“Vanessa’s fierce like you,” Thor said. “Your younger sisters believe in the system, they believe the truth will come out. Like there’s some mistake. Vanessa is keeping the whole idea of a frame job to herself. She’s a protective lion to those two.”
My heart did a little flip. “Did you ask who Rhonda married?”
“Reggie Baker. Know him?”
“No way!”
“You know him?”
“Dude, I know everyone here. Huh.”
“What?”
“Oh, Rhonda and Reggie hated each other in high school, but I guess that’s how it goes.”
“Combustion,” Zeus said. “You think he could’ve engineered this?”
“Hmm.” I sat back and folded my arms. “Reggie was a band guy. Tuba.”
“Tuba, huh,” Thor said.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe not, then,” Thor said.
Zeus nodded in agreement.
“What? Being a tuba-playing band guy means he can’t be devious?” Odin asked.
“Well…” I said, trying to think how to explain the entirety of American high school culture to Odin.
“Sort of. Let’s just say, whoever Nancy is having an affair with just moved up a notch on the suspect list,” Thor said. “Anyway, it’s beautiful out there. The sheep are great. Petey was out there barking.”
“Petey!” I said. “Such a good dog.”
“They’re taking good care of that place, baby.”
I sighed. “At least it’s not a fracking-sand mine. That whole ridge would be shaved off if Hank Vernon would’ve gotten it. Leveled. No trees. He’s an asshole.”
A few of the hard-up farmers had sold their land for sand mining. People often thought of the environmental damage from fracking, but most of the sand used in fracking came from our part of Wisconsin—mining it damaged a lot land. Sadly, I dragged a fry through a blob of ketchup. “I’d give anything to be able to walk that land. I would give anything to see my sisters again.”
“Ice—”
“I know,” I said.
Odin’s face had begun flashing across the table, which meant the computer screen was flashing. He looked up, as if he felt my gaze. “I’m in.”
I smiled.
He was hitting the keyboard furiously now. “She made two phone calls in the minutes after we left.”
Zeus had a napkin and a pen in his hands, and two seconds later Odin was rattling off phone numbers and times, which Zeus wrote down. Thor grabbed his own phone and punched them in, doing a reverse search.
My guys. They were fast and efficient as an Indy 500 pit crew, except way hotter and definitely more destructive.
“Look at this,” Odin said. “She received a call from one of those same numbers sixty-four minutes before we arrived. That was who alerted her that we were coming.”
“Which led to the donning of the bra,” I said.
Odin read the number, and Zeus scribbled the time on the napkin.
“It’s a private number,” Thor said. “Yeah, that would’ve been too easy, I guess. To get a name.”
Zeus sat back. “What do you think?”
“Why not?” Thor said.
“What?” I asked. “Call it? Just call up the number?”
“Worth a try,” Zeus said. “My number will come up Unknown. He or she will probably let it go to voicemail, but maybe that gives us something.”
“Do it!” I said.
He put it on speaker and dialed. Sure enough it went to voicemail. “I’m not here. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” Ding.
I stiffened. The voice…So familiar…
“Damn,” Zeus said. “Always so much easier when they say who they are.”
“Oh my god,” I breathed.
Three handsome bank robber faces turned to me. “What?”
My heart pounded faster and faster. “I know that voice. I think it’s Hank.”
Thor’s mouth dropped open. “Hank Vernon? Bank owner Hank Vernon? No fucking way.”
I put my fingers to my lips as the enormity of it all unfolded in front of me. “I’m ninety-five percent sure.”
“Could you see Hank Vernon having an affair with Nancy Zietlow?” Thor asked.
“Have an affair with a woman whose husband is dying of cancer? And just when that man is getting better, to kill him or help kill him?” I said. “Hell yes. He’s devious. Without conscience.”
“So he takes out Tim Zietlow,” Zeus said.
“Possibly with Nancy’s help,” Thor added.
“How?” I asked. “They can’t make Tim eat the cheese.”
