by Dakota Kahn
But here, with one of my big suspects (and the man whose man had attacked me, damn him) and he was throwing suspicion around on others.
“Why didn’t you call us with this information?” Blake said.
“Why would I? Somebody has already been arrested, and it isn’t like she did anything. Miguela just said stuff. Everybody says stuff. Hell…” And here he grinned big and maliciously, a kind of ‘catch me if you can, coppers’ grin, if you ask me. “Just a couple nights ago, after he pulled that gallows stunt I told Wendover myself, ‘somebody ought to hang you from that thing, you cheating son of a bitch.’”
“I need to use the restroom,” I said suddenly, with such force that both men looked at me like I was something dangerous that might explode at any moment.
“Right through there. The guest room,” Sparks said, nonchalantly pointing toward the hall we’d come in from. I stood up, nearly spilling my drink again, and headed for the door.
The bodyguard was there and had it opened before I could out-pace him, and he walked beside me as I headed down the hall.
Other things came to me - the smell of cheap aftershave, the very subtle sound of the swish of his pants as he moved. The leather creak of his shoes. I could hear them all as I was being grabbed, knocked down, robbed. I don’t know if I heard the sounds then and was just remembering, or if it was all mental projection of what I was hearing now onto the past, but by the time he opened the bathroom door for me I was barely able to keep up on my own two pegs. I slammed the door behind me, locked it, and promptly sat on the side of the tub and cried.
It wasn’t weakness, just tension. And a bit of sickness from being so close to somebody who could so easily hurt me. I won’t lie and say I wasn’t frightened. I wanted to call Blake from the bathroom on my phone, and tell him what I was thinking. Have him make everything all right.
On the strength of what, a jingling bracelet? That was nothing.
No, I’d have to find much stronger evidence that he had done something to me than that. That’d be laughed out of court. Out of hand.
I washed my hands a couple of times while I thought about what the heck I could do, and tried not to think about what it all meant.
Did sending his munchkin to attack me mean that Sparks could have had something to do with Wendover’s death? Sparks was blustery and irritating and weird, but I didn’t think he was in anyway dumb. In fact, I’m sure he could see the implications of us coming to see him without having to have them in any way spelled out - the Wendover investigation, despite the obvious culprit being pursued in Crestgold at this very moment, was far from over. He seemed all too ready to send some attention Miguela’s way.
I could hardly believe Miguela went on a freakin’ date with one of the hated developers. But then I would hardly have believed her breaking in to hotel rooms, either, and I’d seen her do that (heck, I practically did it with her.)
I didn’t know who to trust or even who to hope to trust in this situation.
But I was gonna get my damned briefcase back.
I came out of the bathroom, and the Munchkin was there. Maybe not quite as close to this door as he was to the elevator door, but still far closer than any normal person would find reasonable.
I smiled at him, which was a hard thing to do, given how much I disliked the jerk. His expression didn’t change, but he turned and walked back toward the dining room.
I didn’t follow him.
“There’s so much space up here,” I said, waiting just outside the bathroom door. I glanced around, and made note of the whole layout. Two doors off the side from the bathroom, two doors down the hall, the elevator door on the opposite wall.
That other door probably led directly into the kitchen, and the two doors on the far side, closer to me now, must have been their bedrooms.
“I mean, two people all alone up here must just kind of rattle around. Rattling around,” I said, looking at the doors trying to seem nonchalant.
The munchkin stared at me. His expression didn’t change, so far as I could see, but the blankness in response to my open questioning had moved away from quirky and heading into the downright rude territory. And I bet he was thinking the same about me. In fact, I bet he was itching to grab my upper arm and pull me toward the dining room and get me out of his hair for the rest of the day.
Try it. Try it and I’ll scream bloody murder. I’ll get my cop boyfriend in here so fast he’ll spin your tiny little undersized short man’s hands, you jerk.
He actually made a gesture, a little nod of his head toward the door.
