“Well, I’m an artist, and, if I do say so myself, pretty observant. We’re both intelligent and spunky. We should be able to uncover the truth.”
And what if she didn’t like the truth we found? I didn’t ask her if Randy still had his temper. “We can keep our eyes and ears open, but we can’t interfere.”
“We wouldn’t do that.”
Right. “And we have to stay out of danger.”
“We will. That’s settled. We’ll keep our eyes and ears open, we’ll use logic, and we’ll figure out who was driving a car similar to Randy’s.”
“That person might not have murdered Georgia. Or Matthias, either.”
“Exactly.”
Her “logic” was making me dizzy. I pointed at her thumb drive. “Did you unpack your frilly undies?” I asked with pretend formality.
“Yes, and they’re so lovely I draped them in my front window for all the world to appreciate.”
“I’ll come over with a camera later.”
“No need. I already snapped a photo so I can immortalize it in oils.” Making delicate strokes with an imaginary paintbrush, she spoke dreamily. “I like it. A window, a makeshift clothesline with pretty undies pinned to it, sheer curtains blowing in a breeze . . . And when it’s finished, I’ll give it to you to put up on some of your bare walls.” I could tell she was kidding.
“Thanks.” I clicked back to the photo showing the car and enlarged the license plate. Blurry weeds. Not very helpful.
I moved the cursor to the windshield in front of the driver’s face, and zoomed in, but neither of us could make out anything about the driver. We could see a slice of the steering wheel, which could have been gray or black, but no hands or face.
The only part of the front passenger seat we could see was the top corner beside the door. The seat belt was hanging, slightly twisted, from the doorpost. If anyone was sitting in the front passenger seat, he or she was slumped toward the driver. And was not wearing a seat belt. I couldn’t help a shudder. Had Matthias been transported in that car shortly before Lois took that photo?
“We can’t prove that the driver’s not Randy.” I heard the disappointment in her voice.
“We can’t prove that it is, either.”
“True.”
Dep sat up, leaned closer to the window, and made a noise halfway between a chirp and a bark.
Lois smiled at the cat. “I thought she was a tiger, but maybe she’s part dog and part bird.”
“Bird dog,” I suggested. “She makes that noise when she sees a bird or a squirrel in that tree.” I pointed at the monitor. “Do you want to call Brent about these photos, or should I?”
“Does he need to apply for a search warrant before he comes?”
“He would if you weren’t freely giving him the evidence. Lending it, I mean.”
“So, if I don’t want to lend the drive to the investigators, they’d have ways of getting it from me?”
“Yep.”
“And Brent already knows that the thumb drive might exist, so he’s going to want it, eventually, and we can’t lie and say I never found it, can we?”
Did the car look too much like the one she remembered Randy owning before he moved out west? “I’m afraid not.”
“You phone them, Emily. You seem to know the number by heart.”
I’d learned it when Alec was alive. I didn’t know either of my parents’ cell phone numbers, but the police department’s number was burned into my memory.
Brent promised to be at my place in ten minutes.
Chapter 14
Lois said, “I wonder if Brent’s had dinner. Or anything to eat today. You fixed extra, and it’s really good. He should appreciate it.” Her eyes gleamed.
I burst out laughing. “You’re a matchmaking schemer.”
“Who, me? I just don’t like to see a good man go hungry, that’s all. Anyway, you said you weren’t interested in him. He’s a ladies’ man, or something like that.”
“I’m not. But he was a friend once.”
“Aha.”
“There’s nothing to ‘aha’ about.” I changed the subject to a more important one. “Did you make a copy of your thumb drive?”
“I didn’t have time. Besides, I wasn’t sure it contained files that Brent would want.”
I opened my desk drawer and pulled out a new, blank drive. “I’ll copy the entire drive. It could be years before they return the original drive to you.”
“That long?”
“Yep. If you’re lucky, they might copy the important files and give your drive back sooner, but you never know, especially in a major case like this.” A murder. Possibly two. And maybe more, if we don’t catch the murderer. Or murderers.
