If the killer knew the Fox family, it stood to reason he might also reside in Santa Barbara. She revised her search, clicking on the first listing. A Facebook page for Jonah Montgomery.
Though he’d been smart about his privacy settings, the little she saw told a story, and she stared, dumbfounded, at his profile picture. A dark-haired man, who looked to be in his late twenties, grinned back at her shamelessly. Even through the cold lens of the camera, he exuded charisma. He held open his uniform shirt, the middle two buttons undone, revealing a Superman logo on his bulletproof vest.
Olivia opened another search window, navigating to the Santa Barbara Police Department web page, where she located Jonah and his mischievous eyes in a picture of the most recent class of rookie officers.
“Who’s the hottie?” Emily leaned down over her shoulder, crunching into a pretzel stick.
“Officer Jonah Montgomery of the Santa Barbara Police Department. And apparently, a suspect in a multiple homicide.”
“He doesn’t look like a murderer.”
Olivia raised her eyebrows at Em. They both knew all too well looks had nothing to do with it.
Seventeen
Will didn’t bother to return to the police station. Jessie had already emailed him the link to Peter Fox’s cell phone data, and after the day he’d had, seeing his new partner, Graham, in the flesh would only cause unnecessary torment. The station would probably still be crawling with reporters anyway. A quick call to Steve Li confirmed that Peter Fox’s loafers had been inventoried in the hall closet inside Ocean’s Song, next to a pair of his wife’s sandals. And just as Will had feared, the horseshoe had no useable prints.
Will pondered the location of those shoes and what it meant, as he passed the town square—the quaint cobblestone courthouse decorated in patriotic red, white, and blue—and turned onto Primrose Avenue. He parked on the street, across from the little white house with the red door and the blue Camaro in the driveway.
Holding the pink box he’d picked up at Myrtle’s Café, he rang the doorbell and waited.
Tammy greeted him, looking uncharacteristically frazzled with her oversized sweatpants and her bleach-blonde locks piled into a messy bun atop her head. She scrutinized the box in Will’s hands as JB waved him inside from his perch on the sofa.
Will made his way into the living room, ignoring the excited yaps from JB’s dachshund, Princess. Tammy had wasted no time transforming JB’s bachelor pad. A home sweet home cross-stitch hung adjacent to JB’s taxidermied bass. “I heard they let you out.”
Tammy laughed, scooping the dog up. “More like they couldn’t wait to get rid of him. Isn’t that right, Princess?”
“I know the feeling.”
JB grumbled at both of them. “Are you two ganging up on a sickly old man?”
Will placed the box on the table, meeting Tammy’s dictatorial gaze. “Vegan, gluten-free, low-fat doughnuts, courtesy of Myrtle. The icing is sweetened with a sugar substitute.”
“You shouldn’t have.” JB lifted the lid and took a whiff.
“It’s no problem. I stopped on the way.”
He wrinkled his nose. “No, really. You shouldn’t have. These things smell like cardboard.”
Tammy shook her head, exasperated, but planted a kiss on JB’s forehead, leaving a red lipstick mark. “I’ll leave you boys to it.”
When Tammy had disappeared into the kitchen, JB scrubbed his forehead. “Spill it. Every last detail.”
“No way. You’re supposed to be taking a break, remember?”
“I know you, City Boy. And you didn’t come here to bring me counterfeit doughnuts. Lay it on me.”
After Will filled JB in on the day’s events—from Graham’s coincidental discovery of the cell phone to his own revelatory trip to the Sand Dunes—he helped himself to one of JB’s cardboard doughnuts, scarfing it down so quickly he barely registered the taste. He’d hardly eaten all day.
“So, you’re saying you’ve got three suspects, and you need a little assistance from the Detective of the Year. Is that about the size of it?”
“Three?”
“Bastidas. Montgomery. Bauer.” JB ticked them off one by one.
“You’re giving Graham way too much credit. There’s no way that guy pulls off a quadruple murder. I’m surprised he can pin his badge on straight. But now that you mention it, I do need your help.”
