by Sam Cheever
He did a graceful sidestep, hesitating only a millisecond as his gaze met mine. The gray-blue eyes, so familiar, widened slightly. Time seemed to stand still, stretching the impossibly short moment into something long enough to twist my stomach and steal the breath from my lungs.
It was long enough to know that Lis had been right.
“Who…?”
I never got to finish that question. In the blink of an eye, he was over the railing and gone. I heard a grunt and a thump and then footsteps pounding over the boardwalk that ran along the building on the lower level.
Gun drawn, Hal burst from the room and fixed me with a slightly wild gaze. “Where’d he go?”
I just stared at my PI, too flummoxed to answer.
“Joey?” He lowered the gun and approached, one hand finding my arm and giving it a squeeze. “Honey, what’s wrong?”
I shook my head. My eyes felt as if they were the size of golf balls.
Hal’s handsome face tightened with worry. “Joey, honey, you’re scaring me. Are you hurt?”
I shook my head, finally sliding my gaze to his. “I…”
His hands cupped my face. He lowered his head to look me in the eyes. “Talk to me. What is it?”
A single tear slipped down my cheek. “I…” Swallowing the lump forming in my throat, I fixed him with a disbelieving look. “I think I just saw my brother.”
14
As promised, Victoria Lass was waiting for us in the hotel’s common area. Her plain face held an expression of concern, and her footfalls sounded almost angry as she strode toward us.
I glanced around with appreciative surprise. As with everything he’d accomplished in the refurbished hotel, Garland had done an excellent job with the hotel’s lobby area.
The ceiling was higher than I’d expected, making the not-oversized space feel much larger than it was. A loft ran the length of the riverside wall. It held several seating areas of comfortable chairs that were facing a large TV nestled in the middle of several shelves of books.
The floors were light wood, either ash or maple, I wasn’t sure which, and scattered with brightly-colored rugs sporting Native American prints. The long, outside wall was comprised of sliding doors and windows, with an inviting patio beyond the glass and a view of the river beyond that. Decorative lanterns strung around the patio made it a welcoming spot for pleasant evenings imbibing drinks from the coffee and cocktail bar tucked under the loft.
The seating in front of the windows was similar to that in the loft, overstuffed and covered in what looked like a soft tweed fabric.
Hal inclined his chin. “Ms. Lass. Did you get a chance to set up a viewing of the security tapes?”
She motioned toward the counter that ran along one side of the surprisingly bright space. “I’ve set it up in my office. It’s just through here.”
A young girl stood behind the counter, her eyes wide as we filed past her and through a door, entering an office that was furnished much like the main space. “Tanya, you’re in charge for the next few minutes.”
The young girl watched us like a hawk as we entered her boss’s office, speculation clear in her deep-set eyes.
Victoria Lass went around behind her desk and turned her all-in-one computer around so we could see the monitor. “Since you think Ms. Wickham was killed around midday, I queued up the footage from eleven AM until one PM. I’ve sped it up considerably. Let me know if you want me to slow anything down.”
We watched several cars come in and out of the lot. Most of them parked in front of the building, the drivers going directly to their rooms. As expected, Sheriff Mulhern drove in a little after eleven-thirty to answer the loud music charge and headed up the stairs. Unfortunately, the lot cameras didn’t catch the upper floor of the lodgings.
The sheriff left around eleven fifty-five, which would have given him enough time to knock on the door several times and then speak briefly with the maid.
When we reached the one o’clock mark, Hal looked at Victoria. “I think we’re done with the lot footage.”
But I saw a flash of something just on the outside edge of the footage. “Wait,” I placed a hand on Hal’s arm. “Can you slow that to normal and replay the last minute?”
Victoria nodded and complied.
I watched a silver sedan drive into the lot and move toward the middle of the lodgings. The car drove slowly past a large willow tree on the edge of the lot, and I saw what I’d thought I’d seen behind it. “There!” I pointed toward the front end of a small car.
