“I’d like to check on my sister while we’re out this way,” Hudson said. “Shouldn’t take more than a minute or two.” He stuck the key into the ignition and put the car into drive.
I put my hand on his forearm. “Hold on,” I said. “How much did the detective tell you? About the pills.”
“He didn’t tell me anything. He asked about the accident, if I remembered anything about the car that almost hit us.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That it was a black truck, just like I told you.”
“Hudson, you didn’t see it. Mortiboy was crying and you reached around to feed your fingers into his cage so he’d be less stressed. The car came out of nowhere.”
“You still think it’s the same SUV you saw parked by the river, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Hudson put the car back into park. “You saw the dust cloud we kicked up the day of the accident. And today. Just walking around that driveway, we kicked up a good amount of dirt. That SUV in the lot was clean. You could see your reflection in the paint job. No way it was the same car.”
“Somebody could have washed it.”
“Why?”
“Because they didn’t want us to recognize it. Hudson, I know we disagree on the memory here, but I know what I saw. It was the same SUV that drove us off the road. Remember how I thought it was an SUV and you thought it was a truck? It was both. Even your sister mentioned that Dr. Hall drove a truck away from her house.”
“Did you tell Detective Drayton about Emma’s involvement? Did she?”
“No.” I put my hand on his arm. “Hudson, listen to me. We’ve left Rocky and Mortiboy alone in the motel room all day. Maybe Mortiboy is used to being alone all day, but Rocky isn’t. I need to check on him.”
Hudson’s expression changed. “Take the Jeep. I can walk to Emma’s. He climbed out of the car. “This is the last thing I expected when I suggested a getaway.”
“Nobody expects something like this to happen,” I said. “Sometimes it just does.”
I drove to the motel. When I pulled into the motel carport, the manager flagged me to stop. I parked the Jeep in a space next to the carport and met the manager outside the motel lobby. “Is something wrong?” I asked.
“You bet something’s wrong. First you were asking questions about Tommy and the next thing I know, I got a bunch of street thugs out here asking me about you and your friend. Said something about how they need to talk to you about the doctor who was killed. I don’t want no trouble at my motel. You two need to check right now and find yourself another place to stay.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Tommy’s dad showed up and they took off. Scattered like cockroaches when you turn on a light.”
“Did you tell Officer Buchanan about the gang? About what they said?”
“Of course I told him. I told him they were asking about you and your friend. He told me to have you give him a call when you got back.”
“Listen, my friend’s sister is in some trouble. I’ll call the police later tonight.”
“I don’t think you understand. The gang wasn’t interested in the guy you had here last night. They were asking about the woman with the little girl.”
There was only one friend with a little girl who’d been with me at the Tiki Tropics. Emma.
“Can you describe the guys who were here?”
“I don’t have to describe him. Everybody around here knows Benji.”
The fight-or-flight reflex I’d had in the quarry rushed back to me. Benji knew where I was staying. There was no getting away from him.
“What did he want?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. I told him I don’t want him or his pals hanging around. Even if they came here to buy soda from the vending machine, it’s still bad for business. If word gets out he’s setting up shop at my motel, I’m through.”
“What did Officer Buchanan say when you told him?”
“Said to tell you to find another place to stay.”
“You can’t just kick us out,” I said.
“Actually, I can. This isn’t an apartment, it’s a motel under private ownership. You’ve got an hour to get your stuff out of the room.”
“But—”
“Sorry, ma’am. I know it’s your vacation, but it’s my business.”
I left the office and called Hudson. “We have to leave the motel. I’ll explain later,” I said. “It’ll take me a couple of minutes to pack up the room. I’m half tempted to get Rocky and Mortiboy and leave the rest.”
“Call me when you’re on your way.”
As I crossed the parking lot toward our room, I noticed a dark blue Chevy Avalanche parked next to the vending machine. The driver’s side window was down and the disturbing skeletal face of the man who’d taunted me at the quarry smiled out at me. I ran up the stairs to our room. I slammed the door behind me and threw all the locks.
