Hush

by Nancy Bush

  Danner avoided Jarvis for the moment and stepped across the lieutenant’s threshold while Drano quietly closed the door behind them. In a hushed voice, he said, “He’s been like that for thirty minutes. Just walked in, asked for you. We pointed him to your desk and he sat down and that’s what we’ve got. We were calling you but just kept getting voice mail.” There was a note of censure in his voice.

  “I was at the Rendell memorial service.” Danner slipped his cell from his pocket and quickly switched it back on.

  “You got any idea what this is about?”

  “His girlfriend is my guess.” Danner went on, “I think we’ve got a woman killer on this one, based on the neighbor’s ID. My guess is Jarvis was seeing her romantically. Then somebody—one of them—decided to kill the wife, maybe because Jarvis wanted this new woman? Maybe because his wife’s illness was draining his finances? There are a number of possibilities, but they probably concern this unknown woman killer. Maybe the whole thing was her idea. In any case, it looks like Jarvis is ready to crack.”

  Drano nodded, eyeing Jarvis through the glass walls of his office. “How many women execution-style killers do you know?”

  “Not many who would coldly shoot another woman in the back of the head,” Danner admitted. “Then shoot the daughter as she was trying to escape. Although I don’t think that was part of the script.”

  “Think the daughter’s what this is all about?” He inclined his head, indicating Jarvis Lloyd’s current breakdown.

  “Yeah. I’ll take him to an interrogation room.”

  “Be sure and ask him if he wants a lawyer.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Danner said grimly, and he went out to talk to the sobbing man.

  Coby sat at her desk a moment, decompressing. She’d returned to work after the memorial service, but she could scarcely keep her mind on the job. It was an effort to get anything done, and finally she just packed it in and went home.

  At her town house, she called her father. She wanted to check up on him and also see if he could tell her more about his interview with Clausen from the sheriff’s department. He let her know that it wasn’t as bad as it had been made out. It had mainly been an informal questioning, basically a recounting of the events of the night.

  “Are you worried about me?” Dave finally asked as Coby kept probing. “Bug, it’s okay. I feel like I’m moving through quicksand, but I’m dealing with it. It’s really helped having Jean-Claude and Annette’s sisters around. We’re all . . . getting through it.”

  “And Mom.”

  “Yeah, Leta’s been great.” His voice warmed. “That’s her, though. She’s always known what to do, especially in crises. You and your sister got that from her.” Coby could hear the sad smile in his voice. “Love you all,” he said, then hung up as if he were getting choked up and didn’t want to lose it on the phone.

  Coby went to bed that night in a state of mild uneasiness. There had been strange vibes at the memorial service, culminating with Wynona’s belief that Yvette had killed her sister and Hank Sainer’s mysterious need to have a meeting with her. It also didn’t help that her father, though definitely grieving, seemed to be leaning on his ex-wife, Coby’s mother, for support.

  And then Lucas Moore’s hair, if it was his hair—she kinda thought it was his hair—and so what did that mean?

  It meant someone had cut it from his head and saved it for twelve years. That’s what it meant.

  So what—who—were they dealing with? A killer from the past who had struck again? That didn’t make sense . . . did it? Or had someone sheared off a hunk of Lucas’s hair after he was dead?

  Coby shuddered. She’d been there that night. At the campfire. On the beach. Kissing Lucas . . . touching him . . . running her hands through his hair . . . watching him across the firelight. For that matter, so had Genevieve. And probably Rhiannon . . . and Yvette . . . and maybe a few others. If Lucas had been missing a chunk of hair, it would have been noticed. She would have noticed. But Lucas’s hair had hung straight and smooth from a center part. It was all there throughout the evening. She was certain of it.

  So, the lock had been taken later, sometime after Lucas left the campfire that last time. And sometime before his body was taken away and catalogued by the medical examiner.

  Who? Who could have done it?

  And how could it have anything to do with Annette’s death?

