“This isn’t my crime scene, ma’am, but is it okay if I ask you some questions?”
“That’s fine,” she says, her face still a smear of discontent. “But it’s an inferno out here.”
“I had noticed.”
“Before my makeup runs off my face can we go inside? To my office?”
In her office she lunges for a bottle of water and offers one to Mills. He shakes his head and says, “I need to know if anyone has been in the Canning vault since we were last here asking about the Dali.”
“No. Nobody.”
“No one asking about the Dali? Or that chest? Or any part of the Viveca Canning collection?”
“Just her son.”
“Well, that’s somebody, ma’am. When did he drop by?” “Yesterday,” she says. “It’s in the log. The Scottsdale police have it.” “Good,” Mills says. “Did Bennett go into the vault?”
“He did.”
“Were you with him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he remove anything?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
She flashes him one of those do-you-think-I’m-an-idiot looks. It freezes there in all its patronizing charm until he says, “Okay. Did he tell you what he was looking for?”
“No,” she replies. “I think he just wanted to take inventory and see that everything was intact.”
“So, do a timeline for me. Can you remember how many hours passed between his visit and when you were broken into last night?” She pauses to reapply her insanely red lipstick, gazes into her compact, and then blots with a tissue. She must go through more makeup in a day than Kelly goes through in a year. “The alarm went into the police station around 9:30 last night. He was here probably at two in the afternoon.”
“Did he touch that old chest in there?”
“Just to make sure it was still locked, I think.”
“Did you tell Scottsdale cops he was here?”
Her eyes go buggy. “Uh, hello? Detective? That’s why Lieutenant Chang called you!”
He sits there with no reaction until she recoils, her insult a failure. “And you gave them a log of all your other guests?”
“Just as I already told you.”
“Detectives ask a lot of repeat questions. Like how do you get those braids to stay like that?”
Now she’s a coquette. “You never asked that question before,” she notes demurely.
“I’m kidding,” Mills says. “I don’t need to know.”
“They’re very strong, these braids,” she tells him. “Want to see me unwrap them?”
He takes that as his cue to stand.
He meets up with Preston, who’s loitering in the front gallery room, and the two of them head to the car. Less than a minute into their drive, his phone rings. It’s a San Francisco area code, and he knows who it is. It’s Jillian Canning. She says she has a book for him, a book from her mother’s library as he had requested. “For your psychic,” she says.
“Oh, right. Great. Thanks. If you’re at your Aunt Phoebe’s, we’re not far.”
“Actually, I’m out and about. You know Hava Java at the Bilt-more?”
He laughs. “Of course I do. In a valley of iced tea, it’s a coffee oasis.” Preston snorts beside him.
“I’m just heading into the oasis right now,” she says. “Wanna swing by?”
“Yup. Be there in ten or fifteen.”
When he’s off the phone, Preston says, “Don’t give up your day job.”
And he says, “For what?”
And Preston says, “For poetry.”
“Go fuck yourself. And I mean that symbolically,” Mills tells him. “Considering your age.”
21
Hava Java bustles with the cacophony of the coffee grinder competing with the cappuccino maker competing with the flatulence of the whipped cream nozzles—and the people, a cross section of valley professionals, hipsters, academics, beauty queens, and drama queens, some of them whacking away on their laptops, some in lively conversation. This is poetry, he knows. The poetry of coffee. Jillian waves them over. They sit. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” she asks.
“Thanks,” Mills says. “But we’ll get our own. Department policy.” She shrugs and pulls a book out of her bag. “Here,” she says. “Hope it helps.”
She hands him an exquisitely bound edition of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. “I’ve read a lot of the classics,” he tells her. “But not this one.”
“Are you taking it to your psychic or curling up to it in bed?”
“My psychic,” he says. “I already have some new reading material. I’m reading a book from the Church of Angels Rising.”
She stops in midsip, softly chokes. “Why?” she gasps. “How?”
“To learn more about the church and whatever Angelism is,” he answers. “We know about the vast amount of money your mother had originally bequeathed to the church, on top of what she had donated over the years. We’re kind of wondering what kind of faith calls for that kind of loyalty. She had changed her will, but it keeps the church in play . . .”
“So you’re investigating the church?”
Mills responds with a lone-syllable laugh. “Not exactly.”
“Someone should,” she says.
Mills nods. “I can see why you’d feel that way. Some of this is just personal interest to me.”
“But how did you get the book?” she asks. “They’re not allowed out of the church. Ever.”
“It was given to me,” Mills says. “By an anonymous source.”
She throws her head back, an eyebrow raised, her eyes cartoonishly wide. “You better be careful, Alex,” she says, every word more grave than the one before. “No one, and I mean no one, is supposed to have that book outside the church. None of the church literature is public.”
Mills smiles. “Thanks for the warning. But we’ll be fine, Jillian. Don’t worry.”
“I’ve seen people beaten for taking it home. Never mind giving it to a nonmember.”
Preston jolts his chair closer to the table. “What did you just say?” She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “Fuck,” she mutters. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck it.”
“No, really,” Preston insists. “Please elaborate.”
“I can’t,” she says, her eyes still closed.
