Between a Book and a Hard Place (7 page)

“I'm not sure.” Yvette sobbed. “But Kern was always the smart one.”

“Any idea who would want Jett dead?” I checked my watch. I'd give Dad five more minutes to get to his car. Then I'd call the police.

“Of course not.” Mom shook her head vehemently. “Everyone loved Jett. He was giving the town back its library. Why would anyone harm him?”

“How about you?” I put myself between my mother and the door and released her arm. “You and Dad seem to be getting awfully cozy again.”

“Don't be silly.” Mom huffed. “Kern and I are just good friends now.”

“Right.” I looked at my Timex again. Dad should have made it to his Jeep by now. “Here's the story. You and I came to the library to pick up Jett for a late
lunch. When we got here, we discovered him dead and called the police.”

“But—”

I ran through the scenario we would tell the authorities and added, “Be vague about the time. Tell the police you don't know when we got here.”

“Got it.” Yvette nodded. “Late lunch. Found him dead. Called cops.”

“Good.”

I started to dial 911, and Mom grabbed my hand.

“We need to put our fingerprints back on the railing and the outside doorknob.” Mom pulled me out of the room, then said over her shoulder, “Otherwise, the police will notice they've been wiped clean.”

I stared at my suddenly calm and collected mother. How did she know stuff like that? I certainly hoped she came by her knowledge of forensics the same way I did, via TV and books. But she'd never been much of a reader, and her taste in television had run more toward
Sex and the City
and
Gilmore Girls
than
NCIS
and
CSI
.

I
stood in front of the library, trying to peer through the dirty windows. As soon as Chief Kincaid had arrived and assessed the situation, he'd sent me to wait outside and led my mother off somewhere for a chat. Along with watching the influx of cops, I'd been checking my watch every few minutes since my banishment.

Both ends of the street had been blocked, with an auxiliary officer manning each barricade. I knew they weren't the real deal because, instead of the standard uniform, they wore light blue shirts with navy epaulets and black pants. These volunteers provided traffic control, helped on searches, and supplied additional manpower on an as-needed basis. Unfortunately, the imitation cops were often a few doughnuts short of a dozen.

In addition to the auxiliaries, it seemed as if Chief Kincaid had called in every officer on the Shadow Bend force. The strong police presence was puzzling. True, there had been a murder, but the chief was treating the situation as if there were a bomb threat or a biohazard emergency.

Tired of pacing, I strolled up to the squad car parked on the sidewalk. It was barring the building's entrance and I peeked inside, but there wasn't anything interesting to see. The driver had gotten out and was arguing with the cop from another cruiser—the one positioned diagonally across the mouth of the alley.

I sauntered closer. Maybe I could overhear their conversation and get some idea of what was going on. However, as soon as they spotted me, they clamped their lips shut and frowned.

The officer closer to me was Jessie Huang, one of two female cops on the force. She and I had spent some time together during a previous investigation, and she had bonded with my grandmother's cat.

Hoping Jessie might give me a hint as to why the chief had rallied all the troops, I put a question in my voice and said, “Looks like Chief Kincaid thinks this is more than a simple robbery gone bad?”

“Hard to say.” She looked somewhere over my head, clearly avoiding my gaze. As I opened my mouth to try another approach, the radio on her shoulder crackled to life. Stepping out of my earshot, she listened intently and nodded.

When she moved back to where I was standing, she said, “The chief's ready to talk to you. Meet him inside the library's rear entrance.”

“Is my mother with him?” I asked, trying to gauge Jessie's expression.

“No.”

“Oh.”

A chill ran down my spine. I sure hoped my mother had stuck to our story and left my father out of it. She was a good liar, so she had no excuse to let anything about him slip into her account of the
events. If she got Dad in trouble, I would never forgive her.

Not that I planned to forgive her anytime in the near future anyway, but if she screwed up my plan, I'd be even less inclined to let her off the hook.

As I sprinted away, I heard Jessie mutter to the other cop, “I wouldn't want to be Dev. The chief is mad enough to chew nails.”

Yikes!
Why was Chief Kincaid angry? He liked things neat and tidy, and murder certainly didn't fit into that scenario, but, hey, it gave him job security. At least it did if he solved the case.
Hmm.
I probably shouldn't mention that during our interview.

Walking into the library from the dim alley, I blinked, temporarily blinded by the eighteen hundred watts of illumination now flooding the building's back hallway. Half a dozen lights mounted on tripods marched down the passageway in a straight path to the stairs, where Chief Kincaid stood, gesturing for me to join him.

