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Okay, I might be able to see how from his perspective that was only a “little” threatening. Given that he was a young male of a certain age, threats probably escalated past that once in a while. For me this was verging on panic because I wasn’t a young male but the mother of one. I took a deep breath and tried to think before I reacted.

“You told Fernandez all of this?”

“Yeah, I did. And he wrote it all down, too, so it must have meant something to him.”

“I’m sure it did.” Suddenly my warm cocoa didn’t look very appealing anymore. Nothing did. I didn’t know whether to be glad that Ben had told me this, or upset that he hadn’t told me sooner. Either way there was little I could do about it. Still, it shook me up.

“Mom, are you going to cry about this? Because if you are it won’t help things any.” Ben hated to see me cry.

“Then I’ll try not to. You’re right, though, this upset me. Not at you so much as at Frank. It just boggles my mind that he’d do something like that. The more people tell me about him, the less surprised I am that somebody killed him. He didn’t exactly make a lot of friends, did he?”

“I don’t think so. He wasn’t any friend of mine, anyway.” Ben sighed and finished his drink. “Well, I need to go check in with the suite-mates and schedule another study session for Philosophy of Religion. I keep hearing how hard that final is going to be.”

“Then go do it. Thanks for stopping by.” We stood up and I hugged him. He’d gotten past that point of being embarrassed by a public hug once in a while. I probably couldn’t get away with it on a daily basis, but I could definitely get more hugs than I had any time since fifth grade.

I watched Ben walk away and then I took our mugs back to the counter. Maria wouldn’t even let me wash them before she shooed me away for the evening. Since I needed to start studying for finals and finish up final projects for my classes I let her have her way. Maybe after seeing Ben I could go home and get some school work done. It made a poor example for my son if I didn’t get grades at least equal to his while we both attended the same school.

Driving home, I gave everything I’d learned a lot more thought. I didn’t come up with any big conclusions, other than the fact that probably several people had wanted Frank Collins dead. He seemed to have gone out of his way to make enemies of people, and I didn’t even know all that much about him.

Pursuing that line of thought wouldn’t get me very far without more facts. I tried to shake it off and think about other things. Before I got out of the car on the driveway, I breathed a prayer to ask for God’s presence and peace. I needed both. Maybe for once I could have a restful evening at home, just studying. It sounded like a good idea. I could stop by Dot and Buck’s house first and “borrow” a dog to keep me company and be set for the evening. Getting back into a normal routine would be good.

F
riday started off more like a normal day for me than any other had in the week. Getting a dog to join me for the night helped immediately. I was limited by which ones would happily climb the open staircase up to the apartment, but that still gave me several choices. For company, I’d gone with Dixie’s sister Sophie. The mostly-lab female was the mother to the puppies that had all gone to new homes in the last two weeks. She probably felt her “empty nest” as much as I felt mine. Whatever the case, she’d been good company for me in the apartment overnight.

I got up, enjoying the chill in the air that hung around for the first few hours after sunrise. It might have been cool, but it sure wasn’t anything like what I was used to in the Midwest a week after Thanksgiving. In Missouri this time of year we’d have frost, maybe even snow. And no matter what the precipitation situation, morning would more than likely mean temperatures below freezing.

Here in Southern California there are freshmen going to school with Ben who have never seen snow unless their parents have taken them up to the ski resorts. They might have gone to one of the big promotions at a theme park where a machine pulls up in a parking lot and spits cold stuff that’s promoted as “snow” but I didn’t count that.

The coldest mornings here might make me put on jeans instead of my shorts, and even think about a jacket, but that was about it. The crazy part about weather here is that no matter what the season, you need to dress in layers because the temperature fluctuates so much in the course of a day. When the area anywhere fifty miles around Los Angeles suffers drought, which it has for the last several years, it’s easy to see that the whole region is basically desert. And like any desert, when the sun goes down the temperature may drop twenty or thirty degrees. It still makes me marvel that I’m as likely to need a sweatshirt after dark on the fourth of July as I am on Christmas Eve.

This morning a light jacket felt good as I went out to do my normal work around the kennels. Buck let me pitch in now that he wasn’t feeling uncomfortable around me because of what had transpired with Ben. So we fed dogs and hosed out kennels and mostly got slobbery wet noses pushed into the palms of our hands while we loved on the dogs.

“Thanks for lending me Sophie last night,” I told him when we were done. “I’ll bring her back up to the house once I give her a good walk.”

“That’s fine. She needs the company right now.” When I went back inside she also tried to convince me that she needed some of my cereal while I ate breakfast. It didn’t work. Afterward we took a brisk walk around the neighborhood, Sophie trotting along checking out every bush and tree. She had a gait that looked like prancing when she wasn’t as interested in the plant life along the way. Of course she spent a major amount of time investigating, but we still managed a good walk.