“I knew it.” JB rubbed his hands together eagerly. The same way he approached a sandwich from the Hickory Pit. “What can I do? Interview a suspect? Stake out a location? Chase down a lead?”
“Not exactly.” Will pointed to JB’s laptop, propped at the edge of the coffee table. A sign-up form for Fog Harbor Beginners CrossFit rested beside it. Tammy had already begun to pencil in JB’s details. “I have to warn you, partner. Tammy might be trying to kill you.”
“Of course she is. That’s marriage for you.”
“I sent you a link to Peter Fox’s cell phone download.”
“Files? You’re wasting these powers of deduction on a paper trail?”
Will raised his eyebrows, giving JB an uneven smile. “If Graham planted that cell phone, there was something on it he didn’t want anyone to see. You’re the only one I trust to find it.”
“Because I’m a better detective? C’mon. You can admit it.”
Tammy poked her head in from the kitchen. “Because he knows you’re already bored out of your mind. As far as I’m concerned, you’re saving me, Deck.”
“So you’ll do it?” Will asked.
JB reached for his laptop. Popping the footrest on his recliner, he set the computer atop his belly and stretched his fingers. “Of course I’ll do it. You had me at doughnuts.”
Will braced the heavy bag against his shoulder, waiting for Olivia to throw the first punch. She’d been coming over to box for months now, but Will still hadn’t grown accustomed to the sight of her swinging auburn ponytail in his garage. Neither had Cy, apparently. The orange tabby watched warily from the warm spot on the hood of Will’s pickup truck. Somehow, even with one eye, that damn cat managed to look cynical. As if it was only a matter of time before Will messed things up again.
“I heard you might have a suspect.” Olivia tugged on her boxing gloves and tightened the Velcro around her wrists. “Jonah Montgomery?”
“We hit the bag first, then we talk shop.” Will marveled at her uncanny ability to find stuff out. She always seemed one step ahead.
“Yes, sir.” Olivia landed a vicious jab-cross to the center of the bag, startling him. Like that kiss on the beach. But he dug in and held firm, letting the juddering of her punches quiet his nerves.
“Don’t forget to go to the body.” He peeked his head around the bag to coach her. “Mix it up a little. A jab to the head and a right hook to the gut. That’ll drop ’em every time.”
She wiped the sweat from her face with her forearm and grinned. When Will let down his guard and lost himself in her smile, she drilled a punishing right hook to the side of the bag that sent him stumbling. “Like that?”
He pushed the heavy bag back toward her, and it creaked as it swung on the ceiling hook.
“You forgot to bob and weave,” she said, her grin broadening.
“My turn.”
Twenty minutes later and out of breath, Will stepped back from the bag, exhausted but clear-headed. Boxing required the kind of singular focus that always set his mind right. He stripped off his gloves and tossed them into the corner. “How’d you know about Montgomery?”
Olivia threw him the towel he’d left by the door. “Wade Coffman. The security guard at Shells-by-the-Sea. He heard the BOLO come in over the radio. Did they find him?”
“Not yet.” Will wiped his face and took a seat on the tailgate. “But he’s got a lot of explaining to do.”
After Will shared what he’d seen on the Sand Dunes video footage and what he’d learned from Betty, Olivia reached into her bag, frowning as she retrieved her cell phone. “So, he is a cop then?”
Joining him on the tailgate, she displayed a Facebook page on her screen. The profile picture belonged to a cocky rookie cop who resembled the golf club-wielding man on the video. “Did you call Santa Barbara PD?” Olivia asked.
He gave her a look, trying to rile her up. “This isn’t my first homicide case. Of course I did. He joined the force last year. Clean disciplinary record. No citizen complaints. They told me he took a few days of vacation. He’s due back at work on Wednesday.”
Showing off now, Will added, “I also spoke with Fire Lieutenant Hunt about the horseshoe. None of his crew reported losing it.”
