Pious Deception

by Susan Dunlap

  The intercom gurgled. “Who’s there?”

  Kiernan pushed the buzzer, simultaneously trying to wet her tongue enough to speak. “Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. You were expecting me, weren’t you?”

  “I’m measuring out powder. Come on around back.” The intercom clicked off.

  Couldn’t she shake the baking powder off her hands and walk the few steps to the front door? Kiernan trudged across the unshaded path past the double garage. Her feet sweated in the hot running shoes. She slipped on the edge of a crevasse in the side yard, caught herself, and—grumbling—headed to the back door.

  She was just about to knock when a voice called, “Out here, Kiernan!”

  Kiernan spun to see a blond head poking out of the shack in the back of the yard. The woman standing in the shed doorway was about five six, in her mid-twenties, with bleached blond hair finger-combed back and caught under a yellow headband, pale hazel eyes, and a surprisingly sallow tan for a Phoenician. From a distance her head looked like a small yellow beach ball plopped on top of a sleeveless Harley Davidson T-shirt and tight cutoff cargo pants.

  Close up, Kiernan noted that Patsy Luca hardly looked like the weary, desperate, beaten woman needed to pierce Beth Landau’s defenses at the battered women’s refuge. With one muscular arm braced on the doorframe and the other on a hip, Patsy confirmed Wiggins’s appraisal that she could take care of herself. “Come on in out of the heat,” Patsy said, in an easy Western drawl not unlike Stu Wiggins’s.

  Kiernan stepped through the doorway and stared. A brace of pistols lay atop a stack of boxes on the west wall. A shotgun was propped against the boxes, and an engraved rifle lay on a towel on top. Target pistols, a .22, a .38, and a .45 automatic were in open boxes on a wooden chest, and ahead, on the workbench, was a turret press with a dusty black scale, a half-filled box of bullets, and a group of empty brass cartridges. Poking into the top of the turret press was a clear plastic colander filled with gray powder. The whole place smelled of dust and linseed oil. “My God! This is an armory!”

  Patsy smiled uncomfortably. “That’s what Stu said. He keeps telling me no one needs more than one pistol and one rifle. But of course that’s Stu, and that’s bullshit. What do you carry?”

  “Quick wits.”

  “Hmm.” Her face betrayed little, Kiernan could see the effort that that blank expression cost. Despite her wholesome appearance, there was determination in the set of the jaw and the pressure lines beside the mouth. Her lips were pursed in disdain—disdain for the gunless.

  Kiernan shrugged. “What I sell is my medical background. I can take care of myself. Once or twice I’ve had to protect clients. But that’s not what they pay me for. If they did, I’d find another line of work.” She watched Patsy’s face, but her expression gave no hint of her reaction. She was good, Kiernan had to admit. Not likeable, but good. Unfortunately, both qualities were necessary for this job.

  Patsy leaned back against the workbench. “Well, I don’t plan to be a patsy”—a smile flashed on her face and was gone—“for anyone.” She ran a hand along a rifle barrel. “This is a varmint rifle, a specialized piece of work. It hefts heavy. But its trajectory is flat. Hit a prairie dog at three hundred yards. The guys who carry ’em have ’em because they just like to shoot. They don’t miss often. Some of the city hunters like to use a thin jacket bullet.” She laughed, scornfully. “Taxidermists hate to see them hauling their carcasses in. When those bullets hit, they splatter the innards like foam. Helluva mess trying to clean out the carcass.”

  Despite the air conditioner, rivulets of sweat ran down Kiernan’s back. Her headache was back in force. Kiernan let a moment pass before saying, “If you want to play chicken with tales of gore, you’re way outclassed. You want to hear about autopsies where you’ve got a body that’s been lying out in the open, decomposing for months? You want to hear about the smells? Or the maggots?” She caught Patsy’s eye. “Do I make my point?”

  Patsy hesitated. “Okay, okay. Truce?” An instant later she smiled. Suddenly, the lines of suspicion seemed to melt and she looked like a giggly girl who would spend her Saturday afternoons handing her boyfriend wrenches and lug nuts while he fiddled with his Harley. She looked like the girl Kiernan needed to tackle Beth Landau—if she could play the role to match.