“He was eating stews,” Thor said. “Maybe Nancy mixed some of the cheese into a stew that Tim ate, and the whole thing about him being unable to resist it sitting in the fridge was bullshit.”
I grit my teeth.
“I’m feeling good about ruling out Denko now,” Zeus said.
I nodded. It was horrifying to think my old nemesis Hank was behind this, yet a relief that Denko might not be sniffing around like a dangerous hellhound. Hank was dangerous for sure, but not a trained assassin out to kill us.
“I can’t fucking believe Hank would frame your sisters,” Thor said. “He can’t have the farm, so he makes sure they lose it anyway? Spiteful fucker.”
“No. You guys. He’s getting the farm.”
“I thought the Millers were buying the farm.”
“Oh, they’ll have it for a few years. But guess who they’re getting the loan from? Remember how I was wondering how the Millers could possibly have the cash to buy our farm? Price of alfalfa hay and all that? Maybe your minds were too consumed with milkmaid porn, but I was thinking about the case and how it didn’t make sense. Because they don’t have the cash. Hank will lend it to the Millers, and he’ll do what he did with my folks—put something tricky in the loan that gets him the farm if they miss a payment. Or maybe not even tricky—nobody ever thinks they’re going to miss a payment.”
“That’s what Andy was hiding,” Zeus said. “A condition of the loan was probably to keep it confidential.”
Odin usually chimed in on these brainstorming things, but he sat there perfectly silent. Okay, silent wasn’t quite right; his stormy expression was loud as thunder. Which meant he was really fucking angry. Dangerously angry.
“Exactly—he’d want them to keep it quiet. But nobody else in their right mind would lend to the Millers. They’re bad with money! This is it. The answer.” I looked around at my guys. “Right? We have him.”
“Not yet,” Zeus said. “We still have to prove all of this.” He glanced nervously at Odin. He, too, sensed the stormy thunder. “We can’t just go shoot him in the face.”
“So what if we go around to all the motels with their pictures?” I tried. “You know we’ll find a clerk who’ll identify them together.”
“Probably.”
“So we got him, right?”
“We got him for capitalizing on this tragedy,” Zeus said. “We got him for being the asshole who gets the girl and the farm. But we can’t connect him to the cheese.”
“But we have phone records, the affair, probably the loan…”
Thor shook his head sadly. “We need the cheese.”
“He put it in the case,” Thor said. “Does the Piggly Wiggly have an anti-shoplifting system? Cameras?”
“If they do…Christ, this was six weeks ago,” Zeus said. “If they have it on video, they probably didn’t keep it.”
“Hank Vernon,” Odin growled, staring thunderously into the middle distance. “He kills a man and frames your sister. He thinks he can get away with that.” He turned his gaze to me, then, and the darkness I saw there scared me. “He won’t.”
Thor and Zeus riveted their gazes to Odin.
“Which is why we’ll handle it,” Thor said in his calmest and most serene tone. “We’re on the job.”
“Don’t act like you don’t see exactly what I see,” Odin said. “This is a go
od crime with very little physical evidence.”
“Maybe they’re storing footage in the cloud,” I said. “Maybe they have surveillance in every aisle. Maybe they never clear the cache.”
“Maybe, maybe, maybe. You think Hank is stupid?” Odin asked. “He would let himself be filmed putting tainted cheese into the dairy case? Do we have film of him sneaking to the farmhouse and taking it from the dumpster? If that’s what even happened? Because that’s what saves your sisters. Short of a confession. And Hank isn’t Andy. It would take a lot to make him confess…”
I sighed and slumped back in my molded seat. Detective work was a lot harder than it looked on Law & Order. It was amazing any cases ever got solved in real life.
“We keep going forward,” Zeus said, eyeing Odin. “Look how far we got by following the leads.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, noting the worry in Zeus’s voice.
“No reason to start hacking off anybody’s limbs or pulling out their intestines like rope,” Zeus added.
