Killing Thyme (17 page)

My head swung right, then left, as I tried to orient myself. “What car? I never saw—”

He pointed as a white SUV rounded the corner and disappeared from view.

“It wasn't your fault,” a woman said. “The driver came flying down Yesler and changed lanes at the last minute. Almost like she wanted to hit you. It was crazy.”

Images zipped around in my brain, forming no discernible pattern. I couldn't think in complete sentences, let alone speak them. My pants were torn, and my elbow hurt to high heaven.

“The plate started AL, and I think it ended with a 2.” She scribbled on the back of a parking lot stub.

“Thanks.” I took a deep breath and took the ticket. The
street, the buildings, my rescuer, the witness—everything seemed normal.

Except the sidewalk, where my frosted cookies lay shattered, bits of pink, blue, and yellow covering the dark gray concrete like a mosaic. A pigeon landed with a squawk, zeroing in on a broken teddy bear.

Another white SUV? They were everywhere.

Had the driver truly wanted to hit me?

Talk about crazy.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.

—Ian Fleming,
Goldfinger

By the time I got back to the shop—carrying a bag of biscotti from the Italian market, in place of the broken animal cookies—my fear had sharpened into anger. I could not believe anyone had tried to hit me on purpose, but it didn't matter. The incident fueled my determination to get to the bottom of things.

The first step is knowing where to start. I had two options. I picked the easy one.

My mother could wait.

“C'mon, dog.” Arf obeyed.

“You've got the samples they asked for?” Sandra asked. It had taken her about two seconds to suss out that I'd been rattled, not once but twice, and that I would not be deterred. “Be safe, boss.”

Business before investigation. But as I drove down First Avenue South to meet a prospective customer—a butcher ready to spice up his sausage business—I considered my theories. And the holes in them.

Hannah Hart might have flailed out in anger at Bonnie. She was the only person I knew who wanted Bonnie gone and had access to the building and studio. Josh had keys, but I'd seen his shock at the discovery of the body. But Hannah might have been wound up enough to confront her tenant, even late at night.

Her former neighbors might know if she burned the night oil. Whether she was likely to rage at anyone other than Josh. What she drove and where she might be now.

She was reportedly a small woman. Hard to imagine her attacking Bonnie viciously enough to kill.

And she had no link to Kristen or the stolen bracelet. But I had to agree with the police: Odds were that the two crimes were connected. We needed to figure out how.

I signaled and switched lanes. By that logic, I couldn't rule Hannah out until probing a little deeper.

Brian Strasburg, on the other hand, had an obvious tie to the bracelet—a family heirloom that went missing the night his father was killed.

But while Kristen and I believed Bonnie had been involved in the Strasburg incident, how would Brian have made that connection?

If he had, then all bets were off. Despite his reported personality transformation, I could imagine him harboring a deadly grudge. It's one thing to control your moods around your kid, another to let a potential accessory to murder slip away. Again.

Lawyers know how to track down facts and people.

I steered the Mustang into the butcher's small parking lot and sat, pondering. How would Strasburg have known the bracelet had surfaced, let alone its link to Bonnie-Peggy?

Unless some piece of evidence—known to Detective Washington and the victim's family, but never publically revealed, like the missing bracelet—put her in the loop.
Something they knew, and she knew, that was the reason she left Seattle.

And the reason she came back.

Maybe she thought she could hide in plain sight. That the passage of time would protect her. In a city, we run in circles that barely touch. Now that I live blocks from my work, my experience has changed, but when I worked downtown and lived in Greenwood, work and home were worlds apart. I never ran into a coworker in the grocery store. If Tag and I went out for Sunday breakfast, we didn't run into the bank teller I chatted with every other Friday.

A secret big enough to send a woman on the run for thirty years didn't just lose its power.

Had she come back to make amends?

The absence of signs of a break-in or a search for valuables in the studio ruled out my final option, random criminal violence.

Arf stuck his head over the seat and poked my neck with his nose. I reached up to stroke his bearded chin. “Okay, you're right. No more woolgathering. And I'll bring you a treat, promise.”

