Sticky Fingers (24 page)

“About?”

“Money. Maybe that’s nothing new, since most married people seem to fight over money, but—”

“Was he mad because his wife didn’t want to pay for any more skating lessons?”

“I don’t know.”

If Mitchell was as obsessed with his daughter’s future in ice-skating as I thought he was, I wondered if he might be moved to murder to keep financing the kid’s expensive lessons. But then, why kill the cash cow?

18

It was very dark by the time I dropped Zack a block from his home. A sharp wind had kicked up and blew a few snowflakes against the windshield—not enough that I needed to put on the wipers, but I could feel the temperature dropping fast. I stopped at the yard to pick up Nooch and take him home.

I checked on Rooney before I left. He was still green, but his paint job didn’t seem to bother him. He was still focused on his bone. I left the dog to guard the yard and took Nooch home for his dinner.

I took Penn Avenue out through the Wilkinsburg and Churchill neighborhoods, then hopped on the Parkway East just long enough to hit the suburb of Monroeville. As I drove, I sang along with Dooce’s recordings, listening to the way he built a song, changed key when the emotion shifted, hit the usual pop crescendo, but then sustained the song’s musical motif long into the sound bleed. He made good use of his backup singers, too, unlike most rockers. The women’s voices added another layer of sound, but also an emotional cadence—like a good gospel group. Sometimes the backup singers were the dominant vocals, carrying the melody while Dooce used his raw, shouting voice to embellish.

I could hear the part Deondra would want in most of the songs. A contralto, she had the biggest and most trained voice of the three of us who sang with Stony, and she was a local star in urban gospel churches. If it were up to me, I’d give her the lead backup. I was better at the screaming stuff. Kate had a lyrical soprano for the high notes. Deondra, though, she had the chops to lead.

The Monroeville traffic slowed me down considerably. I remembered the Miracle Mile being one of the first strip malls in the city, but now it was jammed with hellish traffic, no miracles. Fast-food joints, car dealers, and four lanes of bumper-to-bumper vehicles with traffic lights jamming up everybody in both directions was my idea of satanic city planning.

I stopped at a gigantic Sheetz convenience market to get some gas and asked a guy at the next pump where Kenyon Road was, and he gave me typical Pittsburgh directions—all landmarks.

“Make a right at Lowe’s, go past the Outback Steakhouse, through the light at the Exxon station, then past the high school and hang a left. Go past the second church and the house with the tropical Christmas lights. Kenyon is on your right.”

I followed those directions easily. The roads dipped and curved in the dark. Most of the houses were decorated for the holidays with lights and lawn ornaments. As I drove, I wondered whatever happened to icicle lights. Used to be, all these suburban houses had icicle lights dripping from their gutters, but not anymore. Too bad. Icicle lights are pretty.

I ended up parked in front of a modest two-story house with brown vinyl siding. In the front lawn was a blow-up Christmas decoration that looked like a giant snow globe. Inside, a mechanical figure skater twirled in jerky circles–as if she’d had a couple of wine coolers.

I shut off the Monster Truck’s engine because it was loud, and this neighborhood was disconcertingly quiet. No traffic, no buses. I could see families moving around inside the houses and the blue gleam of television screens. Their cars were neatly parked in driveways. Their dogs were safely behind backyard fences. Taking it all in, I sat in the truck and thought about where we might have been if Flynn hadn’t gotten into heroin and I hadn’t come from where I did. Would Sage be attending some white-bread suburban high school, dating lots of kids like Mr. Squishy with the Escalade? Would we be taking her to skating practice? Coming home to a split-level house with curtains in the windows? Somehow, I couldn’t make any of the three of us fit that picture.

Only one other car was parked on the street. It was a couple of houses down, facing me. I saw the interior lights flash on as the driver popped open his door and got out. Then he crunched up the street toward me, hands thrust into the deep pockets of his coat, his head bent against the wind. He opened the door and got into the passenger side of my truck.

“Hi, Bug. Sorry about missing lunch.”

“No problem,” he said. “I got tied up, too. What are you doing here?”

“Hoping to give Mitchell my condolences on the death of his wife. Unless he killed her himself. In that case, I’ll withhold my sentiments. Is he here?”

