Deadly Deceptions

For one thing, I couldn’t pretend that well. For another, Greer probably wasn’t home. Even though she had a cast on her left arm, she attended her yoga class faithfully every morning, had lunch out and then went shopping.

When I was steady enough, I drove back out onto the street and went on to the cemetery. I could call Greer on her cell phone, but what would I say? A body’s been found in the desert and Jolie is ninety-nine percent sure it’s Alex?

What if it wasn’t Alex? Okay, it was almost a sure thing, but there was that one-percent factor.

I bit my lip. Drove through the cemetery gates.

The old lady was there, still fiddling with her flowers.

But there was no sign of Gillian.

Half-relieved, I turned around and fixed my internal GPS on Wal-Mart.

Cell phones were a no-no in yoga class, which meant I wouldn’t be able to get through to Greer anyway, and I still didn’t know what I’d say if I did.

The parking lot at Wally World was crowded.

I wedged the Volvo in between a tangle of shopping carts and an old car with a Confederate-flag sunscreen, and sprinted for the entrance. I was in no particular hurry, though, since I had almost two hours before my lunch date with Beverly Pennington, and I was probably going to break that, anyway.

After all, she’d been married to Alex, and they had several grown children. However acrimonious the divorce had been, she was in for a shock. I didn’t want to be there when she got the news.

I took a cart, wheeled into the store. Two old guys in blue vests welcomed me to Wal-Mart. One of them was dead, but he seemed happy enough.

I guess there are worse ways to spend eternity.

I headed for the children’s section, picked out two pairs of jean shorts and two T-shirts that looked as though they’d fit Gillian, along with some tiny white sneakers. Then it was on to the toy department, where I chose a blackboard and a box of colored chalk.

The whole thing took under fifteen minutes, which left me with a serious gap in my schedule. I paid and left the store with my purchases.

Gillian was sitting in the front seat of my car when I got back.

“Look,” I said, holding up a blue plastic bag. “I bought you a change of clothes.”

She gave me a piteous glance, turned in the seat and wrote “MOM” in the dust on my dashboard with the tip of one finger.

I got the blackboard out of its cardboard box and handed it to Gillian, along with the chalk.

She blinked, looked at me curiously, then extracted a pink stick of chalk from the box and wrote “MOM” again.

I sighed, got into the car and fastened my seat belt. Started the engine. Alarming thought number seventy-two struck in the next instant. I took Gillian’s chin in my hand, turned her to face me.

“Was your mom the one?” I asked slowly. “The one who hurt you, I mean?”

Gillian’s eyes widened, and she shook her head.

“Do you know where she is now?”

She rubbed out “MOM” and replaced it with “WURK.”

Work? Helen Erland was at work, the day after her child’s funeral, selling cigarettes and auto air fresheners and propane tanks for people’s barbecue grills? “Why didn’t you just pop in on her, the way you do with me?”

Gillian’s chest moved with a silent sigh.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take you there. But she still won’t be able to see you, Gillian. Are you sure you want to do this?”

Gillian nodded. Erased “WURK” and wrote “DOG.”

“No dog,” I said without conviction.

Gillian underlined the word with a slashing motion of her hand and looked stubborn.

“We’ll see,” I told her.

We headed for Cave Creek, and sure enough, her mother was behind the counter at the convenience store, wearing a pink cotton smock with a company logo on the pocket. She looked wrecked—her eyes were puffy and swollen from crying, and she hadn’t bothered with the usual heavy makeup. She seemed younger without it. Her hair, blond like Gillian’s, was pulled back into a ponytail, and even though she was pale, there was a tragic prettiness about her.

I bought a forty-four-ounce diet cola, feeling nervous, while Gillian stared at her mother with a longing that made me ache at a cellular level.

“You were at Gillian’s funeral,” Helen said, blinking as though she was just coming out of a stupor. “I saw you.”

I nodded. Put out my free hand. “Mojo Sheepshanks,” I said. “I come into the store sometimes. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Erland—about Gillian.”

She blinked. Retreated into herself a little. I’d seen the expression before; any moment now, the blinds would be pulled and the lights would go out. “You’re the one who was on TV.”

“Yes,” I answered.

“You’re a detective,” she mused.

“A private investigator,” I clarified.

