Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet (6 page)

He paused his efforts to ask, “Do you just call me
you
because you can’t remember my name?”

My shoulders wilted. “Darn. You caught me. No, wait, it’s here somewhere.” I tapped
my temple in thought as he went back to his task. “Oh, right, is it Serving Tray?”

He shook his head, his brows drawn in concentration.

“Is it Lunch Tray?”

“No,” he said with a soft chuckle.

“Is it Ashtray?”

He paused again, and the girl shot daggers at me with her huge dark eyes. She was
either jealous or in so much pain, she just wanted it over with, and I kept interrupting.

“Forget I asked,” he said, a boyish smile lighting his features.

What a heartbreaker. No wonder Pari’s female client base had tripled since he started
working with her.

“See ya round, handsome.”

He winked and went back to work with a grin sparkling in his eyes. I felt sorry for
the girl.

*   *   *

On the way back, I cut through the parking lot and made a beeline for Misery, my cherry
red Jeep Wrangler. In the semi-open space of downtown Albuquerque, I felt naked. I’d
been naked in public once, so while this definitely synthesized that level of discomfort,
this was different. More raw. More acute. More feral.

“He misses you, you know.”

I spun around to see a statuesque African American woman walking past me toward the
back of Dad’s bar. I’d seen her a few times in the last few weeks and figured she
was the new bartender Dad had been planning to hire when I refused the job. He’d wanted
me to give up my PI business and work for him. Silly rabbit. She stopped and offered
me a friendly, I-come-in-peace smile. To say that she was stunning would have been
an understatement. She was like a shimmering skyscraper, jutting proudly into the
sky and daring the world to try to knock her down.

“Your father,” she said, elaborating. Her exotic eyes held me captive for a full minute
before she turned back to the bar. “You’re all he talks about.”

Clearly she knew about our falling out, but I had no use for anything she’d just told
me. Even if it were true, my father did not deserve my forgiveness at that moment.
Nor my attention.

I climbed into Misery and sank into her faux leather seats. She fit like a big red
glove and felt just as warm. Well, not literally. The weather was chilly and her plastic
windows were frosted over. I turned the key to let her warm up. She roared to life,
then settled into a purr. It’d been a while since the two of us had had any alone
time together. We’d have to talk later, but for now, we had places to be and suspects
to see.

Harper had given me her address, and I wanted to check out her dwelling before diving
in too deep. If the person stalking her had left another threat, I wanted to see it
for myself. One could judge a lot about a person by how they left threatening evidence.
Was the culprit violent or just menacing? Would he really harm her or did he just
want to get that rise out of her? That control?

She lived in the gated Tanoan Estates, and I didn’t know if entrance would require
Harper’s express permission or not. I dragged out my PI license just in case. It might
help. It might not.

After pulling up to the gate, I offered the uniformed security guard a placating smile.

He stared, unimpressed.

“Hi,” I said.

He offered a brisk nod. Still unimpressed. I’d have to up my game.

“My name is Charley Davidson. I’m investigating a situation with one of your residents.
Have you had any break-ins recently? Any alarms going off?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Alarms go off every now and then, mostly by the residents themselves.
And we have the occasional break-in, but they’re pretty rare here. Can I ask who hired
you?”

“Harper Lowell. She lives on—”

“I know where she lives.”

When I raised my brows, he tipped his hat back to scratch his head.

“Look, we’ve gotten a couple of calls from her, but we’ve never found any evidence
of foul play on site. No signs of a break-in. No footprints or cars parked near her
house. And she never could describe the intruder. If there was an intruder.”

“So, you think she was lying?”

“No,” he said with a noncommittal shrug. And now it was his turn to lie. “Not so much
lying as … mistaken.”

“You mean paranoid.”

He thought a moment. “Overzealous.”

“Ah. Okay. Well, you don’t mind if I check it out, do you? Ms. Lowell gave me the
key and the security code.”

“Knock yourself out. I’ll just need to record your license-plate number.”

“Do you record the information of every nonresident who comes through?”

“Sure do.”

