Maggie and the Hidden Homicide

by Barbara Cool Lee

  "So tell me this truth—or trash," she added, glancing at Donovan. "Then I can decide how involved I want to be."

  She tapped her foot another few times. "Look, boys," she finally said. "I'm freezing out here and my date is about to come looking for me. So unless you want to tell everyone at the party what this is about, spill it now."

  "Fine," Peter Valentine said. "I think I know why Taiyari killed Ethan Kirby."

  "Don't you dare say that!" Donovan roared, clearly ready to go at Valentine again.

  "Stop!" Maggie said, stepping between them. She raised her palm to Donovan. "Just stand there and let him talk, or I swear, young man, you'll spend the night in jail."

  He clenched his fists, but gave a sharp nod, so she turned back to Peter Valentine.

  The older man had appeared menacing before, when she'd caught him watching Taiyari like a hawk. Even now, his wary expression and hulking figure made her nervous. But now he looked more like a middle-aged man with a burgundy bruise spreading across his jawline, and sadness in his eyes.

  "It's too late now," he said in a resigned tone. "They won. When I was helping Nakawé, we needed to keep everything secret, but now, it's too late…."

  "Nakawé? Nakawé Méndez? That's Taiyari's grandmother, isn't it?"

  He nodded. "She was my friend."

  "Your friend?" Maggie asked, astonished. "Did Taiyari know?"

  He shook his head.

  "I didn't know either," Donovan said. He unclenched his fists. "You were always acting so possessive toward Taiyari, I thought—"

  "—you thought I was in love with her like all you young bucks were? Well, I wasn't. Her grandmother was… a great woman. And she…. We were trying to protect Taiyari. Keep her out of it for her own safety."

  "Keep her out of what?" Maggie asked.

  "Her grandmother had been a great leader of her people. Those Huichol people. She had left her village to come take care of Taiyari, but she had been a very powerful woman back where she came from. And when she was threatened, and saw the other people threatened, she wasn't going to just take it like the others did. Unlike them, she wasn't afraid."

  "Afraid of what?" Donovan asked, looking at the older man more respectfully now.

  "The secret no one would talk about," Maggie said.

  "Yes. No one would tell what it was, until Nakawé came. It happened to her, and she started asking around, trying to get to the bottom of it."

  "What happened?" Maggie asked.

  "There's some sort of blackmail scheme on the farms around here. The undocumented workers, the ones who can't go to the police for help, are being forced to kick back part of their earnings to some sort of syndicate. If they tell anyone about it, even the other workers, bad things happen to them."

  "ICE gets called on them?" Maggie said.

  "That would be a disaster for them. But no. That's not what's happening. If it were, they would probably talk. At least warn each other. But it's something far worse."

  "What?"

  "In the last year there have been accidents. At another farm, there was a tractor breakdown and someone was injured. A man at the Kirby farm refused to pay, and his trailer burned down."

  "That burned trailer," Maggie said softly. "I saw it. Was anyone inside?"

  He shook his head. "It happened when everyone was at work. Luckily. But the family lost everything. As soon as they saw it, they left town."

  "But no one would say who was behind it?"

  "If someone did, they'd be killed."

  "Then how do you know about it?"

  "Because Taiyari's grandmother told me. She told me who the point man at the Kirby farm was, and what she'd figured out about the plot." Then she understood the fear in his eyes. He said softly, "and as soon as Taiyari's grandmother told me…."

  "She was murdered?" Maggie whispered. She felt the chill and wrapped her arms more tightly around herself. "Then why didn't you tell anyone? Why didn't you go to the police?"

  "Because we think—we thought, Nakawé and I, we realized someone powerful had to be behind it. Someone coordinating the whole thing. We identified five different farms where this was happening. There was a bag man on each farm, collecting the blackmail. But someone with power, like the kind of people at this party, had to be behind it. Who can I tell? Who will believe me?"

  "How much money do you think they were getting?" Donovan asked, looking stricken.

