Scoop to Kill (24 page)

We faced each other on the dance floor. He held on to my right hand, and placed his other hand on the curve of my waist. The two-step is not a close-up dance, yet that distance between us forced us to look in each other’s eyes. The circle of our arms defined a private space, and his blue eyes held me there.

The tripping run of the guitar signalled the start of the dance, and the instant the lonesome cry of the fiddle filled the room, the gentle pressure of Cal’s hand sent me stepping back, quick, quick, slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, slow.

I hadn’t danced with many men in my life. Finn, of course. And a couple of awkward efforts with Wayne Jones. The occasional Dalliance civic leader at some function or another.

Dancing with Cal was different. He didn’t have the innate grace Finn possessed, but he wasn’t as stiff as Wayne. He led me around the floor without crowding or pushing. I retreated and he followed, relentless but patient.

“When I close my eyes,” Patty sang, “I almost see the way you look when you were standing next to me.” The words were filled with longing and regret, the music bittersweet. The song spoke to one man in my life, as another’s heat enveloped me.

After a full turn around the dance floor, he spun me around beneath his arms so I ended up tucked against his side. As we promenaded, he leaned down to murmur in my ear.

“I didn’t crawl out from under a rock, Tally. I know a little something about women. I understand why you might be attracted to Finn. He’s fun, maybe a little dangerous, but he’s not reliable.” He spun me around into a classic hold and looked me square in the eye. “I am.”

I nodded. I knew the truth of his words. Hadn’t I relied on Cal in the past? Called him for help when my mama was too drunk to drive to the grocery store? Cried on his solid shoulder when Finn left town?

Quick, quick, slow, slow.

“I don’t know what Finn can offer, but I’m offering you a life.” He shifted us again, bringing me back to his side. “I’m offering you a steady, faithful man and maybe, God willing, a baby or two. Picket fence, PTA meetings, the works.”

I stumbled, but his strong hands held me aloft, and we never missed a step.

“Are you proposing?” I gasped.

He pushed me away, then pulled me close, twisting us in a complicated and dizzying combination, before finally drawing me around to face him again.

Quick, quick, slow, slow.

“Is that so crazy?”

“Last year you were ready to arrest me for murder, and now you want to get married and have babies?”

He snorted, a sort of humorless laugh.

“Give me a little credit, Tally. There was a warrant, so I asked you to turn yourself in. I didn’t want you to get hurt. But I didn’t really think you killed anyone.”

“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence. But, Cal, where’s this coming from? We’ve never even been on a date.”

“Don’t I know it! You always seemed way too young, and then before I made my move you started dating Finn. And when you broke up with Finn, I had already enlisted. By the time I got back, you were married.” He spun me around once, disorienting me as I lost sight of him, but then he was there, filling my field of vision again. “The timing was never right, Tally, but I’ve been half in love with you my whole life.”

“Half in love,” I echoed. “But not all the way in love?”

The expression on his stern face never wavered, but his nostrils flared just a bit. I had come to recognize that tiny motion as a sign of annoyance. “Like you said, we’ve never even gone on a date. I’m not saying we should get married tomorrow or anything. I was just thinking we might go out. Court. Go steady.” He laughed softly, as though surprised at his own whimsy. “We don’t have to talk about anything legally binding until we’ve at least kissed a couple of times.”

He started to spin me into another complicated turn, but I resisted, led us to the edge of the dance floor, and to a halt. I pulled my hand away and cupped his hard jaw, his skin warm and slightly whiskery beneath my fingers. I melted a little when his eyelashes fluttered over his lightning blue eyes and he leaned into my caress.

Part of me thought, what the heck? It wouldn’t hurt to go on a few dates with a handsome man, see where it led. But another part of me, the part that had been scorched by Finn Harper leaving me behind and burned by Wayne Jones’s infidelity, that part of me sounded a warning bell. Cal made light of his mention of marriage, but did I really want to toy with a man so serious?

“Cal, what’s going on here? What’s brought this on?”

When he opened his eyes, I saw such pain and yearning there, I had to resist the urge to pull him into an embrace.

