“Out,” she said. She greeted me with a massive terrycloth towel and started rubbing me vigorously.
At that point, I’d recovered enough to assert my independence. It was a little surreal to be standing naked and scalded pink in front of a woman I’d known about two weeks, no matter how kind she’d been. “I got it,” I whispered, clutching at the towel.
“I have nothing that will fit you properly.” Bettina held up a kimono-style bathrobe by the shoulders, and I slipped my arms into the sleeves.
The silk felt dreamy against my skin, but I did, indeed, stick out in an ungainly fashion from all the openings. The cuffs dangled just below my elbows, and the hem hit me at short mid-thigh. I had a feeling the robe was close to floor-length on Bettina. But all my private parts were covered.
“Come out to the sofa.” Bettina tugged on my arm. “I have an ice pack ready for you.”
And that was how Vaughn found me—sprawled on his mother’s sofa, draped with blankets, and my ghastly ankle elevated on a pile of pillows, encased in a drippy ice pack.
He sat on the coffee table with his knees angled in the gap between us. Cal leaned against the fireplace mantel, his arms crossed over his chest, like a sentry at ease but still vigilant, watchful.
“She’s out there,” I blurted.
Vaughn pitched up one brow. “Lila Halton.” It wasn’t a question. So he knew.
I nodded.
He reached over and took my hand, held it between both of his, ran his thumb across my knuckles. “Her car is stuck in the mud at Peregrine Pointe. From the tracks, it’s clear she tried to drive away, but the problem with sports cars is they tend to be rear-wheel drive.” His tilty smile was thinking about making an appearance—there at the corner. “She spun out huge ruts, but that car’s not going anywhere. So she’s on foot. Either hitchhiking or in the wildlife refuge.”
“Or she called someone to pick her up.”
Vaughn shook his head. “Her phone’s not been used since she called you last night to set up the meeting.” Now he grinned for real.
“You knew then?” I breathed.
The smile slipped off his face. “No. I would never have let you—no. We got her phone records late last night, as soon as Frank started talking. Even then, I only knew that she’d called you and how long you talked, not what about. But your Volvo…” He tipped his head in the general direction of the construction site upriver.
“Is stuck right beside Lila’s car,” I murmured.
“You know they spread gravel around at construction sites for a reason. There’s a big area of gravel on the other side of the trailer. You’re supposed to park…” But Vaughn trailed off when he saw my scowl.
“Wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said. “My keys…” I didn’t have to finish. “How’d you know?” I asked instead.
“Cy Watson.” Vaughn shook his head with admiration. “That kid’s a marvel. I got him out of school for the day, to assist with the investigation. Thrilled him to his toes. Have you ever seen a teenage boy trying to act macho and cool and yet overcome with giddiness at the same time?”
Vaughn chuckled before continuing. “Cy and I were sitting with the forensic examiner in the lab downtown, and he was showing the examiner how his program worked and how he’d hacked into the sensor reporting system when two of the sensors up and quit right while we were watching them. One moment they’re collecting data—well above the threshold Frank had specified, so Cy’s program was substituting lower mercury values in real time—and the next they’re dead, offline, within minutes of each other. I wondered if Frank had an accomplice out on the river destroying evidence, so I immediately called Cal and asked him to go check. He found you instead, hugging the site of the second destroyed sensor.” Vaughn shrugged. “I guess I could arrest you for tampering with evidence.”
“Don’t you dare,” Bettina growled from the kitchen.
I peeked over at her. She was fussing with a teapot and a plate of cookies, but it was clear she’d also been listening to every word.
I flinched as an idea hit me. “She had a paddle—or did. A paddle without a kayak.” The thoughts were stringing in a loosely linear fashion now. “There’s no roof rack on her car. With that car, she could never carry a kayak without a rack. When you—when the medical examiner said Ian was unconscious when he entered the water—how did he know? Did Ian have injuries? Injuries consistent with a paddle? Blows to the head or neck or something?” A vision of Lila swinging the paddle, the blade end whistling in a vicious arc, flitted through my mind and I shuddered. “When you recovered Ian’s kayak, was there a paddle? I mean, I know they would have most likely become separated. They did when I—”
Cal cleared his throat from his spot against the opposite wall.
