In Seconds

by Brenda Novak

  “We’ll let Jake have his half birthday and plan yours, okay?” she said.

  Mia opened her mouth to complain, but Vivian spoke before she could. “What are you going to do for yours?”

  The furrows on her forehead disappeared. “Make a cake,” she announced. “And have a party!”

  “That sounds like fun,” Vivian said. “Will I be invited?”

  Her daughter gave her an impish grin. “Will you bring a present?”

  Vivian laughed. “Of course.”

  “What kind of present?”

  “Aren’t presents supposed to be a surprise?”

  As Mia tried to weasel an answer out of her, Jake wolfed down his cereal, set his bowl in the sink and went up to brush his hair and teeth.

  Just as Vivian heard the faucet go off, a car horn sounded outside.

  “Nana’s here!” she called up to him.

  Rapid footsteps pounded the old wooden floor in the hallway above as he dashed for the stairs and jumped down them two at a time.

  “Have fun!” Vivian said, but she almost couldn’t leave it at that. Wanting to warn Vera about all the dangers of the lake—and to make sure she’d heard about Pat Stueben’s murder so that she’d be extra cautious—she nearly followed him out of the house. But that was precisely the sort of thing that upset Jake.

  Vera was careful with the kids. She’d take good care of him.

  “I can’t wait till it’s my turn.” Mia’s wistful comment broke the silence that had rolled over them like a fog in the wake of Jake’s rushed departure.

  Vivian smoothed her daughter’s hair off her forehead. “Your turn will come soon enough, sweetheart,” she promised. If they were able to stick around…

  Where would they go if they had to leave? And how would she manage another relocation? She’d been on a rent-to-own plan and had recently signed the contract to purchase her house. She no longer had the government’s help and, expecting the coming fall to be her best year yet, she’d invested what money she hadn’t put into the house in her business.

  Just when she’d stopped looking behind her…

  Eager to send her brother an email, to get some reassurance that he, Peyton and Rex were okay in upstate New York and to keep him apprised of what was happening in Montana, she quickly prepared Mia’s breakfast. Then, sitting at the desk in one corner of the living room, she went online—and that was when her throat closed as if someone had tightened a noose around it.

  It was Tuesday, not Sunday. This wasn’t the day she and Virgil usually communicated. But there was a message from him. And it was marked Urgent.

  4

  Myles went straight to the vacation rental where the murder had taken place. Now that the initial shock was over, and the forensic techs and the coroner were gone, he wanted to examine the scene by himself. He planned to look at it from all angles to see if he could get some impression of the events that’d led up to Pat’s death. He also wanted to see if he could figure out a possible motive.

  But, early though it was, he wasn’t the first person at the cabin. An old dented Porsche 911 sat parked off the narrow road on a thick layer of pine needles. Myles recognized it as belonging to Jared Davis, the investigator he’d put in charge of this case.

  “Who’d want Pat dead?” Jared called out as soon as Myles stepped over the yellow crime-scene tape. But he was nowhere to be seen. He must’ve heard the cruiser and glanced out the open door before Myles came up the walk.

  “No one I know,” Myles replied to the disembodied voice.

  “There’s his wife.”

  “Gertie? She wouldn’t have the upper-body strength.” He found Jared in the dining room, crouching not far from the blood on the kitchen tiles, notepad in hand. It was cool outside, about sixty degrees, but the temperature would soon climb to eighty. Why Jared would be wearing a trench coat and wing-tipped shoes, Myles had no idea, but the investigator reminded him of the character on the TV show Columbo, which his mother used to watch. He even acted like him—a little disheveled and disorganized, often absorbed and seemingly inattentive, although he rarely missed a thing.

  “She could’ve hired someone to do it.”

  Myles was just as skeptical of that, but Jared continued before he could respond.

  “She stands to collect half a million in life insurance. I checked.”