When we got back to the house, Dot gave Sophie her breakfast and ushered me in for coffee, which I certainly didn’t turn down. I was happy to be on friendly terms with the Morgans again. They felt like substitute family to me as well as landlords, and I didn’t want to give up our relationship.

Now that Dot and I went to the same church, attended the same Christian Friends group and I lived in her backyard apartment, almost every area of my life would be impacted if we were on the outs with each other. Thankfully we could still be friends instead.

“You missed a visit by Detective Fernandez while you were at work and school yesterday,” Dot told me once she sat down at the table with me, her own cup of coffee in hand. “But then he didn’t want to talk to you anyway, so it wasn’t much of a loss.”

“I expected you would get at least one more set of questions this week, because he had plenty I couldn’t answer Wednesday,” I told her. “He wanted to know all kinds of stuff about the subcontractors for the remodel, and I couldn’t remember the names.”

“That was mostly what he wanted this time. I got out my folder that I’ve been keeping. I think I impressed him.” Dot had kept her own meticulous set of records since she’d employed Frank and it had turned out to be a good idea.

“He wasn’t too happy to hear about all the billing errors that I’d found in Frank’s dealing with his suppliers and subcontractors. I think it just gave him three or four times the number of suspects he wanted.”

“Were there that many billing errors?” I reached over to the plate Dot set out and picked up one of her apple cinnamon muffins. They were still warm, and I figured I better get one before Buck came into the house, because once he did, he and Hondo would both want one. Buck letting the dog eat one, or at least half of his own, would upset Dot. It would upset Sophie too for that matter, because Hondo was the only dog that got to break the “no people food” rule.

“I’m generous to call them that. When I pointed them out to Frank I always called them mistakes or errors, even though I was pretty sure after the third one or so that I found that he was trying to slip things by me and by the suppliers.” Dot’s nostrils flared in aggravation. I could just imagine those conversations she had with Frank. He might have been a tough customer, but I didn’t think he could out-argue Dot. So far I hadn’t met too many people who could.

“Did he correct the errors, or whatever they were, when you pointed them out?”

Dot waggled a hand in a noncommittal gesture. “He corrected some of them. I think his subcontractors straightened out a lot of them on their own. Especially once I took to copying Frank’s information and passing it on to the subs. The plumbing contractor was particularly interested in what I had to show him.”

“I remember seeing the truck here a lot, but I don’t remember the guy’s name.”

“Frank was using Leopold Plumbing this time. I might have gotten Ed Leopold into that, because I knew one of his workers wanted the hours. After all this mess, I’m sorry I ever suggested him to Frank.”

I had to imagine that Frank Collins had not been easy to work with. “Still, it sounds like you tried to do the right thing.”

“I really did. Matt, the worker from Leopold, is a nice young man, and he’s trying to move up in the business as much as he can.” Dot took a sip of her coffee and made a face. “Ugh. I need a warm-up. Want one?”

Once she refreshed both our cups she sat down again, just in time to welcome Buck and Hondo into the house. For a change she was firm about not feeding the dog muffins, and Buck seemed to agree with her. I noticed, however, that he took his plate and the newspaper into the living room where we couldn’t see him around a corner.

“Where was I?” Dot asked after all of that.

“Matt,” I prompted. “You said he needed the hours and he’s trying to move up in the business. What would keep him from doing that?”

“I know him through Candace,” Dot said as if that explained everything. In some ways, since I know Dot well, it did. Her daughter had Down syndrome and lived in a group home in Camarillo so if Dot knew Matt through Candace he likely had some challenges in life. “He went through some of the job training classes that she attended at one point. He’s much younger than Candace, so it must have been one of the more recent sets. And he doesn’t have as many problems. I think he’s dating Candace’s roommate Lucy.”

So there were several ties between Dot and this young man. I said as much, and she nodded. She looked a little worried as she explained all this to me. She stopped talking for a moment, looking thoughtful. “You know, Detective Fernandez asked a lot of questions about Matt.”

“More than he asked about other subcontractors and their helpers?”

Dot waggled a hand. “Maybe a few more. But now that I think of it, he was focusing on the young men who worked with all the contractors. I guess that makes sense after what I told him before.” Her brows wrinkled together. “And Matt is one of the taller, skinnier ones among them. He’s built a lot like Ben. You’d never confuse them from the front, because Matt’s dark-haired and clean-shaven….”

“While Ben is closer to blond and has that awful goatee right now, which I hope he’ll outgrow soon,” I finished for her so she didn’t have to.

Dot shrugged. “At least he didn’t dye his hair blue his first semester. I don’t know how many freshmen I’ve seen on campus over there with blue or purple or maroon hair. Why do they think that’s attractive?”

“If you figure it out, let me know,” I told her. “It’s not attractive to me, but I’m not eighteen, either. I don’t think it’s supposed to be attractive to me.”

