Detour

by Lorena McCourtney

  The deputy gave an impatient sigh, no doubt figuring he had better things to do than discuss the merits of toilet tissues. “He didn’t go anywhere else without you?”

  The persistent questions about Mac made me feel a bit snappish. “Not that I recall. But I don’t have a sign-out sheet for his comings and goings.”

  He ignored my snarky comment. “Did you go anywhere without him?”

  “No.”

  There were more questions about our activities in the three days, more questions about our relationship with Renée Echol. I kept telling him there was no relationship, but he continued digging, attacking the same subject from different angles. Did we know anyone who’d had business or personal dealings with Renée? Did we know any of her friends? Had our visiting friends met her? He wanted a phone number for Magnolia and Geoff. He also wanted to know about our relationship with Sheila, how long we’d known her, how we happened to be parking our motorhome here, what we’d noticed about her activities since we’d been here.

  Finally he let me go and took Mac out to the car. By then I felt drained, as if he’d squeezed my brain dry as an old tea bag. I also felt a definite aroma of wet dog clinging to me. He kept Mac just as long as he had me, and he came inside with Mac when the interview was over. Mac, too, now had a distinctive aroma.

  “We appreciate your time and information,” Deputy Hardishan said politely. “You’ve both been very helpful.”

  “Glad we could do it,” Mac said. “We hope your investigation turns up the killer quickly.”

  “Is there any possibility she killed herself?” I asked.

  I think my question caught him by surprise, because he actually answered. “No, that isn’t—” Then he caught himself and switched to generic cop-speak. “Our investigation will consider all possibilities, of course.”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  He wasn’t about to tell me that suicide hadn’t so far even been a consideration, but it did apparently catch his interest now. “Did she have some reason to kill herself?”

  Maybe. The affair with Brian. The possibility of losing her real estate license because of unethical dealings on Sheila’s friend’s property and/or other property dealings. Maybe getting in over her head financially with purchase of the property.

  But surely a woman with Jimmy Choo taste in shoes wouldn’t kill herself in an ugly, burned-out cabin by a swamp. Much too tacky. This had to be murder. When I didn’t say anything, the deputy gave me a speculative look that made me uncomfortable. Was he thinking I knew more than I was saying? That we’d met Renée, maybe even had dealings with her, but weren’t admitting it? Or that I’d made the suggestion about suicide as a red-herring move to divert their attention from murder?

  “I realize it may be an inconvenience, but you will have to remain in the area as our investigation continues,” he said.

  The statement was phrased politely, but I immediately bristled. I pulled myself up to my full height. Which admittedly isn’t all that impressive.

  “Unless someone is under arrest, I don’t believe you can—”

  Mac’s surreptitious but powerful elbow jab in the ribs stopped me. I blinked in surprise. Mac is not generally an elbow-jabber. Then I caught the urgent message.

  Shut up!

  Mac’s message was clear. Make Deputy Hardishan suspicious enough and we might find ourselves actually under arrest. I shut up, linked my arm with Mac’s, and gave Deputy Hardishan my best LOL smile.

  Chapter 10

  IVY

  “They’re suspicious of us,” Mac said as soon as the door closed behind Deputy Hardishan. “They think we may have killed Renée.”

  Yes. Incredible as it seemed—one LOL and one silver-fox senior as killers?—I knew Mac was right. The deputy’s questions were much more comprehensive and penetrating than he would have asked if we were just witnesses. We were suspects. “Why us?”

  “It’s probably just that at the start of an investigation, everyone’s a suspect.”

  A hopeful thought. Was our finding the body enough to do it? The possibility had occurred to me earlier, but surely reporting a dead body is just an act of good citizenship. Doesn’t everybody do it?

  Although, take a man-on-the-street poll, and you probably wouldn’t find all that many people who’ve been involved with as many dead bodies as I have.

  “What kind of questions did he ask you?” I asked.

