Fee took a few minutes to wash up, brush her hair into some semblance of neatness, if not style, and to put on a smear of lipstick. She seldom went anywhere requiring make-up, but she had samples she could pull out as needed. She’d developed the habit of scrimping and saving at a very young age, knowing the advantage of having a cushion for the times when she lost her home or job. It had happened so frequently in her life that she knew every trick in the book. Learning how to handle her hard-earned cash was the reason she’d taken bookkeeping in high school and accounting at the community college.
It wasn’t as if she could take courses in how to identify smells.
Snuggling Sukey, letting the little dog lick her for reassurance, Fee had her backpack ready by the time the mayor returned. He looked as if he’d spiffed up a little too, and that gave her a thrill. It shouldn’t. He probably did it because he was a town official going to police headquarters, but she liked to think he’d put on that tailored khaki jacket and attempted to brush his hair out of his eyes for her. Which was silly. She hadn’t put on lipstick for him, had she? She’d done it just to put her best face forward.
“Your carriage awaits, milady,” he said with a gallant bow and sweep of his arm.
The men she’d dated usually had motorcycles and met her in bars. She wasn’t entirely certain how to act with an upscale, educated politician who owned a corporation and treated her as if she were as important as he. He even opened the trunk to pull out a blanket for Sukey to sleep on.
“You keep a football in your trunk?” she asked, studying the clutter.
“My trophy football. And the bat that won every game back in high school.” He slammed the trunk shut. “I have to keep them locked up or my mother’s minions would throw them out.”
A jock. She’d known that just from looking at him. One whose mother wasn’t proud of his talent?
Letting Sukey give her one last lick, she threw the blanket on the back floorboard with her backpack. Once the dog curled up, she settled into the luxurious leather of the BMW’s front seat. “I could get used to this,” she muttered, drinking in the rich scent.
“Better not,” he advised. “I’m probably selling it. I bought it when I was young and wanted to show off.” He waited for Aaron’s van to start up, then pulled out of the lot.
“The cost of one of these would make a nice down payment on a café,” she agreed, pondering why he would sell the pretty car. “I won’t even waste money on a fancier bike.”
“Good practice for anyone who lives up here,” he agreed. “Is that your aim, then, owning your own place?”
She really wanted to trust this man who smelled of integrity, but experience had taught her caution. He was a figure of authority, who could ruin everything with a snap of his well-meaning fingers. She shrugged. “Everyone has a dream. Why are you planning to sell your pretty car?”
“I need a place to live, and my income and my lifestyle don’t match. If I’m staying in Hillvale, I don’t need this piece of flash. If I didn’t have to keep up appearances, I could probably drive a motorcycle.”
She really did attract the biker sort. She swallowed a chuckle. “Appearances?”
“I still have to go to business meetings in the city and Sacramento and whatever. I wear my suit and tie and offer to take important people to lunch. I can’t do that on a bike.”
“That sounds like sedate sedan territory,” she said solemnly.
“Yeah. Maybe I could buy the bike and just rent a Mercedes when I needed it.” Sounding disgruntled, he took the car into a curve with the smoothness of a professional driver.
“Have you had any word about the poor man Sukey found?” She figured they’d taken the car topic as far as it should go.
“Walker is keeping in touch with the hospital. The guy is still alive. He may lose the leg. They’re looking for family. We have Mariah hunting down his background.”
“Mariah? Why? Is she a detective?” Fiona had been wondering about the pregnant, black-haired woman who seemed to wield such authority with the other Lucys.
“No, Walker is the one who owns the detective agency. But he’s trying to be scrupulous about keeping his city work separate from his private work. Hillvale doesn’t have a budget for detectives, and his agency needs to be able to bill people for their time. Mariah offers to do the computer work for free. For now. I think she’s opening some kind of company of her own, but I’m not trying to figure out what she does.”
