Dark Tort (7 page)

All this I explained to Britt. He whistled.

“Sounds like a pretty extraordinary young woman.”

“She was.”

He asked, “What about Dusty’s love life?”

I thought back, trying to remember what had been just out of reach when I’d first seen Vic a few hours ago. “A couple of months ago, Dusty told me about some problems she was having with her boyfriend. He’s Vic Zaruski, the fellow who helped me tonight. I just happened to run into him when I was looking for a phone.”

“Stop and tell me about that.”

This I did, as Britt wrote. “Vic was very nice and helpful, and he seemed extremely broken up when he heard something had happened to Dusty.” I went on to explain that I knew little of Vic, beyond a short but friendly chat I’d had with him one time when I’d brought a meal over to the Routts, and he’d been waiting for Dusty. He was going to a technical and vocational school somewhere outside of Denver, and he loved to play the piano. I did remember that he was particularly proud of his car, a vintage white Chrysler Sebring convertible that he kept in immaculate condition. This summer, I’d admired the way Vic glided that ultracool car into the Routts’ driveway, when he came to pick up Dusty. I didn’t know the details of the breakup, I only was aware that I hadn’t seen the Sebring for a while. Still, what twenty-year-old woman didn’t have romantic ups and downs?

“So, did Dusty have a current boyfriend?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe.”

“Dusty told you all this stuff while you cooked together, but you don’t know whether she had a boyfriend?”

“Wait a minute.” She’d said she had something to tell me. And she’d promised to explain the new bracelet. My brain finally recalled what had been bothering me. “There might have been somebody, though she didn’t exactly tell me about it.”

“What do you mean?”

I bit my lip. I was so tired. And was it warm in this room, or was that my imagination? “I’m not sure,” I said finally.

“Tell me anyway.”

“When Dusty came last week for her cooking lesson, she was wearing a bracelet. It wasn’t the kind of jewelry she could possibly afford.”

“What do you mean?”

I shook my head. “It was a complex arrangement of opals and diamonds. I asked her about it, almost, you know, playfully. Anyway, she . . . glanced down at it and kind of frowned. Then she said she’d go take it off, she really shouldn’t cook while she was wearing it. Then I said, ‘Aren’t you going to tell me about it?’ And she said, ‘How ’bout this? I’ll wear it next week and explain it to you.’ ”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. Did you find a bracelet on her?”

“Did you, Mrs. Schulz?”

“No, I did not.”

“Was she wearing it when you discovered her?”

“I don’t remember.”

Detective Britt closed his eyes and shook his head. Then he opened his eyes and half grinned. “What do you think was going on with this bracelet?”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to speculate.”

“Exactly. So, in all your cooking lessons, Dusty Routt never mentioned a boyfriend. But once, you caught sight of a bracelet? And she said she had something important to tell you? Something important to tell you last night, to be exact, when she was going to explain the bracelet.”

“That’s correct.”

Since I wasn’t supposed to speculate, what I didn’t tell Britt was that I had thought Dusty was kidding around one time when she had told me that her real motivation in learning to sauté vegetables, steam fish, bake bread, and roast lamb was to attract a wealthy husband. This dream fellow would fall in love with her cooking, she reasoned, with a laugh and a shake of her newly highlighted hair. But it had felt so much like a joke that I’d never taken it seriously. And in all our time together, she’d never talked again about this inspiration for learning to cook. Maybe I’d inform Britt of this particular conversation at some point.

“Look,” I said, “I have a ton of kitchen work to do for a big party tomorrow, if the party actually takes place. And I mean what I keep telling you, I really am exhausted. Do you have any idea when I could get back the kitchen equipment that I dropped in the H&J office?”

“We’ll have your husband bring it to you.”

“Thanks. Sorry about the mess I left in the reception area.”

“Not your fault. A cleaning team will come in when we’re done with the crime-scene analysis.”

“Good.” I rubbed my eyes. If there had been a bed there in that toasty-warm interrogation room, I think I would have lain down on it.

