Oaths and Miracles Read online

  OATHS AND MIRACLES

  NANCY KRESS

  Phoenix Pick

  An Imprint of Arc Manor

  **********************************

  Want Free Ebooks?

  Sign up for our Monthly Free Ebook Coupon

  http://www.P hoenixPick .com

  **********************************

  Oaths and Miracles © 1996 by Nancy Kress. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Science Fiction Classics, Phoenix Rider, The Stellar Guild Series, Manor Thrift and logos assoc i ated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor, LLC, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  Digital Edition

  ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-61242-178- 0

  ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-61242-177-3

  Published by Phoenix Pick

  an imprint of Arc Manor

  P. O. Box 10339

  Rockville, MD 20849-0339

  www.ArcManor.com

  **********************************

  For my Aunt Sandy,

  who always liked thrillers,

  and might have liked this.

  *********

  Acknowledgments

  The author would like to extend grateful thanks to many people who assisted with the writing of this book. Thanks to:

  Dr. Kishan Pandya, M.D., for sharing his medical expertise;

  Jill Beves, R.N., for her assistance with medical terminology;

  Robert Murphy, New York Department of Investigations, for his many helpful suggestions;

  Terry Boothman, for his unique insight on Robert Cavanaugh’s doodles;

  Miriam Grace Monfredo, Mary Stanton, and Kate Koningisor, for their generous critiques of early drafts of the novel.

  *********

  Oaths and miracles are usually followed by deceptive statements.

  —General Rules for Statement Analysis,

  Rule #9, Federal Bureau of Investigation

  Interviewing and Interrogation,

  U.S. Department of Justice

  *********

  ******

  AUGUST

  He that increases knowledge, increases sorrow.—Ecclesiastes 1:18

  ******

  ONE

  Fourteen minutes into the midnight show at Caesars Palace, the sixth showgirl descending the left side of the Staircase from Heaven tripped.

  Her name was Sue Ann Jefferson, from Amarillo, Texas, although in Vegas she was known as Taffy. Her long legs had shaken throughout the 9:00 P.M. show. Under the tight blue-sequined helmet with ice-blue feathers rising two feet into the air, her face was the color of the waiter’s linen. Her huge brown eyes remained wide open and unblinking during her fall, which tumbled her and her enormous blue angel wings forward into the showgirl on the step below.

  That girl, the most spectacularly built of a spectacular group, wobbled. To keep her own balance and restore Sue Ann/Taffy’s, she thrust her gorgeous body backward. Her smile stayed hard and false as the blue diamonds in her shoulder-length earrings. Over her shoulder she hissed, “Bitch! Stay off the junk when you working!” Eighteen steps below, the famous singer in the white dinner jacket sang on, unaware.

  Sue Ann lurched upright, took another hip-swaying step downward on five-inch sequined heels, and wobbled again. This time her knees gave way. She sat down hard on her step, just as the showgirl above her, smiling fixedly out at the audience, put out her foot to descend to that same step. The foot encountered Sue Ann, not firm ground. The other girl stumbled, gave a small cry, and fell on top of Sue Ann. Both girls caromed into the spectacular body in front of them. The left side of the Staircase from Heaven crashed down the steps in a tangle of feathers, legs, wings, tassels, breasts, and earrings like flying chains.

  The audience laughed and pointed. The famous singer half-turned his head, glimpsed the writhing female pile at the bottom of Heaven, and kept on singing. His eyes were volcanic rock.

  In the line of showgirls on the right side of the staircase, Jeanne Cassidy watched, smiled, waved her arms like an angel, and took the next step down. She knew that Sue Ann wasn’t using. Sue Ann was Jeanne’s best friend. Sue Ann had been like this—shaky, glassy-eyed—for twenty-four hours now. She hadn’t slept. She wouldn’t eat. She wouldn’t tell Jeanne what was wrong.

  The fallen angels picked themselves up and backed up the left side of the stairway, lining up with those on the right. Only Sue Ann stayed where she was, sitting in a heap on the stage, staring at nothing. The line descended slowly, sailing, and walked around her. Dawn had lost one earring. Tiffany’s stocking had torn and her knee bled. The jeers in the audience died slowly away as the customers, in suits and cowboy jackets and evening clothes and polo shirts with shorts, grew uncertain.

