“It’s not really my fault, of course.” She gave him a weak smile, wishing she sounded a little more confident. A little more stable, in fact. “It’s just that my karma, or something, is in one of those off-again phases. It’s bad luck, and it’s screwing up just about everything I touch, and since I touched you, last night, I just figured ...” Her shoulders slumped when she realized he was trying not to laugh. “I know it sounds weird, but just concentrate on the other part, okay? I want to help. What I mean is, I’m not going to shake hands and pack my bags and leave you holding the ... well, the dead body.”
“This isn’t some long-cherished Nancy Drew fantasy, is it?” he asked, but he was teasing, and when he held out his hand, she took it, letting him draw her against the length of him.
This was going to be dangerous, she thought, her body softening all over as she breathed him in, snow and pine and, faintly, the yeasty warmth of the bagel shop. Not because of what they might find. Because of the way Will DeMaio made her feel.
Stepping onto the back porch, Lanie decided that she talked a good game for a girl whose biggest adventure, before last night, was mixing diet Coke with diet Pepsi. As they’d made their way down the icy steps, it was suddenly all too real that there was a very dead body on the steps, and they were going to look at it. Up close.
Will had called the police, who promised to send someone over as soon as they could, but in the meantime, he was determined to take another look at his father.
“Before they start in with the yellow tape and the latex gloves and all that,” he’d told her. “I didn’t love him—hell, I didn’t even like him—but he’s dead, you know? And if someone wanted me dead, in a weird way it’s my fault.”
She didn’t know which was scarier—that someone would figure out he’d killed the wrong person and come after Will again, or that despite what a shit his father had been, Will felt guilty that the man was dead. The last being frightening for how much more evidence it stacked in the “Will DeMaio: Incredibly Nice Guy” category.
Squinting against the snow glare, Will pulled a pair of leather gloves out of his jacket pocket and put them on. Lanie stood behind him, craning her neck to see past his shoulder, and rubbing her arms briskly in the frigid air.
Taking a deep breath, Will reached toward the body, murmuring, “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.” She nodded, but as he turned back to his father’s body, she fought the urge to squeeze her eyes shut. She wasn’t going to be a delicate girly-girl about this. Think of all the great female detectives, she told herself. Miss Marple, Harriet Vane, Stephanie Plum. Okay, they’re fictional, but—
“Oh, man,” Will murmured, and Lanie risked a peek. If the storm hadn’t lasted through the night and into the morning, the way the man had died would have been obvious. Brushing the wet snow from his gloves, Will stepped back, and Lanie got a good look at the front of his father’s coat, where a rime of blood had made a huge, frozen stain. It was lacquered on his throat, too, surrounding an angry wound where a bullet had ripped into the flesh.
“There should be a trail of it,” Will muttered. “Or maybe ... a splatter? God, I don’t know.”
Shuddering, Lanie backed away from the body and turned to face the frozen field between the cabin and Will’s place. She needed a deep breath, a good lungful of the clean white snow.
“I don’t see a gun conveniently lying around.” She peered down at the snow, but the surface was already brittle, sugary and bright even in the weak sunlight. “And I don’t see any blood, but since it snowed all night ...” She let the thought trail out in a white puff of breath. Oh my God, they’d been getting hot and sweaty while Will’s father was out here the whole time ...
Will passed a hand over his eyes, a bright, startled blue before they disappeared, then dug out the snow around the body. “Yeah, he’s sitting on the bare step, not packed snow. Don’t even think about it. And especially don’t talk about it anymore. Let’s just see what else we can find here.”
She nodded, trying to wiggle her toes in her frozen sneakers as she set off in one direction, kicking gently at the snow to look for a blood trail beneath the surface. Will set off the other way, and every time she glanced back at him, the grim set of his shoulders in his heavy jacket made her heart squeeze. The sun was almost directly above them now, and it flashed warm gold on his hair. He reminded her of a very determined little boy, shouldering a burden much too big for him but resolved to carry it anyway.
