Skirting the Grave

by Annette Blair

  “What about the female intern?” I asked. “She’s staying in the car. Is that normal?

  “Never mind,” I said. “She’s getting out on the passenger side, coming around but moving before she rounds the vehicle to grab the door handle with her left hand, while keeping her back to us, and she stays that way while the body’s slipped inside.”

  Werner swore. “There’s a dodge. They returned to the front seat on the far side and he’s getting in on her side, cap down until they pull away.”

  “Go back,” I said. “I think I caught a glimpse of . . . there she is! She glanced in the center rearview mirror, see, then the side mirror. Red hair. Too much makeup. Back up and watch her hand to her hair. It’s not a smoothing or a comb-through but a tug. She’s wearing a wig.”

  Werner whistled. “Good call, Mad.”

  “Officer Zales, I don’t suppose you can do a Bones-or CSI-type TV miracle and superimpose her mouth and nose from the center mirror and her right cheek and half jaw and lips from the side mirror into that full reflection of her on the windshield?”

  Zales looked like I had two heads.

  “Then can you mesh it somehow so we can get a light/dark facial view?”

  Zales raised a brow and quirked his lips. “Since TV equipment is probably fake, I can’t quite pull that off. But since I’m a genius, give me fifteen to be brilliant.”

  Werner bought me a cup of coffee in the break room, and Zales the Brilliant called us in ten.

  When we walked in, one screen showed a face shot of Payton on her slab.

  “You want to know what the female driver looked like to me?” Zales asked as he worked a few keys and put sunglasses on Payton. “She looked like the deceased wearing makeup and a wig.”

  He flashed the uneven composite on the screen, and I know my jaw dropped. The cousin. “Giselle?”

  Werner straightened. “What did the male driver look like?”

  “He was as evasive inside the morgue, bending over the body and scratching his ear if forced into a camera angle. But I called the ME. She said he was broadshouldered and a bit of a know-it-all with brownish-red hair.”

  I looked at Werner.

  “Rickard,” we said together.

  “We’re only guessing,” I pointed out. “But it could very well have been York’s loyal campaign manager and York’s missing daughter.”

  “Zales, put those videos in the York file, please, and get a crime detail to go over the morgue, inside and out. Mr. Perfect Candidate may not be such a great judge of character, after all.”

  Thirty-one

  You can think you’ve made it and yet the next day’s press will always be waiting for you, the public will always ask more of you. In short, you can always do better!

  —GIORGIO ARMANI

  Had we found Giselle? Was she the driver’s intern? Or had Isobel left my father’s house for a command performance?

  I went into the hall and called my brother, Alex, Nick’s FBI partner.

  “What time did Kelsey wake up this morning?”

  “About five. Why?”

  “So you’ve been up awhile?”

  “Yeah, I let Tricia sleep in for this one day before I leave for the conference. You know that. Why?”

  “What time did Isobel come down to breakfast, and has she been there at the house the whole time?”

  “Sixish, and absolutely yes. You saw her. Nick won’t even let her go to work until you call to say you’re on your way to the shop. He plans to drive her over to Vintage Magic and spend the day, by the way. I’m surprised she got to shower alone.”

  “No go, little brother. Stop trying to make me jealous. It won’t work.”

  “It was worth a try. Honestly, she’s been here all along. Nick, he’s hardly paying attention to her, except to make sure she’s safe. He’s brooding over you, is what he’s doing. I know my partner.”

  “Guilt won’t work, either.” Brothers, I thought. “I gotta go solve a case, but will you let Nick and Isobel know that I should be at the shop in about a half hour or so?” Alex agreed to pass along the message, and I hung up.

  I followed Werner to York campaign headquarters, since it was on the way to my shop.

  Ruben Rickard wasn’t there, hadn’t shown up today at all. Very unusual. Werner gave his hotel room a cursory look-see from the hallway. Before we left, he taped the room off and called for a search warrant and then for a neighboring town’s crime scene team, since his team was still at the morgue.

