by Sharon Pape
Praise for the Portrait of Crime Mysteries
To Sketch a Thief
“An enjoyable thriller…[A] fun whodunit.”
—Genre Go Round Reviews
“[A] fast-paced read you won’t want to put down…This is the perfect story to “escape” into for a relaxing afternoon.”
—Dollycas’s Thoughts
Sketch Me If You Can
“Fast-paced and spirited, Sharon Pape’s mystery…introduces police sketch artist Rory McCain and her cranky, ethereal housemate, Ezekiel Drummond…Pape has a sure-handed balance of humor and action that makes her a writer to watch.”
—Julie Hyzy, national bestselling author of
the White House Chef Mysteries
“Police sketch artist Rory McCain, moonlighting as an amateur detective, assisted by the ghost of an 1870s federal marshal. Sharon Pape takes this improbable premise and makes it work—and how! Rory is memorable, her sidekick intriguing. Exceptionally well written, a standout mystery. I’m looking forward to more.”
—Susan Wittig Albert, national bestselling author of Cat’s Claw
“A police artist matches wits with the ghost of an Old West marshal as they work together to solve a double homicide, but it’s the chemistry between this modern woman and crusty cowboy that will draw readers in to Sketch Me If You Can. A spirited debut!”
—Cleo Coyle, national bestselling author of
the Haunted Bookshop Mysteries
“A fun ride.”
—CA Reviews
“Part mystery, part paranormal, and all spine-tingling suspense…This promises to be a great beginning to a dynamic ongoing series that both mystery lovers and paranormal fans will enjoy.”
—Fresh Fiction
“Will suck you in, pull you along, and spit you out at the end after the ride of your life…Sketch Me If You Can is a story you won’t long forget, even after you pass the book along to your friends.”
—The Romance Readers Connection
Berkley Prime Crime titles by Sharon Pape
SKETCH ME IF YOU CAN
TO SKETCH A THIEF
SKETCH A FALLING STAR
Sketch a
Falling Star
Sharon Pape
BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
SKETCH A FALLING STAR
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / March 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Sharon Pape.
Cover illustration by Cliff Nielson.
Cover design by George Long.
Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of
copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-56081-5
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is
stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the
author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For my husband, Dennis.
Who needs a Mount Palomar anyway?
Acknowledgments
I want to thank my daughter, Lauren, for brokering many peace accords between me and my computer, thereby saving my sanity.
I want to thank my son, Jason, for “fixing” me whenever I break myself, which is more often than one might think.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Prologue
Rory was wrestling her suitcase into the trunk of the Volvo when she was startled by a bright little voice wishing her a good morning. She couldn’t imagine who else was out and about, much less in her driveway, at six o’clock on a Sunday morning. She popped her head up so quickly that she banged it on the lid of the trunk.
“Oh my,” said the owner of the voice, an elderly woman so slight that she might have been blown there by a sudden gust of wind. She had stunning blue eyes that were caught up in a seine of wrinkles and white hair that sprouted in random tufts across her scalp. Although she was wearing a blue terry-cloth robe over yellow pajamas, her feet were bare. The lack of shoes didn’t seem to bother her in spite of an outside temperature that was straining to reach forty.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said, her forehead pleated with concern.
“That’s okay,” Rory told her, finding it hard to be annoyed with the woman, who had an open, childlik
e expression, in spite of the years deeply etched into her face. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m Eloise,” she said, a smile puffing up her sunken cheeks and twinkling in her eyes.
“Well, I’m Rory.” She extended her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
Eloise gave it a firm little shake.
“Are you lost?” Rory asked.
Eloise shook her head. “I live over there.” She pointed down the block to the brick colonial owned by the Bowman family.
It was close to a year now that Rory had been living in the refurbished Victorian her uncle Mac had left her, and she knew all her neighbors well enough to say “hello,” ask after their families and presumably borrow a cup of sugar should she ever need one. But she couldn’t recall having seen Eloise before. It was possible that she’d come to stay with the Bowmans recently, as she became incapable of living alone. They probably weren’t even aware that their matriarch was out wandering the neighborhood.
