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Gretchen finished wringing Greg Dempsey dry of any useful information, and she and September headed back outside to the department issue Jeep. Gretchen swung into the driver’s seat and September climbed into the passenger’s.

“What a shithead,” Gretchen observed as they drove away. “His wife gets strangled, carved up, and raped and all he can do is talk about what a bitch in heat she was.”

September nodded.

“Weasel knew Sheila from The Barn Door. He ever meet this guy?”

“Called him a narcissist,” September said. “We should talk to him about Dempsey. I know he checked on Dempsey’s whereabouts during the time Emmy Decatur was killed and basically cleared him.”

Gretchen snorted. “Yeah, what was that again?”

“Dempsey has the graveyard shift at a convenience store off Vick Road. The one in the strip mall. I think it’s a 7-Eleven. He was there. Cameras on him all night.”

She made a growling sound and said, “Maybe he switched the tapes.”

“He’s a bastard,” September said, “but I don’t think he’s good for it. He didn’t react when you introduced me just now. I was standing right there, but he barely noticed me. He didn’t send my artwork to me.”

“If it’s all connected.”

“You and Auggie . . . you think I’m reaching?”

Gretchen made a face. “Nope. I just wish assholes like Dempsey were wiped off the planet. All right, what’s next? This Jake Westerly?”

September said carefully, “Let’s go see the Schenks, Sheila’s parents.”

She made a grunt of acceptance. “I’m going to call this deputy—Dalton—and see what he thinks about Dempsey. I don’t blame him for wanting to pin the thing on him, but he sure dropped the ball.”

“D’Annibal basically squeezed it away from county.”

“Only after Emmy Decatur’s body was found,” Gretchen reminded her. “Sounds like Dawson was just sitting around on his ass like George does instead of getting anything done.”

“Is that the tack you’re going to take?”

Gretchen turned to September, a little surprised. “You want to get warm and fuzzy on a homicide case?”

“No.”

“I know you don’t like my style. And you know what? I don’t fucking care.”

“Why don’t you let me talk to him?” September suggested.

“Think you can do better?”

“Probably not,” she hedged. She didn’t want to get on Gretchen’s bad side, but good God, Sandler could be a downright bully sometimes.

“Fine, you take Dalton. After you talk to him, let’s go to The Barn Door, see if anybody knows this Westerly. Dempsey said Sheila liked cowboys and The Barn Door’s got that going in spades.”

Uncomfortable, September nevertheless kept her mouth shut. She would call Dalton and see if he had anything else to add to the investigation.

The Schenks lived in Portland on the east side of the Willamette River, and when Gretchen and September had explained what they wanted, Sheila’s parents were more than happy to talk to them—maybe anyone—about their daughter. They waxed nostalgic on her days playing elementary and high school soccer. “She always wanted to be a cowgirl, though,” her mother had said. “You just don’t know how hard she tried to get us to buy her a horse. I always said, ‘We live in the city, honey,’ but she didn’t care.”

“We moved from Laurelton to Portland when she was a sixth grader,” Mr. Schenk explained.

From the file, September knew that Sheila was about her same age. “What grade school?” she asked, her thoughts on Jake.

“Twin Oaks.”

September exchanged a look with Gretchen. Glenda Tripp had worked at Twin Oaks and Sheila had attended elementary school there. Gretchen then asked the Schenks about Sheila’s relationship with her estranged husband, and that was when the Schenks shut down as if someone had hit the
GAME
OVER
button. It was clear they didn’t much like Greg Dempsey, but when questioned about it, they kept trying to shift the conversation to happier days with Sheila. They finally admitted that Sheila and Greg just didn’t get along, but that’s all they would say.

An hour later, September and Sandler were heading back to the station when Gretchen took a detour into Taco Bell. “I can’t face the vending machine today,” she said, “and I don’t have time for lunch.”

“Tacos are fine with me,” September said as they walked inside.

“That mighta been a huge waste of time with the parents,” Gretchen said after they’d ordered, received their tray, and walked back to a table.

“Except for the part about Twin Oaks.”

“Yeah . . .” Gretchen frowned. “I wonder how Glenda Tripp got her job there,” she said as she bit into her taco.

