Susan looked at Parkhurst, he raised an eyebrow.
Out in the hallway, he said, “You didn’t arrest her.”
“We don’t have enough evidence.”
He started counting off on his fingers. She was living in the dead woman’s house, using her name, using her money, using her ID, writing checks on her account. How could she expect to get away with that unless she knew Kelby Oliver was dead? And she knew the woman was dead because she killed her.
Susan nodded at all that. “Let’s talk with the DA, see what he thinks.”
“Right. Let’s get out of here.”
“There’s something I have to do first. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
She took the elevator up a floor and went to a room at the end of the corridor. Jen lay on the white sheets unmoving, looking small and blank. Somebody, probably her mother, had pinned a pink bow in her hair. She would hate it. All the fire and spirit and wide-eyed eagerness, all the special qualities that made Jen such a neat individual were gone. All that was left was the hiss and thunk of the respirator keeping air in her lungs.
Susan picked up her hand, surprised at the warmth. Somehow she’d expected it to be icy cold, but it was warm and pink, and completely flaccid. She curled Jen’s fingers around her own, held them a moment, then put Jen’s hand back on the bed. From the box on the bedside table, Susan tore out a tissue, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. She met Parkhurst and hobbled out to the Bronco. At home, she hobbled inside.
“Yank the phones,” he said. “Take your drugs and crawl in bed. I’ll come back later with soup.”
“A cane would be more useful.” She swallowed the magic pain pills and went to bed, drifted in and out, dreamed about corpses on the autopsy table. Sometimes her own face looked up at her, sometimes Jen, sometimes a stranger, sometimes the badly decomposed woman from the silo. What had happened to her?
Yellow, a voice explained. The voice was familiar. Whose was it? She slept fitfully, dreamed, heard the voice again. Ah, she thought, that’s it, that’s—
Pounding at the door shattered the dream. She woke.
41
Susan propped the crutches under her arms, swung into the living room, and answered the door. Parkhurst came in with a container of minestrone soup. He poured out a cup. She sipped and swallowed, took more pills, drank a few gallons of water, went to bed, and dropped off the edge of the world. Hours later she opened her eyes, groggy from drugs and too much sleep.
Sunlight bashing through the open curtains made her squint. The clock said twelve. Not dark. Had to be noon. She inched herself from the bed and stood to see if she could manage that Herculean feat without falling down. Yes.
She pulled in an invigorating breath that was going to allow her to leap tall buildings and stop locomotives. The leaping and stopping idea lasted until she took a step and pain buzzed through her leg. Okay, tall buildings were out. However, she was alive, she was awake, and life was good. That lasted until she remembered she couldn’t take a shower. Okay, she was alive and awake and life had a few drawbacks.
She brushed her teeth, washed her face and slathered soap and water around, trying not to get bandages wet. By the time she was dressed and slipping on shoes, Parkhurst was at the door.
“There’s no reason you can’t stay home today,” he said.
“No reason I can’t go to work.”
“Right.” He opened the passenger door, then went around and slid in under the wheel. “What’s a little gunshot?”
* * *
Hazel looked up when she came in. “You sure you should be here?”
“Yes.” Susan hobbled toward her office. As soon as she got settled behind her desk, Parkhurst came in with two mugs of coffee and handed her one. He planted his rear in the visitor’s chair and slid down so he could rest his mug on his chest.
“Anything more from Joe Farmer?” she asked.
Parkhurst took a cautious sip of hot liquid. “He’s still claiming he shot Kelby Oliver in that field. I questioned him again. Osey had a go at him. Farmer’s slipped over the edge and there’s no hauling him back. He admits to all kinds of things. The problem is about half of what he says is completely wacko. He talks a lot to his dead daughter, and she tells him things like ‘Kelby should know what it was like. If she did, she would vote for the death penalty.’ Times are mixed up in his head. He apologizes to the daughter for not torturing Kelby. She was getting away so he had to shoot her.”
