Speak of the Devil Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Praise for Eye of the Beholder

  “Fast, furious, and impossible to put down.”

  —George Shuman, bestselling author of 18 Seconds

  “Shattuck’s thrilling, danger-filled page-turner has unforgettable characters that linger in the reader’s memory long after the book is finished . . . a breath of fresh air.”

  —Romantic Times

  “This was the kind of book you just can’t put down.”

  —Affaire de Coeur (Reviewer’s Pick)

  “Shattuck’s vivid descriptions of psychic phenomena are intriguing. Her characters are believable, and although she offers many possibilities, the reader is never sure who the villain is until the very last pages. The crimes portrayed in Eye of the Beholder are heinous and despicable, but the brutal revenge enacted at the end is more than satisfying.”

  —The Strand Magazine

  And for Shari Shattuck’s other novels

  “Exploding like a string of firecrackers let loose beneath one’s feet, Shattuck’s debut novel keeps the reader deliciously on edge.”—Publishers Weekly, on Loaded

  “Lethal is fast-paced, edgy, and extremely sensual.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “Unlike many heroines . . . Cally Wilde is a fully formed, strong, and engaging character throughout this fast-paced and suspenseful mystery.”

  —Booklist

  “Complex and totally entertaining.”

  —Fresh Fiction, on The Man She Thought She Knew

  “Shari Shattuck scores a big hit with The Man She Thought She Knew. Smart, fast-paced, and sexy, this book kept me riveted to my seat.”

  —USA Today bestselling author Julie Kenner

  Also by Shari Shattuck

  Eye of the Beholder

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, September 2008

  Copyright © Shari Shattuck, 2008

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are

  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or

  locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-02470-6

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  Oh, my Calee, I wanted to give something to match your joyous spirit and your inimitable comedy, and I will, I promise, but for now, I give you this. I hope you enjoy the funnier bits. I love you, Mommy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A million thank-yous to:

  Laura Cifelli, your kindness and intelligence amaze me, and you make me laugh.

  Paul Fedorko, you are the rock of confidence: What would I stand on without you?

  Creason Moss, wisdom and kindness seldom touched a teenager as much as they have you. Lucky, lucky me.

  Joseph Stachura, you are my ever-present strength and joy.

  All the smarter-than-me editors at NAL, you make me look like I passed tenth-grade English.

  The many firefighters whose lunches I interrupted to pester with questions about arson for not having me arrested on suspicion.

  Captain Anthony Williams, whom I accosted in line at See’s Candies on Valentine’s Day, and who provided me with so much crucial information. (I hope your wife enjoyed the orange creams.)

  The friends I quizzed about banking, building, and business, su knowledge es mi knowledge.

  Sure, I could have done it without all of you, but it wouldn’t have been as much fun, the punctuation would have been horrible, and most of it would have been wrong.

  Chapter 1


  The fierce wind swept across the dusty, faded green sage, bending brittle branches and tugging roots from the parched earth. It pushed ruthlessly at the skeletal leaves of the sycamores in the dry riverbed as it threw its vicious weight against the arid hills of Angeles Crest.

  Every year it came, sweeping the heat in from the desert to Los Angeles with punishing, dehydrating gusts. After almost six months without a drop of rain it came, turning the landscape into acres of kindling, vast swatches of dry brush leading to heartier fuel: drought-weakened trees and countless homes.

  Greer Sands stood at the window, watching the wind blasting the distressed foliage. In the room behind her, friends were celebrating the expected birth of a new child, laughing and sharing their wisdom. Greer felt drawn away from them, pulled instead toward the unstable weather outside. It was impossible for anyone who lived in fear of fire to ignore the threat of those winds, but for Greer it was something more.

  All her life, she had seen glimpses of the future. She had felt the undulations of the natural world playing through her body, and these winds strummed a melody both forlorn and ominous. She was filled with a feeling of vulnerability. Greer bowed her head in acknowledgment of the power and fury she perceived and then exhaled the shakiness that had possessed her.

