He’d been working out lately—not a lot, but enough to tighten the slight paunch around his middle. He looked good, she thought, resisting an impulse to touch his tawny hair. It was thinning, but as soft as the hazel eyes that sometimes arrested her in mid-sentence. But he was already turning away, and Claudia brushed past him, toward the kitchen. “Got anything cold to drink?” she asked.
She could feel his eyes on her back when he said “help yourself,” just a little more sarcastically than she thought necessary. She sorted through the refrigerator and pulled out a can of Diet Pepsi, then closed the door and leaned against it. “Look, I’m sorry, Dennis. I really am.”
“You always are.” He stood near the sink, eight feet away. A variety of paint brushes rested in the drain board, which was perpetually stained with colors. “That I can handle—your emergencies, your apologies. What I can’t handle is everything in between.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that before your latest ‘emergency,’ you weren’t exactly making yourself available. No calls. No returns on mine.”
“Dennis, it was only a few days. I was—”
“Busy. And not for the first time, at least not lately.”
Claudia popped the tab on the Pepsi. She took a long swallow, felt it burn down her throat. He had a smudge on his cheek—paint, probably—and she wanted to go to him and wipe it off, make contact, make whatever had come up between them vanish. Poof. Just like in the movies.
“You know, Claudia, I see you standing there, eyeing me, and what I see is someone who doesn’t know what she wants, who wishes it was me—tries to make it me, but who can’t quite pull it off. That’s the sense I have, what I’ve been picking up for a while now.” He wiped at his cheek, missing the smudge. A faint rosebud appeared where his fingers had been. “How am I doing, Claudia?” he said softly. “Pretty accurate read on the situation, isn’t it.” Not a question now. A statement.
“I think . . .” What? What did she think? She began again, her own voice as soft as his. “I think, Dennis, that . . . I can understand where you might think that. I can—”
“Oh, come on, Claudia. You’re good at a lot of things, but sidestepping an issue isn’t one of them.” He paused, then said, “We’ve been seeing each other for eight months. Guess what? I fell in love with you, pretty damned fast and pretty damned hard. Whoosh! Rockets! Cannons! Sparkles like fairy dust! You . . . well, you only fell in like with me.”
“That’s crazy.” She felt a flutter of panic. “I’m nuts about you, Dennis! I adore you.”
“Adore is good,” he said. He smiled dolefully. “It’s just not enough. It took me forever to see it, but I do now. I’m surprised you don’t. Or won’t.”
“You’re right I won’t.” The soda can felt slick in Claudia’s hand, and too cold. She clutched it more tightly, afraid it would slip loose. “Rockets go off for me, too,” she said, hearing the automation in her tone, knowing he heard it as well.
“Claudia, it’s all right. I’m making it easy for both of us. Come look.”
She followed him into the living room, which he’d converted into a studio for his work. At no small cost, he’d hired a contractor to widen two windows and build a skylight into the roof. He tinkered with wood well enough to erect a handsome and complicated series of shelves to hold his art tools. All told, the remodeling work took nearly two months, and when it was done the room began to blossom with canvases in various stages of completion. He did some paintings for personal pleasure, but most were freelance jobs—artwork destined to become book covers, or backdrops for modeling studios—what Dennis called “mini stages” for jewelry displays and hand lotions. There were few places where she could cast aside a bad day as swiftly as she could in Dennis’s studio. They made love there more often than in his bedroom. But it was all gone now, the room bare except for boxes sealed with tape.
“I don’t understand,” Claudia said, though of course she did.
“Well, it seems my talents are wanted in California. A set designer I know, a friend, he hooked me into a deal to do backdrops for a film producer. It’s just on a one-year contract, but it sounds good. Could lead to other things.”
Claudia walked to the shelves and ran a finger along the inside of one. He’d already wiped it down. “I . . . when did all of this happen?”
“When you weren’t looking,” he answered gently. “My friend’s been after me for a few months. I’d been putting him off. But recently, it started to sound . . . right.”
“But I thought you loved it here.”
