“I’ll make you my arroz a pato.”
I rolled my eyes. I was a whiz at heat-and-serve and not much else, but he didn’t have to rub it in. “Sure. And, well, thanks for your help. And whatever.” Especially whatever.
“Happy to be of service, ma’am. See you tonight.”
As I disconnected, I realized I was humming a little happy tune under my breath, and I forced myself to stop. Sure, there was a lot to enjoy about Bernie Aguilar. Some of his finer attributes played out in my mind, and parts of me I’d given up for dead years ago tingled with sudden warmth. But I wasn’t dependent. I could fend for myself, just as I’d done for the past fourteen years, ever since Wayne had left for pizza and never returned. Until he had. His continuing presence in Arlinda was odd, unsettling. I shook my head. Best not to think about all that now.
Then it came back to me in a rush. Stacy! I hadn’t told Bernie my sister had taken up residence in my backyard. Probably I should have mentioned it.
I was saved from any more thoughts along those lines by the sound of a car pulling up out front. Two more groups came and went before two o’clock rolled around. I pasted a smile on my face and handed them my clipboard to sign before hustling them through the split-level at top speed.
During a lull in the foot traffic, I extracted the cookie sheet from the refrigerator and set it on the counter, unable to avoid another quick peek at the finger. The wedding band looked loose; maybe it had been a better fit until death drained the digit of its life juices. The good citizen in me told me to touch nothing. But curiosity made me wonder how easily it might come off.
I picked up the pencil and touched the rounded tip to the wedding ring. It moved a fraction of an inch. I gave it the barest of taps, and the band fell with a plink to the cookie sheet. Purest accident, Officer.
I bent down to take a closer look. There was something engraved along the inner face. I found a penlight in my bag and shined it on the tiny cursive.
And read, “ ‘June 8, 1987. All my love. Everett.’ ”
The pencil fell from my fingers and rolled across the floor. I felt a hollowness in my chest.
A car door slammed. I managed to draw a deep breath and steady my nerves for what was bound to be an uncomfortable interview with the police.
But it wasn’t Arlinda PD on the mat when I opened the door. It was the woman with her doodle dog. She smiled brightly. “He’s all tuckered out.”
I looked at Winston, and thought I detected a gleam in his brown eye. “Let’s start with the yard,” I said, stepping through the door and closing it firmly behind me. “I’m Sam, by the way.”
“Rita.” She followed me around the garage, the dog stopping to sniff and mark every object we encountered, including the recycling bin and the coiled garden hose. The backyard was a long expanse of grass sloping down into a greenbelt of alders and firs. Landscaping was minimal, except for a couple of rhododendrons surrounded by beds of bark mulch.
Suddenly Winston stiffened and began to bark. He lunged forward, jerking his owner off her feet. She dropped the leash, and he was off like a shot, his big paws throwing up divots of grass as he charged across the yard.
“Winston, come!” she yelled.
Winston reached one of the mulch beds and began to dig like a steam shovel. Bark flew onto the grass behind him. By the time we caught up, he had an object between his teeth and was pulling mightily, his weight back on his haunches.
Rita snatched up his leash. “Probably an old bone down there,” she said with an apologetic smile.
I looked at the soiled grass. Could this open house possibly get any worse?
Just then we became aware of the object of Winston’s attention. It was a bone. But not an old one. It was an arm bone, still cloaked in flesh. A human arm, in fact. And in a flash of insight, I realized things could get worse.
As Winston tugged harder, a woman’s body emerged slowly, horribly, from the bark, the face purple and congested, unseeing eyes clouded by dirt, pale red hair stripped by death of its luster. A strip of shiny yellow fabric, strangely familiar to me, was wrapped around her neck.
Rita whimpered and sagged to the ground, her face as green as the grass. Winston dropped his burden and went over to touch his muddy nose to her cheek.
And that’s when I saw one last thing: a hand, lean and elegant, with long pointed nails lacquered a deep pink, resting on the bed of mulch. The ring finger was missing.
