Revelations

It also felt stiff. In fact, she was afraid if she smiled or raised an eyebrow or drew her lips back from her teeth the facade would crack.

Britny was suggesting that if she liked the “look” she could buy all this stuff. Ann wasn’t sure she’d be able to apply it—heck, if she’d ever have the nerve to try—but she nodded.

“Sure,” she said, moving her lips a minimal amount. “Fine. Put together what you think I’ll need.”

Ann admitted to being low on eye makeup remover—who knew you needed it? she’d have just used soap—and half a dozen other things.

In a state of shock, she wrote a check for more than she’d spent on her entire wardrobe in the last year, then obediently presented herself at the salon, where Jeannie happened to have an opening.

Ann had seen that Mel Gibson movie where he waxed his legs, so she knew the procedure hurt. She didn’t know it would be excruciating until she strangled a scream, her body levitating from the chair.

“Goodness, you’ve let these grow out!” Jeannie chided.

By the time she was done, Ann’s eyelids and entire forehead were in flames. She moaned when Jeannie laid a cool compress over her forehead and told her to relax for a few minutes.

Once the raging pain had subsided to sharp throbs, Jeannie was kind enough to take the bag of makeup from Ann’s nerveless hand and deftly apply foundation to cover the inflamed skin.

“Perfect!” she declared, turning the salon chair so Ann could stare dully at the new her.

Wow. Half her eyebrows were gone. The puffy red skin where the other half had been couldn’t be totally disguised. The effect was…she didn’t know. Maybe good when she healed.

Having a vision of how she’d look when the stubborn hair roots recovered and sprouted stubble, Ann asked suspiciously, “How often do I have to do this?”

She barely refrained from a moan at the answer. She had to put herself through this every few weeks so she could feel feminine?

“The price of beauty…” she muttered.

Jeannie laughed merrily. “If you don’t let them go, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much.”

“Okay,” Ann vowed. “I won’t. I promise.”

When she stood, she swayed, and Jeannie had to grab her arm. “Are you all right?”

“Sure.” Ann gave her head a little shake. “I’m fine.” She gave blood on a regular basis with less trauma.

She paid, ditched the idea of clothes shopping, and walked almost steadily out to her car. There, she stared with amazement in the rearview mirror at the new her, started the engine, and drove home.

Maybe she’d take this campaign to redo her image a little slower. She could put off shopping until next week. Or even the week after. She had to get used to the new eyebrows first. Figure out how to use all that stuff she’d just wasted a week’s salary on. How to wash it off if you couldn’t use soap.

Baby steps, she decided. Nothing radical.

In her slot at the complex, she bowed her head and pretended to be hunting for something in her purse when the young couple who lived in 203 walked by, bickering. Ann wasn’t ready to be seen.

Her stomach knotted, and she stole another look at herself in the mirror. Oh, God. Everyone would notice, wouldn’t they?

What would she say if someone—Diaz, for example—commented? Would she tell him fliply that they’d needed pruning?

With a whimper, she locked her car and raced for the safety of her apartment, the expensive bag of tricks she wouldn’t have the courage to use clutched in her hand.

CHAPTER THREE

SOMETHING WAS DIFFERENT about her. Diaz just couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

Driving again today, he kept stealing glances. It seemed every time he did, Caldwell averted her face.

He felt like he had when his ex had started striking poses the minute he’d walked in the door from work, and he’d known she must have a new hairdo, clothes, something. And he was supposed to notice.

Only, Caldwell didn’t want him to notice.

“You’re staring,” she snapped.

“You’ve done something to your face.”

She looked directly at him for the first time, defiance in her tight mouth and the jut of her chin. “Yeah? So?”

“Your eyebrows.” At a stop sign, he studied them—her—more closely. “Where the hell did they go?”

The minute the words were out, Diaz knew he’d blown it. You look great, was the all-purpose, correct remark.

Caldwell’s vivid blue eyes narrowed and her teeth showed. “I had my brows waxed,” she snarled. “That is, I believe, a normal thing for a woman to do.”

“Yeah, but you’re…” He cleared his throat.

“Not normal?” she inquired.

Knowing danger when he saw it, Diaz ignored the honk of some idiot who was in a hurry.

“You don’t do stuff like that,” he blurted.

