Blue Smoke and Murder

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Then his skimming slammed to a halt. The biggest files were dense JPEGs of Jill’s paintings. Several of them hung in various rooms at Pomona College, a reminder to all fine arts students that talent could be honed, but it couldn’t be taught. You either had it or you didn’t.

  Zach didn’t.

  Jill did.

  The paintings were landscapes taken from her memory—cattle at the water tank, a horse with its butt to the snowy wind, a barbwire fence receding into nothingness against the wild immensity of the land. Zach could taste the snow, breathe the heady wind that had known only stone mountaintops, feel the thickness of the horse’s winter coat turned against the cold.

  Does Faroe know that she’s an artist?

  If he did, he hadn’t said anything.

  Zach finished skimming the files, then brooded over the JPEGs of Jill’s art, wishing he could see it more closely. But there was no time for a flying trip to Pomona and, hopefully, no need.

  Silently he looked through the windshield and digested the raw data, turning it over and around in his mind, connecting facts and speculations, scattering question marks across his mental landscape. When he was done, he was back where he started: Jill was an unusual woman descended from a long line of unusual women.

  Stubborn women.

  Determined women.

  Same thing, actually. Just viewed from another angle.

  He looked over and saw her watching him with eyes the color of spring grass. Her hair burned with a soft fire that made him want to touch it.

  “Morning,” he said. “Well, afternoon, actually.”

  She looked at her watch. “I can’t believe I slept while you were driving.”

  “I’m a good driver.”

  “You could be Jesus on wheels and I still wouldn’t sleep.”

  Zach thought of her file. “A control thing.”

  She shrugged, then stretched. “Why did you stop here?”

  “The road to the cabin looked rough enough to shake change out of my pockets.”

  Jill realized that he’d stopped so that she could keep on sleeping. The fact both amused and charmed her. She was used to hauling her own weight—and then some—when it came to any job. The men on the river had joked about it, but they were intimidated by her. She’d hiked, rowed, and worked every one of them into the ground.

  It was the only way to get their respect.

  “Thanks,” Jill said. “But it wasn’t necessary. I can do with very little sleep.”

  “No problem. It gave me time to go over some of Shawna’s research. So tell me, what’s a woman with degrees in computer science, art history, and art doing as a river guide?”

  Jill’s answer was a lifted eyebrow.

  “You were home-schooled,” Zach said, “went to Pomona College on a full-ride scholarship when you were seventeen, left four years later with three degrees, and went to work as a river guide—rafts and kayaks. I was just curious why you did that rather than teaching or selling art or making money in the tech sector.”

  “I like being outdoors.” Then the last of the sleepy fuzz vanished from Jill’s brain. She hadn’t told Zach or Faroe that much about herself. “Did Shawna investigate me?”

  It was more of an accusation than a question, but Zach answered anyway. “Of course.”

  “I asked for help, not an intrusion into my privacy.”

  He almost smiled. “Hard to have one without the other. But don’t worry, everything so far has come from open sources. The Canyon County Gazette followed you like paparazzi. Big file of news clips. You smoked your SAT. Perfect score. Quite an accomplishment for anybody, much less a girl home-schooled on the Arizona Strip.”

  “Why did you investigate me?”

  “Because you’re in trouble. Hard to help if you don’t know much about the person you’re helping.”

  She chewed on that for a time. She didn’t like it, but it made a sideways kind of sense.

  “Mom worked out a deal with the satellite company,” Jill said. “Kind of like a scholarship for bright, dirt-poor kids. Forty hours a week of free computer time.”

  “Most kids would have spent it playing games.”

  “I loved learning things as much as I loved working on the ranch. Freedom everywhere I looked.”

  “Freedom, huh?” Zach absorbed the fact. “Where did you live before your mother came home and took back her maiden name?”

  “What does that have to do with paintings and death threats?”

  “Nothing. Everything. I won’t know until you tell me.”

