Thick as Thieves

by Sandra Brown

“Who. Sent. Y—”

  “I heard you. I just don’t know what you mean by it. Nobody sent me to you.”

  “I’m supposed to believe that you picked me at random.”

  “I did.”

  “Off the internet?”

  “Why do you doubt that?”

  “Nobody referred you? Or suggested me to you?”

  “No. But what difference would it have made if someone had?”

  “You had never heard of me before you saw my name in that list of contractors?”

  “No,” she said with force. “But clearly you suspect otherwise. Why?”

  “Because this sounds like a cruel practical joke played by someone of my acquaintance who thrives on this sort of shit. You might have been an unwitting partner—”

  “I didn’t partner with anybody.”

  “Who have you talked to about me?”

  “No one except the bartender, Don, and the woman, Lois, I met there. She approached me, not the other way around.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes. Well, no,” she said, correcting herself. “Lisa.”

  “Right, right. Sister dear. I overheard her opinion of me. She advised you to keep away. But here you are.” He extended his arms from his sides in a grand gesture that encompassed the room and beyond. “Why didn’t you take your sister’s advice and have nothing else to do with me?”

  Before she could speak, he held up a halting hand. “You know what? On second thought, I don’t care what your game is. You want your house leveled, get somebody else. I suggest a wrecking crew. Efficient. Cost effective.”

  “I considered doing just that. But I don’t want the demolition to be noticed. I don’t want anybody to know what I’m doing until it’s done.”

  He laughed shortly. “Now that’s odd. But, whatever. I’m out. Thanks for wasting my time. The hour spent on the walk-through. The—”

  “You came to me for the walk-through, remember?”

  “—estimates I worked up.”

  “Which you haven’t submitted.”

  “I was going to bring them over to you in the morning.”

  “Was that when you were going to show me the drawings?”

  “I hadn’t decided.”

  “My decision isn’t a reflection of your ideas. They’re excellent. The finished product would’ve been beautiful.”

  He shrugged off the compliment.

  “You put a lot of thought and time into those drawings. I’ll compensate you for doing them. And, as we agreed, you’ll get one hundred dollars for working up the estimates on the basic repairs.”

  “Keep your money,” he said angrily. “We’ll be even-steven if you tell me why you changed your mind.”

  “I’ll answer as I have to all your personal questions. None of your business.”

  His features turned even more fulminating. “Right. It isn’t. As of now.” He scraped back his chair and carried his empty plate to the sink. “Hate to be rude, but today’s been a bugger. I’m going to bed.”

  She made no move to leave.

  Acting indifferent, he said, “Turn out the lights before you go.”

  “First, talk me through that night when you were arrested and my father disappeared.”

  Ledge had gotten no farther than the doorway leading into the rest of the house when Arden’s words stopped him cold, with the exception of his heartbeat, which spiked.

  He took a moment to school his features before turning around. She had remained exactly as she’d been, except that now her hands were on the table, clasped so tightly her knuckles were white. She seemed to have braced herself to hear whatever was coming, no matter how unsavory it might be.

  He steeled himself and, without inflection, asked, “What do you want to know?”

  “Were you selling marijuana that night?”

  “No. I told you, I was framed.”

  “By whom?”

  He questioned the wisdom of full disclosure, but reasoned that if he was honest on some points, he could hedge on the more consequential ones.

  He said, “You got peeved because I was unreachable today, but other than that question about Crystal, which was obvious fishing about my love life—”

  “You flatter yourself.”

  “—you didn’t ask why I couldn’t be reached.”

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  “If I don’t, it’ll sound worse coming from somebody else.”

  “Does it relate to what we’re supposed to be talking about?”

  “Roundaboutly.”

  “Well?”

  “I spent the better part of the day in jail.”

  She reacted as though he’d told her that Martians had landed. He returned to the table and resumed his seat across from her. “I was arrested after getting into a scuffle.”

  She recovered enough to ask, “With…?”

  “The district attorney.” Judging by how flabbergasted she looked, he thought her reaction was genuine.

  “Where did this altercation take place?”

  “In his office at the courthouse.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who started it?”

  “Me.”

  “What in the world were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking of beating the crap out of him.”

  “Over what?”

  “We go way back. Bitter dislike for each other. We’ve had an ongoing grudge since we were kids.”

  “What provoked you today?”

  “That’s personal and irrelevant.”

  “I doubt that.”

  He frowned. “Enough to say, he’s a sneaky bastard. He plays dirty pool and pulls dirty tricks. I thought he might be the one in cahoots with you on this house business.”

  “I’m not in cahoots with anybody, and I don’t know the district attorney. What’s his name?”

  Looking directly into her eyes to test her reaction, he said, “Rusty Dyle.”

  “I remember a Sheriff Dyle from when I was little.”

  “Mervin. Now deceased. Rusty is his son. Ever run across him?”

  “I wouldn’t have had occasion to.”

  “Hmm.” He continued to watch her closely. She seemed curious, interested, but didn’t appear to be lying.

  “You want to know about that night I was arrested?” he said. “It was Rusty who put the weed in my car. I can’t prove it. I don’t know how he managed to do it without my knowledge, but I’m certain he was behind it.

