up on a possible connection between Mayo and Tiger.
Least of all Mick Townsend. But here he was, larger than life, strolling around the sunken, tiled lobby, looking irritatingly suave and baronial in the lush surroundings that came complete with grand piano, heavy velvet drapes and candelabra. He seemed not just at home but as if he owned the place.
“Gryffald,” he said, apparently unsurprised to see her. “Selling out and going for the Mayo story after all?”
“Just like you, I guess,” she retorted, but she was secretly glad he’d jumped to that conclusion. It would save her the trouble of making up a story to keep him from guessing the real trail she was on.
“So, how’d he die?” she asked. If Townsend was going to be so damned chummy she could at least get some information out of him.
“OD,” Townsend said shortly. “Some exotic drug cocktail. Coke, heroin and belladonna.”
Belladonna? Barrie thought, startled. Coke and heroin was a common combination, called a speedball, among hard-core drug users. Adding a hallucinogen, particularly one with such an occult history as belladonna, was more Other territory than human, although in Hollywood Others often started edgy trends that humans then adopted without knowing the Otherworldly source.
Mick continued, “Of course, we’re not allowed to report that. Total blackout until it’s confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt—or lawsuit.”
He circled the piano, stopped to run his fingers lightly and expertly over the keys. She recognized the opening of an old jazz standard, one of her dance favorites.
Damn, he could play the piano, too. Perfection was so annoying. Barrie felt a warmth spreading through her and was alarmed to find herself wondering what it would feel like to have him run those skilled fingers over her body.
All right, that has to stop now.
Townsend pushed back abruptly from the piano, grimacing. “The story’s already jumped the shark. It’s not enough that Mayo died of an OD at the Chateau Marmont. There’s some genius of a bellhop insisting that he checked into a bungalow with a young guy who was the spitting image of Johnny Love. Ghosts, for God’s sake,” he said, disgusted.
Now it was adrenaline Barrie felt racing through her, accelerating her thoughts.
A bellhop saw Johnny Love?
Phoenix said Johnny Love was one of Tiger’s favorite shifts.
Tiger had a powerful Hollywood client who paid big money for shifting.
Tiger’s body was moved from somewhere else into that alley.
She’d been right. There was a connection between Mayo and Tiger.
She was very still, letting none of her thoughts show on her face. In fact, she used a little glamour—a temporary illusion, a very unstable form of shifting that her father had taught her when she was just a little girl—to keep her expression neutral, a trick a shifter or shifter Keeper could do to make sure she wasn’t giving anything away.
It was a huge lead. What if Tiger had died here, with Mayo? What if—
Her breath momentarily stopped at the next thought.
What if they both had been killed here? Together?
She had to contact Brandt right away.
She swallowed to be sure her voice was steady and said, “That’s ridiculous. The ghost of Johnny Love? The hotel must be getting a kickback from the ghost tours.”
Townsend laughed, a rich, genuine sound that made Barrie’s face suddenly flush warm. “I bet they are.” Then he looked at her, a long look that made her even warmer. “I think we should have dinner and talk about it.”
She was caught totally off guard. “It’s almost two in the morning,” she pointed out.
“Breakfast, then,” he said. “Brunch. Cocktails. Whatever your body clock has in mind.”
She was itching to get to Brandt, which was why she responded without thinking. Really without thinking. “All I have in mind is bed.”
Townsend half smiled, but even his half smile sizzled through her whole body. “Even better.”
“I meant sleep,” she mumbled.
“Sleep is always good,” he said seriously. “Eventu-ally.”
Feeling completely out of control, Barrie said, “‘Eventually’ won’t work for me. Have a good night.” She turned and walked out of the lobby with whatever was left of her dignity, and immediately ducked into the ladies’ to avoid running into Mick again. She sat in front of one of the makeup mirrors and was extremely annoyed to see the red in her cheeks.
“You look like you’re in heat,” she muttered. But looking in the mirror gave her an idea. She put her hands flat on the top of the vanity, and as she stared into her reflection in the mirror, she slowed her breathing and concentrated on her auric body, the energetic field that a shifter manipulates in order to shift. As her eyes bored into the mirror, she began to see the faint outline of light around her own reflection. She pushed with her mind…and slipped on a different kind of glamour, what she thought of as a beauty spell, that would at least temporarily make her devastatingly attractive to anyone who looked at her. She closed her eyes, and felt the glamour float over her head and settle delicately over her entire body, like a gauzy dream of a dress, a sexy and intoxicating softness… .
She opened her eyes. …
The woman who looked back at her from the mirror had her features and coloring, but magically enhanced: a classic Hollywood goddess, too beautiful to be real. In this moment she could have given Lauren Bacall or Myrna Loy or Rita Hayworth a run for her money.
Barrie breathed in, feeling the pure power of that beauty. Then she stood and went out in search of the bellhop.
With the glamour on all she had to do was smile at the young male desk clerk and say she would just love to talk to the man who’d seen the ghost. The clerk pointed her toward the bell stand with a felled-by-lightning sort of look on his face.
The bellhop was in his late twenties but still had the gangly awkwardness of adolescence, and looked equally starstruck to see Barrie coming toward him.
“M-may I help you?” he stammered.
She gave him a dazzling smile. “I hope so. Did you really see the ghost of Johnny Love?”
“I’m not supposed to talk to any more reporters,” he said without much conviction.
“Good thing I’m not a reporter, then,” she said, and watched him waver, captivated by her false loveliness.
He glanced around to see if anyone could overhear them and then leaned toward her. “It wasn’t a ghost, it was a real person. He just looked exactly like Johnny.”
Not a ghost, then. A shifter, Barrie thought, and felt her pulse spike. Was it Tiger?
“And