She leaned partway across the counter and spoke in a low voice. “My husband did not kill our daughter,” she said. “Vince would never have hurt Gillian.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.

Fresh tears sprang to Helen Erland’s eyes. “The police think Vince is guilty,” she whispered desperately. “They’re not even looking for the real murderer!”

I thought of Tucker. Whatever our differences, I knew he was a good cop. He’d be looking for the killer, all right. I let the remark pass, since I wasn’t there to argue. “I know you must have been asked this question over and over again, until you wanted to scream,” I said gently. “But do you have any idea who might have done such a thing? Besides your husband, I mean.”

She sniffled, snatched a handful of tissues from a box behind the counter and swabbed her face. Her skin looked raw, as though she’d tried to scrub it away. “It must have been a drifter, someone like that,” she said. “Nobody who knew Gillian would want to hurt her.” There was a short pause. “She was such a brave little thing. She couldn’t hear, you know, or speak, except in sign language. But she did everything the other kids did—even ballet. She told me she could feel the music, coming up through the floor.”

I swallowed. I could have used a handful of tissues myself just about then.

“I’m so sorry,” I said again.

“Everybody’s ‘sorry,’” Helen Erland replied, almost scoffing. “That won’t bring her back.”

I nodded, looked away, blinked rapidly until my vision cleared. “I wish there was some way I could help,” I said, thinking aloud.

“I work in a cash-and-dash,” Mrs. Erland said, peering at me from beneath an overhead cigarette rack on my side of the counter. “I can’t pay you much, but if you want to help—if you weren’t just saying that—there is something you can do. You can find out who killed my baby girl.”

I felt Gillian’s hand creep into mine, and gave it a subtle squeeze.

I remembered Tucker’s warning the day before, in my apartment. I mean it, Mojo. Stay out of this case.

“This is a matter for the police, Mrs. Erland,” I said. “Not a private detective.”

“The police,” Helen mocked. “They think they’ve got the killer. They’re just going to pretend to investigate until all the media hype dies down. Then Vince will spend the rest of his life in prison—if he isn’t executed—and whoever did this will go free.”

I wondered how much of the conversation Gillian was taking in. She couldn’t hear, and being dead hadn’t changed that, but she’d probably learned to read her mother’s every expression, not just her lips.

Her fingers tightened around mine.

“I’ll look into it,” I heard myself say. It wasn’t the fee that prompted this decision—there wouldn’t be one. And it wasn’t the chance to learn by experience, so I’d be a better detective. Gillian wasn’t going to rest if the killer wasn’t found. That had to be the reason she was hanging around. “But I can’t promise anything, Mrs. Erland.”

A semblance of hope sparked in Helen’s sorrow-dimmed eyes. “Just do what they’re not doing,” she said.

I knew she was referring to the police again, and I nodded. “You’ll have to help me. Answer lots of questions. And if you can get me in to see Mr. Erland, I’d like to talk to him.” Read: size him up.

She nodded almost eagerly. “I get off at six,” she said. “Maybe you could come by my place, and we could talk. I’ll call Vince’s public defender and ask if he can arrange a visit.”

I nodded, but my mind had drifted to the body that was probably Alex’s. Greer’s world was about to collapse all around her, and I’d need to be there to help gather up the pieces. Not that she’d be grateful—comforting her would be like trying to bathe a porcupine.

“When’s your next day off?” I asked.

“I don’t have any days off,” Helen answered. “I took every shift I could get. Staying home makes me—well, I can’t stand it. There are too many reminders, and with Vince gone, it’s even worse.”

“I’ll stop by tonight, then,” I said. Jolie would be off work by then, if it didn’t take too long to process the crime scene. She’d have to be the one to bathe the porcupine. “Your place, around six-fifteen?”

Helen nodded and gave me directions.

I turned to leave, glancing at my watch, and I wasn’t surprised when Gillian didn’t follow. The poor kid wanted to be with her mother.

My throat knotted, and I wiped my eyes with the back of one hand.

I felt a little pang as I drove past Bad-Ass Bert’s, too. I’d finally worked up my courage to move back into my apartment, but it wasn’t going to happen any time soon. I’d have to stay at the guesthouse, in case Greer needed me.

Shit. I really wanted to go home.

It was still too early, but I headed for Beverly Pennington’s place anyway. It was an upscale condo in a gated community, and there were police cars clogging the entrance. The sheriff’s department, Phoenix and Scottsdale PD—the gang was all there.