  “Truce.”

  Turning back to the workbench, she said, “I’m in the middle of reloading cartridges. I don’t like to leave here with the powder out and the shell casing in the turret press like this.” She pulled up the handle of the six-inch-wide machine. “It’ll only take a minute. See, the problem is that I got a good deal on a new rifle, a real good deal. The guy who makes them is a master, or at least he was. His eyes are going. It used to be that there was no space at all between the stock and the barrel. You couldn’t have pulled a thread through there. Now, well … But for mine he was in top form. It’s perfect.… Anyway, the thing is that the specs on the ammo load for the nearest factory-made gun just don’t work as well for this one. I’ll tell you what I think. Here, let me get the primer in the post.” She fingered the small metal disk. “What I think is,” she said, pouring gray powder into a small funnel at the top of the turret press, “is that the specs for the factory-made job call for a different weight of powder. They say sixty grains, but with sixty weight your trajectory’s too tight.” She pulled down the lever, then lifted it and removed a resized shell. “See, this way I can customize my ammo. Not only that, but it saves me over half the cost per shell—”

  “You’ve got to be downtown by six. Let me explain the case while you work, okay?” Stu Wiggins had insisted Patsy was perfect for the job. She damn well wasn’t perfect, but she’d have to do—if she could pull off the act.

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m not usually so distracted. The rifle was my Christmas present to me. You can see how long I’ve been waiting. That’s another problem with Dale Harmon. Time is nothing to him. And you don’t dare fuss, because old and slow as he is, he’s still got a waiting list years long. There are guys praying Dale lives long enough to get to them. See, he—”

  “The case,” Kiernan prodded.

  “Stu told me about it. You need me to play a battered wife, right? Get on the bus with the rest of them, get into the safe house, and breach their files, right?”

  “And be in town by six P.M. It means playing your part nonstop for a day or more. You’ve got to be a housewife, someone with no resources, someone ashamed of herself and her husband, ashamed of what she put up with. Someone who’s used every bit of strength she has to drag herself out and get help.” Her gaze rested on Patsy’s biceps, muscles that could fling a menacing husband into the next yard. “There can’t be any cracks in your performance. No one can have any suspicion. Do you think you can do it?”

  Patsy lifted the last reloaded bullet out of the turret press, plunked it in the box with the others, and turned to face Kiernan. No one feature of her face had changed, and yet her expression had hardened. “The role calls for a fearful wife, not a gun nut. That’s what you’re saying, right?”

  “Right.”

  Patsy closed her eyes and took a deep breath of the dusty air. She caught Kiernan’s eye. “Yes, I can do it. I will do it. But let me tell you, it’s not just the delicate little flowers who get their butts beat and their ribs broken. I know. Married at sixteen, divorced finally at twenty-one. Five years too late. I was never in one of those shelters. I didn’t have kids; that was the one smart move I made in those years. But it got so that I believed my husband when he told me it was all my fault. I was on a first-name basis with the receptionist in emergency. It got so if I could make it I’d drive to Chandler or Scottsdale to get to a different hospital. But after a while they knew me at every hospital in the valley.” She held her gaze. The tension lines beside her mouth dug deep. She looked older, as if the shadows of the past had settled beneath her cheekbones and under her eyes. Glancing at the bullets beside the turret press, she said, “No one’s ever going to smack me aro
und like that again.” She took a breath. “Stu said you thought one of the husbands of the women at the center might have had it in for your priest. Well, if you want someone to find the bastard, you’ve got the right woman.”

  Kiernan put a hand on Patsy’s arm. “I don’t doubt you can do that. It’s obvious you know the situation better than I do. But I want you to understand that this is my case. There’s no free rein here. Your job is to get information, period.” She could feel Patsy’s arm tense under her fingers.

  “These guys, these bullies—”

  “Maybe you’re too close to this.”

  “I’m close all right, but I’m in control.”

  “It’s got to be my control. Can you deal with that? Think about it.”

  Slowly, Patsy nodded. “Inside the house I’ve got a wall full of trophies. They’re from target matches, standard meets, skeet shoots. You won’t find my ex-husband’s balls over the mantel.”

