3 Malled to Death (17 page)

“It’s okay, ma’am. It happens like this sometimes—your memory shorts out—when folks have had a fright. You might think of something later. If you do, give us a call.” The policeman handed Kyra a card.

“Will do,” she promised.

There was more than “good citizen” in her voice and I caught her eyeing him speculatively. At six-one or -two with a muscled build and shaved head, he had a certain rough attractiveness that clearly appealed to Kyra. From the appreciative look in his gray eyes, I thought he found her appealing, too. I imagined she’d find some reason to phone him and was relieved that she felt well enough to be scoping out date prospects.

“He was cute,” she said as we exited the hospital.

“Mm-hm,” I agreed out of habit, taking a deep breath of the fresh night air. It had been too hot in the ER, and hospital scents always make me tense. I’d spent way too much time in the hospital recovering from my leg injuries.

“Do you want me to drop you at home and tuck you into bed?” I asked. “Or do you want something to eat?”

“Definitely food. Getting knifed makes me hungry.”

We settled for drive-through burgers and hit the Giant close to Kyra’s for pints of ice cream before pulling up at Kyra’s cottage. The smell of grilled beef was making my mouth water and I’d taken a bite of my burger before Kyra even got the door unlocked. Since her arm was in a sling, I carried both our dinners and plopped them down in front of the red brick fireplace in Kyra’s living room. Actually, it was her aunt Harmony’s living room; Kyra had moved into her aunt’s house when she agreed to manage the store for a year. Full of cushy floor pillows, sofas soft enough to swallow you up, and Indian, Persian, and Navajo rugs piled three deep on the floor, the room was a welcoming space. Pale blue paint stenciled with a star motif added a note of whimsy, as did kerosene-style lamps wired for electricity. Kyra turned one on and it cast a yellow glow.

She wiggled her arm out of the sling and held out a hand. “Food,” she demanded.

I knew better than to comment on her ditching the sling so soon. “Do the losers frequently lie in wait after a bout to get revenge?” I asked after we’d munched through most of our burgers and fries. I peeled the plastic off the top of my coffee ice cream and scooped up a spoonful.

“Only the psychos.”

I thought about it. Lexie had been pissed off. Could she have waited outside for Kyra to emerge, followed her to her car, and attacked her? That must have been what happened, and yet . . . I scrunched my eyes closed to bring the scene back and replayed it in my mind: Kyra walking toward her car, the dark figure springing out in front of her. My eyes popped open and I said with certainty, “She was waiting for you.”

“So she asked someone what my car looked like or where to find me.” Kyra shot me a half-exasperated look. “Don’t go making a federal case out of a simple ‘I’m pissed at you’ beating.”

“Knifing. Still, you’re probably right. The simple explanation is usually the right one.” I shook off my uneasy feeling. It had to have been Lexie because who else would want to hurt Kyra? I couldn’t help thinking that if Kyra weren’t a trained athlete, if she didn’t have superb reflexes and hadn’t reacted so quickly when the attacker pounced, that she might have suffered a far worse wound than a cut on her arm.

Twenty-four

• • • 

Fubar woke me
the next morning by leaping onto the pillow beside me and thrusting his muzzle into my face. He interrupted another nightmare, this one also featuring the blood-stained bathroom, but this time it was my mom lying dead in the stall. I jerked awake and clasped Fubar convulsively.

“Mrrp,” he said. He leaped down again and I opened one eye to see him sitting proudly beside a vole corpse. His mangled ear gave his head a lopsided look, but there was no mistaking the smug look on his face. It was the same expression generations of Hemingwayesque big-game hunters sported in photos with their foot planted on the rib cage of a lion or rhino.

“Good job,” I murmured, closing my eyes again. Why had my cat made it his mission to rid the neighborhood of rodents? He got perfectly good cat food in his dish every day, served up by his favorite slave—me—and still he had to bring me little trophies? At least he hadn’t plopped this one on the bed, as he had the dead ribbon snake he’d caught a couple weeks earlier.

Convinced that he’d impressed me with his prowess, he picked up the dead critter and trotted out the bedroom door. I was wondering if I should call my shrink about those sleep meds when the doorbell rang. I was wide awake and out of bed before the echoes died down. I guessed I was a little on edge from the dream and Kyra’s run-in the previous night. Belting my terry-cloth robe around my waist, I hurried to the front door, hoping it wasn’t more bad news.

