Arizona Heat

by Linda Lael Miller

  “That’s a bullshit, politically correct term for suspect,” Jolie told me.

  “You don’t think she could actually have done this?” I challenged, furious because the possibility, so readily dismissed before, suddenly seemed more viable.

  “What do we really know about Greer?” Jolie asked reasonably. “She’s a stranger, remember? And she’s being blackmailed—she told us that herself—so it’s safe to assume we might find some nasty surprises if we went poking around in her background.”

  “She’s our sister,” I argued.

  “That doesn’t mean she isn’t a killer,” Jolie pointed out.

  “She wouldn’t!”

  “Wouldn’t she?”

  “Jolie, stop. You know better than to think Greer—Greer—is some kind of monster!”

  “Chill, Moje. I’ll be there in half an hour. We can talk more then.”

  She hung up.

  I hung up.

  I flung the phone onto the couch and nearly hit Justin Braydaven, who must have blipped in while I was pacing and ranting at Jolie.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought about you, and here I was.”

  I stopped. I’d meant to look Justin up on Google, find out how he’d died, but I’d been too busy. No time like the present, I thought. Greer wasn’t home, the police hadn’t arrived and Jolie was still thirty minutes out. I went to the computer, a laptop I’d borrowed from Jolie since my desktop was still at the apartment, and logged on. There was the daily threatening email from my ex-husband’s girlfriend, Tiffany, who had been riding with Nick the night he died. She’d been thrown through the windshield and permanently maimed, and for some mysterious Tiffany reason, she blamed me for her disfigurement.

  I tucked the message into the Death Threat file and forgot about it.

  “My mom isn’t doing too well,” Justin said.

  I looked back at him over one shoulder. “Are there any other kids in the family?” I asked hopefully.

  Justin shook his head. “Just me and old Pepper,” he said sadly, “and he’s about on his last legs. Poor old dog. If I died six years ago, that means he’s almost fourteen. When he goes, I don’t know what Mom will do.”

  I went to the Google page and typed Justin’s full name into the search line. “Does she have a job? Hobbies?” The Damn Fool’s Guide to Insensitivity, page forty-three. But I was trying.

  Justin didn’t seem offended. He simply sighed and said, “She works at home, doing billing for a credit card company in a back bedroom. And her hobby is ordering stuff off QVC.”

  There were something like seven thousand references to Justin on the web, according to Google, but I wasn’t going to have to wade through them. The first one told the story.

  “You were killed in a drive-by shooting,” I said.

  There it was again, that ole sensitivity o’ mine.

  Justin winced. “What was I doing at the time?”

  “Waiting for a streetlight to change after a concert,” I answered, turning in my chair. “If it’s any comfort, they caught the perp. He’s doing life in the state pen.”

  Justin absorbed the news with admirable ease. “Then I guess I’m not hanging around here waiting for my killer to be caught, like Gillian is.”

  My heart seized. “Did she tell you that’s why she’s here? In sign language or something?”

  “No,” Justin said. Then he reached for the TV remote, lowered the screen expertly and flipped to a rock-video channel. “You had me ask her if she knew who killed her. It was no great leap to guess why she’s still around. The question is, why am I still around?”

  I thought I knew the answer to that one, though I wasn’t about to say so.

  I do have some sensitivity, after all. There are moments when I positively exude it.

  Justin hadn’t gone into the Light, if there was such a thing, because his mother couldn’t—or wouldn’t—let go.

  Chapter Four

  MY CELL PHONE rang again. Justin picked it up off the couch cushion and tossed it to me. I checked the caller ID panel.

  Tucker.

  “Hello,” I said, trying not to sound breathless.

  “There’s some bad news coming down, Moje,” he replied.

  “I know,” I responded. “Alex Pennington was found dead in the desert today. Full of bullet holes.”

