Sketch Me If You Can (12 page)

“Take it easy, Case,” Oberlin said with an uncomfortable laugh. “I don’t think Ms. McCain is looking to put anyone on trial here.”

“Of course not,” Rory said lightly. She gathered her notes together and slid them into the folio. There was no point in staying there with Casey in guard-dog mode. She thanked Oberlin again and said her good-byes.

“Wow!” she exhaled as she slid into her car. She’d pulled it off! She’d really pulled it off. Of course, it was unfortunate that Casey had interrupted the interview, but some things were simply not under her control. Besides, it had given her a chance to see how the two of them interacted. From the moment she’d laid eyes on Casey, she’d known that the woman was not only trying to protect her man, but she was also trying to protect the great wealth he’d just inherited. Wealth that would soon become hers as well. Rory was willing to take bets that the engagement ring on Casey’s perfectly manicured finger would soon be joined by an equally impressive wedding band. In her opinion David Oberlin was about to jump from the frying pan directly into the fire.

She pulled out of the driveway and started the winding descent down the hillside, her mind still racing as if she’d just downed a double espresso. She was beginning to understand Jeremy’s certainty that his sister had been murdered. She’d just begun to scratch the surface of the case and she already had two people with motive and opportunity and, according to the police report, only each other as alibis.

Rory had taken on the investigation as a goodwill gesture to Jeremy, but she had to admit that she’d found tonight’s little caper exhilarating. She hadn’t felt this challenged by her work in a long time. No, that wasn’t fair. She’d actually
never
felt this challenged by her work.

By the time she pulled into her own driveway, the last of the sun’s rays had been all but gobbled up by the horizon. The house loomed in front of her, dressed in murky shadows, compliments of a broken street lamp. Damn—she’d forgotten to leave a light on when she’d rushed off to work that morning. She certainly didn’t relish the thought of walking into that darkness, knowing that a sullen, moody ghost was waiting inside for her.

Z
eke was sitting on the staircase, third step from the bottom, like a parent awaiting the return of an overdue child, or a spouse the return of a loved one after a quarrel. But his expression was neither worried nor apologetic.

“You keep even worse hours than your uncle did,” he observed. Either he’d forgotten about his tantrum the previous evening, or he was pretending that it hadn’t happened. Not that it mattered to Rory. She’d had a long day on very little sleep, and now that the adrenalin rush from her meeting with Oberlin was ebbing away, all she wanted was some peace and quiet. She certainly had no desire to engage in verbal fisticuffs with the marshal.

“I didn’t know I was expected to punch a time clock,” she said as she walked past him.

She dropped her jacket, purse and folio onto the small upholstered bench that Mac had placed in the entry to facilitate the changing of footwear in bad weather. Then she kicked off her heels and padded barefoot down the hall to the kitchen.

She grabbed a peach from the refrigerator, eating it as she headed back to the staircase. On the way, she stopped to pull her notes out of the folio. Zeke was nowhere in sight. Just as well. Upstairs she turned into the study and booted up the computer. She wanted to write out her impressions from the interview for Jeremy while they were still fresh in her mind. When the monitor flashed to life, Mac’s icons covered half the screen. She found a strange comfort in seeing them there exactly as they’d been when she last visited Mac. Before she could start to wallow in melancholy, she opened the word processing program, pulled up a new page and started typing. Twenty minutes later she was about to read through her notes to see if she’d omitted anything important when a sharp whistle made her jump in her seat.

She swung her chair around in a one-eighty, trying to locate the source of the noise. Puzzled, she turned back to face the computer and found Zeke perched on the edge of the desk.

“How’s that for a warning signal?” he asked her. His expression was perfectly sober, but she could swear there was a touch of amusement in his voice.

“I appreciate the effort,” she said, trying to keep her own voice businesslike, “but a signal that’s supposed to avoid startling me shouldn’t actually make me levitate out of my chair.”

“You sure do startle easy.” Zeke laughed. It was a deep raspy sound, as if he was a little rusty in the laughter department. He was looking at Rory as if he expected her to start laughing along with him.

