Bone Valley (20 page)

It might not
sound like it’s that hard to do, but let me tell you—running at top speed with armloads of M. David files wasn’t easy.

Two of the files dropped and I was too scared to stop and pick them up. So I kept up my fifty-yard dash, made it to my car, which fortunately I’d left unlocked on the theory that it was three a.m. in the middle of an orange grove and there wouldn’t be much transient traffic waiting to steal my purse and my Handi Wipes. Gasping now, I threw the files on the seat, got the key out of my purse and in the ignition in record time—if there isn’t an Olympic event for this, there should be—and I hauled buggy out of there.

With Miguel and his red pickup too soon on my tail.

There being no traffic on Sugar Bowl Road, I couldn’t weave and duck between other cars and had to count on speed alone to keep ahead of Miguel and his truck, and hope he couldn’t run me off the road. I had the passing thought that I should have punctured his tire, though with exactly what I wasn’t sure, and made a mental note to get something sharp and long to carry in my purse so I could puncture tires if this ever came up again. That should make passing security at the courthouse an interesting break in my routine.

Then I concentrated on driving as fast as an old Honda Civic can go.

Which turns out to be pretty fast. At least enough to keep me ahead of Miguel, who hung in there and kept honking his horn as if I somehow had managed not to notice he was following me.

By the time I hit State Road 72, where, despite the wee morning hour, there was traffic, and plenty of it, mostly trucks, I had enough of a lead to think.

And to conclude that perhaps I needed to consider giving up this B and E thing. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as it used to be.

For one thing, Miguel had not only scared me, but ruined my attempts at sneaking away without leaving a trace. Now there was a busted window, a jimmied filing cabinet, a copy machine left running, and M. David files in the black loam behind the office. Not to mention car tracks.

But at least there wasn’t a body—mine.

After he had tried to sweet-talk me into unlocking Rayford’s office door, Miguel had simply hurled his thin but strong body against it. The sound and the fury of the first hurl suddenly and thoroughly convinced me that I wasn’t really up to the task of rendering him unconscious with a flashlight, and inspired by the potential threat of imminent harm, I’d run into Rayford’s private bath—seeking a second locked door or a weapon or just in a blind panic—but lo and behold, there was a small window over the toilet and it didn’t have burglar bars.

So, okay, if Rayford had paid an expert to design his security, the man needed to seek a refund. Using the toilet as a ladder, I was up and out, not without some difficulty in juggling and grasping the M. David files, but I slipped through that window just about the same time Miguel busted through Rayford’s outer office door, and shouted, “Lilly, Lilly, it’s me. I won’t hurt you.” Or some such nonsense.

I decided his actions were louder than his reassurances—I mean, come on, you don’t convince a girl you are harmless by smashing in not one, but two locked doors—and I sprinted for the Honda like the horsemen of Armageddon were on my tail.

So here I was, twenty minutes after my mad-dash escape, dodging giant trucks on 72, and, suddenly, going home didn’t sound like a good idea.

I mean, Jimmie was spry, but old, and the Glock was at the bottom of the Peace River and Bearess was sleeping next door with Grandmom, and I wasn’t at all sure just how sturdy my doors were.

Calling the sheriff ’s department was out of the question, given that my front passenger seat was covered in the spilled paperwork I had stolen after I’d climbed in a window in someone else’s office without their consent, implied or otherwise.

As I whipped around a slow-moving and suspiciously weaving car, apparently scaring the probably drunk driver into spinning off onto the shoulder, I realized I had only one safe haven to go to.

Philip.

And so I went, spinning my Honda into his driveway at precisely 3:47 a.m. and banging on his door with rising levels of anxiety.

Philip was wearing a dark silk robe over his pajamas, nattily clothed in the wee hours of the morning, having taken the time to properly cover himself for company despite the shrill probability that it wasn’t the Avon lady calling, but trouble.

He looked so calm and
GQ
that I wanted to slap him.