I peered through the spy hole. Jay Callahan stood on the walkway. I stepped back, astonished and revoltingly pleased to see him. Tightening the robe’s belt, I opened the door.

Jay beamed at me and held out a cup of Starbucks coffee. “I’ve got cinnamon buns in here,” he said by way of greeting, rattling the paper bag he held in his hand. He wore a striped cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up so the corded muscles of his forearm stood out. Pale freckles nestled in the light sprinkling of red-gold hair and I thought inconsequently that he must need gallons of sunblock in the summer.

“That’s the magic password.” I opened the door wider.

He came in, staring around with open curiosity. I’d owned the home for a bit over a year and I was still working to cover up some of the damage done when it was a rental property, but Jay didn’t say anything about the hole in the drywall behind the door or the missing bit of baseboard in the living room. “You play guitar?” he asked, crossing to the instrument and picking it up.

“Yep.” I took a swallow of the coffee, watching him strum gently.

“I sing.”

“Really?”

“Maybe we can form a duo, make our fortunes in Nashville.” He sang a phrase from a Garth Brooks song in a surprisingly deep voice.

I applauded, laughing. “You might be ready for the Grand Ole Opry, but my playing definitely isn’t fit for prime time.” Taking the guitar from him, I placed it in its case. “How are you feeling?”

Putting a hand to his side, he said, “Pretty good. It twinges when I stretch, but I changed the bandage myself and it’s healing okay. No sign of infection. It’s the price I pay for getting careless.” His eyes narrowed slightly.

“To what do I owe this early morning . . . visit?” I’d almost said “invasion,” but I was actually pleased to see him so I decided to forgive his unannounced arrival on my doorstep.

“You’re not working today, right?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had the actual weekend off, as opposed to a Monday and Tuesday, say, and I was reveling in it. Of course, it’d be a lot more fun if someone hadn’t attacked my best friend last night.

“Me either,” he said with satisfaction.

“Then who’s giving the shoppers their sugar fix, plying them with calorie-laden treats?” I mocked gently.

“I hired a new employee. She looks enough like Mrs. Fields to be her twin; in fact, I have trouble not calling her Mrs. Fields. I’ve decided she can handle things on her own today.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Because I wanted to see you.”

Wham!
My eyes widened, but before I needed to say something, Fubar provided a welcome distraction by poking his head in to see who had invaded his territory without permission. At the sight of Jay, or, more specifically, Jay’s athletic shoes, I’d swear his eyes lit up with glee. He pounced. Fubar’s main joy in life, right up there with derodenting the world, was shoelaces. He liked nothing better than to tangle shoelaces, and frequently discombobulated the neighbors by jumping out of the low boxwood hedge to wreak havoc on their laces. I knew the man next door had switched to loafers purely to confound Fubar.

“Nice kitty?” Jay said doubtfully, looking at the large, rust-colored cat with the mangled ear and truncated tail who was going to town on his shoelaces. Before I could intervene, he stooped and picked up Fubar, holding him at face level, back legs dangling. “Now, fella, I hope to be spending a fair amount of time here so you and I are going to have to come to an understanding. If I bring you a feather toy or your own set of shoelaces next time I come, will you leave my shoes alone?” Jay didn’t look at me, he kept his eyes on Fubar’s, but I got the feeling he was talking to me. Not about the laces, but about spending time together. Warmth eased through me and I couldn’t help but smile.

Fubar twitched his tail back and forth and Jay took that as agreement. “So we’re agreed: shoes are off-limits.” He set the cat down. Fubar disappeared into the kitchen and I heard his cat door push outward and flap shut.

“I think that went well,” Jay said with a mock-serious nod.

The last strange man through my door had been equally unexpected—Detective Anders Helland—and he, too, had been kind to Fubar. I didn’t know why that thought crossed my mind. “Did you say something about cinnamon buns?”

When he handed over the bag, I headed for the kitchen and grabbed two plates out of the cupboard. Jay followed me, ignored the gaps in the tile where my handyman had abandoned the task when Spring Break arrived, and sat at the table. “Is it okay that I’m here?” he asked.

