Holly Blues (30 page)

I listened to the message again, holding my breath.
Beside the road.
The similarities between the way Joyce Dillard and Leslie Strahorn had died were chillingly clear. Two women, both victims—most likely—of vehicular homicide. Two women, connected through their acquaintance with Sally Strahorn. The implication of that connection would be all too obvious, at least to the police.

From the end of the block, I could hear the
clang
-
clang
-
clang
of a Salvation Army bell. A couple of women walked past me with a curious look, and I stepped back against the storefront, moving out of the traffic. I replayed the message a third time. It ended with “Call me as soon as you can. I may have an update on Dillard.” I hit the talk button.

“You’re
where
?” McQuaid demanded angrily, when I told him. “What the hell are you doing in Lake City, China? I thought you were with Ruby.”

“I am with Ruby,” I said, although I wasn’t, at the moment. I didn’t think it was a good idea to mention Big Bird. “Justine is willing to take Sally’s case, if it comes to that, and she asked me to dig up whatever facts I could. Lake City seemed like the place to dig. Ruby came along.”

“Now, look, China—” he began, but I stopped him.

“Let’s not fight about this, McQuaid. Just listen, okay? It’s important. I got your message about Joyce Dillard. And I’ve found out how Leslie died. Listen to this.”

I sketched out what I had learned at the quilt shop, ending with, “One of the women I talked to says that Sally’s car was parked behind Leslie’s garage for several days. It disappeared about the time Sally headed for Pecan Springs. About the same time Leslie was struck. The cops don’t have a lead on the hit-and-run vehicle. Yet. Or if they do, they’re not making it public.”

There was a silence. “Sally told you she came on the bus. Right?”

“Correct. But we don’t have any way of knowing whether that’s true. Maybe she drove her car to Pecan Springs and parked it, and Jess Myers picked it up. All I know is that when he phoned the shop, he told me to tell her he had it—the car, I mean. When I gave her that news, it scared her. Oh, and Hazel Cowan saw him driving it,” I added. “In Pecan Springs, yesterday evening, around six.”

“What else?”

“Only that Sally tried repeatedly to phone her sister yesterday evening. But that was after the hit-and-run. She wouldn’t have tried calling if she had known Leslie was dead.”

“You think?” McQuaid asked wryly. “Don’t sell her short, China. Maybe she was just trying to establish her innocence. Maybe she lied. Maybe she wasn’t phoning Leslie. Could’ve been Myers she was trying to reach.”

“Damn,” I muttered, feeling sick. He was right. All I had was Sally’s say-so about trying to call her sister. And what was that worth? She was an accomplished liar. I could testify to that.

“The cop here—Jamison—is pretty well convinced that Sally did it,” McQuaid went on. “Killed her folks, or at least set them up for Myers. Killed Joyce Dillard, too. Jamison is a good cop. Smart. He was the police chief when the Strahorns were killed, so he’s got a good handle on the evidence—what little there was. He got demoted when he didn’t clear the case.”

“What does he think about Myers?”

I could hear the shrug in his voice. “Not so much.”

“In spite of the fact that he was on the Strahorn suspect list?” I demanded. “And that he’s in Pecan Springs right now, stalking Sally?”

“I’m just telling you what he thinks. And doesn’t. And you don’t know for a fact that Myers is
stalking
Sally. For all you know, maybe he’s just trying to connect with her. Maybe the two of them are involved in a joint venture.”

I felt even sicker. “What do
you
think?”

“What do I think?” He sighed. “I don’t know what the hell to think, China. Myers could have done it. Sally could have done it. They could have done it together.” He paused. Behind me, the Quilters Rule door opened, and the two women customers came out, clutching shopping bags and chattering happily. Molly had obviously made a sale.

“I guess,” McQuaid said finally, “I’m leaning toward together. I somehow can’t bring myself to buy the notion that Sally pulled the trigger on her parents, but I’m willing to entertain the possibility that she might have hired Myers—or seduced him into doing it. Jamison said she was sleeping with him before her parents were killed. I also think she might have spotted Joyce Dillard walking along the road and run her down—impulsively, maybe, without prior intent. Having done that once, she might have done it again—in Lake City. Or she might have gotten Myers to do it. Or she and Myers might have done it together.”

