To Die For (28 page)

“You’re tough,” he said unsympathetically. “You can take it.”

He wouldn’t take “no” for an answer; his track record on that so far was pretty damn consistent. So I decided my arm hurt after all our rolling around on the floor and he had to help me put on some makeup to cover my bruised cheekbones; then my hair just wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do and I told him he’d have to braid it. After two attempts, he growled something obscene and said, “All right, that’s it. You’ve punished me enough. We need to leave or I’ll be late.”

“You might as well learn how to braid hair,” I said, giving him the Big Eyes. “I just know our little girl will wear her hair in braids sometimes, and she’ll want her daddy to do it for her.”

He almost melted under the onslaught of Big Eyes and mention of a little girl; then he caught himself. He was made of some stern stuff, to withstand the double whammy. “We’re having all boys,” he said as he hauled me to my feet. “No girls. I’ll need all the reinforcements I can get without you bringing in a ringer.”

I grabbed my notebook before he hustled me out to the garage and practically stuffed me into the Crown Vic. If I had to sit in a police station, I might as well work on my clues.

When we got to City Hall and he ushered me into the police station, the first person I saw was Officer Vyskosigh. He was wearing street clothes, so I guessed he had just finished his shift. He stopped and gave me a little salute. “I enjoyed the dessert you sent, Ms. Mallory,” he said. “If I hadn’t been late getting off my shift, I wouldn’t have gotten any. Sometimes things work out for the better.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” I said, smiling at him. “If you don’t mind my asking, where do you work out? I can tell you do.”

He looked faintly startled, then preened a little. “The YMCA.”

“When this is over and I can go back to work, I’d like to show you around Great Bods. We offer some programs that the Y doesn’t, and my facilities are first-rate.”

“I looked around last week,” he said, nodding his head. “I was impressed with what I saw.”

Wyatt was gently herding me forward with his body, and as we turned the corner to the elevator, I looked past him and called, “Bye, now,” to Officer Vyskosigh.

“Would you stop flirting?” Wyatt growled.

“I wasn’t flirting. I was drumming up business.” The elevator doors opened and we stepped inside.

He pressed the button for his floor. “That was flirting. So cut it out.”

Chief Gray was talking with a group of detectives that included MacInnes and Forester, and he looked up when Wyatt steered me toward his office. The Chief was wearing a dark taupe suit and a French blue dress shirt. I gave him a big smile and a thumbs-up, and he self-consciously stroked his tie.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Wyatt muttered as he parked me in his chair. “But it’s too late now to change my mind, so just sit there and make lists, okay? There are some guys here who have high cholesterol, so try not to smile at them and give them heart attacks. Don’t flirt with anyone who’s over forty, or overweight, or married, or under forty, or single. Got it?”

“I’m not a flirt,” I said defensively, and pulled out my notebook. I couldn’t believe he was being so dog-in-the-mangerish. That might be list-worthy.

“The evidence says otherwise. Since you told him he’d look good in blue, Chief Gray has worn a blue shirt every day. Maybe you should clue him in on some other colors.”

“Oh, how sweet,” I said, beaming. “He must have gone shopping that very day.”

Wyatt studied the ceiling for a moment, then said, “Do you want some coffee? Or a Diet Coke?”

“No, I’m fine right now. Thank you. Where will you be, since I have your desk?”

“Around,” he said unhelpfully, and left.

I didn’t have time to get bored. Several people popped into the office to thank me for the bread pudding, and ask for the recipe. The women asked, that is; I don’t think it occurred to the men. Between interruptions, I doodled in my notebook and wrote down other things that might or might not be relevant, but didn’t hit on that magic detail that would tie everything together.

Around lunchtime, Wyatt returned with a white sack containing two barbecue sandwiches, and with two soft drinks hooked in his fingers. He moved me out of his chair—I don’t know what it is about him and his chairs, that he can’t share—and looked over my list of clues and my doodles while we ate lunch. He didn’t seem impressed by my progress. He did like where I’d written his name, then drawn a heart around it and an arrow through the heart. He scowled, though, when he found his new list of transgressions.

