Dead Certain (14 page)

“Thank you. So are we.” Greer fussed with her plate. “He just picked up one infection after another. Colds so often turned into pneumonia. That last infection, well, we caught it early, but it was just determined to do him in. It all went so fast. . . .”

Amanda reached out her hand and Greer took it.

“I haven’t really known what to do with myself since he died. Kevin had needed so much care, and I was so happy to be with him, in spite of the fact that it was pretty much continuous. I was lucky that Steven’s job was such that I didn’t have to work, so that I could be with Kevin every day. We always knew he was just here on loan to us, that we wouldn’t be keeping him.” She brushed away a tear. “Well, we just figured we’d have had him a little longer than we did. It’s been hard to . . . adjust . . . to it just being the two of us. In a way, I think it’s easier on Steve, because he travels with his job, and that keeps him busy.”

“Have you thought about looking for a job?”

“I don’t feel ready to commit to something all day, every day. But I’ve been doing some volunteer work at the local hospital, and some over at the library. That’s where I started reading up on ways to use the Internet to look for lost people—you know, people from your past?” She smiled. “That’s how I found Sean. I searched the Internet. Of course, he was easy to find. Well, I keep telling myself how lucky I am. I lost my son, but I did find my brother. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to see Sean again. And here’s the icing on the cake. I just recently found—”

“Hey, girls.” A tall, thin, balding man with an easy smile poked his head into the room.

“Steve, honey, this is our guest for a few days. She’s a friend of Sean’s. Sort of . . .” Greer made the introductions and gave Steve a quick rundown on Amanda’s situation.

“I’m grateful to you for staying here with Greer while I’m away,” Steve said as he shook Amanda’s hand. “I always hate to leave her alone.”

“I’ve always been fine.” Greer wagged the fingers of one hand at him. “But I think it will be fun to have Amanda here. Now, honey, are you all packed?”

“I think so. I just stopped home to pick up my suitcase. I was hoping to take along my blue shirt, though. I can’t seem to find it.”

“I know just where it is.” Greer put her plate down and excused herself to Amanda.

“Oh, no, please. Do whatever it is you need to do. I hate feeling that I’m holding you up.”

Greer and Steve left the room in a flurry, and Amanda continued to nibble at her lunch. She flipped through the photo album again, one picture to the next. Kevin with Greer, Kevin with Steve. The three of them together in the backyard. At a lake. In front of a large building that could have been a museum, Kevin in a wheelchair, wearing a New York Giants cap and a crooked smile, Greer and Steve standing proudly on either side. So sad that they’d lost the son they’d both clearly loved so much.

“I lost a son, but I did find my brother. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to see Sean again. And here’s the icing on the cake. I just recently found—“
Greer had been saying when Steve had entered the room.

Amanda couldn’t help but wonder who else Greer had found. Whoever it was, she hoped it was someone who would bring a little of the lost joy back into Greer’s heart. And maybe, just maybe, a little of that might rub off on Sean.

Later, when Sean showed up after ten—and several hours after Amanda, citing exhaustion, had excused herself and gone off to bed—Greer tried pumping Sean for information. As far as she was concerned, if he was involved with Amanda—or wanted to be—she wanted to know about it. If he wasn’t, he needed his head examined.

“So, how long have you been seeing Amanda?” She tried the soft approach.

“Since her partner turned up dead.” Sean speared a couple of green beans with his fork.

“You didn’t know her before that?”

“Greer, I’ve been in Broeder for a little more than six months. In that time, I’ve put in sixteen-, eighteen-hour days, seven days a week.” He took a long drink from the bottle of water he’d brought in with him. “So you figure out when I would have gotten around to romancing Ms. Crosby—or anyone else, for that matter—which you obviously think I am doing.”

“I was just wondering if you’d been seeing her, that’s all.”

“Oh, I’ve been seeing her, all right.” He snorted. “Of course, until this morning, I figured that from here on out, I’d be seeing her through the bars of one of my cells. At least until they gave her one of those nifty orange jumpsuits and hauled her off to the county prison.”