  A long time later Coby fell asleep, but her fragmented dreams were of Dana Sainer, who kept telling her that she had it wrong. It wasn’t about her. She was fine now. Her eating disorder under control.

  “No matter what my father says to you Monday, it’s not about me,” Dream Dana told her. “You’ve got it wrong.”

  Souvenirs. That’s what they call them. Mere trinkets. Memorabilia. Sentimental reminders.

  I carefully lift the curl of Lucas Moore’s hair from the envelope and smile at the touch of it on my hand. It burns like a coal.

  Too bad that bitch found it. She suspected it was mine and she wasn’t going to give up until she learned the truth.

  I had to silence her.

  Had to.

  And Coby . . . ready to play detective.

  I look at her and see how wrong I once was about her, about all of them, as it turns out.

  Once I adored them . . . now I just want them dead.

  Dead and gone.

  I know where Coby lives. I know where she works.

  I know. . . .

  Chapter 17

  On Thursday, Coby met with Nicholette to discuss Rhys Webber and gave her the bad news: Webber wasn’t going to do anything his lawyer—Nicholette—suggested and therefore was going to have a very public, very expensive divorce. Every woman he’d ever slept with was bound to speak up and try for her moment in the spotlight; they’d all learned from the Tiger Woods debacle. Everyone except Webber, that is.

  “He’s not the type to listen,” Coby told Nicholette. “Ever.”

  Nicholette sighed, nodded, and ostensibly went back to the drawing board with her client. Coby had other things to think about, Danner being the top of her list, although Annette’s murder and its maybe connection to Lucas Moore was running a close second, if it wasn’t a dead heat.

  Faith called in the afternoon and said she was meeting Hugh for dinner. She sounded excited, but like she was trying to tamp it down, and Coby felt a faint twinge of envy. She and her sister were communicating more since Annette’s death, maybe because they’d been linked again through Danner, in a strange way. For that Coby was glad, but she felt unsettled and unable to concentrate on much of anything and sensed this would continue until there was some resolution to Annette’s murder.

  At the close of work, she grabbed up her cell phone and checked her list of saved telephone numbers. Some of them were old, old, old. She’d plugged them in from a contact list she kept online of family and friends from the past, some never called even once, most seldom phoned. Like most people, she called about three of the numbers steadily. A bunch more on an irregular basis. Most never, or almost never.

  Dana Sainer Bracco was one of the latter, as were most of her so-called friends from the campout, and Coby made a face as she ran by her number. No help there. Of the other girls from their group, only Genevieve, Yvette, and McKenna had been at both Annette’s birthday party and the campout, and she planned to talk with them more. But in the interest of thoroughness, she was going to contact all the girls who’d been around the campfire the night Lucas died, if she could reach them. Maybe there was no connection between the two deaths; she believed the sheriff’s department considered them independent even if Danner was exploring the idea they were linked. But there was that lock of hair that Jean-Claude had said Annette believed was Lucas’s, so there was something weird there.

  And then Wynona had pointed her in Yvette’s direction. Could that be true? Could Yvette have really killed her sister? Could she be the one who’d taken a swatch of Lucas Moore’s hair and kept it all these
years? That just didn’t sound like her. Yvette was about the least sentimental type of person Coby could imagine.

  Or could Yvette have killed Annette and someone else took Lucas’s hair, and Annette just happened to find the lock that night?

  Coby shook her head, slightly boggled. Too many questions and not enough answers. It was time to check with the other girls who’d been at the original campout. She didn’t have Ellen’s number, but she thought she remembered that McKenna had kept in contact with her. If she checked with McKenna, she might be able to scare up a contact for Ellen.

  She thought briefly of Kirk, Paul, and Vic, who had all been at the campout and also at the beach last weekend; Paul and Vic in Seaside while Kirk was at Annette’s party. They would resent any interference by Coby; they already resented Danner. And she really didn’t want to contact them unless she had to.

  And then there was Jarrod . . . and Genevieve.