But then I wanted to hug him, and did so in great relief, and we tumbled back into the house and he locked the door, and flipped on a light and studied me.

“No blood,” he said. “So what is going on that you need to—”

“Miguel is chasing me,” I said, and grabbed him for a second hug, and with my face muffled in his silk robe, I gave Philip the sixty-second version of my second outing of the night.

“Did he hurt you? Are you all right, Lilly?”

“Yes, fine, fine, but Miguel is out there, maybe still chasing me, and—”

“Then let me move your car into the garage and out of sight,” Philip said, like he’d had plenty of practice with this very type of thing.

Hell, he was a criminal-defense attorney in Florida. He probably
had
had practice with this sort of thing.

“And bring in the files in the front seat, would you?” I asked as I shut and locked the door behind him, my heart beginning to slow into its regular rhythm.

Philip was sitting
behind me on his king-size bed, his big, strong fingers massaging my sore neck. It felt delicious. So, okay, he wasn’t a trained Rolfer, but then he hadn’t busted down doors to try to kill me either. Besides, my skin still tingled from his recent devotions and our hot shower in the early morning. His legs straddled my hips and I could feel their pressure against me. I knew he wasn’t eighteen, but I thought he might be good for another round, and I knew I was.

But as my fingers inched out to suggest just such a thing with just the right touch, Philip dropped his hands. “Maybe we should get some coffee and look at those files you salvaged.”

My word, I really, really liked this man. I bang on his door before dawn, send him out into possible danger to hide my car and fetch some files I had stolen, and then he comes back inside, showers me, makes love to me, rubs my neck, and then comes up with a word like
salvaged.
Instead of stolen.

Maybe I loved him.

Maybe I could
marry
him.

But I didn’t have to figure that out just right at this precise moment because the man had said “coffee” and suddenly that was the thing I needed more than anything else, even more than another round of great sex, and we untangled ourselves and went to the kitchen, where he put the twice-filtered water on to boil and ground the beans. While Philip putzed with the coffee production, I dove into the salvaged files like a person looking for the lost winning lottery ticket.

Philip being the only other human besides me who fusses so over a cup of coffee, I had time to discover from these files that Rayford was not only organized, but ruthless in keeping paperwork.

A man after my own heart in some ways. Too bad he was otherwise such a yahoo.

What I learned from reading through the salvaged files was this: While M. David was the CEO of Boogie Bog, and the sole partner in the corporation that owned Delilah Groves, that is, before Rayford owned an interest in the groves, M. David had himself ordered the dumping of the waste phosphogypsum in his own groves. And detail-oriented cowboy Rayford had photocopied the documentation.

Why would M. David want to poison his own orange groves?

Philip handed me a steaming cup of coffee, topped off with just the right amount of organic soy milk, and kissed my ear. “I put in a half teaspoonful of sugar because you had such a hard night,” he whispered.

I sipped, I let the caffeine enter my circulatory system, convinced, and not for the first time, that some evolutionary mistake had rid our own bodies of the ability to make our own caffeine—I mean, our bodies can manufacture vitamin D, why not caffeine?

While I pondered that, Philip read over my shoulder. “Why would he put that toxic waste in his own orange grove?”

Yes, hadn’t I just asked myself the same thing?

But I remembered what Angus and Miguel had told me—there were millions of gallons of the stuff behind those earthen dams and no way to get rid of it.

“Rayford said Boogie Bog tried to sell it off to be mixed into concrete block or road materials, but the nuclear-waste folks had that market cornered. So, maybe, stupid as it sounds to us, M. David was experimenting to see if he could use the gyp as fertilizer.”

“Actually,” Philip said, slipping into college-professor mode once again, “I’ve read that phosphate companies are beginning to experiment with that. I think perhaps they’ve even sold some to third-world countries for fertilizer.”

“Nice, real nice.”

“This was two years ago, according to those documents, that M. David was dumping the gyp on his groves. That’s strange timing for the lawsuit, isn’t it?”

