Criminal Intent (MIRA) (31 page)

“I’m the soul of discretion. You can trust me completely.”

“I want you to run a background check on Annie Kendall.”

“On Annie—”

“Shh! Jesus, Dix. Discretion. Should I spell out the word for you?”

“Sorry. Uh…may I ask why?”

“No, you may not. I want every piece of information you can find on her in the next hour or so. Put it in an envelope, seal it up, and leave it on my desk. And don’t let anybody know what you’re up to.” With his thumb and forefinger, he pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s not exactly, uh, kosher.”

“Gotcha.”

“Thanks, Dix. I owe you one. I’ll buy you lunch at Lenny’s some day next week.”

“Be still, my beating heart. But don’t go blowing your entire paycheck on little old me, Hunter.”

“Oh, shut up,” he said, and cut off the call.

“T
he
thing is, Lorena,” Dr. Jeremy Colfer said from his perch at the foot of Gram’s hospital bed, “once you get out of rehab, we really don’t feel it would be in your best interests to continue to live alone.”

“I see.” But it was clear to Davy that she didn’t see, not at all. “Why don’t you just put me on an iceberg and set me adrift? I’ll just float away, out to sea, like the Eskimos do.”

Across the hospital bed, Davy exchanged a glance with Brian. This wasn’t going well. He’d known it wouldn’t go well. Gram was too independent, too stubborn, to give up that independence without a struggle. “Gram,” he said, “we’re concerned about your safety.”

“No, you’re not. I’m just a disposable old woman. Somebody you can crumple up like a used piece of tinfoil and toss out with the rest of the garbage.”

“Damn it, Gram,” he said. “You know better than that.”

Trudy Barrows, the hospital social worker, spoke up. “There are options, Lorena,” she said. “There are some very nice nursing care facilities nearby. They’re all clean and modern. You could have your own room. Maybe even be able to bring along some of your own furniture. I can give your family
a list of facilities. They can drop in any time to check them out—”

“I’d rather be dead.”

“You don’t mean that, Lorena,” the young woman said solicitously.

“Who the hell are you to tell me what I mean? You try walking in my shoes for a while, young lady, and then you come back and we’ll talk. And stop calling me by my first name. I’m sixty years older than you, and we don’t even know each other. Didn’t your parents ever teach you any manners?”

Trudy blanched, but she shut up. “Listen,” Brian said out of the blue. “What if you came to live with me?”

All heads turned toward him. “With you?” Davy said.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought.” Glancing around the room, Brian said, “I called Alec last night and we talked about it. He said that whatever I wanted to do was fine with him.”

Score one for Alec. “In New Mexico?” Gram said weakly.

“We have a wonderful house,” he said, “with a brick patio surrounded by yucca and saguaro, and the desert just a few yards away. We eat breakfast out there every morning. You could have your own room, and the house is all on one level, so you’d never have to climb stairs again. We have a housekeeper who comes in five days a week, so you wouldn’t be alone. There’s so much to do there. Music and arts festivals and wonderful restaurants. Including mine. Gram, you’d love it there.”

“It sounds wonderful,” Gram said wistfully. “But I’ve lived here for eighty-six years. I don’t even know what saguaro is. I’d love to visit some time, but—I don’t want to leave here. This is home.”

“The offer’s on the table, Gram. At least think it over.”

Davy saw the glint of a tear in her eye. “I’m tired,” she said. “I need to sleep now. Get out, all of you. Just go away and leave me alone.”

Ah, shit. He
knew he was going to regret this, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. Rising to his feet, he said, “She can live with me.”

“But—” Trudy Barrows shot a nervous glance at Gram, probably afraid of being verbally decapitated. “You work during the day, Mr. Hunter. She needs somebody to be with her.”

“I’m not completely helpless,” Gram said, her exhaustion suddenly and miraculously cured. “I may be a cripple right now, but I don’t intend to be for long.”

“I’ll figure something out,” he told the social worker. “I’m already paying Elsa Donegan to come in part-time. Maybe I can convince her she needs full-time hours.”

“Your place is too small,” Brian pointed out. “You told me that just this morning.”

“Screw it. I’ll buy a house if I have to.”

“You could move in with me,” Gram said.

“I’m not moving in with you. Your house is falling down around your ears. I don’t intend to wake up some morning and find the roof lying in pieces around me. I’ll buy something livable.”

Now that he’d had time to get past the shock of what he’d just done, the idea didn’t sound quite so horrifying. As a matter of fact, he was starting to warm up to it. “You’ll have to leave your house behind, Gram, but you can bring along as much of your stuff as you want, and you won’t have to move away from Serenity. What do you say?”