I looked out the kitchen window to where I could see my apartment. “This all keeps going back to the apartment one way or another doesn’t it? Did Frank have anything to do with building your apartment when it was new?” I seemed to remember him making claims in that regard, but I wasn’t sure how truthful they might have been.

“In a way he did. He was somebody else’s ‘helper’ at that point. I’m not too sure how much better he’s gotten at the business, to tell the truth,” Dot said with a grimace. “When we were building he mostly pounded nails and painted, the kind of work it didn’t take much skill to do. He certainly hung around enough after things were done and we were moving the girls in.”

“Was he married then?”

“Not yet, although he did marry rather young. I think he would have waited longer, but he made a mistake there and found a girl whose family insisted they get married immediately. If I remember right, Tracy has several older brothers.” Dot still wore a look of distaste over Frank’s behavior.

That made me think of another question I wanted to ask her. “Does Candace’s original roommate from the apartment still live around here?”

“No, and we might have Frank to blame for that, too,” Dot said tartly. “Susie got very interested in boys and young men shortly after the girls moved into that apartment together, and I know Frank egged her on. I always hoped it wasn’t more than that.”

I felt my stomach give a little lurch. “But you’re not sure?”

“Not totally, no. I always felt thankful that Candace didn’t ever go through much interest in relationships and, well, sex to be perfectly honest. Developmentally she tests out at about thirteen, where all of that starts to really catch fire for a lot of girls, but it never did for her. Susie was another story.”

“Did it lead to problems?”

“Some. Her parents had a lot of talks with her, and Buck and I certainly kept a close eye on the place, since they were on our property. We were trying to give the girls as much freedom as we could and still monitor them. I suppose most of Susie’s behavior was pretty natural. But either she just didn’t have many inhibitions or she didn’t have any impulse control. After about six months her mother decided that they’d had enough and Susie moved to a group home in a very sheltered environment out past San Bernardino. We haven’t heard from them in years.”

“Wow. Sounds like it was heavy stuff to deal with.”

“Definitely. The more I think about Frank Collins, and hear things about him, the more I could just kick myself for giving him another chance remodeling that apartment this time. And now you and I are both in a fix because I have no idea what we’ll do about getting somebody to finish up there.”

I’d thought about that, and had no great ideas to offer. “The bulk of what’s unfinished is in the bathroom. Maybe Ed, the plumbing guy, would want to take over.”

“It’s worth a try. I might call him and see what he thinks of the idea.”

“Great.” I stood up and gave Dot a quick hug. “But I have to get going. Thanks for the coffee and the chat. They were just what I needed.” Like a good guest I rinsed my cup and put it in the sink and cleaned up any crumbs I’d left behind. I called out a goodbye to Buck in the other room and headed for the apartment. I probably had as much studying and catching up to do as my son, with finals coming up soon.

Saturday morning, as Buck and I worked in the dog runs, a familiar car pulled up on the driveway. The nice, shiny sedan shouted “unmarked car” even without Ray Fernandez getting out of it with a steaming carry-out cup of coffee in hand. He looked sharp for a Saturday in nicely faded jeans and a tweedy sport coat. A silk T-shirt appeared to be the one concession to the weekend. His outfit made me wonder if Armani made blue jeans. I had no clue, but if they did, Fernandez would wear them. His certainly fit him well in a way that looked classy.

He strolled over to the dog runs, and greeted us with a nod of his head. His expression was mostly unreadable thanks to dark sunglasses. “Mr. Morgan, Ms. Harris.” It was hard to tell if he was saying hello or taking roll call.

We both said hello to him, and Buck made a move to turn off the hose he was using to clean out a run. I finished sweeping with the wide broom, taking care not to push anything in Fernandez’s direction. Those loafers of his probably cost more than the bulk of my closet contents put together.

“I’ll be done here in a minute, Detective. Did you want to speak to both of us?” Buck asked as he went to the front gate of the run.

Fernandez held up his free hand. “Don’t stop on my account, Mr. Morgan. I really came by mostly to ask you to come to the station at some point and look at a few pictures for me.”

“That must mean you found something. Did you find the gun?” I blurted out.

Fernandez inclined his head, and I expected him to shut me down, but he surprised me instead. “We did. It was in the storage tank of the unit we towed in as evidence.” Once again I didn’t envy the crime-scene tech who had that job.

“So could you trace it? Were there prints on it?”

Fernandez shook his head. “I don’t know why you ask these kinds of questions, Ms. Harris, when you know I can’t tell you the answers.”

“If you’re going to continue looking at my son as a suspect, I feel we have a right to know things like this.” It might not have been the most solid argument, but it was the only one I had.

Fernandez took a drink of his coffee. “I can see your point, but it doesn’t mean I’ll be sharing much information with you. I do appreciate the fact that you and Ben have been honest with me so far.”

My temper flared and I felt like asking him what he meant by “so far” but I kept that thought to myself. There was no need to upset a man who could arrest my son. “I am almost always honest with everyone, Detective Fernandez.”