by Lisa Gardner
“So how long do you think you’ll be in Virginia?”
“Don’t know. Right now, I have more questions than answers, so at this rate it could be a while.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Motel Six.”
“Virginia has more to offer than Motel Six, you know. Ever have some free time, feel like seeing any of the sights …”
He let the invitation trail off politely. She nodded with equal politeness. Then he surprised her by saying quietly, “I ran a background check, Rainie. You don’t have to pretend for me.”
She stiffened. She couldn’t help herself, even if she was supposedly now at peace with her past. Old habits died hard; she found she was relentlessly stroking the icy cold bottle of unconsumed beer.
“You run background checks on all your dates?” she asked finally.
“Man can’t be too careful.”
She gave his muscle-bound build a meaningful look and he rewarded her with a grin.
“You found me at work, asked a lot of questions, and kept following up,” he told her. “Call me old-fashioned, but I like to know more about the women chasing me. Besides, your friend Sheriff Hayes sang your praises from here to the Mississippi—”
“He tell you I was indicted for man one?”
“Charged but never tried.”
“Not everyone sees the difference.”
“I’m from Georgia, honey. We consider all women dangerous; it’s part of their charm.”
“The open-minded men of the South. Who would’ve thought?”
Officer Amity grinned again. He leaned over the old wood table and planted his thick forearms. “I like you,” he said bluntly, “but don’t play me for dumb.”
“I don’t know what you mean—”
“I’m not who you want to have dinner with tonight.”
“Luke,” Rainie declared grimly, “has a big mouth!”
“Sheriff Hayes is a good friend. It’s nice to see they grow them right in Oregon, too. By the end of this evening, however, I’m gonna be even a bigger friend for you.”
“Oh yeah?”
The waitress interrupted them with heaping platters of food. The minute she was gone, Vince said, “Eat your ribs, ma’am. Then I’ll take you to Amanda Quincy’s car.”
Society Hill, Pennsylvania
Bethie was humming when they finally pulled up to her darkened town house. It was nearly ten o’clock; the moon was full and the humidity a soft, fragrant caress against her wind-burned cheeks. It had been a wonderful day, a glorious day, and while the hour was growing late, she still wasn’t ready for it to end.
“What a fabulous evening,” she said gaily.
Tristan smiled at her. Three hours ago, as the day cooled and slid into a purple-hued dusk, he’d taken off his sweater and tucked it around her shoulders. Now she snuggled in soft, cable-knit cotton, inhaling the scent of his cologne and finding it as poignant as his touch earlier in the afternoon. He’d retrieved a navy-blue blazer from the trunk for his own warmth. The jacket was finely cut but there was something about it that nagged at her. Giggling, she’d finally gotten it. He looked like an FBI agent, she teased him. He’d become a G-man. Fortunately, the comment seemed to amuse him.
“What now?” she asked.
“I believe that’s your call, love.”
“Are you playing hard to get?”
“I thought it would be an interesting change of pace.”
Bethie giggled. She was probably still feeling the effects of the champagne, she decided, because she’d never been the giggling schoolgirl type, not even when she’d been a giggling schoolgirl. Today, however, they’d had one bottle of champagne in Pennsylvania Dutch country, then another bottle back in Philadelphia, sitting down at the waterfront after a superb lobster dinner at Bookbinder’s. She’d been worried about driving home, but fortunately the champagne didn’t seem to affect Tristan at all. He was a solidly built man, and one who could apparently hold his liquor.
Interesting, she thought absently, but should a man who’d just had a kidney transplant be able to hold his liquor? She wondered when he took all his pills.
“I don’t think we’re alone anymore,” Tristan murmured.
“What? Where?” She looked around her quiet street wide-eyed. Tristan had his arm draped casually around the back of her seat. She leaned her head closer to him.
“I don’t see anyone,” she said in an exaggerated stage whisper.
“Your neighbor. Through the lace curtains.”