  Mac slid into the bench seat of the dinette and rested his elbows on the table. “He wanted a detailed account of every minute of our last three days. Where we’d gone and what we’d done. If either you or I had gone off alone during that time. All I could think of was when you and Magnolia went into Trinidad so she could get her hair done.”

  Uh-oh. “I’d forgotten that. I told him I hadn’t gone anywhere without you.”

  So now Deputy Hardishan no doubt figured he’d caught me in an outright lie. Would he also find out I hadn’t been with Magnolia the entire time she was in the hair salon? I’d wandered through a couple of antique shops and a drugstore, but I hadn’t bought anything, and then I’d found a bench to sit on overlooking the harbor. Would anyone remember me? Unlikely. At one antique store, a young woman ran her hand over my jacket, apparently not even noticing I was a live person and not one of the mannequins displaying vintage clothing. Invisibility at work.

  “Did you remember to tell him about when you went to get toilet tissue?” I asked.

  Mac shook his head. “I didn’t think about that.”

  Caught in another “lie.” I could see a lurid spread in some tabloid. Elderly Couple Charged with Murder! Not the first time wife has been involved in death! They’d no doubt dig up photos that made us look like zombie-weirdos capable of anything from decapitation to cannibalism. And a photo of the motorhome too. The Deathmobile in which we transported victims and dumped them in inconspicuous spots around the country.

  Mac jumped up and paced back and forth the short length of the living room. I put the kettle on the stove and got tea bags out of the cupboard.

  “He wanted to know about my past, before you and I were married,” Mac said as he paced. “He asked about my familiarity with guns, if I owned one now or if I’d ever owned one in the past. He wanted to know all kinds of things about you. Including if you had experience with guns.”

  The deputy had imagination. Ivy the LOL gun moll. With a Glock tucked in her bra?

  I was sitting on the bench seat of the dinette now, drinking my tea. Koop managed to squeeze under the table and into my lap. “He asked me the same things about you.”

  Mac sat down across from me. “This changes things, doesn’t it?”

  “In what way?”

  “About leaving.”

  “If we’re not actually under arrest, we can still—”

  “But we’re suspects now. How will it look if we just take off and disappear?”

  Guilty, that’s how we’d look. Yes, we could go, just drive off into the sunset. Or rainstorm. Whatever. But leaving—running off—would probably only make them more suspicious of us. It also might concentrate the investigation on us instead of on the real killer.

  “But staying doesn’t mean we need to go chasing around on some killer-hunting expedition,” Mac said almost hastily, as if he figured that was what I was thinking. Was I? “We’ll just be here, available, letting the authorities do their thing. We don’t have to go looking for the killer for them.”

  When I didn’t say anything, Mac’s eyebrows lifted. “Right?”

  Right. Non-involvement. “Who else do you suppose is on their suspect list?”

  A minute later we had at least one answer. A frantic pounding on the door made me jump to my feet and started BoBandy yipping. I hesitated a moment. With a murderer on the loose, answering an unknown knock in the dark could be opening the door to a killer with a shotgun or machete or ten sticks of dynamite. I looked around for a possible weapon to counteract such an attac
k. Neither the toothpicks in the plastic dolphin holder on the dinette nor the cup of hot tea in Mac’s hand looked as if they’d be particularly effective against machete or shotgun.

  A moment later, Sheila’s frantic voice joined the frantic pounding. Mac opened the door.

  “That deputy stopped to talk to me after he left you!” Sheila was too upset even to barge inside. She just stood there with wind and rain tossing her red hair into a tomato froth, arms—no machete or dynamite visible—flapping like a demented windmill. “They think I may have killed her!”

  “He said that?” Mac asked.

  “He didn’t have to say it. He knew about my argument with Renée and asked all kinds of questions about it.” She paused, eyebrows moving in a wet frown. “I may have made some threats while we were arguing. I don’t remember that, but apparently some other people do.”

  “Would you like to come in?” I said.

  I barely had the words out before she was inside and dropping to the sofa as if her flowered legs had suddenly wilted. She’d come without rain jacket or hood, and wet red hair now plastered her face.

