by Paula Munier
“Right.” She knew these guys worked all kinds of hours when they were on a case, on and off the clock.
Thrasher and Troy raised their beers to Mercy.
“To our own little Jessica Fletcher,” said Troy, laughing.
The captain frowned.
“Just quoting the Cat Ladies.”
“Very funny.” Mercy clinked her wine glass against their beer bottles.
“I’m not sure I even want to know how you figured out that our runaway perp was Ruby Rucker’s son,” said the captain. “But tell us anyway.”
“Just a guess.”
“An educated guess,” teased Troy.
Mercy sipped her wine, and thanked St. Vincent of Saragossa—patron saint of winemakers, according to Martinez—for red wine everywhere. “We knew from the private investigator’s report that Ruby visited a Planned Parenthood clinic while she was in Albany. But she didn’t have an abortion. So it stands to reason that she might have been pregnant and that she might have had a baby.”
“That baby would have been George’s son,” said Troy.
“Most likely.”
“Most likely?”
“Ruby had a number of affairs while she was married to George.” Mercy sighed. “Any number of men could have been his father, including my own grandfather, if you believe the gossip.”
Pizza Bob was back with the Howls. He placed the two pans on the table. “Enjoy!”
As soon the restaurateur walked away, Elvis and Susie Bear scrambled to their feet, sitting nicely back on their haunches and waiting politely to be served. Sunny followed suit. Only the synchronized wallop of their tails against the old pine floors and the glisten of saliva on their flews gave away their anticipation.
“You don’t believe that.” Thrasher served himself two slices of the pie and slipped each dog a generous slice as well.
When it came to dogs, thought Mercy, the captain was a pushover.
“No, I don’t.” Mercy removed one large piece of pizza, folded it lengthwise, and nibbled at the pointed end. “What else did Rucker say?”
“All he’ll say is that his son had nothing to do with anything.”
“I imagine everything is Rocky Simko’s fault,” said Mercy.
“Convenient, since he’s dead.” Troy helped himself to a couple of slices.
“Rucker’s lawyering up.” Thrasher retrieved a printout from his pocket and pushed it across the table. “But we found these in his wallet.” The printout showed two photos. One of a tall skinny young man with strawberry-blond hair that stuck out in wild tufts and cowlicks, wearing a suit and tie in what was obviously a high school graduation picture. The back read: Arlo Martin, Class of 2018, Miami Latin High School. The other showed the same young man with an attractive woman in her early forties. A petite brunette with brown eyes, dressed in a bright pink jersey sundress that showed off her curves, smiling a smile that could sell a million houses. An older South Beach version of the Las Vegas blonde who’d taken George Rucker and Peace Junction by storm.
“That’s Ruby Rucker all right.”
Mercy smiled. “She hasn’t changed much, apart from her hair color.”
“She runs a successful decorating business in Little Havana.”
“Of course she does,” said Mercy. “When did Rucker find out about his son? I can’t see Ruby telling him. Ever.”
“Rucker said he got a letter from Arlo last year.” Thrasher finished his first piece of pizza and wiped his hands elegantly on his napkin before starting in on his second piece. “After his stepfather died, he asked his mother who his real father was. She didn’t want to tell him, but when he threatened to do a DNA test, she gave in and told him about Rucker. He took it upon himself to contact him.”
“And now he’s lost him just as he found him.” She nibbled some more, but she just wasn’t that hungry. Hard to eat when she knew she was missing something. “I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Arlo. Unless he’s the one who put that bomb on my grandmother’s porch.”
“Rucker’s not saying,” said Thrasher. “Although nothing we know about Rucker would lead us to believe he has a clue how to build a bomb.”
“He could have picked up some pointers in prison.” Troy flagged down Pizza Bob for another beer. “You need to eat, too, Mercy. Keep up your strength.”
She noticed that Troy had already downed all his pizza and his beer. He must be feeling better, if he’d gotten his appetite back, she thought. Or he wasn’t used to long lunches. Too much eating on the run. “Arlo could have learned how to build a bomb on the internet.”
