Blue Smoke and Murder sk-4

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Though Jill’s voice was even, her eyes were narrow, her mouth flat. She didn’t understand her mother. She didn’t like her father.

  She detested fundamental Mormonism.

  I was raised by women in a militantly testosterone-free zone.

  Now Zach knew why.

  “Then Mom got pregnant with me,” Jill said. “I suspect she thought she was safe from the baby mill-menopause and all that-and stopped whatever birth control the doctor had given her.”

  “That’s how I came into the world,” Zach said.

  Jill smiled crookedly. “So you were an ‘oops’ baby, too.”

  “Pretty much.”

  She let out a long breath, and with it some of the tension that had come when she talked about the childhood she’d tried very hard to forget.

  “Mom hung on to the pregnancy, had me, and gritted her teeth when her husband took a fourth, really young wife,” Jill said. “At least I assume my mother gritted her teeth. Maybe she was relieved that he wasn’t dogging her sheets anymore.” Jill blew out another breath. “Whatever. She stuck with him until she overheard plans for my marriage to one of the elders. I was eight.”

  Zach’s eyebrows shot up and he said something under his breath.

  “Oh, the marriage wasn’t supposed to be consummated until I started having periods,” she said acidly. “You see, the elders were worried about me. I wasn’t a good little fundamental wallflower. So they arranged for me to move in with some old man’s extended family until I was ready to have babies. Then I’d be his fifth wife.”

  Zach didn’t know he was angry until he felt the adrenaline lighting up his blood. “That’s illegal.”

  “Not in fundamental Mormon country. The mainline church doesn’t support plural wives, but it doesn’t exactly sweat to exterminate it, either. It’s an open secret in the Mormon West.”

  Zack watched while Jill bent over, picked up a rock, and sent it out over the pasture with a vicious snap of her arm.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Mom somehow got word to her aunt.”

  “Modesty Breck.”

  “Yes. A few days later Modesty came and brought us to the Breck ranch. I shed my polyg clothes-bonnet and long skirts-cut off my long braids with a kitchen knife. I learned to ride, rope, brand, handle hay bales, and mend fence.”

  “Your father just let your mother go?” Zach asked.

  “Oh, he came to take us back. Once.”

  “What happened?”

  Jill’s smile was both real and cold. “Modesty ran him off with a snake gun. Told him if he ever walked on Breck land again, she’d kill him and bury him in the kitchen garden, because all he was good for was fertilizer.”

  Zach laughed. “I think I would have liked your great-aunt.”

  “She wouldn’t have liked you. She didn’t have any use for men. Mom took back her maiden name and changed mine, too. None of the Breck women have entered a tabernacle since.”

  “Yet you live in an overwhelmingly Mormon county.”

  “That’s why I was home-schooled.”

  “No wonder you don’t trust the sheriff,” Zach said. “You don’t trust anyone in civil authority.”

  “Not when the Latter-day Saints are involved. Ned Purcell is an elder in the church. Every elected official around here is publicly devout. More than a few of them have plural marriages, though nobody talks about it.”

  “School roll call must get monotonous,” Zach said dryly.

  “Oh, they’re not stupid. Everybody but the first wife picks a last name out of a telephone book. Daddy is called uncle, except for the children of the first wife.” Jill fired another rock into the pasture. “When it comes to women, this place is stuck in the 1850s.”

  “You’ll be happy to know that St. Kilda Consulting is firmly grounded in the twenty-first century,” Zach said.

  “Joe Faroe certainly is. He respected my skill on the river. Actually, he enjoyed it. He really didn’t care that a female was better at something physical than he was. That’s pretty rare in a man, no matter what the year.”

  “You’d like his wife.”

  “I already like his son. There’s nothing wrong with Lane that a few more years won’t cure. He’s going to be a good man.”

  “Full circle.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “From your childhood to the river where you saved Lane’s life to my knocking on your hotel room door because someone threatened to kill you. Funny thing…”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  Zach looked back at her. “You haven’t mentioned the paintings once.”

  18

  HOLLYWOOD

  SEPTEMBER 14

  1:00 P.M.

  No problemo,” Score said into the telephone. “I’ve got the kind of evidence you can’t use in court, but he’ll sweat big bucks after you show him the airline manifest and the photos from the kiddy whorehouse in Thailand. He’ll not only pay you alimony, he’ll kiss your ass with gratitude for not selling everything to the Enquirer.” He paused. “No, the Enquirer won’t pay more for the photos than he will. Trust me on that.”

  Another phone rang. Someone in the front office picked it up. Seconds later, a light blinked on his intercom, telling him that his next appointment was waiting. He wrapped up his conversation, assured the client that the photos were coming by special messenger to her lawyer, hung up, and hit the intercom button.

  “Send her in,” Score said.

  His door opened to one of his tech specialists. At the moment her hair was dyed black with green tips. The nose and lip studs were missing, but the tongue bell was still there.

  Made him drool to think about it, so he didn’t. She was one of his best techs. He didn’t care if she showed up naked with pins stuck everywhere.

  But she had a way of redlining his temper. No respect.

