“Don’t let her lock the door so I can’t get in,” he said as Cate grabbed the briefcase and slid out of the SUV.
Cate’s shadowy image in the window as she approached the door showed an unfamiliar, long-haired woman in belted jacket and high-heeled boots. The briefcase bulged with importance. She took a deep breath, blinked her eyes open wide to be sure the lashes weren’t stuck together, and pushed the door open.
The bell tinkled as Cate stepped inside. The first thing she saw was the Kimmy doll lying on the floor, the rocking chair overturned. Odd.
A faint scent of an exotic incense still permeated the air, but the flute music was silent now. There was no sound, in fact. No Celeste swishing through the beaded curtain across the opening to the back room. Not even a rustle of papers or scrape of chair to indicate Celeste knew Cate had arrived.
Cate waited a few moments and then called tentatively, “Dr. Chandler?” No answer. She repeated the name more loudly. “Dr. Chandler?”
Again no answer. Except maybe a furtive creak from the back room?
Cue spooky mood music now.
For a moment, Cate’s finger almost stabbed that call button, but she determinedly held it back. No creak. Just nerves manufacturing creaky … creepy … sounds.
She stepped briskly toward the curtain. Light filtered between the strands of wooden and ceramic beads. The strands swayed softly. Had her movement caused that? Maybe. She swallowed. Maybe not …
Cate raised her voice so it wouldn’t come out shaky. “I may be a few minutes late. I hope that hasn’t inconvenienced you?” No answer. Cate lifted her hand to push the hanging strands of the curtain aside, but something made her fingers clutch a handful of beads instead. Celeste had to be there in the back room. She’d dimmed the lights just before Cate arrived. At least someone had dimmed them …
Cate swallowed again, but her mouth was so dry the swallow stuck in her throat. “Are you there, Dr. Chandler?”
Silence.
“Are you all right, Dr. Chandler?”
More silence.
Okay, she’d just retreat to the safety of the SUV and call Celeste to announce her arrival. No point in acting like a dumb movie heroine stepping into the monster’s den.
Then she spotted movement behind the curtain, as if someone had been bending over and straightened up. And there was something on the floor beneath the beaded curtain … Her heart thudded, and her throat went tight and thick, as if one of those wooden beads had suddenly jammed inside it.
A foot.
A foot wedged in a high-heeled sandal. Toes pointed upward. A few inches of shapely ankle and a black pant leg.
And then, stomping down beside the foot, two feet. In heavy black boots.
In spite of all their pre-planning, Cate’s finger didn’t stab the call button. A more basic instinct took over and a scream welled up from deep inside her, a primal shriek that burst up from her lungs and exploded out through her throat. Even as she knew it was her screaming, the sound seemed distant, alien and unfamiliar, as not-her as the long brown hair on her head.
An arm shot through the curtain. A hand clutched her throat. An eye glared venomously through the beaded curtain. The scream died as the fingers closed around her throat and cut off her air.
Lord, what do I do now? He’s choking me. Help!
Panic thundered through her body and brain. Her head felt thick and heavy, clogged … her vision darkening even as her lungs burned. Desperately she flung her hands up to ward off the fingers squeezing her from light into darkness.
The briefcase swung upward too. She had no conscious plan to use it as a weapon, but it slammed into something solid behind the curtain, hit hard enough to thunder vibrations up her arm. A grunt of pain and the hand let go.
She dropped the briefcase, staggered, gasped for air, and frantically grabbed the cell phone in her pocket, but the front door was already crashing open behind her. Mitch hadn’t waited for the ring of the phone when she screamed. On the other side of the curtain another crash as a door slammed on the far side of the back room.
Mitch yanked the curtain, and half the strands broke and clattered to the floor, wooden and ceramic beads hitting and bouncing. He stumbled over the body on the floor. He looked down. “What—?”
The roar of a motorcycle blasted from the alley behind the store. Mitch leaped to the door and yanked it open.
