One Chef!

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Paul Stark couldn’t watch the Evening News with Vanessa one moment longer. He leapt out of his Follot armchair to pace the living room of the apartment atop the Chrysler Building that he shared with his sister Kate.

He’d tried killing the television’s audio and filling the cavernous silence with Bach.

And then The Boss.

Neither helped.

So he turned the news anchor back on.

From behind her little desk she radiated that perfect mixture of holier-than-thou and barely contained s*x.

“Police are looking for heiress and network executive Kate Stark, twin sister of international jetsetter Paul Stark.”

“Did you enjoy saying that, Vanessa?” he talked back to the screen. “You sure looked like you did.” But all of Vanessa’s delivery was verbal. Lead anchor or not, she’d been boring as hell in bed.

“The brother and sister are co-owners of the highly successful Cooks Network television station as well as several others and currently reside in what is considered the ultimate bachelor pad in downtown Manhattan—”

“Blah, blah, blah, Vanessa. You’re just all bent out of shape because you didn’t get to stay here more than a few nights.” She was also clingy as hell.

The police had been all bent this afternoon when they’d found Paul home rather than Kate. The FBI who’d followed close behind had been far more serious and far more thorough, the woman definitely hadn’t taken his word on anything no matter how charming he was being.

That’s when he’d turned on the news and really started to worry.

He paced away from the TV.

The curved arc of narrow triangular windows that were the art-deco signature of the uppermost stories of the Chrysler Building had the midday sun marching across the polished heart-of-pine flooring. The fitted circular cross-sections of pine trees offered him their rings of history to pace on. He used them as an excuse for a wandering mind as he “contemplated the ages.” At least that’s what he told Kate whenever she asked him about it.

Bored out of his skull and daydreaming about women would be a more accurate assessment, but you couldn’t say s**t like that to Kate without her tossing it right back at you like a curve ball in a game of fast pitch.

The flooring didn’t distract him this time any more than it usually did. He considered going downstairs but they didn’t use the sixty-sixth floor much except for entertaining; he’d fixed it up when they’d bought the place, but it was mostly a party space for other tenants of the building. The three thousand square feet of the sixty-eighth were his and Kate’s personal apartments. The five thousand of sixty-seven had been left open except for a couple of home offices. It served as their living room, dining room, and kitchen.

The Old World elegance of the former Cloud Club couldn’t eradicate either the news or Vanessa’s look-at-me, I’m-so-damned-cute voice.

Paul crossed to one of those triangular windows and looked down on Manhattan. But he didn’t see one of the most spectacular views in the city—it was hard to beat having an apartment on the top three floors of the Chrysler Building.

Instead he looked down and saw the city that was hunting down his little sister. He could get away with calling her that, since she wasn’t here. After all, Kate was thirteen minutes younger and three inches shorter than his six feet.

If she were here, she could pound the snot out of him, so he normally had to exercise a little discretion.

“Master Chef Kate Stark and Harold Merritt, a guest judge in Kate’s Kitchen from Hell studio…” Vanessa restarted the story again behind him as if they were doing a breaking exclusive of the next World War.

Must be a really slow news day for Kate to be stuck all evening as the lead story. And once more, the typically crappy photos—clearly Photoshopped to make them look even more like criminals—were plastered across the screen. Kate had never looked that rough even after the time Paul led her on a curative all-night bender through Manhattan’s seediest dives the night she’d quit the Secret Service.

“…are being sought by authorities in the double murder of another chef,” who apparently wasn’t popular enough to deserve a name, “and the hot Hollywood rising-star Zania.”

“Not rising anymore, Vanessa, unless she’s planning on rising from the dead.” Paul half-waited for his sister’s scathing comeback that usually made the tagline on his jokes. Perhaps: And it’s not Hollywood that is hot, you airhead.

Of course Kate’s response never came. Nor the follow-up comment about him actually stooping low enough to bed such a pea brain.

The film of the victims’ last moments had predictably been posted anonymously to YouTube and gone instantly viral. The film was chaotic: deaths, Zania’s clothing failure revealing a truly impressive errant breast, power failure in the studio, then lights back on. Somewhere in those few seconds of darkness, the two surviving judges had scampered, though Zania’s breast had remained.

Then they plastered the screen with a shot of the hurriedly-edited cover of the next Playboy featuring Zania; the publisher had added a black wreath and “In Memoriam” to the cover. With the free advertising they were getting, this was going to be a record issue.

Paul did take a moment to appreciate the barely clad woman in the magazine’s cover image splashed across the screen. Her cover-shot halter top required significantly less leather than it took to make the one on the horse she rode on. The girl really did know how to sell it.

But was she that hot in real life? Unlike Vanessa. Rather, had she been that hot in real life?

He’d ask Kate, but…

Damn it! When she hadn’t come back to their pad last night, he’d assumed that she’d shacked up with some cute guy. She did that on rare occasion, well, almost never. And she’d always let him know before. Disappearing for days at a time was more his style than hers.

But now, a morning of silence—and then this.

“What did you get into this time, Katydid?” She hated that nickname, but she hated it less than her middle name so she let him get away with it. Even with that caveat, he made sure never to use it when she had a chef’s knife in her hand. While she might have been dangerous as a Secret Service agent, she was lethal as a chef.

Okay, bad analogy considering the current news for Starlet Zania and the former chef competitor Miss Nameless. They’d flashed her picture once—blond with black bangs, slim, and a knowing smile that Paul rather liked—making her much cuter than the overstated Zania. But she didn’t have the fame to claim any more screen time than that.

Still there was no answer from Kate.

Unable to stop himself, he glanced over at her bent-wood IKEA chair. The woman had no sense of history. If they were going to lease the top three floors of the Chrysler Building—truly the ultimate bachelor-twins’ pad—why had the woman bought herself a Swedish box-store chair that she’d had to put together herself? With disposable tools, no less.

“Well, guess I’m going to have to track you down to find the answer to that question, too.” He’d better find her before the police did. They’d clearly just been gearing up to create a world of hurt for Katydid.

That meant tracking down Erika Albert.

Crap!