Maggie and the Hidden Homicide

by Barbara Cool Lee

  Jasper puttered around the yard, sticking his snout into all his favorite nooks and crannies, from the prickly spot behind the pink bougainvillea where he'd once spotted a mouse, to the base of the rusty rebar wave sculpture that he constantly threatened to lift a leg against when she wasn't watching.

  She scolded Jasper to leave the ugly sculpture alone. He lowered his leg with a grumble, then went to roll on the freshly mowed grass instead.

  While they cradled their coffee mugs, Maggie told Reese what she'd learned from Lauren, and they pondered the possibilities.

  "If they still can't find Taiyari," Reese said, "that means either she's dead"—Maggie crossed herself—"or she's run off because…."

  "Because she killed him?" Maggie finished the thought.

  "Either way, there's nothing you can do about it," Reese pointed out.

  Maggie raised an eyebrow at him. "Really?"

  "Yes, Maggie," he said firmly. "You don't need to stick your nose into another murder investigation. You've been having too many close calls with killers, and I don't like that. I want you to stay safe."

  She felt a treacherous glow at his overprotectiveness, but she resisted it. "Fine. I won't think about the murder."

  He nodded approval.

  "For now."

  He frowned at her and started to protest, but she stopped him.

  "That gives us time to deal with our current problem."

  The sparkling ocean was reflected in his Ray-Bans as he leaned back in his lounge chair. "From where I'm sitting, I don't see any problems."

  "You wouldn't," she muttered. "What about the big For Sale sign out front?"

  "Oh, yeah," he said, clearly having already forgotten all about his promise to let her park her tiny house at his new, currently nonexistent property. "I was going to buy a ranch, wasn't I?"

  She felt a lurch in her stomach. "That's what you said to Nora this morning. Don't tell me you already changed your mind." She was really going to be stuck if he flaked on her. She had better start scrambling to find somewhere to park her little trailer before she got an offer on Casablanca.

  "Hold on a second," he said swiftly, noticing her expression. "I didn't say I was backing out. I just didn't think there was any big rush. I was going to take my time and deal with it. I only mentioned it to Nora to get her off my case about going back to work. Have you had on offer on this place?"

  "No," she admitted. "But it's making me nervous just the same."

  "Then relax." He put his hands behind his head and looked out at the water. "Hakuna matata."

  She glared at him. "That's easy for you to say. You're just renting Casablanca. You own four other homes."

  "Five," he corrected. "And you can park your little house at any of them if you need to."

  "Which one? The London flat, the New York penthouse, or your cabin that's perched on the side of a cliff overlooking Lake Tahoe?"

  He laughed. "We'll figure something out."

  "My business is in Carita. This is where I want to live. And it's going to be hard to find a place to park in town, especially after my bankruptcy goes through."

  "I'll take care of it for you," he said with a shrug. "No biggie."

  "That's just the point," she said. "I don't want you to take care of it for me. I'm not begging you to let me squat on your property. I thought we were equals. We had a deal: you were going to buy a ranch out in Carita Valley, and you'd let me rent a space from you to park my tiny house."

  "As I recall," he drawled, "I offered you the prime spot by my crawdad pond."

  Where he had joked she'd have the Sexiest Man on the Planet skinny dipping in front of her, but she pushed that thought out of her mind because it reminded her of yesterday's kiss on the beach and the confused feelings the kiss had stirred inside her. "That's what you said," she agreed. "Except now there's no ranch, and it doesn't look like you're planning to get one in the near future."

  She leaned back in her lounge chair with a creak. "I get that you're going through some stuff, Reese. Really, I do. You're entitled to change your mind about your plans. But I put Casablanca on the market, and informed the bank I was going to file for bankruptcy if I took a loss on the sale. Now I may end up stuck with nowhere to go."

  "I haven't changed my mind. I said I needed a change, and I meant it. I just really have been taking things one day at a time. And…."

  "And what?" she asked.

  "And I haven't exactly decided what I want to do."

