Читать книгу Confessions - JoAnn Ross - Страница 11
ОглавлениеChapter Four
The medical examiner’s office was in the basement of the town’s eighty-year-old redbrick courthouse. Since the ancient elevator tended to be iffy, Trace decided to skip it.
As Mariah accompanied him down first the narrow flight of stairs and then the long, poorly lit hallway, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that none of it was real, that she was plotting out a script.
Beautiful wife of charismatic senator is killed in an isolated ranch house during a thunderstorm, she set up the scenario. With the help of the murdered woman’s sister, an award-winning television writer, the crime is solved, the politician husband is arrested and justice wins in the end.
No, Mariah considered. That plot left the wife still dead. She erased the mental slate in her mind and began again.
Beautiful wife of charismatic senator is shot and wounded during a thunderstorm. While she lies in a coma, dogged small-town sheriff and glamorous television writer, estranged from her family for years, set out to prove the husband guilty.
The smoking gun is found. The senator gets a pair of silver bracelets and a ride in the back of a patrol car to jail, where he breaks down and confesses.
His wife wakes up in the hospital, seemingly no worse for her harrowing experience and requests a cup of herbal tea and a divorce. The sisters embrace. The music swells.
“Whatever would I have done without you?” the older sister asks tearfully.
The younger one shrugs. She is not only glamorous and famous, but modest as well. “Hey,” she says, “that’s what sisters are for.”
So, in sixty minutes, minus commercials and a network newsbreak, justice is served, a family is reunited, and the story ends on a happy, upbeat note.
It was a nice scenario, Mariah considered with an inward sigh. Too bad things didn’t work that way in real life.
Unfortunately, there was one thing that was exactly like it appeared on television. And that was the morgue.
Trace flipped the switch beside the door. The rows of fluorescent tubes flickered to life, casting a bright, but complexion-draining light over the scene. Cool air was blowing from the vent above the loading dock door of the windowless room. “The doc’s probably out getting breakfast.”
“I’m amazed he could eat.”
Trace’s only response was a shrug. Taking a new cop out for a Denny’s Grand Slam after he’d watched his first autopsy had long been viewed as a rite of passage.
A metal table stood in the center of the linoleum floor. Beside the table was a scale, like that used in supermarkets to weigh apples and oranges. Although a camera was fixed to the ceiling overhead, allowing photographs of record to be taken, the room lacked the overhead microphone that would allow the forensic pathologist to record his findings for later transcription. Instead, metal clipboards hung from hooks on the bilious green wall.
Between the clipboards and the old-fashioned black wall phone was a cork bulletin board covered with official memoranda, some of which, Mariah noted absently, were years old. Against the opposite wall, rather than the tidy steel compartments she routinely wrote into her scripts, was a walk-in freezer.
Trace gave her a judicious look. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”
“I’m sure.”
Watching her wrap her arms around herself, Trace suspected that it was not the cold she’d find inside the freezer Mariah Swann was trying to ward off, but the iciness that had taken hold of her heart.
She took a deep breath. “Let’s get it over with.”
Mariah had witnessed death before. She had even, on one memorable occasion, in the name of research, sat in on an autopsy. She had to leave the room to throw up when the pathologist popped the top of the skull with a tool that resembled a crowbar, but so had the detective assigned to the case.
This time, however, she had a personal connection to the sheet-draped body stretched out on the wheeled gurney. This was no anonymous skid-row slashing victim; this was her sister.
Trace drew back the cloth covering Laura Fletcher’s face. He watched the myriad emotions flicker across Mariah’s face: first shock, then startled recognition, followed an instant later by pain. Then, ultimately, love.
When she reached out to smooth away a few strands of auburn hair from her sister’s cheek, he made a move to stop her from contaminating the evidence, then decided, what the hell.
“That’s where she was shot?” she asked, observing the smudged wound at the left temple. Though she was almost as pale as her sister and her trembling hands betrayed her tumultuous emotions, Mariah’s voice remained steady.
“There and in the chest.”
“I want to see.”
“I’m not sure—”
She raised her chin. “I said, I want to see what was done to my sister, Sheriff.”
Their stares locked and held. Fuck it, Trace decided. He didn’t feel up to arguing the point.
