by J. S. Marlo
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Startled, she dropped her iPhone. It hit her toes. “Ouch!”
“Come here.” With a delicate nudge of his hand on the small of her back, Jasper coaxed her onto the bed before recovering her iPhone. “Were you about to call me?”
A soft warm glow shone in his eyes. She looked frightful, and yet he appeared oblivious to her disfigurement.
With the iPhone resting on her lap, she leaned against the pillow. “Actually, I was thinking I should call Damien or Nathalie, but then maybe I should start with Ariana in case she somehow heard about the explosion.”
He sat on the edge of her bed. “I called the kids after I talked to your doctor. Ariana took it in stride, but I did promise her you’d call as soon as you could.”
“Thank you.” His thoughtfulness melted her heart. “When did you talk to my doctor?”
“Five minutes ago in the corridor.” He cast his gaze along her body. “I didn’t want to lie to Ariana in case she asked me how you look, so I called before I saw you.”
His reasoning amused her. “And how do I look?”
A smile touched his lips. “You look amazing. And alive.”
Tears pooled in her eyes. “How’s my car?”
“Let’s put it this way...” He placed a comforting hand over hers. “I’ll write up a report for your insurance company this afternoon and we can go car shopping tomorrow.”
Though its color never appealed to her, she hadn’t planned on replacing her car for another five years. “What happened? Did I blow it up when I used my remote starter?”
“You started your car with your remote?” A dubious edge spiked in his voice. “How far were you from your vehicle?”
“Maybe ten feet...” The intensity of his piercing gaze unsettled her. “I meant to unlock the door, Jasper, not start the engine. I pushed the wrong button by mistake.”
“No, you didn’t.” The man squeezed her hand. Hard. “You pressed the right button. If you’d waited to be seated behind the wheel to start your car, you might be dead.”
“You mean I didn’t cause the explosion?” Not liking the deep lines carving his forehead, she searched his face for an explanation. “That was an accident...right?”
A sigh he didn’t try to silence hissed through his teeth. “I’m waiting for the official report, but some clues suggest you detonated an explosive device when you started your engine.”
The idea that someone attempted to kill her filled her with dread—and fury. “It can’t be related to Thomas’ murder, can it?”
“Don’t know.” Jasper drummed his fingers over the top of her hand. “I need you to go through the last few days with me. Start with this morning. Did you see anyone lurking in the parking lot of the Rec Center? Someone waiting in a parked car or on a bench near the entrance?”
“No, but maybe Nathalie did.” By saying that, she knew he would check with her friend. “Hold on. There was that car that didn’t belong parked on the street when I left home.” In her mind, she superimposed her palette onto the vehicle. “An ash gray car. Four doors. I didn’t see any driver, but it followed me out of the neighborhood. I...” She searched her memory for any car she might have glimpsed at the Recreation Center resembling that particular one but drew a blank. “I don’t recall seeing it afterward.”
Pensive, he removed his hand then retrieved his phone and a stylus. “Make? Model? License plate?”
“Let’s see...it had four wheels and a roof?” Had she walked by it, she might have remembered its logo. “Does that help?”
He stared at her with dubious laughter in his eyes. “You’ll have to show me where it was parked. Now about yesterday. Did anything out of the ordinary happen? Any visitors? Phone calls?”
“Well, I met with Thomas’ widow. That was interesting.” And disappointing. Nonetheless she gave him a full account of their conversation.
The stylus stilled over the screen of his phone. “How come you never mentioned that check before?”
“Because I didn’t think it was related to his death?” On second thought, she regretted keeping it from him. Had she given him the check, he could have had his handwriting expert examine it before she bothered Thomas’ widow for nothing. “I sure made a fool of myself.”
“You followed a lead.” He lifted his shoulder in a half shrug. “Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. What else happened yesterday?”
By the time Liliane finished recounting her last few days, the doctor still hadn’t made a second appearance, so she called her daughter.
Chapter Fifteen
~Don’t rush me, I’m waiting for the last minute.~
After the doctor released Liliane from the hospital, Jasper drove her home.
As he pulled into her concrete driveway, she pointed at the compact yellow car, the graduation present of her third neighbor’s son, parked in place of the gray car of this morning.
He narrowed his eyes. “I’ll get an officer to canvass the street to see if anyone remembers it.”
Upon walking in, he checked every door and every window for signs of break-ins. She followed him throughout the house then ended up back in the garage.
“Liliane?” Bent down, Jasper examined the lock of the side door leading outside. “It looks like the keyhole is scratched and the wooden frame is chipped. Have you ever noticed this?”
The first owner built the house over thirty years ago. Since she bought it, she completed many repairs and renovated some rooms, but she hadn’t touched the garage yet. “No, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. I hardly use that door.”
Whoever placed the alleged bomb could have tried to sneak in after her lover departed from her driveway. She might have spooked the culprit when she also left early.
“If this was an attempt to sneak in, it failed. The deadbolt wasn’t touched. Still, I want it processed.” Gazing into her eyes, he brushed her cheek—her unscathed cheek—with the back of his fingers. “You should go take a long shower or a bath while I wait for the guys—unless you need help.”