Of all mornings too. Rory’s alarm clock had chosen that night to stop working, so she’d overslept and was already late leaving for the airport. Thank goodness she’d decided to drop Hobo off with her parents the night before or she wouldn’t stand a chance of making her flight. It was going to be a toss-up anyway, and not even her indomitable aunt Helene would be able to convince the airline to wait for her. Still, she couldn’t just drive away and let Eloise continue roaming around on her own. She’d have to drop her back home and see her safely inside.
She was about to coax Eloise into the car when she saw Doug Bowman come tearing out his front door with a raincoat over his pajamas and his comb-over standing on end as if he’d just rolled out of bed.
Things were looking up. She just hoped Doug wasn’t in a chatty mood.
“Mom!” he yelled, flip-flopping down the street to them in slippers that were in imminent danger of flying off his feet. “Mom, come back here. Mom!” he implored like a man who was mere inches away from the end of his quickly fraying rope. Rory understood that feeling only too well, courtesy of a certain deceased federal marshal who shared her home and her life. Judging by the desperation in Doug’s tone, this probably wasn’t his mother’s first solo flight.
Eloise didn’t bother to acknowledge her son. Still focused on Rory, she started giggling with her hand in front of her mouth like a little girl. “You know he’s going to miss you,” she said in a singsong rhythm.
“My dog?” Rory asked. Eloise had probably seen him out in the backyard or when they’d gone for walks. “Don’t worry about Hobo; he’ll be fine.” She turned away to close the trunk of the car. “He’s staying with my mom and dad while I’m away.”
When she turned back, Doug Bowman was stumbling up the driveway, holding his raincoat closed and trying to catch his breath. Eloise paid him no mind.
“No, silly,” she said, “I mean your Marshal Drummond.”
Rory felt the blood drain from her face so fast that it left her a bit light-headed. How could Eloise possibly know about Zeke? Although his ability to travel beyond the house had improved exponentially with her reluctant help, he still couldn’t leave the house unless she was with him or at his destination. And unless she’d developed selective amnesia, she was certain she’d never seen Eloise before. It occurred to her that the one variable in this troubling equation was Eloise herself. Unfortunately, Rory didn’t have time to investigate the situation further, but it would definitely be number one on her “to do” list when she returned from Arizona.
“Hi, Rory. Sorry about this,” Doug wheezed as he reached them. He immediately took hold of his mother’s arm as if he were afraid she might slip away again. “Rory can’t visit with you right now, Mom. We’ll come by another time, I promise.” He gave her arm a gentle tug. “We have to get home—Jean’s whipping up some of those pancakes you like.”
In spite of her fragile appearance, Eloise stood her ground. “Don’t you worry, dear,” she said to Rory, giggling again. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
Doug looked from his mother to Rory and back again. “You’ll have to excuse my mother,” he whispered as if Eloise wasn’t standing beside him and perfectly capable of hearing every word. “I’m afraid she hasn’t been herself since the stroke.”
Rory managed to arrange her face into a lighter, “no worries here” expression for Doug’s consumption. “I’m glad your mom and I had a chance to meet,” she said. She would have liked to ask Eloise if she’d mentioned the marshal to anyone else, but that wasn’t possible with Doug right there. At least the Bowman family wasn’t likely to buy any strange tales she might tell.
“Rory, you have yourself a lovely trip,” Eloise said, tucking her arm through her son’s. “Come along now, Douglas. You know I don’t like cold pancakes.”
Doug wished her a good trip as well, looking relieved that he didn’t have to pick his mother up and carry her home like a truculent two-year-old. They set off across the lawn in deference to Eloise’s bare feet.
Rory was about to get into her car when Eloise stopped abruptly and turned back to her. The smile had vanished, swallowed whole by an expression Rory could best describe as sympathy.
“Something terrible is going to happen,” Eloise intoned solemnly. Then quick as a wink her childlike aspect returned, her smile as bright as ever, and without another word she let her son escort her home.
