Blue Smoke and Murder sk-4

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Besides, he’d been told to guard Jill Breck, not a bunch of paintings.

  “I’ll take the foldout bed,” he said, looking at the butt-sprung couch facing the TV.

  “What about my car?”

  “Someone from St. Kilda will handle it. Just like they’ll take care of the Chevelle I was hauling home when they called me.”

  Jill opened her mouth, closed it. “Just like that? They’ll take care of my car?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “I’m not used to other people taking care of things for me.”

  He smiled slightly. “Get used to it. It’s what St. Kilda Consulting does best.”

  16

  RENO, NEVADA

  SEPTEMBER 14

  8:00 A.M.

  Lee Dunstan hung up the phone with a curse and wished he could have a whiskey with his breakfast eggs.

  Damn doctors. Get a few fast heartbeats and they make you give up everything worth living for.

  “What’s wrong?” Betty asked.

  Ken Dunstan looked at his father with concern. Lee was a stubborn old man who refused to slow down and let his son manage what was left of the family art appraisal/reprographic business. Lee wouldn’t have known an opportunity cost if it crawled up his leg. Hanging on to the Dunstan paintings for an extra quarter century had been foolish.

  And then selling one to a single collector without soliciting other bids had been stupid.

  “Whatever it is,” Ken said, “take it easy. It’s not worth getting a heart attack over.”

  “I’m not having any damn heart attack,” Lee said, ignoring his wife. “You’ll have to wait a long time for your inheritance.”

  Ken looked at the ceiling and shook his head. “Yeah, like I’m counting the days.” And like there will be anything left by then.

  “You should be,” Lee retorted. “Only five days to the auction.”

  Under the table, Tiffany Dunstan put her hand on her husband’s thigh, silently telling him to let his father’s sniping go.

  “Now, Daddy Dunstan,” she said, “you know a few dollars will never replace you.”

  “Huh,” was all Lee said.

  Betty sighed, picked up the thermos beside Lee’s plate, and poured another cup of decaf for her husband. She’d be lucky if he didn’t throw the coffee into the fireplace. He hated decaf almost as much as he hated green vegetables, blood pressure meds, and getting old.

  “That goddamn bitch!” Lee growled.

  Nobody asked who the bitch was. In the Dunstan household, there was only one bitch that redlined Lee’s temper in nothing flat.

  Justine Breck.

  “She’s been dead for decades,” Betty said, handing Lee the decaf. “You’re alive. If that isn’t revenge, what is?”

  “Dead, but not buried. Not deep enough.” He looked like he’d been chewing on bitterweed. “Troublemaking slut.”

  With that, Lee took a drink from the cup his wife handed him-and almost spit it back. He slammed the cup down and went to the kitchen for the other pot of coffee, the one everyone else drank from.

  “Don’t tell me that was her on the phone,” Ken said dryly.

  Tiffany gave him a look.

  “Lee, you know what the doctor said about caffeine,” Betty murmured.

  “It’s my life, damn it.” Returning to the table, Lee took a swig of coffee and wished it was whiskey.

  But he knew better than to start drinking when he was angry. Nothing good came of that, and a whole lot of bad.

  He didn’t want to end up like his father.

  “The bitch ruined my daddy,” Lee muttered.

  Betty started to tune out. She’d heard enough about her father-in-law’s old lover to last several lifetimes.

  “He should have killed the bitch,” Lee said.

  Instead, Thomas Dunstan had killed himself.

  Betty bit back a sigh. She was tired of the past getting in the way of the present. Real tired.

  “So, who called?” Ken asked, wondering what had set his father off.

  “Some gallery owner, wanting to know if I’d been approached about some new Dunstans.” Lee’s lip curled.

  Ken didn’t ask what that had to do with the bitch. He was just glad his father had switched the channel. The past couldn’t be changed. The future could. He knew it even if his father didn’t.

  Tiffany got to her feet and hugged Lee. “I’m so sorry. Why can’t galleries just accept that you and Mr. Crawford have all but two of the privately held Dunstan paintings? Why do unsavory people keep making trouble for you?”

