Dead Giveaway yrm-3

by Leann Sweeney

  "Hope he doesn't get all stupid when he lands his hundred-million-dollar NBA contract. Sometimes green is the only color that matters with these young superstars."

  "You're being judgmental. Will is not your typical, cocky jock. He seems pretty damn normal to me— and to Kate."

  "He is an amazing athlete, which means reporters are gonna be on this case like fleas if they find out he's even remotely involved."

  "They won't hear it from me," I said.

  "Someone in the Department's always taking a leak in the general direction of the press, but let's hope we can keep Will's name out of this. You both went to Olsen's house. When was that again?" He poised his pen for my answer.

  "Two days ago. Then she calls me tonight. Says she needs to talk to me. I figured her more as the HighTea-at-the-Warwick-Hotel type than a coffeehouse patron."

  "Why couldn't she talk to you over the phone?" he asked.

  "Believe me, I asked that question. She said she was in a rush, but would stop here on her way back to Bottlebrush. Said she had more to tell me about Will."

  "That was all?" Jeff asked.

  I closed my eyes, thought hard about every word Verna Mae and I had exchanged earlier. "That's all I remember, Jeff. Sounds to me like she was here in Houston, but that she didn't come to town just to chat with me."

  "Maybe. Or she could have been passing through. Anything unusual about the tone of her voice? Was she nervous? Upset?"

  "She seemed the same as when we met in person— someone whose roof wasn't nailed on tight."

  He looked up from the notebook, his blue eyes narrow. "Explain."

  "First off, the woman was as happy as a hog in a peach orchard when I brought Will to meet her. She may have been surprised to hear from us, but she was prepared. Verna Mae knew everything about Will, had followed his every move since the day he was left on her porch."

  "How did that happen? Adoption files in this state are welded shut," Jeff said.

  "With the cases I've worked so far, don't you think I know that? First thing I did after talking with Verna Mae was track down the caseworker who picked up baby Will from the local police. She owns a private nanny service now. I'm meeting with her Monday, and sure hope she can shed some light on how Verna Mae learned so much about my client."

  "Could the Olsen woman have contacted Will Knight tonight? If she was as obsessed as you say, maybe she came to town to meet with him."

  "Will would have called me, especially after how strange she seemed the other day," I said. "She made us both feel about as comfortable as Baptists in Las Vegas. No, I'm thinking Verna Mae had business in the city. Anyone with as much money as she seemed to have has business."

  "You should know," Jeff answered with a grin.

  "Smart-ass." I used my knee to bump his.

  Kate and I inherited buckets of money along with a still-profitable computer company when our daddy died, money that I use to help unwed mothers like my own biological mother had been. The money also helps support my PI business—a business I started to help adoptees locate their birth families. Bottom lines aren't important to me; reunions are.

  "Business would be a logical explanation for Verna Mae showing up," I said. "The CompuCan CEO is always calling Kate or me to approve or sign stuff."

  "Okay, she may have been in Houston for reasons unrelated to your case," he said. "But from what you've told me, seeing Will Knight the other day might have brought her here, too. Does he live in town?"

  "He does. Bellaire. You want me to call him? See if he saw her today?"

  Jeff didn't get a chance to answer.

  A man wearing a dark suit came in with a uniformed cop trailing on his heels.

  "Who's in charge here?" the man said.

  Jeff pushed back his chair and slowly rose. "That would be me, sir. How can I help you?"

  "What the hell happened?" The man was red-faced, and his bulbous nose bore evidence of more than coffee drinking.

  Jeff walked the short distance separating us from the newcomer and stopped within inches of the guy's face. "Who's asking?"

  "Jack Brown. I own this place," the man said.

  "Sergeant Kline. HPD Homicide. A woman was murdered out back, Mr. Brown, then buried in a pile of coffee grounds. Those grounds your own special gift to the environment, maybe?"

  Brown's bluster disappeared. "Wet grounds are heavy. Expensive to have hauled off."