  Because most murders were committed by family or friends, Jared had classified her as a “person of interest.” That was standard procedure, to look close to heart and home. But Myles didn’t believe Pat’s killer could be Gertie. “You’ve got to eliminate every possibility, right?”

  Jared stood but at five foot eight he barely came to Myles’s shoulder. “You don’t think it’s her.”

  Myles had made that clear yesterday. “Not a chance. I saw her after she found her husband. She was destroyed. Grief like that can’t be faked. Besides, they were happy, always together.”

  “Maybe she’s a hell of an actress. Maybe, when I dig a little deeper, I’ll find out she’s been embezzling from her husband’s real-estate company and he was about to audit the books.”

  The interior of the house contrasted sharply with the beautiful day dawning outside. Birds sang in the towering trees that shaded the property and the lake lapped gently at the shore only fifteen yards or so from the front entrance. It was a rustic paradise. Pine and moist earth overpowered every other scent, and the forest behind the house created a deep and resounding quiet. Everything about this crime seemed incongruent with its surroundings.

  Trying not to let the disturbing sight get to him the way it had yesterday, Myles ordered himself to maintain some emotional distance. He’d grown soft since coming here, had gotten caught up in the idyllic life of a “safe” community. “You’re jaded, you know that?”

  “I’m just saying. It wouldn’t be the first time a wife decided to off her hubby to avoid detection. With humiliation and divorce on the one hand and the answer to all her financial problems on the other…” He let his words fade away.

  “She didn’t need to embezzle. Pat would’ve given her any amount. They’d been married for forty years.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Myles arched an eyebrow at him. “You’re jaded, like I said.”

  “Yeah, well. You spend twenty years working for the LAPD and that’s what you get.” He shrugged. “You can take the cop out of L.A., but you can’t take L.A. out of the cop, not after that long. I plan to check her bank accounts and telephone records, just in case.”

  “You do that. I’m relying on you to be thorough. Don’t waste a lot of time, though. I want to catch this bastard. And the longer you dick around with Gertie, the less chance we’ll have.”

  “I don’t dick around when I’m on the job, Sheriff.” Jared sounded insulted. He had a tendency to take things literally and to carry logic to illogical extremes.

  “I’m telling you not to pursue her exclusively, okay?”

  “Of course I won’t. I’ll follow every lead.”

  “Perfect.”

  “You seem uptight,” he added. “Is there a reason?”

  “Pat’s murder isn’t reason enough?” Myles retorted, but he knew his agitation had as much to do with Vivian as Pat. He couldn’t figure her out. He wanted to feel angry at her for being so unreasonable, but those marks on her arm, the ones put there by her ex-husband, made it impossible to hold her resistance against her. She probably didn’t want to give another man any control over her life, and yet her body craved what every healthy adult body craved.

  Including his…

  “We’ll get the guy who did this,” Jared promised.

  Myles tilted his head as he studied the smeared blood on the tiles, the fingerprint dust, the partial footprints, the spatters on the wall, baseboards and cupboards. In some places, so much blood had been spilled that it hadn’t completely dried. Knowing it came from the man who’d sold him his house made Myles sick to his stomach. He’d seen death—car accidents and gang
shootings when he worked for the police department in Phoenix—but never such a brutal slaying. And never anyone he knew. “What about Pat’s stepson?” he asked.

  “Delbert’s on my list.”

  Jared’s absolute reliance on logic was usually helpful in an investigation. At any rate, no one else had as much experience with murder. Since Myles had taken over as sheriff, his office hadn’t dealt with a crime worse than hunting without a license or holding up a liquor store with a Super Soaker. “Good.”

  “You placing your bet on Delbert?” Jared asked.

  Myles propped his hands on his hips. “I’m not placing any bets.”

  “So why’d you bring him up?”

  “Because he’s at least as likely to have killed Pat as Gertie is.”

  “Except that he lives in Colorado.”

  “Travel being what it is, maybe he came back.”