  The famous singer finished his song and started another. The girls sashayed behind him, arms on each other’s shoulders, a line of half-naked pelvises and long legs that blocked Sue Ann from audience view. Jeanne saw the stage manager rush out, grab the girl under the armpits, and drag her off stage left. Kemper’s fat bulging face was purple.

  The song finished. The audience laughed and applauded. The famous singer bowed extravagantly, his moussed hair bouncing. The curtain swept closed.

  Jeanne pushed her way through the chattering gleaming bodies. When the wall of flesh proved too solid, she used her elbows. “Owww! Bitch …”

  “Where is she? Fred, where did she go?”

  “Outta here!” Kemper yelled. “A million dollars sitting in the audience and you bitches think you can go on using—”

  “Taffy doesn’t use,” Jeanne said coldly. “Where is she?”

  “In the can. You get her outta here, Amber, I’m telling you, outta here, before Bobby gets back here, he’ll have her tits in a jar—”

  Bobby was the famous singer. Jeanne pushed her way to the backstage ladies’ room.

  Sue Ann sat on a toilet, her body stocking in place, the stall door open. Two girls dressed like mostly hairless tigers stood at the sinks. They bustled out, striped tails twitching, without glancing at the stalls.

  Jeanne knelt in the narrow space. “Sue Ann? What is it? What happened, honey?”

  The girl didn’t seem to hear. Her eyes, huge and fixed, stared at something straight ahead and invisible.

  “Susie, it’s Jeanne. I’m here. What is it? Is it Carlo? Did you have a fight?”

  “Carlo’s dead.”

  Jeanne put out a hand, steadied herself on the side of the stall. Sue Ann’s tone scared her more than the words. “Dead? How do you know, Sue Ann?”

  “I know.”

  “Did you see it? What happened?”

  “What do you think happened? You know what he is. Was.” This was said in the same voice: calm, empty, completely without inflection. Jeanne’s spine turned cold.

  “Susie—”

  “And now I’m dead, too.”

  The ladies’ room door opened. Jeanne felt her heart skip. A sudden vertigo took her, like the swoop of a great dark bird, blinding. A showgirl dashed into the stall next to theirs and muttered, “Damn!” In a moment urine tinkled into the bowl
. Jeanne’s vertigo passed and she could see again: Sue Ann, motionless on the toilet, white to the lips.

  “Sue Ann, you’ve got to get out of here. Now. Kemper says you’re fired anyway.”

  Sue Ann appeared not to have heard her. “He loved me,” she said tonelessly. “Carlo loved me.”

  “Now, Sue Ann.”

  “He did love me. He would have left his wife. Soon.”

  “Right. Get up. Stand up now.”

  “I was the first woman he really ever loved. I mean really.” Her eyes stared expressionlessly at the stall door.

  Jeanne got to her feet. The weird toneless monologue made her stomach lift and shiver. She heard the music start onstage for the next number. She was supposed to be in it; so was Sue Ann. Without them both the line would look skimpy. Carlo was dead. Panic turned her angry.

  “Get up, damn it! Get up off that toilet!”

  Sue Ann didn’t get up. But she turned her face to Jeanne’s, slowly, mechanically, like an automatic flower.

  “Cadoc. Verico. Cadaverico.”

  “What?” Jeanne said. Her stomach flopped again. Sue Ann had snapped. She was standing in a Las Vegas toilet with a crazy girl marked for death. Then she realized Sue Ann was speaking Italian. Something Carlo had taught her, some lying dago sweet talk from a two-timing son of a bitch.

  “It’s a joke,” Sue Ann said in that same flat voice. “A joke that will make me dead.”

  Jeanne grabbed both Sue Ann’s hands and yanked her off the toilet. She dragged her out of the ladies’ room and into the showgirls’ dressing room. Kemper had gone. From the stage floated the music for “Somehow I’ve Always Known.”

