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Lioness
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PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
SHIRLEY PALMER
“A first-rate, nailbiting hardcover-debut thriller…Admirably paced and plotted, with the kind of guns-a-popping denouement that begs for transfer to the big screen.”
—Kirkus Reviews on Danger Zone
“With its taut plot, [Palmer’s] African thriller makes a suspenseful follow-up to her previous book, A Veiled Journey.”
—Publishers Weekly on Lioness
“This romantic thriller…explores the complexities of culture as well as those of the human heart.”
—Publishers Weekly on A Veiled Journey
“…a suspense thriller…[with a] frenetic tempo and myriad plot twists.”
—Publishers Weekly on Danger Zone
Also by SHIRLEY PALMER
THE TRADE
DANGER ZONE
A VEILED JOURNEY
LIONESS
SHIRLEY PALMER
For Dan Palmer
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go to Peter Miller of PMA Literary Management in New York, who first read this novel and loved it. Thanks, too, to Ken Atchity of AEI in Los Angeles, who nurtured the first draft.
The people at MIRA Books, Dianne Moggy and Amy Moore-Benson, have been, as usual, terrific. Thank you both.
If the elephant vanished the loss to human laughter, wonder and tenderness would be a calamity.
—V. S. Pritchett
reviewing The Roots of Heaven
The slaughter of the elephant on the plains of Africa has slowed in recent years, but has never been eradicated. It still continues. The elephants who once visited the caves of Kitum are no more.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Prologue
British Airways Flight 283 from Nairobi stood outside the hangar, its cargo doors open. Cat Stanton was aware of activity inside the cavernous building, the whir of machinery, forklifts moving containers into place, men’s voices. Nothing seemed real.
Joel’s coffin inched into view, alone on the platform that descended from the bowels of the 747 toward the wet, shiny tarmac. As it cleared the protection of the giant aircraft, rain bounced off the gray metal carrying case.
He would like that, Cat thought. Joel loved the rain. She started toward the open doors of the hangar. A restraining hand touched her arm.
“Honey, you don’t have to go outside, you’ll get soaked,” John Rifken said. “They’ll bring him in.”
Cat took a moment to process his words—they sounded hollow and distant—then said, “It’s okay, John. It’s only rain.” A cold storm had barreled down from Alaska, unheard of in September, and still hovered over Los Angeles.
She started walking again and felt John keeping pace with her. She heard the whisper of wheels on the cement floor and turned to him.
“John, I…” She glanced at the black-suited men behind him trundling a wheeled cart and fumbled for words. “John, keep them here for a minute. I’ll be all right.”
John looked at her face. “Okay, honey.”
Silently he motioned to the two attendants from the mortuary, and they stood back with the casket carriage they had brought to transfer the coffin to the waiting hearse.
Alone, Cat walked out into the rain. She tried not to think of Joel in the darkness, his bones crushed, his body mangled.
One
Cat stared into the eyes looking back at her from the mirror of the bathroom attached to their office. Her office now. She forced herself to form the word, say it aloud. “Dead.” She made herself go on, “Joel is dead.” Her twin brother, the other half of herself. Dead.
She heard Mave Chen open the outer door and turned on the faucet, ran her hands under cold water.
“Cat, are you okay?”
These days, that was Mave’s constant question. What did it mean, okay? What was okay? She had a payroll to meet, an architectural practice to keep alive. Ongoing jobs had to be supervised, anxious clients reassured that nothing had changed now that The Stanton Partnership was just one architect, a thirty-two-year-old woman at that, running a crew of twenty draftsmen. The hotel job—the job that had killed him—had been put on hold, and for that she was grateful. She never wanted to hear of it again.
Was that what Mave meant by okay?
“Sure,” she called back through the open door. “Just washing my hands.”
“There’s a letter,” Mave said. Her voice sounded strained.
Cat dried her hands quickly, dropped the paper towel into the wastepaper basket, reentered the office. “What letter?”
Mave held out a large brown envelope.
Cat felt her heart thump twice against her chest then start to race. Suddenly light-headed, she stared at the envelope. It was battered, water-stained. The stylized lettering of the address jumped out at her.
“It was among the rest of the mail,” Mave said. “That’s Joel’s architectural lettering.”
Cat took the envelope, sank into Joel’s chair behind the partner’s desk they had shared. Since his funeral, she had alternated between her own side and his, otherwise she found herself staring at his empty chair, lost to time and grief. His clutter was still in place—piles of books on architecture and art and wildlife photography, some fossils he’d found interesting. A few pieces of modern sculpture. A framed picture he’d taken of Jess the year they had all turned seventeen—the year he and Jess had become lovers.
