Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

by Suzann Ledbetter

  Crimes of passion were generally the ones that wind up in a cold case unit's file drawer. Premeditated murder?

  "Mistakes," Jack said. "There are always mistakes. Tiny missteps. Big fuckups. Overthinking it. Overplaying the hand you dealt yourself from a stacked deck."

  His chuckle sounded more like a death rattle. "Outfoxing the foxes is a helluva lot harder than it looks, Golden Boy."

  Wheeling into a bank's ATM lane, he clamped off the thought that knowing and proving weren't synonyms, either.

  The round-tripper to Little Rock had taken a toll on his cash reserves. Bribing rental car clerks in two states cost a friggin' fortune. Especially when it was the fifth and seventh gomers, respectively—God forbid it ever be the first—who coughed up the info Jack sought.

  Yancy worked cheap, but yesterday's data mining and Dina's today were rolling up Jack's credit card balances like a space shuttle's odometer. The premium he'd paid for a couple of last-minute airfares, he didn't care to think about.

  Or refunding Gerry Abramson's retainer by tomorrow. Every nickel of it. Not a single expense Jack had incurred was billable to National Federated. Mention the burglaries' kennel connection and Abramson didn't need a hired bird to follow the bread crumbs straight to Dina.

  "Knowing and proving." Jack pulled another slice of his net worth from the ATM's metal lips. "Without me, Gerry's got bupkis."

  The ramifications were still playing Ping-Pong in his head when he parked beside the Beetle in the driveway. The S-10 had commandeered the garage, having more pawnable stuff stowed in it than in the Taurus's backseat.

  "Home sweet home." Jack's breath caught. A four-letter word that packed that kind of a punch was usually profane, not profound. "Jeezus Louiseus." He slammed the car door. "Trot down to Arkansas for half a day and you come back the friggin' marshmallow man."

  "You're home!" Dina's happy voice turned the corner of the garage a beat faster than she did. Her million-watt grin, that mop of hair flying every which way, the leap into Jack's arms, laughing and strangling him simultaneously, he hadn't let himself dream about.

  "So is the kitchen on fire?" he teased. "Or are you just kinda glad to see me?"

  No answer. No chance to. Not with his lips impulsively covering hers, then their tongues touching, savoring, exploring until Jack had to stop, had to pull away, before his knees buckled and the impact with the driveway killed them both.

  "Uhhh," she moaned, sliding down till her feet touched ground. "Whew, boy."

  "Yeah," he sighed. "What you said."

  Wobbling back a little, she looked up at him with a mixture of "Wow," trepidation, and "Well, maybe one more in case that was a fluke." He knew, because he was thinking it, too. And it scared the hell out of him.

  "That wasn't supposed to happen," she said.

  "Bound to, eventually." His casual shrug felt like a muscle spasm. "This, uh "

  Friendship didn't sound right. Relationship didn't, either, somehow. Maybe because Jack detested it. Attraction? So last week. Conspiracy? Not.

  "This connection between us," he finally said. "It was there at the get-go. For me, anyway."

  "Except it's backward," she said. "Usually, if you like somebody, like I think we like each other, you go out, get to know each other better, then if you hit a rough patch, you fix it, or you say, 'Gosh, that was fun while it lasted,' and forget it."

  Jack scratched his head, not disagreeing with her, but uncertain if this was one of those times when a wise man should, or suffer the consequences.

  "We," Dina went on, "started with the rough patch. The more we get to know each other, the rougher it is, and no matter how much we like each other, we can't fix it, and we can't just forget it, and 'Gosh, that was fun while it lasted' is—"

  Jack shut her up the only way he knew how. He relished the softness of her lips, the taste of her, the feel of her lithe little body curving into his.

  This time when they parted, he cradled her face in his hands. "I don't know how to fix all of it. There's no guarantee I can fix any of it. But forget it? Uh-uh. Whatever happens, happens, but I'm not walking away. Not now, not ever."

  "Even if—"

  He pressed a finger to her lips. "Even if."

  19

  Harriet looked at Dina, then to Jack and back again. "I don't want to know."

  "Know what, Mom?" C'mon, Dina thought. Ask me why I have this loony grin on my face. Why inside, it feels like I'm balanced on one tiptoe on the rim of a volcano.

  "Why it took you ten minutes to fetch McPhee in here." She muttered something ending in "broad daylight" and went back to watching TV and stroking Phil's head.

  "Do you want to hear about Jack's trip?"

  "Not especially." There was petulance in her voice and a tremor.

  "Are you all right?"

  "Not especially." Harriet bowed her back, as she sometimes did when angina tightened her chest and radiated downward. "Got me a gas pain that won't quit, thanks for asking." Her mouth pursed. "And that's all it is, so quit fussing and leave me be."

  Her skin was neither flushed nor a porcelain grayish-blue. Respirations were shallower and quicker than Dina's, normal for Harriet. Scrutinizing every twitch and sniffle would irk a raging hypochondriac. If her mother weren't inclined to brave acute symptoms and complain about minor ones, Dina wouldn't hover so much.

  Particularly now. Stress was exacting a toll on them all. Harriet's resiliency was already compromised.

