by Susan Dunlap
Kiernan leaned back in the chair. “That’s lucky for them. Warren was after the water rights, certainly, but with him there was also a touch of revenge. Maybe he’d spent too many nights lying under the stained-glass window in Vanderhooven’s meditation dome listening to Beth Landau complain about Vanderhooven.”
“Nothing like righteous indignation to put a better face on greed, eh?”
From the kitchen came the sound of the broiler door opening. “Five minutes,” Brad Tchernak called.
Eyes half-opened, Ezra lifted his brown head, stretched, and dropped it back on Kiernan’s stomach. To Chase she said, “He was Beth’s lover, which also meant he had access to her key to Vanderhooven’s rectory, to her office at Hohokam Lodge, and to the Culiacán. He was the one person who could take that bottle and put it back in the drawer a couple of days later. And the peace-making ritual Vanderhooven and Beth had, Vanderhooven would never have mentioned it, but Beth did. You can just picture her lying there in the dome, telling Bud Warren about it. So he knew that if he left the bottle on Vanderhooven’s desk, Vanderhooven would take a drink, for old time’s sake. Vanderhooven would see that peace offering as Beth’s accepting his idea of the monastery. Vanderhooven would be drinking to his ultimate triumph. His last triumph. You can see how the idea would appeal to Bud Warren.”
“But what about the autoerotic asphyxia?”
“For Beth’s boyfriend there was a wonderful irony to it, don’t you think? But it had a very practical purpose, to divert attention until John McKinley died. All Warren needed was for Rattlesnake to be isolated long enough for the old man to die without signing the new will.”
“Four minutes,” Brad Tchernak called from the kitchen.
“What’s that?” Chase asked.
“Dinner. Brad’s broiling the bluefish and tomatoes I had flown in from Jersey. You see what a decadent life I’m leading, Sam.”
“That’s pretty blue-collar decadence.” Chase laughed. “Well, bon appétit.”
Kiernan hesitated then replaced the receiver.
The smell of broiling fish floated through the door. Ezra cocked his head expectantly. Below, a huge wave arched and crashed, sending three body-surfers speeding toward the rocky shore. Kiernan watched them hold form till they were within seconds of being smashed into the rocks, then twist back under the surf. Last week when Chase had said she was not unlike Austin Vanderhooven she hadn’t asked him why. The question had gnawed at her all week. Vanderhooven had died in the rising wave of his obsession. And she’d been lucky enough to see her obsession peak and crash like the waves. Like the surfers, she could duck under and float back out.
The phone rang. Irritably, Ezra barked, yawned, and returned his head to its perch. “Kerry. It’s Stu. How’re you doing out there?”
“As well as can be expected for someone who is virtually buried under wolfhound. How about you?”
“It seems kind of dull here in Phoenix without you stirring things up. You know you left enough ruffled feathers to fill a heap of pillows.”
“Who are those feathers attached to?”
“For starters you’ve got the Vanderhoovens fussing because they can’t bury the body until the coroner’s inquest comes up with a real death certificate. The one Necri signed is gone—not that it would have been legal anyway. Necri seems to be gone too. Can’t say I’m surprised.”
Kiernan could picture Stu, settled much like herself on the porch of the house she’d imagined for him. His boots would be on the railing, a beer in one hand, an empty Ben’s Burger bag beside him. “What about Sylvia Necri?”
“Well, no doubt about it, Sylvia’s in a heap of trouble. Once the sheriff heard about her giving Bud Warren access to the retreat’s water rights, he didn’t take long to ask ‘in return for what?’ ”
“For updates on the status of Rattlesnake and McKinley’s will? Information that Bud Warren got from Beth Landau, who got it from Vanderhooven, right?”
“Right. I don’t know what-all the D.A. could have done with that, but what he is doing is using it as leverage. So between that leverage and the forgery charge, Sylvia’s talking a mile a minute. On the other hand, Bishop Dowd isn’t talking at all. Under psychiatric care is the official word. And what I hear is that Dowd is showing no improvement. Considering all the charges the D.A. could bring against him, that could be a right smart move on his part. Only thing he did let slip was that there are Sheltons in L.A. and Florida.”
“How’d that sit with the archdiocese. I can’t imagine the Sheltons would get much from the McKinleys, but from the Church …?”
