Double Cross (15 page)
“Officer Ferrell, how are you?”
“I’m calling because we got the toxicology report back on your friend, Elise Hovden.”
That was news. I didn’t even know they had done a toxicology test on her. As if he’d read my mind, he said, “It’s part of our procedure for a suicide scene. Did you know anything about Ms. Hovden’s Valium use?”
I waved at Kacey to get her attention. She took off her hearing protectors. “I didn’t know Elise took Valium.”
Kacey raised an eyebrow.
“Kacey Mason is here with me. She didn’t know, either.”
“The reason I ask is that we didn’t notice a prescription bottle in the car or at her house, though I can’t say we were looking for anything like that. And she was loaded. Not enough to kill her, but enough to zonk her pretty good.”
I shifted the phone to my other ear and propped it there with my splinted hand. “That’s strange. Why would she take an overdose of Valium if she intended to kill herself with carbon monoxide?”
“It’s not that unusual, really. A person who is going to commit suicide will sometimes take something to calm the nerves first. What’s unusual is the amount of Valium she took. She must have been pretty loopy by the time she got into the car.”
“Have you checked with her doctor?”
“Since there was no prescription bottle, we don’t know who her doctor is. Besides, we’re not really doing an investigation. I was curious and just thought it was worth a phone call to see if you knew anything about the Valium.”
“Sorry, we don’t.”
“By the way, I read in the paper that you were quite a hero in Coppell last week. I guess I don’t feel so bad about getting flipped by you.” He gave an awkward half laugh. “I want you to know that I’m okay with that and there are no hard feelings. You’re pretty tough—especially for someone so . . . attractive.” He cleared his throat.
I wondered if he thought I’d been lying awake worrying about whether he was mad at me. Then I wondered if he was coming on to me.
“Thank you, Officer Ferrell. I’m glad there are no hard feelings. I was lucky out in Coppell, that’s all.”
“You can call me Ed.”
Uh-oh. I didn’t like where this seemed to be going. “Listen, I’m in the middle of something, so I’ve got to go.”
“I thought that maybe—”
I had to interrupt him before he got it out. “Wait, I forgot to ask. What will you be doing next on Ms. Hovden’s case?”
“There is no case. It’s already been ruled a suicide. We’re closing the file.”
“Of course. Thank you for calling, Officer Ferrell.” There was no way I was calling him Ed. “I’ve really got to go. Good-bye.” I shifted the phone back to my good hand. As I clicked it off, I heard him say, “But I—”
Kacey removed the empty magazine from her pistol. “So, Elise was on Valium. I guess I can see that. She seemed to have some anxiety issues.”
I stuck the phone back in my pocket. “We can talk about that in a minute. First, you’re not going to believe this. I think Ferrell was going to ask me out.”
Kacey cringed. “It makes me feel oily just to think about it.” A sly smile lit her face. “Oh, he’d be great for you, though. Congratulations.”
“Thanks. You’re a real scream. Anyway, at least he said I was attractive.”
“Let’s see, Rob Morrow . . . Officer Ferrell—” she held her palms up and moved them as if she were weighing the two men on a scale—“that’s a tough one.”
“What are the odds of settling down with a guy like Rob Morrow?” I said. “I’m just another woman to him. I’m not going to let myself take him too seriously.”
She replaced the magazine on her pistol. “Well then why don’t you get out and meet someone real? You never go out; you just sit around the house like a grandma. You’re gorgeous, but you never give guys a chance to meet you.”
I picked up my gun. “Wait until you’re older, dream girl. You’re used to walking around campus where there are a million guys your age drooling over you. Enjoy it while you can. It’s different when you get out in the real world. Think about it. Where does a twenty-nine-year-old security specialist who’s recovering from a drinking problem meet guys?”
