Deadly Deceptions (24 page)

“Iced tea, please,” Beverly said to Carlotta. “And be sure to add mint leaves.”

Carlotta nodded and vanished.

I waited, scanning the room. No family photos anywhere. No knickknacks. Certainly no votive candles flickering on the mantel in memorial to her dead son, à la Angela Braydaven. If I hadn't known better, I'd have thought the condo was one of those high-priced vacation rentals, elegant but anonymous.

The kind of place aliens might think would pass as normal.

Beverly caught me looking and smiled slightly, though not in a friendly way. “I understand from certain sources within the police department that you practically found Jack's body,” she said.

I had to swallow before I could say anything. “I'm sorry,” I said, acknowledging her son's untimely death, but not that I'd been among the first people to see his corpse lying on my sister's entryway floor.

“As I said on the telephone, Jack and I had—issues,” she told me coolly. “He tried to scam me one too many times.”

I thought of the numeral on Beverly's front door and figured somebody ought to add a couple more sixes. Issues or not, how could she be that cold?

Carlotta returned with two glasses of tea—nobody had bothered to ask if I wanted one—and set one down for each of us, on coasters, of course. I left mine untouched, since I don't eat or drink in the homes of people who may sprout horns, fur and hooves at any second.

When the housekeeper had gone, I got to the point. “What do you want, Mrs. Pennington?”

She smiled, took a sip of her tea and eyed me thoughtfully over the mint sprig jutting out of the glass. “I thought you'd never ask,” she said.

I'd left my dog in the care of a dead security guard. My sister was missing, as was her housekeeper, I had a stop to make at the cop shop and I was getting nervous because I hadn't seen Gillian recently. I'd spent two hours at the emergency room, and I was due at Tucker's for supper at seven. Damn it, I had things to do.

“I just did,” I said.

“I wasn't really planning to hire you,” Beverly confessed, without a shred of remorse. “This is about your sister.”

I started to get up.

“Sit down,” Beverly said.

I did, but not because of the command in her voice. I sensed that something important was happening, something I wasn't going to like but needed to know about just the same. I think on some level I'd understood that all along.

Beverly got up, went to a bureau against the living-room wall, opened a drawer and produced a manila envelope. Then she handed it to me. “I was planning to use this,” she said, “but with Alex on a slab, it seems pointless.”

My hands shook as I took the envelope, laid it in my lap.

Beverly backed off, fortunately. Sat down on the couch again, picked up her iced tea. I wondered if it was the electric variety, but she seemed sober. Had I imagined the drunken slur in her voice when we spoke on the telephone that first time? Maybe I had. At that moment I wasn't too sure about anything.

“Take it. Look at it at your leisure. It's of no use to me now.”

I couldn't bring myself to open that envelope. Not in front of Beverly Pennington, anyway. “What is it?” I asked. I sounded uncertain, and I hated myself for it. I was pretty sure I could hate
her,
too, if I knew her better.

“Information,” Beverly said. “Don't you want your iced tea?”

“I have to get back to my dog,” I said. That time, I made it all the way to my feet. “Why give this to me?”

“You'll see,” she said airily. Then she leaned forward, gave the little bell another tinkling shake.

Carlotta bustled in.

“Ms. Sheepshanks does not want her tea,” Beverly informed her. “Please remove it.”

I was already at the door, with my hand on the knob. I looked back at Carlotta, and for a moment it seemed she wanted to leave with me.

Our gazes met, held briefly. Then she bent, picked up my glass and left the room without a word.

I thought about Greer's reference to the rehab center, and Alex's assertion that Beverly hadn't been sober in twenty years. Now I wondered what the story really was, and if I'd ever know.

I decided to take a stab at it. “You sounded…ill when we spoke on the phone.”

Beverly's smile was icy. “Drunk, you mean? I'm on medication, Ms. Sheepshanks, not that it's any of your affair. I've been under a lot of stress lately—or hadn't you heard?”

I didn't say goodbye—or anything else—to Mrs. Pennington. Figuring I'd pried enough, I just clutched the manila envelope to my side and booked it for my car.

The dead security guard reluctantly climbed out of the driver's side. “We didn't have cars like this in 1952,” he said. “There isn't even a choke.”

I stooped to make sure Dave was still okay, and he was. He'd nudged my purse aside and settled down for a snooze on the car seat.

I turned to the security guard again, planning to ask why he was hanging out in the parking lot of a Scottsdale condo-complex and gently steer him in the direction of the Light, but he was gone.

