by K. C. McRae
“I need to go to the bathroom!”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Nadine said, and hurried out.
Lauri cleaned up as best as she could, blinking back tears of disgust. This was police cruelty. They’d put that revolting woman in the jail with her on purpose. That Val person was probably even in on it.
She threw the dirty paper towels through to the walkway.
After an hour, Nadine returned with lunch: Cokes, cheeseburgers, and fries in waxed food boxes Lauri recognized from the Hungry Moose. Ignoring the food, she demanded to go to the bathroom again.
Nadine took her upstairs and left her in there, giving her time to balance on one foot at a time and wash her feet in the sink. Then she scrubbed her sandals where the splatter had reached them until the soles began to split from the water. They made soft wet noises when she put them on and walked out to where Nadine waited to lead her back to the jail.
“Hasn’t my mom paid the bail yet?” Lauri asked.
“She can’t. Your bail hearing isn’t until tomorrow morning,” Nadine said.
“Tomorrow morning!”
“I’ll move you out of the holding cell to one of the bunks across the hall.”
Lauri tried her most beguiling smile, the wide-eyed one she reserved for other women. “I’m pregnant. Do they know that?”
“Does who know?”
“The judge, or whoever. Whoever’s in charge of getting me out of here.”
“With a murder charge the judge might set the bail too high for your mom to pay. You could be here a lot more than one night. So you might as well make the best of it,” Nadine said.
Lauri gaped at her. Nadine opened one of the smaller cells, conducted her inside, and handed her the cold cheeseburger. She sat on the edge of the bed and ate half of it, trying to ignore the gross smell from the cell across the aisle. She kept the Coke and set the food wrappings on the floor outside the bars.
Nadine moved Val into the other bunk cell. Then she used a hose with a spray nozzle to sluice down the floor under the bench where the drunken raccoon-eyed woman continued to snore. The drain in the floor emitted loud, throaty gurgles as she worked.
Lauri removed her soggy sandals and crawled into the narrow bottom bunk. She shivered until the thick blanket began to reflect warmth back to her. Her muscles began to unclench.
She wasn’t getting out of here today. She still had a hard time believing she’d be stuck here all night. As for Nadine’s warning about bail, her mind refused to go there. Just tonight, she told herself. That was all she had to get through. Her mom would help her. Merry would help her. At least she had a blanket. And no one could barf on her in here. There was even a little toilet in the corner, hidden behind a concrete partition.
It still totally and completely sucked.
thirteen
Merry rang the doorbell and moments later heard footsteps. Jamie opened the door but didn’t step back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You were right, and I was wrong, and I’m sorry. Can we put all this stuff between us aside for now? I need your help.”
His eyes held hers for a long moment, then he blew out a breath and gestured her in. She limped along behind him, through the living room and kitchen and down the basement stairs. She knew the way well; Jamie had grown up in this house, had bought it from his parents when they moved to Arizona to escape the frigid Montana winters.
“Is Gayle here?”
“She’s at work.”
Merry realized she didn’t know where Jamie’s wife worked. And didn’t really care.
“Why were you at the station on your day off?” she asked.
“Had to pick something up and managed to stumble into the Hawkins and Lester show.”
Lester Fleck seemed to spend an awful lot of time with Rory Hawkins. Shirlene had said he’d been there when they’d taken Lauri.
In the basement they passed a finished guest bedroom and tiny half-bath, ending up in a large open room. One wall held fishing rods, each supported horizontally on pegs. In the corner a pair of waders hung from a rack, along with a couple of pocketed canvas vests and an assortment of hats. A shelf at eye level boasted an assortment of books on fishing, maps, and an ancient metal tackle box. The painted concrete floor and cinderblock walls provided at least a ten-degree drop in temperature from upstairs.
An old sofa with tattered brown cushions caught her eye. Gayle must not be aware of the history in that thing or it wouldn’t still be around. Merry smiled to herself. When she looked up, Jamie was watching her, and her smile faded.
She pulled the chair out from a small table fitted with a vise for fly-tying. A large compartmentalized box covered the rest of the table, the sections filled with floss and tinsel, a dozen sizes of hooks, fur and feather hackle materials, and three different whip finishers. Jamie sat at the industrial-looking table in the middle of the room. He’d been installing guides on a bamboo fly rod.
“Is Lester the sergeant’s toady?”
He turned so his chair faced her and tipped it back on two legs. “Lester’s not bad, actually, and I can’t blame him for playing Hawkins to make his life easier.” He paused. “So have you seen Shirlene?”
“I talked to her on the phone. She’s calling Kate.”
He nodded.
“So why did they arrest Lauri?” she asked.
Jamie’s eyes slid to the side. “Screw the apology, huh. You just came over here to grill me.”
“No. The apology is real. But my cousin’s in jail for murder.”
He let out a puff of air. “Yeah. Okay. I guess it’s not a big secret. Or at least it won’t be, and Kate will find out sooner than later anyway. You remember yesterday when I told you Hawkins put a rush on the ballistics?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we got them back. The gun we found in the duplex was the gun that killed Clay. And guess whose fingerprints are on it?”
