Skin and Blond (Blond Noir Mysteries Book 1)

by V. J. Chambers

  It was confirmation enough. I wasn’t barking up the wrong tree here. Even if Lissa wasn’t certain, I could see that she had her own misgivings. That was enough to keep me pursuing this line of inquiry. How it related, I wasn’t quite sure, but I knew that it didn’t look good for Andrew.

  Man, poor Lissa. I wished there was something I could do for her. I was fairly certain that she was married to a man who was not only unfaithful to her with his own sister, but who was probably a murderer. This wasn’t going to be easy for her.

  Right then, I resolved not to push any harder on her. I wouldn’t make this any more difficult than it already was.

  “Listen, Mrs. Webb,” I said, “I don’t really need anything else from you—”

  “I’ve known for a while.” Lissa wasn’t looking at me. She was staring down into her lap, and her face was pinched.

  “You don’t need to—”

  “I walked in on them.” She shivered. “It was years ago. Years and years ago. Andrew and I hadn’t been married for very long, and I was pregnant with our first child, and I just couldn’t…” She drew in a shuddering breath. “He was over at Madison’s house, because he was always over there. I couldn’t get him to stay home. He would spend hours with her. Sometimes, I’d tell him to invite her over to our house, and she’d come, but that was worse, because I felt invisible. They had all these in-jokes and they’d been through so much together, and when they talked to each other, there was no way to get a word in edgewise. It was just like being alone, only I had to wash their dishes. So after a while, I just let him go to see her, and I stopped inviting her over. I felt horrible, jealous of my husband’s sister. It seemed like that should prove that he was actually a nice guy—how devoted he was to her. But…” She tightened her grip on the armrests even further.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. “Mrs. Webb—”

  “But that night, I’d had it,” she continued, still not meeting my gaze. “He’d been gone for hours, and I was all alone, and I needed his help with a household project. I’d been trying to get him to put together the baby crib for ages, but he kept putting it off. Finally, I decided I’d do it on my own, but I made a complete mess of it, and I had turned into a sobbing heap, lying on the floor in the nursery, surrounded by screws and pieces of wood and nuts and bolts. When I got a chance to breathe, I decided I’d go and find him. He was going to be a father, after all, and he was going to have to do his share. He couldn’t spend all his time goofing off with his sister. I needed him too. So, I got in the car, and I went over to her house to find him.

  “No one answered when I knocked on the door,” she said. “I knocked a few more times. I could see his car was in the driveway, and I knew he was there, so I let myself in. They weren’t in the living room, and they weren’t in the kitchen. I went wandering through the rooms until I found them. And then… then I saw them. And they were…” Her nostrils flared. “Well, I just ran away. I ran away, and I never… Andrew saw me, and he asked me about it later, and I pretended like I didn’t see anything. It was too horrible, you know. Just too, too horrible to even acknowledge. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t see it. If I ever thought about it, I just shoved it to the back of my brain. If I acknowledged it, then my marriage was over, and I didn’t want that to happen. I’m not the kind of woman who gets divorced. I wasn’t raised to quit. So, I never said anything. I never did anything. I just pretended…” She covered her mouth with one hand, raising her gaze to meet mine.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. At a loss, I offered her the box of tissues.

  She waved them away. “You think he killed her, don’t you?”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “He’s not right when it comes to her. He never has been. He’s… obsessed. I sometimes thought Madison acted out so much because she just wanted to drive him away. Maybe she thought if she did all the things that disgusted him, he’d leave her alone.”

  Oh, fucking hell. This was horrible.

  Lissa took a shuddering breath, and then she leapt up out of the chair. “I’m sorry. I can’t…”

  I stood up too. “Mrs. Webb. I’m so sorry. I know how difficult this must be for you to—”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything.” She yanked her purse up over her shoulder, clutching it, her eyes wild. “Actually, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything about any of this to you. If you try to claim otherwise, I’ll deny it.”

  What? “But this is important, what you’ve told me. It’s—”

  “He’s my husband. I love him. I shouldn’t have—” She shook again, shook all over. And then she fled from the office.

  I went after her. “Mrs. Webb, please!”

  She scurried away from me, never looking over her shoulder.

  I watched her go.

  Well, hell.

  * * *

  “I’m not going to get as drunk this time,” Brigit promised, sipping on a hard cider in The Remington. “But after a day like that, I needed a drink.”

  “Go over it again,” said Crane, his eyes shining. “Tell me the whole story.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” I said.

  “It’s just… the pathos.” He clutched his chest. “It’s like a Greek tragedy. Incestuous love. Murder. Agony.”

  “It’s disgusting, Crane,” I said.

  He chuckled, stirring his drink.

  “I just can’t believe it,” said Brigit. “I can’t believe that the whole time, he and Madison were…” She wrinkled up her nose.

  “It’s gross, all right,” said Crane. “But I don’t get why you think finding this out proves he’s the murderer.”

  “Well, we can’t prove that yet,” I said. “His wife said she’d recant the whole thing, for one thing. And it’s not the kind of thing that people leave evidence of. It’s a hidden thing. I don’t know how we’d prove it.”

