Azure Secrets

by Patricia Rice

  “We don’t know. Walker has men watching the highway, but if they’ve seen anything, they haven’t let us know. It’s not as if we’ve explained what we’re doing.” Sam dropped the cukes into iced water.

  Fee wanted to take the knife away and show how it was done, but she needed to work quickly, before Haas conked out and Walker and Monty showed up looking for her.

  “Put Brenda on alert,” Fee warned. “Haas has diabetes and is drinking doubles. I didn’t have a lot to work with. Let me pull these basics together so I can go out and sniff Lee. I really need to learn what different kinds of guilt smell like.”

  “Besides fish?” Sam asked in worried amusement. “You’ll be feeding him fish. How will you sort it all out?”

  “I’ve never really tried,” Fee admitted. “Do you deliberately sort out whatever it is you do or just act instinctively?”

  “Instinctively, mostly,” Sam agreed. “It’s in the scent and feel of the dirt, the way the plant feels in my hands. . . so many things. I see what you mean. Food must be like that.” She thought about it. “And music and any kind of creative activity.”

  “If you poison that man in my restaurant, you’ll know what a pan upside your heads feels like,” Dinah threatened.

  “I don’t want to poison him. I want to see if he smells guilty or if he smells like Stacy. Did Aaron learn anything when he broke into Peggy’s apartment for Stacy’s blanket?” Fee began cutting seaweed sheets.

  “Not enough. He says Stacy’s toys reflected mostly happiness. Peggy’s things were. . . well, Aaron doesn’t say much. I just picked up the impression that Aaron thought she was miserable, resentful, and/or plotting—not exactly his words. I wish we had Teddy here to test Lee for emotion.” Sam removed her apron. “I’m experimenting with the plants I hung on the window. It’s almost time for Val to sing, so I need to go out there.”

  Sam was wearing a cream pant suit with a blue silk shirt that set off her platinum hair and blue eyes—a far cry from her usual jeans and t-shirt. They were all learning to push out of their comfort zones.

  Fee peeled strips off Sam’s cucumbers and rolled them up with the prepared rice and crabmeat. Dinah pointed at the sauces she’d prepared. Fee poured small amounts into sauce dishes and added them and the sushi rolls to a bamboo tray she’d found at Tullah’s thrift shop.

  She left her apron on. She wanted invisibility. As the clear, operatic notes of one of the death goddess’s operatic dirges emerged from the front room, Fee took courage from an inhalation of the kitchen’s comforting odors and carried the tray out.

  Someone had dimmed the lights for Val’s performance. Versatile Harvey was providing accompaniment on a violin. The house wasn’t full at this early hour. They’d tempted Lee with an invitation to an exclusive opportunity to test a new menu at Michelin’s “next five-star” restaurant.

  But the photos and message they’d sent separately from an anonymous source had been the persuading factor, Fee knew. The invitation had just been a way for Lee to cover his tracks.

  Fee noticed Cass sitting in a corner with her guests—more gourmands invited to give credence to the menu-tasting. Apparently city people were sufficiently bored to accept mysterious last-minute invitations when offered by the right people. Cass was well known in circles beyond Fee’s knowledge.

  Randall Lee was immediately identifiable. A distinguished older man wearing a tailored gray suit that complemented his silver hair, he sat with a slender woman of the same approximate age. Did bringing his wife mean Lee was innocent? That he hadn’t brought Stacy up here? He certainly didn’t look like an angry hornet.

  He nodded acknowledgment of the tray but kept his eyes focused on Val and Harvey as he drank his wine. Fee slipped away, trying not to gag on his odor of evil.

  Haas had been foul-smelling, but not on this level. Perhaps her reaction was simply to the unexpectedness of a pleasant gentleman emanating the odor of rotten fish and sewage. Plus the scent of innocent child—she’d caught a whiff of Stacy’s blanket smell.

  “Poison is too good for that festering abscess,” Fee growled at Mariah, who was posing as a waitress and waiting in the kitchen for her order.

  Mariah looked alarmed. “Thomas says Lee isn’t wearing a gun but might have a knife on him.”

  Mariah’s birth father was the restaurant’s maître d’. In his tux, hovering over the diners, he looked like a bandy-legged penguin with the wizened face of an ancient shaman. Fee figured he had weird gifts to match Mariah’s, but she didn’t know what they were.