I offered him my best smile. “Is there any way I can get a copy of the most recent
pages?”

He shook his head. “Not without a warrant.”

Darn. I made a mental note to set Cookie on that. She had a knack for getting protected
documents without a warrant. I was pretty sure that was her superpower.

After he took down my information, I drove through the estates until I came to Harper’s
house. Tanoan was one of the nicer parts of Albuquerque. At least Harper’s parents
did that much for her.

And Harper was doing everything right: Gated community with uniformed security guards.
Active security system. Triple locks on all the doors. I went from room to room, checking
for any signs of foul play before I hit the kitchen. It’d been something like an hour
since I last had a cup of coffee. Surely she wouldn’t mind.

To my utter delight, she had one of those machines that used those individual cups
and made one serving of coffee at a time. I may have ordered one of those. I’d have
to go through the boxes when I got home.

I searched her cabinets, wondering where I’d be if I were a K-Cup before coming to
the conclusion that I’d be in heaven, that’s where. Filled to the brim with grinds
of shimmering black gold. I opened the last cabinet door and jumped back in surprise.
A stuffed white rabbit sat against a can of beets. Normally white rabbits, especially
stuffed ones, didn’t bother me, but there was something creepy about having one in
a kitchen cabinet.

Staring.

Judging.

I started to reach up and take it down, then stopped myself. This was evidence. True,
it wasn’t particularly incriminating or overtly threatening, but it was evidence nonetheless.

And it was scary. Its eyes weren’t on right, and its neck looked like the stuffing
had been pulled out so that it sat lopsided on its little shoulders.

I left it there and exited Harper’s house unnerved and un-caffeinated.

*   *   *

After informing the security guard of what I found, leaving him unimpressed again,
I gave him my card and made him promise to keep an eye out for anything out of the
ordinary. Then I started for home with my tail tucked between my legs. According to
Angel, Reyes was going to be at that warehouse tonight, so I had some time to kill.
I could do that on my sofa just as easily as I could running around Albuquerque like
a chicken with my head cut off.

Wait. Somehow the word
chicken
struck a chord. I played with it in my mind. Rolled it over my tongue. Then came
to a conclusion: It was me. I was a chicken butt. I was suddenly scared of everything.

I pulled off Academy and into a shopping center to stew in my own astonishment. I
was a chicken of the most cowardly kind. Like a roosting hen. How can the grim reaper
do her job if she’s a roosting hen? Suddenly every sound, every movement, caused an
adrenaline dump the size of Australia to flood my system. This would so not do. I
had to get my act together.

I looked at Misery’s dash. Being with her was comforting on some level, but not as
comforting as my sofa. Then it hit me. An atrocity I’d overlooked for years. I’d never
named my sofa. How could I do that to her? How could I be so callous? So cold and
selfish?

But what would I name her? This was big. Important. She couldn’t go through life with
a name that didn’t fit her unique personality.

Filled with an odd sense of relief at the new goal in life, I put Misery into drive.
I could worry about being a roosting hen later. I had a sofa to name.

With renewed energy, I pulled back onto Academy—after hitting a drive-through for
a mocha latte—and had just started for home when my phone rang.

“Yes?” I said, illegally talking on the phone while driving within the city limits.
Scoping for cops, I waited for Uncle Bob to stop talking to whomever he was talking
to and get back to me.

My uncle Bob, or Ubie as I most often referred to him, was a detective for APD, and
I helped him on cases from time to time. He knew I could see the departed and used
that to his advantage. Not that I could blame him.

“Get that to her, then call the ME ay-sap.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I’m not sure what calling the medical examiner ay-sap is going
to accomplish. I’m pretty sure his name is George.”

“Oh, hey, Charley.”

“Hey, Uncle Bob. What’s up?”

“Are you driving?”

“No.”

“Have you heard anything?”

Our conversations often went like this. Uncle Bob with his random questions. Me with
my trying to come up with answers just as random. Not that I had to try very hard.
“I heard that Tiffany Gorham, a girl I knew in grade school, still stuffs her bra.
But that’s just a rumor.”

