Sophie Littlefield - Bad Day 05 - A Bad Day for Romance

by Sophie Littlefield

  “She wouldn’t even talk to me after the second time I went back there,” Taffy said, as though Stella hadn’t said a word. “And yet she let them bring that awful husky Lardner girl back to visit, and she doesn’t even know her!”

  Stella’s phone chimed and she took a quick look, keeping her expression neutral. Chrissy had come through, sort of:

  freezer break rm

  Stella wasn’t exactly sure what to make of the cryptic text, but she didn’t have a choice: the window of opportunity would close just as soon as the receptionist finished puffing and gabbing on her phone. “You know what,” she said, “my digestion has been positively delicate lately. Will you excuse me while I visit the little girls’ room?”

  Taffy grunted dejectedly, and Marty didn’t even bother to acknowledge her. She walked down the hall to the restroom, which happened to be next door to the sheriff’s office, and looked back to make sure the Flycocks weren’t watching. Then she dropped to the floor and started low crawling, a skill she’d learned from watching marine corps drills on LiveLeak.com. With her ear flat to the carpet, she brought one leg and then the other up and propelled herself forward, never coming more than an inch off the ground and making almost no sound at all.

  Stella was neither lightning fast nor particularly flexible, but considering she was up against an overweight sixty-something halfway to a diabetic coma, she was able to slip past the sheriff’s office door without attracting his attention. She continued down the hall, knowing if she got to the double doors at the end she was out of luck, because it was reinforced and security-latched since the holding cells lay on the other side.

  The third door she peered through gave her a view of a plastic dinette set, and she smelled the strong scent of burnt coffee and overripe bologna: bingo. Stella propelled herself across the hall with an extra-firm kick, sliding the last few inches on the waxed linoleum floor of the break room. Then she rolled and came up standing in the corner, where she was shielded from view, and took stock.

  Sharing wall space with a geriatric harvest-gold fridge and a rather flea-bitten and poorly mounted deer head, from whose antlers some wag had hung a sign reading “Today Ain’t Your Day and Tomorrow Don’t Look Good Either,” was a meat freezer that was easily five feet long and more than knee-high, a padlock hanging from a hasp bolted to the top-mounted door.

  Stella sighed as she dug her tools from her purse and got to work. Some day the county was just going to have to learn that cost-cutting measures should be restricted to noncritical aspects of the operation. Goat himself had let slip that while the county had sprung for proper security for the Property and Evidence Unit up in Fayette, the satellite offices had to make do with whatever they had on hand while evidence was en route to the county seat. In Prosper, Goat had lucked out: the safe that was used by the Hardees management before the restaurant converted was perfectly adequate for all but the bulkiest items.

  In Quail Valley, at least they could freeze their evidence, if it took the form of, say, a severed limb or an icicle that had been used to stab someone. The downside was that anyone with a Knipex mini bolt cutter with jaw notch recess and angled cutting head—whose tagline was “cut more than you ever thought possible,” a claim that Stella had tested on several occasions—could make quick work of the padlock and make fast and loose with whatever she liked.

  It took a fair amount of effort to bear down hard enough to cut clear through the padlock, and by the time Stella had the thing off the hasp she was sweating. She tucked the lock in her pocket, then eased open the freezer door as quietly as possible, pausing to make sure there were no footsteps coming toward her, and peered inside.

  Lying on the floor of the freezer, wrapped in plastic like a fillet at the butcher, was a compact hunting bow. And every inch of it, save the bow sight and the arrow rest and the bowstring, was pink.

  “Hell’s bells,” Stella whispered. She reached gingerly for the bow and picked it up carefully. It was lighter than she’d feared, but it was still half as tall as she was. She looked around the room, gaze lighting on the window, which someone had thoughtfully left open, probably to air out the offending food smells.

  She’d tossed the bow out the window and made it out the door when she heard someone shooting the lock on the other side of the double doors. No time for slithering: Stella crouched low and ran, chancing a glance in the sheriff’s office as she passed. Fairweather had his eyes closed and his hands clasped on top of his generous belly, taking a noonday nap.

