The Unquiet-CP-6 by John Connolly

They looked distorted, her nose misshapen and her cheeks swollen. A shard of light from beneath the door caught the edge of her bare feet and the hem of a long red dressing gown. The varnish on her toenails was red too. It looked freshly applied. She removed a pack of cigarettes from a pocket of her gown, tapped one out, and lit it with a cigarette lighter. She kept her head down, her hair hanging over her face, but I still caught a glimpse of the scars that ran across her chin and her left cheek.
    “I should have kept my mouth shut,” she said softly.
    “Why?”
    “He came around and threw two grand in my face. After all that he’d done to me, a lousy two grand. I was angry. I told one of the other girls that I had a way of getting even with him. I told her that I’d seen something I shouldn’t have. Next I hear, she’s sharing Donnie’s bed. Donnie was right. I am just a dumb whore.”
    “Why didn’t you go to the cops with what you know?”
    She drew on the cigarette. Her head was no longer lowered. Absorbed by the details of her story, she had briefly forgotten to hide her face from us. Beside me, I heard Angel hiss in sympathy as he caught sight of her ruined features.
    “Because they wouldn’t have done anything about it.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “Oh, but I do,” she said.
    She took another drag on the cigarette and toyed with her hair. Nobody said anything. Eventually, Mia broke the silence.
    “So now you say you’re going to help me.”
    “That’s right.”
    “How?”
    “Look outside. Back window.”
    She put her hand to her face and stared at me for a moment, then walked to the kitchen. I heard a soft swishing sound as she parted the curtains. When she returned, her demeanor had changed. Louis had that effect on people, especially if it seemed like he might be on their side.
    “Who is he?”
    “A friend.”
    “He looks…” She tried to find the right word. “…intimidating,” she said at last.
    “He is intimidating.”
    She tapped her foot on the floor. “Is he going to kill Donnie?”
    “We were hoping to find another way of dealing with him. We thought that you might be able to assist us.”
    We waited for her to make her decision. There was a TV on in another room, probably her bedroom. It struck me that she might not be alone, and that we should have checked the house first, but it was too late now. Finally, she reached into the pocket of her gown and withdrew her cell phone. She tossed it across the room to me. I caught it.
    “Open the picture file,” she said. “The ones you want are five or six photos in.”
    I flicked through images of young women smiling together at a dinner table, of a black dog in a yard, and a baby in a high chair, until I came to the pictures of Donnie. The first showed him standing in a car park with another man, taller than he was and wearing a gray suit. The second and third pictures were different shots of the same scene, but this time the faces of the two men were a little clearer. The photos had been taken from inside a car because the frame of a door and a wing mirror were visible in two of them.
    “Who is the second man?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I followed Donnie because I thought he was cheating on me. Hell, I knew he was cheating on me. He’s a dog. I just wanted to find out who he was cheating with.”
    She smiled. The effort seemed to cause her pain.
    “You see, I thought I loved him. How stupid is that?”
    She shook her head. I could tell that she was crying.
    “And this is what you have on him? This is why he wants to find you: because you have pictures of him on your phone with a man whose name you don’t know?”
    “I don’t know his name, but I know where he works. When Donnie left him, the guy was joined by two other people, a woman and a man. They’re in the next picture.”
    I flicked on, and saw the trio. They were all dressed for business.
    “I thought they looked like cops,” said Mia.