“Wait, what?” I said. Was that the a lot it would take to make him confess?
Odin’s hard and stormy gaze was fixed on Zeus. “Of course. No reason.”
“No, I would think not!” I said.
“We go forward,” Zeus said to Odin.
I was not loving their vague conversation. “I vote for not having a man’s intestines being pulled out like rope to be on the table. Let’s opt for following up with those motels instead.”
“Are you propositioning your husbands?” Thor asked, trying to inject humor into the whole situation, but it wasn’t working. Bloody intestines like rope were out on the table now.
I pushed away the ketchup-drenched fries. “I’m officially done with these.”
“Thor, you should follow up on the motels.”
It was a bit of a surprise that Zeus said that. Yes, Thor was the sparkly people person, but Odin was better at questioning strangers.
“Should I go with Thor?” I asked.
“You’re with us. The three of us break into the grocery store,” Zeus continued. “It closes at ten.” He glanced at the time.
“No hurry,” I said. “Stock boys won’t be gone from the Pig until eleven.” I knew that from having friends who worked there back in high school.
“What? Everyone calls it the Pig?” Zeus asked.
“Yeah.”
“We can’t get out of this town too soon.”
“What would you call it?” I asked.
“A store shouldn’t be named Piggly Wiggly in the first place,” Zeus declared.
“That’s not an answer,” I said.
Zeus shot me a stern and sexy look.
“Oh dear,” Odin said, shaking his head gravely. “What will we do with you?”
I bit my lip as delicious shivers slid all over my skin.
“Maybe we take this someplace else,” Thor said. “Not that Walmart isn’t romantic.”
We headed out to dine on steaks and frog legs at the Cobblestone Supper Club, which was not much more romantic, what with the glassy eyes of decrepit mounted buck heads.
A girl I remembered from a rival high school, Annie, was our waitress. She’d been a cheerleader, and she still had that really sunny way about her where you couldn’t help but like her.
Between courses, we plotted out a map of shady motels for Thor to visit. He wanted to deal with the night clerks, because night clerks were the easiest to bribe. One of those sorts of things criminals seemed to just mysteriously know, the way baby spiders just mysteriously know how to build perfect webs.
“I could take half these motels and you two could break into the store,” Odin said.
“I need you with us,” Zeus said.
Odin gave him a hard look. “It’s a fucking cakewalk to get in there.”
Zeus shrugged. “You’re the computer guy.”
“Oh, come on,” Odin said. “Their username is admin. Their password is one-two-three. You saw it as well as I did.”
“You both noticed all that when we were there?” I asked.
Odin turned his amber eyes to me. That would be a yes. A really sexy yes. Odin saw so much, it was scary sometimes. He was smart, beautiful, and more dangerous than ever. Right at that moment, I would probably even do hu-cow with him if he asked.
“The three of us are in the Pig,” Zeus said.
Odin’s expression grew dark, but then Annie came back, and it was time to order dessert. My guys each ordered their own. Our marriage might involve group fucking, but my guys drew the line at one-dessert-with-four-forks action.
I still smiled to think about that. We had a marriage. And things were looking dire, yes, but together we could do anything. I really did firmly believe that.
We’d get through this.
My optimistic mood lasted exactly one second longer, because just then, Hank Vernon himself entered the restaurant.
Hank Vernon. The man who destroyed our family.
I forced my gaze to the saltines.
“What is it?” Odin asked.
I felt my guys all staring at me. They probably thought I was having a bad reaction to the food. Or maybe I just hated the saltines.
“Isis?” Thor said.
My heart pounded as I tracked Hank’s movements out the corner of my eye. Hank was maybe fifty, and he was with a younger version of himself—one of his cousins. He wore a nice houndstooth sport coat with a turtleneck, and he had his sunglasses perched atop his swept-back hairdo like the avid downhill skier he liked to remind everyone that he was. He led his cousin to the corner booth, the nicest booth, without waiting to be seated. It was like he thought he owned the place, which of course he probably did. He’d barely sat down before he began waving and pointing violently at the table, as though to call a dog onto the carpet.
