“What a lovely expression,” Lucy said. “I’ll treasure it and the image, but adobe or concrete, either one, that’s gonna hurt.”
“She’s thirty-one,” I said quickly, before things got out of hand again.
Danya stared at Lucy. “Not possible.”
“It’s been verified,” I said. “But if you want, we could cut off an arm or a leg and count rings.”
Lucy chucked me in the ribs with an elbow. It didn’t hurt the way it used to when Jeri did it. But that they both felt compelled to do so on occasion must mean something. Then she sat closer to me and put an arm through mine, hugged it close.
“So your kid sister went to a Jo-X party and your dad didn’t know,” I said to Danya. “That’s about right for a kid these days. Punishment for that is taking away their cell phone for half an hour, give it back right before they go suicidal. How did Xenon notice her? She pretty, too?”
“Pretty? She’s a lot more than just pretty. She’s five-ten and looks like a showgirl. And you should see what she wore to that concert. So, yeah, that evil bastard picked her out of the crowd.”
“Okay. How’d that get you involved? And what’s with this Pahranagai Inn? I found a receipt in Xenon’s wallet. The name on the receipt was Nathan Williams.”
“Never heard of him, but it’s probably Jo-X.” Danya glanced at Lucy, then stared at me. “Can she be trusted? This isn’t . . . this is getting into some really private stuff, Mortimer.”
“Mort. She can,” I said.
“I can,” Lucy echoed. “And his name is Mort in case you hadn’t picked up on that yet.”
Danya gave her a hard look, then turned to me. “Josie woke up here. In this room. She was at the party in Vegas. There were like sixty people there, she remembers that. And she had a few drinks, then . . . nothing after that, until she woke up here, naked, a hundred fifty miles away, and she knew she’d been raped.”
“Rohypnol,” I said. “He roofied her.”
“That’s what I thought, too. Nothing else made sense.”
“What I mean is—they found Rohypnol at Jo-X’s place. The police did when they searched it. Your father told me.”
“Well, shit. That rotten asshole. Jo-X, not my dad.”
“Jo-X—who, let us not forget, ended up in your garage.”
“Which is still one unbelievably weird goddamn mystery I don’t know shit about,” Danya said harshly.
“Or me,” Shanna said, and I felt Lucy’s arm tighten on mine at the lapse in grammar. I bumped her shoulder, indicating that she could keep it to herself, vent later.
“Josie phoned my cell,” Danya said. “I was in Reno. She was crying. She told me where she was and asked me to come get her and bring her some clothes ’cause hers were gone. Jo-X took ’em, the bastard. Don’t know why. All she had were towels and bedsheets from in here so she couldn’t leave the room. And she wanted me to bring her a ‘Plan-B’ pill.”
“Plan-B?”
“A ‘morning after’ pill. Just in case. But if you’re thinking we should’ve gone to the police, Josie said she’d been douched. She didn’t do it, but she could tell. Douched her when she was unconscious? How evil is that? And she’s older than sixteen and he’s famous, which meant everyone would think she was just a dumb groupie, which maybe she was, so the police might figure it was consensual and she was looking for a payoff—and on and on. You know how it goes. Famous rich guys almost never get prosecuted for rape. For them it just goes away and the girl is stuck with everyone knowing or thinking she’d been raped, or that she’s a gold-digging liar. So we handled it.”
Handled it. That sounded familiar. “How’d you do that?”
“Hey, if you’re thinking we killed the fucker, think again. This all happened about a month ago. And stringing him up in our garage would’ve been a super way to cover it up. What we handled, was Josie. Getting her back home, talking to her, not letting Dad find out what had happened ’cause he would’ve gone totally ballistic and done something really stupid.”
“And the retarded girlfriend who drove her down to Vegas didn’t notice the car was empty on the return trip?”
“My dumb sister told her Jo-X said he’d buy her a plane ticket back if she wanted to stay until that next afternoon or the day after. And, of course, she did, and, of course, the girlfriend had to get back or her parents would find out, so she left the party kinda early and went back to their motel.”
Sounded like a couple of typical dumb kids, all right.
The room went quiet for a while.
Okay, who killed Xenon? Danya?
Motive, I thought—check. Opportunity was iffy since Jo-X was usually surrounded by fans and various sycophants. Means? A bullet in the chest, another in the head? She could manage that if she could get him alone, which was that opportunity thing again. But string him up in their garage like some sort of a trophy afterward?—no way in hell. In fact, Jo-X in their garage was like being given a get-out-of-jail-free card. They should have stayed in Reno. Running and hiding out like this was stupid.
I looked at Danya. “You said this is the room Josie woke up in?” Quickly I turned to Lucy and said, “I ended that sentence with a preposition. Is that okay?”
She bit my shoulder. “Poophead.”
“Ow,” I said, mostly for show since she didn’t draw blood. I looked at Danya.
“Yes,” she said.
“And here you are.”
“We didn’t stick around very long when we got Josie. We looked around a little, but mostly Shanna and I got her dressed and