“Because it’s a waste of time for me? Are you suggesting I’m hopeless?”

“Because you just don’t do it!” he all but shouted.

Somebody rapped on his window. “Hey, buddy, you want to quit arguing with your girlfriend and get a move on?”

Diaz hit the down button and fixed an icy stare on the red-faced Yuppie who thought the world would end if he was held up two minutes.

“Maybe you want to rethink interfering with law officers in the performance of their duties.”

“You’re cops?” His stare took in the grill between front and back seats, the radio and the gun that Caldwell displayed as she bent forward, casually letting her blazer fall open. “And you’re sitting at the stop sign…why?”

“I’m afraid that’s not your concern, sir.” Caldwell had a gift for cool dismissal. “Please return to your car.”

Diaz zipped the window back up, glanced both ways, and started across the intersection. His mouth began to curve into a grin before they made it across.

He turned his head to see his partner’s mouth twitch.

“God knows what he thought.”

A laugh bubbled out of her. “That we were conducting a stakeout?”

“Squabbling like a long-married couple is more like it.”

She drew back instantly without seeming to move a muscle. He just felt it; her contracting into her space, a turtle making sure its shell was ready and available. Diaz thought a faint flush touched her cheeks, too.

“You made me mad.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t very tactful,” he admitted. He took another glance. Definitely pink cheeks. And the eyebrows… Much as he hated to admit it, the shaping had the effect of opening her face, emphasizing eyes he’d always known were spectacular. “Actually, uh, I like what you did. It looks good.”

“Really?” She couldn’t know how uncertain she sounded.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just not used to my partners having a makeover.”

“I didn’t go that far,” she said, really quickly, the pink in her cheeks deepening. “I only did my eyebrows.”

Uh-huh. She was hiding something. God. Had she had a bikini wax, too? Was that why she was embarrassed?

He felt a surge of lust that shocked him. It was all he could do not to let his gaze lower to her crotch. Just for a second, he’d imagined her naked, a thatch of silky dark hair at the vee between smooth thighs and a flat, pale belly.

He looked away from her so fast, something cracked in his neck. Don’t think of her that way, he ordered himself. She’s a cop, your partner. Never, ever, imagine her naked again.

Keeping himself from thinking anything at all seemed to be the only way he could prevent pictures from forming before his mind’s eye. But sustaining a giant blank like a dry-erase board where he normally had a tangle of thoughts and plans and images took an enormous effort. His palms grew sweaty.

“I made a few calls,” she said, breaking the silence and bailing him out.

“Calls?”

“About Dad. And Leroy Pearce.”

“Right.” He relaxed fractionally. He could think about this. “What’d you learn? Wait.” He put on his turn signal. “Let’s stop for a cup of coffee.”

No espresso here. The truck stop café had padded booths patched with duct tape, middle-aged waitresses in starched pink uniforms who willingly refilled white china mugs whenever the level dropped, and French fries that tasted so good, they were probably still being made in beef fat.

Reluctantly, he skipped the fries. Breakfast hadn’t been that long ago. But he figured a piece of pie would settle.

One of the things he liked about Ann Caldwell was her appetite. Most women were on a perpetual diet. She never seemed to give a thought to calories.

When he said, “Pie sounds good,” she agreed.

“Make mine cherry,” she told the waitress. “Warm.”

“À la mode?”

“Why not?”

“Boysenberry,” he said. “I’ll take the ice cream, too.”

“Okay,” he said, once the waitress had left them alone in a booth in the far corner. “Find out anything?”

“That scrape along the driver’s side door and fenders bothered the mechanic who looked at the truck after the accident. He mentioned it in his report, but no one picked up on it.”

“Who would remember if the scrapes were there before that night?” Diaz frowned. “Where was your father going?”

“He was on his way home from The Blue Moon.” The tavern was a popular hangout for the older cops. “He had a blood-alcohol level that would have gotten him in trouble if he’d been pulled over, too. That’s one reason ‘accident’ was the obvious answer. He was speeding, lost control on the curve…” She shrugged.

“What do you think?”

Her voice was clipped. “Dad liked his beer. But I never knew him even to wander across a center line when he was behind the wheel. He carried it well. You know?”

“That’s what they all say,” Diaz reminded her.

