Move to Strike (27 page)

Correction, Paul would have to do most of that for her, because what she had to do was practice some law. She had very little time left before a crucial motion in the case had to go on file. She checked her diary. The 995 hearing was twenty-four days away. She had three days left to file the paperwork and still allow the prosecution twenty-one days notice of her arguments.

Back to the law library this afternoon.

It was getting late, she had a divorce trial in a few minutes, and she was sitting in the Bronco spying on her sixteen-year-old client.

She called Paul.

“I was on my way out the door,” he said. “Just eating a final bite of oatmeal.”

“Could you stop over at the Sykes house and pick up something from Beth today?”

“What do you want me to pick up?”

“Any phone bills that include the night Sykes died.”

“Sure. Good thought. I’ve been wanting to talk to her anyway. About the marriage and about her son.”

“And ask her if Daria has told her about going to the house that night.”

“Don’t give her time to think about it. I hear you. Anything else?”

“Has Dave LeBlanc been located yet?”

“It’s a missing-persons case now. No word from my buddy at the LAPD. The crash investigators in Carson City are still insisting that there’s no sign of sabotage so far. So we have no grounds to assume that his disappearance is linked to the crash. He had just been fired. Maybe he just rode the ’Hound to some more welcoming state, like Alabama.”

“And maybe Aerosmith will retire one day.”

They both had a good laugh over that one.

“I’ll call LA again and see if I can build a fire.”

Nina saw Nikki leave the medical building and walk over to an adjacent building in the trees where there was a lab.

“I have to go now, Paul. I was wondering. Matt and Andrea and I and the kids are going over to Sand Harbor to edify ourselves with Shakespeare tonight. They’re doing a preview performance of the festival coming later this summer. Want to come?”

“Sorry. I have to get back to Carmel for the weekend. Business.”

Back to Susan with the shiny black hair, Nina thought. It was just as well.

“My local doc’s coming in on a Saturday to take my cast off,” he added.

And Susan could take off the rest. “That’s great, Paul. When will you be back?”

“Sunday night. Late.”

Nikki came out of the lab and headed east, crossing the strip of parklike woods that led to the street. She stopped at the bus stop, standing back in the shadow of a building as if she didn’t want to be seen.

“Uh, Paul. How soon could you get to the corner across from the consignment store? Nikki’s about to hop a bus for points unknown.”

“I’m on my way.”

Nina was out of time. She had to get to court. With a strong feeling of uneasiness, she shifted gears and pulled out of the parking lot, watching Nikki out of the corner of her eye as she hung in the shadows at the bus stop, her pack swinging against her side, looking as resolute as a missionary in search of a convert.

CHAPTER 21

SANDY SAID ON the phone, “Paul called while you were in trial.”

“What did he report?”

“He followed Nikki to a rock shop over by the factory outlets.” Sandy gave her the address. “He’s waiting for her around the corner.”

Nina called Paul and ten minutes later parked beside him in the Raley’s parking lot. He sat about two feet below her in the Mustang as they talked through their open car windows. “She still hasn’t come out,” he said, pointing to the sign over the hole-in-the-wall shop called Diggers.

“I’ll take it from here,” Nina said.

“Just in the nick. Beth Sykes is waiting for me. I assumed you didn’t want me to alert Nikki that I was following her. So the little monkey’s doing a little research of her own.”

“I’ll catch her on the way out,” Nina said, “and have a talk with her.”

“Walk softly, and dump the big stick before you go. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so mad.”

Paul stopped up the block to park in an extra-wide spot on the street that looked like it would keep his new car safe from passing traffic. He approached the Sykes’s house on foot. Two cushioned chairs were next to each other on a porch on the private side of the house facing away from Louise’s. In them, in one of them, two people squeezed together. As Paul got closer, the woman hauled off and slapped the man.

“Dylan, no!” said Beth Sykes. She pulled herself up and out, dislodging her companion in the process. He lurched to his feet also, struggling to right himself. Paul, who found himself conveniently near a cluster of red-berried hawthorn bushes, ducked down to take in the scenery. “You have to go now,” she said. “I’m expecting somebody.” She looked up the block, straight at Paul’s bush and through him, and turned back without seeing him.

“Beth, I’ve always wanted you. Didn’t you know that? You’re holding on to a past that’s over. You can’t go on loving someone that’s dead and gone,” Dr. Dylan Brett said, with an expression Paul pegged as calculatingly winsome and charming. To Paul’s eyes, Brett looked too standard issue. Eyebrows not too bushy, lips not too fleshy, forehead not too broad. His negatives never quite added up to a positive. He blended well into the scene, however, in a romantically casual outfit of brilliant white, the perfect contrast to emphasize his dark hair. “You’re alive,” Brett continued, in a voice unappealingly close to a coo. “And this is our chance to be together. It can be the way we always wanted it to be ...”

“Have I ever said anything to encourage you? Done anything to make you think I . . .”

“You’re so sad,” he said. “I can make you happy.”

“Dylan, go.”