After we had eaten he said, “The lab guys say that the black hairs are original, not dyed. And that they’re Asian, which is a big break. How many Asians do you know?”

Now I was really puzzled. There aren’t many Asians in this part of the country, and though I’d had some Asian friends in college, we hadn’t kept in touch. “None since college, that I remember.”

“Remember, Native Americans are of Asian heritage.”

That put a whole new light on things, because this close to the Eastern Cherokee Reservation, there were a lot of Cherokees around. I knew a lot of people with Cherokee heritage, but I couldn’t think of one who might want to kill me.

“I’ll have to think about this,” I said. “I’ll make a list.”

After he left, I did make a list of all the Native Americans I knew, but even as I was writing the names, I knew this was a waste of time. None of them had any reason to kill me.

I went back to my clues. I wrote down:
Asian hair.
Wasn’t that what all good-quality human-hair wigs were made of? Asian hair was heavy and straight and glossy; anything could be done to it, in terms of color and curl. I wrote down
wig,
then circled the word.

If the person trying to kill me had been smart enough to wear a wig, then we shouldn’t be paying any attention to the color of the hair. This threw the field of suspects wide open again. A wild idea struck me and I wrote down a name, with a question mark beside it. This was taking jealousy to the extreme, but I wanted to think about this person some more.

Around two o’clock, Wyatt stuck his head in the door. “Stay here,” he said brusquely. “We have a call about a murder/suicide. Turn your cell phone on and I’ll call you when I can.”

If my cell phone is with me, it’s always on. The big question was, when would he be back? I’d seen how long it takes to work crime scenes; he might not be back to fetch me until midnight. There is no good that comes of not having your own wheels.

The constant noise in the big room outside Wyatt’s office had lessened considerably; when I went to the door, I saw that almost everyone had left. They were all probably going to the scene of the murder/suicide. If I’d been given the choice, I would have gone, too.

To my right, the elevator dinged, signaling someone’s arrival. I looked around just as the person stepped out, and I froze in shock as Jason, of all people, came into view. Well, not shock; that’s too strong a reaction. More like surprise. And I wasn’t frozen, either, if you want to get literal about things.

I thought about ducking back into Wyatt’s office, but Jason had already seen me. A big smile lit his face and he came toward me with long steps. “Blair. Did you get my message?”

“Hello,” I said with a lot less than enthusiasm, and didn’t bother answering his question. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for Chief Gray. Same question back atcha.”

“There were some details to clear up,” I said vaguely. This was the first time I’d spoken to him in five years, and I felt uneasy about speaking at all. He was so firmly out of my life I could barely remember anything about our time together.

He was still handsome, but his looks didn’t speak to me at all. The state legislature wasn’t in session, but now that he was a state representative, he did things like play golf with the chief of police, and even when he was casually dressed, as now, he went for a higher fashion statement than he had before. Though he was wearing jeans and docksiders—no socks, of course—he also had on an oatmeal-colored linen jacket. Some linen blends now don’t wrinkle so horrifically; he hadn’t been smart enough to find one. His jacket looked as if he’d slept in it for a week even though he’d probably put it on fresh just that morning.

“I haven’t seen the chief since this morning,” I said, stepping back so I could terminate the conversation by closing the office door. “Good luck.”

Instead of going on his way, he stepped forward into the office doorway. “Is there something like a break room where he’d go for coffee, or anything?”

“He’s the chief,” I said drily. “He probably has his own coffeemaker. And someone to pour it for him.”

“Why don’t you walk with me while I look for him? We could catch up on old times.”

“No, thanks. I have paperwork to do.” I gestured toward Wyatt’s desk, where the paperwork was all his except for my notebook, but of course I’d gone through all his paperwork again, so in a way it was mine.

“Aw, come on,” Jason cajoled. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a snub-nosed pistol. “Walk with me. We have a lot to talk about.”

Chapter
Twenty-eight

Obviously I would never have gone with him if he hadn’t had that pistol jammed in my side, but he did, so I did. I was sort of in shock, trying to wrap my mind around what was happening. Thinking about something else until my subconscious felt ready to face this obviously wasn’t going to work this time. By the time I realized he wouldn’t have shot me in front of witnesses—and there had been a couple of other people still in the department—it was too late; I was already in his car with him.

