The Truth Seeker

by Dee Henderson

  What were they going to talk about after the first ten minutes? She washed away the soap, then realized her hair still felt rough. She reached for the shampoo to do it a third time. She knew it would just be a tangle of flyaway strands when it dried.

  She hated talking about herself, and he had to have already gotten his fill of the O’Malley family gossip just by being around Marcus. The case—it was the only thing she really was comfortable talking to Quinn about. And that would make great conversation.

  It didn’t make sense that the cat had died.

  She frowned at the thought, but because it was easier to think about work than Quinn, she let herself follow the tangent, puzzled.

  The cat would have awoken early, long before the fire blocked the doorway. Either the doorway was closed so the cat couldn’t get out—and Jack had said it was open—or the cat hadn’t been able to wake up.

  What would a sleeping pill do to a cat?

  It bothered her that Egan had taken two when his doctor’s notes said he was reluctant to take even one and used them only sporadically. The fire had been early in the evening. It wasn’t like he had taken one, still been awake hours later, and then taken the second one. He had taken two sleeping pills, gone to bed, turned on the TV, and smoked a cigar.

  She dropped the shampoo bottle.

  Smoked a cigar, but the ashtrays and cigarettes were in his office and on the kitchen table. He’d been having himself a treat, a last cigar.

  She swore as soap ran into her eyes, hurriedly stuck her head under the water to rinse the shampoo out, grabbed for a towel, and made the mistake of hitting the hot water on instead of off, nearly scalding herself.

  It hadn’t been a tragic accident. Not if he had also given his cat a sleeping pill, not wanting to die alone.

  It had been a suicide.

  Quinn paused by the painting on the wall by the kitchen phone, captivated by the fourteen-inch watercolor. The wildflower garden was a vibrant explosion of color around a reflective pond, the scene alive and yet at the same time tranquil. He leaned down to read the signature. A Sinclair. In the kitchen. He laughed softly at the discovery.

  Lisa was so casual and careless about the art she acquired. A collector himself for decades, his mother had been a professional artist; he envied Lisa’s talent to spot something excellent. She bought something because she liked it and had no concept of how good she was at making that choice. He was going to have to convince her to come wander the downtown galleries with him. He needed something for the office back at the ranch. He had found a Calvin Price sculpture in New York and needed two paintings to make the arrangement complete.

  With regret that the odds of getting her to part with the watercolor were nil, he moved on to dry his hands and got down two glasses from the cabinet.

  Lincoln Beaumont and Emily Randall had promised some solid answers on Amy Ireland Nugan by noon tomorrow; there was only so much background information that could be dug up on a Sunday without it being obvious they were looking. What they had found so far was inconclusive, going back only as far as New York where Amy had lived before coming to Chicago.

  His father was dead; Amy Ireland was going to be at the book signing Tuesday night. A link would last forty-eight hours. Quinn didn’t think Lisa would understand the favor he was paying her by being here instead of investigating tonight. He didn’t plan to tell her why he had come to Chicago; it was a quiet, private search. He’d rather have Lisa irritated at him than feeling sorry for him.

  He heard the water stop then a door close. Lisa was not a woman who lingered over makeup and hair—with her looks and smile she already caught plenty of attention, and her attempts to tame her hair tended to frustrate her and make the problem worse. He picked up the tall glass of cold fruit juice he’d poured for her and walked back toward the living room. She’d looked not only parched and tired but stressed. He hoped to the depths of his heart that the victim had not been a child.

  He should have found something better to say. She’d looked so defensive about being caught just back from a crime scene that it had made him want to wrap her in a hug. She usually showed so much intensely focused energy that he was caught off guard by the moments that showed the other Lisa—tiny in stature, drained of energy, showing the strain of her day.

  He’d seen her slogging through marshes to reach a murder victim, dealing with the remains of a lady who had died at home and not been found for a week, coping with a stabbing victim. He’d spent the last two months watching her put together the forensic evidence they needed to identify who had murdered a federal judge. She was incredibly good at her job.

