“But then I was positive when I sneaked upstairs and played Peeping Tom watching the rehearsal. And realized it was you all along, the redhead in a brown wig. Though you sure had me fooled before tonight.” He tapped her forehead as if chastising her for the deception.
Cate determinedly detoured his statement of recognition even as it sent ripples of panic through her. “The bride insisted on the wig. Maybe you noticed the bridesmaids are all brunettes? Her color scheme, you know, to emphasize how blonde she is.” Cate managed an exaggerated roll of eyes. “The others are all natural brunettes, but I had to get this wig to fit in. I know how it looks. Like I stole the tails off a herd of horses! Then a couple of the groomsmen didn’t show up, and now the buffet is late, so Robyn wanted more punch while we waited, and I really have to get the ginger ale for the punch. Before Robyn goes into orbit or the wedding party turns into a mob rioting for food and drink.”
The barrage of irrelevant chatter didn’t work this time.
“Shut up, Cate. I know who you are and what you saw at the Mystic Mirage. And then when you saw the tattoo on my arm tonight …” He shook his head. “I could practically smell the panic. Just like now. Not a good scent on you, Cate. Worse than ol’ Travis’s cologne.”
She’d thought he hadn’t noticed anything about her reaction there in the carport, but she’d been wrong. Maybe dead wrong. Maybe he’d have done something right then, but he couldn’t with jealous Melody standing there tapping her booted toe. She tried to keep from swallowing convulsively.
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Have you talked to the police yet?”
Cate started to babble a denial. No, she hadn’t talked to the police, hadn’t told them anything about him! So everything was fine. Then she realized that was exactly the wrong thing to let him know.
“Yes! I-I called them as soon as I got back from the carport. They’ll be here any minute now. They know all about you. Your arm, the tattoo, everything!”
For a hopeful moment, Cate actually thought he bought it. He’d turn and run. Instead he laughed.
“You’re a lousy liar, Private Investigator Cate Kinkaid.”
She automatically started to correct him. “Assistant—” She broke off as she realized that scrupulous honesty about her PI status wasn’t going to win her any brownie points at the moment. And what she should be doing was screeching her head off.
She gave it a try. “Help!” The first word came out a squeak instead of a scream. She lifted her head and got it up to a yell. “Mit—”
Before she could get the name out, he clamped a hand over her mouth and yanked her around with his other hand so her back was to his chest. Over the hand clamped at her mouth, Cate’s gaze jerked to the brightly lit windows of the Reception Room. She saw what he was also seeing. Nothing happening there. No one looking out a window. No one rushing out the door to help her.
She tried another yell. Great. Now she sounded like a moose in labor. And earned herself a vicious dig of fingers into her jaw.
Now what? Rolf seemed to be considering that question too, even as his arm crushed her ribs and his hand smashed her mouth.
Was grabbing her some unprepared, impulse decision? Like killing Celeste with a sword snatched off the wall? Maybe that plague her car had caught was a good thing. It kept him from just throwing her in the trunk and taking off. But now he didn’t know what to do with her?
She wasn’t going to stand here and cooperatively wait while he decided on a suitable course of action. She tensed her leg and kicked backward into his shin.
Barefoot, that had about as much effect as a marshmallow attacking a refrigerator, and all it did was make her heel hum with pain. She tried to bite his hand clamped over her mouth, but she couldn’t even get her mouth open.
She was breathing hard, at least as hard as she could breathe with her mouth clamped shut and her lungs compressed under his arm, but he wasn’t even puffing. All he did was mutter, “Nice try, Ms. PI.”
She tried again, a backward punch with her elbow into his ribs.
But all that blow did was the funny-bone thing that made her elbow feel as if she’d stuck it in an electric socket, and his only reaction was a grunt. He whipped her around until they were facing the river. Moonlight turned the flowing water to liquid silver. Lights glittered on the far side. A scent of smoke drifted from the back side of the vineyard, incongruously bringing a nostalgic memory of bonfires back home when she was a girl. The dock and little rowboat looked picturesque as an artist’s moonlit painting.