Hoping she wasn’t going to faint on him again, he yanked back the sheet.
At the sight of Laura’s nude body, Mariah flinched and unconsciously put a hand to her own breast as if she suddenly felt the impact of the gunshot herself.
Trace watched her thoughtful gaze move back and forth, from one wound to the other. The lady, he decided, was no cream puff.
“There’s carbon stippling,” she murmured, pointing out the unmistakable tattoo of powder soot imbedded in a ring around the head wound.
“Yeah. Interesting you should recognize that.”
She heard the question in his voice. “In case J.D. didn’t have time to fill you in, I’m a television scriptwriter. I specialize in crime shows.” She tossed off the names of a few of the more successful ones and a made-for-television movie.
“I’ve caught a couple of those. The ones I saw were pretty accurate,” he allowed.
“Thank you. I pride myself on my research.” She looked up at him. The earlier anguish in her eyes had been replaced by an anger much chillier than the artificially cooled air in the freezer. “You know what this proves, don’t you?”
He crossed his arms. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“It proves I’m right. Alan shot Laura.”
“I’m not sure I get your drift.”
“I don’t need a degree in forensic medicine to tell that my sister was shot from intermediate range.”
“I’d say twelve to sixteen inches,” Trace agreed.
“You said on the drive over here that you found her in the bedroom. In bed. Without any clothes on.”
“Yeah.” He was still bothered about that part. Why lay out all that dough for fancy nightgowns if you weren’t going to wear them? “So?”
“So who else would Laura have allowed to get that close to her under those circumstances?”
“Why don’t you tell me? I didn’t know your sister.”
“There are only two people most women will allow to see them stark naked. Their husbands and their gynecologists.”
“What about lovers?”
“Husbands, lovers, same thing.”
“Sometimes not.”
Mariah shot him a sharp look. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that a woman’s husband and her lover are not necessarily always the same person.”
“Are you accusing my sister of having an affair?”
He thought of the ribbon-bound letters and shrugged. “At this point I’m not ready to accuse anyone of anything.”
“She was not having an affair.”
“Whatever you say. Are you finished looking?”
Her mind reeling with what the sheriff had just implied, Mariah dragged her gaze back to Laura’s body, looking at it so intently Trace thought she might be memorizing her sister’s features. She was.
“Yes.” She bit her lip as he drew the sheet back over the lifeless form.
Her emotions in a turmoil, Mariah latched on to the one thing she could handle right now. It was up to Mariah to make certain Laura’s killer did not get away.
“It was Alan,” she insisted.
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “Maybe not.”
Frustrated, Mariah tried another tack. “Did you find the weapon in the house?”
“Sorry. But I’m not at liberty to discuss the investigation.”
“Not even with the victim’s next of kin?”
“No offense intended, Ms. Swann, but technically the senator’s the next of kin.”
Mariah’s response to that was an earthy, pungent curse.
Trace turned off the lights. They were walking back down the dingy hallway when Mariah suddenly said, “Could you tell me where the rest rooms are?”
Her face had turned the color of the puke green walls. “Right around the corner. First door to the left.”
She was gone before he could finish his instructions.
After throwing up, Mariah splashed her face with cold water, then swirled more water that carried the scent and flavor of chlorine around in her mouth. She dug through her purse and located a lint-covered peppermint Life Saver, which she popped into her mouth. Then, taking a deep breath, she rejoined Trace, who was waiting exactly where she’d left him. “You okay?” His gaze briefly swept over her too pale face.
“Fine. Thanks,” Mariah lied.
Although the basement was a great deal warmer than the autopsy room, she still felt chilled all the way to the bone. She felt, Mariah thought bleakly, as cold as Laura.
His sharp eyes caught the slight shiver she tried to conceal. “My office is upstairs. How about I buy you a cup of coffee? Or tea,” he amended, thinking about her dash to the toilet.
The way her nerves were jangling, the one thing Mariah didn’t need was any caffeine. But she’d try anything to warm up. “Tea always makes me feel like a kid with flu. But I could use some coffee, thank you.”
