Chasing Venus (12 page)

She glanced up at
Simpson over her lenses.
 
“Is your
team done?”
 
She sounded completely
normal again.
 
Calm and
self-possessed.

Reid was
impressed.
 
She’d done one hell of a
job getting a hold of herself.
 
Clearly for his and Simpson’s benefit.

Simpson spoke.
 
“Ms. Rowell, until further notice I’d
like you to remain in the vicinity.”

“Don’t tell me you’re
arresting me.”

“No.”

She looked back down at
her pages and kept her voice casual.
 
“Then I’ll do what I like.”

Reid watched Simpson
decide how to react.
 
He was used to
intransigence and flippancy both; they were as much a part of his job as
stakeouts and interrogations.
 
Finally, “Ms. Rowell, don’t make me sorry for not taking stronger
measures with you.
 
I will if I have
to.”
 
He nodded at Reid and strode
toward the front door, his footfalls heavy on the century-old floorboards.
 
The door clicked shut behind him.
 
Reid listened to the cruisers start up
outside, heard the gritty static of a police radio come to life.
 
Headlight beams lit up the front
windows.
 
Eventually the vehicles
drove away.

Through it all Annie
kept marking up her pages as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
 
And though she was now alone in her
house with him, still she didn’t look his way.
 
Yet Reid couldn’t tear his eyes from
her.
 
Her hair was mussed, her
lipstick had worn off, and her eyeglasses weren’t exactly styling.
 
Yet somehow she still managed to compel
his attention.

He let his eyes roam
that small, determined body of hers.
 
He’d imagined more than once what it would feel like in his arms.
 
He wanted to know for real.

He started when she
spoke.
 
“Shouldn’t you be shoving
off now, too?”

“You trying to get rid
of me?”

“Show’s over.
 
I would think you’d want to go.”

“I didn’t come for some
show.”

Her pen stilled over
her pages.
 
Ask me
, he communicated silently.
 
Ask
me what I did come for
.

But she didn’t take the
bait.
 
She didn’t give him the
opening to say,
You, I came for you
.
 
Instead she removed her glasses, set her
work aside, and asked a different question.
 
“You still think I’m innocent?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You’re one in a
million, you know that, Reid Gardner?”
 
He heard a little more belligerence in every word she spoke.
 
“Did you forget your cop training?
 
Simpson and crew already have me
convicted, so why shouldn’t you?
 
Forget indicted!
 
They’re way
past that.
 
I should already be on
Death Row as far as they’re concerned.”

“Why are you getting so
angry all of a sudden?”

“Because there are
goddamn dead frogs in my backyard and I sure as hell didn’t put them
there!”
 
Then she stopped and shook
her head vigorously.
 
“No.
 
Forget it.”

“Tell me about the
frogs.”

“No.”

“I’ll find out anyway.”

“Have at it.”

This was going
nowhere.
 
He approached the sofa and
motioned for her to move over so he could sit beside her.
 
“
Scooch
over.”

“No.”

“I said
scooch
over.”
 
When he nearly sat on her, she grudgingly slid to the next cushion.
 
He settled himself and clasped his hands
between his knees.
 
“If you tell me
what’s going on, I might be able to help.”

“Forget it.”

“You can trust me.”

“Right.
 
I don’t even know why I’m talking to
you.”

“Maybe because on some
level you know you can trust me.”

She pointed her finger
at him.
 
“Don’t turn into some Dr.
Phil amateur shrink on me.
 
Even
though you are on TV and are currently sitting on my couch.”

He smiled.
 
“It’s good to see you haven’t entirely
lost your sense of humor.”

“I’m still not going to
tell you a damn thing.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell
you
a damn thing.”
 
She fell silent and averted her gaze but
he knew she was listening.
 
“There
was a time when I was suspected of murder.”

Her head snapped in his
direction.

He went on.
 
“So I have some idea how you feel.”

“You were suspected of
murder?”

“For a short time.
 
After my fiancée was killed.”

He could talk about it
now; he’d been able to for years.
 
He could discuss the facts clinically, dispassionately.
 
He could relay how Donna had been
murdered only weeks before the Big Day, how it was one of those cases you hear
about where instead of people gathering for a wedding, the very same people
gather for a funeral.

Heartbreaking
, people called it.
 
Heartbreaking
.
 
Yeah, that was about right.

He could talk about the
details; he just couldn’t talk about the woman herself, how she’d made him
feel, the man he’d grown into when he loved her.
 
Nor could he talk about the beast who’d
killed her.
 
If he tried to do that,
whether he was overcome with love or rage, his heart knotted and his mouth lost
the ability to form words that someone else could understand.

Even to this day.
 
Five years later.

“Your fiancée was murdered,”
he heard Annie murmur.
 
“That’s
awful.
 
I’m so sorry.”

He nodded.
 
What was there to add?
 
Sometimes life sucked.
 
Sometimes the worst possible thing
actually did happen.

She spoke again.
 
“I can’t even imagine what that must
have been like.
 
It must have been
unbearable that you were actually suspected.”

“It didn’t last
long.
 
But it killed me.
 
Especially because it cost time.”

Voices reached his ears
from the street.
 
People were
walking past Annie’s house, a man and a woman.
 
The woman was laughing.
 
It was a Saturday night laugh, free and
easy.

It might as well be Bigelow out there,
he thought
.
 
Free and easy.
 
Getting away
with murder.

Reid felt the hate
wriggle inside him.
 
Malignant
companion.
 
Always there; growing if
he didn’t watch it.

“Reid?”