  In the dining area, Dina nodded Jack away from the chair nearer the wall he'd gravitated to for meals. It was the only one with a direct, diagonal bead on her mother. He was perfectly capable of monitoring Harriet himself, except he didn't have Wexler radar or years of experience recognizing the blips.

  Dina also knew Harriet's silent Maydays when she saw them. A tissue dabbing sweat at her temples and mouth signaled a blood-sugar slide or chest pain. Her knuckle pressing up the oxygen cannula meant breathing difficulty. Fingers flexing, her feet tapping under the throw indicated tingling, numbness or cold associated with poor circulation—also symptomatic of respiratory distress.

  The reported discomfort probably was just indigestion, Dina thought. Real or a sly insult to my cooking, as opposed to Chef Boy-ar-McPhee's. Why live in peace and harmony, when you enjoy being the stick poking a hornet's nest?

  From the paper grocery sack Jack retrieved from the trunk, he took out two beverage cans clad in foam cozies. An eyebrow crimped as he held out one to Dina. "Beer?" he mouthed.

  First he kisses her till her toes curl under, then he smuggles in beer disguised as sodas? And not the four-bucks-a-sixer brand she'd buy in November, refrigerate outside behind a bush and make last until March.

  Dina felt her mother's sidelong squint at the tabs' merry pop-whissh. The container's coved top and gold band above the cozy was identical to a soda can. The escaping foam was thicker and frothier than a cola, but it slurped the same.

  Only better. Way and wonderfully better.

  Harriet was again entranced by City Confidential, though the volume was muted enough to eavesdrop. Dina slid the can across the table and bumped Jack's. "To whatever happens."

  He winked, then drank to it. "That's the spirit."

  A cold beer and a sit-down evidently took precedence over his changing clothes. The only concessions to comfort were draping his suit coat over another chair, a loosened tie and collar button.

  The ceiling fixture's glare wasn't flattering to anyone, but scored every crease and the marionette lines in Jack's face. Sleep didn't cure that kind of tired, but counting back, Dina realized he hadn't had a full, dreamless night's rest in a week.

  She smiled to herself. If the beer didn't knock him out, other prescription remedies were at her disposal. He might even thank her for it someday. If he ever figured out she'd drugged him.

  "Did you eat on the plane?" she asked.

  He snickered. "Been a while since you've flown anywhere, huh?"

  Never, actually. If not for a few fami
ly vacations to the Great Smokies, the Rockies and Disneyland, she'd have never crossed the Missouri border.

  "I can reheat the veggie casserole we had for dinner, and there's plenty of Jell-O salad."

  To his credit, he didn't grimace at the menu. "Thanks, but I'm really not hungry. Should be, but maybe pretzels and snack mix are more filling than I thought." He glanced downward at a rustling noise. "Outski, you nosy mutt."

  Nabbed with his snoot in the grocery sack, Phil schlumped back into the living room and flopped beside the ottoman. A dog's life wasn't merely seven times a human's; it was fraught with unending disappointments.

  "So," Jack said. "Got anything interesting to show me?"

  "Mm-hmm." A finger traced down her neck, then followed the scoop of her tank top. "And I found some interesting stuff on the Internet, too."

  "Oh, yeah?" Eyes hooded, he blew out a growly sigh. "If I ever get you alone "

  "Promises, promises." There was plenty more double-talk where that'd come from, except Dina sensed the governess in a smock and elastic-waist jeans tuning in.

  She wanted him, and was damn well going to have him. Give to him completely, body and soul but not on a lumpy couch. Or a pallet on the floor. Not like horny teenagers half listening for Mom's footsteps in the hallway.

  Jack wouldn't want her that way, either. The time for lovemaking would come and so would they. In private, if only for a few hours.

  Moving aside the laptop, Dina slid over the sheaf of papers reordered after her charming repartee with Gerry Abramson. Yes, the man had a right to be angry. It was her prerogative to not remind Jack of the deadline. Messages stacked in his voice mail queue undoubtedly contained several from the insurance broker.

  Beginning with the mundane, she showed Jack sheets of photos from the seminar posted on F.D.I.C.'s Web site. "Carleton deHaven was in most of them. I didn't waste ink on the ones without him."

  Jack sorted through them, discarding a few at a glance. "No time-date stamps in the corners," he grumbled.

  Professional, not amateur photography, Dina assumed. Or the shots were cropped to look that way. "I compared them with the seminar schedule. They're more or less in chronological order."

  The beer sluicing down her throat brought an involuntary shudder. A half can and already a nascent buzz was commencing at her temples. Once a cheap date, always a cheap date.

  "MentalWealth," she said. "These people really believe they can think themselves rich?"

  "Every generation has a guru." Jack shrugged. "Positive thinking is better than wallowing in the negative. Like me being positive the ones raking in the cash aren't the pigeons flocking to these mumbo-jumbo conventions."

  "Is that legal? Promising people they will get rich that way?"

  "Never underestimate the power of greed, kid. If it doesn't pay off, the onus is on the pigeons for not believing enough."

  He bent over a photo sheet, then held it up, angling it toward, then away from the light. "Got a magnifying glass?"

