When they met up at the front of the house they heard a woman’s voice through the door. “Hello?”
“Hello, ma’am?” Paul said, standing in front of the peephole so she could see him, not be afraid. “We got a report of a strange noise over here and wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Officer, I’m—” They heard a choking noise, then “—fine.”
“Are you sure, ma’am? Could you open the door?”
“No!” Choking again. “I’m pregnant. Please, I’m pregnant. I have to—” Another choking sound.
“I remember this from when Marcy was pregnant too,” Steve whispered. “Morning sickness. Poor woman. I bet she’s embarrassed to open the door. Us being here is probably making it worse.”
Paul nodded, then said to the door, “That’s okay, ma’am. We just wanted to make sure there were no problems.”
They heard a muffled “Thank you,” and then the sound of steps moving away fast.
“Someone must have heard her getting sick and called it in,” Steve said as they got back into their cruiser. “Poor lady, she must feel like crap puking her guts up all day.”
“Probably. So, burgers or burritos?”
They made their all clear report at 4:30 and were on their second In-N-Out Burger Special by 4:42.
Eve had watched the two officers walk around the house from behind a curtain. They had been so close. She’d thought this was it, they had found her.
But then they left.
She looked down at her hands. Made herself take a deep breath, focus. She had to finish before Harry came home that night. She’d better get back to Kelly.
CHAPTER 37
Windy climbed into the minivan when Ash pulled up and said, right off, “Her father was a gambling addict for whom she used to cook late-night breakfasts when he returned from the casino. Oh, and he owned a shoe factory. That’s my best shot. What did you get?”
“Her nickname here in Los Angeles is the Home Wrecker.”
Windy stared at him for a moment, then sank back into the seat and put her hands up, surrendering. “Okay, you win. That’s better. Tell me everything.”
Ash was still trying to piece together the interview he’d had. Or rather, two interviews. Bubba O’Leary, the man who had been Eve’s mentor and most notable lover, lived in an art deco house on Beverly Glen, hunched up against the property line in all four directions to make the most of its expensive Beverly Hills real estate. Bubba himself, in a calf-length gray silk robe and gym socks, opened the door. He was stout but looked to be all muscle, like a hearty underworld hatchet man. He said, “You’re supposed to be the masseuse.”
“Sorry.” Ash held out his badge.
“Las Vegas police department. I haven’t been to Vegas in ages.”
He had a pointy goatee and long sideburns. His hair was thinning on top but he had a ponytail in back, and Ash could just picture him in a cap, turned backwards, sunglasses on even at night, a white guy in his mid-forties trying to look down with it, whatever “it” was this week. Taking a chance he said, “That’s not what I hear. I hear you were there two weeks ago.”
Two ideas clearly warred in the man’s head, slam the door and deny everything, or open it wide and pretend to be Nice-Guy-with-Nothing-to-Hide. The fact that he even hesitated told Ash that both would be an act, but he was glad when the door opened. Easier than having to jam your foot in it, and more legal.
“Why don’t we talk in the living room? Close the door,” Bubba said and loped off toward the back of the house.
Ash followed him into a living room that looked like it had been stolen from the Titanic, or more likely Titanic the movie.
“Sit,” Bubba ordered, pointing to a curved chair in dark blue leather and wood that belonged on the Lido deck. Ash sat on the sofa.
“Do you want a drink?” Bubba made for a wood panel that turned into a pop-out bar, complete with brass rails to keep the glasses from sliding off in a storm.
“No thanks.”
The man took out a glass anyway, reached for a bottle of scotch, poured himself four fingers, and tossed it off. His eyes were a little shinier when he faced Ash again. “What do you have that toothpick in your mouth for?” he demanded.
“Bad gums.” Ash crossed a leg over his knee, leaning back comfortable, like he had all the time in the world.
He could have told Bubba the drink was a mistake. It was almost too easy to make him lose his cool, not three seconds passing before Bubba blurted, “Okay, so I was in Vegas two weeks ago. So what?”
