The Readaholics and the Gothic Gala (18 page)

“Many a murder's been done for less,” Maud concurred. “Look—isn't that the turnoff for the staff lot?”

I swung the van to the right, taking the unmarked
side road that led toward the small lot. A scrim of trees veiled it from the main road, probably so the rich homeowners could maintain the illusion that house elves and yard fairies kept their homes and acreages clean and mowed. We came around a bend, and the lot lay in front of us, shielded by another thin belt of trees from the golf course. It contained a black scooter chained to a pine tree, a grimy pickup truck with plastic sheeting duct-taped over the broken passenger window, an ancient sedan plastered with bumper stickers promoting everything from Save the Manatee to the right to life, and a station wagon. A tan station wagon with Illinois plates. Satisfaction and anticipation rose in me. We'd found it.

“T
here it is,” Maud said. She unbuckled and started to get out of the van before I'd come to a complete stop.

“Wait,” I said. “We have to call Hart. I promised him.”

She made a face, but stayed put. I dialed Hart's cell phone number and when he answered, I told him we'd found the station wagon.

“Great work,” he said. “I'll be there in fifteen. Don't touch the car. Where did you say this lot is?”

I gave him directions and hung up to see Maud giving me a sly grin. “You slept with him.”

My face warmed. How could she tell that from the thirty-second conversation I'd had with him?

“There's something in your voice,” she answered my unspoken question. “Good for you. He seems like a stand-up guy, for a cop.”

“I like him a lot,” I said, not able to keep a big smile off my face. Not wanting to get into a discussion about Hart and our relationship—talking about it might jinx it—I leaned over to pick up Trent Van Allen's file from the floor. “Here.” I handed it to Maud. “Something to entertain us until Hart gets here. It's the dossier on
Trent Van Allen. Read it out loud—I haven't had a chance to look through it yet.”

Her long, tanned fingers flipped quickly through the three pages the file contained. She returned to the beginning and began reading. “Trent Van Allen. Born Pocatello, Idaho, April 12, 1973. That makes him forty-three. His Social's been blacked out—too bad because I could have discovered everything there is to know about him with that.” She rubbed her long nose with her forefinger and resumed reading. “Enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1990. It says here he was infantry. Saw action in Kuwait during Desert Storm. Purple Heart, Commendation Medal. Two lines blacked out here, too. Transferred to Camp Pendleton. Honorable discharge in 1996.” She looked up from the folder. “I wonder why he left the marines. It seems like he was good at it.”

I shrugged. “Tired of getting shot at? Tired of taking orders?”

“He got a job at Jose's Repair and Body Shop in Barstow. Desolate place, Barstow. Hot, dry, windy, where I-40 and I-15 hook up. Two years after he shed his uniform, he got busted for drugs—cocaine. Possession with intent to distribute. A few more drug busts after that, a two-year stint in a California prison, and then he relocated to the East Coast, looks like Virginia for a while and then New Jersey.”

“That's probably where he met Sharla,” I said. The greenhouse effect was warming the car, so I opened my door to let a breeze in. A slightly noxious smell came with it and I wrinkled my nose.

“Looks like he got mixed up with stealing cars for
chop shops, maybe mob-related, if the names of his known associates are anything to go by: Louie ‘Big Lou' DiLuzio, Andreas ‘the Carp' Fezatte, Gina ‘Mama G' Umstine.” She looked at me. “What would my mob nickname be, if I were a ‘made' woman?”

I laughed at the idea. “Fast Fingers Maud?” I mimed typing on a keyboard. “We could shorten it to an acronym: F2M, or F-Squared M.”

“You could be the Organizer. Amy-Faye ‘the Organizer' Johnson. It sounds sinister in that context.” She resumed reading. “He did three years in a New Jersey prison for grand theft auto. He got a light sentence because he ratted out his partner, the aforementioned Big Lou. When he got out, he apparently drifted to Illinois, where he resumed his old activities and added some armed robbery—a couple of banks. Back to prison he went. Did four years. Got paroled five weeks ago. It says here he never met with his parole officer. Must have skipped town immediately, a violation of his parole.” She shook her head.

“So where did a guy who's been in prison or hanging with lowlifes and stealing cars most of his adult life get something that he thought he could sell to someone associated with the Celebration of Gothic Novels?”

