by Lisa Jackson
“You’re too close to this.”
“God damn it, Lang.” Savvy jumped to her feet just as O’Halloran looked into the squad room.
“When you have a minute, want to come to my office?” he said.
“We’re not done,” Lang said as Savannah headed after O’Halloran. When Savvy ignored him, he added, “You said you got some files from Bancroft Development?”
She stopped at the door to the sheriff’s office and called back, “They’re in my Escape, which is at Isaac’s Towing by now, most likely.”
“Ah. Okay. I’ll get somebody to retrieve them.”
“I looked them over. I don’t think there was anything there.”
He nodded as if he heard her, but she realized, with another spurt of renewed anger, that he thought she was just covering up for Hale some more. Her heart was pumping wildly, she realized as she entered O’Halloran’s sanctum. Hale wasn’t involved. He wasn’t. But he was being targeted like a main suspect, and what did that mean for little Declan? And how come he hadn’t told her about the interview with the cops?
And who could have wanted to kill her sister? Kristina had had her issues, yes, but she wasn’t a bad person. Was it Declan Jr.? Whose sexual lure might be as powerful as his mother’s. Who maybe had drawn Savvy’s sister under his spell so powerfully that she thought it was sorcery. Whose sickness and lust for revenge or payback or bloodlust, or whatever, had put them all in his sights, the women of Siren Song and Declan Bancroft, and herself as well.
Did that even sound like a sane argument?
She needed to talk to Hale. And she needed to talk to Declan Sr.
“Take a seat, Savannah,” the sheriff said, gesturing to the chairs on the opposite side of the desk as he settled his bulk into his desk chair, which creaked and groaned under his weight. When she did as instructed, he said, “Last week we were going to put you on desk duty today, as I recall.”
“We were going to meet today and discuss it.”
“And how are you feeling?”
“A lot of things have happened. I’m . . . still processing,” Savvy admitted.
“But you’re here at work.”
“This is the one area that I feel certain about right now. My job.” She gave him a weak smile. Lang’s words still rang in her ears, and her head was full of thoughts of Hale . . . and little Declan . . . and Catherine’s warnings....
“You still want to be out in the field.”
“Yes.” She was adamant.
“If you feel ready, I don’t see any reason to hold you back,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said with feeling.
“I’m sorry about your sister. We all are.”
Savvy nodded as she got to her feet. Feeling like she’d gotten past a huge obstacle, she walked back toward the squad room and then felt something wet on her chest. Looking down at her gray shirt, she saw two wet spots spreading across her breasts.
May Johnson was just coming out of the break room. “What?” she asked, seeing Savvy had stopped short.
“My milk just came in,” Savannah said.
“What did you say?” Hale asked, the receiver of his landline pressed to his ear, as he watched the nanny, Victoria, carry the baby toward his nursery, cooing to him.
“Your mother’s on her way,” Declan repeated, sounding pleased.
Hale let that information process slowly. He’d figured out how to put in the new car seat, and he’d driven Declan home, with Victoria following behind in her car. His head was full of thoughts of bringing the baby home and settling him in. Thinking of his mother, who, in her way, was as bullheaded as her father—probably why they didn’t get along—made him feel like the precarious merry-go-round he’d been riding was about to spin out of control. “My mother is flying in from Philadelphia?”
“I told her about little Declan. She should be here in Portland tonight.”
“How’s she getting to the coast? The roads are still a mess.”
“Oh, they’re fine. I saw it on the news. She’s a grandmother, Hale,” he said, as if that explained away irrational behavior. “She’s going to want to see the boy. I do too. I’m getting out of my driveway this afternoon and coming up there to see him. Maybe I’ll stay overnight.”
“I’ll have someone come get you,” Hale said quickly. His grandfather’s driving ability was suspect at best and didn’t allow for any unexpected changes, like hazardous weather conditions.
“The roads are clearing. It’s fine.”
