Dead on Ice (13 page)

A wicked grin crossed Doris’s face. “I think it’s wonderful that you’re a great-grandmother. You look like one.”

“So do you,” Mildred responded to the insult. “Unfortunately for you, you can’t ever become one at this point. Such a pity.”

The two elderly women were eyeing each other when Cameron stepped between them. “Good morning, ladies. How are we today? Have either of you seen Joshua?”

Both women glanced in the direction of the lounge.

Cameron followed their eyes. The corners of her lips curled and a devilish glint came to her eyes. She stepped into the room.

Sensing a cat fight, Doris and Mildred rushed to the doorway to watch.

Joshua saw Brianne’s eyes widen with surprise, and a hint of fear. He turned around just in time for his lips to collide with Cameron’s. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders to take him into a tight hug. With her mouth on his, she tasted his mouth with an intensity that she had never done before in a public setting. The grip of the gun she wore on her hip dug into his hipbone, but he didn’t mind. His head was swimming when she released him. He took a deep breath. “What was that for?”

“That was for nothing.” Gazing into his blue eyes, she ran her fingers through his silver hair from the top of his head down past his ears and across his cheeks. “Now you have a license to do something.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.” He kissed her again.

Disappointed, Mildred and Doris stepped away.

With a glare, Brianne left in search of Freddie.

Chapter Nine

Irving sat up on his hind legs, with his front paws on the door, to peer out the passenger window when Cameron pulled her cruiser into Raccoon State Park. The skunk cat let out a mixture of a growl and meow from deep in his throat. His emerald eyes widened. His mouth dropped open, and he let out a clicking noise that meant he had something in his sights that he dearly wanted to capture.

The predator was on point.

“Easy going, kiddo,” Cameron urged him after unclipping her seat belt before reaching over to unclip Irving’s pet seat belt. When she opened the car door, Irving shot out over her lap, scurried under the cruiser and practically flew into the woods.

“They told me you had a skunk for a partner,” a deep, male voice boomed from the picnic area.

“Irving is a cat.” Cameron sauntered across the gravel parking area to where a huge man was seated on top of the picnic table.

He was dressed in khaki pants and a button-down shirt. While watching her approach him, he took a deep sip of his soda.

“He only looks like a skunk,” she said. “You should see the reaction of murderous suspects when they see him coming. It’s more effective than a K-9.”

“Sounds like the reaction of suspects when they see me coming.” With a chuckle, he stuck out his hand for her to shake. “Special Investigator William Walton.” After shaking her hand, he flashed his FBI identification at her. “Everyone calls me Big Will.”

“Detective Cameron Gates.” She opened her coat to show him the badge she wore clipped next to her gun on her belt. “They call me a lot of things.”

“Sassy. I like that.” Big Will chuckled again. “My people say you were asking about a mob contract out on an actress—” He put up his fingers to simulate quotation marks when he used the word “actress”. “—named Cherry Pickens that was put out on her in Spring 1985.”

“Was it Humphrey Phoenix?” she asked. “I’ve been told two different things. One said it was the mob, but then I read that Humphrey kept claiming to be a legitimate business man who dealt in smut.”

“Correct on both fronts.” Standing up, Big Will stuck his thumbs into the waistband of his pants.

Now that he stood to his full height, Cameron saw that Big Will was bigger than she had thought. He towered over her, and was as solid as a tank with muscle. He wasn’t kidding. If I saw him coming at me, I’d be scared, too.

“Did your check bring up the murder of a has-been pop singer named Blake Norton?” Big Will asked. “He was in Vegas trying to make a comeback.”

Nodding, Cameron took up the story. “Cherry Pickens was fooling around with him behind Phoenix’s back. So he had Blake Norton killed and put out a contract on Cherry Pickens. That’s why she disappeared.”

Big Will grinned. “Phoenix didn’t want Pickens killed. He only wanted to send her a message by killing Norton.”

“Then why did she run?”

“The hit was carried out by a couple of mob assassins. While Phoenix didn’t work with the mob, he did have powerful friends and connections. Those powerful friends contracted the hit as a favor, but things went wrong.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Cherry Pickens was hiding in the bathroom.”

“That made her a witness,” Cameron said.

“No matter how much money Phoenix had invested in Cherry Pickens, the mob couldn’t let her live to tell. Somehow, she managed to escape, which says a lot considering that these were pros. That was when the contract was adjusted to include her . . . for damage control.”

“But she escaped.”

Big Will smiled. “Like I said, she was a resourceful girl. You got to be good to be able to escape not just the scene, but the town when you have the mob after you—especially in Vegas.” Looking down at her, he folded his arms across his chest. “Now tell me about your interest in Cherry Pickens.”

“We found her body.”

“Where?”

“In a freezer in the basement of a hoarder house in Hookstown,” she said. “The house happened to belong to the lawyer who had done some work for her several years before.”

Big Will’s eyes widened. His mouth dropped open slightly. “I don’t suppose COD was natural causes.”

“Broken neck. She had a high amount of heroin in her system. She probably would have OD’d if her neck wasn’t snapped.” She went on to ask the question she had contacted the FBI to ask. “Is there any possibility that this was a mob hit?”

“Did the hoarder have any mob ties?”

“None.”

“When was she killed?”

“We pinpointed the date to the summer of 1985,” she said.

“She disappeared in early May 1985, when Blake Norton was killed.” Big Will scratched his head. “So she was killed a few weeks later.”

“That’s what it looks like,” Cameron said. “Do your people know if anyone ever took credit for hitting her? Did anyone collect on it?”

