by Lisa Jackson
“She’s coming in after work today, unless she chickens out. She was pretty anxious on the phone.”
Savannah checked the time on the wall clock, then unlocked her desk drawer and pulled out her messenger bag, plucking her cell phone from its side pocket. “Better let Hale know I’m coming.”
“Hale, yes.”
“Funny,” she said, then decided to place the call after first speaking with Lang about the knife. She slipped her hand inside her bag, pulled out the plastic square, and laid it on her desk.
Lang’s brows lifted as he registered the knife inside.
“It’s from Catherine Rutledge,” Savvy said. “She wants it tested for DNA evidence.”
“Why?” he asked carefully.
“She said it has to do with her sister, Mary. She believes Mary used it to commit suicide, or at least that’s what she wanted me to think.”
“I thought Mary fell or something. I think that’s what it said in A Short History of the Colony.”
“I’ve got to read that thing, no doubt about it. Apparently, Catherine told different stories about how Mary died. She said she fell to her death or she died from complications of a miscarriage, but now, by her own admission, those are lies. Mary had been living on Echo Island until fairly recently, I guess. Catherine says I’ll likely find Mary’s DNA on the knife.”
“Echo Island?”
“I know. But there was supposed to be an old harridan living there. That’s one of the rumors, anyway.”
Lang slowly pulled the plastic bag nearer to get a closer look at the knife inside. “Catherine isn’t the type to let out her secrets. Ever. What the hell is she doing?”
“Trying to skirt a full-on homicide investigation and still get some answers from the knife. She asked for a private DNA test and said she wanted to be billed for it, but I’m thinking I’d like to press this myself. Something weird there.”
“You’re gonna go ahead and process the knife as if it’s evidence in a homicide.”
“I’m not going to tell Catherine that just yet. I’ll wait for the results. But I’m not putting it through as any private request. I want the results back as soon as I can get ’em.”
“That woman . . .” Lang shook his head.
“I know. Oh, and I said you might ask for an exhumation of Mary’s body.”
“Is that what I want to do?”
“Catherine says Mary’s dead and the knife had something to do with it. Maybe Gilmore should take a look at her body.”
“Maybe,” he said glumly.
“What?” Savvy asked.
“You’re going to ride off into the sunset, have a baby, and leave me dealing with Catherine and the Colony again.”
“I’m coming back. Jesus, Lang. How many times do I have to say it?”
“Lots more.”
“I’m coming back,” she said again. Then she punched in the digits to Hale St. Cloud’s cell phone.
CHAPTER 6
The Seaside office of Bancroft Development was on the top floor of a two-story commercial office building overlooking the Necanicum River. The company used to sprawl throughout the entire building, but with a sluggish economy and the lawsuit looming over Bancroft Bluff, Hale had rented out the lower floor and had condensed the office staff and assigned it to the top floor. Their Portland office, on the other hand, was expanding, as not only did they have the Lake Chinook development, but there were also several apartment projects around Portland nearing completion. With the current sizzling rental market, those buildings already had several offers from would-be investors to buy them outright before they were even finished. And an investment group with a solid reputation had already put in an offer for a high-rise on the east side that was barely in the planning phase. Business, as they say, was booming.
But not at the coast. At least not for Bancroft Development. Currently, they had only three projects under construction, two small commercial buildings and one residential house right on the Promenade, where they were in the process of demolishing the existing house and starting from the bottom up. Of the two commercial buildings, one was a four-unit office condo complex north of the city, near the town of Gearhart; the other was an apartment building with six units, three upper and three lower, tucked along the Necanicum to the south of their offices. To date, they’d poured the foundation for the office complex, and the apartments were being framed. None of the coast projects were even close to completion, and with their limited staff, Hale was wearing a lot of hats these days. He could trust the people in Portland to apprise him of what was going on, but the Seaside projects required daily supervision.