“What were you doing there?”
“Visiting a friend.”
“A friend named Eve Sebastian. From what I hear, you weren’t very friendly.”
Bubba poured himself another drink, swallowed half of it, and brought the other half to a chair near Ash, compressing himself into it. “Not for lack of trying.” He gave a hard grin.
“Why did she object?”
“Hell, why does Eve do anything? Move to Vegas for example. She was miserable there, miserable without me, and yet she refused to let me help her.”
“Help her how.”
“Relieve her stress.” With his pointy beard and glittering eyes he was really starting to look like a satyr in a bad eighteenth-century painting.
“When was the last time you spoke to Eve?”
“Then. Two weeks ago.”
“You haven’t called her?”
“No, I haven’t called her,” Bubba said in a mincing voice. “I’ve got my pride, you know.”
“Did she break things off with you because she was seeing someone else?”
“That’s never stopped her before.”
“So she was seeing someone else?”
“No. I have no idea. We didn’t exactly talk about other men.”
“Did the name Barry or Harry come up?”
“Are you listening? When Eve and I were together, we didn’t discuss that kind of thing.”
“I don’t think they discussed much at all,” a woman’s voice said from the door behind them. Ash swiveled his neck and saw her, tall, naturally redheaded, stunning in a burgundy satin robe edged with cream lace, a large L embroidered in cream over one breast. She was the kind of woman that had set Ash’s blood on fire as recently as two weeks ago. Now he watched with detached admiration as she gave him a slow smile and floated into the room. She held onto his eyes but addressed her husband, saying, “Bubba, darling, did you tell the handsome police officer about your love affair yet? I hope I haven’t missed that part.”
“Lonnie, stay out of this,” Bubba growled, but he seemed more jealous than mad.
Lonnie slid onto the couch next to Ash. “Why are you holding back, my love? It’s so interesting.” She crossed her legs, giving Ash plenty of smooth thigh and the faintest glimpse of what lay beyond. “You see, Mr. Policeman—”
“Ash Laughton.”
“Ash,” she said and the word sounded almost pornographic. “You see, Ash, Bubba and Eve were having a thing. The bad boy chef and the mother of sin. Perfect, isn’t it? But they—”
“I told you to shut up.”
Lonnie looked at her husband. “If you don’t want to hear about it, you are free to leave, darling. I think it’s adorable.” She was smiling but her voice had a cool edge in it that sounded to Ash like a command.
It must have sounded that way to Bubba too because he heaved himself out of the chair and trudged out of the room.
Ash expected Lonnie to move closer to him but she didn’t. She stayed where she was and used her eyes, looking him over slowly, with heat. She said, “Bubba is a fool to leave me alone with you. Tell me, what has the little home wrecker done now?”
“You call her the home wrecker?”
“Home wrecker, bitch, slut. They’re interchangeable.” She shrugged and her robe came open at the neck just enough to expose the edge of a nipple. “So what is it this time? Has she stolen someone else’s husband?”
“Not exactly,” Ash
said.
“Are you involved with her? Because maybe then you can tell me what she does. Is it some special way she sucks your dick? I’m a very fast learner. I bet it wouldn’t take more than a single lesson for me to get the basics. Of course, there would have to be practice after that.”
“I’ve never met her.”
“Your loss, apparently. Men seem to fall at her feet.” She began to trace the outline of Ash’s hand with a fingertip. “Bubba won’t be back for at least twenty minutes,” she told Ash.
“Thank you for the offer, but I can’t stand a ticking clock. Are you certain your husband had an interlude with Eve?”
“Interlude. I like that. All of Los Angeles knows about it. But he doesn’t call it an interlude. He calls it a love affair. Says he was in love with her. He wanted to leave me, divorce me, and marry her. I built his damn restaurant and he was going to leave me for some fry cook slut.”
“But you two are still married?”
