Instead he drew back and let her slide slowly to the ground, his expression both amused and irritated and smoldering. Stella was pretty sure she’d just keep sliding until her jelly legs collapsed on the ground, if Goat didn’t grab her shoulders at the last minute and hold her up.
“Didn’t plan on that,” he said. “Ought to arrest you twice, making me behave like a damn fool in the middle of the street.”
Stella sucked in sweet cold air and licked her bruised lips and tried to gather her wits. She didn’t care about Bayer or the Knowleses or anyone else who might have seen what had just taken place; she didn’t even care if Goat tossed her in the lockup—as long as she got to ride over in his car, and they took the long way.
But she was trembling. Chalk it up to some post-endorphin-rush effect—her teeth were a tick away from chattering out of her head, and her heart was thudding overtime. And a little blinky light was going off somewhere deep in her soul.
A warning light. A danger sign.
Because she was on the edge of giving it all away, of caring so much for Goat that she endangered everything else—the barriers she’d constructed, the side business she’d built up so carefully, the safe place she represented for the abused and helpless.
Reckless felt irresistible. In the moments that they touched, all that mattered was getting a little more of him, a lot more of him, and that wasn’t right. They both had jobs to do, and even if they sometimes seemed to be at cross purposes, the work still had to be done.
So Stella bit the inside of her cheek just hard enough to shock her system back to attention. The feeling in her limbs tingled and returned, and she stood up on her own power and gave Goat a gentle little shove, pushing him back away from the Jeep. Then she tugged her top down over her jeans—it had somehow managed to ride up in a scandalous fashion—and patted her hair back into place.
“Arrest me all you want,” she said, making her voice sound bored, “only it won’t change the fact that you started that, not me. Now git on out of the way, I got to go. And before you head back to all your law duties, make sure you get them boxes down like you promised Noelle.”
Then she edged past him and walked around the front of her Jeep to the driver’s side and managed to get the door unlocked and her seat belt on and the engine started without looking back.
And that felt so good, so brazen, that Stella figured she’d push her luck and got her lipstick out of her purse. Oh, she loved that Regal Red. She applied it with care in the rearview mirror, mashing her lips together when she was done, and only then did she start driving slowly away from her house.
And she didn’t look, not until she was safely past both Goat and his damn department-issue Charger, and then she peeked in the mirror just long enough to see that he was standing with his fists on his hips, shaking his head and laughing.
Guess I won that round, she thought happily as she put the pedal to the floor and left him in the dust.
Chapter Twenty-nine
By the time she got to the Mingus home, her heart had stopped hammering and her skin had stopped tingling, though the memory of Goat’s hands on her ass was proving difficult to shake.
Still, she pushed those thoughts from her mind as she parked a couple of houses down the street, behind a mud-splattered Ford pickup. No sense alerting Salty that she was back to pay another visit. At least it looked like she might have him to herself, which would make things far simpler—the minivan was nowhere to be seen, and Salty’s truck was parked neatly where it had been the last time.
She got her lightweight portable rig from the cargo hold, slinging the high-tech pack over her shoulder. She’d brought only the simplest gear along for this job, because even though Salty’s innocence was looking far more dubious than before, she still didn’t get the kind of vibe from him that warranted the heavy-duty treatment. And more and more these days, Stella was going with her gut.
Her luck continued. After getting no answer at the front door, she slipped carefully around the side of the house and found him in the backyard, tinkering with the electrical that he was laying down in the half-finished shed. It clearly wasn’t working the way he’d planned, since he had a work light strung on a fat yellow extension cord running from inside the house, and he was cussing a blue streak while he poked at a galvanized floor box. Stella was treated to a fine view of his mostly adequate rear end, but she leaned against the framed-out shed wall for a moment and considered how, once you get one nice man-butt stuck in your mind, you can look at all kinds of others and they don’t do anything for you.
Finally she coughed delicately. Salty dropped the screwdriver he was holding, and it clanked on the poured concrete floor and rolled away.
On top of Salty’s other problems, the shed wasn’t level.
“I’d keep my day job,” Stella suggested.
Salty managed a terse string of curses and got to his feet. “This ain’t the best time, Miz Hardesty,” he said. “My wife’s taken the kids over to her sister’s so I can get this fucking thing finished, and I want to take advantage of daylight.”
“Dark’s coming early today, I expect,” Stella said mildly, setting her pack on the floor and unzipping it. She crouched down and sorted through the contents, and when she stood up again, she took the Bersa from the leg holster under her loose fleece pants, almost as an afterthought. The Mak was a loss at this point—she only hoped the boys babysitting Walsingham would have the good sense to wipe it, but otherwise, it was just another in a long line of unregistered weapons, one of the sunk costs of Stella’s business.
Salty regarded the gun with resignation. “Well, hell. What now? I told you everything.”
“You didn’t tell me you talked to Priss last month,” Stella corrected him. “Probably more than once. Am I right? You know, I can look at your cell phone bills, if I want.”
She wasn’t 100 percent certain about that last bit, but she wouldn’t be surprised; Chrissy had gotten so slick with her online poking around that Stella guessed she could probably get a hold of his baby pictures and first grade report card if she wanted, too.
