Second Grave on the Left (3 page)

“Is she here?” he asked, anger and fear twisting his benign features.

Even the toughest cop alive grew weak in the knees when standing on the business end of a snub-nosed .38. Apparently, Cookie wasn’t graced with the sense God gave a squirrel.

“Warren Jacobs,” she said, slapping him upside the head.

“Ouch.” He rubbed the spot where Cookie hit him as she took the gun and crammed it into her purse.

“Do you want to get someone killed?”

He lifted his shoulders like a child being scolded by his favorite aunt.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I went to your apartment complex after you called then followed you here and waited to see if Mimi would come out. When she didn’t, I decided to come in.”

He looked ragged and a little starved from days of worry. And he was about as guilty of his wife’s disappearance as I was. I could read people’s emotions like nobody’s business, and innocence wafted off him. He felt bad about something, but it had nothing to do with illegal activity. He probably felt guilty for some imagined offense that he believed made his wife leave. Whatever was going on, I had serious doubts any of it had to do with him.

“Come on,” I said, ushering them both back into the diner. “Brad,” I called out.

His head popped through the opening, an evil grin shimmering on his face. “Miss me already?”

“We’re about to see what you’re made of, handsome.”

He raised his brows, clearly up to the challenge, and twirled a spatula like a drummer in a rock band. “You just sit back and watch,” he said before ducking back and rolling up his sleeves. That kid was going to break more than his share of hearts. I shuddered to think of the carnage he would leave in his wake.

Three
mucho grande
breakfast burritos and seven cups of coffee later—only four of them mine—I sat with a man so sick with worry and doubt, my synapses were taking bets on how long he could keep his breakfast down. The odds were not in his favor.

He’d been telling me about the recent changes in Mimi’s behavior. “When did you notice this drastic change?” I asked, the question approximately my 112th. Give or take.

“I don’t know. I get so wrapped up. Sometimes I doubt I’d notice if my own children caught fire. I think about three weeks ago.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, looking up, “where are your kids?”

“What?” he asked, steering back to me. “Oh, they’re at my sister’s.”

A definite plus. This guy was a mess. Thanks to Norma, I’d graduated from taking notes on napkins to taking notes on an order pad. “And your wife didn’t say anything? Ask anything out of the ordinary? Tell you she was worried or felt like someone was following her?”

“She burned a rump roast,” he said, brightening a little since he could answer one of my questions. “After that, everything went to hell.”

“So, she takes her cooking very seriously.”

He nodded then shook his head. “No, that’s not what I meant. She never burns her roast. Especially her rumps.”

Cookie pinched me under the table when she saw me contemplating whether I should giggle or not. I flashed a quick glare then returned to my expression of concern and understanding.

“You’re a professional investigator, right?” Warren asked.

I squinted. “Define
professional.
” When he only stared, still deep in thought, I said, “No, seriously, I’m not like the other PIs on the playground. I have no ethics, no code of conduct, no taste in gun cleansers.”

“I want to hire you,” he said, unfazed by my gun-cleanser admission.

I was already planning to do the gig for Cookie pro bono—especially since I barely paid her enough to eat people food—but money would come in downright handy when the bill collectors showed up. “I’m very expensive,” I said, trying to sound a bit like a tavern wench.

He leaned in. “I’m very rich.”

I glanced at Cookie for confirmation. She raised her brows and nodded her head.

“Oh. Well, then, I guess we can do business. Wait a minute,” I said, my thoughts tumbling over themselves, “how rich?”

“Rich enough, I guess.” If his answers got any more vague, they’d resemble the food in school cafeterias everywhere.

“I mean, has anyone asked you for money lately?”

“Just my cousin Harry. But he always asks me for money.”

Maybe Cousin Harry was getting more desperate. Or more brazen. I took down Harry’s info, then asked, “Can you think of anything else? Anything that might explain her behavior?”

“Not really,” he said after handing his credit card to Norma. Neither Cookie nor I had enough to cover our extra coffees, much less our
mucho grandes,
and since I doubted they would take my bunny slippers in trade …

“Mr. Jacobs,” I said, putting on my big-girl panties, “I have a confession to make. I’m very adept at reading people, and no offense, but you’re holding out on me.”