In the room, I haphazardly tossed everything Hudson and I had unpacked back into our suitcases, not taking the time to sort through his/mine or dirty/clean. I clipped on Rocky’s leash. Even Mortiboy seemed to be understand now was not the time to be difficult. As if he understood he was helping Hudson by cooperating with me, he sat in front of his carrier and let himself in when I opened the carrier gate.
I wasn’t about to leave the room alone. Nervous energy kept me moving about the room, back and forth past the bed Hudson and I had shared last night. Back and forth past the trashcan, now overflowing with once-pink rose petals that had browned and shriveled up in the twenty-four hours since being part of our romantic backdrop. Back and forth past the empty wine bottle from the night Emma had spent with me in the room telling me her deepest, darkest secrets.
The day I’d checked into the motel, the manager had said he recognized my friend, he’d seen her check in with her husband. But he’d been referring to Dr. Hall, not Jimmy. Emma lived in Palm Springs with her husband. She’d have no reason to check into the motel with Jimmy—but she would with Dr. Hall. And she’d acted like she’d never been there before.
Facts were coming at me, realizations I didn’t want to see. Emma had a medicine cabinet filled with prescription pills. Emma had been the one to feed me information about Dr. Hall long before anybody else knew he was the body in the river. Emma had been the one to place Dr. Hall in the Avalanche parked by the river.
Emma had provided answers to my questions almost before I’d had a chance to ask them. And Emma had asked me to keep her confidence, to not tell Hudson anything I knew.
But I had. And he was headed out to their house because he wanted to protect her. Protect her from who? Herself?
I hated every single thought that came at me, because it went against what I chose to believe. I didn’t want to think Emma was a murderer.
I picked up my cell phone and called Hudson. He didn’t answer. I left a message and followed it up with a text: On my way. Considering the accusations flooding my mind, it was the best I could do. I called the front desk. “I’m packed and ready to leave. Can someone help me get the animals and bags down from the second floor?”
“Give me a sec.” He slammed down the receiver. A few seconds later, there was a knock at the door.
“Coming,” I called. I grabbed the end of Rocky’s leash so he wouldn’t take off and I opened the door. Officer Buchanan stood on the other side.
THIRTY
Buchanan was dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans. He held his hand out to stop me from talking. “I’m here unofficially. We need to get you out of here.”
“But—”
“You’re not safe here. The motel manager called me. He said Benji and his gang came by. They know you’re staying here. They’ve probably been watching you come and go. I don’t know what his beef is with you, but when Benji gets it into his head somebody o
wes him something, he doesn’t just give up.”
I backed up. “I don’t owe Benji anything.”
Buchanan pressed a button on his phone. A couple of seconds later, he put the phone on speaker. A voice spoke, familiar, despite the tinny tone.
“Night? Are you there? What the hell, did she hang up on me? Night!”
I grabbed the phone. “Tex?” I turned off the speaker option and held the phone to my head.
“Night. Listen to me. Buchanan is on your side. He knows he screwed up by not listening to you when you saw a body, but he’s trying to make up for it by seeing this thing through. You stumbled on a doozy of a drug ring. Looks like the good doctor has been supplying discontinued drugs to some meth heads in Salton. When he stopped showing up, they came looking for him. Only a matter of time before something like this happened. You need to trust Buchanan and get out of there.”
“But—”
“No but. Just go. You can trust him. He’ll explain.” He hung up on me.
I held the phone and stared at it. Buchanan said, “I called him for a favor. I heard about my son, about the note. You don’t trust me—I get that. I know calling your captain friend was unorthodox, but everything about this case has been unorthodox. For your safety, I need you to get out of this motel room and away from here. You trust Captain Allen, so I thought it was the most effective way to cut through your doubts about me.”