Chapter 3
I wasn’t even aware that a third person had joined us until I turned to stumble back to the house and almost collided with a policeman. He was staring at the body, his eyes hard.
I steadied my voice with an effort. “Officer Decker?”
“Sergeant,” he said, still taking in the details of the scene. He was a few inches taller than me, maybe five-nine, with rich dark skin and brown eyes. His hair, tight black curls edged with gray, was buzzed close to his scalp, and he wore silver wire-rimmed glasses. I guessed him to be around my age, which is to say the downhill side of thirty-five.
“I need your names,” he said.
I introduced myself. Rita was still cowering in the grass, her head in her hands. Winston sat by her side.
Decker pulled his radio from his belt. “Both of you can wait over there.” He indicated a spot about twenty feet from the corpse.
“Look,” I said. “She’s a wreck. Can I take her up to the house to wait? Maybe get her a glass of water?”
His glance was just short of hostile, but after a moment he nodded. “Don’t touch anything.”
“You got it.” I helped Rita to her feet, and we trudged up the slope to the house.
I got her settled on the living room couch, and Winston jumped up to sit next to her, leaving smears of mud and grass on the pristine upholstery. Rita’s skin hue was almost a perfect match for the white leather.
“Can I get you something? A glass of water?”
She nodded. “Water would be good.”
In the kitchen, I searched the cabinets until I found a glass mug, and filled it from the tap. I brought it back to the living room. It was deserted. Rita and Winston had vanished.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, stashing the glass on the mantel and running to the door. I looked up and down the street. Not a trace of dog or owner.
I retrieved the glass and took a slug of water. It tasted strongly of chlorine. Then I sat on the couch to wait.
Within ten minutes, a second police car and the coroner’s wagon had pulled up out front. I got up and watched the action from the sliding door. Crime-scene technicians were measuring, photographing, reducing the horror to a neatly docketed, impersonal file. I moved to the front door. The sidewalk was covered with a scattering of bystanders, drawn to the spectacle of sudden, inexplicable tragedy.
I checked my watch. The open house was officially over, but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to venture up the street to collect my signs. I had one foot out the door when Decker appeared as though he’d been conjured up. “Going somewhere?”
“I was thinking about getting my signs.”
“That can wait.” He looked around. “Where’s the other lady? The one with the dog?”
“She took off.”
His eyes narrowed. “I told you to stay put.”
“Hey, I’m still here. I turned my back for a moment and she split.”
“You have her contact information, though, right?” He nodded at my sign-in sheet.
“Uh—well, no. She never got around to signing in. With the dog and all. But her name is Rita. And the dog is Winston.”
“I’m sure that will narrow things down. Let’s go inside.” He wiped his feet carefully, his restless eye taking in the short hallway, the white-on-white living room, the vaulted ceiling with its exposed woodwork.
“You the listing agent?” he said.
I shook my head. “It’s my boss’s listing. Everett Sweet.”
“I’ll need his information.”
I took one o
f my cards off the counter and penciled all of Everett’s numbers on the back. Decker tucked the card into his breast pocket. “Tell me what happened.”
“Well—” I got the story out, telling it baldly and without conviction. I could see he wasn’t buying it.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You let a couple of thieves clean the place out. What were you doing? Aren’t you supposed to keep an eye on them?”
“I—I got distracted. They seemed so nice. Listen, it was my first open house. The plumbing was plugged up, and then there was this finger—”
“Their description?”
“Huh?”
“The couple,” he said with a tinge of impatience. “They may be involved. At the very least, they’re in possession of material evidence in a homicide. Did they drive here?”
Haltingly I told him everything I remembered about Bill and Natalie. “They took a brochure. Then they drove off.”
“Car make and model?”
When I looked blank, he said, “Color?”
“Blue. Or gray.” At his look of disgust, I added, “I’m certain it was gray.” Or green, now that I thought about it.
“You said something about a finger?”
