Dead Wrong

by Janice Kay Johnson

  "Nah," Nita contributed. "Take a look."

  They all did, some more surreptitiously than others. Bronwen was laughing and leaning, none too subtly, on Jennings's roommate. Jennings himself was slumped, apparently oblivious to everybody around him, staring morosely into his drink.

  If Will hadn't been looking in that direction, he might not have noticed the two women just entering J.R.'s. Trina Giallombardo, gleaming mahogany hair still pulled back, but more loosely than during working hours, with a second woman Will didn't recognize.

  "Well, well," Travis murmured, "if it isn't your mom's sidekick."

  "A cop?" Gavin said with interest.

  "Yeah, don't you recognize her?" Travis nodded toward the pair, heading toward an empty booth a safe distance away, thank God. "Trina something. Will?"

  Reluctant to talk about her, he said only, "Giallombardo."

  Gavin studied the two and shrugged. "Should I remember her?"

  His disdain irritated Will, who nonetheless kept his mouth shut. He didn't much like Trina Giallombardo himself.

  Just as she was sliding into the booth, she saw Will. Their gazes locked for a startled moment before hers touched with seeming alarm on Travis and then the others with Will.

  "Isn't that the cop that was coming around to talk to all of us?" Jody asked. "What's she doing here?"

  "Maybe getting a drink," Will suggested. "Or dinner."

  She seemed to be concentrating awfully hard on the menu, as if conscious of the stares.

  "Even cops eat," he added.

  "You should know."

  Will glanced at Gavin, who was smiling but whose tone had sounded edgy. Oh, hell, Will thought; he was probably imagining things. Gavin was just ribbing him. He'd hung out at Will's house plenty often. He'd never seemed uncomfortable with the fact that Will's mom was a police detective.

  "Yeah, that's right," Justin said, too loudly. "You're on the in, aren't you? Are the cops gonna arrest anybody, or do they not have a clue?"

  Will unclenched his jaw. "Sorry, no in. You know as much as I do."

  "But you're in the D.A.'s office now, right?" Vince asked.

  Before he could answer, Gavin complained, "Why hasn't this cop I should recognize talked to me? Don't I rate?"

  Will was getting a headache. He rolled his shoulders slightly to ease tension and realized Trina was watching them. She turned her head quickly and pretended to be scanning the room when she saw him looking.

  "Which one is the cop?" Gavin asked.

  "The one facing us," Jody told him. "She talked to me the day after Amy's murder."

  "Yeah? What did she want to know?"

  "You know. Who Amy was dating. Whether she'd been afraid of anyone. Stuff like that."

  "What did you say?" Karin asked. "Did she complain about anybody to you? She didn't to me."

  Jody shook her head. "Me, either. I mean, everybody liked her."

  In the moment of silence that followed, Will guessed they were all seeing, as he was, an image of Amy's battered body, naked in the freezing night, her limbs sprawled obscenely in a message of contempt from someone who hadn't liked her, or maybe just didn't give a damn who she was, only what she represented.

  "Poor Amy," Nita whispered.

  "You have no idea if they even have a suspect?" Gavin asked.

  Will shook his head. "I really don't."

  He didn't tell them about Trina Giallombardo's drive to Salem to talk to Ricky Mendoza or the tape of the interview that he'd listened to. He sure as hell didn't say, Did you know Amy was murdered just like Gilly was?

  Lack of knowledge didn't stop anyone from speculating. Jimmy McCartin showed up about then and edged into the booth next to Jody, who pouted and squeezed closer, if that was possible, to Bruce Restak.

  "Wow, you guys talking about the murder?" McCartin asked.

  "What else?" Travis said fatalistically.

  They all had theories, it developed, most having to do with a Ted Bundy type who'd come here to ski.

  "Even murderers like powder snow," Justin said, with a flippancy that made Will realize he never had liked the guy.

  Bruce Restak, Travis's artist friend, tried to change the subject, maybe because as a relatively recent arrival in Elk Springs he hadn't known Amy well or maybe because an ugly murder didn't seem like his idea of fun conversation, but the topic of a new art gallery in town fizzled. Nobody except Travis cared.

