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  “Nothing brassy,” he said. “We’ll have the stylist put in several shades, so it will look natural.”

  For someone who had never even put a temporary rinse on her hair, bleaching her hair to several shades of blond seemed at least as difficult as putting a man on the moon. “H-how long would that take?”

  “Oh, several hours, I’d think. Your hair will have to be double-processed.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your own pigment will have to be bleached out, then blond pigment streaked in to replace it.”

  Well, at least that made sense. She didn’t know if she’d ever have the nerve to do anything that drastic, but it was an option she could consider. “I’ll think about it,” she said dubiously.

  “Think hard,” he said. “What else?”

  She sighed. “My clothes. I have no sense of style.”

  He looked at the skirt and blouse she wore. She had changed out of her pants as soon as she got home, because she couldn’t stand another minute of worrying about whether or not people were looking at her butt. “Actually, you do,” he drawled. “Unfortunately, it’s all bad.”

  Her cheeks turned red, and he laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said kindly, extending a hand to help her to her feet. “You just never learned how to make the most of yourself. You have a lot of potential.”

  “I do?”

  “You do.” He made a circling motion with his finger. “Turn around. Slowly.”

  Self-consciously she did so.

  “You have a good figure,” he said. “You should show it, instead of hiding it inside those old-lady clothes. Your skin is excellent, you have good teeth, and I like those odd eyes you have. I’ll bet you’ve been embarrassed by your eyes all your life, haven’t you?”

  She almost squirmed, because as a child she’d been hideously aware of her different-colored eyes and always tried to blend into the background so no one would notice them. “For God’s sake, play them up,” Todd said. “They’re different, special. It isn’t as if you have one brown eye and one blue, which would really look weird, and I don’t know if it’s genetically possible anyway. You’ll never be a ravishing beauty, but you can definitely be very, very nice to look at.”

  “That’s all I want, anyway,” she said. “I don’t think I could handle ravishing.”

  “I’ve heard it’s a burden,” he said, smiling at her. “The best light is in my bathroom. So step into my boudoir, if you dare, and let’s get started on this transformation.”

  Daisy extracted a small bag from her purse. “I brought my makeup.”

  “Let’s see what you have.” He took the bag from her and opened it. He didn’t make a tsking sound, but she got the feeling he barely refrained. “That will do for a start,” he said with kind forbearance.

  He lead the way through his bedroom to the bath, and if Daisy had ever harbored any doubts about Todd’s sexual affiliation, his bedroom settled it. It was exquisitely furnished in Chippendale, with a huge four-poster bed that was swathed in graceful swags of netting, and with huge, lush potted plants artistically arranged around the room. She wished her own bedroom looked half as good.

  My goodness, even his bathroom was decorated. He’d done it in green and white, with touches of peach and dusty blues. She’d never been in a man’s bathroom before, she realized. She was faintly disappointed to see an ordinary toilet, though of course there was no reason for him to have a urinal hanging on the wall. Besides, it wouldn’t have gone with the decor.

  “I don’t have a vanity chair, sorry,” he said, smiling again. “Men don’t sit down to shave.”

  She’d never thought of it before, but he was right; shaving was something else men didn’t sit down to do.

  “Okay, first get your hair away from your face. Do you have a headband or anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then tuck it behind your ears and brush it away from your forehead.”

  She did as he said. That awful self-conscious feeling was back; her fingers were clumsy, unable to manage the simple act of tucking her hair behind her ears without fumbling. She suspected she’d stumble over her own feet if she had to walk anywhere right now.

  He opened a drawer in the built-in vanity and took out a box, about ten inches wide and five inches thick. He flicked the clasp, raised the lid, and trays unfolded—trays filled with all sorts of brushes and lipsticks, arrays of colors for the eyes and cheeks all displayed in little containers. “My goodness,” she blurted. “You have more makeup than Wal-Mart.”

  He laughed. “Not quite. This box brings back memories, though. I was on Broadway for a while, and you have to slather on layers of makeup to keep from looking like a ghost when the lights hit you.”

  “That sounds like fun. I’ve never been to New York. I’ve never done much of anything.”

  “It was fun.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “It wasn’t home,” he said simply “Besides, Mother needed someone to take care of her. That’s the way it works: they take care of you when you’re young, you take care of them when they’re old.”

  “Family,” she said, smiling, because her own was so close.

  “Exactly. Now,” he said, his tone turning brisk, “let’s get started.”

  Less than an hour later, entranced, Daisy stared into the mirror. Her lips parted in wonder. Oh, she wasn’t a raving beauty, but the woman in the mirror was attractive, and she looked confident, lively. She didn’t fade into the wallpaper. And most important, men would notice her!

  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.

  Mitchell knew his car, so Sykes borrowed one from a pal and cruised through Mitchell’s neighborhood, if you could call two ramshackle trailers and one dilapidated frame house, surrounded by junk, a neighborhood. They were the types of places inhabited by women with frizzy hair who wore tight, stained tank tops that showed their dirty bra straps, and by men with long, straggly hair, yellowed teeth, and an unshaken belief that life had done them wrong and owed them something. Sykes didn’t openly look at any of the three places as he drove by; with his peripheral vision he searched for Mitchell’s blue pickup, but it wasn’t there. He’d drive by again after dark, see if any lights were on, but he didn’t really expect the cockroach to turn up again so soon.