  "Yeah. That's what I figured. You cooperate, and maybe the city won't be too pissed off about how you handled your garbage problem." Jeff turned to the cop standing next to the clearly agitated owner. "Show Mr. Brown to a table, and I'll be with him in a minute. Maybe he'd like some coffee."

  Jeff came back over and bent close to my ear. "I need to interview this one now that I have his complete attention."

  I whispered, "Okay, I can wait."

  "Please go home. I'll call you."

  "But—"

  "And do me a favor? Let me talk to Will Knight first."

  He said this nice enough, but he wasn't asking for a favor: Jeff was warning me not to contact my client.

  "If you say so," I answered.

  Now, sometimes you gotta dance to the tune the band plays, especially when one of the fiddlers is your cop boyfriend. But as I drove home, I had to think long and hard whether this was one of those times.

  2

  I arrived home around ten, grabbed a Coke from the fridge and headed for the living room, unable to stop thinking about Verna Mae's call to me today and the horrible way she died. The sheer brutality had me as mad as a bull in red dye factory. I needed to find out what had happened. I mean, why beat a woman to death for jewelry and the contents of a handbag that could have been snatched without much effort? But maybe she had some fight in her and pissed off her assailant. If the bad guy was on drugs, it wouldn't take much to set him off.

  Then there was Will. He would soon learn about this, and I sure wanted to be the one to tell him. I did have his number on speed-dial. One press of a button and I could see if he was home, walk that tightrope Jeff had placed between me and my client by asking Will if he'd had any surprises today—like a visit or call from Verna Mae.

  Don't be an idiot, I told myself. I needed to respect Jeff's request, and I sure didn't want to get on the wrong side of HPD. I was still a new PI and under the supervision of Jeff's good friend Angel Molina of the Molina Detective Agency. Though I am a registered investigator, I only stay that way if I don't get into trouble. Getting into trouble with Jeff would affect not only my ability to work as a PI but also our relationship... which could affect Jeff's friendship with Angel... and maybe then affect the prospect of getting my little subsidiary of the Molina Agency, Yellow Rose Investigations, licensed by Texas in a few years. That damn domino effect will get you every time.

  No call to Will. Period. But I had to do something.

  With my calico cat, Diva, watching from the arm of one of the overstuffed chairs, I practically wore a hole in the Oriental rug in front of the sofa while sorting through all this, thinking about what I'd seen tonight and trying to remember every detail of my conversation with Verna Mae the other day. Could there be a clue from our meeting, a clue to explain why she contacted me today, a clue connected to her death?

  Sipping intermittently on my soda, I recalled the woman's enthusiastic greeting when we'd arrived at her house, an encounter that immediately made Will and me uncomfortable. It would have made any sane person uncomfortable. I mean, what was Will supposed to do when a stranger hugged him like the human equivalent of Saran Wrap? Verna Mae's nose only came to his navel, and she pressed her plump face into his abdomen, wrapped her fleshy arms around him and held on for dear life. He reacted by raising his own arms as if he were being fitted for a tuxedo, all the while staring at me bug-eyed.

  After she finally let go, she gave me one of those pat-you-on-the-back type hugs, thanked me for bringing her boy back home and walked us through her I Lust for Waverly house to the dining room. There
we found a meal fit for a July Fourth picnic. Fried chicken, potato salad, a slab of ribs, baked beans and a gallon of sweet iced tea were laid out on a massive table—enough food to serve the state legislature.

  We filled our plates—she'd even brought out the good china—and went out to the front porch. I chose the wicker chair right next to a planter filled with baby's breath, and Will sat to my right. Verna Mae flanked him on the other side. Thank goodness the round glass-covered table was high enough that he could fit his unbelievably long legs underneath.

  I no sooner took my first bite of beans when I dropped my napkin. I bent to retrieve it and saw it had blown under the planter, the one I hadn't paid much attention to when we walked inside despite its presence near the front door. The one I now realized used to be a bassinet.

  A white wicker bassinet on wheels.

  I felt like ten caterpillars were crawling up my neck. "Um, unusual use of a baby bed," I said. "Did it belong to one of your children?" About then I was praying that was the explanation, but my gut told me otherwise.

