Tacked to Death (16 page)

Twenty-Three

What Michaela viewed on those tapes was
completely scandalous. They were appalling, so much so that she had
to fast-forward through quite a bit of it. All she could do was
repeat the word wow over and over again, and shake her
head.

All the tapes, except one, displayed a
story of a love affair, if that's what it could be called. More of
an erotic affair. The stars were Sterling and a woman she had never
seen before, and they did things on those tapes together that she
had no clue were even possible. One tape featured some other gal
with Sterling. Probably a one-night stand. Is this what Juliet had
discovered—that Sterling had this disgustingly perverted side to
him? Had he taped her?

Michaela had never seen an X-rated
movie—never had an inclination to—but what she saw on the tapes was
likely way up there in that category. It was actually gross. The
thing was, it became obvious to Michaela that the woman who was on
most of the tapes had no clue she was starring in them. At the end
of the last tape, which she assumed was the most recent one taken,
Sterling sat by himself at the end of his bed. He slicked back his
hair with his hands, sighed, and started speaking:

"As you can see, Carolyn, we've had
quite a run, and I'm sure Charles will not be a happy man when he
receives these tapes. Don't bother destroying them. I have a few
copies in select places. You've been charming and fun and it is
obvious that you make an excellent star, but you have not come
through for me as you had promised." He raised his voice now,
sounding like a madman. Ha! Michaela had always sensed there was
something lurking underneath that suave, smooth exterior and here
it was, coming out of him as a freakish pervert. "You, my dear,
promised to get me back in good with the family and make sure my
allowance not only matched what it once was, but was increased
substantially. You've failed miserably. I am now giving you, as of
today, one week to make good on your promises, or else something
tells me that you won't be getting a dime of the Taber fortune once
the family sees this. I don't have much more to lose, but you, my
dear, have what, forty, fifty million that would slip out of your
nasty little hands—which I love, by the way. One week, Carolyn. One
week."

With that the tape finished up. The
date flashed across the screen. It was almost a week to the day
before Sterling was murdered.

Holy flying horse pucky. Who was the
woman who had made promises to Sterling that she couldn't
keep?

* * *

Michaela wracked her brain and went
over everything about three hundred times. At least it felt that
way. Finally, at about 1:30 in the morning, she started to drift
off to sleep, and that's when she heard it. At first it was like
the moment when falling asleep as the body drifts into that next
stage, almost as if the soul is being shaken loose—the body jerks
and then a deep sleep follows. The jerk came, but not the sleep. A
noise in the house. She sat up and listened. Had she started
dreaming? No. There it was again—in the kitchen. What if someone
was rummaging for a weapon—a knife? She quietly slid out of bed and
tiptoed over to her bedroom door; she kept a baseball bat behind
it. She now realized that she should've been keeping it next to her
bed. What good would it have done her if whoever was down there had
made it upstairs without her hearing? The phone. She needed to get
to the phone and call 911. Dammit, she'd left the portable phone in
her office. She wished for the day when phones couldn't travel all
over the house, when they had cords on them and were stationary.
Yes, that would've worked much better right about now.

She heard a creaking sound. Whoever was
there now climbed the stairs. She gripped the bat tighter and hid
behind the door. She stood still as she watched a figure enter the
room. It was not a man, but a woman, and as Michaela switched on
the light, she was stunned to see Juliet Mitchell spin around and
point a gun at her.

Twenty-Four

“
Juliet! What in the hell are
you doing?” Michaela white-knuckled the baseball bat, poised and
ready to swing. "Put the gun down."

"Give me the letter!" Juliet yelled.
Her tearstained face was streaked in black from mascara. She did
not look well, and if Michaela was right, she smelled of
alcohol.

"Juliet, let's talk about this.
Rationally. You put the gun down and I'll put the bat down and we
can talk. Okay?"

"Give me the letter. I won't let you
ruin my life!"

"I don't want to ruin your life. Let's
talk."

"No. You don't understand."

"Tell me then, what don't I
understand?"

"Juliet, put the gun down!" Zach
Holden, standing behind the girl, looked as horrified as Michaela
felt. "Please, Jules. This won't solve anything. Let's work
together on this."

Michaela wasn't too sure she should be
relieved to see Zach or not, but if he could get Juliet to put the
gun down, she at least would still have the bat in her
hands.

"Why should I? If anything happens to
my dad, then what good is any of this? Especially after what you
told me tonight!"

"Juliet, all I was trying to say is
that we're young and we don't need to rush anything. This has
nothing to do with your father."

"It has everything to do with my dad!
Everything. You're just like Sterling. All you want is one thing."
Positioned between Zach and Michaela, Juliet weaved a bit to the
side. Michaela looked for the right moment to pounce. But she had
no idea where Zach stood in all of this.

"My dad only wants to protect me and I
thought that was what you wanted, too." She turned away from
Michaela and pointed the gun at Zach.

"That's not true," Zach replied. "I'm
sorry about tonight. You surprised me is all. I thought we agreed
to take things slow. The marriage thing, it was out of the blue.
You've got to admit that. But, I'm not opposed to getting married
at some point."

Michaela saw that Zach was trying to
save his skin, but she hoped it wasn't as obvious to the girl. "I
believe him, Juliet. Give me the gun and you and Zach can go and
work things out."

"Give me back the letter. We know you
were at Sterling's tonight. It had to be you. You overheard us in
the barn at the polo field." Juliet slumped to the floor, and
Michaela and Zach both seized the opportunity. Zach wrapped his
arms tightly around her, and shook the gun out of her hand, and
Michaela quickly picked it up. She didn't want to aim it at anyone,
but she needed the power right now. Still, instead of turning it on
either one of them, she simply held it, while Zach wrestled with
Juliet, who finally calmed down and began crying into his
shoulder.