“A pipe bomb would be more Simko’s style than Rucker’s,” said Thrasher. “But dead men don’t talk. And as long as Rucker isn’t talking, either, we’ve got more questions than answers.”
“We’ve got to find Arlo Martin.”
“Why is Arlo even here?” She peeled off a pepperoni and popped it in her mouth.
“To meet his father,” said Troy.
“He could have just gone to visit him in prison.” She tore off a piece of the crust. Pizza Bob made great crust. “Why go to all the trouble to escape from prison and travel to Vermont and raid all these properties?” She wiggled the crust at Troy and answered her own question. “Because Rucker is looking for something. Something he can give to Arlo.”
“An inheritance,” said Troy.
“That would explain why Simko came along. To share in the bounty,” said Thrasher. “Whatever it is.”
“Mary Lou said the judge’s parties were all about drugs and prostitutes and gambling and money laundering,” said Mercy.
“All cash businesses,” Troy pointed out.
“The judge died unexpectedly,” said Mercy. “Maybe some of that cash got lost in the shuffle.”
“This is all speculation,” said Thrasher.
“Where’s Ruby in all this?” Ruby was the key to this puzzle, thought Mercy.
“We don’t know,” said Troy.
“We’re trying to find her,” said the captain. “We’ve asked local authorities down there to locate her.”
Pizza Bob served them another round. “On me,” he said, as he tried and failed to sneak the dogs another couple of breadsticks without their noticing.
“I saw that,” she said. “We thank you. Dogs, too.”
Pizza Bob shrugged away their thanks and went back to his other customers, the ones not talking about the missing and the murdered. Mercy wondered what it would be like to have a job like his. Where the only puzzle was how much cheese to order each week, not what happened to Ruby Rucker and Beth Kilgore.
“Why kidnap my grandmother?” She sipped the last of the wine in the first glass. She wasn’t sure she needed—or wanted—the second. On the other hand, it was a shame to let a glass of Big Barn Red go unsipped.
“We thought Rucker blamed Patience for losing Ruby to Red, but maybe that’s not it at all.”
“It’s not,” she said.
“Maybe Rucker believed that Patience knew where the money was,” said Troy.
“Local law enforcement must have been turning a blind eye to the judge’s parties for a cut,” said Thrasher. “Maybe he thought your grandfather was crooked.”
“Or that he was sleeping with Ruby so he could find out more about where the judge was stashing the drugs and the cash,” added Troy.
“And that your grandmother knew about it.”
“But that’s all wrong.” She downed the last of the Big Barn Red. “Wyetta said that August Pitts was the crooked one.”
“That’s right,” said Troy. “Crooked as a three-dollar bill were her exact words.”
“Wyetta Wright? Best pecan pie in Vermont?”
“That’s right.” Troy told the captain about their visit to Wyetta’s Café.
While the two men discussed the artist’s many fine attributes, Mercy’s attention wandered. She remembered the torn-up floorboards in the old bungalow. And the junk pile behind it where they’d found Kilgore’s body in
a barrel. The house where they’d found Becker and Goodlove in the keeping room. And the bunker where her grandmother had been locked in a bathroom. All good out-of-the-way places to host illicit parties and to hide whatever needed to be hid. Money, illegal substances, bodies.
“This is one crazy conundrum,” she said.
“If anyone can figure it out, you can,” said Troy.
“Most of the pieces are here,” she told them. “Like you say, I should be able to figure it out. But I need to see it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Back at the cabin, Mercy settled Elvis onto his side of the couch for a long nap. Sunny abandoned the dog bed for the floor at the shepherd’s feet, positioning her head on the sofa muzzle to muzzle with his. The golden seemed to understand that Elvis could use a little quiet canine company.
Mercy was ready to work. She went to her own hiding place, a small space in the back of the cabin. She’d painted the room the color of Buddhist monks’ robes—saffron—and equipped it with tools meant to encourage her version of enlightenment: heavy bag and boxing gloves, yoga mat and bolster, and a tiny, intricately carved altar laden with candles and Buddhas and family photos. She’d added a large freestanding whiteboard recently, the better to think through the puzzles that kept popping up in her life, like it or not.
