Rest in Pieces (26 page)

So he hadn’t been lying when he’d told me had a thing for me for a while. That was sweet. Ben made me feel safe. I liked it.

“Turn around and let me rub your shoulders. You seem tense.” His voice was mellow and soothing.

I turn my back to him.

His hands slid up my arms to my shoulders and he kneaded lightly. “Tough day?”

I forced myself to relax. “Yes, this hot cop almost gave me a ticket. Luckily I talked him into bringing me dinner instead.”

“You think I’m hot.” There was a smile in his voice.

This was nice.

“Of course I do. You have a fantastic butt.” I only lied when I needed to, or to get out of a ticket, or if I needed to cut in line at the grocery story, or pretty much whenever I had something to gain by it. Now, I felt like telling the truth, or at least some of it.

“So you’ve been looking at my butt.” He sounded pleased. His hands moved to my neck. It was wonderful.

“You have a very nice body, and I think you’re well aware of that.” I closed my eyes and willed myself to relax. Ben was bending over backwards to be nice. I liked it but something was off. It felt like he was trying too hard.

Was this about him being jealous of Daman? Had he somehow found out about the kiss we’d shared an hour ago?

“Mom, I’m ready for you to check it.” Max walked in holding his math homework.

I sat up straight and Ben dropped his hands. Why did I feel like I’d been busted by my parents for making out on the couch? At least we hadn’t had to straighten any clothes.

“Let me see.” I took the paper and scanned it. It looked good, except for one problem. “Take another look at number four. I think your answer is a bit too high.”

Max took the paper and his gaze zeroed in on number four. “Oh, it’s sixteen. I got it.”

He set the paper on the sofa back, erased, and wrote the correct answer. “He tossed the paper on the sofa. “I’m going to get ready for bed.”

“Homework in your backpack please, so we don’t have to look for it in the morning.” I picked up the paper and handed it to him.

He sighed like I’d just asked him to vacuum the entire house, but took it and lumbered down the hall to the bathroom.

“You’re a great mom. Ever thought about having more children?” Ben slid his hands back to my shoulders.

That was a little too much. Yes, I’d like to have another child but it seemed a little soon for that conversation.

His front left jeans pocket vibrated and I’m not going to lie, I was a tiny bit excited. A man with a vibrating penis could take over the world.

I turned around to check it out. Unfortunately, it was his phone.

He worked it out of his jeans and glanced down at the screen. “Sorry, I need to take this. It’s work.”

I stood. “I’ll just go check on Max.”

Giving him some privacy seemed like a great idea. I walked to the hallway and knocked on Max’s open door. I peeked inside. He must be in the bathroom. I remembered that I’d left my work tote bag with the murder board and all of Molly’s medical records on the kitchen counter. Best not to leave it lying around even if the bag was zipped. I walked back down the hallway and was about to step into the living room when Ben’s whispered voice caught my attention. With the peculiarity of the house’s architecture, sound from one particular spot right by the front door was crystal clear in this one square foot of tile. I’d used it more than once to spy on Max.

“I told you, I’m making progress. She trusts me. Just give me time.” He shoved a hand into his front pocket and leaned against the front door.

Was he talking about me?

“I’ll find out what she knows, but I’m telling you now, she’s not involved. Just because she and Molly were friends doesn’t mean that Molly told her anything.”

My heart dropped to my knees. That bastard, I knew he was too good to be true.

Son of a bitch. Ben had been playing me. Did I have stupid tattooed across my forehead? He’d seemed so sincere, if a little pushy. And I’d fallen for it.

“I can’t right now. I’m in the middle of something.” Ben waited for whoever to stop talking. “Okay, fine. I’ll be right there.”

He ended the call and slid the phone in his back pocket.

I stepped into the living room and smiled brightly. “Is everything okay?”

He plastered on that aw–shucks ma’am smile and shook his head. “I hate to cut our evening short, but something just came up at work. Rain check?”

Rain check on what, the fake romancing me or planting more bugs in my house? Now I knew for sure who was bugging my house, but I still didn’t know why.

“Sure.” I walked to him. “No problem. I’m used to police emergencies.”

I made my way to the door and opened it for him. “Call me sometime.”

Or never; that was fine too. Now, I questioned everything he’d ever told me.

“Dinner tomorrow?” He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek.

