Dos Equis (28 page)

friends here?” He indicated the Mexican police, surrounding the area like a wagon train circle.

“No, I did not.”

“Why is that?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“I see. Well, that aside, as I already said, I know nothing about any stolen documents or papers. The information we

received was volunteered to us. By a man who was in your home by invitation.”

“A man? What man?” she demanded to know.

“Your boyfriend, Ms. Huber.”

“My boyfriend? I don’t have a boy…” Her words died off as Jared appeared next to Darren. “What the fuck are you doing

here?”

Jared only shrugged.

Her eyes moved from Jared to Darren like a claw scratching across a chalkboard. She spit out: “This man is not my

boyfriend. I barely know him. He’s nothing but a two-bit hustler who tried to solicit funds from me to fix his face. I told him no, and sent him on his way. I’ve had nothing to do with him. He certainly was not welcome in my home!”

Again, Darren appeared unperturbed. “Oh, I see. Well, we have sworn statements from witnesses who recently saw you

with Mr. Lowe at several restaurants and social events in both Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo. They certainly intimated that you and Mr. Lowe were more than just strangers. We have another statement from a Mr. Anthony Gatt. He told us he happened to be in

your home at the same time as you were…entertaining…Mr. Lowe. And, Mr. Lowe has shown us a cheque, signed by you,

dated this week. So, I’m sure you’ll understand if we have some doubts about your stated relationship with Mr. Lowe.”

I thought Frances might become apoplectic. Her face was turning bright red at the cheeks and tip of her nose. By drastic

contrast, the rest of her skin had gone deathly pale. She was wringing her hands so ferociously one of her French tips had

snapped off.

“B-bu-but I was a consultant to those women. That’s all!

Nothing more. You can’t prove anything more!”

“We’ve already begun preliminary discussions with your actual clients—the children of the deceased women—and it seems

your stories don’t quite match up. As such, Ms. Huber, we’re here to invite you to be our guest in a very nice Mexican jail.”

I’d never been as impressed with Darren Kirsch as I was at that moment. Although I’d never admit it to his face, I always

felt he was probably a pretty good cop. Now I knew how wrong I was. He was an
excellent
cop.

With more than a little pleasure, I watched as Frances Huber resisted arrest. She cursed, shouted and flailed, and finally

blubbered and pouted as they fixed the cuffs around her wrists.

With my arm around my mother’s shoulders, we were the last to leave the area. We mounted the steps to the dining room, not

far behind the criminal and her captors. Ahead of us, we could hear a renewed commotion. When we reached the top step, I

could see the cause.

Frances was standing in the middle of the dining room. All the staff and paying guests had long ago been evacuated. But

waiting for her, like a jury convened to witness her downfall, were Errall, Sereena, Toraidio, and Jared, now in the arms of Anthony. Mom and I joined them. For a brief moment, Frances locked eyes with each one of us, painfully taking in the extent of our betrayal and treachery. It wasn’t, to be truthful, a happy moment, but it was deeply, deeply, satisfying.

When it was just us left in the room, silence descended like a shroud. My mind was racing, trying to understand what had

just happened. The next voice I heard spun me around like a top.

“I don’t know about any of you, but I need a stiff drink. Do you think the bar will reopen now that the murderess is gone?”

JP.

“You did what?” Marie-Genevieve Taine asked her brother.

“I’m the one who set the boat on fire.”

“JP, I always suspected you were a little on the cuckoo side, but this proves it!”

We were gathered in my sunny living room, the nearby front door left slightly ajar to let in a stream of unusually warm spring air. There was still snow on the ground, but the steady
dwop dwop dwop
sound of dribbling melt water off the roof, was a sure sign that winter was on its way outta here. It was the first day since we’d returned from Zihuatanejo that we were all together again. The occasion was extra special because JP’s sister, and Jane’s year old son, Joshua, had driven down from Regina to

join us.

We were celebrating many things. Topmost were the successful completion of Jane Cross’s final case and the incarceration

of Frances Huber. Sharing top billing was the fact that JP was, contrary to popular belief, still alive and kicking.

