“Don’t fall asleep.” I prodded his calf with my foot. “I bought you lunch; now you’ve got to put out.”
“Willingly,” he said, inviting me into his arms by stretching them up toward me.
I fought the temptation to let him pull me down against his hard chest. “No, no, you have to give me something I want,” I said, pressing my lips together to keep from smiling.
“You do want me,” he said with conviction but sat up, brushing at blades of grass on his shoulders. His voice shifted from seductive to businesslike. “The autopsy results are back.”
“And?”
“Let’s just say they’re equivocal. Her neck was broken, possibly in a fall.”
“It was an accident?” All my theories went up in smoke.
He held up his right hand, and the garnet in his University of Colorado class ring shot red sparks. “Not so fast. She might have fallen, she might’ve been pushed. There are no signs of manual strangulation. But . . . livor indicates she was moved after she died, so we have to assume she was with someone.”
“Maybe they just found her, already dead.”
“Then why move the body? Why not just call 911?”
Montgomery had been through this with his team, I could tell. “When did she die?”
“You know the pathologist doesn’t want to commit to a time, especially since the girl was dead better than a week before we found her. Ballpark figure, she died sometime on Sunday or Monday two weeks ago.”
The day she had the baby, or the day after. “Did you find any prints in her place?”
“Plenty, but none of them are in the system. She wasn’t killed in the apartment—”
“How do you know?”
“She struck the back of her head, just where it meets the spine, on a hard edge of some kind.” Montgomery’s hand snuggled up under my hair, and two fingers made a slow circle on my neck to demonstrate. “There’s no trace evidence of any sort on her kitchen counters, her bathtub, any likely surface, and no indication anybody tried to clean up.” His hand lingered, kneading my neck muscles, and I forced myself to lean away. It felt too damn good.
“Got any leads?”
“How about you?” he countered.
I let him get away with not answering my question—for the moment—and told him about my interviews with Patricia, the Falstows, and Linnea Fenn and gave him my impressions. “Pastor Zach could well be the baby’s father,” I said. “I think the mother suspects something but can’t admit it to herself. Or he could’ve killed Elizabeth in a fit of rage if she told them she was pregnant. I’m sure he laments the day stoning disobedient kids went out of fashion.”
Montgomery grinned at my vicious humor.
“And the Falstow woman . . . well, she definitely wanted Elizabeth’s baby. Still does. But Elizabeth was already committed to giving them the baby, so I don’t see any motive for them to kill her.” I paused, reviewing my impressions of all the people I’d talked to about this case. I wondered why Elizabeth had lied to Linnea about the pregnancy. Maybe because she was ashamed. Or maybe because she didn’t want questions about the baby’s paternity. Both of those items pointed to Pastor Zach, as far as I was concerned.
“I need the name of your client, Charlie,” he said. Montgomery’s expression and voice told me he’d be pissed if I ducked the question. PIs in Colorado have no legal standing when it comes to protecting clients’ confidentiality unless they’re working for a lawyer and are covered by attorney-client privilege.
“No can do. My client’s into discretion.”
He glared at me from under dark brows. “I can charge you with second degree kidnapping.”
I grinned at his bluff. “Uh-uh. I’ve had nothing to do with the baby. And the mother voluntarily left the kid with my client—she’s got a note—so I don’t think you could even scare her with a kidnapping charge.”
“Obstruction of justice?” Montgomery offered, but I could tell he wasn’t going to press the issue.
“Get a court order and I’ll spill it all,” I suggested, pretty sure he wouldn’t go that route, at least not yet. “I’m not exposing my client to your Gestapo tactics without one.”
“Damn, and I left my jackboots at home this morning,” Montgomery said, pretending to study his shined shoes. “Have you figured out who the dad is?”
I plucked a blade of grass and began systematically shredding it. “Lots of possibles, but no one admits to it. Too bad we can’t just DNA-test ’em all, figure it out.”
“And you called me the Gestapo.” He grinned. “Ever heard of a thing called probable cause?”
