Five
It couldn’t be, Lanie thought, trying to ignore the frightening way her heart had sped up again, like a train out of control. Why would anyone want to kill Will?
Maybe he is an axe murderer. Or a bondage master. What do you really know about him?
No way. It was ridiculous, it was maybe even naïve, but in her bones, she knew that Will DeMaio was a nice guy. A good guy.
And no one was killing a good guy on her watch.
Especially not if it was her bad luck that had set off this whole nightmare.
Will was pacing again, his jaw set in a grim, tight line, and he was talking more to himself than to her. “I just don’t get it,” he muttered. “I mean, why was he here? And why here? This house, I mean. It doesn’t make sense.”
This house ... Lanie sat up straight, glancing at the end of the counter. “Will? Did he drink, your dad? And smoke?”
“You better believe it.” He snorted. “He rarely did anything else.”
She got up and nudged him aside to open the cabinet door below the sink. “I found this earlier,” she said, pointing to the empty bottle of whiskey, “and those,” she added, gesturing to the crowded ashtray. “Do you think he was staying ... here?”
“Could be.” His eyes narrowed as he crossed his arms over his chest. He was so tense, he looked as if he would snap if she brushed against him accidentally. “He knew the people who used to own this place before your friends—he might have known where a spare key was.”
“That doesn’t make sense, though,” she said, sitting down again. “Wouldn’t you have noticed him over here?”
“I was away until Wednesday, up in Boston.”
She squashed the urge to ask him whom he’d been visiting—or, more specifically, whether his friend was the female variety. It wasn’t important, not right now. Not with his dad murdered in very cold blood on the back porch, and Will most likely the bullet’s intended recipient.
It didn’t really make sense, because she certainly didn’t have any experience with murder—and she took it for granted Will didn’t either—but while her life was far from perfect lately, it was sort of like a dresser with a wobbly foot. It was irritating, a little troublesome, but ultimately fixable, even if in the short term all she could do was shim up the wobble with a matchbook.
This was like the whole dresser falling apart after someone had taken an axe to it. And then setting it on fire.
No way was she going to shake Will’s hand, thank him for the lovely orgasms, and leave him with a charred and smoking ruin.
She couldn’t explain that to Will, of course. But she was going to have to inform him that she intended to help pretty much right now, because the look on his face screamed, “Thanks for everything, but we should probably say good-bye now.”
And it was a decent motivation, as far as she was concerned. Not many guys would expect a woman he’d slept with once to stick around when messing around turned into murder. But she was damned if she was going to let her recent run of disasters trickle over onto him. Violent death was a whole other level of really bad karma. It wasn’t her violent death, thank goodness, but it was on her back steps, and it was the father of her one-night stand.
Will was opening his mouth, and before he could get a word out, she scrambled for something that wouldn’t make her sound like a lunatic.
“I want to help,” she blurted, squaring her shoulders for the argument she desperately hoped wasn’t coming. “This is ... well, this is kind of a nightmare, actually, but for you, not for me, but I’m here, and I really like you, and I just ... well, if you want the truth, it’s all my fault anyway.”
So much for not sounding like a lunatic.
But Will was even more adorable when he was stunned, in the I-have-no-idea-what-you-just-said way, of course, not the my-father’s-been-murdered way. It took him a blinking, mouth-gaping minute to process what she’d said, and then all he could manage was, “Excuse me?”
“It’s not really my fault, of course.” She gave him a weak smile, wishing she sounded a little more confident. A little more stable, in fact. “It’s just that my karma, or something, is in one of those off-again phases. It’s bad luck, and it’s screwing up just about everything I touch, and since I touched you, last night, I just figured ...” Her shoulders slumped when she realized he was trying not to laugh. “I know it sounds weird, but just concentrate on the other part, okay? I want to help. What I mean is, I’m not going to shake hands and pack my bags and leave you holding the ... well, the dead body.”
“This isn’t some long-cherished Nancy Drew fantasy, is it?” he asked, but he was teasing, and when he held out his hand, she took it, letting him draw her against the length of him.
This was going to be dangerous, she thought, her body softening all over as she breathed him in, snow and pine and, faintly, the yeasty warmth of the bagel shop. Not because of what they might find. Because of the way Will DeMaio made her feel.
Stepping onto the back porch, Lanie decided that she talked a good game for a girl whose biggest adventure, before last night, was mixing diet Coke with diet Pepsi. As they’d made their way down the icy steps, it was suddenly all too real that there was a very dead body on the steps, and they were going to look at it. Up close.
Will had called the police, who promised to send someone over as soon as they could, but in the meantime, he was determined to take another look at his father.
“Before they start in with the yellow tape and the latex gloves and all that,” he’d told her. “I didn’t love him—hell, I didn’t even like him—but he’s dead, you know? And if someone wanted me dead, in a weird way it’s my fault.”
She didn’t know which was scarier—that someone would figure out he’d killed the wrong person and come after Will again, or that despite what a shit his father had been, Will felt guilty that the man was dead. The last being frightening for how much more evidence it stacked in the “Will DeMaio: Incredibly Nice Guy” category.
Squinting against the snow glare, Will pulled a pair of leather gloves out of his jacket pocket and put them on. Lanie stood behind him, craning her neck to see past his shoulder, and rubbing her arms briskly in the frigid air.