“Stop it there, please?” Hal requested.
“We moved closer and peered at the image. It could be the car I saw when we found Prince.”
Hal glanced at the manager. “Can you enlarge this at all?”
“Not much. It will get too pixelated.” She tapped her keyboard, and the feed scrolled rapidly backward, the clock in the upper corner flashing numbers at a speed that was almost too fast to follow.
Two hours passed, and she stopped it as the little white car I remembered drove into the lot and backed beneath the drooping branches of the willow.
We scrolled through it several times but couldn’t see the driver in any of the pictures.
Hal looked at me. “Is that the car?”
“Yes.”
Hal nodded. “Can we get a few pictures of this car? And then I’d like to see the upper floor.”
Her expression tightened, and her mouth thinned. “I’m afraid there’s a problem with that.”
She changed perspective, and the screen went black.
We didn’t react. I was thinking the software was in flux and would settle onto the correct perspective any second. But it remained black.
Hal and I swung our gazes to Victoria at the same time. Her eyes as hard as pebbles, she held out a cell phone. “This is what those cameras look like.”
I stared with horror at a monitoring device whose lens was coated in a glossy black substance. The paint coated its face and dripped down its sides.
“What about the footage directly before this?”
Victoria scanned it back several moments. The camera was working, the picture clear and sharp. And then a black splatter blocked out part of the image. Followed by a heavier wash of obscuring paint. And the image was gone.
“There’s no footage of anyone walking up to it?”
Victoria shook her head. “Not a soul.”
“How did someone paint this without being seen?” I asked.
Victoria nodded at my question. “I’ve been thinking about that. The way the railings are on the ends of the decking, someone who was agile could have climbed up behind the camera and painted it without being seen.”
“How about from the camera on the other end?”
“It’s clear. It captured everything up to a little over halfway down the decking. But it didn’t catch any activity beyond that.”
I frowned, thinking about someone painting over a camera in broad daylight. “Can you go back to the parking lot footage and pan it forward to within an hour of the sheriff’s arrival?”
She did as I requested, and we watched Martin Robb drive into the lot and park in front of Tiffany Brooks’ room. Before disappearing beneath the upper balcony, he glanced up at the room above Tiffany’s. Did he know who was in that room? Or, had he been looking at the camera that hung from the corner of the roof? The one that ended up covered in black paint?
Hal and I shared a look. “Why would he be so interested in the camera on the top floor?” I asked.
“That’s an excellent question,” Hal said. “The answer requires another conversation with Mayor Robb.”
“Could you tell if anything was disturbed?” Arno asked, his body language as taut as I’d ever seen it. If I had to guess, I’d say Sheriff Mulhern was putting a lot of pressure on him to close the Calliente investigation.
“The scene looked the same as I remembered it,” Hal told him. “Did your people get any new fingerprints?”
Arno r
an a hand through his blond hair, leaving it standing up on end at the top. “They’re working on it now.” He fixed me with a look, his brown eyes trying to drill into my head and find the answers he hadn’t been able to wring from me. “Joey, this is bad. If this guy is really related to you, Mulhern’s going to do more than ask you to leave the case. He’ll arrest you for tampering with evidence.”
I just shook my head, too dazed and confused to respond.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Arno glance at Hal for help.
My PI shook his head. “Give her a break, Arno. We don’t even know who this guy is yet. If we could get fingerprints that may actually be a good thing. If his prints are on file and we discover he’s a known entity, that might help us find him and clear all of this up.”
“And if they’re not?” I asked, surprised at the sound of my own voice. I hadn’t intended to speak until I had a chance to talk to my mom. I wanted to know if it was possible I had a brother.
Hal squeezed my shoulder. “Then he hasn’t been in trouble before, and that will work in our favor.” He crouched down in front of me, clasping my icy hands in his. “Either way, we’ll get to the bottom of this, honey.”
