Murder by Numbers (10 page)

“‘Dynamic,' huh?” Liza had noticed the slight flush on her friend's face. “And just in the insurance business?”

“He also pretty much rolled through the female population of the county,” Ava admitted, the flush growing deeper. “I went out with him for a while when I was a senior at Coastal University. He had looks, money, a nice car, clothes…and, um, he was pretty dynamic.”

“I'm surprised you didn't hook him,” Liza teased.

“If I'd been thinking about financial security back then, I would have. I made a bad enough choice in husbands.” Ava made a face. “But I was smart enough even as a kid to see that Ray had a roving eye. He wound up marrying one of the Enderby girls—a damned good catch for the son of a fisherman.”

If there were such things as first families of Maiden's Bay, the Enderbys would be at the top of the list. Oh, some of the Californian newcomers settling here probably had more money. But the land they purchased for their new stately homes probably came from the Enderbys. Much to Pa Enderby's disgust, the last generation of the clan had been all girls. So, except where it was chiseled in stone on various town monuments, the Enderby name was about to become extinct.

Pa Enderby had been extremely vocal on that subject. His wife had been on Valium for decades.

“Ray ran for mayor as the new broom, with the paper's support. The old guard was pretty much under the thumb of the boys from Killamook.”

Liza nodded. The business and tourist interests in Killamook had pretty much run the county for as long as she remembered.

“At least Ray is trying to stir up a little life around here,” Ava said. “So far he's started some worthwhile things. And he's good for some colorful copy.”

So, Ray was colorful, dynamic even…but no match for Oliver Chissel. A local boy who wanted the town to make it big, but his two biggest coups—the boardwalk restoration and bringing the movies to Maiden's Bay—had just about canceled each other out. Chissel had created a lot of financial resentment in town, but the one who might be hurt worst in the long run, and certainly with his peers, was Ray Massini. The mayor could be facing a lot of disappointed voters next year.

“Ray knows how to kill people with his bare hands. He didn't give the sheriff much of an alibi for the night Chissel was killed,” Liza said.

“I can see him killing somebody in the heat of battle, but not the guy who is about to bring home the bacon for the town, and not in cold blood. Ray needed Chissel alive and functioning. Besides, I remember Ray as a boy with a gleam in his eyes—for me. I refuse to believe my old college flame is a killer. If you're finished trying to embarrass me, how about going back to work?” Ava said.

Liza did.

She spent the afternoon finishing several puzzles and the evening working up columns around them.
Cushion expanded
, she thought. Feeling tired but virtuous, she staggered off to bed early.

The phone rang around midnight.

Liza had grown up in the belief that late-night calls meant bad news—grandparents dying, car crashes, that sort of thing. That was the primal fear that gripped her heart as she blearily picked up the phone, squeezing out a shaken “Hello?”

“I didn't wake you, did I?”

Liza wasn't sure which was more annoying—Michelle's incredulous voice or the party noises going on behind her.

“What's up, Michelle?” She tried to keep the growl out of her voice.

“Buck just called with an interesting factoid about our friend Peter Hake,” Michelle reported. “He picked it up from a financial columnist. It seems that early in his wheeling-dealing career, Hake wound up doing a deal with a regional retailing group—some of the store owners were franchisees who didn't like what Chissel was offering. Mysteriously, the holdouts began having bad things happen to the plate-glass windows of their stores, with what looked like the early makings of a serious fire hazard tossed inside. Arson wasn't ever committed, but the threat of it had the holdouts sweating bullets. Hake was found at the scene of one of these ‘accidents' with a hammer, but the store owner wouldn't press charges. The guy who told Buck the story said the old boy broke out into a cold sweat just remembering what happened. The franchisees gave in, and Chissel got what he wanted.”

Liza sat up in bed, silently processing what she'd just heard.

“Are you still there?” Michelle demanded.