“Ah, good old Betty Wilson. Old bat. She’s always watching me. About time I had something good to show her.” Bethie draped her arms around Tristan’s neck and kissed him full on the mouth. He complied readily, his other arm curling around her back and trying to draw her closer only to have the gearshift get in the way. They broke apart breathlessly, thwarted by bucket seats, and she was struck once more by the taste of him on her lips, and her own desperate hunger for more.
His eyes had grown dark again. She loved it when they held that intense, burning gleam.
“Bethie …” he said thickly.
“Oh God, come inside!”
He smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Virginia
The salvage yard was dark and deserted, but Officer Amity had come well equipped. He handed out two high-powered flashlights, then strapped a fanny pack filled with tools around his waist. Rainie was impressed.
“I didn’t take you for the breaking and entering type,” she told him.
Amity shrugged. “When I called earlier, the owner wasn’t big on cooperation. Salvage yards can be that way. They’ve paid for the vehicles and they’re afraid to have their newfound property seized as part of a police case. Understandable maybe, but why should you and I keep beating our heads against a wall, when we’re both so capable of scaling a chain-link fence?”
“I can do fences,” Rainie assured him. “Dobermans have me a little more concerned.”
“No dogs. I drove by earlier.”
“No dogs? What kind of self-respecting salvage-yard owner doesn’t have a dog?”
“The kind who’s been turned in to the humane society twice and could no longer afford the cruelty-toward-animal fines. Now he has a security company that drives around in hourly intervals. You see headlights, duck.”
“Cool,” Rainie said and started whistling “We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
Five minutes later, they’d scaled the eight-foot-high fence and were making their way through the final resting place for thousands of cars. Compacted cubes of metal were piled into rusted-out heaps. Back ends, front ends, bumpers were scattered about like dismembered limbs. The newer acquisitions sat quietly in long lines, fully formed skeletons still awaiting their fate.
“Sheee—it.” Amity whistled, looking out at two football fields’ worth of wrecked vehicles and untold numbers of tires.
“I’d say look for an SUV,” Rainie murmured, “but that doesn’t exactly limit our options.”
“America’s love for the big automobile,” he agreed. “Kind of ironic that we’re about to compare a Ford Explorer with the proverbial needle.”
“Split up?”
“No.”
Rainie nodded and pretended not to hear the concern in his voice. The moon was full, visibility great for a nighttime rendezvous. Still she was conscious of the total hush, the unnatural still of a cemetery-like place. In the dark, abandoned metal took on lifelike shapes, and it was hard not to turn shadowy corners and feel the hairs prickle at the nape of her neck.
They walked in silence, flashlights slicing through the twisted heaps. Every few feet they’d come to an SUV, check for make and model, then keep on moving. One dozen down, five hundred to go. They stumbled upon one particularly crushed compact car and Rainie recoiled at the stench of dried blood.
“Jesus!” she cried, then stuffed a fist into her mouth to keep from saying more.
Vince swept his flash
light over a four-door sedan that had forcefully become a convertible. The cloth seats had once been blue; now they were stained with ugly splotches of brown.
“I’m guessing car versus semi,” he said.
“I’m guessing decapitation,” Rainie moaned and quickly moved on.
The sound of an approaching engine rumbled through the silence. Rent-a-Cop. They ducked swiftly behind a mountain of twisted chassis, still too close to the bloody convertible and Rainie pinched her nose with her fingers to block out the smell. She was thinking of the medical report now, the one Quincy had no doubt read time after time after time. How Amanda Quincy had struck the telephone pole at approximately 35 miles per hour. How the force of that impact pushed the front bumper down and the rear bumper up, launching her unsecured body into the air. Her body had hit the steering wheel first. The column had crumpled as it was designed to do, sparing her internal organs but doing nothing to halt her flight. Next had come the dashboard, bending her body like a rag doll at the waist. Finally came the metal frame of the windshield, not designed to crumple on impact, and now driving deep into Mandy’s brain while the unyielding glass crushed all the bones in her face.