“I’m not getting anything,” he called from half a dozen yards away, “and if we mess with this much more, we’re going to be trampling the evidence.”
“I think that’s a given already.” Rubbing her mittened hands together, she surveyed the crisscrossed web of trails they’d made, an abstract in the snow.
He’d jammed his hands in his pockets when he walked back to her. “I just wish I knew what he was doing here.”
“What about his pockets?” Lanie said quietly, turning her gaze up to him. He looked unsettled by the idea, but he nodded and walked back to the body, reaching toward the coat.
“There’s a wallet,” he said, lifting it out, “and that’s it.”
“Maybe there’s a receipt for something?” This was so much harder than she’d thought—not that she’d believed it would be a piece of cake in the first place—and she couldn’t begin to imagine what it was doing to Will.
At least the practical aspect of figuring it out was giving him something to do. He thumbed through the worn billfold and retrieved a scrap of white paper, which he waved at her. “The motel out on the highway,” he said. “Makes sense.”
He looked up suddenly and jerked his head toward the road. “Here comes the cavalry.”
Gently sliding the wallet back into the jacket pocket where he’d found it, he pulled her against him, briskly rubbing her back as they watched a salt-spattered black SUV with the local police emblem emblazoned on the door pull up, crunching through the snow.
“Cavalry, huh?” she murmured.
“The not-so-esteemed Jackson Holby,” Will murmured back. “Voted Most Likely to Be a Security Guard in high school. This is going to blow his mind.”
“Hey there, Will,” a stout, red-cheeked man called as he climbed out of the truck, zipping up a huge gray parka. He looked like a sooty version of the Michelin man. “Got a dead body here, huh?”
“And you’ll never guess who it is,” Will called back, murmuring to Lanie, “even though I already told the dispatch officer.”
“Let’s just take a look, shall we?” He was having a hard time wading through the packed accumulation, each massive booted foot pulled up with effort. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, chest heaving, and squinted down at the corpse. “Holy shit, Will—pardon my language, miss—but this looks just like you.”
“That’s because it’s my father, Jackson.” Lanie didn’t dare look at Will for fear of giggling, but she could picture his eyes rolling.
“Your dad? Didn’t he leave town, oh ... ten years ago?”
She thought she could feel the frustration vibrating off Will in waves now, and she sighed. If this was the best the local police force had to offer, they’d be better off investigating on their own.
“He did, Jackson, but there’s no law preventing the occasional visit, you know? I’m not sure why he was here, but he was, and now he’s dead. About a hundred feet from my front door, as a matter of fact.”
“Huh.” As noncommittal grunts went, this guy had them perfected, Lanie thought, watching as he used his nightstick to nudge open the dead man’s coat. If he understood Will’s inference, he didn’t show any signs of it.
She had halfway decided to introduce herself, offer her statement about finding the body, when two more police cars pulled up, and a team of four men, two in street clothes and two in police-issue parkas, got out.
Thankfully, the thumbnail on any one of them seemed more intelligent than Jackson Holby, and she and Will were separated and questioned immediately as th
e evidence techs started their work on the body and the surrounding area. By the time they were allowed inside, where Lanie gathered her things and stuffed them into her bag, she was truly frozen, and the idea of trudging across the snowy field to Will’s house was mitigated only by the chance to crawl into what she hoped was his big, warm, snuggly bed, with him.
When the detectives had given them permission to leave, however, Will had other ideas.
“We should get out of here,” he murmured. “Let them do their thing, take the body away, all that.”
“And go where?” she whispered back. “And do what? Shouldn’t they be protecting you? Didn’t you tell them that you may have been the target here?”
“It’s a small town, Lanie.” He backed her up against the bathroom sink, where she’d been collecting her toothbrush and deodorant. “They’re going to go off and question everyone who might have it in for me, and I thought we could concentrate on figuring out what my father was doing.”
“Won’t they do that, too?”