“Yes. You know why? Because she didn’t want him.” Lonnie leaned back, tipping her head into the couch, and gave herself a private smile. “She came here and told me herself. Said they had been involved, but he still loved me, and I should do everything I could to keep him. Smug little bitch.”
“And you did. I mean, he still lives here.”
She tilted her head so her eyes got his. “Of course. I love my husband.” As if she had not just been propositioning him.
Ash was almost at the front door, letting himself out, when a heavy hand grabbed his shoulder. Bubba, red-faced, stood there, scanning Ash.
“Did you have a quick one with my wife?” he demanded.
“No.”
“Why not? She’s gorgeous. She’s a babe. Have you met Eve?”
Ash felt a strong urge to punch Bubba, knock some sense into him, tell him to stop being an asshole and treat his wife better because she deserved more than he was giving her. He contented himself with shaking his head.
“Eve’s got nothing on my wife. I was an idiot to have a fling with her. She was just there, an okay piece of ass. A little on the bony side. Is she in big trouble?”
“Possibly.”
“Good,” Bubba said.
“And that,” Ash concluded to Windy in the minivan, having edited out only a few parts, “is the difference between a woman scorned and a man. Men are complete babies when it comes to emotions.”
There was a tense pause and then Ash said, “Why don’t you and Cate and Bill come over for brunch or something one weekend when Bill is in town? I’d love to meet him.” He thought it came out sounding very much like he meant it.
Windy pictured Bill and Ash next to each other—Bill in his polished loafers, perfectly creased khakis, ironed shirt with his monogram on it, cufflinks, the shirt unbuttoned on top because it’s a weekend; Ash in a pair of jeans with the pocket faded in a line where his wallet went, a T-shirt, maybe a sweater, broken-in tennis shoes. “Yes, that would be great,” she said, glad she wasn’t answering on a polygraph.
Neither of them got much farther in their thoughts because both their cell phones rang simultaneously, Jonah on one, Ned on the other, to tell them the Home Wrecker had murdered again.
CHAPTER 38
The van that drove them from the Vegas airport to the crime scene hadn’t even pulled up in front of the house before Windy said, “This is wrong.”
Jonah looked in the rearview mirror at Windy in the backseat, holding the map on her lap. “Did I take a wrong turn?”
“No, I mean this isn’t Eve. The Home Wrecker. Whoever. She’s not the one who did this murder.”
Ash turned all the way around in his seat, staring at Windy. “How do you know?”
“The trees. And the entrances. I should have known when I saw the address, 23066. Old houses don’t have five-number addresses, you usually get them in fancy new tracts. But mostly I can tell from the scale of the doors and the foliage.” Windy was learning that you could date the age of the developments around Las Vegas based on the relative sizes of the doors to the trees. New houses had big doors and small trees. The tress lining this street were saplings, the doors worthy of cathedrals. “This area was probably built in the last three years, not more than the last five,” she explained. “It’s not old enough for Eve.”
“What if she lived out here and the house she lived in was torn down and replaced with this development.”
“Maybe,” Windy conceded, “but I’m not sure that would be enough of a trigger for her.”
“Damn.” Jonah slammed on the brakes. “Look at this place.” The area around 23066 Hartwell was swarmed with press vans, their satellite antennas coiled with red and blue cables spiking high into the air like bug-eyed Cyclopses. “They must have heard the dispatch from the 911 call,” he said. “The mailman called it in, saw bloody footprints leading from the front door when he went to deliver the mail, then found the door unlocked and—”
Windy gripped the front seat, leaning forward. “Blood from the doorway?”
“Yep.”
“This isn’t Eve,” Windy repeated, but she knew she was going about this wrong. Evidence, not hunches.
