by Nancy Bush
She snapped her arm free and pushed his shoulder hard. “Jesus Christ, you scared the crap out of me.”
“You following Seth?”
He was so good-looking, and such a pain in the butt. Here, then, was a real PI. She’d run into him several times during the course of her two years on the job. He was the bane of the department, although Cooper Haynes, one of River Glen’s two remaining detectives, had admitted that Taft had done some good investigative work on more than one occasion. Elena Verbena, the other detective, didn’t think so, but Elena was a hard-ass and determined not to like him in that way that really said she might be attracted to him.
And for good reason. Sporting a three day’s growth of dark beard, dimples hidden in the fur, blue eyes regarding her with faint humor, Jesse James Taft was too attractive to be any good, Mac had thought. She’d learned differently, but the man was unorthodox and if she thought she had a problem with authority, Taft took the cake. Rumor had it he’d been fired from not one, but two, separate police departments, and then had gone on his own. He was a fixer for the wealthy around River Glen and Laurelton and the Greater Portland area. He was also a guy who worked for free sometimes, if he felt his clients deserved a break and the police weren’t doing the job. Mackenzie’s dealings with him had been fairly benign, although she’d been warned his bonhomie was an act, something he could switch on and off at will. He was charming and dangerous and exactly what she did not need right now.
He said, with a smile that she didn’t trust, “I’m on a job and you’re ruining my mojo.”
“I’m on a job, too.”
“What kind of job?”
“I don’t think I want to tell you,” she said.
“What kind of job?” he repeated.
“An errand for a friend.”
“What kind of errand?”
“I don’t have to talk to you. Get out of my car. Where’s yours?” She glanced around. There weren’t many vehicles parked on this stretch of road.
“I’m around the corner.” He inclined his head. “What kind of errand? I need to know why you’re in the way.”
“Yeah? Well, I don’t have to tell you. And this conversation has just hit a junior-high low, so go away.” She motioned him to get out of her car.
“You’re watching Seth Keppler.” She tried not to let him see he’d hit pay dirt, but he was too good at reading people. “Why?” he asked.
“Like I said, an errand for a friend.”
“What friend?”
“Stop with the questions. You can’t grill me.”
“Why’d you quit the force?”
“I just told you—”
“Was it Bennihof? He come on to you?”
She opened her mouth but couldn’t answer. She could lie with the best of them at times, but Taft’s bombastic style made it near impossible. “That’s none of your business,” she finally sputtered. “Get out!”
His face shuttered. He’d heard the right answer even if she hadn’t given it. After a moment, he said, “Probably good that you left. Whatever you’re doing now, let it go. Seth and Patti are in for a while, maybe for the night. It’s their routine.”
“Why are you watching them?”
“An errand for a friend,” he tossed back at her, sliding out of her car. He motioned her to take off as he closed the door and then headed around the hedge she now realized he’d been hiding behind.
She felt like staying where she was, just to be obstinate, but that wouldn’t get her anywhere. Taft was surveilling Seth and Patti for some other reason. It might serve her better to work with him than against him.
She drove around the corner and found his black Jeep Rubicon with him just climbing into it. She pulled up next to the Jeep, rolled down her passenger window, and called out, “Give me your cell number.”
He was only halfway into the driver’s seat and stopped for a moment. “You looking for a date? After Bennihof, I thought—”
“Just tell me.”
“Hand me your phone, and I’ll do you one better.” He shut the Rubicon’s door and walked around to the driver’s side of her car.
Reluctantly, she rolled down her window, pulled her phone from its iOttie holder, unlocked it, and passed it to him. He quickly entered his information into her phone, then sent himself a text with hers.
“We good?” she asked, letting her annoyance show.
She saw the dimples beneath his beard momentarily deepen. “Yep.”
“I don’t like you very much,” she said.
He laughed. “That’s a lie.”
“I want to know more about Seth Keppler.”
He patted her car and moved away.
“C’mon, Taft. Be a pal,” she called. He shook his head as he walked back to his Jeep. Her passenger window was still down, so she added loudly, “I just want to know what his deal is. Is he a big bad criminal, or just another loser that I’m wasting my time on?”