“Yeah. But we’ve got a head start while they’re here dusting for fingerprints and whatever else it is they do, and I don’t feel like sitting over there at home watching them cart my father’s dead body away.”
She frowned, suddenly very sure that his bed was not in her immediate future. “Okay, but how are we going to get anywhere? The rental car barely made it here last night, and that was ten inches of snow ago.”
She squinted up at him when he didn’t answer immediately, and her stomach gave a nauseating little lurch of anxiety. “I have a feeling this isn’t going to be good.”
Even his tired grin wasn’t reassuring. It was far too mischievous for the present circumstances.
“Remember when I mentioned the snowmobile?”
Six
Maybe she wasn’t intrepid enough for sleuthing, Lanie thought, clutching Will’s jacket with hands gone completely numb in the frigid afternoon air. Maybe she needed to update her image of discreetly poking around for clues in a saucy convertible, wearing a bag to match her shoes. No one dressed like that anymore but her grandmother, anyway, whose white leather pocketbook was stored in her closet with her white leather church shoes, right beside the black patent leather set.
As far as she knew, Nancy Drew had never ridden on the back of a snowmobile that resembled a New Age rocket, icicles dripping from her hair and her rear end smarting with each jolt of the contraption over the hard-packed snow. Which was traveling much, much too fast for her taste.
“... there,” Will shouted, only a fragment of his voice carrying over the icy wind as he jerked the snowmobile forward with a groan from the engine.
“What?” she yelled back, hanging on and digging her knees into his hipbones, just to make him uncomfortable.
“We’re almost there!” He took one hand off the steering bar and pointed at the highway, now visible as they cleared a small rise, and Lanie blinked frost from her eyelashes to squint at the faded motel sign sitting dejectedly by the side of the road. The Come On Inn, dented metal letters spelled out. Maybe that was what passed for romance up here in the country.
A minute later, Will steered the snowmobile across the deserted road and slid to a stop in the parking lot, cutting the engine.
“You okay?” He held out a hand as he jumped off, shaking snow dust from his hair.
“My ass has been better,” Lanie grumbled. Her foot shook as she stepped down, and she caught Will’s eye in time to say, “Don’t even think about it,” when she noticed his mouth opening in a retort.
But she let him pull her against him as they made their way through the unplowed snow to the front office. Warmth was warmth, even if it was coming from a kamikaze snowmobile driver.
“What if no one’s here?” she said. The window was grimed with salt from previous snows, and probably a decade’s worth of road dust besides. There were no cars in the parking lot, which stretched the length of the squat white brick building, and no lights visible behind the heavy drapes in the guest rooms’ windows.
“Clarice will be here,” Will said, pushing open the door, and Lanie followed.
He was right. When the bell jingled, a head of wild raven hair jerked out of the doorway behind the counter, and an enormous pink bubble snapped and deflated. “Hey, Will. What’s up?”
“Stayed here again last night, Clarice?” Will said, folding his arms on the counter and leaning over it, sniffing. “Any coffee brewed?”
“I end up staying here every night,” Clarice said. “I told Henry we could get reservations on the Web if he put in a cable modem—I’ve only got dial-up at home. You need a room or what?”
“I need some information.” Bastard, Lanie thought. He was twinkling at the girl. “But even more than that, I really need some caffeine.”
“It’s almost four o’clock, Will. What does this look like, a diner?”
“Come on, Clarice. You mainline coffee and HTML all day.” Twinkle, sparkle.
Lanie rolled her eyes and settled on a cracked black leather chair beside the window. She would just sit and contemplate the effects of frostbite while Romeo flirted them up something hot to drink. At this point, she didn’t care if it was a twenty-year-old package of Swiss Miss.
A minute later, he thrust a steaming cardboard cup into her hand and settled into the chair beside her. Clarice perched on the counter, swinging a pair of electric purple high-tops and snapping her gum. “What do you want, Will? I’m coding stuff for the Web site, and I want it to go live later today.”