His response was to pull her close into a kiss. At first, she did not resist. She lolled like a soft doll in his arms. The languorous moves that followed gave Paul time to position himself to maximize his viewing pleasure. He didn’t get off on watching other people make love, but he didn’t object to the show, and he found Beth’s face, when it came into view occasionally, so interesting. She did not look like a woman in love should look. She looked tortured.

After a while, inflamed, Dylan pushed for more. The gentle kisses heated up. Beth, now mashed against the side of the house, skirt rising in Brett’s well-groomed hands, began to struggle.

Brett ignored her protests and pressed on.

Which Paul did find objectionable. Strolling out from behind the bushes, he pretended to tie his shoe, allowing them one second to unclench, and another second for Beth’s skirt to adjust itself, and walked up to introduce himself.

“I’m glad you came,” Beth Sykes told Paul after the guilty-looking Brett took an abrupt leave. “I should explain about Dylan.”

“No need.”

“I want to explain. He and I have been friends for a long time. I’m afraid I’ve cried on his shoulder once or twice lately, aroused the white knight in him. He sees me unhappy—well, you know, some men think love solves everything. He’s a junkie for love, the poor guy. And it was nice to be kissed again, nice to remember what it was like, getting swept away . . .”

“You mean love doesn’t solve everything?” Paul said lightly. “News to me.”

She laughed, loosening slightly. “If you hadn’t come along, he would have stopped, you know. He really loves his wife. He can’t resist taking liberties when they’re offered—he was an ugly duckling and he jokes around about being female-deprived growing up—but he never goes too far.”

Paul wondered if that was true. Maybe this latest incarnation of the perfect doctor was just as false as the last one. Maybe Dylan loved her, not his wife. Maybe Dylan’s alibi was a lie and he was a murderer.

“Come in. There’s something I want to show you.” Ushering him briskly inside, she led him straight into the living room, where a large photo of Christopher Sykes hung above a brocade couch next to a smaller one of his father. Paul had passed right by it on his previous visit with Wish.

“My son,” she said. “An incredible, fantastic human being. In the middle of all this, somehow I feel he’s been forgotten.”

“It’s a terrible loss,” Paul said, wondering if she would be suing Connie Bailey after the final NTSB report came in, heaping pain on pain.

They stood for a moment looking at the photograph, Paul covertly checking her out. She stood next to him, a pale woman, small-bodied, beautiful in that immaculate way of some women, her curly blond hair falling softly over her shoulders. He imagined that she looked damn good in a tailored suit or an expensive tennis outfit. She looked good enough in the loose skirt and bare feet, her face blushing pink from Brett’s whiskers.

She seemed to nod at the boy in the photograph, a fleeting conflict wrecking the serenity of her features. He thought she probably spent a lot of time gazing at it. Observing her face as she looked at the boy, he felt a tingle of recognition at her expression. He knew how she felt. He knew the anarchy of losing someone you loved and how you scrambled afterward for a direction, diverted by obstacles that rose as turbulent as volcanoes between you and some kind of peace. The kid looked like her, not too tall, close-cropped hair, intelligent and calm-looking, the kind who never goes through that stage of resistance and rebellion that makes growing up and away so hard.

Another reason never to have children, Paul thought, feeling the pain passing through the woman next to him like a current. He couldn’t see opening yourself up to that kind of experience voluntarily.

The air was still. He heard a cat meow somewhere in the back of the house. He was very conscious of the door into the study, which he could see a few feet away. It was closed tight. No wonder she had put the place up for sale.

She saw where he was looking and said, “Let’s go back outside.”

To Paul’s surprise, Jan Sapitto, curves clasped by a blue bikini, lay on a lounger at the far side of the pool. She pulled her sunglasses down and called out a greeting to them, then took up some oil and began to rub her tan arms. Paul and Beth continued on, finally settling on the back side of the house under a purple-and-white-striped canvas umbrella on a slight rise between the lake and the house. Paul admired the streaky blue of the lake beyond the bushes. He hadn’t had time to look at the view on his first trip here.

“I used to love this view,” she said. “That’s why we bought this house.”

“You have a lot of space too. Plenty of room for visitors.”

“Yes. Jan loves spending time up here when the weather’s good. She’s been here a lot this summer.”

Paul took that to mean she had visited more this year than usual. Apparently, Bill Sykes had made her feel slightly less at home than Beth did.

“I can’t help thinking about that hiding place your husband built down there in the pool,” Paul said. “Did you know about it?”

She shook her head. “Bill was secretive. He had a safe deposit box I didn’t know about either, with old coins he had collected over the years. That collection turned out to be worth almost twenty thousand dollars.”

“Hope you checked under the mattress, then.”

“Nothing there,” she said. “I suppose when I move we’ll find something else.”

“So he hid things from you?”

“Not from me especially. It was just his way. Bill grew up very poor in a little farming town in Indiana. His parents went bankrupt, so he worried about money, although we had all we needed.” She motioned toward the cup in her hand. “Would you like some coffee?” Her long-fingered left hand still flashed with a diamond that was at least a couple of carats.