Cat slit open the envelope, extracted half a dozen sketches. A note fell from between the drawings, a page ripped from the sketching pad, and Cat picked it up with trembling fingers. Joel’s printing ran together as if he’d scribbled the note in haste. She took in the words at a glance, then read them again to make sure she understood what they said.
“Cat, what is it?” Mave reached to take the note from Cat’s shaking hand. She read it aloud. “‘Need to talk to you. Will call as soon as I can get to a phone. There’s something odd going on here, nothing’s what it seems to be. Don’t worry, I’m on top of it. Will get the film developed in Nairobi. J.”’ Mave looked up, her eyes wide. “There’s no date. What do you think he meant?”
Cat shook her head. Joel must have written it around the time of his phone call seven weeks ago. The call had been garbled, breaking up without making any sense. But she’d known it was Joel and had not been surprised she couldn’t understand what he was saying. She’d figured he was calling fro
m a village phone somewhere and would call again. That was the last time she had heard his voice. A week later, Jock Campbell had called their client and friend, John Rifken, to say that Joel was dead. And John had come to tell her in person.
Cat picked up the envelope, studied the blurred postmark. She could make out the year, 1986, but not the month nor the place where it had been mailed, and she reached for a magnifying glass, bringing the postmark closer. It could be Nairobi, but according to Jock Campbell the accident had happened in the remote bush. Joel had never returned to Nairobi. And if he had, he would have called her.
So who had sent it?
She put the envelope aside, picked up the sketches.
They’d been done from a mountainous point, high above golden grassland dotted with grazing animals. They were good. In a few lines, he’d caught the drama of the landscape, but something was missing. Cat knew Joel’s work as well as she knew her own, and these had an unfinished quality, as if he’d left out the core of each scene.
So why had he sent them?
She looked up at Mave.
“Get John Rifken on the telephone. I need to see him, now, today.”
While she waited for Mave to make the call, Cat spread the sketches over the desk. Four washed with colour and a couple merely thumbnail sketches, done in a hurry, but still small works of art. She traced the lines Joel had drawn with her fingers. He had been so good at what he did….
“Cat.” Mave came back into the room. “I spoke to Charlotte, Mr. Rifken’s assistant. She says he’s in Houston meeting with his investors in Bluebonnet Development.”
So he was moving ahead on the Kenya project. “Try him in Houston.”
“I already did. I left word at his hotel and at the Bluebonnet office.”
“Did Charlotte say when he’d be back?”
“He’ll be in his office on Friday.”
Two days. “Okay Mave, thanks.”
Cat waited until Mave left, closing the door softly behind her, then punched out the number she had for Jock Campbell in Nairobi. Eleven hours ahead of Los Angeles, it was already midnight there, and she listened to the ringing tone, then a click and a terse message in a hard male voice.
“You’ve reached Campbell Safaris. Leave your name and number, we’ll call back.”
Cat gave the information requested and added, “It has been six weeks since my brother’s death and I have not yet received a police report, or his cameras or film. I’d appreciate it if you would look into this, Mr. Campbell, and get back to me.” She gave the time and date, then said, “I’ll expect a call from you tomorrow.”
Cat hung up, swiveled Joel’s chair so that she could look into the dark green leaves of the coral trees outside on San Vicente. Then her eyes picked up her own reflection in the window.
At a quick glance, it could have been Joel sitting there; they’d been so much alike, more than was usual for fraternal twins. Both tall, though he’d been taller and heavier. But the same toffee-colored hair, the same straight dark brows and greenish-gold eyes. Feline eyes, their father always said, followed by how like their mother they were, nothing like him, what they needed was to toughen up—Quickly, Cat slid her mind away from Derek Stanton.
From their birth, they’d been like two sides of the same coin, answering each other’s unasked questions, finishing unspoken thoughts. Even now when Joel was dead, she heard his voice in the drafting room, the clatter of his feet taking the metal stairs outside their office three at a time, as only he did. Not her imagination. She actually heard it as if Joel were still here, alive.
And every night she awakened moaning and terrified, the nightmare images gone the minute she opened her eyes. All that remained was the horror and the knowledge that it was the same dream, night after night.
She swung the chair back, flipped on the intercom.
“Mave, would you check flights to Nairobi, please. Flying time, availability, that kind of thing. I’ll let you know the date later. And find out about hotels. Something large and anonymous.”
She was going to retrace Joel’s route, see what he had seen, go to the place where he’d died. And once in Nairobi, she would start asking a few hard questions.