His office, tucked away in a corner on the third floor, was shabby, but neat. Two chairs, covered in an uninspiring mud-hued Herculon dating back to the earth tones of the 1970s, sat in front of a weathered pine desk.
A law enforcement recruiting poster featured a scrubbed and polished young man in a starched khaki uniform standing beside a patrol car.
A second poster advertised the Silent Witness program, while another more colorful one featured McGruff, the crime dog, dressed like Sherlock Holmes and advising citizens to Take A Bite Out Of Crime. Taped to the beige wall beside the poster were crayon drawings from a class of third graders, thanking the sheriff for a tour of the jail.
On the opposite wall were FBI posters of most wanted felons who looked as if they’d come straight from central casting: a long-haired, tattooed biker, a wild-eyed Charles Manson lookalike and a sullen woman with a frizzy blond perm and four-inch-long black roots who looked like a poster girl for sexually transmitted diseases.
“Nice photo collection,” she murmured. “And so much more original than the usual candid vacation snapshots of the wife and kids.”
“I don’t have a wife. Or kids.” He gave the wanted posters a cursory study. “And sometimes, as clichéd as it might seem, the bad guys really do look like criminals.”
“But not all the time,” she noted significantly.
“No.” Trace frowned as he thought of the mild-mannered sixth grade science teacher and Boy Scout leader who’d strangled, then methodically dismembered five hookers before he and Danny had finally caught up with him. “Not all the time.”
He gestured toward one of the chairs. “Have a seat. Nobody’s made coffee this morning, so I’ll have to get some from the machine down the hall. How do you take it?”
“With cream. Two sugars.”
He reached into a top drawer, grabbed a handful of change and left the office.
Drained, Mariah sank down onto the seat he’d indicated. The wood-framed window offered an appealing view of the town square across the street.
She watched as a young man threw a Frisbee to a remarkably talented springer spaniel who, from what she could tell, never missed. She envied both man and dog. They were playing on the fragrant green grass in the bright morning sunshine, oblivious to the horrors of the world around them.
Had it only been yesterday that she’d been the same way? Until this morning, murder had always been an intriguing challenge. Fortunately, enough people shared her fascination with violent, unpredictable crime to have made her a very wealthy woman.
Although she made her living thinking up innovative ways to kill people in the crime dramas she was best known for, her stories had always been born in the fertile ground of her imagination. She would painstakingly create her characters, weaving in enough sympathetic traits to win the audience’s empathy, then murder the victims in ways that occasionally inspired letter-writing campaigns to the networks and advertisers from religious and moral watchdog groups.
The complaints never disturbed her. In Mariah’s world, any publicity you didn’t have to pay for was good publicity.
And when the script was completed, she moved on to the next story, the next murder, never giving those deceased characters another thought. They weren’t real, after all.
But, dammit, Laura was.
Mariah lit another cigarette to get the smell of the autopsy room out of her nostrils. “It’ll probably taste like toxic waste,” Trace warned when he returned to the office. “And the cream is that nondairy stuff. But it’s hot.” He put a brown-and-white cardboard cup down in front of Mariah, then went around the desk, pulled an ashtray from one of the drawers and handed it to her.
“Thanks.” She took a sip of the coffee, found it as bad as he’d predicted, but drank it anyway, willing the warmth to replace the ice in her bloodstream. “May I ask you a question?”
The leather chair behind the desk creaked as he leaned back in it. “Shoot.”
“Are you religious?”
“Not particularly.” Trace grimaced as he took a taste of his own black coffee. But like her, did not put it down. Unlike her, he needed the caffeine.
“Do you believe in God?”
He stared off into the middle distance as he considered that. His eyes were the color of steel, set deep in his unshaven, hollow-cheeked face. “I suppose I believe in what AA would call a higher power. Why?”
“I didn’t think I did. Not anymore, anyway.” She drew in on the cigarette, thinking that the fiery hell she’d been taught to fear during her catechism days was too good for the man who’d murdered Laura. “But I realized, down in that room, that I’m not nearly the agnostic I thought I was.”
She took another drink as she tried to put what she was feeling into words. “It’s not that I want to believe Laura’s in some mythical wooded glen like all those near-death experiences people describe, visiting with all our dearly departed relatives, listening to some heavenly choir,” she stressed. “It’s just that what’s down in that room—her body—isn’t her.”
