To Coach a Killer Read online

  “Typically,” Willem agreed. “But there’re no other little people on either side of my family. I’m the anomaly, and when I was born, I was indeed the source of my mother’s greatest shame. She detested the fact that I wasn’t perfect, and that I drew stares and pitying looks from others. She sent me to live with my paternal grandmother early on, thank God. My grandmother has never shown me anything but unconditional love.”

  I took that in and then tried another, reasonable tactic. “Well, when you moved in with your grandmother, that was a new environment for you, correct? No destruction or chaos followed you, did it?”

  “On the contrary,” Willem said. “The day I went to live with her a freak storm struck and caused major destruction to her estate. She and my grandfather spent months and a fortune repairing it.”

  Gilley and I exchanged another unspoken, Yikes!

  Willem continued, as if he really wanted to convince us. “When I was five and attended my first day of kindergarten, a pipe burst in the building, flooding the entire school. When I was six, Gran treated me to a vacation in Montauk. The day we arrived the hotel’s parking lot developed a sinkhole that swallowed up three cars, including the hotel’s shuttle van. On the first day of middle school, a construction crew hit a gas line and the resulting explosion caused the gymnasium’s ceiling to cave in. My first day of high school, the bus I was supposed to ride to school in, crashed into a pickup truck twenty feet from my bus stop. And on and on it goes. The only silver lining is that no one has ever been seriously hurt, but I have literally dozens of these stories, Catherine. They all end in some kind of disaster.”

  I could feel my heart rate tick up a tiny notch as a seed of doubt crept into my mind. All I knew about curses was what my sister, a world-renowned psychic, had told me; and that was that they weren’t real—just a gimmick the corrupt played upon the vulnerable.

  But Gilley’s insistence to the contrary had rattled me. Gilley had spent a decade as a professional ghostbuster in partnership with two very gifted psychic mediums, M.J. and Heath Whitefeather.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I’d watched Gilley nod his head while Willem had recounted some of the chaos and destruction that had followed him throughout life and I began to think that perhaps my sister had been mistaken. I mean, Gilley would know better than anyone if there was some credence to the idea.

  Still, perhaps because I was scared, I tried pushing back against the notion one more time. “But, Willem, you’ve been here . . . what? Fifteen minutes already, and nothing even remotely unusual or destructive has happened.”

  The second that last word left my mouth the building’s fire alarm went off.

  All three of us jumped at the ear-piercing sound, and Gilley let out a high-pitched squeal.

  I lifted my chin and began sniffing the air. Sure enough, the smell of something burning wafted faintly to my nose. “Call nine-one-one!” I yelled at Gilley before turning to run out the interior door, which placed me in the central hallway leading to the stairs and the upper floors.

  Dashing up to the second-story landing, I shouted to the wide-eyed tenants standing in their doorways, “Get out of the building! Everyone, clear out!”

  The tenants and their staff began to rush for the stairs, and I did too, but instead of going down, I went up.

  I know it was stupid, but my first obligation as landlord was to make sure that everyone got out of the building, so, against all common sense, I rushed up the stairs to a now thickening haze of smoke and, upon reaching the landing, I was picked right up off my feet and carried back down the steps.

  The move was so sudden and unexpected that I didn’t take in who’d lifted me into his arms until we reached the second-floor landing. It was as I was shifted slightly in those strong arms that I realized I was staring right into the handsome face of Maks Grinkov, my former . . . or maybe current . . . flame. (No pun intended.)

  “Maks!” I exclaimed. “What’re you doing here?”

  Maks rounded the landing and began to fast-track us down to the first floor. And even though he was exerting himself, he was still able to offer me a crooked smile. “Currently, I’m earning my hero badge by saving a beautiful woman from a burning building.”

  I held on to Maks and said nothing more until we reached the exterior door; he turned and pushed on it with his back. Once outside I felt the bite of the early spring cold and shuddered.

  Maks held me tighter. “It’s all right, Catherine,” he said soothingly, obviously misinterpreting my reaction to the cold. “You’re safe.”

