On the Run (33 page)

Natalie was sitting on the concrete floor, one leg stretched out in front of her, the other bent, grimace of pain on her face as she rubbed the knee. Packages of toilet tissue surrounded her.

But my gaze riveted on something that had been exposed when she crashed into the mountain of toilet tissue, something she hadn’t yet seen because her back was to that corner of the room. I looked away quickly, but not soon enough. She turned her head, her gaze targeting where mine had been.

“The safe!” she gasped. “I looked all over for that thing—” She broke off, her gaze darting back to me.

I tried not to look as if she’d said something that could be interpreted as incriminating. “Well, isn’t that just like Jock and Jessie?” I declared. “Hiding something valuable under a mountain of toilet tissue.”

I shook my head in a gesture of “can you believe that?” The safe was small, maybe fifteen inches square. Not large enough to hold any great amount of gold. The lock was a combination-style dial. I couldn’t remember the numbers, but I knew where to find them. “Frank will be pleased. He’s never been able to find any of Jock and Jessie’s important papers.”

“Just what I always wanted to do. Help ol’ Frank,” Natalie said, her tone disgruntled. She got a leg under her but couldn’t reach anything solid to grab onto so she could stand up. “Now do you suppose you could come over here and help me stand up so I can get away from this miserable monument to Jock and Jessie’s paranoia about the world running out of toilet tissue?”

Her pants had actually ripped where she’d hit the concrete floor with her knee. She hadn’t faked the fall, and she didn’t appear to be in good shape for running now. I kicked my way through the avalanche of toilet tissue—they’d favored Charmin—and gave her a hand. She got to her feet. I helped her stand while she took a couple of limping steps, her back bent as if it hurt to stand.

But then, like a snake uncoiling, she suddenly straightened, and her hand slid up to grip my upper arm, fingers closing around it like a rawhide handcuff.

“Wh-what are you doing?” I asked.

“Do you know what’s in that safe?”

“Some papers. Maybe wills and a deed.”

“There’s at least a half million dollars worth of diamonds in there.”

Her hand squeezed tighter, and her back was ramrod straight now. It felt as if the woman could bend steel with her fingers. And it suddenly occurred to me that knowing about the diamonds might not be good for my health. I was right.

“And I’m not going to let one old woman stand between me and those diamonds. Not after—”

She broke off, but I got the gist. Not after what she’d already done.

“Well, uh, hey now . . .” I mumbled irrelevantly while a whole lot of thoughts clattered around in my head.

At the top of the clatter was the unpleasant knowledge that if she was going to steal the diamonds, she couldn’t leave me alive to identify her. Next was the thought that it really
was
murder, not homicide/suicide, and Natalie had done it. I started to wonder how she’d done it, but self-preservation kicked in, overriding even curiosity.

I did the first thing any self-respecting sleuth would do. I kicked her in the shins. On the bad leg, of course. This was no time for fair play.

She grunted in pain, and the leg gave way, dragging us both down, but the other leg held firm, and the vise-grip never faltered. Her teeth gritted as she straightened up again, and then she shoved me toward the stairs.

“Don’t try that again,” she warned.

“Wh-what are you going to do?”

No answer, just another vicious shove.

“How did you know about the diamonds and gold?”

Again no answer. Apparently we were not going to play Twenty Questions. We reached the foot of the stairs. I pretended to stumble over toilet tissue. I figured if she wanted me upstairs I was better off downstairs.

I didn’t have any choice, however. She efficiently yanked my arm behind me, gave it an expert twist, and up the stairs we went. I remembered Mikki saying Natalie had studied karate. Perhaps there had also been a session on arm twisting. My bones felt breakable as toothpicks under her grip. She marched me through the kitchen and down the hallway to the master bedroom, my arm screeching every time she gave it a wrench. She was gimpy on the leg, but it slowed her only fractionally. Still keeping my arm behind my back with one hand, she opened the bedroom door with her other hand, still gloved. No fingerprints.

Inside, we marched straight to the gun cabinet, where I knew she expected to find an arsenal of artillery. She gave a grunt of unhappy surprise when she opened the door and found only empty hooks on the green felt.