I caught a faint undertone of anxiousness. “Sure,” I said casually, not wanting to let on exactly how okay it was.

“Did you have anything planned for today?”

“Just finding out who shot at my dad and knifed Kyra.”

“Tell me.”

In those two syllables, his voice went from bantering to serious. I gave him details of the shooting at my parents’ house which he hadn’t heard on the news, and told him about the attack on Kyra last night. He munched his way through a cinnamon bun while I talked, and licked his fingers clean before I could hand him a napkin.

“The attacks must be related,” he said when I finished.

“To Zoë’s death,” I said, ripping off a small section of cinnamon bun and popping it in my mouth. I talked around it. “It’s too much coincidence, otherwise, although I suppose the attack on Kyra might be a fluke.” I scrunched up my face doubtfully. “She’s not connected to the movie at all, like Ethan and Zoë.”

“Okay, leaving Kyra out of it for the moment, what do you think the link between Zoë and your dad is?”

“Grandpa and I already talked about that.” I told Jay our theory and what we’d learned about Margot Chelius.

“You work fast,” he observed with lifted brows. “How did you find all that out?”

He was too damn quick. “Let’s just say my grandpa is a handy guy to know when you want to find stuff out.”

“A wiretap?”

I shook my head.

“You bugged her?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

Jay chuckled and shook his head. “Your grandpop’s a piece of work. Do the terms ‘felony’ and ‘jail time’ mean nothing to him?”

“Not much,” I admitted.

He went back to being serious. “So you’ve eliminated the actor who got fired. That leaves Jesse Willard, the Bleek guy, and Chelius. If your grandpop’s on Chelius, you and I should tackle Willard or Bleek.” He pulled a coin out of his pocket. “Heads it’s Willard and tails it’s Bleek. You call it.”

He flipped the quarter into the air and it spun in silver circles. I felt like that coin; my head whirled and I didn’t know which side was up. Jay’s presence had a lot to do with that, I knew, and it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant feeling.

“Tails.”

Twenty-five

• • • 

A visit to
Jesse Willard’s house elicited the information that he and his father were at a local park. Mrs. Willard, who gave us the information, was a plain woman two inches taller than either her husband or son, with a rawboned angularity emphasized by an unflattering shirtwaist dress. She eyed us carefully when we knocked on the door, and then called her husband on his cell before telling us where he and Jesse were. She had an air of grim determination about her and as we left I wondered if she’d always been like that or if it was new since Jesse’s return from the war.

We pulled up to the park, a city-owned property with several miles of walking/jogging trails, a large pond, and sports fields, currently populated by hardy middle schoolers engaged in a soccer tournament. The day was sunny and springlike, and I was suddenly happy to be out in the fresh air and not wandering the climate-controlled halls of Fernglen. A large, shaggy dog bounded toward us, a Newfoundland cross of some kind, and I knew from the way Jay crossed his arms at stomach level that he was more bothered by his wound than he let on. The dog didn’t leap on us, but contented himself with sniffing our shoes thoroughly. I patted his massive head and he licked my hand as a young woman trotted up with a leash in her hand.

“Sorry,” she said, clipping the leash to the dog’s collar. “Josh doesn’t always listen.”

“I’ve got a cat like that.” I smiled.

As she hauled Josh away, Jay pointed to a section of park where men sat hunched over small tables playing chess. “That’s where Mrs. Willard said they’d be.”

We walked along the lakeside path and I stopped to watch six newly hatched ducklings step into the water, following their mother without hesitation, before continuing on to the chess area. I spotted Jesse immediately. He sat with his head propped on one hand, studying the chessboard as his opponent moved a pawn. As soon as the man’s fingers lifted from the piece, Jesse pushed his bishop across the board and slapped the chess clock. He had a cast on his hand—probably from punching the restroom stall door, I thought. Mr. Willard leaned against a low rock wall behind the men, watching his son play. A slight breeze riffled his dishwater-colored comb-over and he looked more relaxed than I’d ever seen him.

“Jesse loves chess,” he said in a low voice when Jay and I joined him by the wall.

“And he doesn’t have any trouble playing it, since—?”

Willard shook his head. “No. For whatever reason, that part of his brain is completely intact. He plays as well—better—as he ever did. This”—he gestured to the park around us—“is the only time he forgets, I think.”