“Yep. That was the strange thing about the orange-defamation suits. All the protests took place a couple of seasons ago.” Then I sipped and sipped and finally felt up to the long explanation about the SLAPP suit by proxy, and I told it, though Philip’s expression suggested he would really rather nibble my ear again.

When I finished the tale, I gave Philip a serious look. He gave me a serious look back.

“What you are telling me is that M. David experiments with the gyp in his own groves, and when Miguel and Angus found out and started protesting, he stopped using the gyp at Delilah. Or maybe it was killing the trees. Who knows? But M. David quit using Boogie Bog’s gyp in the groves and resigned as its CEO, and then nearly two years later, when Angus and Miguel start rallying the troops to stop his plans at Antheus, he files suit against them with the orange-defamation case.”

“Yep, that’s what I figured.”

“How does that lead to M. David’s murder? Or to Angus’s murder?”

Well, there he had it—now that it no longer mattered, I’d proved my SLAPP suit by proxy theory, but still didn’t have a solid clue as to who killed anybody.

“And how does that lead to Miguel chasing you last night?”

Oh, yeah, that. I’d started to explain to Philip after he had hidden my Honda and safely returned via his garage door, but then he’d looked at me with those Dean Martin eyes, and said soothing things in that Dean Martin voice, and the next thing I knew I was naked under a hot flow of water while he ran his soapy hands all over me, and then we were in bed, and then and then and then, and finally here we were, back to Miguel.

With a bit of careful editing, I explained to Philip about the receipts in the glove compartment that I had salvaged and how Miguel knew I had taken them, and that he might want to silence me in case I decided to turn over evidence of his crime to the police.

“Where are the receipts?” Philip asked, just as calmly as if I had told him I’d bought a new briefcase, not that I possessed evidence of a murder that I had myself stolen after fleeing the scene of that murder. So I answered the question like I was explaining where the new briefcase was.

“In my desk, at home.”

A quick flicker of how-dumb-can-you-get passed over Philip’s face before he restored his expression to a cross between Dean Martin sexy and criminal-defense attorney on guard. “You should—”

Then, in the middle of Philip’s alpha-male order, and before I could bristle into my “don’t boss me around” spiel, the man paused.

I watched his face as he reformulated his budding directive.

In a moment that challenged my grandmother’s sage advice that a woman could never retrain a grown man and should therefore never expect to, Philip asked, “Lilly, would you like me to hide them for you? We could go get the receipts, and I could put them in my safe.”

Suspiciously, I studied him for a minute. Suspicious, that is, that he seemed willing to let me make up my own mind about something important. But before I pondered too deeply on that, I thought about the risk of roping him into what was increasingly a big, frigging mess.

“Maybe we don’t want them in your office. I don’t want you implicated if this goes bad.”

“My safe isn’t in my office. It is at a secret and undisclosed location. My clients sometimes ask me to provide secure storage for them. Because of that, I have a location that is search-warrant proof because of its hidden location. If you will provide me with the receipts, I will take them there for proper safekeeping.”

I noticed he didn’t say I could go with him.

So the Golden Boy had a secret safe that he was going to keep secret even from me, and where he kept illegal things for his clients.

Yeah, okay, I was definitely warming to this guy. Especially since he gave me that Dean Martin look again.

“How about another shower?” I asked, not at all in the mood for a coy suggestion or an engaging game of sly hands on thighs.

So, we didn’t end up solving any murders, but we were very, very clean and very, very satisfied when Philip followed me to my house, where I gave him the salvaged receipts. Before he left, Philip had to search my house for fugitives and unlocked windows, give me fifty kinds of instructions on staying safe, and make me promise all kinds of self-preservation things. Before Philip would leave me, I had to give him fifty kinds of reassurances that Miguel wouldn’t gun me down in my own office in front of witnesses.

