Swift Justice (20 page)

Adrenaline coursed through my system, and I was out of the car, pounding up the driveway, before the startled driver realized his predicament. I really needed to start carrying my gun, I thought, pounding on the tinted driver’s window with my fist. I could just make out the shape of the driver inside.

“What in Sam Hill is going on out here?” a querulous voice called from the direction of the house. A small man old enough to get a salute from
Good Morning America
on his next birthday, with white hair wisping around his head like cotton candy, and wearing a pair of old jeans with the waistband hiked up to his armpits, stood quivering behind a half-open storm door.

“Call the police, sir,” I yelled. “This man was following me.”

“Is he one of those stalkers you hear about?” Curiosity had replaced fear in the man’s quavery voice, and he took a step out onto the stoop.

“Probably,” I said, yanking on the door handle. Locked. “Sir, the police?”

The engine revved, and the car backed up a foot. For one moment, I thought the driver was going to try reversing over my Subaru. Then the engine cut out and the window buzzed down a couple of inches. I found myself looking into the frightened and defiant face of Jacqueline Falstow.

“You followed me!” I said.

She nodded, brushing a strand of auburn hair off her forehead.

Damn, I was losing my touch. She must have followed me from her house to the park, waited while I lunched with Montgomery, and then trailed me here. “Why?” I asked, although I suspected I knew the answer.

“I thought you’d lead me to Roberta,” she whispered, her gaze meeting mine for a fraction of a second before she fixed her eyes on the steering wheel.

And I would have, I realized, if I hadn’t needed wine and broken fifteen traffic laws to exit on Uintah. As it was, I’d led her damn close to my client’s house. Annoyance at myself made me scowl.

“Don’t call the police,” Jacqueline pleaded, misinterpreting my expression.

I knew she was worried about how an arrest would look to
a judge if the courts ended up deciding who got custody of Olivia.

“Are you going to cut this shit out?”

Dark circles under her eyes attested to sleepless nights as she said, “Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that . . . Does she live on this street?” She looked left and right, as if hoping to see the baby in the window of the yellow house next door or in an infant swing in the yard across the street.

“Go home, Mrs. Falstow,” I said, irritated with the woman, but feeling unwanted sympathy for her, too.

“Hey,” said a voice at my elbow. “That’s a girl. I didn’t know they had girl stalkers these days.”

The homeowner was peering suspiciously from Jacqueline to me, his eyes bright blue in a face with more wrinkles than a litter of Shar-pei puppies. His head only came up to my chin.

“Thank you for being concerned,” I said. “My friend and I just had a misunderstanding. We won’t bother you anymore.” I gave Jacqueline a meaningful look and she nodded. I shook the man’s callused hand and walked back to my car. Making a U-turn, I waited for the Mercedes to precede me down the street. When we reached the intersection with the main road, she turned right and sped off in the direction of the interstate. I went left and tooled around the side streets for twenty minutes before deciding the coast was clear and I could backtrack to Melissa’s.

The Lloyds had a small house set back from the road on a couple of acres of forested land. Aspens and the ubiquitous lodgepole pines crowded around the house. A thicket of shrubs with glossy dark leaves nudged up against the porch that ran half the length of the house, and a flower garden, most of its blooms spent, nestled under a picture window facing the road. Wind chimes of ceramic, metal, and wood clanged and rattled as I rang the doorbell. The din of the chimes would make sitting on the porch with a Pepsi or glass of wine about as appealing as dining on the interstate, drowning the sounds of birds and wind. On the thought, a magpie landed on the porch rail, his black feathers gleaming iridescent as he cocked his head to study me. The opening door startled him, and he flew off with a loud caw.

“Yes?” A man stood framed in the doorway, a look of impatience on his face. Wearing a paint-spattered pair of cargo shorts and a black T-shirt, he looked to be about my age. A paintbrush tipped with sage-colored paint dangled from his left hand, and he kept his right hand on the door. He was
obviously primed to announce he didn’t need Girl Scout Thin Mints or Boy Scout popcorn or marching band chocolate bars.

“I’m Charlie Swift. I’m looking for Melissa. Is she here?”

“You’re the PI?” A faint look of interest replaced the impatience in his brown eyes.

“Yes. You must be Ian. I thought you were working in Arizona.” I extended my hand, and he shook it, leaving a smear of paint on my thumb.

“I am,” he said with a thin smile. “I rearranged a couple of meetings and flew up for the day to see how Mel was getting on with the baby. She’s not used to infants. Neither am I, for that matter. C’mon in.” He pulled the door wider. “Excuse the mess. Mel had to take the baby to the doctor, and I thought I might as well get some stuff done.” He gestured to the living room just off the entryway. Blue plastic tarps covered the furniture and most of the floor, and a ladder stood in one corner, a small bucket balanced precariously on the top step. The paint smell cleared my sinuses.

“I hope Olivia’s okay,” I said.

“Just the sniffles. But Mel was convinced she had meningitis or bubonic plague or something equally unlikely, so she hauled her off to the doctor.” His voice held the disparaging note of the superior male who thought taking an aspirin was tantamount to tattooing
WUSS
on his forehead and wouldn’t visit the ER unless he’d severed a limb in a manly woodchopping accident or been mauled by a puma, preferably while hauling a field-dressed elk out of the woods. “Mind if I keep working?”