“I just thought that maybe you’d been going out with her, Sean. You don’t have to be such a smartass about it.” Greer frowned. “I get it. You’re not dating. Though I don’t understand why not. Such a pretty girl, and she seems like she’s real smart. Owns her own business—”

“Don’t you get it? Amanda has been a suspect in a murder I’m investigating. You don’t get chummy with suspects, Greer. You don’t see them as anything other than that, and you don’t ask them if they’re free on Saturday night. At least if you have more than half a brain, you don’t.”

Greer gave him her iciest stare. “You can’t possibly be serious. You could not have thought that sweet woman could have killed anyone.”

“Greer, I’m a cop. I can’t make assumptions. I can only evaluate the facts, not appearances. And until the facts are in—until the evidence points one way or the other—it has to be played strictly by the book. Cross the t’s, dot the i’s.” He paused to chew and swallow a piece of steak. “Look at Ted Bundy. Lot of people had a hard time believing he could be guilty of the things he did.”

He cut another piece of meat. “The steak is great, by the way. Thanks for fixing it for me.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Oh, don’t look at me that way, Greer.”

“I cannot believe you just compared Amanda to Ted Bundy.”

“I did not. But in the beginning—after the first murder—things didn’t look too good for Amanda. She had motive, she owned a gun the same caliber as the murder weapon, the sweatshirt she’d admitted to wearing on the night her partner was killed had gunshot residue on it. Christ, she’d even left a message on the victim’s voice mail saying she was going to kill him.”

“She isn’t the killer type, Sean. Anyone can see that.”

“Sorry to shatter your illusions, but there is no one killer type. Christ, Greer. Derek England’s murder was my first homicide here in Broeder. Everyone’s watching to see what I do. I know that. Especially since my brother-in-law is the one who brought me in here, got me the job.” He took another sip of water. “How would it look for Steve if I did a lousy job? And you tell me what the hell kind of cop would I be if I ignored evidence just because the suspect is beautiful and smart and owns her own business?”

Greer smiled with satisfaction.
So he had noticed. . . .

“What?” Sean asked.

“You said beautiful.” She picked up his empty plate and took it to the sink to rinse off. “I only said she was pretty.”

Muttering curses under his breath, Sean thanked his sister for dinner and headed out the door.

Amanda lay beneath the covers in the darkened room at the end of the hall and turned over yet one more time, wishing she could close her eyes and not see the blood. She’d taken two showers already that day, the first in her house, when Dana Burke had so kindly taken her home and let her take off the clothes that were heavy with Marian’s blood. Dana had bagged and tagged each item of clothing as Amanda had removed it, then turned on the shower for Amanda and told her she’d wait downstairs, for Amanda to take her time. She must have known how long it would take to wash away the blood. Amanda had stood beneath the steaming stream of water, mindlessly scrubbing her skin raw, trying to remove every last trace of the morning’s tragedy, every bit of pain, knowing she never really would.

She squashed the pillow under the right side of her head and allowed her body to sink down into the too-soft mattress, listening to the dull hum of voices somewhere far away. Greer and Sean. She knew instinctively that they were talking about her. If she hadn’t been so damned tired, she’d have been tempted to sneak to the top of the stairs to try to listen.

Now, that’s something I haven’t done in a long, long time,
she mused.
Not since we were all together—Mom and Dad and Evan and I—living in the same house. We’d never given the voices a second thought, Evan and I hadn’t. We thought everyone’s parents argued at night after the kids had been tucked in. Thought all kids fell asleep to the sound of those hushed accusations, those angry voices touched with a quiet civility.
There’d been a familiar comfort in the consistency of the hum of voices from the floor below. It wasn’t until after her father left that she began to understand the price of that comfort.

The voices below weren’t raised in anger, but there was a steady flow, a certain rhythm, to the conversation between sister and brother. There’d been questions she’d have asked of Greer earlier if they’d been more than mere acquaintances.