  “Sit down,” Score said. “What do you have?”

  “Not much,” Amy said. “I ran it through every electronic cleaner program we have. Still sounds like she packed the bug in a suitcase stuffed with clothes.”

  “Better than nothing.”

  Amy shrugged and handed over some pages of script.

  A glance at the first page told Score what he already knew. The locater was alive and well. The subject was about twenty miles from the old lady’s ranch. Heading home, because there sure wasn’t anywhere else in that part of the world to go.

  “Huh. Did she rent wheels?” he asked.

  “If she did, the bug wasn’t in range for the transaction. But the progress of the locater is right in line with what I’d expect from a car on the road.”

  “That’s the trouble with satellite phones. Too expensive for most people to keep close like a cell phone. It’s probably out of voice range a lot of the time.”

  “She hasn’t used it,” Amy agreed. “Maybe she bought a cell phone.”

  “Not from any carrier in Mesquite or Page.”

  Hacking into business records was Score’s specialty. Cell phones, landlines, credit cards, airlines, hotels, restaurants, jewelry stores, state and federal government-if information was out there, so were Score’s clever employees.

  “Maybe the cell carrier hasn’t registered her account in their main computer yet,” Amy said.

  “Or maybe she got smart and bought a throwaway,” he said.

  “That’ll make it tough for us.”

  Score didn’t answer. He was scanning the second page of the script. “Two voices? You sure?”

  “One female, same pattern as you recorded when you called her,” Amy said, scratching her head with a pencil. “One male, identity unknown.”

  Frowning, Score read the few verifiable words to come out of the mush of sound that the bug had sent to his computer. Then he swore under his breath. The word paintings had appeared more than once.

  Is she talking about them being burned?

  Is she selling them?

  Does she really have them or were the JPEGs pre-burn files?

 
Is it all a scam?

  Had the old lady’s grandniece been in on it from the jump?

  The garbled signal didn’t have any answers. Neither did his own experience with Modesty and Jillian Breck. Modesty had died before she talked. Jill had been clever enough to avoid his trap altogether.

  Even ducks know what to keep away from during hunting season. Dodging me in Mesquite didn’t exactly require big smarts on her part.

  But it irritated the hell out of him.

  Score tossed the script aside with a curse. “Keep after it. And if that bug moves from its present location, tell me ASAP.”

  “How far? The government is dicking with the GPS again. Three-hundred-foot radius of error.”

  “Set up a one-mile guard perimeter. Tell me if or when she breaks that fence. Even ten feet beyond that mile. Got it?”

  “Got it.” Amy stood and headed for the door. The green tips of her hair bounced stiffly.

  Score read the script again and again. Nothing new popped. Except his blood pressure. He really needed to hit the gym before someone stupid redlined his temper.

  But more than a workout, he needed to find out what the Breck bitch was up to.

  He looked at his calendar. He didn’t have too many appointments in the next few days that couldn’t be handled by other employees, but he had a few he should handle. He supposed he could assign another operative to Breck.

  Not likely. Not with the old lady dead. Even if they busted it down to manslaughter, I’d do hard time.

  This one I keep real close.

  Silently he rubbed thumb against index finger, wondering if he should get closer to the Breck woman now or risk waiting.

  If she had the paintings, yes, he should be closer.

  If she didn’t, no.

  If. If. If.

  He laughed out loud, the sound as reckless as he’d like to be. But he was too smart to be stupid.

  I should cut back on the ’roids.

  Not yet. It’s too much fun twisting big guys’ dicks.

  He shook his head over the skinny runt he’d once been and went back to his calendar. If he had to, he could handle the Breck woman and not be missed from work.

  He almost hoped she’d make him do it.

  19

  RENO

  SEPTEMBER 14

  1:38 P.M.

  Caitlin Crawford glanced up from the computer in her home office as her husband walked in. He looked out of place among the sleek modern furniture she loved. He was dressed like a weekend cowboy who’d never been on a horse. In the decade they had been married, she still hadn’t gotten used to his wardrobe. But she’d learned to accept it.

  A rich man was entitled to his oddities.

  And it was really odd that Tal had taken her for his third wife solely because she came from an upper-crust Pasadena family who could no longer afford its good breeding. He’d acquired her like one of his paintings, enjoyed parading her “class” in front of his friends and business associates, and kept on wearing his hick cowboy boots and bolo ties.

  And losing money.

  He has a lot to lose, she reminded herself. Anyone who can afford Pollock and Picasso has more money than he knows what to do with.

  Caitlin’s mother hadn’t raised any stupid daughters. Caitlin might not know about the intimate details of her husband’s business transactions, but she had hired someone to keep tabs on all of his bank accounts. Cash was her bottom line. Being raised genteel and poor in a rich neighborhood had taught her what made the world go round.

  It wasn’t sex.

  But her husband didn’t make finding out about his accounts easy for her. Tal was old-fashioned about more than his wardrobe. She had a house account that he generously filled and never mentioned how business was, if she should spend less or more. If it weren’t for whispers and rumors, she wouldn’t have known that federal tax collectors had been taking a very hard, long look at some of his business write-offs. She didn’t know why, or what, or how serious the government’s case was. She only knew enough to be afraid.