“Oh, c’mon. You’re just making excuses. My gosh, Rob Morrow came to your hospital room to meet you! With your looks, you could meet guys in a monastery. In fact, that’s a great idea. Why don’t you come to church with me Sunday morning? There are a million good-looking guys at the church next to the campus.”
“Yeah, and all of them are nineteen.”
“No, actually there are a lot of guys in their twenties and thirties. And they’re not all married, because some of them come in by themselves.”
“Sounds like you’ve been scoping. Where do you get the time to listen to the sermon?”
“I keep my eyes open, that’s all.”
I checked the magazine on my pistol and turned toward the target. “Anyway, back to Elise. I can see why she would take a pill or two if she was going to kill herself, but why take an overdose before she gets in her car in a closed garage and turns on the ignition?”
“Overdose? Who said anything about an overdose?”
“Ferrell—I mean, Ed—” I smiled—“Ed told me that she had taken much more than a usual dose. Not enough to kill her, but a lot.”
“Maybe she wanted to be sure that she got the job done.” She pulled out her phone and squinted at the clock. “We’re running out of time. We’d better get back to shooting.”
I picked up my hearing protectors. “By the way, you don’t happen to know who her doctor was, do you?”
“No, but I imagine her personnel records at the Ministry would show that.”
I shook my head. “Never mind. Let’s put up a couple more targets and I’ll show you how a real lefty shoots.”
I picked up my gun. As the target rotated into place and I raised my Sig, I thought of the missing laptop and the Valium and the calls to Brandon. I pictured Elise’s twisted body in the front seat of her car. Nothing about her death added up.
I sighted down the barrel and tried to concentrate but couldn’t shake the feeling that Elise’s death and the attempt to blackmail Simon were connected. I squeezed the trigger. The muffled pop must have triggered something in my brain, because it occurred to me that the one person who still might be able to shed some light on this whole thing was the person who’d known about Simon’s illegitimate son longer than anyone else. And I was having brunch with her Sunday morning.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
THREE DAYS LATER I eased my Camaro up to the wood-shingled guard station at my mother’s gated neighborhood in Southlake. I was running late because of my date with Rob Morrow the night before. Well, that’s not exactly accurate. It was what happened after the date that had me running late.
Rob had taken me to a new steak place in Victory Park near downtown Dallas. A pack of professional jocks held down the restaurant’s corner booths every weekend evening, and the staff treated Rob like a rock star. I was shallow enough to be impressed, and I thoroughly enjoyed the envious looks the restaurant’s female patrons shot my way as the maître d’ led us to a primo booth in the back.
Rob was everything I could have dreamed: witty, intelligent, self-confident, and of course, beautiful. With curly golden hair that fell loosely over the collar of his long-sleeved polo, he gave the impression of a guy who had leaned his surfboard against the wall just in time to throw on a shirt and pants for dinner. Oh, yeah, and his yellow Ferrari made an impression, too.
He seemed disappointed that I was a nondrinker, which practically forced me to explain that I was an alcoholic—not exactly recommended conversation for a first date. He took it in stride, though. I figured that in his crowd a visit to the Betty Ford Center was as ordinary as a trip to the eye doctor.
Though I was booze-free for the date, my nerves had pushed me to medicate in another way. Before Rob picked me up, I took a couple of painkillers, something I hadn’t done for several days. It’s not fair to blame the painkillers for what happened. But blaming something other than myself helps ease another kind of pain—the I-hate-myself pain that I felt as I slunk out his apartment door at eight a.m. and grabbed a taxi back to the house.
I was glad that Simon wasn’t alive to see that he hadn’t really changed me. He should have known that you can’t turn trash into treasure by dressing it up in Armani and playing praise songs in its ear.
The taxi ride from Morrow’s place to the house had seemed longer than it was, probably because the entire way I was staring at an unpleasant truth. After Simon helped me crawl out of a bourbon bottle, I had convinced myself that my horrible choices in men, and the promiscuous way I acted with them, were behind me. Now, however, I had no choice but to admit that even stone-cold sober—painkillers notwithstanding—I was as capable as ever of behaving like a . . . well, let’s just say behaving badly. I couldn’t escape the conclusion that I wasn’t worth much to anyone, including myself.