  “I lived in a place like Hildale,” she said curtly. “I wasn’t quite a Creeker, but close enough.”

  Jill watched Zach. His eyes were slightly narrowed, looking at a horizon she couldn’t see.

  “Creeker,” Zach said after a moment, flipping through mental files. “Based on the days when Hildale and Colorado City were a single city on two sides of the creek. Fundamental Mormon community. Multiple wives required for a man to get into heaven. Bonnets, long sleeves and longer skirts, minimal education for girls, followed by real early marriages, usually to a much older man. Kids. Lots of them. Brings an entirely new meaning to the term ‘blended family.’ Midwives, not doctors. No birth certificates.”

  “Yeah,” Jill said. “It makes it easier for the poofers to vanish and no questions asked.”

  “Poofers?”

  “People—women, babies, or kids—who are here one day and gone the next. Dead and buried without ceremony or notice. Nobody ever says their name again or talks about how the poofers died.”

  The idea left a nasty taste in Zach’s mouth, but all he said was “How many sister-wives did your father have?”

  She flinched. “You didn’t get that out of the Canyon Gazette. They avoid the whole subject of plural marriages, poofers, and anything else that might make the patriarchy frown. Then there are the Sons and Daughters of Perdition, the men and women who leave the church. My mother was a Daughter of Perdition.”

  “Are you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not to me,” Zach said. “As for knowing about fundamental Mormons, I soak up all kinds of learning from a variety of sources. No multiple degrees, though. Formal education didn’t do it for me.” Between Garland Frost and working for the feds, I learned more than most people ever do, or ever want to. “Is that why your mother left your father? She didn’t want a sister-wife?”

  “What does this have to do with—”

  “The paintings came down through your family,” Zach said neutrally. “That means your family is important to the investigation.”

  Jill hissed a word through her teeth. She hated talking about her so-called family. With impatient motions, she opened the door and got out of the truck. “I need to move around. I’ve done enough sitting.”

  Zach got out and followed her. She covered the ground easily, quickly, with the stride of someone used to hiking miles wearing a backpack. Smoke jumpers, the military special ops, and dedicated trekkers all had that walk.

  None of them looked as good as Jill from the rear.

  Deliberately he glanced away. Last thing he needed was an inconvenient lust for a client. Especially a client with an art and art history background who wasn’t in any hurry to talk about the paintings that somebody cared enough about to cut up her car and threaten to kill her for.

  I know you like her, Faroe, but it has to have occurred to you that Jill could have painted the things herself.

  It sure has occurred to me.

  And the more Zach saw of the Breck ranch—poverty central or he’d eat what was left of the barn—the more it seemed likely that Jill wouldn’t mind having some money to play with.

  She circled the black ruins and went to the untouched metal windmill that was drawing water up for a ranch that no longer existed. She stared at the cool water pouring into the big tank, spilling over, filling ditches to irrigate pastures where stock no longer grazed.

  Zach waited and watched Jill. It didn�
��t take a detective to figure out that family life wasn’t her favorite topic.

  She stared at water flowing into the tank, ripples chasing across the shimmering surface, the liquid of life overflowing to run down irrigation ditches.

  Just when Zach had decided that St. Kilda would have to dig up the family past for him, Jill started talking again.

  “I have three full brothers,” she said evenly. “Older. A lot older. Mom had a series of miscarriages in between and after the last son was born. When she went to the local midwife, she was told that she should pray more, it was God’s will that she bear children. Mom nearly died trying to carry out God’s will. Then she went to Salt Lake City and found a doctor who didn’t put religion before his patient’s needs.”

  Zach watched the expressions shifting over Jill’s face like shadows over the landscape. He listened with an intensity that she didn’t notice. She didn’t like her past, but it was very much a part of her.

