Last Girl Standing

by Jackson, Lisa

  And she had his client list on a sheaf of papers that she’d managed to print out when he wasn’t around. She would have preferred the file, but she could input them into her own contact list when she had time, which she did right now, as a matter of fact.

  She took her laptop to the dining room table, along with the file containing Hal’s clients. She sat down and, with her Pilot pen, started making notes to herself, first on paper, then to be inputted in the computer. She made herself an itinerary. She needed to meet with McCrae or Quin and get a feel for what the police had on Delta. She knew a lot of the county prosecutors; one of them would be assigned to Tanner’s homicide case. Whether they would go after Delta or not was anyone’s guess at this point. Delta felt that McCrae was sympathetic, but that only meant so much.

  And there was the issue of the knife . . .

  Curiously, she believed Delta on that one. She’d panicked. But it looked bad, and could to a jury, if the case went to trial. More problematic was the book she’d written, which apparently was making a small fortune and showed no signs of stopping as the story of Tanner’s murder spread across the Internet. Delta hadn’t mentioned her increase in book sales, but maybe she felt like the information was already readily available.

  Amanda snorted. Hal had accused her of taking hard-luck cases. Maybe not so with Delta.

  * * *

  Ellie took a good, long shower. He hadn’t really touched her. Just made her strip, which she’d done, excruciatingly slowly. He’d wanted it that way, and well, she’d been counting the minutes till McCrae got the message, her mind whirling as she’d worried he might not act in time or maybe at all.

  But like the hero he was, he’d shown up, and Crassley had shoved her into the closet and locked the door. Had he really thought she’d keep quiet? Maybe he’d believed he could keep McCrae out of hearing range.

  Whatever. She still felt dirty. Kind of scared and kind of exhilarated. And mad. She truly wanted to kill him. Would, if she could without facing the consequences. She could have kicked him to death.

  Her cell was ringing as she toweled her hair dry. She swept it up from her dresser and saw it was McCrae. “Hi,” she answered shortly.

  “Crassley’s in county. Already got a lawyer. Seems to have one at the ready, and not a public defender. I’m heading back to the station now.”

  Ellie said, “Thieving must be profitable.”

  “You doing all right?”

  “You keep asking. I’m fine. I have murder in my heart, but otherwise I’m fine.”

  “Don’t do anything rash.”

  “Oh, like go out to the Crassleys and torch their property and all those fucking cars? And the dogs?”

  “The dogs aren’t part of it.”

  “I know, McCrae,” she said wearily. “But excuse me if I want some payback. It’s been a helluva day.”

  “What did you mean about ‘a job’?”

  “What?” she asked, deliberately misinterpreting.

  “You said ‘Nia said it was a job.’ What was a job?”

  Should she tell him? A part of her wanted to keep that nugget to herself, in case it was true.

  But you’re not even a reporter, right now . . . and he saved you . . .

  “We had a fight, Nia and I. Long story, but it’s why I went to the Crassleys. I thought I could . . . interview Gale. That was erroneous, as you know. There’s no interviewing a Crassley. Nia was talking about Penske. She said he was on ‘a job.’ She was dating him off and on around that time. You know they’d hooked up while she was still in high school.”

  “I heard that rumor,” he agreed.

  “She said, ‘He didn’t want to be with her. It was a job.’ I took it to mean that Penske didn’t want to be with Bailey, that it was a job.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? That’s it?”

  “You think Nia implicated her family. That somehow Penske was with Bailey that night, on their orders. Maybe they had something on him. Maybe they could prove he’d been seeing Nia when she was underage. Something like that. The Crassleys blamed Bailey for Little Dan’s death, among other things. You think Penske was used to set her up, maybe even kill her.”

  “Impressive, McCrae.” She was a little surprised he’d followed her thinking so closely. “So what do we do now?”

  “You, stay away from the Crassleys.”

  “What about you?”

  But he had already clicked off.