Only, to her surprise, forty-five minutes later, Salty had admitted only to occasional drink-and-dial sessions where he tried to get Priss to indulge in phone shenanigans. Beyond that, he was still sticking to his story. Stella had got him rigged up to the foundation two-by-fours with a simple set of plastic restraints and some boot cuffs that she had recently treated herself to because they came in a rainbow of colors. For Salty, she used a vibrant purple, though he didn’t seem to appreciate her thoughtfulness.
A little work with a suede flogger seemed to unsettle him more than causing him any real pain, but it did get him to admit that Priss had occasionally asked him to wear an Oasis Pool Maintenance uniform in the bedroom while she ordered him to check her filters … and a turn with a leather riding crop had him coughing up some rather dull details about tax reporting for his father-in-law’s firm, but despite Stella’s best efforts, he continue to maintain his innocence in the matter of knocking off his rival for Priss’s attention, or Priss herself, or Liman.
And that was perplexing. It was exceedingly rare that Stella got this far in an interrogation without turning up the dirty little nuggets she’d been looking for. In fact, she didn’t recall ever interrogating anyone who turned out to be innocent before, and she didn’t care for it one bit. For one thing, it meant she would have subjected an innocent—well, relatively speaking—man to unnecessary pain. And for another, she did not care to be wrong.
That was why, when she felt the whoosh of something moving fast through the air behind her only a fraction of a second after hearing the snap of a footstep in the shed, it was almost a relief. She had been breathing hard from exertion, and Salty had been making various sounds of protestation, so she wasn’t really surprised she’d been snuck up on, but just as something heavy crashed down on the top of her head with a distressing amount of force, Stella had the satisfaction of knowing that while she’d been wrong
about Salty, she’d been barking up a tree that wasn’t growing too far away from the right one.
Chapter Thirty
Stella had woken up from being beat unconscious a couple times in the past, and it had been a disorienting experience, involving grogginess and double vision and tingling in the extremities.
This time, however, Stella found that within seconds of waking up with a considerable headache, she had a crystal-clear memory of being beat at her own game. She also noticed that her mysterious bludgeoner had got into her supplies and secured her wrists her with a pair of her own disposable black plastic riot cuffs. Something weighed uncomfortably against her midsection, but she couldn’t see what it was over her bound wrists.
It took her all of half a second to figure out where she was: the backseat of a minivan that was clearly used more often for toting kids than captives, judging from the faint smells of Frostees left in a hot car, and diapers and spit-up and lost french fries. And there were visual clues, too, armless action figures and wild-haired dolls and Legos lodged in the corners and under the seats, and car seats bolted tight to the captain’s chairs.
She couldn’t make out much in the way of the driver, from her vantage point in the backseat, other than a thin wrist fiddling with the radio.
Well, it wasn’t Salty—that was for sure—since Salty was built bigger and wasn’t wearing maroon nail polish or jangly silver bracelets the last time Stella saw him. No, it appeared that Stella’s fate was in the hands of his wife. Interestingly, Doraleigh hadn’t brought her husband along. Maybe she hadn’t even bothered to take off his restraints. The more she thought about it, Stella figured that must be the case, or Doraleigh would have used the boot cuffs on her; as it was, her feet seemed to have been left free, which she confirmed by jiggling them.
Which was, in itself, a useful development. A woman who comes home and finds her husband tied up and being tortured, and then elects to leave him there, is a woman dealing with a complicated set of emotions. Something to be delved into, for sure, as soon as Stella was in a position to delve.
Which she would be in a matter of moments. Funny thing about those riot cuffs—you’d think all the rabble-rousers and protesters and demonstrators who ended up in them might have had the foresight to watch any of the dozens of YouTube videos showing exactly how to get out of them. Of course, real foresight would mean tucking a straight pin—preferably one of those nice .50-millimeter steel-shaft glass-head pins she sold at the shop—into the stretchy bit of lace covering the underwire of her bra, as she had trained herself to do before each and every mission.
Because preparation was one of those things that separated Stella from the amateurs. Which Doraleigh clearly was.
She slipped the pin from her bra and went to work on the cuffs’ roller locking tension system. It took only a few minutes of fiddling to get the pin where she wanted it between the roller lock and the strap, and her left hand was free. Thirty seconds later, her right hand was, too. It was the sort of thing that took hours and hours of practice to master, but slow times in the shop were perfect for that sort of thing.
Stella dropped the plastic loops on the floor and flexed her wrists a few times. She couldn’t see much out of the minivan’s windows other than the occasional treetop or power line. With her hands free, she found she could focus a bit better, and she thought about the fact that it appeared to have been Doraleigh all along who’d been behind the killing spree.
All, presumably, over a man—and not just any man, but the spectacularly unimpressive Salty Mingus. Sure, it was bound to piss a woman off if her man kept mooning after his old girlfriend. And no doubt, it complicated things when you were staying home bringing up his children. But honestly, Stella couldn’t quite get her mind around the idea of a woman taking a long look at Salty and finding herself stirred to passion strong enough to make a killer of her.