“I’m tired of waiting,” he said simply.

“For what?”

“For the future. For the right time. For you. Bryan . . .” He trailed off and looked into the middle distance, composing himself. “This past month has made me realize how life can just”—his brow furrowed as he searched for the words—“just end.”

He cleared his throat. “When I stood by his coffin, I thought about what he’d been doing the day he died, the humdrum little things he was doing that day, filling up what turned out to be the last minutes of his life, and it made me question how I spend
my
minutes. I don’t want to waste any more minutes on waiting.”

This time, I didn’t even try to resist my impulse to pull him close. He folded around me like an old bed quilt, warm and heavy.

“Cal,” I said softly, my voice muffled by the surprisingly soft skin beneath his jaw. “I’m so touched. But I’ve already had one ill-advised marriage. That’s my quota. No more.” He opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. “I think you need to get past your grief before you jump into anything, even just going steady.”

I felt his whole body stiffen beneath my hand.

He pulled back. For a second, he wavered uncertainly, as though he might reach out and snatch me close again. But then he nodded his head once, turned on his heel, and stalked back to the table, drawing the anxious attention of everyone at the head table.

I let him go.

It was not a night for romance.

I
tipped my head back against the brick facade of the Gish-Tunny Center. The wall still held the heat of the afternoon sun, and the contrast between warm wall and cool air felt oddly comforting. I let my mind drift along the faint strains of music coming from inside, doing my best not to think about how my love life had gone from zero to sixty—and back to zero—in nothing flat that night.

“What are you doing out here?”

My eyes snapped open, and I found Bree and Alice standing before me, all clean and pressed and ready for a dance.

“Me? What about you?”

“Your friendly neighborhood Cinderellas have finished the housework and are ready to get their dance on,” Bree replied.

I chuckled, but my heart wasn’t in it.

“Can I borrow Alice for a minute or two?”

Bree gave me the stink-eye. “Are you going to get my child into more trouble?”

“I don’t think so,” I said hopefully.

“I’ll be fine, Mama. I’ll keep Aunt Tally safe.”

“Okay. I’m going in to that dance to find some rich, handsome cowboy. But I’ve got my phone. Just buzz if you get in a pickle.”

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Tell Marla and Rosemary Gunderson that I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. I just needed to check something out across campus.”

I took Alice by the hand and led her across the moonlit campus toward Sinclair Hall. “You still have Emily’s keys, right?”

Alice nodded. “Are we breaking in?”

“No. Well, yes. But just to borrow her computer. We need to search the Internet for something.”

We let ourselves into Emily’s office, and Alice booted up the computer.

“What are we looking for?”

“Two words: q-u-i t-a-m.”

She glanced up at me, her eyes wide with surprise, but then typed in the words.

“The very first result is for something called a
qui tam
action.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“Um . . .” She clicked open a link and read to herself for a moment. “It looks like it’s a type of lawsuit where an individual person sues on behalf of the government. So, like, if you found out that someone was cheating the government by, like, charging the military too much for fighter jets, you could file a lawsuit representing the interest of the government.”

She studied the screen some more, then uttered a short, mirthless laugh.

“Apparently the government wants to pay people to narc. So if you bring one of these lawsuits, you get a cut of whatever the government recovers. Like fifteen to twenty-five percent. And your attorney fees.”

“Attorney fees?” I had a sudden thought. “Can you do a search for this type of lawsuit and ‘attorneys’ and ‘Dalliance, Texas’?”

Her fingers flew over the keyboard.

“Huh,” Alice said. “It looks like there’s a directory of lawyers in Texas who handle these types of cases. And there’s only one listing in Dalliance: Jackson and Ver Steeg.”

“Oh.” I sagged against Emily’s desk and closed my eyes. “Oh, my.”

“What?” Alice asked.

Silence stretched between us, and I could almost hear the wheel click in her giant brain as she made the same realization I had.

“The difference between the two spreadsheets,” she said. “It wasn’t just a math error.”

