A Taste Fur Murder

by Lyle, Dixie

  “I see. Would you care to peek inside my refrigerator, Foxtrot? All you have to do is ask.”

  I shook my head. “No, Oscar. You’re too smart to leave anything like that out in the open. In fact, you may have already disposed of the drug in question—by leaving it under Juan Estevez’s mattress.”

  The ironic disdain on his face vanished. Genuine anger smoldered in his eyes, and he set his drink down with a sharp clack! “You believe I poisoned Mother. With a horse tranquilizer.”

  I met his eyes calmly. “Did you?”

  He got to his feet. “Come with me.”

  I stood up. He led me into the kitchen, where he opened the fridge. He reached inside and took out a small jar of cold cream—the all-natural kind with no preservatives. I have something similar, and I keep it in the fridge, too.

  Oscar handed it to me. “Disregard the label. This is dermorphin—or, as it is more commonly known, frog juice.”

  “Frog juice?”

  “Yes. It’s derived from the skin of Phyllomedusa sauvagei, a species of South American frog. It’s both a painkiller and stimulant—ideal for horses. Until recently, there wasn’t even an accurate test for it, and it’s thirty to forty percent stronger than morphine. It would make an excellent murder weapon, don’t you think?”

  I eyed the jar skeptically. “And why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I very much doubt Mother was poisoned with anything so esoteric. If I were the killer, I would have used this—but I certainly wouldn’t reveal that to you. What does that tell you?”

  He had a point. ZZ and Maria were both poisoned with carfentanil, not dermorphin. If what I was holding contained what Oscar claimed, he was unlikely to be the killer.

  “How do I know this isn’t what it says on the label? It’s not like I have a chemical assay kit in my back pocket.”

  He sighed and closed the refrigerator door. “Send it out to be tested, of course. I’m intimately familiar with your competence, Foxtrot, and have no doubt you’ll pull whatever strings are necessary for some hapless, lonely laboratory technician to get you the results within hours. But in the meantime you’ll have Shondra place me under the equivalent of house arrest, and I do not appreciate the curtailing of my freedom that will cause. Therefore, I will provide further proof of my innocence, in the forlorn hope that you will go away and never speak of this again.”

  After this speech, he returned to the living room, drained his drink, and prepared another.

  “Okay, I’m listening,” I said. “Prove away.”

  “I wasn’t home the night Maria was killed. I was, in fact, out obtaining the dermorphin in question.”

  I frowned. “No, you weren’t. You didn’t leave the estate.”

  “Which you know how?”

  “Security cameras.”

  Oscar raised one eyebrow. “Please. I’m a grown man, Foxtrot—do you really think I’d allow Mother’s overpriced watchdog to dictate my comings and goings? Ms. Destry is reasonably good at what she does, but I grew up on this land. There are ways to exit without being caught, and I’ve been taking advantage of them since I was a teen.”

  A hole in Shondra’s perimeter? She wouldn’t be happy about that, but that was a problem for another time. “Who else knows about your secret escape route?”

  “No one I’ve seen in years. And I very much doubt the girlfriend I had when I was seventeen would be prowling around the estate looking to assassinate people with a flying drone.”

  “Can you prove any of this?”

  “Sadly, I can. Francis’s contact for the dermorphin was to meet us in a run-down little all-night diner off the interstate. We had gone into town together after dinner, and then he pretended to drop me off at the house just before ten. I left via my hidden route, and he picked me up outside on the road. We arrived at the diner just before eleven. I’m sure the waitress there—a woman with the unlikely name of Jerrileen—remembers us, because we were there for hours. Francis’s associate arrived at around four thirty AM.

  “I hope you realize,” he continued as he reached down and opened a drawer, “that were I the villain you believe me to be, right about now is when I would pull out a handgun and announce you would never live to tell anyone your theory.”

  He pulled out a notepad and a pen, instead. “As I am not, I am simply going to write down the name of the diner and directions to get there. I presume you will follow up with all due diligence and thus my name and reputation will be restored to their former tarnished glory.”

  I took the paper from him. “I will, thanks. Though I’m a bit surprised you’re being so cooperative.”

  He gave me a withering look. “Don’t be. Believe it or not, I want my mother’s attacker brought to justice as much as you do. And once you deduced the nature of my relationship with Francis, any thought of profiting from the endeavor promptly died. You’re not stupid, Foxtrot, and neither am I. Do me the courtesy of at least regarding me as a worthy opponent, will you?”

  I couldn’t help but grin. “I do, Oscar. And for the record—I never believed you were actually behind the murder attempt. But I had to investigate every possibility.”

  He nodded graciously. “I understand. Now go catch the bastard, will you?”

  I let myself out.

  * * *

  I did follow up, of course. I called the waitress at the diner, who did remember Francis and Oscar and the third guy who met them. I overnighted the cold cream jar and its supposed dermorphin to a lab I know in New York that would get me an answer fast—don’t ask how I knew about them or why they owed me a favor—but by then I was pretty sure Oscar was telling the truth.

  So who was left?

