by Faith Hunter
There were family photographs on the walls in groupings, a big painting of sunflowers, wild roses, and honeysuckle on the wall over a fireplace, and antique vases on the shelves of built-ins. The neutral couches were darker than the trim, and the back of the room was mostly windows that looked out on the water and a pool, which had to be new because it hadn’t been in the satellite photos. Instead of sitting, as the lawyer instructed, I walked around the main room, taking in everything that could be taken in without touching anything. Taking surreptitious photos of the art and vases, the antique ones in particular. One of those voice-activated security systems was sitting on a table, so I didn’t say anything aloud. There were no visible cameras, but security could be monitoring our every move, so no one overstepped a legal code of behavior and I kept my back to the security device while taking pictures of everything on the shelves and on the walls, thinking—knowing—they were important but unable to tell the others.
Sotto voce, FireWind said, “Ingram.” When I got to the group he said, “Jones informs me that Mrs. Merriweather’s personal checking account shows she wrote a ten-thousand-dollar check to a private security firm, the kind that does background checks and divorce investigations. On the same day, she wrote a similar check to Ms. Goode. This took place eight weeks past.”
Before he could continue, Merriweather and Goode reappeared; they sat on the sofa that faced the room, and the lawyer pointed again at the sofa she wanted us to stuff ourselves on. It was too short, so I sat on a small pink chair, running my hand over the fancy upholstery. It was amazingly soft. I wondered how much it would cost to get my sofa covered in fabric like this, and then I wondered how hard it would be to keep clean of cat and dog hair. I sighed sadly.
My bosses and the probie took the sofa that had been pointed out to them, which left them facing the windows, squinting in the brightness. Ms. Goode was holding her mouth a little tighter than she had at the door, likely because her client had just revealed crucial info and the lawyer realized she was flying half-blind. The special agents introduced themselves, all fancy-sounding titles, which did not seem to impress the lawyer at all.
When it came my turn, I said, “I really like this fabric.”
The lawyer closed her eyes, either trying to keep from cussing me out, or praying for patience. I was betting on the cussing option. Rick LaFleur raised his brows, fighting a smile, Racer shook her head, and FireWind’s eyes twinkled. “Special Agent Ingram, you have questions for Mrs. Merriweather?” he asked.
“A couple,” I said. I wasn’t a cat like Occam, but I had learned a lot about ambush hunting in Spook School and from my cat-man. I crossed my legs and my arms, elbows on my thighs, making myself look small, like a wereleopard on a limb. I leaned forward, staring at Merriweather. She was dressed in a bright shade of pink, almost matching the color of the rug. Her shoes were aqua, with pink bows on them. She’d never be able to walk very far or, say, work in her garden in the shoes, but they were pretty. “Can you tell us why you left the poly marriage with Connelly Darrow, Thomas Langer, Erica Lynn Quinton, Cale Nowell, Donald Murray Hampstead, and Stella Mae Ragel? You seemed happy in the photographs at the wedding ceremony. And now most of the poly marriage members are dead.”
Merriweather closed her eyes and dropped her head.
Goode went dead quiet for a half beat too long. More gently than I might have expected, she said, “Cadence, does Luther . . . ?” She stopped and began again. “We can postpone this. I think we need to talk more thoroughly, just you and me, before you talk to the special agents.”
“Why?” the CEO’s wife asked. “They know. All these years, all the money to get away from it all, and it’s out again. It’s come back to haunt me.” Eyes still closed, she leaned back against the sofa. Racine/Cadence looked as if she might cry, and I should have felt guilty, but I didn’t, because there was something about her demeanor that was off somehow, and also familiar. Almost as if . . . as if she was manipulating, like a churchwoman who kept secrets and engineered situations and controlled people from the background, a back-stage conductor or puppeteer, pulling strings. I couldn’t exactly put my finger on why I thought that, but it was there all the same.
