The process hadn’t been painless. First Todd had insisted she pluck her eyebrows: “You don’t want Joan Crawford eyebrows, dear. She had one brow hair that grew to about three inches long, and she named it Oscar, or something like that.” But thankfully he hadn’t wanted her to have Bette Davis eyes, either, so she’d been able to limit the tweezing to a few stragglers.
Then he had walked her through the application of a full makeup job, and, to her relief, it wasn’t very complicated. The main thing was not to use too much, and to always have a tissue and cotton tip at hand to repair any mistakes or wipe off excess. Even mascara was easy, once she had used the tissue to blot most of the goop off the little brush before applying it to her lashes.
“Heathens,” she had muttered, surveying her lovely dark lashes in the mirror. There wasn’t a caterpillar in sight.
“Beg pardon?”
“Mascara makers. They’re heathens. Why don’t they just tell you to blot most of the mascara off the brush before you start?”
“Honey, they have enough to worry about warning people not to poke it in their eyes, or eat it. I guess they figure if you really want to wear mascara, you’ll learn how.”
Well, she had wanted, and she had learned.
“I did it,” she said numbly, staring at her reflection. Her complexion was smooth and bright, her cheeks softly flushed, her eyes mysterious and larger, her lips full and moist. It hadn’t been difficult at all.
“Well, honey, of course you did. There’s nothing to it; just practice and don’t go overboard with the color. Now, let’s think about style. Which would you rather shoot for: nature girl, old money, or sex kitten?”
Todd stood in his open front door and cheerfully waved a good-bye to Daisy. He couldn’t help smiling. This was the first time he’d ever spent any time with her, though of course he’d known who she was, and he really liked her. She was touchingly naive for someone her age, but fresh and bright and honest, without a jaded bone in her body. She had absolutely no idea how to make the most of her looks, but, thank God, he did. When he was finished with her, she was going to be a knockout.
He strode to the phone and dialed a number. As soon as the call was answered on the other end, he said, “I have a candidate. Daisy Minor.”
SEVEN
Glenn Sykes was a professional. He was careful, he paid attention to details, and he didn’t let himself get emotionally involved. He’d never spent a day in jail; in fact, he even had a clean driving record, without so much as a speeding ticket to his name. Not that he hadn’t had a speeding ticket, but the driver’s license he’d presented had been in a different name, an alternate identity he’d prudently set up for himself some fifteen years previously.
One of the reasons he was successful was that he didn’t draw attention to himself. He wasn’t loud, he seldom drank—and never when he was working, only when he was alone—and he always kept himself neat and clean, on the theory that law-abiding people were more likely to keep an eagle eye on anyone hanging around who looked dirty and unkempt, as if dirt somehow translated into shiftiness. Anyone who saw him would automatically categorize him as Joe Average, with a wife and a couple of kids, and a three-bedroom house in an older subdivision. He didn’t wear an earring, or a chain, or have a tattoo; all those, however small, were things that people noticed. He kept his sandy brown hair cut fairly short, he wore an ordinary thirty-dollar wristwatch even though he could afford much better, and he watched his mouth. He could and did go anywhere without drawing undue attention.
That was why he was so disgusted with Mitchell. The dead girl wasn’t anyone important, but her body, when it was discovered, would still draw attention. The resultant investigation probably wouldn’t amount to much, and he’d been careful to make certain the cops wouldn’t have anything to go on, but mistakes happened and even cops got lucky occasionally. Mitchell was jeopardizing the entire enterprise; Sykes had no doubt that if Mitchell was ever arrested in connection with those girls’ deaths, he’d drop every name he’d ever known in an effort to strike a deal with the D.A. Mitchell’s stupidity could get every one of them a prison sentence.
The hell of it was, if Mitchell couldn’t get it up with a conscious woman, there were other ways to do it. GHB was a crap shoot; you might take it one time and be okay, with just a gap in your memory. The next time, it could shut down your brain. There were other drugs that would work; hell, booze would work. But, no, Mitchell had to slip them GHB, like he was getting away with something and no one would notice when the girls didn’t wake up.
So Mitchell had to go. If Mayor Nolan hadn’t given the word, Sykes had already decided it was time for him to be moving on, before Mitchell brought them all down. But the mayor, for all his southern-fucking-gentleman manners, was as cold and ruthless as anyone Sykes had ever met; he didn’t pretend that he couldn’t sully his hands with murder—though Sykes didn’t exactly call killing Mitchell murder. It was more of an extermination, like stepping on a cockroach.
First, though, he had to find the bastard. With a cockroach’s talent for self-preservation, Mitchell had gone to ground and hadn’t turned up at any of his usual haunts.
Since Mitchell was already spooked, Sykes decided to play this low-key. While it would have been satisfying to simply walk up to the bastard’s trailer and put a hole between his eyes as soon as he opened the door, again, things like that tended to attract attention. For one thing, Mitchell had neighbors, and in Sykes’s experience neighbors were always looking out the window just when they shouldn’t. He could dispose of Mitchell in far less dramatic ways. With luck, he could even make it look like an accident.