First, as Alec would have, I copied Lois’s Fallingbrook River pictures to my hard drive in case I ever wanted to examine them more closely. Then I started copying all of the files from Lois’s thumb drive onto my blank one. The doorbell rang.
Lois shooed me downstairs. “I’ll keep track of this. You go let your detective in. Offer him something to eat.”
Brent was dressed almost the same as he’d been the night before, in jeans and a tweed blazer, but it was a different blazer, more blue than gray this time, and he was wearing a light blue T-shirt under it. And, undoubtedly, his service revolver in a shoulder holster.
Apparently, Dep recognized his voice. She ran downstairs so quickly that her little kitty paws actually thumped. She wound figure eights around Brent’s ankles. He picked her up. The way he nestled her against his right side reminded me of Alec holding her the exact same way, keeping her away from his weapon. Alec.
I asked Brent, “Have you eaten?”
“I’m okay.”
“That’s not what I asked. We grilled chicken—”
He glanced toward the back of the house. “We?” Gently, he put Dep on the floor as if he were considering reaching for his gun. I knew he wouldn’t, but he looked ready. Then again, he always seemed ready for anything. Alec had, too, and Misty did. And Tom still did, even though he was retired. Apparently, that constant alertness was an occupational hazard for police officers.
“Don’t worry. I’m not harboring any murderers or would-be attackers. No one’s here besides Lois and me.”
I saw last night’s warning in the steady gaze of those gray eyes. Just be careful, Em. For Alec’s sake.
I went on as if he hadn’t spoken volumes while not saying a word. “And there’s Caesar salad if you don’t mind anchovies.” If I remembered correctly, he liked them.
“I haven’t eaten. And anchovies are great. But first things first. How about that thumb drive?”
“It’s upstairs. Lois is using my computer to look at the images.”
His jaw tensed. I knew what he was thinking. We’d tampered with evidence. Again.
I felt the blood drain from my face, and I had to work at not looking stricken. “We didn’t delete or change any of them. We weren’t going to bother you if the images hadn’t been the ones you needed, so we looked at them first. Lois is sure that some of them match the prints that were torn out of her photo albums.”
“Checking on possible evidence is never a bother. Lead the way?”
I scooped Dep up and cradled her in my arms all the way to the second floor. Brent followed us, but stopped in the doorway of my combination office and guest room. “You haven’t changed the color since I helped paint this room before you and Alec moved in.”
Undoubtedly having heard us coming, Lois had filled the screen with the picture of the car driving up the dusty track.
“I like the white,” I said. How inane. “It’s nice and bright.” Even more inane. Dep must have thought so, too. She squirmed. I set her on the floor. She hopped up onto the desk, and from there onto the windowsill again. She wouldn’t see many birds now, at dusk, but that didn’t deter her from gazing at the tree.
Lois rolled the desk chair back. Lights on the two thumb drives were flashing madly. The copying was stil
l going on.
I couldn’t tell if Brent noticed. He bent forward and stared at the sunlit black car on the screen. After a long silence, he asked, “Are there more?”
“Not of the car, unfortunately,” Lois said, “but there are more that I took that day, including the one I used for the painting I showed you last night.” She clicked back to that picture and pointed to the lower left corner. “It has that black splotch that might be the car, but I can’t tell more than we could from the painting.”
Brent smelled like sunshine and fresh air. I straightened, farther from the screen and from him. “It’s very much like your painting,” he told Lois. “Mind if I take the files to the forensics guys so they can try to enhance the images?”
“Okay.” Her voice was unusually soft as if she could barely force the word out.
“We can make copies for you,” he offered.
I pointed at the two thumb drives connected to my computer. “We already are.” The lights had stopped flashing. Duplicates of Lois’s files should now be on the drive I was planning to lend her. “Evidence can be held almost indefinitely, so I thought she should have a copy now. Forensics might take a long time.”
The slight tilt of Brent’s head could have been agreement.