  Cooper definitely had a motive, but I didn’t see how he could have gotten into Estevez’s room to steal the controller and plant the poison. No, it made far more sense that the killer was on the inside—someone who knew when Estevez’s room was empty.

  There was only one person I hadn’t talked to since the attempt on ZZ’s life: Juan Estevez, the accused. I doubted very much that Sheriff Brower would let me anywhere near him in person, but there were other ways. I got on the phone to ZZ’s lawyer, and she called another lawyer, and they called someone else.

  Networking. I loved it.

  And when all was said and done, the next voice I heard on the phone was Juan Estevez himself. He may have been locked up, but that didn’t mean he was in solitary confinement.

  “Foxtrot?” he said. He sounded puzzled. “My lawyer said I should talk to you. Look, I didn’t try to kill your boss.”

  “I know that. And I’m now doing my best to prove it—so any information you can give me would be a big help to both of us.”

  “But—you’re the one who got me arrested in the first place!”

  “And I’m really, really sorry about that. But we both know you were set up, so let’s just let bygones be bygones and work on getting you out of there, okay?”

  There was a pause, but it wasn’t a long one. “Right. Yeah. Okay, what do you want to know?”

  “Who would want to frame you?”

  “I—I can’t say. I mean, I don’t know.” Now he sounded nervous. And his choice of words seemed to indicate he was afraid of telling me what he knew.

  “Juan. You’re already in jail and charged with murder. I don’t see how telling me anything could possibly make your situation worse.”

  “At least I’m alive.”

  What? He was behind bars, and likely to stay there. Who could he possibly be afraid of—

  And then I got it.

  “The government,” I said. “You were developing this for the government, and now you think some CIA assassin is going to slip into your cell and inject you with cyanide in your sleep if you open your mouth. Right?”

  Silence.

  “Okay. I understand why you don’t want to talk, so just listen. The government isn’t after you. For one thing, they wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble; it would have been much ea
sier to just plant drugs on you or something. For another, why would they want Maria or ZZ dead?”

  “Maria was just collateral damage.” His voice was tight. “ZZ was the real target. She was going to out me on the Internet, raise a public outcry. This project was supposed to be under the radar; any kind of backlash would have killed it. That’s what they told me.”

  “Who? Who told you that, exactly?”

  “My … handler.”

  That stopped me dead. “Oh, good God,” I breathed. I was starting to see the shape of the thing. “Juan, R and D geeks don’t have handlers. They have supervisors, or managers, or maybe liaisons, but they don’t have handlers.”

  “Well, I did.” He sounded sulky.

  “Did you ever meet this handler in person?”

  “Of course not. Encrypted emails only. And dead drops.”

  I knew what that was—a fancy way of saying someone would leave you a package at a remote but publicly accessible location, and you’d come by later and pick it up. “Dead drops of what?”

  “Cash. Lots and lots of cash. That’s how I knew he was the real thing.”

  I shook my head, even though he couldn’t see it. “You’ve been reading too many spy novels, Juan. You’re a US citizen on US soil, not a revolutionary in a South American jungle—though the South American angle is getting stronger and stronger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lots of cash to develop a remote-control assassination device. Who do you think would love to get their hands on a few of those?”

  “Drug lords, you mean? No way. When those guys off someone, they want everyone to know—they don’t use poison, they use bombs and automatic weapons. The GEQ is a weapon of subtlety, not mass destruction.” There was a note of wounded pride in his voice.

  But he had a point. So, if Estevez’s mysterious financial backer wasn’t the CIA or narcoterrorists, who did that leave?

  I asked Juan a few more questions, but he didn’t have any other useful information. I thanked him, told him to hang in there, and hung up.

  Somebody wanted to kill ZZ, and pin the crime on Juan. Somebody with a bunch of money to spend, and a reason to spend it.

  But who?

  * * *

  Follow the money is always good advice. Whoever the killer was, they’d invested a lot in this project. That suggested they had a lot to gain.

  What else had they bought?

  The graveyard itself was worth a lot of money, but it wasn’t for sale—so maybe the killer had bought other land, nearby.

  I spent a lot of time paying for ZZ’s indulgences, so I was intimately familiar with the kind of paper trail large purchases generated. Finding out who owned the land adjacent to the graveyard wasn’t hard, but getting the name of the majority shareholder in the shell company who’d bought it eighteen months before took a little more digging. That gave me the name I’d been after all this time—but it still didn’t prove they were the killer, just that they had motive.

  But it did start me thinking, And even though the answer I came up with seemed ludicrous at first, it did hold together. There was one simple way to prove it, too.

  I headed upstairs, checked in with the security guard at the door, and went inside. Tiny looked up when I entered and told me, [Nothing to report, Foxtrot.]

  I looked down at ZZ. At least she was breathing on her own, now; the doctor had given the okay to remove the respirator a few hours ago. “Hey, boss. You’ll be up and around in no time, I guarantee. And when you are, you won’t have to worry about the person who did this to you, either. I’m about to put them behind bars.”

  Tiny’s ears perked up. [You know who the killer is?]

  “I think I do, Tiny. But I’m going to need you to help prove it.”

  [What do you need me to do?]