  “Whatever the doctor gave her worked,” Jill said. “No more miscarriages. No more babies, either. About that time my father became a fundamentalist. He moved everyone to New Eden, set up a house, married a sixteen-year-old, and had more children. He took a third wife. She was fifteen. Babies. A lot of them. Mom stuck with him.”

  Though Jill’s voice was even, her eyes were narrow, her mouth flat. She didn’t understand her mother. She didn’t like her father.

  She detested fundamental Mormonism.

  I was raised by women in a militantly testosterone-free zone.

  Now Zach knew why.

  “Then Mom got pregnant with me,” Jill said. “I suspect she thought she was safe from the baby mill—menopause and all that—and stopped whatever birth control the doctor had given her.”

  “That’s how I came into the world,” Zach said.

  Jill smiled crookedly. “So you were an ‘oops’ baby, too.”

  “Pretty much.”

  She let out a long breath, and with it some of the tension that had come when she talked about the childhood she’d tried very hard to forget.

  “Mom hung on to the pregnancy, had me, and gritted her teeth when her husband took a fourth, really young wife,” Jill said. “At least I assume my mother gritted her teeth. Maybe she was relieved that he wasn’t dogging her sheets anymore.” Jill blew out another breath. “Whatever. She stuck with him until she overheard plans for my marriage to one of the elders. I was eight.”

  Zach’s eyebrows shot up and he said something under his breath.

  “Oh, the marriage wasn’t supposed to be consummated until I started having periods,” she said acidly. “You see, the elders were worried about me. I wasn’t a good little fundamental wallflower. So they arranged for me to move in with some old man’s extended family until I was ready to have babies. Then I’d be his fifth wife.”

  Zach didn’t know he was angry until he felt the adrenaline lighting up his blood. “That’s illegal.”

  “Not in fundamental Mormon country. The mainline church doesn’t support plural wives, but it doesn’t exactly sweat to exterminate it, either. It’s an open secret in the Mormon West.”

  Zack watched while Jill bent over, picked up a rock, and sent it out over the pasture with a vicious snap of her arm.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Mom somehow got word to her aunt.”

  “Modesty Breck.”

  “Yes. A few days later Modesty came and brought us to the Breck ranch. I shed my polyg clothes—bonnet and long skirts—cut off my long braids with a kitchen knife. I learned to ride, rope, brand, handle hay bales, and mend fence.”

  “Your father just let your mother go?” Zach asked.

  “Oh, he came to take us back. Once.”

  “What happened?”

  Jill’s smile was both real and cold. “Modesty ran him off with a snake gun. Told him if he ever walked on Breck land again, she’d kill him and bury him in the kitchen garden, because all he was good for was fertilizer.”

  Zach laughed. “I think I would have liked your great-aunt.”

  “She wouldn’t have liked you. She didn’t have any use for men. Mom took back her maiden name and changed mine, too. None of the Breck women have entered a tabernacle since.”

  “Yet you live in an overwhelmingly Mormon county.”

  “That’s why I was home-schooled.”

  “No wonder you don’t trust the sheriff,” Zach said. “You don’t trust anyone in civil authority.”

  “Not when the Latter-day Saints are involved. Ned Purcell is an elder in the church. Every elected official around here is publicly devout. More than a few of them have plural marriages, though nobody talks about it.”

  “School roll call must get monotonous,” Zach said dryly.

  “Oh, they’re not stupid. Everybody but the first wife picks a last name out of a telephone book. Daddy is called uncle, except for the children of the first wife.” Jill fired another rock into the pasture. “When it comes to women, this place is stuck in the 1850s.”

  “You’ll be happy to know that St. Kilda Consulting is firmly grounded in the twenty-first century,” Zach said.

  “Joe Faroe certainly is. He respected my skill on the river. Actually, he enjoyed it. He really didn’t care that a female was better at something physical than he was. That’s pretty rare in a man, no matter what the year.”

  “You’d like his wife.”

  “I already like his son. There’s nothing wrong with Lane that a few more years won’t cure. He’s going to be a good man.”

