Motion for Malice (18 page)

"As if murder's warm and fuzzy? Hold on." I heard someone say something in the background, and Maizy said, "No, thanks, I'll walk today" and then she was back. "Give me ten minutes, and pick me up at the Walgreens parking lot on Chancellor," she said. "I'm going to call the paper and call you out sick. You've got more important things to do than answer phones today. And by the way, you might want to think about staying at a hotel tonight."

"I'm not staying at a hotel," I told her. "That would look as suspicious as this picture."

"Suit yourself," she said. "But I'd expect a visit from Brad Bensinger at some point. It might be better if you're not there."

Detective Bensinger. I'd forgotten about him. He'd probably go to the office first, expecting to find me there. With any luck, Missy could send him on his way without Howard or Wally seeing him. But it would only be a matter of time before he showed up at my apartment. I knew he was already skeptical of my explanation for how my fingerprints wound up all over the crystal ball. I couldn't imagine what he'd think when my picture showed up in the newspaper. Actually, I didn't
want
to imagine it.

I stood up on shaky legs, folded the paper into thirds, and stuffed it deep in the wastebasket. I couldn't stop the entire tri-county area from seeing it, but at least Curt wouldn't. I had to explain this to him when he got home, before he caught the media version. But there was no way to contact him before then.

Maizy and I were on our own.

"I tried," Maizy said when she got in the car. "I couldn't get anywhere with the paper. They wouldn't tell me a thing. It took three different people to tell me to get lost."

Not a good sign. Maizy had more cover stories than a spy. If she couldn't find out who'd submitted that photo, no one could.

"And," she added, "your boss is a bit of a doofus. He wouldn't take my word for it that you were sick. I had to have the doctor call him."

Under other circumstances, that might have worried me. But these weren't those circumstances. What she said barely registered. "You're driving," I told her. "I'm still a little shaky." Understatement of the morning. I could barely catch my breath. My heart was still in overdrive, and I was seeing little black spots in my field of vision. It was entirely possible I was having a heart attack. If I was, that seemed like the least of my worries.

After we had switched places, I asked, "What doctor?"

She grinned at me. "Meet Abigail Hightower, M.D., who recommended you stay home for at least a week due to a case of shingles."

I rolled my eyes. "I'm too young to get shingles."

"That's what your boss thought, too." She steered the Escort out of the parking lot. "And let me tell you, that guy really knows how to ask the questions. I had to educate him about a very rare strain first discovered in Cracked Elbow, North Dakota. I suggested he get vaccinated at his first opportunity. Those television commercials really come in handy sometimes."

"Is there such a place as Cracked Elbow, North Dakota?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Does it matter? It got you the day off, didn't it?"

I gave her a weak smile. I knew she was trying to distract me from my panic, to calm me down so that I could think straight again. And I appreciated the attempt, but the situation called for more than the well-intentioned efforts of a seventeen-year-old, even one like Maizy. This situation called for Curt. I didn't think I could get through this mess without Curt's support, and I knew I didn't want to try. So he'd made a disparaging remark about me being abnormal. When you got right down to it, he wasn't really wrong. But I was pretty sure I could still set things right. After all, he hadn't evicted me or anything. So I'd cook him the turkey, however one cooked a turkey, and prove that I could be as normal as the next woman. Then I'd hit him with the fact that he was renting his apartment to a suspected psychic killer.

Yeah, that ought to go well.

Maizy didn't say much for the rest of the drive to Oak Grove. I'd never seen her so subdued. She'd even dialed it back a notch in appearance, tucking her body jewelry and blue hair into a black pea coat and black knit cap. The Doc Martens remained, as did the deep purple nail polish. No embellishments on her middle fingers. Maizy had lost her sense of whimsy.

She parked in front of Destinies with Dorcas and killed the engine. "Good to be as close as possible," she said, "in case we have to bail."

There was one car, a Volkswagen Beetle, parked two blocks up the street, facing the other direction. A man on a bicycle with a canvas newspaper bag on the handlebars pedaled furiously in front of the VW and disappeared down a side street. I couldn't imagine what might cause us to bail. Until I thought of our unexpected run-in with Seaver Beeber. That would do it.