“You call it
cuckoo
,” JP said making the most of his lilting French accent, “Some call it
éclat
!”

Some of us tittered; others only smiled at the dark memory of the night we thought we’d lost him.

“Tell me,
mon frère brillant
, just how does exploding your own boat make any sense?”

“I was in that woman’s house, like I told you. There were guards outside. I must have made a noise or caught their attention somehow, I don’t know. I saw that they were intending on coming inside to see what was up. I grabbed my stuff, jumped out the back, and scrambled down the hill, which was my regular escape route. Maybe not the best idea, but I had nowhere else to go.

I could hear them shouting at me to stop. I made it down to the kayak I’d left at the shore. I got in and started paddling for my life. I was feeling pretty good about things at that point: I had all I needed from the house. If only I could get to the boat, pull up anchor, and get the hell out of there fast, I’d be all right.”

“Something went wrong?”

“Oi, you poor, poor boy. Dat’s so bad for you,” my mother interjected, as if hearing the tale for the first time.

“I knew they’d try to find a way to come after me. What I didn’t expect was for them to get in the water so fast. I don’t know where they had it stashed, but before I was even at the boat I hear the roar of a Sea-Doo.”

“
Oh merde
,” Marie-Genevieve murmured.

“Vhat’s dat?” Mom asked.

“It’s nothing, Kay,” Anthony assured her, not even looking up from the baby, blissfully asleep in his arms. “Just a French

expression of concern.”

“Okay, den.”

“Then it got even worse. They had guns. They started to shoot at me.”

“
Oi merdey
!” my mom said in her best French.

Marie-Genevieve gave Mom a sweet smile, and me an apologetic one, before returning her attention to her brother.

“I was in a bad spot. They were coming fast. There was no way I’d get to the boat, ready her to sail, and get away from these guys without being shot and probably killed. I knew I had to get out of there. But after everything we’d been through, I just couldn’t leave them all the stuff we’d collected on Frances. Plus, I knew I’d need a distraction to have any chance at getting away.”

“Ahhhhhh, so you started the boat on fire. Now I see.”

“Yeah. And then I swam like hell.”

“Which was about the time we were approaching in our boat,” I told her. “We saw the fire. Then boom!”

“We thought…” Errall hesitated, looking at me, “Well, some of us thought, JP had blown up with his boat.”

“When he hadn’t shown up by the next morning,” Anthony added, “I have to say, we thought the chances of his having

survived were pretty slim.”

“So where were you? Why wouldn’t you have called your friends? You must have known they’d be worried to death about

you,” Marie-Genevieve pointed out.

“Well, a lot of things happened at once,” JP explained. “I was a little too close to the boat when it went off. A flying board hit me in the head. I was hurt, and bleeding. But somehow I kept on swimming. Lucky for me, the guys on the Sea-Doo had

given the boat a wide berth, and were waiting for the fire to burn out to see what was what. When they saw Russell and the rest of you approaching, they forgot about it, turned tail, and got out of there.

“I got to shore and must have passed out. I don’t know how long I was out. Eventually some local kids who were smooching

on the beach found me and shook me awake. Everything I had on me, the scanner, my cellphone, everything was soaked and

useless. The kids insisted I go to the hospital. I guess I was bleeding pretty badly. It looked worse than it was. You know how head cuts bleed.”

“Oi oi oi,” my mother was almost crying.

JP leaned over and gave her lap a reassuring pat. “I’m okay now, Mrs. Quant.”

“I know, I know, but eet’s steel very very sad.”

“When I got out of the hospital, I knew if I didn’t do something fast, all our plans were going to go up in smoke. That was the day it was all supposed to go down. I knew they would be trying to get Frances to incriminate herself at Amuleto. But if that didn’t work, losing all our proof meant any chance we had left to take her down was ruined.”

“But didn’t everything go down with the boat? Or get ruined in the water when you swam to shore?” his sister asked.

I shot JP a smile. “This, Marie-Genevieve, is where your brother proves exactly how brilliant he actually is.”

“It’s true,” he crowed, giving his chest a Celine Dion thump.