“They’re not that fine.” Hale thought his grandfather’s anxiousness could also be attributed to his belief that someone had been at his house.
“All right. Have someone come get me,” Declan grumbled. “But I want to be there when Janet shows up.”
“Mom shouldn’t drive over the mountains yet. It’s not safe.”
“Well, you tell her that when she lands. See how that goes over.”
Though Hale rarely saw his mother these days, he knew of her formidable will. What the hell? He’d inherited some of that, too. He could handle her. But he sure wished Declan would have let him tell his mother about the baby first. The surprising part was Janet and Declan rarely talked to each other. They’d been damn near estranged for all of Hale’s adult life.
“What time is she getting in?” Hale asked.
“Seven or so.”
“I’ll leave a message on her cell. What made you decide to tell her about the baby?”
“Well, you didn’t seem to be picking up the phone.”
“I’ve been a little busy,” Hale said dryly.
“Ack. For your own son?”
Hale held on to his temper with an effort. While visiting his grandfather the day before he’d laid out all the events that had surrounded baby Declan’s birth, the terrible weather and Kristina’s death, expecting a different reaction from Declan’s rather befuddled “Well, why couldn’t you just wait for the ambulance, son?”
With his grandfather, sometimes explanations were a waste of breath. Hale had left him then, heading home to take a shower, drink a glass of red wine, and fall into bed. Sylvie had left him a message with Victoria Phelan’s number, and he’d made plans to meet with the nanny at the hospital this afternoon. As soon as he got up, he’d gone to see Savannah and the baby. Savvy had been on one foot and the other to get home, so he’d taken her into Seaside so she could rent a car. Then he’d headed to Ocean Park to meet Victoria and pick up baby Declan.
“I’ll come get you,” he said to his grandfather as Victoria cruised into the kitchen.
“I’ll get my overnight bag ready,” Declan said.
“You have formula?” Victoria mouthed, holding up a baby bottle, and he pointed to the cabinet that Kristina had chosen for baby supplies.
Victoria was slim and attractive, and he hoped she was going to be good for the baby. She’d signed a contract with Kristina, so now he and she were forging ahead, seeing how things worked out. There was nothing wrong with her. She just seemed kind of . . . young . . . and, well, he wished that Savannah were here. He wanted her to be with Declan, to be at the house. He wanted her to be Declan’s mother in Kristina’s place. But that was never the way it was supposed to be. He was just . . . wishful.
“What?” Hale asked, realizing his grandfather had said something that he’d missed.
“I said, your father was a good man. I’m just sorry Janet never saw that.”
“Yeah.”
Hale’s mind moved to the call he’d received from the medical examiner’s office. They’d done an autopsy on Kristina’s body earlier today. As far as he knew, there had been no surprises. Death was caused by blunt force trauma to the head. Kristina’s body had been sent for cremation, and Hale needed to think about a memorial service. But he wanted to talk to Savannah about that.
“I never wanted her to marry Preston, but he was the right man for her,” Declan was going on.
“We can talk about this later.”
“Sure, sure.�
��
“I’ll be there in about an hour,” Hale said, hanging up.
Declan was thinking about Preston because of the baby’s birth. Hale’s father had been in the back of Hale’s mind, too: how he wouldn’t be able to meet his grandson, how his slow death from liver cancer had robbed him of that chance, how the cancer had come on almost immediately after Janet divorced him. Though separate, those two issues always collided in Hale’s mind: his parents’ divorce and his father’s declining health. Janet had split from Preston St. Cloud when Hale was about eighteen, and she’d met her current husband, Lee Spurrier, whose family was in the banking business in Philadelphia, almost immediately afterward. While Hale was in his first year of college, Janet Bancroft St. Cloud became Janet Bancroft St. Cloud Spurrier and moved to the East Coast. Preston’s health started declining at the same time, and as soon as Hale graduated, though he started working for Declan, he was half taking care of his father at the same time.
