She would not think about anything but the task before her. Confronting
Crandall.
He had called in sick, she learned, but, driving up and down the
streets of Aspen, she spotted his four-wheel-drive vehicle parked, very
nearly hidden from view, alongside a garage in a fenced enclosure. The
sign on the fence forbidding unofficial entry clued her in. Unless she
was very much mistaken, this was a police storage facility.
She drove around the block and parked her car on the street
perpendicular so that it faced the garage and would be less
identifiable. Studying the layout and surrounding properties, she
guessed that the updated garage had once been a carriage house for the
much larger Victorian mansion adjoining the fence.
She had two options, and neither was all that much to her liking. She
was a writer, not a sleuth or a detective,
but if she was going to take Crandall by surprise and get from him what
she needed to know, she had to get onto that property. So she could
either dart into the yard to the side of the Victorian house, climb the
tree, maneuver herself out onto a limb stretching out over the police
yard and hurl herself down... or she could grow her own set of wings.
Quick, hot tears stung her eyes. She dashed them away and started to
get out and cross the street when another police vehicle, this one
marked, cruised by. The female officer didn't notice Crandall's
vehicle until her car had passed the gate. She backed up and pulled
into the drive at the gate. Looking annoyed, she got out of her
vehicle and sorted through a ring of keys for the one to the padlock.
Robyn decided this was as good an opportunity as she was ever going to
get. There were no windows on the street side of the old carriage
house, and once the police-woman had entered the building to see what
was going on, Robyn could slip through the gate and hide alongside the
garage on the opposite side of the outbuilding from the door.
The policewoman snapped open the padlock and left it hanging on the
latch as she shoved the gate open far enough to walk through.
Her heart pounding, Robyn got out of her car and forced herself to wait
until the officer opened the door and went inside.
Tamping down her fear of getting caught, Robyn stood and walked across
the street as if nothing in the world mattered, but once she was
inside, she ran for cover. Making her way along evergreen shrubs to
the north side of the carriage house, she went to the back, then across
the back to the southwest corner.
She waited what seemed forever, straining to listen, hearing nothing,
but in what was really less than two minutes she heard the door open
again. Peeking around the corner, she watched the female officer
walking back to her car, apparently satisfied that whether Crandall had
called in sick or not, he had reason to be in a locked storage
facility.
A small, cranky terrier in the yard of the adjacent Victorian house
caught sight of Robyn and started barking and snarling. The
policewoman looked back. Robyn held her breath and flattened herself
up against the back of the building until she heard the gate clanging
shut and the police car drive off. The dog's owner called her
snapping, angry pet into the house.
Robyn took a few deep breaths to calm her frayed nerves. Was this
worth it? But she was in now. Locked in, to be accurate, so she might
as well do what she had started out to do.
She plucked up her very righteous anger and walked calmly around the
Comer, slipping inside the dark, dank entrance to the outbuilding. She
could hear Crandall's grunts as he shifted boxes about, somewhere to
her right. She moved along the south wall.
She'd been inside police property rooms before. This one, although
evidently housing older items and not current evidence, was set up
similarly, with removable metal shelving in rows like library stacks.
Looking through them toward the lighted end of the old carriage house,
she spotted a figure in a larger area with a table.
She went silently down the side aisle until she came to the place where
Crandall stood at a table pulling archival computer tapes from a
carton.
She leaned against the end of the metal storage racks. "What are you
looking for, Detective Crandall?" she asked softly.
Startled, he dropped a canister of digital tape. He jerked his head
around in her direction. "How in the hell did you get in here?"
"Through the door."
"Well you can just take yourself right back out the door, Miz Delaney,"
he mocked. "This is a restricted area on police property."
"I assumed it was. And since you're just like any other private
citizen when not on duty, why are you here when you called in sick?"
He scowled at her, but he clearly wasn't at all that concerned. "I'm a
cop, I have matters to research. This is where that gets done. You,
on the other hand, are not a cop, but a broad sticking her nose in
business she'd be better off leaving alone. Now, I'll do you a favor
and look the other way while you get your butt out of here."
"I don't want your favors, Detective Crandall, but if asked, I'll be
sure to tell your supervisors you were willing to be very accommodating
about a civilian trespassing on police property."
Sighing heavily, he picked up the canister he'd dropped and flung it
back into the carton. "What do you want?"
"I want to know where you were, Detective Crandall, when Spyder Nielsen
was murdered."