“Well, wise guy, I’ll bet no one told you this.” Will felt the heat from Olivia’s body as she moved closer to him, could see the sweat glistening in the tendrils that had escaped her ponytail. She seemed to sense it too, pulling back and extending her phone instead. He studied the Facebook post on the screen, trying to make sense of it. Jonah stood at the center of a stage, with a shiny red holiday bow pinned to his uniform.
“What am I looking at here?”
“Jonah’s privacy settings don’t allow us to view most of his posts, but he was tagged in this one at Christmas. It’s a charity date auction to benefit the Santa Barbara Children’s Hospital. You know, bid a few bucks to have dinner with a handsome cop. I’m sure you’ve been asked to do that sort of thing.”
Will’s cheeks warmed but Olivia appeared not to notice.
“And guess who chairs the fundraisers for the hospital?” She clicked to another web page and waited for his reaction. He recognized the woman immediately—the trendy haircut, the gray-blue eyes, the perfect white teeth—though she hadn’t been smiling when he’d met her in the Shell Beach parking lot. According to Peter’s assistant, Marcia, smiling didn’t come naturally.
“Hannah Fox,” he answered.
Eighteen
While Deck mulled over the Facebook post, Olivia cursed herself. She’d all but called him handsome. She’d made him blush. He was probably embarrassed for her, especially after that kiss last night. After the way he’d pulled away from her, leaving her no choice but to run.
“Do you think she and Jonah were having an affair?” Deck slid her phone across the tailgate, maintaining his distance. “From what I’ve heard so far—Peter’s assistant, the couple on the beach—it certainly sounds like the Fox marriage was on the rocks.”
“It’s one of my working hypotheses. Unlike you and JB, always jumping to conclusions, I prefer the scientific method.”
He heaved an exasperated sigh. “So, what was Jonah doing in Fog Harbor then?”
“Crashing the family vacation? You said yourself that Hannah called him crazy in her last text to Peter. He might’ve been stalking her.”
Deck nodded his agreement, bolstering her confidence. This Olivia could do, and she wondered what it said about her that she felt more comfortable delving inside the mind of a brutal murderer than talking about her feelings for the man in front of her.
“So, hit me with a profile, Doctor.”
“Well, I think we can both agree these murders were highly personal. The killer was known to them and was likely aware they vacationed here on a regular basis. Killing a family in the middle of summer vacation, that makes an emphatic statement. You’re not safe anywhere. Since Peter was killed first and apart from his wife and children, I’d guess he was the primary target. The killer must’ve been watching the family since he anticipated they wouldn’t be at the fireworks show with the rest of Fog Harbor. He picked the perfect opportunity, but he’d been planning it for a while. Still, he didn’t quite get it right, did he? He didn’t plan on the bodies being discovered so soon. I don’t think he’s killed before.”
“And the fire? Just covering his tracks?”
“Maybe. Fire means complete obliteration. The ultimate power and control over the victims. A fire rages just like a person. It destroys everything. The ultimate revenge. I’d say you’re looking for a very angry individual.”
“Damn. I might sleep with the light on tonight.”
Olivia laughed uneasily. The profile unnerved her too.
“Do you have time to come inside?” Deck hopped off the tailgate, and Cy followed him, meowing impatiently at the door. “I have something else I want to show you. In the interest of the scientific method.”
“Well, when you put it like that. How could I resist?”
After Deck vanished to the back of the house, Olivia splashed her face with water from the kitchen sink. She examined her reflection in the microwave door and smoothed her hair. Passable. Then she took a seat at the kitchen table on one of the vintage red vinyl chairs Deck had bought from a secondhand store, telling her they reminded him of his mother.
He returned in a clean T-shirt, a laptop computer in his hands. “Meet my other suspect.”
Olivia read the file name on the computer screen. “Elvis Bastidas.”
While Deck ran through the basics on the ex-con, she began scrolling the scanned documents. With every word that caught her eye—parole, threat, murder—she felt less and less certain about Jonah Montgomery. “Have you looked at this already?”
He shook his head. “You’re the first to see it since Peter’s assistant emailed it to me this afternoon. I didn’t want to sway your opinion.”
She scoffed teasingly. “As if.”
“Right. What was I thinking? You’re harder to sway than a concrete block.”
