On the Run (30 page)

“And that young man who was killed in the rollover accident?”

“Not involved in either the drugs or Eddie’s death. Doesn’t bring him back, of course, but I think it’s a relief for the parents to know that.”

“I’m glad to hear it too.”

Deputy Hamilton gave Abilene a sideways glance, as if he’d like to know more about this sudden announcement of her married status. His gaze dropped to her left hand. No wedding ring. But he was too polite to pry, of course, about something that wasn’t a police matter.

Abilene was jiggling on her toes, looking decidedly uncomfortable even if he wasn’t prying, so I said, “We’d better get our shopping done so we can get back to the house and the emus. Thanks for bringing us up to date.”

“You haven’t found any more stray bullets out there, I take it?” He sounded serious enough on the surface, but I heard an unexpected undertone of tease.

No, no more stray bullets. Although we did capture one imitation
survivalist.
But I decided Deputy Hamilton didn’t need to know that and went along with the tease. “No. Although Abilene did find a mysterious green object.”

“Green object? Something suspicious looking, you mean?”

“Oh, definitely.”

“Don’t move it, whatever you do,” he commanded. “It could be explosive. Are there wires or anything attached? Any writing on it?”

“No wires,” I said solemnly. “No writing. And we’ve already moved it. But we definitely think it may be explosive.”

He grabbed a deputy’s ever-present notebook out of his pocket. “How did it arrive?”

“By emu express.”

A blank look, and then Deputy Hamilton leaned back against the Coke machine and grinned. “You’re putting me on, aren’t you, Mrs. Malone? You really had me going there for a minute. Strange green object,” he scoffed. He tucked the notebook back in his pocket. “So what was it? Fur ball coughed up by that cat of yours? Or maybe feather ball belched up by one of those emus?”

“Actually, it’s an emu egg. Which may explode into a real live emu any day now. We’re trying to hatch it. Not personally, of course. With a heating pad.”

“And it’s actually green? You’re not still putting me on?” he added suspiciously.

“Green . . . well, bluish-green to be more accurate . . . is the honest truth. And big.”

“That’s interesting. I wouldn’t mind—” He broke off with a sudden glance at Abilene. I was almost certain he’d started to say something about coming out to see the egg and then changed his mind because of the information Abilene had dropped on him. “Well, good luck with your hatching, then.” He lifted the can in a small salute, and we watched until he drove off.

Abilene’s face had an uncharacteristic woebegone look, but she made no comment as he disappeared around the bend.

“Nice guy,” I said.

“Nosy cop,” she muttered.

We bought fresh milk and eggs and headed back out to Dead Mule Road. A bank of dark clouds loomed off to the southwest, and my skin prickled with that feel of a coming storm. I waited for Abilene to say something about her “Mrs.” proclamation, but, as usual, she wasn’t big on explanations. Finally I brought up the subject myself.

“I was surprised when you told Deputy Hamilton that you were Mrs. Morrison. I thought you intended to use your Tyler name now.”

“Yeah, I do. But . . .” Her smooth brow, beneath the slight curl of blond from curling iron, furrowed, as if this were a problem she didn’t know how to handle. “Legally, no matter what name I use, I’m still married.”

True. Escaping abuse in the middle of the night in a Porsche did not constitute divorce.

“Deputy Hamilton isn’t really a . . . a nosy cop. I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t fair. He’s nice, and I think I could . . . really like him. But, however awful my marriage to Boone was, I’m still married to him. And it wouldn’t be right, to . . . get involved.” She sounded troubled but resolute.

I was surprised. This was not the attitude many people had in this era of now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t marriages. I was also impressed by her admirable sense of right and wrong. However troubling and inconvenient and, given Boone’s abuse, even unfair the situation might be, she was still married to him.

“Do you . . . understand?” She peered across the center console of the motor home at me, as if she wasn’t certain she understood herself.

“Yes, I think I do.”

“Do you think I’m being silly? I don’t love Boone. I never did. I never wanted to marry him. And I know he had a girlfriend in town. It didn’t matter to
him
that he was married. But . . .” Her voice trailed off uncertainly.

