrozen. His skin was unyielding and cold, shockingly cold against my fingers. He was stiff as a board, and not from rigor mortis.
The corpse was frozen solid.
Chapter Five
“Idon’t like this,” Angelo said that night over dinner—a three-story bar and restaurant down in Santa Monica. We were in LA, after all, and I wanted to see the sights, including the pier. Jack had recommended a good place for fish tacos, and he’d been right.
“I gotta say, I didn’t like it much either,” I said with a shudder, remembering the thick, unnatural feel of the frozen skin under my hands. I pushed the last remaining half of my fish taco aside. “How did someone keep that corpse frozen long enough to get it out there? And what the hell did that drawing mean?”
Next to Fiori’s body, near his hands, which were tied above his head with thick ropes over cable ties, was a single symbol. It had taken a second for us to work it out, because the line was faded in some areas.
“Is that…” I’d said, squinting at it. “A circle?”
Jack had sucked in a sharp breath. “It’s a heart,” he’d replied, without any of his usual congeniality.
“A heart,” I’d confirmed, seeing it now that he’d said it.
Angelo had come over and looked down at it as well. “Hard to do when your hands are tied upandfrozen.”
All of us knew Ricky Fiori hadn’t written it. His body had obviously been dumped here after he’d been killed elsewhere, unless, as Jack pointed out when he recovered his dark sense of humor, there had been a sudden, localized permafrost in that tiny western corner of the desert. But someone had put that heart there. It was too unlikely to be coincidence.
“A guy freezes solid in the desert,” I said now to Angelo, who was sipping his coffee with a dubious look on his face. “It’s like something out of a movie.”
“A horror movie,” Angelo agreed, and pushed his coffee away just as I’d done with my taco. He had a thing about coffee, and I smiled to myself. “It’s a strange sort of prank to play,” he added.
A prank? I thought that over while I flicked through some of the photos I’d taken of the body. Jack had driven us back to LA once we’d taken a good look at the scene, and had assured us that he’d get “cleaners” in to dispose of the body.
“Boss wouldn’t want the Bernardis to think we had anything to do with this,” he’d said.
The only thing Angelo had said was, “Better make it fast.”
“Yeah, he’ll start melting soon,” Jack had sighed.
Maybe itwasa prank. I frowned at Angelo. “Jack has a macabre sense of humor about him sometimes. You think he was involved?”
Angelo drummed his fingers on the tabletop a few times before he shook his head. “I could be wrong, but he seemed genuinely surprised when we got there.”
I couldn’t argue there. “So it’s Greco who’s the prankster,” I suggested. “He killed his host for some reason—maybe Ricky didn’t make his coffee the way he liked it—” Angelo gave an amused huff. “—and then he drove the body out to the desert, left the tracker on the corpse, drove back to town.”
