Lost Lake Page 13

  “No, but thank you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Well, maybe just one doughnut.” I had missed lunch, after all. I chose a warm apple fritter and watched through the front windows as rain began to fall.

  The clerk flipped her long red hair off her shoulder and leaned forward, opening her green eyes wide. She was twenty, maybe twenty-one. “Are you here about Patrick’s mom? It’s so, so sad. She used to fill up her tank here all the time.”

  “It is very sad. Thanks for the doughnut,” I said. “He’s in the back?”

  She nodded and returned to her magazine, clearly disappointed not to have gotten anything more out of me. Outside, the rain intensified. We both jumped as a flash of lightning lit up the sky. Almost immediately a tremendous clap of thunder followed.

  In his office, Patrick Crabbe slumped at a wooden desk that tottered on uneven legs, surrounded by stuff: magazines, empty soda cans, scraps of paper. Boxes of yellowing receipts were stacked on every surface. Two tall bookcases were filled with binders and auto repair manuals. A small trash can overflowing with fast-food wrappers and wadded-up tissues sat square in the middle of the room.

  On the desk in front of Crabbe was a single piece of paper that looked like my high school math exams: a mess of notations and scribbles, slashed through with big, fat red marks.

  “Mom’s obituary,” Crabbe explained. He looked haggard, more sunken since I’d seen him last, as though the weight of his mother’s death had caused him to cave in on himself. “The paper is asking for something, and I’m having a heck of a time. How do you sum up a person’s life in three to five paragraphs?”

  I leaned against the door frame. “The Voice doesn’t have an obit writer?”

  Crabbe shook his head. “Nope. They used to, but she died a few years ago. She was smart and wrote her own obituary when it became obvious she was dying. Four paragraphs. The paper sent it over as an example of what they’re looking for. What can I do for you, Gemma?”

  “I have a couple of follow-up questions. They’re a bit delicate, Patrick, so please bear with me and know that I’m asking them because my job is to find your mother’s killer. I don’t have the time or the luxury to beat around the bush.”

  He frowned. “Ask away.”

  “I’ve had a few reports from people close to your mother telling me that she was worried about you. Maybe even frightened.”

  Crabbe’s frown deepened. I started to speak again, but another tremendous clap of thunder shook the station.

  Patrick waited a beat then said, “Storm’s close. Who are these people, Gemma, that you’ve been talking to?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Patrick, but I can’t get into those details. Help me understand what your relationship with Betty was like. Did you two fight recently? How’s work? Is everything going okay in your life?”

  He leaned back and stared down at his hands. He was silent so long I was afraid he simply wasn’t going to talk, and then all of a sudden, he spoke with a fury so cold I nearly stepped back out of the room.

  “Fucking Kent. He comes back to town and everything goes to hell. My business starts losing money. Mom develops this paranoia, I can’t explain it, it’s as though she’s seeing ghosts around every corner. He’s like the goddamn Grim Reaper.” Crabbe exhaled noisily and looked up at me. “Kent should have died. Not Mom.”

  “You’re upset, Patrick.”

  “Damn right I’m upset!” Crabbe stood up and shoved his mother’s obituary to the floor. “Don’t patronize me.”

  I swallowed. Was he on drugs? Experiencing some kind of manic episode? In my head, I ran through the usual suspects for such an outburst, finally settling on grief and its accompanying stage of anger.

  I stood, silent, watching as Crabbe breathed heavily through his nose. The moment passed, and he slowly slid back into his chair. He rubbed at his eyes, took a sip from a water bottle.

  Still I waited.

  Finally, he said “I’m sorry. I know you’re not the enemy. I just … it’s overwhelming, you know?”

  “Yes, I do know. Patrick, one of the things your mom told one of these, ah, witnesses was that she’d seen you in the backyard, behind the house, in the middle of the night. Just standing there. Is that something you’ve done?”

  “Why on earth would I do that?”

  “Insomnia?” I offered.

  “Well, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Your so-called witnesses are lying. My mother never told anyone that … because it never happened.” Crabbe looked at me, then away. I was relieved to see the rage in his eyes had dissipated. “I’m tired, Gemma. Was there anything else?”