Amanda rolled onto her left side, thinking about her brother. She couldn’t imagine having grown up without Evan, couldn’t imagine having had suffered through her parents’ divorce without his calm, steady influence. He’d always been there for her. Still was. She smiled to herself, recalling his indignation at her being suspected in Derek’s death. Even knowing the admittedly damning facts against her, Evan had been infuriated that Sean Mercer—or anyone else—considered her capable of killing.

She sat up and dangled her legs over the side of the bed. Overtired now, she was unable to sleep, and yet lacked the strength to get up, dress herself, and go back downstairs. Not that she wanted to engage either Sean or Greer in conversation. She’d been living alone far too long to enjoy such intimate contact in the middle of the night. If the truth were to be told, she’d been mildly uncomfortable since the minute she stepped into this house.

For one thing, she wasn’t accustomed to sharing living space with anyone else. Sharing it with a stranger was that much more disconcerting. But she recognized that stubbornly insisting on staying alone, in her house, until questions were answered about the killings of two so close to her would have been folly. She understood that there was safety in numbers, and she was safer—theoretically—here, under the same roof with the sister of the chief of police, but even that knowledge didn’t make her much more comfortable with the situation.

For another, over the past year, she’d learned to rely upon herself for her strength and her safety. Allowing someone else to keep her safe smacked of a cop-out. But there was that little matter of a killer who’d already struck too close to home not once, but twice. In the end, she’d endure the discomfort of living under someone else’s roof, depending on the efforts of someone else to watch her back. She may not like the arrangement, but she wasn’t stupid.

She lay back down, flat on her back this time, and stared at the ceiling, wondering how long she could keep her eyes open. Closing them merely served as an invitation for the nightmare images to return, and she’d seen enough that day to last a lifetime. Marian on the floor, blood smearing her clothes and her chest and her throat and puddling under her head.

Marian, just a few days earlier, bringing Amanda tomatoes from her garden and gleefully confiding that her beefsteaks were a full twelve ounces heavier than the best her next-door neighbor had grown that summer. Marian, proudly showing off the treasures she’d bought at the house sale earlier in the week . . .

It just wasn’t fair, Amanda’s weary brain protested. It just wasn’t fair that good people like Derek and Marian died so terribly when the person who killed them was out there somewhere.

She got out of bed and raised the shade on the window that overlooked Greer’s backyard. Now, at half past ten, the yard lay in semidarkness, the lamp from the patio casting just enough light to throw shadows across the flat expanse of lawn. Somewhere out there was someone with blood on his hands. If Sean was right, this someone was watching for her, waiting for her. Maybe right now, at this minute, this someone was cutting the glass in one of the panes in her back door, sliding the glass out carefully and quietly, then lifting the latch. Was he already inside, treading carefully across her kitchen floor, maybe in bare feet, pausing every few steps to listen for sounds of her stirring on the second floor? In his pocket did he carry the same knife he’d used to butcher Marian, or the gun he’d used to put a bullet through Derek’s head?

And what, she wondered as she chewed on a fingernail in the dark, was the point? What had he, this faceless, nameless someone, wanted from Derek, from Marian, that he might now want from her?

Hard as she tried, though she lay awake several more hours thinking about it, Amanda could not come up with one good reason why anyone would want her—and Derek, and Marian—dead.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

Humming along with the radio, his fingers tapping out the beat on the steering wheel of his car, Vince Giordano sat in the cool shade of a sweet gum tree, watching the cars that buzzed by, waiting for Dolores to arrive home from work and hoping she wouldn’t be too late. He had a surprise for her. Oh, did he ever.

The white compact slowed, then pulled into the drive and disappeared around the back of the house. Still humming, thinking how it was a shame that some car company had started using that particular song in their commercials, because now every time he heard it, he thought about pickup trucks, he craned his neck, hoping she’d come back around the front. And just as he thought it, there she was. He got out of the car and started across the small patch of grass that had gone too long without water in the late summer sun.

“Hey,” he called amicably.

“Vinnie.” Dolores’s face brightened. “What are you doing here?”