  “I spoke to a few of Gertie’s neighbors last night. I guess she and Pat had some sort of falling-out with her son over a vehicle?”

  That hadn’t been cleared up? Myles had all but forgotten it. “About a year ago, Pat and Gertie lent him the money to buy a new truck. He was supposed to pay them a couple thousand the moment he received his tax refund but he didn’t. I remember Pat complaining about it when he came to the station to deliver the calendar he gave out at Christmas, but…I haven’t heard about that since.”

  “I’ll see what Delbert has to say,” Jared said. “If I can reach him.”

  “You’ve tried?”

  “Three times. Could be he’s on his way here.”

  Myles walked over to the sliding glass door and found droplets of blood even there. Pat had put up a fight; he’d simply been overpowered. “I’m sure he is,” he said. “Especially if he expects to be included in the will. Delbert has always taken his parents for everything he can.”

  Jared wrote a note about Delbert on his pad with a pencil that’d been broken in half and barely had any lead.

  “Is that shitty pencil the best you can do?” Myles asked, momentarily distracted.

  Jared held up his hand to examine the pencil stub. “What’s wrong with it?”

  Myles opened his mouth to say that he could at least carry a decent pen—but snapping at such an inconsequential detail only revealed his stress. What did it matter as long as that pencil put words on paper?

  Once again reining in the irritation that’d been lurking ever since he crawled out of bed, Myles waved away Jared’s concern. “Not a thing,” he said, but Jared was too literal to let it go. He couldn’t understand why Myles would mention it if he didn’t expect some action to be taken.

  “There might be a pen in my car…?.”

  “Forget it.” Even if there was a pen in his car, he had little chance of ever finding it. His vehicle was so full of wrappers, receipts and other flotsam, Myles often wondered if it violated the health and safety codes. “What about the call Pat received prior to coming here? Do you know who made it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  Jared blinked at him. “The number goes to the pay phone outside the Kicking Horse Saloon.”

  The fact that Pineview didn’t have cell service wasn’t going to help them solve this crime. Here, pay phones were still an important form of communication, which meant that call could’ve come from anyone. And that particular location, right outside the town’s favorite bar, made it unlikely that a bystander would pay attention when someone was using it.

  “So you’re checking out Gertie and Delbert,” Myles summarized. “Who else is on your list?”

  “All the hunters, campers, fishermen and recreationists who’ve come through here the past couple of days.”

  Myles eyed the blood spatter on the wall. The photographs shot by the forensic techs would be sent to an expert. But it would take time to get the analysis. Everything took time…?. “How many people do you figure that is?”

  “Least fifty.”

  “That narrows it down.”

  Jared didn’t react to his sarcasm. “We got a partial thumbprint—in blood—on the door handle. That should help. Especially in conjunction with all the footprints.”

  Except that none of them were very clear. They’d lifted the prints with tape but who knew if they’d show anything useful. “If we find a suspect these things might help. Otherwise…”

  “If it’s not Gertie or Delbert it’s one of the campers.”

  “Why would a camper call about a rental and then kill the real-estate agent?”

  “Sometimes there isn’t a reason.”

  “You think we have a psychopath in the area?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “I don’t know about that. Pat wasn’t attacked as soon as he and whoever he was with came into the house. He was murdered in the kitchen—as if he spent some time with his assailant, had a discussion first. If death was the goal from the beginning, there’d be no reason to pretend to be a prospective renter. Not once the killer got inside the house anyway.”

  “So you’re suggesting he knew his attacker,” Jared responded.

  Which was why Jared kept going back to Pat’s family. “There are holes in that theory, too,” Myles said. “Anyone who showed up here intending to kill would bring a weapon. This offender used some sort of blunt object. To me, that suggests he grabbed whatever was close at hand.” Myles wasn’t sure what that was. A rock? Part of a tree branch? A hammer? He was relying on the autopsy to reveal more about the wounds Pat had sustained and what could’ve caused them.