He made me drive, while he kept the pistol trained on me. I thought about driving him into a telephone pole or something, but I flinched at the idea of being in yet another car accident. My poor body was just now recovering from the last one. I didn’t want to get hit in the face by another air bag, either. Yeah, I know, a bruise is temporary but a bullet can be forever, so maybe I didn’t make the best choice. Just in case I had to drive into a telephone pole, though, as a last resort, I glanced down at the steering wheel to make certain there was an air bag there. The car was a late model Chevrolet, so of course it had one, but after the week I’d had, I wanted to double-check.

The funny thing is, I was alarmed but not terrified. See, the main thing to know about Jason is that he’ll do anything to protect his image. His whole life is built around his political career, polls, and his ambition. How he thought he could get away with murder when at least two people had seen me leaving with him, I don’t know.

I followed his directions while I waited for him to realize this, but somehow he seemed to be in his own alternate reality. I didn’t know where he was taking me; in fact, we seemed to be driving aimlessly around town while he tried to think of somewhere to go. He kept pulling at his lower lip, which, I remembered, was a habit he had when he was worrying about something.

“You wore a black wig, right?” I casually asked. “When you cut my brake line?”

He shot me a nervous glance. “How did you know?”

“Some hairs got caught on the undercarriage. The forensics team found them.”

He looked faintly puzzled, then nodded. “Oh, yeah, I remember sort of catching the wig on something. I didn’t think about any hair coming out because I couldn’t feel anything pulling.”

“They’re checking now for a list of people who bought black wigs,” I lied. He gave me another nervous glance. Actually, it wasn’t much of a lie. When Wyatt found my notebook with the word
wig
circled, he would definitely check it out.

“People saw me leaving with you,” I pointed out. “If you kill me, how are you going to explain that?”

“I’ll think of something,” he muttered.

“What? How can you dispose of my body? Besides, they’ll hook you up to a lie detector so fast your head will spin. Even if they can’t find enough evidence to bring you to trial, the publicity will ruin your career.” See, I know Jason; he has nightmares about anything that might threaten his career. And even though he’d cut my brake lines, I simply couldn’t see him killing me in person.

“You might as well just let me go,” I continued. “I don’t know why you’re trying to kill me—
wait a minute
! You might have cut my brake lines, but you definitely didn’t shoot at me last Sunday. What’s going on here?” I jerked around to stare at him and the car swerved. He cursed and I hurriedly straightened the wheel.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, staring straight ahead and forgetting to keep me covered with the pistol. See? Jason is just not cut out for a life of crime.

“Someone else shot at me.” My brain was racing, and all the separate little links were knotting together, forming a chain. “
Your wife!
Your wife tried to kill me, didn’t she?”

“She’s crazy jealous,” he blurted. “I can’t stop her; I can’t reason with her. This will ruin me if she gets caught, and she will, because she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

That made two of them.

“So you thought you’d sort of kill me yourself so she wouldn’t have to? Beat her to the punch?”

“Something like that.” Frazzled, he raked a hand through his blond hair. “If you’re dead, she’ll stop obsessing about you.”

“Why on earth would she obsess about me? I am so totally out of your life; this is the first time I’ve spoken to you since our divorce.”

He mumbled something, and I threw a glare his way. “What? Speak up.” He mumbles when he feels guilty about something.

“It might be my fault,” he mumbled, slightly louder.

“Oh? How’s that?” I tried to sound encouraging, when what I really wanted to do was beat his head against the pavement or something.

“When we argue, I might say something about you,” he confessed, and now he was staring out the passenger window. Really. I thought about simply reaching over and taking the pistol away from him, except he had his finger on the trigger, which is so totally stupid if you aren’t an expert, and Jason wasn’t. If he had been, he would have been watching me like a hawk instead of staring out the window.

“Jason, you dummy,” I groaned. “Why would you do something stupid like that?”