I made an executive decision and canceled lunch.

No lobster for me. Maybe I’d spring for a box of fish sticks.

Jolie called again just as I was pulling into Greer’s driveway.

No squad cars in evidence there, anyway. And no sign of Greer’s pricey SUV.

Call me callous, but I was relieved.

“Was it Alex?” I asked, without a hello.

“Yes,” Jolie said.

I swore. There’d been, as they say, no love lost between Alex Pennington and me, but I wouldn’t have wished him dead. And Greer was going to come unglued when she found out. “What happened?”

“He must have pissed somebody off, big-time,” Jolie said. “The term ‘riddled with bullets’ has new meaning.”

“Where are you?” I whispered loudly, getting out of the Volvo.

“In my car, headed for Greer’s,” Jolie replied. “Where are you?”

“Waiting for you at Casa Pennington,” I said, punching in the security numbers on the back gate with a stabbing motion of one finger. “Are there any leads?”

“The suits don’t discuss things like that with lowly crime-scene techs,” Jolie answered. “Right off the top of my head, though, I’d say they haven’t got a clue.”

“If that was supposed to be a play on words, it bites,” I snapped.

“Moje?”

“What?”

“I’m on your side.”

“Greer is going to freak.”

“Maybe,” Jolie said.

“What do you mean, ‘maybe’?”

“She’s the wife, Moje. She and Alex haven’t been getting along lately. She’s automatically a suspect.”

I dealt with another jolt of adrenaline. Yanked open the front door of the guesthouse and went in. “You mean a person of interest.”

“That’s a bullshit, politically correct term for suspect,” Jolie told me.

“You don’t think she could actually have done this?” I challenged, furious because the possibility, so readily dismissed before, suddenly seemed more viable.

“What do we really know about Greer?” Jolie asked reasonably. “She’s a stranger, remember? And she’s being blackmailed—she told us that herself—so it’s safe to assume we might find some nasty surprises if we went poking around in her background.”

“She’s our sister,” I argued.

“That doesn’t mean she isn’t a killer,” Jolie pointed out.

“She wouldn’t!”

“Wouldn’t she?”

“Jolie, stop. You know better than to think Greer—Greer—is some kind of monster!”

“Chill, Moje. I’ll be there in half an hour. We can talk more then.”

She hung up.

I hung up.

I flung the phone onto the couch and nearly hit Justin Braydaven, who must have blipped in while I was pacing and ranting at Jolie.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought about you, and here I was.”

I stopped. I’d meant to look Justin up on Google, find out how he’d died, but I’d been too busy. No time like the present, I thought. Greer wasn’t home, the police hadn’t arrived and Jolie was still thirty minutes out. I went to the computer, a laptop I’d borrowed from Jolie since my desktop was still at the apartment, and logged on. There was the daily threatening e-mail from my ex-husband’s girlfriend, Tiffany, who had been riding with Nick the night he died. She’d been thrown through the windshield and permanently maimed, and for some mysterious Tiffany reason, she blamed me for her disfigurement.

I tucked the message into the Death Threat file and forgot about it.

“My mom isn’t doing too well,” Justin said.

I looked back at him over one shoulder. “Are there any other kids in the family?” I asked hopefully.

Justin shook his head. “Just me and old Pepper,” he said sadly, “and he’s about on his last legs. Poor old dog. If I died six years ago, that means he’s almost fourteen. When he goes, I don’t know what Mom will do.”

I went to the Google page and typed Justin’s full name into the search line. “Does she have a job? Hobbies?” The Damn Fool’s Guide to Insensitivity, page forty-three. But I was trying.

Justin didn’t seem offended. He simply sighed and said, “She works at home, doing billing for a credit card company in a back bedroom. And her hobby is ordering stuff off QVC.”

There were something like seven thousand references to Justin on the Web, according to Google, but I wasn’t going to have to wade through them. The first one told the story.

“You were killed in a drive-by shooting,” I said.

There it was again, that ole sensitivity o’ mine.

Justin winced. “What was I doing at the time?”

“Waiting for a streetlight to change after a concert,” I answered, turning in my chair. “If it’s any comfort, they caught the perp. He’s doing life in the state pen.”