  * * *

  Danny O’s was busy, with the waitstaff holding trays of food, a lot of breakfast items from their twenty-four-hour menu, and a large population of construction workers who probably liked the size of the portions, large, and the size of the price, small to medium.

  Delta hadn’t been here in years. Tanner called it “slumming it,” and Delta tended toward salads and lean meat and expensive wine. I’m a snob, she thought, the label like a kick to the gut. She’d always thought of herself as that girl whose parents owned the mom-and-pop grocery store, not Dr. Tanner Stahd’s wife.

  She was sitting at one of the smaller booths, perusing a menu for anything she might like to pass the time—iced tea was about all that appealed to her—when a shadow fell over her shoulder, and she glanced around quickly, apprehensively.

  “Brad?” she said, seeing the hulk that was Brad Sumpter looming over her.

  “Hi, Delta,” he said.

  He was nervous, she realized. Well, so was she. Brad had already been a bodybuilder when they were in high school, and that had continued through the reunion and apparently for the years after. He’d never said much, being more Justin Penske’s sidekick.

  “Can I sit down?” he asked, and then plopped down across from her, pushing the table a little closer to her side of the booth to make room for a swelling gut. Maybe his obsessive workouts had stopped, or at least petered out. He looked like he was going to seed.

  “What . . . are you doing these days?” she asked him.

  “I saw what Amanda said about you. I wanted you to know, I know you didn’t kill him. I was glad she said something. I thought you guys still hated each other. It’s good you don’t.”

  “Yeah . . . thanks.”

  The waitress came and asked if they were ready. Delta almost wanted to leave, but she ordered the iced tea. After a long moment, while he apparently waited for her to order more, Brad shook his head, and the waitress moved on.

  “If you ever need anything . . .” He trailed off.

  “Thanks, Brad. I’m doing okay. It’s hard . . . for all of us.”

  He looked off across the restaurant, and she could see he was wrestling with some deep emotion. His lips moved, and his eyes were sad. “You know, when it all gets straightened out and it’s better, that’ll be a good thing.”

  “Yes,” Delta said slowly.

  Her iced tea was delivered, and she pulled the glass close.

  “Aren’t you gonna put sugar in it?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You look good, Delta.”

  “Thank you.”

  He waited another moment, then pushed himself up from the table. “Well, I’d better be going.” He hesitated, then added, “I didn’t want any of this bad stuff to happen to you or Tanner.”

  He left before she could question him further.

  * * *

  A hard breeze was kicking up. As Amanda walked from the kitchen and cut across the dining room, she saw a paper bag fly up outside the front-room windows. She crossed the living room and unlocked the rarely used front door. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d opened it.

  There, held down with a handful of pebbles, was a manila envelope. She picked it up and brought it inside. “For you” was scratched across the front in pen.

  She opened it up and shook out the contents. A notebook.

  Bailey’s notebook.

  Chapter 26

  McCrae changed his mind about returning to the station and went looking for Tracy again, but she wasn’t on the schedule t
o work at the bar that day. Jimmy, her boss and possibly boyfriend, regarded McCrae with serious suspicion this time and wouldn’t say anything apart from the fact that Tracy wasn’t there.

  McCrae started to leave, then looked at the stool where he’d sat the last time he was here, remembering Tracy leaning over the bar, pulling back, telling him about Penske’s burner phone and the guy who was watching. The old car with the faded hood pulling up outside Lundeen’s, the watcher talking to the driver.

  He had a sudden mental picture of the Crassleys’ car graveyard.

  He left in a hurry.

  * * *

  Delta’s cell phone rang as she was leaving Danny O’s. She pulled it out of her purse, regarding it with trepidation as she crossed the parking lot to her car.

  Ellie.

  “Did McCrae tell you what happened?” Ellie responded to Delta’s hello.

  “Um . . . no, I don’t know . . . what do you mean?”

  “You haven’t talked to him?”

  “Not for a while. What happened?”

  There was a pause, and then she said, “Can I do an interview with you? I’m not with the station any longer. It would be for the paper, maybe. Something written. No camera, unless you wanted that and we could figure it out.”