“Both.” He climbed into his vehicle and rolled his window down so he could still hear her.
She stared across at him. “My friend thinks he’s responsible for her friend’s disappearance.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Who’re you working for?”
Taft screwed up his face in thought, then said, “Text me. We’ll get something to eat sometime and exchange information.”
She was jubilant. She hadn’t really expected him to comply. She didn’t have much information to bargain with, but he didn’t need to know that. “I will,” she said, putting the RAV in gear.
“Goodbye for now, Officer Mac.”
“Ex-officer Mac.”
He saluted her as she hit the gas and drove away and she felt his gaze on the back of her neck long after she was out of sight.
CHAPTER THREE
Mackenzie parked in the driveway of her mother’s house and started a text to Taft. No reason to let grass grow beneath her feet. Strike while the iron’s hot and all that. But then she hesitated over the phraseology. She wanted him to open up to her, but she didn’t know him well enough nor possess the key that would unlock his reticence. He was brash and forthright, but she sensed his lips were tightly sealed. She’d heard a lot of adjectives used about him, but blabbermouth was not one of them.
Finally, she just texted: Tonight. 7:00. Deno’s or Pizza Joe’s. Your choice.
She waited for five minutes, her teeth on edge. If he didn’t get back to her, she was going to have to push. She needed him a whole lot more than he needed her.
The front door opened and Dan the Man squinted out at her car. She’d been sitting inside it for too long and he was wondering what she was up to. He was very fussy about her loose hours, and to be fair, her mother was equally concerned. Mackenzie sometimes felt like she was back in high school and that was a no-go. Since Mom was loads better, maybe it was time to leave. But where to go? She had some savings but she wasn’t exactly rolling in the dough right now, either.
When her cell remained silent, she finally got out of the car, thinking about what her next text should be. She didn’t know where Taft lived, or where he worked, if he even had an office. She knew only the gossip about him, and what she’d seen, which was very little. She’d run into him a time or two during the course of police work. Her ex-partner, Bryan “Ricky” Richards, had had a beef with him over Taft’s “interference” of the arrest of a wealthy “captain of industry,” Mitchell Mangella. Mangella, who’d grown up in River Glen, moved to New York and became a hedge fund guy, apparently made scads of money and bought homes and businesses around the world, had then sold most of his assets and moved back to River Glen. He’d been accused of stealing his own wife’s jewelry, by his wife, and the wife had lodged a complaint with the River Glen PD, which hadn’t taken the accusation too seriously since Mangella had bought the jewelry, a necklace and bracelet, for the woman in the first place and the two of them were still living together. Still, an investigation had been opened. Mackenzie had reserved judgment
on the whole debacle, but Ricky had landed firmly on the beautiful Prudence Mangella’s side. Taft had beat River Glen’s finest to the punch when he uncovered said stolen pieces at a pawn shop in Northeast Portland, which, naturally, had cameras, and showed that a woman had dropped the jewelry there. The woman turned out to be a friend of Prudence’s, not Mitchell’s, and the two women had been working together to get either Mitchell, or an insurance company, to pay for the stolen pieces. Prudence had zeroed in on Ricky’s allegiance to her during the course of the investigation and had stoked his adulation, promising . . . what . . . Mackenzie still didn’t know. But then it had all come crashing down and accusations were hurled right and left. Mangella roared at Prudence, and Prudence roared right back, and the River Glen PD gently tiptoed backward out of the whole affair. As far as Mac knew, Mangella and Prudence were still battling it out, though still living together. Marriages . . . there was no telling what made them work.
But Ricky had fallen for the lady hook, line, and sinker, even though her partner had been merely a pawn in the Mangellas’ ongoing war. Mac had told him to get over it, which had only served to piss him off at her. And the department had been made to look bad at being beaten to the punch by Taft, so nobody was happy, especially after Taft, having been called into the department by Chief Bennihof, had essentially breezed through and made it clear the department shouldn’t blame him for doing their job. He’d cruised out about the same time Mac was leaving for the day and they’d struck up an acquaintanceship, one that consisted until today of a few witty remarks and some unspoken mutual awareness but not much more. Of course the department considered him a turncoat to law enforcement, and Ricky seemed to somehow blame him for ending Prudence’s interest in him. Ricky still had trouble seeing that Prudence had used him for her own ends and that when those ends failed to materialize, she had no further use for him.