  “Put this on.” She shoved jeans and a yellow cotton sweater at Sue Ann. When the girl didn’t move, Jeanne grabbed Sue Ann’s headpiece and yanked. A handful of hair came off with the sequins and feathers. Jeanne shoved the sweater over Sue Ann’s head, right over the body stocking and sequined pasties. The sweater stuck. Sue Ann gasped, unable to breathe, and then pulled the sweater down over her head. Without prompting, she kicked off her heels and pulled the jeans over her feathered G-string. Her face was still expressionless.

  Jeanne pulled on her own clothes and sneakers and grabbed her purse and Sue Ann’s. Both women still wore stage makeup. Their hair, Sue Ann’s dyed platinum and Jeanne’s natural red, stuck out wildly. Jeanne clutched Sue Ann’s arm and steered her down the back stairway, past the stage door to the basement, through subterranean corridors stifling with boiler heat, and out a door beside a loading dock far from the casino’s glittery entrance.

  What if they were out there now, in the parking lot? Waiting?

  She forced herself to walk normally. But nothing was normal, nothing would ever be normal again. Nothing had been normal for four months, not since she’d come to Las Vegas to be Amber, not since she’d driven her third-hand Ford Escort, a graduation present, out of her father’s East Lansing driveway because East Lansing, Michigan, wasn’t good enough for her, not her, not for Jeanne Cassidy who was made for fun and bright lights and excitement. … Her stomach flopped again and she thought she was going to be sick. Sue Ann moaned softly, the sound oddly indifferent. Jeanne had heard that sound once, from a jack rabbit caught in a coyote trap, resigned to dying.

  “Keep walking,” Jeanne hissed, although Sue Ann hadn’t stopped.

  One mile, two … the parking lot seemed endless. At this end there were no limos, no Caddys, no Porsches. Jeanne had left her Escort beside a wooden fence, hoping for some afternoon shade. Now the fence was a shadowed looming barricade. It could hide anything. …

  She shoved Sue Ann into the car, locked her door, and scrambled into the driver’s side. On the highway, Jeanne suddenly felt better and then, a few minutes later, worse. Another wave of vertigo took her and the car swung to the left. She pulled it back into the lane.

  “Cadoc,” Sue Ann said tonelessly. “Verico. Cadaverico.”

  “Will you shut up with that stuff?” A joke that will make me dead. “Listen, Susie, where are your family? Your parents?”

  “No parents.”

  “Sisters, then. Or brothers. Anybody.”

  “Nobody.”

  “Damn it, you must have somebody! Everybody’s got somebody!”

  “I had Carlo.”

  Jeanne wanted to slap her. Instead she kept her eyes on the entrance to McCarron Airport. A jet screamed overhead, landing. Her abdomen began grinding again and something wet and sticky slid between her legs.

  Her period. Now.

  “Susie, where can you go? With who? Think, damn it!”

  Sue Ann’s voice, for the first time, lost a little of its toneless despair. “My cousin Jolene. In Austin …”

  “Fine. Cousin Jolene, then. Fine.” She would put the ticket on Visa. If there was still room, there had to still be room, but she’d bought those snakeskin boots—

  Jeanne parked in Short Term Parking and yanked open Sue Ann’s door. The movement made another gob of blood spurt between her legs—she could feel it, oozing through her body stocking and around her G-string. Her fucking period always started at the wrong time, and it was always bad. Her stomach ground and flopped. “Come on, Susie—”

  They hurried, wild-haired, across two lanes of cars in the brightly lit parking lot. Pain stabbed Jeanne’s stomach. She faltered. “Listen, Sue Ann, I just remembered, I have Tampax in the car, and I need—”

  “No! Don’t leave me—”

  Jeanne peeled Sue Ann off her. “Just for a minute, I promise, I’m bleeding like a pig, and the ladies’ room is always out in places like this. … I won’t put it in until you’re on the plane, I promise, but I have to get it from the car. … Sue Ann, let me fucking go!”

  Sue Ann started to cry. Jeanne pulled herself loose and sprinted between two parked cars, toward her Escort. Sue Ann wrapped her arms around herself, shivering in the night desert air. It was 1:12 A.M.