  And maybe your own father?

  “And Leta was at the beach, too, that night,” Coby said aloud, a little taken aback at how angry her voice sounded.

  Sighing, she grabbed her coat and headed out.

  Glancing at the squad room clock, Danner stifled a yawn and wondered if he had the energy to talk to Jarvis Lloyd anymore. They’d spent a long night together that hadn’t amounted to much, as it turned out, and by the morning Lloyd had been sent home, as the ADA hadn’t found enough evidence to hold the man on anything useful.

  “He needs to give us a name,” Charisse Werner told Danner when she breezed in bright and efficient after Danner’s all-nighter with Lloyd, which hadn’t produced much more than Lloyd telling him again and again and again, “She took me over. She just took me over!” Then more weeping. Then, “She took me over. She took me over!”

  “Find out who ‘she’ is,” Charisse decreed, when brought up to date with the interview, “and then bring her in. Sounds like this jerk is in it up to his hairline, but get me something concrete.”

  There was a discussion with Drano about whether to place the man on a twenty-four-hour hold, but the general consensus was to cut him loose and see what happened next. The supposed doer, whoever she was, wasn’t one of the numbers listed on Jarvis Lloyd’s phone records. Maybe Lloyd contacted her with a temporary cell phone, but they hadn’t found one on his person or premises.

  “He’s close to a complete breakdown,” Danner told Charisse. “He should be in a hospital.”

  “Send him home,” the ADA answered, sounding as heartless as her reputation would suggest. “If she’s his lover, then associating with her got his family killed.”

  On that, Charisse had a point. During his interview with the man, Danner had brought up Lloyd’s wife’s name and his daughter’s, and it was the latter that had sent the man into a crying jag that seemed damn near endless. Twenty-year-old Angie Lloyd was Jarvis’s “little girl” and he couldn’t think about her without breaking down.

  “Keep an eye on him,” Charisse told Danner flatly. She was a no-nonsense redhead—fake color, he was pretty sure—whip thin, with a hard chin and gray eyes and amazing breasts—fake size, he was certain—and a penchant for tight suits with short skirts. She had nice legs, though a little on the skinny side, and designer shoes that looked about as comfortable as thumbscrews.

  Lloyd was released and Danner spent the next couple of hours making notes on his thoughts. He headed home midday and managed to catch about four hours of sleep before he got a call from Celek, who’d been assigned babysitting duty on Lloyd, telling Danner that Jarvis had stumbled out of the house, disheveled and seemingly disoriented, and walked about seven blocks to the MAX line and taken the train into the city, where he alighted on Burnside and found his way south to a hotel with guest suites and a lobby bar in a Casablanca style.

  “He’s just sitting at the bar, nursing a drink,” Celek reported.

  “Waiting for someone at three P.M.?” Danner asked.

  “I guess.”

  “Has he made you?”

  “No.” Celek was offended.

  “Okay.”

  Danner ran through the shower and drove back to the station. Celek called him when he was halfway there. “He’s on his way home again.”

  “No one met him at the bar?” Danner asked.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “How does he seem?”

  “Beaten down.”

  Suicidal? Danner veered off course and headed straight to Lloyd’s house. He passed Celek coming the other way and jerked his thumb in the direction of Jarvis’s place. He didn’t have time to talk. He arrived in time to catch a glimpse of the man entering his garage and closing the door behind him.

  Danner idled across the street. Through the line of narrow windows on the garage door he saw the light switch off. Lowering his window, he thought he could hear Lloyd’s car’s engine running.

  He hesitated, waiting, hoping the garage door would go up and Lloyd would back out.

  Nothing happened.

  “Shit.”

  Danner leapt from the Wrangler, which was double-parked, its own engine running. He sprinted across the street. If Lloyd was intent on killing himself with carbon monoxide, he was sure as hell gonna stop him if he could.

