"Business as usual." Jack stood and sidled around the coffee table. McGuire deflected the cutoff at the pass. Jack said, "Hey, I appreciate you taking it easy on the search."
"We ain't the Gestapo, McPhee."
Okay, so much for killing him with kindness. Or halting his progress toward the desk. Yancy casually swept confidential paperwork into the top drawer, then lowered the laptop's screen. He nodded and smiled at McGuire as he emptied the printer's and fax's bales.
The detective smirked, not happy his sneak-a-peek had failed, but somewhat amused the kid had seen it coming. "What's your name, son?"
"Yancy." He sat back in the desk chair like a minimogul. "What's yours? Sir."
McGuire slanted a look at Jack. "Is he a protégé or a clone?" It was either a rhetorical question, or another observation took precedence. McGuire's finger tracked the phone line across the floor to the crack under the bathroom door. "Somebody making book in the can?"
Jack had had enough. "If there's an official reason for this visit, let's hear it."
His desktop computer's hard drive was returned in a plastic zip bag. "Real exciting crap on this one." McGuire regarded the laptop. "I'll bet what's on that wouldn't put me to sleep."
Jack didn't blink. Search warrants have a twenty-four-hour lifespan. The one executed on the office had expired. Requesting another at the same location with the same probable cause would raise a judge's curiosity, if not his hackles.
He rethought that supposition as McGuire removed a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. "I went to your new address to search the Ford. The old lady who answered the door said it and you were not on the premises."
Jack mentally smacked his forehead. "I forgot about the vehicle search. That's the truth, believe it or don't." Removing the Taurus's ignition and trunk keys from the ring, he added, "If I wanted to give you the runaround, I'd have washed it, vacuumed itthe works." He laid the keys in McGuire's palm. "I haven't even cleaned the trash out of it for a week."
The detective tossed the search warrant on the desk and strode toward the door. Jack followed him outside, rather than let the Asian-Swedish pitcher with satellite-dish ears tune in to the conversation.
"The S-10 is a one-passenger truck, Andy. I had two of them. That's why I drove the Taurus this afternoon."
"Mm-hmm. Always som'thin', isn't there?"
"I also told you why it's been parked in the Wexlers' garage since Monday."
"Go back inside, McPhee."
"If you want copies of those glove-box, passenger's-door and trunk-lock photos, Yancy can download them off the camera and burn a disk."
"I said, go back inside."
Jack held up his hands. "Okay, okay. But you know in your gut who killed Belle, the same as I do."
"From all indications, I'm lookin' at him." McGuire slipped on a pair of sunglasses. "If I'm not, prove it."
16
"I
don't like fish. It smells funny, and it tastes like fish." Harriet sniffed the flaky bite of flounder impaled on her fork. "But I like this fish."
"Thanks." Jack grinned. "I think." Personally, he could take it or leave it, but the steamed entrée and veggies conformed to her diet. Dina graciously deemed the steak he'd fixed the other night a rare treat, and wasn't referring to how it was cooked.
"You like tuna, too, Mom. And salmon."
"I eat 'em. That's not the same as liking 'em."
Dina huffed, "But you"
"It's wonderful sitting down together for a meal," said Jack, the self-appointed United Nations. "Bachelors think feeding their faces in front of the TV ranks up there with microwave nachos, but they're fooling themselves."
Harriet slanted him a look. "Some folks fool easier than others."
He chuckled at the insult. "Obviously, you're feeling better than you were when we got back from the office."
A sinking spell was her diagnosis and it fit as well as any. Nothing dire, or definite, just a general malaise that rolled in and gradually receded, like an internal tide.
She'd insisted Andy McGuire's unannounced arrival hadn't precipitated it. From her account, giving what-for to one of Park City's finest was the highlight of her day. Age and illness bestowed few perks. Impunity to tell a cop or anybody else to go chase his shadow was one of them.
"So," she said to Jack, "how are you holding up?"
"A little tired." The admission had the advantage of being true and corresponding to his excuse for disappearing for nearly thirty hours. "Pulling an all-night surveillance on not much sleep beforehand used to be a lot easier."
Dina pointed her fork at him. "Which is why you'll have the couch tonight. No arguments. Phil and I already voted."
"That old sofa's no featherbed," Harriet said, "but a far sight softer than a jail cot. I hear they're nothing but a slab of foam rubber with a dirty sheet on top."
Jack and Dina exchanged a silent "Oh, hell." Their eyes averted to Harriet, blithely nibbling an asparagus spear. Phil's nose crested the corner of the table near Dina's ribs, as if her sudden paralysis was an excellent opportunity to clean her plate for her.
"Some nights," Harriet said, "a sliver of a crack in a patio door lets in more than a couple of moths. But raise your bedroom window of an afternoon? Why, it's downright fascinating what'll drift in on the breeze."
Dina yelped, "You've been spying on us?" She appealed to Jack, as though expecting him to march off her mother to the gallows.
"How else am I supposed to find out anything? Both of you treat me like the dog." A finger jabbed the air. "I didn't say
a
dog, Dina Jeanne. I said
the
dog." Harriet pinched off some fish and lobbed it to Phil. She recited, "Finish your dinner. Drink your milk. Time to get up. Time for a nap, a poop, a pill."
"Hey, that's not fair!"
"Wasn't when I treated your daddy that way, either." Harriet's lips curled under, then smacked. "Like he wasn't a person anymore. Just a thing with not a brain in his head, long before his failed him.
"I didn't tell him about the bills. About borrowing from Peter to pay Paul for groceries. Troubles you and Randy were having
none of that, for fear it'd upset him."