  He also made a conference call, including Nick, to the FBI in Boston. Afterward, he put an arm around my shoulder and walked me to my car. “The Feds are sending a couple teams to Kingston’s Vineyard, one to search Rickard’s house, in case he kidnapped Giselle and forced her to do his dirty work.”

  “She did seem rather stiff in those pictures, like she was working against her will. You think she glanced in the mirror on purpose?”

  He gave me a double take. “I’ll follow up that possibility. Nick’s staying close to Isobel, per the Bureau, because in doing so, he can stay close to Quincy York without arousing suspicion.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “Meanwhile, the Feds are also going to visit the Kingston York estate. See if Grand-mère or her henchmen are holding the missing twin against her will.”

  “That’s the only way you could get the FBI to help, hey? Kidnapping across state lines?”

  “One, it applies, and certain wording helps. Two, between Nick and I, we’ve got enough friends in the Bureau who listen to us. And three, we told them that solving our case might solve the York embezzling case.”

  “Where do we go from here?” I asked.

  “We each go to our respective places of employment. You distract me.” He rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “I can’t believe we lost a body on my watch.”

  “You’re blaming me?”

  “Not at all.” He opened my Element door, helped me inside, and closed it. “I’m blaming myself. I’m gonna call Nick and tell him that he has to be your bodyguard today as well as Isobel’s.”

  “I feel rather discarded.”

  “You’re fishing for a compliment,” he said. “You’re wanted, but this isn’t the time or the place. Besides, you’re not ready, kiddo. You told me so.”

  “And you are ready?”

  He leaned in and kissed me. “Oh yeah.”

  Scrap. “Can I call you if I have ideas about the case?”

  “I’m looking forward to it. Now go before I change my mind about being a gentleman.”

  He watched me drive away, and I watched him in my rearview mirror until I got to the corner, all the while thinking I had to let him go. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt either of them.

  I pulled into the Vintage Magic parking lot beside Nick’s Hummer, and Isobel came out to meet me, with the contagious enthusiasm I’d come to appreciate. She handed me a Frappuccino. “Nick bought it for you, and I fitted two people. Now I’m ready to begin the alterations, but I didn’t want to start, in case you had special instructions.”

  “I like initiative in an intern,” I said, pushing my car key’s lock button. Bleep.

  Nick waited in my doorway and slapped a notebook into my hand. “Werner called an ambulance for you last night?” he’d written, the scratch marks of a couple broken pencil points visible in the text. Oy.

  “I thought you were here playing all evening,” he’d added.

  “Not,” I said, raising the Frappuccino in thanks and then taking a quick, cooling sip.

  He shoved another note under my nose: “You never said they wanted to take you to the hospital.”

  “I take it Tunney’s been here?”

  “Nick’s mad at himself because he judged you incorrectly,” Isobel said.

  Nick snapped his gaze her way, his expression saying, “I can speak for myself!” Which he couldn’t.

  Isobel shrugged. “Well, neither of you is saying how you really feel.”
<
br />   “Nick?” I asked. “When is that jaw wire coming off?”

  “Now!” he wrote, a piece of pencil lead flying. He tossed the notebook and missed my trash can on his way out to the Hummer.

  “You can’t leave,” I called. “You’re Isobel’s bodyguard.”

  He came back, grabbed Isobel’s hand, and dragged her to his truck.

  “Guess I’ll be back,” Isobel called on a chuckle, grinning as he practically pushed her into the passenger side. She stuck her head out the widow as he pulled out of my lot. “He really cares for you,” she yelled, and Nick burned rubber.

  Thirty-two

  Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.

  —SYDNEY J. HARRIS

  “Eve,” I said, a half hour later. “You look gorgeous; your style is emerging as gothic with a steampunk edge. I love designing for you.”