“Absolutely.” Not. I’d find some way out of it.

He walked out the door and to his fancy silver truck. I waved like a lovesick teen, closed the door, and leaned against it. I walked over to my kitchen table and ran my hand under the table where he’d been sitting. I’d gotten all of two inches when my fingers encountered a small square of plastic. I bent over and looked at it.

It was a bright, shiny new listening device.

I hated when I was right.

Chapter 22

The next afternoon, I left work early, claiming I was still nauseated from the fake stomach flu I’d been ailing from. I picked up Max from school and met Haley and her girls at the Lakeside Park. Unfortunately, Monica refused to get the fake flu and leave her one day conference so she couldn’t join us.

I glanced up at our kids climbing on a giant spider web of ropes. They were having a wonderful time and not paying attention to us.

I pulled the lipstick jammer out of my pocket and turned the bottom. “This is a signal jammer so that in the event someone is listening to us, they won’t hear a thing.”

“Wow, where’d you get it?” Haley picked it up and examined it.

“Daman, but I don’t want to talk about it.” Only I really did. I hated that I couldn’t tell her about Daman or his suspicions about David. Not that I didn’t think Haley would tell anyone, but Daman had asked me to keep quiet.

“Ben is the one who bugged my house, but he isn’t working alone. I don’t think he killed Molly, but I think he knows why she was murdered. I overheard him talking to someone on the phone last night about how I wasn’t going to be a problem and how he was making headway with me.” It still pissed me the hell off.

Haley’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

I nodded. “Yep, I fell for the old romance the information out of her.”

I am such a sap. I’d never really thought of myself as particularly sappy, but obviously my capacity for sap is growing.

“He seems so nice and genuine.” Haley always wanted to believe the best about people. I’m pretty sure she’d try to find the good side of Osama Bin Laden.

“I didn’t see it coming, either.” I hunched my shoulders. “It sucks because I like him.”

I also liked Daman too, which may or may not suck depending on if he was romancing info out of me, too. This dating two guys thing was tough especially when I didn’t know whether they were dating me because of my sparkling personality or because they wanted to monitor my activity.

“What a jerk.” She put the lipstick down. “Do you think he bugged my and Monica’s houses?”

I shook my head. “Clearly he works for someone else. He had the opportunity to bug my house and maybe Monica’s when she wasn’t home, but yours is a problem. Someone is there all of the time.” I sucked on my bottom lip. “Can you make a list of all of the people who’ve been in your home since the night of Molly’s viewing? It’s probably a little bit further than we need to go back, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“Good idea.” Haley’s gaze stayed on the kids making sure they were okay. “I’ll start as soon as I get home. I’ll need to ask Pierre and Anise.”

Pierre was her personal chef. He was French and snotty and hated Americans, but he could do amazing things with vegetables that actually made them taste good. I asked him how once, but because he’s French and snotty, he yelled at me for a long time. I left the kitchen when he picked up a knife and started waving it around to drive home whatever point he was trying to make in French. Evidently, vegetables are a touchy subject with him.

I unzipped my tote bag and pulled out the stack of medical records. “Let’s go through these again. I’m out of leads. I don’t think we’ll ever find out where all of that money came from or the gold.”

I sucked in my bottom lip again. I should tell her about the new info I’d found out about Molly. I’d just leave out where I got it.

“I’ve found out something new about Molly. I can’t tell you how I found it out, but she was into something illegal…possibly money blackening or turning white money, which is dirty, into black money, which is actually clean. Apparently Lakeside has a seedy, criminal underworld thing going on. Money laundering for terrorists or something.” It still sounded so impossible.

Haley crossed her ankles and leaned back. “My gut reaction is, huh? But now that I think about it, there are lots of things about Lakeside that don’t make sense. We have more banks in this town than the entire countries of Switzerland and Grand Cayman combined. I know for a fact that they do the bulk of their deposits in cash. Where else do you see people take Whole Foods sacks full of cash into a bank for deposit?”

“I’ve never really noticed. Then again, my paycheck is direct deposit so I never go to my bank.” It’s not like I have extra cash lying around that I throw into a Whole Foods bag and carry into the bank. Hell, I can’t afford to shop at Whole Foods.