I looked at the officer in front of me and saw things through his eyes. He’d been accused, investigated, and ignored, but he’d gone out of his way to find a way to get me to hear what I needed to hear. I was in danger and the danger wasn’t coming from him. I held the phone out. “I’m sorry.”
“Make it up to me by listening to me now.”
I looped Rocky’s leash over my wrist and picked up Mortiboy’s carrier. Buchanan grabbed the suitcases. We left the motel room and descended the stairs as quickly as possible. The Avalanche was gone from the parking lot. Two yips and one long meow were the only complaints we heard. Buchanan put my suitcase into the back of the Jeep.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
“Hudson is at Emma and Jimmy McKenna’s house. We should go there.”
“I’ll lead the way. Stay close.”
We made quick time. Buchanan pulled past the driveway and I pulled in. He got out of his sedan and met me on the sidewalk. “Are you coming in?”
“Afraid I can’t. This is an open investigation. I’m off duty, here unofficially. I’ll be in the area, so if anything happens and you need me, it won’t take me long to arrive, but I’m not going to jeopardize this case by letting my ego get in the way.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Ms. Night, you’re a brave woman,” he said. “Not a lot of people I know would go out on a limb when nobody believes them. Would have made your whole vacation a lot smoother if you’d ignored what you saw.”
“That’s not who I am,” I said.
“So I heard. You ever think of changing professions?”
“Into what?”
“Police work.”
I had a flash of Tex telling me to stay out of his investigations on more than one occasion and smiled at the idea of telling him what Buchanan suggested. “I like what I do,” I said. “Besides, I’m not sure I’m cut out to wear a uniform.”
He laughed. “I’m not sure anybody would want you to.”
I didn’t tell Buchanan I was nervous about going inside. Everything pointed to Emma lying, but I didn’t know if Hudson could see it with the same clarity I could. Hudson was wearing blinders. The same kind of blinders I’d once worn when trying to prove his innocence.
I pulled the animal carriers and the luggage out of the car. The front door opened and Hudson joined me. He grabbed the suitcases and I wrangled the animals. Inside, Jimmy sat at the table, nursing a bottle of beer.
“Where’s Emma?” I asked.
“She’s gone,” Jimmy said into his bottle.
I looked between the two men. “Gone?”
“She left a note that she took Heather to the movies, but that was a long time ago,” Hudson said. “We’ve been calling her, but the calls keep going to voicemail.”
“Hudson, can I talk to you? Alone?” I asked.
“Sure.” He bent down and let Mortiboy out of his carrier, scratched him behind the ears a couple of times, and stood back up. I kept Rocky’s leash clipped on and led us to the now-empty guest room.
I sat down on the bed. “Join me?” He sat next to me. Rocky jumped onto the bed and nosed us both before settling down around the pillows. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I don’t think Emma is the victim here,” I said.
I went on to tell him what I’d started to see: Emma’s involvement in the dissemination of information, her connection to Dr. Hall, and her lying about never having been to the motel. If I’d expected him to tell me I was wrong or get angry at me for accusing his sister of being involved in a horrific crime, I would have been disappointed. Hudson wasn’t that guy. He also didn’t proclaim I was right. He looked at me, his dark brown eyes searching mine, no argument offered, but also no denial or judgment.
“Neither one of us wanted to see it. Emma’s painted herself as a victim in all of this, but she could have orchestrated everything that’s happened from behind the scenes. The attacks all took place when she wasn’t around. So much of what I know came to me from her. She could have made it up to lead me on a wild goose chase.”
“But why?”
“Sometimes when people feel trapped, they think there’s only one way out of a bad situation.” I lowered my voice and reached out for Hudson’s hand. “She said Jimmy never hit her, but there are other forms of abuse that aren’t physical. I don’t know either one of them as well as you do, but no matter what your sister did, I don’t think she’d put Heather at risk.”