Cate’s legs wobbled unsteadily beneath her. She looked for someplace to sit, but all she saw was a chair at the desk where Celeste had apparently been working. She’d have to step over the body to get to it. No, she couldn’t do that … She braced herself against the wall instead. She’d never fainted in her life, but she figured this was how you felt just before a faint. She gasped breath after breath, valuing the air drawn into her lungs as she never had before.
Mitch closed the door and came back to look down at the body sprawled on the floor. His feet crunched on beads.
Plain now why Celeste had not responded to the call of her name. She lay on her back, eyes wide open, their expression shocked even in death. Half the curved blade and the ornate brass handle of a sword protruded from her chest like some macabre ornament.
Cate knelt and pressed her fingertips to Celeste’s throat. It seemed the thing to do even as what she wanted to do was run screaming into the rainy night. No movement, no twitch of pulse. Yet the body was still warm, which meant she must have surprised the killer bare moments after he’d thrust the sword into Celeste’s chest.
Mitch already had his cell phone in hand, and a moment later he was giving the 911 operator information about location and victim and his own identity.
Cate’s glance swung to the polished gleam of Oriental swords on the back wall of the shop. Also plain now why the display had looked unbalanced. One sword was missing. Because it was now planted deep in Celeste’s chest.
Then she glanced around, suddenly aware of what she wasn’t seeing. She stepped back to peer around behind her.
Mitch returned the phone to the clip on his belt. “What are you looking for?”
“My briefcase. It’s gone! He must have grabbed it.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he thought there was something important or valuable in it?”
“Was there?”
“No. Like I said, just … PI stuff.”
The police must have been cruising nearby, because a squad car, lights flashing, was already screaming to a stop behind Mitch’s SUV. Two officers burst through the door, the effect of their entrance marginally diminished when they both did Keystone Kops skids and crashes on rolling beads that had spread like some viral infection.
There was a certain déjà vu about the officers’ activities after they collected their balance. Cate had been through this before, on her first murder scene. The officers checking the pulse for themselves, snapping questions, making calls back to the station. More sirens and flashing lights, more officers arriving. A fire truck. An ambulance. One of the officers got the lowly job of corralling the runaway beads.
Passing cars slowed, and onlookers appeared out of nowhere to cluster on the sidewalk. Some even framed their faces with their hands to peer through the windows until an officer herded them back. Cate and Mitch stood out of the way, beside the fallen doll. Cate’s cold fingers felt welded together, as if she might never be able to separate them. She looked down and saw she was standing on one of the astrological figures painted on the floor, this one an oversized scorpion. She stepped away from it, her feet feeling crawly.
Even if there was a certain familiarity to this, even if she were a private investigator for fifty years and discovered fifty bodies along the way, Cate knew she would never get used to this. A dead body. Murder.
An officer approached them, and Mitch did the talking first, telling the officer who the victim was and what he knew. That the killer had fled through the rear entrance and escaped on a motorcycle. No, he hadn’t seen the man and had only heard, not
seen, the bike. Cate gave the facts about who she was, her appointment with Celeste, and her encounter with the man behind the curtain. Details were fading, she realized uneasily, as if her mind desperately wanted to be rid of them.
“You didn’t see his face?” the officer asked.
“No. Just an arm and one eye.”
“Could you tell how tall he was?”
Cate hadn’t thought about the man’s size, but this was a good point. “His eye was above mine, so he had to be taller. Over six feet, I’d say.”
“How about the color of the eye you could see?”
“I’m not really sure. Dark, I think.”
“And the arm?”
“Muscular. Tattooed,” she remembered suddenly.
“Can you describe the tattoo?”
“I saw it …” Cate hesitated, desperately trying to bring the tattoo into focus. It was there, but it was just beyond her grasp, like a nightmare that left your heart pounding but slid out of full memory when you woke. “Swirls, I think.”
She lifted her hand and made wavy motions in the air. “Colored swirls. Maybe a design in them. But I—I’m just not sure.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, but if there was a design in the swirls, it stubbornly stayed just out of focus, beyond her reach. All she could really remember was the terrifying strength of the hand squeezing her throat, the feeling that her body might explode with the desperate demand for air.