She hadn’t realized it was such a beautiful night until now. Enough to take your breath away. Except hers was already taken away by the harsh grip over her mouth and around her ribs. A killer grip. And she knew he wasn’t admiring the view. What was he thinking now?
The stark thought that this might be her last moonlit night here on earth hit her. Because Rolf couldn’t let her live with what she knew about him. The only question seemed to be how he intended to do it.
Lord, help me, guide me! Send someone! Tell me what to do!
Where was that van from Mr. K’s with the buffet food? Where was some couple coming out for a romantic stroll in the moonlight? And where, when you needed one, was a smoker sneaking out for a puff?
Rolf made up his mind and started walking her across the parking lot. His knees bumped the back side of her legs. She stubbed her bare toe on the asphalt and stumbled, but his grip didn’t loosen. She made the only noise she could, a squeak of protest, when they reached the road that led around to his cottage and the sharp gravel bit into her bare feet. He didn’t slow down, just yanked her higher so her feet dangled above the gravel.
His grip didn’t soften, but once they were around the line of trees that concealed the cottage from Lodge Hill, she felt him relax slightly. She stiffened when they reached his pickup … he was going to throw her into it! No, he bypassed the pickup and plunged into the dark carport. He circled the dismembered motorcycles and took her to the counter at the back wall. He had to take his arm from around her ribs so he could use his hand, but he slammed her against the counter and held her immobile with his body.
With his free hand he flicked the switch on a fluorescent bulb that buzzed to light over the counter. He grabbed a roll of duct tape hanging on a nail on the wall.
With killer resourcefulness and one hand still over her mouth, he held the roll to his teeth and loosened a six-inch strip with his other hand, then used his teeth to tear it off the roll. Much more competent with teeth than she was. He slapped the strip of duct tape across her mouth as he pulled his other hand away. With both hands free and his body still pinning her against the counter, he quickly added several more strips of tape across her mouth.
He twisted her palms together, efficiently wrapped duct tape around her wrists, and shoved her toward the door that led inside the house.
Inside, the first thing she saw was a dim vision of a woman in a long, pale dress with dark hair hanging at a peculiar angle. A moment later she realized this refugee from a cheesy horror movie was her, reflected in an uncurtained window at the far end of the living room.
Maybe someone would see her?
No. The vineyard started back there.
Other than her own reflection, the small house looked incongruously cozy. Coffeemaker and toaster on the kitchen counter, row of duck magnets on the refrigerator, faint scent of fried bacon and onions in the air. The living room sofa was brown suede with a scattering of orange pillows, bright Navajo throw rug on a hardwood floor, TV with a stack of DVDs beside it. A table held an assortment of cups and trophies, most with a bronze or silver motorcycle and rider on top. An arched doorway opened onto a hallway.
Rolf didn’t offer her a guided tour of his motorcycle race trophies. He shoved her through the hallway and into a bedroom. Cate made an instinctive squeak-yelp of terror.
He flicked a light switch. “Don’t worry. I’ve lost my taste for redheads. This is strictly bus
iness. Although I must admit you do pack an interesting briefcase.”
He bent down and with several more wraps of duct tape fastened her ankles together. Now she knew what the roped and tied calf felt like at a rodeo she’d seen once. Except here there was no quick release coming a minute later.
Rolf yanked the closet door open, studied the interior, and apparently decided against it. Why didn’t he just throw her in the pickup and take her somewhere? He’d have to kill her before he dumped her, of course. But surely that wouldn’t be a problem for him.
She snapped a curtain over the thoughts. Don’t give him ideas he hadn’t already thought of!
He looked over at her, still standing where he’d left her, since a bunny-hop attempt at escape hadn’t seemed too workable.
“You’re a problem, you know that?” he grumbled. “We’d all be better off if you’d just concentrated on Travis.”
Keep him talking, her instincts shouted. Yeah, right. And I should do that how, with my mouth taped shut?