“I was just hoping to get a look,” I said, talking flightily and (despite my attempts) a little desperately when the elevator dinged.
We both turned and looked at it as the doors slid open.
A kid, dressed in a blue and brown uniform, stepped right out as if he’d been invited. He had a package in his hands, and an electronic pad in the other, with a stylus.
“Sign here, package for Mr. Sparks,” he said, glancing from the munchkin to me. He gave me a look, up and down, and I think he tried to wink at me but I turned. The munchkin’s hands were full and I bet he wouldn’t want to chase down a woman in front of a stranger.
So, as if I’d been there before, I turned around and walked right down the hall, opened up the second nearest door, and walked right through.
I closed the door behind myself and observed everything I could. Sparsely decorated. There wasn’t even a bed in the corner, just a tatami mat like a Japanese house. Looking around quickly, up, down, everywhere I could, there wasn’t a thing out of the ordinary. Or ordinary. There was nothing.
I pulled open the closet door, and at that exact moment the bedroom door opened. The Munchkin was there, framed by the white of the hallway like some weird doll, hanging from the ceiling, his arms up slightly, his eyes barely focused. He had a brown package in one hand. The other was clenched in a fist.
I grabbed inside the closet, reaching through the dozen black sports coats all exactly the same, pushing my hands in, and then I just dove in entirely, slamming the closet door behind me so hard it burst right open again.
The Munchkin stepped into the door’s way, and I squeezed back into the cramped closet space, tripped over something and fell on my rear. I grabbed forward at anything I could to put it between myself and him, and found the thing I’d tripped over. I held it up, like a shield, grabbing the handle in one hand, the base in another. It felt good and familiar.
It was my briefcase, the one he stole.
That gave him a quick pause, and just long enough for me to take a long, steady breath, and scream at the top of my lungs, “Blake! Blake! Help! Blake!”
The first time I ever saw this horrible little man react was when he winced at the volume of my voice. The second time was seconds later, when Blake burst through the door, reaching into his coat, and the little man’s face turned into a grimace of annoyance and effort as he whipped himself around and planted a kicking foot right in Blake’s chest.
Blake was too big to get knocked back by the attack, but he grunted and stumbled forward, his face in complete pain. The little man turned and was aiming another kick at my half-fallen man, but he got a face full of briefcase before he could do so.
He tossed the briefcase aside, reared back, then froze.
Blake had his gun out and cocked, and told the man not to move.
Sparks appeared in the doorway behind him, watching with a grave concern.
“I think you better do what he says, Randall,” Sparks said. “We’ve got some misunderstandings to clear up.”
“Do we?” I said, panting. I had only jumped in a closet, fallen over, and thrown a briefcase, but I felt like I had run a marathon. “A guy like you says ‘misunderstandings’ it means he’s going to get out his checkbook. No dice, not for somebody who attacked me in a parking lot.”
Now that the real danger was over, I felt safe to shout and stand over this guy - what’d he called him, Randall? - and look
openly mad at him.
“Turn around, hands behind your back,” Blake said, handcuffs out.
“So, money won’t fix this. Okay, how about an explanation?” Sparks said. I noticed he’d filled up the entire doorway, and was leaning against the jam. If he wanted to block Blake from taking Randall out of here, he’d be able to do it.
I retrieved my briefcase, if I should need to throw it again. I’d hit Mr. Sparks right in the middle of the towel.
“An explanation means you were involved, Mr. Sparks,” I said. Tears of relief and anger were trying to squeeze themselves out of me, and it took a physically painful effort to keep them from flowing. I wouldn’t let Sparks think I was a weepy woman he could pity and mock. “An accessory. Even after the fact.”
“I’m in love with Miguela Sepulveda,” he said. “That’s it. And when the two of you broke into that PIs bedroom, I knew that one of you had taken the information he’d gotten on Miguela. I didn’t find it in Miguela’s house, and so I reasoned, wrongly, that it would be in your briefcase.”