“Please,” Preston begs. “Just give me a little more.”
“He took the book out of the church by mistake.”
“Who?” Mills asks.
“Just some church member,” she says. “There was a $1,500 fine and a three-day work camp assignment for any member caught with a publication outside the church.”
“Jesus,” Mills whispers.
“Jesus has absolutely nothing to do with this.” She says something else, but the noise of the café chops up her words. When Mills asks her to repeat herself, she says, “He refused to pay. He refused to go.”
“Was there some kind of hearing?” Preston asks.
She laughs. “If that’s what you want to call it. It’s a joke. But yes, he was heard before a panel of his peers. He told them truthfully he had not even made it out to his car in the parking lot when he realized he had taken the book by mistake. But by then someone had already turned him in. They sentenced him to the maximum.”
Preston looks at her as if she’s high. “That’s some story,” he says. “It’s true,” she tells them. “When he refused to abide by the sentence, they beat the shit out of him.”
“Who did?”
She looks away. Her face is a portrait of sorrow and anger and bitterness, each a Picasso-like shape, an angle of her, a different way of seeing her. And Mills thinks he sees her. “I can’t do this,” she whispers. “Certainly not here. I’ve said too much already in public. There could be repercussions.”
“We understand,” Preston tells her, his eyes sympathetic. “We need to know more, but we can wait for a better opportunity.”
Mills nods, even as another
approach to her occurs to him. “You ever been to Tahiti?”
“Huh?”
“Tahiti. You ever been?”
“Interesting change of subject, but yes,” she says. “My parents took us there a few times over the years when we were younger. Beautiful place. One of my favorite places, now that I think about it.”
“Were you aware your mother was planning a trip there?”
“No. When?”
“Next month.”
“No. But she wouldn’t necessarily tell me,” Jillian says. “She travels a lot. And we weren’t completely reconnected anyway. That’s my biggest regret now.”
Mills tells her that her mother had purchased a one-way ticket. Her cup is halfway to her mouth when she pauses and says, “What?” “Phoenix to LA. Change planes. LA to Tahiti,” Mills recites. “No return.”
“That makes no sense.”
“That’s what we said. Any chance she was buying real estate there?” “Could be,” Jillian says. “Anything’s possible. But if she was getting ready to move in a month, she would have told me.”
“Unless she was running away,” Preston suggests.
“From?”
“From whoever wanted her dead,” Preston replies.
“I don’t know what to say,” Jillian says. “Maybe you should talk to her lawyer. And I’m not saying that to shut you down this time. I’m saying that because her lawyer would probably know about her real estate dealings.”
She’s right. Viveca’s lawyer probably knows a lot of things about the dead angel. If only Mills can get the douchebag to return his calls. “Can we meet again in private, someplace safe like my office?” he asks Jillian. “I will do whatever I can to protect you if you feel in danger. But I have to know more about this cult.”
She exhales a catharsis as deep as a canyon. Choking back tears she says, “Thank you. Thank you for calling it what it is. You don’t know what that means to me.”
Mills nods, says nothing. Preston, the avuncular one, grabs her by the hand and squeezes it, and that’s enough for her to recover her smile, thin as it is. Mills gets to his feet. Preston follows.
“No coffee for you guys?” she asks.
“We’ll get some on the way out,” Mills tells her. He holds up The Secret Garden. “Thanks for the book. I’ll let you know if my psychic finds anything noteworthy. But tell me, how did you get into your mother’s place to get it? You have a key?”
She starts to pull her things together. “No,” she replies. “My brother gave me one. How generous of him.”
“But how did you get through the guard gates at Copper Palace?” Mills asks.
“My Aunt Phoebe drove me.”
“Does she have a remote?” Preston asks.
“I don’t know,” she says, her voice betraying some annoyance. “The guard just let us in.”
“Only asking for your protection,” Mills says, aware of the elasticity of truth. As he turns away, he says, “We’ll be in touch. As I said, I’d like to meet with you again.”
As soon as he starts the car, a steaming cup of coffee in the holder beside him, he dials Gus.
The “I love you”s came, at first, in panting breaths. Then they climbed the scales. The “I love you”s became more fast and furious the longer they went at it. The longer they rocked into each other, the longer Gus buried himself in her, the longer they rolled and intertwined and the further they sunk their kisses into each other’s faces. The “I love you”s yielded only for the muffle of a kiss. He felt himself inside her, every inch of her pocket closing around him. Yes, he loves her. Yes, he said so. Yes, she heard him. And he heard her. It’s not just the sex talking. It’s the intensity. It’s the way they absorb each other’s skin. When he wakes up an hour later, she’s still sleeping. Gus slips out of bed and quietly pads off to the shower. Then he sits out in the private courtyard donning one of those ridiculous hotel bathrobes, something Gleason Norwood would wear in the spa while waiting for his anal bleaching. Just a guess. He flips through Billie’s copy of Rolling Stone magazine. With every page he turns, he ages a decade. He does not recognize the name of one band, one solo performer, anybody. He supposes Beyoncé is a household name. But not in his household. No criticism, he’s just not drawn to her. Valley Imaging provides playlists for patients who’d rather hear music than the rattling and rolling of the MRI, and he’s heard Beyoncé on those playlists and can’t help but wonder why she’s always in such a hurry. She sings so fast. As if she has to finish the song and go pee. There are no more Billie Welches out there. Except for the one in the bedroom. His phone rings. It’s Alex.