“I do. It’s just that I never intended to stay.” He waved a hand around. “I’d only come here to close the house after my aunt died and left it for me. She . . . well, you know the history on that, so I’ll fast forward. I came, I met a woman, I fell in love, I stayed. The woman didn’t love me back. It’s time to go.”
“Dennis—”
“Don’t, Claudia. Please.”
By now, both of their voices wobbled, hers as much as his. “When?” she asked.
“Saturday.”
“This Saturday?”
He nodded.
“That’s . . . fast.”
“It had to be. If I wavered, you might’ve talked me out of it.”
“I wish you’d given me the chance.”
“I did. I tried.” He shrugged. “All those calls that went unanswered? That was me, Claudia, looking for a thread to hang onto.”
She looked around the room, feeling the first tears threatening at the corners of her eyes, blurring her view. How could she have not seen this coming?
Dennis moved toward her, took one of her hands in both of his. “What we’ve had, it was good. It—”
“It was love. Is love.”
“No. Shhh. For me, it’s love. For you, it’s the idea of love.” He lifted her hand and kissed it. Then he smiled. “We’ll try it again when we’re old and gray, huh?”
She pushed her face into his shirt, letting it blot the mist from her eyes, inhaling his scent. Dennis gently pushed her off, then tilted her head and put his lips to hers. They swayed together in a melancholy embrace. Long seconds later, he breathed a goodbye into her hair and let her go.
* * *
She got back to the station with five minutes to spare, long enough to hit the ladies room and fill her mug with coffee. That someone had thoughtfully bothered to brew a fresh pot escaped her. She gathered files and a notepad, and dragged a chair into the chief’s office a beat behind the others. Carella and Moody edged sideways, trying to make room.
“Boy, Hershey,” said Suggs. “You looked lousy an hour ago. You look worse now, like you just swallowed battery acid. Hope whatever I got ain’t catchin’.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” she said absently, already thumbing through a folder. She looked up, feeling the heat of five people pressing in. Booey fidgeted at his bites. He quit when her gaze stopped at him. “Let’s get started,” she said. “You already know about the Farr case. We’re nowhere with it, and now we have another situation.”
Suggs snorted. “Spoken like only the queen of understatement could speak it. Tell ’em straight up, Hershey.”
She nodded and stepped them through details of the Becker autopsy, waiting out a chorus of gasps before she described her interviews with Barbara Becker and Babs Kensington. They couldn’t shake it, the concept that Henry Becker’s watery death had nothing to do with a misfire in the symmetry of his brain and everything to do with cold calculation in the brain of someone else.
“Barbara Becker seems such an unlikely candidate to kill someone,” Moody said at length. “Sure, she’s going to inherit her husband’s money, but it’s not like she’s tried to hide the fact.”
“Not only that,” Carella added, “but why take the risk? Becker was a sick man. Why kill him when he would be dead soon enough, anyway?”
Claudia was about to respond when she caught Booey out of the corner of her eye, his arm throttling the air. “Go, Booey,”
she said.
“Actually, unless he had some kind of complicating disease or infirmity, Mr. Becker could’ve lived another decade, maybe more. Alzheimer’s isn’t a death sentence, not in the strictest medical terms. It’s more like a, a . . .”
“Life sentence,” Suggs said quietly. “My granddaddy went that way, with Alzheimer’s. Boo, you were too young to even know him, but the poor man got kicked around by that disease for fifteen, sixteen years. It was awful, watchin’ a man who’d been proud all his life forget where he lived.” Suggs pulled nail clippers from a pocket and opened them up. In the next second he seemed to remember where he was and tucked them away again. “Thing is, up ’til the last couple of years, he was in good shape, physically. He’d been tough all his life. That man never sat, never stopped moving. You shoulda seen him. He . . . anyway, even after retirement his ticker was strong. Lungs were good, too. But eventually he forgot how to use his body—I guess that was it, really—and he stopped moving. He took to sittin’ a lot, starin’ a lot, lookin’ out at nothing, really. In the end, he just . . . drained away. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
Booey murmured something and then a respectful quiet filled the room. Claudia wished she could think of something to say. She glanced around; Moody and Carella were looking at their feet. Suggs spared them all by breaking the silence himself, growling that he was just trying to illustrate a point and for everyone to damn it all to hell, get back on track. They weren’t at a wake. They were at a murder investigation.
