Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [71]
She took a moment to glance at herself, pick at a stray false eyelash, and pretend I wasn’t present, then she eyed me with an eyebrow lifted in an arch that Wolverine would’ve died for. Then she said, “Who are you looking for again? I don’t think you ever said.”
I ducked the question by asking another one. “You’re Adrian deJesus, aren’t you?”
Sister Rose froze mid-eyelash-investigation, and her whole body went rigid in a dangerous way. Without moving, and in less than a second, she’d gone from casual interest to a defensiveness that was ready for violence. I didn’t want any violence, even if I was pretty certain of my capacity for coming out on top.
She said, “You’re a cop, are you? Just a cop?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you’re a cop, and I want you out of here, right now. Sooner than now.” She was standing again and looming, prepared to bully me if it came to that.
“I’m not here to make any trouble for you,” I babbled. “I spoke to your parents last night.”
“Get out.”
I stood up, too, since I wasn’t willing to be the only one with my butt that close to the floor, and I wanted to give her the impression that I wasn’t the kind of girl who takes bullying lying down. “I won’t get out, not until we have a chat about your sister,” I said, running with my practically-totally-obvious theory that I was talking to the estranged brother.
She was visibly thrown, for all she tried to hide it. Her breathing was suspended for a pair of shocked seconds, and beneath a trowel’s worth of cream shadow, her eyes widened, then contracted. “My sister?” she asked, committing to nothing, but not ordering me out of the dressing room, either.
“Your sister. Your little sister,” I added, extrapolating from the approximate age of the person in front of me. Sister Rose was in her late twenties or early thirties, by my best approximation. “Isabelle deJesus, who went missing about ten years ago.” I then parroted everything I knew from the closed and semi-sealed police report. “She never came home from school.”
Rose went from discreetly shocked to stricken. She wanted to know, “Why now? Why you? I don’t even know who you are. You say you’re a cop, but I’m sorry, I still don’t buy it, and I want to know what’s really going on. What do you want from me?”
“I only want to talk about your sister. I know you’ve had a falling-out with your family; I went there first, and it was your father who finally gave me this place, and your … your stage name, as a lead.”
“But why?” she demanded, more desperate than commanding. “Are there any new leads? Nobody cared a decade ago. Why now?”
I held out my hands and said, “Please, sit down. Let’s both sit down, and just have a little talk. I’ll tell you what I know, and you can tell me what you know, and maybe we’ll have a productive conversation, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, not certain that she meant it, I could tell. She descended slowly back onto her seat—a small, round vanity-style stool that didn’t look large enough or strong enough to hold her. “Okay, but you have to tell me the truth.”
I agreed and likewise backed down gingerly into my seat, being careful to keep eye contact. “Let me start over,” I tried. “My name is Raylene, and yours is Adrian—yes or no?”
“Yes.”
I was almost surprised. I almost expected a token denial, or at least an insistence that it used to be her name, and now it was Rose, et cetera. But no. All she said was, “Yes.” So I said, as a gesture of good faith, “You’re right, I’m not a cop. But I don’t work for the government, either, and that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it?”
She didn’t really answer, except to flip her head in a disdainful shrug. She said, “Motherfucking meatheads.”
“Right now, those are my sentiments exactly,” I commiserated.
She countered loosely with, “Oh yeah? What have they done to you lately? Did they ever kidnap your little sister and refuse to give her back? Did they ever try to hunt you like a dog, and chase you into hiding?”
“The first part, no. The second part, actually yes.” I was already out on a