A few snowflakes had begun to fall. They didn't improve the grim landscape.

"Let's get this over with." I got out of the car. "You know the door's going to be locked, right?" I turned the knob. The door wasn't locked. It was barely closed.

I climbed the stairs ahead of Maizy, remembering the landmarks along the way: the hole in the drywall, the bare bulb overhead, the ratty carpeting. The whole place had a feeling of desolation about it. Clearly Dorcas's fellow tenants had moved on a long time ago. The silence roared in my ears

A few moments later we stood outside of Destinies with Dorcas. I reached out a gloved hand and tried the knob. Locked. "Well, that's that," I said, relieved.

"No problem." Maizy stepped in front of me with a little cloth pouch in her hand and squatted in front of the door. I heard a few tinking
sounds and a second later the door swung open. She straightened.

Big problem. Now I actually had to go through with this. "You know that's illegal," I told her.

She shrugged. "What'd I do? I just jiggled it a few times. It's an old lock."

Even though it was early morning, very little light was reaching into the building. It didn't want to be there any more than I did. I squinted into the darkness of Dorcas's studio. "I can't see a thing in there. And we probably shouldn't turn the light on."

"No problem." Maizy exchanged the little cloth pouch for a mini flashlight from her satchel. Switching it on, she aimed it at the floor. "Let there be light." And she handed it to me.

It would be nice if Maizy had a problem once in awhile. I held my breath and stepped into the studio, careful to keep the light beam trained on the floor. The studio had been creepy enough in the light. In the dark, it moved more toward terrifying. Dorcas's desk and black-draped table were still there, along with the empty desk chair, now facing the door. The crystal ball was gone, of course. I could smell something that I chose to believe was chemical residue, overlying an unpleasantly musty, closed-up smell.

"It looks the same as before," Maizy whispered.

"Why are you whispering?" I whispered back. "There's no one else in the building." At least I hoped there wasn't. I thought again about Seaver Beeber and the unlocked street door and the possibility of him creeping up on us unnoticed. Then I stopped thinking about that, because I was giving myself the willies. Seaver was probably sitting in his brother's kitchen drinking a goblet of blood.

"It seemed appropriate," Maizy said in her normal voice. "I've never been to a crime scene before. My dad let me do a ride-along one time, but as soon as they made an arrest, he made me go home. Do you think anything's been moved?"

One thing had been moved: Dorcas's dead body. Although I could still picture it in vivid, gruesome detail. I turned away from the chair to sweep the flashlight across the floor, looking for obvious signs of disruption to the carpet, like a cutout in the size of a cubbyhole.

"I think we should start with the corners," Maizy said. "It'd be the easiest place to take up the carpet."

Staying close, we moved toward the corner by the black-draped table. The carpet was ridged and puckered there, as if it had been improperly laid or stretched over time. I pointed the beam directly into the corner. "See if it'll come up."

Maizy knelt down and tugged at the carpet. A ragged strip tore free in her hand. She looked at me over her shoulder. "Shouldn't there be padding or something here?"

I nodded. "Is anything under there?"

She felt around and shook her head. "Just dust and grime." She replaced the torn strip, patting it into place. "Guess Dorcas didn't predict the need for a vacuum cleaner."

We moved around two more corners doing the tug-and-pull, managing not to rip any more carpet in the process. Not that anyone would have noticed. My guess was that Weaver planned to simply let the lease expire and surrender the studio's contents to the landlord for disposal. I didn't think he'd want the rickety table or the chair in which his wife had been killed.

Maizy stood, dusting off her knees. "I'm starting to think we're missing something."

Common sense came to mind. "Do you think this is normal?" I asked her. "Running around murder scenes with a flashlight and peeking under carpets?"

"What's normal?" she asked. "My Great-Aunt Ginger thought it was normal to talk to her bedroom slippers."

I guess normal was a matter of perspective.

"Besides," Maizy said, "you're trying to find out who wants to send you up the river for murdering Dorcas. Do you really care if this is normal or not?" She took hold of my hand and tilted the flashlight beam up to my face. "I didn't think so. Come on, there's one more corner."