  She posed in her fifties booties and the clockwork pinstriped jumpsuit, rust and black, that I made her. “Your idea for black cameos as part of the copper buttons was brilliant,” she said.

  “You have so embraced this style; I could do nothing less than give you the benefit of my design expertise. The purple hair with the rust lock up front is a good touch.”

  “Thanks. Kyle likes my style, too.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He made a quick business trip back to New York for the day, so I came to play with you.”

  I whimpered. “I so don’t have time to play with only a day and a half to Brandy’s fund-raiser.”

  Eve pouted. “You played with Werner last night.”

  “You saw the paper, I take it?”

  “That and I heard Tunney’s story about how cozy you looked.”

  Good thing she hadn’t talked to Stevens.

  “We did get cozy. We danced to fifties tunes.”

  Eve about fell off her high-heeled boots. She grabbed the counter and sat on the stool behind it. “Hope is giving me heart palpitations. You’re attracted to Werner.”

  “But I miss Nick.”

  Eve snorted. “Does Werner know how committed you are to him?”

  “Very funny. I’ve tried to be honest. Which hasn’t kept him from wanting more, and that worries me.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Can’t. Gotta do alterations, and my intern stepped out with Nick. Work the counter for me, like a good goth, so I can go upstairs and fix fifties outfits for Saturday.”

  “Since it’s Thursday, I get your drift. Go, hurry.” She shooed me away like a pesky fly.

  I hadn’t been upstairs in my sewing corner for more than two outfits when Werner came up the stairs. Sure, I liked seeing him, because I wanted to hear the latest on the case. “Do you have anything juicy to tell me? Have you caught Rickard yet? I’m betting he’s our killer.”

  Werner looked good in a trench coat, and he played the handsome, silent type to perfection.

  “I shouldn’t let you distract me,” I said getting up to meet him in the center of my mostly empty second floor, except for the caskets and horse-drawn hearses, remnants of my building’s first life as the Underhill Funeral Chapel carriage house.

  When I got to Werner, he reached for my face with both hands, tilted it, and fit his lips to mine.

  My legs turned to jelly, but he held me up, close and tight.

  When we came up for air, he didn’t let me go. “I needed that,” he said, smoothing my lips with a finger. “I needed you.”

  Oh Lordy, after a kiss like that, what did I remember but Nick’s kisses? This had to stop, I was driving two good men to distraction, and it wasn’t fair.

  “We did get Rickard,” he said, “but not the way you mean.”

  “I don’t get it, but then I’m having trouble understanding myself right now.”

  Werner winked, misunderstanding me, and maybe that was best for the moment. “We found the hearse,” he said, “that picked up Payton’s body abandoned behind a small crematorium in Rhode Island. Rickard was inside. He’s dead. He has a single needle mark that matches Payton’s.”

  I stepped back. “Our best suspect is dead? I suppose he can’t have killed Payton, then. Does that make Giselle our killer? What’s her motive?”

  He shrugged. “She seems to have greed down to a science with all those homes, yet she could be dead, somewhere, too. And you haven’t heard the worst of it.”

  “What could be worse than losing our prime suspect?”

  “Payton was cremated with a set of forged papers as good as the ones they used to pick her up.”

  “I need to sit,” I said, a bit sick to my stomach.

  He walked me over to my sewing area, and we both took a chair. “Why cremate the body? We knew it was murder.”

  “But we don’t know who murdered her or what was in that syringe, which is why she was going to a more comprehensive forensics lab,” Werner said. “We only suspected Rickard; now he’s dead, too. And what do you think Quincy York is going to say to his niece being cremated without permission from her next of kin? News at eleven?”

  “So we’ll never know?” I asked.

  “Square one, Mad. We have to start from square one.”

  “You must have some evidence from the autopsy?”

  He unbuttoned his coat and threw it over my workbench. “I do, actually, but I’m not sure what to do with it. It’s a rare blood type.”

  “Rewind, please?”