“No, I don’t think you’re being silly. We shouldn’t base our actions on someone else’s sins, no matter how tempting it might be to justify what we do that way. I think you’re taking the high road here, being strong and wise and moral. I’m proud of—”

I broke off when Abilene gave a kind of snort. I glanced over and saw her lower lip wobbling. She blinked rapidly, and I realized both snort and blinks were an effort to hold back tears. I suddenly felt tearful too. Abilene’s young life hadn’t been a picnic. She’d never received enough hugs or praise or reassurances of her value as a person. The knowledge gave me an ache inside.

Yet Abilene, who’d managed to survive being shoved into an unwanted marriage, the responsibility of three children, and a husband who deliberately broke her arm, was not about to succumb to the weakness of tears now. She lifted her head. “You’re not going to get all sloppy and sentimental, are you?” she muttered.

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

“Good.”

“But I am going to tell you, whether you want to hear it or not, that I’m proud of you. I’m proud of your strength of character and your standards. And if I had a granddaughter, I’d want her to be much like you.”

Another wobble of lip told me I might not be the only one about to go sloppy and sentimental here. I knew Abilene wouldn’t want that display of emotions in herself.

“You’re also one humdinger of a booby-trap builder. But if you build another one without including me, I may take another pair of horse clippers to your hair. And this time you’ll wind up with a hairdo that will make you look like ol’ Ute’s twin.”

Abilene’s mouth dropped open as she took in my praise/ threat. Then she nodded solemnly. “Okay, it’s a promise. No more solo booby traps. I’ll write it in blood if you want.”

“A simple notarized statement will be sufficient.”

Abilene grinned, tears safely under control now. “If I’d ever known either of my grandmas, which I didn’t, I guess I’d want them to be just like you. Kind of grumpy sometimes but . . . nice.”

So then it was my turn to snort and do the blinking routine as we stopped at the gate and Abilene got out to unlock it.

We had lunch, tuna sandwiches, and then decided we had time to haul the somewhat worse-for-wear capture net over to the burn pile before the coming storm arrived. I didn’t see any lightning, but thunder rumbled in the distance. First we demolished the brush enclosure, so no other camper/skulkers might be tempted to spy on us. Then Abilene grabbed hold of one side of the net and I got the other, and we dragged it between us.

“How’d you ever get this thing out there and up in the tree all by yourself?” I panted as we slogged our way through the tall weeds. The net seemed to catch on every stick and rock.

“I just kept imagining it was Boone, and then I’d give it another yank or kick. Worked great.”

We reached the burn pile and draped the bedraggled net over the coffee table. We could have a fine bonfire later this fall, although, given the contents, it wasn’t going to be one that invited hot dogs and marshmallows.

Just a few days in the bright sunlight had faded the brown fabric on the sofa to a lighter shade. Wild animals had gnawed on the clotted blood, shredding the fabric and exposing tufts of stuffing. The smell was gone now, and the sofa could have passed for any discarded old piece of furniture rather than a site of death.

But even if the physical remnants of death were gone, I still had a Technicolor image of Jock and Jessie on the sofa. I stepped around behind the sofa so I wouldn’t have to look at where they’d once sat in death, intending to rest a minute before we went back for the fallen branches in the brush enclosure.

And spotted something.

30

I stepped closer to the back side of the sofa. Still squeamish about touching it, I kept my hands clasped behind my back as I leaned forward. A gust of wind whipped my hair in my eyes, and I shook it away.

Abilene glanced up from where she was pulling burrs and cheat grass seeds out of her socks. “What’re you looking at?”

I was looking at long hairs. One was tangled in the faded brown fabric, the other, about to blow away, fluttered in the wind.

Nothing surprising about that. A hair or two caught in the fabric of some piece of furniture is hardly unusual. Over time, I’ve probably vacuumed enough of my possum-gray out of various pieces of furniture to knit myself a bikini. If I were into bikinis.

But these were two long
blond
hairs. Who in the Northcutt household had long blond hair? Certainly not Jock or Jesse. An image of a Dolly-Parton-sized blond immediately came to mind, but these blond hairs couldn’t have come from her. We’d moved the bloody sofa out to the burn pile before she arrived.

Unless these blond hairs had already been there, caught on the sofa during some earlier visit. When she was doing . . . what?