Before Maud could speculate, Hart's Tahoe came around the corner in a cloud of dust. He parked beside the van, on Maud's side, and got out, wearing a sport coat and olive green slacks. The wind riffled his brown hair. He greeted us. The smile in his eyes as they met mine made me tingle and I almost forgot why we were there. I remembered when he pulled a crowbar out of
the back of the SUV, and disposable gloves from his pocket. He didn't object when Maud and I followed him to the car. As we got closer, the stench I'd noticed earlier got stronger.
Uh-oh.

“Reeks,” Maud observed.

I nodded, concentrating on breathing shallowly through my mouth. Hart's expression was grim. I'd read enough police procedurals to know what the odor likely meant. There was a body hidden in the car. I couldn't imagine whose it could be. Had Van Allen had a partner Sharla hadn't mentioned? She might not have known. As far as I knew, no one from Heaven had gone missing. The station wagon's windows were tinted, and it had one of those pull-across screens that hid the contents of the back section from view. A sun visor lay across the dash. Hart tried all the doors, but they were locked. The Volkswagen was so ancient that he had no trouble popping the two front doors with a slim jim he took from his coat pocket. He left them ajar, letting the air circulate.

“You might want to stand back,” he said, inserting the tip of the crowbar under the lip of the station wagon's access hatch.

I shuffled backward a few feet, but Maud inched in closer. Positioning the crowbar near the lock, Hart leaned into it. Metal creaked. Pumping on the tool, Hart put his whole weight into it. The lock popped with a screeching bang that made me jump. The hatch flew up, barely missing Hart's chin. A wave of fetid, rotting air rolled out, almost viscous in its intensity. I gagged. Maud pulled a pot of Carmex from her pocket
and calmly rubbed some beneath her nose. She offered the pot to me, but I declined. Hart found the release button that freed the screen drawn across the back of the station wagon and it sprang back, rolling up in its case.

At first I couldn't process what I was seeing. The body was bloated and swollen. Its head was canted at an awkward angle and its fur matted with blood. It was a deer, a small doe, probably from this spring's crop of fawns. I flopped over from the waist, giddy with relief that it wasn't a human body. Hart circled the car again, bending over to inspect the grille, and then came over to put a hand on my back.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded. “I thought it was going to be a body.”

“There's front-end damage,” he said. “Van Allen must have hit the deer on his way to the Club. I guess he loaded it up, thinking to get some venison steaks out of it. Then, of course, he never came back and it's been baking in the back of that wagon for a week. Damned if I know who to call about this. I need to search the car, but until that carcass is out of there, I'm not going near it.”

“I know a couple of guys,” Maud said, punching a number on her cell phone. “They're dead-animal removers. Usually they deal with livestock, but I'm sure they can handle the deer.”

Maud's guys said they'd come. I used the intervening half hour before they showed up to tell Hart about my encounter with the Stewarts, husband and wife, not brother and sister. He winced when I described them
kissing, but looked interested when I told him they were legally married. “At least,” I added, “that's what they say now. I suppose they could be lying about that, but I don't know why they would. I'm ninety-nine percent convinced that they stole Eloise Hufnagle's book, like she claims, and they've been doing this charade so she won't connect them.”

“They'd have been smarter to stay away from each other completely,” Maud pointed out, “but I guess the newlyweds didn't want to give up their, ahem, marital intimacies for what might be a year or more. So, they may well end up losing out on millions because they couldn't keep their hands off each other for a few months. I'll bet the disappointment and blaming takes more of a toll on their marriage than being separated would have.”

“You talk like it's a foregone conclusion that Mary Stewart will lose the court case,” I said.

Maud gave me a pointed look. “I suspect word will get back to Eloise Hufnagle somehow, don't you?”

Now that she put it that way, I did indeed think Eloise was likely to find out about the secret marriage. The words “secret marriage” made me think of gothic romances and I thought it ironic that Mary Stewart should be living out so many of the clichés of her genre.

When the knackers arrived, Maud and I strolled through the narrow greenbelt to the edge of the golf course. Clouds scudded the sky now, and I zipped my fleece jacket against the chill. I did not need to watch the doe being pulled out of the station wagon. Hart stayed, saying he had a responsibility to oversee the
operation and safeguard any evidence. Once through the strand of scraggly oaks and small pines, Maud and I found ourselves midway down the fairway for the fourteenth hole with a clear view of the Club across another fairway and the eighteenth green.