  “Greer,” called her friend Whitney’s voice behind her, “are you okay?”

  Whitney and Greer had met nine months before when Greer moved into a home pocketed in the national forest above Los Angeles in the ranch community of Shadow Hills. Whitney was a full-bodied, dark-haired beauty of forty, who was half-Native American. As a Cree Indian she was given a name with each stage of life, and looking at her glowing smile now, Greer thought again that the Elder who had bestowed on Whitney the name Shiny Girl had captured her very essence with those two words.

  When they’d met, Whitney had accepted Greer’s sixth sense without question, and she could see that Greer was awash with something now. Greer smiled back at Whitney and hastened to reassure her. “I’m fine. It’s just this wind—it’s hard for me not to listen to it.”

  Whitney nodded, easily understanding the submerged meaning beneath her friend’s surface explanation. She moved closer and asked in a quiet voice, “Everything copacetic?”

  Focusing on the question brought a quiver to Greer’s breastbone. She placed a palm flat against it and half closed her eyes, letting the quiver expand until she could read it, see it as a color or a shape. It glowed in her mind’s eye, like a huge cloud of light, multicolored, with dark impenetrable sections. “I don’t know,” Greer said slowly. “I can feel something huge. . . .”

  “Oh my God, how cute is that!” came a voice from the sofa behind them. It was accompanied by oohs and aahs, in a range of soprano notes.

  Happily distracted, Greer and Whitney turned to admire the blue sleeper that their friend Jenny was holding up over her swelled stomach. Even seven months pregnant, Jenny looked sexy. Her Hispanic heritage was serving her well through her pregnancy, her golden skin glowed with a sunny flush, and her extra weight only served to flatter her natural curves.

  “Oh,” she beamed, “Lewis is going to love this. He so wants it to be a boy.” She smiled a little sadly. “I wish he was here.”

  “When’s he coming back?” asked Mindy, the party’s hostess. She was a small, energetic woman whose lifelong association with horses had given her that happy, weathered look that comes to those who experience much of their life from the back of a horse under an open sky, laughing heartily all the while. The creases on her face were fixed in a smile.

  “Three weeks, I hope,” Jenny said wistfully. “The building should be finished by then, but they just keep having delays with the permits. Every time they finish a stage, they have to wait for the inspector to sign off, and he takes days to get out there.” She sighed again. “He wouldn’t be there at all, but he couldn’t turn down this huge contract.” After a few years of struggling, her husband, Lewis, had finally hit the big time with his contracting business, and though Jenny was enjoying the financial fruits of his labors, she wasn’t too keen on the cost of his absences.

  “Has Lewis built an apartment building before?” Mindy asked.

  “No. Condos, yes, but this is the first multistory building he’s contracted. He hated going away right now, but it’s a three-complex deal and the next two are back in LA County.”

  “Score!” Mindy laughed. “Pretty soon I’ll be lodging horses at your ranch!”

  “Let me get used to having one horse first. I always promised myself I would get one when I could afford it, so I let you talk me into taking him, but King is a good bit more time-consuming than I expected. Especially with Lewis gone.”

  Greer rejoined the small group and sat down on an ottoman that had been pulled up to complete an informal circle. “Well, Bakersfield isn’t that far. He can be back in, what, three hours if he needs to be.”

  “And he’s made it back at least one day a week,” Jenny said. “I know he worries about me, and I just wish he could feel every kick like I do.”

  Mindy’s voice dropped to a sarcastic growl. “Wait ’til you go into labor. You’ll wish you were the one kicking him, wearing steel-toed boots.”

  The group of women shared a laugh that cut off abruptly as the kitchen door swung open and a man entered the female population. He was large and burly under his cowboy hat, and he stopped when he saw the dozen women looking at him expectantly. His eyes scanned the room, and then turning his meaty palms up he asked, “What?”