He looked at
Annie.
 
Her eyes were
sympathetic.
 
The automaton was gone
and so was the spitfire, both replaced by a real woman, flesh and bone, heart
and soul.
 
Less protected than
earlier; some of the veils lifted.
 
“I think that’s the first time you ever said my name,” he told her.

“Without cursing.”

Their gazes locked and
they both smiled.
 
The hate burrowed
back into its hole, for the moment thwarted.

“Do you want to tell me
about it?”
 
Her voice was soft.
 
Her gaze was soft.
 
His eyes trailed down her body before he
forced himself to look away.

“Not right now.”
 
Another
time
hung in the air.
 
And, he
noted, she didn’t protest.
 
He
cleared his throat.
 
“So you see, I
have some idea what you’re going through.
 
I might be able to help you.”

She didn’t say anything
for some time.
 
Then, “Let’s just
say I’ve got to do this on my own.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, I
barely know you.
 
For another, I
have no reason to trust you.”

There it was
again.
 
The contentiousness.
 
The pushing back.
 
He sighed.
 
He’d pierced it for a moment.
 
At least he knew that was possible.
 
“You have your demons, too, don’t you,
Annie?”

“I don’t know about
demons.”
 
She rose from the sofa, a
signal of dismissal.
 
“But I have
mistakes I don’t want to make again.”

He recognized a security
system when he saw one.
 
He had a
damn good one of his own.
 
It had
worked for five years now, with only the occasional test.

Must be her ex
, he thought, watching walls rise around her as
surely as if she had bricks and mortar on hand in her living room.
 
It made sense that she didn’t want to
put herself through the wringer again.
 
He respected that.
 
And
maybe, unlike him, she hadn’t yet learned how to be casual.
   

He rose, pulled his
wallet from the rear pocket of his jeans, and held a business card in her
direction.
 
“If you change your mind
about that on-your-own thing.”

She took it and perused
the information, then lay it on her coffee table.
 
He figured there was a good chance it
would collect dust there until someday she threw it out.
 
She led him to her door and he moved
through it, but turned on the porch to look at her one more time.
 
“I meant it about helping you.”

She nodded.

He had to leave
then.
 
There was nothing for it but
to go.
 
He forced his feet to walk
toward his rental car, aware of the door clicking shut behind him, of her
moving deeper into the old house.

He didn’t think she was
watching him through the front window but his hope got the better of him.
 
He glanced that way as he turned the key
in the ignition.
 
No sign of her.
 
As the engine rolled over, he knew he’d
have to get back to work, find out about those damn frogs.
 
There was one person he wouldn’t ask for
help, though, for the first time in forever.

He pointed the car
south for the long drive to the airport, its headlights poking through the fog
rolling in from the Pacific.
 
No, he
wouldn’t involve Sheila.
 
Not this
time.

Less than 48 hours
later, Annie had defied Lionel Simpson and was well out of her vicinity.
 
In fact she was in a
Peet’s
in Orange County, sitting across a small round table from Michael’s wheelchair
and feeling a bit better about the world.

And not entirely
because of caffeine and a chocolate macaroon.

“Curare is a generic
term for a variety of poisons,” Michael said.
 
He dipped the last of his biscotti into
a non-fat latte.
 
“The bark of
Strychnos
toxifera
,
sometimes combined with other additives, can be boiled and strained into a
number of pastes.
 
All of which
possess deadly properties.”

Despite her anxiety,
Annie smiled.
 
Count on Michael to
know the Latin term.

“And then,” he
continued, “the potency of the compound can be tested quite easily by
experimenting on small animals.”

“Like birds.”
 
Annie stared down into her
cappuccino.
 
“Or frogs.”

“The frog is pricked
with the poison and then it is simply a matter of counting the leaps the poor
creature is able to make before it expires.”

“The fewer the leaps,”
Annie finished, “the more potent the dose.”

It was Poisoning for
Dummies, detailed in the sort of books mystery writers consulted.
 
And it had come back to her in a flash
on Saturday evening when she was standing with Simpson and his men in her
dug-up backyard.

Now it was a relief to
talk about it.
 
There weren’t a lot
of people Annie could discuss poisons with.
 
Most didn’t know enough to hold an
intelligent conversation on the topic, and those who did would probably assume
that she had gained her knowledge at the expense of Maggie Boswell.

A
baristo
appeared at Michael’s elbow.
 
“Can I
get you anything else, sir?”

Michael smiled, shook
his head.
 
“Thank you, no.”

He scurried away.
 
Annie leaned across the table.
 
“They make most people go up to the
counter.”

“It’s the
wheelchair.
 
And the fact that I’m
an old-timer.”

Those were part of
it.
 
Quite simply, Michael was a
beloved member of the community.
 
Whenever Annie visited him in Corona del Mar, she envied the steady,
unchanging rhythm of his life.
 
He’d
lived in this beach community for forty years.
 
He was as much a fixture in the charming
downtown as the traditional barber shop and the independent bookseller.
 
This was an older, less glitzy part of
Newport Beach than the terraced developments climbing the hills further inland.
 
She never tired of strolling Michael’s
neighborhood, tucked between the main drag and the ocean.
 
Every street was overhung with oaks and
birches and walnut trees and most houses boasted a square of lush green lawn
and a multitude of shrubs and flowers, from bougainvillea to cyclamen to agapanthus.
 
Cute-as-can-be bungalows huddled beside
huge Spanish-style and contemporary glass-and-steel homes.
 
But no property went too far over the
top.
 
It was as if all his neighbors
shared Michael’s understated elegance.