“No way that was a mob hit,” Big Will said with certainty. “In 1989, an informant, who is now in the witness protection program, reported that the mob still had a contract out on Cherry Pickens.”

“Which means the motive for her murder was something else,” Cameron said.

“That’s what it looks like to me.” Big Will sniffed and looked around.

When a foul odor reached her nose, Cameron covered her face. She could hear Irving screeching behind her.

Big Will covered his face with one hand while pointing over her shoulder with the other. “I thought you said that was a cat.”

Whirling around, Cameron saw Irving racing across the parking lot toward her. His fur was flared so that he looked twice his size. As he grew closer, the stench became worse. “Irving? Is that you?”

“Skunk!” Big Will turned to run. In his hysteria, he banged into the edge of the picnic table and fell over. He rolled before scrambling to his feet and running up the hill to where his car was parked along the road.

Cameron wanted to back away also, but she couldn’t leave Irving, who was equally hysterical. When he got to her, he stopped, dropped, rolled, and pawed at his face with first one paw and then the other.

“What did you do?”

Irving howled. When he tried to rub up against her, she backed up. He followed her in her retreat until she had her back up against the picnic table. Crying out, the big cat reached up to claw at her thighs.

Cameron looked from where the cat was pitifully writhing in misery at her feet to the state police cruiser. There was no choice. The only way to get Irving home and cleaned up was to take him in the police car.

“You do realize that we’re never going to live this down.” She picked up the howling cat. Clinging to her with his front claws, he rubbed his face back and forth across her shoulder. “What happened? Did she get mad when she found out you were a cat in a skunk suit?”

“What’s that hideous smell?” Covering his nose with both hands, Donny stood in the bathroom doorway.

“Skunk,” Cameron answered with a sigh of disgust.

Spying the open door, Irving clawed to get out of the bathtub where he was getting his second bath since Cameron had taken him to Joshua’s house.

“Close the door before Irving gets out,” she told Donny.

“I thought he was a cat that only looked like a skunk.” He laughed after stepping inside and closing the door.

“Obviously, the skunk he had a run-in with at the park saw him for what he was and sprayed him.”

Donny sniffed again. “Are you sure all that smell is Irving?” He moved in to catch a whiff of her hair. “I think that’s you, too.”

She dismissed his comment as a joke. “Cut it out.”

The bathroom door opened, and Joshua stepped in with a cardboard box filled with tomato juice. “Lucky for you, the supermarket got a delivery today . . . and Chester is not known for its Bloody Marys.” He handed a quart bottle to his son. “Open and start pouring.”

“Into the tub?” Donny asked.

“Into the tub.”

Standing over Cameron, who held Irving to prevent his escape, Donny poured the tomato juice into the tub. “Are you going to take a bath after Irving?”

Cameron laughed. “Why would I want to take a bath in tomato juice?”

Donny looked from her to Joshua, who was pouring a bottle of juice on her other side.

Following his gaze, she looked up at Joshua. “Stop it.”

He bent over to sniff her hair and frowned.

“What?” she snapped.

Joshua reached into his pocket, took out his car keys, and handed them to Donny. “Go to the store to get another case of tomato juice.”

Looking into the cat’s eyes, which were filled with misery, she slumped. “Oh, Irving.”

Chapter Ten

Cameron wasn’t a fan of heavy perfume. She preferred a light, soft scent of cologne. But the next morning, she felt as if her usual scent still held a skunk base, even though Joshua claimed it wasn’t “that bad”.

She suspected he was lying.

Anything was better than the smell of skunk. Even after a long soak in the tub of tomato juice, she couldn’t get rid of the smell. It was impossible for her to get the shampoo to lather up enough to get the smell out of her hair.

All this from just carrying Irving and riding in the car home with him?

The next morning, she doused herself with a double dose of citrus-scented perfume that Sarah had left in her room before going off to the Naval Academy.

After two washings, her clothes, still smelling of skunk, got tossed into the garbage. Luckily, Joshua’s younger daughter and Cameron were the same size. The clothes Sarah had left in her closet fit Cameron like they had been made for her.

Now that the detective could safely eliminate the mob as a suspect in killing Cheryl Smith, it was time to focus on her other suspects: friends and relatives of Angelina Sullivan, which meant diving deeper into Angelina’s murder.

This being the case, Joshua had reason to ride along. Angelina Sullivan’s body had been found on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River. Until proven otherwise, they could assume she had been killed at the yacht club when her car was dumped into the river from their boat launch. That gave Joshua jurisdiction in the case.

It wasn’t until Cameron and Joshua opened the doors to her police cruiser that they realized the skunk smell had permeated the interior.

Joshua jumped back and slammed the door shut. With his hand over his nose to block out the scent that felt like it had gone up his nose to attack his sinuses, he announced they were taking his car.

“What am I going to do?” Cameron’s voice was high pitched.

“Take it to your motor pool and have them fumigate it.”

“I can’t do that.”

She could envision the endless teasing that she was going to receive from the guys on the force. I thought Irving was a cat. He is. Yeah. Right.

Joshua was climbing into the driver’s seat of his SUV. “Come on. I don’t have all day. You can call your motor pool on your cell along the way and have them come pick it up.”

She noticed that she had left her valise with all her case files in the back of the cruiser. She had been in such a rush to get Irving inside and bathed that she had forgotten to take her briefcase inside. “Maybe if I just leave the windows open for a few days.”

“I don’t think a few days will do it,” Joshua said. “Put on your big girl pants, and get it fumigated.” He rubbed the sides of his nose as if to eject the smell. His eyes were watering.

Holding her nose with one hand, Cameron threw open the door, grabbed the valise, slammed it shut, and then ran while taking in a deep breath of fresh, cold air.