He worked his lower lip, a remorseful guilt oozing out of his pores. Not so much an I-killed-my-wife-and-buried-her-lifeless-body-in-the-backyard kind of guilt but more of an I-know-something-but-I-don’t-want-to-tell kind of guilt.

With a loud sigh, he lowered his head into his palms. “I thought she was having an affair.”

Bingo. “Well, that’s something. Can you explain why you thought that?”

Too exhausted to put much effort into it, he lifted his shoulders into the slightest hint of a shrug. “Just her behavior. She’d grown so distant. I asked her about it, and she laughed, told me I was the only man in her life because she was not about to put up with another.”

In the grand scheme of things, it was quite natural for him to suspect adultery, considering how much Mimi had apparently changed.

“Oh, and a friend of hers died recently,” he said in afterthought. His brow crinkled as he tried to remember the details. “I’d completely forgotten. Mimi said she was murdered.”

“Murdered? How?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t remember.” Another wave of guilt wafted off him.

“They were close?”

“That’s just it. They’d went to high school together, but they hadn’t kept in touch. Mimi never even mentioned her name until she died, so I was surprised at how much it affected her. She was devastated, and yet…”

“And yet?” I asked when he lost himself in thought again. This was just getting interesting. He couldn’t stop now.

“I don’t know. She was torn up, but not really upset about losing her friend. It was different.” His jaw worked as he rifled through his memories. “I really didn’t think much about it at the time, but quite frankly, she didn’t seem all that surprised that her friend was murdered. Then I asked her if she wanted to go to the funeral, and my god, the look on her face. You’d think I’d asked her to drown the neighbor’s cat.”

Admittedly, drowning the neighbor’s cat didn’t really clue me in as much as I would’ve liked. “So, she was angry?”

He blinked back to me and stared. Like a long time. Long enough to have me sliding my tongue over my teeth to make sure I didn’t have anything in them.

“She was horrified,” he said at last.

Damn, I wished he could’ve remembered the woman’s name. And why Mimi wasn’t surprised when the woman was murdered. Murder is usually quite the surprise to everyone involved.

Speaking of names, I decided to ask about the one on the bathroom wall. Having found no foreign objects in my teeth, I asked, “Did Mimi ever mention a Janelle York?”

“That’s her,” he said in surprise. “That’s Mimi’s friend who was murdered. How did you know?”

I didn’t, but his thinking I did made me look good.

Chapter Two

DON’T CROSS THE STREAMS. NEVER CROSS THE STREAMS.

—BUMPER STICKER

“What are you listening to?” I asked, reaching over and turning down the radio as Cookie drove home. “This Little Light of Mine” was just way too happy for the current atmospheric conditions.

She hit the
SCAN
button. “I don’t know. It’s supposed to be classic rock.”

“Oh. So, did you buy this car used?” I asked, thinking back to the dead guy in her trunk and wondering how he got there. I still needed to figure out if Cookie had been a black widow before she met me. She did have black hair. And she’d recently cut it. A disguise, mayhap? Not to mention her early-morning, pre-coffee mean streak that made road rage a practical alternative for a healthier, happier Cookie. The departed rarely just hung out on Earth for no particular reason. Dead Trunk Guy most likely died violently, and if I was ever going to get him to cross, I’d have to figure out how and why.

“Yeah,” she said absently. “At least we know where to start with Janelle York. Should I call your uncle on this one? And maybe the medical examiner?”

“Absolutely,” I said supernonchalantly. “So, then, where did you buy it?”

She looked over at me, her brows knitting. “Buy what?”

I shrugged and looked out the window. “Your car.”

“At Domino Ford. Why?”

I flipped my palms up. “Just wondering. One of those weird things you think about on the way home from investigating a missing persons case.”

Her eyes widened in horror. “Oh my god! There’s a dead person in my backseat, isn’t there?”

“Wait, what?” I said in stuttering astonishment. “Not even. Why would you assume such a thing?”

She fixed a knowing gaze on me a heartbeat before she pulled into a gas station, tires screeching.

“Cook, we’re five seconds from home.”