  Guy-speak for "Go get me a magnifying glass," knowing the two Harriet used to read with were on the tray table. He wasn't being rude. Men were genetically programmed to pose supply questions, rather than state demands. Primarily because women were genetically programmed to answer them.

  After a few seconds' examination under Harriet's lighted, rectangular model, Jack turned the sheet around and passed Dina the magnifier. "Second row, third shot from the left. Tell me what you see."

  A beaming fat man with a comb-over was shaking hands with F.D.I.C.'s dissipated has-been celebrity endorser. In the background, Carleton deHaven looked on, an elbow braced on a crossed forearm, a self-satisfied smirk on his face.

  "Compare it to this one." Jack slid over shots of Sunday's informal brunch. In those, deHaven presided over a round table of nattering disciples. At each surrounding table, a MentalWealth associate held court with seven attendees not quite as enthused to break muffins with an aide-de-camp.

  "Okay," she said. "DeHaven doesn't seem to be chatting up his group like the other men. He isn't eating much, either."

  "Look closer at him, then at the later one in the hotel lobby."

  Frowning, she bobbed the magnifier left to right. Obviously there was something important Jack wanted her to find on her own. As if she'd ever been a whiz at those What's Different? panels in the funny pages.

  A final sweep begged a double take, then another. "The resolution's not great, so I can't be sure," she qualified. "Maybe it's just a shadow, but in the lobby photo, deHaven's hair is—"

  "Creased," Jack said. "Hat hair."

  "Could be."

  "Well, it ain't a shadow. And he's wearing the same three-button sport shirt and jacket he wore at the brunch." Jack tapped images of others in both photos. "Everyone else at the brunch, then in the lobby, is in a business suit and tie."

  He related deHaven's alleged late-morning migraine attack and the desk clerk's report about Comb-over's frantic pacing. "If deHaven didn't go AWOL midafternoon, why would Comb-over be in a tizzy about the endorser's incoming flight? No doubt, a flunky checked the parking garage and saw deHaven's car there. It's logical the minions kept dialing his room and his cell. Probably even knocked at 220's door a time or two, but they wouldn't dare get a passkey and barge in."

  "Why not, if he was ill?"

  "Also logical that at some point, possibly from day one at MentalWealth, deHaven convinced them to never invade his privacy. For all I know, he was screwing around on Belle every chance he got. In any event, if he hadn't established a do-not-disturb policy, going missing at this gig would be too risky."

  Dina said, "He wasn't scheduled to speak again until the banquet that night. But if Comb-over did call deHaven's cell phone, why didn't he just answer it?"

  "Because he was either in the Park City airport or on the plane, flying back to Little Rock. The background noise, either place, would give that away."

  "He could say it was the TV," she countered.

  "A migraine makes you extremely light and sound sensitive. A TV that loud would be excruciating. Plus, one PA announcement—at the Missouri airport or in flight—blasting in the speaker holes, and deHaven's screwed."

  Dina had met her ex-husband's parents' and siblings' flights at the airport. Announcements and canned precautions were as constant as hospital pages.

  "The hat hair is key," Jack said. "If the bastard wasn't sweating before or after he shot Belle, airplane cabins are stuffy as hell in February, let alone July. Besides that, just try and convince me that anybody with a migraine ripping his skull would sit in a hotel room with a friggin' ball cap on."

  Excellent point. Gwendolyn Ellicot at TLC had migraines and prescription meds to combat them. The tablets were miracle drugs, but Gwendolyn had to lock herself in her office and lay her head on a dog pillow on the desk until the pain relented.

  "You're thinking the ball cap was deHaven's disguise."

  "Sort of." Jack leaned sideward to exchange his empty beer can with a full one from the sack. A waggled finger offered Dina a second round. She declined, rather than graduate from cheap date to a blithering, giggling idiot.

  He cupped his hand over the tab to muffle the popping sound. "I figure he changed into faded-out jeans or shorts, and tennis shoes or sandals in the room. The dress shoes, slacks, sport shirt and jacket went into a small carry-on. Add a ball cap, the drugstore specs worn for both Simpsons' photo IDs and it's down the fire stairs."

  "The sport shirt wasn't packed." Dina indicated the morning and evening photographs. "He wore that."

  "No, he didn't. It's purple."

  Not just purple. Bright, almost Barney violet.

  "With the sports shirt buttoned," Jack said, "you can't tell whether there's a T-shirt under it at the brunch. Can't later in the lobby, either, but by then, it's under there for sure. DeHaven chose a memorable, can't-miss color he wanted to be seen in. But keep it on for the hustle downstairs and out the garage? Dead giveaway."

  Dina looked down
at the photos trying to imagine deHaven dressed as Jack described. In Web site publicity stills and previous seminar archives, deHaven was always business formal. Anyone accustomed to that uniform of sorts might not connect a man of similar stature and coloring in Sunday-go-to-Dairy-Queen clothes.

  "But how do you know he wore glasses?"

  "Done it myself a thousand times. Specs alter facial features more than you realize. For a few dollars more, you can buy lenses that react to sunlight and stay shadowy-gray indoors."