  "I have no other children, Ms. Rose." She rested a hand on Will's arm. "I placed the bassinet where I found my boy that night."

  A brief, tense silence followed before Will said, "Cool," and continued eating.

  I believe that's how teenage boys cope with everything—by eating.

  Verna Mae raised the thin eyebrows over her gray eyes—the only thin thing on her body. "You may have the planter if you like, Will."

  He gave me this pleading sideways glance that shouted, Please help me.

  "A baby bed in a men's dorm might make for some interesting jokes," I said, trying to sound lighthearted rather than critical.

  "Of course," she replied. "I was just... kidding." Her tone was terse enough that I knew the lighthearted approach had failed.

  So much for my acting skills. "Why don't you tell us about the night Will arrived."

  Her face relaxed and her eyes glazed over in dreamy remembrance. "I heard him crying. Jasper— he was my husband—said a cat was in heat. But I knew better. Thank goodness Will came to us in October, because the weather was perfect. No danger of him freezing or dying from the heat." She turned to Will. "When I picked you up, you quit crying right away. You knew we belonged together."

  More hairy little feet on the nape of my neck. More painful glances from Will.

  "But that's not how things worked out," I said.

  "Thanks to Jasper." She practically spat his name. "Will was sent to me. God knew how much I wanted a baby, but Jasper called the police—even after I told him it was downright blasphemous to go against God's will. We should have kept our baby."

  "But... your husband did what he was supposed to," I said, trying to sound apologetic for pointing this out.

  She looked at me like I'd tracked horse manure onto her plush white carpet. "The right thing to do, my dear young woman, is to accept what God gives you. And He gave me a perfect baby boy."

  Will subdued a "Yeah, she's definitely crazy" smile by scooping up one last giant forkful of potato salad and shoving it into his mouth.

  "If you'd kept him," I said, "wouldn't people have wondered where this baby came from?"

  "They might have had questions," conceded Verna Mae. "But folks in town knew we wanted to adopt. It's not like I didn't talk to everyone and their stepcousin about our desire for children."

  "Did you apply to be Will's foster parent after he was taken from you?" I asked.

  "That's not something I wish to discuss." From her brusque attitude and the little twitch near her eye, I figured I'd better leave the subject alone.

  According to my amateur psychological analysis, this woman was angry at her dead husband and mad at the system that took Will away—grudges she'd held for nineteen years. Focusing on her old wounds wouldn't help Will find his birth parents. I needed to know what had not appeared in the newspaper articles, anything that would give me a place to start looking for clues. I said, "The articles Will's parents kept about the abandonment were pretty sketchy. Did Will come with a note? Or a special formula or baby bottle? Anything?"

  "Nothing but the little T-shirt and diaper he arrived in," she said.

  "No blanket?" I asked.

  "Maybe a flannel receiving blanket. I don't really recall."

  "Did he arrive in a box or a car seat or... what?" I asked.

  "One of those plastic infant seats that you could buy anywhere back then. Officer Rollins took everything with him that night. Said he needed them for evidence. Evidence. Like it was a crime God left Will here with me." Her eyes filled and she blinked hard to fight back the tears.

  Explaining to this woman that child abandonment was indeed a crime back then, and still is if you don't drop the baby off at a hospital or other safe haven, would have done no good. I chose another direction. "Did you hear anything about the baby in the days that followed?"

  "Only that CPS got custody. Ridiculous arrangement. He already had someone to love him. But look at him," she said, beaming at Will. "He's turned out beautifully despite all those mistakes."

  She put her hand on Will's forearm and kept talking, rattling off stories about championship games he'd played in, starting with Little Dribblers. Little Dribblers, I learned, was not a team of bib-wearing toddlers but rather a youth basketball league.

  Will and I may have been squirming before, but this was the Twilight Zone moment—when we realized she'd followed Will around, maybe even with a camera. "And... how did you learn all these things about Will?" I asked. Because she shouldn't have known anything, not even his name.