  “But if the murder resulted from a spontaneous act, a sudden flare of temper, why couldn’t Delbert be our man?”

  “He could. Except that Pat wouldn’t have driven over here to meet Delbert. What would be the point?”

  “Delbert could’ve lured him here under false pretenses.”

  “We just established that this wasn’t a planned killing. The evidence doesn’t support it.”

  Jared scratched his chin. “Do you know how hard it is to solve a truly random crime, with no eyewitnesses? If our offender was a visitor to the area, we might never narrow it down.”

  “Exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  Putting his pad in his coat pocket, Jared turned to leave.

  “Where are you going?” Myles asked him.

  “I’m meeting Linda at the Golden Griddle.”

  Linda Gardiner was the other investigator Myles had assigned to the case.

  “We’re hoping to come up with a list of people who used the pay phone yesterday when Pat received that call,” Jared went on.

  The Golden Griddle was across the street from the bar. Anyone there would have a clear view of the pay phone—if he or she happened to look. But that restaurant only served breakfast. “It closes at one. The call came in shortly after two.”

  “True, but it takes the waitresses an hour or so to clean up. If we’re lucky, one of them saw someone at that pay phone while she was getting into her car and can at least give us a description.”

  If we’re lucky. What if they weren’t?

  They’d have nothing but a body.

  5

  Heartbroken, Vivian gaped at the screen.

  “Mommy?”

  She could hear her daughter calling her but Mia’s voice sounded small and tinny, as if it came through the dark tunnel of a dream. Vivian didn’t react, couldn’t react. She was frozen in time and space. It wasn’t until her daughter came up and tapped her arm that she was able to blink and look away. And then the many years of practice she’d had hiding her fear and disappointment from her children came to her rescue, and she managed to conceal her reaction to what she’d just read. “Yes?”

  Mia’s eyebrows knotted. “Why wouldn’t you answer?”

  “I was concentrating on something else.” She wondered if Mia was getting old enough to see through her smile. She would at some point, wouldn’t she? Vivian was screaming inside: This isn’t fair! Not again! Not Rex!

  “Oh.” With a
shrug of her thin shoulders, Mia let it go. Nothing bothered her for long. “Watch me, okay? I’ll show you my new dance.”

  Mia was taking ballet lessons and, much to Jake’s chagrin, she often made up her own routines and insisted on performing them, even in public.

  Vivian schooled her features into a pleasant expression as Mia leaped and twirled. No music played, but that didn’t diminish Mia’s enthusiasm. She danced just to move and she did it whenever the mood struck her. Costumes were more important to her than music, but this morning she hadn’t bothered to change into the tutu she sometimes wore all day.

  Vivian believed her daughter had real talent, but ballet was far from her thoughts right now. The terror that’d begun to advance on her when she heard about Pat’s murder raced up to smack her right in the face as the meaning of what she’d just read went through her mind.

  Rex is missing…Rex is missing…Rex is missing…

  Where? How? Was he dead?

  No, that couldn’t be. She was still in love with him. Maybe. Or maybe she only wished for what could’ve been. Even if her feelings weren’t quite that strong—even if desperation, familiarity and the need for a safe harbor had brought them together in the first place—he’d been a good friend and a talented lover, relief from the loneliness that had plagued her both before and after their breakup.

  “Do you like it, Mommy?” Mia sang out.

  Vivian’s face ached with the effort of maintaining her smile. “Of course. It’s beautiful.”

  Beaming at the compliment, Mia lengthened her performance by stringing other routines together, ones she’d been taught in class that Vivian easily recognized. “Aren’t you going to clap?”

  Vivian dutifully brought her hands together.

  When, at last exhausted, her daughter finished, Vivian clapped again. “Bravo!” she cheered, but trying to staunch her tears only caused the lump in her throat to swell.

  Fortunately, Mia seemed satisfied. She ran off to change and brush her teeth, leaving Vivian alone to deal with Virgil’s news.