“He arrived about half an hour ago. We questioned him most of the afternoon. Now he’s alone.”

“Where’s his daughter?”

“After her skating lesson, he dropped her off at the mall. I’ve got an officer watching her at the Clinique counter. Mitchell’s alone in the house.”

We both looked. The curtains were pulled, blinds drawn, blocking any view of the inside. We could see only thin slivers of light beneath some of the blinds.

I said, “You think Mitchell’s the one who killed Clarice?”

Bug got comfortable in the seat, stretching out his legs and leaning his head back against the headrest. “I don’t know. He seemed genuinely upset about losing her when I interviewed him today. Unless he’s a heck of an actor, I think he’s sorry she’s gone. But the night she died, he had dropped their daughter off at a skating lesson and disappeared for a couple of hours. Enough time to kill his wife and dump her body.”

“Is he smart enough to get away with murder?”

“Well, nobody got away with it. The body floated up right in the middle of the three rivers. Even a moron would’ve known to tie a concrete block to the carpet, right?”

“So, by reason of his low IQ, you’re putting Mitchell at the top of your list.”

He sent me a wry smile. “Are you questioning my deductions, Watson?”

I smiled, too. “You know what I’ve been thinking about? The way the carpet was tied around Clarice. Nice and neat.”

“Like a pork loin.”

“Exactly. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t had a home-cooked meal in a while, but, yeah, I was thinking of the way Loretta ties up her rolled steak. Does one of the husbands cook?”

“Mitchell does. Eckelstine sends out for a lot of pizzas. I checked on the cord. It’s an ordinary kind of rope you can buy at Home Depot and Lowe’s. We’re checking to see if anyone bought some recently, but it’s something lots of people would just keep in the garage. Tell me about Eckelstine. I heard you were at his house today.”

Damn that reporter. He’d seen me at the house and blabbed to the cops.

Bug said, “Did you talk to him? Or do something else?”

I turned sideways in the seat to get a better look at Bug. “Is that your Boy Scout way of asking if I had hot, satisfying sex with Eckelstine?”

Bug didn’t meet my eye, but kept up his surveillance on the Mitchell house. Attempting to sound uninterested, he asked, “Did you?”

I had to make a conscious effort not to grit my teeth. “I gave that up.”

He shot me a glance. “I know a lot of guys who say they’re going to give up beer, but then a game comes on the TV and the refrigerator calls. It’s tough changing an ingrained behavior.”

“What the hell would you know about that?”

“Never mind,” he said. “Forget I brought it up.”

I had worked up some temper to argue with him and was surprised that he waved the white flag already. “Is this how you fight with Marie? Float your opinion and give up when she goes into attack mode?”

“I don’t fight with Marie. She always wins. I’m a wuss.”

I smiled at the thought of family strife in the Duffy household. Bug seemed happily married, with the sweetest kids who never got in trouble.

His thoughts must have strayed in the same direction, because he was quiet for a minute, then said, “How is it going with you and Flynn and your daughter? I mean, is she getting used to having a dad on the scene after all these years?”

“She’s adapting. Already, she’s trying to play us against each other.”

Bug gave a soft laugh. “Yeah, I know how that works.”

“Flynn’s doing okay, though,” I said. “He’s trying to do things right—checking with me before he takes a position, you know?”

“Presenting a united front is key with teenagers, I hear. Gotta be a team.”

I didn’t want to talk about how Flynn and I ought to be a team.

Bug said, “I looked up Mr. Squishy, by the way. To check if he had any kind of—you know, criminal record. He’s clean, except for some speeding tickets. His kids are okay, too.”

“No stalking charges?”

“Stalking?” Bug turned his head, interested. “You think the boyfriend is stalking your daughter?”

“He’s a pest, that’s all. Calling her a lot.”

“What do you mean by a lot? Every hour?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Hm.” Bug thought things over for a moment. “That kind of thing can escalate. You want me to have a talk with him?”

“I can talk with him myself.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have a badge.” Bug smiled. “You’d be amazed at the power of waving a shield under a teenager’s nose. Suddenly he starts thinking about what happens in prison showers.”

I liked the mental picture of Bug intimidating Sage’s boyfriend. “You’d do that for us?”