“Putting aside the widow for a minute,” he said to Claudia, “you got any motives that jump out at you on the Kensington woman?”
“I wish,” she replied. She turned to Moody. “Mitch, see what kind of background you can get on our Babs Kensington. Who was she before she came into Henry Becker’s life? Who’s she friends with? What about her family? All we know right now is what she’s told us, and that isn’t much.”
“You got it,” said Moody, “down to the color of her underwear.”
“Sure, give him the looker,” Carella quipped.
“Don’t you worry, Emory,” Claudia said. “She’s not your type.”
“Oh, yeah? What is my type, Lieutenant?”
“Your wife.”
Carella laughed. “Minor detail.”
“Not to her, I bet.”
“Can’t argue with the truth,” he said, affection for his wife evident in his tone. “The woman centers me. I ever mention that?”
Suggs grunted. “About a hundred times a day.”
“Okay, okay,” said Claudia. “Look, Emory, while Mitch is getting acquainted with Kensington, you and Booey take the paperwork trail. Do whatever it takes to get a grip on Becker’s estate. See how Mrs. Becker is really going to make out—down to the dime. See what kind of investments he had. Take a walk through his business life, too. He’s been officially retired for a long time, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t recently or even still dabbling in something. Oh. And find out whether there might even be a possibility that his passion for model railroading could’ve set off someone—another hobbyist, or maybe a collector with a keen eye for his displays—that sort of thing. You never know.”
They kicked the Becker case around for a while, trying out theories, refining investigative strategies, making lists, assigning tasks.
“So, Hershey,” said Suggs, “it ain’t like I don’t have plenty to do right here, but if you got anything in particular that would take some higher-level muscle, you just say the word and—”
“Word.”
“What?”
“I have something.” Claudia shifted to face him squarely. “It would be a huge advantage if you could keep a lid on the M.E.’s conclusions for as long as possible. Let Barbara Becker continue assuming that the doctor is going to sign off on the death. Stall everything. Stall the M.E.’s office on releasing the body. Stall her on funeral arrangements. Be sympathetic, but . . . stall.”
“Whoa. I said I got higher-level muscle. I didn’t say I could move heaven and earth.”
“We need this.”
“I . . . yeah. All right.” Suggs looked grimly at his phone, as if it might ring any moment and have Barbara Becker on the other end. “I’ll give it my best shot.”
“Good.” Claudia began to gather her files and notes. “Then that’s all—”
“What about the Farr case?” Moody asked.
She looked from him to the others, then settled back in her chair. “We’re staying with it. I wasn’t going to bring this up yet, but I suppose now is better than later because I think it’s just about time to squeeze Raynor.” She looked at Suggs. “I think I know how we can do it.”
“Somethin’ tells me I should fasten my seat belt,” Suggs murmured. “But go on, Hershey. Make it good.”
She laid out a plan, talked them through the questions, then stood up and smiled. What she had in mind was routine—routine anywhere else, anyway. Here, though . . . she could see the doubt in their faces. “Come on,” she said. “Think about it. What we’re going to do will be interesting. Maybe even fun.”
Suggs groaned. “Hershey, sex is fun. Fishin’ is fun. Moonshine on a hot summer night—even that’s fun if you don’t think about the next mornin’. What you’re talkin’ about? ‘Fun’ is not the first word that springs to mind.” He sighed. “But it just might work.” He aimed a finger at her. “Might. Now I got things to do, so get on out of here, all of you—and take those damned extra chairs with you. They’re cluttering the place up.”