The security guard finally moved on. Amity and Rainie stood. She said, “I know how to find the Explorer.”
“The windshield?”
“Yeah.” And maybe it was horrible, but things moved much faster from there.
They finally found the dark green remnant at the very edge of the salvage yard; Rainie called it a remnant because it certainly didn’t resemble a vehicle anymore. The entire back end had been clipped off, no doubt soldered together with some rear-ended SUV’s front end by the auto world’s equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein. The runners were gone. Both doors and the front seats stripped. The tires shed. What was left looked like a gutted fish head, lying on the gaping back hole where its body used to be while its crushed bumper smiled obscenely in the dark.
“Spooky,” Amity muttered.
“Let’s not linger.”
“I’ll second that.”
Officer Amity opened up his fanny pack and spread out his wares. He was the proud owner of two pairs of latex gloves—a little late to protect the evidence now, Rainie thought, but what the hell. He’d also brought a penknife, a screwdriver, a wrench, four Baggies, and interestingly enough, a magnifying glass.
He handed her the screwdriver, and wordlessly they went to work. First they took off the trim piece of the B-pillar, exposing the plastic casing around the driver-side seat belt. Rainie tested the strap with her hand, and true to Amity’s report, it spooled toothlessly onto the floor. He held up the flashlight to provide better lighting and before they went any farther, she got out the magnifying glass. She held it up to the casing. Then she looked somberly at Amity. The plastic casing bore deep scratch marks: they were not the first to pry it open.
“I hereby do solemnly swear,” he murmured, “to disassemble all ‘nonoperative’ seat belts in all auto accidents to come.”
Rainie exchanged the magnifying glass for the penknife and cracked the mechanism open. Inside was a giant white plastic gear, with one main white plastic paw and one small back-up lever in case the primary failed. In theory, when the seat belt was pulled forward, it turned the gear, which then caught on the lever and froze. Except that in this case, the main paw had been filed down and the back-up lever clipped off. Rainie pulled on the seat belt again, and they both watched the white gear spin around and around and around.
“If she’d taken it in,” Amity said after a moment, “the mechanic guy would’ve caught it.”
“So our guy had to make sure she didn’t have the vehicle serviced.”
“Isn’t that risky, though? If you’re going to tamper with a seat belt, why do it a whole month before? Seems like you’d do it day of, or maybe I’ve just been watching too much Murder, She Wrote.”
“Prejudices,” Rainie said. “Yours, mine, any cop’s. She knows the seat belt is broken, so she doesn’t even put it on. And when you arrive at a scene where the driver is drunk and hasn’t even bothered to strap in …”
“You think she’s pretty stupid,” Amity said quietly. “You think, whether you mean to or not, that she got what she deserved. And then you don’t ask too many questions.”
“Nobody looks too closely,” Rainie agreed. She was frowning though, chewing on her bottom lip. “It still seems risky. I mean, if you wanted to kill someone and have it look like an accident, would you simply tamper with a seat belt and hope fate sooner or later takes its course?”
“Victim has a history of drinking and driving. Perp provides the alcohol, then lets her get behind the wheel. Chances are she won’t make it home.”
“Are they? A shocking number of people drink and drive every day without crashing. Look at Mandy, she’d already done it dozens of times before.”
“Maybe he wanted an out. Think of it this way: even if we’d caught on right away, how are you going to prove who tampered with the seat belt weeks before a collision? That just leaves us with looking at who got her drunk. Victim was of age. Serving her isn’t a crime, and letting her drive is back to being a civil matter, not criminal.”
“Someone who wanted to plan a murder, but wanted to be cautious,” Rainie murmured, then firmly determined, “no, I don’t buy it. If you’re going to go to this much trouble to kill someone, you’re going to see it through. You’re going to make sure you got the job done. Oh shit, we’re idiots!”