  “Just one more question. You hinted that your mom didn’t have the funds to be giving money away. We discovered financial paperwork indicating otherwise and a revised will that leaves you and Kent Starbuck equal heirs to your mom’s assets. Is that a surprise?”

  “Money comes and money goes.” Crabbe wearily waved a hand. “My mom had some money stashed away, huh? And she kept it a secret? Great. I’ll get back on my feet. Maybe relocate the station to a more appealing lot. And if Kent gets half of Mom’s cash, so be it. Maybe he’ll take it and leave for good.”

  “Maybe.” I nodded. “Thanks for your time, Patrick. I’ll be seeing you around.”

  I turned around and started to leave, but Crabbe’s voice, low and monotone, called me back.

  “Excuse me?”

  He had moved to a corner of the office. Kneeling, his back to me, he said over his shoulder, “Not if I see you first.”

  Crabbe slowly turned around. In his hands were reams of old receipts, the print faded, the edges torn. He smiled, and I saw once more how similar he and his brother looked.

  “That’s an old joke my mom and I had. I’d say ‘I’ll see you’ and she’d say ‘Not if I see you first.’”

  “Ah. Well, good-bye, Patrick.”

  I left the station and hurried to my car, holding my jacket over my head in a pathetic attempt to keep dry. By the time I was in the driver’s seat, I was soaked. As I started the car and pulled out of the lot, Crabbe’s awful smile—the one he shared with Kent—followed me and a chill settled into my bones that had nothing to do with the weather.

  Back at the station, I poked my head in the chief’s office, but he wasn’t there. I ran into his secretary in the hall and she told me he’d already left for the day. I’d wanted to give him a heads-up on my plan for catching the leak but as I thought about it, I realized it might be best if he didn’t know all the details.

  I had a small window in which to lay the first trap, during the shift change from day to night, so at my desk I quickly typed up a bland summary of the Starbuck homicide. I included information about the missing Owen Rayburn Diary, including rumors of a curse and the priceless nature of the diary itself. Anyone reading between the lines would believe that I was investigating the possibility that the diary, the cursed diary, was somehow responsible for Betty Starbuck’s murder. I included a picture I pulled off the internet of a worn, brown leather journal. It wasn’t Rayburn’s, of course, but I asked everyone to keep an eye out for something similar at the local pawn shops.

  It was ridiculous. I no more believed in curses than I did in the tooth fairy. And yet … it was appealing. Everyone loves a bit of the supernatural, especially a sleazy reporter like Bryce Ventura.

  I headed up the summary with a “be on the lookout” alert, then printed and posted it on the Red Board. It was just in time, too. People were suddenly moving in and out of the locker rooms, patrol officers changing into and out of uniforms, nonuniformed personnel retrieving handbags and coats from their lockers.

  It was shift change.

  It was the end of my day and the start of someone else’s.

  * * *

  I was halfway up the canyon when I remembered what day it was. Bull’s birthday. I was still stinging from the encounter with him the day before, but birthdays were a big deal in our family and we’d had di
nner planned for weeks. I turned around and drove to Chevy’s. The pizzeria was packed, and I elbowed my way to the small private room in the back, where I found Bull, Julia, and a dozen of their friends gathered around a long table. Brody came in with Grace a few minutes after I arrived and worked on getting her set up in a high chair.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered in Bull’s ear as I gave him a hug. He wore a cowboy hat that, together with the bruise on his eye, made him look like a villain in an old western. “What’s with the hat?”

  “A gift from your grandmother. She insisted I wear it tonight.” Bull squeezed me tight, then released me and held me at arm’s length. “No apology necessary, honey. We both want what’s best for your grandmother. We just have to remember that we’re on the same team. The disease is the enemy, not each other.”

  “I guess it’s true what they say: with age comes wisdom. You’re practically oozing it from your pores.” I smirked. “Not surprising, considering you’re a hundred and twenty years old.”