I looked over at Annie, who was up at the bar—ordering Hank’s drinks, I guessed. She’d lost her sunny expression. She looked a little scared, even.
Bile rose up in my throat. It wasn’t that I worried Hank would recognize me. He probably wouldn’t even recognize me without a disguise—he was that self-absorbed. It was just that I couldn’t bear to look at his smug, demanding, overprivileged face. I couldn’t not think about Mom and Dad, so desperate to keep our family together on that farm that they perished out at sea doing a job they had no business doing. I’d always suspected he probably laughed when they died, astounded at his good luck.
And there he sat.
He was saying something to his companion. It looked like he was scolding him, but you couldn’t tell with Hank. The man probably burned through hundred of dollars of skin care products a week, but not even an act of God could keep the meanness off his face.
Annie sped across the place with two drinks loaded onto her tray. She set them down with extreme care.
Hank addressed her, saying something with that smug look of his. That look had always gotten to me. He was so proud of himself, so satisfied. He felt powerful and smart, and he could do whatever he wanted—that’s what the smug look had always said to me.
“Do we need to go back to Margie’s?” Thor asked.
“She’s not sick,” Odin said, directing his gaze to Hank and his cousin. “It’s him.”
Zeus stiffened. “Vernon.”
They’d never laid eyes on Hank, but they knew me.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“Motherfucker,” Thor said.
“You guys! Don’t sit there staring at him. Let’s just go.”
“Agreed,” Thor said, with a quick glance at Odin, who was definitely more than staring at Hank. He was assaulting the man with his eyes.
Zeus pulled bills out of his wallet. Several hundreds, double what our meal probably cost. He set the money on the table, and we stood. “We’re not here to draw attention.”
Odin had different ideas, it seemed. He grabbed the money and his jacket and headed over to Hank.
“What the fuck,” I breathed.
We all watc
hed as Odin interrupted whatever was happening.
“He’s good,” Zeus said. “He just wants a look at him.”
Odin handed Annie the money, then turned and strolled toward us. We headed to the heavy, stained-glass door, with Odin right behind us.
“What the fuck?” I said once we were in the parking lot.
“Just wanted a look at him,” Odin said. “Told Annie we’d been called away.”
“I can’t believe you did that.”
“Sometimes you need to get a look at a man,” Zeus explained, like it was so obvious and simple.
We sat around at Margie’s for a while and headed back out after eleven. Thor took off to the motels in the smaller rental car while Odin and Zeus and I waited on the street near the Piggly Wiggly.
Splitting us up into teams of three and one made little sense.
When the last car was gone, we stole around to the delivery entrance. Odin went to work on the locks. Zeus leaned up against the building in the shadows, keeping watch.
I leaned next to him. “What’s up with you and Odin?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have him help canvass motels?”
He glanced at Odin, who was crouched in front of the door, hard at work. “I want him with us.”
“Why?”
“He’s just, you know, not sleeping.”
“You think he isn’t making good decisions?”
“His decisions so far have been good,” Zeus said.
“You think that could change?”
“You have a calming influence on him. When you touch him, his pulse actually lowers. Have you ever noticed?”
I shook my head. But I understood now. He wanted me to be with Odin to calm him, but for him to be with him if he did really go dark.
“I’m not going to lie to you, goddess—this really is a careful crime. It’s a strong, well-planned crime without a lot of hope of physical evidence. He was right about that.”
“Are you preparing me for failure?” I asked.
“We’re not giving up. But sometimes the bad guys win. Right now, it looks like the bad guys might win. We’ve seen it before, and we handle it, but Odin’s in some kind of trauma network. Did you see his face when you recognized Hank’s voice?”
“No.”
“I did. Look at Hank. A despicable man with a lot of power over other people. A bad man getting away with hurting others. Who does that remind you from Odin’s life?”
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