“No, thanks. How was his business going?”

“Well enough, especially since he hired Dylan Brett, but he was winding down. I think he loved what he could do for people, but he had learned his job a long time ago and he was getting out of date. He never took to the less invasive techniques, the skin peels and collagen injections. He was a surgeon, first and foremost. He didn’t care to retrain. I think he would have retired soon. He was in his late sixties, you know. And he hated getting sued. He would tell me it was part of being a physician nowadays, but I think he had hoped he’d make it all the way through his years of practicing medicine without legal problems. He practiced for twenty-five years without a single malpractice claim, and then they started coming. Two in six years. The malpractice insurer was having a fit.”

Paul said, “Robin Littlebear and Stan Foster?”

Beth said, “That’s right. You probably know more about those lawsuits than I do at this point. Paul, could it have been one of them? I keep thinking about Linda Littlebear.”

“I understand she attacked your husband.”

She nodded. “That was awful. She jumped him one night, and came around here another time. She really hated Bill for what happened to her daughter. She suffered. I know . . .” she said, and swallowed at the thought of how much she knew before she continued. “That’s why Bill didn’t have her thrown in jail. I wanted him to press charges, and his attorney was particularly gung-ho . . .”

“Jeffrey Riesner?”

“Right. You know him?”

“I gave him a shampoo once.”

She frowned, puzzled.

Paul smiled to show her he was making a little joke even though he wasn’t. “Your husband refused to go after her.”

“He didn’t want the publicity,” she admitted.

“So you think Linda Littlebear might have killed him?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, “I do.”

“You say she came to the house one night . . .” Paul prompted.

“She climbed the fence and came around the back, found Bill in his study. This was several months ago. I was in the bedroom getting ready for bed.”

“What happened?”

“All Bill would tell me is that they argued and he prevailed. He wouldn’t discuss it. Do you know . . . have you checked to see if she has an alibi?”

“Word is she was drinking with some people at a bar near the Round Hill Mall.”

“Do you believe everything you hear?” Beth asked.

Beth’s alibi was also based on the testimony of a friend, but Paul wasn’t ready to get into that until he got a chance to talk with Jan Sapitto in LA again. “It might not stand up,” he conceded. “I think I can imagine how you must feel, with your niece accused of killing your husband, but I have to ask, what makes you so sure it wasn’t Nikki?”

“It wasn’t Nikki!”

“Because she’s family?”

“Because I don’t believe it. Okay, maybe she came here to take something. She’s mixed up right now, growing up. You have to make allowances for her age and the kind of person she is. She has her own integrity, you know, and that’s one reason I won’t—I just don’t believe she had anything to do with hurting Bill. That’s why I brought in Nina and you, to prove that to everybody else. What kind of world is this, where we believe such terrible things of children?”

He had no ready answer for her, except that this kind of world was the real world. “What about that restraining order your husband got against Linda Littlebear?”

She lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “I imagine Bill threatened her with legal action that time she came into his study. That would be his style. He had given her a break, but she had blown it. Bill expected her to feel grateful to him for being easy on her, even for forgiving her. For someone who worked so closely with people and their psyches, he didn’t really understand people that well. I think I understand her better. She blamed him for killing her child. Her emotions got the best of her . . .” She said this sadly. “She went on a rampage.”

“You think that meeting set her off?”

“Maybe. What I do know is that she’s more likely to have killed him than Nikki. Nikki is a child, not a vicious one, either. Just picture Linda, a strong, young, strapping woman, picking up that sword and striking him with it. It seems possible to me.”

“Why do you suppose the police didn’t arrest her?”

“I know they considered Linda. They asked me a lot of questions about her, and I understand they questioned her. But Nikki’s a whole lot easier, that’s all. That’s why we have to push back hard.”

“Linda’s depressed and mentally disorganized. It’s hard to see her . . .”

“I imagine you’ve seen plenty of drunks in your job?” Beth asked. “Because she’s a major alcoholic. And I don’t care how nice someone is sober, drunk they’re something else.”

“It’s true. An awful lot of violent crime is fueled by alcohol.”

Having made her point, Beth moved on to another theory. “And then, there’s the casino announcer, Stan Foster,” she said. “Bill said he was unbalanced and angry. Told me he threatened him too . . . I don’t know how far it went with him, but I know Bill took his threats seriously.”

“Stan Foster is dead.”

“No!”

“He died in a car wreck in March.” And from what Nina had said about the man, his death could be called a blessing. The quest for beauty was an equal opportunity destroyer. No amount of plastic surgery would have made that man like himself.

“I didn’t know,” she said, frowning. “That’s a shame.”

“Did you know him well?” She looked rather stricken for someone that didn’t.

“No. I only met him once. He was a terribly troubled person.”

“Okay, let’s look at this from another point of view,” Paul said, moving on. “Two malpractice lawsuits in six years. Was there anything in your husband’s behavior that changed during that time in particular? I mean, he had a real stretch before where everything went remarkably well.”