Without waiting for my answer, he climbed up the ladder
and dipped his brush into the bucket. I had to crane my neck to look up at him as I said, “I just stopped by to let Melissa know she should expect a call from the police.”

The brush clattered to the floor, spraying sage-colored paint on the ladder and the wall. I picked it up gingerly between two fingers and handed it up to him. He had freckles on his hands.

“The police? Why do they need to talk to us? To Melissa? I suppose it’s about Lizzy,” he answered his own question. “Mel told me she’d hired you to find out who the baby’s father is. She told me about the baby being Lizzy’s and Lizzy turning up dead. What a shame.”

“Elizabeth worked for your wife and left the baby with her,” I pointed out, circumspectly not mentioning the closer relationship between Elizabeth and Melissa. I didn’t know if Melissa had come clean with her husband. I suspected not. “Since she was killed not long after leaving the baby here, the police just need to talk to Melissa. I didn’t give them her name, but they’ll probably come up with it.”

“It’s too bad. What happened to Lizzy, I mean,” he said, brushing paint onto the wall in choppy strokes. “She was a sweet girl.” His profile looked pensive.

“You knew her?”

“I met her once or twice. As you said, she worked for Melissa.”

“What was she like?”

“Really pretty, with a great smile and—”

Great tits, I filled in mentally when he paused.

“Her husband was in Iraq or Afghanistan, and she was counting the days until he got back so they could leave
Colorado. I got the feeling she’d had a bad experience here. Her dad died, she said, and her mom remarried some jerk she couldn’t stand.”

“Where were they going?” I asked, knowing there was no “they.”

“She talked about Virginia,” Ian said. “I remember because she said she wanted to go to the University of Virginia and study psychology. Melissa said she was a great little seamstress, but I guess she had bigger plans.”

“It was nice of you to take time to draw her out,” I said. His back was to me now as he painted up into a corner. I maneuvered closer to see more of his face, almost tripping on a drop cloth.

“She seemed lonely. We got to talking when she came to install those curtains she made.” He jerked his head in the direction of ruby-colored velvet drapes half closed against the westerly sun.

“When did you first meet her?”

“I don’t know . . . late last year? Not too long after she started sewing for Mel.”

“Was she already pregnant?”

He laughed uneasily. “I hope so, since her husband was already deployed. She wasn’t showing, though, if that’s what you mean. Why?”

Before I could answer, my cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” I said, stepping into the hall.

Gigi’s excited voice bounced over the line. “Charlie! There’s another PI here. She said she’s the one you’re looking for.”

“What?”

“You posted a question on some online bulletin board,
right? Well, this woman says Elizabeth Sprouse hired her to find her birth mother. I think she carries a gun,” Gigi added in a whisper, and I assumed she meant the strange PI.

“Tell her I’ll be right there.”

I flipped the phone closed, ducked my head into the living room to say good-bye to Ian Lloyd and remind him to tell Melissa the cops would come calling, and gratefully escaped the paint-scented confines of the house for the fresh air in the yard and my car parked in the driveway.

I walked into my office to find Gigi holding a gun. Déjà vu all over again. Another woman, with short salt-and-pepper hair, wearing black leather pants and a matching vest that showed off smoothly muscled arms, was showing Gigi a two-handed shooter’s grip. The pink cast got in the way.

“Cup the bottom of your right hand with your left. Like this.” She demonstrated, and the gun, a small .22 that looked like a Halloween prop in Gigi’s hands, took on a silky air of menace.

“Oh, Charlie,” Gigi said, catching sight of me in the doorway. “This is Frieda Vasher. She’s showing me how to hold my gun.”

Bending, Frieda tucked the gun into an ankle holster before turning to greet me. “Swift,” she said, shaking my hand with a grip that would mash aluminum cans, “I’ve heard a lot about you. The way you tracked down the Olson kid . . . whew!” She shook her head. “That story in the
Denver Post
about it was great advertising, I’ll bet.”

“I got some business from it,” I admitted. The lines in
Vasher’s face suggested she was in her late forties or early fifties, but she was as fit as a twenty-year-old. She wore no makeup, but a tattoo that looked like a Celtic bracelet girdled one rock-hard bicep. Her eyes were a light gray, almost silver, under strong black brows. She studied me for a moment, and I got the feeling she saw more than most people.

“Let me tell you what I know about the Sprouse girl,” she said, pulling forward the straight-backed chair and straddling it backward.

I propped my shoulders against the wall and nodded: I was listening. Gigi rolled her chair around the desk and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands, her expression suggesting she had front-row seats to a Broadway premiere.

“She contacted me a year ago May—”

“How’d she get your name?”

“My Web page,” Vasher said with a grin that showed one front tooth slightly overlapping the other. “I notice you don’t have one. You might want to think about designing one; I get better than half my business off the Internet these days. Anyway, she came to see me and said she wanted to find her birth mother. She was obsessed.” Her brows drew together. “She’d been saving money for years to afford a PI, squirreling away every dime of her allowance and the money she made sewing. Can you imagine?”