She dragged deep on the oxygen cannula and exhaled a sigh. "Earl would've fretted somethin' fierce, too. What I didn't know is, upset's what keeps you feeling alive, instead of like the dog underfoot that can't think, or talk, or help fix a blessed thing."
A dozen emotions were reflected in Dina's expression. Resentment, sure. Guilt, admiration, despair, fear, love, regret, obstinancethose and others mirrored in her mother's face.
"You're right," Jack said. "Except on my part, maybe the secrecy was to protect me, not you. Whatever you may think of me, I don't want you to think any less."
Harriet harrumphed and stabbed a boiled baby carrot. "There you go, calling me stupid again."
"
Mo
-ther. He did no such thing."
"Did so." She glared at Jack. "If I believed you killed your ex-wife, do you think you'd have slept on my floor Monday night?"
"No, ma'am."
"Would your bony knees be under my table now?"
"No, ma'am."
"All right, then." She rounded on Dina. "As for you, missy, do you believe I'm so addlepated, I can't divine that McPhee caught you burgling that woman's house Sunday night? And her being murdered is why you two have been in cahoots ever since?"
The hand Dina rubbed over her mouth didn't quite hide a grin. "No, ma'am."
"Humph. You did till a second ago."
The Queen Mom, as Dina called her occasionally, had spoken. Harriet's official membership on the Save Jack's Ass Committee humbled him. He'd imploded the proverbial glass house she'd pretended was granite, along with the illusion that her daughter was a Rapunzel who spun gold from dogs' hair.
The collapse was inevitable without Jack instigating it. Delete him from the Calendar Burglar equation, and Dina's almost untenable disgust with herself and increasing carelessness would have proved her undoing.
Not for the first time of late, Jack thought about predestination. He used to joke about it being DFW, O'Hare, KCIwhatever airport you ran through or wasted hours in for a connecting flight to wherever you were going.
His definition never failed to get a laugh, particularly from a bored shmuck on the bar stool beside his in an airport lounge. It probably still would, though somehow, the punchline seemed flatter than it once did.
"McPhee." Harriet's tone insinuated it wasn't her first attempt to get his attention. His fork screeched across an empty plate he'd swear was half-full a moment ago. Seated on the floor beside him, Phil cocked a flop ear expectantly.
"I said, why do the police think you killed Mrs. deHaven?"
Starting with the .38, he related the evidentiary arrows pointed at him. Several were unwittingly self-inflicted. The majority were impossible to explain without implicating Dina and others, or violating client confidentiality.
Dina cleared the table, while he encapsulated the holes in McGuire's theory. "Homicide investigations hardly ever nail down every detail. A preponderance of evidence, beyond reasonable doubtthose come into play in the prosecutor's office long before a judge instructs a jury."
Jack drew finger doodles on his crumpled paper napkin. "The case against me isn't quite tight enough for a murder charge. Not yet. That's why they bounced me this morning."
Harriet flinched at a serving bowl whanging off the kitchen faucet. "Lord have mercy, girl. There won't be a dish left in the house if you don't quit slinging them around."
Dina's cheeks reddened, but she acted as though she hadn't heard. Silverware crashed on the bottom of the sink. A saucepan's lid clanged like a cymbal.
Harriet sniffed and tugged the cuffs of her sweater over her wrists. Back to business, it implied, and not her daughter's monkeyshines in the kitchen. "All right, McPhee. If you didn't kill that woman, who did?"
"Three candidates: Mr. X, a mope named Brett Dean Blankenship, or Belle's husband, Carleton deHaven."
More or less thinking aloud, he went on, "Mr. X is an UNSUBan unknown subject. Someone with a personal motive, say a jilted lover, or an impersonal hired gun.
"Several problems with that. The biggest, it makes no sense for a lover to lay the murder on me. From my interviews with Belle's friends, it's a wonder they didn't hint she was cheating, even if she wasn't."
Harriet said, "Friends like that, you don't need enemies. Or maybe you do. Folks that wish you ill are honest about it."
Jack agreed. "As for a contract killer, he could have stolen my .38, provided that was part of the deal. Belle
was
shot execution style, but" he shook his head "I just don't buy it. Among other things, why shut off the electricity? Better yet, why leave it off?"
From the kitchen, Dina said, "I thought it was to confuse the time of death."
"The killer may have thought that," Jack said, "but immersion in jetted, hundred-some-degree water would have affected it, too. Possibly more."
"Why would a hit man care about the time of death?" Harriet said.
"He wouldn't. Whether the power was on or off goes to establishing an alibi."
Dina said, "Either way, Brett Dean Blankenship as the killer doesn't make sense, either. Why steal your gun, murder your ex-wife, then try to run you down with his car outside the police station?"
Harriet gasped. "Run you down?"
Noting Dina's neat subtraction of herself from the crosswalk incident, Jack said, "Aw, he missed me by a mile." He winked at her. "Excellent question, though. If he had the smarts to set me up, he'd have planted more evidence, tipped McGuire to Cherise Taylor's involvement with the kennel setupsplenty of loose ends available to wind around my neck."
"If," Dina said, "he knew about the kennels."
"He tailed me too often not to. Much as I'd like to believe I spotted him every time, there are thousands of small white cars in this town."
"Okay," she said, "except I still don't understand why you bothered talking to his mother."
"Process of elimination." Jack couldn't articulate the sensory cues a personal space exudes. Home isn't merely where the heart's supposed to be. It's where it beats loudest.
The house's jazzy exterior trim and Mary Blankenship's sporty red car were at odds with someone still enamored of hewed-plank paintings and rooster lampshades. The decor was as time-warped as her life. Brett Dean had commandeered the reclinerthe dad chairbut remained the lazy, indulged kid she'd supported, cooked for and cleaned up after since the man of the house disappeared from the pictures atop the piano.