“But if what you’re accusing her of is true, then she did. Those drugs we found, they were part of a bigger crime. You think she was working with the doctor to sell them on the street. Drugs, Madison. That’s a kind of corruption I can’t fathom. If those drugs had hit the street in Salton, a lot of kids might have died.”
“There’s something else you need to know.” I stood up and went into the bathroom, but left the door open. “When we were staying here, I accidentally discovered a stash of pills hidden in the bathroom. Come here.”
Hudson stood up and joined me in the tight space. I opened the medicine cabinet. It looked like it had when we were staying here. One by one I removed the contents and set them inside the sink basin, and then I tapped at the shelf until I found a latch that released the fake interior. I slid the metal frame out.
The hidden shelf was empty.
THIRTY-ONE
“This shelf was full of prescription bottles,” I said. “And I mean full. There were probably a hundred vials in here and they’re gone. You don’t think she took them, do you?”
He slammed the medicine cabinet shut.
Whoever had used this hidden storage area to hide the pills had taken them in the past few days. That meant sometime between Dr. Hall’s murder and today, someone involved in the distribution of illegal drugs had been in this house. This bathroom.
It could have been anybody. It could have been Emma or Jimmy. They both lived here. The vials had Emma’s name on them but the sheer volume of them was questionable. Did she even know they were there? If so, why hide them?
Now that I’d moved from the house to the Tiki Tropic motel, I had no idea who else had come and gone from the house in the past few days. Was that the real motivation behind the physical assault on Hudson and Jimmy? Benji seemed to be keeping tabs on all of us. Had the attack been a way to keep the guys from the house—Emma and me too—so they could get in and search? Emma had told me that Dr. Hall said he’d left something behind. That was the day of the acci
dent, and it was looking more and more like Dr. Hall had taken pills from Emma’s house and then tossed them out his window when we had the accident. But then why leave a full shelf of pills behind? He’d been killed sometime between that accident and the following morning. Had someone been in the house—in this very room—since then?
Hudson left the bathroom while I slid the false shelf back into the interior of the medicine cabinet and then restocked the shelves. When I came out, I was alone. I returned to the dining room and found Jimmy at the table peeling the label off of his bottle of beer. Hudson stood by the sliding doors, staring out into the backyard. I walked over to him and put my arms around him from behind. “If she is involved, she’s in danger,” I said. “Our number one priority should be to find her and make sure she’s okay.”
He turned around, surprise and concern on his face. “What about the police?”
“She’s your sister and she’s Heather’s mother. If she did this, then she needs help. Let’s find her first and go from there.”
“Trust me, she’s okay,” Jimmy said from behind us. “Emma looks out for one person: Emma.”
I got angry. “From what I’ve seen, she has to. You haven’t treated her particularly well. And even now you’re just sitting here waiting for her to walk in. She could be in some kind of trouble and you’re not even out there looking for her. Why not?”
“Hudson, control your woman,” Jimmy said.
“No, I think Madison has a point,” Hudson said.
Heat flamed my face and climbed my neck. “Maybe you know more than you’re letting on.”
Jimmy jumped up from the table, knocking his chair backward. “This is bullshit. I opened my house to you and you’ve caused me nothing but trouble. Now you’re accusing me of something, but I’m not sure what. What do you think I did, Madison? Threatened my wife? Endangered my daughter? Oh, wait, I get it.” He took two steps toward me. Even though I was afraid of him and his temper, I stood my ground. “You think I murdered Dr. Hall when I found out he was having an affair with my wife and tossed his body in the river. That’s right. You didn’t know I knew about that, did you? I saw them together at the antique marketplace. They didn’t even try to hide it. Bet that makes me look even more suspicious. But tell me this, miss detective. Why would I dump the body in the same river I’m using as a job site? I’m going bankrupt on this job. You’re a businesswoman. Think about this: killing Dr. Hall would have been bad business.” He was right in front of me, inches separating us. Hudson stood off to the side, watching but not interfering.
The Decorator Who Knew Too Much Page 18