Fiona tried to digest that but computer searches were above her pay grade. She just liked keeping her name out of them. She could wield a spreadsheet and a bookkeeping program. That’s all she needed. “I’m glad Sukey found him before he died, but I wish I knew why he was there. He wasn’t living on the mountain, was he?”
“Walker said there was no evidence of it. I saw him and another guy near an older model Lincoln last night. I haven’t seen the Lincoln since, so I’m not sure if it was his or not. We’re waiting to hear if he gains consciousness. The hospital said he’s mostly hallucinating and not making much sense right now.”
He drove with confidence through the town Fiona remembered from her long bike trip up here. She’d stopped for coffee and a rest. The place didn’t look any different in daylight from any other town she’d seen. There was the discount store where she could pick up treats for Sukey, next to a grocery, restaurant, and dentist. Not upscale by any means, so she didn’t feel out of place.
Monty swerved the car into the lot of an official-looking concrete building. Aaron’s van pulled in after him.
“I need to go in, have someone unlock the car lot,” Monty told her, turning off the ignition. “Want to come with me?”
“I’d rather go across the street to the store, but if you won’t be inside long, I’ll wait here and walk Sukey.”
The dog yipped at her name. Fiona figured Monty wasn’t happy with her choice, but she didn’t have to make him happy. She pulled Sukey into her arms and rummaged for the new leash. “What did Orville do with my rope and the old collar?”
“He was planning on leaving them at your place after he ran an X-ray on the collar. He said some pet owners are peculiar and put ID inside the leather. They want to be able to identify their animal, but not allow others to identify them.”
“That’s just dumb.” Fiona climbed out and set Sukey down to sniff. She waved at Aaron as he climbed out of his van but kept her distance.
She had once thought it might be fun to be around people who might be as weird as she was. She was currently doubting that notion. She really didn’t like Aaron knowing her greatest fear or whatever it was he did. She now had an inkling of understanding of why people got weirded out around her.
The men returned with a security guard who unlocked the car lot and took them to the smashed Jag—a car that had removed a big-hearted woman from the world for no reason. Fiona lingered behind, feeling awkward.
She wanted to ask about Peggy’s family, especially her little girl, but it wasn’t as if she knew Peggy’s family, so maybe she should just stay out of it. Keeping her distance, she watched Aaron study the Jag’s driver seat, then adjust it for his long legs.
“The driver was shorter than I am,” she heard him say.
She cuddled Sukey from a safe distance. She really didn’t want to get near a killer car.
He climbed in, then extended his long fingers over the steering wheel as if reluctant to touch it. Knowing the stench of being near the cartel’s evil, Fiona almost gritted her teeth with him. She wondered if Aaron’s impressions of bad men were as ugly as their smell. Only someone wicked would have plowed down Peggy and kept on going.
Aaron let his hands drift just above the wheel until he apparently found what he was looking for. Fiona watched in fascination as he gripped the wheel where a driver’s hands might have held it.
He jolted backward, as if experiencing the sensation of hitting something. He clutched the wheel tighter, and his leg pushed down, as if accelerating. The car, of
course, didn’t go anywhere.
When he finally climbed out, he looked pale—paler—and grim. “Thank you.” He said to the security guard, then nodded and turned to Fee. “You try it.”
She stepped backward in shock. “Me?”
“He didn’t have a passenger. Get in on that side, see what you notice.” He even opened the passenger door for her—without wincing, she observed.
She glanced at Monty, but he merely crossed his arms and frowned. Okay, she’d never smelled a car before. . . Well, yes, she’d smelled Monty’s and thought it smelled rich. She just didn’t have much experience outside food.
Handing the leash to Monty, she sat down on the Jag’s passenger seat and immediately smelled fish, cartel fish.
Nine
Wednesday
Once they left the car lot, Monty placed his hand on Fiona’s arm so she didn’t run off. He didn’t know what she was or what she’d—smelled?—but she’d paled even more than Aaron had. Resigned, he signaled toward the street. “Coffee shop on the corner. Explanations required.”