“Bare hands? Gloves?”
“I—” She squeezed her eyes shut. She should know the answer. But she didn’t. She finally shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“How about a wristwatch?”
“I don’t think so … but I’m not sure. Just tattoos.” Tattoos that she couldn’t remember.
“Okay. Anything else?”
“Before he ran out, he must have grabbed the briefcase I dropped, because it’s gone.”
“Could you describe the briefcase for us, please.”
This was pre-murder, and there was no fuzziness in this memory. “Tan leather, fold-over top, with a brass buckle. Hard leather handles.”
“Initials or any other identifying marks?”
“No.”
“What was in it?”
This time she couldn’t get by with a general “PI stuff” answer. Neither could she offer a professional-sounding list of important documents and casework. She listed the actual items, even as a flush of embarrassment rose to ambush the Plum Fatale blush on her face. Notebook and pen. Two Snickers bars. Several of Rebecca’s old Good Housekeeping magazines. A bag of kitty snacks. And finally, the item she’d most dreaded naming.
“And a, um, old flannel nightgown.”
Whatever the officer may have thought about the unlikely contents of the briefcase, he simply listed the items in his notebook without comment and briskly continued the questions. “No identification, money, or credit cards?”
“No.” Hastily she rushed on to another subject. “I did see that the guy was wearing heavy black motorcycle boots.”
The connection she’d been too stunned to make before jumped into her head now. A guy with a motorcycle. Big. Muscular. Like the biker guy she’d seen coming into the Mystic Mirage that day she’d so ignominiously rushed out. Like the God’s-gift-to-women manager of the Lodge Hill vineyard. Two guys she’d already melded into one.
Rolf Wildrider.
And he’d seen her. Eye to eye.
13
The police detained them at the Mystic Mirage for another hour, then asked them to come to the police station to sign formal statements the following day.
Cate had debated with herself for a considerable time about giving them Rolf Wildrider’s name, her conscience stumbling over a roadblock that could compete with the Great Wall of China. Yes, she was almost certain the hand around her throat had been attached to Rolf’s muscular arm and lean body. But she wasn’t cross-my-heart positive. Maybe Rolf and the killer just shared some general physical characteristics. What would it do to his future if he really was, after mistakes in his past, now trying to be a good-citizen grape grower, and she entangled him in an unfair accusation of murder?
She didn’t even know if he had a tattooed arm. He’d been wearing long-sleeved denim that day she saw him at Lodge Hill, and she had no memory at all of arms on that guy coming into the Mystic Mirage that day.
But neither did she want a killer running around loose, endangering other people because she’d made some unwise judgment about fairness. How fair would it be if he killed someone else?
Including the fact that someone might be her.
Okay, she’d give them Rolf’s name. Just as soon as she knew for certain he had a tattooed arm.
Cate’s car was parked at Mitch’s condo, and they went back there. Mitch didn’t have much to say, and Cate knew he was upset by all this. Upset by murder. Upset that the guy got away. Upset that she was involved.
Even though the SUV was warm, Cate’s teeth gave a skeletal chatter every few seconds. She kept seeing the bronze gleam of that sword and Celeste’s open eyes. The killer’s one eye venomously targeted on her. Rolf’s eye?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Now she’d never know who Celeste was considering investigating. Whoever it was, Celeste had obviously been right about meeting with Cate on a “matter of life and death.”
Inside the condo, Cate slung her leg over a tall stool at the counter between kitchen and dining area, stiff fingers clutching her jacket tight around her. Vaguely she realized she’d lost the belt somewhere. Mitch made instant coffee, apparently figuring she needed caffeine now to jolt her out of this daze, and set two cups on the counter.
“You okay?” he asked.
Oh, sure, she was fine. She’d stumbled across a dead body, the killer had tried to choke her, and he’d seen her up close enough to count her freckles. Just another day in the life of your average assistant PI. But she didn’t want to get into that because Mitch would no doubt use it to tell her she should find another line of work.
