Skirting the Grave (17 page)

I never thought I’d see the day Brandy could befriend a millionaire non-philanthropist, unless she knew something about Cort I didn’t.

Before she preceded him out the door, she came to give me a thank-you hug. She’d never held so tight. As for me, thinking of Isobel and her distant family, neither had I held so tight or appreciated Brandy so much.

“Good luck, sweetie. Call me if you need me,” I said. “Fund-raiser’s right on schedule, though. Everybody’s picking up their fifties formals for the big evening event. Some chose fifties day wear for the afternoon garden party/car show.”

“You, too,” Brandy said. “Good luck sleuthing.” She eyed the newspaper, dancing picture side up. “Good luck all around.”

Several of us watched Brandy and Cort drive away, though we weren’t the entire family, since Tricia was sleeping in, and my dad had yet to return from Fiona’s.

“I’m off to the morgue,” I said. “If anyone cares. Werner’s going to let me look at the clothes Payton was wearing.”

Isobel sat straighter. “That’s smart. Nobody knows clothes better than you do.”

Had I told her that Payton died wearing rags?

“Detective Werner told me Payton’s outfit seemed odd,” Isobel said, furrowing her brow.

“Or my dad told me, or Ruben did.”

Ambiguity was so not welcome at this point in the investigation. Werner seemed to be waiting for me as he paced his office.

He whistled when he saw me.

Besides Isobel, he was the first to appreciate my sixties Geoffrey Beene mint green linen slit-neck swing dress, paired with bow-topped natural python platform pumps.

“You look like a meadow in a bottle,” he said. “A real tonic.”

“Bet you say that to all the glamazons.”

He winced, because those had been fighting words in third grade. His words.

“That’s a compliment these days,” I assured him. “Don’t worry, no more name-calling. What’s got you so happy?”

“You can tell, hey? With Nick’s FBI connections, he tracked down the money Patrick York embezzled.”

“The fortune that went missing a few years ago? That’s big. So that was Nick’s case with its tentacles around the throat of our case? I guessed correctly.”

“Yep. After tracing a series of York holding and dummy companies incorporated under fake names, nonexistent subsidiaries, and subdivisions, Nick and I sort of found it at the same time in Ruben Rickard’s own convoluted financials.”

“I knew Rickard was too cocky. When did you and Nick do all this?”

“Almost all night last night. Why?”

“Just wondering. So how does it help solve Payton’s death?”

“Oddly enough, Payton’s name was on one of Rickard’s fake companies.”

“So you think they were embezzling partners and they let her father go to prison for their crime?”

“That might be jumping the gun, but it’s a distinct possibility we’d need to prove.”

“I must say that I’ve lost a bit of sympathy for her, but may I see her clothes, anyway?”

“The forensics lab came for her body at eight, couple hours earlier than expected, but I held the clothes back for you. I can messenger them over when you’re done. No need to go to the morgue; they’re in my office, but you have to wear latex gloves to touch them.”

Gloves to touch thrift store throwaways? It might work for the future, to keep me from having public visions, but would it work? I mean, how would I look fitting a dress wearing latex gloves? Like a freak of nature?

On the other hand, I might need a reading. How do I pull that off wearing gloves?

When, as I feared, I got nothing from the clothes, I skimmed my exposed wrist above the gloves, along the peach peasant blouse. As I did, I heard “Good, the bitch’ll look like crap in that,” in a deep, modulated voice.

It all happened in a blip, and I barely blinked, though I wasn’t sure when Werner got so close. I turned to him. “Somebody went Dumpster diving for these. Cheap, no personality. Definitely not something a York would wear, any York. My instinct is that she was being demeaned on purpose, maybe controlled, especially on the train, possibly with the trace drugs found in her system.”

“Good hypothesis,” Werner said, “because the trace drug, while it could make her easily manageable, couldn’t kill her, and it would have been taken in pill form. But there’s a single recent needle mark in her arm with no drug to account for it being there.”

“What requires a needle to inject but leaves no trace?” I asked.

“Air,” Werner said. “Insulin, because it occurs naturally in the body, though too much can kill, like certain minerals. I’m sure forensics has a long list of injectable invisible killers.”