“I was born Elizabeth Racine Alcock,” she said. She sat up and her eyes found mine before dropping to her hands, folded in her lap. There was a huge, multidiamond set of rings on the left one and they glittered with white fire. As if the rings gave her strength, her tone altered, going from quiet to pedantic and unemotional in a single heartbeat. “I killed my high school assistant principal for attacking me. I was fourteen. No one wanted to believe he was a pedophile, even after more girls came forward. They blamed me and . . .” She took a breath as if it hurt to speak. “They sent me away. I served my time.” Her tone said she had gone through hell doing that, but her words had hardened and she raised her eyes, looking from one to the other of us, staring us down.
“They sealed my records when I got out. I was eighteen and fresh out of juvie, back home and trying to find myself after all that had happened. A county councilman decided I was used goods and acceptable prey.” She took an unsteady breath. “He accosted me in a parking lot. I knew I had to leave. I’d never be safe in Florida. So I stole Mama’s cigarette and liquor money and got on a bus. I rode the bus until my money ran out in Tennessee. At a local diner, I ran into Stella and her friends. They bought me a burger. They took me in, no questions asked.”
Cadence Merriweather’s eyes were fierce and I understood how she had survived all that had happened to her. “There was an acceptance in Stella’s group that I had never experienced before. It was recognition, approval, and tolerance. It was this amazing . . . joy.” The fierceness faded and she smiled, but the happiness of the memory didn’t last. “But things didn’t stay the same after the ceremony. Or maybe I grew past the need for what they offered, I don’t know. Things got messy. People started pairing off more. Jealousy started to be a problem. There was this one big argument, I don’t even remember what it was about now. But I packed up and left the group. Then Donnie left too, heading north. I went east, to Knoxville.”
It must have been a pretty big argument and very traumatic, I thought. Stella Mae had erased her name and most of her images from the photo album. That suggested strong feelings.
“I worked two jobs. I changed my name legally to Cadence Blue Thompkins because I thought it sounded artsy and I wanted to be an artist.” She glanced at the sunflower, rose, and honeysuckle panting on the wall.
“I took online classes and when I graduated, I went to work for a small shop in town. They let me hang my paintings on the walls. I met my husband, who had just graduated from Duke. He was this big, brawny, earnest, energetic man who said all the right things and pushed all the right buttons. I fell in love, we married, and I became Cadence Blue Thompkins Merriweather.” She took a breath. “I haven’t seen or talked to Stella or any of the others in years. But I knew when I heard about the deaths that you might find me.” She looked at Goode, her expression a little guilty. “Sorry I didn’t tell you.”
Margot said, “Do you want to reconsider part of that? Everything you told us was mostly the truth until the last part.” Margot smiled and leaned in. Margot knew truth or lie, a gift from the witch blood that ran in her family. She couldn’t do magic for nothing, but she could sure ’nuff sniff out falsehood. “The part that said you hadn’t seen or talked to Stella or the others. That wasn’t the truth.” Margot looked at her tablet as if checking notes, and back up, focusing on the lawyer. “Ms. Dominique Goode, of Goode Law Firm. You specialize in divorce. So, let’s start back at the part about not talking to Stella and move to the part about the divorce.”
Goode stood up. “That will be all for today. I know you have questions and we will provide answers. Perhaps it would be best to provide them in writing, rather than stress my client. She isn’t well. I’ll be talking to my client and be in touch.” She pointed at the do
or.
I got up and left the room, back out into the cool bright sun of autumn. After a while the others followed. Back at the cars, FireWind spoke, his voice far too soft to be anything but a threat. “Perhaps we should have discussed who was lead in this interview.”
I pulled my phone. “Remember in Stella Mae’s room, when you told me about the tea set you got for your wife in St. Louis?”
“San Francisco.”
“Okay.” I’d never been to either place and where he’d bought the tea set didn’t matter. “You recognized the vase in Stella’s bedroom because of that trip, right?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice sounding more normal and curious. “It was a Roseville piece. Sunflower pattern.”