  "At least ten thousand dollars per month from each farm."

  Maggie resisted the urge to scoff. That kind of money was a fortune to the victims. But the dress and heels she wore cost more than that. She'd been married to a rich man, and knew the Carita elite. The cocktail party crowd were more interested in hanging out with celebrities like Reese than in dirtying their hands with some small-time blackmail. It didn't make sense. But "murder," she said. "You really think someone killed Taiyari's grandmother because she was getting close to finding out?"

  "Not someone," he said. "Ethan Kirby."

  "The dead boy—?"

  "—was the point man for the Kirby farm."

  "Did his father know?" she asked.

  "No. I worked for Brian Kirby for years. I'll never believe he knew. But Ethan was the one. He didn't want to work. He wanted to party. And he met someone, someone like these people here, and he got involved with them. And he killed Nakawé because she was going to expose him. And…." He looked so grief-stricken that Maggie realized the worst part of it before he said it:

  "Taiyari killed her boyfriend because she found out he'd murdered her grandmother."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was a sad drive home.

  Maggie had called Ibarra and told him everything Peter Valentine had confessed, and the farm manager had promised to go straight to the police and give them a complete statement about everything he knew.

  Ibarra had told Maggie he'd follow up if Valentine didn't come clean immediately. He thanked her for helping him get to the truth about the murder of Ethan Kirby, and his last words had been, "I'm sorry, Maggie. I really am."

  She and Reese didn't speak on the drive home.

  Reese parked his Porsche sideways in Casablanca's driveway and then came around and handed her out of the car.

  "I'm sorry, Maggie," he said. "I know you feel for the girl."

  Maggie heard Jasper barking in the tiny house. She unlocked the door and he came bounding out, running and circling and bumping into them, filled with joy at being reunited with his person.

  She felt herself crying and just stood there in the driveway with the happy dog and the sad man and the night sky bright with stars overhead.

  Without a word, Reese put his arm around her and led her into Casablanca. They went out to the back yard and sat in the lounge chairs, and Jasper romped and explored on the little lawn.

  "Coffee?" Reese asked.

  She didn't respond.

  "Coffee or tea?" he asked.

  She just lay back on the lounge chair, trying to make the tears stop.

  "Coffee, tea, or me?" he asked, and that finally got a smile out of her.

  She sat up straight and stuck her legs out in front of her on the lounge cushion. The fringe on her little cocktail dress shimmered as she moved, and her gold sandals sparkled on her feet like Cinderella's glass slippers. She looked out across the pool's waterfall edge to the cove in front of them and wiped away the tears.

  Reese didn't say anything. He sat on his chair sideways, feet on the floor, leaning forward with elbows on his knees to watch her. His shirt was still unbuttoned from his strip tease routine, and the purple silk gapped open to expose the expanse of tanned chest beneath.

  She felt that stirring of attraction he always brought out in her. He had often shaved his chest for movie roles, but now there was a dark shadow of hair over the sleek bulge of his muscles. With the one-month beard and the chest hair and the unruly blond mane, he seemed almost leonine. It was all less mannequin-sleek than before, and more… man. At the moment he was
pure male, physical perfection brought to life, and it would be so easy to forget about his distracting celebrity, and the illness of his addiction, and all the complications that would make falling in love with him so impractical.

  She gave him a faint smile and he smiled back. His hand reached out to hers, and he leaned forward, just waiting for her to give him a sign that he had permission to take their mutual attraction to its logical conclusion.

  She didn't give him that sign, and eventually he took his hand away and stood up to gaze out at the sea.

  "Who do you think is behind the blackmail?" he eventually asked, not turning around.

  She realized she'd been so focused on the missing girl that she hadn't even thought of that part. But she had a pretty good idea.

  "Peter Valentine said this all happened recently."

  "Recently?" he asked, turning around to face her.

  "The accidents and the escalation in violence happened since Nakawé Méndez arrived. He had no idea any of it was happening before she started fighting back."