As I stared out the cab window, I wondered where I was going. Not in the taxi, but in my life. Nature seemed to have imposed a couple of bleakly unfair rules on me. Everyone who cared about me either died or ran out, and the only meaningful skill I had developed in nearly thirty years was a knack for letting everyone around me down. My thoughts led back to a question I had been asking myself with increasing frequency since Simon’s death: What was the point of a life poorly lived, a life with no apparent purpose?
If I had been blessed in any way in my life, it was that I had never been prone to depression, but by the time the taxi arrived at the house, I was about as low as I’d ever been. It’s strange, though, how the simple routines of everyday life can sometimes save us from ourselves. I suppose that’s another blessing—one that life gives to all of us if we’ll let it.
First, I had to pay the cab driver. Then I had to find my house key. Once in the house I had thirty minutes to get ready and leave for my mother’s. With one eye on the clock, I turned my thoughts from the gloomy to the mechanical. Gradually, as I showered, dressed, and applied my makeup, my morose thoughts became less like a pistol pointed at my head and more like a vaguely unpleasant haze. They impeded my navigation but didn’t completely shoot off my guidance system.
One other blessing of the morning was that Kacey was staying at her sorority house until finals were over. At least I didn’t have to look her in the eye as I crept into the house.
By the time I reached the guardhouse in my mother’s neighborhood, I was functioning at a level above suicidal. In fact, while the guard searched his list of expected guests, I concentrated on the present and fought my nerves for the second time in twelve hours. Despite our initial underwhelming reunion, I was excited to see my mother again. I had concocted all sorts of plausible excuses for her previous unusual behavior. After all, she had as much right to be nervous as I did. As the guard buzzed me through, the depressing image of Rob Morrow was receding and my hopes were rising for a new and improved mother-daughter relationship.
Beyond the gate were ten or twelve huge houses, each with at least an acre of wooded lawn. The guard pointed to a two-story colonial just around the curve. “Okay, Ms. Pasbury, it’s number 8, right over there.” I pulled away from the guard hut, eased the car past several winter-dormant but still immaculately manicured lawns, and stopped at the curb in front of number 8.
The house had to be at least ten thousand square feet, and I wondered what the two of them did with all that space. I stepped out of the car and headed up the stone walk that led to the front door. I had hardly rung the bell when my mother burst onto the porch in a blue silk dress and mink wrap.
“I thought you wouldn’t make it in time! Let’s go straight over to the driveway. Stanley will pick us up.” She grabbed my wrist and tugged me along behind her as she cut across the yard to the driveway.
“Where are we going?”
“Why, to church, of course. It’s Sunday.”
I looked down at my blue jeans. “Church?”
“You know we always go to church on Sundays.”
I shook my hand free from hers. “How would I know that? You’ve been gone for twenty years!”
“We always went when you were a child; every single Sunday. I would dress you up in your cute little sailor dress, and you would march right up those church stairs. You were so adorable. All the other parents would comment on you.”
“You made me wear a sailor dress?”
She sighed. “What difference does it make? I just know that everyone told me how cute you were. Here comes Stanley now.”
A black BMW crept up the driveway from somewhere behind the house. As my mother stepped aside to let it move up to us and stop, she said, “One thing will never change. I go to church every Sunday. Even when I lived on the street, I made it to the homeless mission for services.”
Since her return to my life, I had already discovered a number of baffling things about my mother. This, however, was one of the most difficult to figure. In every part of her life she seemed to spend far more time on the superficial than the spiritual; yet she attended church as faithfully as a Puritan and apparently thought her presence in the pew somehow painted her soul a more pleasing color. If religion really worked like that, I needed to pay closer attention.
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