She shook her head in mute frustration. “Does that make any sense?”
Trace put his cup on the desk and locked his hands behind his head as he remembered an instance, during his days as a rookie cop, when he’d gotten into a similar theological discussion with a sergeant who, whenever he looked at all those bodies in the morgue, saw nothing but dead meat.
At the time Trace had disagreed. He still did.
“You look at the faces,” he said quietly. “And they’re empty.”
“Exactly. Everything that made Laura who she was, everything that made her special is gone,” she stressed. “So where did it go? It couldn’t just disappear into thin air.”
“All souls go to heaven?” Trace asked.
Thinking that he was being condescending, she bristled. “Why not?”
She’d expected a smirk. Instead he smiled and she was surprised to note that it held considerable charm. “Sounds good to me.”
Mariah was in no mood to be charmed by some small-town, black Irish cop. Even if his firmly cut lips did remind her of a Celtic poet.
“Callahan,” she murmured, “wasn’t that Dirty Harry’s last name?”
He didn’t directly answer her question. “You know,” he mused out loud, “sometimes I think I should have become a chiropractor.”
“A chiropractor?”
“Or a dentist. Going through life as a cop with the name of Callahan isn’t always easy.” This time the smile reached his weary eyes, turning them a gleaming pewter.
Even as Mariah found herself momentarily intrigued by their warmth, she shook off the feeling. “So, when are you going to question Alan?”
“As soon as he’s out of surgery.”
“Too bad you can’t do it while he’s still under the sodium Pentothal.”
“Are you insinuating that the senator is a liar?”
“He’s a politician, isn’t he? It comes with the territory.” Her gaze turned serious. “You realize, of course, that this is going to turn out to be a media circus.”
“The thought had occurred to me.”
“Are you also aware that Alan Fletcher has a great many powerful friends? Not only here in Arizona, but in the rest of the country as well?”
“You don’t get to be chairman of the Armed Services Committee without some powerful friends.”
His easy drawl irritated her. Her gaze met his and held. “I just thought I should warn you.”
“Consider me warned.” His gray eyes darkened, but his tone remained mild. Only a well-honed ear could have detected the steel in it.
Mariah swallowed the rest of the thick brown brew and stood up. “Well, thanks for the coffee, Sheriff. I’d better check into the lodge. I’ve got a lot to do.”
“Before you go, I need to ask you a couple of questions. About your sister.”
She sat back down. “All right.”
“Were you close?”
“When we were kids, we were as close as two people can be.”
“And later?”
Mariah sighed. “Not as close as I would have liked.”
She’d never forget the knock-down-drag-out fight between them on her last night in Arizona. Laura had only been attempting to soothe the always turbulent waters between father and daughter when Matthew Swann had discovered her intention to become an actress, like her mother.
But at the time, Mariah had viewed Laura as a traitor. Embarrassed, angry and young, Mariah had struck out with her most powerful weapon—words. She’d flung hurtful accusations like bullets, claiming Laura had abandoned her the same way she’d abandoned Clint Garvey on their wedding night.
Knowing that her sister had never gotten over the painful events of that disastrous night, Mariah had gone so far as to suggest that Laura would never marry any man because of her unhealthy relationship with her own father.
The word incest was never spoken, but the unpalatable suggestion had hovered over the room like a deadly cloud.
When an apoplectic Matthew had demanded Mariah apologize, she’d refused. It was the last time she was to see her sister for a very long time.
Then, two years ago, during a trip to California, Laura had surprised her by showing up on the set of a made-for-television movie. Their first meeting had been cautious. Their stilted conversation had reminded Mariah of two boxers, circling the ring, feeling each other out in the early rounds.
Gradually, emotional walls began to go down. Enough so that Mariah believed that while they’d probably never regain the relationship they’d once shared, perhaps, if they both continued to try, they’d be able to create something equally satisfying.
She began turning the empty cup around in her hands as she considered bleakly how she’d thought they would have time to patch things up.
“Did she happen to discuss her marriage with you?”
“Only in passing.”
“Did you get the impression her marriage was a happy one?”
“How could it be? Considering who her husband was.”