  Kiernan released Patsy’s arm. “Okay. I need everything you can get about the lodge, about Beth Landau, about her relationship with Austin Vanderhooven, and about what happens to her or for her now that he’s dead. Try to get her to open up to you. Vanderhooven was planning to build a retreat near her place. See what you can get out of her on that. And her files, Patsy. There’s something in those files she’s hiding. She didn’t balk at telling me about Vanderhooven, mind and body, but when I mentioned her files, she snapped shut. Can you get into the files?”

  For the first time Patsy smiled full face. She was almost pretty, Kiernan realized. Or as pretty as a woman streaked with gunpowder and sweat could be. “Yeah. I can do locks.”

  “And there’s a guy named Joe Zekk, a friend of the priest, if you hear or see his name, pay attention. It’s ten after five. With traffic—”

  Patsy laughed. “Don’t worry about my making it on time. I drive just like you’d think I do.”

  “Don’t get caught. By Beth Landau or the cops. Landau’s in the center of this case. I’ve taken my shot at her. Yours is the last one we’ll get. If you blow this, the case is over.”

  “Stu, it’s Kiernan.”

  “Kerry, just the woman I’ve been waiting on. You get along good with Patsy?”

  “I’ll withhold judgment.”

  Wiggins’s breath hit the receiver. “Trust me.”

  “I am trusting you.”

  “Good. Now, you ready for this? I’ve got this buddy at the phone company. He owes me a bundle. Well, he owes me a lot less than he did last night, maybe nothing at all now—”

  “Stu?”

  “Well, you know that long-distance number, the one that Austin Vanderhooven took collect calls from?”

  “Joe Zekk’s number.”

  “Well, my buddy got ahold of Zekk’s billing record. Bad part is it just covers this week. Something to do with the computers or the filing system, or something. But the interesting part is that Zekk had a long-distance call.”

  “And your buddy traced that?”

  “You’re with me.”

  “To?”

  “Philip Vanderhooven’s hotel in Maui.”

  18

  AT TWELVE MINUTES AFTER five, Bishop Dowd pulled the Buick up to the curb by Sun Fun Pool and Patio Shop. The cold hollow feeling in his stomach had gotten worse. His hands were shaky. He had to pull himself together. He began reciting: “Through this holy unction and His most tender mercy, may the Lord pardon thee whatever faults thou hast—” He stopped abruptly, shocked to find himself murmuring the old Last Rites. Still, he was in better control. By the time he rolled down the window Tom Huerta was there, looking as uncomfortable as Dowd had ever seen the man.

  “I’ve only got a fifteen-minute break, Bishop Dowd. This isn’t the time I normally take it. I had to get a guy to cover for me. I’ve got three minutes to get back.”

  Motioning Huerta closer, Dowd pulled two sheets from the manila envelope. “Here you go, Tom. This top one’s the interment permit. It’s got yesterday’s date on it.”

  Huerta nodded uncomfortably.

  “You know what to do with it, right?” Dowd prodded.

  Huerta nodded again. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I could lose my job over this. Or worse.”

  Dowd’s face flushed. “Look, Huerta, do you want the archdiocese to keep doing business with your brother or not?”

  Huerta took a step back, as if slapped by the bishop’s reaction.

  Get hold of yourself, Dowd told himself. He closed his fingers around the steering wheel. “Now, Tom,” he said more calmly, “I know you’re putting yourself out. I won’t forget it. And the men I’ll be dealing with won’t forget you either.” He patted Huerta’s arm. “There’s nothing to worry about, Tom. You have a legitimate reason to be in the sheriff’s office. No one’s going to question that. So all you have to do is keep this operation to yourself. And nothing can happen. These forms are perfect.”

  “Nothing can happen! I answer the phones, Bishop Dowd. I already took a call from some guy, some anonymous guy, saying the sheriff should take a look in Haley’s Funeral Home. Saying Father Vanderhooven’s body was in there. Saying he was murdered.”

  Dowd gasped. “What did you say you’d do?”

  “I didn’t say anything. Didn’t have to. The guy hung up.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.” Sweat ran down Huerta’s cheeks.