  “Lee smells of Stacy.” Fee picked up a kitchen knife and whacked tuna, wishing it were the hornet’s fingers.

  Mariah covered her abdomen and went pale beneath her natural brown. Dinah shoved her on a stool before she passed out. “We were right? What the hell do we do now?”

  Fee’s mind whirled as she assembled ingredients. “Your spirits said he traveled with bodyguards. We need to know who they are. Can you talk to Keegan, find out if anyone has noticed any unusual activity that might indicate Lee has Stacy with him? I can’t do anything permanent until I know.”

  “Do I want to know the definition of permanent?” Mariah asked warily.

  “I can’t poison him in Dinah’s restaurant,” Fee said reassuringly. “All I really want to know is if we can get Stacy away, but I need help if we have to pry information out of him. I can use spices that appeal to his greed, feed his penchant for power, puff him up with importance—and then try to find the right questions to ask.”

  As she thought it out, she mentally chose ingredients to add to the basic sauces Dinah had prepared. “It would be good to know if Stacy can be kept safe before we really go all out.”

  Mariah eyed the seaweed strips Fee laid out and whacked. “Once he’s fed and puffed, he’ll be more susceptible to suggestion?”

  “Keeping in mind that I haven’t tried this since I persuaded my foster father to teach me to drive, that’s my hope. Lee is a toxic dump who needs to be eradicated. I don’t really care what happens to him as long as we have Stacy, but if we have to torture her location out of him, it could get ugly.” Fee deftly cut the sashimi-grade tuna into thin strips. “I can make him think he’s been poisoned and that we have the only antidote, but I’d much rather use passive persuasion.”

  “I’ll talk to Keegan and Cass. If Lee wasn’t expecting the lack of cell towers up here, he’s already handicapped.” Mariah departed on her mission.

  “How’d you learn to make that?” Dinah asked, waving her spoon at the cutting board.

  “Japanese cook in one of the restaurants I worked for. He taught me how to use knives. Probably the same way you learned to use spices.” Fee nodded at the scrumptious odors emanating from the stove.

  “You think I should put sushi on Delphines menu?” Dinah asked as she removed peppery fish from the oven.

  “As an appetizer, maybe, just for fun. But it’s not part of the reputation you want, is it?” Fee wanted to ask if Dinah would hand the café over to Monty, but now just wasn’t the time. She simply wanted to reassure the nervous chef with normal talk.

  Fiona knew what Lee smelled like now. She didn’t have to go back out front. She cut and pinched and rolled and let the waitstaff plate and deliver to the entire dining room, so it didn’t look as if anyone was being singled out. But Lee received the plates and sauces with the extra wasabi and spices the others didn’t need.

  Val had sung three sets and Fee had a refrigerator full of sushi before Mariah returned to the kitchen. “Keegan says there’s one of those tall Mercedes vans parked at the empty Weldon cabin that Monty’s been cleaning out. And if you want to poison anyone, you might want to start with the two thugs in the alley.”

  “Crap, crap, crap,” Fee chanted as she sliced an avocado into thin strips. “I’d have to smell them to find their allergies or weaknesses. Otherwise, it’s just basic food poisoning or ipecac, and strangely enough, I don’t keep either on hand.” She began reciting plants that might cause
nausea. “Aloe, amaryllis, avocado seeds. . .” She eyed the ones she’d just removed. “Do we want to kill them? I’m not sure of the toxicity level.”

  “We could beat them with our sticks instead,” Mariah suggested unhelpfully.

  “Put them to sleep,” Fee crowed, following that thought. “I can do that, although it won’t knock them unconscious, just slow them down.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, Lucretia. Keegan’s rounding up a rescue operation, and I don’t want him getting shot.” Mariah headed for the doorway into the café.

  “Don’t you get shot,” Fee called after her. “We’re all waiting to see if that baby comes out talking!”

  Mariah waved acknowledgment and disappeared into the front of the house—just as the squeal of brakes followed by a shattering boom brought the music to a dead halt.

  Slowing down to park at Delphines, Monty watched in incredulity as the white ghost bike in the parking lot rolled into the highway, directly into the path of Haas’s speeding Escalade.