Several people wearing white Tyvek coveralls, booties, and rubber gloves were swarming over the tiny corridor and down the steps. I assumed there were even more in the basement, dusting for prints and gathering any other forensic evidence the killer had left behind.

One of the coverall crowd was kneeling in the storage room doorway, pawing through an unzipped wheeled suitcase. He glanced up at me as I passed by him, a speculative expression on his face, then twitched his shoulders and continued digging around in the duffel.

Oh. My. God! I should have realized I'd be a suspect. Family was always under suspicion. But in my
haste to make sure my father wasn't implicated, I hadn't considered my own vulnerability.

Before I could panic, Chief Kincaid joined me and said, “Follow me.”

“Where's my mother?” I asked, refusing to be ordered around like his pet dog.

“I sent her to the station to rest,” Chief Kincaid answered. “Yvette claimed she felt ill and needed to lie down.”

“I should go check if she's okay.” What I really wanted to know is what she'd told the chief. “Maybe she should see a doctor.”

“Yvette's tougher than she lets on.” The chief started down the steps, but when I didn't immediately move, his head snapped back and he glared. “Don't just stand there. I need you to go over the crime scene with me.” He raised a brow. “Unless you're feeling a case of the vapors, too.”

No way was I admitting to Poppy's father that I didn't want to spend any more time with a corpse—I had my reputation as a tough chick to maintain—so I sucked it up and accompanied him back into the basement, hurrying to keep up with his rapid descent.

Eyeing the back of Chief Kincaid's heavily starched khaki uniform, I marveled that his clothes looked as if he'd just put them on a few seconds ago. Likewise, his gray buzz cut appeared to have been freshly barbered and his black shoes shone. Eldridge Kincaid demanded perfection from the folks around him, but even more so from himself.

As I had guessed, several more Tyvek-encased people filled that area. The chief stopped at the threshold of the archive room.

A man staring down into the professional-looking
camera that hung around his neck was blocking our way, and the chief barked, “Aren't you done yet?”

The guy jumped as if he'd been slapped, then skittered backward. “Sorry, Chief. Some of the images are blurry. I need a couple more minutes.”

“I thought you knew what you were doing.” The chief narrowed his steel blue eyes, and the man froze until Chief Kincaid snapped, “What in the Sam Hill are you expecting, an engraved invitation? Go.”

As we waited for the photographer to finish, the chief took out a notebook and stared at the pages. Since he clearly didn't want to talk, I took the time to glance around the basement. When my father had hustled me through this area previously, it had been dark. But now, with the police lights, I could see that the whitewashed walls were stained and cracked. At some point, they had sustained water damage and hadn't been repaired.

Although the building housing the library wasn't very large, it seemed to me that this space and the archival room didn't equal the upstairs. I looked to see if there was another doorway, but didn't find any. The structure must only have a partial basement. The rest was probably a crawl space.

Chief Kincaid maintained his silence until the photographer emerged from the archives and gave him a thumbs-up. Then the chief tilted his head toward the doorway and said, “After you. Keep your hands in your pockets and don't touch anything, just point if you need to.”

I nodded, took a deep breath, and forced myself to walk into the room.

The body of my stepfather was exactly as Mom
and I had left it a couple of hours ago, and I looked questioningly at the chief, who said, “The county medical examiner was in Kansas City, attending a conference. We can't move the vic until he gets here.”

I nodded, then waited with a patient air for further instructions. There was no rushing the chief. I'd find out what he wanted faster if I cooperated with him, a lesson his daughter, Poppy, had yet to learn—which was one of the many reasons they weren't speaking.

“What time did you and your mother get here?” Chief Kincaid asked.

“I'm not really sure,” I hedged. “Sometime after one or one thirty maybe.”

“Walk me through what you did once you arrived at the library.”

“We came in the side door,” I said slowly, wanting to get my report right. Our story had more potholes than MoDOT had left unfilled on I-70. “Mom had a key.”

“So when you two got here, the door was locked?” He took a notepad and a mechanical pencil from his shirt pocket and made a note.

Shit!
I wasn't certain how Yvette had answered that. “I'm not sure. Mom put her key in the lock, then turned the knob. I guess it could have already been open. What did my mother say about it?”

Ignoring my question, the chief asked, “Once you were inside, what did you do?”

“Mom explained that Jett was doing research in the archives, so we came down here.”