  Lee grunted and patted Tiffany’s thin shoulder. “Don’t you worry, sweetie. I know how to protect Ken’s heritage.”

  Ken grimaced. If his father screwed this up the way he had everything in the past, there wouldn’t be anything left to protect.

  Tiffany smiled at Lee. “I’m sure you’ll protect everything just fine.”

  Betty wished she was equally sure. “I’ll be glad when this auction is over.” She pushed her scrambled eggs around on her plate. “Most people in the West are land poor. We’re art poor. It gets old.”

  Nobody said anything. It was the simple truth.

  Lee drank more coffee. A retired teacher’s pension, plus the occasional income from authenticating his father’s paintings, didn’t add up to the high life. But Tal Crawford was nobody’s fool. At the end of the auction, Lee would be rolling in the kind of green cows didn’t eat.

  Assuming nothing went wrong.

  Nothing will, Lee told himself. Tal Crawford didn’t get where he is by backing three-legged ponies.

  “You want diamonds, I’ll get you diamonds,” Lee said gruffly. “After the auction.”

  Betty pushed a few more yellow bits around her plate and didn’t say a word of another simple truth ringing in her head.

  In the closed world of Western art, nothing was a sure thing.

  17

  BRECK RANCH

  SEPTEMBER 14

  12:15 P.M.

  Zach put on his truck’s parking brake, switched off the engine, and looked over at Jill. She was still asleep against the truck’s hard door, using his leather jacket wrapped around her belly bag for a pillow. Obviously she hadn’t slept real well last night with a strange man on her hotel couch a few feet away.

  Or she’d still been shaken by the death threat.

  Either way, Zach was in no hurry to wake her up. She looked peaceful, which she sure hadn’t last night.

  He lowered the window on his side. Nothing but wind, silence, and warm sunlight. As he’d thought, no one had bothered to follow them.

  Perfect.

  Or not.

  Time would tell.

  He reached back into the bench seat of the crew cab and fished out his laptop. He hadn’t had time to check for new files before he and Jill left the hotel this morning. Might as well do it now. Jill could show him around the burned ranch house when she woke up.

  No hurries, no worries.

  No one was going to sneak up on them out here.

  The Arizona Strip was a lonesome landscape. The only signs of civilization were distant jet contrails across the empty blue sky, and the singed line of old poplars that some long-ago Breck had planted as a windbreak next to the ranch house.

  The rest was pretty much ashes and wind.

  A bitter end to a pioneer family, Zach thought.

  Jill stirred, sighed, but didn’t wake up. Her hair burned copper and auburn in the sun coming through the closed window. Her breasts rose and fell beneath her dark T-shirt with every breath. Her lips were relaxed, pink, full.

  Tempting.

  No wonder Lane got himself a good case of puppy love. That’s one intriguing woman. Strong without being butch, smart without strutting about it, and determined. The kind of woman who walked next to her man, made homes and babies, and settled the West.

  He looked out at the blackened, skeletal remains of the barn, the old farm equipment scorched and rusting, the barbwire-fence
d family graveyard near the pasture, and the bright run of springwater in the pasture ditches.

  She’s the last of the Brecks.

  Alive but surrounded by death.

  And I better keep her breathing, or Faroe will have my butt for kicking practice.

  Zach booted up the computer, saw that the battery was full-for once-and the signal strong. He typed in the code that would connect him via satellite to St. Kilda.

  His black eyebrows rose. While he’d slept and then driven to Jill’s ranch, St. Kilda had been busy. He downloaded files.

  And downloaded.

  And downloaded.

  Shawna must have worked all night.

  Now it was up to him to sort through all the facts and find the ones that might help him keep Jill alive. It was the sort of work he was used to. He was good at it. That’s why St. Kilda paid him a retainer plus flat fee per op, just to make sure he didn’t look at another employer.

  The first file Zach found was Jill’s. He opened it and began skimming documents with the speed of a man accustomed to sorting through mountains of information to find the few vital facts that could save lives.

