Inherit the Dead

merely by holding it between finger and thumb meant that an agreement of some kind existed between the two of them, and she was far from willing to accept anything of the kind. “I haven’t seen her,” she said, and this time even she could hear the lack of conviction in her words.
    “When you do,” he said.

    He stood on the doorstep and took a deep breath. The air pollution in Brooklyn wasn’t as bad as it was in Manhattan, and you could still smell the ghosts of the roses of summers past. He looked down the street both ways, and saw the curtain at the first-floor window across from 354 fall hastily back in place.
    That could account for the feeling that he was being watched. It would not account for the tail he’d shaken that morning, or the uncomfortable feeling that he hadn’t so much shaken the tail as the tail had done a better job of following him the second time.
    He checked his watch, not quite ten thirty, as he came down the steps and turned left to head for his car.
    “Mr. Christo! Mr. Christo, please wait!”
    He turned and saw the girl from the photograph standing on Athena Williams’s front step.
    His first feeling was relief that the first time he saw her in person she wasn’t looking up at him from a body bag.
    His second was the sudden realization that whoever was following him could have followed him right to Angelina Loki’s hiding place.

15
VAL M C DERMID
    T he photographs had been no preparation for the reality. The full impact of Angel’s beauty was available only in the flesh. Perry was so occupied with scanning his personal database for comparisons he lost all sense of urgency and just stared.
    It soon came to him. The impossibly young Lauren Bacall of To Have and Have Not, but without the carefully constructed coiffure. Angel’s toffee-blond hair had a tousled, bedhead look that the prudish Hollywood studios could never have tolerated. But the feline eyes, the full-lipped mouth with the tilt of a smile even in this moment of distress—all of it a dead ringer for Bacall at her most vulnerable.
    She’d stopped short a couple of feet from him after shouting, “Wait,” in a frantic voice just the right side of a scream. She drew her breath in sharply, emphasizing the full breasts beneath her skimpy black T-shirt. She had a coat on, but she’d only draped it over her shoulders. She folded her arms across her midriff, but not so fast that Perry didn’t notice the tremble in her long fingers. She tucked her chin down and gave him the up-slanted look that Bacall had made her own.
    “Angel?” Perry knew it, but he couldn’t quite believe it. There had been something dramatic, almost film noir, about the places thiscommission had taken him so far. He usually dismissed high-flown romantic ideas like that as idle fantasies designed to make him feel better about the routine repetitiveness of the job. But being confronted with a woman who could have stepped out of the pages of Dashiell Hammett was deeply unsettling.
    And it was Hammett that came to mind, not Chandler. This girl—no, make that this woman—was bristling with raw sexuality. Her photograph had attracted him; her physical presence mesmerized him.
    “Who are you?” she demanded. “Who are you really ?”
    “Like I told Athena, my name is Perry Christo. I’m a private eye. Your mother hired me to find you.” He didn’t have to work at injecting his voice with warmth.
    She shuddered, and it wasn’t just from the cold, her arms folding even more tightly round her slim body. “Are you the one? Is that what this has all been about? My goddamn mother finding me?”
    He couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. Was he so dazed by her beauty? “I don’t know what you mean. Am I the one? What one?”
    She unfolded her arms and ran a hand through her hair. Even in the gray light of an overcast day, it shimmered bright gold against the dull green of the garden’s evergreen foliage. “The one who’s been stalking me,” she said impatiently.
    “Stalking you? Someone’s been stalking you?”
    She gave him the haughty stare that youth reserves for the dim adult world. “But I don’t suppose you’d call it that, Mr. PI.” Her top lip curled in a sneer.
    “I’ve not been stalking you, tailing you, following you, or anything that might come under that heading.” He took a step backward and spread his arms out in a placatory gesture. “Swear to God. I’ve been trying to find you, sure. But today’s the