  "Do? You mean about the house?"

  "About my life."

  He said it very simply, and she realized he meant it. He was rich, famous, suffering from drug withdrawals, and desperately unhappy. He really had no idea what he wanted in his life. And her pushing him wasn't helping at all.

  She started to apologize, but he waved it off.

  "It's not you," he said. "It's not you at all. It's me. I need something, and I can't figure out what. I've been drifting. I told you that a month ago. And I thought, after visiting my parents' farm, that buying a place like theirs would make me happy. I thought if I could get something like my parents have, a focus, a direction, something to do with my life, it would help me figure myself out."

  He lay there a minute and then said, "and it will." He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out his phone to speed-dial someone. "Patricia?" he said when the call was picked up on the other end.

  Patricia was his personal assistant, who Maggie rarely saw, but who, from her office in LA, somehow managed to provide her spoiled client with everything from plane tickets to masseuses at the drop of a hat.

  "I need to buy a ranch," he said.

  Such a statement would make any normal person react with surprise, laughter, or annoyance, but Patricia clearly didn't even blink, because he simply said, "Okay. Have him call me, thanks," and hung up.

  Then he looked out at the ocean again. "All settled."

  "Seriously?" she asked, though she knew he was serious. That's how it worked when you had the world at your feet.

  "Seriously," he answered. "Now we can relax." He watched the wake that still lingered on the water, though the speed boat had long since gone out of sight. "The change will do me good," he muttered.

  He turned his head toward her. "Now how about a swim?"

  "Not me," she said, standing up. "I've got to go to back to work. I don't have any assistant to cover for me while I laze around all day anymore."

  "You've never lazed around a day in your life," Reese said.

  "Jasper!" she called, and the dog came to her side. "Let's leave the idle rich and go do something productive with our day," she told him. She turned back to Reese. "And what are you going to do today?"

  He shrugged. "Be idle and rich. And sober. That's enough for one day."

  "Be sure you do," she said firmly. "Stay sober, that is."

  She left, pondering that. Idle and rich seemed to be asking for trouble with a newly sober ex-addict. "He needs a project," she said to Jasper as they headed downtown.

  Jasper nodded wisely.

  Chapter Eleven

  That afternoon, Maggie closed up her little bead shop. She was an hour before her already-early new closing time, and it pained her to turn away potential customers, but she had no choice. She needed to get some answers.

  Soon she found herself sitting in the familiar creaky chair that faced Lieutenant Ibarra's desk.

  The owner of the desk sat across from her, looking annoyed.

  Ibarra's little office, a converted closet that gave him privacy from the main squad room, was as cramped as ever. Clearly he hadn't managed to get into his boss's good graces enough to improve his work space. The room was stuffy with the door closed, and the chair Maggie sat in had a broken spring that squeaked melodramatically every time she moved.

  Which was a lot, because she was all worked up about the wrong direction the case was taking.

  "Why don't you get out of here, Maggie?" Ibarra asked. "Don't you have a shop to run?"

>   "I had to come down here and get an explanation for this mess. I thought you knew better."

  "What mess?" he asked. He knew what she was talking about, though. She could tell by the way he avoided meeting her eyes.

  "I had the radio on in my shop and heard the news," she said. "You know darned well what I'm upset about."

  He finally looked at her. His expression was patient, amused, anything but upset.

  "It's not funny!" she said. "There are lives at stake!"

  "I'm not laughing at that," he said. "I'm laughing at you. Carita's resident little crime solver. Let me take a guess: you have a different theory about the murder of Ethan Kirby. What is it this time? International spies? Secret messages scrawled in blood? Poisoned barbecue meat?"

  "Stop laughing at me," she said, trying to act coldly analytical despite his scorn. "Taiyari is still missing, and might be hurt, or dead, or anything. But Chief Randall announced to the press that she's the killer and the case is closed. That's ridiculous. You have no evidence."

  Ibarra picked up his pen and tapped it on the big stack of papers on his desk. "Do you think you know all the evidence the police have, Maggie?"