“Speaking of injections, Grand-mère’s a diabetic,” I said. “There were old needles in the top tray of the trunk.”

“Did you touch them?”

“Of course n . . . no, actually.”

“I’m gonna send somebody over to dust that trunk and everything in it for prints. Should have done it before.”

“I need the roller skates for Saturday.”

“Hold that thought. I gotta take this call.” He listened and hung up. “This is odd, but a transporter from the forensics lab is here for Payton.”

“I thought they came two hours ago.”

“So did we all. Whoever took her body was evidently not from the lab we hired. The medical examiner said the early paperwork was in order. Two people came for her then, a male driver and his female intern.”

I indicated his door. “Should we go talk to the morgue staff, see if we can get a description of the drivers?”

“We can do that if the morgue surveillance cameras don’t show us anything. With cameras at different angles, we can usually get a license plate and ID the drivers.”

I followed him to the morgue for a copy of the visitors’ log. “I want you to know that no blame is being placed,” he told his peeps, which they seemed to appreciate. I followed a silent Werner to a room with a bank of wall monitors. Werner introduced me to Officer Zales, at the controls, and handed him the log copy. “Right there,” Werner said, pointing to the second to the last entry. “To the minute, pull up the surveillance.”

“Of course, both drivers are wearing billed uniform hats, pulled down to cover their eyes, and dark glasses,” I said as the video came up from different angles on six screens. Werner jingled the change in his pocket, a sign of tension. “The driver’s moving like he knows where our cameras are,” Werner remarked. “He’s rubbing his face, scratching his nose. Whoops, there go his keys, and he picks them up in a forward surge until he’s out of camera range.”

“What about the female intern?” I asked. “She’s staying in the car. Is that normal?

“Never mind,” I said. “She’s getting out on the passenger side, coming around but moving before she rounds the vehicle to grab the door handle with her left hand, while keeping her back to us, and she stays that way while the body’s slipped inside.”

Werner swore. “There’s a dodge. They returned to the front seat on the far side and he’s getting in on her side, cap down until they pull away.”

“Go back,” I said. “I think I caught a glimpse of . . . there she is! She glanced in the center rearview mirror, see, then the side mirror. Red hair. Too much makeup. Back up and watch her hand to her hair. It’s not a smoothing or a comb-through but a tug. She’s wearing a wig.”

Werner whistled. “Good call, Mad.”

“Officer Zales, I don’t suppose you can do a Bones-or CSI-type TV miracle and superimpose her mouth and nose from the center mirror and her right cheek and half jaw and lips from the side mirror into that full reflection of her on the windshield?”

Zales looked like I had two heads.

“Then can you mesh it somehow so we can get a light/dark facial view?”

Zales raised a brow and quirked his lips. “Since TV equipment is probably fake, I can’t quite pull that off. But since I’m a genius, give me fifteen to be brilliant.”

Werner bought me a cup of coffee in the break room, and Zales the Brilliant called us in ten. When we walked in, one screen showed a face shot of Payton on her slab.

“You want to know what the female driver looked like to me?” Zales asked as he worked a few keys and put sunglasses on Payton. “She looked like the deceased wearing makeup and a wig.”

He flashed the uneven composite on the screen, and I know my jaw dropped. The cousin.

“Giselle?”

Werner straightened. “What did the male driver look like?”

“He was as evasive inside the morgue, bending over the body and scratching his ear if forced into a camera angle. But I called the ME. She said he was broadshouldered and a bit of a know-it-all with brownish-red hair.”

I looked at Werner.

“Rickard,” we said together.

“We’re only guessing,” I pointed out. “But it could very well have been York’s loyal campaign manager and York’s missing daughter.”

“Zales, put those videos in the York file, please, and get a crime detail to go over the morgue, inside and out. Mr. Perfect Candidate may not be such a great judge of character, after all.”

Thirty-one

You can think you’ve made it and yet the next day’s press will always be waiting for you, the public will always ask more of you. In short, you can always do better!

—GIORGIO ARMANI

Had we found Giselle? Was she the driver’s intern? Or had Isobel left my father’s house for a command performance?

I went into the hall and called my brother, Alex, Nick’s FBI partner.

“What time did Kelsey wake up this morning?”

“About five. Why?”

