Dark Tort (2 page)

My breath came out in frosted white tatters as I trotted, half blind, toward my normally trustworthy vehicle, which had delayed me tonight with its drained battery. I could imagine the voice of my husband, Tom, a sheriff’s department investigator, urging me to get cracking. Get out of there. But I didn’t know what had happened, and I desperately wanted to help Dusty. Tom’s voice drilled my inner ear: Never stay alone at a crime scene that hasn’t been secured. Right, right. This was a rule every cop learned at the academy. But I wasn’t sure I’d actually been at a crime scene, because of course, I wasn’t a cop. But being married to a cop, I’d learned the rules—sometimes the hard way. And I often didn’t exactly follow them, as Tom frequently was at pains to point out.

Hugging my sides, I hurtled awkwardly across the gravel. Dizziness assaulted me, and I slowed to a walk and tried to breathe normally. What was the swooshing noise in my ears? I tried to ignore it, tried to tell myself it was the hum of traffic from Interstate 70. My white shirt gleamed in the neon haze drifting down from the crown of a nearby light pole. Where was my jacket? Inside the van, probably. I rummaged in the pockets of my pants, and realized I had dropped my car keys in the law firm office. With just the smallest amount of hope, I pulled on the van door. Locked, of course.

I turned around and tried to think. Was it close to eleven? What place would be open? Where would there be a pay phone? Did anyone actually use pay phones anymore? I shook my head to rid myself of the drumming in my ears and tried to force myself to think clearly.

As I trotted around the building I scolded myself again for not getting here right at ten, when I was scheduled to show Dusty how to make the high-protein bread King Richard had asked I serve his clients the next morning. I cursed as I surveyed the front lot, where a freezing nighttime mist hugged the grid of streetlights in front of the long, two-story office building. This was where the lawyers, clients, and staff parked . . . but the space held only Dusty’s Civic.

My breath puffed as I ran, panting, toward the shopping center across the street. I thought of Dusty again, sprawled out on the reception-area carpeting. Back in my pre-Tom days, I’d been unhappily married to John Richard Korman, a physically abusive doctor who was the father of my fifteen-year-old son, Arch. It was during my years with the Jerk, as his other ex-wife and I had called him, that I’d learned the lessons of Med Wives 101, our own version of medical authority. Sometimes you can’t feel a pulse, I stubbornly reminded myself for at least the tenth time.

After glancing around for traffic—there was none—I hopped onto the road beside the parking lot. A combination of dropping temperature and frigid humidity had sheeted the pavement with ice. I shivered. Why hadn’t I worn my jacket into H&J? Because I’d been in a hurry to meet Dusty for our sixth and final cooking lesson. She’d said she had something to tell me.

I scooted across the street to the access road that led up to the three-sided strip mall. Ahead, a few lights twinkled in the chilly fog. The main tenant of the shopping center was a supermarket. There were also a liquor store and two bars, a reminder of our saloon heritage here in the West. Other occupants included a store called Art, Music, and Copies, various and sundry clothing, shoe, and western-wear stores, and Aspen Meadow Café. These all appeared abandoned and wreathed in darkness.

Please, God, I prayed, as I jumped carefully onto the access road’s slippery pavement. Please let Dusty be okay. The thin, vulnerable face of Sally Routt, Dusty’s mother, loomed before me. She’d already lost a son, Dusty’s older brother, whom I hadn’t known. I couldn’t even contemplate talking to Sally about Dusty being hurt. Or worse.

The cord to one of the pay phones outside Aspen Meadow Café was torn off. The other phone had no dial tone. Another sudden, glacial breeze stung my skin as I tried to make out shapes in the near distance. The shopping center was not abandoned, after all. About ten folks, their bodies padded with puffy down jackets, huddled outside the grocery store. But the store was closed. What was going on? I wondered. Then I remembered a special on ski-lift tickets beginning at midnight. The first two dozen people to buy a hundred bucks’ worth of food got a season pass at Vail. The would-be bargain hunters stomped and stamped, but they were tough—again, this was the West—and had no intention of wimping out in heated cars.

It would take me at least five minutes to jog up there, and several more to find someone with a cell phone who could call an ambulance. Plus, I was freezing. I needed to find someplace closer.