  “I don’t know if he bribed those two deputies who arrested me, or if he tipped them anonymously, but it makes no difference. He saw to it that I got caught with enough evidence to make it look like I was dealing. I wasn’t. God as my witness, Arden.”

  Looking startled, she angled back in her chair.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “No. I do. It’s just, that’s the first time you’ve called me by name.”

  Her name had been constantly pinballing inside his head for the past couple of days, so it surprised him now to realize that he hadn’t addressed her by it. But he didn’t comment on it. What was he supposed to say? That he’d sighed her name, moaned it, in more than a few lurid fantasies?

  She indicated his cheekbone. “That looks more serious than a scuffle.”

  He drew a breath, let it out. “It was.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It’s a dull roar. The whiskey helped.”

  She pushed her glass across the table toward him. “You’re welcome to the rest.”

  “No, thanks. I’ve done all the bingeing I’m going to do tonight.”

  “Well, you did have a bugger of a day.”

  “Jail, you mean?”

  She nodded.

  “I was left to stew for several hours. Wasn’t that bad.”

  “Did you post bail?”

  “No, Rusty had a change of heart. Declined to press charges.”

  “That was decent of him.”

  He
scoffed. “Decent, my ass. It was self-serving.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said grimly. “But I’m sure I’ll find out.”

  “Dirty pool.”

  “Count on it.”

  He wondered if now was the time to tell her that he suspected Rusty of being the party surveilling her house every night. If he did, though, she would press him to explain why he would think that. He couldn’t tell her without wading into the deep end. He could get in over his head real fast.

  And he would be inviting more trouble for himself and everyone around him if he pointed the finger at Rusty, and the accusation was later proven to be false.

  For a while neither of them pursued the topic, then Arden said, “Back to that night before Easter, were you locked up?”

  “For the next several nights, in fact. I wasn’t arraigned until Wednesday of the following week. They kept me in a holding cell. Old-fashioned. Off to one side of the squad room. Uncle Henry came as soon as he was notified and tried to bail me out. They gave him the run-around. He was beside himself.

  “For my part, I was livid, because I knew Rusty had set me up. I already had one strike against me. Who would believe me over the sheriff’s son? I spent that first night thinking up ways to eviscerate him. Finally I exhausted myself and fell asleep.

  “The next morning, I woke up to a lot of chatter and activity. The squad room was buzzing. Human body parts had been discovered by early-morning fishermen in the root system of a grove of cypresses on the lakeshore. The remains were eventually identified as Brian Foster’s.”

  “The man my father allegedly killed.”

  “Yeah.”

  He couldn’t tell her how anguished he’d been to hear about that gruesome discovery. He’d had a discomfiting intuition that the dismembered parts would turn out to belong to one of his accomplices.

  That was, one of the two other than Rusty.

  “All day Sunday,” he said, “there was a lot of coming and going in the squad room. Sheriff’s deputies. Game wardens. State troopers. Organized chaos. Nobody had been reported missing, so they didn’t know where to start to identify the victim. Had this been a terrible accident? Or a homicide? Easter ended with nothing concrete to report. No clues.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me? I was fed, let out to use the bathroom, but otherwise ignored.”

  “You weren’t questioned?”

  “No. I’d already refused to talk without a lawyer. The one my uncle had called to represent me had begged off until Monday because of the holiday. Besides, my little possession charge took a back seat to the grisly discovery at the lake.”

  Choosing not to expand on Foster’s fate, he settled an incisive look on Arden. “Your turn. What are your recollections of that Saturday? Was your dad around?”

  She nodded. “All day. Lisa and I had shopping to do for Easter dinner. Dad was in the garage tinkering on something when we left for town, and was still puttering when we got back a couple of hours later. She and I dyed Easter eggs, upholding the tradition in honor of our mother. The three of us had an early supper. Dad left soon after.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Still light, but not for long.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “To the cemetery to tend Mother’s grave. Before he left, he kissed me on the top of my head and patted my shoulder.” She placed a hand on her shoulder to mark the spot. “That was the last time I saw him. That’s it.”

  Quietly he said, “That’s not even close to being it.”

  “Well, it’s all I have firsthand knowledge of. We didn’t know he hadn’t returned home until the next morning when Lisa sent me upstairs to tell him that breakfast was ready. He didn’t come home on Sunday. Lisa and I ate the Easter ham without him.”

  “Did you report him missing?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “After my mother was killed—you know she died in a car wreck?”

  “Heard that. I don’t know the circumstances.”

  “Her name was Marjorie. She’d gone to see a former college classmate in Fayetteville, Arkansas. As she was driving back, she ran into a band of freezing rain and sleet, hit an icy patch, skidded into the back of a eighteen-wheeler.”

  Her eyes turned reflective. “Dad told us that she hadn’t felt a thing, that she’d died instantly. Lisa never questioned or disputed him, but I seriously doubt she believed the instant-death story.”

  “Did you?”

  She brought him back into focus. “I wanted to. With all my heart. But I’m almost certain that Dad knew better and had lied in order to spare us.”