“Yeah, it was overrated in the OSI, too.” I pushed to my feet, swatting grass off my butt. “Those of us not mooching off the city’s dime have to get back to work.”
Montgomery stood. “Too bad we can’t spend the day like that.” He nodded at the kids dashing in and out of the fountain’s spray, gilded with sun and water and the joy of summer.
I gazed at them for a moment, trying to absorb some of their carefree attitude. “I do have a bikini I didn’t get to try out this summer,” I mused with a sidelong look at Montgomery.
“You’re torturing me, Swift,” he said.
The heat in his eyes almost made me jump in the fountain to cool off. I beat a hasty retreat to my car, telling Montgomery I’d call him if I learned anything pertinent to his homicide investigation. Like who fathered Elizabeth’s baby. Like who killed her.
I dialed the number to Designer Touches to warn Melissa the police were working hard to find her and got an answering machine that told me the shop was closed for the day. Hmm. Maneuvering around a van doing ten miles under the limit, I dialed her home number. A man’s voice answered with an impatient “Hello?”
Her husband must be home early. “Is Melissa there?”
“She’s busy. She’ll call you back.” Without even waiting to get my name or number, he hung up.
I debated calling back but decided that a drive out to Melissa’s house might prove more fruitful. I pointed the car north on 1-25 to Monument, the small town adjacent to Colorado Springs. The exit was almost twenty miles up the highway, and I cruised along at just over the speed limit. Passing Uintah, I remembered my wine supply was low and crossed two lanes of traffic to exit. My favorite wine store, CoalTrain, sat just off the access ramp, in the shadow of the highway overpass. I wondered idly if Aurora Newcastle had ever considered opening a Purple Feet in Colorado Springs. I liked the store but wasn’t prepared to drive an hour to Denver every time I needed some zin or pinot grigio. A screech of brakes and a blare of horns behind me made me check my rearview mirror. A gray SUV with the distinctive Mercedes hood ornament had taken my example and jumped off the interstate at the last moment. It barreled up Uintah as I swung into the parking lot.
With several bottles of chardonnay rattling in a box, I got back on the highway. Another call to Melissa’s number netted nothing, not even an answering machine. A faint twinge of worry niggled at me, and I sped up. Fifteen minutes later I was about to make the turn onto Scottswood Drive, Melissa’s street, when I noticed a familiar silhouette cresting a hill as I climbed the next one. Don’t be silly, I told myself, dismissing the notion I was being followed. SUVs, even Mercedeses, were a dime a dozen in this area. Still, this one was the same gray as the one that followed me off at the Uintah exit.
I’d survived as a cop in a war zone by trusting my instincts, and I decided to heed them this time. Passing Scottswood, I made a quick left at the next street in front of oncoming traffic, trusting the Mercedes, if it was really following me, would have to wait to make the turn. With no one in sight behind me, I pulled into the second driveway I came to, one partly obscured by lodgepole pines. Sure enough, the gray SUV zipped past the driveway entrance moments later. Gotcha, amateur. I backed out of the driveway and followed the Mercedes from a distance of a couple of blocks. It drove slowly, hesitating at a cross street, before going straight. When the driver gave up and pulled into a d
riveway to turn around, I quickly closed the distance between us and used the Subaru to block the driveway.
Adrenaline coursed through my system, and I was out of the car, pounding up the driveway, before the startled driver realized his predicament. I really needed to start carrying my gun, I thought, pounding on the tinted driver’s window with my fist. I could just make out the shape of the driver inside.
“What in Sam Hill is going on out here?” a querulous voice called from the direction of the house. A small man old enough to get a salute from Good Morning America on his next birthday, with white hair wisping around his head like cotton candy, and wearing a pair of old jeans with the waistband hiked up to his armpits, stood quivering behind a half-open storm door.
“Call the police, sir,” I yelled. “This man was following me.”
“Is he one of those stalkers you hear about?” Curiosity had replaced fear in the man’s quavery voice, and he took a step out onto the stoop.