Kristina crossed his path at the Bridgeport Bistro one night, at his lowest point. She knew of his grandfather, having grown up around Tillamook, which was just south of his grandfather’s Deception Bay home, and she’d heard about Hale’s father’s illness. She’d been a willing ear and a godsend while Hale juggled all the pieces of his life. He’d been damn near overwhelmed, and Kristina had come into his life at the right time. He’d married her shortly after Preston passed away, only later realizing that he barely knew her.
He watched Victoria heat up a bottle of formula in the microwave. Her hair was long and dark brown, and she wore a skintight T-shirt and skinny jeans.
She sensed him looking at her and turned to give him a bright smile. “He’s a beautiful little boy.”
“Thank you.” Hale hesitated, then asked, “Have you had much experience as a nanny?”
“Oh, it’s all in my profile. The one I gave to your wife. Oh. Sorry. It’s just so weird that she’s gone.”
Hale nodded. “How long can you be here today?”
She blinked at him. “Ummm . . . I thought I was living with you.” A red flush crept up her skin. “I mean, I’m moving here, right?”
“I’m just catching up slowly. Do you have a copy of your profile? And the contract?”
“Sure. It’s in my room.”
She walked down the hall to the spare bedroom across the hall from the nursery. Magda, their cleaning woman, had come in today and had changed all the sheets, crying and crossing her heart as she did her work, saying, “Mrs. St. Cloud said she wanted the beds changed for the baby and maybe some guests. I was going to do it last week . . . but, oh, now . . .” When she trailed off into more tears, Hale had assured her that she was doing what Kristina had wanted and that was a good thing.
It had reminded him again, like almost everything did, that the world had changed in the last two days.
Hale started thinking about his four-bedroom house and did a mental head count: one for the baby, one for Victoria, one for his grandfather, one for his mother, maybe, and one for himself. Not enough. When Janet showed, somebody was going to be sleeping on the couch. Of course, maybe it was a moot point, if Detectives Hamett and Evinrud decided he’d killed his wife, and hauled him off to jail.
Grabbing up his cell phone from where he’d left it on the counter, he went to his favorites list and touched the number for Savannah’s cell. Maybe she could give him an idea what the hell was going on.
CHAPTER 24
Savvy heard Hale’s ring tone and dragged her attention from the physical evidence report on the Donatella homicides. She scrabbled around in her messenger bag until she found the phone. “Hello?” she said a little cautiously. She was in the squad room, and she really wanted to talk to him without anyone overhearing.
“Hey,” he said, sounding relieved. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad, I guess.”
“Are you at home?”
“No, I’m at the department.”
“You went back to work already?” He didn’t try to hide his surprise.
“Yeah. How’s the baby?” she asked.
“Good.” He gave her a quick rundown of picking Declan up from the hospital and how the nanny was settling in, and the fact that his grandfather and his mother were heading his way.
“You’re going to have a houseful,” she said, her mind already moving ahead. “I hear you were visited by two Seaside detectives.”
“Yeah.”
There was a moment when neither of them said anything. Then Savvy said, “I’m working on some other angles.”
“To Kristina’s murder? Is that allowed?”
“Not really. No. But there are some questions that cropped up when I was in Portland that I wanted to go over with you.”
There was a weighty pause. Then he said in a cooler voice, “Are you buying this? That I had something to do with Kristina’s death?”
“I talked to a couple of people who believe Kristina was having an affair. That’s more where I’m going.”
“Who said that?”
She ignored the question and asked, “You never thought that? Never had a suspicion?”
“Kristina having an affair? No . . .” She could practically hear the wheels turning in his mind. “No,” he said again, then added, “One of the reasons I called was to talk about a memorial service for her.”
Savvy felt like a heel. “Absolutely. I’m happy to help any way I can. I’m sorry, Hale.”
“I know.”
“Look, I don’t mean to be a dog with a bone, but you never even got the inkling that she might be seeing someone?”