“Okay, Mrs. Schulz. Where will you be for the next couple of days? In case we need to talk to you some more.”

I gave him our address, the Ellises’ address, where I was supposed to be doing Donald Ellis’s birthday party the next day, and the location of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Aspen Meadow, where I was catering Gus’s christening on Sunday. Almost as an afterthought, I said, “I sure don’t feel like going back to work after a friend of mine has died. I don’t want to think about having to act happy when I see people.”

“Oh, Mrs. Schulz,” said Britt. “Tell me about it.”

Tom was waiting for me in the department snack room. I blinked in the bright light of the pop and candy machines that lined the walls. In one, glassed-in shelves offered limp, plastic-wrapped sandwiches that looked like one of Arch’s lab experiments. Several patrol officers, appearing even more exhausted than the sandwiches, sat talking at one of the small tables. Upon our entrance, they put down their foam coffee cups and surveyed us with hooded, curious eyes. Tom nodded to me and tilted his head, indicating the door. The less said in the department, he seemed to be saying, the better.

Fine by me.

“I was just bringing in the bread ingredients,” I explained to him ten minutes later, once we were headed up the interstate, back toward Aspen Meadow. A blanket of clouds now obscured the moon, and the night was once again impenetrably dark. A chilly wind slapped the dark sedan and swirled up flakes of ice from the roadway. I went on: “When I went in, I tripped over her. It took me a few minutes to realize Dusty was just lying there . . . and that she wasn’t moving.”

Tom drew his mouth into a frown and concentrated on keeping the car from swerving out of the lane. “First tell me how you’re doing. Then we’ll get to Dusty.” He flicked me a quick glance, which seemed to tell him I wasn’t doing very well, as a matter of fact. He turned his eyes back to the road and held out his right arm. “Come here.”

I leaned in to his embrace. My seat belt cinched my torso and I unbuckled it. What was he going to do, arrest me? I was numb, cold, unable to feel anything. The reassuring way Tom tugged me into his warmth, the way his strong hand held on to my right shoulder . . . these were what I needed, and he knew it.

“Did you get somebody to go over there, to be with Sally?”

“I called Father Pete. I know he’s recovering from that coronary, but I also knew he’d probably have another one if I didn’t call him about this.”

“Will I be able to see Sally when we get home?”

“Nope. You’re a witness, and they’re going to try to keep you apart.”

“But she’s my friend,” I pleaded. “A neighbor, Tom. Please. I just feel responsible, dammit. I keep thinking, if I’d only arrived on time—”

“Stop. Look, let me see what I can do. Father Pete should be there, and our team is probably finishing up at the Routts’ house. Then the victim-assistance people will go in, try to be helpful, that kind of thing.”

I shuddered. I didn’t want to picture the victim-assistance team, with their quilts and their counseling. Your daughter’s just been killed, Mrs. Routt, you need anything from the grocery store? But I knew they would do better than that.

“I want to be there for Sally. Her family has been through too much.”

Tom’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “I’ll talk to my people. Don’t worry. Knowing you, you’ll be there, Miss G.”

I snuggled into Tom’s side, closed my eyes, and thought about the Routts. I liked them. And I felt empathy for Sally, since I’d spent quite a few years as a single mom myself. But life had been much more challenging for her than it had been for me. When Colin’s father had skipped, Sally had told me she’d been forced to patch together funds for food, clothing, and shelter from a variety of government agencies. Our parish, Saint Luke’s Episcopal, had coordinated with Habitat for Humanity to chip in with materials, muscle, and weeks’ worth of meals, coordinated by yours truly, to help build Sally, her father, Dusty, and little Colin a modest, two-story house across the street from us.

But there had been other disasters, like Dusty’s pregnancy and loss of her scholarship. Dusty had told me she wanted the baby. She’d been excited. And then she’d miscarried. On and on it seemed to go for the Routts. Now gossip in town would center on how “the welfare people” were clearly unwilling or unable to break out of the pattern of screwing up their lives. Unfortunately, Dusty’s murder would appear to be confirmation of this cruel judgment.