“Probably,” I said, yanking on the door handle. Locked. “Sir, the police?”
The engine revved, and the car backed up a foot. For one moment, I thought the driver was going to try reversing over my Subaru. Then the engine cut out and the window buzzed down a couple of inches. I found myself looking into the frightened and defiant face of Jacqueline Falstow.
“You followed me!” I said.
She nodded, brushing a strand of auburn hair off her forehead.
Damn, I was losing my touch. She must have followed me from her house to the park, waited while I lunched with Montgomery, and then trailed me here. “Why?” I asked, although I suspected I knew the answer.
“I thought you’d lead me to Roberta,” she whispered, her gaze meeting mine for a fraction of a second before she fixed her eyes on the steering wheel.
And I would have, I realized, if I hadn’t needed wine and broken fifteen traffic laws to exit on Uintah. As it was, I’d led her damn close to my client’s house. Annoyance at myself made me scowl.
“Don’t call the police,” Jacqueline pleaded, misinterpreting my expression.
I knew she was worried about how an arrest would look to a judge if the courts ended up deciding who got custody of Olivia.
“Are you going to cut this shit out?”
Dark circles under her eyes attested to sleepless nights as she said, “Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that . . . Does she live on this street?” She looked left and right, as if hoping to see the baby in the window of the yellow house next door or in an infant swing in the yard across the street.
“Go home, Mrs. Falstow,” I said, irritated with the woman, but feeling unwanted sympathy for her, too.
“Hey,” said a voice at my elbow. “That’s a girl. I didn’t know they had girl stalkers these days.”
The homeowner was peering suspiciously from Jacqueline to me, his eyes bright blue in a face with more wrinkles than a litter of Shar-pei puppies. His head only came up to my chin.
“Thank you for being concerned,” I said. “My friend and I just had a misunderstanding. We won’t bother you anymore.” I gave Jacqueline a meaningful look and she nodded. I shook the man’s callused hand and walked back to my car. Making a U-turn, I waited for the Mercedes to precede me down the street. When we reached the intersection with the main road, she turned right and sped off in the direction of the interstate. I went left and tooled around the side streets for twenty minutes before deciding the coast was clear and I could backtrack to Melissa’s.
10
The Lloyds had a small house set back from the road on a couple of acres of forested land. Aspens and the ubiquitous lodgepole pines crowded around the house. A thicket of shrubs with glossy dark leaves nudged up against the porch that ran half the length of the house, and a flower garden, most of its blooms spent, nestled under a picture window facing the road. Wind chimes of ceramic, metal, and wood clanged and rattled as I rang the doorbell. The din of the chimes would make sitting on the porch with a Pepsi or glass of wine about as appealing as dining on the interstate, drowning the sounds of birds and wind. On the thought, a magpie landed on the porch rail, his black feathers gleaming iridescent as he cocked his head to study me. The opening door startled him, and he flew off with a loud caw.
“Yes?” A man stood framed in the doorway, a look of impatience on his face. Wearing a paint-spattered pair of cargo shorts and a black T-shirt, he looked to be about my age. A paintbrush tipped with sage-colored paint dangled from his left hand, and he kept his right hand on the door. He was obviously primed to announce he didn’t need Girl Scout Thin Mints or Boy Scout popcorn or marching band chocolate bars.
“I’m Charlie Swift. I’m looking for Melissa. Is she here?”
“You’re the PI?” A faint look of interest replaced the impatience in his brown eyes.
“Yes. You must be Ian. I thought you were working in Arizona.” I extended my hand, and he shook it, leaving a smear of paint on my thumb.
“I am,” he said with a thin smile. “I rearranged a couple of meetings and flew up for the day to see how Mel was getting on with the baby. She’s not used to infants. Neither am I, for that matter. C’mon in.” He pulled the door wider. “Excuse the mess. Mel had to take the baby to the doctor, and I thought I might as well get some stuff done.” He gestured to the living room just off the entryway. Blue plastic tarps covered the furniture and most of the floor, and a ladder stood in one corner, a small bucket balanced precariously on the top step. The paint smell cleared my sinuses.
