Inherit the Dead

first time I’ve clapped eyes on you, Angel.”
    Angel frowned, her cat’s eyes narrowing, her expression considering. “I don’t know . . . You look like you’re telling the truth. But somebody’s been stalking me.”
    “Is that why you took off from Montauk?”
    She drew back, her arms clamping against her midriff again, jittery as a stand-up comic waiting to go onstage. “How did you know that if you’re not the one?”
    “I told you. I’ve been looking for you. All I had to go on was what your mother knew. She sent me to your father’s house, but all he could tell me was that you’d taken off. He pointed me toward your buddy, Lilith. And that’s how I found out about you and Randy going on the run.” Perry shook his head, desperate to impress her with his truth. Usually, he didn’t give a damn what the targets of his investigations thought of him. But Angel was different. He wanted her to think well of him, and that made him uncomfortable.
    Angel sneered again. “ ‘I thought he’d, like, protect me?” Her voice rose at the end of her sentences. It was her generation’s habit to make the most commonplace statement sound like a question. Her generation, Perry reminded himself. She’s hardly more than a child, and you’re a man heading straight down the slope toward middle age. Get ahold of yourself.
    “And he didn’t?”
    Angel looked sideways. “I got scared. I was sure someone was on my tail, but Randy, all he cared about was . . . Well, you know. He just blew me off, told me I was paranoid. I figured if he wouldn’t take me seriously, I was better on my own.”
    Perry remembered his own uneasy sense of being followed—and it was more than paranoia, he was sure about that. Still, it was easy to succumb to paranoia when you were out on the edge. He knew that from living with his eyes on the rearview mirror. It saddened him that this beautiful young woman was already prey to such fears.Quickly, he scanned the street. Seeing nothing suspicious, he focused on Angel again. It wasn’t exactly a hardship. Perry chastised himself for the thought and forced his mind back to the job in hand. “So you took off again?”
    She nodded. “I figured I’d be safe with Athena. The one person in my life who never betrayed me.” She sighed and gave him a half smile. “And then you showed up.” For a moment, she brightened. “You think maybe the person who was stalking me was another PI my mother hired?”
    Perry shrugged. He didn’t think Julia Drusilla was a belt-and-suspenders kind of client. “It’s possible,” he hedged, trying to keep the doubt out of his face and his voice. “She’s certainly keen to find you.”
    Angel unfolded her arms and put her fists on her hips. It was an attempt at taking control of the conversation. Attempt being the operative word. Whatever subterfuges she’d learned over the years, hiding her feelings hadn’t been among them. He could read her body language as easily as the morning headlines. He could see anxiety in the tightness of her stance and the rigidity of her features. “Did she tell you why?”
    Perry smiled, trying to reassure her. “There are some papers you need to sign so you can both claim an inheritance. It’s money your grandfather left in trust for you. You can’t access the money until you’re twenty-one, but you both have to sign the papers.”
    “Did she tell you how much money?” Angel’s chin came up. Perry thought she was trying for assurance, but she just came off like a defiant little girl.
    “Let’s just say she made it clear that the stakes were high. For both of you.”
    Angel shook her head in disgust. “I’ll say they’re high. High enough for her to want me dead so she can get her claws on all of it.”
    It was a melodramatic moment. Perry had long years ofexperience watching families tear themselves apart, and it wasn’t the first time he’d heard an accusation like this against a parent. But no matter how often a child spat out such words, it still cut him like a blade. All those broken relationships started in the same place—the innocent eyes of a newborn gazing into the face of someone who owed them a duty of love and care. And they’d all taken a journey down a twisted highway littered with shattered dreams and broken hearts to a place from which there was no retreat. If Angel truly believed this about her mother, there was no way Perry’s mission was going to have a happy ending.
    Just as well, he