Nobody can complain that police officers aren’t helpful in this town. “Coming from a man in uniform, that sounds like an indecent proposal. Are you sure it’s not illegal?”
His laughter soothed her battered body. “Do me a favor, would you? Don’t lock the bathroom door and try not to fall. I’d hate to have to kick the door down or bring you back to the hospital.”
To hear he intended to check on her reassured her. “I’ll leave it ajar and I promise to scream if I need help. How does that sound?”
“Good. Liliane?” Jasper stopped her in her tracks as she headed inside. “Until we determine if someone did make an attempt on your life, it might be best not to mention anything to anyone, not even Nathalie or Damien.”
“Agreed.” She didn’t want them to be worried sick or start acting like overprotective mother hens—and smother her alive.
~ * ~
When he dropped her off at her office, Jasper convinced Liliane to let him borrow the infamous check and a few leases. His investigation had become so convoluted that he didn’t want to ignore any elements, as insignificant as they appeared.
One of Liliane’s landscapes hung over his fireplace at home. He loved how the northern lights in her paintings danced across the night sky, each wave blending with the next on the canvas, and how she enhanced the beauty of her landscapes with subtle nuances. If the stroke of a letter raised doubts in her mind about the authenticity of a signature, he deemed it worth investigating. At this point, he trusted her intuition more than he trusted Thomas’ widow.
The handwriting expert he contacted promised to examine the documents as soon as he received them, which meant Jasper should expect the results in a day or two. Whether these results proved relevant or not was an entirely different matter.
One of the reports on his desk at the station revealed the partial print on Thomas’ personal phone matched Rose’s right index, but then the gi
rl had already admitted touching it.
By leaving the truck at the motel where Thomas met his young lover, the killer placed the emphasis on the victim’s character and behavior. The same motive could apply to the exposure of his private parts or his personal phone. Then again, whoever sent these last two messages to Thomas requested a picture of his joystick. Had the victim readied himself to snap one, he would have needed his phone.
Could the phone have fallen from Thomas’ pocket without him realizing it or did the killer borrow it to plant some evidence on it? Like texts or pictures? The more Jasper dug into his suspects’ motives, the more it resembled a crime of passion or passionate hate.
“Detective?” Officer Welsh’s head peeked around the partly open door of his office. “Ethan Mink phoned while you were out. He said he looked everywhere but couldn’t find his wife’s yellow negligee.”
“Thank you, Welsh.” Jasper had asked Ethan to search for it in case he missed it when he combed the house. The disappearance of the negligee substantiated the other report on his desk. Sophie’s DNA was found on the garments retrieved from under the bed at the motel, but not Thomas’ or any other contributor’s. The report contained more interesting observations. The surface of the dishwater had been wiped clean along with the kitchen faucets, but no rags had been found in the sink.
In the most likely scenario, someone slipped a sedative in Sophie’s drink. Since no dirty glasses were found anywhere in the house, the murderer either placed it in the dishwater—and started the cleaning cycle—or disposed of it. While it would have been easier to get rid of the glass, the murderer might have feared someone would notice it missing.
The clean dishes had raised a bright red flag in Jasper’s mind. Most individuals on the verge of committing suicide wrote a note before their final act of desperation. They didn’t bother cleaning the dishes. Jasper had hoped for a print on the dishwasher that didn’t belong to the victim. Instead he got zilch, not even the victim’s prints, which heightened his suspicion.
The sexy picture snapped through the bedroom window added another lawyer of mystery to the case. On it, Sophie gazed at the ceiling seemingly oblivious to her surroundings, but somehow she found out about it since Liliane caught her in Thomas’ office searching for it.
If Sophie suspected Thomas of having it, does that imply Thomas snapped the picture? Did Sophie spot him through her window? That in itself gave her a motive to kill him and commit suicide—except she didn’t kill herself. “Where do you fit in this, Sophie? Who wanted you dead? And why?”
His mind traveled to the explosion that rattled his world this morning. Until he received the report from the inspector, Jasper assumed someone made a deliberate attempt on Liliane’s life—an attempt that failed. The timing alluded to a connection between the two murders. Logic dictated she unearthed something important, something incriminating, something worth killing for, but he faced two problems with that assumption. First, that something stumped both of them. Second, what would be the perpetrator’s next move?
Will the perp try again or fade into obscurity? Until he figured that out, Jasper intended to keep Liliane under police protection twenty-four hours a day.
A knock on his door interrupted his musings. He gestured for Officer Morse to step in. “You got something?”
“I finished canvassing Ms. Irwin’s street.” The veteran stopped in front of Jasper’s desk. “Nobody recalls seeing any stranger, but a man walking his dog before dawn remembers a car parked two doors from her house. He...” A lopsided smirk tugged at the left corner of the officer’s mouth, raising his mustache. “He told us, unofficially, that he scratched the side of the car near the trunk with the handle of his retractable blue leash when his dog darted underneath, and left an apology note in the windshield underneath a wiper. He thinks his pooch smelled a cat or a squirrel. Anyway, he agreed to let me borrow the leash.”