I peered along the line of nearby storefronts. Next to the unopened café was Art, Music, and Copies. Inside, a gray fluorescent bulb blinked, as if someone had forgotten to turn it off. Still, I thought I remembered that the copy place, as we called it, was supposed to be open late. I trotted up the sidewalk and banged on the large plate-glass window, which boasted hot pink lettering that screamed “You Own It, We’ll Clone It!” I tried the door, which rattled reassuringly: it was locked, but loose. Someone had to be in there, I reasoned. Still, as I knocked harder, I wondered if I should be running up to the grocery store.

When there was no response, I hammered mercilessly on the glass door. And it broke.

Finally someone appeared. I even recognized him: a young fellow, twentyish, Dusty’s boyfriend. Vic Something. I’d seen him over at the Routts’ house from time to time.

He yelled, “Why did you do that?”

“I need help!” I called, surveying the shards now littering the inside of the store. “It’s an emergency!”

“I guess so.” Vic was tall and very slender, his peaked face set off by an explosion of curls the color of straw. As he moved toward me, his young, high forehead wrinkled like folded tissue.

“Could you just hurry up?” I implored.

Vic’s long legs finally brought him to the door. “You didn’t have to break the door. Oh, it’s you, Goldy,” he said breathlessly. “Well, I can only let you do a couple of copies, and you’re going to have to pay cash because—”

“I need a phone!”

His hand was unexpectedly warm and moist as he grabbed mine. “Take it easy, take it easy. Okay, step over the glass.” His last name swum up into consciousness: Vic Zaruski. Yes, definitely Dusty’s boyfriend, but did I recall that they’d broken up? I wasn’t sure what kind of connection Vic had with Dusty now, if any, because my mind wasn’t working properly.

“I simply have to call help.” I stumbled forward over the pile of glass and into the store’s warm interior. “Show me the phone. Please. Someone’s hurt.”

Vic, his wide, dark brown eyes blinking in disbelief, his hair glowing like a ragged halo in the flickering neon, seemed at a loss for words. But he moved to the counter, picked up the phone, and handed it to me.

As I punched in the three digits, Vic’s worried glance took me in. He reached underneath the counter and pulled out a sweatshirt. “Put this on,” he whispered. I clutched it and nodded thanks. When the emergency operator answered, I told her what I’d found, and where. I said we needed medical help right away.

Vic drew back, his face drained of color. He said, “ What?” But I had to ignore him, as I was telling the operator that in addition to an ambulance, she needed to send the sheriff’s department.

I pulled the sweatshirt over my head as the operator continued to talk, telling me to be calm, that help was on the way.

“What’s going on?” Vic demanded. Wind blew through the hole where the door had been, and a couple of curious ticket seekers from the grocery store peeked in. How much had they heard? What if they decided to go across the street to poke around and try to see what I was so upset about? Abruptly, I hung up the phone and bolted for the smashed door.

“Was there a break-in?” Vic persisted from behind me. “You said you needed an ambulance for Dusty? Why? Why do the cops need to come?”

When we reached the glass, I suddenly turned back. Vic collided with me and I caught a whiff of his scent, some musky boy-cologne.

“Vic,” I said, my voice low. “You need to herd these people back up to the grocery store. It’s important that they not go across the street. Please.”

“I can’t—” he began to protest. But I ignored him, as well as the people staring at me as I stepped over the glass and onto the sidewalk.

“Hey, Goldy—” came one voice, but I didn’t look back.

“I’ll get my cell,” a female voice announced, but I didn’t pay any attention to that either. My skin needled under the huge sweatshirt as I walked quickly down the slick sidewalk. I knew I shouldn’t be talking to anyone now except medical and law enforcement people. No sense making more of a mess of this than I already had.

Behind me, Vic’s excited voice told the curiosity seekers to get back up to the grocery store. He ordered them not to follow us. Us? Dammit. Vic’s footsteps echoed down the pavement behind me.

“Vic, you cannot follow me,” I shouted. He didn’t answer, and soon he was right at my side. As we walked, he begged me to talk to him, but I just shook my head. Finally we arrived at the grass-covered hill that overlooked the road. We stood, waiting, for what felt like an eternity, but which in actuality was probably not more than fifteen minutes. Vic’s frustration and fear radiated like a negatively charged aura.