  “Full circle.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “From your childhood to the river where you saved Lane’s life to my knocking on your hotel room door because someone threatened to kill you. Funny thing…”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  Zach looked back at her. “You haven’t mentioned the paintings once.”

  18

  HOLLYWOOD

  SEPTEMBER 14

  1:00 P.M.

  No problemo,” Score said into the telephone. “I’ve got the kind of evidence you can’t use in court, but he’ll sweat big bucks after you show him the airline manifest and the photos from the kiddy whorehouse in Thailand. He’ll not only pay you alimony, he’ll kiss your ass with gratitude for not selling everything to the Enquirer.” He paused. “No, the Enquirer won’t pay more for the photos than he will. Trust me on that.”

  Another phone rang. Someone in the front office picked it up. Seconds later, a light blinked on his intercom, telling him that his next appointment was waiting. He wrapped up his conversation, assured the client that the photos were coming by special messenger to her lawyer, hung up, and hit the intercom button.

  “Send her in,” Score said.

  His door opened to one of his tech specialists. At the moment her hair was dyed black with green tips. The nose and lip studs were missing, but the tongue bell was still there.

  Made him drool to think about it, so he didn’t. She was one of his best techs. He didn’t care if she showed up naked with pins stuck everywhere.

  But she had a way of redlining his temper. No respect.

  “Sit down,” Score said. “What do you have?”

  “Not much,” Amy said. “I ran it through every electronic cleaner program we have. Still sounds like she packed the bug in a suitcase stuffed with clothes.”

  “Better than nothing.”

  Amy shrugged and handed over some pages of script.

  A glance at the first page told Score what he already knew. The locater was alive and well. The subject was about twenty miles from the old lady’s ranch. Heading home, because there sure wasn’t anywhere else in that part of the world to go.

  “Huh. Did she rent wheels?” he asked.

  “If she did, the bug wasn’t in range for the transaction. But the progress of the locater is right in line with what I’d expect from a car on the road.”

  “That’s the trouble with satellite phones. Too expensive for most people to keep close like a cell pho
ne. It’s probably out of voice range a lot of the time.”

  “She hasn’t used it,” Amy agreed. “Maybe she bought a cell phone.”

  “Not from any carrier in Mesquite or Page.”

  Hacking into business records was Score’s specialty. Cell phones, landlines, credit cards, airlines, hotels, restaurants, jewelry stores, state and federal government—if information was out there, so were Score’s clever employees.

  “Maybe the cell carrier hasn’t registered her account in their main computer yet,” Amy said.

  “Or maybe she got smart and bought a throwaway,” he said.

  “That’ll make it tough for us.”

  Score didn’t answer. He was scanning the second page of the script. “Two voices? You sure?”

  “One female, same pattern as you recorded when you called her,” Amy said, scratching her head with a pencil. “One male, identity unknown.”

  Frowning, Score read the few verifiable words to come out of the mush of sound that the bug had sent to his computer. Then he swore under his breath. The word paintings had appeared more than once.

  Is she talking about them being burned?

  Is she selling them?

  Does she really have them or were the JPEGs pre-burn files?

  Is it all a scam?

  Had the old lady’s grandniece been in on it from the jump?

  The garbled signal didn’t have any answers. Neither did his own experience with Modesty and Jillian Breck. Modesty had died before she talked. Jill had been clever enough to avoid his trap altogether.

  Even ducks know what to keep away from during hunting season. Dodging me in Mesquite didn’t exactly require big smarts on her part.

  But it irritated the hell out of him.

  Score tossed the script aside with a curse. “Keep after it. And if that bug moves from its present location, tell me ASAP.”

  “How far? The government is dicking with the GPS again. Three-hundred-foot radius of error.”

  “Set up a one-mile guard perimeter. Tell me if or when she breaks that fence. Even ten feet beyond that mile. Got it?”