“About the case,” he said through clenched teeth. I could tell his teeth were clenched
because his words were suddenly forced. That meant he was frustrated. Too bad I had
no idea what he was talking about.

“I wasn’t aware that we had a case.”

“Oh, didn’t Cookie call you?”

“She called me a doody-head once.”

“About the case.” His teeth were totally clenched again.

“We have a case?”

But I’d lost him. He was talking to another officer. Or a detective. Or a hooker,
depending on his location and accessibility to cash. Though I doubted he would tell
a hooker to check the status of the DOA’s autopsy report. Unless he was way kinkier
than I’d ever given him credit for.

I found his calling me only to talk to other people very challenging.

“I’ll call you right back,” he said. No idea to whom.

The call disconnected as I sat at a light, wondering what guacamole would look like
if avocados were orange.

I finally shifted my attention to the kid in my backseat. He had shoulder-length blond
hair and bright blue eyes and looked somewhere between fifteen and seventeen.

“You come here often?” I asked him, but my phone rang before he could say anything.
That was okay. He had a vacant stare, so I doubted he would have answered me anyway.

“Sorry about that,” Uncle Bob said. “Do you want to discuss the case?”

“We have a case?” I said again, perking up.

“How are you?”

He asked me that every time he called now. “Peachy. Am I the case? If so, I can solve
this puppy in about three seconds. I’m heading down San Mateo toward Central in a
cherry red Jeep Wrangler with a questionable exhaust system.”

“Charley.”

“Hurry, before I get away!”

He gave up. “So, the arsonist just got serious.”

Sadly, I had no idea what he was talking about. Uncle Bob was a homicide detective
and rarely worked anything but murders and the like. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why are you
trying to find an arsonist? And why is he just now getting serious? Was he only kidding
before?”

“Three questions, one answer.” He mumbled something to another officer, then came
back to me. “And that answer is because our arsonist is now a murderer. The building
he torched last night had a homeless woman in it. She died.”

“Crap. That would explain why you’re on an arson case.”

“Yeah. Have you heard anything?”

“Besides the Tiffany Gorham thing, no.”

“Can you put out some feelers? This guy is getting sloppy.”

“Wait. Is this the one who makes sure the buildings are empty before starting the
fires?”

“The one and only. We’ve linked him to four fires so far. Same MO, right down to the
timing device and accelerant. Only this time he didn’t get everyone out. This homeless
woman didn’t happen to visit you, did she?”

“No, but I’ll see what I can dig up.”

“Thanks. I’ll bring the folder on this guy over tonight.”

“Sounds good.” He was only coming over for Cookie. He had such a crush.

“So, have you talked to your dad?”

“Oh, no, you’re breaking up. I can hardly—” I hung up before he could question me
further. Dad was not open for discussion, and he knew it.

The minute we hung up, my phone rang for a third time. I answered. “Charley’s house
of Cheerios.”

“Your uncle called,” Cookie said. “He has a case he wants you to look at.”

“I know,” I replied, faking disappointment. “I just got off the phone with him. He
told me all about how he needed you to contact me immediately, and you refused. Told
him you had better things to do. Like funnel money into offshore accounts.”

“Did you know you ordered a neck massager? This thing is great.”

“Are you getting any actual work done?”

“Oh, yes! I got the addresses you needed, but there’s not much on the brother. He’s
never received a single utility bill.”

“Maybe his parents are paying his utilities, too.”

“That makes sense. I’ll check into their accounts, see what all they’re paying for.
But I do have a work address on him and an address for Harper’s parents.”

“Perfect. Text them to me.”

“Now? Because this feels amazing.”

“Only if you don’t want me to file embezzlement charges against you.”

“Now it is.”

4

You can’t fix stupid,

but you can numb it with a 2 by 4.

—T-SHIRT

Having already driven across town, I’d gone from being fairly close to Harper’s parents’
house to way out in the boondocks. I pulled a uey amidst a blaring horn—mine—and headed
back that way only to be blocked by another gate when I got there. One made of intricate
iron surrounded by a high brick wall. I pushed a button on the speaker box.