  “No.”

  “It would be your chance to proclaim your innocence.”

  Delta unlocked the driver’s door. “I’m not interested, Ellie.”

  “With the sales of your book skyrocketing, this could be a big interview. Built-in online audience. Do you have a website?”

  Delta clicked off. The hungry tone in Ellie’s voice pissed her off. Not with the station any longer . . . was that even true? Didn’t matter anyway. She wasn’t giving interviews. Amanda had told her not to, and she hadn’t planned on it anyway.

  She called Amanda, who picked up on the second ring, surprising her. “I just got a call from Ellie, who wants to do an interview.”

  “No,” Amanda responded.

  “That’s what I said.” She sighed. “I’m sure you heard about Zora and Brian. I’m having trouble thinking of anything else. Zora was supposed to be taking care of Owen tonight, so I could have some time to myself.”

  “She asked you if she could babysit?” Amanda asked quickly.

  “She offered, yeah.”

  “Delta . . . you’re too trusting. Zora was . . . she had some problems. She’d been trying to get pregnant for years.”

  “I know. I think that’s why—”

  “She talked about if you were convicted of murdering Tanner, that maybe she could have your son. I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk ill of the dead, but that’s a fact.”

  Delta was struck silent.

  “Don’t trust anyone but me,” Amanda said tautly. “And . . . stop by the house later. I have something to show you.”

  “What?”

  “Come by after dinner . . . around eight? I’ve got some things to do, but I think I might have some answers to some old questions then.”

  “I’ll have to get a sitter.”

  “Do it,” Amanda said and hung up.

  Well, great. Just after telling her that Zora had been angling for Owen . . . seriously? What had she planned to do if Delta had left Owen in her care?

  She shivered. The idea of finding a sitter tonight . . . if her mother couldn’t do it. She wasn’t going to go.

  “Mom,” she said, greeting her mother a few moments later as she pulled out of Danny O’s lot. “Could you babysit tonight? I need to meet with Amanda.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Thank you,” she said gratefully. “Gotta go. I’m driving, and I don’t want a ticket.”

  “Okay, honey.”

  She clicked off and headed back toward Woody’s Auto Body. After several miles, she noticed a big, black SUV changing lanes along with her. She changed lanes again, and the black SUV followed.

  Her heart lurched.

  She drove on to Woody’s, one eye on the black SUV. The auto body shop was on the outskirts of Laurelton, about a half-hour drive from West Knoll. As she turned at a light, she expected the SUV to follow, but it cruised through the light and went on. She thought there was a man at the wheel. Brad Sumpter, maybe?

  Unnerved, she drove back to the auto body parking lot. The note was still on the door, but through its window panel, she could see someone inside. She walked up to the door and tried the knob. The door opened, and she was inside a small room with a counter and two metal chairs. There were pictures of cars along the walls and a number of items for sale to improve the appearance of a car—chrome cleaner, chamois cloths, leather upholstery wipes, bottles and sprays of all colors and scents, scented trees in cellophane that nevertheless permeated the room with flavors that nearly obliterated the sharp scent of oil and paint.

  Woody was behind the counter. His hair was still long, pulled up into a man bun and streaked with gray. He wore a wife-beater T-shirt, and she could see a portion of the landing eagle tattoo that spread across his left shoulder. Her dislike of tattoos had faded over the years, and Woody’s made her feel warm, almost happy, like meeting an old friend and recognizing they hadn’t really changed. His face was, as ever, more comical than handsome and was covered with a short, but raggedy beard. But it was a familiar face, and when he smiled at her, Delta’s resistance fled. “Woody,” she greeted him, a catch in her voice.

  “Mrs. Stahd,” he drawled.

  She was horrified to feel tears building. She touched her finger to the corners of her eyes, seeking to hold them back. “Sorry. Tanner and then now Zora . . .”

  “Hard to believe there’s not some evil purpose behind it all, right?”

  She nodded.

  He shrugged, as if purposely setting that aside. “Whatever are you doing in a place like mine?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Looking for some answers, maybe.”