Justin absorbed the news with admirable ease. “Then I guess I’m not hanging around here waiting for my killer to be caught, like Gillian is.”

My heart seized. “Did she tell you that’s why she’s here? In sign language or something?”

“No,” Justin said. Then he reached for the TV remote, lowered the screen expertly and flipped to a rock-video channel. “You had me ask her if she knew who killed her. It was no great leap to guess why she’s still around. The question is, why am I still around?”

I thought I knew the answer to that one, though I wasn’t about to say so.

I do have some sensitivity, after all. There are moments when I positively exude it.

Justin hadn’t gone into the Light, if there was such a thing, because his mother couldn’t—or wouldn’t—let go.

CHAPTER FOUR

MY CELL PHONE RANG AGAIN. Justin picked it up off the couch cushion and tossed it to me. I checked the caller ID panel.

Tucker.

“Hello,” I said, trying not to sound breathless.

“There’s some bad news coming down, Moje,” he replied.

“I know,” I responded. “Alex Pennington was found dead in the desert today. Full of bullet holes.”

Too late, I realized I’d made a mistake. I wasn’t supposed to know Alex had been pumped full of lead. And Jolie would get in a lot of trouble, maybe even lose her job, if I answered Tucker’s inevitable question.

“How did you find out?” he asked.

I closed my eyes. Opened them again. Logged off the Internet. “I’m a detective,” I said lamely. “I have my sources.”

Tucker thrust out an exasperated sigh. “Yeah,” he retorted. “Your sister, Jolie, the crime-scene tech. She’s so lucky you’re not talking to any other cop on the planet right now. Look it up in one of your Damn Fool’s Guides, Moje—this is a serious breach of ethics.”

“Got it,” I said. “But isn’t it a breach of ethics for you to call and tell me about Alex’s death before the next of kin has been notified?”

He laughed, but it was a raw, broken sound. “You have a point,” he said. “I hate it when you’re right.”

“Get used to it,” I replied. “It happens at least sixty-five percent of the time.”

“Damn Fool’s Guide to Stupid Statistics?”

“Very funny. Hilarious, in fact.”

“I’m going crazy, Moje. I need to see you.”

“Are you still living with Allison?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry,” I chimed, with a brightness I certainly didn’t feel. “All booked up.”

“Moje, be reasonable, will you? I’m not sleeping with her.”

“So you say.”

“You don’t believe me?”

My eyes started to burn. “I want to. I really do. But the map of that emotional territory is clearly marked ‘Here be dragons.’”

Tucker didn’t answer. What could he have said?

“How’s the investigation going?” I asked, to get things started again. I wanted to hold Tucker in my arms, get naked with him and lose myself in the wonderful world of multiple orgasms. I couldn’t, because even if he wasn’t having sex with Allison, he was in too deep. So I settled for stretching the conversation as far as I could, just so I could hear the sound of his voice.

Pitiful.

“It’s not,” Tucker said glumly.

I decided it might be in my best interests to be forthcoming about my plans to visit Helen Erland that evening, though I wasn’t about to let him know she was trying to arrange for me to see Vince in jail. He would have blocked that, on general principle. He’d hear about it after the fact, of course, but by then it would be too late.

I threw him a bone. Part of the truth. But, hey, that’s better than nothing, isn’t it?

“Mrs. Erland asked me to investigate Gillian’s murder,” I said, and braced myself for meteor impact. Oceans were going to overflow. Continents would shift. A new ice age would begin.

And here’s me, the flash-frozen mammoth with fresh grass in its mouth.

“When,” Tucker countered evenly, “did you speak with Helen?”

“Today at the convenience store where she works,” I answered after swallowing. “Gillian appeared in my car at Wal-Mart, and she wanted to see her mother. So I took her there.”

“Mojo, if you compromise this case—”

“I might solve it, you know.”

“As far as the sheriff’s office is concerned, it is solved.”

“Not what you said on the news this morning, Detective Darroch.”

“Look, Mojo, there’s an official investigation going on here, and it’s delicate.”

I ignored that. I was in charge of the unofficial investigation. “Helen doesn’t think he did it. Vince, I mean. And neither does Gillian.”

“Helen is out of her head with grief, and she doesn’t want to believe Erland’s guilty. As for Gillian—well, I hate to tell you this, Sheepshanks, but ghost testimony doesn’t hold up in court.”