  Will's headache worsened. Justin Hill wanted to talk about European ski resorts and the beautiful women who thronged after the top competitors. Gavin and Jody kept on about Amy and the investigation. McCartin kept trying to reminisce about wild parties in high school that Will didn't even remember him being at. Travis seemed morose tonight.

  Meantime, Will was painfully conscious of Trina Giallombardo's presence, not that far away. He found himself assessing her in a way he hadn't when she wore a stern, authoritarian persona along with the regulation navy blazer, sturdy shoes and badge and gun on her belt. Tonight, like most of the other women, she was in a turtleneck, jeans and sheepskin-lined boots. She might have on a little makeup. Maybe that was why her face seemed more vivid, more intriguing. Different.

  Despite her Italian heritage, her skin was paler than that of most of the women here. Which probably meant she wasn't a skier. Her lips weren't plump and pouty, her hair blond, her legs long. Studying the classic oval of her face, he found himself thinking Renaissance Madonna. A face of simple prettiness rather than exaggerated beauty. She sat there quietly, observing, as he guessed she always did.

  Not his type, of course, but tonight he found her more interesting than he did the women at his table. Which probably had to do with his pounding head and restless mood.

  "I'm going to call it a night," he said into a pause in the chatter. "Headache."

  "Yeah, I'm a little under the weather, too," Travis said. "I came with Bruce. Can you drop me at home?"

  "Sure."

  "You're leaving?" Jimmy McCartin said loudly. "The party is barely getting started! Hey," he added, "have you thought any more about that house?"

  "House?" someone asked.

  "Yeah, I'm with Century 21," he told everyone. "I've got cards if anyone is thinking about buying. I took Will up to that new development at Crescent Ridge to look at some houses. There's some real beauties there, right, Will? He's considering one."

  Will ignored him.

  "Hey, give me a call," Gavin said, standing to let Will out.

  "I can stop by the dealership," Will said.

  "Nah, I'm not there anymore. The guy who owns it was an asshole." He shrugged. "He needed me more than I needed him. This is a slow time of year for sales anyway. I don't need to work for a few months."

  "You make enough to take months off?" Will asked in surprise.

  "Hell, yeah! My best month ever, I made $30,000. This year wasn't that good, but I did fine. This guy at the Toyota dealership wants me to sell cars for him, but I'm not in any hurry."

  Justin Hill was loudly telling everyone about some endorsement deal and the shit pot full of money he was getting just for lending his name when Will walked away.

  "I've been known to hide out in my room in Schladming or Bad Gastein when I knew Hill was in town," Travis said in a low voice. "Who invited him tonight?"

  "Not me." Will shook his head. "I was just thinking what a jackass he turned out to be."

  "Always was. Who invited McCartin?"

  "No one."

  Will's route had, by design, taken him in front of Trina Giallombardo's table.

  "Hey," he said, stopping. "You here undercover? Should I pretend I don't know you and keep going?"

  "I go out once in a while." Trina looked at her friend. "Sandy, if you haven't met him, this is Will Patton. Will, Sandy Kilts."

  He tore his gaze from Trina to nod at the friend. She immediately reminded him of a colleague in the D.A.'s office in Portland. Smart, intense, passionate and completely uninterested in wasting precious time on makeup, bea
uty salons or shopping. This Sandy's dishwater-brown hair was captured haphazardly atop her head with some wooden implement that looked like a two-pronged fork. She seemed oblivious to the fact that she'd dribbled barbecue sauce from the buffalo wings down the front of her sweater.

  "Are you a cop, too?" he asked.

  "Me?" the friend exclaimed. "Wow. No. I write for the Sentinel. I did an article not that long ago about you," she said, looking at Travis.

  Travis had been hovering in the background, but now he took a step forward. "Right! I knew you looked familiar. Hey. I was flattered. Thank you."

  "You're incredibly talented. You don't need flattery from me."

  "Haven't you heard how insecure we artists are?"

  She gave him a brisk glance. "You don't look insecure."

  Will laughed out loud for the first time tonight. "Cockiest guy I've ever met," he told her.

  Travis elbowed him. "We've been talking about you," he said to Trina. "Or, more accurately, about how the investigation is going."