“She didn’t go to elementary school at Twin Oaks,” September said, dragging from her memory information from Glenda’s file. “She went somewhere in Portland.”

“I remember that, too. . . .” She shook her head. “Could be coincidence.”

“Could it?”

“We gotta be careful about making connections when there aren’t any. Sheila Dempsey attended school at Twin Oaks until sixth grade, but she doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with the school since. Glenda Tripp was looking for a job, and found one at Twin Oaks.”

“Or . . . there’s something the two women share that’s centered around Twin Oaks,” September said.

Sandler grimaced. “Okay. We should check the current staff. See if any of them were there when Sheila attended and knew Glenda.”

“Okay.” September’s mind was already traveling back to the Jake Westerly angle, trying to figure out the best way to handle it. She didn’t believe he had anything to do with Sheila Dempsey’s death, but he did know Sheila, and he knew September, and well . . . she wanted to talk to him before Sandler or anyone else did.

They finished eating, tossed their trash into a bin, slipped the tray in its slot on the counter atop the garbage receptacle and headed back to the Jeep.

“I’ll check on the staff at Twin Oaks,” Gretchen said as they wheeled into the department lot. “And I’m gonna do some more background checking on that prick Dempsey.”

“I’ll call Deputy Dalton, and then see what I can find on Jake Westerly,” September said casually.

“Have George look into it. All he ever does is sit like a stone in front of his computer. Give him something to do.”

“Yeah . . .” September said, though she had no intention of doing so at all.

“If Dalton tries to do a little two-step, we might have to meet this deputy face-to-face and discover his level of incompetence firsthand.”

“Dempsey didn’t tell him about Westerly or much of anything else,” September reminded her.

“Dalton didn’t do shit,” Gretchen retorted. Then, “Maybe it is better if you talk to him.”

Ya think?
September wisely kept that to herself as well.

As soon as she got back to the station she put in a call to the deputy, who wasn’t in at the moment, so September was invited to leave a message. She told Dalton’s voice mail who she was and that she was following up on Sheila Dempsey’s homicide. After leaving her cell number, she hung up.

Next, she checked for Jake Westerly through her own computer and came up with an address not all that far from her apartment complex, and a number that, by the exchange, was clearly his cell.

Should she call him? Stop by? She didn’t even know what the hell he was doing any longer, and wondered if she should revive her Facebook account and see if she could find him that way. She’d deactivated the account, which she only sporadically looked at anyway, after she’d received the artwork.

The artwork . . . Jake Westerly. He’d been a classmate of hers in second grade and pretty much every grade since. But there were a lot of kids who’d gone all the way through elementary school and high school with September. Jake was just the one who’d made the biggest impression on her. She, Auggie, and May had been enrolled in public school after their father had gotten in a furious wrangle with the administration of the exclusive private school that March and July had attended. According to family legend, Braden had bellowed that they were a bunch of arrogant hypocrites with too much power for their paltry little lives, or something like that. So, September had gone kindergarten through sixth grade to Sunset Elementary, then moved on to Sunset Junior High, and finally Valley Sunset High. Jake Westerly had done the same.

Sheila Schenk Dempsey had attended Twin Oaks, but the family had moved and September had never known her, though they were the exact same age. But Sheila had been Jake’s hairdresser, so it was possible that Jake Westerly had known her before her parents moved from Laurelton to Portland. Could be random. Gretchen was right about making too many connections, too soon.

All September needed to do was ask him.

What did she know about him today?

Nigel had started his own winery shortly after Kathryn’s death, his fight with Braden, and his subsequent dismissal from Rafferty Enterprises. September had asked her sister July about the Westerly winery at July’s birthday party, which had taken place at The Willows. She’d learned that Nigel’s sons, Jake and Colin, had taken over the business, which was known as Westerly Vale Vineyard. Though September had pressed for more details, July hadn’t seemed to be interested in anything but her “date,” Dashiell Vogt, who stood on the fringes of the outdoor party, a glass of wine in hand, surveying the crowd but not really a part of it. Though July’s attention seemed riveted on him, September didn’t get the same hit from him. He was too aloof, his attention more often on Braden and March than July or any of the other women invitees. But September hadn’t seen July since and didn’t know what the current status was between them.