“Did you touch anything besides the banister?” Chief Kincaid asked.

“Uh.” I pretended to think, then said, “I may have
leaned on the doorframe of the storage room. I peeked inside there when I walked past.”

“I see.” The chief jotted something on his pad. “How long was it between when you discovered your stepfather and when you called nine-one-one?”

“I don't know.” I wrinkled my brow. “Everything seemed to go in slow motion once we saw him like that.” I gestured toward Jett's lifeless form. “Mom was hysterical, so it took a while to calm her down.”

“How about you?” Chief Kincaid tilted his head appraisingly. “Were you upset, too?”

“In the sense that someone was dead and it looked like murder, yes.” I shrugged. “But I'd only met him once before—at the city council meeting—so we didn't have a personal connection.”

“I see.” The chief folded his arms. “You said he was dead. How did you know that?”

“It was pretty obvious from the wound, but I took his pulse.”

“Did you notice this?” Chief Kincaid used his pencil to point to Jett's left hand. When I squinted, he said, “Take a closer look.”

Reluctantly, I moved nearer and bent over to inspect my stepfather's fist. Immediately, I saw a shred of paper clutched between his fingers.

“I checked his other wrist.” I glanced at the chief. “What's Jett holding?”

“Don't you know what it is?” Chief Kincaid's tone was frustrated. “We can't examine it until the ME gets here and takes it from the vic.”

“Is that what you wanted me to see?” I asked, wondering why I couldn't have answered the chief's questions without returning to the crime scene.

“Do you know where your stepfather's cell phone is?” Chief Kincaid asked.

“No.” I shook my head.
Shit!
I should have gotten rid of both Yvette's and Jett's phones. If the police saw all his texts to her, they'd know our story about discovering the body was a lie. “Isn't it on him?” I crossed my fingers and asked the universe for it to be missing.

“No.” Chief Kincaid indicated the empty phone holster on Jett's belt. “The murderer must have taken it.” The chief frowned, then gestured to the floor and asked, “Was this here when you arrived?”

“What?”

Chief Kincaid tapped the toe of his shoe near a trace of what looked like sparkling gray sand.

“I didn't notice it.” Although I kept my expression blank, I prayed that my father hadn't stepped in whatever material Chief Kincaid had discovered. Just in case, I'd have to make sure he got rid of the shoes he'd been wearing.

“Is there anything in this room that looks out of place to you?”

“How would I know?” I retorted. “I've never been in here before.”

“Right.” Chief Kincaid nodded. “So what was special about today?”

“What do you mean?” I felt my heart speed up. This smelled like a trap.

“Yvette said you were picking up your stepfather for lunch. He's been in town for quite a while now. Why were you getting together in the middle of a workweek?”

“Tuesday afternoon isn't exactly a busy time for me,” I stalled.

“Perhaps.” The chief's eyes drilled into me. “But previously, the only reason I've known you to lock up your store during business hours is in the case of an emergency.” He stepped closer to me. “How is having lunch with your mother and her new husband an emergency?”

“It isn't.” I wiped my suddenly sweating palms on my jeans, then wished I hadn't when I saw the chief notice my actions. “The thing is, Mom has wanted me to get to know Jett, but he's been extremely busy. So when he told her he was free for a late lunch today and she asked me to join them, I decided to close for a couple of hours. Business is usually slow between noon and three.”

“What a good daughter.” Chief Kincaid's voice held a hint of sarcasm.

“I try.”

“I was under the impression from your father that you weren't really on very good terms with Yvette,” the chief murmured.

“True.” I met his gaze without wavering. “That's precisely why I made the extra effort to accommodate my mother's wishes.” Thankfully, Yvette wasn't the only adept liar in our family. It was a skill I had picked up during my days as an investment consultant. “I was trying very hard to begin to rebuild our damaged relationship.”

“I see.” Doubt lingered on each clipped word he spoke to me.

“Was anyone else aware that you planned to have lunch with your mother and stepfather?” he asked. “Maybe you discussed it with a friend?”

“No.” I bit my lip, remembering my phone call with Noah.
Hell!
I needed to warn him not to repeat our conversation should the police question him.
Although I couldn't see why the cops would think to talk to him, better safe than sorry.

“Why is that?” Chief Kincaid wrote something down before looking up at me and asking, “It seems like a matter you'd discuss with Boone and my daughter before deciding what to do.”

“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.” I paused to gather my thoughts, then added, “Mom just stopped by the store and asked if I could join them.”