  “Maybe. But maybe not.”

  “I guess I’ll never know,” she said wanly. “In any case, she was suddenly gone. Essentially, so was Dad. He was never the same. Before, he drank an occasional beer. Two at most. I guess you could say that he began drowning his sorrow.

  “He fooled himself into thinking that he covered it well, that no one knew, not even Lisa and me. But of course we did. That Easter weekend wasn’t the first time he had left us without notice and stayed away from home for days at a stretch.”

  “Was he drinking that Saturday?”

  “At the time, I didn’t think so. I remember being glad of it. I was wishing for an Easter without Lisa and me pretending not to notice that he was drunk. Functioning, but drunk. We had to do that a lot.”

  With the tip of her finger, she traced the wood grain pattern of the table. “In hindsight, I suppose he was steadily drinking all day. But when he gave me that goodbye kiss, I didn’t smell liquor on him.”

  Ledge asked when she’d learned about the store burglary and Foster’s death.

  “Dad still hadn’t returned by Monday. Lisa was on spring break from college, but because she had to take care of me, there were no trips to Padre or Cancún for her. She planned to spend that week working on a paper that was due when classes resumed. The school bus picked me up that morning as usual.” Ruefully, she added, “I didn’t know it then, but that was the end of my usual. Forever.

  “When the bus dropped me off that afternoon, there were several squad cars parked in front of our house. The officers had come to question Dad about his whereabouts on Saturday night.”

  Ledge said, “The burglary at Welch’s had been discovered that Monday morning when employees reported for work. Only one was unaccounted for.”

  “Mr. Foster,” she said. “Dad’s employment at the store was short-lived. He didn’t take his dismissal well, called it unjust. He was particularly bitter toward Mr. Foster.”

  “Why?”

  “His termination had come from higher-ups, but it was Foster who’d hand-delivered Dad his severance check.”

  “Huh.”

  That was a previously unknown fact that Ledge tucked away for further review.

  “According to people who witnessed the exchange,” Arden said, “Dad was verbally abusive to Foster.”

  “So, when the human remains found in the lake were identified as his, and Joe Maxwell and the stolen cash were nowhere to be found…”

  She raised a shoulder. “The logical conclusion was that Dad was the culprit, that possibly he’d coerced or blackmailed Mr. Foster into opening the store and the safe, then killed him.”

  “That’s the logical conclusion, yes. But do you believe it?”

  “No.” When he continued to look hard at her, she repeated the denial. “Dad drank. He would get emotional and sentimental, but never violent. Not once. It wasn’t in his nature.”

  “Sober, maybe.”

  She gave a stern shake of her head. “Even drunk. He was maudlin, but never mean.”

  “It was well known that he was struggling financially.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “It’s possible that Dad had become desperate enough to clean out the store safe with Brian Foster’s help. I could almost accept that. But I don’t believe Dad could have killed him aft
erward. He didn’t have it in him to kill anybody, no matter the circumstances.”

  “Arden,” he said softly, “with half a million dollars at stake, circumstances can turn ugly in a heartbeat.”

  Chapter 17

  That night in 2000—Brian Foster

  “…in addition to hiding the money,” Rusty said, “we need a fall guy.”

  “Someone to take the blame?”

  “That’s what fall guys do, Foster.”

  “I know, I know, but—”

  “We may not need one, but we should have it set up in case Burnet double-crosses us.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Brian said. “It’s probably a good idea. But who?”

  “The town drunk, otherwise known as Joe Maxwell.”

  Disbelieving that Rusty could be serious, Brian switched his cell phone from one damp hand to the other.

  For days leading up to tonight, he had been a nervous wreck.

  Actually, since the day Rusty Dyle had approached him with his heist scheme, Brian had been teetering on the borderline of a complete meltdown. It wasn’t as though he and the sheriff’s son were close friends who had been blood brothers since childhood and trusted each other implicitly.

  They had met only a few months ago, and it had been Rusty, with his engaging swagger, who had suggested that they “hang out.” That invitation to camaraderie was a startling and flattering first for Brian. Nobody had ever asked him for companionship. He didn’t have an appealing personality. Indeed, it was blah, which was a drawback to making friends, or so his mother had hammered home to him. Daily.

  Her assessment had been shared by his first employer, who, after Brian had been on the job for only three months, had called him into a closed-door meeting, during which he had described Brian as “unprepossessing,” and then had fired him for failing to show initiative. He didn’t foresee the likelihood of Brian acquiring a go-getter spirit. Ever. Basically: Make yourself scarce.

  That having been his first job after graduating junior college, it was an inauspicious launch of his professional life.

  Following his dismissal, he had spent an anxious month of unemployment before seeing the online notice of an open position in Penton, Texas, for Welch’s Mercantile. Never having heard of either, he had looked them up on the internet.

  Both the town and the position at Welch’s had seemed to Brian to be as unprepossessing as he. But for a young man who’d grown up in the Steel Belt, the geographical area with its dense pine forests and mystical-looking lake held some allure. Also, it promised escape from the only house in which he had ever lived, with his pipsqueak father and domineering mother.