Quickstep to Murder (15 page)

Before hopping into the shower, I made the phone call I’d been putting off: Sherry Indrebo. This time, her aide put me through immediately. “Tell me you found it,” Sherry said, again skipping the small talk. I wondered how much time we could all save on a daily basis if we eliminated the how-are-yous and have-a-nice-days from our conversations.

“It’s not there.”

“What? Of course it’s there,” she said impatiently. “You didn’t look hard enough.”

“We searched the place from top to bottom.”

“
We
?”

“Rafe’s half brother. He helped me look.”

“You told someone else?” Anger and disbelief jangled her voice. “What kind of moron are you?”

The kind that didn’t appreciate being called a moron. “The police probably have it,” I said with some satisfaction. “They took his laptop, too.”

“I guess I’m going to have to handle this myself.” She banged the phone down. I debated calling her back to tell her Tav was staying in Rafe’s condo, but decided against it. It might do her good to come face-to-face with a man wielding a knife.

 

As I finished dressing, the doorbell rang and I jumped. The police again? Fighting off the cowardly urge to pretend I wasn’t there, I walked to the door. The fuzzed outline of a man showed through the wavy glass insets beside the door. I opened it a cautious half inch to find Leon Hall on the stoop. His thick brown hair was mussed and anger or anxiety contorted his face. Before I could guess his intention, he stiff-armed the door and it bounced back, hitting the side of my face, my chest, and my knee. With an exclamation of pain, I stumbled back and he pushed into the hallway.

“Where is she?” He looked around. “She wasn’t upstairs.”

Hall’s habit of charging in to look for people was getting wearisome. Did my place look like the local outlet of Hiding Places ‘R’ Us? My brow and knee hurt where the door had conked them and it made me cranky. “Get. Out. I’m calling the police.” I marched toward the phone in the kitchen. A choking sound halted me and I turned to see Hall standing where I’d left him, hands at his sides, blinking rapidly. Holding back tears? I hesitated.

“Are you looking for Taryn?” I finally asked, compassion getting the upper hand over good judgment.

His jaw worked. “She didn’t come home last night.” I bit my lower lip. Not good. “What makes you think she’s here?”

“She said.”

“What?”

“She called at dinnertime last night and told me she was rehearsing here, getting ready for that competition, and not to expect her until late. She never came home at all. When I went to wake her this morning, her bed hadn’t been slept in.”

His eyes shifted from side to side and I could tell he still thought Taryn might be here. Maybe he didn’t so much
think
she was here as
hope
she was here. The alternatives were worse. It felt awkward standing here in the foyer and I invited him back to the kitchen, watched him lower himself heavily into a chair, and brought him a glass of water. “I was out last evening,” I told him once he’d taken a swallow. I leaned back against the counter, ready to get a running start if he went on the attack again. “As far as I know, Taryn wasn’t here.”

“But she might have been?” He was reaching for straws, his bloodshot eyes searching mine. “With another instructor maybe?”

I had to shake my head. “Have you tried her cell phone?”

“You think I’m stupid? It goes straight to voice mail.”

I thought of how I’d last seen her, sliding into the front seat of Sawyer’s car. “Have you checked with Sawyer Iverson?”

He growled. “Taryn knows she’s not supposed to see that poofter outside of dance practice. He’s not good for her. His family has too much money. He doesn’t know how to work.” Hall pounded one anvil of a fist on the table, making it shudder.

I didn’t feel the need to argue with him about Sawyer’s work ethic, and his anger made me hesitate to tell him I’d seen Taryn go off with Sawyer Friday morning . . . and they certainly hadn’t been planning to practice their cha-cha. After a moment’s thought—he was Taryn’s father and she was only sixteen—I told him about visiting the house and seeing Taryn drive off with Sawyer.

He didn’t react the way I thought he might. “What were you doing at my house?” he asked suspiciously. He seemed to have a limited emotional range: suspicion and anger. Living with him must be exhausting.

“I wanted to talk to Taryn.”

“What couldn’t wait until her next lesson?”

I sighed, wondering how I painted myself into corners like this. Mentioning the pregnancy was going to make him go ballistic. “I didn’t think Rafe got her pregnant and I wanted to ask her about it.”