Sereena and Jared came into the room carrying trays. Jared’s held glasses and a pitcher of margaritas in honour of our

successful Mexican escapade. Sereena had some eats. She held her tray in front of me, at the same time offering me a napkin

and saying, “This cooking thing is really quite easy. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.”

I looked down at the two bowls on the tray. One was filled with salsa chips from a bag. The other with store-bought salsa.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that opening a bag and a jar did not constitute cooking. Then again, with Sereena’s history in the kitchen—or rather lack of it—maybe it did.

Anthony merely rolled his eyes when he saw the “cooked” goods, and said, “Go on, JP.”

“No one should ever collect electronic information without backing it up. I knew the boat wasn’t a particularly safe location.

So, every piece of information I collected got downloaded to a back-up Data Traveller device. My friend Elena at the copy

store in town agreed to keep it safe there for me.

“When I got out of the hospital that morning, I knew Russell and Sereena would already be on their way to their meeting with Frances. I was supposed to meet with Darren and the Mexican cops to go over everything we had before we all went to

Amuleto. But I had nothing to give them. I only had a few hours to duplicate everything using the Data Traveller and put the files together again.”

“I’d been keeping Kirsch abreast of what we were doing all along,” I added. “So when he told Frances that he’d already

begun a preliminary investigation, he wasn’t lying. When they were hiding around the corner as I was trying to get Frances to slip up and admit she was a murderer for hire, he finally decided I wasn’t going to get anywhere. So they burst in and arrested her for the murders we did know about. I thought all that information was lost. Darren knew better.”

“And I’m willing to bet they’ll find plenty more dirt on Frances, once they start digging,” JP happily proclaimed.

“There’s one thing I don’t get,” Jared said. “Didn’t you begin tracking Frances through a suicide website? What does that

have to do with murdering old women?”

“Soon after she killed her mother, and the inheritance money was more of a pittance than the windfall she expected,” I

explained, “Frances considered—for a moment or two—committing suicide. She was searching the Internet for resources,

when she discovered The Ending Society. It was in that site’s chatroom where Frances met a woman who truly
was
serious about killing herself. They began this rather intense cyber friendship. Eventually, Frances told her about what she’d done to her mother. She felt pretty safe doing it because the Internet is so anonymous. Her new friend began to wonder if her own life

would be better—and worth living—if she got rid of
her
mother too. She was Frances’s first client.”

Marie-Genevieve got up and hugged her brother.

“What was that for?” he asked when she stepped back, a tell-tale tear in her eye.

“Jane would be so proud of you. She gave you a job as her assistant because she believed in you. She probably didn’t say it

out loud, but she knew you could do this. And right now, she’d be the first one to step up and say: I told you so, bub!”

Errall stood up, holding her frosty margarita high. “A toast to Jane Cross. She was one feisty broad…”

“A wonderful wife…” Marie-Genevieve added.

“A loving mother…” This from JP.

“A fine detective and a fine person,” I said. And meant it. “We’ll miss her. But we’ll always remember her, mostly through

her little Joshua.”

We drank.

“There’s one last piece of business we must attend to,” Sereena announced. She produced a small package, beautifully gift-

wrapped, and handed it to Marie-Genevieve.

“What’s this?” she asked, searching our faces for an answer.

JP only shrugged. The rest of us smiled and waited.

Marie-Genevieve slowly unwrapped the parcel, revealing a small leather case. She reached inside and pulled out an

impressive-looking stack of one-hundred-dollar bills, held together with a pretty ribbon. Her mouth dropped open, but nothing came out.

“It’s eighty-six thousand-three-hundred dollars,” Sereena told her. “Fifty-five thousand from the sale of the Korova paint-

ing…” “Twenty-five thousand from Frances, meant as a down-payment for my bogus surgeries,” Jared said. “The authorities

agreed to turn a blind eye while I cashed the cheque, before they froze her accounts.”

“And seex-tousand-and-tree-hundred dollar from me. Because of de odder paintings I sell to dat man’s friends,” my mother

proudly announced. By “dat man,” she meant Toraidio Garza, whose friends were still buzzing about the newest talent on the