  “When I finished with the financials, I looked over our suspects’ and our victim’s medical records. The twins and Payton shared the same rare blood type.”

  “No surprise. Mothers were twins, fathers are brothers.”

  “Only two other suspects have the same blood type.”

  “The candidate and the embezzler?” I guessed. “The girls’ fathers? Nah, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”

  “ ’Fraid you’re right. Grand-mère has their blood type . . . and so does Ruben Rickard.”

  “Hel-lo. Did you ask the old lady how he’s related?”

  “Sure I did. She’s here in Mystic, by the way. She’s staying over at the Pearl Seahorse with her son and his entourage. She says Ruben Rickard isn’t related.”

  As a carhop call girl, she’d been carrying a baby and had chosen Slick, the wealthy, as its father. How would a kid feel if he’d been sold, even for big bucks? But I was reaching, drawing my own conclusions. “So,” I said, “are you going to research Rickard’s adoption?”

  “You pull that out of the air?”

  “Logical conclusion. So how rare is their blood? Do Rickard’s parents have the same type? And are they his natural parents?”

  “Evidently, half the people on Kingston’s Vineyard have that blood type.”

  “Right, old Kingston’s thirty-two children settled there. Sounds like a good place to start looking into Rickard’s family tree.”

  “You astound me,” Werner said. “You get right to the root of the problem. Zip, no forethought.”

  If only he knew. “I spent my life getting into trouble for speaking without thinking. My father hates it. Now, you commend me for it. Maybe that’s why I like you so much.”

  “I sure hope it’s more than that.”

  Oh, bad timing to answer that, even if I was sure of the answer, which I wasn’t.

  “Have you told Quincy York yet that his niece has been cremated without her father’s permission?”

  “I stopped here first for moral support, and maybe a kiss? Quincy’s gonna call another press conference, and I’ll rightly be raked over the coals for losing his niece’s body and letting her get cremated.”

  “It’s called a crime, which you didn’t commit. Werner, skip the candidate. Go see his brother, Patrick. Tell him what happened to his daughter. See if he’ll sign off or give permission after the fact. He seems like a man who would empathize with the need for forgiveness.”

  “You’re right. Patrick needs to know, not Quincy.”

  “Right,” I said. “The candidate should look to his
own family. He loses track of them, then he’s surprised bad things happen.”

  “Bad things?”

  “Like his wife’s plane crash. That was horrific. I wonder if Rickard had anything to do with that.”

  Werner froze. “Are you a conspiracy theorist?”

  “Not especially, but when you talk to Grand-mère, try asking her what happened to her husband.”

  “Because?”

  “Nobody talks about him. Ever. Like he never existed.”

  “Mad, you’re making me crazy with theories that don’t have anything to do with Payton’s murder.”

  In for a penny. “Did you investigate Madame Robear? It still bothers me that the owner of a modeling agency initially identified Payton as Isobel. It’s just so odd that she would get the identification wrong.” Because even though Isobel modeled for her, I think Giselle worked for her as a call girl.

  “I tried to contact Robear,” Werner said. “She’s put her modeling agency in the hands of an assistant and skipped the country. She left no forwarding address.”

  “I worked with her models in New York, you know? She might once have mentioned an Anatole Sevigny from France.” She might, though she hadn’t. “She could be at his place as we speak, Château Sevigny. Call him; ask him about Madame Celine Robear.”

  “You’re sure honing your sleuthing skills, Mad. Are you bucking for my job?”

  “Nope, I’m bucking to clear Isobel’s name and put her family in jail, if they’re guilty, which I think they are. As sin.”

  “I think you’re right,” Nick said, stepping into the light, his hand on his sore jaw.

  “How does it feel?” I asked.

  “It hurts, but I’m glad I can talk again. Isobel said I’m supposed to be your bodyguard now, too?”

  Werner cleared his throat. “Give her up, already.”

  “It’ll never happen,” Nick said as he went downstairs.

  Thirty-three

  A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is.