Grinning, she remarked, “JB is wearing off on you.”
Olivia studied the most recent entries in the file. Three letters, printed in the neat script of a man with time on his hands. Bastidas had probably written several drafts so as not to have a single mistake. No cross-outs. No scribbles. “These letters are intense.”
Deck pulled his chair closer to her, reading over her shoulder. The last correspondence had arrived a few months ago.
Hello Mr. Fox,
Me again. The sucker you fucked over back in ’95. The one you wouldn’t let talk to the jury and tell his story like a man. The one who’s been biding his time in this shithole prison. Did you think I forgot about you? I think about you and your family every day. I know everything about you. Where you live. Where you work. The kind of car you drive. The fancy schools your kiddies go to. How often you screw your pretty little red-headed wife. I know who you really are… a dead man walking. You took twenty-five years from me. You owe me everything. And I plan on taking it… the easy way or the hard way. I’ll be seeing you.
“And you said he got out of Crescent Bay State Prison last week?”
“That’s what Marcia said. Apparently, she was more worried about it than Peter since he brought his family here anyway. I put a call in to Bastidas’s parole agent.”
Olivia couldn’t help but think of her late father and her half-brother, Termite. Both members of the Oaktown Boys, they’d always relied on the gang to settle their scores. Mercifully, Termite had gone back underground since she’d last seen him. If she never laid eyes on him again, it would be too soon. “A guy like that never does his own dirty work. You should check out his known associates. Try to figure out how he got those letters past the prison gates to Fox.”
He leaned back, smirking at her. “You should’ve been a cop.”
“Psychologists live in the shades of gray. Law enforcement is too black and white for me. Right or wrong. Good or bad. Guilt or innocence.” Sometimes she wished she could see the world so dichotomously.
“Friends or lovers.”
He may as well have landed an upper cut just beneath her rib cage. The words sucked the air right out of her, and she couldn’t speak. Unfortunately, Deck continued without mercy, and there was nowhere to escape to.
“We should talk about what happened last night.” No way to bob and weave.
“What’s there to talk about? Nothing happened.” Though Olivia’s memory claimed otherwise.
They’d been halfway down the beach, in
the heat of a debate about the upcoming parole hearing of a member of the Manson family with Olivia arguing that, after fifty years in prison, the woman deserved a chance to prove herself outside prison walls. No surprise, Deck had disagreed. When Olivia’s fingertips had brushed his hand by accident, a current of undeniable anticipation had zinged through her, a not-so-subtle reminder that she found him both insufferable and irresistible.
“It didn’t feel like nothing.”
“You stopped us from making a stupid mistake. Clearly, I broke my own rules and you’re not interested anyway.”
“Not interested?”
Olivia kept her eyes on the table, safe from his pitying gaze. “You pushed me away.”
“And then you ran off. You didn’t even give me a chance to explain.”
She stood up and retreated to the corner of the kitchen. Unable to bear her discomfort any longer, she turned away, hiding her face. “Explain what? That you don’t see me like that anymore?”
Deck’s chair scraped the linoleum. She heard his footsteps approaching behind her and tried to focus on what to do next. But his hand on her shoulder stirred her thoughts like a witch’s brew.
“Olivia, look at me.”
She looked.
“Can I have a do-over?”
She rested her hands on his hips, and he took another step toward her, cradling her cheek. His lips meandered along her jaw, marking the space between her ear and chin with soft, torturous kisses. Olivia slid her hands along his back, pulling him closer. Stupid mistake, be damned. Until finally he pressed his mouth to hers.
It felt inevitable as the tides, this kiss. The first time, last March, when she’d shown up on his doorstep, and he’d kissed her breathless, Olivia had known it would happen again. No matter what she’d told herself. What lines she’d drawn. What silly oaths she’d sworn. Now, with his lips on her neck and his hands on her body, she couldn’t remember why she’d ever thought this was a bad idea.
One Child Alive: An absolutely gripping crime thriller packed with nail-biting suspense (Rockwell and Decker Book 3) Page 7