“Wait a minute,” I objected. “Wasn’t Sally the one who insisted on your going to Sanders? Why would she do that if she knew that Dillard was dead?”

“Maybe she was trying to cover her tracks. Play innocent.”

I tried again. “I can’t believe that Sally could have sat at our table with the kids and acted like nothing was wrong if she’d just killed her sister—not to mention this woman in Sanders
and
her parents? Do you?”

“Do I? I don’t know.” He sounded tired. “Yeah, I guess maybe I do. Sally isn’t always Sally, you know. Sometimes she’s this other person, Juanita. When she’s Juanita, all bets are off. And maybe there’s a third character, somebody like Bonnie, of Bonnie and Clyde. I’m sorry, but that’s a fact, and we have to face it.”

I ran quickly through the rebuttal arguments and didn’t find one that seemed persuasive, even to me. McQuaid was right, of course. Sally’s dissociative disorder made anything possible, even the murder of her sister and her parents. But we were looking for an answer to a question that neither of us wanted to put into words.

“You’re staying in Sanders tonight?” I asked.

“Yeah. There’s a motel down the road. The Sycamore Court. The KC airport isn’t that far away. With luck, I’ll be able to rebook my flight from there. Should be home by midday. You’re going back to Pecan Springs tonight?”

“As soon as I can connect with Ruby. That is, unless she’s dug up another lead we ought to follow. We have to get something to eat, too.” As I said that, I realized that I was hungry.

He grunted. “I don’t suppose there’s been any word from Sheila or the Pecan Springs cops. They haven’t picked Sally up?”

“They hadn’t when Ruby checked, an hour or so ago.” I shivered. “You have no idea where Sally might have gone?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t pretend to know what goes through that woman’s mind. She could be in El Paso by now. Or Juarez.” He sounded disgusted. “Call me when you get back to Pecan Springs. I don’t want you to go home, remember. If this Myers is a threat, he might show up there.”

“I am going to Ruby’s,” I gritted.

“Good girl.” He paused, and his voice dropped. “Be careful, China. Joyce Dillard is dead. Leslie is dead. Sally is missing. This isn’t a game.”

Damn. I understood his intention, but “good girl” irritates me. I bit back a terse response and said only, “Yes, I know. I’ll be careful. I promise.”

“Good,” he said. “Love you.” He clicked off.

The Sycamore Court may have changed hands, but it still looked as seedy as it always had: a long, low, L-shaped brick-veneer building, with the office at the long end of the L. The roadside sign was still lit, with a red-neon Vacancy declaration beneath it. Optimistically, someone had used an ATV with a blade to scrape the snow from the parking lot, but if it was an effort to attract business, it hadn’t been very successful, for there was only one car, parked beside the office. The desk clerk, maybe. Or the owner. When the Clarks owned the place, they had lived in the two units next to the office. On call twenty-four/seven, and never took a vacation. McQuaid shuddered. He couldn’t think of a more restricted life.

The office was too warm. When he opened the door, the heat hit him like a blast from a tropical wind, heavily scented with perfumed air freshener. A woman was sitting behind the desk, reading a book. She was dark-haired, painfully thin, with a lined face, bright red lips, and sad, dark eyes rimmed in black pencil. Her heavy red sweater sported a green plastic holly leaf and a little gold bell pinned to it, over her name badge. Darnella, it read.
A sweater?
McQuaid thought in disbelief. The place was stifling.

Darnella put down her book, a paperback romance with a cover featuring a muscular man, half-naked, with long blond hair, entwined with a top-heavy raven-haired beauty wearing the barest minimum.

“Help ya?” she asked, in a tone that suggested that she would really rather go back to her book.

“Single, one night,” McQuaid said and took his drivers’ license and credit card out of his wallet.

“Smokin’?”