“Banks are supposed to report any deposits of ten thousand dollars or more by filling out a suspicious funds report, but I’ve never seen one being filled out even when I deposited twenty thousand in cash.” Haley was so blasé. Like depositing twenty grand in cash was something she did every day.

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her why she was carrying around twenty grand. Daman had told me to trust no one.

“It was the weekly deposit from one of my parents’ Chik–fil–as. It had been a particularly good week and they didn’t want all of that cash in the safe.” She explained.

I hated that even for a second I’d doubted her.

“Since I have no idea where to look to find out what Molly was into, let’s go through these again.” I handed her half of the stack of medical files. “I hope we missed something because I’ve got nowhere else to look.”

“Okay.” She slid her pile in front of her and thumbed through a quarter inch of the stack, picked it up, and turned it face down beside her.

“What are those?” There was no way that she’d read through them that quickly.

“Files from her pediatrician. We decided they were no use.” Haley leaned down, picked up a rock, and placed it on top of the stack she’d just turned face down, and put the rock on top of it to keep the pages from blowing away.

“That’s right.” I moved the rock and grabbed the pile. “I guess I’ll check them just in case.”

I skimmed the first page and the second and so on. Nothing but routine childhood illnesses. About three–quarters of the way through, things got interesting. I thumbed to the next page and the next. I went back and reread the dates, counting. “Can you think of a reason why Molly met with Dr. Turley every Friday for the last two years? Always the last appointment and there are no treatment notes, just an entry of the date.”

Slowly Haley lowered the handful of papers she’d been reading. “No.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. Dr. Turley is a pediatrician, so seeing her is out of his scope of practice. If he billed it, her insurance company would deny it. So she paid cash for her visits?” Not that any of this mattered, but my work brain had kicked in. I knew the scope–of–practice thing all too well. Before Lakeside Regional, I’d worked for a doctor who liked to throw in the occasional pelvic exam for his cute female clients; only he was an orthopedic surgeon. Trust me, when your orthopedic surgeon offers free pelvic exams with every knee surgery—say no and find a new doctor.

“We now know that she had plenty of cash.” Haley set the papers down and put the rock on top of them. “Why every week? Clearly Molly had other doctors, so if she had some sort of medical problem, which isn’t in these records, she would have gone to another doctor. In some cases, I know that adults with special needs will often stay with their pediatrician because they feel comfortable, but Molly didn’t have special needs. Or did she?” A slow smile curled on her lips. “Last appointment of the day?”

“Yes.” Something else was going on, something that didn’t have anything to do with medicine.

“They were having an affair.” Haley’s shoulders shook with laughter. “She told us that she was seeing a doctor. We all assumed that it was Dr. Dick, but it was Dr. Turley.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Ewww. He’s like seventy and married and he was her pediatrician.”

I tried not to picture the two of them going at it, but the image kept popping into my head. I couldn’t help the gag building in my throat. Dr. Turley had always reminded me of a crazy–eyed Santa Claus. He was fat, overly jolly, smelled like peppermint, and one of his eyes wandered. I never knew which eye I was supposed to look at.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense.” Haley looked a little dazed like she was trying to wrap her head around it, too. “Think he was the father of her baby?”

“Makes sense if they really were having an affair.” Had he killed her because she’d told him about the baby?

“He’s a pillar in this community, I guess an illegitimate child wouldn’t be a good thing?” I couldn’t even convince myself of that. In this day and age, illegitimacy wasn’t a big deal.

“Maybe.” Haley wasn’t buying it either. “Okay, I can almost see the affair—almost—and the baby could happen, but I don’t see him killing her. Now wait a minute.” She pointed to me. “Have you met Puddy Turley, his wife?”

“Puddy?” God, I hope that’s a nickname.

“It’s short for Prudence, anyway, she makes Edna Miars look like Miss Congeniality. When LisaBeth, Dr. Turley and Puddy’s daughter, was a junior in high school, she was the second alternate on the varsity cheerleading squad. Two cheerleaders both had bizarre accidents and couldn’t finish out the season. One fell out of the second story window of her house breaking her leg and the other was the victim of a hit and run car accident and broke her pelvis. And that’s not all. Once, when Puddy tried to join the garden club, but didn’t have enough votes from the membership committee, the whole committee mysteriously came down with food poisoning. You don’t cross Puddy. My money’s on her for the murder.” Haley crossed her arms.