She wheeled the whiteboard into the great room. She did her best thinking here, under the soaring ceiling, surrounded by her books and her fireplace and her favorite sentient beings. Here in her own sunlit home, flooded with light from the tall windows that looked out onto the mountains, where Elvis was safe and sound and she could protect him. No more near-death experiences in the woods.
“You’re making an incident board.” Amy scooped up baby Helena in her arms to make way for Mercy and her board.
“Just like all those cop shows you binge watch,” said Brodie, shaking his head. “Meta.”
Mercy didn’t watch much TV, but when she did it was mostly crime series: Bosch, Vera, and Prime Suspect: Tennison reruns. Brodie was more of a Star Trek, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones kind of guy.
“I have to. There are just so many pieces that don’t fit.” She positioned the whiteboard at the end of the farm table, facing Amy and Brodie. Amy put Helena in the high chair and snapped a bib on the toddler. She gave her a teething biscuit, pulling up a chair for herself. Brodie sat down next to her.
“Brodie and I are having leftover chili. Want some?”
“I’m good. Thanks to Pizza Bob.”
Elvis and Sunny did not rise to the bait of Amy’s chili as they normally would have done. They were both sleeping off all that pizza. Muse was curled up in the curve of Sunny’s feathery tail, her new favorite place to doze.
While Amy served up chili for herself and Brodie, Mercy dragged all the files back to the farm table and gathered the materials she’d left on the coffee table. They’d been dusted for prints but nothing actionable had turned up from forensics yet. These things took time—too much time. And she didn’t think there was anything to find anyway.
Mercy was prepared to figure it out herself. She posted all the pictures she had of the suspects: Beth and Thomas Kilgore on their wedding day, Ruby and George Rucker at the Little Chapel of the West, George Rucker and Rocky Simko’s mugshots, Arlo Martin and his mother in Miami, Joey Colby in the woods, Deputy Pitts and her grandfather Sheriff Red in uniform, the masked man on her grandmother’s front porch.
Next she added the crime scenes: Joey’s camp, her grandmother’s Victorian, the lodge, the barrel, the old Cape Cod, the 1950s house. Brodie brought her the Las Vegas postcard, the one that Ruby had written to George.
In black marker, Mercy wrote out a timeline with the dates of the murders and other key events.
“Cool,” said Brodie, between bites of chili.
“I think you like investigative work,” she told him.
“It’s like a real-life escape room.” Brodie and Amy had been on several escape room adventures, from Vermont to Boston.
“Brodie is good at solving the clues.” Amy took a wet cloth and wiped down the mess Helena had made of the teething biscuit.
“Not as good as Amy,” he said.
“We’re both good.”
“Great, then you can both help me.” Mercy studied the board: The victims, the suspects, the dead, and the missing. The places where all these people, dead and alive and unaccounted for, had lived, congregated, passed through, never to be seen again.
“What are we looking for?” Amy took turns feeding herself and her baby, spooning chili first into her mouth with an adult-sized spoon in one hand and then into her daughter’s with a baby spoon in the other hand.
“Something odd, something off, something that doesn’t fit.” They fell into a silence born of concentration and deliberation.
“Mercy, what do you think doesn’t fit?” asked Amy finally.
“I’m not sure.” She sighed. “But this postcard bothers me for some reason. It has from the beginning.”
“Vegas is awesome.” Brodie pointed to the postcard. “I was there a couple of years ago for the Consumer Electronics Show. It was a blast.” He looked at Amy sheepishly. “That was before I met you.”
“I know.”
“You can tell this is an old postcard,” he said. “The Hacienda isn’t there anymore. It’s the Mandalay Bay now. That’s where we stayed.”
Mercy stared at the image of the Las Vegas Strip on the postcard, with the Hacienda and the Luxor at one end and the Stratosphere at the other. What was it her mother had said about Las Vegas? It’s such a tacky town. There’s no pride of place. They spend absurd amounts of money to build these outlandish casinos, and ten years later they blow them up and start all over again.