I believed him. He was a man who pursued knowledge with dogged persistence, never giving up until he found his answers. But, I was caught in a weird limbo between joy at the idea of having a brother and fear that he was apparently mixed up in a murder.
I nodded mutely. “I need to try to reach Joline,” I told him.
Hal stood and pulled me gently to my feet. Glancing at Arno, he said, “Let me know if you learn anything about the guy?”
Arno nodded.
We headed for the door.
Arno’s voice stopped us as I was stepping into the hallway. “You said this guy drove the white car you saw leaving the scene of Mr. Prince’s attack?”
I nodded. “He was driving it last night too. Apparently, he was following us.”
Arno’s gaze tightened, narrowed. “And you know this how?”
I briefly debated not telling him but figured he’d have to handle his own problems with Lis. I had enough problems of my own. “Lis was showing a house across the street from Sonny’s. She saw him watching us.”
Arno’s gaze swung away, and he nodded. “Okay. Thanks.”
I glanced at Hal. That had been way too easy. “Tell her I’ll call later,” I told Arno.
He didn’t glance up. He just shook his head.
“Let’s head home,” Hal said as we exited the building. “You can make your call, and I’ll fix us something to eat.”
That was a deal I couldn’t refuse.
The silence between us was uncomfortable as we drove home. Hal glanced at me a few times. I knew he was worried, but I needed time to process what I’d seen, and I couldn’t reassure him until I had.
He turned onto Goat’s Hollow Road. “I’m a good listener if you’d like to talk about him.”
I shrugged. “There’s not much to talk about. I only saw him for a second, and then he was gone.”
“What made you think he was related?”
“Didn’t you see him?”
“Only briefly. He was on the balcony, and I had my back to him. I didn’t notice him until he started to run. He shoved me down before I could react.”
I blinked, noticing the bump on his temple and the trace of dried blood. Then I was angry with myself for not noticing it sooner. I reached out and touched his face. “You hit your head.”
“It’s just a bump. It’ll be fine.”
He parked in the circular drive in front of the house and stopped the Escalade.
I didn’t move. My legs and arms felt too heavy to lift. A single question kept burning its way through my mind. I didn’t think I’d be able to think about anything else until I found the answer.
“What is it?” Hal asked gently.
I frowned.
“I’m sure your mom will clear this up. Maybe the guy’s just someone who looks like your dad. That happens all the time.”
I couldn’t tell him I knew at a bone-deep level that I’d met my brother. I couldn’t explain it to anyone else because I couldn’t explain it to myself.
The question burned another trail across my brain, and I suddenly couldn’t stand it. I looked at Hal. “Why was he there?” I asked him. “How is he mixed up in this?”
“I don’t know, honey. The best thing to do is to tackle this in manageable bites. Talk to your mom first. We’ll take it from there.”
I nodded, knowing he was right. Talking to my mom was the logical first step.
So why was I dreading it with every fiber in my body?
I plopped onto the couch and sat with my cell phone in my hand. Nails clicked on the entrance tiles and then disappeared as the pibl’s paws hit carpeting. A beat later, a large, golden form leaped onto the couch, and a wet tongue scoured a trail over my exposed knee. Summer was Caphy’s favorite time of year. Shorts exposed a lot more flesh for her to kiss.
“Hey, sweet girl.”
“Meow!” LaLee yelled. She jumped onto the couch cushion and up onto the back, where she sprawled casually over the top as if she were the queen and the couch was her throne. The diva was apparently peeved that I hadn’t been around to hear her laments all morning.
Though I was dreading the call I was about to make, my fur-babies made me feel better. Caphy made me feel loved, and LaLee made me feel needed. After all, every diva needs an audience.
Hal came into the living room and handed me a frosty glass of lemonade. I thanked him, tears filling my eyes at how lucky I was. “You’re all the best.”
He kissed the top of my head. “I’ll have lunch ready in twenty minutes. I think it’s a good time to call Paris right now.”