She grimaced. “Yeah, I know. But, see, he drove me places a lot when he’d had as much as a six-pack. And, if anything, he’d slow down. Get more cautious. He never speeded. He said he’d picked up too many body parts off highways. When I got my license, he told me that if I was ever ticketed for speeding, I wasn’t driving again for a year. If I was lucky.”

“He wasn’t, um…” Diaz tried to think how to phrase his question without offending her. “He hadn’t been feeling low about anything?”

His meaning sank in and her voice rose. “Low?”

The waitress brought their pies, but neither of them picked up a fork or broke their locked stare.

“You’re asking if he was depressed?” She flattened her hands on the table. “You think he might have committed suicide?”

“He drove at high speed into a tree. Yeah, the thought occurred to me.”

Her face worked, and he braced himself for the blast.

“No! He’d never do that!” She breathed heavily. “How can you even suggest…?” She broke off with a lurch, as if a sob had torn at her throat.

In alarm, he said, “Jeez, Caldwell. Don’t get worked up. I just figured I should throw the possibility on the table.”

“It’s a horrible thing to say!”

“I’m not making an accusation. I just asked. Cops commit suicide, just like other people.”

“Not my father!” she yelled.

Heads on the other side of the diner turned.

“Okay, okay,” Diaz soothed. “Had you seen him in the week before he died?”

“I talked to him the day before.” She glared at him as if he was going to argue. “He was feeling good about an arrest, and he claimed he had a break in the Lofgren case. He wanted to know why my arrests were so low for the month.” She swallowed. When she continued, she’d stripped her voice of emotion. The change was so stark from her passionate defense of a moment before, he knew the memory must burn in her belly. “Dad said if I couldn’t do the job, he’d seen an ad for a new session at the cosmetology school. Then he—” She stopped again. Deliberately relaxed, but Diaz saw the effort it took. She stirred her coffee, although the half a teaspoon of sugar she’d added had long since dissolved. “He was his usual supportive self. That was just his way.” She shrugged again. “He wasn’t any different than ever. If anything, he seemed to be in a good mood.”

Suddenly furious for reasons he hardly grasped, Diaz asked, “Then he what?”

She stared at him.

“Tell me.”

“What difference does it make?”

“I want to know,” he said, rough and unyielding.

Just audibly, she said, “He laughed. ‘Hell, they wouldn’t take you once they got a look at you.’ That’s what he said. But by God, if I couldn’t use the advantages he’d given me to do the job, I’d better start exploring other career paths.”

Diaz wished the son of a bitch was alive so he could plant a fist in his face. “He just couldn’t admit you might be his equal.”

“But why?” she whispered, as much to herself as to him. “Did he hate me?”

Diaz couldn’t remember ever hearing Sgt. Caldwell talk about his daughter. “Maybe,” he suggested, “he desperately had that urge men sometimes do to live on through a son. He couldn’t see himself in you, so you wouldn’t do.”

“I tried.” The two small words were as desolate as anything he’d ever heard.

“If he wasn’t proud of you, he didn’t deserve you.”

She looked at him with those vivid, desperate eyes. “You have a son and a daughter both, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Picturing his kids, dark-haired and bright-faced, smart, mischievous, all bony elbows and knees and warm cuddly bodies at the same time, Diaz knew his voice softened. “Can I live again through my son but not my daughter? Is that what you’re asking?”

She glanced down, saw the ice cream melting in pale rivers around her pie, and picked up her fork. “I guess.”

“No.” He couldn’t imagine the concept, not the way she meant. “Actually, I see more of myself in Elena than Tony. He looks like his mom, loves to talk like she does. He’s creative, too, like she is. Elena’s more for mulling things over before she gives an opinion and takes action. Tony’s the rash one.”

Around a bite, Caldwell asked, “You were a cautious kid?”

“Yeah, I hung back.” Damn, this was good pie. “I can remember every time Mom served a new dish, I’d watch my sisters’ faces as they tried it before I put a bite in my mouth.”

Caldwell laughed, and he saw that some of the misery had left her face.

“Back to your father. We need to hit up his drinking buddies. Find out if anybody knows about the scrape on his truck.”

She nodded. “I can do that. I know his friends.”

“While you’re talking to Roarke, see if his story about the car that landed on his face has changed.”