I opened my eyes. Had I slept? I thought so. What time was it? The dashboard clock said it was half past three. The road was now cloaked in a frigid fog that promised snow. Despite the icy slick that was glazing the roads, I wanted Tom to drive faster. I wanted to get home, take a shower, and get into bed. I wanted my dear warm husband to lie down beside me, wrap his arms around me, and tell me everything was going to be all right. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

The sedan crested the hill and I pulled away from Tom. The dark cloud surrounding us obscured the mountains of the Continental Divide. There, the peaks had been iced with snow since the beginning of September, and I suspected they were now getting a fresh dumping.

“So,” I asked Tom, “what are the cops doing at the Routts’ house now? I mean, right this minute?”

Tom exhaled. “The usual. If the mother’s not a suspect—”

I snorted and checked the rearview mirror. Pinpricks of snow were tapping on the windshield. “Of course she’s not a suspect.”

“They’ll ask if anyone else has rights to the house.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Miss G. Let me finish. Our guys don’t want anyone to be able to go into the Routts’ house and plant things.”

“Plant things?”

Tom’s voice turned weary. “Put things in there that would tend to implicate someone else. Or indicate suicide.”

“Tom, for God’s sake. There was redness around her neck and on one of her cheeks. Her face had been bashed into a glass-covered picture.”

“Okay then, look at it from another angle. The department doesn’t want anyone entering and removing incriminating evidence. Once our guys have those two things established—that is, nobody strange can come in, and nothing can be taken out—they’ll talk to the mother, see if she knew anything suspicious going on with her daughter. Threatening phone calls, that kind of thing. Then they’ll ask permission to go through Dusty’s stuff. Drawers, pockets, correspondence, you name it. They’ll be seeing if they can come up with some clues as to what happened to her, and why.”

We headed past the closed shops on Main Street, where the fog softened the smiles from the merchants’ electrified jack-o’-lanterns. When Tom pulled into our driveway, I glanced at the two police cars parked outside the Routts’ house. When we finally stepped carefully across our ice-crusted deck, I began to shiver.

Coming into the chilly house did not help. With fall temperatures fluctuating from thirties in the mornings to the eighties in the afternoons, we kept the heat off in most of the rooms. And despite the absence of the Jerk, all the windows remained closed and security wired, unless we were home. The reason for this was simple.

Roger Mannis, our arrogant, creepy county health inspector, was the prime suspect in a head bashing I’d received before a June catered event at the Roundhouse, a catering-events center by Aspen Meadow Lake that I’d opened last spring. The center, too, was finally fully wired for security. Now, unfortunately, the Roundhouse was having a whole set of pipes replaced, and the trenches dug around the former restaurant made it look like a giant prairie-dog village.

I’d expected that Roger was still plotting against Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right! until Tom explained to me that he and Roger had had a talk. Tom could intimidate anybody, all the while keeping his voice easygoing and his hand resting gently on his gun. Roger’s manner had been stiff, but comprehending, Tom said. But when we weren’t at home, Tom added, the windows were to remain closed and armed.

So here we were, unfortunately, with the October chill permeating the shut-up house. Arch, who had his own thermostat, had kept his room positively balmy when he was younger. But now that he was involved in sports, he liked his own cold. If he became chilled, which was rare, he tucked himself inside a sleeping bag on his floor.

The clock indicated it was four o’clock. Arch would be getting up in three hours. With Tom always involved trying to solve murders, how would I tell Arch that our lovely friend from across the street had met such a fate? I did not know. I couldn’t even remember whose turn it was to drive carpool.

Tom turned off the security system, then announced he was bringing in firewood from the pile he’d stacked next to our deck. I moved, zombielike, through the house to the living-room windows. Several neighbors had leashed their dogs and were trailing behind them up the sidewalk, ever curious about what new crisis was overtaking “the welfare people.” Anger prickled my skin, but there was nothing I could do. Maybe I was wrong, anyway; maybe they wanted to help. The police cars were still parked outside the Routts’ house, and Father Pete’s car was behind them. There was no movement from within.