Primly, she said, “I don’t want to interfere with your life.”

“Face it, Gram, you’ve been interfering with my life since the day I grew up and moved out of your house. Why should you stop now? If you’re living with me, at least I won’t have to drive across town every time you drag me out of bed at three in the morning.”

“And I can bring Koko?”

“Yeah,” he
said, suddenly weary. “You can bring Koko.”

“Fine, then. Start house hunting.”

Outside, in the parking lot, Brian shut the car door behind him and said, “Congratulations, big brother. You always were her favorite.”

Davy stuck his keys in the ignition and fired up the engine. “Before this is over,” he said, “I’m going to want to kill myself. I can just tell.”

Brian chuckled. “You’ll do fine. And if you need help, I’m just a phone call away.”

“A phone call and the better part of a continent.”

“You could visit me, you know. The road runs both ways. Hell, bring Gram along with you. I meant what I said. I think she’d love it there. You both would.”

“Maybe. You never know.” He watched as Brian pulled out his wallet, removed a slender piece of paper, and held it out to him. “What’s that?”

“What’s it look like? It’s a check for six thousand dollars. Made out to you.”

“But what’s it for?”

“Payback, Davy. Five thousand plus interest. I know it’s a little overdue, but better late than never.”

“I didn’t expect you to do this,” he said, taking the check from his brother and admiring the bold, looping script of Alec Turturro’s signature.

“I know you didn’t. That’s why we did it. You helped give us a start, and somehow, we managed to make something of it. Alec and I owe you a hell of a lot more than just money, but I guess for now this check will have to do.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. Just take the money. With a new house to buy and Gram coming on board, I’m sure you can use it. You know, Davy—” Brian refolded his wallet and tucked
it back into his hip pocket “—I’m not that messed-up kid any longer, desperate to get away from everything he’s ever known. I didn’t even know where I wanted to get away to. Just knew what I was running from.”

Davy rested his wrists on the top of the steering wheel. “I know, Bri.”

“I’m almost thirty-four years old. Where the hell has the time gone?” Brian paused, studied Davy’s face as though he wanted to remember every detail of it. “I think it’s time we started being a family again. What do you think?”

Davy put the car into gear and backed out of the parking space. “I’d like that,” he said.

Jessie had bought the bleach. It was all her idea. Sophie still wasn’t sure how she felt about it. But Jessie was a year older and totally awesome, and Sophie had great faith in her. The Goth look, Jess had said, wasn’t going to fly in Serenity. Especially if she wanted to play soccer. And Sophie wanted to play soccer, wanted it so bad she ached with it. She missed the physical activity, missed spending time with kids her age. She was tired of lying around doing nothing. The babysitting gig was okay, but Sophie couldn’t wait for school to start. She’d always liked school, or at least she had until Daddy died and the other kids treated her like she had the plague.

But Jessie said that was normal. She’d been treated the same way after her mom died. People didn’t know how to act, so they made damn fools of themselves. But eventually it faded away. Besides, Sophie was starting over in a new school, in a new town, where nobody cared about her past. Best of all, Jessie had promised to watch out for her. Sort of like a big sister. Introduce Sophie to all her friends, show her the ropes, make sure she had somebody to sit with during lunch period.

So she let Jessie buy the Lady Clairol, then she knelt in a kitchen
chair, head bowed over Mrs. Crowley’s kitchen sink, while Jess applied the foul-smelling stuff to her head. The twins stood by, goggle-eyed, watching the whole process, even though Jessie had told them to go play on the computer or something.

First, they’d had to bleach out all that black hair dye. Because the color was so dark, it had taken two applications of bleach to remove it. Sophie’d looked in the mirror and giggled. Her hair was this icky platinum blond that Jessie said made her look like a cheap cocktail waitress. “Now what?” Sophie said.

“Now we apply the new color. Sit still while I read the directions.”

Jessie had picked that out, too. Sophie had told her what her hair had looked like before. “Sort of like soft butter,” she’d said, and Jess had searched the aisles at Rite Aid until she found something she considered a soft buttery color. The picture on the box came pretty close, Sophie had to admit. Jessie was probably the smartest person she knew. Still, this was scary, a lot more scary than it had been dyeing her hair black in the first place. There wasn’t much you could do to make black turn out wrong. But blond was more risky. If something went wrong, she could end up with green hair. Green hair when you wanted it green was okay. Accidental green hair was a different thing. She just hoped Jessie followed the directions carefully, because if they screwed it up, her mom would probably kill her.