  I eyed him skeptically. “Am I?”

  His smile widened. “Of course,” he said, easing me to my feet again.

  Gilley appeared next to me, his phone in his hand and a desperate look on his face. “What were you thinking?!” he shouted.

  I took a step back. Gilley had never screamed at me like that.

  “You could have died!” he went on, and then I understood.

  “Oh, Gil,” I said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “I’m perfectly fine.”

  “Gilley has a point,” Maks said.

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’re not helping.”

  “Catherine, when a building’s on fire, you find the nearest exit, not the nearest way to the top floor.”

  “I was trying to warn my tenants.”

  Maks pointed up into the air, where the sound of the smoke alarm and now approaching sirens were becoming far too loud to ignore along with the ever present smell of smoke. “I think we would’ve figured it out,” he said.

  I stared up at the top floor as if expecting to see the glow of orange flames, but only a thin sliver of smoke eked out the top right window.

  Just then Martin Wallace came running down the street toward us. He was the tenant in that section of the building. Holding a cup of coffee and pale as a ghost, he came to a stop next to us and said, “Oh, God! I think that might be my toaster!”

  Turning to me as if he needed to explain himself, he said, “I put my English muffin in, and that’s when I noticed I was out of coffee, so I went down the street to grab a cup. I’ve only been gone a few minutes!”

  A fire truck pulled to a stop in front of the curb and three firemen jumped out. They were all looking up at the window leaking smoke. “Is the building manager here?” one of them asked.

  I stepped forward. “Yes, sir. I’m the owner of the building.”

  He took his eyes off the building, waved to the two others, and they dashed inside. “Can you take a head count for me, please?” he asked, motioning to the gathering crowd. “We need to know if there’s anyone still inside.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  Moving through the crowd, I silently counted all of my tenants, including Maks, but I then approached the dentist, Dr. Strickland, and because I wasn’t familiar with his entire staff, I had to ask if all of his employees and patients were accounted for. He pointed to the small group surrounding him and confirmed that everyone had made it out safely.

  At that moment, the two firemen who’d dashed into the building appeared again, one holding a smoking toaster, which he set down on the sidewalk and then blasted with a fire extinguisher. It made a huge mess, but I wasn’t about to complain.

  I then headed back over to the man in charge. “Everyone made it out of the building safely.”

  The fireman nodded and pointed to the toaster. “That seems to be your culprit. My guys are still gonna do a suite-by-suite check just to be thorough. We had to break down the door to the suite to get to the toaster, but it’d be a good thing if we didn’t have to repeat that process for all the others. Do you have a set of master keys handy?”

  I motioned over my shoulder toward the building. “They’re in my office.”

  He waved us forward. “I’ll escort you in.”

  Once inside, I headed straight to Gilley’s desk, quickly rummaging through the top drawer to locate the master key ring. After handing that over to the chief, he then escorted me out of the bui
lding. Luckily, I was able to grab both my coat and Gilley’s on the way out.

  Everyone waited in the cold for about twenty minutes as the firemen went floor to floor and suite to suite. At last we were able to move back inside, and Martin followed me, Maks, and Gilley into my office. “Catherine, I’m so, so sorry,” Martin said. He looked absolutely beside himself.

  “Martin,” I said calmly, “Please, don’t worry too much about this. The building has insurance, and, if you could cover the cost to repair the door of your suite, and promise that you’ll never leave a toaster unattended in your office again, then I think we can put this whole matter behind us.”

  Martin nodded vigorously, thanked me profusely, and left.

  Once he was gone I collapsed onto the sofa. The morning had been quite eventful on a number of counts. Sitting up again, I looked around. “Where’s Willem?” I asked Gilley.

  “He ran to his car and drove away the moment we got outside.”

  My jaw dropped. “And you just . . . let him go?”

  “What did you want me to do, Cat?” Gilley snapped. “Hang up with nine-one-one to give him a comforting hug and beg him to stay right before something big, like a meteor, fell out of the sky to kill me?”

