If Looks Could Kill (10 page)

Chris couldn't quite manage an answer. It wasn't a mistake. The murders were real. They were real and they were plotting out just like her books. She'd been having trouble sleeping again, staring into the darkness wondering why she felt chased, and suddenly she knew.

Two years. It had been going on for two years. She felt invaded. She felt assaulted, sitting amid her plastic flowers and orphaned cats. She desperately wanted to get out of there, to run back home, to take off riding through the hills until she could find some new shoots of spring. Instead she sat right where she was and picked her pen back up.

Very carefully, she ripped off the sheets she'd been doodling on and threw them in the trash. Then she turned her attention to the detective.

"What do you want me to do?"

Chapter 4

"She's no more
eccentric than anybody else in this town."

Mac took another sip of coffee and leaned back farther in his chair as he conversed with Sue through the office door. "I didn't say I called her eccentric, I said L. J. Watson did."

Busy entering tax evaluations into the computer, Sue never bothered to look up from where she was working. She did allow Mac a laugh. "L. J. considers anyone who doesn't vote Republican and own a horse eccentric. Chris is just... Chris."

"How long have you known her?"

Now Sue looked up, her expression dry. "Is this interest professional or personal?"

Mac afforded Sue the scowl that question deserved. After only a few days in town he found it necessary to remind himself at five-minute intervals that he wasn't in the big city anymore. "I can't afford personal interest. I'm paying off two wives and two kids. I'm just trying to catch up with that memo on my desk yesterday."

"Five years," she said, going back to her computer. "We moved to town just about the same time."

"What do you know about her?"

"Other than the fact that she's my youngest's godmother and the family baby-sitter when Tom and I want to get out of town?"

Mac went back to his coffee, the new budget still unperused on his desk and Curtis Marshall's health forms unfiled. "Yeah. Besides that."

"Nothing very mysterious. She writes a hell of a book, tends to dress in bright colors, and likes her privacy enough that she hides here. Considering the fact that she's not only the most interesting person to hit town since Quantrell but also an active member in almost every town function, it's no big surprise that we let her."

"Does she always take in teenagers for the night?"

Sue smiled. "Teenagers, ventriloquists, old ladies who talk to fish. Chris is a sucker for a sob story. I think it's because she never had a family of her own. She's kind of adopted us."

"No family?"

"Foster homes. It's quite a success story, if she'd just admit it. She finally got out of the system at eighteen and worked her way through school... schools. She has about three degrees. She's got more useless information stuffed in that brain of hers than a 'Jeopardy' champ."

"Where'd she live before here?"

"St. Louis, around the midwest. I don't know. Why don't you ask her?"

Which meant that Chris Jackson could have more connections to St. Louis than just an itch to set fictitious murders there. Which also meant that Sue wasn't the one who was going to give it up on her.

Mac sat in his imitation-leather swivel chair, looking out into the Formica-paneled reception area of the Pyrite City Hall and Police Department, a room brightened by Sue's plants and decorated in aerial photography and aldermanic meeting notices, and thought yet again of the differences here in Pyrite. Of the similarities.

He needed the word on the streets. He needed a snitch. Snitches were a hell of a lot easier to come by in the big city. They were a lot less conspicuous. Besides, the best ones were hookers, and from what he'd been able to gather, Pyrite was a one-whore town. And she resided way out along a dirt road that ended somewhere up the north side of Wilbur Mountain, which meant she couldn't exactly watch the street action on Main.

On the other hand, small towns did have cafes.

Closing the files before him, Mac pushed his chair back. "Think I'm going to get some lunch. You?"

Sue just shook her head. "If you're going over to the Kitchen, make sure they give you an extra Blue Plate. Sheriff's off today, and it's our turn to feed the prisoner."

"From last night? What's he still doin' there?"

"Nobody wants him home enough to post bail."

Mac automatically reached in the drawer for his gun and beeper and came up empty. Habits died hard. He shut the drawer and patted the gun still strapped to his hip, seeking familiar security. "Well, hell, what is it? I'll post it myself."

"For Cooter Taylor? You're the one he tried to bite last night. Do you really want to let him loose in Oz again?"

That stopped Mac halfway to the door. "Oz?"

Sue looked up with a grin. "I swear, they didn't tell you anything when they hired you. The trailers over behind the dump. Been called Oz ever since the tornado of sixty-five, I hear." Her grin grew very dark. "Although, if I were the wizard, I sure wouldn't want to live there."

Mac nodded, running a hand through his hair as he stepped out into the front room. Sue continued to clatter on the computer.

"Have you read her stuff?" Mac asked suddenly.

Sue looked up. "Yeah."

"What do you think?"

She considered it for a second. "I think she's really good. What about you?"

Mac had finished
Hell Hath No Fury
while he'd waited for Curtis in the emergency room. "I think she's spooky."

Mac was retrieving his keys when the front door opened. He was going to just nod a vague hello, the standard response in this town, when he realized that he'd been caught wishing. It was Chris Jackson.

"Sue?"

Mac was intrigued. For a minute she didn't even see him standing halfway across the floor. Striding into the room, attention all on Sue, she looked like a heron readying for takeoff. An agitated heron at that.

Sue swung around at the sound of her friend's voice. After working with Sue for only two days, Mac could gauge the importance of Chris's interruption by the fact that Sue was on her feet before the woman reached her.