Message received. I needed to bite the bullet and call my mom. Sighing, I found her number in my favorites and tapped it. Caphy sprawled out alongside my leg and fell asleep with a sigh, her squishy head hanging over the front of the couch.
LaLee gave me a running commentary of her morning, punctuated with some tail-whipping and the occasional semi-angry yowl. I interpreted the yowls as her description of how her sister had made her persnickety feline life miserable.
I actually found myself grinning at the thought.
The phone rang several times, and I started to think Joline wasn’t going to answer.
Ethel Squeaks trotted into the living room and bumped her snout against my knee, her curly tail whirling happily behind her.
“Hello, pretty piggy.” I scratched the thatch of hair between her oversized ears. “Did you get a yummy treat?” In answer, she squealed softly and ran toward the kitchen. I wasn’t sure if she was going to get her ball or to beg for more food from Hal. Caphy jumped down and ran after her, no doubt worried she was going to miss out on a treat.
I was so entertained by the squealing and whining sounds coming from the kitchen, I nearly missed the moment when my mother finally answered her phone.
“Joey, honey. This is a surprise.”
“Hi mom. I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner.”
She gave me a happy little laugh. “Oh no, honey. We won’t go out for another few hours.”
I winced. It was nearly seven PM in Paris. I couldn’t imagine waiting to eat until nine or ten. “How’s Garland?”
“He’s wonderful.” I could hear the love in her voice, and it made me happy. “I’m so glad we made this trip together.”
“Are you seeing a lot of the sights?”
“We are. He’s in meetings for several hours a day. But I make good use of my time.”
“That’s good.”
There was a beat of silence as my mother read between the lines and into my forced cheerfulness. “What’s wrong, Joey?”
“What makes you think something’s wrong?” I said, knowing it was a weak deflection.
“I know you. I can tell when you’re upset about something. I presume you called because you wanted to talk to me about it…w
hatever it is. So, talk to me.”
“I don’t know how to start.”
“Just spit it out.” Joline’s voice was filled with worry, almost as if she knew what I was going to ask.
I hesitated another beat and then sighed. “Mom, I need to ask you something, and I need you to be honest with me.”
“Of course, honey…”
“No, I mean it. Totally honest. This affects more than just me.”
Silence met my words. I could almost feel my mom bristling through the phone line. “Do you think I lie to you on a regular basis?”
I bit back a quick response, knowing it wouldn’t go well. She’d lied to me about a lot of stuff over the years. Most of it life-changing. “I’m not accusing you of anything, Mom. I just want to know the truth.”
“Just. Ask. Me.”
“Do I have a brother?”
If silence had a texture, hers would be like porcupine quills. For several seconds, I sat and waited for her to answer, not knowing what to expect. Was she just stunned by the question? Or was she trying to come up with an expedient lie that I’d believe?
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Mom?”
She made a small noise that sounded like a terrified mouse.
“Mom, talk to me.”
“Oh Joey.”
Heat flared in my cheeks, and pretty little stars burst before my eyes. “I do, don’t I?”
“He. Oh, honey…”
“Where has he been, mom? Why didn’t you tell me?” Anger sizzled along my spine, making me feel like a rocket preparing to erupt.
“I never expected your paths to cross. They weren’t supposed to…” A small sob broke the tension on the line. “He wasn’t supposed to know.”
“Please speak to me in full, coherent sentences, mom. Or I swear I’m going to lose it.”
She sucked air and went silent for a beat. Then, finally, “His name is Joshua. Aside from you, he was the most beautiful baby in the world.”
Tears slid down my cheeks. I knew she was crying too because the tears clogged her voice.
“We were so young. Too young to be parents. And your father had such big plans. But we just couldn’t…” She swallowed audibly. “We gave him up, Joey. We did it because we loved him. But we told the adoption people not to tell him about us. We didn’t think we’d be able to stay away if he knew about us.” She sniffled loudly. “Oh, honey. I’m sorry. We tried to ensure this wouldn’t happen.”
