Die Buying (22 page)

Sounded like something used in prehistoric spa treatments.

“It needs to be protected, excavated, mined for the richness of historical, anthropological, and archaeological data it undoubtedly contains, not destroyed to cater to the recreational whims of the tiny segment of society that can afford to pay two hundred bucks to chase a dimpled ball around.” He caught my upper arm and dragged me to a display case. “Look!”

I looked. What appeared to be chunks or bits of stone sat under the smudged glass, attended by labels with incomprehensible phrases like “flake blanks,” “flint-working,” and “refined biface preforms.” My eyes glazed over. “Fascinating,” I murmured. “And are these similar to the artifacts you were trying to protect when Porter’s company broke ground for that Hyacinth Hills shopping center?”

Harding stiffened beside me. His voice when he spoke no longer sounded like that of an enthusiastic professor going on about his favorite subject. It held an undertone of menace. “What are you really here for, Ms. Ferris? I get the feeling you’re not quite the amateur archaeologist Kyra made you out to be.”

“She exaggerates.”

He blinked his eyes slowly, studying my face in unspeaking silence.

“I read that you were arrested for assaulting Jackson Porter three years back,” I admitted. “And I was curious how it came about that you were protesting another of his developments. Surely there are other developers despoiling the landscape?”

“Are you mocking my work?”

“No, I’m not,” I said truthfully. “It seems like important work, and I can see you take it seriously. I’d just like to know where you were last Sunday night.”

Harding’s lips thinned to a straight line. “You mean when some public benefactor killed Porter?”

I nodded, casually taking a step back from Harding, who was leaning uncomfortably close.

“You may be wearing a uniform, Ms. Ferris, but it’s not one that gives you the right to question my movements.” A fleck of spittle appeared at the corner of his mouth, but he didn’t seem to notice. “You spend your days protecting the Mecca of crass consumerism, making sure spoiled shoppers have a pleasant experience lapping up the products that greedy corporations make them think they need. Do you know what life was like in this area fifteen thousand years ago? What people had to do to survive?” He was almost shouting.

“No,” I said.

“No. You don’t.” An eerie half smile spread across his doughy face. “Are you married, Ms. Ferris? Do you have kids?”

The abrupt change of topic caught me off guard. “That’s none of your business.”

His gaze shifted to my left hand. “No, you don’t. Pets?”

Something in my reaction pleased him because his smile grew. “When someone threatens what’s important to me, I strike back.”

I faced him stonily, unflinching, thinking that his soft exterior covered an iron will, and wondered what his coworkers thought of him. My mind flitted to the biology professor in Alabama who had opened fire at a department meeting, killing three of her colleagues. “Are you threatening me?” I asked, squaring my shoulders.

“Not at all,” he said. “Just making my position clear.” He blinked mildly.

“Well, thank you for your time, Harding,” I said, deliberately omitting his title. I started for the door, angling toward it so I could keep an eye on him.

“Any time, Ms. Ferris,” he called after me with fake bonhomie. “Any time. Tell Kyra I’ll be by early next week to pick up the signatures she’s collected.”

If it were up to me, I’d bar him from the mall, but I just said, “I’ll let her know.” The door was only two steps in front of me and I burst through it into the weak February sunshine, feeling like I’d emerged into fresh air after weeks spent below ground in some dark, noxious cave. Dyson Harding was a nutter, a psycho, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that he’d graduated from framing professors he disliked to murdering developers who stood in the way of his academic priorities.

 

 

I was in
a burger drive-through, getting lunch before returning to the mall, when my phone rang. I recognized the number. “Grandpa!” I answered. “Where have you been?”

“Sorry, Emma-Joy,” he said, sounding chipper. “I just got your messages. Can you come pick me up at the hospital? Confounded doctor says I can’t drive for a couple of days.”

Cold clutched at me. “The hospital? What—?”

“Nothing serious. I’ll tell you when you get here.” He gave me directions to a hospital about halfway between here and D.C.

I phoned Joel to let him know I’d be late getting back to work, grateful that Woskowicz wasn’t around to grouse about it. “Anything going on?” I asked.

“Nada. We’ll hold the fort until you get back. I hope your grampa’s okay.”