“She’s always trying to make me jealous,” he said defensively. “I love Debra, I really do, but she isn’t like you. She’s clingy and insecure, and I got tired of the way she tried to make me jealous and I started firing back. I knew it made her mad, but I didn’t know she’d flipped out about it. Last Sunday night, when I got home from playing golf and found out she’d actually shot at you, we had this huge argument and she swore she’d kill you if it was the last thing she did. I think she’s been staking out your house or something, trying to find out if there’s something going on between us. Nothing I said made any difference to her. She’s crazy jealous, and if she kills you, I probably won’t even be reelected as state representative. I can kiss the governorship good-bye.”

I mulled all this over for a minute.

“Jason, I hate to tell you this, but you married a nitwit. That’s fair, though,” I added judiciously.

He looked at me. “How’s that?”

“So did she.”

That made him sulk for a few minutes, but finally he groaned and said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to kill you, but if I don’t, Debra is going to keep trying and she’ll ruin my career.”

“I have an idea. How about you have her committed to a mental institution,” I suggested sarcastically. I meant it, too. She was a danger to others—namely, me—so she met the criteria. Or criterion. Whatever.

“I can’t do that! I love her.”

“Look. It seems to me you have a choice: if she kills me, it may ruin your career; but if you kill me, the results will be way more serious because you’ve made a prior attempt and this shows premeditation, which will get you in serious hot water. Not only that, I’m engaged to a cop, and he’ll kill you.” I took my left hand off the steering wheel and held it over for him to see the ring.

“Wow, that’s a rock,” he said admiringly. “I didn’t think cops had that kind of money. Who is he?”

“Wyatt Bloodsworth. He questioned you the other day, remember?”

“So that’s why he was so nasty. I get it now. He was the football player, wasn’t he? I guess he has plenty of money.”

“He gets by,” I said. “But if anything happens to me, he’ll not only kill you—and the other cops would look the other way, because they like me—he’ll burn your village and sow your fields with salt.” I thought I’d throw in a little biblical warning just to impress him with the seriousness of the consequences.

“I don’t have any fields,” he said. “Or a village.”

Sometimes Jason could be stupendously literal. “I know that,” I said patiently. “It was a metaphor. What I meant was, he’ll totally destroy you.”

He nodded his head. “Yeah, I can see that. You’re looking hot these days.” He tilted his head back against the seat and groaned. “What can I do? I can’t think of anything that will work. I called in that murder/suicide to get the cops out of the building, but not all of them left. You were right; there were witnesses. If I kill you, I’d have to kill them, too, and I don’t think that would work because by now the cops have probably found out that call was a false alarm and they’re back at the station.”

As if on cue, my cell phone rang. Jason jumped a foot. I started to fish around in my bag for the phone, but Jason said, “Don’t answer it!” and I pulled my hand out.

“That will be Wyatt,” I said. “He’ll go ape shit when he finds out I left with you.” That wasn’t biblical, but it was accurate.

Sweat beaded on Jason’s brow. “You can tell him we were just talking, right?”

“Jason. Get a clue. You’ve been trying to kill me. We have to get this settled or I’m telling Wyatt you made a pass at me, and he’ll take you apart all the way down to your molecules.”

“I know,” he groaned. “Let’s go to my house so we can talk, come up with a plan.”

“Is Debra there?”

“No, she’s watching your folks’ house, figuring you’ll turn up there sooner or later.”

She was stalking my parents? I’d scalp the bitch for that. Hot fury zipped through me, but I controlled it, because I needed to keep my head. I had talked Jason around, but I knew Jason and I wasn’t the least bit afraid of him. Evidently his wife was crazy as a loon though, and I didn’t know what we could do about her.

I drove to Jason’s house, which of course is the one we’d bought together, and which I’d given him in the divorce. It hadn’t changed much in five years; the landscaping was more mature, but that was about it. The house was red brick, two-story, with white shutters and trim. The style was modern, with interesting architectural details, but there was nothing about it to make it stand out from the rest of the neighborhood. I think developers have at the most five house plans and styles that they use, so subdivisions have a cookie-cutter look to them. The garage doors were down, so Debra wasn’t at home.

When I pulled into the driveway, I said thoughtfully, “You know, it might have been smart to move rather than expect Debra to live here.”