He checked the time on his desk clock. Nine forty-five a.m. Declan hadn’t come into the office yet, but as he’d aged, his time of arrival had grown later and later. Sometimes he didn’t get in till noon, but since he was more of a figurehead now than ever before, it really mattered only to Declan whether he even showed or not.
Glancing out the window at the now driving rain, he strode out of his office and grabbed his jacket from the wooden tree in the entryway. As he passed by the open door to Sylvie Strahan’s office, she glanced up and said in a stage whisper, “Ella’s going to give you hell again.”
Ella Blessert was their receptionist and bookkeeper. She’d been an assistant bookkeeper before the economic downturn, but after their full-time bookkeeper, Nadine, made the move to Portland with Clark Russo, Ella had taken over all the office bookkeeping duties. She had also, unfortunately, adopted a proprietary attitude about Hale and his well-being, and she was constantly mother henning him. For someone in her midtwenties, Ella was a fussbudget like he’d never seen. Hale wondered if he could sneak out without her seeing him. He didn’t really want to be reminded that he never dressed for the weather, or anything else.
But from her reception desk angled in a corner of the upper gallery, Ella saw him before he’d taken the first step down the curving staircase to the first floor.
“You can’t go out in this weather without a hat, Mr. St. Cloud. Here, take my umbrella.”
“I’m fine, Ella.”
Sylvie strolled out of her office with a smile threatening her lips, ostensibly to turn toward the butler’s pantry–type coffee room, but she hesitated at the upper stairway rail. Hale gave her a “Don’t go there” look, which she ignored, and then she had to cut off some laughter when she saw the lavender umbrella Ella was holding out to Hale.
“We can’t afford to have the boss come down with the flu or worse,” Ella told him. “You’re the engine around here, Mr. St. Cloud.”
“It’s Hale,” he told her for about the thousandth time. Her mannerisms and rigid office protocol tickled Declan, who flirted outrageously with her, but they just made Hale feel tired and impatient.
He glared again at Sylvie, who simply lifted her hands and turned away, her shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter. Though Hale had no interest in Sylvie other than as his right-hand woman, he sometimes wondered why he couldn’t have chosen someone more like her as a mate than Kristina. She seemed, at least as well as he could ascertain, to have a strong sense of herself and what she wanted and where she was going. Kristina, on the other hand, was losing confidence daily, and he didn’t know what, if anything, he could do about it.
It was all he could do to circumvent the lavender umbrella as he headed downstairs. He was just about to push through the glass double doors to the outside and dash across the parking lot to his SUV when his cell phone started singing the default ring he’d chosen for his sister-in-law. Grabbing it from his pocket, he glanced at the caller: Savannah.
“Hey, Savvy,” he answered as he gauged the strength of the rain. A deluge. Maybe he’d been too hasty in ignoring Ella’s umbrella.
“Hi, Hale. I need to talk to you some more about the Donatella homicides. Go over some Bancroft Bluff records again. Sometime today convenient for you?”
That caught him up. He’d been expecting to hear something about the baby. “Something happen?”
“We’re going over the case again, and I volunteered to talk to you and your grandfather again, in fact everyone from your side of the partnership associated with the Bancroft Bluff project.”
“Ahh . . .”
“Would you rather have someone else?” she asked, misinterpreting his reluctance.
“No. Hell.” He made a face. It was just that the last thing he wanted to do was rake all that up again. Not that he didn’t want to find the killer. It was enough to freeze the blood the way the Donatellas had been executed, and it filled him with rage whenever he thought of the person who’d taken the lives of his friends. If going over all their testimony and files again would help, fine. “My grandfather should be in this afternoon. How does one o’clock sound?”
“Can we make it two?” she suggested. “At your offices.”
“That’ll work,” he said.
With that he ran out to his TrailBlazer, hitting the remote several times and reaping the reward of flashing lights, which let him know the doors would be open. He slammed himself inside, then switched on the ignition as beaded water broke and ran down the sleeves of his jacket, and drips slid down his neck and under his collar.