  I stared at Gilley wondering if he’d lost his mind. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “You heard him,” Gil said, positioning his hand on his hip to show me he wasn’t about to back down. “The boy is cursed! I’m not cuddling up to that. In fact, I should get some holy water and spritz this whole office just to flush out any bad juju.”

  I put a palm to my forehead, feeling the first painful twinges of a stress headache. “Gil,” I sighed.

  “What’s this about a curse?” Maks asked. He’d been hovering near us, listening to our conversation, and he seemed genuinely concerned.

  Before I could tell him that it wasn’t anything I could discuss—I’d meant it when I’d promised Willem that our conversation would be private—Gilley said, “Cat’s new client is cursed. It’s why the building caught fire.”

  “Gilley!”

  “Well, it’s true!”

  “It is not!” I yelled, my temper getting the best of me. “The building didn’t catch fire, a toaster did, and Willem had nothing to do with that!”

  Gilley pursed his lips and eyed me skeptically. “So it’s just a coincidence that he walks in at ten this morning, confesses that a gypsy cast a spell on him in utero, and that he’s had a string of catastrophes follow him his entire life and by ten-twenty all the smoke alarms are going off?”

  I stared incredulously at Gilley. Was he kidding? “Of course it’s a coincidence!”

  Gilley crossed his arms, his lips still pursed. “I think not.”

  Meanwhile Maks had taken up a corner of Gilley’s desk to perch himself on and watch our back and forth like taking in a tennis match. To Gilley he said, “Was he really cursed by a gypsy?”

  “Yes,” Gil said.

  “No!” I yelled.

  Gilley turned again to me. “Cat, I know you don’t believe in curses, but they’re real, okay? Just ask M.J. or Heath. We’ve dealt with them before, and their aftermath, and they were never anything to take lightly or dismiss.”

  I sighed heavily. It wasn’t even eleven a.m. and already the day felt long. “My sister says they’re a bunch of hooey, and I’ll take her word for it.”

  “Really?” Gilley said, tapping his foot. “And Abby’s handled exactly how many demons in her time?”

  I frowned. “Well . . . none that I know of, but I think she’d know if any of that was real.”

  “Would she?” Gilley asked, then he lowered his voice another octave and dipped his chin. “Would she?”

  “I can’t even believe I’m having this conversation,” I said, completely exasperated. “Gilley, get me Willem’s phone number. I want to call him and see how he’s doing.”

  “Why call when we could probably just turn on the news and follow the path of destruction all the way back to his house?” Gil muttered, but he did head around his desk to peck at his computer for a moment. He then jotted down the number on a sticky note and handed it to me. “Here. Please don’t encourage him to come back here.”

  I took the note and offered him a withering look. He simply squinted at me and pursed his lips again.

  We were at our version of a standoff.

  Maks interrupted the uncomfortable silence by sliding off Gilley’s desk and coming around to stand in front of me. Lifting my chin with his finger, he said, “Can we talk later?”

  I softened, but a part of me was still a tiny bit hurt that he’d disappeared on me nearly four months earlier and I hadn’t seen or heard from him since. “During this talk will you be planning to explain why, after everything that went down around here, you chose to simply disappear like a thief in the night? And for that matter, why I haven’t heard from you since before Christmas?”

  “I will,” he promised. “But first allow me to apologize for that, Catherine. It wasn’t what I wanted, and I had every intention of getting in touch with you, but you have to trust me that circumstances dictated that I stay away for a time.”

  “That’s cryptic,” I mused.

  “Yes, I know. But I’ll explain everything tonight, if you’re willing to hear me out.”

  “Tonight is pretty short notice,” I said, feeling a blush touch my cheeks. Maks unsettled me in a way that I found both vexing and intoxicating. I couldn’t quite figure out his power over me, well, other than—for a man—he was simply breathtaking.

  “You have other plans?” Maks asked. I liked it that he sounded a tiny bit jealous.