“I was passing along the street, and I looked at the clock and said, ‘Hey, Dolores should be just about getting home right about now.’ And you know what?” He took one of her hands in his own and watched her blush. “Just as I was thinking it, didn’t you pull right into the driveway?”

“No way.”

“Oh, yeah. So I’m taking that as a sign that you don’t have plans for dinner tonight, and that you’d come out for dinner with me.”

“Well, I . . . I just got home.” She blushed again, brushing off her dark pants. “And I’m not really dressed up. . . .”

“You look great, Dolores. Better than great.” He lowered his voice and leaned forward to touch her forehead with his own. Richard Gere had done that in some movie, and Vince had been hoping that someday he’d have occasion to use that move in real life.

“If you could give me a minute, maybe to fix my makeup, feed my cat . . .”

“Sure. Whatever time you need.”

“Okay, then. Yes. I’d love to have dinner with you tonight.” She backed toward the sidewalk, still beaming, the faint blush still tingeing her cheeks. “Would you like to come in, just while I . . .”

“Sure. Sure. That would be nice.” Vince smiled gently, as if he were a simple man being invited into the home of a friend.

The small twin house had a porch with an old-fashioned swing at one end. A row of geraniums in plastic pots that were supposed to look like clay were set along the perimeter of the porch, where a railing had once been. There was a rusty black mailbox attached to the front wall and a wreath of bright plastic flowers on the door.

“The previous owner took the rails off,” she explained as if she needed to. “I want to put them back on someday. But I had to put money into the kitchen—”

“Hey, don’t feel like you have to make excuses to me. Please.” He held up one hand as if to halt her words in their tracks. “I think it’s wonderful that you own your own home. I’m really impressed. I mean, how many thirty-year-old women can say that they bought their own house?”

“Vinnie, I’m thirty-seven,” she laughed.

“Get outta town,” he scoffed. “Thirty-seven. Right. What do I look like, huh?”

“No, really, I am.” She unlocked the door, and he took note of the type of lock. Just in case he needed to know at some future date. “I was thirty-seven last month.”

“Now you’re telling me that I missed your birthday.” He put on a sad face as he followed her inside. “Well, I’ll make it up to you. I know just the way.”

“Oh, Vinnie, you don’t have to do anything. Just”—she smiled, her entire face lighting up—“just . . . well, just dinner out tonight, that will be enough. More than enough.”

“I can do better, but we’ll let that go for now. You go on and do what you have to do, and I’ll just wait for you.”

“I’ll hurry, I promise.” She paused on the bottom step and called, “Cujo, where are you?”

“Cujo?”

“Cujo’s my— There’s my baby.”

A large gray cat ambled out from the dining room, pausing on his way to Dolores to give Vince the once-over. He did not appear to like what he saw.

“That’s my baby,” Dolores cooed, and bent down to scoop up the cat. “Say hello to my friend Vinnie.”

Cujo glared imperiously in the general direction of the intruder.

“What a nice cat,” Vince said, thinking he was expected to say something. He didn’t like cats, never had, but figured that wouldn’t be the appropriate thing to tell her. “He’s . . . big, isn’t he?”

“Huge. Weighs almost forty pounds. But he’s a sweetie. Oh, I should feed him before I run upstairs.”

“Oh, hey, I can do that. Just tell me what to do.”

“You wouldn’t mind? I’m just thinking that it’s already so late, since I got home so late and everything . . .”

“I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“Well, then, there’s a can of cat food on the counter in the kitchen—that’s straight through here, straight ahead through the dining room—and the can opener’s mounted under the cupboard closest to the sink.”

“I’m sure I can find it. You run along.” Vince thought momentarily about giving her backside a tap as she turned to the steps, but decided that might be a bit premature, all things considered. He was going to do a little something a little later to speed up the progress of their relationship as it was.
One thing at a time,
he cautioned himself as he went to the kitchen.

