Die in Plain Sight Read Free Page B

when it comes to sex, a woman’s imagination is always better than reality.”
    Lacey made a face. “I hear you. I never started out to spend my life alone, but men keep changing my mind. After some of the specimens we’ve known, being single looks real good.” With a shrug for the state of manhood in modern America, she added, “Give me a good painting any day. Speaking of which…”
    She reached for the third painting and turned it around.
    Scream Bloody Murder.
    Shayla grimaced and went back to her stickers.
    “Um,” Lacey said, her brown eyes intent on the canvas. “Maybe not. It’s brilliant, no doubt, but this is a charity event and…”
    Her voice trailed off. The savage, almost abstract whirl of turquoise water and black night, pale hair and blood-red mouth distorted in a death cry stunned Lacey each time she saw it. It made her stomach clench as if she’d stumbled onto a murder scene too late to do anything but close the eyes of the dead.
    Art, like humanity, wasn’t always kind.
    “Do you think he really saw that?” Shayla asked reluctantly, drawn in spite of herself to the raw reality of the painting.
    “I think he dreamed it.”
    “They call those kind of dreams nightmares.”
    Lacey couldn’t argue that. “But anyone who can look at this and not feel something doesn’t deserve to be called human.”
    “Some really sorry pieces of mobile protein are called human.” Shayla turned away from the painting. “It’s too real. The difference between being able to imagine something that violent and actually doing it seems small enough to make me nervous.”
    Lacey didn’t answer. Part of her had always wondered if her grandfather—who always painted from life “en plein air”—had once seen violent death. But most of her really didn’t want to know what his inspiration had been.
    Maybe that was what her father had meant when he told her: Leave it alone, Lacey. Some people aren’t what you want them to be.

Southern California
    Tuesday afternoon
5
    G lass walls on all sides of Savoy Tower’s penthouse conference room showed the colorful sprawl of Moreno County’s high-tech industrial parks, world-class shopping centers, skeins of freeways, and subdivisions that ranged from six-bedroom McMansions to luxury beach condos for the itinerant and truly rich. Low mountains, chaparral-choked canyons, rolling hills where white-faced cattle grazed, citrus groves, strawberry fields, marinas, and a few highly endangered saltwater marshes were interlaced like fingers through the various developments. Bounded by mountains to the northeast and ocean to the southwest, the Savoy Ranch was both fulcrum and lever of a power that reached to the state governor and the United States Senate, and had a hefty down payment on the present vice president.
    The portrait above the head of the sleek cherry conference table was as imposing as the view: old man Benford Savoy himself, the merchant who had made a fortune selling twelve-dollar eggs and thirty-dollarwomen to forty-niners. Mining gold from other men’s pockets was a lot easier than crouching in icy water and panning for gold from “can see to can’t see.”
    Benford had taken the gold and bought up an old Spanish land grant. Land and wealth had passed from generation to Savoy generation for almost one hundred years without a hitch. Said hitch was the third generation’s bride, Sandra Wheaten Savoy, who had the gall to leave part of her Savoy inheritance to her sister’s children. It was an irritant to have someone “not of the blood” sit on the board of Savoy, Inc., but when the cause was important enough, those of proper Savoy blood unbent enough to acknowledge their shirttail Pickford cousins.
    Another hitch in the proud Savoy tradition occurred in that same generation. Benford Savoy III, called Three by his close friends, had the bad fortune to beget a daughter rather than a son for his one and only child. The next best thing to a son was to have his