The male ego . . .
Mac ignored Dan the Man and hit the remote for the garage door. She locked up her car, walked through the garage, and let herself into the house through the kitchen door as much to avoid her stepfather as to see if her mother might be at the table doing a jigsaw puzzle, her favorite pastime throughout her chemotherapy, surgery, and recovery, one she hadn’t as yet given up.
“Hey, Mom,” Mac said, finding her just where she’d expected her to be.
“Hi there.” She barely glanced up from the thousand-piece puzzle of various African animals.
“A lot of grass,” Mac observed.
“A lot of grass,” her mother agreed. “A lot of stripes, too.”
Mac looked at the picture of what the puzzle should look like when finished on the front of the box. Zebras and okapis. Yep. A lot of stripes.
Dan the Man entered the room from the living room. He smiled at Mac and said, “You sure spend a lot of time in your car.”
“I sure do.”
“What takes so long?”
“My RAV is kind of my office these days, Dan.”
Her mother looked up. “You can stay here as long as you like,” she said, jumping ahead to the unspoken question hanging between them. “It’s really helped having you around after the surgery and I like having you here.”
Mac pulled her attention back to her mother. Beverly Gerber’s pallor, though still pale, was showing a faint pinkness underneath, a slow return to health that filled Mac with relief. Mom’s illness the last year and a half had taken over all their lives and scared Mac to her core. Mac and her mother had never been what you could call close, and there had definitely been a rift when Mom had married Dan, but recognizing she could lose her had chilled Mackenzie to the bone. She’d moved in to help care for her and in the process they’d found each other again. If Dan weren’t around, Mac felt she and Mom might even find their way to a kind of friendship they’d never had before. But Dan the Man was entrenched.
As if to prove that point, Dan said, “I was just talking to your mother about ordering from the River Glen Grill. She loves that chicken salad. Think you could pick up for us?”
Mac immediately felt herself resist. He always volunteered her without asking. Not that she minded helping out her mother. That’s why she’d moved in in the first place. But Dan was that guy who always seemed to be asking for something. “Sure,” she clipped out.
“You’re part of dinner, too,” said Mom.
“Well, there is our budget—” Dan started.
“Thanks, I’ve got other plans,” Mac said at the same time.
Mom looked like she was going to argue, but Dan clapped his hands together and said, “What else would you like, honey? Feeling up for a glass of white? I’m sure Mackenzie would pick up a bottle of chardonnay?” He turned and smiled at Mac.
Mackenzie slid a glance at her mother, whose brows had knit into mild consternation. Mac said to her, “I could get you a rosé,” knowing her mother’s favorite.
“Oh . . . no, thanks.” She met Mac’s gaze and they shared a moment of silent understanding. Mackenzie had a memory of her mom smiling at her that same way from a seat in the audience, silently encouraging her as she emoted her way through whatever small part she’d been assigned, drama being Mac’s favorite subject in school. She recalled the animation in Mom’s face. The fun they’d had. Before the disappointment when, following her father’s death, Mac had given up any dreams she might have had in the arts and had determined to go into law enforcement, just like her father. Though she’d never outwardly voiced it, Mac knew her mother had been sorely disappointed, even though she’d agreed with Mac’s declaration that she needed a paying job.
“Still not feeling like a drink?” Dan asked Mom, his voice oozing with empathy.
She smiled faintly and nodded, turning back to her puzzle.
Mackenzie pivoted and walked back out the kitchen door. Dan was never going to listen hard enough to recall that Mom didn’t really like chardonnay. He had it in his mind that chardonnay was the white wine all women drank and no matter how many times he was told differently, he reverted to his own rock bottom notions.