Stella twisted to get a better look at whatever was cinching her stomach and discovered with surprise that she was wearing a Home Depot giveaway canvas tool belt, the kind they handed out at vendor demos. The ends had been wrapped around twice and knotted securely, if a little snugly, at her waist. More interestingly, the handy tool pockets bulged with lumpy objects—heavy sons of bitches that were pressing down in the neighborhood of her bladder and her kidneys and whatever else was located at that latitude. The tops of the pockets had been clamped shut with big heavy-duty binder clips.
So it was another drowning that Doraleigh had in mind to keep Stella quiet. She nodded to herself: a beginner mistake. Novice criminals tended to find something that worked for them once, and stick to it, rarely thinking to branch out and expand their repertoire until they were a lot further down the criminal path. Just like a man who hit his wife with an open palm to reduce the risk of bruising was liable to do it to the next gal he hooked up with, and the next.
Still, she doubted Doraleigh would be using Adriana’s pond again, and she made a quick mental inventory of likely ponds, lakes, and reservoirs in the county. Depending on how far Doraleigh felt like driving, there were lots of possibilities. If it was up to Stella—if it were she who was hoping to send a body to a watery and hopefully permanent grave, she’d probably go for one of the old limestone quarries up near Picot, which went nearly a hundred feet deep in some places.
Of course, a quarry was a funny place. With a stone bottom and walls, it wasn’t as friendly to aquatic life, to plants rooting on the floor and critters eating algae and so on up the food chain, as was, say, a farm pond. Stella had gone swimming in the old quarries as a teen, and it was downright creepy how the bottom, as it sloped away from the walls to unknowable depths, was covered with only a thin layer of greenish brown slime, with not even a school of guppies for company. A body left in such a place would bump about the bottom, where the sun couldn’t reach without even a catfish for company. The thought made her shudder.
“Are you wakin’ up back there, Miz Hardesty?” a voice came from the front. A full head of striped curls leaned around to look at her.
“Doraleigh Wall,” Stella said. “Or I suppose I should say Mingus, now. How long you and Salty been married, anyway?”
“Three years in June, not that you’d care.”
“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t I care?” Stella demanded, mystified. “I’m as big a supporter of matrimony as the next person.”
“Yeah, well, the way you been chasing around trying to figure out what happened to that no-good homewrecking stuck-up bitch Priss Porter, when she’s the one gone and, and, and made a mockery of my marriage—so I can’t even hold my head up high in the grocery store—”
“Are you saying folks knew about Salty seeing Priss? It was common knowledge?”
“What would you call it, when your husband doesn’t bother to come home from his so-called business trip to the city until midnight even though he knows it’s your bunco night? Oh, you can bet all the girls in the neighborhood know about that.”
Because you told them, Stella thought. Doraleigh didn’t strike her as the kind of woman who’d suffer in silence. “Did you kill her, Doraleigh?”
“Only ’cause she didn’t leave me no choice! It was self-defense! I mean, it was self-defense of Salty, but that’s like my own personal self-defense ’cause we’re married and all.” Doraleigh’s voice had gone all high and thin and wobbly.
“Which is why he’s still tied up to a two-by-four and you’re driving the getaway car,” Stella muttered.
There was a suspicious pause. “You making fun of me, Stella?”
Stella sighed. “No,” she said tiredly. “Just trying to get the facts straight.” She felt the lumpy objects tied to her waist through the canvas and figured them for river stones, the kind of rocks that people liked to line their driveways with. Had she seen them at the Mingus’s place? She couldn’t recall, but there had certainly been a bounty of building materials lying around in back.
“Well, you might as well quit that. I hate to say it, but you might want to stop
worrying about mine and Salty’s differences and start makin’ your peace with Jesus with the time you got left.”
“Me? What do I have to be confessin’ over? Wouldn’t that be more on you, seein’ as you’re fixing to drown me like a bag of cats?”
“Only ’cause I was provoked,” Doraleigh insisted in that same thin and reedy voice, and Stella realized there would be no talking sense to the gal. Denial put folks in a weird state, one where you might as well let them just spin their wheels because nothing you said or did was going to reach them anyway.
“What about Keller? Did you kill him, too?”
“Who?”
“The guy in Priss’s trunk?”
“Oh, that. Of course not. Why would I kill a perfect stranger? You’d have to ask Priss why she done it.”
“Priss killed him? You’re sure?”
“Well, I mean, she didn’t say she did, exactly—but there she was sitting in my living room asking my husband to get rid of a body, I’d say it’s pretty clear she done it.”
“Wait. Priss came to your house?”
“Well, yeah.” Doraleigh’s voice trembled with bitterness. “She comes to my house and knocks on my door, and when I open it I know right away who she is, of course I knew from all those pictures Salty hides in the bottom of his sock drawer, and I couldn’t even believe she had the nerve after I’d caught Salty sneaking up to the city last summer—”
“So you knew all about the affair.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know how far she’d go to hang on to Salty. She was an evil, scheming woman, Miz Hardesty, you got to see that.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty evil, forcing herself on Salty that way,” Stella muttered under her breath.
A Bad Day for Scandal Page 23
