Chilling Effect (An Aroostine Higgins Novel Book 2)

by Melissa F. Miller

  She settled into the seat, slowed her breathing, and tried to wipe the image of Isaac Palmer from her mind. She might have succeeded—she might even have caught a quick cat nap—if it hadn’t been for a car that pulled up alongside the Jeep, idled for a moment, and then eventually parked, leaving its headlights on. Her eyes snapped open. She blinked into the light and squinted to make out a figure moving toward her car. She tensed and hit the door locks.

  Tap, tap, tap. The person was rapping on the passenger side window. A concerned woman peered in at her with wide, heavily made-up eyes.

  “Are you okay?” the woman shouted.

  She nodded yes, but the woman’s forehead was still crinkled with worry, so she gestured for the Good Samaritan to move back so she could open the car door. She unlocked the door, stepped out into the cool night air, and smiled reassuringly at the woman.

  “I’m fine. Thanks for stopping to check on me.”

  “Sure, okay.” The woman pulled her jacket closer around her body.

  Aroostine noticed she was wearing a sequined leotard under it. Gray yoga pants and flip flops completed the outfit. She examined the woman’s face more closely. Thick eyeliner, lots of blush, and bright red lipstick couldn’t hide her tired pallor.

  “Are you a cocktail waitress up at the casino?” she asked. It was the only explanation for the attire.

  “Yeah. Ruby Smith.” The woman stuck out her right hand to shake and her coat fell open.

  Aroostine took her extended hand. “Aroostine Higgins.”

  “Are you having car trouble or something?” Ruby jerked her head toward the Jeep’s engine.

  “No, nothing like that. I’m just waiting for my husband.” While he stomps around in the woods or communes with nature or whatever he’s doing.

  Ruby cocked her head and glanced over at her car.

  “Uh, okay. Listen, I don’t know if you’re from around here or what, but a guy was killed tonight. It’s probably not safe to just be hanging out on the side of the road, you know?”

  So word of the murder was getting around.

  “No, I’m not from here. I’m sorry to hear about the death.” She considered Ruby’s tense face. “Were you . . . close to him?”

  “Not like that. He lived next door to me. He was a completely harmless, nice guy, and he took a bullet right between the eyes . . .” Ruby trailed off and took a long, shaky breath. Then she frowned and gestured toward her own car, moving her hand in a downward motion,

  “I can see how that would be disturbing—” Aroostine began, then she turned to look where Ruby was gesturing and stopped midsentence.

  A tiny face was pressed up against the rear passenger side window, grinning. Its owner waved excitedly at her.

  The pieces began to fall into place. She turned back to Ruby.

  “You’re Lily’s mom?”

  “How do you know Lily?” Ruby’s voice was raw with suspicion.

  “I met her when I was leaving the steak house. She was playing fairy in the bushes while she waited for you,” Aroostine hurried to explain.

  Ruby’s posture softened just a bit.

  “Oh, okay,” she said with a nod. Then her eyes widened and her voice shook. “I don’t usually bring her up to the casino. I just . . . I didn’t know what else to do.”

  A twinge of guilt ran through Aroostine for her earlier judgment of the woman. “First of all, you don’t owe me any explanations. Second of all, I’d say you did the right thing. Your next-door neighbor was murdered. You couldn’t very well leave her home alone after that.”

  Ruby gulped down air and nodded again. “Yeah.”

  Ruby’s rear car door opened slowly.

  “Lily Lotus Smith, don’t you dare!”

  The door closed. Lily made a sad face out the window.

  Aroostine tried not to laugh.

  “She seems like a great kid,” she told Ruby.

  “She is. She’s so smart and hardly gives me any trouble. She’s a little bit flighty, though. Always living in her make-believe world.” Ruby paused for a moment. “I think it’s her way of dealing with living on the reservation. She pretends she’s in some faraway land or something to escape.”

  Aroostine thought of another little girl who used to pretend she lived on the moon, under the sea, anywhere but where she really lived—a place of limited opportunity but no end of misery.

  “That’s normal. She’s just creative.”

  Ruby gave her a sidelong glance, as if she knew she was receiving parenting advice from the childless. “She’s got to keep her head on straight. That was one reason I liked her spending time with Isaac. He . . . he made something of himself. He got a degree, had a good job. I thought it would show her that it wasn’t a fantasy—a better life was a real possibility for her, even if she never got off the res . . .” Ruby choked back tears.

  Aroostine gnawed her lower lip. She had no idea what to say to comfort the woman. She was obviously shaken up enough to be confiding in a complete stranger who she met on the side of the road. Before she had the chance to frame a response, Ruby wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing mascara and eyeliner across her face, and sniffled.

  “Sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” She straightened her back like a woman who was used to doing hard things and pushing back fear and doubt.

  “Please, don’t be,” Aroostine said. Then she plunged in, unwilling to let the opening pass. “You know, I found him.”

  Ruby blinked. “Found him—Isaac?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a friend of his or something?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Ruby eyeballed her. “Then who are you, exactly?”

