Shallow Grave-J Collins 3 (25 page)

to step in.”

My anger surfaced. “Cocktail waitresses are disposable then?”

“No. Th

ey’re interchangeable. And I don’t need a goddamn lecture on morality and feminism from you, okay?”

“Fine.” I don’t know why I’d directed my frustration at her anyway. Not her fault I’d hit a dead end. “Do you know anything about the guy she’d met here? An Hombres pledge working security? Evidently they were an item.”

“Pledges come and go. I ain’t got time to keep track of them, nor do I care who’s banging who. You know rumors fl y in the bar and restaurant biz and they usually don’t mean dick. As long as my employees are doin’ their job, I stay out of their personal shit.”

Maybe she should pay closer attention. Case in point: Charity and Dave. And Trina. I picked up my coat instead of picking at her some more. “I’m in the back section tonight?”

“Yep.” Crystal opened the safe and removed a cash drawer.

“Were the tills short last night?”

284

“About $500 between all the registers.”

I whistled. “Did you tell Dave?”

“Yeah. He blamed you.”

“I fi gured he might.” I’d keep an eagle eye on him to see if he’d make creative change from other stations.

“Anything else?”

“Watch your back. Charity, Dave, and Beau are pissed off I didn’t fi re you.” She shook her fi nger in my face. “Don’t take matters into your own hands again.”

I smiled nastily. “No guarantees.”

It was a long ass night.

285

Kevin picked me up the next morning after he found my note about Sheriff Richards hiring us. He wasn’t happy I’d already tentatively agreed to investigate the Dove case. He was even unhappier when I confessed my undercover work at Bare Assets.

I girded my butt cheeks for an ass chewing that never came.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer and demanded,

“Aren’t you going to rail on me?”

“No. It sucks that he put you in such a bad position.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Just fi nish this favor for Martinez as soon as possible, because it’s seriously fucked up. Sounds to me like there’s more going on there than he’s telling you.”

True. I batted my eyelashes and cooed, “You could 286

help me. If you watched one of the other sections, maybe you’d see something I’m missing that would wrap this case up.”

Kevin’s grin was predatory. “Hate to tell you this, babe, but I wouldn’t be watching the bartenders if I went undercover in a strip joint. But I’ll think about it. Take one for the team, so to speak. When’s your next shift?”

“Tuesday.”

We were cruising through rugged ranch land. In early fall, bushes and trees scattered across the horizon were a tapestry of color, nature’s own crazy quilt. Th e

landscape’s natural dips and crevasses, striped with multi-colored layers of sediment, broke up the startling visual impact of vastness. Dirty clouds reigned over the sky.

Th

e gloomy day, my scattered thoughts and the reality of what we were about to do— interview a grieving mother—gave me a serious case of déjà vu.

Not déjà vu. Kevin and I had been in this situation seven months ago when we interviewed Shelley Friel about the murder of her daughter, Samantha. Th at’d

been the beginning of a string of dead bodies.

I hoped this wasn’t another case of history repeating itself.

Th

e Dove house was nice, probably built in the 1940s after WWII. Two stories with a front porch that’d recently been modifi ed with a ‘three-season’ room. Two 287

barns, an old red wooden one and a metal monstrosity twice the size of the house and barn combined. Next to it was a machine shed with a door propped open.

My gaze swept the pasture. Beyond the metal fence, Hereford cattle drank at the stock tank. A carport angled to the right side of the house, close to the front door.

Beneath the canopy was a silver Buick and a white Dodge 250 diesel truck.

Didn’t appear the drought had aff ected the Dove family.

“Do you know how you’re going to approach this?”

Kevin asked.

“Nah. I’ll wing it.” I wanted to size up Sharon Dove before I brought up Maria’s moonlighting gig, mostly to see if she’d off er it up fi rst. Th

en maybe that’d give me

a better indication on why she’d abandoned her other daughter and her grandson.

A woman, maybe early sixties, met us at the front door. She was part Native American/part Mexican, stal-wart, her short dark hair tamed into a sleek bob. Easy to see where Maria had inherited her looks. A pair of red reading glasses dangled from a beaded chain around her neck.