  But she was defensive about it because others had made her that way. It wasn’t something a woman was supposed to enjoy doing. Doctors were supposed to go into the profession to heal the living, not investigate deaths. Lisa didn’t enjoy what she saw on the job, but she was wise enough to be good at it. He understood Lisa well enough to know she had never chosen the easy or the traditional. She’d been going her own way for a long time. She had the strength to deal with unpleasant facts, to face them head-on and do what needed to be done. He admired that enormously.

  He didn’t mind her job; he liked a maverick—he was a bit of one himself. And she wouldn’t be Lisa without that fascinating contradiction. She was the only lady he’d met who intrigued him more the longer he knew her. And while he didn’t want her to treat him like a brother, he did wish she would relax with him like she did with her brothers.

  He heard her coming, her voice pitched low, letting him know a ferret had found her. For a lady who had lizards and snakes and mice for pets, the ferret was practically conventional.

  Quinn looked at her casual blue cotton shirt and clean jeans and sighed. “You want a hamburger somewhere. I was going to suggest a nice restaurant.”

  “We’re not going out to eat.” She reached for the briefcase on the floor by the couch, opened it to retrieve her phone log and her cellular phone, closed it with her left foot, then juggled the items to one hand as she dug her keys out of her pocket.

  The slight distance to her voice, her attention and concentration on her own thoughts, a precision to her movements—he’d seen it before, her shift-into-work mode.

  Even when relaxed she tended to be restless, spinning something in her fingers, tapping her foot, unconsciously always having energy moving. But it changed when she locked into work and her concentration centered on a puzzle, her very stillness a mark of her intense focus.

  She had no idea she could be read so easily, but then he’d been studying her for a long time. At least she hadn’t reached for the small black canister rolling around at the back of the briefcase. To his relief she was a woman who didn’t mind fighting dirty and wasn’t above taking help along if she was going somewhere she thought might be trouble.

  Unfortunately, her track record with getting into trouble was well established. She was nearly as bad as her sister Kate. For years Quinn had watched Marcus quietly try to keep close tabs on the two of them. Kate, a hostage negotiator for the Chicago police department, had been known to walk into situations where a guy had a bomb; Lisa just walked into murder scenes, determined to find a killer. “Where are we going?”

  “To ask a man to exhume a cat.”

  Three

  “I’d ask you to clarify that, but I’m afraid you mean it literally.” Lisa glanced over and found Quinn watching her with that mildly amused look he got when he was humoring her. She had to force herself not to drop her gaze. She had been relishing the fact she was squashing his dinner plans for the evening, but he was turning the tables on her. The man knew exactly what she was thinking.

  “I do.” She scooped up Sidney, the animal’s coarse warm fur, long body, and slight musky smell familiar and comforting, and walked back to the spare bedroom to put the animal back in his cage. Sidney clasped himself around her wrist and sniffed her fingers, with reluctance returned to his home when set down, then promptly chattered as he spotted the ping
-pong ball in his cage and hurried to pounce. Lisa rubbed her finger down his spine, then closed his cage door. The animal was playing from the moment he woke until he dropped asleep from exhaustion.

  When she returned, Quinn hadn’t moved. “Please explain.”

  She didn’t want to share case details with him, but if they were not talking about work, she didn’t know what to say. “Bring my briefcase; the case folder is inside.”

  “Drink this first.” He held out a tall glass, one of her good company glasses with its little red rose pattern around the rim. She favored the plastic thirty-two-ounce monsters that fit her car’s cup holder.

  The tone in his voice said it was nonnegotiable and she was impatient to leave. She gulped the juice down, then slowed to savor the last of it. It tasted like nectar. She set the glass down on the side table atop a book club newsletter. “Okay?”