“Not the guy with the grudge because Clay got him fired for doing coke.”
“Gus Snyder. No, they aren’t his.”
“You’re shitting me. Lauri’s fingerprints are really on the gun?”
He nodded. “It’s confirmed. Actually, I guess they knew there was a fingerprint match last night, but they had to know for sure it was the same gun used to kill Lamente before the county attorney would let them move on it.”
“You keep saying ‘they’,” she said.
He rubbed his hand along the back of his neck. “Well, I’m sorta on the edge of this thing now. Hawkins is doing as much of the investigation with Lester as he can. He knows you and I are friends, and he doesn’t trust me.”
She shook her head. “So what does she say about the fingerprints?”
“Lauri?”
Merry nodded, trying to hide her impatience.
“I don’t know if she’s said anything,” Jamie said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m off today.”
She ignored him. “When you talked to her after she found the body, she admitted to snooping around before going into the bedroom. She could have touched it then.”
He gave her a look. “And the footprints we found outside the window match a pair of the boots we took from the house.”
She grimaced. “They’re Shirlene’s.”
He raised his eyebrows.
Merry shook her head. “Lauri borrowed them.”
“She tell you that?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Back to the gun—she’d have to be stupid to leave her fingerprints if she used it, right? And if the murderer wiped it clean and Lauri touched it when she was snooping around before she found Clay, hers would be the only prints on it. Did you find anyone else’s? Denny’s?”
“Just hers. Hmm. That’s something to think about. Anyway, Gus Snyder? Admits to hating Lamente, but has an alibi. He was in Lewiston
, staying with family for three days. Had relatives around him the whole time.”
“Shit.” She’d been planning to go see Snyder next.
He watched her for a moment. “Everything points to her, Merry.”
She studied the floor. “It sure looks like it.” She thought of Shir-lene’s face when talking about her daughter’s pregnancy. How would it affect her if Lauri were convicted of murder? Merry shivered in the cool air, unable to get her head around the idea of her cousin inside a prison.
“Could she have done it? In your mind?” Jamie asked. “I know she’s your cousin and all, but—”
She looked up, shaking her head. “No. I mean, she is my cousin, and I don’t have a lot of family to spare, but I really believe she’s innocent. There must be other possibilities. Besides Snyder, I mean.”
He humored her, running through the list of people around the periphery of the crime. He’d spoken with most of them before Rory Hawkins had pushed him aside. He told Merry that barring another ready suspect, the police looked at the spouse.
“Clay Lamente didn’t have a spouse, but he had a girlfriend,” he said.
“I know. Remember, we put her out when she was on fire.”
“Right. She seems pretty shaken by his death.”
Merry reached over and fingered the feathers of a rooster cape. “She could be acting, I suppose.” But she didn’t really believe it.
“Sure, and I’m not saying it’s impossible to fool me. But why would she do it?”
Merry sighed. “I don’t know.”
“And Clay’s mother provided her alibi. Barbie said she and Clay were supposed to get together that night, but he called her and said he wasn’t feeling well. So he went to bed, and she stayed home. Olivia came over, and they worked on some volunteer stuff.”
“WorldMed.”
“Right.” Jamie’s chair creaked as he brought the front legs down.
“Was Olivia there the whole time?”
“From seven until about eleven.”
She put both elbows on the table and laced her fingers together. “But you said he was killed between nine thirty and midnight.”
“Yes. But Anna was over at Clay’s, with Denny Teller, from about ten thirty on.”
“And they didn’t see anyone.”
“Nope. They went to bed about eleven. But they still would have heard the shots. He must have been killed before they got home, between nine-thirty and ten-thirty.”
“Did Barbie have a key?”
“No. But she knew where they kept the extra. Just like Lauri did.” He picked up a whip finisher and twirled it absently between his thumb and forefinger. The silver metal shone in a small patch of sunshine angling through the basement window.
“Could she have used a silencer?” Merry asked.
He raised one shoulder and let it drop. “Silencers are hard for the average Joe—or Joanna—to come by. And they aren’t designed to be used with revolvers like the thirty-eight we found, but with semi-automatics. So it would have to be specially made for the gun, and even then a silencer—sound suppressor, really—might muffle the shot a bit, but it would still be pretty damn loud. They just don’t work on that kind of gun. And there was no evidence that the killer shot through anything like a pillow to muffle the shot, either.”
Merry considered. “Lauri said she was there around midnight. Anna and Denny still would have heard the shots if she’d done it.”
“She said that’s when she was there. The prosecution will say she’s lying, that she was there earlier.”
She remembered staring at the puddle by the police station while eavesdropping on Lauri. “It rained that night, but she said it had stopped by the time she got there. If Lester could identify the footprints, they must have been distinct. No water in them, right?”
“Right.” He thought for a moment, then quirked his lips. “Still, and this is just looking at it from the prosecution’s standpoint, she could have come back.”
“After he was dead? Why?”