  Stella stood all the way up and walked back to the waiting room, dropping onto the mauve couch across from Taffy and picking up a magazine off the end table. “Hot flash,” she gasped as she fanned herself, hoping Taffy would be distracted enough not to notice that her hair was askew and her clothes mussed from crawling.

  She needn’t have worried. When Chrissy appeared a few seconds later wearing an inscrutable expression and her blouse buttoned two buttons higher than it had been earlier in the day, Taffy leapt from her seat.

  “How is she?” she demanded. “How is my baby holding up?”

  “She’s as delightful as ever,” Chrissy snapped. “We just couldn’t stop bonding over all those good old days on the pageant circuit. All them memories, why, the years just fell away.”

  Taffy blinked, then narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “You didn’t provoke her, did you? Because this is a very upsetting time for her, and she needs to be surrounded by positivity. You sure seemed awfully chummy with that guard, and if she felt like you were taking his side—”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Flycock. Divinity and I just had us a little chat and then I told her I’d talk to Lloyd about upgrading her to the better meal plan and getting her a room with a private bath.”

  “Oh.” More blinking, while Marty heaved a huge sigh and turned his back on all the women to resume staring out the window. “Well, I suppose that’s all right, then.”

  “Listen, I’ve got an idea,” Stella said, and then laid out the possibility of calling Pearline Moss. The bow in the freezer had shifted Stella’s estimation of Divinity’s innocence, though she couldn’t yet fathom a motive. Stealing evidence would certainly throw a wrench in the case against Divinity, but if the girl was going to get out in time for the wedding, she would need more help than Stella could provide. “Pearline’s the best there is. A real shark.”

  When Stella had gone to work for Pearline, she’d had Chrissy do a bit of background checking, out of a general disregard for and suspicion of lawyers, especially those who worked on behalf of the Kansas City Mafia, members of which Stella had gone up against in the past. She still bore the scars to prove it. Chrissy had been impressed with Pearline’s record, which did not appear to have a single mobster on the roster but focused more on rich suburban ladies who got into jams embezzling from the PTA or shoplifting from Nordstrom. “She’s defended some of the best families in Kansas City,” Stella added when Marty cleared his throat and stared at his feet with a decided lack of enthusiasm. “No, er, riffraff.”

  “She sounds like exactly what Divinity needs,” Taffy snuffled, dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief.

  “We, er, uh, what with Divinity’s expenses since she moved up to Branson… and all… and the real estate market’s been in the crapper… ” Marty said dejectedly. “This lawyer of yours got some sort of payment plan?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that. She’ll give you a, um, generous professional discount,” Stella said delicately. “I’ve helped her quite a bit with her… sewing needs over the years, so if I give her a call and explain things, why, I imagine she’ll come down here and get Divinity out as a courtesy. There’s no reason she should have to wait in the lockup while things get sorted out.”

  “Yes. Please. She’s hired,” Taffy said, pointedly refusing to look at her husband.

  Stella excused herself to make the call, passing the receptionist on her way out and enduring
the fumes from the smoking butt she’d crushed on the sidewalk. As Stella had surmised, Pearline was happy to help, but wouldn’t be able to come to Quail Valley until Sunday afternoon, a regrettable but unavoidable complication as Pearline was spending much of the weekend coaching a board member of the Kansas City Opera on how to appear more sympathetic to the jury at her Monday morning trial for stabbing her housekeeper with a letter opener after the poor woman dropped her Waterford punch bowl.

  Stella sighed as she hung up, wondering how to frame the news to the Flycocks. Her hopes of getting Divinity out in time for the wedding had been dashed, but maybe Taffy would be suitably buoyed by Pearline’s upcoming visit that she’d be willing to slip away long enough to see her cousin married, and Dotty could be convinced to settle for two-thirds of the Flycock branch of the family tree.

  “She’ll call you as soon as she gets a minute,” Stella told the Flycocks, and then said her good-byes, dragging Chrissy toward the door before she could say anything further to upset Taffy.