“What’s your Web site about?” Lanie asked politely, blowing on her coffee. All the good detectives—at least the ones who didn’t rely on brute force as a rule—always made small talk.
“Farscape fan fiction,” Clarice said, taking her gum out of her mouth and rolling it between two fingers. Her nails were painted bright green. “And the possibility of alien life on earth.”
Lanie swallowed her coffee too fast and coughed. “Oh.”
Will bit back a grin and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Was an older guy, looks just like me, staying here any time recently?”
“Your dad?” Clarice slid off the counter and walked around it, flipping open the guest register. She shrugged when Will frowned at her. “The name kind of gave it away. Here it is, Mike DeMaio, Tuesday the fifth, till this Thursday. Why?”
“Just wondering.” Staring into his coffee cup, his tone was casual when he asked, “Anyone hanging around here with him? Any trouble?”
“This isn’t a baby-sitting service either, Will,” Clarice said with an exasperated huff, but when he turned his blue gaze up to her, she gave in. “I think Chick Statler stopped by once, and what’s his name? Um ... yeah, Petey Petrowski, too, a couple of times.”
“Chick?” Lanie asked, setting her empty cup on the floor and wondering if she should have been taking notes.
“It’s a nickname,” Will explained. “For Jason Statler. If you saw him you’d know it’s kind of like calling Michael Jordan ‘Shorty’, but he doesn’t seem to mind.”
“Is that it?” Clarice interrupted, popping a fresh piece of gum into her mouth. Her dark eyes were bored beneath the coat of thick black eyeliner. “I’ve got two more pages to design.”
“What room was he in?” Will stood up, and Lanie followed, hoping they weren’t headed back to the snowmobile so soon. “If it’s free, can I have it for tonight?”
“If it’s free ...” Clarice snorted, and handed him the key to Room 10. “I think I can squeeze you in.”
“Charming,” Lanie said, fingering the faded blue spread. It felt like early-issue polyester, and there was a questionable stain on one corner. The walls were a grim beige—she suspected they’d once been white and were now just dirty. A nondescript nightstand had been set beside the bed, and a lamp was bolted to its scarred surface.
“No one comes here for the ambience,” Will called from the bathroom. “Personally, I’m a little disappointed there are no Magic Fingers. Find anyth
ing?”
“Maybe Clarice cleans up better than you thought,” she called back. “There’s nothing here but a trusty King James and a phonebook.”
“Nothing in here, either. Damn it.” He came out of the bathroom and dropped onto the bed, frowning. “What do we do next, Nancy?”
“I’m not sure, Ned.” She sat down beside him and shrugged off her coat. He’d cranked the thermostat when they came in, and warm, stale air gushed from the clattering unit by the window. “It’s been a while since the whole thing with the old clock and figuring out the password to Larkspur Lane.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, and lay back, throwing an arm across his face. “And I have no idea what to do next.”
“Well, we could interview his old buddies in town,” Lanie said, toeing off her sneakers and scooting backward to cross her legs on the end of the bed. “Figure out who else he saw while he was here. But we could also try to trace his movements, check out your office, and ... what?” She’d glanced back at him and stopped when he removed his arm and looked at her blankly before his eyes warmed with amusement.
“You watch a lot of cop shows, Lanie?”
“No,” she said with an injured huff. “Just CSI once in a while. And Law and Order. Well, and the occasional rerun of NYPD Blue. You know, when it was still worth watching.” She bit back a smile as Will snorted, and added, “Okay, I watch my share. What do you watch?”
“Baseball. Football. Basketball. Hockey.” He grinned when she rolled her eyes, and added, “And this surprises you? Hello, guy here. I wasn’t going to mention the adult movies on Cinemax After Dark, but if you really want to—”
“I don’t, thank you.” She sniffed, and then turned around to face him. “We could just stop, you know. The police are handling it, and they probably wouldn’t like you poking around on your own anyway. The thing is, you could still be in danger, especially if someone really mistook your dad for—”
“Lanie.”
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