Dolores’s house was a lot like Dolores. Nothing fancy, but sturdy, practical, functional. Few flourishes, but tidy, with the occasional attempt at decor. A few pots of plants here, a crystal bowl there, colorful candles in assorted holders on the sideboard in the dining room. A nice enough package—as was Dolores—but nothing to get too excited about.

“Come on in here, cat,” he muttered as he turned on the overhead light, and failed to notice that the cat had declined to follow him into the near-dark room.

He found the can, located the cat food, then dumped it unceremoniously into a ceramic dish with raised purple fishes on the bottom and around the rim.

“Hey, cat. Dinner.” He went to the doorway and looked down at the cat, who glared up coolly, calmly whipping his tale snakelike on the hooked rug. “Okay, have it your way. Personally I don’t give a shit if you ever eat again.”

He rinsed the can out in the sink the way his mother used to do, then looked for the trash can, which he found near the back door, which gave him an opportunity to look around. Scope out the yard, check out the back door, the basement door. You just never knew.

He took a minute to play with the lock, listening to the little cylinders tumble, thinking how easy it would be to break in.

“Vinnie?”

“Oh. Hey, that was fast.”

“What are you doing?”

“Oh, I was just checking the lock on your back door. Making sure it was tight, you know.”

“It should be fine. I had them changed after I moved in last year.”

“Never hurts to keep track,” he told her with a comforting smile. “You gotta make sure your home is secure. Jeez, don’t it seem that every night you hear about another home invasion? It’s on the TV just about every night.”

“I don’t watch the news.” She shook her head, her permed blond curls barely moving. “It’s too depressing. Rapes. Murders. Robberies. Little kids being abused. Little sick kids selling lemonade to help pay their medical bills.”

Dolores’s mascara-darkened eyes brimmed with sympathetic tears. “I know all those things happen every day. So I don’t watch. And between you and me, Connie drives me nuts some days. Noon news, news at four. News at six. I tune it out. I just don’t want to know.”

“Yeah, well, you know what they say about ignorance being bliss. Not that I think you’re ignorant,” he hastened to add. “I mean, you’re smart, Dolores. Maybe the smartest woman I know. And you’re right. There’s so much bad stuff going on in the world that we just don’t have any control over. It hurts to watch that stuff.”

“Exactly. That’s exactly my point.” She peered behind him to see if he’d fed the cat. “Cujo. Come on in here, now. Vinnie’s got dinner for you. Isn’t he a nice man?”

Cujo continued to stare from the safety of the dining room.

“Maybe he’s not hungry right now,” Vince offered, hoping that he wasn’t going to be expected to stand here and wait for the cat to eat. “Cujo might not be hungry, but I sure am.”

“Oh, of course you are. It’s almost eight o’clock. We can go. We don’t have to wait.”

Like I was gonna . . .

“Now, you like the Pepper Pot or the Oak Tree Inn?” Vince asked while Dolores pulled on the front door to close it tightly.

“Oh, they’re both wonderful.” Her eyes lit up. “But they’re both so expensive, Vinnie. Are you sure you don’t want to have a burger down at the Dew Drop?”

“Dolores, we have had burgers together at the Dew Drop Inn for the past two weeks. Now I want to have a nice dinner out with you, just you and me, at someplace nice. Someplace special.” He slid into his smooth role, donning sincerity like a pair of gloves. “Because you are special, Dolores. The most special lady I ever knew. And I want you to have the best.”

“Oh, Vinnie.” She stopped dead in her tracks on the top steps. The blush was back, her face scarlet with pleasure even in the dim porch light. “That’s so . . . so sweet.”

“It’s true, Dolores. You’re . . . well, you’re one of a kind.”

“And you’re one of a kind, too, Vinnie.”

“Well, then, shall we go?” He offered his arm and she took it, smiling.

“We can go in my car,” he told her when she paused at the sidewalk.

“It’s a beautiful car,” she told him. “I don’t think I’ve ever ridden in a Lincoln town car before.”

“Well, it’s not new, you know.” He opened the door for her and held it until she had slid past him onto the seat.

“Oh, the leather is so nice. It looks almost new.”

