Hot Property

by Sherryl Woods

  When she got home that afternoon she went straight to the office and asked to see copies of the most recent budgets. Mr. Kingsley emerged from his office just as the reports were being handed to her.

  “What brings you in?” he asked, taking the papers from Celia before Molly could get her hands on them. He glanced through them, then passed them on. Reluctantly? Molly couldn’t be sure.

  “I thought I’d try to catch up on what goes on around here,” she said, tucking the papers into her briefcase before he could change his mind. “I wasn’t here when the budget was approved. I have no idea how a place like this operates. If I’m going to pay a thousand dollars every quarter for maintenance, I want to see how it’s spent.”

  “Very prudent,” he agreed. “Celia, get her the proposed budget as well as last year’s actuals.”

  The petite blonde bobbed her head. “Should I get the report that just came in from …”

  “No, that won’t be necessary.”

  “Which report is that?” Molly asked. “Everything is a matter of public record, isn’t it?”

  “Once it’s been presented to the board, naturally.”

  “I see. Then this report Celia mentioned hasn’t gone to the board yet?”

  “It’s on the agenda for next week. Of course, with all that’s happened, the timetable could be shifted. I imagine most of the meeting will be devoted to replacing Allan.”

  “The bylaws call for another election, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. He had most of his term remaining, so there will need to be a new election, rather than an appointment.”

  “Any idea who might run?”

  “Mendoza’s the most likely candidate. Has all sorts of experience from before. He could move right in and know what needs to be done.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I’m sure that’s important.” She stepped to the door. “Well, thanks for these, Celia. Good-bye, Mr. Kingsley.”

  He nodded. Before she’d taken two steps down the hall, however, she could hear his raised voice. She got the distinct impression he wasn’t happy with Celia’s generosity with the building’s budget figures.

  When Michael showed up a half hour later, she was still going over the two reports. Although in some areas the costs seemed high, she couldn’t find any obvious discrepancies. Not that she knew what to look for. Obviously the figures were going to add up. The only way to find really lousy deals would be to see comparative bids on everything.

  “What do you have there?” Michael asked, glancing at the papers she’d spread out on the coffee table. “You bring some work home?”

  “No. Actually, it’s the condo budget.”

  He groaned. “I don’t suppose it just happened to be in the mail today.”

  “No. I asked for it. It seems to me that …”

  “Dammit, woman, haven’t you heard a single thing I’ve said to you?”

  She gazed at him innocently. “Which things were those?”

  “Let me narrow it down to one.” He leaned in close. “Stay out of this case.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who put me on the list of suspects.”

  “But we both know you don’t belong there.”

  Surprised to hear him actually say it, she said, “Thank you. When did you decide that?”

  “I’ve never believed you are capable of murder. However, someone is taking great pains to make me believe you are, starting with using your knife, making sure only your prints were on it, and then telling me about a set-to between you and Allan over your boy. Hasn’t it occurred to you that someone, possibly the killer, is very anxious to see you behind bars? If it is the killer and if he or she decides that the tactic isn’t working, it may seem to him or her that more drastic measures are called for.”

  With all those hims and hers and someones scattered around, it was tricky, but Molly was relatively certain she understood what he was getting at. In fact, the picture he was painting made her blood run cold. Just in case she’d got it wrong, she asked, “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, dammit, that you could be in danger. Now will you just stay the hell out of my way!”

  She was ninety-nine percent certain that it wasn’t a question. “Okay, yes. I’ll back off. I still think there might be information I could get for you …”

  “As a detective I have access to more information than you could possibly imagine.”

  “But people might be more open with me.”

  Wiping his hand wearily across his face, he sat down. “Okay, let’s just suppose for a minute that you do get someone to spill his guts. Then you’d have exactly the information the killer is trying to keep us from getting. Talk about a motive for murder.”

  “Okay, okay, I get your point.”

  “Is Brian home?”

  “Yes. He’s in his room.”

  “Get him, please.”

  His temper appeared to be on a very short leash. Molly went to get Brian. Naturally, he wasn’t in his room. He was standing in the shadows just beyond the living room. He’d obviously heard every word. For the first time since the murder, he looked scared. When she gestured for him to come, he hung back.

  “What did he mean, Mom? Is somebody going to hurt you?”

  “No, Brian. You and I are going to look out for each other, and we’ll be just fine.”