  Bull rolled his eyes. “Just you wait. Fifty, sixty, even seventy years old … those were good birthdays. Milestones. Now? Now the guest list gets smaller and the health complaints list gets longer. I had to listen to that woman talk for fifteen minutes straight about a mole removal. A mole! I told her I’d have taken a pair of scissors to it and saved her the co-pay. She didn’t appreciate the comment. Avoid her, at all costs.” He pointed to one of Julia’s friends, an attractive older woman with a small bandage on her chin. She saw us staring and flushed. Bull held up a hand and made a scissoring gesture. The woman huffed and turned away.

  “You’re terrible.”

  “The worst part is she thought I was joking. You hungry?” Bull pointed to the table as servers set out six extra-large pizzas. “We went big.”

  “Starving.”

  I sat between Grace and Brody, keeping the baby occupied with toys on the tray of her high chair, talking with Brody about his day in between bites of a mushroom-and-olive thin-crust pizza.

  There were few things Brody enjoyed more than discussing his work, and he began telling me in earnest about a contract he was reviewing for a mining corporation in South Africa.

  I slowly drifted away, paying more and more attention to Grace’s fuzzy, beeping toys and less and less attention to the minutiae of the health standards in some pit on a continent I’d never been to.

  “I lost you, didn’t I?”

  Busted. I dropped Grace’s glowing frog thing and turned back to Brody. “I’m sorry, honey … but yes, you lost me somewhere between Johannesburg and the Black Plague.”

  Brody laughed so hard he snorted beer. “Black damp. Not plague.”

  “Are they different? Wait, wait, it’s okay. No need to explain.”

  “I know it’s incredibly boring compared to what you do.” Brody wiped his mouth and sighed. “But I think this stuff is fascinating. And it’s important to me. It’s my career. I appreciate you trying to listen.”

  “I do try. It’s just so … technical sometimes. I need the abridged version.”

  Across the table, Julia stood up and clinked her knife against her water glass. “If you will all stop stuffing your faces for a moment, I have something to say. Today is the day that many, many, many years ago, my darling husband, Bull Weston, came into the world. He wasn’t supposed to live. He arrived early, a tiny thing, and there were complications. He fought for his life, though, and he’s been fighting ever since. In the military, he fought for our country. As an attorney and then as a judge, he fought for justice. As my husband, as a surrogate father for our granddaughter, Gemma, he fought for what was best for our family. And now, as I face down the barrel of this insidious disease that is stealing my memories, stealing my mind, he’s fighting for me. So let’s raise a glass in honor of the birthday boy. To Bull, the best man I’ve ever known. The love of my life. May you live to see as many sunrises as inspire you and not one sunrise more.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd. “To Bull!”

  I hadn’t heard Julia speak so eloquently, so coherently, in months, and I buried my face in Brody’s shoulder to keep from sobbing. This was the woman who’d raised me, this was the woman who’d begged me not to join the police force and then presented me with my first handgun at my graduation ceremony. Complicated, passionate, a fighter herself.

  I pulled away from Brody and caught Bull’s eye across the table.

  He was happy, content. For tonight, anyway, he was at peace with the world.

  Chapter Twenty

  Wednesday dawned with the kind of gentle light that comes through stained-glass windows: soft and full of grace. The sky was alive with shades of pink and orange as I left home and headed into work.

  My mood was upbeat, with no sense of what the day would hold, of where I would find myself that evening. I arrived thirty minutes early in order to remove the report from the Red Board. I took it down and put in the shredder. It had either served its purpose or not; it was now time for me to come up with some other false report I could post for the next shift.

  Then something happened that I rarely experience: I got lucky.

  “Hey, Monroe! I think I saw a UFO last night! You want to take a road trip down to Roswell with me?” Barking laughter from the rest of the room. The cop, encouraged by the laughter, continued. “There’s a mermaid in my bathtub!”

  “What the hell is he talking about?” I muttered to Finn as I set my things down and booted up my computer.