She glanced at her phone as she placed it back in its car holder. Still silent. Her other plans might not be materializing but she wasn’t giving up yet. In the meantime, she would head to the River Glen Grill. A couple hundred rungs higher up on the sophistication scale than the Waystation, it was probably the nicest place in River Glen and nearby Laurelton combined. An expensive meal for Dan to be ordering; he was notoriously cheap. But then she hadn’t gotten Dan to cough up the money for whatever he’d ordered for Mom and himself, so maybe he hoped Mackenzie would also foot the bill, even though he had to know her current financial situation wasn’t the best. She would need to demand payment from him. One thing Mac had learned over her months of living with him: You needed to nag him until he caved. Though as a rule nagging didn’t come naturally to Mac, she almost lived for it with Dan.
* * *
After watching Mackenzie Laughlin drive off from Seth Keppler’s, Taft drove past the town house once more, just to be sure the lowlife was staying home. His F-150 was still in the drive and the house lights were blazing against the damp March evening. A sporadic wind had kicked up and was currently sending an escapee plastic bag jigging and jagging across the property to cross the road and land in the laurel hedge he’d been standing behind while he’d been surveilling Seth and Patti’s home earlier.
Patti came into view in the living room window as Taft slowly cruised by. She was carrying two drinks and looking down at someone seated on the couch below his line of sight. Behind her the wall-mounted television was set to some speed-racing event that probably was prerecorded. In his research Taft had determined Keppler loved anything that had to do with vehicles in general, racing in particular. The fact that his truck was over a decade old was either because Seth didn’t have the funds to buy a new one, something Taft was pretty sure was untrue based on the man’s illegal side ventures, or it was indicative of his desire to stay deep, deep under the radar with a vehicle that
wouldn’t deserve a second look in an area rife with trucks. If River Glen’s finest was onto Seth’s side deals, they sure weren’t acting like it. Maybe it was some overall quiet, clandestine investigation by them that would result in a sting, but Taft would bet his last George Washington that just wasn’t so. He knew enough about River Glen PD’s operation to have little respect for some of them. The detectives on the force were the only ones worth their salt, and one of them had quit. That left only Haynes and Verbena to uphold “protect and serve” along with a group of other street cops and departmental police who were varying degrees of incompetent, too gung-ho or just putting in their time . . . in Taft’s biased opinion.
He’d never been part of the River Glen PD, as he had several other police departments, mistakes he’d made in his youth, mistakes he wasn’t going to make again. His questioning of authority had rubbed the old guard the wrong way, which he’d ignored, and he’d naturally bucked the bad aspects of the cop culture he’d experienced, naively expecting it would change. The expectation was that he should be the one to change, not them, which had forced him to say adios twice before he’d really understood that being a cop just wasn’t going to work for him.
His sister had often told him he had a thick skull. He smiled faintly now and sketched the sign of the cross even though he wasn’t Catholic or even particularly religious. It was just what he did when he thought of Helene. She’d been a decade older than he was, and she’d been gone about a decade as well. She’d warned him about being too cocky, too sure, too rash. He’d ignored those warnings throughout his years with the police. He was a little more seasoned now, but his reputation had been formed. The result: The cops didn’t like him much.
He mentally shrugged. He worked for law and order in his own way. Too bad if it sometimes stepped on others’ toes.
With Seth and Patti apparently in for the evening, he turned the Rubicon west toward Laurelton and his own condo. Helene had told him to save up and buy real estate, and he’d listened to her advice. She’d left him a small amount, which he’d saved and then had added to that amount, exercising the lease option to buy his condo at the end of the contract. Now, seven years later, he lived in the two-bedroom end unit of a onetime motel that had been renovated and converted, and he sometimes took care of neighborly duties for some of the others in the rambling, one-story, sixteen-unit complex. It wasn’t a whole lot of space but it worked for him. He’d resisted the requests to “move in together” from his list of sometime girlfriends, which had resulted in more than one screaming breakup when he hadn’t even realized he and said girlfriend were supposedly exclusive. He’d had a dog once, Helene’s golden retriever, but John-Boy had been aged even then, and he hadn’t lasted a year and a half after his mistress’s death. Nowadays he took care of Tommy Carnoff’s two pugs whenever the older gent in the unit next door decided on a trip somewhere with his latest lady friend. Taft might have had a few women in his life, but Casanova Carnoff beat him hands down at playing the field.