  Too late, I realized I’d made a mistake. I wasn’t supposed to know Alex had been pumped full of lead. And Jolie would get in a lot of trouble, maybe even lose her job, if I answered Tucker’s inevitable question.

  “How did you find out?” he asked.

  I closed my eyes. Opened them again. Logged off the internet. “I’m a detective,” I said lamely. “I have my sources.”

  Tucker thrust out an exasperated sigh. “Yeah,” he retorted. “Your sister, Jolie, the crime-scene tech. She’s so lucky you’re not talking to any other cop on the planet right now. Look it up in one of your Damn Fool’s Guides, Moje—this is a serious breach of ethics.”

  “Got it,” I said. “But isn’t it a breach of ethics for you to call and tell me about Alex’s death before the next of kin has been notified?”

  He laughed, but it was a raw, broken sound. “You have a point,” he said. “I hate it when you’re right.”

  “Get used to it,” I replied. “It happens at least sixty-five percent of the time.”

  “Damn Fool’s Guide to Stupid Statistics?”

  “Very funny. Hilarious, in fact.”

  “I’m going crazy, Moje. I need to see you.”

  “Are you still living with Allison?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry,” I chimed, with a brightness I certainly didn’t feel. “All booked up.”

  “Moje, be reasonable, will you? I’m not sleeping with her.”

  “So you say.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  My eyes started to burn. “I want to. I really do. But the map of that emotional territory is clearly marked ‘Here be dragons.’”

  Tucker didn’t answer. What could he have said?

  “How’s the investigation going?” I asked, to get things started again. I wanted to hold Tucker in my arms, get naked with him and lose myself in the wonderful world of multiple orgasms. I couldn’t, because even if he wasn’t having sex with Allison, he was in too deep. So I settled for stretching the conversation as far as I could, just so I could hear the sound of his voice.

  Pitiful.

  “It’s not,” Tucker said glumly.

  I decided it might be in my best interests to be forthcoming about my plans to visit Helen Erland that evening, though I wasn’t about to let him know she was trying to arrange for me to see Vince in jail. He would have blocked that, on general principle. He’d hear about it after the fact, of course, but by then it would be too late.

  I threw him a bone. Part of the truth. But, hey, that’s better than nothing, isn’t it?

  “Mrs. Erland asked me to investigate Gillian’s murder,” I said, and braced myself for meteor impact. Oceans were going to overflow. Continents would shift. A new ice age would begin.

  And here’s me, the flash-frozen mammoth with fresh grass in its mouth.

  “When,” Tucker countered evenly, “did you speak with Helen?”

  “Today at the convenience store where she works,” I answered after swallowing. “Gillian appeared in my car at Walmart, and she wanted to see her mother. So I took her there.”

  “Mojo, if you compromise this case—”

  “I might solve it, you know.”

  “As far as the sheriff’s office is concerned, it is solved.”

  “Not what you said on the news this morning, Detective Dar
roch.”

  “Look, Mojo, there’s an official investigation going on here, and it’s delicate.”

  I ignored that. I was in charge of the unofficial investigation. “Helen doesn’t think he did it. Vince, I mean. And neither does Gillian.”

  “Helen is out of her head with grief, and she doesn’t want to believe Erland’s guilty. As for Gillian—well, I hate to tell you this, Sheepshanks, but ghost testimony doesn’t hold up in court.”

  I glanced in Justin’s direction, hoping he’d left.

  He was still sitting on the couch, and he was listening. For all I knew, he could hear Tucker’s side of the conversation as well as mine.

  “It’s not easy being a ghost,” I said.

  Tucker sighed again. He sighed a lot whenever we talked about my strange new talent for seeing dead people. I could only conclude that he wanted me for my body, not my mind.

  It was a sure bet it wasn’t my detective skills.

  “Moje,” Tucker said. “I’m not sleeping with Allison.”

  I would have replied, “And I’m not sleeping with you,” if Justin hadn’t been there, taking it all in.

  “Whatever,” I answered.