“Yes,” Liza said shortly. “I'll pass this along to Sheriff Clements”—she squinted at the clock—“later this morning.” Michelle made speaking noises like a teakettle about to boil, which Liza interpreted correctly from long practice. “No, we can't claim this as proprietary information. Withholding it, if it proves useful, is probably a felony. Besides, the sheriff may have it already. He'd already glommed on to your ‘Hollywood insider' theory. We do have computers up here, too. Good-bye, Michelle.”

She put the phone in its cradle even as Michelle's protests still erupted into the air from it.

She dropped back to her pillow and closed her eyes.

She hated it when she got dragged out of a sound sleep. It was always so hard to get back into dreamland. When sleep finally came, though, it wasn't restful. First Liza dreamed that Ray Massini had buried Oliver Chissel up to his neck, then turned his head completely around with his bare hands. Next Peter Hake appeared with a huge sledgehammer.

But when he swung it, Chissel's head exploded into a million glittering fragments.

Liza felt far from bright-eyed and cheery as she hauled herself out of bed the next morning. In fact, she felt more as though she were nursing a hangover. And she hadn't done a thing to deserve it. Staggering down the stairs, she winced at Rusty's exuberant greeting.

“No run today,” she croaked at the dog, fitting the reel-in leash on his collar. She stood in the open doorway and pointed.

“Go over to the bushes, do your business, and come back here.”

Rusty did as ordered, although he sent several reproachful looks her way as they went back into the kitchen.

“Empty the dog, fill the dog,” Liza grumbled as she put bowls of food and water down.

Rusty gave a cheerful bark of agreement as he dug into his breakfast with abandon.

She turned on the little black-and-white portable TV on the kitchen counter, hoping that a dose of news would help get her back in sync with the world.

As luck would have it, the interim head of Mirage Productions was explaining how the company would continue on course despite the loss of Oliver Chissel. Everything, he said, was going well for the film. Mirage was doing fine. The conscripted board member looked like a deer caught in the headlights, while his delivery sounded like a kidnapping victim reading the abductors' demands.

Not the most convincing performance I've ever seen
, Liza thought.
And I've seen a few of them.

She opened the refrigerator, whose shelves were still bare. Liza blinked. Had she eaten last night? Sometimes, in the throes of sudoku creation, she tended to forget about such mundane details.

She couldn't remember cooking, much less eating.

“Maybe I feel like crap because I'm really hungry as well as tired,” she consoled herself. But her spirits fell again when she discovered that she was out of coffee, too.

“Only one thing to do,” she said, climbing the stairway as if it were the final approach to the summit of Everest. “Throw on some clothes and go to Ma's.”

Maybe no one at the diner would recognize her if she laid low in one of the back booths.

 

Liza sat hunched over the remains of eggs and toast, her hair in a ponytail under a baseball cap with the brim pulled down to cover her face. She reached for her coffee cup when her seat jumped as if a level three earthquake had struck. It hadn't. What she'd felt was just the impact of two bodies dropping into the booth behind her.

“Coffee please, Liz,” a familiar voice yelled up to the front—Curt Walters. He carried on in a more conversational volume. “Much more, though, and I think my bladder's either going to burst or rust through. I tell you, man, double shifts just aren't fun anymore.”

“Were they ever?” an even more familiar voice asked. That was Kevin Shepard—Liza was sure of it. She hunched a little lower, willing them not to notice her looking so awful.

“Says the man who used to pull all-nighters before final exams,” Curt scoffed.

“That was one night,” Kevin said. “Sound like you'll be pulling a lot more overtime before this case is finished.”

“Yeah. Clements is busting everybody's butts,” Curt reported. “The state police offered their crime scene and forensics people to help with the case. He's even been trying to push them.”

“But you always say that stuff takes time.”

“I know that, and he knows that, but the idiot reporters only know what they see on TV shows. There everything's done and the crime is solved in under an hour.”

“Minus commercials,” Kevin joked.