  “Maybe Detective O’Hara ought to look out for us. He has a gun.”

  “We’re not going to need a gun. Come on, kiddo. The detective has a couple of questions for you.”

  For once the prospect of being a part of the investigation didn’t seem to appeal to him. He stayed right where he was.

  “Brian, what on earth is wrong? He just needs to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “I don’t know anything, not really.”

  The not really worried her. That generally meant he knew something but didn’t deem it important according to his own value system. His system quite often varied considerably from those of such authority figures as his mother and his teachers.

  “I want you in the living room right now, and I want you to answer every question Detective O’Hara asks with the truth. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said dutifully, but he didn’t look happy about it. She recognized that stubborn set of his mouth and wondered how the detective would do at getting past it.

  Michael looked up from the budget papers and smiled at Brian. “Hey, amigo, how’s it going?”

  “Okay, I guess,” Brian said, leaning against Molly’s knee.

  “I need your help.”

  “My help?” he said, straightening a little. “What can I do? I’m just a kid.”

  “I need to know if you ever saw Mr. Winecroft around the building.”

  Apparently Brian thought the question was innocuous enough. He responded readily. “Sure. He was always around.”

  “Did you ever talk to him?”

  “Not much. I don’t think he liked kids very much.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “He was always yelling at us.”

  “Us? You and who else?”

  “Timmy and Kevin. We’d swim every afternoon. Sometimes we’d go to the beach and forget to wash the sand off our feet before we went into the pool or we’d sit on one of the chairs without a towel.”

  “Did he yell at you recently?”

  Brian glanced at Molly uneasily. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “How recently?”

  “Day before yesterday.”

  “What were you doing then?”

  “Nothing, not really. We were in the garage, see, just messing around. We weren’t hurting anything. And he caught us. He said he was going to call the police if he saw us near there again.” His lower lip quivered and Molly could see the sheen of tears welling up in his eyes.

  “Near where?”

  “I don’t know. That was the really weird part. I mean we were just sort of hiding and stuff.”

  “Was he alone or was someone with him?”
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br />   “I didn’t see anybody.”

  “Could you show me where you were?”

  Sensing finally that he wasn’t in any real trouble, Brian’s expression brightened. “Sure.”

  Michael nodded. “Let’s go take a look.”

  The building’s garage was on a single level, beneath the structure but aboveground. Outside light filtered in, but it was the overhead fluorescent lights that kept it from being gloomy. Unlike some dark, shadowy parking garages that scared Molly to death, she’d never felt anything but safe in this one. Until now. There was something about Brian’s story that suggested that something had been happening in the garage that Allan Winecroft hadn’t wanted anyone to know about.

  Brian led them to the area near the greenhouse along the outside perimeter of the garage. The building’s plants were brought here to recuperate. The area was filled now with a few small potted palms and trays of impatiens and two or three plastic sacks of potting soil. As far as Molly could see there was nothing sinister going on.

  “Was this the way it looked when you saw Mr. Winecroft here?” Michael asked.

  “I guess,” Brian said slowly. “We weren’t even in the greenhouse part.”

  Molly noticed the nearby hoses, kept there both to water the plants and for resident use in washing their cars. “You weren’t spraying each other with the hoses, were you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Either you were or you weren’t.”

  Brian scuffed the toe of his sneaker along the cement. “Maybe just a little. It was really hot that day.”

  “You had an entire ocean and a pool, if you wanted to cool off.”

  Brian looked subdued.

  “Were you getting water on the cars?”

  “Maybe some of them,” he admitted.

  “Is that why Mr. Winecroft got mad?”

  “Maybe. I guess.”

  Molly and Michael exchanged a look. “So much for that,” she said.

  Michael nodded. “Maybe.”

  “You think it was something else?”

  “I’m not sure. I just can’t imagine him getting all worked up over a couple of cars getting sprayed.”

  “Maybe one of them was his.”

  “So what? All he had to do was ask the kids to dry it off. Remember what I was told, that he’d been so furious with Brian that you’d gotten even by stabbing him to death.”

  “How mad was he, Brian?”

  “Pretty mad. He was really yelling and stuff. He turned real red. He even said he’d have us all kicked out. I was gonna tell you, Mom, but I forgot.”

  “More likely you figured I’d punish you.”

  “Not really, because we didn’t do anything. Not anything bad.”