  The bike rolled. By itself.

  Half-drunk and driving too fast, Haas slammed his brakes, but the bike crunched beneath the SUV’s wheels. The Escalade spun out of control.

  Monty winced as the monster car crashed into the town’s lone streetlamp, bending it almost to the point of snapping.

  Monty stopped his car behind the disabled vehicle. Following him, Walker halted his official vehicle and turned on the flashers, blocking the highway. Haas climbed shakily out of the driver’s seat. The man had imbibed too many whiskies before he’d received a call that had made him fade beneath his artificial tan. Refusing Monty’s offer of a meal or a room, Haas had run out.

  They’d feared he wouldn’t make it down the mountain, but the bike trick. . . may actually have saved the fool’s life.

  “How did he manage that?” Walker asked. “I know he’s drunk. I have a sheriff’s deputy waiting for him down the road. But the bike. . .”

  Glancing at the restaurant, seeing Cass watching out the window, Monty rubbed his eyes. “The bike rolled into him of its own accord,” Monty said, processing the image. “Like Peggy was on it.”

  Walker made a rude noise but didn’t have time to form a reply. Screaming incomprehensibly, a short woman with wild black curls emerged from a Lincoln stopped illegally on the street. The Escalade had nearly hit it.

  The Lincoln appeared untouched, but that didn’t matter to the raging virago who swung at Haas with a purse three times as large as Fee’s and probably a ton heavier. Weight didn’t slow the woman down. She whammed Haas upside the head, and when he staggered, hit him again from the other side, all the while shouting in what sounded like Spanglish.

  Walker headed for the woman. Monty aimed for Haas.

  “You let them take mi pobrecita, you cabrón!” the woman screamed with the fourth or fifth blow.

  Haas cowered beside his car, trying to cover his head.

  “You have what the hijo de puta needs, give it to him! Nothing is worth the pobrecita’s life!”

  Haas vomited down the side of his shiny black vehicle and passed out, slumping to the blacktop.

  “Call Brenda,” Monty shouted, remembering what Fee had said about Haas and his diabetes. Alcohol and little food. . . Monty left the shrew to Walker and ran toward the restaurant. Fee had done what he’d asked her to do, brought Haas to his knees with alcohol and food. But even Fee couldn’t produce ghost bikes and viragos.

  He knew enough Spanish to know the woman hadn’t been furious about the accident. She had been crying about a poor little girl and cursing someone Haas apparently knew. Monty ought to be calming her down and persuading information out of her, but Cass in the window warned that this type of madness did not occur without the Lucys behind it.

  And the ever-helpful women weren’t emerging from the restaurant to lend their peculiar form of aid. Something was very wrong.

  As Monty reached the boardwalk, he could see Fiona at the window inside Delphines, hand over her mouth as if in shock. Seeing him, she frantically gestured for him to stay away.

  Like hell he would. Cass was beside her, looking serenely unperturbed. The old bat had probably orchestrated this whole mess, pulling puppet strings as he’d seen her do before. That bike had not rolled out on spirit power.

  He shoved open the door, prepared to tackle a Lucy revolution, although who the hell they’d cornered remained unknown.

  Until the door closed and his eyes adjusted to the dim interior.

  Two gunmen gestured for him to join the rest of the restaurant patrons and staff at the front of the room.

  Thirty-two

  Monday, evening

  In horror, Fee watched Monty halt in the doorway—while Randall Lee and his wife escaped through the kitchen and their armed guards held the restaurant hostage. Spooked by Monty’s entrance, they were aiming their weapons at him.

  One wrong move, and the mindless thugs would start shooting. This time, her mad notions could get them all killed.

  Wishing for a real magic wand, Fee froze, not wanting the gunmen to have any excuse to start shooting at Monty and her friends.

  Lee had thrown down his napkin and fled the instant he’d seen Mrs. Gonzalez attack Haas. Was Mrs. G a key to finding Stacy?

  Seeing Walker occupied by the insanity in the parking lot, knowing the police chief hadn’t checked out the Mercedes van yet, Fee mentally wept. Lee would reach it first. Even if Stacy was in it, Keegan wouldn’t have the authority to stop him.