“What?” I said, shouting now at the older man. To his… credit, I guess? He looked neither alarmed nor ashamed. He knew everything that was wrong about what he’d done and had no qualms about it.
“Look, I found out some things about Miguela Sepulveda that I found intriguing. And so I hired a man to find ways to get into her place, seek out certain articles, and retrieve them,” he said, his expression looking very pained at using coy language.
“You’re confessing to about a felony a minute here, Mr. Sparks,” Blake said, “so you might want to cool it on the explanation.”
“You’re right, it’s much more fun to directly confess to crimes than to do any of this talking around it. Miguela Sepulveda was a bit of a wild-child. She left Whispering Pines, changed her name to Chica Sands, and attempted to be an underwear model for a couple of years. Her rich family suppressed the pictures, but I knew she’d have to have copies at home!”
Sparks sounded so excited by the notion, and smiled so broadly I wondered seriously if he was just nuts.
“Are you kidding me?” I said.
“But my PI, well… I went cheap - you don’t become rich throwing money away - and hired someone from the area. Reno, actually. Big mistake. Next time, I’m getting my own guy flown in. Because he does what I ask, gets me my info, and then tries to extort money from me. If I ever see him again, he’ll have trouble. If Randall finds him…”
“And all because you like Miguela?” I said, trying in vain to make real sense of this madness.
“Yeah. Not that she couldn’t stand to make an improvement. That’s why I got her this.”
Sparks knelt down and picked up the brown package, and tore it open. “Look,” he said, holding up a DVD from the box. “It’s just what she’ll need. In a few months, we can date, maybe look for a partnership, a merger. I know she’s rich in this town, but in the circles I run in…”
He chuckled, and while he did that, and talked, his arm moved like a spastic monkey was pulling it by wires, so it took superhuman efforts to see the title of the DVD. Then, when I read it, it took superwoman efforts not to throttle the man right there.
How To Look Good in Your Underwear - A Fitness Guide with a pretty blonde lady posing mid-exercise in Victoria’s Secret garb.
Holy crap. This was how this guy was approaching a woman - you’re fat but might be attractive if you worked at it. Call me then.
Oh, boy, did I, right at that moment, hope he was the murderer.
“Come on,” Blake said, pulled Randall to his feet and out the room.
“You’ll regret it,” Sparks said, in a normal, conversational tone.
“Not as much as you’d regret giving that to a woman. Any woman,” I said, then I grabbed the DVD and looked closer at it.
Holy crap.
“See?” Sparks said, laughing. “She looks good, doesn’t she?”
She didn’t just look good, I knew her.
The woman on the cover of the fitness DVD was Mrs. Greene.
Chapter 16
In cop movies, it’s just the cops who go for a meeting with the chief where he tells them “You’re off the case!”
In my life, it seems, I am destined to get all the bad parts of being a cop without, alas, being able to arrest anybody, or catch any bad guys. Yet.
Because Sheriff Dulap was talking to me from behind a desk, his voice and expression calm but a vein in his forehead looked like it was trying to make a break for it. Blake sat calmly next to me, occasionally rubbing his sleep-deprived eyes while following what his externally calm, internally boiling boss was saying.
“The future of the entire town, which means of everyone in the town, elected officials and public servants alike, is dependent on a meeting tonight. A meeting that may depend somewhat on the good graces of two teams of developers. One of those teams had a tragedy this weekend. We’re seeking to resolve it. Have I said anything either of you don’t understand?” he said, very slowly.
Just the part where you have any authority over me or where I have to listen to a single thing you say is what I wanted to tell him, but he might have shot me where I stood, so I kept quiet.
“I understand, boss,” Blake said, very matter of factly. He was always matter of fact. Even when arresting the guy who attacked his girl. He could’ve at least kicked him a couple times when his hands were cuffed. I would not have minded.
“All right, excellent, I’ve heard from Blake. You, Miss Becker, do you understand what I’ve said?”