I glanced in Justin’s direction, hoping he’d left.

He was still sitting on the couch, and he was listening. For all I knew, he could hear Tucker’s side of the conversation as well as mine.

“It’s not easy being a ghost,” I said.

Tucker sighed again. He sighed a lot whenever we talked about my strange new talent for seeing dead people. I could only conclude that he wanted me for my body, not my mind.

It was a sure bet it wasn’t my detective skills.

“Moje,” Tucker said. “I’m not sleeping with Allison.”

I would have replied, “And I’m not sleeping with you,” if Justin hadn’t been there, taking it all in.

“Whatever,” I answered.

“Stay away from Helen Erland.”

“No. But thanks for the input.”

“Mojo—”

I hung up.

“I could find out if he’s sleeping with her,” Justin said.

“Justin,” I answered, “don’t help.”

He grinned. “It’s not like I don’t have time on my hands,” he reasoned. “I could help you solve the case, too.”

“How?”

“By spying on people. I’m invisible to most of them, remember. That could come in very handy.”

“I’ve got a better idea, Justin,” I said. “Go home.”

“I can’t. My mom’s too sad. It’s a bummer.”

“That isn’t the home I was talking about.”

“I have to wait for Pepper,” he told me decisively. “He’s old and he might get lost or something. It won’t be long, and I might as well make myself useful in the meantime.”

My throat closed and my sinuses clogged up instantly.

“Do you think they let dogs into heaven?” Justin asked. “Because I’m not going if they don’t.”

I started to cry.

Justin blipped out.

Alive or dead, men can’t stand tears.

JOLIE ARRIVED while I was rooting through the cupboards looking for something that could reasonably be expected to morph into lunch.

“You look terrible,” she said after letting herself in.

“Do you think dogs are allowed in heaven?” I asked.

“Sit down,” Jolie ordered. “You’re a train wreck.”

I slumped into a chair at the kitchen table.

Jolie washed her hands at the sink—a good thing, since she’d probably been dropping pieces of Alex Pennington into evidence bags all morning—and opened a can of soup. “Greer’s not back from shopping yet?” she asked, getting out a saucepan.

I shook my head.

“It will be interesting to see how she reacts to the news,” Jolie said, plopping the contents of the soup can into the saucepan. “Do you ever buy groceries?”

I ignored the grocery gibe. Jolie cooked. It made sense that she had a fixation with supermarkets. To me, they were just places where I ran into crazy stalkers and dead people. “Greer,” I said evenly, “did not riddle Alex with bullets and leave him to rot in the desert.”

“Don’t be so free with the gory details, okay? I could get fired if anybody finds out I called you from the crime scene.”

Guilt washed over me. I bit my lower lip. Who needs collagen when you can get the plump look by gnawing on yourself? “I might have let something slip to Tucker,” I confessed.

Jolie stared at me, her eyes going huge and round. She was beautiful, even clad in khaki shorts, a Phoenix PD T-shirt and hiking boots. Her long hair, done up in about a million skinny braids, was tied back with a twisted bandana. “Mojo Sheepshanks,” she said, “you didn’t tell him I told you about Alex?”

“He guessed,” I said.

“Right,” Jolie snapped, glaring.

“Not to worry,” I said, holding up two fingers pressed close together. “He and I are like that.”

Jolie swirled an index finger around one temple. “You and Tucker are like this. Both of you are crazy!”

“Tucker isn’t,” I said.

Jolie turned back to the soup, her spine rigid.

“You’re going to have to sit with Greer tonight,” I told her. “So I hope you don’t have any plans.”

Jolie didn’t look at me. “And where will you be?”

“I have some investigating to do.”

Jolie muttered something I didn’t quite catch, but I thought I heard the words real job in there somewhere.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said. “And how hard can it be to hang out with Greer for a couple of hours?”

Jolie rounded her eyes at me.

Just then the front door crashed open, and Greer came in. She went immediately to the cupboards and started ripping through them, a one-armed marauder. She found a package of Oreos—Nick liked to smell them, and even though I seriously doubted he’d ever be back, I kept them around just in case—and started stuffing them into her mouth, two at a time.

I figured a size-twenty-two wardrobe might be one of the dark secrets hidden in my foster sister’s mysterious past.