  If Tal went down, she’d go down with him.

  “How did the meeting with Lee Dunstan go?” Caitlin asked. Her tone was upbeat, her smile warm, and her stomach tight with fear.

  “I told you not to worry about a thing, baby. It’s all taken care of. The IRS will be sniffing up someone else’s butt real soon.”

  She managed not to curse out loud. Or scream. Eighteen months ago, the head of the accounting firm Tal used for business and personal record-keeping had been indicted, tried, and sent to jail for fraud, leaving behind a lot of financial wreckage for the IRS to sift through, searching for taxes owed on unreported profits.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, smiling through her clenched teeth.

  She just wished she believed it. But Tal never talked business with her, which left her dangling alone with her vicious fear of being poor again.

  “Would you like to go over the guest list for the post-auction party?” she asked.

  “I’d rather be whipped.”

  Caitlin had been expecting that response. Tal had married her to add a gloss to his home, his entertaining, and his reputation. Because she’d been raised to be a rich man’s wife, she was good at gloss. Since she wasn’t the type to count money that wasn’t in her hand, she’d cut the guest list down to people who could do Tal’s various business interests some good, and to hell with his freeloading shirtsleeve relatives and old acquaintances. He wouldn’t miss them unless someone pointed out their absence.

  The money saved would go to her own hidden bank account, along with everything she’d skimmed from the household account.

  A woman married to an older man had to look out for herself. Though Tal would never admit it, he simply wasn’t as quick as he’d been five years ago. Or even last year.

  “Then I won’t bother you with the details of the party,” Caitlin said, smiling.

  “You need any more money in the household account?”

  “Don’t I always?”

  Tal laughed and pulled a checkbook out of his jeans pocket. “Fifty do it?”

  “Sixty?”

  “Hell, these parties just keep getting more expensive.”

  “And you keep getting more business from them.”

  Tal laughed. “You got me there. Sixty it is.”

  Smiling, he wrote his wife a check for sixty thousand dollars. She was a bargain at twice the price.

  Class couldn’t be bought, but it could be married.

  20

  BRECK RANCH

  SEPTEMBER 14

  1:49 P.M.

  Jill drove up to the old cabin, put on the parking brake of Zach’s truck, and turned off the engine. She was still rather surprised by him. When she’d said that the dirt track leading to the old homestead was hard to find unless you knew what you were looking for, he’d just handed her the keys to his truck.

  Altogether an intriguing man. Unexpected, too. She could tell he liked the way she moved, but he hadn’t even hinted at a pass, much less made one.

  Very intriguing.

  Irritating, too. The longer she was with him, the more the idea of a pass appealed.

  “Home sweet home, such as it is,” she said.

  Zach closed the computer he’d been using. Silently he took in the weathered old cabin backed up against a red sandstone cliff and tucked beneath a massive old cottonwood.

  He whistled softly. “And here I thought I lived with pieces of history.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I’m not on a contract for St. Kilda, I collect abandoned industrial art-old muscle cars of the ’60s and early ’70s-and restore them. Carcheology, as it were, relics of a time before OPEC ruled. But this cabin goes back to a time before internal combustion engines owned the world, a time when seeps of crude oil in Pennsylvania weren’t worth the land they sat on.”

  Jill smiled. “I’d like to have lived then.”

  “You’re one of the few people I’ve e
ver met who could actually do it.”

  The compliment surprised her. She glanced sideways at Zach. He was looking at the cabin, his light brown eyes like a hawk’s, missing nothing.

  Intriguing, irritating, intelligent. Sexy in a lean, easy-moving way.

  She shook her head at the direction of her thoughts. She’d never jumped a man. She wasn’t planning on starting now, no matter what her hormones were pushing for.

  “What did St. Kilda say about Blanchard?” she asked, turning away from anything personal.

  “There are art dealers in east Texas, and there are men with the last name of Blanchard in east Texas, but no man fits in both categories. Or woman.”

  “He could have been just visiting, or looking for art.”

  “He could have been a figment of his own imagination.”

  She smiled rather grimly. “Yeah, that occurred to me when I saw my trashed car.”

  Zach studied the weathered cabin with its thick, crooked shutters and rifle slits that had been filled in during a later, safer era. He’d seen the bones of pioneer cabins while he scoured the rural West for old muscle cars, but he’d never seen a place this old that people still occupied.

  “The dude was hoping you’d bring the paintings with you,” Zach said.

  “I’d have to be dumb as road apples to do that.”

  Laughing, he turned and watched the sunlight burn gold and red in Jill’s hair. “You’d be surprised how dumb people are.”

  “Actually, I wouldn’t,” she said. “I’ve had men refuse to get in my raft because-”

  “-you’re a girl,” Zach cut in. “Stupid. Any man who looked at more than the usual places would see that you’re an athlete.”

  “Usual places?”

  “Tits and ass.”

  She snickered. “I think it comes with the Y gene.”

  “So Y gene equals stupid?”