If Monty were a mystical magical Lucy, he’d say Aaron had been revolted by the car, but Fee—looked as if a tarantula had crawled up her arm. As much as he didn’t want her to be a crazy Lucy, he’d learned that ignoring their information, no matter how peculiar, led to disaster. He didn’t need any more disasters on his watch. Torched mountains, exploding bluffs, and murder were more than enough.
Aaron grimaced at Monty’s command, but he was the one who’d demanded this expedition. Monty knew he wouldn’t like whatever he heard. He never liked it when the Lucys told him weirdness. Still, if these two could help identify the psycho who had killed a social worker in his town, he wanted the killer nailed, preferably to a telephone pole.
“Let me go to the store,” Fiona begged. “I can’t tell you anything.”
“Bullshit. You didn’t turn three shades of gray because of nothing. You didn’t even look like that after Peggy was hit.” Monty half-dragged her down the street. “If you know something Walker should know, I need to hear it.”
“I nearly threw up when Peggy was hit,” she argued. “Hard to see gray when I’m puking.”
Aaron opened the coffee shop door for them. “Trust him. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
Monty felt a modicum of gratification at that admission. Aaron was an astute businessman and world traveler. He hadn’t achieved his success by being naïve.
At this hour of the day, the coffee shop was occupied by a few people using it as an office, clicking away on their devices. Monty selected a table away from them while Aaron went to the counter to put in their orders. Fiona had asked for one of the fancier drinks, a chai latte, whatever that was. So she wasn’t entirely the poverty-stricken waif—unless, of course, she’d worked in a coffee shop. He didn’t know a damned thing about her.
“Aaron, you go first,” he ordered as the antique dealer took the chair between the ones he and Fiona had chosen.
“It was deliberate, as we suspected,” Aaron said with disgust. “I see the image of Peggy—or a slender female. It’s hard to differentiate between what the driver actually saw and what was in his thoughts. The emotions impress the image into the material, not logic. I’m not entirely certain the driver was rational—he enjoyed the impact too much.”
Monty watched Fiona, not Aaron. Her mouth was practically gaping. He used to be like that when the Lucys made their insane pronouncements. He’d learned to take it in stride. “What else?” he asked, because that wasn’t what had turned Aaron pale.
“The bicycle. The driver knew what the bike looked like, to the extent that anyone recognizes bikes—wide wheels, basket, blue.” Aaron slanted a glance at Fiona. “Like yours.”
She clasped her hands until the knuckles whitened, stared at them, and said nothing.
Monty got up to collect their order and bring it back to the table. “So the slender female could have been Fiona in the psycho’s thoughts? Or just any woman on a bike?”
Aaron shrugged. “No name attached. But there was the image of a dog. He’d been hunting for a dog and had just seen it.”
Monty clamped his hand over Fiona’s wrist as she seemed prepared to shove from the table. “Sukey was running loose that morning.”
The dog yipped obediently, and Monty released Fee to let her calm the mutt in her backpack before it got them thrown out. “Anything else?” he asked of Aaron.
The antique dealer shook his dark hair. “Just the satisfaction the driver felt when the car slammed into the bike. The driver was soulless evil.”
Attuned to Fiona, Monty practically heard her swallow. She reached for her paper cup and inhaled as if the tea were an asthma nebulizer and she was suffocating.
He gave her a moment to calm down, then caught her wrist again, pinning her to the table. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. With anyone else, that was a bad sign. With Fiona. . . He just didn’t know. She never looked anyone in the eyes if she could avoid it. He wanted her story.
“Tell us, Fiona,” he demanded. “A killer didn’t come targeting a dog and a woman on a bike for no reason. Peggy didn’t have a dog. You do.”
Fiona wished for the power to turn invisible. She wanted to strike out, question the ridiculousness of waving hands over a steering wheel to obtain images, and redirect this conversation away from her.