  “Better.” He picked up her briefcase. “Keys.” He held out his hand for them and she didn’t argue the point, simply handed them to him. She’d let him wrestle with the slightly off-center dead bolt.

  She waited at the edge of the walkway while he locked the house. In the drive his car was parked behind hers. “I’m driving,” she insisted as he handed back her keys.

  “Fine, but I’m riding with you. Your word, or I won’t move my car.”

  It wasn’t beneath her to try to give him the slip, but she hadn’t been intending to; she’d only thought about it. “My word,” she agreed grudgingly.

  It was almost 7 P.M. The sun was low in the sky but the heat was still intense, and when she unlocked her car door it hit her like a wave. She should have risked the possibility of a late afternoon summer thunderstorm and left the windows open a few inches.

  Her car was a mess.

  Quinn was not known for being neat. He had a wonderful lady who kept his ranch house in order, but when he traveled—there was a reason he stayed in hotels. If he saw this mess in her car, all those times she had teased him would be wasted. She had thirty seconds while he moved his car to the street.

  She rapidly grabbed what she could and shoved it into two plastic sacks she found tucked between the seats: her fast-food dinner sack from yesterday, a pair of jeans that needed to be returned to the store, three coffee cups, a thermos that now had floating green stuff growing in the liquid, overdue library books, and a birthday gift bought but not wrapped that was now three days late.

  She was normally so neat and organized, so proud of how she kept her house and car that she got teased about it by her family; instead of that, Quinn was going to see her after a week in which her schedule had been one of a thousand interruptions. It wasn’t fair.

  She popped open the trunk and dumped the sacks there.

  “You didn’t need to clean up for me.”

  She slammed the trunk closed. “Shut up, Quinn.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He opened the driver’s door for her. She stopped, caught by surprise, looked at him, and then eased inside with a slight smile. She should have expected it; Quinn was consistent to a fault about politeness.

  He held the door for ladies, let them step inside first, insisted on carrying things and getting the car when it rained, always picked up the check, made a point of waiting for a lady to speak first. But when he did those things for her, there was an extra twinkle in his eyes; he liked doing them because he knew it would fluster her.

  She found that reality amusing but would never admit how much she enjoyed the unspoken dance. She kept hoping to catch him off guard, but in the years she’d known him he always managed to keep a step ahead of her.

  She started the car and turned the air-conditioning on high while he circled around the car to the passenger seat.

  “Is there a baseball game on tonight?”

  She flipped on the radio and punched in WGN, relieved to find his guess was right. It was a town favorite, the Chicago Cubs playing the Chicago White Sox. The familiar voice calling the play-by-play was a welcome addition; it eliminated the need for conversation. She pulled out of the subdivision and considered traffic on a Sunday evening to choose the best route northwest.

  Quinn settled his hat on one knee. “Tell me about the day. I can tell it’s been bad.”

  Just when she wanted to be annoyed with him, his voice changed and he said exactly the right thing. No wonder both Jennifer and Kate had raved about the man when they dated him. He placed a high value on listening. She let herself relax a bit. “The file is on top in the briefcase.”

  He retrieved it.

  She looked over when it had been silent for several minutes to find him studying the photos. There was nothing gentle about his expression. She looked away, not sure what she thought of that expression and the intensity in it. He looked like what he was: a cop.

  “It doesn’t look like arson.”

  “It’s a suicide, Quinn, and I missed it. There’s an addendum in there on a cat that died. The bedroom door was open, and yet the cat died in that bedroom. Egan fed his cat a sleeping pill, took two himself, smoked his last cigar, and lay down to die.”

  She felt annoyance. “I just didn’t think suicide; that was stupid. It fits this case like a glove. His wife has been moved to a nursing home, he’d passed running his business to his nephew, friends admitted he was lonely, and his cat died in a room with an open door. He killed his cat.”

  “If you’re right, be glad he didn’t show up at the nursing home and kill his wife, then himself.”

  “I know.”