Two
“So, sugar, what’s the urgency?” John Rifken asked. He back in the black leather chair behind a desk only slighter smaller than a tennis court. He sounded as if he’d come out of the Texas hill country, which he had—he just hated to mention that it was by way of Harvard Law School. Liked to refer to himself as a simple Jewish hillbilly, but to his credit, he always grinned when he said it.
For answer, Cat lifted the bag she’d brought with her, placed it on the desk in front of him.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Joel’s cameras. They came yesterday.” They’d been in transit before her call to Jock Campbell. “And they’re empty. No film, no photographs. And this came the day before that, while you were still in Houston.” Cat handed him the battered brown envelope.
John looked at her, then opened the envelope and removed the drawings. He riffled through them quickly, then went back to study them.
“These are pretty good.”
“Did you see the note?”
He picked it up, read it. “Yeah, well, you know what Joel was like—” He stopped, then said, “I’m sorry, honey, you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, I mean he could be pretty goddamn difficult with people. It’s a good thing you were there to smooth the ragged edges, sugar, or I’d probably be your only client.”
John Rifken had known them since childhood, encouraged them to form The Stanton Partnership as soon as they’d received their licenses to practice architecture, given them their first commission five years ago. He’d once been a client of their father’s….She pulled her thoughts back from that path. Cat looked out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Seventeen stories below, Los Angeles again sweltered under a copper-colored October sun and smog hazed the distant hills. The fire season this year threatened to be long and dangerous.
She turned back to face him. “He was brilliant and he didn’t suffer fools easily. But he wasn’t paranoid. If he said something wasn’t right, then it wasn’t.”
“Honey, Joel was like a son to me, but that don’t mean I was blind to his faults.” He shook his head. “That boy had a hell of a burr under his saddle.”
Cat felt her gut clench. Of course he’d had a burr under his saddle. They both did. Joel just hadn’t bothered to hide it as well as she did.
“What’s that got to do with his note?” she asked. “Something’s not right about his death, John.” A freak accident, Jock Campbell had said. The Land Rovers had run into a large herd of buffalo, the most dangerous and unpredictable beasts in Africa. Joel had been killed in the ensuing confusion. A shutter in her mind opened on longhorns streaming over the hill in Malibu. She shook her head, and the image was gone as quickly as it had come.
The police investigated Joel’s death, Jock Campbell had said. Their report would follow. But it hadn’t.
“I should have had an autopsy—”
“Whoa. Steady. Your imagination is really runnin’ with the cattle here.” Rifken shifted in his chair. His fingers went to the patch over his right eye. He’d lost it in his wildcatting days in the Texas oilfields—or in a barroom brawl over a woman. The story varied according to his mood. “Let me give Jock Campbell a call—”
“I’ve already done that. He says the police report is on its way. He said the same thing last week and the week before that.”
“Sugar, you gotta remember you’re dealing with a Third World bureaucracy. I warned you about that. Did you tell Jock about this note?”
“No.” She left the word hanging.
Rifken frowned. “Why not?”
“I wanted to talk to you first.”
He stared at her, then nodded. “So, I’ll get him to fax the report.”
“I did that yesterday.”
“No. Not okay. John, I don’t think Jock Campbell was even on that safari with Joel.”
His answer surprised her.
“’Course he wasn’t, honey. Jock doesn’t deal with clients. He’s got a farm upcountry. Occasionally he takes an old friend like me out on safari, a few days to drink some good whiskey, tell tall stories, sleep under canvas. His son does the hard work.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” She thought of the phone conversations she’d had with Joel while he was in Nairobi, trying to remember whether he’d mentioned that. They’d talked mostly about the jobs they had under way in Los Angeles, some general comments about the trip. He’d been thrilled with Nairobi, but had not yet connected with his old college friend Stephen N’toya and was still trying. After he left Nairobi, she’d had only that one garbled call from the bush.
“It wasn’t important, sugar,” John said. “The kind of country we want for this hotel is remote and wild. That’s the attraction. I didn’t expect Jock to take charge of Joel’s expedition himself. Joel knew that.”
“Okay.” She let it go. The office had been busy and she’d paid only cursory attention to the details of Joel’s trip. The start of their international reputation, she thought bitterly. She pulled her Day-Timer out of her briefcase. “While you were in Houston, did you settle on a new time frame for the project? The sooner the better for me.”
“Honey, wait a minute.”
The tone in his voice caught her attention. She looked up.
John got up, made his way around the desk and over to the bar in the corner of his office. She caught the rich smell of good bourbon, heard the clink of ice cubes. He turned, a glass in his hand, and held it up in invitation.
Cat shook her head. “Thanks, but I still have a lot of work tonight.” She waited for him to say what was on his mind.
“Honey,” he said finally, “you gotta know that Joel’s death has changed everything.”
Lioness