Chapter 15
Almost midnight and Day Two without Robin. Day Two without worrying about a proper meal, dishes, skirmishes over chores, or what to watch on TV. Claudia didn’t miss any of it, but she ached for the company of her daughter and felt the silence of her house as if it were a tomb. Of course, there was the kitten, which though not yet named had begun to demonstrate actual moments of affection, but the distraction lacked staying power. Nothing—not the freedom, not the wine, not the oboe—nothing could fend off a long night weighted with loss. Her daughter was in Washington with her ex-husband, with whom she had slept for all the wrong reasons. The boyfriend with whom she had slept for all the right reasons, or so she’d thought, was packing for California. Claudia felt the creep of loneliness press in.
She settled onto the couch, put her bare feet up on the coffee table and flicked on HBO, not caring that a Mel Gibson movie she’d never seen was already half over. She refused to open the case files again—had intentionally left them on the dining room table—but banishing them from her thoughts was something else altogether. The Becker case didn’t bother her. Oh, it wouldn’t be open and shut, but the components were comfortably familiar: wealthy man killed, wife to inherit, brazen young woman in the background. It would take legwork, but not a lot of creativity. The Farr drowning, though . . . . Claudia shook her head. Suggs better do his part. He better have the network he claimed he did. Raynor better have the greed she thought he did.
The cordless telephone was on the table beside her. She picked it up and pressed the talk button. She’d spoken to Robin two hours earlier. Was it too late to call again? She started to dial, then set the phone down. Of course it was. What was she thinking? For as good a time as Robin was having—and she was; Claudia could hear it in her voice—she sounded tired, too. How could she not? A long drive, bonding with her daddy, the kitten she’d left behind . . . the poor kid’s world had shifted on its axis in less than seventy-two hours. She needed sleep, and Claudia hoped Brian had enough parental brain cells to make sure she got it.
She yawned, tired herself, but restless. Two murders. Two murders in tiny little Indian Run, both made to look like accidents. She wondered whether it had occurred to Suggs that other murders masquerading like tragic mishaps might well have slipped by him over the years. Easy enough to happen, once you began to make assumptions, to take things for granted. Claudia irritably pushed off the couch and aimed for the kitchen. She’d almost done it herself with Becke
r. There was a . . . a mindset here, a small-town mentality of invincibility. And really, hadn’t she moved to Indian Run partly for that very reason? For that seductive notion that bad things, really, really bad things, just would not—could not—happen here? Life happened quietly here. Except for the murder last year, death happened quietly, too. Or so it would appear.
She paused with her hand on the refrigerator, Henry Becker’s swollen face abruptly intruding in her mind. Why had the Beckers moved to Indian Run? Was it Barbara Becker’s idea? Did she imagine that Indian Run would be an ideal place in which to go unnoticed? In which to orchestrate an accident? Was the woman that clever? That calculating? Claudia opened the door and rummaged for a piece of cheese. Maybe she was. Maybe she was smart enough for that, and smarter still to bring in a flighty young woman to serve as an unwitting accomplice.
The kitten wound around Claudia’s ankles. She broke off a small piece of cheese and dropped it for him. Robin would probably disapprove, but she was curious if he’d go for it. He did, and she smiled. A relationship without complications.
* * *
The Raynor thing wouldn’t go down until Saturday, but by Friday morning Claudia’s team had developed at least a little information on the Becker case. She wasn’t sure any of the information qualified as a lead, but it showed promise. For one thing, Moody had learned that Barbara Kensington had a record. In the scheme of things it was so minor that it hardly counted—a juvenile shoplifting bust and half a dozen bad check charges eight years old—but Moody hoped the information might lead him to something else or someone else who could tell him more about the caregiver. More immediately intriguing, though, was Carella’s news: Barbara Becker wasn’t merely going to become rich with her husband’s death; she was destined to become filthy rich. Becker’s estate, trains and all, was worth a cool eight million dollars. She wouldn’t get it all, though. A last-minute codicil to Becker’s will provided a hundred thousand dollars to the “current and primary caregiver of Henry Becker, excluding his wife, Barbara Becker.”
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