  Allan Winecroft apparently hadn’t seen it that way. Was it possible that Brian had seen something and just hadn’t realized it? She could tell from the speculative gleam in Michael’s eyes that he was thinking the same thing.

  “Did I help?” Brian asked.

  “Yes,” Michael said slowly. “Yes, I think you did.”

  As they started back toward the building, Molly heard a faint scrambling sound, a slight rustling. Michael and Brian apparently heard it too. They all looked back toward the greenhouse.

  “Probably just a raccoon,” she said.

  “Probably,” Michael agreed.

  He didn’t look as though he believed that any more than she did. Someone had been lurking in the shadows, possibly listening to discover just exactly how much they knew.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Years ago, when she was still single and living alone, Molly had endured a series of harassing phone calls. They began benignly enough, just like the calls she’d been receiving the last couple of days. But the hang-ups escalated into obscenities, and eventually the nature and frequency of the calls went from the realm of nuisances into very real threats. The caller turned out to be a stranger, a man who’d stumbled on her number by accident and liked the sound of her voice. Even so, she was left with an odd sense of being watched. More than once, she had caught herself looking back over her shoulder, filled with a vague sense of unease.

  Since the first hang-up call she’d received after the murder, all of those old nervous feelings had resurfaced, leaving her thoroughly jittery at the sound of the phone. The incident in the shadowy garage tonight didn’t help a bit. She left the light on when she went to sleep.

  When the phone rang at one A.M., she sat bolt upright in bed. Instantly wide awake, she grabbed the phone and waited, saying nothing herself. She hung up, only to have it ring again at once. This time she said, “Hello.” She wasn’t surprised when no one responded to her greeting. Remembering everything she’d been told before about not challenging the caller, about not feeding the desire for a reaction, she quietly hung up. She did make a note of the time, and then she tried to go back to sleep.

  The next call came an hour later. Again no one spoke. Again she hung up, but she was losing her patience and her anxiety was mounting. When the fourth call came, though she was quaking inside, she said quietly, “I’m recording these calls for the police. I’d suggest you stop making them.”

  “You bitch!” The voice was a low, menacing growl. She couldn’t even make out whether it was a man or a woman. She considered trying to goad the caller into saying something more, but the line clicked dead.

  Her death grip on the phone had tensed the muscles across her shoulders. Anxiety sent perspiration trailing down her back. Every nerve on edge now, Molly pulled the pillows into a stack behind her, turned the radio on to the soothing sounds of WLYF, and sat up, waiting. As the minutes ticked by and then the hours, she realized there would be no more calls, not tonight. At dawn she finally fell into a fitful sleep.

  It was less than twenty minutes later when she was jarred awake again. Before she could grab the phone, the ringing stopped. She heard the faint murmur of a voice in the living room, then a crash as the phone clattered to the floor.

  “Mom!” Brian yelled, barreling through the door and throwing himself onto the bed, his expression panicky.

  His whole body shook as she clutched him to her and tried to soothe him. “Sssh. It’s okay. What happened? Who was on the phone?”

  “I don’t know,” he said and again his body shuddered in her arms.

  “Did he say something?”

  “He said … he said you’d wind up like Mr. Winecroft, if you didn’t stay away from the cops.” His arms clung even more tightly around her neck and his lower lip quivered. “Mom, I don’t like this. I’m scared. Maybe we should move. It wouldn’t be so bad changing schools again.”

  Molly could barely control her own trembling, but now hers was less fear than gut-deep fury. How dare someone terrorize her son like this! Instinctively, she thought of Michael. She picked up the card he’d given her, reached for the phone, and dialed his home number.

  A soft, musical, feminine voice answered, the accent distinctly Hispanic. So the detective was involved. It shouldn’t matter, but to her surprise it did. She didn’t like the shaft of pure jealousy that shot through her as she waited for him to take the call.

  “What is it?” he said seconds later, about the time it would take to pass the phone across a bed. There was no sleepy sensuality to his tone. It was fully alert and all business.

  “I think you’d better get over here,” she said. Her voice tripped in mid-sentence, then caught on a sob.

  “Calm down,” he said quietly, using the same soothing tone she’d used with Brian only moments earlier. “What’s happened?”

  She swallowed hard. “I’ll explain when you get here. I think it might be a good idea if you put a tap on my phone, while you’re at it.”

  After that he didn’t ask questions. “I’ll take care of it. You just sit tight.”