“I hope Olivia’s okay,” I said.
“Just the sniffles. But Mel was convinced she had meningitis or bubonic plague or something equally unlikely, so she hauled her off to the doctor.” His voice held the disparaging note of the superior male who thought taking an aspirin was tantamount to tattooing WUSS on his forehead and wouldn’t visit the ER unless he’d severed a limb in a manly woodchopping accident or been mauled by a puma, preferably while hauling a field-dressed elk out of the woods. “Mind if I keep working?”
Without waiting for my answer, he climbed up the ladder and dipped his brush into the bucket. I had to crane my neck to look up at him as I said, “I just stopped by to let Melissa know she should expect a call from the police.”
The brush clattered to the floor, spraying sage-colored paint on the ladder and the wall. I picked it up gingerly between two fingers and handed it up to him. He had freckles on his hands.
“The police? Why do they need to talk to us? To Melissa? I suppose it’s about Lizzy,” he answered his own question. “Mel told me she’d hired you to find out who the baby’s father is. She told me about the baby being Lizzy’s and Lizzy turning up dead. What a shame.”
“Elizabeth worked for your wife and left the baby with her,” I pointed out, circumspectly not mentioning the closer relationship between Elizabeth and Melissa. I didn’t know if Melissa had come clean with her husband. I suspected not. “Since she was killed not long after leaving the baby here, the police just need to talk to Melissa. I didn’t give them her name, but they’ll probably come up with it.”
“It’s too bad. What happened to Lizzy, I mean,” he said, brushing paint onto the wall in choppy strokes. “She was a sweet girl.” His profile looked pensive.
“You knew her?”
“I met her once or twice. As you said, she worked for Melissa.”
“What was she like?”
“Really pretty, with a great smile and—”
Great tits, I filled in mentally when he paused.
“Her husband was in Iraq or Afghanistan, and she was counting the days until he got back so they could leave Colorado. I got the feeling she’d had a bad experience here. Her dad died, she said, and her mom remarried some jerk she couldn’t stand.”
“Where were they going?” I asked, knowing there was no “they.”
“She talked about Virginia,” Ian said. “I remember because she said she wanted to go to the University of Virginia and study psychology. Meliss
a said she was a great little seamstress, but I guess she had bigger plans.”
“It was nice of you to take time to draw her out,” I said. His back was to me now as he painted up into a corner. I maneuvered closer to see more of his face, almost tripping on a drop cloth.
“She seemed lonely. We got to talking when she came to install those curtains she made.” He jerked his head in the direction of ruby-colored velvet drapes half closed against the westerly sun.
“When did you first meet her?”
“I don’t know . . . late last year? Not too long after she started sewing for Mel.”
“Was she already pregnant?”
He laughed uneasily. “I hope so, since her husband was already deployed. She wasn’t showing, though, if that’s what you mean. Why?”
Before I could answer, my cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” I said, stepping into the hall.
Gigi’s excited voice bounced over the line. “Charlie! There’s another PI here. She said she’s the one you’re looking for.”
“What?”
“You posted a question on some online bulletin board, right? Well, this woman says Elizabeth Sprouse hired her to find her birth mother. I think she carries a gun,” Gigi added in a whisper, and I assumed she meant the strange PI.
“Tell her I’ll be right there.”
I flipped the phone closed, ducked my head into the living room to say good-bye to Ian Lloyd and remind him to tell Melissa the cops would come calling, and gratefully escaped the paint-scented confines of the house for the fresh air in the yard and my car parked in the driveway.
I walked into my office to find Gigi holding a gun. Déjà vu all over again. Another woman, with short salt-and-pepper hair, wearing black leather pants and a matching vest that showed off smoothly muscled arms, was showing Gigi a two-handed shooter’s grip. The pink cast got in the way.
Swift Justice: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Books) Page 13