I held out my cell, with the photos I had taken of the objects on the shelves. Centered in the rows of shelves were three vases, two short, one tall. All three were sunflower pattern vases; one was an exact match for the one in Stella’s room. The one with the small card that said “I love you,” with a date only a few months past. “The painting had her name on it and the sunflower on it is an exact match for the vases.”
“LaFleur, will you please read the house with the psy-meter?” FireWind asked. “Racer, schedule an appointment with Ms. Goode and Mrs. Merriweather at HQ for this evening. Or we will get a paper and pick up her lying client. In handcuffs for all the neighbors to see.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. Walking briskly, Racer went to the front door. Rick went to his car and opened the trunk. That left FireWind and me alone.
He said, “Good work, Ingram. Is that why you took lead?”
“No. Ms. Goode had her walls up against professional questions, and especially against good-looking men, but she didn’t have them up against a little country hick chick like me.” I grinned.
“Country hick chick?”
“That’s what JoJo calls me sometimes. I kinda like it. And just so you know, Mrs. Merriweather wears the exact same shade of pink of all the clothes I saw on the floor of Stella Mae’s bedroom before someone cleaned it up.”
Only minutes later Rick returned and said, “No indication of death magics, but I could hear Margot talking to Goode. By her tone of voice, that woman is not happy with her client or with us.”
Margot, who walked up on his heels, said, “You got that right. But we have an appointment in two hours with Goode and Merriweather at HQ.”
Rick frowned. “Two hours? That’s awfully fast. Why not wait until morning? Get a chance to put together her story. Prep her client.”
“Because she bargained with us. We’ve agreed to not obtain warrants for her home and her husband’s business, or a subpoena for her client,” Margot said. She looked at FireWind and her full lips widened. She looked a little wicked. “She suggested that she wanted only you at the interview. Not me, because I must be some kind of paranormal, and not Nell because she is, and I quote, ‘an obnoxious child.’”
FireWind laughed softly. “Let’s get back to HQ and prep. I hate to throw you two directly from an out-of-town case and into a new one, but I need you.”
“You couldn’t care less about throwing us into another case,” Margot said. She tapped her nose. “Truth-senser, here.”
“True. I was trying for polite,” FireWind said, his tone droll. “We’ll meet you at HQ.”
SIXTEEN
I didn’t much like being called an obnoxious child by a powerful woman. My method had worked, but I needed to alter the way I approached females like the lawyer Goode. That would take some cogitating that I didn’t have time for just now.
FireWind and Margot sat across the table from Goode and her client. Racine/Cadence had changed clothes and was wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt, with sneakers. Her dress and her body language were very different from the cowed woman we had met at the Merriweather home. Either that woman had been a fake or she had metamorphosed like a phoenix from the ashes in just a couple of hours.
Rick, Occam, Tandy, and I were crowded into the small cubicle behind the new observation mirror. I glanced side-eyed at Rick and Occam and they seemed fine together, no cat disharmonies, which I figured was a good thing. Unit Eighteen hadn’t had a standard interview room until recently. Previously we had just used the cameras in the null room, but that room was being saved for UTMC patients and to decontaminate evidence from death energies, so the new interrogation room was getting its first workout.
“I specified only Special Agent FireWind for this interview,” Goode said, in an opening salvo.
“If Special Agent Racer leaves, this interview is ended. We then proceed with a warrant for Mrs. Merriweather’s home, and this becomes much more invasive,” FireWind said, his voice without inflection. “Luther Merriweather would likely discover just how close to separation and divorce he is. And why.” It was a baiting technique. None of us knew for certain Racine/Cadence was looking to leave her husband, but hiring a PI and a divorce lawyer was a good indicator.
Goode narrowed her eyes at him.
Margot said, “This interview is being video recorded.” She gave everyone’s name and the date and time. “Now. Mrs. Merriweather. When did you resume the affair with Stella Mae Ragel?” She pushed the small card from Stella’s bedside across the table to the suspect.
Racine/Cadence stared at the card, emotions rushing across her face too quickly to read. She looked at her lawyer and Goode nodded permission.