  “Leave your post, I’m afraid. But it’ll be worth it.”

  When we left, the guard—a muscular black man with steel-rimmed glasses—looked down at Tiny curiously. “I gotta ask,” he said. “Where’s he do his business? I been on shift six hours, the guy before me eight, and neither one of us seen him get walked.”

  “Oh, there’s an en suite bathroom,” I said with a straight face. “He knows how to use it.” Then I walked away, Tiny right beside me.

  We were in the foyer when I heard Ben call out, “Foxtrot! Talk to you for a minute?” He stood in the hall in his cook’s whites, looking anxious.

  I glanced down at Tiny. “Stay here, okay? I’ll be right back.”

  Tiny rolled his eyes, but lay down on the floor of the foyer.

  I walked over to Ben. “What is it?”

  He looked around. “Not here. In my office, okay?”

  “All right.” I followed him to the kitchen, then the small room he used for his office. There was space for a tiny desk and two chairs; I pulled up one while he leaned against the desk with his arms crossed and looked nervous.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s going on? Is it about your … heritage?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “More about my future.”

  “That sounds a little ominous.”

  “Does it? Isn’t supposed to. The last thing I want right now is ominous.” He ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair. “These last few days—they’ve been crazy, haven’t they? Maria getting killed, ZZ in a coma, me and you all mixed up in some kind of supernatural weirdness that I would have laughed at a week ago.”

  I couldn’t disagree with that. “It’s been crazy, all right. I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to leave it all behind.”

  He stared at the floor, a pensive look on his face. “Yeah. That’d be the smart thing to do, wouldn’t it? Hit the road. Maybe go to Vancouver Island, try to find a few more of my kind. But that would just lead to more weirdness, wouldn’t it? For all I know, Thunderbirds don’t get along with one another. I might get into a scrap that would level the eastern seaboard.”

  Now, there was a frightening thought, and one that was too big to wrap my head around at the moment. I was about to catch a murderer—that was about all my poor overstressed noggin had room for right now. “I don’t know what to tell you, Ben. I don’t have any easy answers. This—whatever this is—is as new to me as it is to you. I’m keeping my head above water, but I haven’t figured out how to swim yet.”

  “I kind of figured that. You usually seem to have all the answers, but—well, it doesn’t matter. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” He uncrossed his arms and let them hang down at his sides, where they twitched like they needed something to do.

  “Oh, good. So this is about something really earth-shattering, like tonight’s appetizer?”

  He smiled ruefully. “I wish. I called my sister this afternoon.”

  “And?”

  “And I didn’t get to talk to her. Her voice mail told me she’s out of the country. ‘Gone to Europe to bolster their failing economy,’ as she put it. No other details. She must have been on the way to the airport when she stopped in here.”

  “Sounds like she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “And I don’t feel like chasing her around the globe. Now here’s the weird thing: When I realized that, I actually felt relieved.”

  He was resting his seat and hands on the desk, his palms flat and his fingers gripping the edge, his weight on his arms. It was making the muscles in them bulge out, and I was trying not to stare. “Relieved? Why?”

  “Because I like it here, Foxtrot. It’s like I belong. And it’s not just the job, or the people—it’s something else.”

  He cut his eyes to the side, avoiding mine. Even though he hadn’t asked a question, it felt like he had.

  “I’m … not sure what you mean,” I said. Which wasn’t true; I knew perfectly well what he meant. What I didn’t know was how I felt about it.

  “I guess what I’m asking,” he said, bringing those dark eyes up to look into mine, “is if you feel it, too. Because if you do…”

  I didn’t know what to say.
So I stood up and kissed him, instead.

  This was not as romantic as it sounds. It was, in fact, more out of panic than passion. See, I always knew what to say, even when I didn’t. I even had a whole list of things to say when I didn’t know what to say, and I was very good at saying them—so good that only the people who knew me really well could even tell I was at a loss.

  But right at that moment, I couldn’t remember a damn one.

  He smelled good. He tasted good, like chocolate with a hint of mint—he must have been snacking in the kitchen. I wish I could say he was a good kisser, too, but the truth was I couldn’t tell; I’d caught him completely off guard. Ever kiss someone—I mean really kiss someone—when they weren’t expecting it? It’s like going upstairs in the dark and miscalculating how many steps there are. Your foot comes down on something that isn’t there, your whole body lurchs, and there’s this terrible moment of vertigo, shock, and embarrassment. You just screwed up something you thought was a piece of cake.

  I pulled back immediately. From the look of consternation on his face, you’d think I just told him a rutabaga had been elected pope.

  “Whoa,” he said. “That’s—I didn’t mean—”

  “No, it’s okay—I didn’t—I mean you didn’t—”

  “I was talking about—”

  “No, no, it’s fine—”

  “Stop.” He took me gently by the arms, which was about the only thing preventing me from bolting so fast I would have left a Foxtrot-shaped hole in the wall. “Listen to me. That was—well, it was awkward, but it wasn’t wrong. You just caught me off guard, is all.”

  I stopped trying to swallow my own tongue and met his eyes. They were just as gorgeous, but very serious. “Really?”