His cell phone rang. He shook his head at Darnella, flipped his phone open, and saw that it was Sally. “Where the hell are you?” he snapped into the phone, angrily disguising the thankfulness he felt. “People are looking for you.”

“What did Joyce tell you?” Her voice was thin, anxious.

“Pets?” Darnella asked.

He shook his head again. “Sally, I need to know where you are. Tell me.”

“I don’t have much time. What did you find out from Joyce?”

“Turns out you got a dog or a cat in your car, we’ll know, and you’ll get a bill.” Darnella slid a card across the counter. “Name, Address. Make, model, license. Sign at the X.”

“Hold on a sec,” he said to Darnella, and turned away, walking to a corner of the office, facing the wall. “I couldn’t talk to Joyce, Sally.”

He couldn’t read anything into her pause. “Why not?” she asked.

“Because she’s dead.”

“No!” A small cry, a sudden intake of breath. “How? When?”

“How do you think?” he countered.

“How should
I
know?” she replied plaintively. “I’m not there, am I? How did she die, Mike? For God’s sake, tell me!”

There was something in her voice that made McQuaid want to give her the benefit of the doubt, but he couldn’t. Not yet. He’d already given her too much, maybe. And there was Juanita, always Juanita. “I don’t know, Sally. She’s . . . dead, that’s all.”

“You’re lying,” she said harshly. “She can’t be dead. It’s not possible. She can’t . . .” She took several deep, hard breaths, as if she was trying to steady herself. “Tell me what you know, Mike.” Her voice rose. “
Tell
me.”

And then he didn’t have a choice. He’d been a cop for too long. He’d spent way too much time interrogating people. He could taste a lie, and Sally wasn’t lying, at least about this. She didn’t know that Dillard was dead—although (he reminded himself) Juanita might know, or Sally might be involved with the situation in some other way. But still—

“She was found dead in a ditch by the side of the road,” he said without inflection. “No word on whether it was hit-and-run or something else.” He listened for a reaction, anything that would suggest that Sally was making a connection to Leslie’s death. There was only silence. He went on. “Jamison is handling the investigation. Remember Jamison?”

“I don’t . . .” She gulped. “The police chief?”

“Used to be. He got demoted when he couldn’t clear your parents’ murders.” He toughened his voice, used what China called his cop voice. “Where the hell are you, Sally?” He didn’t want to tell her that Leslie was dead and that the police were looking for her. He didn’t think she knew, but part of him was still a cop, on the cops’ side. He was playing fair. He settled for something else. “You know that Jess Myers is looking for you, don’t you? Have you hooked up with him?”

She didn’t answer. “Sally?” he said. “Sally? Damn it, Sally—” But it wasn’t any use. She was gone. Maybe she was in a moving vehicle and had driven out of signal range. Or maybe she was with Myers and—He didn’t want to complete the thought.

“Look, mister,” Darnella said in a complaining voice, “if you’re gonna check in, I wish you’d hurry up and do it. I’ve just got to the good part in this book. I wanna get back to it.”

McQuaid pocketed his phone, finished the check-in, and was given the key to his room, with the disconcerting instruction to turn up the electric heater to high to warm up the room, but be sure to turn it down before he went to bed, or else it might cause a fire. “Old wiring,” Darnella said and picked up her book again. “Shorts out sometimes.”

“What time’s breakfast?” McQuaid asked.

“Breakfast?” Darnella laughed sarcastically. “That’d be down the road toward town, place on your left. Open about seven, dependin’ on whether ol’ man Perkins gets his truck started. This morning, he didn’t open up ’til after nine. Last week, it was noon.”

The room was cold as the inside of a meat locker, and McQuaid could see his breath. He turned the heater up to high and flicked on the television. There were three network channels and that was it. No CNN, no Weather Channel, no NatGeo, and the reception wasn’t all that great. He turned off the set and, still wearing his coat, sat down on the bed and looked around. The standard 1950s cheap motel room: a too-firm, unwelcoming bed; dresser, mirror, chair; dinky bathroom. Green-painted walls, water-stained tile ceiling, dark green carpet, not recently cleaned.