She grabbed the magnifying glass and before Amity could react she was around the mutilated hunk of metal to the passenger’s side. She pulled on the seat belt. It caught and held. Perfectly good, of course. It would need to be.
“You son of a bitch,” Rainie said. And then Amity was holding the flashlight and she was running over the tight weave of the strap with the magnifying glass. “There! Right there!”
The fabric buckled and warped, a two-inch span where the fibers had been stretched as the SUV hit the pole, the seat belt caught, and a body flew against the strap.
“Meet passenger number two!” Rainie cried triumphantly, and then a heartbeat later, “Oh, Quincy, I am so sorry.”
15
Society Hill, Pennsylvania
The minute Bethie opened her front door, her security system sounded a warning beep. She crossed the threshold and worked the keypad. As was her custom, she entered in the disarm code first, then requested a survey of the various security zones. All quiet on the western front.
Tristan shut the front door behind her. Then locked it.
“Nice system,” he commented.
“Believe it or not, as part of our divorce decree, my ex-husband must provide basic security for the girls and me for the rest of our lives. Not that he minds. Quincy has been at his job a little too long; he sees homicidal maniacs everywhere.”
“You can never be too sure,” Tristan said.
“Perhaps.” Bethie set down the picnic basket next to the entry table. It needed to be cleaned out, but that could wait until morning. She started humming, thinking about waking up with Tristan and the various possibilities for breakfast in bed. When was the last time she’d made omelets or biscuits or crêpes suzette? When was the last time she’d started her day with anything more than black coffee and a boring piece of toast? She was so happy she’d gone out with Tristan today. And she was even happier that she’d taken these first few baby steps back into the land of the living.
She glanced absently at her answering machine and was surprised to see that she had eight new messages.
“Do you mind?” she asked, nodding her head toward the digital display. “It will only take a minute.”
“By all means. Do you have some sherry? I can pour us each a glass while I wait.”
Bethie directed him toward the small wet bar in her dining room, hoping her cleaning woman had been conscientious about checking the crystal decanter for dust; Bethie had last had a glass of sherry five years ago. Well, this was a night for new beginnin
gs.
She picked up a little spiral notepad and hit play.
The first message was a hang up, from seven-ten that morning. The caller had just missed her: she’d left with Tristan only moments before. Then came another hang up. Then another. Finally, a person: Pierce calling shortly after noon. “We need to talk,” her ex-husband said in that crisp manner of his. “It’s about Mandy.”
Bethie frowned. She felt the first prickle of unease. Another hang up. Another hang up. Then another one. The muscles in her abdomen tightened. She realized now that she was steeling herself for something bad, preparing her body for the blow.
It came at precisely 8:02 P.M. Pierce, once more on the machine. “Elizabeth, I’ve been trying to reach you all day. I’ll be honest, I’m very worried. When you get this message, please call me immediately on my cell phone, regardless of time. Some things have come up. And Bethie—maybe we need to talk about Tristan Shandling because I tried to run a background check on him today and no such person exists. Call me.”
Bethie’s gaze came up. She fumbled with the volume switch on her answering machine but it was already too late. Tristan stood in the doorway, holding two tiny glasses of sherry and gazing at her curiously.
“You asked Pierce to run a background check on me?”
She nodded dumbly. The blood had drained out of her face. She felt suddenly light-headed, unsteady on her feet.
“Why, Elizabeth Quincy, you have finally surprised me.”
Tristan set down the two glasses on a side table. Run, Bethie thought. But she was in her own house, she didn’t know where to go. And then she was thinking of all those textbooks Pierce used to have in his office. The day she’d come home and found her girls staring wide-eyed at a pile they’d pulled down from the bookshelf, color photo after color photo of mutilated female flesh, naked, tortured bodies with hacked-off breasts.
“Who … who are you?”
“Supervisory Special Agent Pierce Quincy, of course. I have a driver’s license that says so.”
“But … but you have the scar. I touched it, I know!” Her voice was rising.