He also didn’t know she thought the guy behind the curtain was Rolf Wildrider. There’d been no time or privacy to discuss that at the Mystic Mirage.
With some hesitation, Cate told him her suspicions now. “Maybe I should have given them Rolf’s name.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I keep thinking, since you said Rolf was still on probation, that it would be unfair to make trouble for him just because of similarities in size and muscles. And motorcycle. But I still think it was him.”
“Maybe you have a subconscious suspicion about any guy with a motorcycle,” Mitch suggested.
Cate started to indignantly deny that, but maybe it was true. One had tried to kill her not all that long ago in her other murder case. There’d been trouble with a motorcycle gang when she was a kid back in southern Oregon. Tonight’s killer had escaped on a motorcycle. Incidents, she had to admit, that probably tended to warp her viewpoint.
Unexpectedly, after a thoughtful tilt of head, Mitch added, “Actually, I’m thinking about getting a motorcycle myself. It wouldn’t use nearly as much gas as the SUV. Will you ride on it with me?”
“I don’t think I’m a biker-babe type. Do you even know how to ride a motorcycle?”
“I had a little Honda 250 back in college. It was cheap to run around on.”
Cate had no idea what the 250 referred to. Number of parts the bike would break into when crashed? Number of girls it was guaranteed to attract? She waved away the motorcycle discussion.
Mitch went along with turning the conversation away from motorcycles. “I noticed Celeste had only one shoe on. I wonder if that means she lost the other shoe trying to escape from him?” he asked.
This was something else Cate hadn’t noticed. Or maybe she had, but it was trapped back there in her subconscious, like details of the tattoo on the arm.
“I was almost certain Celeste killed Eddie the Ex, but I was wrong, wasn’t I? Because now the killer g
ot her too.” Cate felt a lump in her pocket and realized she’d somehow come away with a wooden bead. She pulled it out and worried her thumb across the glossy surface.
“What would motivate someone to kill both of them?” Mitch asked.
“I don’t know. But doesn’t it seem logical that there’s a connection?” Something clicked in her head. The dolls! “I don’t know about a motive, but Eddie the Ex’s killer shot the dolls at Jo-Jo’s house. Celeste’s killer knocked the doll in the store to the floor. Doesn’t doll hostility suggest a connection?”
“Eddie may have shot the dolls at Jo-Jo’s himself,” Mitch pointed out. “And at the Mystic Mirage, the killer may have accidentally bumped into the doll when he went for a sword on the wall. He didn’t take time to chop off its head or smash it.”
“I think the doll thing shows they’re connected,” Cate repeated.
“Are you going to suggest this connection to the police when we go in tomorrow?” Mitch asked.
“Yes, I believe I will.”
Mitch slid onto a stool beside her at the counter. “Maybe Celeste did kill Kieferson. Maybe someone objected and decided she deserved the same fate. Two killers.”
Great. Now they were multiplying like fleas.
“There are other possibilities,” Mitch added. “Maybe Celeste’s killer was someone just passing by. He decides to go in and grab the goodies, and he winds up killing Celeste just because she’s there. Wouldn’t a guy planning murder have brought his own weapon?”
“His bike was around back. It looks to me as if he had something planned,” Cate pointed out.
Mitch nodded. He shifted on the stool and toyed with his coffee cup. “Look, this is off the subject, and maybe none of my business. But kitty nibbles and a nightgown in your PI briefcase … I can’t help it. I’m curious.”
That had to come up, didn’t it?
“It wasn’t really a PI briefcase,” Cate admitted. “It was left over from a job I had when I actually did have business papers to carry around. I stuck a lot of stuff in it tonight, just anything I could grab, so Celeste would see a bulging briefcase and think I was a busy private investigator with lots of important cases.” She rubbed the large bead hard enough to make her thumb sting. “Okay, I know. Dumb. Foolish pride. Say what you’re thinking. Pride goeth before a fall. Whatever.”
Dolled Up to Die Page 12