  The women burst into laughter again, and Mindy got up and crossed over to her husband.

  “I’m sorry, honey. It’s not you—it’s just your timing. I think everyone’s met my husband, Reading, except you two.” Mindy pointed to Leah and Greer. “Reading, this is Whitney’s new neighbor, Greer.”

  “You have a lovely home,” Greer said, gesturing to the spacious vaulted ceiling of the ranch house before reaching out to shake hands. As her soft skin met his rough fingers, a distinctly unpleasant jolt went through her fingers. It didn’t travel up her arm, as sometimes happened when she met a person intent on harm, but the jolt caused her to look more deeply at the man. His eyes were guarded, but she sensed nothing more.

  “Nice to meet you too,” Reading was saying. He released Greer’s hand and she wondered if her reaction had been a residual effect of her overall unease.

  “And this is Leah Falconer, Jenny’s best friend and our local bank manager,” Mindy was saying proudly, laying an affectionate hand on Leah’s shoulder. The conservatively dressed, aristocratic brunette shrugged herself politely out from under it. Greetings were exchanged, and then Mindy asked Reading if he would like a glass of wine.

  “No, thanks anyway. I’ve got to go out and hose off a couple of the horses, they get overheated in this infernal wind.”

  When Leah asked politely about how many horses they had at the ranch, Reading told them a total of twenty-one. Only five, he explained, belonged to him and Mindy; the rest were boarded.

  “I told you about Mindy and Reading,” Jenny told Leah with mock exasperation. “Remember? This is where I board King. I bought him from Mindy.” Leah and Jenny’s friendship had happened upon them quickly because of a shared harrowing experience that had preempted the usual years of trust building. The result was that they seemed as though they’d known each other for far longer than a few months, but details sometimes got lost.

  Reading nodded. “She found you a real sweetheart too. You want me to give King a hose-down?”

  “Yes, please.” Jenny looked relieved. “I worry about him so much in this weather.”

  Leah squinted her intelligent eyes at Reading and asked, “Don’t you worry about fire?”

  “Don’t even say it!” shrieked Mindy. “It’s our worst fear. We have all kinds of evacuation plans, but it would not be easy. Basically we have friends with ranches down in the flats where we would relocate the horses if they were in danger.”

  Greer gr
imaced and said to Reading, “I don’t know how you can stand to work outside in this dry heat.”

  Reading looked at her with a glint of devilish humor in his eyes as he surveyed the room full of women. “Well, today, it’s either heatstroke or estrogen radiation.”

  With that, he waved a hand at the laughing women, kissed Mindy, and headed out. Greer watched him go, wondering what the pain in her hand when she touched him had meant. Once or twice before, a chilling sensation had traveled to her heart when she’d come across someone intent on harm, but she hadn’t made the connection until later. She didn’t read men very well, never had, and this sensation had been different, localized and quick, definitely not pleasant. But that wasn’t consistent with a person who would willingly spend time in heat like a furnace blast to make sure that horses, some of which didn’t even belong to him, were more comfortable.

  Greer sat back and sipped at her soda, letting the soft feeling of female company hold her in its sway. A feeling not unlike weightlessness came over her as she watched Leah and Jenny together. They were so different, Jenny with her street style and toughness, with her wavy hair caught up in a casual ponytail, and Leah in her perfectly pressed silk blouse and tailored gray skirt, her short, dark hair stick straight and severely styled. Yet they were so often together now. Only nine months ago, things had been very different for Leah. She had been lucky to survive that difficult time, and Greer often worried what lingering scars it would leave.

  “I’m betting it’s a girl,” Whitney said. And with a pleased smile, she pulled out a pink wrapped gift and handed it over.

  Jenny looked very touched when she removed the lid of the small white box and gazed down on a child-sized silver bracelet with a single turquoise stone banded in silver.

  “Oh”—there were tears in Jenny’s eyes as she looked up at her friend—“you made this, didn’t you?”