  He smiled. "And what does that prove?"

  "That something changed."

  "Like what?"

  Maggie sighed, feeling defeated as all her idealistic beliefs were shattered. "It means that some nice young man who just graduated from college with a mountain of debt showed up to work at the charity around that time."

  Reese's shoulders dropped. He was disappointed, too. "Wow. That's a shame. I liked him. I didn't put that together. But couldn't that be a coincidence?"

  "It could. But it makes sense. He told me he'd never be out of debt. And that you don't go to work for a nonprofit to get rich." She leaned back in her chair and looked up at the stars. "And maybe that's true. But working for a charity like that means sacrificing your own goals to help other people. Maybe he's not quite the saintly person he appears to be."

  "Most of us are more sinner than saint, Maggie."

  "I know," she said. "But hopefully very few of us are murderers."

  Maggie sat on the daybed late that night. She was having trouble sleeping, and had decided to do something productive instead of just being sad.

  She had a slicker brush in her right hand, a book on grooming Collies in her left, and Jasper sat in front of her on the floor, staring dubiously from one of her hands to the other.

  "We have to face this sometime," she told him, and he shook his head.

  "Yes," she replied. "We do. You're shedding all over the place, and most of the fur is ending up tangled in your ruff." She reached out and pulled at a clump, and he shook his head, backing away.

  "Exactly," she said to him firmly. "We can't go on this way." She closed the book with a snap of the covers. "According to this, it's easy. I just use the twenty-seven grooming tools they recommend, in the correct order and with the correct technique, and you'll be looking like a champion show dog in only a hundred hours of work."

  He shook his head again, not appreciating her humor.

  "It's the way it goes, Kid. It's the price of being so gorgeous. Now come here."

  She held out her hand to him, enticingly, and he didn't budge. "Okay. We'll make a deal." She reached over to a shelf and grabbed the jar of treats. "One treat for every five minutes of brushing."

  He still looked skeptical, and she quickly caved.

  "Fine. One treat for every minute of brushing. Fair enough?"

  He nodded, and came up to sit in front of her. She ran the slicker brush over his ruff, and, at the same time, held out a treat.

  Jasper took the treat and sighed.

  "I know," Maggie said. "It's hard to be beautiful. But you're tough. You can handle it."

  They got a welcome break a few minutes later when her phone rang.

  She got up to answer it, and saw it was from a number she didn't recognize. Her finger hovered over the MUTE CALL button, but then she hit answer instead.

  "Maggie McJasper?" a girl's voice said.

  "Yes?"

  "This is Taiyari…." There was a hiss on the phone, then she repeated, "Taiyari Méndez."

  Maggie almost leaped through the phone at her. "Taiyari! Are you okay? Where are you? Are you safe?"

  "No," she said. "I'm not safe at all. I don't know what to do. You told Carmen—" The phone cut out and Maggie shouted into it:

  "I'll come get you! Or you can come here. Where are you? How can I help?"

  Maggie's hand slipped on the phone case and she realized she had broken out in a sweat. She rubbed her free hand on her jeans and then switched the phone to that hand.

  "…you wanted to help," the girl was saying.

  "What? I didn't catch what you said," Maggie said.

  "My phone's almost out of juice. I said I had called Carmen, and she told me you were looking for clues to clear my name."

  "Yes. But that was before. Before we found out about your grandmother."

  "What?" The phone was cutting out, like she was in a bad cell phone zone, but Maggie thought she sounded confused. "My grandmother…."

  "I can hardly hear you," she said into the phone, finding herself shouting to try to overcome the technological gap between them. "Where are you?"

  "…come alone. No police."

  "Alone? I can bring Lieutenant Ibarra. He'll help you."

  "No!" Her shout came through loudly, and Maggie pulled the phone away from her ear. "You have to come alone. I don't know who… trust… who killed Ethan…."

  "Wait!" Maggie shouted. "You're cutting out. Tell me where you are."