Parkhurst lifted the coffee mug. “From what I can gather, the dead daughter is irritated about it. He says killing Arlette Coleridge was an accident. Claims he didn’t mean to, didn’t want to. She wouldn’t give him Oliver’s address and so he hit her. Apologizes all over the place for slapping a woman, says he’s never done that before.”
“How did he know Arlette had that information?”
“He’d been stalking Kelby Oliver for months, following her around, calling, threatening. He saw them together numerous times.”
“Slapped her,” Susan said. “The woman was beaten so severely she died.”
Parkhurst nodded. “I’ve hammered at Farmer, and each time he comes back with a different story. Sometimes he just slapped her, sometimes he hit her over and over until she talked, sometimes he shot her.”
“Shot her.” Susan’s head was starting to ache. “Autopsy show any bullet wounds?”
“No.”
She massaged her temples. “Is it possible he didn’t kill Arlette?”
“He’s so out of it anything’s possible. Innately he feels you don’t hit a woman, so he’s changed beating her severely to a slap. Or maybe he did just slap her and then someone else came along and beat her to death.”
“Anything point to that?”
“Nothing to say either way, according to Sergeant Manfred in Berkeley. She was a defense attorney. Could be somebody wasn’t happy with his defense.”
“And came along just after Farmer left?”
“Possible. Not likely.” Parkhurst sipped at coffee. “He admits to killing Kelby Oliver, but thinks he shot her, and denies shoving her in the silo.”
“If he didn’t kill her, who did?”
“We have a dandy suspect lying in a hospital bed.”
Susan massaged her temples. “Cary Black exercised her right to keep her mouth shut.”
“Sounds like guilt to me,” Parkhurst said.
“Yes,” Susan said, drawing out the word. “Cop’s wife. She knows a thing or two about how the system works.”
“She moved in, took over Kelby’s name, her house, her money.”
“True.” Susan hoped the caffeine would get rid of her headache. “I got the impression Mitchell Black slaps her around.”
“Sweet fellow.”
Something flickered way down in the murky bottom of Susan’s mind. She couldn’t get it to float up where she could grab it. “Where is he? Why can’t we find him?”
“He moves around. By the time we find the motel room he rented, he’s checked out.”
“Why?”
Parkhurst shrugged. “Something to hide.”
“What?”
“When we find him, we’ll ask.”
Her dream from last night swam around and floated slowly up. The voice in her dream was Jen’s, telling her about a yellow shirt. “Find something of an evidentiary nature and we’ll arrest somebody.”
Parkhurst stood up. “Do my best.” He gave her a sharp look. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She buzzed Hazel and asked her to have Osey come in, then she took a folder from the teetering pile, moved it to the center of the desk, and opened it. As she read about the devastation caused by the tornado, she tried to tease loose the rest of the dream. Just as she grabbed it by the tail, Osey came in and it slithered away.
“You wanted to see me?”
She nodded. “Have a seat.”
In his loose-jointed, ambling way, he folded himself into the chair Parkhurst had vacated.
“Ho
w’s it going with Ida?”
Osey grinned. “She’s a mite subdued.”
“What about Kelby Oliver’s sister? She tell you anything that might help us?”
“That woman sure does talk, that I can give you. Enough to cause a headache. She was in Berkeley trying to find her sister. Talking to police and people who knew her. At her job, and like that. There’s some gaps in her story. I’ve been checking airlines.”
Susan rubbed her right leg, because rubbing the left made pain shoot everywhere. “Was there any friction between Kelby and her sister?”
“I don’t know about that, but I did learn that Kelby Oliver was a rich lady by most standards. Seems she owned a house in Berkeley that she sold for over two million, and she had money on top of that. Who pays two million for a house?”
“Someone who wants to live in Berkeley.”
“Faye, the sister, inherits everything, and she can use it. She’s married to a man who can’t keep a job. When he gets one, it isn’t right, or the boss is stupid and he says so to the boss’s face and gets fired. Never finds anything he likes, or a place where he’s appreciated. Faye’s been supporting the family working at the phone company. I can see him drooling over the fact he’ll be able to get his hands on Kelby’s money.”