  The door was locked. Frantically looking around, Danner found a small tree limb and banged it down on the door handle with all his might, stomping against the door panels with his foot until the wood around the lock splintered and he was inside. He leapt over the hood of the car to the driver’s side where Lloyd’s feet were sticking out of the door. He was lying on the seats. Eyes closed. Unconscious. Danner held his breath and yanked Jarvis from the car. The open door was letting in air, but he didn’t trust himself to breathe until he had hauled Lloyd’s limp body five feet from the door and laid him on the damp grass in front of his house.

  Celek was there, big-eyed, gulping.

  Lloyd half came to, groaning. Danner wanted to slap the man silly but restrained himself with an effort. Bastard. Getting his family killed.

  “Tell me her name,” Danner growled at him. His fists were bunched in the man’s shirt and he wanted to yank him to his feet.

  “I don’t . . . know. . . .” His eyes rolled around.

  “Tell me her name!”

  “I don’t know it! I don’t.” He started sobbing again. “I thought I did. But I don’t. I called her Sheila, but I don’t think that’s who she is. She took me over! I didn’t know. . . . I didn’t know!”

  And with that he collapsed into unconsciousness again.

  Celek said uneasily, “Lockwood?”

  “Call nine-one-one,” Danner grunted in disgust.

  “Oh, man . . .” Celek put his cell phone to his ear and took a few steps back but watched Danner with a worried eye.

  “I’m not gonna kill him,” Danner muttered to the freckle-faced Celek. “I don’t want him dead. Yet.”

  He went back inside the garage and turned off the car’s engine, and he heard the sirens as he stepped outside again. The EMTs appeared within minutes and started Lloyd on oxygen.

  “Is he okay?” Celek asked them.

  The taller of the two EMTs answered, “He’s breathing, but he should be coming around by now.” He frowned. “Did he take something else?”

  “Probably,” Danner growled. “He wanted to kill himself pretty badly, I imagine. He was in the garage when I got here.”

  “He was in his house until about forty-five minutes ago,” Celek said. “I was outside.”

  “We need to pump his stomach,” the second EMT said.

  “Gotta get him outa here,” the taller one answered tersely, and they loaded Lloyd into the back of the ambulance and took off, sirens screaming.

  Celek stared after them. “Maybe he did know I was following him,” he said guiltily.

  Danner drew a deep breath, deeply furious with Jarvis Lloyd, but it wasn’t Celek’s fault. “He came to us,” Danner reminded the younger man. “He probably already had this in mind. He just couldn’t quite c
onfess last night. Whether he made you or not doesn’t really matter.”

  Celek shot him a grateful look. “Thanks.”

  Danner shrugged. “Truth.” They walked to their respective vehicles, Danner’s mind on Lloyd’s trip to the bar. Whom had he planned to meet this afternoon? To Celek, he asked, “How’s that burglary case coming? With the nightclub venues?”

  “Nothing new. But most of ’em have happened on weekends, so maybe something will break soon.”

  Danner nodded and climbed into the Wrangler. Time to check out the Casablanca bar and see if he could learn something.

  “He was drinking water,” the bartender told Danner half an hour later when he caught up with him inside Rick’s—no surprise there, considering the motif.

  “Just water?”

  He nodded. “Said he was waiting for someone. Guess they never showed.”

  A waitress wearing all black except for a silver sequined headband around her forehead said, “He took a couple pills.”

  “When?” Danner demanded.

  “Right before he left. What’s wrong with him? He was like the saddest guy on the planet.”

  “He got involved with the wrong woman,” Danner told her. “Maybe he was trying to meet her today. Have you ever seen him before?”

  The bartender and waitress both shook their heads. “If he came at night, you’d have to check with Len,” the waitress said. “He’s on at six.”

  Danner checked his watch. Getting close to it, but there was still some time. “I’ll do that.”

  He drove back to the station and called ADA Charisse Werner and told her that Jarvis Lloyd was in the hospital after a suicide attempt, then, needing a shower and shave, headed back to his apartment.