Feeling sad, I tossed Beverly Pennington's “information” into the backseat and climbed in. On the way to Scottsdale PD, I bought a cheeseburger for Dave and one for me, and we shared the fries.

Filing the report on Tiffany's attack was a tedious process, but I got it done.

I hurried back to my car, and Dave, and we were off. My cell phone rang when we were almost home, but it was in my purse and Dave was sitting on it, so I let voice mail pick up. When two more calls came in, in short order, I decided it was probably Tucker.

I pulled off onto the shoulder on Scottsdale Road, extracted the purse from under Dave and rummaged for the phone.

Tucker, all right.

I didn't listen to the messages. I just speed-dialed him.

“What?” I said.

“How did it go at Beverly Pennington's?” he asked.

“You called me three times and
that's
what you want to know?” I could have been dead. I could have been bludgeoned, poisoned, stabbed, run down by something diesel-powered, or shot. Did he bother to inquire about any of those possibilities? No.

Frankly, I was a little miffed.

“Her husband and her son are both dead,” Tucker went on. “Your sister is missing. Beverly Pennington could be involved. So,
yes,
that's what I want to know.”

“I'm fine, thank you. Just fine. Nobody's made an attempt on my life in, oh, three hours now.” I swallowed. “I filed the complaint against Tiffany, and I feel rotten about it.”

“She's a danger to herself and others,” Tucker said.

A semi whizzed by, the driver blowing the air horn angrily.

I pulled farther onto the shoulder.

“She probably needs medication.”

“That's for a doctor to decide,” Tucker told me. “Tell me about Mrs. Pennington.”

“Love makes people do strange things. And I think Tiffany really loved Nick.”

“Mojo,” Tucker said.

“She's weird,” I told him, referring to Mrs. Pennington now and trusting Tucker to make the leap. “She gave me an envelope and when I asked what it was, she said I'd see. I'm scared to open it. There could be anthrax spores inside. Or plastic explosives.”

“You're getting paranoid in your old age, Sherlock. Open it. If I hear a boom, I'll call the bomb squad.”

“Gee, thanks. Except I'd be vaporized by then, wouldn't I, and so would Dave.”

“Are your pain pills wearing off or something? You sound super-cranky.”

“You'd be cranky, too, if you'd had a day like mine!”

“No argument there,” Tucker said. “Go home. Take a couple of aspirin and a nap. Bring this mysterious envelope with you tonight, and we'll open it together.”

It sounded like a plan, though I doubted I could resist taking a peek before then. “Can I bring anything?” I asked, taking a stab at normal conversation. “For dinner, I mean?”

“Sure,” Tucker answered. “As long as it isn't food.”

N
OBODY WAS LURKING
in my apartment. Trust me, I checked, after retrieving the Glock from on top of the refrigerator. Granted, it wasn't loaded, and I didn't know how to remedy that, even though Bubba had sold me bullets and I had a shooting lesson under my belt, but I was counting on the intimidation factor.

While Dave lapped up water in the kitchen, I sat at the table, staring at the envelope Beverly Pennington had given me. My head ached. My legs stung, badly scratched. Call me a sap, but I felt genuinely sorry for Tiffany Oberlin. And the fact that I hadn't been to bed the night before finally caught up with me.

I repaired to the living room, stretched out on the couch and fell asleep.

When I awoke, it was dark, Dave was licking concealer off my face and the phone was ringing.

Blinking, I sat up. Flicked on the lamp on the nearest end table.

What time was it?

The phone stopped ringing, then started again.

I stumbled into the kitchen to grab it off the hook. “Hullo?” I mumbled, still disoriented.

“You're late,” Tucker said, though not unkindly. “Are you okay?”

“I'm not sure,” I said blearily.

“Did you open the mysterious envelope?”

I shook my head, yawned loudly, then remembered he couldn't see me. “Not yet,” I answered. “I sort of fell asleep. Did I miss dinner?”

“The kids have eaten. I'll throw another steak on the grill when I see the whites of your eyes. One for Dave, too.”

The sensible thing would have been to beg off and stay home. I'd been wounded in action. I was rummy, not rested. And the idea of venturing onto Allison's turf, like some sneak thief, didn't appeal. But I wanted, even needed, to see Tucker.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll be there in a few minutes.”

“Bring the envelope,” Tucker reminded me.

I nodded again, remembered again, yawned again. “Okay,” I repeated, and hung up.

Next, I splashed my face with cold water at the bathroom sink, applied more concealer and did what I could with my hair, which wasn't much. I finally wound it into a gob on top of my head and secured it with a plastic squeeze clip.