  Her journalist friend said, "The police line is, 'We're pursuing several leads.' That's all I can get out of her."

  "Doug Jennings is here tonight," Will commented.

  "Just left." Trina nodded toward the door.

  "Really?" He turned to see that Bronwen Fessler was now in their booth on Bruce Restak's other side. She was talking, and everybody else seemed to be listening.

  "You think the guy is as heartbroken as he looks?" Travis sounded thoughtful.

  "What makes you ask that?" Voice changing indefinably, Trina set down her glass.

  "Hmm?" Travis turned back. "Just surprised to see him here. And from what I can gather, he spends most of his time weeping on various women's shoulders."

  "Wait. You don't work with him, do you?"

  "I see the lift operators around. And I remember Will here after Gilly—" He stopped, rocking on his heels. "Sorry."

  "People mourn in different ways," Will said. "Some get mad, some turn into hermits, some talk."

  "Uh-huh," Trina agreed. "Last year, I had to go tell a guy that his wife had been killed in a car accident. He grabbed a shotgun and started shooting. We had to cuff him and take him in."

  Sandy traced a finger around the rim of her glass. "This older woman I worked with lost her husband to cancer. After that, he was all she could talk about. It was as if she thought she was keeping him alive. The sad thing was, everyone took to avoiding her."

  Trina nodded. "For some people, grief seems to be intense but brief. Others…"

  "Never quit mourning?" Travis didn't look at Will, but they both knew who he was talking about.

  Will couldn't help the harshness in his voice. "Natural death is easier to accept than murder."

  "But Amy Owen was murdered, too," Sandy Kilts pointed out.

  "Remember they were divorced," Travis said.

  Did that matter? Will wondered. From all he'd heard, Doug Jennings had wanted Amy back. He'd claimed—hell, he was still claiming—to love her. Okay, she wasn't part of the pattern of his life the way she'd have been if they had still been married. But emotions and memories had a great deal to do with grief.

  Will and Gillian had fought the night of her death, with bitterness they probably couldn't have retreated from. Their paths had been diverging. She'd wanted to go into the Peace Corps and, like a jerk, he'd been saying if she loved him she wouldn't go. He hadn't been mature enough to let her go with the faith that she'd come back to him. After that last fight, he doubted she would have. If she'd really had sex with Mendoza to hurt him, it probably meant that she still did love him even if she didn't want to. But he judged himself harshly enough to know that, if she hadn't died, he wouldn't have been able to forget the slap in the face. After the police came knocking on his door—After that he'd have forgiven anything, if only he could have had her back.

  "He might love the idea of her more than her," he heard himself saying. "I don't know why they got divorced…"

  "She wanted to settle down and start a family, he didn't," Trina said.

  "He loved her, she loved him, but they got a divorce because he didn't want two a.m. feedings?" Will shrugged. "Not one of the great passions of the century, even if he is weeping into his beer now."

  "You do have a point."

  "Anyway, he was working when Amy was murdered," Travis said.

  "Hmm? I thought we were talking about grief, not murder."

  Her friend laughed. "Oh, come on! You had that cop look. We all saw it. We might not have been talking about murder, but you were thinking about it."

  "I wasn't…."

  "Yeah, you were." Will grinned. "Let me tell you, I can recognize it from a thousand yards. I'd be talking to Mom at breakfast, her sitting there in her bathrobe with her hair sticking out every which way, and suddenly something I'd said would make her point like a setter that sees a duck. It would turn out she was investigating this guy's father, or I'd just blasted someone's alibi out of the water."

  A waitress edged past them, drinks rocking as the tray grazed his arm.

  "You know," Sandy scooted over and patted the seat of the booth, "you two could join us."

  He was tempted, but he was afraid their friends would be insulted to have them make excuses and then settle down at a booth with someone else.

  "Thanks," he said, backing away, "but I've been battling a killer headache."

  "Nice to see you again." Travis nodded at both women and followed once Will had said his goodbyes. Both grabbed parkas from the rack near the entrance and zipped up before stepping out into the frigid night. "We could have stayed," he said mildly.

  "It would have looked like we were just trying to get away from the friends we were supposed to be having fun with."