  The black car tore around the corner of the line of cars and barreled toward Sue Ann. Jeanne, turning at the sound, her body whirling slowly, slowly as if this were a dream, saw Sue Ann lift her face to the oncoming car, the same way she’d lifted it to Jeanne in the toilet stall. Cadoc. Verico. Cadaverico. Yellow floodlight gleamed on Sue Ann’s white lips. Overhead a jet screamed its descent.

  The car hit Sue Ann without slowing down. Her body bounced off the grille onto the hood, then flew backward. She hit another car, a green Toyota spotted with rust, and slid to the ground. The black car, a Buick LeSabre with California plates, disappeared around the lane of parked vehicles.

  Jeanne stood without moving, still in that eerie slow-motion dream. When her legs did move, they carried her in a hesitant step, like a wedding procession. Everything looked too bright, as if it had been drawn by a child with new crayons. She saw, so sharp that it hurt her eyes, the rust smeared from the Toyota on Sue Ann’s yellow sweater, at a precise point just above the left breast. Below the rust, a blue-sequined pasty showed lumpy through the thin cotton. Sue Ann hadn’t zipped her fly all the way. Her eyes were still open.

  Jeanne knelt beside the body and groped for a pulse in the wrist. She didn’t know how to find one anyway. She put her head on Sue Ann’s quiet chest, then yanked her head back as if it were burned. After that, she couldn’t think what else to do, so she did nothing.

  From somewhere far, far away, someone shouted.

  Then there were running footsteps, and the screech of sirens, and someone saying “Miss? Miss?” Later, there were bright lights and coffee she didn’t drink and blue uniforms with gun belts and questions. Many questions. But that was much later in this queer slowed-down time, and by then Jeanne had already decided what she must not say, ever, to anybody, anyplace, anytime. Not here, not at home in East Lansing, where she was going as soon as they let her leave Las Vegas, nowhere. Not to anyone.

  Not ever.

  TWO

  Robert Cavanaugh, FBI Criminal Investigative Division, Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, looked at th
e girl seated in front of him and fought off irritation. It wasn’t her fault that he hated interrogating adolescent girls. And that’s what this one was, no matter what her driver’s license said. She was twenty-one like he was an Arab terrorist. The casinos didn’t care. Not as long as they could prove it was the girl lying about her age and not them knowingly hiring children to pose half-naked at 2:00 A.M. for vacationing out-of-towners who thought they were living the glamorous high life.

  “Let’s go over it one more time, Miss Cassidy.”

  “Ms.,” the female LVPD uniform murmured behind him. Cavanaugh ignored her. Her presence was obligatory; her political correctness was not. And as far as Cavanaugh was concerned, this witness was a little girl.

  You’re only twenty-nine yourself, he heard Marcy, his soon-to-be-ex-wife, say inside his head. Cavanaugh ignored Marcy, who was thirty-five. She was good at logic, even better at external images, but bad at tuition. She was a great success in corporate marketing.

  “I told you everything I can,” Jeanne Cassidy said.

  “I know. But I want to be sure I have it all.”

  “I’m so tired,” the girl said, which Cavanaugh believed. She looked tired, under the garish showgirl makeup, or what was left of it after her crying. She looked tired and stunned and miserable, all of which was expected after seeing her best girlfriend killed by what the LVPD had logged as a hit-and-run. Jeanne Cassidy’s weary stunned misery didn’t interest Cavanaugh. But she also looked scared. That did interest him.

  “You and Miss Jefferson do the midnight show. Miss Jefferson collapses halfway down the onstage staircase because she hasn’t eaten anything all day.”

  “That’s what she told me,” Jeanne Cassidy said, and it was lie number one. Cavanaugh had a nose for lies. And this exhausted girl wasn’t any good at it. However, there was something odd about her, something different from the usual gorgeous-but-not-too-bright kids who strutted their stuff in Vegas, mostly turning after a year or two to drugs or prostitution or dubious boyfriends. Sometimes all three. This girl was subtly different, but Cavanaugh hadn’t yet put his finger on how.