Old Chaos (9781564747136) (20 page)

Rob spent the afternoon in his office, ostensibly reorganizing the Investigations staff but mostly staring out his window at the hill above the parking lot. Because Mack had been cremated, there was no burial service. Rob didn’t want one, but the funeral had not brought a sense of closure. The only way to gain release would be to find out who had suppressed the landslide hazard warning. As of yesterday, that investigation was out of Rob’s hands.

Try as he might, Rob could feel no urgency about Drinkwater’s death, though it was probable the two cases were linked. Rob didn’t care who had killed Fred, but he did care, a lot, about who had suppressed the warning. The irony of his situation did not escape him. He wondered what the state investigator was doing. With
his
case.

Outside an east wind shook the branches of the vine maples on the hillside. A cold, dry day.

Well, it wasn’t his case. He thought of his cousin Charlie. Might as well say it was Charlie’s case.

Brooding, Rob pushed the files on his desk around, shuffled them, piled them in reverse order. He had moved Jake Sorenson and Todd Welch from Corky’s department to Investigations and bumped Linda Ramos up to acting sergeant, acting because she had not yet passed the sergeant’s exam. Thayer Jones, who
had
passed, had refused the promotion. Thayer was a twenty-year veteran. Like Corky, he wanted to coast to retirement.

Rob had asked for Corky’s computer nerd, too, but Corky balked at that. Rob could have ordered the move anyway, but he didn’t want to antagonize Corky, who had been surprisingly cooperative over the loss of two good men. That could wait. Jeff Fong had computer savvy.

Impatient, Rob yanked out the folder marked
drinkwater.
Jeff would be calling in soon with preliminary results from the autopsy. Maybe Fred had died of chagrin. Rob extracted the crime scene photographs and put on his reading glasses.

“You’ve got to stop them!”

Rob’s pulse jumped. “What the hell?” He shoved himself to his feet with a jab of pain.

Lorenz Swets, three hundred pounds of enraged barge captain, shook off the desk sergeant’s restraining hand and glowered at Rob from the doorway.

Sergeant Howell was out of breath. “Sorry. He just bulled his way in.”

Rob waved a hand. “It’s okay. Come in and sit down, Larry. When did you get back?”

Huffing, red in the face, Larry sat in the visitor’s chair. “This morning. Three weeks on the river, and I come home to this. Shit. Inger’s spitting bullets.” His voice took on a plaintive tone.

Rob appreciated the anticlimax. Inger was a strapping lass, but her husband weighed twice as much and out-topped her by half a foot. It was a tribute to the strength of her personality that she had him cowed.

“You’ve got to stop them,” Larry said again, earnest.

“By them, I guess you mean the state investigators.”

“They took her computers, mainframe and laptop, and hauled off all kinds of paper records. What are they after? I don’t understand. The hill that slid, it was like a blob of Jell-O on a warm griddle. How can they blame Inger for a fucking landslide? You gotta stop em, Rob.”

“I was the one who called them in.”

“Inger told me Beth McCormick—”

“Beth okayed it. It was my idea.”

Larry gaped.

“About the records.” Rob maintained eye contact. “There was an irregularity in the county’s approval process when those houses at Prune Hill were in the planning stage.”

“Is that all?” Larry’s voice squeaked.

Rob shrugged—and winced. Have to remember not to shrug. “If Inger has a beef, tell her to come to me. I want to talk to her anyway.” But not about the state’s investigation.

“About the mudslide?”

About her affair, if any, with Fred Drinkwater. “About the way the county operates,” Rob said smoothly. “We’re in a muddle here because of Mack’s death, and nobody knows the way things are supposed to work in the courthouse better than Inger. I’m ignorant. I always let Mack deal with the commissioners. Tell Inger I’ll be calling her.”

Larry was frowning, his eyes unfocused. “Uh, yeah, sure. Hey, what’s the word about the developer, Drinkwater? I hear he’s dead.”

Watch it, Rob said to himself. “Unattended death. That means we have to look into it.” After fifteen minutes of soothing obfuscation, Larry left looking less irate than when he showed up.

Rob riffled through the pile of photos and took another look at the death scene. Bizarre. Way too peaceful.

Drinkwater wasn’t sitting, exactly. He was
lolling
on an upscale deck chair, legs extended on the footrest, towel draped chastely across his lap, arms limp. His head was turned to the right, his eyes were closed, and his mouth hung open a little as if he had just fallen asleep or passed out. A whisky glass half-full of some cloudy yellow liquid sat on a small table near his right hand. A second deck chair, empty and upright, angled toward him as if someone had been talking with him, but there was only one glass. A third deck chair was shoved back against the wall, perhaps stored there. The water in the spa shone unnaturally blue under the SOCO lights. Bizarre. And something was missing.

The phone rang. “Lieutenant Neill,” he said, absently and inaccurately.

“Hey there, Undersheriff.”

Word had got out. Rob grimaced. “Hi, Jeff. Did the ME have preliminary comments?”

“Unofficial ones. Hedged around with weasel words.”

“Gotcha.”

“Somebody used a choke hold on Drinkwater.”

“No kidding?” Rob rubbed the skin between his eyebrows. “I don’t buy it. Fred would have struggled.”

“Maybe he did,” Jeff said. “The body voided. There’s minor postmortem bruising, too, as if it was rearranged.”

“Even so.”

“Doc thinks he was probably out cold.”

“Drunk?” That made some sense. If I’d just killed half a dozen people in the name of profit I’d head for the bottle, Rob reflected. Or a bridge to jump off.