Mikki had never been on my list of suspects. Greedy, yes. She liked expensive things, and she’d snatched up anything valuable in the house like some kid set free in a toy store. She wasn’t on good terms with Jock and Jessie. She resented their favoritism toward the first wife. She also hated penny-pinching to provide for Frank’s kids.

Could she have assumed that if Jock and Jessie were dead, their assets would flow easily to Frank and thus to her greedy fingers? Was she willing to kill to make that happen? She’d been both surprised and resentful that there was no will, which was keeping the big assets out of her reach.

But could all that add up to the clever, ruthless, cold-blooded killer Ute had warned us about?

“Ivy, what
are
you looking at?”

“Come see for yourself.”

Abilene circled the sofa. She confirmed my identification, which didn’t take some high-tech expertise in forensic science. “A couple of blond hairs.” Unspoken was
So what?

“Don’t you think that’s odd? Blond hairs? And don’t you think it’s odd that they’re on the back side of the sofa? That’s not where a person’s head would rest if he or she were sitting on the sofa. How did they get there?”

The sofa had stood perhaps six or seven feet away from the back wall in the great room. The space behind it was part of the walkway between front door and dining room. But a person would have had to be
crawling
behind the back side of the sofa in order for hair to catch on it at that height.

I had a quick vision of shapely Mikki on hands and knees behind the sofa, gun tucked into her belt. Mikki rising up, her greed and hostility exploding in—

The vision collapsed right there. Jessie had been shot from in front of the sofa, not by someone creeping up from behind.

“Maybe the Northcutts entertained a group of very short, blond survivalists who chased each other around the room,” Abilene said. I wrinkled my nose at that facetious suggestion, and, sighing at my lack of imagination, she added, “Or maybe they came from one of Frank Northcutt’s kids. Either of them could have long blond hair. And they’ve visited here several times.”

True. And kids could leave traces of themselves in the strangest places. I’d once noted an odd blotch on my grandniece Sandy’s bedroom ceiling. Turned out, agile and gymnastically inclined Sandy had tried a unique method to eliminate a spider and left a footprint up there.

“Does it look bleached or natural blond to you?” I asked.

Abilene leaned closer. “I don’t see dark roots, but it would probably take lab tests to tell for sure. Or DNA tests could identify who the hairs came from, couldn’t they?”

“I think the hair root has to be attached.” I leaned closer. Yes, root was attached on at least one of these hairs. “And they could do an identification only if there were DNA samples from the other person to compare with.”

I couldn’t see us dashing around, snatching hairs from the heads of possible suspects for comparison. Nor could I see Deputy Hamilton excitedly ordering expensive and time-consuming DNA tests if we did come up with comparison hairs. It was a big stretch to think these two anonymous blond hairs might be connected to Jock and Jessie’s deaths. And yet . . .

“I wonder why we didn’t notice them earlier? The blond stands out against the brown fabric.”

Abilene grimaced. “Maybe because we were too busy looking at dead bodies and blood.”

Right. And swatting at flies. Neither had we done an in-depth examination of the bloody sofa when we helped Frank wrestle it off the deck. We were just anxious to get the unpleasant task done.

Abilene turned her back to the rising wind and folded her arms. The darkening clouds had moved closer. The wind lifted a spiral of leaves around her. “Okay, what possible connection do you think two blond hairs could have with Jock and Jessie’s deaths, since you apparently do think it?”

Put so bluntly, I couldn’t come up with anything specific. “It just seems odd, that’s all,” I said finally. “Like the bullet in the deer head over the fireplace. Very odd.”

“The only blond we’ve actually seen around here is Frank Northcutt’s wife, Mikki. Do you suspect her?”

“I guess I don’t really
suspect
her . . .”

“But you don’t really
not
suspect her.”

“She was on Ute’s list of suspects,” I pointed out.

“But she was at a cosmetologist convention in Austin at the time of the deaths.”

“Supposedly.”

Abilene didn’t reject my “supposedly” as I thought she might. She nodded slowly, acknowledging that even though Mikki had told Frank she was going to the convention, that didn’t necessarily mean she’d gone there. “But even if these hairs are hers, they could be from a long time back. She was here at least once with Frank when Jock and Jessie were alive.”