“Have the police cleared him?” I asked. Jay wandered a couple steps away, watching the chess match, but I knew he was listening to every word.

Willard’s hound-dog eyes looked even sadder, if possible, the lower lids drooping to expose a fraction of their red interior. “I don’t think so. But they haven’t arrested him. They questioned him for hours, but Jesse stuck with his story that he found Zoë in the bathroom, that she was already hurt when he arrived. He tried to stop the bleeding, he said”—Jesse would’ve been trained in the same self-aid and buddy care techniques the military taught me—“but then I think he experienced a break of some kind, had a flashback, and became convinced his unit was under attack.”

“That’s maybe when I saw him run out of the bathroom.”

“Could be. Anyway, without a weapon or a motive, the police don’t have enough to arrest him, our lawyer says, so he’s free for now. Jesse doesn’t need this, Officer Ferris.”

“EJ.”

“He’s got enough on his plate without the police hounding him. I didn’t think he’d even met that woman—”

“Wait—he knew Zoë?”

“Not knew her, knew her,” Willard said, clearly unhappy. “He had a run-in with her two days before she was killed.”

Jesse glanced up from his game and shot us a look, as if he knew we were discussing him, and then refocused on the chessboard.

“What happened?” I asked, getting a sinking feeling in my stomach. Jesse having a “run-in” with Zoë was not good.

“Apparently he argued with her. She knocked into him with a shopping bag and he allegedly ripped it away from her and flung it across the hall. She yelled at him and he shoved her, apparently. It wasn’t a big deal.” The way Willard’s shoulders drooped said he knew it
was
a big deal. It was potential motive.

I’d never heard so many “apparentlys” and “allegedlys” in one sentence outside a TV courtroom show. “How did the police know about this?”

“She told one of the guys she worked with and he repeated it to the police. They found part of the encounter on the mall video.”

Jay and I exchanged glances. “Who did she tell?”

“Some guy named Bleek told the police about it. I remember that because it makes Jesse’s situation bleaker,” Willard said without a hint of humor. “If only he had a job, I think it would help him. He needs to feel like he’s got a purpose in life, that there’s a reason to get up in the morning. But prospective employers take one look at him . . .”

Jesse’s game must have ended because he leaned across the table to shake hands with his opponent, whose grumpy expression suggested he’d lost, and crossed to where Jay and I stood with his dad. His hand smoothed over the burn and the place where his eyebrow had been, as if trying to cover them up, or maybe the scar pained him. “EJ,” he said with a smile. “Good to see you. And—” His brow furrowed when he looked at Jay, as if he knew he should know his name but couldn’t come up with it.

“Jay.” He shook hands with Jesse.

“Right. The cookies.”

“You win?”

Jesse nodded and focused on me again. “Thank you for helping me yesterday. That police guy, the detective, he told me what you did.”

I felt myself blushing. “I’m glad the docs were able to do something for your headache.”

“Yeah, now if only they could unscramble my brain.” The words could have been bitter, but he said them with a wry humor.

“You’re getting better every day, Jesse,” his father said.

“I know.” He stood silently for a moment, looking out across the park, and then turned back to us. “I watched a video of that Congresswoman who was shot in the head in Arizona. I think it was filmed more than a year after she was hurt, and she was still speaking in one-word sentences and her husband—the astronaut—was having to translate. You could see how hard it was and she cried sometimes. She was working at getting better, though. That’s me. I’m working at it.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that that wouldn’t sound patronizing or falsely cheerful, so I nodded my agreement. Mr. Willard patted his son’s shoulder.

“We’re trying hard to find out what really happened to Zoë Winters,” I said after a long moment.

“I appreciate that,” Jesse said. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t hurt that woman.”

• • • 

After the Willards
left, Jay and I strolled around the lake, close enough that our shoulders brushed. We hadn’t talked about it first, but we veered as if by mutual agreement onto the path that wound past stands of cattails and water grasses. An early red-winged blackbird called from atop a plume of grass that seemed too thin to support his weight, and I spotted the ducklings I’d seen earlier, now swimming with confidence in the middle of the pond. The sky was a pure blue unfuzzed by humidity, and a colorful kite shaped like a dragon rose from the far side of the water, towed by a boy of seven or eight.