“Anything on his whereabouts during that time period?”
“Yeah. He was away on a camping trip. Somewhere in the wilderness, all by himself.”
“What do you have on Cary Black?”
Osey repeated what he’d put in his report, essentially that she was a friend of the woman in Berkeley that Joe Farmer either killed or didn’t kill. Cary Black left California without telling anyone, even her husband, making it look like she was a victim of foul play. Big search for missing wife of police officer.
“She had to know about the search,” Osey said. “She bought San Francisco and Oakland newspapers. Lots of articles about her disappearance. Her picture all over.”
“You suggesting she planned it? She left home and came here for the express purpose of killing Kelby Oliver?” That said premeditation.
Osey sucked in a breath and let it out on a sigh. “Well, ma’am, I’m not sure. She sure did leave home for some serious reason.” He frowned. “The dead woman was too badly decomposed to tell much, but this Cary Black isn’t very big. How’d she get Oliver in the rat hole?”
“Kelby Oliver wasn’t very big either. They were roughly the same size.”
“Driver’s license says five-two, a hundred and thirty-five pounds. If she was banged on the head—”
Susan looked at him. “What did you say?”
Osey eyed her like maybe she’d get dangerous any second. “A hundred and thirty-five pounds. Cary could have knocked Oliver unconscious first.”
“Before that.”
“Uh…”
“Getting Oliver in the silo.”
“The rat hole?”
“Why did you call it that?”
Osey shrugged. “That’s just what we always called that door. It’s used to get the grain flowing down, if it’s not coming. Every kid who grows up on a farm knows to stay away from silos.”
Susan rubbed her leg again, then reached for the phone. “Hazel, would you please send Ida in.”
* * *
Shit, Ida thought, oh shit, this is it. This is where the chief says pack your bags and get the hell out of Dodge. I shot the chief of police, for God’s sake. How am I going to get another job with that on my résumé? She hesitated at the doorway when she heard Osey’s voice. Had he made a complaint?
Deep breath. Chin up. Get in there. Ida Rather get it over with. Osey got up to offer her the chair. Did he think she couldn’t take this standing up? She ignored the chair and stood at attention.
“Sit.” Susan couldn’t take all that rigid discipline. “Tell me about Cary Black.”
Ida unbent enough to perch on the chair, mentioned the poor eyesight, the fear, the reluctance to call her sister. “Of course, Faye isn’t her sister, but I didn’t know that when I urged her to call.”
“What did she say about her ordeal with Joe Farmer?”
Ida repeated everything she’d put in her report.
Susan shifted, trying to find a position that would ease the pain in her leg. “Anything you can add?”
“No, ma’am, not really. Except Pearl Wyatt, a neighbor. She was really mad at Kelby, because Pearl wanted to buy the place and she feels Kelby snuck in and stole it away from her. She wanted it for her son. She told me she was so mad she could spit. But nobody would kill over something like that, would they?”
People kill for all kinds of reasons. Susan had known a homicide to result over two quarters.
* * *
By the late afternoon, Susan’s leg throbbed with such vengeance she propped herself on the crutches and hobbled to the pickup. On the way home, she stopped off at Doctor Eckhard’s office to have the wound checked and the bandage changed. China said it was bleeding again and she should stay off of it, gave her another prescription for pain pills, and told her to go home. Wobbling with an unsteady lurch, she climbed back in the pickup and took herself home.
She swallowed pain pills with a gulp of water, oozed herself down on the couch, and floated away on chemically induced sleep. No dreams disturbed her. She slept through the night, woke at five, drank a large glass of water, and basically drifted in and out of sleep all through Wednesday.
When she finally surfaced, at nine o’clock in the evening, she realized her ears weren’t crackling. She could hear! That called for a celebration. She picked up a handful of CDs and looked through them, but before a decision could be made, the doorbell rang. She let Parkhurst in.
He looked at the CDs in her hand and grimaced. “Bach, I presume.”
“A little Borodin, I think, for a change.”
“Some change,” he said.