“Mrs. Dove? We’re the investigators Sheriff Richards sent. I’m Julie Collins, and this is my partner, Kevin Wells.”

288

“Call me Sharon. Please. Come in.”

We traipsed behind her into the sun porch, decorated in the typical Midwestern version of a tropical theme: white wicker furniture precisely arranged around a glass-topped coff ee table. Th

e cushions were tastefully

understated pseudo-Hawaiian prints done in pastel shades. Kevin spread out on the settee. I opted for a chair next to the windows.

“Coff ee?” Sharon asked.

“Th

at’d be great, thanks.”

While she brought out the sugarcane-shaped serving tray and fi ddled with cups resembling coconut shells, I had that oh-my-god-I-have-to-get-out-of-here-right-fucking-
now
urge to run to the closest Tiki bar and gorge on rum. And to top off my claustrophobia, I was in the throes of an epic nicotine fi t.

Kevin sensed my distracted state and helped matters by glaring at me.

Sharon sat in the wicker rocking chair, pouring cof-fee from a French press. “I suppose the sheriff has fi lled you in?”

“Some. You reported Maria missing, although she wasn’t living here at the time of her disappearance. How did you fi nd out she was gone?”

“We were on vacation in Hawaii for two weeks prior to that. When we returned I kept calling her and getting 289

no answer. I knew something was wrong.”

A spoon rattled. Kevin loaded his cup with sugar cubes. He was as bad as Martinez.

“How often did you talk to Maria?” Th

is from Kevin.

“Not as often as I liked after she rented the apartment in Rapid City. She didn’t have a car, so I didn’t see much of her either.”

“Did you ever stop in to see her at work?”

“If we were in town.”

I’d posed the question innocuously, but it didn’t trip her up. Sharon hadn’t known about Maria’s other job.

“Didn’t you have a key to her apartment?”

“No. I promised I’d give her space. And look what happened.” Her voice cracked, she clapped her hands over her trembling mouth, but gut-wrenching sobs poured out anyway

Her grief pounded at me like a tidal wave.

In that second I hated Sheriff Richards for putting me in this position. Mostly I hated myself for being a sucker and not saying
no
when I had the chance.

I battened down my emotional hatches. When her storm of grief subsided, I felt I’d weathered it pretty good, considering I hadn’t given into my desire to run like hell.

Kevin handed Sharon a lace hankie from a stack on the end table and murmured soothingly to her.

290

Sharon sagged in the rocker. “Sorry. It probably seems silly to you, because Maria has been dead for years.”

“Th

e sheriff mentioned you’d talked to a Lakota Holy man a few months after Maria’s disappearance, and the holy man indicated Maria was dead.”

“Yes.”

“And yet you still held out hope she was alive?”

She nodded. “Hiring a holy man to spiritually search for answers was my late husband’s idea, not mine.

I went along with it because it eased his mind.”

“Who was the holy man?”

“Myron Blue Legs.”

Shit. A shiver of foreboding tracked my spine along with the reminder of Abita’s prophetic phrase,
coincidence
is fate in disguise.
Why did I feel the universe—or fate, or karma, or kismet or whatever the hell it was called, conspiring against me to make my life one big ball of chaos? And the dangling strands of that mass were nothing more than dead-end cosmic threads that off ered no hope of fi nding a common connection? Th

e deeper I

looked, the more
I
unraveled.

Sharon kept talking. “He and Clem had been friends since they served in Vietnam. I didn’t put much stock in what Myron told us. He’s a bit of a shyster. I can’t believe he was right.” Sharon wiped her nose. “Anyway, I thought fi nding out what had happened to her couldn’t 291

possibly be worse than not knowing.” Her gaze locked to mine. “I was wrong.”

Oh no, she wasn’t going to drag me into a confession about my situation with Ben. By the look in her eye, the sheriff had already given her an earful. I had to toe the professional line, more for my own sanity than anything else.

“Th

e reports gave us the basics, so why don’t you tell us about the Maria you knew.”

“My Maria was a nice, sweet woman. She’d always been such a good girl. Sure, she had some problems, like most kids. Nothing major, physically harmful or illegal, unlike her—”

She caught herself, frowned at her coff ee and didn’t fi nish the thought. At least, not aloud.