“Yeah, I—”
“Show me,” he said.
I took the cookie sheet out of the refrigerator and plunked it on the counter, describing the events that had led to my discovery. His face registered nothing. He was probably used to seeing body parts of all descriptions in unlikely places, though truth be told, crime in Arlinda was usually limited to busting bums for urinating in alleys and citing homeowners for keeping roosters on their properties, a violation of Municipal Code 9.42.050.
“You mind if I lock the place up?” I said. I’d had enough for one day.
“We’ll take care of that. You got the keys?”
I retrieved my jacket from where it was hanging in the hall and fished around in the pocket. Nothing. I tried the other pocket and came up with the ring of keys.
“Here you go.” I handed the keys to Decker, and he pocketed them before returning to the task at hand, which was using a pair of tweezers to manipulate the finger into a baggie. I looked away.
“You recognize the deceased?” he said.
The question came so suddenly I was nonplussed. “The de—oh. No. No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re not sure?”
There was a dangerous note in his voice that put me on alert. “Sure, I’m sure. I mean, maybe I’ve seen her picture someplace. But I didn’t know her.”
He was silent as he sealed the baggie and wrote the date and time on it with a black Sharpie, then did the same with the ring.
“So, what do you think?” I said when the silence got to be too much for me.
“I think it’s a finger.”
“I gathered that much. But why was it in the freezer and not—not—?”
He didn’t bother to answer my question. “You handle it?”
“Nope. Not me. Not at all.” I spread my palms out, hoping not only to express my intrinsic honesty but to show him all my own digits were accounted for.
“Anything else out of place?”
“No. Yes. There was a knife in the sink. I dropped it in the dishwasher.”
He made a note, then placed both baggies into a third bag and pressed the top edge to seal it. “So, what do they want for this place?”
“What?”
“The asking price,” he said, speaking slowly, as if to someone mentally deficient.
“Three ninety-five. Listen, what should I do with these cookies? They’re evidence, right?”
“Nope,” he said. “They’re carbohydrates. Go ahead and bake ’em off if you want.”
My stomach did a little flip-flop. “I’ll pass on that.”
I emptied the tray of dough into the trash and double-checked that the oven was off. Then I glanced at my watch and shifted my feet a little.
“In a hurry to get somewhere?” he said.
“Yeah. Anywhere but here.”
He didn’t actually smile, but his face lost some of its grimness. “You can go. I’ll be in touch.” He jotted more notes on his pad, and I fled. It took me less than two minutes to collect my signs and get the hell out of Campus Heights.
Chapter 4
Arlinda is a big town with a small-town vibe. Fifteen thousand people sounds like a lot, but when you’ve lived among them for thirty-five years there’s no such thing as six degrees of separation. Blow your nose and the next person you run into will tell you there’s a sale on Kleenex at Blake’s Drugstore and Gift Shoppe, Seventh and Pine. It’s wonderful to be a part of such a close-knit community, when it’s not annoying as heck.
I parked in the center of town, my thoughts automatically turning to something sweet and gooey to restore my equilibrium after the gruesome finds at 412 McMillan. Leaving the van at the foot of G Street, I trekked up the steep hill to the bakery, figuring the cardio would offset the megadose of “bad” cholesterol and refined sugar to come. A blanket of fog pressed down on me, leaving tiny droplets of moisture on my upper lip as if I’d actually broken a sweat. In June on the North Coast, the sun was as elusive as Sasquatch, hidden in a patchwork sky of gray on gray. Novice gardeners planted their basil, their bell peppers, their tomatoes in May, only to watch them shrivel and die in June, starved for sunlight and strangled by powdery mildew. Experienced growers rigged hotboxes over their seedlings, or treated them with doses of UV light, if the marijuana growers had left any units on the shelves.
Ramona’s Bakery was one of four small businesses in a long, low building fronting Fourth Street. There was a big kitchen in the back, and a small seating area for customers: rustic wooden tables that today happened to be filled to bursting with carbo-loading patrons. Ramona herself was behind the counter.