It seemed almost sacrilegious to spoil this gift of a day with worry, so I deliberately put all thought of Zoë, and the attacks on my parents and Kyra, and Jesse Willard’s plight out of my mind. “How did you come to be a recovery agent?” I asked Jay instead. “When the other boys in elementary school were saying they wanted to be firefighters and soccer stars, did you pipe up with, ‘I’m going to be a recovery agent’?”

He laughed. “Not quite. I wanted to be a baseball star, actually. I pitched for my high school team—”

“Where?”

“In Oklahoma. I got a scholarship to OSU, but I wrecked my shoulder in an ATV accident two games into my first season. No more baseball.” He rotated his shoulder, as if in memory of the pain. “It was probably a good thing,” he said, “because I could spend all the time I would’ve spent practicing baseball on actual studying.”

“Did you?”

“Hell, no. I joined a fraternity and studied beer and sorority girls for a couple of years until my folks threatened to stop paying my tuition if I didn’t get my grades up. So, I buckled down and got a degree in math. It took an extra semester because of all the goofing off I’d done, but I graduated cum laude.”

I tripped over a rough patch on the path and Jay gripped my elbow to steady me. “Thanks.” His hand slid down my arm and his fingers interlaced with mine. The feel of his palm against my own made it hard to concentrate on what he was saying.

“Then I looked around and wondered how I was going to make a living. I thought about getting my teaching certificate, but I had a friend who taught in a middle school and she talked me out of that, so I got a loan and went to grad school. Accounting.”

“You’re a CPA?” I pulled back and stared at him. I couldn’t imagine him behind a desk all day, crunching numbers. He had too much energy, seemed too restless, to be happy doing that.

He smiled at my astonishment. “My expertise is in forensic accounting. I joined the FBI straight out of grad school. I thought it was what I was meant to be doing, until . . . Anyway, when I left the FBI, I had enough to live on for a while and I traveled: the Philippines, Ukraine, Tahiti. I saw all sorts of spots that were off the beaten path, places I’d always wanted to visit. In Yemen, I ran into a man who’d been a guest speaker at the FBI Academy. He was working for Lloyd’s, looking to recover a yacht that Somali pirates had made off with. I helped him out, we got the yacht back, and I discovered I liked the work.” Before I could comment on his colorful history, he said, “What about you? How’d you end up in the military?”

I watched the dragon kite nosedive to the ground before answering. “Nothing nearly as interesting. I grew up in Malibu. Ethan made it big when I was still young, so I was a child of privilege, you might say. No athletic talents or performing abilities. My only competitive sport was power shopping. In high school, I got caught up with the wrong crowd and I woke up hungover after my graduation party and knew I needed something more than shopping, boys, and alcohol in my life. I marched right down to the nearest recruiter and enlisted.”

Jay gave me a humorously admiring look. “You took teenage rebellion to new heights. I’ll bet your parents reacted the way you hoped—went ballistic.”

Frowning, I said, “I wasn’t trying to piss them off.” Was I? “I just felt I needed to do something more real.”

“So you went from the land of make-believe to the realest of the real. The military. War.”

“I did,” I said slowly, never having thought of it that way before.

Jay stopped walking and tugged on my hand until I was facing him. A slight question in his eyes, he leaned forward and let his lips brush mine. When I leaned into the kiss, he put his arm around my waist, pulled me closer, and kissed me properly. A warmth that was more volcanic than cozy fizzed through me. Jay’s chest and thighs felt steady and solid against mine and I wondered if he could feel my heart beating. My arms twined around his neck, but then I drew away with a gasp.

“Your side!”

“It’s fine,” Jay assured me, trying to pull me into his arms again. “It’s feeling better by the second, in fact. Hardly know it’s there.”

I laughed and gave him a quick kiss. “Still, we don’t want to aggravate the wound.”

“Yes we do.”

A gaggle of teens bicycled past, one of them towing a skateboarder. They gave us knowing looks and one of the girls giggled. Jay released me with a rueful grin, his hazel eyes fixed on mine. “Lunch?”

“Sure. Then we can get back to figuring out who’s behind the murder and the attacks.”

“That romantic streak of yours is what attracted me in the first place. Let’s do it.”