"Oh, for chrissake, spare me your candy-assed theories! Candelaria
whacked Nielsen. Period, end of discussion. Where I was has about as
much to do with that as not bing
"Except Trudi Candelaria did not kill Spyder, and I think you know it.
I think my husband knew it."
"You know what? What you think or what your husband thought or what
Howdy Doody mighta thunk doesn't interest me in the least."
Her anger pitched higher. Struck by Crandall's resemblance to Keller's
caricatures of him, she made herself stay collected. "How many people
knew your daughter, Betsy, was pregnant with Spyder Nielsen's baby?"
"That he'd screwed her and then dumped her, you mean? That his
freaking doxy threw money at my little girl? Is that what you mean?"
Crandall's face registered such anguish for a split second that she
felt a stab of sympathy for him. The anguish dissolved to a sneer.
"Well, lady, you're undoubtedly somebody's little girl, too, but you've
just bought and paid for a one-way ticket to hell. You get my
meaning?"
- Her chest tightened. Her ticket had better be to heaven after all of
this, or hell would see the fury of a woman done truly wrong. "Did you
kill him, Detective? Did you go there and pick up that bronze and
murder Spyder Nielsen?"
He swore vilely. "No. Somebody beat me to it." "Somebody? Not Trudi
Candelaria?"
"You just don't know when to give up, do you." He slammed the four
sides of the top of the crate together and hurled the box back onto the
meta
l shelf only four or five feet away from her. He closed the
distance in three steps of his squared body and grabbed her by the
wrist, twisting her arm behind her back.
Pain shot clear to her shoulder. She struggled, knowing she had no
chance against Crandall's bulk and power, but in the instant she pulled
loose, Crandall went flying backward. He crashed into the table and
fell on his butt to the floor.
Robyn stared at her arm, where there was no more pain, 'and then at
Crandall, whose rank confusion screwed up his face, and she knew.
It wasn't any native strength of her own that had broken free and
thrown Crandall to the floor, but the power of an angel. Of Kiel.
"Are you there?" she asked. "Are you really here somewhere?"
Finish him off, Robyn. You're doing just fine. Relief shouted itself,
coursed through her, but her elation was short-lived.
"You bet I'm here, you stupid interfering cow!" Crandall hissed, and
before she knew what was happening to her had begun to Swing a wooden
chair at her back.
She screamed and braced for the pounding blow but it never came. She
found herself standing behind Crandall. The power of his swing as the
chair swept through the spot where she had been, crashing and breaking
against the metal storage racks, reverberated in Crandalls body
instead.
Knowing Crandall was stunned, she couldn't help the laughter bubbling
out of her.
He turned, still holding the jagged back of the chair, more enraged
than ever, roaring vile epithets at her. But now she understood he
could not hurt her, that Kiel would move her or block Crandall.
"Tell me the truth, Detective Crandall. I want to know it all."
"In hell," he bellowed at her, advancing on her, not getting it yet
that nothing he could do could touch her.
"No, now," she said. "Right here, right now. Did you kill Spyder
Nielsen?"
He swung at her again and again with the jagged, splintered back of the
chair. Each time, she was trans ported in the blink of an eye to a
safe space behind Crandall.
He began to pant, to breathe heavily with the exertion, to fall victim
to the confusion. His eyes glazed over in his fury. "He deserved to
die," Crandall snarled. "He deserved to die a thousand deaths, and
that sanctimonious bitch had the nerve to throw money at my Betsy!"
His pain tore at Robyn, but she had to know the truth. "Did you kill
him, Detective?"
Enraged even more at what Spyder Nielsen had done to his daughter, he
swung at Robyn and missed three more times, like a blind wild man
lashing out at a target he couldn't see. In his rage, he hurled the
table, and when that didn't work, he pulled down the long row of metal
shelving.
There should have been no escape for her, but when the resounding metal
clash died away, Crandall standing defeated at one end, Robyn stood
unharmed at the other.
"Who the hell are you?" he screamed. "How the hell can you still be
standing there?"
Tears seeped into her eyes for this man whose spirit was so warped, and
now so crushed by events he must have believed beyond his control.
"Please. Just tell me what happened."
He sank to his haunches, coveting his face, crying like a brokenhearted
child. Kiel materialized somewhere out of sight and walked in. He
went to Robyn and put his arm around her shoulders.