“What I thought was, she’s acting crazy. That’s about as far as it went. She thought she was going crazy.”
“It doesn’t seem right to me, either, but then I don’t know,” Savvy admitted. “I’ve got this strange theory, and it’s . . . I don’t want to talk about it now. I’ll come to your house.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to wrap things up here,” she said, thinking about the breast pump and a trip to the ladies’ room. “I’ve got a few things to do. Then I’ll come your way.”
“Bring an overnight bag, just in case. It’s terrible weather, and you might want to stay,” he said before he hung up.
Savvy replaced her phone in her messenger bag. No, she wasn’t going to stay over at Hale and Kristina’s house. There was a nanny in place for the baby, and she couldn’t suffer any more of the dangerous thoughts that seemed to infect her reason whenever she was too close to Hale.
Dragging her attention back to the case, she glanced back down at the report again. There was nothing in it she hadn’t seen before. In her mind’s eye she thought about Owen DeWitt’s comment about Charlie with Kristina at the Donatella house. “He had her up against the wall. Banging her like crazy . . .” She checked again to see if the techs had found anything—blood, tissue, semen—other than that of the victims themselves, but there was no mention of it. The techs had taken fingerprints and had used luminol over most of the house, looking for blood traces from tissue or semen or actual blood from the perpetrator, but there wasn’t anything definitive.
Catherine had said Declan Jr. was too careful to leave any evidence.
Was he the man Kristina had been with, if she’d been with anyone at all . . . ?
Savvy thought about that hard for a few moments, testing her own gut feeling on the subject. She did believe Kristina was having an affair, whether Hale knew it or not. She also believed that affair had gone sour; Kristina had wanted out. She’d said as much to Savannah, and all her talk of sorcery, of feeling weird, and not being herself, seemed to add credence to that theory.
Lang had been gone for a while, and now he returned, running his hands through his damp hair as he retook his seat at his desk. “Cold rain,” he said. Savvy was considering how to tell him she’d talked to Hale, when he added, “Finally reached Curtis about those deaths outside the Rib-I last Thursday.”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing.
The guy who killed those two is a ghost. Meets ’em outside, then pops ’em. End of story.”
“Hmmm.”
“There was a gal inside the bar who saw Garth, the male victim, get in some guy’s grill about hitting on his date, Tammie, the female victim. Curtis asked for a description, but all she said was that she thought he was good-looking. Had a big smile. Tammie and Garth must’ve made up, because they were having sex in the parking lot when the killer attacked them.”
Savvy thought about her meeting with DeWitt. “A lot of restaurants and bars in Portland, and I was at the Rib-I two nights later, meeting with Owen DeWitt.”
“I know.”
They looked at each other. “DeWitt said some things about my sister,” Savvy admitted.
“Uh-oh.”
She smiled faintly. “Yeah. Like she was having sex with somebody up against the wall in the Donatella house on which the killer spray painted blood money. Said he saw her there with the same guy a couple of times when he was at the site, looking for some proof that it wasn’t his fault the dune failed. DeWitt’s like that. A blame shifter.”
“That’s why you wanted to recheck the physical evidence?”
She nodded. “I didn’t find anything. I don’t even really know if I believe DeWitt’s account.”
“Have you told St. Cloud this?”
“Not all of it. I asked him if he thought Kristina had a lover, and he acted like it was news.”
“You talked to him today?”
“Yep.” She related her conversation with Hale, and his expression darkened until she finished with, “We have a memorial service to plan together. I’m going to talk to him today, tomorrow, every day.”
“Don’t get in Hamett and Evinrud’s way. I’m just sayin’.”
“I’m just sayin’ that someone other than Hale killed my sister. I want to talk to DeWitt again.”
“Hell, no. Savannah,” he said, spreading his hands in a “What gives?” gesture.
“If Kristina’s death has anything to do with the Donatella homicides, that’s our case.”
“I’ll talk to DeWitt.”
“Okay, fine.”