“I’ve got something for you,” the detective says.
“My visions tell me it’s a Rolex.”
“Ha ha! Once again, your visions come up short.”
“Thanks, Alex. What’s up, bro?”
“It’s a book. From the dead woman. I need you to work your magic.”
“I’ll try,” Gus tells him. “I’m at the Desert Charm. Bring it by.”
“Oh right. Billie’s in town. This can wait ’til Monday.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. No problem. Go enjoy.”
Later, after Billie is up and showered, after she takes Glinda for a short walk in the stifling heat, Miranda arrives with her puppy and a bottle of wine. Billie pours a glass for herself and her sister and hands Gus a beer. Miranda is Gus’s age, divorced, no kids. Billie worries about her sister’s loneliness, her tendency to isolate. Billie doesn’t seem to remember that, before Gus, she wrote hit songs about her own loneliness and isolation. Their parents are gone. So it’s just the two sisters. Which is why Billie brings Miranda along for the ride as often as she can. They’re the best of friends, overlapping at the core, as they should, even if it means that for Gus, sometimes, three’s a crowd. Miranda will accompany Billie on the Australia and New Zealand tour. “You should come, Gus,” Miranda says from her spot on the floor. Gus and Billie are stretched out on a sofa, the short part of the “L” perfectly free for Miranda, but she chooses the floor; she’s ensconced on a huge pillow looted from the bedroom, wedged between Glinda and her own pup, a Maltese named Garbo.
“Billie and I have already discussed it,” he says. “Maybe for one week of the tour.”
“You’ll need a week just to get over the jet lag,” Miranda tells him.
“Not if we do what we did last time,” Billie says, a twist of conspiracy in her voice. “Last time we stopped in Tahiti both ways. It breaks up the flight almost evenly. Lovely place too.”
“It’s paradise,” Miranda chimes in. “Gorgeous. We took this tiny little plane to Bora Bora and hung out there for a few days. I love it there, Gus.”
After “tiny little plane” the rest of the words were mere mosquitoes to him. Because they were all but drowned out by the roar of engines, jumbo jet engines, struggling engines, failing engines, engines coming apart. “No! No, you can’t do that!” he cries.
“What?” Billie asks, sitting up, grabbing his arm. “What’s wrong?” “You can’t do that,” he repeats. “That’s my vision. I see a plane going down in the South Pacific. I’ve been having this vision since I came home from LA. Please, don’t go . . .”
“Go where? To Tahiti or to Australia? Or both?” Billie asks him. “I can’t let you fly over the Pacific right now.”
Billie stares at him. “Let?”
“You know what I mean.”
She gives him a coy grin and then says, “How do I know this isn’t a ploy because you don’t want me to do the tour down there?”
“Because you know it isn’t. You know me. I’m not one for ploys.” “You can tell me more about the vision later, Gus. Not now. I don’t want to scare my sister.”
Miranda sets her wine glass on the floor beside her. “Oh no. Please scare me.”
Gus describes his vision of the ill-fated flight. Miranda gasps at all the right places. He edits the most graphic of the images. Still, Billie turns away through most of
his story, studying something outside at the courtyard pool, the fountain, maybe, or nothing at all. She’s quiet over dinner, despite her sister’s prodding. She’s quiet after Miranda leaves. She stays up after Gus has gone to bed. “Gonna write in my journal,” she tells him. The rest of the weekend is chilled, despite 108-degree heat. They love and they make love, and it’s purely mechanical, but they don’t talk about the tour anymore.
22
There’s an email waiting for Mills from the OME Monday morning.
Alex—
We’re done with the Canning body. We’re preparing to release to family, pending your go ahead. Let us know.
Mills writes back, tells them to release the body. The quick email exchange reminds him to check in with Roni Gates at the lab. She says that tests for possible trace DNA from the shooter have, so far, come back inconclusive. But they did find a few stray hairs that did not belong to the victim, as well as fibers from a garment that were not consistent with the clothes Viveca Canning was wearing at the time of her death. “They might match a garment worn by the killer,” Roni says. “Or the fibers could just be stray ones from other clothes Viveca wore around the house.”
“That’s going to be a little harder to nail down than the hair,” Mills says.
“Yup,” Roni confirms. “It will be. Let’s talk again tomorrow, if we can.”
Turns out they’re talking again only minutes later.
Powell and Preston have skulked into his office, trying to remain marginal while he finishes his call. As soon as he hangs up, they pounce. “We’ve got the warrant,” Preston says, “to search the gallery. Just came from the judge now.”
“We can search her vault and open the lock on the chest,” Powell tells him. “Looks like the break-in actually helped our cause.”
“How so?” Mills asks.
“Convinced the judge that something isn’t right over there,” Preston replies. “The judge agreed the break-in could have been an attempt to destroy evidence.”
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