  Then his skimming slammed to a halt. The biggest files were dense JPEGs of Jill’s paintings. Several of them hung in various rooms at Pomona College, a reminder to all fine arts students that talent could be honed, but it couldn’t be taught. You either had it or you didn’t.

  Zach didn’t.

  Jill did.

  The paintings were landscapes taken from her memory-cattle at the water tank, a horse with its butt to the snowy wind, a barbwire fence receding into nothingness against the wild immensity of the land. Zach could taste the snow, breathe the heady wind that had known only stone mountaintops, feel the thickness of the horse’s winter coat turned against the cold.

  Does Faroe know that she’s an artist?

  If he did, he hadn’t said anything.

  Zach finished skimming the files, then brooded over the JPEGs of Jill’s art, wishing he could see it more closely. But there was no time for a flying trip to Pomona and, hopefully, no need.

  Silently he looked through the windshield and digested the raw data, turning it over and around in his mind, connecting facts and speculations, scattering question marks across his mental landscape. When he was done, he was back where he started: Jill was an unusual woman descended from a long line of unusual women.

  Stubborn women.

  Determined women.

  Same thing, actually. Just viewed from another angle.

  He looked over and saw her watching him with eyes the color of spring grass. Her hair burned with a soft fire that made him want to touch it.

  “Morning,” he said. “Well, afternoon, actually.”

  She looked at her watch. “I can’t believe I slept while you were driving.”

  “I’m a good driver.”

  “You could be Jesus on wheels and I still wouldn’t sleep.”

  Zach thought of her file. “A control thing.”

  She shrugged, then stretched. “Why did you stop here?”

  “The road to the cabin looked rough enough to shake change out of my pockets.”

  Jill realized that he’d stopped so that she could keep on sleeping. The fact both amused and charmed her. She was used to hauling her own weight-and then some-when it came to any job. The men on the river had joked about it, but they were intimidated by her. She’d hiked, rowed, and worked every one of them into the ground.

  It was the only way to get their respect.

  “Thanks,” Jill said. “But it wasn’t necessary. I can do with very little sleep.”

  “No problem. It gave me time to go over some of Shawna’s research. So tell me, what’s a woman with degrees in computer science, art history, and art doing as a river guide?”

  Jill’s answer was a lifted eyebrow.

  “You were home-schooled,” Zach said, “went to Pomona College on a full-ride scholarship when you were seventeen, left four years later with three degrees, and went to work as a river guide-rafts and kayaks. I was just curious why you did that rather than teaching or selling art or making money in the tech sector.”

  “I like being outdoors.” Then the last of the sleepy fuzz vanished from Jill’s brain. She hadn’t told Zach or Faroe that much about herself. “Did Shawna investigate me?”

  It was more of an accusation than a question, but Zach answered anyway. “Of course.”

  “I asked for help, not an intrusion into my privacy.”

  He almost smiled. “Hard to have one without the other. But don’t worry, everything so far has come from open sources. The Canyon County Gazette followed you like paparazzi. Big file of news clips. You smoked your SAT. Perfect score. Quite an accomplishment for anybody, much less a girl home-schooled on the Arizona Strip.”

  “Why did you investigate me?”

  “Because you’re in trouble. Hard to help if you don’t know much about the person you’re helping.”

  She chewed on that for a time. She didn’t like it, but it made a sideways kind of sense.

  “Mom worked out a deal with the satellite company,” Jill said. “Kind of like a scholarship for bright, dirt-poor kids. Forty hours a week of free computer time.”

  “Most kids would have spent it playing games.”

  “I loved learning things as much as I loved working on the ranch. Freedom everywhere I looked.”

  “Freedom, huh?” Zach absorbed the fact. “Where did you live before your mother came home and took back her maiden name?”

  “What does that have to do with paintings and death threats?”

  “Nothing. Everything. I won’t know until you tell me.”

  “I lived in a place like Hildale,” she said curtly. “I wasn’t quite a Creeker, but close enough.”