  She stared at me, color rising in her cheeks. "Why does that matter?"

  "Probably doesn't," I answered quickly. Getting her more agitated than she already was did not seem like a good plan, so I decided to keep my thoughts to myself about how Will's adoption information should have been better protected.

  "It's been very difficult since he went away to college, though," Verna Mae went on. "That drive to the university in Austin is simply awful."

  The drive to the university? She was still stalking him today, and right there I should have quit worrying about the woman's mainspring popping and pressed harder for how she got her information. But did I? No. Stupid me changed the subject, asked about how the town reacted to the excitement of an abandoned child. And that's where I failed as an investigator. She was practically admitting to stalking the kid, but the idea made my stomach do little flip flops, made my skin prickle. I moved on, asking questions that didn't provide us with anything new.

  The Coke I'd been sipping had made my hand cold. I quit pacing and set the can on my coffee table. How I wish I'd probed further the other day, gotten past my own discomfort at Verna Mae's obvious obsession with a kid who, by law, was supposed to have remained anonymous to her. The only other thing I learned of value was the name of the policeman who took Will away—Burl Rollins—currently chief of police in Bottlebrush. My calls to him yesterday and today had not been returned, but maybe, with Verna Mae dead and a county deputy sent to hunt up her relatives, he might talk to me tonight.

  Yes. That's what I could do now. Jeff didn't say anything about my contacting the police in Bottlebrush.

  Diva followed me into my office—a converted study right off the front foyer. Once the cat was settled in my lap, I powered up my computer and within two minutes had Burl Rollins's home phone number. An unlisted number would have taken a little longer, but his was right there in the white pages.

  A sleepy woman answered on the fifth ring.

  "Is this Mrs. Rollins?" I asked.

  "Yes, ma'am. And who might you be?"

  "My name is Abby Rose, and I'm an investigator calling about a local woman named Verna Mae Olsen. Could I speak to Chief Rollins, please?"

  "What kind of investigator?" she asked warily.

  "Private. Unfortunately, Mrs. Olsen passed away this evening and—"

  "Oh, I know she's dead, and so does the Chief," Mrs. Rollins said.

&n
bsp; "Terrible thing," I said. "I identified her body and... it was very... upsetting. I'm hoping to find out what happened to her, and maybe your husband can—"

  "You identified the body and now you're asking me what happened? Somehow that doesn't compute. Had she hired you for some reason?" Mrs. Rollins asked.

  "No. She was simply a person of interest in a case I'm working."

  "Person of interest? Aren't you slick with your cop lingo? Listen, Ms. Rose, you want to talk to Burl, you better be straight with me."

  "I would, except I'm not sure the Houston police would want me discussing what I saw tonight."

  "Burl tells me everything and the reporters will be saying plenty tomorrow, so why don't you just tell me what the hell happened?"

  If I'd learned one thing in my short career as a PI, it's that you have to give to get. So I gave. "Mrs. Olsen was severely beaten. That's all I know."

  "Beaten? My heavens, that is not a nice way to go. Who'd be mad enough at a middle-aged country woman to beat her up? And I'm not just asking to be nosey. Burl would be asking you the same question."

  "The police think she was robbed. I take it Mrs. Olsen was well-off?" I made it a question. It was her turn to give now.

  "Listen, Ms. Rose. You're not getting another thing out of me until you tell me what's going on. What kind of case are you working on?"

  I explained about Will, how he was the baby found on the doorstep so long ago.

  "The baby? You don't say?" She sounded genuinely surprised and a whole lot friendlier all of a sudden. "Now that's pretty interesting. I'm certain Burl would like to talk to you. Give me your number and I'll have him call you in the morning."

  "I-I'd kind of like to speak with him tonight."

  "You're out of luck. He's picking up the warrant to get inside Verna Mae's house. Deputy Sheriff called for his help about thirty minutes ago."

  "He's at her place?"

  "He will be, I expect. Said he'd get the warrant and meet the deputy there."

  "From what Verna Mae said the other day, I assumed she lived alone. Why would he need a warrant?" I asked.