He drove first to the residential demolition site on the Promenade, the walkway that ran in front of Seaside’s oceanfront houses. Finding a parking spot across the street, he waited a few moments, looking at the house they were about to tear down, with its once proud, now tired and worn wooden siding and porch. It had been a very nice home once, but years of pounding wind and rain and sand had beaten it down. The new owners wanted something modern and gleaming, and though Hale was a fervent believer in giving the customer what they wanted, in this case he’d tried to talk them into saving something of the original beach cottage architecture to keep with the surroundings. His advice had fallen on deaf ears.
Seeing the new owners, the Carmichaels, he climbed from his car and jogged across the street, meeting them on the front porch. They were young and wealthy, and Ian’s grandfather was friends with Declan. Hale shook hands with both Ian and Astrid, who was six months pregnant. He could hardly talk about the house at all for all the questions Astrid asked him about his “own” pregnancy. How was Savannah feeling? How was Kristina doing? Were they excited? Had they picked out any names? Did they think Savannah would go past the due date? How late did they plan to go before asking about being induced?
“I don’t really know,” Hale admitted when confronted with this last question.
“I bet you’re just so excited,” she declared. “Oh, my God. If I was as close as you are . . .” She made a squealing sound and looked delightedly to her husband.
Ian put an arm around her and asked Hale, “So, when’s the demolition?”
“Should be next week, barring unforeseen circumstances.” This was old news, and Ian was clearly just trying to turn the conversation away from babies and to something else.
But Astrid would have none of it. “As soon as my little girl comes along, we’ll have to get together. If you move closer to Seaside, they could go to the same schools together. You should really consider it.”
“Leave him alone,” Ian said good-naturedly. “Now, about that outdoor planking. You don’t think it should be wood?”
“Not if you want it to last,” Hale said, leading them through the house, up the stairs, and out to the deck that overlooked the ocean. They discussed the merits of some of the new products on the market. Then Astrid brought the conversation back to babies, and by the time Hale left, he had a mountainous headache. No breakfast this morning, and he needed food.
He left them and drove into Seaside, heading down Broadway and crossing the bridge to stop at the Bridgeport Bistro to pick up a Dungeness crab and Havarti sandwich on an onion bun and a Coke to go. He took them back to his office and ate at his desk. Ella had clucked at him when he’d returned, his dark hair slick with rain, and for half a second he’d seriously thought about acting like he was shivering and hacking up a lung just to see what she would do. Instead, he’d shut his office door and settled at his desk, and that was where Declan found him when he knocked lightly on the panels, then stuck his head inside.
“Did you pick me up a sandwich, too?” he asked, seeing the remnants of the waxed paper that had been wrapped around the sandwich and pinned with a toothpick.
“You need to call me and let me know.”
“Cell phones,” Declan said with a snort.
“They work,” Hale pointed out.
“I’m not hungry, anyway. Just had breakfast.”
Hale slid a glance to the clock. Twelve forty-five. “I met with the Carmichaels earlier.”
“Who?”
“The people who bought the house on the Promenade.” It was worrisome the way his grandfather seemed sometimes to lose track. He didn’t want to borrow trouble, but there was definitely some short-term memory loss going on. Was it age or something else?
“Oh, yes, yes.” Declan looked slightly embarrassed.
Hale brought his grandfather up to date on what had transpired with the plans for the Carmichaels’ house and then moved on to some of the other projects. “We’re still red tagged on the Lake Chinook project,” he noted at the end, “but I talked to Russo, and he thinks he and Vledich can get it going again without too much more delay.”
“You think he’s right?” Declan was skeptical of the abilities of Clark Russo, and, for that matter, anyone else who worked for them.
“I don’t want to have to go to Lake Chinook if I don’t have to,” Hale admitted.
“Bad time of year to cross the mountains. Storms are coming,” Declan said.