“Mikki took all the guns,” I said.

“Figures. Greedy pig.” Then, as if it were automatic to make some negative remark about her ex-husband, she added, “She ought to use one of them on Frank, the jerk.”

“Frank never said anything derogatory about you,” I chided reproachfully. An irrelevant statement, of course, but anything to try to distract her. “Though Mikki isn’t a big fan.”

“The feeling is mutual. You’d think a woman in the hair business could get a better bleach job than she has.”

I didn’t tell her I’d mistaken her own bleach job for Mikki’s.

She was still staring at the empty cabinet. I knew where the Saturday night specials Mikki had rejected were, but I wasn’t about to point that out to Natalie.

Opportunistic Natalie could probably manage without a gun anyway. The kitchen held an ample supply of knives and various other sharp objects. And most anything can become a murder weapon if you’re creative. One of Jock’s old ties, or laces from Jessie’s shoes, would do nicely for strangling. A pillow for smothering. And hands! What better weapon than a pair of rawhide-strong hands? I jumped away from those thoughts before they could make some mental gazelle leap into Natalie’s head.

I tried to think of something to persuade her to give up this idea of killing me, something to her advantage, but nothing came to mind. From her point of view, letting me live was not an option.

A hopeful thought suddenly occurred to me. Abilene! She’d surely come back to the house soon. Tall, strong, toss-sacks-of-emu-feed-around Abilene was a match for Natalie any day! Natalie thought I was alone here, and if I could just stall, keep her talking long enough for Abilene to return to the house . . .

“You’ve handled this very cleverly,” I said conversationally. “The authorities and Frank are all convinced Jock and Jessie’s deaths were a double suicide.”

She didn’t deny my oblique allegation. “You’re curious about how I did it, aren’t you?”

“You certainly fooled everyone.”

“Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” She laughed with a delight that gave me shivers.

She wanted to tell me, I realized. She’d pulled off this fantastic feat but had no one to whom she could boast about her accomplishment. Who safer to tell than one soon-to-be-deceased LOL? And, as far as I was concerned, the longer it took to tell, the better.

“The note was the really clever part, of course. How did you manage that?”

“It wasn’t part of my original plan. I just intended to get them out of the way and make it look like a home invasion thing. But it occurred to me the police would then be looking for a killer. Much better if it looked as if one of them killed the other, then took his—or her—own life. Then there wouldn’t be some big manhunt for a killer.”

I nodded. The grip holding my arm behind me had relaxed slightly, but I knew it could clamp down again fast as a rattrap if I tried to jerk away. “Good thinking. But how did you do it?”

I looked over my shoulder and saw her smile with satisfaction at her own cleverness. “Jock and Jessie needed their signatures notarized on a bunch of papers about selling rights on some books they did years ago. They were going to go into Dulcy or Horton to have it done, but I reminded them that I’m a notary public because I need to be for the real estate business, and I could do it. They could just sign the papers, and then I’d add the notary seal when I got back to Texas and mail the papers from there for them.”

“Is that a legal way to do it?” Then I realized the irrelevancy of that question. A minor matter about illegally notarized papers hardly mattered when you were planning murder. Natalie didn’t even seem to hear me anyway.

“I got the papers lined up for them to sign, one on top the other there on the dining table, so all they could see were the signature lines. But what they didn’t know was that I had an extra page stuck in the middle, one that was blank except for signature lines. Worked like a dream. They signed everything.”

“And then you typed in the message about leaving this world in loving togetherness.”

“Exactly. I thought the wording was a nice touch.”

Oh yes. Very sensitive. “But I still don’t see how you actually killed them. I mean, from everything I’ve heard they really liked you. They even gave you money. But surely they didn’t just sit quietly on the sofa and let you shoot them?”