  “I wouldn’t even want to,” said Brigit.

  “But what I’m saying,” said Crane, “is that it doesn’t necessarily make him more likely to kill her, does it? I mean, depending on how you look at the situation, it might make it less likely.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, he and his sister have been carrying on like this for a long time probably. He says that they’re close. She’d probably the most important person in his life, and their bond is even stronger because of the secret nature of their forbidden love—”

  “Stop making it sound like the plot of a trashy romance novel,” I said. “This is totally disgusting.”

  “I’m just saying, why would he kill her?”

  “Well, she was pregnant,” said Brigit.

  “But she was having an abortion,” I said. “And maybe it wasn’t even about that. No, to a person like Andrew, Madison is a possession, an extension of himself. He was disappointed in her, because she never made it up to his standards, and he was always trying to mold her into what he wanted her to be. But at some point, he got frustrated. And he decided that she was too flawed. So, he killed her, the way you might crumple up a bad attempt at a drawing.”

  Crane raised his eyebrows. “That’s your motive?”

  “He’s an abusive asshole. Abusive assholes kill.”

  “No, they don’t. They like having things to control. That’s what makes them feel good about themselves, knowing that they pull all the strings.”

  “He killed her. He’s creepy.”

  Crane shrugged. “Maybe he did. But if I make this into a book, I’m not having him as the murderer.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “It’s too obvious, that’s why not,” said Crane. “I mean, sure, you could be suspicious of the guy, but once you find out the big reveal—that he’s been screwing his sister—well, that’s a big enough twist for him. No, the murderer’s someone else.”

  Brigit drank some cider. “There isn’t anyone else. We’ve been through all the suspects. It’s the brother.”

  “Life isn’t a book, Cr
ane,” I said. “The brother’s creepy. He killed her.”

  Crane shrugged. “If you say so.”

  “You’re right about one thing, though,” I said. “I can’t prove it. I believe it, but I don’t have a shred of evidence.”

  “Well, we’ll find some,” said Brigit.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Because, see, the problem is, when your client is a murderer, it’s pretty likely that you’re not going to get paid if you expose him.”

  * * *

  “You’re off the case,” said Andrew Webb. His face was the color of a tomato, and he’d just burst into the inner office.

  I got up from my desk. “Mr. Webb. So good to see you.”

  Brigit poked her head in the door. “Um, Mr. Webb is here.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I gathered that.” I gestured to the chair. “Would you like to sit down, sir?”

  He didn’t sit down. Instead, he cast a venomous glance at Brigit. “Why don’t you go ahead and invite your assistant inside? I’m sure she’s just going to stand outside and listen in anyway.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. Come on in, Brigit.”

  Brigit shot me a confused look.

  I motioned her inside.

  She came in and shut the door.

  “What can we do for you?” I asked Andrew.

  He looked back and forth between us. “When you accused me of murder, I let it go—”

  “I didn’t accuse you,” I said.

  “Well, you came pretty damned close,” he said. “But I let that go, because it proved to me that you were so interested in finding the truth of the case that you’d look at the person paying your bills. I found a certain amount of integrity in that. And since I know that I didn’t lay a finger on Madison, I thought you’d find the truth of things eventually. But this…” He shook his head.

  “Mr. Webb, perhaps if you took a seat, we could have a calm, rational—”

  “Calm?!” He laughed wildly. He put a finger in my face. “What kind of ideas did you put in my wife’s head?”

  “Lissa and I had a conversation yesterday, it’s true. But information she gave me, she volunteered.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “You did it. You have her convinced of crazy things now. I come home to find her utterly destroyed. She’s crying on our bed, and she’s ignoring the kids, and she hasn’t made dinner, and she tells me she wants me out of the house. And all because of you.”

  “Sir, if you’re having marital issues, then I’m very sorry, but it really isn’t my concern.”

  “How dare you accuse me of something so appalling?”

  “Mr. Webb—”

  “Madison was my sister. Only my sister. I would never have…” He clenched his hands into fists. “All this time, Lissa never once said anything, and then one conversation with you, and she’s telling me that she’s always known this about me, and it’s—it’s not true.” He glared at me, daring me to challenge him.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “She couldn’t have seen anything,” he said. “If she did see it, it was years ago. How could she even be sure she did see anything? No, I don’t even think there’s truth to that story. I think it’s something that you spun up and planted in her memories.”

  “You think I’m a hypnotist or something?” I noted that there was something quite telling about that last little bit. He’d almost as good as admitted that he and Madison were involved in that way.

  His nostrils flared. “Don’t mock me.”

  “I’m sorry.” I smiled tightly. “I assure you, sir—”

  “Don’t ‘sir’ me.”

  “I had nothing to do with your wife’s memories. She volunteered them.”

  “You asked her questions. You stirred her up.” He sank his hands into his hair and turned in a circle. “I’ve lost my sister. I’ve lost my home. My wife and my children. I have nowhere to go. And it’s all because of you.” He advanced on me. “Why couldn’t you just find the person who killed Madison? Why did you have to go digging into everything about her, uncovering all her secrets like that?”