  Jill watched Zach. His eyes were slightly narrowed, looking at a horizon she couldn’t see.

  “Creeker,” Zach said after a moment, flipping through mental files. “Based on the days when Hildale and Colorado City were a single city on two sides of the creek. Fundamental Mormon community. Multiple wives required for a man to get into heaven. Bonnets, long sleeves and longer skirts, minimal education for girls, followed by real early marriages, usually to a much older man. Kids. Lots of them. Brings an entirely new meaning to the term ‘blended family.’ Midwives, not doctors. No birth certificates.”

  “Yeah,” Jill said. “It makes it easier for the poofers to vanish and no questions asked.”

  “Poofers?”

  “People-women, babies, or kids-who are here one day and gone the next. Dead and buried without ceremony or notice. Nobody ever says their name again or talks about how the poofers died.”

  The idea left a nasty taste in Zach’s mouth, but all he said was “How many sister-wives did your father have?”

  She flinched. “You didn’t get that out of the Canyon Gazette. They avoid the whole subject of plural marriages, poofers, and anything else that might make the patriarchy frown. Then there are the Sons and Daughters of Perdition, the men and women who leave the church. My mother was a Daughter of Perdition.”

  “Are you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not to me,” Zach said. “As for knowing about fundamental Mormons, I soak up all kinds of learning from a variety of sources. No multiple degrees, though. Formal education didn’t do it for me.” Between Garland Frost and working for the feds, I learned more than most people ever do, or ever want to. “Is that why your mother left your father? She didn’t want a sister-wife?”

  “What does this have to do with-”

  “The paintings came down through your family,” Zach said neutrally. “That means your family is important to the investigation.”

  Jill hissed a word through her teeth. She hated talking about her so-called family. With impatient motions, she opened the door and got out of the truck. “I need to move around. I’ve done enough sitting.”

  Zach got out and followed her. She covered the ground
easily, quickly, with the stride of someone used to hiking miles wearing a backpack. Smoke jumpers, the military special ops, and dedicated trekkers all had that walk.

  None of them looked as good as Jill from the rear.

  Deliberately he glanced away. Last thing he needed was an inconvenient lust for a client. Especially a client with an art and art history background who wasn’t in any hurry to talk about the paintings that somebody cared enough about to cut up her car and threaten to kill her for.

  I know you like her, Faroe, but it has to have occurred to you that Jill could have painted the things herself.

  It sure has occurred to me.

  And the more Zach saw of the Breck ranch-poverty central or he’d eat what was left of the barn-the more it seemed likely that Jill wouldn’t mind having some money to play with.

  She circled the black ruins and went to the untouched metal windmill that was drawing water up for a ranch that no longer existed. She stared at the cool water pouring into the big tank, spilling over, filling ditches to irrigate pastures where stock no longer grazed.

  Zach waited and watched Jill. It didn’t take a detective to figure out that family life wasn’t her favorite topic.

  She stared at water flowing into the tank, ripples chasing across the shimmering surface, the liquid of life overflowing to run down irrigation ditches.

  Just when Zach had decided that St. Kilda would have to dig up the family past for him, Jill started talking again.

  “I have three full brothers,” she said evenly. “Older. A lot older. Mom had a series of miscarriages in between and after the last son was born. When she went to the local midwife, she was told that she should pray more, it was God’s will that she bear children. Mom nearly died trying to carry out God’s will. Then she went to Salt Lake City and found a doctor who didn’t put religion before his patient’s needs.”

  Zach watched the expressions shifting over Jill’s face like shadows over the landscape. He listened with an intensity that she didn’t notice. She didn’t like her past, but it was very much a part of her.

  “Whatever the doctor gave her worked,” Jill said. “No more miscarriages. No more babies, either. About that time my father became a fundamentalist. He moved everyone to New Eden, set up a house, married a sixteen-year-old, and had more children. He took a third wife. She was fifteen. Babies. A lot of them. Mom stuck with him.”