Inside the butcher's shop, a glass-front cooler dominated the retail space up front. Swinging double doors led to the workroom and giant coolers and freezers in back. The butcher had given me a tour, and I rubbed my bare arms to warm up.

“So here are the samples we talked about. And some of our smoked black peppercorns,” I said.

Once upon a time, butchers were big men with broad chests, full bellies pushing out their spattered white aprons, beefy arms bulging out of white T-shirt sleeves. No longer. The modern food entrepreneur can be anyone. Inspired by a love of backyard grilling, this one had left computer programming for meat cutter's classes, then bought this shop from an old-school butcher ready to retire.

“For the first year, I bought my spices from the same people he did. But then you called, and I thought, yeah, check it out. I'm ready to move beyond the basics, offer customers a little more.”

He had a good palate and a good nose. We talked spices for sausage—red and black peppers, sages, fennel, oregano, garlic. We talked salami, the popular cured meats, and wild game variations. We talked salt.

He placed a respectable opening order, and I gave him a gift bag of our grilling rubs to try. “Your customers will love these. They'll think you're a brilliant butcher—”

“Which I am,” he said, a dimple forming in his left cheek.

“Which you are,” I agreed. “Because you give your customers what they need to make their friends and family think they're brilliant cooks. We're working on a cocoa and pepper blend, and one with hibiscus flowers that will knock your socks off.”

He raised a finger and disappeared through the swinging doors, emerging with a small white insulated box. “Two pork loins and a small roast, and our sweet Italian sausage and maple breakfast sausage. Love to hear what you think about the flavors. And I put in a treat for your dog.”

“You just made a friend for life. I like you, too.”

Business accomplished, my copilot and I headed for Beacon Hill and Wedding Row. My intention was to chat up the tenants and find out more about Hannah and Bonnie, their habits, and the tensions. I had a hunch that in a building full of artists and retailers, little escaped observation.

The parking spaces out front were roped off to make room for a fleet of art cars. Need a distinctive way to arrive at your wedding or reception? Search no further! While it's hard to ignore the Yellow Cab repurposed as a shark or the Chinese dragon stretch limo, my personal fave is the Barbie Dream Hearse—billed as “Seattle's only hearse for the living.” Several young women in short dresses and long legs,
champagne flutes in hand, ogled its charms and giggled over the prospects of a bachelorette party cruise around the city in a star-speckled white Cadillac Brougham hearse with a pink-and-white interior.

Gotta love being part of a city where weird as a way of life meets geek computer culture, creating our own brand of Northwest nerd cool.

But I don't love prowling for parking. I turned left, made another left, and another, back to where we'd started. Nothing. I drove south another block and went left again, wondering if I should go back home. I get nervous leaving the Mustang too far from my destination.

“What say we cross our fingers and double back?” I glanced in my rearview mirror as if expecting Arf to reply.

And that's when I saw it. Wedged between a red Camry and a dented blue pickup sat Bonnie Clay's van.

I found an alley to pull into and made a call. “I ought to have you on speed dial,” I told Detective Spencer.

“You're sure it's hers?”

“Yep.” I hadn't paid much attention to the van when we dropped Bonnie off Friday night, but the bumper sticker removed any doubt. Next to an earthy brown handprint were the words “I make art from mud.” I read Spencer the van's New Mexico plate number and waited while she ran it.

“Hmm,” she said. “Then why is it registered to Elena Sophia Istvanffy?”

I inhaled sharply.

What the fennel . . .

Changing your name when you marry, fine. Picking your own first name or shedding an outgrown nickname, good on you. I understand cultural traditions, like when a law firm employee changed her name in accordance with her Cheyenne heritage, though it did create a record-keeping challenge.

But stealing a name? From a woman who'd been your friend?

“Detective, if you're thinking my mother bought the van for Bonnie, or registered it for her, using her maiden name, think again. Not a snowball's chance. I'm unsure about a lot of things right now, but I am positive those two women hadn't exchanged a word in thirty years.”

“I'll send a patrol car,” she replied. “And we'll be there in twenty minutes.”