Jeff was giving the blood alcohol level. High but not paralytic. “He may also have been drugged. We’ll have to wait for toxicology.”

Rob sighed. “Time of death?”

Jeff chuckled.

“What?” The ME was notorious for refusing to commit himself on the time of death.

“The evening after the mudslide. Sometime.”

That was apparently as useful as the ME was going to be, lacking the rigorous analyses the lab would conduct. Patience, Rob told himself, signing off.

It was getting dark out. He finally left an hour later, having e-mailed everyone their reassignments and touched base with the state investigator. Then he went home to Meg. Halfway there, what was missing from the death scene photographs came to him. Nude or fully clothed, Fred Drinkwater would not have been caught dead without his cell phone. It should have been lying on the small table alongside the hypothetical second glass. Somebody had rearranged things, all right.

Kayla drifted in and out of doped sleep. The plastic surgeons had harvested a segment of bone from the iliac crest of her pelvis the previous day. They would use it to reconstruct her cheekbone, but they thought she ought to heal a bit before they performed the first of what would be several surgeries on her face. She had wanted them to go in and get it all over with, but that wasn’t likely to happen. How long, she wondered—when she was able to wonder. Mostly she just drifted.

The pain in her pelvis more or less balanced the pain in her cheekbone, leaving her, she thought dopily, suspended over a pit of pain. Something wrong with that image.

Image. “Have to change my image,” she muttered.

“No shit? What do you have in mind?”

She blinked her good eye—her remaining eye. “Charlie.”

“That’s me.” He was eating something. “Would you like a French fry?”

“That stuff’ll kill you.” Her mouth watered. The surgeons didn’t want her to chew yet.

“Naw. I’ll suffocate under a pile of student lab reports first.” He popped another fry into his mouth. “I brought your mail.”

“Mm. Snail mail?”

“And e-mail. I printed the e-mail up for you. Lots of good wishes. I zapped the penis enhancers and the Christian debt removers first. What the hell is Christian debt? Forgive us our trespasses?”

“Ow. Don’t wanna laugh.”

“Okay.” He chewed peacefully.

That was the good thing about Charlie. One of the good things. If you didn’t want to talk, he didn’t force conversation. Her eye closed, and she sank into comforting darkness. She woke to nightmare again, drowning, reaching out.

“Hey, Kayla.”

“H-hold me.” It was amazing that she didn’t mind it when Charlie saw her cry. And he didn’t try to sweep her into his arms and carry her off on his white horse either—just let her grip his hand hard. The vision of Charlie as a White Knight tickled her, and she gave a watery giggle.

“That’s better. Okay now? It’ll fade.”

A lot you know. The resentful thought surfaced, but she was grateful.

He looked at his watch. “I have to leave. Your mom will be here tomorrow, right?”

“I don’t want to see her.”

“Sure you do. Tell her you need a new television—digital, big flat plasma screen, satellite dish.”

That did make her laugh. Kayla never watched TV. She saw too many old people anesthetized
by Jeopardy!
and the soaps. The thing was, Charlie didn’t watch the tube either. Too busy with his precious rocks. “Oh God, your dissertation! Weren’t you supposed to defend it this week?”

“Tonight.”

It was five
p.m.
according to the big wall clock. She stared at him. “Are you out of your mind? Get out of here. Go read a book or recite your mantra, or whatever you do to prepare for intellectual crises. I may be a self-absorbed bitch, but I’m not that greedy for attention.”

He stared back. His eyes were an utterly dazzling blue and never mind that they were shadowed with sleep-deprivation.

“Go away. Now. And call me,” she said, “as soon as you know.”

He didn’t say anything, but the smile he gave her took her mind off her misery for the next three hours. That was when he called.

Though Meg did her best with dinner, it was a glum and mostly silent affair. Rob made a stab at helping with the dishes but wasn’t up to their usual banter. She suppressed her irritation. He had a right to gloom.

At ten she sent him upstairs to lie flat, which he promised to do, though she could hear him talking on his cell. Maybe he was calling his daughter. That thought reminded her to call her own child. When she did, though, she found that Lucy was studying for a big examination—all her exams were big these days. Meg clicked her phone off and went to make sure the front door was locked, an urban habit she was unable to shake. She saw a light come on across the street and took the phone from her pants pocket.

“Hey, Charlie, you’re home early.” He usually got in around eleven.

“Oh, hi, Meg. How are you?” He sounded odd, as if he were at the bottom of a well or floating in space.

“Fine. How’s Kayla?” Maybe something had gone wrong with the bone harvest.

“Uh, sore and grumpy. Uh. I think she’ll be okay.”

“Want a cookie?” Meg had baked in anticipation of cop swarms in her kitchen. The swarms hadn’t materialized yet, but they would. Rob’s new investigation team was meeting next day.

“Sure. I’m hungry.” He sounded surprised.

“Come when you’re ready.”

“With you in ten.”

Charlie was definitely spaced, Meg decided. Probably tired— that was a long drive, especially with side trips to the hospital. She started a pot of coffee and heaped a small plate with cookies. She could hear creaking noises upstairs. Rob pacing the floor. Maybe it helped him think, but it wouldn’t improve his back.

Oh stop fussing, she told herself and went to the kitchen to await Charlie.

He took longer than he said he would.

“It doesn’t matter.” She waved his apology away. “Coffee?”

“Uh, sure. I, uh, had to call my dad.”

She poured a mug full and went to the fridge for milk. “You look dazed. What’s the matter?”

He rubbed the back of his neck, grinning. “I guess I don’t believe it’s over. They accepted my dissertation. I don’t even have to revise it.”