Chapter 1
According to the map, Tucson was a straight shot southeast on I-10 from Phoenix. What the map failed to indicate was the amount of traffic that plied the route between those two cities on any given day. Rory had been looking forward to an easy drive, during which she could enjoy the unfamiliar landscape of the Sonoran Desert. Instead, she found herself playing the same unnerving game of “dodge the semi” that she played on the Long Island Expressway. However, at speeds of seventy-five and above, it was the expressway on steroids.
Although she couldn’t risk taking her eyes off the road for more than a second or two, she managed to catch glimpses of the desert plain with the hearty scrub that made it unique in the world, according to the tour guide she’d read in preparation for the trip.
Having lived all of her life on a relatively flat island, Rory was enchanted by the way the distant mountains faded into the horizon, like giant roadblocks intended to keep the desert from wandering beyond its allotted space. Everywhere she looked, Zeke was front and center in her thoughts. This was his home, his true place in the world. Or it had been before the twentieth and twenty-first centuries came calling. She wasn’t sure he would even recognize it now. For that matter, she was having a hard time imagining the desert as he’d known it, back when buzzards were the largest things that sailed the skies, and a man alone on horseback had only his gun and his wits to keep him alive.
Her thoughts circled back to the reason she was there—her promise to find out who’d killed Zeke by putting a bullet in his back a hundred and thirty-four years ago. The marshal didn’t seem to care that the killer was also long dead. He stubbornly refused to move on beyond his present limbo without that bit of knowledge. Rory had done all the research it was possible to do from her home computer, and she’d gone through the newspaper archives in Huntington, but she’d come up empty. Tucson was their last hope.
To set the stage for her trip, she’d told her family that she might be visiting a college friend in Arizona sometime in the spring. She couldn’t very well say she was making the trip to find out who’d killed the ghost in her house, or that she was trying to keep a promise she’d made to said ghost, unless she was also interested in an extended vacation in a nicely padded cell. Thanks to Zeke, she could teach a master class in the white lie. Only this time the lie had turned around and bitten her.
“You’re not going to believe this,” her aunt Helene had said in an enthusiastic phone call three weeks after Rory first mentioned her prospective trip.
Rory had braced herself for whatever was coming. When Helene took on a project, it was total immersion. She’d resear
ch it inside out, upside down and sideways. Yet in spite of all her work and best intentions, she often wound up jumping off a cliff without considering the impact of her landing.
“When you said you wanted to go to Arizona, I had this lightbulb moment,” her aunt went on.
Uh-oh. The warning sirens were starting to blare. “I haven’t actually made any plans yet,” Rory said, hoping to defuse whatever bomb was ticking away in Helene’s mind.
“That’s what I figured. So I’ve taken care of it for you.”
Too late.
“All you have to do is pay your share and show up at the airport.”
Her share? Of what? What had Helene signed her up for? With a tangle of questions fighting for air time, a bewildered “What?” was all Rory managed to get out.
Helene was only too happy to fill in the details. It seemed that some of the actors from her Long Island acting troupe, the Way Off Broadway Players, had decided to go on vacation together between productions. But where to go? Enter Helene, stage right, armed with tour books and a soliloquy about the wonders of Arizona.
Once she’d convinced the group that any other destination couldn’t possibly measure up, she’d gamely taken on the job of travel agent. She’d spent hours online and then on the phone, but it was all worth it in the end, she’d proclaimed, since everyone was thrilled with the tour package she’d arranged for them.
Rory hadn’t bothered to point out that “everyone” couldn’t possibly have been thrilled, since “everyone” hadn’t been consulted. Of course, she shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d learned when she was still quite young that Helene sometimes took hostages when she plunged off a cliff.
In the end, she’d decided not to object. Her aunt’s intentions were honorable; plus, she’d freed Rory from the work of planning the trip herself. For all she knew, traveling with the Players might even turn out to be fun. She would simply bow out of their side trip to Gray Wolf Canyon, in the high country near the town of Page, and head down to Tucson on her own.