  “No,” Gilley said. “She’s got nothing on her agenda other than another night of Hallmark movies and Skinnygirl pop-corn.”

  I turned and gave Gilley an absolutely murderous look. He shrank in his seat and held his hands up in surrender.

  Turning back to Maks, I said, “What time were you thinking of getting together?”

  Maks lifted my hand and stroked it ever so lightly with the fingers of his free hand. The move sent a delicious shiver up my spine. “Seven o’clock?”

  “Seven could work,” I said.

  “Please, she’ll be ready at six-thirty,” Gilley assured him.

  If Maks weren’t holding my hand I would’ve used it to smack Gilley. As it was, my smile tightened and I reiterated, “Seven o’clock will be fine.”

  Maks winked at me, kissed the top of my hand, nodded to Gilley, and left the office. The second the door closed I rounded on Gilley. “I know that you’re quite upset that Michel left this morning, which is why I’m not going to fire you on the spot, but, Gilley Gillespie, if you ever leak another client’s personal confession from this office again, I swear to God, friendship or no friendship, your butt will be out that door faster than you can say Candy Darling!”

  Gilley gasped and put a hand to his mouth. He knew how serious I was, because I only invoked the name of his favorite icon when I really meant what I said.

  “You’d . . . fire me? Me, Cat?”

  I crossed my arms and glared at him. “In a minute, Gilley. That was unconscionable!”

  Gilley’s eyes watered slightly and his lower lip trembled.

  Inwardly I groaned. He looked like a sad puppy and I felt my conviction soften. Still, he needed to understand that, without the sacred trust that exists between all life coaches and their clients, the system simply couldn’t work. So I stood my ground. “I mean it, Gilley. What’s revealed within these four walls stays within these four walls.”

  “But it was just Maks,” Gilley said hoarsely. “I mean, wouldn’t you have told him over dinner all about your crazy client who thinks he’s cursed?”

  “No,” I said, and I meant it. “It’s none of Maks’s business. And it’s none of yours either. You don’t get to repeat the intimate details of someone’s life for your own amusement.”

  Gilley’s gaze dropped to his lap. After a moment, he nodded. “Okay
. I get it. I’m sorry, Cat.”

  I inhaled deeply and let it out in a measured exhale. “Good. Thank you. And now that we’re on the same page, please get Willem on the phone for me. I want to make sure he knows that I don’t think he had anything to do with this morning’s events.”

  Gilley sat in his chair looking at me with an uncomfortable expression. I couldn’t tell if he was feeling contrite for having been reprimanded, or if there was something else triggering his expression.

  “What?” I finally asked.

  “Curses are real, Cat. They are. And if Willem is under one, then that could mean trouble for us.”

  I considered that for a moment.

  See, I believed that Gilley was more knowledgeable in this area than I was, but I still found the whole thing a bit farfetched. Still, didn’t I at least owe it to Willem to consider the possibility that the life he was describing was some giant series of coincidences?

  So, I asked Gilley, “Do you think M.J. or Heath would be willing to talk to me about it?”

  “Sure. But let’s ask Heath and keep M.J. out of it. I don’t want her to worry about us.”

  I nodded. “Good. Yes, we don’t want to upset M.J. so early in her pregnancy.”

  Gilley smiled at me, looking genuinely relieved, and just like that we were back to being on good terms again. He then turned to ring Willem and I headed to my chair where I could pick up the extension.

  In the few moments that Gilley took to place the call, I reflected on the sudden reappearance of Maks Grinkov, and while I was thrilled to see him back in town—and in the building no less—I was also a bit nervous about all that came with that.

  Maks was involved with something that frightened me—namely, the Chechen mafia. Weeks earlier, I’d had a nasty encounter with one of their paid assassins who’d also tried to frame me for murder. Maks knew the assassin. Hell, he’d had dinner with her on the night she’d tried to murder me. And she’d shot someone else I was developing feelings for—a local police detective who, if not as sophisticated and cosmopolitan as Maks, still managed to hold his own in the captivating department.