“That sounds a lot like conjecture.”
Mariah swore. “All right, I’ll admit to being prejudiced. But that doesn’t mean the man isn’t a rat. And although Laura never got into specifics, whenever the conversation would drift Alan’s way, I received the definite impression that she was far from happy. Which wasn’t that surprising, considering all the rumors about his infidelity.”
“Rumors aren’t necessarily fact.”
“True. But believe me, Sheriff, in Alan’s case, they were more than true. In fact, the worm even hit on me once. During one of his political fund-raising trips to California.”
She scowled. “He actually had the gall to invite me up to his hotel suite. Allegedly to discuss my relationship with Laura, but since his hand was on my knee at the time, I had the impression that his wife wasn’t uppermost in his mind.”
The senator was either incredibly nervy. Or stupid. “You didn’t take him up on his offer.” It was not a question.
“I assured him that if he ever touched me again, he’d learn exactly how a bull feels when a cowboy with a pair of nutcutters turns him into a steer.”
Trace inwardly flinched. “Did you tell your sister about the incident?”
“Of course not. I figured she had to know what kind of man she’d married. Why should I make her feel worse?”
“Did she ever mention another man?”
There it was again. That not very subtle accusation. She lifted her chin and met his veiled gaze straight on. “My sister would not sleep around.”
“You’re sure of that.”
“Absolutely.”
“Would you happen to know if she had a friend whose name began with the initial C?”
C? Clint Garvey immediately came to mind. Deciding that Laura’s brief, disastrous elopement was none of this man’s business, Mariah said, “No.”
From the way she’d begun tearing that cup into little pieces, Trace knew she was lying. He’d bet the Suburban, along with a year’s pay on it.
“Your sister and her husband have been married a long time not to have children.”
She arched a brow. “I believe that’s what they call a leading question, Sheriff.”
“I suppose it is,” Trace said agreeably.
“Not that I can see what bearing it would possibly have on this case, Laura always wanted a large family. But things didn’t work out.”
Trace decided against mentioning the home pregnancy test the evidence unit had found in the bathroom wastebasket. “One more question.”
Something new had crept into his voice. Something that had her instantly on alert. “All right.”
“Your earlier comment about all the senator’s powerful friends—” he braced his elbows on the scarred wooden arms of the chair, linked his fingers together and eyed her over the tent of his hands “—were you concerned about my competence to investigate this case?
“Or were you worried that when push came to shove, I’d turn out to be just one of those stereotypical, corruptible rube cops you write into your television programs?”
Mariah had the grace to flush. A band of tension tightened at the back of her neck. But she held her ground.
“I’m not sure.”
The answer wasn’t the one Trace would have preferred to hear. But he couldn’t help respecting her honesty. He pushed himself out of the chair. “When you decide, let me know.”
“I’ll do that.” Mariah stood up as well and tossed the tattered pieces of cardboard into the metal wastepaper basket. “Are you finished questioning me?”
“For now. I’ll drive you to the lodge. When J.D. arrives with your Jeep, I’ll have him drop it off there.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
Silence settled over them on the short drive. Suddenly exhausted and emotionally drained, she leaned her head against the passenger window.
When he pulled up in front of the lodge office, she unfastened her seat belt and opened the door. “Thanks for the ride.”
“No problem.” She was already on the curb. “Oh, one more thing, Ms. Swann.”
Mariah glanced back over her shoulder and found herself staring into a rigid, determined face that was a dead ringer for Dirty Harry. His heavily lidded eyes were hard gray stones, his poet’s mouth was pulled into a grim line.
“Yes?” Her voice was neither as strong or self-assured as she would have liked.
“You don’t have to worry about me bowing to political pressure.” Deep hash marks like goal posts slashed their way between his dark brows. “Because if the senator does turn out to be the one who killed your sister, I will personally nail his balls to the jailhouse door.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Mariah refused to flinch at the crude cop language she suspected he’d deliberately chosen to shock her. “And when you do,” she shot back, “I want to be the one swinging the hammer.”
With a toss of her head, she turned on her heel and marched away.
* * *
Trace returned to the Fletcher ranch, where the evidence team was methodically continuing their investigation.