Another trip to The Willows might be in order, she decided now. And maybe one to nearby Westerly Vale Vineyard. Maybe that was the way to contact Jake.

Jake Westerly. Good God. Her mind wanted to slip to their time together, but she wouldn’t let it. With a sound of frustration, she dragged it back to the present. It was an effort to put thoughts of Jake aside, but she managed.

She put in a call to Detective Wes “Weasel” Pelligree and, after chatting with him about the state of his injury, which was healing fine and pissing him off more than anything because it was keeping him away from work, she asked, “You met Greg Dempsey face-to-face, right? Sheila’s husband?”

“Eh . . . I only went to The Barn Door a few times, especially after eating that seventy-two-ounce steak,” he said. “Dempsey was there once with Sheila, and they were in a corner, havin’ a big fight. He was mad ’cause she was there and he had to go to work. He told her to go home and she told him where he could stick that. Got kinda ugly and I was startin’ their way, when he stalked out.”

“You called him a narcissist,” September reminded him.

“Yep. From what Sheila said. You know the type: they’re only thinkin’ about what’s next for them. They’re bored with everythin’ you say. Don’t even hear ya. And everythin’ that comes out of their mouth is about them.”

“I know the type,” September agreed, thinking about both her current and ex-stepmother.

“You lookin’ at Dempsey for Do Unto Others?” he asked.

“Well, he sure can’t say anything nice about Sheila.”

“His kind can’t say anythin’ nice about anyone. Much as I’d like to take it to that guy, he didn’t kill Emmy Decatur, and if you check, he was probably puttin’ in the hours at work when the Tripp homicide went down, too.”

“You sound just like I feel.”

“How’s that?”

“Depressed. I want it to be Dempsey, too.”

They talked for a few more minutes, then September hung up, a smile lingering on her lips. Her cell phone rang a few minutes later and she recognized the ring tone as the one she’d assigned to her brother. She’d put a call into him and it had taken him a while to call back. She answered, “So you are still on the planet.”

“I’ve been busy. Portland’s got another task force and they want me to be a part of it.”

“It’s hell to be popular.”

“Yeah, well . . . you know what I want to do.”

“And you know what I said about that,” she responded.

“Don’t worry. It ain’t gonna happen. D’Annibal’s practically assigned me to the task force before I was asked. You guys are down to a skeleton crew with Weasel laid up.”

“Wes is getting better. I just talked to him.”

“Huh. Well, what’s the big news you alluded to?”

September smiled faintly and said, “Just checking to see if you’re ready for another sister.”

“Another sister? What do you mean?”

“Our current stepmama is pregnant with a girl.”

There was a suspended moment, and then he barked, “Rosamund? No way!”

“’Fraid so, Bro.”

“What month?”

September grinned. All of them always went to the same place. “January. But never fear, she’s naming it Gilda.”

“Bullshit.”

“That’s pretty much what I said.”

“This isn’t some kind of joke, is it?”

“No joke.”

September had left a message on Auggie’s cell when she’d gotten back from seeing Rosamund and March and told him to call her. She was glad Auggie was so sought after and unavailable so he would quit bugging her about Do Unto Others. Especially now, when Jake Westerly’s name had cropped up.

“I’m going to have to talk to our father,” he said in a long-suffering tone.

“Ah, you can skate for a while more. Rosamund’s already pregnant. A little late for changing anyone’s mind.”

“Man, I don’t want to deal with him.”

“Then don’t,” was September’s advice. “You’ve got along this far without him, let it go. Maybe after the blessed event you might want to meet your new sibling, but I wouldn’t sweat it till then. Me, I’ve got to go back. Rosamund barred me from the attic and basement, so until I talk to Dad, I can’t get to my grade school artwork short of pushing her out of the way and making a run for it.”

“Pregnant . . .”

“Ruminate on that some more. Meanwhile, I’ve got some interviews to take care of.”

“What interviews?”

“I’ve got three homicides. You know the drill. There are always interviews.”

“Who, specifically?”

“Good-bye, Auggie.”

“Damn it, Nine!”

“I can’t hear you. I think my cell’s breaking up. . . .” She clicked off and took a deep breath.