  Silence for a moment, so long Maggie worried the phone had gone dead, then Taiyari answered, "Carita Valley… campground. Pine Hollow Road… no police… alone."

  Maggie took a deep breath, then said, "I promise. No police. I'll be there as soon as I can."

  There was only silence in response. Maggie wasn't sure if she'd hung up to save battery power, or if the phone had died. She wasn't even sure if Taiyari had heard her response. She hit redial on the phone but got an Out Of Service signal.

  So she put the phone in her pocket.

  But the girl had said she didn't kill Ethan. In her gut, she believed Taiyari. That meant Peter Valentine had been lying, or mistaken, about what was going on.

  Ethan Kirby had wanted to tell Taiyari something. If he had killed her grandmother, would he confess it? That seemed unlikely. And it seemed unlikely she would meet him alone if she already knew he was a murderer. No, there was something else going on.

  And that meant Taiyari could very well be innocent. Someone else killed Ethan Kirby. Someone who wanted him silenced, or someone who was angry with him for another reason. And that meant they might also be trying to kill Taiyari. And she was the only one who knew where Taiyari was.

  She stood there for a minute, thinking hard. She wasn't sure Taiyari had heard her promise not to bring the police. And she wasn't sure if that was a promise she should keep.

  Will Ibarra was as honest as they came. She knew that. But if she called him, he would feel compelled to make an official report. Taiyari was the prime suspect in a murder case. Ibarra was a by the books cop.

  And she'd promised Taiyari. She'd given her word. Whether the girl had heard it or not, it was a promise.

  "I have to do this," she said to Jasper.

  He shook his head at her, and she had a feeling he was right.

  She grabbed her jacket, dark purple fleece that would blend into the night.

  She grabbed her purse.

  She grabbed her car keys.

  She told Jasper no when he tried to come with her, and she left her tiny house and went down the steps to the driveway. Was she really going to go meet a suspected murderer alone in the dark in some strange place? Wasn't that the last thing the too-stupid-to-live heroine in a cheap horror movie did before she got herself killed? Was Brooke right? Should she be planning some pithy final words to say before she got herself deservedly killed for her idiocy?

  She walked over to Casablanca's big red front door and knocked.


  Reese came to the door shirtless and in jeans, obviously still awake at this late hour, and she found herself doing the thing she usually did when she was stressed out: falling into his arms for a reassuring hug.

  He held her close and patted her back and said, "what is it? what's wrong?"

  She pulled away when she got herself under control and told him quickly that she was heading out to some campground in Carita Valley to talk to Taiyari, and she had promised not to call the police.

  He took the news reasonably well.

  "Are you out of your freaking mind?!" he shouted, and she shushed him.

  "Don't hush me, Magdalena! You're going out alone in the dark to see some girl you think is not a killer, who wants to meet you alone because she swears she didn't murder her boyfriend, but thinks everyone else, including the police, might be involved in murdering people?"

  "I wasn't planning on going alone," she said mildly.

  "Fine," he said. "I'll come with you. But first we're calling the police to meet us there. You do know where we're going, right?"

  "No!" she put her hand on his arm as he turned away. "No police. I gave my word."

  He shook his head at her, looking a lot like Jasper had earlier. She would laugh if she weren't scared to death. But she gave him a stubborn frown instead. "Hurry up. We've gotta go."

  "Let me get my shoes," he said. He shut the door on her and she stood there for a minute, looking up Pine Hollow Road on her map app. They had passed it during their real estate search a few days ago, but she hadn't noticed. Soon he came back, jacket on, sneakers in hand, and shoving his phone into the pocket of his jeans.

  He walked across the driveway barefoot and got in the passenger seat of her car, cursing under his breath the whole way.

  While she got in to drive, he pushed his seat all the way back and folded his long legs like pretzels to put on his shoes.

  He was still muttering curses under his breath the whole time, and she ignored it, and put the car into reverse, and they headed out.

  Chapter Twenty-Two