The crew would never be given a Good Housekeeping award for neatness. Papers and other items were strewn throughout the house, fingerprint powder clung to furniture and doorframes.
He climbed the stairs to the bedroom, careful not to touch the bannister. The room, which had been messy earlier, now looked as if a hurricane had blown through it.
He bent down, picked up the towel he’d noticed on the floor the first time he’d been in the room, and lifted it to his nose. An exotic oriental scent rose from the still damp terry cloth.
“Shalimar perfume,” a female voice offered behind him. Trace turned around and saw Jessica Ingersoll, Mogollon County Attorney standing in the doorway. She looked cool, crisp and professional in a white linen suit.
“There were bottles of bath oil and cologne in the bathroom,” she informed him. “Along with some talc. It appears to have been the late lady’s signature scent.”
He bagged the towel. Then, using the edge of his hands, he carefully unscrewed the top of a turquoise jar atop the dresser. The scent of the fragrant pink cream matched that on the towel.
“Does that mean it’s the only one she wore?”
“Very good, Callahan,” she said with a nod. Her hair, the tawny hue of autumn leaves, had been pulled back with a gold filigree clasp at the nape of her long, slender neck. More gold gleamed warmly at her earlobes and wrists.
A Philadelphia-born graduate of University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law, Jessica Ingersoll was thirty years old and as smart as a whip. She was also a tigress in bed. Their affair had begun his first week in town. It had been as hot as it had been brief and when it was over they’d remained friends.
She glanced around the room with disdain. “Christ. It’s a good thing Fletcher’s going to be able to afford an army of maids when he gets out of the hospital. This place is a pigsty.”
“It wasn’t all that neat before the ETU guys got here.”
“So they tell me. So, what do you think we’re looking at? A B&E gone bad?”
“Perhaps.” He squatted down and began going through Laura Fletcher’s underwear again, lifting each piece to his nose. “Perhaps not.”
“Gracious, Callahan,” she drawled on the unmistakable Main Line accent that always reminded him of Katharine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story, “if I’d known you were so kinky, I wouldn’t have let you get away.”
“Give me a break. I’m looking for the nightgown the victim wore to bed.”
She arched a brow. “I was told she was nude.”
“She was when we found her. But I’ve got a hunch.... Jackpot.” He held the seafoam gown out to her.
“Nice,” she murmured, running her fingers over the sheer lace insert. “But not my size. In case you’ve forgotten, sweetheart, hidden beneath my staid, Philadelphia lawyer suits are breasts Miss Universe would kill for.”
“And she’s modest, too,” he muttered, feeling that familiar tightening in his groin. “Would you quit trying to turn me on for old time’s sake and just smell the damn thing?”
“Kinky,” Jessica repeated, even as she did as instructed. “Shalimar,” she murmured. She rewarded him with another smile. “I knew you had a clever head on those wide, manly shoulders.”
He stuffed the silk nightgown into an evidence bag. “The question is, why did she take it off?”
“Why, Callahan,” the attorney said with mock shock, “surely it hasn’t been that long since you’ve bedded a woman. Why the hell do you think she took it off?”
Although he wasn’t about to admit it, it had been a long time since he’d gotten laid. Too long, if the way just looking at Mariah Swann’s jean-clad ass sashaying across the parking lot had made him hot was any indication.
Remembering the raunchy sex he and Jessica had shared, he considered that perhaps there might be some advantages to this case, after all. While what he and the winsome prosecutor had was admittedly a long way from love, there’d also been a lot more involved than casual fucking.
What it had been, Trace decided, was affectionate lust.
“My guess would be that she wasn’t alone all night.”
“And I’d guess that you’re right.” She shook her head with regret as she took in the bloodstained mattress. “You know, as good as sex can be, it sure as hell isn’t worth dying for.”
“Amen.” He pulled a ballpoint pen from his pocket and tagged the evidence. Smiling, she patted his cheek. “But if any man could make the choice a close one, Sheriff, it’d definitely be you.”
The contrast between her cool looks and uninhibited attitude had been one of the things that had attracted Trace to Jessica Ingersoll in the first place. “Thanks. I think.”