  The sheriff’s department was doing well with their investigation. After one day, they now had three of us as suspects. I tried to take comfort in that old adage about safety in numbers. There should be even more. Had they ferreted out Brian’s relationship with Renée yet? That would give them both Brian and Kathy as suspects. Even Duke might be a suspect, given that he’d had hostile dealings with Renée in the past. He also kept a gun in a holster by his door and he’d been away from home for some length of time on an unusual solitary expedition. Would a clerk at McDonald’s verify that he’d been in there for pancakes? If that was really where he’d gone.

  Sheila jumped up. “Then he wanted to know where I’d been every minute of the last three days. I was with you two and your friends some of the time, but not all of the time, and yesterday I wasn’t with anyone. I have no alibi!” she wailed. In spite of her distress, she paused long enough to wrinkle her nose. “It smells strange in here.”

  Neither of us offered an explanation. “I don’t believe they’re saying anything yet about actual time of death for which you or anyone needs an alibi,” Mac said.

  I was fairly certain they couldn’t pin Renée’s death down to the hour. Early on, there are details about lividity and rigidity and body or liver temperature that can come close. But, as the hours go by, time of death becomes ever more difficult to determine closely. I’d learned that from a few other instances of death in which I’d been involved. There was the bug and maggot thing for longer times between death and body discovery, but I guessed that with Renée they had chosen that three-day time period because they had information that three days ago was the last time anyone had seen her alive. And who, I wondered, was that last person?

  “Did that officer ask you any questions about me?” Sheila peered at us suspiciously as she sat down again. “Did you tell him about my altercation with Renée?”

  “We didn’t tell him anything about you and Renée. Although he did ask about you,” I admitted.

  Mac turned the discussion in the opposite direction. “We also seem to be suspects, so I’m sure the deputy asked you questions about us. What did you tell him?”

  “Well, uh, nothing really.” Sheila’s gaze zigzagged from floor to ceiling and back again. “Certainly nothing incriminating.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was uneasy because she perhaps had told Deputy Hardishan something incriminating about us, or if she suddenly realized she might be sitting here cozied up to a couple of gray-haired killers. Which I found reassuring about her innocence, because she wouldn’t be wary of us if she had killed Renée herself, would she?

  Unless she was afraid we knew enough to incriminate her . . .

  Did we? No, all we knew was what Sheila herself had told us, that she’d had a “run-in” with Renée some time back. Although we also knew she’d had plenty of time to rush out to the cove and put a bullet in her former friend. Probably even enough time to kill her elsewhere and move the body to the burned cabin. She wouldn’t even have needed a car to go to the cove if she’d killed Renée right there. Duke had said she sometimes went out there on her bicycle or even a run.

  So she was right. She had no alibi. Maybe we were the ones who should be nervous. Maybe we were sitting here in the presence of a flower-booted killer furtively hiding her own guilt under a pretended wariness of us.

  “Was the deputy going to talk to Duke?” I asked.

  “I talked to Duke on the phone while the deputy was out here with you,” Sheila said. “He said someone had already been there. They asked about what vehicles he’d seen in the area in the last few days. His trailer window looks out on the road to the Kabins, you know.”

  “Had he seen anything?”

  “Oh, yes. He always keeps an eye on the road, and he knows cars. But he didn’t have license numbers. His eyes aren’t good enough for that, and he didn’t know about Renée being dead then anyway. He also heard a couple of vehicles and a motorcycle go by during the night when he couldn’t actually see them.”

  A motorcycle. Interesting. Maybe Renée had ridden out there on a motorcycle with someone? Someone who could have killed her and just ridden away.

  “But Duke said he hadn’t thought much about any of the vehicles at the time. Kids go out there to party. I’ve told him he ought to put a gate across that road. It crosses his property.”

  “I wonder why he hasn’t done it,” Mac said.

  “He says he doesn’t want to keep people from going out to enjoy the beach.” She wrinkled her nose, apparently not in agreement with that generous attitude.