“You’re saying Taryn’s a liar?” Hall looked outraged and pushed his chair away from the table with a scraping sound.

I didn’t think it would appease him if I told him that all teenage girls were liars. It came with the territory. I’d lied to my folks about completing homework so I could dance, to my friends about who was my BFF at any given moment to avoid hurting feelings, to Danielle about borrowing her favorite green sweater. I wasn’t proud of the lies, but, looking back, I thought they were pretty much par for the course.

“Taryn’s under a lot of pressure.”

“Don’t tell me about my own daughter!” He rose, glaring. “My daughter is not a liar.” He swiveled his jaw from side to side. “I’m going to talk to the Iverson kid. If I find out he’s done anything to hurt Taryn—”

“Have you called the police? Told them Taryn’s missing?” I asked as he surged past me, intent on rending Sawyer Iverson limb from limb.

“They were useless,” he said, continuing toward the door. “Said it’s too soon to consider her a missing person, asked me if she had a history of running away, if I’d checked with all her friends. They don’t give a damn that my baby’s out there somewhere and she’s only sixteen.” Wrenching the door open, he tromped outside and slammed it so hard it bounced open again. I stood at the threshold watching him make his way to the street. The very set of his shoulders betrayed his anger and I saw people give him a wide berth as he bulled down the sidewalk.

Was it possible that Tuesday’s scene with me and Solange was staged, that he knew damned well Rafe wasn’t at the studio because he’d killed Rafe? But how would he have known about my gun? Taryn and Sawyer had been present when Rafe brought my gun up that night . . . but was it likely that Taryn had mentioned it to her father? Or that he’d broken into my house to steal it? It seemed too convoluted to me, which was too bad because I didn’t much like Mr. Leon Hall and I’d’ve been happy to elect him Rafe’s killer. The thought of Phineas Drake and his implied willingness to set up someone came to mind, but I virtuously put it aside, locked the front door, and headed up the interior staircase to the studio.

Music poured out of the small studio and I peeked in to see Vitaly rehearsing with one of the competitive students. I gave him a thumbs-up, which he returned behind his partner’s back, along with a slight grimace I took to be a comment on her waltzing. Maurice was instructing his senior group in the ballroom and I smiled to see two new elderly gentlemen circling the floor with Mildred and Edwina. Hoover, watching from his spot under the window, scratched an ear vigorously with his hind paw. It felt almost normal today, the most normal it had felt since Rafe’s death. I hummed a snatch of tango music and walked into my office to see Solange rifling my drawers.

I stared at her a moment, anger building, before she noticed me. “Can I help you find something?” I asked icily.

She started and looked up, eyes widening. In a split second, though, she had recovered. “Oh, there you are!” She said it as if she’d been looking for me for hours.

Like she expected to find me in my desk drawer?

She came around the desk toward me, moving fluidly in blue leggings, a matching workout bra that bared her tight midriff, and a whiff of sheer skirt. Her hair was caught up in a casual knot and skewered with a couple of combs. “I was just . . . There was a man here looking for his daughter. I was going to write you a note about him. It’s the scariest thing,” she added, scanning my face to see how I was reacting.

“Getting caught searching someone’s desk?”

Annoyance flashed across her face and her voice was indignant as she said, “No! Having your sixteen-year-old daughter go missing. It’s got to be every parent’s nightmare.”

I had to agree with her on that.

“I mean, think of all the dreadful things that could happen. Abduction, rape, murder, sold into white slavery . . .” She shuddered.

I couldn’t tell if she was acting or genuinely worried about Taryn. “Well, I saw her go off with her dance partner Friday noonish, so I don’t think she’s in that kind of trouble.” She might well be in more trouble when her father caught up with her.

“Really? Thank goodness for that.” Solange edged toward the door. “Well, I guess I don’t need to worry about that note anymore. Gotta get into the ballroom—Maurice asked me to help with his class.”

“Solange.”

Stopping on the threshold, she looked a question at me. Something like defiance or malice lurked in her eyes.

“Where were you Monday night?”

Her expression soured. “I’ve already gone over that with the police and I don’t see that it’s any of your business, Stacy.”