She stuck the CD in the player, turned the volume low, and went to the kitchen for two glasses of orange juice with ice. She gave one to Parkhurst. He sat on the floor, back propped against the hearth, legs straight out. She slouched in a corner of the couch, pillows stacked behind her, closed her eyes, and listened to the nocturne from String Quartet no. 2.
“We still haven’t found Mitch Black,” he said. “Anybody who takes such precautions to keep his whereabouts unknown has got to have something to hide.”
“No doubt, but he didn’t arrive until Wednesday, August twenty-seventh. Kelby died on Monday the eighteenth.”
Parkhurst raised an eyebrow. “You know what day she died? Even Doc Fisher doesn’t know that. Okay, if Mitch Black didn’t kill her, what about Faye Turney? She’s rich now.”
“She didn’t do it.”
“Okay. We still have Faye’s no-good husband. He’s rubbing his hands together at the thought of putting them on all that money.”
“Not him either.”
“I strongly doubt Pearl Wyatt shoved Kelby in the silo in a fit of pique because Kelby bought the house. Which brings us back to Cary Black.”
“Cary got here on Wednesday the twentieth. Kelby was killed on Monday.”
“There you go with Monday again. Why are you so sure she was killed on Monday?”
42
“So what’s with Monday?” Parkhurst said.
Susan captured an ice cube and crunched down. “I think it went like this: Kelby Oliver had a stalker. We know now it was Joe Farmer. He terrified her. He sent notes, innocent words with an underlying flavor of menace, left messages on her answering machine, turned up wherever she went, followed her, overtly threatened when nobody could overhear. Said what happened to his daughter would happen to her. She fled, bought a house without even seeing it, and came here. She hid away, seldom went out.”
“Yeah, so?”
“On Monday she was outside when she saw a man with a shotgun.”
“If she was holed up in the house, what was she doing outside?”
“I don’t know. But for some reason she went out…
”
* * *
… and lugged the cardboard box to the barn, stashed it on a shelf in the small officelike room, and dusted her hands on the seat of her jeans. Why, Kelby wondered, had she agreed to this? The entire morning cleaning the guest room and getting it ready for Arlette’s friend, she’d felt serious misgivings. She didn’t know this Cary Black and she certainly didn’t like the woman knowing where she was. What if this Cary let slip to a friend or relative that she was here living with Kelby?
It was a mistake, it was a mistake, it was a mistake. Kelby knew it. By letting Cary come, the danger doubled. Now two people knew where she was. Tucking in her yellow T-shirt, she went from the dim light of the barn out to bright sunshine. She blinked.
Man with a shotgun! He raised the gun. Boom! She ran.
Boom! She raced to the open shed that sheltered a tractor. Ducking inside, she crouched by one large wheel. How had he found her? Slowly she rose, peered around the side of the shed. The harsh sunlight was dazzling. Shot pinged against metal.
“Got ya!”
She ran, stumbled, recovered, kept running. Lungs on fire, breath coming in short gasps, heart hammering, she pounded toward the cornfield. The wind picked up. The great stalks rustled like a live thing just coming awake. Was he hiding in there? Stalks eight feet high. She’d never see him.
Sweat stung her eyes. She swiped the back of a wrist across her face, stumbled again. Heat lightning flickered in the distance. Heavy smell of dust and corn mingled with the sweet scent of flowers.
At the last second she shot off to the right and ran along the flagstone path toward the cottonwood trees. Slipping on fallen leaves, she skidded around a tree and squatted, leaning against the trunk, trying to quiet her breathing. Leaves blew in her face. She pawed at her hair to get it out of her eyes.
Ears straining, she waited. Where was he? She heard the crackle of dry leaves. A footfall. Faint. To her right. She froze, strained to see. The wind sighed, the cottonwood trees murmured back. Carefully, she rose, waited.
Boom! She took off, hoped she wouldn’t fall. The air was alive with sound, whispering grasses, swaying leaves, creaking branches. Hearing a thud, she whirled. Behind her! Coming closer! A scream bubbled in her throat. “What do you want?”
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