I wasn’t positive about the money, since the information came from Mikki, but Natalie agreed with it, her tone scornful. “Oh, well, yeah. As long as it was some piddling little amount for the kids. But then I had this chance, this chance of a lifetime, to get in with a group putting up a fantastic new shopping mall. It’ll be the showplace of Dallas. We’d borrow the money to finance it, of course, but I needed to come up with $250,000 right away to get in on the deal. That’s why I came up here. But when I asked to borrow that much, Jock and Jessie turned me down flat. Even when I offered to pay much higher than the going interest rate, which would make it an excellent investment for them, they weren’t interested. Jessie said the only investments they made these days were in the hard stuff, gold and diamonds. That paper money and shopping malls and everything else would soon be worthless. Stubborn, pigheaded old fools!” she suddenly added angrily.

“So you killed them and found the gold coins they’d invested in?”

“No, of course not.” She sounded impatient with that foggy line of thinking. “There wouldn’t have been any point in killing them if I didn’t already know about the gold. I found it an earlier time when the kids and I were visiting and I was poking around down in the basement. And I overheard them talking about investing this huge amount in diamonds and storing them in a home safe.
Then
I decided to kill them. If they wouldn’t loan me the money.”

“Ah.”

“But I gave them a last chance, even after I had their signatures on that blank sheet of paper.” She sounded defensive, as if this “last chance” justified everything that came afterward. “Jessie was sitting there on the sofa when I asked again to borrow the money. This time she laughed, as if I’d told some big joke.”

“So you ran and got a gun?”

“I’d already gotten the gun from the cabinet in the bedroom.” “Because you figured they were going to turn you down.”

I felt a movement behind me that might have been a shrug. “Whatever. I like to think ahead. So I just pulled the gun out of my pocket and shot her. Jessie was surprised, I think.”

No doubt. “And Jock?”

“He heard the shot and came running from outside. I saw him crossing the deck. I ran and hid behind the sofa. The end table and big lamp blocked him from seeing me.”

The source of those blond hairs, I realized. Natalie pressing her head hard against the back of the sofa while she hid and waited to kill again.

“He rushed over to the sofa. He didn’t scream. He sat down beside her, and he was just making these . . . awful little blubbering noises. I think he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.” She swallowed hard, as if that had somehow affected her. But not enough to change what came next. “I didn’t want him to have time to do anything. So I reached over the sofa and shot him in the head.”

She spoke matter-of-factly, as if what she’d done was inevitable. I shivered. In reaction, she jerked my arm again, and pain slammed through my shoulder and across my back.

“Jock had gunshot residue on his hand.” I had to keep her talking until Abilene showed up. “How did he get that?”

“I thought of that. His fingerprints had to be on the gun, and his hand had to show that he’d shot it. I . . .” For the first time her voice wobbled, as if the memory was getting a little gory even for her. She was speaking now almost as if in a trance, as if she were watching the memory unroll on some movie screen inside her head. “I wiped my prints off the gun and put it in his hand. I put my hand over his and shot toward the far end of the room.”

Leaving gunshot residue on Jock’s hand and a bullet in an already dead deer head.

“Then I put one more bullet in the gun so there wouldn’t be an unexplained one missing and set it on the sofa beside his hand. I got the paper with the signatures on it and typed the message and set it on the coffee table. But there was . . . blood everywhere. I realized it would look strange if the note wasn’t blood-spattered too. That some smart cop might figure out it was put there after they were dead. So I-I took a tissue and dipped it in Jessie’s blood and spattered the note.”

Not the most cold-blooded thing she’d done, of course. But somehow so . . . personal. And very thorough. As if she committed murders and set them up to look like suicides every day.

I looked over my shoulder at her. “Then you arranged it so they were holding hands.”

“It seemed appropriate.” Her gaze suddenly focused on me, as if she’d come out of the trance. “So now you know.”

“Then you loaded up the gold coins.” Dropping one out in the parking area, although I didn’t mention that.

“But I couldn’t find the safe with the diamonds.”

Which was the reason for this return trip, and my potential demise. My legs felt as if my bones had melted. I sagged under Natalie’s grip, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Now what? What else could I do to keep her talking? Was Abilene close enough that if I screamed bloody murder she’d come running?

I didn’t have a chance to talk or scream. Natalie suddenly yanked me around so she could lean over and use her free hand to open the shallow drawer below the main part of the gun cabinet. Not good, because I already knew what was in the drawer. The Saturday night specials lay there like two toys. Two dark, evil toys. She picked up one of the small guns.