“For you,” Bug said.

For a second, I wasn’t sure how to take that.

Smoothly, Bug went on, “All parents need a little help now and then. And threatening the Squishy kid would give me the opportunity to blow off a little testosterone.”

“You don’t seem like the type. I mean, blowing off steam.”

“You might be surprised. I didn’t become a cop by accident.”

An odd second ticked by, and I said, “Speaking of parenting, I wonder how Clarice Crabtree managed with two kids in separate households. I mean—two adopted teenagers, each with a different father. Plus her own dad losing his mind. She had a complicated family life going on. And that busy career she was so proud of. How’d she make it all work?”

“Yeah, usually it’s a guy who’s married more than one woman—a con man looking to cash in on their incomes.”

“But in this case, Clarice is the big wage earner.”

Bug said, “Sometimes people want everything like they’re items on a résumé. Usually, it’s a guy who thinks like that—wants a family with two point two children, nice car, and the important career, all the trimmings. It’s unusual for a woman to think that way, but not impossible, I guess. She seemed to opt out on most of the real parenting. She let Mitchell take charge of the ice-skating lessons, for instance.”

“And I get the impression Richie Eckelstine was pretty much left to fend for himself.”

“About the boy. Do you think maybe he could have gone off the rails? Is he capable of killing his mother?”

I thought about Richie. He clearly felt abandoned and resentful, but he’d done something healthy about it by finding a skill to get good at. But had I let myself be influenced by the leave-me-alone-I’m-fine facade he put up? I was susceptible to that kind of kid—one who had a tough life but was determined to rise above it. I tried to think clearly about whether or not the kid had played me. Could he have killed Clarice? He wouldn’t be the first teenager to shoot a domineering parent.

But suddenly we saw two flashes beneath the pulled blinds of an upstairs window in Mitchell’s house. Two lightning flashes, I thought. Or maybe a camera?

And a single heartbeat thumped by before I truly realized what I’d seen.

Bug said. “Oh, hell. Was that muzzle flash?”

We bailed out of the truck together.

“Please,” Bug said as we ran across the front lawn of Mitchell’s house past the plastic ice-skater. I knew Bug wasn’t talking to me. “Please don’t let him be dead.”

Bug had his sidearm out. With his other hand, he pounded on the front door. “Police,” he shouted in a voice that boomed. “Open up!”

I cursed. Backing up, I tried to look up into the second-floor windows, but I couldn’t see anything. I cursed some more.

Bug hauled out his cell phone and hit 911.

I was operating on instinct when I took off running around the house. In the dark, I jumped over a coiled garden hose, forgotten in the grass, and nearly lost my footing as the side yard fell away in a steep bank of grass coated in a skim of snow. I found myself in the backyard a moment later, under a wooden deck and some leafless trees that hissed in the wind. The driveway curled around the house on the other side, ending in a garage located in the basement. A motion-detecting light was already on, casting a yellow light across the grass toward a line of trees. I saw a thick woods there.

Then a freight train hit me, and I went flying. I hit the ground and rolled into the grass, and I felt more than saw the person who’d hit me run out of the yard and down into the woods.

I scrambled to my knees and heard someone crashing through the underbrush, heading away from the house. Maybe it was a deer, but I thought deer would be lighter on their feet. Whoever was running away sounded heavy-footed and already out of breath.

I got up and ran toward the trees. But I stopped at the edge of the woods. The ground slanted away from the house, looking treacherous in the dark. I took a few steps into the woods, but my boots immediately got tangled in a thick carpet of fallen leaves and the jagged roots of trees and bushes. I’d be flat on my face within a few yards. Plus, I’m a city girl. Those suburban woods might just as well be a jungle with poisonous snakes and little bloodthirsty guys with blowguns.

Besides, Mitchell was upstairs, maybe hurt. Maybe dead.

I ran back to the wooden deck and took the steps two at a time. I nearly fell over a patio table, but I caught my balance and reached the sliding door. Grabbing the handle, I threw my weight against it. Unlocked. The door slid open and I went inside. The first room was a den—TV set, sofa, clutter on the coffee table and floor. A light left on in the kitchen showed me the way to the carpeted stairs, and I leaped upward.

“Mitchell? Mitch?”