Dave was up for a ride, already jumping at the front door when I joined him there, stuffing Beverly Pennington's envelope into my purse before taking off the chain and turning the dead bolt. I'd considered bringing the Glock, too, but that seemed like overkill. And, besides, Tucker would have his handy, even though he was off duty.

Allison's big territorial, with the veterinary office out back, was a little way out of town. When I drove through the open gate I got heart palpitations. I was on dangerous emotional ground, for sure, but I couldn't turn back.

Tucker came outside to greet me when I pulled into the driveway behind the house. He wasn't wearing a chef's hat, but he did sport a barbecue apron that said “Dad” on the front in big red letters that looked like crayon. If my head hadn't been so tender, I'd have laid it against the steering wheel in utter defeat.

Daisy and Danny appeared behind Tucker, small and blond and curious. They both summoned up tentative, uncertain smiles—their friend had been murdered, after all, and the world was no longer such a safe place as they'd probably believed. I suspected those fragile smiles were more for Dave than me, but I plastered an answering one on my face anyhow, and forced myself to get out of the car.

Dave bounded after me, then past, rushing to greet the twins.

Tucker put out a hand to me, and the gesture touched me in an indefinable way.

“Hi,” I said shyly.

Daisy and Danny were still playing with Dave, but I knew they were watching when Tucker's hand closed tightly around mine for a moment, then rested on the small of my back.

“You remember Mojo?” he asked quietly, turning to his children.

“She was here with the sick basset hound,” Danny said, nodding. “Mom fixed him.”

“Mom's in Oklahoma,” Daisy told me. “Grampa's heart is acting up.”

Mine was, too, though I doubted I'd need a bypass in the near future. Hearts are tricky, tender things, prone to all manner of injury. “I'm sure he'll get better,” I said. I wasn't sure of any such thing, of course. I was merely whistling in the dark.

“Mom can't fix Grampa if his heart attacks him,” Danny said, looking worried. “She's not a people doctor.”

The roots of the grass on Allison's lawn seemed to have grown up around my ankles, tangled, holding me fast to the spot where I stood.

“Come in,” Tucker urged, giving me a tug in the direction of the house.

“Dad got you a present,” Daisy said, looking puzzled but not resentful.

“A present?” I asked, surprised. Tucker was romantic in all the ways it really counted, but his gifts tended to come in fast-food bags.

We stepped into a large, pleasantly cluttered kitchen with red tile floors and granite countertops. There was a copper basket near the stove, shaped like a chicken and full of brown eggs, indicating a serious cook in residence. Pictures and school papers and a little chart with stars on it covered one side of the double-wide refrigerator.

Tucker smiled, releasing my hand now that there was less danger that I'd bolt for my car and zoom back down the driveway in the fabled cloud of dust, and handed me a wrapped package, tied with a ribbon.

“Open it!” Daisy and Danny chorused, jumping up and down. Dave got into the spirit of the thing, as dogs will, and did some jumping himself.

I accepted the package. Opened it slowly.

It was a book; I'd already guessed that by its size and shape.
The Damn Fool's Guide to Careers.

Tucker grinned.

I gave him a look, then laughed. The message was clear. Forget being a private detective. Forget running a biker bar. Become Something Sensible in Ten Easy Steps.

If I hadn't known he meant well, I'd have hit him with the book.

Probably disappointed, Daisy and Danny immediately lost interest in the present. And me.

“Can we go camping with Chelsea and Janice?” Daisy wheedled, tugging at Tucker's arm. “Please?”

“No,” Tucker said.

Danny remembered my presence. “Janice is making a real movie,” he said solemnly. “I want to be in it. She said I could be Spider-Man.”

“Go,” Tucker told his children. “Play, or something, and take the dog with you.”

“I'm not going to quit,” I told him firmly when we were alone.

He set the book aside, pulled me into his arms and kissed me. “I know,” he said against my mouth. “I just want you to keep your options open.”

“How about that steak you promised?” I asked. “I'm starving.”

He chuckled. “Coming right up,” he said. Then he took my hand again and led me through a dining room, then a living room and out onto a patio. There was a pool, shaped like a horse's head and shining turquoise in the night, and distant lights twinkled in the dark desert. I had a strange, disjointed sense of being temporarily transported to some distant and sparsely populated planet.

A coyote howled, not too close but not too far away, either. The sound was poignant, bereft, full of yearning for the old days and ways, the time long before the first white settlers came to the area, and certainly before the developers began to gobble up the desert. The memory of ancient freedom was imprinted in Brother Coyote's nimble bones.