“Well, never mind,” I stumbled along. “It’s a big river, of course, but—”
Vaughn stopped me with a tighter squeeze of my hand. He pulled a phone out of his pocket and punched a speed dial number.
“Find a kayak paddle?” he asked the person who answered. “Uh-huh. Where? Two places? One blade broken off.” Vaughn shot me a questioning glance.
I nodded. “White shaft, yellow blades. My handprint—if it’s not too muddy—will be on the broken blade which I dropped about fifteen or twenty feet in from the gap in the silt fence on the riverbank.”
“Where you went over the wall,” Vaughn added with a squint and another hand squeeze.
I nodded.
“You left some nice tracks there too.”
“I do my best,” I murmured.
He muttered into the phone a few more times before hanging up—short sentences, as though he was a field general directing his troops. Every effort was being made to find the missing Lila.
CHAPTER 22
Lila was found, three hours later, soaking wet and huddling in a hollow she’d clawed into a mound of blackberry vines deep in the wildlife refuge. From all accounts, she was only slightly less miserable than I’d been. It was no consolation.
The information was relayed to me through Bettina who had also asserted her right to retrieve proper clothing from my house, help me dress, and drive me to the hospital to have my ankle X-rayed.
She also drove me home again, with a sheaf of instructions from the doctor. While my ankle was not broken, I had been told to stay off of it—and he meant all the way off. He’d said this most emphatically with a tremendous cinching of his bushy eyebrows into a threatening line—for at least two weeks. And after that, only tentative hobbling with the assistance of crutches. Oh, goody.
Vaughn took charge of questioning the suspects at the police station. He informed both Frank and Lila of each other’s presence—in separate holding rooms—and the information began to flow fast and thick. Not all of it reliable, however. At least, not at first.
Vaughn let me proofread his report later. Said he didn’t want any embarrassing typos since it was sure to be read by a lot of interested parties before the case went to court, so I examined the document with a red pen in my hand. But it was far too engrossing, and I completely forgot the guise under which I was supposed to be assisting.
I think Vaughn thought keeping me in the loop was a form of compensation for Lila’s attack and my unpleasant dip in the river. He insisted on remaining under the erroneous impression that he was responsible for what had happened to me, no matter how many times I tried to talk him out of it. We had already become very good at arguing with each other.
Frank had readily admitted to the hacking by proxy. He didn’t know the name of the kid he’d hired, but he’d been happy with the results. Just goofing around, he’d claimed. Nothing serious. Nobody actually got hurt, et cetera. All the classic justifications.
When Vaughn had pressed Frank about his activities on the night of Ian’s murder, and he’d became aware that claiming to be with Lila wasn’t going to cut it, he’d ponied up to having a meeting. A long, late-night business meeting.
Who else was at the meeting? M
ore hemming and hawing.
“You can’t have a meeting by yourself,” Vaughn had said, his observation dutifully recorded in the transcript.
I chuckled.
“A couple of aides,” Frank had muttered.
“Aides. Well, that’s exciting,” Vaughn had replied. “Aides to whom?”
“Ross Perkins.”
I sat up straighter and pounded the pillow under my ankle, and maybe growled a little.
“So two aides to Ross Perkins were in the room with you?” Vaughn clarified. “How about the man himself?”
Indecipherable.
“Say that again,” Vaughn insisted. “Yes or no will work.”
“Yes.”
On and on it went. I admired Vaughn’s patience. Eventually, it came out that not only had Ross Perkins indeed been present at the meeting, but that the meeting had been called in order to come to an agreement about one of Frank’s developments. And that the agreement also entailed a transfer of funds. Ross had never touched the money, but one of his aides had gone home carrying a hefty addition to his child’s college scholarship fund. Frank claimed that it was just one of his many acts of philanthropy.