  All their work. . . for nothing. And these wonderful people could die for their efforts.

  How had that bike rolled out in time to stop the county attorney? Why?

  If she wanted to believe in anything. . . She wanted to believe Peggy had come back to haunt her killer or her daughter’s kidnapper—

  Or maybe give them time to find Stacy?

  Find Stacy.

  She could hear the cry almost as well as if it had been uttered aloud. Was Peggy telling her they still had a chance? Or was she being a superstitious idiot?

  She had her bike. She knew the shortcut to the Weldon Place where the Mercedes van was parked.

  She couldn’t hesitate any longer, she had to act now—while two gunmen pointed scary weapons at her and all her friends and Monty.

  Monty’s arrival had shaken the bodyguards. Fee could smell their sweat. The mayor was twice their size, but he wasn’t armed.

  Find Stacy.

  She was shaking as badly as the gunmen. She’d only ever wanted to be helpful, to make people like her. Or at least not throw her out.

  People liking her wouldn’t save Stacy. A horrible plan formed as she realized what only she could do—and had to do before her friends got hurt and Stacy was lost.

  Which meant she’d have to quit being unassuming and nice. She’d have to be obnoxious, act as confident as Monty—and alienate everyone she’d come to love. Oh well. She’d always known home and family were temporary. She’d left her heart in so many places there wasn’t much left to lose anymore.

  Praying everyone would be too shocked to react, Fee lifted her chin, caught the gunmen’s eyes, and strolled boldly toward them as if she were their boss. “Now that we have the law and Haas occupied, Eduardo is waiting. We can negotiate. Come with me, if you like, or stay and hold the locals out of this. Your call.”

  She walked right past the startled gunmen toward the kitchen.

  “Wait,” one of them shouted.

  “She’s the one who stole the dog,” the other said. “She must be one of Eduardo’s putas.”

  Puta, sweet. That would be the day when she whored for that foul-smelling rat. Fee reached the kitchen and broke into a run before they settled the argument. Praying Monty would take care of her friends, she shoved her knife into her apron ties. Then she picked up the box of soporific sushi she’d been preparing for the bodyguards who were no longer in the alley.

  Dinah had turned off the burners before the gunmen herded them into the front. She could d
o nothing else here.

  Throwing the sushi box into her basket, hanging her stick over the bike handle, she pedaled furiously down the alley to the path through the woods that Sukey had led her down. She missed Sukey. But Sukey probably missed Stacy and her familiar home.

  She hung on as the bumpy path nearly threw her.

  Fee didn’t have time to reflect on the ephemeral quality of homes before she skidded to a halt in the woods just outside the cabin clearing. The van was still there. Lee’s chauffeured car hadn’t arrived but surely would any minute.

  Hearing a child’s plaintive cry, Fee didn’t have time to dither. She had to be Monty, diving into a situation and praying action would save the day.

  In disbelief, Monty watched Fee march past armed men as if she’d known them all her life. That wasn’t the Fee he knew, was it? Consorting with gangsters?

  She’d admitted that she knew Eduardo Gonzalez, that the gangster had come to the diner where she worked. And she knew Peggy. The diner’s owner was related to Peggy’s ex. And these men recognized her. Fee was part of the Gonzalez gang?

  The other Lucys were looking as shell-shocked as he felt. This didn’t process.

  “Good girl,” Cass whispered, undaunted. “Your turn.”

  Monty glared at his half aunt in disbelief. That Cass was involved made much more sense. “What did you do to her?”

  One of the confused gunmen swung in his direction. Irrational fury rising, Monty glared at him too.

  “Lee is getting away,” Cass warned.

  “If that’s him in the limo, no, he’s not. He’s stuck like the Three Stooges in their clown cars. Was the bike your doing?” Without waiting for a reply, Monty furiously picked up a chair and flung it at the gunmen. He had nearly a foot in height on them, and fifty pounds in weight, and hell of a lot more coordination.

  And the dumbasses didn’t have their safety locks off.

  Before they could flick a switch, he kicked the balls of the one who hadn’t ducked. While the goon groaned, Monty grabbed his wrist and forced him to drop his weapon. Old Thomas stomped a foot on the elbow of the one who had hit the floor, eliciting a scream of agony. Good for the old man.