“Any time.” Her voice was throaty and every bit as seductive as the rest of her. “And I mean that literally.”
For the first time since Cora Mae had called him with the one-eighty-seven code, Trace found something to laugh about, just as she’d intended. Relaxing slightly, he shared what he’d learned so far.
“I think I might have an idea who your writer is,” she said when he got to the letters. “You may want to go talk to Clint Garvey.”
The name rang a bell. Trace knew Garvey to be the Fletchers’ nearest neighbor.
“The woman who does my hair used to have a thing going with Garvey,” Jessica elaborated. “Last time I was in, a couple of weeks ago, she was waving the scissors around like she wished she could be hacking away at something else besides my hair, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I have the picture. So she was mad at Garvey?”
“Livid. But actually, now that I think about it, she seemed angrier at your victim. Kept muttering about the lady already having one man and how she had no right taking someone else’s.”
“Want to give me her name?”
“Not really. Since she’s the only decent hairdresser I’ve managed to find in this part of the state and if she ends up in the state pen for murder I’m going to be really pissed.” She scowled. “It’s Patti. With an i. Patti Greene. She runs The Shear Delight on Pinewood Drive.”
Trace wrote the name in his notebook.
“There’s something else,” she said. “Patti said something about telling Matthew Swann about his daughter’s affair.”
“Not the husband?”
“If she had that in mind, she didn’t mention it. Apparently Swann broke the couple up once before. Patti was hoping he’d have the clout to do it again.”
Trace thought about the message left on the phone recorder and decided that he had a pretty good idea exactly what Swann had been so angry about. He also thought about the fact that Cora Mae still hadn’t managed to track the rancher down in Santa Fe.
“You know,” Jessica said thoughtfully, “this is going to generate a lot of heat. We’d better start the paperwork for obtaining a search warrant.”
Trace had already decided to do just that. “Worried the senator might withdraw permission?”
“Cases like this, the killer is usually a family member.” She told Trace nothing he didn’t already know. “If Fletcher is involved, and he gets spooked, he could do just that.”
“Wouldn’t want to step on any murderer’s constitutional rights,” Trace agreed dryly.
She laughed. “Spoken like a true cop. That’s the difference between you and me, Callahan. All you have to do is put on your blue body stocking with the big red S sewn on the front of it, outrun a few locomotives while dodging speeding bullets and apprehend the bad guys.
“While I, on the other hand, have to make certain they make it through the convoluted maze of our judicial system without escaping through some legal loophole.”
He thought of Laura Swann lying all alone in the morgue and vowed that would not happen.
“I think I’ll stop by the Garvey place on the way back to town,” Trace said. “And I’m calling a press conference for noon. Doc Potter should be done with the autopsy by then and we’ll know more.”
“You realize there’s a good chance most of the national media won’t be able to make it here by then?”
“One can only hope.”
“You’re incorrigible, Callahan.” She shook her head and gave him a saucy grin. “That’s probably why I like you. Along with the fact that you’re not bad in bed.”
There were a lot of reasons Trace liked her. And for more than terrific sex.
“I assume you want to be there?”
“You ever known a politician who wouldn’t jump stark naked through flaming hoops at a chance for national publicity? I’ll be there.”
Jessica Ingersoll might be a politician, Trace thought. But she was also, as they would have said in the Dallas PD locker room, “a stand-up guy.”
“Stop by my office about eleven-thirty,” he suggested. “The doc should be done by then.”
She stepped over the lingerie and walked over to the bed. “It’s a date.”
“Well, I’ve got an autopsy to attend. And some paperwork to get started on. Later.”
“Later.” She was frowning at the bloodstained headboard and didn’t bother to look up at him.
Trace was unlocking the Suburban when a voice called out to him. “Hey, Callahan!”
He looked up and saw Jessica leaning out the bedroom window. “Yeah?”
“You are going to shower and shave and change your clothes before the press conference, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” he said, not wanting to admit he’d been too busy to give any thought to the matter.
“Good. Because you look like roadkill.” She wiggled her perfect patrician nose. “And no offense, Sheriff, but you kinda smell like one, too.”
He waved off her accusation, but as he drove back to town, he lifted his arm and sniffed.
As usual, she was right.