“Three today, Sam?” she said, grabbing up a pair of plastic tongs and positioning them over the double-chocolategot her walnut cookies. “Or four? This looks like a ‘four’ day, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“Four, definitely” were the words on my lips; then I flashed on frozen lumps of cookie dough mingling cozily with a pale finger and my stomach did a flop.
“Um—actually, maybe I’ll just have coffee today,” I said.
Ramona paused, her tongs in midair, and stared at me. Her gray curls were flattened against her head by a hairnet. She wore a white kitchen apron over a sleeveless tie-dyed T-shirt, displaying sun-spotted leathery skin and lots of ropy muscle running from shoulder to wrist. A tattoo of her infant grandson was inked on her left biceps. For a woman who spent her days up to her elbows in butter and sweet chocolate, she was lean to the point of gauntness, driven by cacao and ambition.
“Must be something serious to put you off your usual,” she said.
My usual? I was officially a regular, a known cookie junkie. “Sometimes change is good.”
“I suppose.” She fixed up my coffee with cream and four sugars and handed it over, accepting an assortment of coins in return.
“Let me know if this is gonna be a regular thing,” she said. “I might have to adjust my baking quotas.” She cackled with laughter.
I took my coffee down the hill to the VW. As I climbed aboard, my phone rang. I dug it out of my pocket and punched a button. “Hello?”
“Sam,” Bernie said.
I took a deep breath. “Look, all I did was host an open house. And then this happens.”
“I know. Tragic.”
“I guess so.”
“I mean having to postpone dinner. Again.” He sighed. “I’m at the scene now. Should have things wrapped up in about twenty minutes, then I’ll swing by your place so we can go over your statement.”
“I’m sorry. I mean, about dinner.”
“Me, too. I’ll see you in a bit.”
As I hung up, I wondered if Bernie was starting to regret his involvement with me. Surely there were other women out there less trouble-prone than I. But there was no accoun
ting for taste.
I sipped the coffee, leaning back in my seat. The open house replayed in my brain like a lowbrow comedy: Norm and Ethel, Winston’s wet nose and muddy paws, the bright young couple who’d cleaned the place out. I could still feel the phantom tickle of fleas as they crawled up my ankles. Or maybe it wasn’t phantom at all. I was going to have to burn my clothes.
I shook my head and thought of my real estate bible and Step 4, hosting the perfect open house. Mine had been as far from perfect as it was possible to be. I remembered the photograph of a smiling agent greeting her smiling prospects at the door, everyone looking so goddamn happy you’d think they’d all won the lottery. She didn’t have fleas, a corpse in the landscaping, or a finger in the freezer.
I moved restlessly, trying not to think about the finger. Its inexplicable presence inside the house added an extra layer of horror to the tragedy. Despite my efforts, I pictured it, with its grisly end and slim band of gold. The inscription was what troubled me the most. What was my boss’s connection to human remains in a major appliance?
I had the distinct feeling that when I’d learn the answer I wasn’t going to like it.
—
I made a few stops on the way home, picking up beer and breakfast pastries. When I pulled up in front of our house at Fickle Court, there was a burgundy SUV parked across the street. My heartbeat accelerated a little. Bernie had arrived to go over my statement.
With keys in hand, I climbed the three wooden steps to the front porch. For a minute I thought I heard voices. I distinctly remembered locking both the knob and the deadbolt. I tried the handle, and it turned easily.
Stacy was lying on my couch. The boot was off her injured foot, and the foot itself was resting on Bernie Aguilar’s lap.
Shock made me speechless. Bernie looked up and smiled at me, the rat.
“Oh, Sam, you’re back,” Stacy said. “I was going to wait till you got here to get some help with my boot, but Bernie took care of it.”
“He did, did he?”
Her lips curved. “He showed up just in time. My knight in shining armor. It’s a real bitch getting that boot off and on by myself.”
A Killer Location Page 4