  Seeing how Mitchell lived always reminded Sykes of how narrow his own escape had been. If he hadn’t been smarter, made better decisions, he might be Mitchell. Now, that was a scary thought. But he came from the same trashy background; he knew exactly how Mitchell thought, how he operated. In his work that was a plus, but Sykes never wanted to actually live that way again. He wanted more. Hell, Mitchell probably wanted more, too, but he was never going to get more because he kept making those stupid decisions.

  With an eye to the future, Sykes salted away every dollar he could. He lived simply, but cleanly. He had no expensive habits or vices. He even played the stock market a little, with conservative stocks that didn’t perform spectacularly, but nevertheless always posted a gain. One day, when he had enough—though he wasn’t certain exactly how much was enough—he would walk away from everything and move where no one knew him, start a small business, settle down as a respected member of the community. Hell, he might even get married, have a couple of rugrats. His imagination couldn’t quite conjure up that picture, but nevertheless it was possible.

  Mitchell wasn’t jeopardizing just Sykes’s immediate future, but all of his plans. Those plans were what had gotten him out of the trash dump of a house where he’d grown up, what had given him a goal when it would have been so much easier to just let himself drift in the sea of waste. It was always easier to do nothing. Don’t worry about cleaning the house or cutting the grass, just drink another six-pack of beer and smoke another joint. Never mind there’s no food in the house for the kids; when that monthly check comes in, first thing, you gotta get your booze and drugs, before the money gets gone. It was easy. It was always easier to blow the money rather than spend it on things like food and electricity. The tough ones, the smart ones like him, figured out that the hard road was the road out.

  No matter what, Sykes would never go back.

  Once he took on a project, Todd Lawrence was an unstoppable force. Between trying to get her house ready to move into and Todd commandeering every other spare minute she had, Daisy felt as if she had been caught up in a tornado that refused to let her drop. The only thing that kept her from collapsing was the visible change she could see in herself.

  She didn’t have the nerve to try for the sex kitten image, and she had no idea what “old money” entailed, so she opted for the nature girl. She could handle that, she thought. Todd, however, had other ideas.

  “I think we’ll go for old money,” he said lazily when she presented herself at his house on Saturday for their shopping expedition and trip to a beauty salon in Huntsville. Hands on his hips, he looked her up and down. “Your face will look better with that kind of hair-style.”

  “Old money has a hairstyle?” she asked incredulously.

  “Of course. Simple, uncluttered, very good cut. Never too long, just to the top of your shoulders, I think. I have something in mind that you’ll like. Oh, by the way, we’re going to get your ears pierced today, too.”

  Protectively she grabbed her earlobes. “Why? I don’t think a makeover should include bloodshed.”

  “Because clip-on earrings are hideously uncomfortable, darling. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt.”

  She peered at his own earlobes, hoping they were hole-free so she could refuse on the basis that he didn’t know what he was talking about. No such luck; both lobes sported small indentations. He smiled and patted her hand. “Be brave,” he said cheerfully. “Beauty always comes at a price.”

  Daisy didn’t think she was brave so much as totally unable to stop this train she had started in motion. She was still trying to come up with a compelling reason why she didn’t need any body parts pierced when Todd bundled her into his car and they set off for Huntsville.

  Their first stop was a beauty salon. Daisy had only ever been in Wilma’s beauty shop, and there was a definite difference between a “shop” and a “salon.” For one thing, she was asked what she wanted to drink. All Wilma ever asked was if you were in a hurry. She started to ask for a cup of coffee, but Todd, with a twinkle in his eyes, said, “Wine. She needs to relax.”

  The rece
ptionist, a striking woman with short platinum hair and a pleasant smile, laughed as she fetched the wine. It was delivered into Daisy’s hand in a real wineglass, instead of the plastic disposable glass she had expected. On further reflection, though, she supposed Todd wouldn’t give his patronage to any salon so gauche as to serve wine in plastic or Styrofoam.

  The receptionist consulted her book. “Amie will be right with you. She’s our top stylist, so you can just relax and put yourself in her hands. You’ll look like a million dollars when she’s finished.”

  “I’ll just have a word with her before I leave,” Todd said, and disappeared through a door.

  Daisy gulped her wine. Leave? Todd was leaving her here alone? The bottom dropped out of her stomach. Oh, God, she couldn’t do this.

  She had to do this.

  Three hours later, on her third glass of wine, she felt as if she had been tortured. Sharp-smelling chemicals had been swabbed on her hair, chemicals that bleached her a bright yellow-white and made her look like a punk rocker who had been frightened by a television evangelist. After that stuff was washed out, then more chemicals were applied with what looked like a paintbrush, on one strand at a time, and each strand was then wrapped to keep it from touching the other strands. She morphed from a punk rocker into something from outer space, wired to receive satellite transmissions.

  While this was happening, her eyebrows were waxed—ouch—and she was kept busy receiving both a manicure and a pedicure. Her nails were now all the same length, polished a transparent rose with pale tips. Her toenails, though, sported a wicked shade of red. Daisy tried to remember if she had ever painted her toe-nails before; she didn’t think so, and even if she had, she would have chosen some pale pink shade that was barely noticeable. She would never, never have chosen look-at-me red. The effect was startling—and wonderfully sexy. She kept holding her bare feet up and staring at her red-tipped toes, thinking they didn’t even look like her feet now. Too bad she didn’t have any sandals to show them off. She had some flip-flops, but she couldn’t wear those to work.