“Well, I got a good deal on it,” he said. For a car that was eight years old and had more than a hundred thousand miles on it, he’d gotten a damned good deal, since he’d paid cash.

“I don’t think I ever even saw your car before.”

“That’s ’cause I always walk to the Dew.”

“Well, if I lived half a block away, I’d walk, too.”

“I’m only there until I can find something more permanent,” he told her as they pulled away from the curb. “I took the room because it was the only thing immediately available. Plus, when I first came to town, I wasn’t sure how long I’d be staying. But now . . .”

“Now . . . ?”

“Now I’m thinking I might want to stay around for a while.” He winked at her.

“Oh,” she said under her breath.

Oh, indeed.
He smiled at her across the front seat.

Dinner went exceptionally well. By the time the last bit of red wine had been sipped and coffee and dessert had been served, Dolores was starry-eyed and Vince Giordano—Vinnie Daniels, that is—was feeling about as confident as a man could be. There was only one more thing to do.

He’d baited the hook. Now all he had to do was reel her in.

He stopped the car in front of her house and reached for her face, caressing it gently, touching her lips with his fingers. Then he sighed, got out of the car, and went around to her side to open her door.

“You’re such a gentleman, Vinnie,” she said as she got out of the car.

“You’re a lady.” He shrugged, as if it went without saying. “You deserve to be treated with respect.”

She took his hand and led him up the narrow walk to her front door. At the top of the steps she paused and asked, “Would you like to come in for a nightcap?”

“Oh, I . . . oh, yes, thank you.” He grinned his boyish best. “If you’re sure . . .”

“I’m sure. I think I have a little brandy. My ex . . . that is, an old friend used to drink brandy on holidays.” She unlocked the door and pushed it open.

“Well, this is a holiday of sorts,” he said as he stepped inside. “Since we are celebrating your birthday.”

She went directly into the kitchen. “Cujo?” she called.

Fucking cat. It had better not screw this up. He needed to get this show on the road. He was tired of sleeping in a cold lumpy bed—alone—and eating out every fucking night. He figured he had a good shot tonight if he played this right, and no damned cat was going to mess it up for him.

“There you are. Did you eat your din-din? No?”

Oh, brother.

“Vinnie, the brandy is in the sideboard. Middle door.”

“Okay.” He opened the door, thinking he could just about down the whole bottle himself. Or use it to drown the fucking cat. He found the bottle and shook it. Not enough for the cat. They might as well drink it.

“Here we go.” Dolores came into the room holding a chunky water glass in each hand. “Not exactly brandy glasses . . . what do you call them?”

“I call them brandy glasses.” He smiled and took both from her and placed them on the table. With a flourish, he poured the brandy and handed a glass to her.

“To us,” he said. “To many, many, many more nights just like this one.”

A blushing Dolores tipped her glass to his, touching rims.

“You did have a good time, didn’t you?” Sincere Vinnie. Concerned Vinnie. Gentleman Vinnie.

“Oh, I had a wonderful time, Vinnie. It was a perfect night.”

“I thought so, too. And that’s why . . . well, come into the living room. I have something to say to you.” He grabbed the bottle of brandy in one hand and his glass in the other, and shepherded a curious Dolores to the sofa.

“What, Vinnie?” She took a slug of brandy, as if she felt she needed to fortify herself.

“Well, Dolores . . . Oh, give me a minute. I’m not good at stuff like this.” He rolled his eyes upward, as if seeking guidance, closed his eyes, then turned to her and took both of her hands in his. “Dolores, I know we haven’t known each other for very long. Just a few weeks, I know—you don’t have to say it. But from the first minute I saw you—the first time I looked at your face—I just felt something. Something . . . special. Something that I never felt before with no one else.”

“Oh, Vinnie,” she cooed, much as she had earlier cooed to the cat. “That’s so sweet.”

“Now, I think you felt it, too, didn’t you, Dolores?” He drew his brows together thoughtfully. “But you can tell me if you didn’t. It would be better if you did. Tell me, I mean. Now. Before I make a fool out of myself.”