  “Is he a suspect in the murder?”

  She blinked. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask him that. But he couldn’t be a suspect!” She jumped up again, fully alarmed. “Not Duke. That’s ridiculous. Although Brian and Kathy are surely suspects. Especially Brian.”

  “But Duke could be a suspect too. You said he was unhappy that Renée had tried so hard to push him into selling out earlier,” I pointed out. “Do the law enforcement people know about that? Maybe, since Renée was now buying the Kate’s Kabins property herself, she’d approached him again about selling.”

  “He didn’t mention her doing that.” Sheila frowned. “But he doesn’t tell me everything.”

  “Would it upset Duke if Rene again started trying to get him to sell?” Mac asked.

  “It might. He finally told her the other time that if she came back again, he’d run her off with a shotgun. But that was just Duke playing tough guy,” she scoffed. “He doesn’t even own a shotgun.”

  Would she know if he did? But then, it didn’t matter. I don’t know much about guns, but I know enough to tell it wasn’t a shotgun blast that put that neat hole in Renée’s chest.

  I didn’t want to be suspicious of Duke. I like ol’ Duke and his patient, tree-training abilities and his rescued Scarlett and his upbeat attitude about a champagne-worthy celebration coming soon.

  But Duke had a handgun, and even guys who seem calm and peaceful have been known to take a wacko turn into violence. Isn’t a description of Duke exactly how people usually describe the neighbor who suddenly turns killer? He was always so quiet. Kept to himself. Never bothered anyone.

  “I’ll talk to him again,” Sheila said. “I’ll tell him to be careful what he says to those law enforcement people. You’re always hearing about some guy who goes to prison for years before DNA tests or something prove he was innocent all along.”

  “Before you go,” Mac said, because she was edging toward the door now, perhaps anxious to get away from us, “do you know about any other personal relationships Renée may have had? Male relationships, someone other than Brian?”

  Sheila stopped with a hand on the door. “I hadn’t thought about that, but it’s certainly a possibility. She might have had something going with an investor on buying the property.”

 
I thought about the black leather jacket and studded shoes in which Renée had died. Not totally a biker-chick outfit, but maybe leaning in that direction. And Duke had heard a motorcycle.

  “Maybe a motorcycle-ish investor?” I suggested.

  Mac and Sheila both looked at me. “Motorcycle-ish?” Mac repeated doubtfully.

  I scowled back. Motorcycle-ish is a perfectly good word. Quite descriptive, actually. Sheila didn’t question it.

  “I’ve heard biker gangs sometimes channel drug money into legitimate investments such as real estate. I doubt Renée would have had any scruples about dealing with dirty money.”

  “A lot of ordinary people like motorcycles. Not all motorcycle-ish guys are into gangs and crime. And there are some great Christian motorcycle groups,” Mac said, and I appreciated his standing up for both my vocabulary and a Christian motorcycle group we’d met down in Texas.

  “Now that I think about it, I remember hearing Renée’s ex-husband is in the area, and he’s been in prison. Maybe being involved with gangs and drugs was how he got there. They were divorced before she came here, but, who knows? Maybe they hooked up again.”

  Mac and I exchanged glances. Could an ex-husband be our Unknown Man? Either the killer himself or a motive for Brian killing Renée?

  “Did she have children?”

  “A son, I think. He got in trouble and lives with her parents back in the Midwest somewhere now.”

  Sheila scooted out without saying anything about church, and the next morning we saw her SUV pull out of the driveway before we were ready to leave. Attendance at church was a bit skimpy that morning. I inquired about her of a woman I remembered her talking to last week, but the woman didn’t know anything about Sheila’s absence. Apparently, her not being there wasn’t unusual. Actually, Duke had said as much when he mentioned she sometimes used Sunday mornings for garage sales or exercise.

  After another good message, this time about the woman Jesus encountered at the well, Mac and I went back to the motorhome. I was just getting out of the pickup when my phone tinkled.