Thicker Than Blood (8 page)

Rachel was staring at her feet. The heels of her loafers were worn, she’d have to remember to get them to the shoe shop. “A couple of years ago, he pretty much saved my life. I should have gone over there sooner. I shouldn’t have waited.”

“Lord, girl, if people did all the should-haves, my Mama wouldn’t be going to church on Sundays ’cause we would all be in Heaven.”

“If I ever find out who sold him that stuff, I swear I’ll kill him.”

“Guess it wouldn’t do much good to tell you to lighten up.” Goldie leaned forward as a boy from the cleaning crew crossed the street. “What you doing out here by yourself, Peter?” she called. “You got all that work done?”

Peter grinned widely as he got to the curb and waved something that looked like a piece of dark paper. “Those others are slow. But they be done soon.” He seemed to chop his sentences to a manageable length.

“What you got there?” Goldie frowned at the envelope. “You didn’t take anything from the offices did you?”

“No.” Peter looked pleased with himself. “Not from an office. I don’t do that. You know I don’t.” Rachel noted a dimple in his left cheek that made his face winsome.

“Then where did that come from?” Goldie pointed at the dark rectangle in his hand.

“Bathroom.”

“Give it here.” She held out her hand.

Peter held it above his head and Rachel could see it was a brown envelope, about five by seven inches. Abruptly, his resistance evaporated and he held it out. “Didn’t steal it. Found it.”

“Not a lot of difference between stealing and finding,” Goldie said, taking the envelope from his outstretched hand. “Depends on whether the owner lost it before you found it.”

Peter hung his head.

Goldie ruffled his hair, fondly. “I know you didn’t mean anything by it, but I sure don’t want anyone getting the idea you stole it.”

“Looks like it’s just an empty envelope,” Rachel said.

“It’s an envelope, all right.” Goldie was opening the flap. “But not quite empty.” She shook some of the contents into her palm. The little mound glowed purple in the streetlight. “What the hell is this?”

Rachel stared at the small sand-like heap in Goldie’s hand. “Let me see.” She shook the envelope into her own hand, got up and moved to the yellow light over the garage’s pedestrian exit, where the color became whitish. “Peter!” she called. “Where did you find this?”

He had started back across the street. “Bathroom,” he called. “Like I said.”

“They doing H over there or what?” Goldie muttered. “I’m not sure I ever seen any myself, but I expect that stuff ain’t sugar.”

Peter stood on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, his shoulders slumping dejectedly.

Rachel gazed at him a moment, then strode across the street, squatted down at his side and looked up into his cherub’s face. “Can you show me where you found that envelope?”

Goldie, moving as deliberately as ever, arrived at Rachel’s elbow. “You know what it is?”

“All I know is it looks exactly like the stuff that was in the teapot in Lonnie’s kitchen.”

“The stuff that did him in?”

“Far as I know, yeah,” Rachel said. “Peter, show us where.”

The office, almost as big as a conference room, was paneled with a dark wood that showed red in the grain. On the gray plush carpet, a blue-and-white-print Victorian sofa and two pale blue, velvety wingback chairs sat across from a huge, highly polished teak desk. The top was barren of papers.

“This is where you found it?” Rachel asked Peter.

He shook his head. “Not here.” He pointed to a door on the other side of the sofa. “In the bathroom, like I tell you.” Nervously, he chewed on a fingernail.

Goldie gave the room an appraising gaze. “This guy don’t like cheap bric-a-brac does he?”

“What makes you think this is a guy’s office? The chairman of the board is a woman.”

“No joke?”

“Nope.” Rachel moved across the thick, plushy carpet, opened the door Peter had pointed and flipped on the light. On the shelf over the sink sat a marble mug and two onyx-handled brushes, one obviously for shaving.

“If this belongs to a woman, she’s got a beard,” Goldie drawled.

“Might be Jason’s office,” Rachel muttered distractedly. “He was the only exec high enough to rate an office like this, except the chairman.” She picked up the mug. Something inside it rattled.

Goldie frowned. “The guy who got himself killed?”

“He was general manager of this place.” Rachel was peering into the mug. There was no soap inside. Instead there was something small and shiny. She tipped the cup over her palm and a cuff link rolled out. On its silvery face was the etched form of a tortoise.

She motioned to Peter. “Show me exactly where you found this envelope.”