  Bishop Dowd pressed his hands against his thighs to stop the shaking. “Good. Good. Now, Tom, of course you realize Father Vanderhooven was not murdered. We’re not dealing with anything like that. If there was a murderer loose, I would be—”

  Huerta held up a hand. “Look, Bishop Dowd, I don’t want to hear any more. I’m just sorry I got myself involved in this at all. I did it because a bishop of the Church asked me. I guess I should have known better, but I assumed being a bishop meant something.” Dowd started to speak, but Huerta held up his hand again. “I’m in this too far to back out. I’ll handle these forms. I know what to do with them. But don’t think the problem of that call is gone. Every call that comes in to the office is taped. And if the guy who called makes a fuss, the sheriff’ll check the tapes and he’ll find the call. And he’ll find me.”

  Dowd’s hands shook but he kept his voice steady. “Unless you can get the tape and erase it, eh, Tom?”

  Huerta glared at Dowd. He shook his head, grabbed the manila envelope, and strode away.

  19

  AT JUST SIX P.M. Patsy Luca walked into the waiting room at the Self-Help Center. Already she hated this assignment. This was not what she had become a detective to do. Forcing down the urge to square her shoulders and stride through the clumps of limp-looking men and women waiting for the soup line, or for vouchers for whatever miserable, paint-peeling, bug-infested, drug-filled dive they would spend the night in, she walked slowly to the women’s-center door. In her white pants and flowered blouse she looked no different from anyone else in the center. She hated the pants, she hated the blouse; they were gifts from her mother. But most of all she hated being without a gun.

  She pulled open the women’s-center door and had to fight the urge to turn and run. The room stank of defeat, of hopelessness, of being trapped. In that instant she was fifteen again, standing in her mother’s nine-by-twelve living room in Yuma, watching a soap on TV, listening to Jimmy, the baby, working up to a scream because his diaper was full, smelling the crap in the diaper, smelling the defeat that filled the house. The fear that had welled up in her then filled her now. She forced herself to step forward. “I’m Patsy Luca,” she said to the sandy-haired woman by the desk. “I got here as soon as I could. I’m just so relieved that you’re going to take me away from … from everything.” She could feel her face flushing from humiliation.

  “I’m Beth Landau. You talked to me on the phone. But Patsy, we didn’t decide where you’d be staying. The place we’re going is full.”

  Patsy couldn’t believe it. The panic in her voice was real as she said
, “No! I’ve got to go! I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “If you don’t have money, I can get you a voucher for a room in one of the hotels that cooperate with us.”

  “No! I can’t stay here in town. My husband, my ex-husband, will kill me.”

  “Patsy, he won’t know where you are.”

  “Oh yes he will. He’s got friends all over. And none of them work; they just hang out. And now they’re hanging out looking for me. He’ll kill me!”

  Beth laid a hand on Patsy’s arm. “Patsy—”

  Patsy wanted to smack the side of her hand into the woman’s wrist. She couldn’t blow the whole job, not here, not before she even got on the bus. Her voice was shaking as she said, “He smashed three of my ribs the last time. He told me if I left him he’d find me and he’d break the rest of them, one by one. Don’t you believe me? Do you want to see my scars?” She grabbed her blouse as if to pull it free. Her face was red, she could feel it.

  Beth sighed. “Okay. I think you’re probably worrying too much, but if you’re that frightened, then we’ll make room for you. But you’ll have to sleep in the storeroom. I can roll a cot in there and—”

  “Anyplace is fine. I’m just so relieved.” Patsy was relieved, relieved to be going, relieved that she wouldn’t have to talk her way out of showing her scars—her five-year-old scars.

  Beth turned to the others. “Okay, let’s go, then.”

  Two young women stood up and began to gather their belongings. In a carrier an infant slept. A toddler in an Olympic Crawling Team shirt lay on his back across two plastic chairs. A dark-haired boy and girl sat huddled by the legs of the chair. Facing the group, Beth Landau said, “I want to emphasize how important it is that we keep the location of the house where we’re going secret. If its location gets out, the house will be useless. And more important, we could all be in danger. You understand?”