“So you’ve been up awhile?”

“Yeah, I let Tricia sleep in for this one day before I leave for the conference. You know that. Why?”

“What time did Isobel come down to breakfast, and has she been there at the house the whole time?”

“Sixish, and absolutely yes. You saw her. Nick won’t even let her go to work until you call to say you’re on your way to the shop. He plans to drive her over to Vintage Magic and spend the day, by the way. I’m surprised she got to shower alone.”

“No go, little brother. Stop trying to make me jealous. It won’t work.”

“It was worth a try. Honestly, she’s been here all along. Nick, he’s hardly paying attention to her, except to make sure she’s safe. He’s brooding over you, is what he’s doing. I know my partner.”

“Guilt won’t work, either.” Brothers, I thought. “I gotta go solve a case, but will you let Nick and Isobel know that I should be at the shop in about a half hour or so?” Alex agreed to pass along the message, and I hung up.

I followed Werner to York campaign headquarters, since it was on the way to my shop. Ruben Rickard wasn’t there, hadn’t shown up today at all. Very unusual. Werner gave his hotel room a cursory look-see from the hallway. Before we left, he taped the room off and called for a search warrant and then for a neighboring town’s crime scene team, since his team was still at the morgue.

He also made a conference call, including Nick, to the FBI in Boston. Afterward, he put an arm around my shoulder and walked me to my car. “The Feds are sending a couple teams to Kingston’s Vineyard, one to search Rickard’s house, in case he kidnapped Giselle and forced her to do his dirty work.”

“She did seem rather stiff in those pictures, like she was working against her will. You think she glanced in the mirror on purpose?”

He gave me a double take. “I’ll follow up that possibility. Nick’s staying close to Isobel, per the Bureau, because in doing so, he can stay close to Quincy York without arousing suspicion.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Meanwhile, the Feds are also going to visit the Kingston York estate. See if Grand-mère or her henchmen are holding the missing twin against her will.”

“That’s the only way you could get the FBI to help, hey? Kidnapping across state lines?”

“One, it applies, and certain wording helps. Two, between Nick and I, we’ve got enough friends in the Bureau who listen to us. And three, we told them that solving our case might solve the York embezzling case.”

“Where do we go from here?” I asked.

“We each go to our respective places of employment. You distract me.” He rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “I can’t believe we lost a body on my watch.”

“You’re blaming me?”

“Not at all.” He opened my Element door, helped me inside, and closed it. “I’m blaming myself. I’m gonna call Nick and tell him that he has to be your bodyguard today as well as Isobel’s.”

“I feel rather discarded.”

“You’re fishing for a compliment,” he said. “You’re wanted, but this isn’t the time or the place. Besides, you’re not ready, kiddo. You told me so.”

“And you are ready?”

He leaned in and kissed me. “Oh yeah.”

Scrap. “Can I call you if I have ideas about the case?”

“I’m looking forward to it. Now go before I change my mind about being a gentleman.”

He watched me drive away, and I watched him in my rearview mirror until I got to the corner, all the while thinking I had to let him go. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt either of them.

I pulled into the Vintage Magic parking lot beside Nick’s Hummer, and Isobel came out to meet me, with the contagious enthusiasm I’d come to appreciate. She handed me a Frappuccino. “Nick bought it for you, and I fitted two people. Now I’m ready to begin the alterations, but I didn’t want to start, in case you had special instructions.”

“I like initiative in an intern,” I said, pushing my car key’s lock button. Bleep. Nick waited in my doorway and slapped a notebook into my hand. “Werner called an ambulance for you last night?” he’d written, the scratch marks of a couple broken pencil points visible in the text. Oy.

“I thought you were here playing all evening,” he’d added.

“Not,” I said, raising the Frappuccino in thanks and then taking a quick, cooling sip. He shoved another note under my nose: “You never said they wanted to take you to the hospital.”

“I take it Tunney’s been here?”

“Nick’s mad at himself because he judged you incorrectly,” Isobel said. Nick snapped his gaze her way, his expression saying, “I can speak for myself!” Which he couldn’t.

Isobel shrugged. “Well, neither of you is saying how you really feel.”

“Nick?” I asked. “When is that jaw wire coming off?”