  “Nice going,” she muttered, once they were outside the building. “You get Taffy riled up any more, she’s liable to try to storm the cells and then Lloyd’s gonna have to lock her up, too, and how you going to explain that to Dotty?”

  “I don’t get how her and Mrs. McAfee can be twins,” Chrissy mused. “Mrs. McAfee’s pretty cool. And Mr. Flycock, you think that’s his real hair? Plus why’s he always hunching like that? It’s like he figures if he can disappear into that raincoat he won’t have to listen to his wife anymore.”

  “No idea, but hush up, I got something interesting to show you.”

  Stella had Chrissy stand guard on the sidewalk by the entrance while she fetched the plastic wrapped bow from a mound of English ivy on the side of the building. She took the long way back to her Jeep, taking advantage of a storm culvert and a thicket of black walnut trees to shield her from view, and tossed the thing in the trunk before driving around to pick Chrissy up. On the way, she checked the dashboard clock; if they floored it, there would be time for a late lunch, a massage, and a nap before the rehearsal dinner.

  “You gonna tell me what you just plucked out of the bush?” Chrissy asked.

  Stella filled her in, and was rewarded with a whistle. “You gotta be shittin’ me.”

  “Nope, it looks like it’s Divinity that done it.”

  “No, I don’t mean that, her killing someone don’t surprise me in the least. I just can’t believe she managed it with that bow. Only pink bows they make are youth models, and they don’t have a heck of a lot of firepower.”

  “Maybe she has spectacularly good aim.”

  “Mmm.” Chrissy didn’t bother to mask her skepticism.

  “What about you? You find out anything useful?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Divinity’s gotten even nastier,” Chrissy said, slumping into her seat and massaging her temples. “And I had to practically pry Lloyd’s tongue off the floor where it fell outta his mouth all drooling. He said he had to oversee the visit but all he done was sit out in a folding chair staring at me.”

  “Well, we got good reason to think Divinity did it, but why?” Stella asked, trying to focus Chrissy’s commentary. “Bryant dumped her, she wasn’t gonna stand for it—something along those lines?”

  “I don’t know… I mean, she really didn’t give me that impression. You know how sometimes a gal will just dig in tighter and tighter the more a guy tries to put her behind him?”

  “Mmm, don’t I know it.” It was one of the biggest ongoing challenges in their line of business—the curious natural phenomenon that somehow rendered a man more attractive when you couldn’t have him anymore. It was most problematic when that man did the kinds of things to a woman that brought her to Stella in the first place, because then Stella had to deal with the twin scourges of first straightening a bad man out and then convincing his ex that she was better off without even the new-and-improved version.

  “Well, she ain’t one of ’em. She was saying how she’s already got her eye on someone new, he plays bass in some band that opens for the Outlaw Junkies. Sounds like she barely waited for the door to slam on Bryant’s way out, tell you the truth.”

  “So, maybe he was the one all broke up about it? He threatened her, told her if he couldn’t have her no one else would either, et cetera… She, I don’t know, killed him in self-defense?”

  “No, sounds like he moved on, too. Divinity confirmed he’s seeing her old roommate, this Lexie girl. Honest, Stella, I think they really were down here doing just what Divinity said, rehearsing for her My Side of the Mountain audition.”

  “Her what?”

  “Aw, you gotta be kidding me,” Chrissy protested. “You never heard of it? On TLC? They run promos for it all the time.”

  “You know I only got the basic.” Stella had downgraded her cable in a cost-cutting move a while back and discovered she was just as content without all the channels competing for her attention, especially since the covert justice business tended to get done in the after-work and leisure-type hours when other folks generally found time to tune in. Also, in the recent months, when Stella had been trying to juggle both her romance with BJ and her Goat… entanglement, for want of a better word, she had discovered that she needed to spend a fair amount of time mooning and sighing and curling up in the corner of the sofa with a romance novel, looking for answers in her beloved dog-eared copies of Nora Roberts’s Three Sisters Island trilogy.