“Tell me the truth,” she insisted after nearly throwing me through the windshield. She had really good brakes. “I mean it, Charley. Dead people follow you everywhere, but I don’t want them in my car. And you suck at lying.”

“I do not.” I felt oddly appalled by her statement. “I’m an excellent liar. Ask my dentist. He swears I floss regularly.”

She threw the car into park and glared. Hard. She would do well in a prison setting.

After transforming a sigh into a Broadway production, I said, “I promise, Cook, there’s not a dead person in your backseat.”

“Then it’s in the trunk. There’s a body in the trunk, isn’t there?” The panic in her voice was funny. Until she flew out of the car.

“What?” I said, climbing out after her. “Of course not.”

She pointed to her white Taurus and stared at me accusingly. “There is a dead body in that trunk,” she said. Really loud. Loud enough for the cop sitting next to us with his window down to hear.

I rolled my eyes. It was late October. Why the hell was his window down? When he opened his car door and unfolded to his full height, I dropped my head into a palm. Thankfully it was my own. This was so not happening. If I had to call my uncle Bob, an Albuquerque Police detective, in the middle of the night one more time to get me out of one of these ridiculous altercations I tended to have with random cops, he was going to kill me. He told me so himself. With an orange peeler. Not sure why.

“Is there a problem here, ladies?” the officer asked.

Cookie scowled at me. “Why don’t you tell him there’s not a dead body in that trunk? Hmmm?”

“Cook, really?”

She threw her hands on her hips, waiting for an answer.

I turned back to Dirty Harry. “Look, Officer O. Vaughn,” I said, glancing at his name badge. “I know what Cookie said sounded bad, but she was speaking metaphorically. We would never really h-have…” I’d looked back at his face, at the almost contemptuous expression lining his mouth, and a vague familiarity tingled along my spine. In a Stephen King’s
It
sort of way. “You wouldn’t happen to be related to Owen Vaughn?”

His mouth thinned. “I
am
Owen Vaughn.”

No way. For reasons known only to him, Owen Vaughn tried to kill me in high school. With an SUV. Though he later told the police he was only trying to maim me, he refused to tell them why. I’d apparently rained buckets on his parade, but for the life of me, I never figured out what I’d done.

I decided to play it cool. No need to throw past criminal activity in his face. Time to let bygones be bygones. Mostly ’cause he had a gun and I didn’t.

I smiled and socked him in the arm like we were old friends. “Long time, no see, Vaughn.”

It didn’t work. He tensed, took a moment to examine the place where my fist had made contact, then let his gaze wander back to me, zero in on my eyes like he wanted nothing more than to strangle the life out of them.

Awkward.

Then I remembered he’d been friends with Neil Gossett in high school. I’d recently become reacquainted with Neil, and decided to use that bit of info to break the block of ice Vaughn was encased in. “Oh, hey, I just saw Neil the other day. He’s the deputy warden at the prison in Santa Fe.”

“I know where Neil Gossett is,” he said, the contempt in his voice undiluted. “I know where all of you are.” He leaned toward me. “Don’t ever doubt that.”

I stood in shock a solid minute as he turned and walked to his patrol car. Cookie stared, too, her jaw slightly ajar as she watched him drive away.

“He didn’t even check the trunk,” she said.

“Is it just me,” I asked, gazing at his disappearing taillights, “or was that a really stalkery kind of thing to say?”

“What the hell did you do to him?”

“Me?” I placed a hand over my chest to demonstrate how much her words hurt. “Why do you always assume it’s my fault?”

“Because it always is.”

“I’ll have you know that man tried to maim me in high school. With an SUV.”

She turned to me then, her expression incredulous. “Have you ever considered moving to another country?”

“Oddly, yes.”

“Trunk. Dead body.” She walked to the car and unlocked the trunk lid.

I dived toward her, closing the lid before the dead guy could see me.

“I knew it,” she said, backing away from the car again. “There’s a dead body in the trunk.”

Trying to shush her with an index finger slamming against my mouth repeatedly, I whispered, loudly, like drunks do in a singles bar, “It’s not a dead body. It’s a dead
guy
. There’s a difference. And if he realizes I can see him, he’ll be all up in my face, trying to get me to solve his murder and crap.”