“Wait a minute. What’s wrong with this picture?” she asked her helpers, not really expecting an answer. She pulled her laptop across the table and opened it up, going online. Searching for the history of the brief happy life of the Hacienda Casino.
“What are you looking for?” asked Amy.
“Brodie, you are brilliant.” Mercy grinned.
“Huh?”
“Listen to this.” Mercy consulted her screen, where she’d pulled up several stories about various casinos on the strip. “Better yet, write these dates down on the board.”
Brodie shuffled to his feet and took up the black marker as if it were a sword. “Ready.”
“The Hacienda was imploded on December 31, 1996,” said Mercy. “The Mandalay Bay did not open in its place until March 2, 1999.” She looked up at Brodie, who was faithfully recording the names and dates as she rattled them off. “Good.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Hold on,” she said. “The Luxor next door opened its doors on October 15, 1993. The Stratosphere opened its doors on April 30, 1996.” She could hear the squeak of the marker as Brodie documented her words.
“I still don’t get it.” He stepped back to examine his handiwork.
“I get it!” Amy clapped her hands, and her baby did the same.
Monkey see, monkey do, Mercy thought. “Then let’s hear it.”
“I want to get this right.” Amy frowned, thinking. “The photo on this postcard would have to have been taken between April 30, 1996, and December 31, 1996.”
She grinned. “Well done, Amy!”
“So what?’ asked Brodie.
“It means that Ruby Rucker probably didn’t buy it in Vegas in 2000 and mail it to George. She must have sent him an old postcard from 1996, one she had already.”
“They could keep on selling the postcards even if they aren’t accurate.”
“Four years later?” Mercy shook her head. “I don’t think so. Four years is an eternity in Las Vegas. Besides, the year 2000 was huge in Vegas. They had all sorts of special Millennium New Year merchandise.”
“So there was only a short period time when this postcard could have could have been made, and it was obsolete almost as soon as it was produced,” said Amy.
> “You’re right about Las Vegas.” Brodie replaced the cap on the marker and tapped it on the postcard. “They don’t do obsolete. They like everything shiny and new and neon. They would’ve put out new postcards.”
“Ruby Rucker was a Las Vegas native,” said Mercy. “She liked shiny and new and neon.”
“Then why didn’t she just buy a shiny new neon postcard when she got there and mail that one to her husband?” Amy smiled at Helena, who was still clapping her hands. “If she was into shiny new neon things.”
“Exactly,” Mercy said. “Why take that old postcard with her from Vermont when she could just buy a new one when she got to Vegas?”
“Unless she only wanted the guy to think she went to Vegas,” said Brodie. “Maybe someone else sent the postcard for her.”
“Good thinking,” she said. “But the handwriting on the postcard is Ruby’s. George hired a private investigator who confirmed that.”
“Maybe he was bad at his job.”
“Maybe. But the writing on the postcard matches the notes on the back of the old photos of Ruby and George that Mary Lou Rucker-Smith gave us.”
Brodie squinted at the postmark on the postcard. “And the postmark is Las Vegas, August 5, 2000.”
“Weird,” said Amy.
“Indeed.” Mercy scrutinized the white board one more time. “What if the handwriting is hers only because she needed the handwriting to be hers.”
“To fool people?” asked Brodie.
“Yeah. Like she wanted George to believe that she went home to Vegas, but she really didn’t,” said Amy.
“Well, she didn’t, at least not for long. She ended up in Miami,” said Mercy.
“A long way from Las Vegas,” said Brodie.
“But she could have sent a new postcard if all she wanted to do was throw George off her trail,” she said. “Not go through all this premeditated subterfuge.”
“That doesn’t really prove anything. It could just be an old postcard.” Brodie sat back down, handing the marker back to her.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” Mercy said.
“Whatever.”
“I feel like we’re just going in circles here.” Mercy stood up. “I’m supposed to take Mr. Horgan his new kitten today. We’d better get going. Can I leave Elvis and Sunny here with you?”