I tried to hold the light steady while she squatted in the final corner, the one nearest to Dorcas's desk chair. It wasn't easy, what with the tremors that gripped me just being in its vicinity. And seeing the bloodstain on the floor. I don't know why it surprised me that it was still there. Eventually the landlord would have to hire a cleaning service if he planned to rent the space. Or maybe he'd just burn down the building. That would be my first choice.

"Little dark over here," Maizy said. I jerked and slid the flashlight beam back to her hands. "That's what I thought," she said, and held up something. "Jackpot."

"What is it?" I followed her hand with the flashlight, and the beam swept across the wall toward the window.

"Don't do that!" Maizy hissed, leaping up and knocking my arm back toward the floor. "What if we were followed?"
Oh, great. That hadn't occurred to me.

"Now that it's obvious where we are in the building," she said, "we should get out of here."

"I doubt there's much mystery about where we are in the building," I said. "And there's no one around for blocks."

"We've got to go anyway." She kicked the carpet back into place.

I looked at her. "What did you find?"

"I'll show you in the car." She pointed me toward the door with a hand on my shoulder. "Hold on a second," she said when we'd reached the hallway. She bent over and did something with her tools, tested the knob to be sure the door was locked, and straightened. "Might as well leave it how we found it."

"You're pretty good at this," I said on the way down the stairs. "Where did you learn to jimmy locks?"

"My dad taught me," she said. "I can get through any door in under ninety seconds flat."

She unlocked the Escort for me and hurried around the hood to get behind the wheel. When both doors were locked, she drove down the block, made the first right, and pulled over to the curb again. She pulled something out of her pocket. "Take a look at this."

I took a look. It was a paper band, the kind used to cinch stacks of bills. Pretty unremarkable.

"It's a currency strap," Maizy told me. "Notice anything interesting?"

I took another look. It was still a paper band and still unremarkable. I shook my head.

"The color." She gave it a little shake. "It's mustard colored, right? Mustard is the color used for hundred dollar bills."

I frowned at it. "How do you know that?"

Maizy tucked it carefully into her backpack. "American Bankers Association standard. Each denomination has its own color band. Hundreds are mustard colored. And there can only be a hundred in the stack. A hundred hundreds." She drew in a breath. "Who knows how many stacks there were."

After seeing Dorcas's financials, I had some idea how many there were. No way was she cashing those checks and depositing all that cash into the bank to pay taxes on it.

"So Seaver was after the money," I said. Maybe he'd even killed his sister-in-law for it. It was the classic motive. Question was, how would Seaver know the money was there, unless Weaver told him, maybe even asked him to retrieve it as Seaver had claimed. It was surprising to me that cautious Weaver would keep such large amounts of cash in such a rathole of a building. It seemed to me he would have been better off having a safe built in his own home. But maybe he deliberately made it harder to access so he wouldn't be tempted to gamble it away. Kind of like keeping the best cookies on the highest shelf.

"Maybe," Maizy said, putting the car into gear. "Maybe not."

Just when I thought things were coming into focus. I turned to face her. "What do you mean?"

She shrugged. "Maybe he really was picking up something for his brother, but it wasn't money. Maybe it was something in her desk. We didn't look in her desk."
"And we're not going to," I told her. "I'm never going back there again."

"Agreed," she said. "That place has bad mojo. But what I'm thinking is we can't rule anyone out yet. Including Artemis Angle. Remember, Dorcas leaving the Society of Seers took money out of his pocket." She shivered. "And I'm pretty sure he wouldn't stand for that."

"He did seem to have a different relationship with Dorcas than he let on," I mused. "And he's kind of flying under the radar in all of this." And he had that flight information on his desk, which implied that he and Dorcas had gotten cozy around the crystal ball at some point.

"And then there's Tippi McWirth," Maizy pointed out. "Maybe she stopped by the studio to get some of her husband's money back and things got out of control. That chick is a little scary. And she has a black SUV." She sailed through a stop sign. I held my breath until we were in the clear on the other side of the intersection. "I think we ought to go see both of them."