Another nod.

“I’ll tackle Leroy’s neighbors. Talk to the widow, the EMTs. You never know. Someone might have noticed something.”

“Okay,” she agreed. “Do we tell the lieutenant what we’re doing?”

“Not until we have something to go on. He’d say the whole idea is wacko and tell us to drop it.”

She laughed. “I told you I’d have let it go if you’d just said that in the first place.”

“The way you let the Lofgren thing go when I didn’t back you?”

His honest answer to their superior that he didn’t think the case justified reopening had been a betrayal, as far as Caldwell was concerned. Partners backed each other, she’d said. In general, Diaz agreed. Truth was, he didn’t think they’d find anything this time, either, in investigating the two deaths and the one near-miss. But Caldwell would feel better if she wasn’t left wondering, and that was good enough for him.

“That was different,” she said.

“This matters, too.”

Pushing her empty plate away, she cleared her throat. “I didn’t say it the other day, but I want you to know I appreciate you taking me seriously.”

“Yeah, yeah.” They were descending into Hallmark territory, which made him uncomfortable. If he’d talked about his feelings more readily, he might still be married. “Good cops have hunches. I figure this one might be legit.”

“Yeah.” She looked grateful. “I mean, I hope it’s not, but I’d like to be sure.”

Grateful. That stuck in his craw. Her bastard of a father had never respected her opinions or worth, so she was pathetically grateful when someone did. He almost liked it better when she snarled.

“You done?” he asked abruptly.

“What? Oh. Sure.” She drained her coffee and slid from the booth. “Pit stop.”

He made his own, taking a second to frown at himself in the blotchy mirror above the sink in the men’s room as he washed his hands. The face that looked back at him was older than he remembered being, grimmer. Every one of his thirty-six years showed today. He wondered how Ann Caldwell saw him, whether she ever…

No, damn it. He wasn’t going there. He didn’t want to know if she ever had moments like he’d had in the car, when she felt a flash of intense sexual awareness. Hell, he’d rather not know if she didn’t, either. A man had some pride.

NOT UNTIL late that afternoon could Diaz get over to Pearce’s house.

His widow answered the door, her eyes puffy and red-rimmed, her stare vague.

“Mrs. Pearce, I’m sorry to disturb you,” he began. “But I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

“Questions?”

“About your husband’s accident.”

“But…why?”

He came up with something slick about tying up loose ends, and she finally nodded and stood back.

The living room was dim with drapes drawn and only one lamp on. She sat in the large brown recliner that dwarfed her, and he guessed it had been her husband’s. A basket at her feet overflowed with crumpled tissues.

She wrapped an afghan around her shoulders as if she were chilled despite the warm room. “What do you want to know?”

Diaz flipped open his notebook and held his pencil above a blank page. “Were you home at the time of the accident?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know what he was doing. I was sewing in a room on the other side of the house. I heard a few thumps and vaguely wondered what he was up to.”

“I understand he had somebody stop by to speak to him?”

“Did he? I guess he might have.”

“Were both ladders his?”

She nodded, her mouth crimping. “I told him to call a service. Those gutters were so high off the ground, but he was determined…” She groped for a tissue.

Diaz gave her a moment to blow her nose and compose herself. “Did you hear him fall?”

She sniffed and shook her head. “I…I had the sewing machine running. I thought I heard a bellow and I stopped to see if Leroy was calling for me, but then when he didn’t again, I finished the seam.”

“You couldn’t have done anything,” he said gently.

Tears overflowed. “I’d have held the ladder if he’d asked. He was so stubborn!”

That was one way of putting it.

“How did you learn that he’d fallen?”

Mopping her cheeks, she said, “The doorbell rang. It was Ron Blackman from next door. He said…he said there’d been an accident, that he’d called 911 already.” Her voice faltered. “That Leroy had fallen.”

By the time she got out there, neighbors had gathered and several had slid down the bluff to Leroy. She didn’t actually remember who was there.

“Except Ruth Blackman. She had her arm around me.”

“But you knew everyone there?”

“All I could see was Leroy, crumpled against a tree.” Fresh tears filled her eyes. “I kept thinking he’d swear and sit up.”

Feeling cruel for making her relive her husband’s accident, Diaz thanked her and made his escape. He was glad that in her grief she hadn’t noticed the tenor of his questions.