“Wouldn't have taken him more than seven, eight minutes to walk from here to the Club,” Maud said, narrowing her eyes to measure the distance. “Maybe ten in the dark.”

I tried to put myself in Van Allen's place, imagining the walk across the manicured grass, dodging sand traps. He could enter the Club through the pro shop—I tried to remember what time it closed on a Saturday night—or walk around to the front. He had either bought a ticket for the gala earlier in the day, possibly from Gemma, or paid at the door. Once inside he had . . . what? Gotten a drink, helped himself to a plate of hors d'oeuvres, and gone searching for the person he had come to find. Had he set up a meeting, or had he just known the person would be there?

“It was prearranged,” Maud said when I asked her opinion. Her pale blue eyes looked almost gray in proximity to her gray Windbreaker. She still had it open, apparently unfazed by the cold and stiffening breeze. “He was going to trade whatever he had—information, photos, valuable object—for money and hightail it out of Colorado. Why take the risk of meeting the target twice?”

That made sense. “So he met up with his mark and they went to the office, or they had prearranged to meet in Wallace's office, which would suggest a pretty good knowledge of the Club's layout.”

Cocking her head, Maud gave it some thought. “I think the office was spur-of-the-moment, a deserted and quiet place to have a conversation and do the trade.”

“They couldn't have done the trade there,” I pointed out. “Not if Van Allen left whatever it was in the station wagon. And I can't see the blackmailee traipsing around the costume party lugging a briefcase or gym bag full of money. I can't imagine Van Allen was prepared to take a check or a credit card.” I tried to remember if I'd seen anyone Saturday night with a duffel or a box, but no one came to mind.

“Okay,” Maud said. “So they were going to do the swap at the car. One of their cars. No one with half a brain would be willing to hike across the golf course to this lot with an ex-con, so my guess is that Van Allen was going to come back here, get the ‘package'”—she put air quotes around it—“and rendezvous with the mark at his or her car, where he'd get the money.”

“He wasn't in costume, not masked,” I mused, “which seems to mean he didn't mind the victim knowing who he was.”

“Interesting point,” Maud agreed, nodding.

Before we could dissect the events of Saturday night further, Hart called us back. We found him standing beside the station wagon, empty of everything except fluids and stench. We carefully positioned ourselves upwind, and I was suddenly grateful for the colder air and the gusty breeze. He had stripped off his sport coat and donned a white coverall that zipped up the front, paper booties, and a puffy cap like surgeons wear. I
knew he wasn't so much protecting his clothes from deer blood as protecting what might be a crime scene from the introduction of outside elements, namely, his hair and fibers from his clothes. I'd read enough Patricia Cornwell and Tess Gerritsen to know how easily evidence is mucked up by improper crime scene protocols.

“I thought you might want to be here when I searched the car,” Hart said. “Your reward for finding it.” He flashed a smile.

“You're not so bad, Hart,” Maud said. “I may have to reevaluate my opinion of your species.”

He looked a bit taken aback. “Men?”

“Cops.”

Hart laughed, and then eased the passenger-side door wider with his elbow. Trying to touch as little as possible, he went through the glove box first. “Nothing in here but the registration, a bunch of napkins, and this.” He straightened, displaying a gun, which dangled from his forefinger by the trigger guard. He sniffed at the barrel but didn't comment before tucking it into a plastic evidence bag.

Maud and I went around to the driver's door and peered in, able to see nothing more exciting than stains and pebbles on the worn mats, a tin of chewing tobacco, what looked like receipts tucked under the sun visor, and a half-full bag of cheese puffs. Hart worked his way methodically from the front seat to the back, finding nothing more. Finally, the three of us gathered around the open hatch at the back. Hart eyed the blood-soaked carpet with distaste.

“Only place left to look is under there.” He nodded
to the stiff piece of flooring that covered the spare tire's hidey-hole. Hooking his fingers under the cover, he lifted it.

Maud and I crowded closer, looking over his shoulder. All I saw was the spare tire and the jack and lug wrench tucked into a niche. Hart lifted the tire out and ran his fingers inside the rim, but then shook his head. “Nada.”

Disappointment flowed through me. I'd been so sure we were on the verge of figuring out why Van Allen had been killed, and probably by whom.

“Is it possible that the gun is what Van Allen was selling?” Maud asked. She stood with her hands on her hips, a line between her brows. “Perhaps it was used in the commission of a crime and has the murderer's fingerprints on it.”