“The only useful thing they've given us is that when they removed the stiff, the crime scene techs found broken glass all around him.”

That was so like the image from Liza's nightmare that she couldn't help gasping.

A second later, she heard Kevin saying, “Liza?”

She turned. Kevin had one knee on his seat, looking over the tall back of the booth at her.

He wasn't smiling, and Curt looked nervous. He probably wouldn't have been talking about the crime scene at all, except that he looked out on his feet—or his seat, actually. Tired people talked too much. It was a truism in TV shows. It probably applied to real life, too.

“What's the big deal?” Liza said, carefully keeping her voice low. “That beach is probably the burial ground for about a million broken beer bottles.”

“Yeah, but glass that's been in sand for any length of time would get etched—scratched and rounded.” Curt shook his head. “These pieces were fresh.”

He broke off, looking annoyed at himself for blabbing more.

Kevin fixed Liza with a disapproving stare.

“Curt, maybe you'd just better head home and get some sleep,” he said. “I'll pay for your coffee.”

“I think you're right.” Curt got out of the booth. “See you around, Liza.”

And if you do, you'll probably be ducking me
, Liza thought.

“Bye, Curt,” she said aloud.

She took a sip of her coffee, aware of Kevin's eyes still on her. “Broken glass.”

She suddenly remembered her joke about Chissel breaking the windows on Main Street and getting taken out by an enraged store owner. Well, Hake had a history of plate-glass vandalism…

“You're just going to keep it up.” Kevin's voice had a snap to it now.

“You know, this all seems to point to someone here in town—someone opposed to the filming…or angry at the filmmakers, especially Chissel,” Liza said.

“Goddammit, Liza!” Kevin really sounded angry now.

“So who had Chissel gotten angry up here in Maiden's Bay? Well, he's been holding up payment for the extras and the people who rented out their homes and businesses as film locations. Getting hit in the wallet—that's pretty bad.”

She looked up at Kevin. “But there's someone with a lot more reasons to be fuming at Oliver Chissel, who put his prestige on the line for the whole film project up here, who was played and bamboozled from the get-go. There were nicer accommodations for most of the film people in Killamook, so the locals didn't participate in that profit stream, their food got trucked in by an out-of-town caterer, so the restaurants in town didn't pick up much business, and now Chissel screws up the boardwalk redevelopment schedule with his additional shooting. The one who's really hurt—the one with the most against Oliver Chissel—is your buddy the mayor.”

“Do you know anything about collateral damage?” Kevin almost spat the words. “We saw a lot of it over in Iraq. An artillery shell lands on somebody's house instead of an enemy gun emplacement—that's collateral damage. Civilians run out from a doorway into a firefight—they're called collateral damage.”

He leaned over the booth back, glaring down at her. “That's what you're doing, when you play detective around town here. You think it will all turn out well, but innocent people get hurt. It happened last time—”

“You can't say he was exactly innocent,” Liza protested.

“Maybe not. But his life was ruined, then ended. You can ruin somebody's life this time, too.”

Like I'd rat out poor Curt for working his mouth about something he shouldn't when he could barely keep his eyes open
, she thought angrily.

She opened her mouth to say so, but Kevin abruptly turned his back to her, thumping down so heavily the whole booth shook.

He clearly wasn't in the mood to talk anymore.

Liza finished her coffee in silence and went up to pay the check.

Walking along Main Street to City Hall, she tried to sort out the thoughts playing leapfrog through her brain. Images of Chissel smashing windows—or Chissel and Hake committing the vandalism—danced in her mind's eye. They were really hard to accept. Chissel didn't strike her as the kind of guy to get his hands dirty. Then why had there been broken glass on him?

Suppose he'd tried to
stop
someone from smashing the windows?

Hmm…It was at least possible.

Obviously, that didn't work out well
, Liza thought. She was just passing Schilling's Pharmacy with the disfiguring plywood still covering half the display windows as Nora Schilling came out the door.