“Over there.” He pointed.

“In the toilet?”

“No,” he giggled. “Behind it. I was doing the mop. I bump it.” Peter pointed to the lid of the tank. “That envelope, it fell down behind.”

Rachel examined the envelope. The rim of the flap was damp. “Look,” she said, as much to herself as to Goldie, “he fit the flap over the edge of the tank and the lid held it there. But why?”

Goldie was still staring at the tank. “Because if he was a coke freak or something, he couldn’t exactly leave the stuff laying around.”

“But in a regular office envelope? Not wrapped up or anything? Any user knows you have to keep the stuff clean and dry.”

“You’re making a big mistake if you think folks always do things sensible.”

Rachel’s gaze was fixed on the envelope’s contents. “No,” she said softly, running her tongue over dry lips. Her eyes, huge and dark, found Goldie’s. “I don’t think Jason was a user. But I think I might be looking at why he was killed.”

Chapter Fourteen

“You telling me he was a dealer?” Goldie’s voice cracked with shock.

“No.”

“Then what are you getting at?”

Rachel didn’t answer. She moved to Jason’s desk.

Peter was shifting his weight from one ragged tennis shoe to another and flicking anxious glances from one woman to the other.

“It’s okay,” Rachel said to him. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

Goldie patted him on the shoulder. “The others are gonna be finished by now. You go on out to the van and tell them to get in and wait for me.”

He nodded, clearly glad to be done with it. The door sighed on its hinges as it closed behind him.

Rachel opened the desk drawers and began pawing through the contents.

Goldie peered over her shoulder. “What the devil you doing now?”

“They haven’t packed up his shaving mug. I thought there might be a schedule book in here. One of those things where executives write down every thing they do. But I don’t see one.”

“You think he wrote down ‘Thursday, ten a.m., meet with Colombian drug dealer’?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, seeing as how you think he got himself killed because of something we just found, if it’s all the same to you, I’m gonna get the hell out of here.”

Rachel closed the drawers. They both headed for the corridor. Goldie was pulling the door closed when a sharp voice behind them split the silence.

“Who are you?”

Rachel jerked upright and dropped the cuff link, which skittered across the floor tiles and landed at the feet of the woman who had spoken.

Pale hair gleamed in the bright light of the hall as Charlotte Emerson, in a cobalt-blue cloak, bent over and picked it up. She looked tense when she straightened and, despite her size, formidable. “Where did this come from?” She eyed them both, then recognized Rachel. “Good heavens. What are you doing here?”

Eyes meeting Charlotte’s, Rachel said with as much aplomb as she could muster, “This is Goldie—she’s in charge of the office-cleaning crew. Goldie, Charlotte.”

“I lost something,” Goldie said.

Rachel nodded. “While she was working here tonight. I came over to help her look for it.”

“I see. Is this what she lost?” Charlotte held up the cuff link.

Rachel paused on the edge of saying yes, but Charlotte probably had seen Jason wearing the cuff link. “No, that’s something we found on the floor while we were looking. We should’ve just put it on the desk. I didn’t realize I still had it.”

Charlotte turned to Goldie. “What did you lose?”

“A…ring.”

“Well, it wasn’t just any old ring,” Rachel added. “It belonged to her mother, and to her grandmother before that. Goldie lost weight and the ring was loose. The last time she remembered having it was when she was cleaning the bathroom in there.” Rachel tapped the door to Jason’s office with one hand and smoothed her shirtfront with the other.

The stiffness in Charlotte’s shoulder relaxed. “What does it look like, in case someone turns it in?”

“Gold, with a…a red stone,” Goldie said carefully.

“A garnet,” Rachel added smoothly. “Is there someone we could call to report it?”

Charlotte smiled. “I’ll report it myself in the morning. When I turn this in.” She held up the cuff link.

“Sorry to have disturbed you,” Rachel said.

“Quite all right. I was just a bit startled to find someone here so late.”

It wasn’t until later that Rachel began wondering what Charlotte was doing at the office at that hour.

Outside, tiny drops of mist hung in the air and the pavement was damp.

Goldie let out a low whistle. “You just may be the best liar I ever heard, and I have heard me some genuine champions.”

“You weren’t so bad yourself.”