Vaughn was less than impressed.
Lila’s interview transcript was far more emotional. She’d started babbling immediately, forgot to ask for a lawyer until she was nearly finished. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help suspecting that she knew exactly what she was doing. Her story hinged on intent, and she did a very good job of claiming that everything that happened during her encounter with Ian that night had been accidental.
It was dark, she couldn’t see very well. Ian wouldn’t tell her what he was doing, if it was true he was seeing another woman—she’d heard rumors, but then again there were always rumors about Ian and women. His evasiveness had pushed her over the edge.
She’d known for some time that he liked to kayak on the river after dark. She thought it was a ludicrous risk, but what else would you expect from such a passionate crusader who was willing to sacrifice everything for his beloved environment? Lila continued toeing that line. In fact, she was even more effusive in her descriptions of Ian than the many eulogies that had been written about him by the faithful.
So she’d gone to the park with the long, sloping beach where he usually set off on his kayak tours and waited for him. It had been a lovers’ tiff, that’s all. She’d lost control, grabbed the paddle and swung it a few times. In the dark, she’d connected with some part of him, didn’t know exactly where, just felt the thud shudder up the shaft to her hands.
But Ian had fallen—hard—atop his kayak. He didn’t move.
She panicked. Tried to feel around for a pulse. In the dark. He wasn’t breathing; she was certain. She was crying in big, gulpy sobs now. Vaughn had to stop her and ask her to repeat every other sentence so the recording would have her statement clear.
In abject horror—she actually used those words—she’d shoved Ian’s kayak, with Ian on top of it, into the river. It was a stable sort of kayak, hardly bobbled as it floated away.
I wondered how she could see that. So did Vaughn, because it was the next question he asked.
Lila had to think about it for a minute. Lights on the far shore, she decided. He was silhouetted against them once the kayak was out far enough. But by that time she couldn’t get him back either.
Didn’t know what to do. So she carried the paddle back to her car and drove away.
“Was this during low tide?” Vaughn asked, although I was sure he knew the answer.
“I don’t know. There was a lot of beach. Does it matter?”
Of course it mattered. I’d seen the fresh mud surface left behind by a receding high tide. Several feet of moving water, even if it looks calm on the surface, has amazing rearranging powers. Any signs of a struggle that might have scarred the beach at low tide would have been smoothed out within a six-hour time period, well before morning light.
“Where’s Ian’s car?” Vaughn asked.
“Didn’t you know?” Even though I was reading the report, Lila’s incredulity was evident in her phrasing. “Ian didn’t own a car, hadn’t for years. No fossil-fuel use for him. He was such a purist. He kept his kayak at the park, hidden in some bushes, chained to a tree. So far, no one had ever tried to steal it. Good karma or something.”
Vaughn turned the conversation to Lila’s employment with Cox and Associates.
Lila admitted that she and Ian had hatched the plan for her to go to work for Frank Cox so they could obtain insider information about his plans to annex the wildlife refuge. He’d offered a land exchange—a less desirable property well away from the river which he would donate to the county as a replacement refuge if they would cede the waterfront refuge to him so he could expand the adjacent development. It was a dirty proposal from the very beginning, guaranteed not to float with the county commissioners until Ross Perkins, in typical fashion, had gotten himself involved as a sort of broker.
Things had been progressing rapidly with regard to the refuge—in the wrong direction from Lila’s point of view—so she’d upped the ante. Suggested a few things of a romantic nature to Frank. But it had come as a complete surprise (she claimed) when he’d taken her up on her offer the day after Ian had disappeared. She’d known he’d been at a meeting with Ross Perkins the night before and that it was something he wouldn’t want to discuss with the police. The affair had been both brief and lackluster, but she’d decided to go along with it in furtherance of her cause—insinuating herself with Frank in the hope of sabotaging the land-swap deal. Which had worked perfectly because when the police came around collecting statements, Frank had asked her to back up the date of their first liaison—to claim they’d been together the night Ian went missing. In exchange for her lie, she’d extracted his promise to halt the refuge deal.