“A man was murdered two days ago,” I said.
“Yes, the tragedy of which I spoke. And so, with that in mind, and everyone on edge, you’ve decided it would be a good time to antagonize the other developer, and arrest his bodyguard under spurious charges?” Dulap said, applying just a touch of heat to his tone.
It did not sit well with me.
“Spurious?” I said, practically bouncing out of my chair. “That rat hit me! He tried to do me in! One way trip to the bone orchard! Assault! Theft! His boss should be sitting in a cell right next to him!”
“On what evidence?” Dulap said.
“Briefcase!” I shouted, now really out of my seat, getting ready to punch everybody.
“You found your stolen article on his person,” Dulap said.
“And he as much as admitted it after we found it.”
“Oh, so you found him in an agreeable mood after the article was discovered? So you’re telling me there was the possibility of an amicable agreement without having to arrest him, and antagonize Mr. Sparks?”
I was mortified, and sat down. I nearly stood up again, immediately, to throw my chair at the man. I looked at Blake, to see how he was raising up his furious anger.
He just stared at his boss, blank expression, not even moving. Like he was doing his best impression of that Randall Munchkin.
“Is that all, Sheriff?” Blake said.
A pregnant silence fell between the men, and yet again, I could see Blake was handling things, in his own way, better than I would have. What can I say, just ‘cause I’m a firecracker (and a cute one) doesn’t mean, because Blake’s less explosive, he’s some kind of damp squib.
He’s more like a big cat. A puma. He’ll sit and stare at something for a long time, until you’re almost sure he’s fallen asleep. And then, voom, when you least expect it, all this explosive power and strength come out and gets ya.
Which in this case meant simply saying the words, “I had probable cause and the individual had assaulted me. Protocol required me to take the action I did. To do anything less would have been unworthy of the badge.”
“And why were you there in the first place?” Dulap said, not giving up yet.
“Because I had some questions for him,” Blake said, simply. And that was all he was going to give.
I wasn’t quite shoved out of the station, but Dulap walked behind me, talking about obstruction and all the things they liked to threaten me with witho
ut even pausing for breath, talking me out until my feet were on the sidewalk, my back to the station, and my car… absolutely nowhere I could see.
Because I hadn’t driven there, I came with Blake. Argh!
And now, a couple miles walk from anywhere I needed to be, I couldn’t help feeling stranded, even with Blake just a few yards away, because he couldn’t come to me. Nobody would come to me. There was wilderness just a few steps away at almost any point in Whispering Pines, and it all felt like it was crowding around me now, coming closer and poking at me with pine needle fingers.
I started walking, at first I thought randomly, until I found my feet were smarter than I was, and heading quite definitively toward the workout yard. There were actually two fitness centers vying for business right next to each other. One was some kind of chain, Universe of Fitness with light blue coloring and a caricatured curved body for a logo. Right next door was The Dog Pit, with a snarling pit bull logo and heavy metal bursting forth from it.
I went to the much friendlier Universe, looked in the window, and saw just who I was looking for. Miguela Sepulveda, sweating and wearing a lycra bodysuit made of some material that seemed to come from beyond both time and space, to be able to keep Miguela’s impressive mass secure like it did. Especially as she attacked the elliptical machine with a military intensity, a sort of focus that made her a little scary to approach.
The suit was leopard print. It did not make her look more supple. But it did give me something to start a conversation with when I came into the gym - after fighting off two sales reps with harsh language, and telling the third I’m an officer of the court and was prepared to press suit against her unlawful business practices.
Miguela Sepulveda appeared to be watching all of this with a look of intense concentration. I wondered if she was preparing a whole set of lies to tell me when I came up to her, ready to confront her with my myriad terrible truths.
Then I saw the earbuds in her ears, and saw her lips were moving to some song pounding into her noggin.
“Miguela,” I said, then again, like I was talking to a deaf aunt, exaggerated and loud. “Miguela, I got to ask you some questions.”