Ten minutes inside was enough to back her hunches. The woman who lived in the house, Martha Carson, a pretty brunette twenty-two-year-old dental receptionist, had been beheaded like the other Home Wrecker victims. Her above average face lay smashed into the carpet, her hair matted with blood from a hard blow to the scalp that looked to Windy like it had been made with the butt of a pistol. There were pieces of her hair all over the floor of the carpeted entry hall that still had their roots on them, showing they had been wrenched out of her head in a struggle. Her nude corpse was lying a few feet away pressed against the wall, hands and feet tied behind her, the spray of blood at that point showing the head had been cut right there. The knife work was crude, more sawing than slicing. The other rooms of the house had been ransacked, the mattresses cut open and sofa cushions unstuffed, but there was no sign of posing, no sign of breakfast and, Windy thought most telling of all, no sign of Lysol. Even if the other parts of the killer’s MO changed, the Lysol was something she thought they could count on because it was masking something that embarrassed the killer.
Larry stood up from his examination of Martha’s head, rubbed a hand over his red goatee, and whistled low through his teeth. “Wow, Kit Wilson really called it.”
Windy faced him. “What are you talking about?”
“He said on TV the other night that the Home Wrecker used a gun to gain entry, knocked his victims out. That looks like exactly what happened.”
“He said that? Where?”
“On one of those news shows. They did a reconstruction of what happened—he reads it different than we do, you know—and then he profiled the killer. He talked about a gun, violence, restraints, got it all, everything you see here.”
Windy felt her spine going tight, thinking of the words she would use when she fired Larry, knowing he was just doing what she did—jumping to conclusions—only doing it wrong, when he shrugged and said, “Yeah, Kit, he really set it all out. That must be where our copycat got the idea. No way this is the work of the Home Wrecker.” He looked up at her and Windy could see him struggling with his face, finally breaking into a smile and going pink at once. “Fooled you, didn’t I, boss? You thought I was going to say he got it all right and you were wrong and this was our guy.”
“No,” Windy insisted weakly.
“Don’t lie to me, boss. I’m learning,” he paused, adding, “to read you anyway. Crime scenes, I could use a few more years before I take over your job. I think you still have a thing or two to teach me.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Windy said, giving him a little smile.
She went out through the massive double doors to find Ash, tell him the great news about Kit Wilson, saying at the end as she pulled off her protective slippers, “This is not Eve’s work. I would gladly bet my job on it.”
Ash, grim, nodding, said, “You won�
��t have to. We just got the bio on the victim. Martha Carson, girlfriend of Norman Dicks, known as ‘Lice’ on the street, because he’s always got so much white powder in his hair he looks buggy. He’s an international businessman who travels often to meetings, almost always in places like Thailand, Mexico, Canada, and Florida.”
“A drug courier,” Windy said. She put a hand on the crime scene van for balance as she climbed back into the pumps she’d taken off to go into the crime scene. She was still wearing her suit, was beginning to feel like she’d be wearing it all her life.
“Yes. And apparently one who recently decided to demand a larger share of the action for himself from his bosses.”
“So someone wanted to teach him a lesson. This was a drug hit.”
“Looks like it. We’re handing it over to narcotics, unless you think we should hold on to it.”
“I can’t think of any reason.” She looked past him, into the dusk. “This is awful to admit, but I’d half hoped we had another Home Wrecker killing.”
“I understand. More clues. More chances to stop Eve.”
“That, and a reprieve.”
“What do you mean?”
“She seems to like order, patterns. We found the Johnsons’ bodies on Friday and the Waterses’ on Tuesday. That means we should expect to find bodies every five days.”
“Five days? From Tuesday, that would be—”
“Saturday,” Windy finished for him. “The day after tomorrow. Of course, she could be accelerating.”
CHAPTER 39
It was almost eight thirty when Windy got home. She sat in her car in the driveway for a moment, looking at her house in the glow of the streetlights. The bushes in front needed to be trimmed, or even replaced with cactus, something a little more indigenous to the desert. And maybe they should repaint the door. But it looked peaceful. She liked her house. They had only been here a month and a half, but it already felt like home. She liked knowing that Cate and Brandon were inside waiting for her. That there was sanity in there, a place to lock out all the crap she had seen that day. Everything in the world that mattered to her was right here.
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