Nora sighed. “It's an eyesore, but we're still not sure whether or when we can get a replacement window up.”

Liza's anger at the vandal flared up. These weren't big retail-chain mall stores, where a broken window might represent a fraction of a percent of the bottom line. They were mom-and-pop operations hanging on with their teeth and toenails.

“You'd have to have a sick mind to do something like this,” she said.

Nora blinked, as if struck by the thought. “I—I suppose you're right,” she said.

As she continued walking down the street, Liza tried to recover her train of thought. Right—Chissel trying to stop the vandal. Her mind immediately threw up a hard-to-dismiss objection. Why would an out-and-out scumball like Chissel stick his neck out—literally, as events proved—to help the Main Street merchants he was screwing over?

Did he hope it would make him some kind of hero?
Liza wondered.
Or…

She suddenly envisioned Hake, taking a tactic from their old playbook, smashing the windows. Chissel moves to stop him. An argument ensues, and Chissel ends up stretched out on the pavement.

The only problem was that if this scenario were true, Chissel should be carrying a mark from whatever was breaking the windows. Liza hadn't noticed any.

“Of course, I only saw his head,” she told herself. “Maybe the blow that took him down landed somewhere else on his body.”

Liza slowed up, realizing she was suddenly surrounded by news vans. “Great time to come down here,” she groused, “right in the middle of the daily briefing.” Still, she decided to join the rest of the locals checking out the show.

The natives might not be restless, but the newspeople definitely were. At the top of the stairs leading to the City Hall entrance, Brenna Ross looked harassed as annoyed questions bombarded her.

“You can't tell us the cause of death?”

“Is there a reason why the Sheriff's Department is withholding so much information?”

“Doesn't the public have a right to know?”

“The Sheriff's Department is attempting to conduct a thorough investigation as quickly as possible,” Brenna replied. “Much information is not available yet. In the meantime we continue working to protect and serve the citizens.”

Behind the glass doors of City Hall, Liza made out Ray Massini, his face like a thundercloud.

He ought to be glad he's not the one having to field questions
, Liza thought.
Brenna is doing a damn good job with very little ammunition.

A heavy hand on her shoulder spun Liza around. “You're the bitch that shoved a bug up Massini's shorts about me breaking the windows on Main Street.” Deke Jannsky's angry face was almost nose to nose with her. In a weird way, the wash of beer-and-cigarette breath brought Liza back to he days when she was a little kid and her dad came home after a couple of quick ones with his fellow Pacific Bell linemen.

Of course, Dad apparently bathed and brushed his teeth a lot more.

“So stop screwing around with me, or you'll regret it.” Jannsky stormed off down the street even as people in the crowd began to turn their way.

Moments later, the briefing ended in mutually insincere good wishes. Liza made her way around to the side entrance. Massini was nowhere to be found as she entered the sheriff's office.

Sheriff Clements leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head, watching a portable television where two talking heads discussed how terrible it was that his department didn't gush more information.

“So,” Clements asked, “come to complain about Deke Jannsky running his mouth at you?”

“I can't believe the cameras caught that.” Liza nodded toward the TV. “So I guess you have great sources.”

“The mayor's been politicking the DA to get after Deke, and your name leaked out somewhere.” Clements sat up straighter. “Since you didn't answer with an immediate ‘Yes! Squash him like a bug, Sheriff!' I imagine there's something else you'd like to discuss.”

“It's just something my partner passed along—you may have it already.” Liza related the story Michelle had told her about Hake's ploy to bolster Chissel's negotiating position with the store franchisees by smashing their display windows.

“Supposedly he was caught near one of those vandalism sites with some sort of tool, but the store owner declined to press charges.” She finished. “I wasn't sure if that would actually go into a record somewhere. Anyway, I thought it was something you ought to hear.”

“As a matter of fact, we didn't get a hit on that. Can you tell me where this incident took place?” Clements asked.