  She started to talk, and he waved the pen at her. "And no, Lauren Douglas telling you public information isn't the same thing."

  "So what proof do you have that Taiyari is the killer?" she asked.

  He didn't answer, but just kept tapping that pen.

  "Have you even looked for the missing beadwork?" she asked. "And all the men who were interested in Taiyari. What about them? How do you know it wasn't one of them who killed Ethan?"

  "Those weren't a man's footprints in blood in that trailer," he said, getting serious. "The case is simple. Unfortunately for the girl. And Chief Randall—"

  "—is a blowhard who values quick case closures over nuanced crime-solving," she finished.

  "I'm fully aware of my esteemed boss's flaws," he said mildly. "But in this case, he's right."

  He sighed and set down his pen. "I'm sorry for the girl, Maggie. Really, I am. She's all alone, with no family. And maybe she had a legitimate beef with the boy. They argued about something. Maybe he threatened her out there, all alone in that trailer. Maybe she acted in self-defense. Until we find her, we won't know. But that's all that's left now. Finding her. Bringing her in alive."

  "No family," Maggie whispered. "Have you looked into that?"

  "Into what?" Ibarra asked.

  "Her grandmother's death."

  He shrugged. "What's there to look into? Taiyari's grandmother died a month ago of natural causes."

  "What was her name?"

  "Who? The grandmother? Nakawé Méndez."

  "Nakawé," Maggie whispered, trying to visualize this woman who seemed so much a part of Taiyari's life. She leaned forward, and the spring in the chair hit her in the backside. She ignored it. "Don't you think it's suspicious that her grandmother died just a month ago, and then this happened?"

  "No. I don't. You're going off on a tangent here. It has nothing to do with anything."

  "What did the old woman's autopsy say?" she asked.

  "Autopsy? A hard-working old lady died in her sleep. The coroner found no signs of foul play, and she was at home, collapsed on her bed in her work clothes." He looked up at her. "Did you think I wouldn't check that, Maggie?"

  "No," she said reluctantly. "I know you're a good cop."

  "Thank you," he said mildly. "There are times I wonder."

  "So there wasn't an autopsy. Was there any investigation at all?"

  "Of what? She died in her sleep."

  "And she was poor and lived in a run-down trailer, so nobody cared."

  He bristled at that. "Don't you put that on me, Maggie. We do not place the value of one life over another in this department."

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean that."

  He smoothed down his ruffled feathers. "You don't have to like Randall, or the way he runs this department. I don't always like it myself. But don't ever suggest that we don't care about right and wrong. If someone is killed, we take it seriously."

  "I'm sorry," she repeated. "I really didn't mean to suggest that. It just feels awfully coincidental that she died so recently, and then this happened."

  "It's not foul play every time a person passes away," he pointed out. "There was nothing suspicious about her death."

  "What about her secrets? Something was going on with her."

  Ibarra raised an eyebrow at her. "Secrets? You mean her immigration status?"

  "You know she was undocumented?"

  "Sure. And that she had a reputation as a bit of a troublemaker. But no one else had anything to say about the so-called secret Donovan Cruz told you about."

  She must have looked surprised, because he said, "Oh, yeah, we looked into it. They think there's something there, among the workers. But I saw no sign of anything. It's probably just a rumor, a fear of the policia that tends to run through the migrant worker communities. But whatever it was, it had nothing to do with her granddaughter."

  Maggie picked up on what he'd said earlier. "Who said the grandmother was a troublemaker? What kind of trouble did she cause?"

  He looked a bit doubtful. "I don't know. That's how Kirby described her. She probably demanded he clean up the worker quarters or something, just like the Gallegos charity does. That's all."

  "He's upset that his son was murdered. So he might say anything against Taiyari's family."

  He shook his head and fiddled with his orange coffee mug. "Nope. This was something else. He actually said he didn't think Taiyari did it. Thought she was a nice kid, and a good influence on his son, who was a bit of a wild child, not wanting to settle down and work on the farm with his dad. He was a bit of a party boy. Dated half the girls in town, apparently." He smirked. "Like your own sexy party boy."