She didn't need protection anymore, she needed his support in the face
of Crandall's grief.
She looked up at him, sympathy glittering in her eyes, and then she
turned her attention back to Crandall.
arty Dtsnop
He wiped his bleary face with the arm of his shirt. "I didn't kill the
bastard," he said at last. "Candelaria didn't either."
"Did you know that when my husband was selected as special
prosecutor?"
Crandall shook his head. "Not for several weeks afterward."
"How did you find out?"
His face contorted. "That tire. That frigging damn tim. Spent weeks
checking it out, combing through sales records of tire dealers all over
the state. I thought it was a flat waste of my time, but there was no
way your husband was letting it go."
"What happened" Kiel asked.
"I sent photos of the tread imprint to state labs. Came back matching
the tread of some woman who drove herself off the highway up in Routt
County off the Oak Creek Road."
Robyn swallowed and traded looks with Kiel. "Detective, who was
she?"
"Name was Jaclyn Thompson. Another one of Spyder Nielsen's rejects.
She lived over outside of Steamboat Springs. No family, not a lot of
friends, either, just family money out the ears. Twenty-damn-three
years old."
"Then everything Trudi said was true?" Robyn asked. "There was a
shadowy figure leaving the house that night."
"Bald-faced lie," Crandall snarled. "Do you honestly think she arrived
home from that little soiree at 12:17 and saw a shadowy figure but
didn't see the car Thompson was driving? I don't think so."
Robyn frowned. "Why would she make up that story, then?"
"Because she's a lying whore--but aside from that the Thompson woman
had to have gotten away clean. Can-delaria never saw a car coming back
down the mountain when she was on her way home."
"She wouldn't have known there was a tim track to be seen," Kiel
guessed.
"Exactly. Candelaria never saw any shadowy figure and she had no alibi
after the party. She was making up her story as she went along, lying
through her teeth the whole time. And the truth is, she deserved to
fry as much as her lover Spyder Nielsen deserved to die."
Kiel shook his head. "Was the tread a perfect match? You're certain
it was this Thompson woman?"
"Yeah, I was certain." He laughed unpleasantly. "The tire had a flaw.
Chances of it not being the same are about ten billion to one."
Silence reigned in the cold, unheated building. Robyn shivered. "What
happened to Jaclyn Thompson?"
"She spent a few days in Routt County Memorial in a coma." Crandall
picked himself up off the floor and dusted off the seat of his pants.
"Died the day Candelaria was arraigned."
Kiel separated from Robyn, preparing to deck Crandall if he decided to
come at them again. "When did you know this?"
Crandall sent them both a look of unmitigated hatred "Maybe halfway
through the trial."
Robyn shivered again. "You never told anyone?" "Not a soul. Seemed
like a good time to keep my trap shut. Far as I was concerned, real
justice was bein' handed down by the Lord. Nielsen was a goner, his
whom was almost there, and the perp that really bashed o1' Spyder in
the head was long since punished, dead and buried. Your husband was
doing a fine, upstanding, job, ma'am, and I was happy as a clam to let
him do it."
Her teeth gnashed together. Keller had been lied to and used. "I'm
very sorry for what happened to your daughter, Detective Crandall, but
none of it justifies putting an innocent woman on trial for her
lif
e.,"
"Save your judgments, lady," he snapped. "Trudi Candelaria didn't get
anything she didn't have coming."
The vestiges of Robyn's sympathy for Crandall evaporated. "What about
my husband?"
"What about him?"
"Did he finally uncover your lies? Did you have to murder him, too?"
"Well, no, But it was damned accommodating of him to die like he did."
Crandall laughed derisively again. "I was bustin' his chops and he
knew it--he just didn't know how."
Kiel had never heard the term 'busting his chops' before, but he
divined from Robyn's experience that was what the Feds called it when
informants or perps were lying to them.
A righteous anger burst into flames inside him, anger that went back to
the core of Keller Trueblood's integrity. Without so much as a blink,
Using only the force of his will, Kiel slammed the detective against
the wall.
Robyn clapped her fingers over her mouth to stifle her cry, but Kiel's
outrage only magnified. He seemed to grow larger than life and his
beautiful bronze-colored hair lengthened. His jeans and sweater were
gone, his body was cloaked in a gleaming white robe, tied in the middle
with a purple cord.
His wings appeared then, glorious, powerful, more mindnumbingly
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