“No. Gunderson must have monkeyed with the spreadsheet template to calculate the facilities and administration charge using a slightly higher percentage. It padded all the grant requests by a bit, which he could then skim off the top. That’s why Bryan told Ashley that fractions of percents mattered.”

Alice whistled. “With Emily’s grant, a fraction of a percent wouldn’t amount to much, but for the hard sciences, those grants can be millions of dollars. Just half a percent of that is thousands of dollars.”

“Bryan figured it out. And he decided to cash in, to file one of these
qui tam
actions. Probably because of the baby.”

“But how would Gunderson have known?”

“Bryan’s lawyer is Kristen Ver Steeg. Her partner is Madeline Jackson, who is Rosemary Gunderson’s niece. I’m guessing Madeline Jackson said something to the Gundersons.”

“She did.”

Alice and I both yelped. We hadn’t heard George Gunderson approach, and now he stood between us and the door. And he had a gun in his hand.

“She didn’t mean to betray Bryan’s confidentiality. She simply thanked us for referring Bryan to the firm and mentioned that he was considering a
qui tam
action, which could prove lucrative for the firm. It never occurred to her that I was involved in the fraud Bryan planned to expose.”

George stepped further into Emily’s office and shut the door behind him.

“It seems I misjudged you, Ms. Jones,” he said. “I rather thought I might get caught, but not by you.”

Was that a compliment? An insult? Did it really matter when I was clearly about to die?

“May I ask what gave me away?”

Fine. If the man wanted to play this game, I’d play, too. Anything to buy us a few more minutes, and maybe a chance of getting out of this pickle.

“Little things,” I said. Beside me, I felt Alice shift in her seat, heard the faint click of her fingers on the computer keyboard. I kept talking to keep Gunderson’s attention on me rather than her. “The pieces have been there all along—you had opportunity to kill Bryan, and you could easily hide the blood from your crime beneath your academic robes. Rosemary said you’d been working late, so you might well have run into Emily here the night she died. In fact, it was probably your tiramisu on the counter at her house. Between your wife and Ginger, you probably knew enough about insulin and diabetes to manipulate her sugar levels to incapacitate her until you could kill her. Then there were all the hints in what Bryan said and did before he died, comments about percentages and safe bets. You also seemed to have more money than other members of the faculty.”

I shrugged. “I never would have put it all together, though, if I hadn’t seen that French lesson on the whiteboard today. The night she died, Emily said something about a key, but it didn’t make sense until I realized that she meant q-u-i, not k-e-y. And then . . . well, then it just fell into place,” I concluded lamely.

George sighed. “Yes, Reggie mentioned you had been agitated about that French lesson. Still, you were perfectly pleasant at dinner. I thought perhaps you’d failed to connect the dots. But then your cousin said you’d had a sudden inspiration and had hared off across campus. It had to be something important to take you away from the party. I knew then that you’d draw the inevitable conclusion.” He shook his head sadly. “I didn’t mean to do it, you know.”

Was he serious? He stole tens of thousands of dollars over the course of years . . . Oops?

He squeezed his eyes closed and tilted his head, like he was trying to stretch out a stiff neck. Before I could take advantage of his distraction, his eyes popped open and he steadied the gun on me.

“I just . . . I need you to understand.”

“I understand,” I lied.

He laughed, a raw, desperate sound. “Anything to calm the crazy man? I’m afraid I’m not crazy, Ms. Jones. Just cornered. I . . . I’m not a bad man. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

Which would be cold comfort, indeed, to Bryan and Emily.

“Three years ago my Rosemary was diagnosed with breast cancer,” he said. “You cannot imagine what it was like, holding her hand through the chemotherapy, holding back her hair when she was sick and too weak to do it herself. My beautiful girl.”

Despite the gravity of my situation, I felt a welling of emotion for this man, so obviously in love with his wife and so helpless in the face of her disease.

“God, the morning they wheeled her into the operating room for her surgery, she looked so small and frail in the bed. I wanted to go with her, to be with her, but she had to face it alone.” He shrugged. “I was unmanned.”