“Why’s that?”

Like I said: clueless. “Because this is where we lived when we were married,” I said patiently. “She probably feels like this is my house instead of hers. She needs her own house.” Weird, but for the first time I felt a gleam of sympathy for her.

“There’s nothing wrong with this house,” he protested. “It’s a good house, nice and modern.”

“Jason. Buy the woman her own house!” I yelled. Sometimes that’s the only way to get his attention.

“All right, all right. You don’t have to yell,” he said sulkily.

If I’d had a wall right there, I’d have beat my head against it.

We went inside, and I rolled my eyes when I saw he still had the same furniture. The man was dense beyond saving.
He
was the one Debra should kill.

Now, I knew the cavalry was on the way; the first place Wyatt and the guys would check would be Jason’s house, right? They knew Jason wasn’t the one who had shot me, but Wyatt would also see my notes and put two and two together the way I had. The person who was jealous of me was my ex-husband’s new wife, only she wasn’t so new, since they’d been married four years. How much more obvious could it be? Jason hadn’t shot at me, but he’d left that worried message the next morning—after five years of no contact at all. Wyatt might not catch on immediately that Jason was the one who had cut my brake lines, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I could probably expect the first patrol car to come rolling up within five minutes.

“So,” Jason said, looking at me as if I had all the answers, “what can we do about Debra?”

“What do you mean, what can you do about me?”

The shriek made me jump about a foot straight up, not only because I hadn’t been expecting it, but because it obviously meant Debra was home, after all. On the list of things that were not good, that was at the top.

Jason jumped, too, and dropped the pistol, which didn’t go off—thank you, Jesus—because my heart probably would have stopped. It came close to stopping anyway when I turned around and faced the former Debra Schmale, now Mrs. Jason Carson, who appeared to be dead serious about her status. She was holding a rifle, and she had the stock up to her shoulder and her cheek against the stock as if she knew what she was doing.

I swallowed and put my tongue in gear, though my brain was still stuck in park. “He meant how could we convince you that you don’t have any reason to be jealous of me. This is the first time I’ve talked to Jason since our divorce, so he was just trying to get back at you for trying to make him jealous, by throwing me in your face to make you jealous, and really you should shoot him instead of me because I think that was a really shitty thing for him to do, don’t you?”

Under the circumstances I think that was a masterpiece of a speech, if I do say so myself, but she didn’t even blink. She kept that rifle aimed right at my chest. “I hate your guts,” she said in a low, vicious tone. “That’s all I hear—’Blair, Blair, Blair.’ Blair this and Blair that until I want to throw up.”

“Which, I’d like to point out, isn’t my fault. I had no idea he was doing that. I’m telling you, shoot him instead of me.”

For the first time Jason seemed to realize what I was saying. “Hey!” he said indignantly.

“Don’t ‘hey’ me,” I snapped. “You’re the one who caused this. You should get down on your knees and apologize to both of us. You’ve driven this poor woman almost crazy, and you’ve caused me to almost get killed. This is all your fault.”

“I’m not a
poor woman,
” Debra snapped. “I’m pretty and I’m smart, and he should appreciate me, but instead he’s still so in love with you he can’t think straight.”

“No, I’m not,” Jason said instantly, taking a step toward her. “I love
you.
I haven’t loved Blair in years, since way before we got divorced.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Has he ever told you he was cheating on me? Doesn’t sound to me as if he loved me, does it to you?”

“He loves you,” she repeated. Obviously she wasn’t about to listen to reason. “He insisted we live in this house—”

“Told you,” I said in an aside to Jason.

“
Stop talking to him.
I don’t want you to ever speak to him again. I don’t want you to ever
breathe
again.” Furiously she stepped closer, so close the rifle barrel was almost jabbing me in the nose. I drew back a little, because the bruises from the air bag were fading and I didn’t want a fresh set. “You got everything,” she breathed on a sob. “Oh, I know he kept the house, but he can’t bear to change it, so you might as well still have it. You got the Mercedes. You drive around town with the top down like you’re hot shit, and I have to drive a
Taurus
because he says it’s good for his image that we drive American cars.”