“We are real lucky she didn’t come in when you were going through that desk. We would’ve been in shit so deep we would’ve been drawing flies for the rest of our very short lives.”

“Funny,” Rachel mused, “I wasn’t even thinking about that. All I was trying to do was get out of there without her seeing this.” She reached under her shirt tail and drew out the envelope.

A car passed, its taillights making red holes in the mist.

“Christ almighty, girl. I forgot about that friggin’ envelope.”

Rachel tapped a corner of it against her forehead. Her hair was damp, and not from the weather. “If what’s in this envelope is the same as what I found in Lonnie’s apartment, I think they got it from the same place.

“Oh, my God,” Rachel said softly.

“What?”

“Lonnie hates garlic.”

“You are making about as much sense as a valley girl on LSD.”

“He couldn’t eat garlic. Said it tore up his stomach.”

“So what?”

“When I found him, he smelled of garlic.”

Goldie frowned. “Don’t make sense. Nobody went in there and forced him to eat Italian sausage.”

“But the whole bed smelled of it.”

“So maybe he was doing an Italian hooker.”

Rachel shook her head, trying to make sense of it.

“You thought the stuff you found in his kitchen and what we found in that envelope came from the same place,” Goldie said.

“They sure look alike. It’s possible they came from the same place.”

“And where might that be?”

“The water quality lab.”

Goldie’s mouth dropped open. “You gotta be joking.”

“Lonnie delivered a lot of packages to them. Come to think of it, the guy I talked to in the lab asked about him. Maybe Lonnie found out they were making some kind of drug and stole a couple of fixes.”

Goldie’s right eyebrow and shoulder rose in unison. “Must be pretty potent stuff to just up and kill him like that. Mmm-mmm. A drug factory, right here in River City.” She looked back at the InterUrban building.

“But that don’t explain the garlic,” Goldie went on. “And it sure don’t explain Mr. High-and-Mighty Jason getting himself offed by some maniac driving a car.”

The crew had spotted Goldie and was beginning to pile out of the van. “It’s raining,” one of them called.

“So what are you doing standing there? Waiting to drown?” Goldie called. “Get back inside. I’ll be there right quick.”

Rachel was staring at nothing, hardly aware that the mist had become fat drops of rain. “Maybe it does explain about Jason. What if he found out his own water quality lab is making street drugs?”

Chapter Fifteen

Goldie said it under her breath: “We gotta call the cops.” Raindrops were beginning to collect on her eyelashes.

Rachel shoved the envelope under her shirt again to keep it dry, her eyes locked on Goldie’s. “I can’t. At least not yet.”

Goldie cocked her head. “I guess that’s nobody’s business but yours.” As though defying the rivulets of rain that ran down her cheek to her chin, she crossed the street to the van.

“Hey!” Rachel called. “Thanks for your help.”

A hand waved as the van pulled away from the curb, the wipers sweeping across the windshield.

When Rachel reached her apartment, she locked the door, stopping only to grab a towel for her dripping hair before taking a dinner plate from the cabinet and pouring out two tiny piles of granules, one from the plastic bag she had found in Lonnie’s teapot, the other from the brown envelope.

“Bingo,” she said softly to Clancy, who was watching her intently from a bookcase shelf.

The two samples looked identical.

Oh, Lonnie, how could you do this to yourself?

She drew a deep breath, let it out slowly and decided it probably wasn’t wise to leave this stuff lying about.

Standing on a stool, she unfastened one of the two light fixtures on the bedroom ceiling, removed the bulb, and inserted the packets. The room would be a little dim with only one light, but it would have to do.

Exhausted, she shucked her damp clothing, left it in an untidy muddle on the floor, and got into bed.

The first rays of sunlight on the bare windows woke her. Rachel rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but her mind began to chatter about the tie tack she had found in the Caddy’s dented fender.

Finally she rose, took the small piece of silvery, coin-shaped metal from the cigar box and gazed at it. The tortoise gazed back. Too bad she’d had to give Charlotte the cuff link.

There couldn’t be many pieces of jewelry with that design. Perhaps she could find out where it was from. Hadn’t Jason said it was Indian? But there were dozens of Indian groups in the Southwest alone.

Should she just go to Charlotte, tell her the truth? But she’d have to explain why she hadn’t called the cops, and that might risk her contract with InterUrban. She’d have to think it through.