Hale nodded, but he’d been thinking more of the time it would take, two hours plus each way in good weather. “Let’s see what Clark can pull off.”
Declan harrumphed and let it go. “How’s Kristina?” he asked, which was his roundabout way of really asking, “How’s Savannah?” which, distilled down, actually meant, “How’s the baby?”
“Savannah’s coming by today,” Hale said.
“Here? To the office?”
“She wants to reinterview us about Bancroft Bluff.”
“Ack. When in God’s name is she going to quit that job with the sheriff’s department?”
“As soon as she goes into labor.”
“Not before? I don’t like thinking about her chasing after criminal scum in her condition. It’s not right.”
“Well, today she’s chasing after us.” Hale smiled.
“What are you going to tell her?”
“What do you mean?”
“How many times do we have to rake up DeWitt’s incompetence? Our lawyers are handling the whole goddamn mess. We don’t need to be talking to the police.”
“They have a double murder to solve,” Hale reminded, seeking to deflect Declan from another diatribe about their onetime geological engineer.
“Well, it’s not our fault. Shoulda never gotten involved in that whole mess with Marcus. It’s a shame. A goddamn shame about what happened to him and Chandra. I’m not sayin’ different. But it’s not our fault, for God sakes. We built in good faith, and if DeWitt had had half a brain, we wouldn’t be in this shit storm!”
“She’s going to be here at two,” Hale said.
“Well, fine.” He turned toward the door. “I’ll be in my office.”
CHAPTER 7
Savannah picked up a chicken Caesar salad at the Drift In Market and ate it at one of the picnic tables crowned with red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloths and bunched into a corner by the west windows. She gazed through the panes, but her view of the Pacific was blocked by other buildings in the small town of Deception Bay, plus there were dense low clouds turning everything fuzzy and indistinct. She had headed north from Tillamook on her way to Seaside and had purposely stopped to eat, but her main reason for choosing the locale was that she wanted to go to the Deception Bay Historical Society and read A Short History of the Colony, by Herman Smythe. Lang had told her that the
powers that be at the historical society would not allow it to be checked out, but that it was only a few pages long and she could easily read it on-site.
Finishing her salad and the hunk of baguette that came with it, she eyed the cheesecake in the deli case and then left before she was caught in the tractor beam of the desire for sweets. Man, but her resistance was down.
“You’re killing me,” she said to the mound of her stomach, lightly placing a palm just beneath her right ribs. Baby St. Cloud gave her a kick, and she chuckled as she climbed into the Escape and drove the few blocks to the historical society.
She didn’t know all the particulars about the romance between Lang and Dr. Claire Norris, but it was during the time when they were getting together that he’d had his first run-ins with Catherine Rutledge. In the course of that particular investigation, which also delved into the women of the Colony, Lang had learned of Herman Smythe’s small book. It was this compilation that Savannah wanted to see.
The historical society resided in a clapboard building at the edge of town, a building that had once been an old-fashioned one-room church. It still even had its steeple, and Savvy gazed at it as she crossed the parking lot and went up the short flight of wooden steps to the front door. A sign in hand-painted blue letters read DECEPTION BAY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, and when she pulled open one side of the double doors, a little bell tinkled overhead, heralding her arrival.
Glass cases extended in rows, with aisles between them that led toward a counter that ran across the back wall. Behind the counter stood a woman, who’d risen to her feet at the sound of the bell. Currently, Savvy was the only visitor.
“May I be of help?” the woman asked. She was the epitome of an old-time librarian with her gray-streaked brown hair pulled into a bun and a pair of pince-nez glasses perched on her nose, the glasses attached to a thin silver chain looped around the back of the woman’s neck. A brooch with a large amber stone was pinned to a dark brown cardigan sweater, which she wore over a white blouse that topped a tan, ankle-length skirt.
“I’m looking for the book A Short History of the Colony , by Herman Smythe.”