  She pushed her sunglasses up and rubbed eyes still gritty from the smoke. She was botching a case right in front of him. It couldn’t get worse than this.

  Walter Hampton had arrived at the farmhouse before them. He was waiting beside a white-and-blue truck advertising Nakomi Nurseries. “Quinn, he’s a grieving man; I’d prefer not to have him think this was a suicide until I know something definite.”

  “Relax, Lisa. It’s your case. I’ll stay in the background.”

  She parked behind Walter’s truck. “You couldn’t stay in the background even if you tried.”

  “I’ll admit, I rarely try.” He opened his door, got out, and slipped on his hat.

  She had considered calling Detective Ford Prescott or Jack, but it was now after seven on Sunday evening. She was here to retrieve a cat, have a brief look around. If she found something, she could always call them back to the site.

  Lisa waited for Quinn to join her before walking forward to meet Walter. She struggled to find the right words. “Mr. Hampton, thank you for coming back over to the house.”

  He turned his baseball hat in his hand. “Your message said it was important.”

  “This is awkward, but I need a favor. Would you mind exhuming the cat?”

  “Of course. Let me get a shovel; it will take me twenty minutes at most. The shoe box is buried at the edge of the garden.”

  The lingering suspicion that it had been foul play and Walter had been involved eased even further with his immediate agreement. “Thank you. If we could borrow the key again, we’ll be in the house. I need to check one last item.”

  “Of course.” He reached into his pocket for the key and looked from her to Quinn.

  She stumbled over the error; Quinn was not in the background when he was standing right beside her. “I’m sorry. Mr. Hampton, this is U.S. Marshal Quinn Diamond.”

  Walter dropped the key as he handed it to her, then dug it from the dirt with an apology. He nodded briefly to Quinn. “Mr. Diamond. Let me get that shovel.”

  She watched him walk toward the detached garage. “I feel sorry for him,” she said quietly to Quinn. “This is tough.”

  “The guy is nervous.”

  “Because he dropped the key?”

  “He didn’t look at me once we were introduced, but given the circumstances, I don’t suppose I can blame him. He knows there’s something you’re not saying.” Quinn turned toward the car. “Get the flashlight, let’s go to work.”

  She
walked back to the car and opened the trunk. She found the flashlight in the box with the roadside flares and the jug of extra windshield wiper fluid. The flashlight gave a weak beam. She should have changed the batteries before coming.

  “What are you looking for in the house?”

  “I just want to see the scene again from a different viewpoint.”

  He walked with her up to the house and wrestled the front door unlocked.

  The house groaned around them as the evening breeze picked up. The charred smell of burned wood hung heavy in the humid air. “Let’s check the office area; maybe he wrote a final note,” she suggested to avoid facing the upstairs for a few more minutes. She’d be surprised if there was one; statistically most suicides didn’t leave one, but it was possible.

  Walter had boxed what papers were salvageable from the desk. If there had been something in the office, he would have likely found it, but Lisa thumbed through the box to double-check. They spent time searching through the downstairs rooms but came up with nothing specific. There was no diary, no letter, no note left in his Bible.

  “I’m going to look upstairs again,” Lisa said, accepting the inevitable. Quinn joined her. The flashlight flickered as they reached the steps.

  “Wait,” Quinn cautioned. “I saw another flashlight in one of the desk drawers.”

  He disappeared back into the office.

  Striking the flashlight against her palm a couple times brought the beam back. Lisa shone her flashlight back up the stairwell. She needed to see if there was any other evidence of a last evening: a favorite book, a keepsake like a picture nearby. If this was a planned suicide, Egan had probably changed his normal nightly routine in more ways than just a cigar.

  A flash of movement at the top of the stairs stopped her. Something was up there. Something fell, and she heard the unmistakable bark of a squirrel. The last thing she needed was an animal disturbing the scene.

  She started up the stairs. “Quinn, there’s a squirrel trapped up there.”