“Me, too.” I hung up and headed for I-95, munching my burger as I drove. Visions of heart attacks, strokes, and hip-breaking falls whizzed through my head. Pulling into the hospital lot twenty-five minutes later, I took a deep breath. I walked as quickly as I could, my knee complaining the whole way, up the path to the hospital lobby. A hugely pregnant woman, whooshing air in and out as her husband counted, waddled by me, blocking my view. When she passed, I saw an old woman sitting at an information desk, a confused-looking couple studying a hospital directory, and Grandpa Atherton, standing near a window, his hands swathed in gauze with his fingers peeking out. His carriage was as erect as always, although his white hair was mussed and he wore what looked like a painter’s white overall.

“Grandpa!” I rushed to him and hugged him. He smelled like charred rubber. “What on earth—”

“Let’s talk in the car, Emma-Joy,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this place. It’s full of sick people.”

Laughing, I took his arm and we proceeded to my Miata. “When are you going to get a real car?” he asked, stooping to get into the passenger seat. “Something with four doors?”

I slammed his door, climbed into the driver’s side, and wended my way back to the interstate. “Now,” I said, once we were cruising along at seventy-five, “spill it.”

Grandpa awkwardly adjusted the heater to a warmer setting and said, “An old colleague got in touch yesterday—he needed my help with a little op he was running in Georgetown—and I’ve been strictly incommunicado. By the time we finished debriefing and they dropped me at the hospital, my phone battery had died—”

“What’s wrong with your hands?”

“Just a first-degree burn,” he reassured me. “No worse than a sunburn. Those incendiary devices are tricky.”

“What—?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” he said, interrupting my question.

I’d heard that quip a thousand times before, both from Grandpa and my friends in the military intelligence community, and I just rolled my eyes. “Doesn’t the CIA have anyone under eighty they can use in their ops?” I asked.

“The CIA doesn’t run ops on U.S. soil, Emma-Joy,” he reminded me.

“Then who—?” I cut myself off. “Yeah, yeah, I know . . . you’d have to kill me.”

He chuckled, but his voice was serious when he asked, “What’s this I hear about another body at the mall? It was on the television at the hospital. A drug overdose?”

I told him about Robbie Porter’s contacting me and last night’s adventures. “You need to back away from this one, Emma-Joy,” Grandpa said, surprising me. “That’s three bodies in a week, assuming young Porter was the victim of foul play.”

“You’re advising me to be cautious, Mr. Incendiary Man? Is this a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ situation?”

“I’m a professional. I trained—”

A flash of anger whooshed through me. “So am I! Present tense. You retired twenty-some-odd years ago.”

A wounded silence filled the car.

I sighed. “Look, Grandpa, I’m sorry. The situation is getting to me. I got my butt chewed by Detective Helland this morning, and Curtis Quigley pitched a hissy before I had my first cup of coffee. Then I met with a nut-job activist who might have killed Porter and who practically threatened to turn Fubar into kitty litter. I’ve had about four hours sleep in the last thirty-six and I’m cranky. I’m sorry. Please?”

“You’re my favorite granddaughter,” Grandpa said, reaching over to pat my knee with his mitted hand. “How’m I going to stay mad at you? Do you still need help catching those car artists?”

“And how,” I said, relieved.

“Good, because I’ve got just the device to trip them up.”

“How are you going to work your gadgets with your hands like that?”

“This is just for show,” Grandpa said, waving his hands in the air. “Comes right off. I’ll have those cameras in place this evening some time, and we’ll have a line on those vandals in two days, tops.”

“What did the doctor say?” I asked suspiciously as I pulled onto his street.

“He’s a fussbudget,” Grandpa said. “Doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Probably wrapped my hands up like this so he could charge my insurance company an extra thousand dollars for the gauze. I’ll be just fine, Emma-Joy—don’t you worry.”

With that, he hopped spryly out of the car and proceeded to his front door. A second later he turned around and called to me, a sheepish look on his face, “Do you have your key? I left mine—well, I can’t say where—when I sanitized before the op.”

With a sigh, I got out and unlocked his front door. “You’re sure you’re okay?” I asked, hugging him again. He felt thin and bony beneath the coverall.

“Dandy.” He winked and closed the door.

Back at the mall, I found Joel scanning the camera screens while playing a game of computer solitaire. “Busy day, huh?” I asked.