“I ran into Stella Mae in an antiques shop in Nashville, in December,” Cadence said. She leaned in and put her folded hands on the tabletop. She was no longer wearing the glittering diamond rings. There was an indention and a white line where they had rested for so long. “My marriage was disintegrating. My life was falling apart. Seeing Stella was like a lifeline.” She smiled sadly. “Things went fast after that.”
“True,” Tandy murmured.
Racine/Cadence admitted that she and Stella Mae had been involved. Meaning they had been having an affair when Stella was not on the road. Things had been getting serious. Racine/Cadence had decided to leave her big-money, deep-pockets CEO husband and had begun divorce arrangements. She had him followed by a private detective for the weeks when the tour took place. There was significant photographic evidence that the CEO was cheating on his not-so-devoted but much-more-discreet wife with three mistresses in three cities. There was an evidence trail for dinners, hotels, gifts, and flowers, none of which had been given to his wife.
Ms. Goode said, “Let me make it clear to you all. Mrs. Merriweather stood to make millions off a very nasty divorce and had no reason to kill Stella Mae Ragel. My client is not a witch or a magic user, or a paranormal of any kind. Her intent was to divorce, take her share of the proceeds, and move in with Stella Mae. They were in love and planning a future together.”
“True, not true,” Tandy said. “Things hidden and things not said.”
I remembered four pages of Stella’s lovers, given to Occam and me at Stella’s kitchen bar, and figured Racine/Cadence had no idea that Stella had been seeing other people. And Cadence’s name hadn’t been on the cat-paper lists. Secrets all around. I watched as FireWind tilted his head, his long braid sliding across his back, letting the silence build in the room. His tone ever so slightly disbelieving, he said, “Mrs. Merriweather. Considering your shared history, I find it highly unlikely that you were unaware Stella Mae Ragel was sharing her bed and body with others in her band, including Catriona Doyle and members of the original poly marriage, Thomas Langer and Cale Nowell specifically. Possibly even Erica Lynn Quinton and Connelly Darrow, among others.”
“No,” she whispered. “No. Stella said . . .” Cadence fell silent and her face paled. She blinked several times and looked down, staring at her naked finger, her breath shallow and too fast. Tears gathered in her eyes. Her lawyer glared at FireWind, who stared back at her unperturbed.
“She didn’t know,” Tandy said. “She is . . . p
ained.”
I crossed my arms over my middle, trying to put it all together and also grieving with Cadence. She had been through so much in her life, had lost so much. Since Stella Mae died, she had been grieving the loss of her lover, added to the loss of her current life and husband, and now she was grieving the betrayal of Stella sleeping with others. Again.
But life had given Cadence Merriweather a backbone of steel and her tears dried quickly. She said, “Stella sleeping with other people was what drove the wedge between us back in the commune. Even then, I wanted a monogamous relationship. I wanted Stella all to myself and Stella . . .” She took a steadying breath. “Stella wasn’t interested in monogamy. I guess she wasn’t interested now either.”
Tandy murmured, “Truth.”
Something about the sequence of events and the intertwined relationships seemed . . . incomplete. My thoughts wandering, I watched the woman in the interview room. While she was holding herself together, Racine/Cadence was also floundering. It made me want to offer the peace of Soulwood to her, but I was afraid the vampire tree might take her instead.
“My client also has been blackmailed by a former commune member,” Goode said, “threatening to go to her husband with details about Cadence’s previous life unless payments continued under the table. His name is Hugo Ames.” She slid a folded piece of paper across the table to FireWind. “His contact information.”
FireWind opened the paper and nodded, passing it to Margot. “Will your client be bringing charges against Ames?”
“Yes, as soon as the separation from her husband is legally formalized. My only purpose in giving you the information is candor and transparency. And the slight possibility that if he was blackmailing Cadence, he was also involved with the murders.” Her tone was hopeful and the glint in her eyes suggested she wanted to see him stretched on the rack for punishment if possible.