Thus reassured, but anxious, Philip left me to hide evidence that my client might well be a man whose passions had put him on a trail of murder. And who might have penciled me down on a list as “next.”

My brother Dan,
the normal one, likes to say that if a door shuts, a window opens.

Me, I find that it isn’t so much doors shutting and windows opening. Rather, I find that if you solve one crisis, another pops up.

Farmer Dave says it’s all about attitude. Mine apparently sucks. But then he’s the one living with a broken heart and an escaped burro from the Grand Canyon.

Opening and shutting things aside, I was fixing to solve one problem and gird the doors and windows in preparation for the next.

That is, I was going to finally get this stupid car case of Jimmie’s settled. Then I could go back to solving M. David’s and Angus’s murders, armed as I now was with all but two of Rayford’s M. David files. Since Josey didn’t seem to be wrapping up M. David’s case, and the police were focused on Miguel, and not even looking for anybody else in Angus’s death, I had the deluded feeling that it was up to me to figure out those murders.

I owed that much to Angus.

I owed it to Miguel. Miguel might be off the list as potential lover, because with all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, I didn’t feel any remnant of lust for the boy, but he was still my client. And, as his attorney, I had a duty to either exonerate him from Angus’s death or help collect information for his defense.

And I owed myself an answer too—had I really lusted after a killer while Philip paid court to me? If so, I might have to consider whether I’d dismissed that last psychologist too soon.

Thus with my mind in overload, zipping into my office in overdrive the next morning, I barely greeted Bonita before I phoned Jason the baby lawyer. The first thing I said was, “I officially withdraw the offer of settlement in the Jimmie Rodgers case.”

“That’s cool,” he said, cluelessly. “I wasn’t going to take it anyway.”

“Fine, then,” I said, and tried to put charm back in my voice. “Might you come over to my office this morning? There’s something we need to discuss.”

After a minimum of false pleasantries, Jason agreed to scamper right over.

How easy was this going to be? I thought, and, despite the fact that I had had no sleep to speak of, I actually hummed as I took the video of the faker plaintiff doing things proving that he was not remotely injured back to our audio room, where in no time at all I made a duplicate. Then, for good measure, I made another duplicate of the tape. I went back to my office and put one copy of the tape in the Jimmie Rodgers file, then went upstairs and locked the original in the firm’s safe. By then our receptionist had buzzed me to tell me that Jason was waiting for me, and I flounced out front, greeted him as briefly as possible, and led him into one of our firm’s conference rooms, where, without further ado, I popped a copy of the video into the player and turned on the TV.

Together Jason and I watched the faker plaintiff going through a morning’s worth of yard chores that made my good back ache. Like an athletic and un-ailing young man, the faker plaintiff was lifting and toting and pulling and bending and scraping and mowing. Any judge or juror watching this tape could conclude only one thing: Nothing was wrong with this man’s back.

“Jason, as soon as I play this videotape before the judge, your lawsuit against Jimmie Rodgers will be dismissed. Not only that, but I’ll file a motion for sanctions for fraud upon the court. Under section 57.105, you’ll have to pay my attorney’s fees.” And you can jolly well guess, I thought, without having to say, that I will document substantial attorney’s fees on this case.

“Did you have a…I mean, a…a warrant?” Jason asked.

“I don’t need a warrant to videotape someone who’s doing something outside, in plain view.”

Jason huffed and puffed and stammered and turned red and lost his cool and carried on and acted very much like the baby lawyer he was. When he finally began to recoup some of his dignity, he turned to me and said, “This isn’t over yet. I’ll, I’ll…you’ll see. You haven’t won yet.” And then he marched out.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I had won. It was all over but the paperwork. I danced all the way back to my office, where Bonita handed me five pink phone-message slips. “Philip. Worried. Call him.” I did, not even bothering to tell him young Mr. Quartermine had been ever so vaguely threatening.

After all, possibly a trained Rolfer client who knew how to make bombs was trying to secretly do me in. So what was a kid lawyer on the scale of worry?