The Blackmans, an older couple, were home next door. Their house, too, backed on the canyon.

Mrs. Blackman offered him coffee, which he accepted, and they talked readily about the tragedy.

“I heard him yell.” A tall, gaunt man with stooped shoulders and close-cropped white hair, Ron Blackman shook his head. “I was on the computer doing some research on a company I’m considering buying stock in. It took me, oh, a couple of minutes at least to get up and go out to the back deck.”

“As stiff as your back is,” his wife put in, “it might have been longer than that.”

“You saw him right away?” Diaz asked.

“I might not have noticed him at all, if the ladders hadn’t been lying on the rhododendrons.”

“Were you the first to see him?”

He considered. “Well, I don’t know. I heard a shout from the other side of the Pearces’. Jack Gunn. I guess we met at the top of the bluff. Got there about the same time.”

“So you were the first two on the scene?”

Unlike Mrs. Pearce, he was putting two and two together and making four.

“Do you mind my asking why the questions?”

Diaz shook his head. “You’ve probably answered every one of these questions already. I apologize, sir. But even a simple accident gets investigated pretty carefully when it’s a police officer who died.”

His expression cleared. “I understand.”

Diaz got the Blackmans to come up with a list of who had gathered in the Pearces’ narrow backyard. They hemmed and hawed and went back and forth before agreeing, with only slight hesitation, on a final list of names.

“I wish we knew whether he had just reached too far, or whether something distracted him.” Diaz closed his notebook. “Someone said they thought they’d heard him talking to someone a little earlier.”

“I did think I heard him talking,” Ruth Blackman said, a little timidly.

“Really?” Diaz hid his intense interest, keeping his tone casual. “Do you remember how much earlier?”

“Well…right before. I mean, I didn’t think anything of it. The day was a little chilly and damp, so not that many people were outside working, but the mail had come in the past hour. I said hello to Margie across the street when I fetched ours.” She added apologetically, “I can’t swear it was him. Somebody might have been talking in another yard.”

“You didn’t hear a second voice?”

“I don’t think so. I just vaguely wondered who’d made Leroy mad this time.”

So the voice wasn’t conversational. “Obviously, you didn’t glance out.”

She shook her head, her expression regretful. “If I’d seen Leroy up there like that, I would have called for Ron to go insist he get down. What was he thinking?”

“His wife thought she’d talked him into hiring a service to clean the gutters. She knew it wasn’t safe for him to do it.”

Mr. Blackman spoke up. “When he hired someone to work for him, he was never satisfied. A couple of years ago, he was working so much overtime he hired a lawn service, but he said they didn’t edge the lawn the way he liked and they overfertilized, so he’s been taking care of it himself since.”

There was a moment of silence as they all reflected on the fact that Leroy’s widow would now be hiring out all those jobs he would have been doing if only he hadn’t been an idiot and for all practical purposes killed himself.

Unless, of course, someone had given him a push.

Some neighbors weren’t home. Others hadn’t been home when Leroy died. Diaz did talk to Jack Gunn, who lived on the other side of the Pearces’. He came up with a different list of names of who’d been gathered to witness the tragedy. He shook his head and insisted that a couple of the people the Blackmans thought had been present weren’t there, and added a few of his own. Diaz knew from experience that every other person present would remember the scene differently, too. Neither, however, remembered anyone being there that they didn’t know.

Gunn, a beefy fellow in his forties, hadn’t heard voices before the accident, but admitted he’d been running a circular saw in his garage. “Stopped for a smoke. That’s when I heard Leroy yell and then fall.”

“Did you see or hear anyone leaving the scene?”

His gaze was sharp. “Leaving? Didn’t see anybody.” He frowned. “Thought I heard a car engine start up, though. Can’t swear to it. Just an impression.”

Back in his car, Diaz made notes of which neighbors he had yet to interview. He’d do better to come back on Saturday morning, when more people were likely to be home.

He hadn’t learned anything to prove Ann’s hunch, but he hadn’t disproved it, either. Pearce might have talked to someone in angry tones right before his fall—or he might not have. Someone might have started a car and driven away just as the neighbors were rushing to the Pearces’, but people did get in their cars and drive away for legitimate reasons.