  “Bryce Ventura’s Twitter feed.” Finn pulled it up on his phone and read it to me in a low, angry voice. “Cedar Valley PD blames museum murder on ancient curse. Missing diary responsible for countless deaths over the years. What the hell, Gemma? Where did Ventura get this information from? He makes us sound like a bunch of loons.”

  Holy shit. It worked.

  I swallowed a smile. “I have no idea. I’ll call him in a bit, get on his case.”

  “You know what’s going to happen next, don’t you? We’ll get every nutjob in town calling us. Did you know there is a group that meets once a month at the Y just to discuss conspiracy theories? Little green men and the people who worship them.”

  “There’s a group of little green men that meet at the Y?”

  Finn made a face and turned away. I smirked, ridiculously proud that my trap had worked. Then I realized what that meant: someone working the evening shift last night was the leak.

  And he, or she, hadn’t wasted any time in talking to Bryce Ventura.

  Did this mean I could eliminate Finn from the suspect list? I started to, then had second thoughts. It would be just like him, sneaky and smart, to act upset about Ventura’s Twitter post while in fact he was the one feeding the reporter the information.

  I pulled up the shift schedule to see who’d worked the night before and began to jot down the names, when the front desk officer alerted me that Mac Stephens was in the lobby, asking for me. I found him standing in the corner, talking in a low, urgent voice to his cousin Jake.

  Mac was angry. “It’s been days, Detective. Where is Sari? Why haven’t you found her yet?”

  I explained that while we’d started to look into Chesney’s life, I didn’t have any updates for him.

  “How can that be?” Mac asked. There were dark circles under his eyes and he’d lost weight. “Someone’s taken her, I’m sure of it. She disappears and a day later, her boss is murdered. Something horrible is going on.”

  “Yeah, you said Sari would turn up,” Jake added. He pushed his eyeglasses up on his nose and stared at me. He looked me up and down, sneered. “What kind of a cop makes a promise like that? You said nine times out of ten, the missing person shows up.”

  “I know what I said,” I snapped. His words stung, because he was right.

  I exhaled, tried to calm down. My frustrations didn’t lie with the two of them. I was spread too thin, running this way and that, seemingly doing a lot but learning little. Progress was slow; it was as simple as that. I was devoting most of
my time to the Starbuck case, and rightfully so.

  “Look, we’re monitoring Sari’s cell phone, credit cards, and bank accounts. The fact that she hasn’t used any of them is troubling, I’ll admit, but if she’s left town of her own volition, then she had a plan in place. She may have been stockpiling cash. Mac, I’m sorry to be blunt, but perhaps there’s a reason she’s gone to all this trouble. Perhaps she doesn’t want to be found.”

  Mac grew angry, his face reddening, his eyes narrowing. He pointed a finger at my face. “This is bullshit. I’m going to have your head when it turns out that Sari’s been kidnapped. If she’s been hurt … that’s on you, Detective. This is gross incompetence, plain and simple.”

  “I know you’re upset. I’m worried, too. I have a meeting today with my team; we’ve gotten additional help to find Sari. We can probably get a few people up to Lost Lake to start canvassing the area—”

  “That should have been done on Saturday when we told you she was missing. You suggested maybe she ran away, maybe she met up with someone. I never should have listened to you. Something’s happened to her!” Mac yelled.

  He stormed out, and Jake followed behind him, a troubled look on his face. Then Jake turned around and opened his mouth as if to speak. But no words came out. He merely shrugged, and then both men were gone and I was left alone in the lobby, my cheeks burning with the unsettling knowledge that there was a chance Mac was right.

  * * *

  “You coming?”

  I checked the time, then swore as I jumped up and joined the chief in the hall. He did not appreciate it when people were late to his weekly staff meetings.

  I joined the others at the table in our largest conference room. There were seven of us: the chief and his secretary, Moriarty and Armstrong, Finn and me, and the intern. The chief had made good on his promise of extra resources; Moriarty and Armstrong were officially on the case with us. This meeting was intended to bring everyone up to speed on what we were calling the Museum Mystery: a lame but appropriate title that captured the Starbuck homicide, Sari Chesney’s disappearance, and the missing Rayburn Diary under one nickname.