“Make one helluva lawsuit. But it’ll never go to trial. Bishop Harrington is making it his business to find the Sheltons and take care of them. Harrington’s an ethical man; he wants to do the right thing by them. He’ll get a lot of support on that. The Catholic community here is really getting behind it. The Sheltons won’t be wanting for much.”
“So, Stu, are you taking it easy now?”
“Easy! Kerry, I’ll be running my bow legs into the ground for the next month paying off all the favors I begged for you. You’re going to have to hire me to help you out on a case out there just so I can get away. You know, I’ve got connections all over.”
Kiernan smiled. “I’ll bet you do, Stu. But for now, you stay put. I’ve got some Jersey bluefish on the way to you, and if Federal Express has to leave them on your stoop, you’re going to be real sorry.”
“One minute to dinner!” Brad Tchernak called from the kitchen doorway.
“I heard that, Kerry, and I know better than to stand between you and your fodder.” The phone clicked dead.
“You ready?” Tchernak stepped around the doorway. His sun-bleached hair stood out in all directions after their swim in the inlet. On his deeply tanned chest the thatch of hair was nearly blond now. One of those grins that transformed his face slowly took hold. “Kiernan, you know it’s great to have you back.” His smile widened; he dropped into a three-point stance, grunted menacingly, charged across the room to the deck and scooped her up. Ezra barked and resettled himself.
Nuzzling her neck, Tchernak said, “Lineman’s greeting.”
“That’s how you handled the defensive line, huh?”
“Well, on the field we got penalized ten yards for holding. And we didn’t end with a kiss.”
“Ten yards? A small price to pay.” She grinned, reached a hand around his back and palpated his gluteus maximus.
A Biography of Susan Dunlap
Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.
Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally to Northern California, where many of her novels take place.
One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book, Karma (1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.
After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published Pious Deception, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.
Dunlap concluded the Smith series with Cop Out (1997). In 2006 she published A Single Eye, her first mystery featuring Darcy Lott, a Zen Buddhist stuntwoman. Her
most recent novel is No Footprints (2012), the fifth in the Darcy Lott series.
In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga and worked for a private investigator on death penalty defense cases and as a paralegal. In 1986, she helped found Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women in the field of mystery writing. She lives and writes near San Francisco.
Dunlap and her father at the beach, probably Coney Island. ”“My happiest vacations were at the beach,” says Dunlap, “here, at the Jersey shore, at Jones Beach, and two glorious winter weeks in Florida.”
Dunlap’s grammar school graduation from Stewart School on Long Island, New York.
In 1968, Dunlap arrived in San Francisco; this photo was taken by her husband-to-be atop one of the city’s many hills. Dunlap recalls, “It’s winter; I’m wearing a T-shirt; I’m ecstatic!”
Dunlap’s dog Seumas at eight weeks old. “We’d had him two weeks and he was already in charge, happily biting my hand (see my grimace),” she says. “He lived for sixteen good, well-tended years.”
Dunlap started practicing yoga in 1969 and received her instructor certification in 1981, after a three-week intensive course in India with B. K. S. Iyengar. Here she demonstrates the uttanasa pose (the basic standing forward bend) for her students.
Seumas and Dunlap in 1988: “He was an old guy by this time, who had better things to do than be a photo prop. I think his expression says it all.”
Dunlap relished West Coast life. “This is what someone who grew up in the snow of the East Coast dreams of . . . the California life!”
For her fiftieth birthday, Dunlap and a group of close writer friends went to Santa Cruz for the weekend. Seated above from left to right: Marilyn Wallace, Marcia Muller, Dunlap, and Shelley Singer. Seated on the floor: Judith Gruber (pen name Gillian Roberts), Linda Grant, and Lia Matera.
The Sisters-in-Crime presidents and former presidents—known as the Goddesses—always gather for a picture at conventions. One year, Dunlap had to miss the gathering. Her friends, knowing how much she wanted to be there, photoshopped her into the image.
Dunlap’s last typewriter, before she happily switched to writing on a computer. “Plotting is one of the aspects of writing I really like—everything’s new, all gates open, all roads wide,” she says. “But it involves a great deal of data with connections that are not always linear. On paper or white board or with notes taped on corkboard—I tried them all—it was cumbersome. Using the computer was magic.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1989 by Susan Dunlap
cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4532-5055-6
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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