“So, you never believed she’d gone to Denver?”

“No. I’m aware that’s what her co-workers told the cops, but it wasn’t true. Maria would’ve told us. I mean, I can understand her keeping it to herself until she’d actually left and settled in, because she would’ve known her father and I would be upset about her moving. But to purposely cut herself off from us? Permanently?” Her hair brushed her square jawline as she shook her head. “No.

Makes me angry the police never looked beyond that.”

“We’ve heard from more than one source that Maria had a boyfriend,” Kevin said. “Was she seeing anyone in 292

particular?”

“She was a beautiful girl; she always had men chasing after her.” She shifted and tapped her fi ngernail on the coff ee table. “Th

at’s another dead-end. I know her

friend Jackie claimed she was hot and heavy with some unknown man, but I don’t buy it.”

I prodded her a little. “Why not? Do you think you know everything about your daughter’s life in those last few months? Especially when you’ve already told us she’d been keeping to herself?”

“No.” Th

e polite veneer vanished. “I think she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m sure those reports have given you the lowdown on her sister, my oldest daughter, Bonita, and the situation with the horrible man she’s been living with. Maria had been helping Bonita, trying to get her away from him, even when she knew how dangerous it was. How dangerous
he
was.”

Sharon calmed herself. Poured everyone another round of coff ee. My cup was still full and had gone cold.

Too bad I hadn’t brought my hip fl ask. Strangely enough, not for me, for her.

“You’re talking about Roland Hawk, right?” Kevin said.

“What a miserable man. For years Roland has controlled my daughter like a puppet. It frustrated our whole family, Maria most of all, because at one time, during 293

Maria’s teen years, she and Bonita had been close. Every time Roland beat up Bonita, Maria was there for her.”

A lesser professional would’ve demanded, “What about you? Why weren’t you there for her? Or Denny?”

but luckily I’d left smarmy girl at the offi ce. I listened,

wondering how Sharon Dove could act so . . . righteous when she’d been so clueless about her daughter Maria’s life, and so apathetic about Bonita’s.

“Th

e last time Maria stepped in to save her poor stupid sister,
Maria
wound up in the hospital, not Bonita.

She fi led charges against Roland. And they stuck. For the fi rst time.”

Her furious gaze locked to mine. “So, you see, I know who killed her. I’ve always known. Proving it without her body has been the problem.”

“Who do you think killed her?”

“Roland Hawk.”

“You sound certain.”

“I am. Roland was livid. He swore he’d get even with Maria for humiliating him. I’ve no doubt he tracked her down, strong-armed her into going with him, hacked her to bits and buried her in a hole in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t the fi rst time he’d done it, either.”

I froze. “What?”

“An old friend of mine is a youth counselor with the worst juvenile off enders on the reservations. Years 294

ago when he got wind Bonita was involved with Roland, he called me in a panic. Seems when Roland was in the juvenile system he kept getting caught with shanks and knives. Th

ey had to isolate him from the other kids because he literally lashed out with them.

“So the counselors, in their infi nite wisdom, put his anger to good use, assigning him to work in the kitchen.

Yes, they gave him a meat cleaver and it didn’t set off warning bells that Roland could hack a chicken to pieces in no time fl at.”

I swallowed hard.

“Evidently, one borderline retarded boy, who scrubbed dishes, really got on Roland’s nerves. Th is kid

mooned around Roland like newly weaned calf. Roland tried to bully him to get him to leave him alone, like he did everyone else, but this boy didn’t understand why Roland didn’t want to be pals with him. When Roland hit him to get his point across, the poor confused kid hit back. And since the kid was considerably bigger, he pounded the living tar out of Roland before the counselors broke it up. After Roland healed up, the kid disappeared. Th

ey never found any trace of him, but I’m

betting Roland honed his hacking skills on him fi rst.”

Another choked sob.

My mind had gotten stuck on
hacked to pieces
. A vision of the Maria’s remains fl ashed in my mind. I’d 295

compartmentalized the bones and dehumanized her.

Sharon had blown the lid completely off my pathetic rationalization.