  “Here?” His brows drew together.

  She shook her head. Didn’t know quite how to proceed, now that she was facing Woody, so she backtracked. “Crystal sent me an e-mail. I hadn’t seen her since the reunion.”

  “She sent you an e-mail?”

  “She warned me to not let the police bully me. She still a preschool teacher?”

  “Nah . . . She’s, uh . . . you know we’re divorced.”

  “I guess I heard that.” Delta nodded.

  “She’s in the marijuana business,” he said.

  “Really?” She couldn’t hide her surprise.

  “I know what you’re thinking, like everyone else. Shoulda been me, right? Well, I was in it first, while she was teaching, and we had rip-roarin’ fights over it. Makin’ good money, but it’s finally what broke us up. She ended up with the business in the divorce. How do you like that?”

  “Wow.”

  “Yep. So if you wanna see her, you gotta head toward the beach. She lives out thataway.” He hooked a thumb toward the west.

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about the guy who ran into Tanner’s car. I think you fixed both vehicles.”

  “You mean the guy Tanner ran into.”

  “I guess I heard it the other way around,” said Delta.

  “Look, Tanner’s dead, and I liked him, but he was a liar. No gettin’ around that. Who d’ya think stabbed him?”

  Delta found his way of hitting the issue straight on refreshing, and a little scary. “A lot of people think it was me.”

  “I know who did it.”

  She smiled faintly, before realizing he was dead serious. “Okay, who?”

  “One of his girlfriends. Tanner always had a few extras around. One for show . . .” He swept a hand in Delta’s direction. “And the others for . . . other things.”

  “Maybe. Who are those girlfriends?”

  “One of ’em’s your lawyer,” he said meaningfully. “Saw that today. Couldn’t believe you actually hired Amanda Forsythe.”

  “I needed someone good.”

  “I get that. Still, it’s a
surprise. I saw them at the barbeque, y’know, Amanda and Tanner.”

  “I remember you being pretty stoned.”

  He chuckled. “Oh, yeah, but I still saw them. In fact, I saw a lot of things. Some I really shouldn’t have. Have kept ’em to myself.” He put a finger to his lips. “But you wanted to know about Mr. Josh McGill. Tanner sideswiped his car and acted like it was the guy’s fault, even though it was pretty easy to tell it wasn’t. McGill’s a hothead. He challenged Tanner in the parking lot, from what they both said, and there was a lot of shouting. Maybe some shoving, but Tanner was smart. He backed down when he was losing. Had to, but it was hard for him. He was a guy who couldn’t be wrong. You know the type.”

  Woody was describing Tanner in terms that were spot-on, but no one had ever had the courage to say so before.

  “The police already asked me this. Bailey’s dad,” Woody added.

  “Oh.” She should’ve expected that. But as long as she was here . . . “Who else was he with?”

  “Zora. Always liked her. Tanner said they got pretty hot and heavy on her pool table before Amanda. Ellie was a score in college. Amanda was high school.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Ahhh, let’s just say we had a mutual confidante, back in those days.” He rubbed his nose, faintly smiling. “She’s the one told me about Ellie and Chris at the barbeque too. A lot of that going around that night.”

  Ellie and Chris . . . McCrae. She’d ignored the rumor about them at the barbeque, had put it down to wild gossip, but maybe it was true. She wished it didn’t affect her so much at this late date, but it did, to some extent.

  “What about you?” Delta asked lightly.

  “At the barbeque? Oh, I stayed true to Crystal.”

  “What about afterward?”

  “You want me to kiss and tell?” He wagged his finger at her. “That could get me in serious trouble.”

  “You just said you’re divorced.”

  “Why do you want to know? Could it be you’re interested in little old me?”

  She almost smiled. He was as outrageous as always.

  “I don’t kiss and tell, but yes, I know what you’re thinking. I can see it. That jealous female thing mixed with a kind of intuition. You think Tanner and I might’ve shared a few women. Not together. Just . . . working out of the same black book.”