  “Well, it’s one of those reality shows. It’s like Hunger Games for grown-ups meets Survivor, with a lot of titty shots and fellas taking their shirts off. They film it in the Blue Ridge Mountains and they’re casting the second season now, only it ain’t like American Idol, you can’t just show up and try out. But Bryant knows somebody, so he got her an audition.”

  “Divinity wanted to be on a show like that?” Stella shook her head, remembering the Christmas cards she’d received from the Flycocks over the years, every one featuring Divinity in a frilly party dress with full makeup and her hair up in one fancy updo or another, eerily segueing from trussed-up toddler to glitzed-out teen to overdone diva. “Doesn’t seem like her thing. I seen them Survivor pictures in People, where everyone’s all slimed up with seaweed and they’re eating grubs and whatnot. You wouldn’t think Divinity would want people to see her au naturel.”

  “Divinity don’t much care as long as the money spends, is my impression,” Chrissy said. “Mountain is tearing up the ratings and they’re only halfway through the first season.”

  “So let me get this straight. Bryant dragged her down to the state park on a camping trip so he could coach her on…”

  “Survival stuff, is what she told me. They were working on her audition video, showing her drinking out of a stream and picking berries and peeing behind a bush for all I know.”

  “So… where’s the video?”

  Chrissy was silent for a moment. “Huh.”

  “Didn’t think of that already? Neither you nor Lloyd nor any of the rest of the cops up here?”

  “Well, far’s I know they could have it tucked away in evidence or something—”

  “But nobody mentioned it? Not in all that time you were back there with those two?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Just how hard did you work him anyway?”

  “I’m not sure I like your tone,” Chrissy snapped. “You try dealing with Divinity carrying on about how there ain’t any hand sanitizer and the crackers are stale, all while Lloyd’s edging his chair closer and closer to you in the visiting room starin’ at you like he don’t want to miss it if your skirt spontaneously falls off all by itself. It was distracting.”

  “So, what did she tell you, anyway?”

  “She says she must of got hit on the head or something because she can’t remember a thing past when she climbed up that tree.”

&nb
sp; “Mighty convenient.”

  “Yeah. She said Bryant wanted to shoot her pretending to sleep up there, like they did in The Hunger Games. Anyway, one minute she said she was climbing up the tree and the next she woke up all lying on the ground cut up and bloody, with her leg twisted and her arm all fucked-up. She saw that Bryant had an arrow sticking out of him, and according to her, she figured it was a hunting accident, and she wanted to get help so she got her a branch to lean on and kind of dragged her leg along behind her until she run into the ranger.”

  “And you’re sure there really was a ranger?”

  “Yeah, he was driving around in the park truck the way they do, looking for folks to bust for exercising their constitutional rights to enjoy the outdoors.” Stella knew not to inquire further into that comment; she assumed it was a reference to the Lardners’ disdain for hunting regulations. “The ranger called the cops and an ambulance for Divinity. Once the paramedics got her toted off to the hospital the ranger took Lloyd and his partner over in the direction where she said she’d come from, and that’s where they found Bryant, shot dead.”

  “They must’ve found the bow about that time, too. Only if Divinity didn’t mention it to you, she must not know they have it. Wonder why they haven’t let her in on that fact?”

  “No idea, Stella, even I can’t get a fella to burst out with confidential information like that just from him breathing my pheromones.”

  Stella snorted. “You done it before,” she reminded Chrissy, and was about to give her a few examples when she noticed that blush creeping back across the girl’s face. “Okay, okay, you want to be all coy, that’s fine with me. Only, if we don’t figure out a way to spring Divinity, I don’t see how we’ll get her folks and Tilly to leave their jailhouse vigil, and I just don’t know what to tell Dotty. I mean, I got Pearline to come down on Sunday, but it would sure be nice if we could get this wrapped up before then.” Stella paused. “I mean, that Divinity’s always been a pain in the ass, but I just can’t believe she’s a killer. There’s got to be some other explanation for that bow.”