  “Stay away from Helen Erland.”

  “No. But thanks for the input.”

  “Mojo—”

  I hung up.

  “I could find out if he’s sleeping with her,” Justin said.

  “Justin,” I answered, “don’t help.”

  He grinned. “It’s not like I don’t have time on my hands,” he reasoned. “I could help you solve the case, too.”

  “How?”

  “By spying on people. I’m invisible to most of them, remember. That could come in very handy.”

  “I’ve got a better idea, Justin,” I said. “Go home.”

  “I can’t. My mom’s too sad. It’s a bummer.”

  “That isn’t the home I was talking about.”

  “I have to wait for Pepper,” he told me decisively. “He’s old and he might get lost or something. It won’t be long, and I might as well make myself useful in the meantime.”

  My throat closed and my sinuses clogged up instantly.

  “Do you think they let dogs into heaven?” Justin asked. “Because I’m not going if they don’t.”

  I started to cry.

  Justin blipped out.

  Alive or dead, men can’t stand tears.

  * * *

  JOLIE ARRIVED WHILE I was rooting through the cupboards looking for something that could reasonably be expected to morph into lunch.

  “You look terrible,” she said after letting herself in.

  “Do you think dogs are allowed in heaven?” I asked.

  “Sit down,” Jolie ordered. “You’re a train wreck.”

  I slumped into a chair at the kitchen table.

  Jolie washed her hands at the sink—a good thing, since she’d probably been dropping pieces of Alex Pennington into evidence bags all morning—and opened a can of soup. “Greer’s not back from shopping yet?” she asked, getting out a saucepan.

  I shook my head.

  “It will be interesting to see how she reacts to the news,” Jolie said, plopping the contents of the soup can into the saucepan. “Do you ever buy groceries?”

  I ignored the grocery gibe. Jolie cooked. It made sense that she had a fixation with supermarkets. To me, they were just places where I ran into crazy stalkers and dead people. “Greer,” I said evenly, “did not riddle Alex with bullets and leave him to rot in the desert.”

  “Don’t be so free with the gory details, okay? I could get fired if anybody finds out I called you from the crime scene.”

  Guilt washed over me. I bit my lower lip. Who needs collagen when you can get the plump look by gnawing on yourself? “I might have let something slip to Tucker,” I confessed.

  Jolie stared at me, her eyes going huge and round. She was beautiful, even clad in khaki shorts, a Phoenix PD T-shirt and hiking boots. Her long hair, done up in about a million skinny braids, was tied back with a twisted bandana. “Mojo Sheepshanks,” she said, “you didn’t tell him I told you about Alex?”

  “He guessed,” I said.

  “Right,” Jolie snapped, glaring.

  “Not to worry,” I said, holding up two fingers pressed close together. “He and I are like that.”

  Jolie swirled an index finger around one temple. “You and Tucker are like this. Both of you are crazy!”

  “Tucker isn’t,” I said.

  Jolie turned back to the soup, her spine rigid.

  “You’re going to have to sit with Greer tonight,” I told her. “So I hope you don’t have any plans.”

  Jolie didn’t look at me. “And where will you be?”

  “I have some investigating to do.”

  Jolie muttered something I didn’t quite catch, but I thought I heard the words real job in there somewhere.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said. “And how hard can it be to hang out with Greer for a couple of hours?”

  Jolie rounded her eyes at me.

  Just then the front door crashed open, and Greer came in. She went immediately to the cupboards and started ripping through them, a one-armed marauder. She found a package of Oreos—Nick liked to smell them, and even though I seriously doubted he’d ever be back, I kept them around just in case—and started stuffing them into her mouth, two at a time.

  I figured a size-twenty-two wardrobe might be one of the dark secrets hidden in my foster sister’s mysterious past.

  “Alex is dead,” she said, spewing crumbs. “He’s dead!”

  Jolie and I exchanged glances.