Rory tried to keep a straight face, determined to keep him from reducing her rules to a joke, but his laugh was infectious, and the circumstances were certainly absurd enough to be funny. Her lips twitched with the tug of a smile, and she was quickly overpowered by the laughter bubbling up inside her. She’d forgotten how remarkably good it felt.

“There you go,” Zeke said. “I was pretty darned sure you had at least one good laugh in you. You’re Mac’s niece after all and he had a mighty fine sense of humor.”

“He did.” Rory sighed, trying to regain her composure. “Look, I’m not trying to be difficult, but that whistle really won’t do.”

“I could see about tonin’ it down some or maybe find a different way to announce myself.”

“I’d appreciate that.” She turned back to the computer screen. It was all well and good to have a little fun, but the only way this strange living arrangement was going to work was if she remained the alpha dog.

She did her best to focus on the notes she’d written, which wasn’t all that easy with Zeke still sitting there, watching her.

“I don’t understand what’s so all fired fascinatin’ about that contraption,” he grumbled after several minutes.

Rory looked up at him. “I’m sure there were things in your time that I wouldn’t have understood.”

“I suppose as how that might be,” he said, vanishing from the front of the desk to stand beside her. “Mac tried to explain how it all works, but I can’t rightly say that I get it.”

“I use the damned thing and I hardly get it,” she said.

Zeke hunkered down to read the screen better. “Well now, I see you’re writin’ there about that Oberlin lady who fell down the stairs and cracked her skull open. So you’ve gone and taken on Mac’s old cases.”

“Just this one. Her brother’s convinced that she was murdered.”

“Interestin’ case,” Zeke said, straightening to his full height again. “Mac used to talk to me about the interestin’ ones. And I believe I was of some genuine help to him.”

“You were. He said so in his letter.”

Zeke smiled, clearly pleased by this revelation. He returned to his seat on the front edge of the desk. “I’d be glad to help you out same as I did for him.”

Rory wasn’t sure how he could help her, or for that matter how he’d been able to help Mac, given that modern investigative techniques were so far superior to what they were in Zeke’s day. But she had to admit that the idea of bouncing her thoughts off someone else had a certain appeal. In spite of how tired she was, she wound up giving him a detailed account of her meeting with David Oberlin and his fiancée, Casey Landis.

“I expect you’re gonna have to wait a good while before tryin’ to talk to Miss Casey again.”

“My thoughts exactly. If I wait long enough, she might think they’re off the hook, maybe slip and say something incriminating.”

“Of course, that’s assumin’ one or both of them is guilty. What’s your gut tellin’ you?”

“That’s the funny part.” Rory sighed, leaning back in the chair. “All that money is a great motive, and David probably knew she was working alone at that house, so they had opportunity, but somehow my gut isn’t convinced they did it.”

“If there’s one thing I learned in our kind of work, gut instinct counts for a lot more than folks these days are willin’ to allow. Back in my day we didn’t have all the bells and whistles. Hell, I don’t think I ever heard the word ‘forensic’ till I started workin’ with Mac. What with all the new-fangled testin’: DNA, toxicology, fingerprintin’ . . .”

“Wait a minute,” Rory said. “You must have had fingerprinting.”

“I do recall some talk about a fella over in Europe who claimed that no two people had the same fingerprints. But I don’t see how you can be sure of that till you’ve gone and checked every single person’s prints.”

Rory smiled. “You have a point there.”

“Everybody’s so focused on the little picture these days that they go missin’ some of the important stuff. You gotta learn to trust your gut. We had instincts long before we had tests.”

“One of the things bothering me,” Rory said, warming to their dialogue, “is that David and Casey don’t have decent alibis. These are two bright, savvy people. If they were guilty they would have made sure they had foolproof ones.”

“Or they were countin’ on investigators thinkin’ just that.”

“Which would bring me back to square one.” Rory sighed again.