“Maybe not. But I don’t know why you’re ashamed to tell me.”

“I’m not ashamed! If you must know, I was at a friend’s birthday party. At Technophile. Dozens of people saw me. I didn’t get home until after two.” She whisked out the door before I could question her further.

I drifted over to my desk and sat, thinking. Technophile was only three blocks from here. It was the current “hot” place in Alexandria, packed to the rafters every night of the week, including Sunday. I was pretty sure Solange could have slipped out at some point, walked to the studio, shot Rafe, and made it back to the party without being missed. Just because she could have, though, didn’t mean she had. And what had she been looking for in my desk? Opening the drawer she’d been poking through, I stared into it, using my index finger to move aside some pencils, sticky note pads, a pair of scissors, and a couple of unlabeled CDs that were probably backup files. Nothing exciting.

A thought crossed my mind: Could Sherry Indrebo have hired or coerced Solange into searching the office to find her missing thumb drive? Maybe she suspected I’d found it and was keeping it for my own purposes. If that were so, why was Solange rifling through my desk and not Rafe’s? I stared at his desk. Maybe she’d looked in Rafe’s first. I shut my drawer more forcefully than necessary and the photo of me and my first ballroom partner hoisting a trophy slapped face downward. I righted it, taking a moment to smile at my gap-toothed grin and the self-conscious expression on Bobby’s tenyear-old face. Last I heard, he sold hot tubs outside Newport News.

Opening the folder with all the paperwork related to this weekend’s competition, I went over everything from the hotel and meal arrangements to the heat times, sending my clients reminder e-mail about what to bring and what time their events took place. I was convinced scheduling and logistics at a ballroom dance competition made D-Day planning look like a walk in the park. Vitaly came in after half an hour and I went over it all with him, too. “You’ll meet Sherry this evening,” I told him, sliding him a page with Sherry’s heats highlighted.

He lounged on the love seat, sipping bottled grapefruit juice. “For the regularities,” he said, noting my glance at the bottle. “Is this Sherry dancing better than that one?” He nodded his head toward the small studio and, presumably, the partner he’d just been practicing with.

I nodded reluctantly. “Sherry’s pretty good,” I said. “You can see she’s competing in the gold divisions.”

“
Da
. Good. She is having money?” He looked up from under the blond hair flopping across his brow.

“Lots,” I assured him.

“Good,” he said again. “Vitaly is liking this studio with the many rich womens. Perhaps Vitaly is buying.” He beamed at me.

“What?”

“Rafe is no longer.
Pfft
.” He flicked the fingers of both hands open like little starbursts. “Vitaly is hearing that Rafe’s share is for selling.”

“Where did you hear that?” I stalled, not sure how I felt about the possibility of Vitaly buying Rafe’s half of the studio. I couldn’t do much better for a dance partner, but I didn’t know a thing about him as a businessman.

Vitaly shrugged and rose. Vowing once again to talk to Tav today about his plans for the business, I wrote his name and number on a purple sticky and passed it to Vitaly. “That’s Rafe’s half brother,” I said. “He’s the one you need to talk to.”

Vitaly left with a flash of his new teeth and I ran downstairs to get ready for my early-afternoon workout with Danielle. We tried to meet twice a week at the health club on King Street, about half a mile from here. Nondancers don’t realize how demanding a sport ballroom dancing is; I trained as many hours as a Redskins lineman did, I’d bet. In addition to the time I spent teaching or practicing, I took a weekly ballet class and a biweekly jazz class, weight-trained at least four times a week to give my arms and legs some definition, and did Pilates for my core, which was critical for balance and posture.

Jogging to the gym because it was quicker than finding a parking space, I pushed through the glass doors just as Danielle emerged from the locker room. “Back and chest today,” she announced. We went into the weight room, a huge space crammed with Nautilus and Cybex machines, weight benches, racks of dumbbells, stacks of mats, and exercise balls. Mirrors lined two walls and windows looked out to the parking lot from the wall opposite the door where we stood. Early-afternoon exercisers crowded the room and the sounds of conversation and groans of straining weight lifters drowned out the TVs.