  Both paused to pull on gloves as they let a car pass, the lights briefly blinding them. "We were just trying to get away from them."

  Funny, Will's headache had eased. "Pretence allows for civilized relationships."

  Travis sighed. "Yeah, yeah. You're right." He held out a hand. Sounding less than enthusiastic, he said, "It's snowing."

  Scattered, seemingly weightless flakes floated from the dark sky.

  "You should be rejoicing."

  Travis grunted. "I've been thinking of giving up the ski school gig. I want more time to paint. I want to sleep in."

  Will's SUV beeped and the lights flashed as he unlocked with the remote. "You love to ski."

  "Fires burn down to ashes."

  Will paused with his hand on the door handle. "Tell me you didn't feel a pang tonight when that idiot Hill was going on about how sad it was you were sidelined while he was going to kick butt in the world championships."

  Surprisingly, Travis laughed. "Sure, I felt a pang. But that's all it was. A man can move on, my friend." He got into the passenger side of Will's Toyota 4Runner.

  "Can he," Will said softly, before opening the door and following suit. It was Trina Giallombardo's face he saw, not with her cop look, but rather from when she first spotted him inside, her eyes startled, her cheeks flushed.

  Was he ready to let Gillian go? he wondered, sticking the key in the ignition. Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  * * *

  TRINA ATE BREAKFAST reading transcripts of Ricky Mendoza's trial. She combed police reports about the investigation into Gillian Pappas's murder at lunchtime while she ate her sandwich without tasting it. She was back to the transcript that evening while she absentmindedly sipped soup.

  When did doing your job cross over into obsession?

  Did she care?

  What else did she have to do with her time? Her social life wasn't exactly hopping, her kickboxing class had been canceled this week, and beyond the bare necessities she wasn't especially interested in decorating an apartment with cheap kitchen cabinets, regulation beige carpet and ugly drapes. Why not obsess?

  She rinsed the bowl, put it in the dishwasher that didn't get anything clean that wasn't already, and opened the cupboard in searc
h of something sweet. Darn it, she'd finished the bag of gingersnaps last night. She was way overdue to grocery shop….

  Her search of the freezer yielded half a pint of Rocky Road ice cream. Happy, she grabbed a spoon and sat eating the ice cream right out of the carton.

  Ten bites into the Rocky Road, she hit pay dirt. Buried in the autopsy report was the startling fact that, when Gillian Pappas's pubic hair was combed by the pathologist, a number of hairs not hers were found. They might belong to three or more men, an analyst later concluded. Two matched Ricardo Mendoza's. So far as Trina could discover, nobody had pursued the origin of the others. Excitement surged in her. Surely the hairs, evidence in one of the worst crimes this county had seen, had been preserved. They could be compared to the ones found on Amy Owen's body.

  Trina turned back to the transcript of the trial, astonished that the defense attorney hadn't made more of the presence of unidentified hair. Okay, some were probably from Will Patton. But had she had sex with a third man?

  The spoon suspended halfway to her mouth, Trina brooded. If Ricky Mendoza had raped and murdered Gillian Pappas, wouldn't that suggest a second man had also raped her? Gang rape wasn't uncommon; savage, sexually motivated murder was more commonly committed by loners. But there were always exceptions. If Mendoza had had a partner, Amy Owen's murder made more sense.

  All along, the core assumption was that whoever killed Amy had to have seen Gillian Pappas's body. Trina wondered if Lieutenant Patton had tagged her to work this case in part because she was a woman. It had to have crossed her mind that the body had mainly been seen by cops. Cops, medical examiner, morgue attendants and the pathologist.

  No, she reminded herself. Attorneys, even jurors, had also seen some pretty graphic photos. But the idea of someone imitating a murder because some photograph inspired him didn't work for Trina.

  She licked ice cream off the spoon. Actually, she concluded, she didn't buy the copycat theory at all. It was so…calculating. Coldblooded. The antithesis of a murder driven by rage and frustration and hatred, where the killer could find satisfaction and a sense of power only by destroying the object of his desire and the cause of his low self-esteem. If you weren't driven by such all-consuming, blind rage, could you bring yourself to rip at a woman's breast with your teeth?