“For the time bein’. But as I recall, Mac was considerin’ some other suspects. You talk to any of them?”

“Not yet. What I really want to do is get back into the house where Gail died. But breaking in at night is out of the question, and I can’t accomplish anything with a real estate agent toddling around after me.”

“Well,” Zeke said, ‘if you can’t be there alone, the next best thing is to be there in a crowd. If the agent’s busy showin’ other folks around the house, that oughta get you some time on your own.”

Rory thought about that for a moment. “I guess I could check the newspapers for the next open house and hang out there in my car until I see other people go in.”

“Or you could put together a crowd of your own.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to get anyone else involved in this.” Her friends at work would probably be glad to help, but the more people who knew what she was up to, the riskier it was that someone would slip and say something that might compromise her job. As for her other friends, they were busy juggling jobs, husbands and babies. They hardly even had time to meet for coffee these days.

“It’s your call.” Zeke shrugged. “I’d help you out if I could.”

Rory wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, but she almost dissolved into laughter again as she pictured him in his homespun cowboy duds winking in and out as he made his way through the million-dollar house alongside a horrified real estate agent.

“Thanks for the suggestion,” she said. “I’ll keep it in mind. But right now I need some sleep.” She saved what she’d written, logged off the computer and pushed back from the desk.

“I’ll be leavin’ you to your privacy then,” Zeke said reluctantly.

Rory didn’t wait for him to vanish. He could watch her regardless of whether or not she could see him anyway. She said good night and went into the guest room where the sheets were still tangled in the center of the bed from the previous night’s insomnia. She made a halfhearted attempt to straighten them out before falling onto the bed without bothering to undress or brush her teeth. It felt like a week since she’d last slept. Her eyes were closed before her head came to rest on the pillow. But just before her thoughts unraveled into the disjointed fabric of dreams, she realized who could populate her makeshift crowd.

T
he next morning Rory awakened more rested than she’d felt in weeks. If she’d dreamed, she wasn’t aware of it. The epiphany she’d had before falling asleep popped into her mind as her feet hit the floor. She jotted a memo to herself on a sticky note and stuck it on her computer screen. It was too early to call anyone.

She showered and dressed, ate a multigrain cereal bar that promised to give her half a day’s worth of fiber and energy and went off to work without seeing Zeke. Except for the fact that she kept expecting him to appear after every little noise she heard, life seemed almost normal. The next time she saw him, they’d have to work out exactly what signal he intended to use. She couldn’t be looking over her shoulder every time a bird chirped, a dog barked or the beams and joists in the old house groaned.

At work, the day plodded along as if everything were happening in slow motion. She arranged a lineup for a witness to a robbery, helped a young mother go through mug shots to see if she could pick out the man who’d tried to lure her little boy away at the playground, then tried to catch up on the inevitable pile of paperwork. If computers were supposed to help cut down on the use of paper, they sure weren’t holding up their half of the bargain.

As the day wore on, Rory had a hard time concentrating. Apparently her subconscious found the circumstances surrounding Gail’s death more interesting than the work she was being paid to do, and it took every opportunity to hijack her attention.

“No, no, no! That’s not what I said!” The middle-aged man who was seated beside her was losing his patience. He was the only witness to a hit-and-run that had sent a woman to the hospital in critical condition. “The guy had a little goatee; he wasn’t friggin’ Santa Claus.”

“You said he had a beard. I’m sorry if I misinterpreted that,” Rory replied tightly as she corrected the picture.

“Fine, let’s just get on with it. I gotta get back to work; no one else is gonna finish up my deliveries.”

Five minutes later he declared the computerized sketch to be a reasonable likeness of the suspect and Rory thanked him for his help.

“Yeah, sure,” he muttered as he hauled himself out of the chair. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

“You okay there?” Leah Russell asked a moment later as she sank into the empty chair beside Rory. “You usually don’t let the assholes get to you.”

Rory shrugged and produced a smile that fell somewhere short of genuine. “I guess I’ve just had a lot on my mind lately.”