  "Don't go there, Will."

  "Sorry," he said, remembering how rough a time Reese had been through recently. "But none of this is relevant to the murder."

  "You don't see how?" she asked.

  "See what, Maggie? That a grieving father is having trouble facing the fact that his son's girlfriend murdered him in a domestic dispute?"

  "Oh, come on, Will. You think that crime scene looked like a domestic dispute?"

  "Yes. That's exactly what it looked like. The position of the knife means the victim had turned his back on the killer. It was someone he knew. That sounds like a lover to me. The girl's footprints are all over the trailer—in his blood, I'll have you know. Other shoes she left behind are the same size as the footprints. It was her walking around in there."

  "Probably," Maggie admitted. "But it was dark. Maybe she didn't know she was leaving footprints when she—"

  "—when she grabbed her things so she could run away to Mexico and avoid prosecution for her crime," he finished. "That's the official theory of the case at this point."

  Maggie leaned forward in her chair. "She's not stupid, Lieutenant. She knows she'd never make it across the border with a warrant out for her arrest."

  He shook his head. "She's a teenager who committed a crime of passion and is in a panic. I don't care how smart she is. She's scared. She might do anything."

  "Crime of passion," Maggie muttered contemptuously. "They didn't look passionate when I saw them."

  "When you saw them arguing in whispers at the edge of the group, an hour before they went off alone together and she killed him."

  "It's circumstantial!" she said, a bit too loudly, and Ibarra scolded her:

  "Lower you voice, Maggie. Or we'll have Chief Randall in here. And believe me, he won't be on your side in this."

  "Of course not," Maggie agreed, voice dripping sarcasm. "Chief Randall has already given a preening press conference announcing he singlehandedly solved the crime."

  That one stung, and Ibarra winced. She knew he agreed with her about his boss. She also knew he wasn't dumb, and realized this case was not as open and shut as the police were telling the pres
s it was.

  But he said, "I don't always like my job, Maggie. But I do it. I follow the law. I follow the investigation. And in this case, the investigation is leading us to exactly where my boss says—an open and shut domestic dispute."

  She stood up, the broken chair protesting. "You should at least consider the possibility that Taiyari is another victim, not the killer."

  "I am considering that," he said wearily. "That's why we're searching for her. Officially she's still a person of interest, no matter what my boss says. We need to find out whether she's another victim, or a criminal. And until we find her, we may not be able to prove if someone else committed the crime."

  He leaned back in his chair. "But don't get your hopes up. She walked around that trailer after Ethan Kirby was stabbed. There's no sign of struggle in her footsteps. No sign she did anything but walk around in his blood and then leave of her own free will."

  "But the beadwork's missing. Her grandmother's legacy could be the key to this whole thing."

  "Yup," he agreed. "Could be. Or not. So we'll keep looking for suspects. And we'll keep looking for Taiyari Méndez. And we'll hope to get a break in the case."

  The door of his office opened and Chief Randall was standing in the doorway like he was posing for his fans, dressed in his usual impeccable suit, aviator glasses, and a camera-ready smile, which faded when he realized who Ibarra had in the office with him. "Has she completed her statement?" he asked Ibarra without even acknowledging her.

  "Yup. Just finished." Ibarra frowned at Maggie. "Time for you to go home, Ms. McJasper, and stop sticking your nose into something that could be dangerous. Got it?"

  She wondered how much of that was for Randall's benefit, but she glared right back at him. "Got it, Lieutenant Ibarra."

  Randall held the door open for her, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from saying something she'd regret to him on her way out.

  Chapter Twelve

  Reese sent Maggie a message as she was leaving the police station to head home.

  PLEASE COME HELP ME, he had texted, and she went into a panic at the words.

  She texted back WHAT'S WRONG?, barely able to get the words out as she started to run the mile to Casablanca, but she'd only gotten a half block before he sent another message.