“I'll wait for you in the bakery.”

Across from Wedding Row, a gaggle of future brides and attendants piled into two BMWs—one black, one white—and I zoomed into the parking spot they left. “You're my lucky charm, dog.”

I'd bought cookies twice today but had gotten nothing more than one nibble of a sugar cookie boat, long sacrificed to the pigeons. I wrapped Arf's leash around a chair leg and popped inside where I ordered a double latte, iced, and half a dozen gingersnaps. No sign of Josh.

“The Airedale outside is yours, right?” the barista asked. “Can he have a cookie? Pumpkin and almond flour, all organic, made for dogs.”

I said yes, then took our treats to the sidewalk table, in the partial shade of a red umbrella. Quizzing the neighbors no longer seemed like a bright idea. Not with cops nearby, and detectives about to descend.

I sipped my coffee and bit into a cookie. A peppery bite took me by surprise. Arf sat up abruptly, facing the street.

Across the street, framed by the overgrown yews flanking his steps, Mr. Adams waved his golf club at me.

“Come in, come in,” he said when we approached, swinging his three-iron like a machete.

Age and arthritis may have slowed him down, but the rhodies and azaleas had been deadheaded, and the junipers and forsythia neatly trimmed. Coleus in their flamboyant reds, pinks, and greens burst out of the brick planters beside
the front steps, set off by the three-lobed chartreuse leaves of sweet potato vine.

Surprisingly cool for the warm day, the house was tidy, a hint of yeast and cinnamon in the air.

“I brought cookies.” I held out the bag. “But you bake.”

He settled into a deep maroon recliner next to the big front window. A lace-covered table held a lamp, his reading glasses, and the TV remote. He set my gift next to his coffee mug. I sat on a green ottoman, Arf at my feet.

“My daughter takes care of me every Sunday. Big family do, like when my wife was alive. She runs the curry—what do you call it? The program that says what teachers gotta teach? Curriculum office, that's it. And my granddaughter, she coulda been a chef.”

Family photos covered the walnut sideboard. In the center stood a portrait of a young man in navy dress whites, unsmiling, hair cropped close. A shadow box held ribbons and medals; a triangular box held a folded flag.

“Vietnam?”

His eyes glistened. “My boy.”

I stood and picked up the gold frame, my throat aching for his loss. Next to it, a black-and-white photo showed a barefoot boy sitting on a dock, cypress trees behind him—Mr. Adams as a child. A wedding portrait, circa 1950. His wife could have stepped off the cover of
Ebony
magazine. He looked like the class nerd who'd caught the brass ring. A photo a few years later, of the couple with two girls and a boy. More recent shots of his daughters and their families.

I picked up a photo of a shining girl in cap and gown. I shouldn't have been surprised. “Mr. Adams, I've never properly introduced myself. I'm Pepper Reece. I own Seattle Spice. Your granddaughter Cayenne works for me.”

“I know who you are. You were in the paper, right before she hired on. You and your dog.” A wicked grin spread
across his wrinkled face. “You think I let just anybody into my house?”

I smiled and glanced out the window, hoping to see the detectives. The break in the yew hedge, where the crumbling steps led to the sidewalk, gave him a clear view of the tables outside the bakery.

“Mr. Adams, you remember anything more about the night Bonnie Clay was killed? You saw a car speed away.”

“Like I said, one of them hot new SUV things. My other daughter drives one. She's a school principal, over near Spokane. They both started out as teachers, same as their mother.” His gaze flicked back to the sideboard, first to the portrait of his wife, then to the image of that beautiful young man. His jaw quivered, and he picked up his coffee cup.

A cup in the blue and brown glazes I'd come to recognize as Bonnie's signature.

“She gave me this, Bonnie did. She was a tough broad. Didn't say much about herself. But when she saw that picture . . .”

Out on the street, a police tow truck passed by, pulling Bonnie's van, the detectives following. I desperately wanted to talk to them, desperately hoped they'd found something in the van that pointed to the killer.

I turned back to Mr. Adams. “I'm so sorry about your son. I know it's been a long time, but I imagine it never stops hurting.”