“A beautiful body in the river, that’s what this needs. Yes, that’ll work! Such a gorgeous moonlit night, and you went down to the river. You even took off your shoes to walk in the grass. Perfect!” He studied her as if seeing her traipsing gaily to the river. “You walked out on the dock. A tragic slip. A fall into the water. A heartbreaking accident.”
That’ll never work, you idiot. I was going for ginger ale. I wouldn’t take time for a stroll to the river. And it’s too cold for barefoot.
But even if the police quickly figured out that her body in the river was no accident, it would be too late. She’d already be dead.
“So all I have to do is keep you hidden until I can get you down to the river.”
Apparently silence here was working the same way Uncle Joe said it did when someone was being questioned. Most people felt a compelling need to fill a silence, even if it wasn’t to the person’s best advantage. Not that knowing more in this situation was any advantage for Cate. All it did was start a quiver in her stomach that threatened to send her into a full-body quake.
Rolf knelt down and lifted the blue bedspread as if checking for under-the-bed bogeymen and monsters, but she could see, as he obviously did, that there wasn’t enough space to shove her under there. And the only bogeyman was out here.
“Hey, I’ve got it!”
He left her standing there, obviously confident of her inability to hippity-hop to escape, and a moment later she heard the door to the carport open. The duct tape felt as if it were cutting off circulation to her hands, but she could move her arms and wiggle her fingers.
She hopped over to a four-drawer dresser and studied the items scattered on top. A small pile of change. Four quarters, a dime, and three pennies. A sock with a hole in the heel. Two red-striped hard candies. A box of tissues. A pocket calculator. Could Nancy Drew or Jessica Fletcher turn any of that into a weapon or way of escape? Cate couldn’t.
But hadn’t LeAnne said Rolf had both a landline and a cell phone? If she could just get out to that phone, and dial 911 … How to dial it momentarily stopped her. But she’d do it with her elbow or her tongue if she had to! She was frantically hippity-hopping out to the living room to find the phone line when he came back from the carport with a stepladder and screwdriver in hand.
He met her at the bedroom door. “Going somewhere?” he inquired. He pushed her aside and she teetered on her taped feet as he answered his own question. “I don’t think so.”
He set the ladder up in an inside corner of the bedroom, climbed up on it, and used the screwdriver to remove the screws on a small panel overhead. The ceiling was plywood, not sheetrock, the screws hidden in the textured beige paint, and the panel had a layer of pink insulation attached on the attic side. Then, as if Cate were a sack of onions, he threw her over his shoulder and hauled her up into the attic. She heard the dress rip as they went through the opening. In the dim light coming from the bedroom below, all she could see was a steeply slanted roof and a pink sea of more insulation.
He plopped her down somewhere between the panel and the back wall, breathing hard himself now. “That ought to hold you while I keep everyone busy so they won’t have time to come looking for you.” He leaned over to check her duct tape bonds in the dim light. “Too bad you’re going to miss the wedding. But that dress isn’t looking too good anyway.”
Language wouldn’t have been possible, Cate realized, if God hadn’t given us movable lips, and hers weren’t moving. Not that Rolf’s monologue really needed a response.
“None of this would have been necessary, you know, if ol’ Kieferson hadn’t gone all high and mighty. It wasn’t as if his hands were so pure and spotless.”
Rolf disappeared back through the opening down to the bedroom, and a minute later the dim light in the attic disappeared as he fastened the panel in place. A brief silence, and then she heard a dull thump when he bumped into something taking the ladder outside, and then a second thump of the door closing.
For a moment she thought about what Rolf had said about Ed Kieferson. Ed’s hands weren’t pure or spotless, but he’d gone high and mighty. About what?
She’d have to figure that out later.
If there was a later.
27
The attic smelled dry and stale and hostile, not cozy and friendly like the attic back home when Cate was a little girl crawling into her secret place to read on a rainy day. And this attic was also claustrophobic, as if the unseen roof above were relentlessly moving down to crush her.
Determinedly, she pushed it back and reinforced the push with a deep breath.
She wiggled her toes, then her fingers. They were all there and moving. Good. Although at the moment wiggling them seemed an ability about as useful as Octavia doing square root calculations in her head.