“Dead,” he said. “How’s your grampa?”

“Feisty,” I said with a smile. “You want to go back out on the mean streets of Fernglen?”

“Sure thing,” Joel said, abandoning his card game and standing. “Hey, you got a call from Elena Porter. She wants to talk to you.”

I couldn’t imagine why. First, I’d found her husband’s body, then her son’s. She must think I was some sort of jinx. “Did she say what she wanted?”

“Uh-uh. Says she’s not up to leaving the house but that you can stop by any time this afternoon.” Joel handed me a message slip with an address scrawled on it. “We can skip our swim this afternoon if you get tied up with Mrs. Porter.” He tried to make it sound self-sacrificing, but I could tell he was trying to wiggle out of our training session.

Stifling a smile, I dashed the faint hope on his face. “No way. See you at the Y at four.”

As much as I didn’t want to face Elena Porter’s grief, I couldn’t bring myself to ignore her request. So, when my shift ended, I found myself headed toward the Porter estate, an overlarge home on an acre of lawn, part of a gated community of similar houses owned by Vernonville’s nouveau riche. The old money had homes on the east side of town, along the river. Even though the houses had different architectural styles—faux Georgian, faux Tuscan, faux Mediterranean—they looked depressingly similar in their newness and fauxness. A black MDX, a silver Mercedes, and a blue Volvo station wagon were parked in the semicircular drive fronting the Porter home. I left my Miata at the curb and walked up the drive.

Catherine Lang, the woman who had been with Elena Porter at Diamanté, opened the door when I rang the bell. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face and twisted into a knot low on her neck, and she wore a brown cashmere sweater with a deep V-neck over matching wool slacks. “EJ Ferris,” I reminded her. “Mrs. Porter asked me to stop by.” A melancholy piano tune played from deeper inside the house.

“Oh, yes,” she said, opening the door wider. “Elena’s distraught, as you can imagine. I’m trying to help out where I can, but, well, there’s not much one can really do at a time like this, is there?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, but led the way down a plushly carpeted hall to a large room with two cranberry leather sofas facing each other over a massive marble cocktail table. Other than that conversation grouping and a gleaming black grand piano, the room was empty, although I noted depressions in the carpet where other furniture pieces had stood. Faded squares on the pale green walls spoke of paintings that had been removed, and I speculated briefly that the Porters might have been selling off their stuff. Was Jackson Porter’s development company on the rocks? Or was Elena Porter just undertaking a redecorating project?

A flood of sad and angry music issued from the piano and wrapped itself around me. I half closed my eyes to listen as Catherine said, “Elena, that mall cop is here.” She cast me an apologetic look.

“EJ Ferris,” I reminded her.

The music stopped in mid-measure as Elena Porter stood up behind the piano, her blond hair flatter than before, looking unwashed, and her plump cheeks sagging under their own weight. I was surprised to see she was the talented pianist, not having associated the socialite with musical virtuosity, or, I realized shamefacedly, any real depth of emotion. “You play beautifully,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, coming around the piano to join us. “There was a time, when I was at Juilliard, but then I met Jackson—” She shook her head.

“I’m so sorry about your son,” I said belatedly.

“Thank you.” She stood as if stuffed with sawdust, arms hanging at her sides, so weighed down with grief she couldn’t move. Or maybe she had taken something, Valium or the like, to take the edge off.

“Let’s sit,” Catherine Lang suggested, guiding her friend to one of the sofas.

I perched on the edge of the sofa across from them, feeling awkward and out of place. What was I doing here, invading this woman’s grief? It was clear she was much more affected by her son’s death than she had been by her husband’s murder. “You asked me to come by—?”

With a glance at Elena, Catherine Lang spoke again. “Elena heard you found Robbie before—that is, was he alive when you found him? Did he say anything?”

Was this a case where a white lie would be comforting, something along the lines of “He said to tell his mother he loved her and he’s sorry?” Both women’s gazes were glued to my face. “No,” I said gently. “He was unconscious. He died almost immediately. I don’t think he was in any pain,” I offered, knowing it was hopelessly inadequate. My mind went back to the image of Robbie sprawled against the garage wall, his flesh as pale as the cement, his dark hair hanging limp across his forehead, his eyes open but unseeing. Describing his last moments in detail would not comfort his mother.