"Honey, what's wrong?" She reached up to pat Chris's shoulder, Puck comforting Titania. Chris Jackson was a tall woman, with short dark hair and the kind of body that would have looked good on an athlete. Sue resembled an overripe Peter Pan. An incongruous pair, especially with the smaller woman offering the comfort.

Mac didn't make it out the door after all.

Chris Jackson seemed to be a pacer. She allowed Sue one good pat on the arm before she eased away and turned, evidently needing to give room to her distress. Considering the length of those legs, it didn't surprise Mac at all.

"Oh." Her eyes went wide at the sight of Mac waiting behind her. Hands lifted a little, fumbled a bit with the edges of a lurid puce-and-purple paisley oversized shirt and then dug into jeans pockets.

"You talked to Lawson?" he asked. It wasn't much of a stretch.

She looked as if she wanted to turn away again. Instead, she shrugged, a small, abrupt movement that neatly telegraphed the news. "I, uh..."

This must have been uncharacteristic behavior on Chris's part, because Sue was completely at a loss as to how to react. She looked at her friend, and then at Mac, as if searching for somebody to quickly clarify the situation so that she could take appropriate action.

Mac took a careful step foward. "You wanna talk?"

Chris Jackson looked as if she'd been hit with a stun gun. Wide-eyed, white, rigid as hell. "Later," she managed, not advancing or retreating a millimeter. "Please?"

Mac gave her the same passive smile he gave murder suspects when they asked for water before facing his questions. "You bet," he allowed easily, knowing within a hairbreadth just how close to come to a skittish person. The biggest mistake most new interrogators made was pushing too soon, too hard. Mac played his targets like very nervous fish.

Chris Jackson was hardly a suspect. But she was going to give him something interesting to do, and he wasn't about to blow that off.

"I'm going down to the Kozy Kitchen," he offered quietly. "Have some lunch. After you talk to Sue, you want to come on over? I'll save you a spot."

He only waited long enough for her to agree before turning for the door. So, there had been a murder. A puzzle, and on his second day here. He might just survive it after all.

* * *

"Three."

"Murders?"

Chris nodded. She was feeling better. Thank God for Sue, who'd poured her coffee and watched her pace and listened to her agitated story without comment. Chris still wasn't sure what she was going to do—what she was supposed to do—but at least the first shock had died a little.

Walking alongside her, Chief MacNamara shook his head thoughtfully. "I'm going to have to do some more reading."

Chris had met him, just as he'd asked. But the last thing she needed was discussing this with the audience at the Kitchen. Victor and Lester might have kept the news to themselves, but Luella would have been down at the Puckett County Courier in ten minutes flat. MacNamara made it a moot point by asking Chris to walk with him to the county jail to feed Cooter Taylor his lunch.

"I'm not exactly sure what to do," she admitted, hands once again shoved into her jeans pockets as she sidestepped the tree planter outside the drugstore. There were minute buds on the branches, and daffodil shoots poking up through the dirt in the tub. Chris wished she could stop and enjoy them, that she could step into each and every store along the square and waste her time checking the merchandise, visiting with the people, steeping herself in the routine. It was the special gift of Pyrite, the secret to her sanity. She catalogued the everyday minutiae of this town the way a penitent did martyrs to invoke.

"What does Lawson want from you?"

"Validation, I think. Either that, or she really did want me to gaze into my crystal ball and tell her why my books seem to have started coming true."

"Have they?"

She wanted to close her eyes again. She wanted to run up and down the library steps a couple of times to work off the sudden tension in her chest. "Yeah," she admitted instead. "I think they have."

Ghosts to add to her collection. Responsibility to be piled atop the weight already on her shoulders. She wondered how she was supposed to atone for something like this. Murders committed in her name, maybe to get her attention. Chris had never known how to think of life any way but, "Shit happens, and I'm responsible." Well, this shit was something she wasn't going to get off her hands.

The world had found her after all. That wonderful, magical silence on the phone this morning when she'd pretended that there was no one left out there to get her, had vanished. Whatever was going on up in the suburbs of St. Louis had something to do with her.

It wasn't just the press anymore, or the fact that with one simple intrusion, the entire illusion could shatter. It was the fact that writing was supposed to be an anonymous business. That was why she could do it, why she could dissect her most painful truths and still offer them up to strangers. Because, somehow, she could pretend that no one actually saw them as
her
truths. C. J. Turner carried the burden of fame and suffered the stain of connection in her stead. If that symbiosis evaporated, Chris simply wasn't sure whether she'd have the courage to let Livvy loose on the psyches of murderers anymore.

And if she didn't, she wasn't sure what else she could do.

"What has Lawson asked for?" the chief asked, breaking into her thoughts.

Chris had almost forgotten him, loping along next to her with the tinfoil-covered plate that smelled like meatloaf in his hands. They'd reached the county courthouse, a big, red, square, brick building with a cupola that was badly in need of repair.

Several of the staff were loitering by the side door on a cigarette break. In the summer, the corner would be a perfect place for a little gossip and laughter, lush and shady, with a riot of color from the flowers that the VFW Auxiliary planted around the statue of Grant. Now, the trees were skeletal and scratching at themselves in the wind. Chris shivered at the stark sound.