“Merry. Why does she say she was there in the first place?”
There was no point in sharing that Lauri had been planning to seduce Clay. Explaining away Lauri’s inexplicable behavior with a different kind of inexplicable behavior wouldn’t go over well with a jury, and might even support the idea that she had been stalking him.
A jury. Christ. She took a shaky breath remembering how hope had turned to horror as her own trial progressed. She forced herself to focus. “Well, it’s still not likely she’d come back.”
“It’s certainly something for Kate to bring up. I guess you’d call the evidence they have circumstantial. But it’s some of the best circumstantial evidence I’ve ever heard of.”
“God.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Could Anna and Denny be lying? About hearing the shots?”
He held up his palms. “Anyone can lie. But why?” He cocked his head to one side. “You know, we had some reports of fireworks going off in that neighborhood that night. They could have heard it and just didn’t realize what it was. They were pretty drunk.”
“Anna didn’t say anything about being drunk.” But she had made it pretty clear she liked to imbibe.
“Anna didn’t … when did you talk to her?”
Merry explained about her visit to the blood mobile.
He looked unhappy. “I should have known.” He paused. “She didn’t tell us they’d been drinking, either. But Denny wasn’t shy about telling us how many black Russians they drank over the course of the evening. It was enough to at least dim their hearing.”
“That’s what he told you. What if they didn’t drink that much? What if they killed him?”
“Why?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Maybe Clay found out Denny fathered Lauri’s baby. Maybe he disapproved.”
“Wait a minute. Denny and Lauri?”
She nodded. “She told me yesterday.”
He sat forward in his chair. “Well, that’s an interesting development.”
“So Clay got angry, and Denny killed him, and Anna is covering for Denny.”
“But why would Clay get angry? And why would Lauri’s fingerprints be on the gun?”
“Well, I’m pretty pissed at Denny, and I’ve never even met the guy. He told Lauri he’s not going to give her any money for the baby. And like I said, Lauri could have picked up the gun when she was snooping around the duplex. And, it’s Denny’s gun in the first place.”
He nodded. “It’s a thought. What’s your scenario for Anna shooting Clay and Denny protecting her?”
She looked to see if he was making fun of her. He didn’t seem to be. “What if Clay didn’t like her seeing Denny, seeing as how Denny is married? It sounds like he was kind of a tight-ass. Maybe he threatened to tell Denny’s wife.”
“That sounds more like a motive for Denny than for Anna.”
Merry considered. “Whatever. They’d have to be in it together anyway.”
“Anyone else you’d like to pin this on?”
She hesitated. “Harlan.”
“Harlan Kepper?”
She shrugged. “He was awfully happy to hear Clay was dead that afternoon we saw him in the hardware.”
Jamie looked puzzled. “You want me to tell Hawkins?”
She shook her head.
He frowned. “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”
“Of course not. But I can talk to the guy. Hell, Hawkins probably wouldn’t bother following up, even if you did tell him.”
“Yeah. Okay. But maybe I should go with you.”
“I’ll let you know when I do it.” But she knew she wouldn’t. She was pretty sure he knew it, too.
They sat in silence for a minute.
“You know, there’s always the possibility that there’s someone else, someo
ne we know nothing about,” he said.
“What I really don’t get is how Bo’s death fits into all this.”
“It might not fit in at all. There’s no proof he was murdered.”
“‘Blunt force trauma to the skull,’ you said.”
“That doesn’t mean someone whacked him over the head. Something could have fallen on him. Shit was flying everywhere, if you’ll recall.”
“Why would he be in the barn once it was on fire?”
“Well, that damn dog seems pretty popular.”
She ignored that. “Pretty weird that no one saw him the whole time we were there, then.”
“I don’t know. They had insurance. Hell, Bo could have set the fire himself, and then been caught in it. I can’t think why Lauri would have it in for him.”
“Hmm.” Merry stood up. “Well, thanks for letting me pick your brain. But I’d better get over to Shirlene’s.”
Jamie walked her upstairs.
At the door, she stopped and turned around. “I really am sorry.”
He sighed. “Me, too. I overreacted.”
“No. I never realized how you must have felt when I married Rand.” She started down the steps.
“Merry?”
She stopped and looked over her shoulder.
“Yeah?”
“I … nothing, I guess.” He bounced a couple of times on the balls of his feet, then fell still.
“Sure?”
“Yeah. I’ll talk to you later.”
She nodded and continued out to the Blazer. He was still standing in the doorway when she pulled away.
fourteen
Merry walked into her aunt’s house and found Shirlene and Kate seated together on the sofa. The shades were half-drawn and the atmosphere was gray and musty with worry. Kate waved her in, still talking to Shirlene. “I’m surprised they arrested her on what they have. Right now our main focus has to be on getting the judge to set a reasonable amount of bail and then coming up with it so you can get your daughter out of jail. I don’t know what will come after that yet—I’m sorry, Shirlene, but I really have to talk to some people and see whether there’s anything else in the mix we don’t know about.”