  Aroostine exhaled slowly. If she was going to stick around and try to get to the bottom of Isaac Palmer’s death, she’d need an ally. And, so far, the cocktail waitress seemed like the most viable candidate, if only because she was actually willing to speak to Aroostine. Her inner lawyer took over and blurted out the words before she could second-guess herself. “I’m an attorney with the Department of Justice. Do you know any reason why someone would want to kill Isaac? You said he was well liked.”

  Ruby stepped back as if putting physical space between them would shut down the line of questioning. “I think what I said was he was harmless. And he was—he was just a numbers cruncher for the casino.”

  Ruby’s words were neutral, but her tone was saying I know more about this than I’m letting on. Aroostine decided to push her, just a little.

  “So in his position he had access to the casino’s financial information, bank accounts, and a lot of money, right?”

  The other woman shrugged and glanced over to check on her daughter again. “I guess. I wouldn’t know. In my position, I have access to the casino’s watered-down rail drinks and domestic bottles.”

  Wrong approach. Aroostine dropped the all-business lawyer act and appealed to the mother standing in front of her.

  “Ruby, listen, you don’t know me and I don’t know you. I get that. But I can tell you’re a good person.”

  “Oh, yeah, can you read minds?”

  “No. But I can interpret what I see. You stopped on a dark, rarely traveled road to check on me. You didn’t have to do that. You’re worried about your daughter’s future. A daughter who, by the way, is delightful. So I can tell you’re doing a good job raising her on your own. And you’re upset about Isaac’s death, which is more than I can say about your tribal police. I don’t need to be a mind reader to know that you’re a good person. I want to find out who murdered your friend and why. Help me.”

  Ruby’s eyes flitted to her car again. Lily had abandoned her window vigil and was waving her wand around the backseat, probably casting some sort of spell. She watched her daughter for a moment and then glanced back at Aroostine with a hard expression, like she’d made a decision.

  “You have to keep my name out of it.”

  “I will.”

  “I need your word. I have Lily t
o worry about.” She said her daughter’s name with heavy emphasis, driving home the point that Aroostine’s promise wasn’t for her benefit, but for the girl’s.

  “I understand. You have my word.”

  They regarded one another for a silent moment that seemed to stretch endlessly into the night. Ruby gave a small nod, like she’d seen something in Aroostine’s face that satisfied her.

  “Okay. Isaac said someone was siphoning off money from the casino.”

  “He told you this?”

  “Yeah. A couple weeks ago, I ran into him when I was going to pick up my paycheck. He was all excited about it.”

  “Do you know who else he might have told?”

  The woman shook her head fiercely, swinging her high-combed hair wildly around her head. “No one. No way he would have told anyone else.”

  “But he told you.”

  “Right. And I told him that running around saying things like that was a great way to get himself killed. Looks like I was right, too.” Her voice cracked.

  Aroostine stopped herself from pointing out that if Isaac really hadn’t told anyone other than Ruby then she was going to find herself the principal suspect in a murder investigation. “How can you be so sure, though, that he didn’t confide in someone else?”

  “I think I really scared him when I said that. He started to get paranoid, fearful of everything. I just know he wouldn’t have. Plus, who else would he tell?”

  “I have no idea. Why’d he tell you? That seems like an odd thing to share with a neighbor.”

  Ruby pursed her lips and grappled with how to respond. She let out a small sigh. “Isaac had a crush on me, okay? He was trying to impress me. I liked him, I liked how he was with Lily, but I didn’t feel that way about him. So I acted like I didn’t know about his feelings, even though they were pretty obvious. But he wouldn’t have told anyone else. I know it.”

  “Okay. Understood. Did he tell you any details—how he found out about the embezzlement, who he thought might be behind it, anything?”

  Another pause and another breath. Then Ruby said, “Yeah. I’d gotten angry with him about the whole mess and told him not to talk to me about it. Then, about a week ago, Lily was at his house—he was teaching her how to play chess. I went over to pick her up, and I could tell something was wrong, you know? He had this real tight expression on his face. He was a million miles away even though he was laughing at Lily’s jokes or whatever. I was worried about him. So after I put her to bed, I walked back over and invited him to my place for a drink.”

  “And?”

  “And he got drunk, sloppy, because he’s not—wasn’t—a big drinker. And he started running me this wild story about how he thought the stolen money was somehow related to the missing drones.”

  Aroostine tried to make sense of the words Ruby was saying, but it was as if the other woman were speaking some language other than English.

  “I’m sorry, did you say drones?”

  Ruby stared at her, disbelief and panic flooding her face.

  “You mean Washington doesn’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “I can’t believe they haven’t noticed. Listen, I have to get Lily to bed. Come to my house in the morning and I’ll tell you all about the military drones that have disappeared from the testing facility here.” She started back to her car and her sleepy daughter.

  “Wait. Which side of Isaac’s house?”

  “I live to the left as you’re looking at the houses. Lily leaves for school at seven thirty. Come any time after that.” Ruby looked at Aroostine over her shoulder and then shook her head. “You really didn’t know?”

  “About the missing drones? No.”

  Ruby shook her head again as she slid behind the wheel of her late-model Buick and started the ignition.