In the time since I’d raced across the street, the darkness had deepened and the cold intensified. On the far side of the street, the parking lot still held Dusty’s forlorn Civic. Vic began to cough in a vain attempt to disguise the fact that he was crying. When I told him again to stay put, he moved away from me.

Across the street, a long black car moved into the parking lot. Then another dark vehicle, this one coming from the I-70 side, pulled into the lot. Not even a moment later, a third car followed them. Oh, Lord, I thought as I recognized all three cars. Maybe the woman with the cell, or perhaps someone else outside the grocery store, had seen me bolting from the building occupied by Hanrahan & Jule. I had to have looked suspicious, frantic and coatless, as I leaped across the street, ran up the shopping-center sidewalk, and banged on the copy-place door. When I’d broken the glass and shouted for a phone, then called for an ambulance and the sheriff’s department, anyone within fifty yards would have heard me.

I stopped at the bottom of the hill and glanced back at the crowd of folks outside the grocery store. They were moving en masse, making their way down to where Vic and I were standing. Welcome to living in a small town. Someone had thought, What’s up at this time of night, with the caterer running away from the office building occupied by H&J? That same someone had put two and two together and made a call. And now, across the street in the H&J lot, we were faced with the result.

The lawyers are coming! The lawyers are coming!

Great.

As I slipped down the embankment on my way to the road, I tried to think. I could not, could not allow anyone to go into the firm without telling them what they’d find. Shivering, I rushed across the street.

“Wait!” I called to the figures emerging from the pair of precisely parked black BMWs. Heeding me, two tall people stood outside their respective car doors, their arms crossed. As they gazed in my direction, they neither talked nor acknowledged each other’s presence. My breath wheezed in the cold, thick fog. Still, I recognized the commanding presence of lean, silver-haired Richard Chenault, the well-built, late-fifties partner who was Dusty’s uncle—the attorney we had dubbed King Richard. This week, King Richard was the only one of the three partners not doing continuing education on Maui.

Standing nearby was his soon-to-be-divorced doctor wife, the statuesque K. D. Chenault, formerly K. D. van Ruisdael. K.D., whom I liked and admired immensely, was an emergency-room doc who had known the Jerk—and hated him. During my divorce, she’d been one of my few supporters. K.D.’s black coat hung open; underneath it, she was wearing a surgical suit. Her long, light chestnut hair, held back in an ineffective ponytail, was slightly disheveled. I wondered if she had just arrived at the big Flicker Ridge house she and Richard still shared—while they fought over property—when the call from who knows whom had summoned Richard. As tired as I was sure

K.D. was bound to be, if she was indeed coming after a shift, I could still imagine her insisting on driving out this late. Yes, the weather was inhospitably cold. But she would have wanted to see if she was needed.

“K.D.,” I gasped as I rummaged in my pants pockets for my set of office keys. “Dusty’s upstairs. It looks as if . . . as if her heart’s stopped. Maybe you could try to help her?”

In one swift movement, K.D. nodded, nabbed the keys, and turned to race up the steps to the firm.

“Dusty?” Richard Chenault asked me, his voice incredulous. “Our Dusty? What happened? Was there a break-in?”

“I don’t know.” I faltered.

A pair of H&J attorneys approached us from the other car. Donald Ellis, an associate at the firm who was in his midthirties, was short and very thin, with a pale face that bore the ghost of teen freckles. His shock of rust-colored hair glowed in the shrouded streetlight. Donald was a quiet fellow who holed up for hours in his office, which was more messy than Arch’s room had ever been at any stage of his childhood. While five of the seven associates had opted to join the partners in Hawaii, Donald had said he desperately needed to catch up on his paperwork. Which begged the question: How was he going to find his paperwork?

The other lawyer was the final associate who’d stayed home from Maui: Alonzo Claggett, or “Claggs,” as the other attorneys called him. I’d learned that fifteen years ago, he and his wife had moved from Baltimore to Vail, where they’d decided to slum it for a couple of years until their wedding-gift money ran out. When it had, Alonzo had continued to be a ski bum while his athletic wife, Elizabeth, whom everyone had always called by her nickname, Ookie, taught squash during the day and worked as a waitress at night. When Ookie’s parents had heard their country-club-raised daughter was spending her evenings waiting on tables, they had fiown out to Colorado and created a family storm that rivaled any hurricane ever to hit the Chesapeake Bay. So much for slumming.