“Okay,” Jessie said. “Let’s do this thing.”

“Can we help?” Sam asked.

“No!” Jessie said firmly, shaking the bottle of hair color. “I told you guys to go do something else.”

“There’s nothing else to do,” Jake whined. “Besides, this is more interesting.”

Jessie began squirting gooey, cool liquid onto Sophie’s head
and working it in with her fingers. “More interesting than nothing? I imagine it is.”

“Let me do that,” Sam said, reaching.

Sophie edged away from him, but she couldn’t go far. “Get out of here, you little weasel!” she said.

“You have to wear gloves,” Jessie said.

“Then how come her head doesn’t have to wear gloves, huh? Answer that one.” Both boys chortled as if Sam had said something hilarious.

“Jesus,” Sophie said. “Kids.”

“Stay still,” Jessie said, “or I’ll miss some of it and you’ll come out looking like a calico cat.”

Sophie stayed still. Calico-cat-colored hair might quite possibly be even worse than green. She wasn’t quite sure what a calico cat looked like, but she was pretty sure she didn’t want her hair to look like one. “How much longer?” she said.

“I’m almost done. We let it set for twenty minutes, and then we rinse it out.”

“I hope this comes out okay. My mom won’t be happy if I come out looking like a freak.”

“Don’t worry.” Jessie applied the last of the color to Sophie’s head and tossed the empty tube into the sink. “Your mom will be blown away.” She smoothed all Sophie’s hair up flat on top of her head. The goop held it in place. “Sam,” she instructed, “get me a bath towel. An old one, if you can find it. Soph, you can lift your head now.”

“How’s it look?” Sophie glanced around for the hand mirror Jessie had brought with her.

“You can’t tell yet. Give it time.”

Sophie found the mirror, held it up, chewed her lower lip as she studied her reflection. It was impossible to tell anything. She looked as though somebody had glued her hair to the top of her head with half a vat of Hershey’s syrup. “You’re sure about this?” she said.

“I’m
sure.” Jessie rinsed her plastic gloves under the tap. Then, with the spray nozzle, she rinsed out the sink. Sam came running with the towel she’d requested, and she dried her hands with it, then wiped down Mrs. Crowley’s brand-new Corian countertop. “There,” she said. “Now, if you can manage to sit still for twenty minutes, we’ll wash it out and I’ll comb it and blow dry it for you.You’re going to look so great, Soph.”

“I hope so.” She still wasn’t a hundred percent with this thing, although it was a little late now to back out.

“You will. I guarantee it. And when we’re done, I’ll watch the boys while you run across the street and show your mom the new Sophie Kendall.”

The Twilight Motel was a crumbling heap that should have been put out of its misery with a few well-placed charges of dynamite. Louis parked out front, next to a disreputable old pickup truck that looked to be from roughly the same era as the building. It was hard to believe that his journey would end in a place like this. What could the woman be thinking? If he’d been given a choice between this and Luke Brogan, he’d probably have chosen Brogan. Then again, considering what he’d just heard about Brogan, there was something to be said for distance.

Downstairs, beneath what was probably the owner’s quarters, it appeared as though somebody had put a video rental store in what had once been the motel office. Louis climbed the steps and tried the door, but it was locked. Inside, Robin Spinney was arranging videos on the shelves. He rattled the knob, and she turned and saw him. Swiping at a strand of hair that was playing peekaboo with her forehead, she set down an armload of videos and came to the door.

“Sorry,” she said, “we’re not open. We were vandalized a few of nights ago, but we should be open again by Saturday.”

“I’m
not a customer,” he said, holding up his P.I. license. “My name is Louis Farley, and I was hired by Luke Brogan to find you.”

He saw the emotions flitter across her face. Surprise, fear, a sudden heated anger. “Get out of here,” she said. “Get the hell out!”

She tried to slam the door in his face, but he was too quick for her. The door closed hard on his foot. Through gritted teeth, he said, “I’m not here to hurt you, Mrs. Spinney. I’m on your side—”

“Take your foot out of my door, little man, or you’ll lose it. My boyfriend’s a cop, and he’s about twice your size—”

“Brogan’s dead.”

“What?”

He took advantage of her surprise to force the door open and squeeze through it. “Last night,” he said. “An intruder broke into his house and shot him.”

“You lie.”

“I only wish. There goes the rest of my commission. It gets better. Somebody’s been following me. This morning, he stole my laptop. Which means he knows where you are. Pretty coincidental, wouldn’t you say? First somebody starts tailing the investigator Brogan hired, then Brogan gets bumped off? Too bad I don’t believe in coincidence.”