She wanted to carve the mayor’s confining hand into bones—but only to escape his hold. She wasn’t someone who ran from problems. She got thrown out a lot. She ducked and hid, but she always stood up to trouble, sometimes to her detriment.
To avoid situations that would get her thrown out, she had trained herself not to speak up. But she was dying to question Aaron, who gave off the aroma of sincerity. Why was she stuck with this totally useless ability to smell what others didn’t? Life would be simpler if she could see things as Aaron did.
“I don’t know anything,” she finally protested. She couldn’t tell them the Jag smelled of cartel. Even she knew that sounded nuts, and she had a lifetime of unpleasant experiences to reinforce her tightlipped choice.
“Start with the dog,” Monty suggested. “Where did you find it?”
She took another deep breath of her chai latte and calmed down enough to see that made sense. She had to trust someone. She certainly couldn’t feel safe if the evil driver of that car was targeting Hillvale for any reason. And she didn’t have anywhere else to go—Hillvale had been her goal for so long, that she’d not planned beyond it.
“My last job was at a crappy diner down in Waterville,” she told them, hunting for words. It wasn’t as if she were used to talking. “It’s not in one of the nicer sections of town. I was there the night before I left for Hillvale. I’d just been fired, and I was furious. So I grabbed my stuff and walked out the front instead of the kitchen.”
Monty’s big hand stroked her bare arm as if she were a cat and he was petting her. Oddly, the touch made her feel a little better, as if she might be a decent person with a good reason to have been angry. Except she’d peppered a gangbanger’s cheesecake, so in his mind, Felix had been justified in firing her. He didn’t believe in defending his employees from creeps who hit on them. That was called a no-win situation, so she didn’t explain.
“I always left my bike chained to a street lamp when I worked the evening shift or the punks would have stripped it bare,” she continued, straining to remember details of a night she’d rather forget. “I unchained it, got on, and was about to leave when I heard shouting back by the kitchen, behind the building. As I said, it’s a lousy part of town. We hear gunshots regularly. I kept my head down and my eyes closed.”
Aaron muttered imprecations and Monty’s grip seemed a little angrier, but they didn’t interrupt to tell her she was an idiot. She already knew that, but she had to put food in her stomach somehow.
“But then I heard a dog yip as if hurt or trapped.” Fiona hid her wince, remembering. “I didn’t want punks torturing some innocent animal, so
I stopped. I could see down the side of the building, but it was dark. I could just make out the shadows of a couple of men beating up on another guy I kind of hoped was my ex-boss. I couldn’t really see Sukey, but she was yapping pretty loud. I thought maybe the dog was trying to defend her owner, but there wasn’t any way I was going down that alley.”
“First smart thing you’ve said yet,” Aaron muttered.
She shot him a glare. “Then one of the thugs turned and kicked, and I heard the dog howl in pain. I was already furious, so when Sukey ran out of the alley, I grabbed her. No dumb animal deserves to be mistreated. I threw her in my basket, and pedaled away as fast as I could. I heard a man calling Sukey, so I figured that was her name, but there was no way I was turning back.”
Monty released her to throw back his coffee as if it were gin. Aaron was the one who picked up the questioning.
“So you didn’t see the thugs, but they probably saw you under the streetlight? Did they try to follow you?”
Fiona shrugged. “No one got shot. They had no reason to care about me. No one ran out of the alley after the dog. I don’t like risking city streets in the dark, so I took my usual route through empty lots and alleys. Even if they’d bothered, they couldn’t have followed me unless they were on bikes. They have no way of knowing who I am or where I live. I just don’t see how any of this has anything to do with me.”
“But you went pale in the car, just as Aaron did,” Monty said in resignation. “You recognized something.”
Anywhere else, Fiona would figure this was the moment she got laughed out of town. But Aaron had just described impressions on a steering wheel, and Monty hadn’t scoffed. Aaron could have been putting on an act, but he smelled of integrity. The only reason she was talking like this was because she didn’t think he was a fake.
Azure Secrets Page 7