Lois clicked back to the image of the car and pointed at the windshield. “They can’t just wipe the reflections off the windshield and reveal the driver, can they?”
Brent studied her as if wondering if she truly regretted that reflection’s existence or was asking for assurance that no forensics tricks could reveal the driver’s face. “I’m afraid not.”
She rolled the chair away from the desk and folded her arms. “It couldn’t have been Randy. He would have stopped to talk. Besides, I saw the car and didn’t even think of Randy. So, there was no way it was his car. I’d have recognized it.”
Her pallor and obvious shortness of breath were giving her away. She wasn’t as confident as her words implied, and maybe, despite her denial, she was scared that her great-nephew might be a murderer.
But I had to give her credit. If she’d truly believed that Randy was driving the car coming toward her that evening, she probably would have flagged him down to say hello. And if, five years later, she still thought the driver was Randy, she might not have told us about possibly having seen him. But she had.
I showed Brent the list of files on Lois’s drive and pointed out the subfolder labeled FALLINGBROOK RIVER. “This is where the photos are.” I clicked on the subfolder, showed him the thumbnail images, and then ejected Lois’s drive.
Thanking me, he took a small evidence envelope out of his pocket. The envelope’s flap had a perforated section with a numbered receipt printed on it. He wrote on the receipt, signed it, detached it from the rest of the flap, and handed it to Lois. Then he slid the drive into the envelope, sealed the envelope, and dropped it into his jacket pocket.
I headed toward the top of the stairs. “Now you can help with the leftovers, Brent.”
“They’re good,” Lois told him.
I stood back to let her lead the way. Dep scooted past all of us. At the foot of the stairs, Lois turned toward the front door. Dep planted herself at Lois’s feet and looked up toward her face. “I’ll be off now,” Lois said.
Brent reached for the doorknob. “I’ll walk you home.”
She glanced at me. “No! Your dinner’s been delayed enough.”
“Stay while Brent eats,” I suggested. “And then we can both walk you home.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s only eight thirty. I’ll be perfectly safe.”
I countered, “You were attacked about this time two nights ago.”
Brent was still holding the doorknob. “Would you like a patrol car to pick you up?”
She glared at him. “No! A detective walking me home would be bad enough if the person who threatened me has been hanging around watching to see if I did contact the police.”
I offered, “How about if I walk you home while Brent eats?”
Brent quickly put a stop to that idea. “Then I’d have to send someone to pick you up, Emily.” I figured he was calling me by my full name to show how serious he was about our not wandering around outside at night when a killer could be loose. “Let’s both walk her home.”
“You’re going to too much trouble,” Lois complained. “If my great-nephew’s home, he could pick me up.”
“It’s no trouble,” I answered.
“I could use a walk,” Brent said.
All of us, except Dep, headed toward Lois’s house. Brent positioned himself closest to the street. I made certain that Lois was between us, making it more difficult for someone to leap out of nowhere and attack her.
I watched for shadowy figures near hedges and picket fences, and I also peeked into houses where lights were on but drapes weren’t drawn. I wasn’t looking for anything inside those houses. I was merely curious about others’ décor. Brent seemed to be keeping track of everything—cars that were parked and cars that were moving, license plates, a family dawdling along the sidewalk across the street, a couple snuggled on a porch swing, a lone cyclist, a teenager, humming and weaving down the street, his baseball cap backward and his hands and eyes on his phone. “Hey, kid,” Brent called. “You’re on your way home for your helmet, right?” The kid raised a lazy hand and kept going.
Lois’s lights weren’t on. Saying he’d check her back door and windows, Brent turned on his phone’s flashlight and went inside first. Lois and I stood in the dark beside the door until Brent returned, pocketing his phone. “Everything looks fine.”
Lois thanked him. “Now will you please go eat? I don’t want to be responsible for the starvation of one of Fallingbrook’s finest.”
He saluted. “Yes’m.”
“And can you manage the porch and front steps if I don’t turn on the light? Sorry, but I feel unsafe with a policeman here.”