Alas. Still on Earth, then.

I sighed.

Tucker sat me down at a glass table and went to the fancy brick barbecue grill nearby to put a couple of steaks over the flames. And memory stirred in me, too, visceral and primitive, an echo of the desert dog's cry. The grill became a fire in a circle of stones, Tucker and I wore skins, and the house behind us was a cavern in the side of a dry red mountain.

“Who's taking care of the veterinary practice while Allison's away?” I asked, shaking off the clan-of-the-cave-bear mood. I still wanted to make a break for it, but I was settling down. Sort of.

“It's closed for the time being,” Tucker answered. “Another doctor is covering for her, and her assistants have some time off.”

“Oh,” I said.

Tucker came back to the table, sat down. Held out a hand.

I knew what he wanted, and tunneled into my purse for Beverly Pennington's envelope. Handed it over.

Tucker held it for a moment, thoughtfully, as though preparing himself in some way, then opened it.

It contained several newspaper clippings—old ones—paper-clipped together with what appeared to be photocopies.

I relaxed a little. No explosion. Probably no anthrax spores, either.

So far, so good.

I scooted my chair a little closer to Tucker's so I could ogle the information Beverly Pennington wanted me to have. I saw right away that the clippings were from the Shiloh
Bugle,
tattered and yellowed at the edges.

My eyes widened when I saw the first headline, and something quivered deep in my belly. I quickly identified it as dread.

Local Man In Critical Condition.

I picked up the clipping to get a closer look.

A chill went through me, a sort of prescience that meant my deeper mind was already cataloging data, adding things up, subtracting and multiplying. The conclusions might come to the surface immediately, days later, or not at all. That part was a crapshoot.

Tucker got up to turn the steaks over on the grill. He'd seen the headline, too, of course, but he offered no comment. I was pretty sure he'd read the article, probably at a glance, and now he was digesting it.

I squinted at the report; there was plenty of light coming through the patio doors, but the print was small, old and a little smudged.

“Frederick Severn, 57, was rushed to a Kalispell hospital on Tuesday night, by ambulance, the victim of an apparent stroke. According to his wife, Alice, he fell ill while having supper on the Severn family farm, on Route 2, outside Shiloh. He has not regained consciousness….”

Tucker came back to the table, and I handed him the clipping and went on to the next, dated a few days later. The headline shouted Poisoning Suspected, but I could barely concentrate on the body of the article. I kept thinking that I'd been nine when Frederick Severn fell ill; it was the same year Lillian and I met Greer in that Boise bus depot.

What was I to make of all this?

Was Beverly Pennington trying to tell me that
Greer
had had something to do with Mr. Severn's illness?

I refocused on the article, but reading it was like wading through something gelatinous. My headache was suddenly a lot worse, and hungry as I was, I didn't think I'd be able to force down so much as a bite of that steak.

Tucker finally took the clipping out of my hand and read it aloud, in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice. What it all boiled down to was that, though Severn had survived, he was essentially a vegetable. Routine blood tests had revealed traces of a common garden insecticide in his system, and the elder of his two stepdaughters, Molly Stillwell, sixteen, who had run away from home soon after her stepfather was hospitalized, was being sought for questioning.

I did something terrible when I was young,
I heard Greer saying that night in the guesthouse kitchen, when she'd come searching for the stolen tamale pie.
Someone knows.

“Oh, God,” I murmured.

“What?” Tucker asked.

I swallowed. “Did I happen to mention, in all the excitement, that Greer is being blackmailed?”

Tucker stiffened. “Yes,” he said. “Last night, after we listened to the voice mails. But you were a little sketchy with the details—and you took your sweet time getting around to it. How long have you known?”

“Yikes,” I said, stalling.

Tucker did not look appeased. He was leaning toward me, his eyes narrowed, his voice low and gruff. “‘Yikes'? Two people are dead. Your sister
and
her housekeeper are officially off the radar. If you know more about this than you're telling me, spill it.
Now.
”

My steak was burning; I could smell it. Tucker didn't take it—or me—off the heat. I felt skewered by his gaze, like a shish kebab, and I was starting to char.

I swallowed again, hard. “I've known for a while,” I admitted. “Jolie and I tried to get some answers, but Greer would never tell us anything. Alex said she'd almost emptied his bank accounts, paying somebody off. She'd taken out some credit cards in his name and maxed them, getting cash advances. He hired detectives and found out she'd lived in Shiloh, Montana, but if he knew more about it than that, he didn't say.”

“You think she's Molly Stillwell, and she poisoned her stepfather,” Tucker said.