  “Sit down, Greer,” I said as Jolie pulled back a chair and pushed her into it. Greer looked up at us, her mouth rimmed with cookie dust.

  “What?” I threw in when nobody spoke, hoping it sounded as if the news had come as a shock.

  “The bastard isn’t off boinking some floozy,” Greer informed us, wild-eyed. “He’s a cadaver!”

  “Calm down,” I said, “and tell us what happened.”

  Greer’s eyes filled with tears. She opened her mouth, shoved in three more Oreos and tried to talk around them. “I just got a call from the police,” she said, the words garbled. “Some hikers stumbled across Alex’s body in the desert this morning. He’d been shot.”

  I tossed Jolie a See? She’s surprised kind of look.

  Jolie took the soup off the burner and set the saucepan aside.

  “What am I going to do?” Greer asked.

  Jolie pulled up a third chair and sat down. “You can start by telling us whether or not you killed him,” she said.

  Greer gasped, and then went into a choking fit. Obviously she still hadn’t swallowed all the Oreo residue.

  I jumped up and pounded on her back, while Jolie got her some water.

  “Killed him?” Greer gasped once she’d recovered the ability to breathe.

  “The man was probably cheating on you,” Jolie said evenly after flinging a shut-up glance in my direction. “He’d moved out and you hired Sherlock here to get the proof. The police are going to want to know if you offed him, Greer, or paid somebody else to do it.”

  Greer bolted for the bathroom.

  Power vomiting ensued.

  “Good work,” I told Jolie in a harsh whisper. “Why didn’t you just ask her how much she stood to inherit and when she plans to remarry?”

  Jolie glowered me into silence.

  We both got up and tracked Greer to the bathroom.

  She was on her knees, with her head over the toilet bowl, dry heaving.

  When she stopped, I soaked a washcloth in cool water and squatted to wipe off her face.

  Jolie flushe
d the john and spritzed the air freshener.

  “You can’t possibly think I would murder my own husband!” Greer sobbed as Jolie and I helped her to her feet. I looked at her cast, due to come off in a few weeks, and wished it had been on her right arm instead of her left. If it had been, she couldn’t have shot Alex.

  “Look, Greer,” Jolie said fiercely, though she was stroking Greer’s back as she spoke, “the cops will give you a day or two to catch your breath, then they’re going to be in your face, wanting a lot of answers. Talk to us.”

  “I didn’t kill Alex!”

  We ushered her back to the living room and sat her down in a leather armchair, facing the empty fireplace.

  “You can tell us if you did,” Jolie said. “We’ll help you.”

  Greer shook her head. “It was probably that bitch Beverly,” she said. “I need wine.”

  “No, you don’t,” Jolie argued quietly. “I know you’ve had a shock, and I’m sorry. But you can’t afford to crawl into a bottle and pretend none of this is happening, because it is. When did you see Alex last?”

  Greer considered. “The day after Lillian’s funeral,” she replied. “He came by to pick up some of his things. He said he wasn’t really leaving—that we just needed some time apart to get perspective.”

  Greer might have been getting perspective, I thought. Alex had probably been getting nooky instead.

  “Where was he going?” I asked after a sour glance at Jolie, thinking hey, I’m the detective around here.

  “He said he’d be staying at the Biltmore.”

  That figured. The Biltmore is posh—nothing but the best for Alex Pennington, M.D., and the bimbo du jour.

  “Did you check?” Jolie pressed. “Call the hotel to find out if he was really there alone and not staying with a girlfriend?”

  Greer’s right hand knotted into a white-knuckled fist. “No,” she said, gazing up at me. “I paid Mojo to do that kind of dirty work.”

  “I was a little busy,” I pointed out.

  “I want my retainer back,” Greer said.

  “Fine,” I told her.

  “Stop bickering,” Jolie said. “Both of you!”

  Greer and I both subsided.

  “A man is dead,” Jolie informed us. “Let’s stay on the subject.”