  “I’m a detective,” I said. “Uncovering secrets is what I do.” But it wasn’t the first time in my career that I’d seen how painful these secrets were when they came to light. Sometimes, it was easier on everyone to just keep them locked up in the darkness.

  “It’s like she doesn’t have any dignity anymore.” He clenched his hands into fists. “You stole that from her.”

  “I stole that from her?” I said. “Are you aware that Madison had an appointment for an abortion today?”

  He froze in his tracks. “What?”

  “When you killed her, did you know that she was pregnant?” I said. “Did you know that you were murdering your own unborn child?”

  He shook his head. “I wasn’t… I didn’t kill her!” But the information had affected him badly. He couldn’t stay on his feet anymore. He clutched at the back of the chair for balance, and there were strange, strangled noises coming out of his throat.

  It took me a moment to realize that they were sobs.

  Generally, I would have offered a crying client the tissues. But not in this case. This bastard didn’t deserve them. He’d abused his sister and killed her. I had no sympathy for him.

  “I didn’t kill her,” he said in a tiny voice. Then he staggered to the doorway.

  Brigit and I watched him make his way through the waiting area and out into the hallway, visibly crying. He looked… broken.

  After he was gone, we were both quiet for several minutes.

  “Holy fuck,” said Brigit.

  “Well, that was a lot of work for no pay,” I sighed.

  She turned to look at me, furrowing her brow.

  “You heard him when he fired us from the case, right?”

  “Well… yeah.”

  “Don’t worry. Your salary’s covered.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Is that… is that it? We’re just done with this?”

  “I’ll pop by the police station later this evening and give what we uncovered to Lieutenant Pike, see if he can make a case of it, get Andrew arrested.”

  Brigit smiled. “Oh, good. You think he will?”

  “Honestly? No. There’s no evidence. There’s no body. There’s no clear-cut motive. I doubt this ever becomes a homicide, and I doubt Andrew Webb will ever be held accountable.”

  Brigit’s face fell.

  I went back to my desk and sat down.

  “That’s worse than doing a lot of work for no money,” said Brigit.

  “What is?”

  “Doing all this work and there not being any justice.”

  “Well,” I said. “The world’s not fair.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Incest?” said Miles, raising his eyebrows from the other side of his desk.

  “Wife says she saw it.” I’d stopped by the station like I’d promised, and now I was giving my report in Miles’s office. “I know I don’t have much, but I got a gut feeling on this guy. He’s a nasty piece of work.”

  “And he might be,” said Miles. “But you’ve got no evidence that he’s a killer.”

  My shoulders slumped.

  “Hey,” he said, getting up from his desk. “I forgot last time I saw you, but I said I had something that might help you out? You remember?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m sure I told you. But, uh, we got a little distracted.” He looked away, embarrassed.

  Had he said something about the case? I wracked my brain, trying to see if it had registered. If he’d said something, and I hadn’t even heard, then I was losing my touch. A detective needed to notice every single detail, and if my emotions were clouding my ability to stay sharp—

  He put a folder in my hands.

  I opened it up. “Another missing persons case?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s kind of oddly similar. Not our jurisdiction, but up the road in Jinn Springs. It ran across it. It jumped out at me, because
the bedsheets were gone, but everything else was there. That’s the same, right?”

  I furrowed my brow, scrutinizing the file.

  “Anyway,” he said, “maybe this case is different than you thought. Maybe it’s not your incest guy after all. Unless he’s involved with this chick too.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it. There’s another disappearance? A similar disappearance?” I closed the folder. “Can I keep this?”

  “No,” he said. “You know I can’t just give you a police file. Now, what might happen is that you and I get talking about something else, and we both forget all about it, and you walk out with that file on accident.” He smiled.

  “Shit, Pike,” I said. “I accused the guy who hired me of incest and murder. I’m not even on this case anymore. I got to let it go.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I see that happening. You’re definitely the type to let it go.”

  “Hey, I let things go. I can completely let things go.”

  He snorted.

  I fingered the edge of the file folder. “I can.”

  “You have any more issues with Colin Pugliano?”

  “No.”

  “Well, hopefully you don’t,” he said. “I haven’t any luck with that permit thing yet, but that’s something I can’t really talk about in the office.”

  “Right.” I nodded.

  We both studied our hands and didn’t speak.

  “Why’d you do it?”

  I looked up at him, confused. “Do what?”

  “Why’d you sleep with a lowlife like Colin Pugliano? I mean, Jesus, Stern, don’t you have any self-respect?”

  I sank down in my chair. It was my turn to be embarrassed. “I was drunk.”

  “Of course you were.” He was sarcastic.

  “I didn’t think. It just happened.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you always say. And it always sound like a cop out to me.”

  “Miles—”

  “You are one of the most deliberate women that I know. When you’re investigating something, you take your time and look at all the angles. You’re not someone who just impulsively ends up—”

  “It looks like that, but it’s not true.” I studied my fingernails. “Because sometimes I go in half-cocked, like I just did, and that’s how I got my ass handed to me by Derek O’Shaunessy.”