Because the bottom line was that even if her fingers and toes could tap out Morse code, she was still stuck here. Tied up and trapped until Rolf came back and took her to the river. She fought down the panic threatening to engulf her.
What do I do, Lord?
She waited hopefully, but no big voice boomed out that help was coming, and all she had to do was sit there and wiggle her extremities until it arrived.
Instead, what came was a voiceless push. Don’t just sit there, do something. Let the Lord help.
If she could get to the panel that opened down into the bedroom, maybe she could shove it off with her feet. She’d have to fall through the opening, but she’d be out of here.
She wrestled her body in that direction, bumping over rafters and flopping into the hollows of insulation between them. Over the second rafter she heard the dress rip again. Definitely no presidential balls for her in this gown. By the third rafter, her skin itched and burned from fiberglass insulation prickling inside her dress and between her toes.
By the fourth rafter, she realized she should have counted rafters when Rolf brought her up here. Because now she had no idea where that escape panel was. She angled her body around so she could thump her feet on the bedroom ceiling below, but nothing gave way on the sections she tried.
She had to stop and rest for a moment. Which was when she heard rustles and squeaks from a corner. Mice? There were mice up here, and any minute they’d be running over her as if she were some newly discovered mouse playground. But she also realized the darkness wasn’t quite as dense as it should be. There was a lighter oblong at the far end of the attic, on the back side of the house. A window!
She rolled and twisted and scooted toward it. Her tied-together feet tangled in the dress, caught a toe in a tear, and ripped it further. Several times the wig snagged on something, and finally it pulled away from her head.
There’s your playground, mice. Go for it.
Finally she was at the window. She twisted her legs sideways so she could peer out. If the glass had ever been cleaned, it wasn’t within the last decade, but the sight was glorious anyway. Dark sky dusted with stars, moonlight, rows of grapevines, light from Lod
ge Hill filtering through the trees!
Yeah, a great view. But she was still trapped here.
With sudden determination, she twisted around, lifted her bare feet, and smashed through the window. Shards of glass peppered her legs, but cold night air flowed into the attic.
For a moment, déjà vu rolled through her. She’d been here, done this, on her one other murder case, when the killer locked her and a friend in a third-floor closet. She’d gotten away then, but that time her mouth and wrists and ankles hadn’t been taped into uselessness. And she was no Houdini able to slither out of all restraints.
Some ideas, Lord?
She lay on her side against a rafter and tried to scrape the duct tape off her face. Had Houdini ever had to cope with duct tape?
But she did have those wiggly fingers. She sat up again and tapped her fingertips together. Rolf was a killer. He’d efficiently used a gun on Ed Kieferson and an Oriental sword on Celeste. But could he have made a mistake when trussing her up? Wasn’t it written somewhere in the Bad Guys Book of Rules that you tied a victim’s hands in back of her, not in front?
She put her hands to her face. Her palms were mashed together, which meant her fingers weren’t in good position for creative walking, but she managed to snag the end of a strip of duct tape. She couldn’t get a good grip, but she pulled and felt the strip slowly peel away from the other strips on her face.
Hope surged through her. She got a finger-lock on another strip and pulled again. This time she was down to skin, and she out-squeaked the mice.
She’d had her legs waxed once, and after the burning, my-skin-is-gone feeling, she’d vowed that even if she got to be hairy as King Kong, she’d never wax again. She hadn’t that choice with the duct tape now, because this wasn’t about smooth legs, it was about her life. She gritted her teeth and pulled three more times to finish the job. She checked the results with an air-kiss and a jaw wiggle. Yes, everything worked.
She could smell smoke from the old grapevines smoldering on the burn pile at the back of the vineyard. No … She sniffed again. This scent was sharper, not so clean and sweet smelling. She stuck her head out the window. A wisp of smoke rose above the line of trees. Someone, tired of waiting for the buffet, had decided on a weenie roast in the fireplace? Or some exotic delicacy Robyn had ordered for the buffet had caught fire?
Dolled Up to Die Page 26