I grunted. And to cover her own little fanny. Two birds with one stone. How better to divert suspicion than to forge an alibi (for a price) with someone who needs it almost as badly as you do? Extortion, pure and simple.
I wondered, though, what must have been running through Lila’s mind at the press conference, when she’d learned that she’d actually killed Ian with her second act—pushing him into the water—rather than her first act—knocking him unconscious. If she hadn’t been in such a hurry to cover her tracks, her lover might have lived.
oOo
I was cranky. Confined. Essentially shackled to the sofa. Restless and sore. A foul mood all around. Couldn’t cook. Couldn’t climb the stairs to the window-lined loft. I desperately wanted to see the rain I could hear pounding on the roof.
If there was something to complain about, I found it, and obsessed upon it.
Then Sloanie brought the kids. Two giggly, bouncy girls with flyaway hair and a drooling baby who’d just sprouted his first tooth and was discovering the joys of crawling.
“Auntie Eva is going to read to you,” she announced to the two girls while giving me a you-are-not-getting-out-of-this glare.
But it was one duty I had no intention of shirking, and one I was particularly well suited to fulfilling at the moment, since I wasn’t going anywhere. With squeals and hasty clambering, Ginger and Hazel wedged tightly against my sides and pressed their little heads against my shoulders. I flipped pages. We read them all—Dr. Seuss, Curious George, Richard Scarry’s Busytown, Olivia the Pig. And then we read them again. And again.
My voice was shot, but it was the best mood-lifter in the world.
In the meantime, Sloanie had tidied the house, rescued the baby multiple times when he’d gotten himself stuck in corners, stashed edibles in the fridge, opened windows for an airing, and generally spruced up the place. She’d been a blur of productivity.
A knock sounded on the door as she was bundling up the kids to leave. She opened it to Vaughn standing on the stoop, his shoulders hunched into a thick, waterproof jacket, trying to avoid the drips falling off the roof overhang.
“Welcome.” She flashed him a bril
liant smile, invited him in, and took his coat—the perfect hostess through and through.
But as he was wiping his feet, Sloanie shifted to winking spastically at me from behind his back, her meaning all too clear. Hazel, the three-year-old, noticed and tried to mimic her mommy. The result was grimacing facial convulsions, but she certainly gave it her best effort. I couldn’t keep from cracking up.
Vaughn caught enough of the shenanigans to be concerned. “Are they always like that?” he asked after Sloanie had herded the kids out and waved good-bye.
“Yes. It’s genetic. I have the same condition.”
“I noticed.” He settled on the sofa and stretched his legs out on the coffee table beside mine.
“Make yourself at home,” I muttered. But I was glad he felt so comfortable. I got the impression it was the first time he’d truly relaxed in several days.
“How’s my report?” he asked.
“Comprehensive.” I pulled the pages out from under my laptop and handed them to him. “Except for one thing. Why did Lila attack me?”
Vaughn sighed. “Her lawyer’s a smart guy. He got her to shut up right before we got to that part. I have a feeling he’s working the temporary insanity angle, and it wouldn’t look good for his client to have perpetrated two eerily similar crimes within a span of two weeks. That would suggest planning and intent.”
I shook my head. “I really don’t think she planned it, against me anyway. Somehow, I caught her off guard.”
“Probably your comment about the mercury readings. You put her at a disadvantage because you knew something she didn’t. My hypothesis is that she then assumed you knew about the murder too, when you didn’t.”
“Yeah, well, I figured it out pretty fast once she started swinging,” I huffed.
“But if she’d been successful, disposed of you—there’s no guarantee that bodies in the river ever surface, you know—she might have gotten away with it. A risk she was prepared to take, at any rate. She could have claimed you’d had an accident, slipped, went off on your own and never came back, whatever.”
Mercury Rising (Tin Can Mysteries Book 1) Page 20