Michaela had a lot of questions and she
was in no mood to not have them answered. "Okay, it's truth time
for all of us. I know about the letter and what it says. What you
wrote in there, Juliet, is disturbing to say the least. It's
obvious to me that you and Zach are protecting your father because
he murdered Sterling, and I have been made the fall guy. Frankly I
don't care how it was done, but you two are going to tell the
police. And—how in the hell did you get into my house?" Her body
quickly filled with a heated rage. Tomorrow she planned to start
looking for a new four-legged companion.

"The letter…yes, Juliet wrote it," Zach
said.

"Got that much. Why don't we start with
tonight, Juliet? How did you get in here?"

"Your kitchen window was cracked and I
crawled through."

Here Michaela thought she'd been
careful when she locked up each night. Living in the back forty
wasn't apparently as safe as it once was. "Did you actually think
you would find the letter and get out of here without me knowing?
And you." She turned to Zach. "How did you get in, and how do you
play into all of this other than wanting to protect Juliet and—from
what I gather—keep on jumping her bones?"

Zach sighed. "We went out tonight. We
figured that you'd overheard us in the barn talking about the
letter and then when we got into Sterling's place, we knew it had
to be you who was there. We tried to figure out how we could get
the letter from you."

"How did you know that I even had
it?"

"We didn't for sure, but we needed to
know. Juliet drank more than usual and she was talking nonsense
about coming here and confronting you and getting the letter back.
I told her that we needed to wait until tomorrow and then we could
all have a sensible discussion about it."

"I would've appreciated that, rather
than having a gun pointed at me." Michaela wasn't completely buying
their story. For all she knew they'd come here to kill
her.

"I told her it was crazy, and we argued
about other stuff."

"Uh-huh."

"When I dropped her off at home, I had
a bad feeling that she might do something stupid, which she did. I
called her a few times and when she finally answered she said that
she was on her way to get the letter from you."

"So, you drove out here and obviously
saw how she'd gotten in, made your way in as well, and here we all
are—the three musketeers." She turned to the inebriated Juliet.
"You're lucky you didn't kill yourself or someone else in your
condition," Michaela snapped. "Okay, the letter. I'm not giving it
back, and seeing how I now have the gun in my possession, we're
going to call the police and the two of you are going to tell them
everything that you know."

"We didn't do anything!" Juliet cried.
"We didn't kill Sterling."

"I believe that. But you did break into
my house and hold a gun on me, and I think you're protecting your
dad, who may have killed him." Michaela tried to change her tone to
one of empathy. She understood the need to protect a parent. Over
the years she'd shielded her own father, who had fought his
gambling addictions on and off, but this was far worse. Juliet was
protecting her father from murder and had involved Zach to a point
that the two of them could possibly be considered as
accomplices.

"She's right, Juliet," Zach
said.

"No. We don't know for sure it was my
dad."

"Can I ask you what you told your
father and why you think he might have killed Sterling?" She looked
at Zach. "Does it have to do with Rebecca Woodson's death? I know
about last summer."

Zach nodded. "I'm the one who told
Juliet about that. I saw her getting serious over Sterling and I
knew that his intentions weren't always honest. He was known for
telling a woman one thing and then doing another. I thought he was
stringing her along like he had Rebecca, and I didn't want her to
get hurt."

"Do you believe that Sterling had
something to do with Rebecca's death?"

He shrugged. "I don't know what to
believe. I was driving home the night of the party. Sterling denies
he had anything to do with Rebecca going off that pier, but Tommy
Liggett was there and he confided in me that he saw Sterling follow
Rebecca out on that deck. Look, Sterling was a complicated guy and
I didn't know if Juliet could trust him."

"You and Sterling were friends,
though."

He laughed. "Sterling had a lot of
friends. He had friends out of convenience. When it worked for him,
then it was all good. If there was someone better to hang out with,
though, he'd leave you high and dry. People understood that about
him. The only real buddy he ever had was Justin Nightingale. When
Justin was alive those two were tight."

Robert and Paige's son. That part of
the web had not been unraveled enough just yet, but she had to take
it one step at a time. "And this didn't bother you? You went and
hung out with him for a part of your summer."

"I was only in Santa Barbara for a
weekend."

"I feel sick," Juliet said.

"Sit down," Michaela told her and
pointed to her reading chair and ottoman in the corner of the room.
The danger appeared to be over, and before she picked up the phone
and called Peters she wanted to try and get as many answers as she
could out of these two, although it looked as if Juliet was going
to pass out.

She turned back to Zach. "Why did you
go to the coast with Tommy and Sterling?"

"Why not? Tommy had been out there
already with him for a month and said it was a blast. Sterling paid
for everything. I thought it would be cool, so I went."

"And you met Rebecca
Woodson."

Zach nodded. "Everyone met Rebecca.
Total party girl, who wanted more from Sterling than he could give,
but he fed her lines, you know—stuff like she could come visit him.
He even told her he'd get her a place to stay in the desert. Stupid
stuff for him to say, because we all knew that he wouldn't live up
to it. I left because I was kind of over the scene and his
bull."

"Do you think Ed Mitchell killed
Sterling?"

"I don't know. I think he's very
protective of Juliet and he'd do anything for her."

"And so would you."

"Yes," he replied quietly.

"Even if it meant sending an innocent
woman to jail."

"I'm sorry. You have to
understand—"