“Did you find the note in the street?” If the owner of the car collected the note, an outside chance existed he might call the dog walker for compensation. Many times in his career Jasper had witnessed greed overriding caution, leading to the arrest of many thugs. “Did you ask the dog walker to contact us if the car owner calls him?”
“No note in the vicinity of where the car was parked, and yes, I told the dog walker to contact us if anyone calls him. I also sent the leash to the lab. With the amount of gray paint that transferred from the car onto the handle, it must have left quite an indentation.” Officer Morse winced. “The technician should be able to provide you with a make and model within the next few hours.”
That wouldn’t give them a name, but if the owner lived in town, it would narrow the list to a few individuals. “Can you contact the auto body shops and ask them to be on the lookout for a gray car with a big scratch?”
“Already done, sir, and I also told the officers on patrol to keep an eye out for any vehicle matching its description.” With Morse, things got done before he was told once.
“Perfect.” Another possibility occurred to Jasper. “Morse, I’d like you to canvass Sophie Mink’s neighbor again, but this time inquire about a gray car that didn’t belong on her street.”
The morning of Sophie’s death, they questioned the neighbors about any strange individuals lurking around the house, but not about a car. It was a long shot in the dark, but sometimes they hit the target despite the odds.
~ * ~
Liliane triple checked the spelling of the names of the five candidates, three men and two women, entered in the computer. The digital ballot on her screen contained no mistakes. However, before she sent it to the local printer for mass production, the quality control team at Headquarters needed to check it again, and then approve it.
Why Headquarters bothered to hire returning officers to run the office, and pay them big bucks, when they didn’t trust them with the simplest task eluded her. Damien would argue they were control freaks and she would counter that bureaucracy hindered the retuning officers’ efficiency.
The deadline to submit the original documents would end at 2:00 p.m. today. If Stuart, or someone from his party, didn’t enter her office in the next twelve minutes, his candidate would be removed from the ballot, and the by-election would continue without him. It also meant reformatting the ballot with one less name.
Nathalie barged into her office. “Has two-face showed up yet? Can I send the digital ballot to Headquarters for approval?”
“Eleven minutes, and counting.” Her iPhone lay flat on her desk with the time on it. While it would be disastrous for his candidate to miss the deadline, Liliane would relish Stuart’s downfall. “Don’t hold your breath. I’m sure he’ll show up.”
Three minutes later, Liliane heard Stuart’s voice as he greeted Gloria with overzealous enthusiasm.
“I’ll be in my office.” Her friend spun on her heels and marched back into her own office.
Since escaping her upcoming visitor wasn’t an option, Liliane plastered a smile on her face and waited.
At 1:58 p.m., Stuart stepped into her office with his sunglasses on and a large brown envelope tucked underneath his arm.
“Hello, Liliane.” He dropped the envelope on her desk. “The original documents you requested. Feel free to examine them.”
Irritated by his arrogance, she compared every sheet to the copies he’d handed her weeks ago. All the while he wore a path in her carpet with his shoes and hummed along to the songs on her iPhone.
In the end, she didn’t discover any discrepancies and accepted them. “You like cutting it close, don’t you, Stuart?”
“From what I’ve heard, you like to play that game too.” A smirk she wished she could erase from his face stretched from ear to ear. “A few feet closer and you would have met your car’s fate instead of looking like you tried climbing a barbed wire fence and stumbled. Am I done here?”
“Yes. Good bye, Stuart.” Don’t let the door hit you on your way out. After he left, Liliane popped her head in the doorway
of Nathalie’s office. “You can send the ballot for approval. I’m going to get a coffee. Want one?”
Her friend diverted her gaze from her computer screen and smiled. “Sure. Thanks.”
A fresh pot of coffee was brewing in the kitchen. Liliane waited for the liquid to stop dripping before pouring two mugs. Her friend liked her coffee with a touch of honey whereas she preferred hers black like Damien’s. She blamed him for starting her drinking coffee during the first election they worked together. By the time that new Member of Parliament had been elected, she was hooked.
Back into Nathalie’s office with both mugs, Liliane was shocked to discover her friend staring into thin air with gaping incredulity. “What’s wrong? Did they reject the ballot?”
“I sent the request and this is the answer I received two minutes later.” Nathalie moved her screen. “Read.”
I am away from the office but I will process your request first thing tomorrow morning. Sorry for the inconvenience.
“Sorry for the inconvenience? Are they kidding me?” Steamed, Liliane lowered the mugs before the temptation to throw them at the screen became too strong to resist. “It’s not even 3:30 p.m. over there. What are they doing at Headquarters? They have one by-election in progress. ONE.”
In order to get the ballots to her remote areas in time for Advance Polls, Liliane had to ship them no later than the day after tomorrow. The local printer had asked his employees to work all night so a few batches would be ready by tomorrow. Waiting until tomorrow to receive Headquarters’ approval was not an inconvenience but an impossibility.
Nathalie picked up her election phone next to her keyboard. “Want me to call them?”
“No, I’ll get Damien to burst their eardrums.” Between the three of them, he possessed the most influence and stood a better chance of success. “Approval or not, at 5:00 p.m., I’m telling the printer she’s good to go.”