“No one will recognize me as a cop if I fall down the stairs,” Brent deadpanned.
“Unless your gun goes off,” I teased.
“How do you know I’m carrying?”
“Aren’t you?”
Lois opened the door. “Would you two get going?”
Neither of us fell down the stairs, or even tripped. Out by the street, I looked back at Lois’s sweet cottage. There were still no lights on inside, but one of the sheers in her front window twitched.
The kid on the bike was gone, and so was the couple from the porch swing. The family, with two grade-schoolers who were apparently collecting fallen leaves, had not traveled very far. A car passed slowly. Brent didn’t seem to notice it, which made me pay it more attention. I didn’t recognize it or the driver. I asked, “Is someone still watching Lois’s house?”
“Not constantly, but we’re keeping an eye on it.” At my door, he said, “Listen, Em, if you’re busy, I can grab a bite at home.”
When would that be? Probably not for hours. “Help me eat the leftovers, and save your bite for another day.”
“Who can resist an offer like that?” He followed me inside and locked the door.
“Come into the kitchen,” I said. “Lois and I ate outside, but now it’s too chilly.” I was babbling. Maybe I shouldn’t have let Lois plan my guest list.
In the kitchen, Brent perched on a barstool. I set a plate of chicken and the salad bowl, now only half-full, on the granite countertop in front of him. “Wine?” I asked.
“I’m working.”
“Overtime?”
“Yep, and thanks. I keep skipping lunches.” He tasted the chicken. “This is delicious.”
I felt silly, standing on the other side of the counter as if we were in Deputy Donut and I was about to hand him a bill. I put the rest of the cookies on a plate and then slipped around the counter, pulled the other barstool farther from his, and sat down with my feet on the footrest. “Have you made progress in Georgia’s case?”
“We found fingerprints on that doll’s legs, and they matched some
in our database.”
“Mine,” I guessed. “They’d be in the database from when I applied to work at 911.”
“Mmp.”
“I’m really sorry about touching that doll.”
“Don’t worry about it, Em. It was an understandable reflex.”
“Were other fingerprints on that doll?”
“Gloves.”
“What about that donut box?” I knew they could use a chemical, ninhydrin, to cause fingerprints on paper to show up in, of all colors, purple.
“Your prints, Chief Westhill’s, and Ms. Treetor’s.”
“What about the rest of Georgia’s house? Like around the back door where he or she broke in?”
“Gloves.”
“Could you tell by the size of the fingers of the gloves whether the person wearing them was a man or a woman?”
“Don’t you think a woman could wear gloves that were too large for her?”
“I suppose, though they might make her too clumsy to accomplish much.”
“Mmp.”
“Did the fingerprint guy find prints in Lois’s house this morning?”
“Hers, yours, mine, her great-nephew’s, and someone wearing gloves.”
“Aha. Randy wouldn’t have needed to wear gloves. No one could have been surprised that his prints were in that house.”
“He’d need gloves if he wanted to make it look like someone besides him had broken in.”
I glared at Brent. “Why do you have to be so right?”
“It’s my job.” I detected a slight twinkle in his eyes.
“Did any of Georgia’s neighbors have surveillance cameras?”
“No. A few businesses on the main streets near her neighborhood had cameras. We’re looking at the videos.”
“Need help?”
“I wish I could say yes, but . . .” Instead of finishing the sentence, he popped another piece of chicken into his mouth.
I said it for him. “I found her, and touched that doll, so that makes me a suspect.”
“Mmp.”
“Do you suspect me?”
“No.”
At least he was clear about that. Still, had he been about to say but, as in but someone else in the department does? If they did, I wasn’t sure I blamed them. My fingerprints were on that doll and on the donut box. Besides, I had probably touched Georgia’s back door when I ran out of her house. And my prints were in Lois’s house, too. But so were Brent’s, and no one was going to suspect him of murdering Georgia and attacking Lois.
Survival of the Fritters Page 11