  Aroostine stood motionless beside the Jeep processing the news that Ruby had just dropped on her. Missing military drones?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Joe parked the Jeep two houses to the right of Isaac’s front door, with its bright yellow X of crime scene tape. Aroostine made out the silhouette of Ruby’s Buick parked in front of the house to the left of Isaac’s. Her house was still and dark. Aroostine imagined her sitting on the edge of Lily’s bed telling her a story as she smoothed the girl’s hair over her pillow.

  “Now what?” she asked Joe.

  She hadn’t fully understood his change of heart—something about a bird and a man named Boom, but he’d come out of the woods with a lead on accommodations for the night and a desire to stay—so she wasn’t complaining.

  “Uh, I’m guessing it’s unlocked,” he said defensively.

  She arched a brow at that, but the response forming on her tongue melted away when she noticed the sky. “Look up,” she breathed.

  It was as if someone had thrown a blanket of stars over the earth. Small pinpoints of light stretched overhead, almost dizzying in number and brightness. No moon, no clouds. Just stars, some clustered close together in the black sky and others sprinkled farther apart.

  “Whoa.”

  He reached for her hand, and they stood together in silence—their breathing the only sound—and drank in the sight. Then as if by unspoken agreement, they walked across the road to the meadow where just hours earlier she’d found the dead jackrabbit. They settled on the fallen log, and she leaned back against his warm chest and tipped her face to the galaxies, planets, and constellations swirling above them.

  After a long silence, he said, “That Boom guy knew about the embezzlement.”

  She wanted to pretend she hadn’t heard him and just keep basking in the majesty of the night sky, but another person who had information about the funds being siphoned was exactly the sort of thing she needed to chase down. So, with no small measure of reluctance, she shifted her weight and tore her eyes away from the sky to look at her husband.

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. He said it wasn’t public knowledge, but I don’t know, Roo. He thinks this thing goes all the way to the top. He made a lot of noise about some Lee Buckmount guy, who’s the CFO of the casino, being involved. This could be a real hornet’s nest.”

  She digested that news then weighed telling him about the drones. Her deliberation lasted all of about twenty seconds. She had to tell someone, and she sure couldn’t call Sid, not at this hour, and not until she got the full story from Ruby.

  “You’re telling me. Do you know anything about a military drone testing facility around here?”

  He’d been the one to pick Central Oregon as a destination and appeared to have digested whole travel guides, which he’d been regurgitating in bits at seemingly random intervals through the trip. She wasn’t convinced a drone testing facility was likely to appear on any lists of can’t-miss local attractions, but judging by the way he leaned forward eagerly, he’d heard something about them.

  “Sure. It’s actually right here on the reservation.”

  “Shouldn’t it be on a military base?” Ever since Ruby had mentioned the testing facility, she’d been puzzling over what possible connection it could have to the White Springs Reservation or any of the tribes living there. Weren’t military drones the sort of top-secret weaponry that the Defense Department would eagerly classify as a national security secret? Why would they plop a testing facility onto a residential area that also served as a major tourist destination?

  Joe answered quickly, as if he were pleased to know the answer to the question. “Well the original plan was to use the facility for civilian drones.”

  “Civilian drones? Why do civilians need drones?”

  Joe gave her a blank look. “Where’ve you been? Civilians need drones to take aerial photographs of their vacation homes and to follow their kids to the bus stop and to spy on their ex-wives—and someday to drop their packages of socks and dog toys on their front porches.”

  She arched a brow. “What in the—never mind. Okay but civilian drones are presumably unarmed, right?”

  H
e shrugged and thought a moment before answering. “I guess, unless you count cameras and surveillance equipment.”

  “But no weapons, not like the ones that operators in Omaha or wherever control to drop bombs on targets in the Middle East?”

  “Right.”

  “So there’s a big difference between testing a flying camera in a populated area and testing unmanned weapons. How’d they get from the first one to the second?”

  Back on surer ground, Joe sped up again. “Conservation of resources. The military bases out in Pendleton and Redmond can test the weaponry—make sure the bombs work when they’re supposed to—but the politicians decided it was wasteful and redundant to have to continue to maintain its own flight testing capabilities when there was a shiny new civilian one right here. So they entered into a contract with the White Springs Reservation to use the testing facility when the Federal Aviation Administration and the corporate manufacturers weren’t using it.”

  “This was all in a travel guidebook?”

  “No, but it was news back when I was researching the area last spring. All of the official Central Oregon websites were making a big deal of the partnership. An innovative partnership between a Native American tribe and the military that would create jobs on the reservation and save the federal government loads of money—what’s not to love?”

  “Maybe the fact that the military drones have gone missing?”

  In the dark, Joe’s face was shadowy, illuminated only by starlight, but she could see the shock roll across his expression like a wave—starting at his eyes and moving down until he opened and closed his mouth, gaping like a fish.

  “Are you serious?” he asked.

  “Maybe. We’ll find out more in the morning.”

  “Why wait?”

  “Because Sid’s not going to be happy if I wake him to run it down and it turns out to be a baseless rumor,” she said.