Taking a deep breath, Will reached toward the body, murmuring, “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.” She nodded, but as he turned back to his father’s body, she fought the urge to squeeze her eyes shut. She wasn’t going to be a delicate girly-girl about this. Think of all the great female detectives, she told herself. Miss Marple, Harriet Vane, Stephanie Plum. Okay, they’re fictional, but—
“Oh, man,” Will murmured, and Lanie risked a peek. If the storm hadn’t lasted through the night and into the morning, the way the man had died would have been obvious. Brushing the wet snow from his gloves, Will stepped back, and Lanie got a good look at the front of his father’s coat, where a rime of blood had made a huge, frozen stain. It was lacquered on his throat, too, surrounding an angry wound where a bullet had ripped into the flesh.
“There should be a trail of it,” Will muttered. “Or maybe ... a splatter? God, I don’t know.”
Shuddering, Lanie backed away from the body and turned to face the frozen field between the cabin and Will’s place. She needed a deep breath, a good lungful of the clean white snow.
“I don’t see a gun conveniently lying around.” She peered down at the snow, but the surface was already brittle, sugary and bright even in the weak sunlight. “And I don’t see any blood, but since it snowed all night ...” She let the thought trail out in a white puff of breath. Oh my God, they’d been getting hot and sweaty while Will’s father was out here the whole time ...
Will passed a hand over his eyes, a bright, startled blue before they disappeared, then dug out the snow around the body. “Yeah, he’s sitting on the bare step, not packed snow. Don’t even think about it. And especially don’t talk about it anymore. Let’s just see what else we can find here.”
She nodded, trying to wiggle her toes in her frozen sneakers as she set off in one direction, kicking gently at the snow to look for a blood trail beneath the surface. Will set off the other way, and every time she glanced back at him, the grim set of his shoulders in his heavy jacket made her heart squeeze. The sun was almost directly above them now, and it flashed warm gold on his hair. He reminded her of a very determined little boy, shouldering a burden much too big for him but resolved to carry it anyway.
“I’m not getting anything,” he called from half a dozen yards away, “and if we mess with this much more, we’re going to be trampling the evidence.”
“I think that’s a given already.” Rubbing her mittened hands together, she surveyed the crisscrossed web of trails they’d made, an abstract in the snow.
He’d jammed his hands in his pockets when he walked back to her. “I just wish I knew what he was doing here.”
“What about his pockets?” Lanie said quietly, turning her gaze up to him. He looked unsettled by the idea, but he nodded and walked back to the body, reaching toward the coat.
“There’s a wallet,” he said, lifting it out, “and that’s it.”
“Maybe there’s a receipt for something?” This was so much harder than she’d thought—not that she’d believed it would be a piece of cake in the first place—and she couldn’t begin to imagine what it was doing to Will.
At least the practical aspect of figuring it out was giving him something to do. He thumbed through the worn billfold and retrieved a scrap of white paper, which he waved at her. “The motel out on the highway,” he said. “Makes sense.”
He looked up suddenly and jerked his head toward the road. “Here comes the cavalry.”
Gently sliding the wallet back into the jacket pocket where he’d found it, he pulled her against him, briskly rubbing her back as they watched a salt-spattered black SUV with the local police emblem emblazoned on the door pull up, crunching through the snow.
“Cavalry, huh?” she murmured.
“The not-so-esteemed Jackson Holby,” Will murmured back. “Voted Most Likely to Be a Security Guard in high school. This is going to blow his mind.”
“Hey there, Will,” a stout, red-cheeked man called as he climbed out of the truck, zipping up a huge gray parka. He looked like a sooty version of the Michelin man. “Got a dead body here, huh?”
“And you’ll never guess who it is,” Will called back, murmuring to Lanie, “even though I already told the dispatch officer.”
“Let’s just take a look, shall we?” He was having a hard time wading through the packed accumulation, each massive booted foot pulled up with effort. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, chest heaving, and squinted down at the corpse. “Holy shit, Will—pardon my language, miss—but this looks just like you.”
“That’s because it’s my father, Jackson.” Lanie didn’t dare look at Will for fear of giggling, but she could picture his eyes rolling.
“Your dad? Didn’t he leave town, oh ... ten years ago?”
She thought she could feel the frustration vibrating off Will in waves now, and she sighed. If this was the best the local police force had to offer, they’d be better off investigating on their own.
“He did, Jackson, but there’s no law preventing the occasional visit, you know? I’m not sure why he was here, but he was, and now he’s dead. About a hundred feet from my front door, as a matter of fact.”
“Huh.” As noncommittal grunts went, this guy had them perfected, Lanie thought, watching as he used his nightstick to nudge open the dead man’s coat. If he understood Will’s inference, he didn’t show any signs of it.
She had halfway decided to introduce herself, offer her statement about finding the body, when two more police cars pulled up, and a team of four men, two in street clothes and two in police-issue parkas, got out.
Thankfully, the thumbnail on any one of them seemed more intelligent than Jackson Holby, and she and Will were separated and questioned immediately as the evidence techs started their work on the body and the surrounding area. By the time they were allowed inside, where Lanie gathered her things and stuffed them into her bag, she was truly frozen, and the idea of trudging across the snowy field to Will’s house was mitigated only by the chance to crawl into what she hoped was his big, warm, snuggly bed, with him.
When the detectives had given them permission to leave, however, Will had other ideas.
“We should get out of here,” he murmured. “Let them do their thing, take the body away, all that.”
“And go where?” she whispered back. “And do what? Shouldn’t they be protecting you? Didn’t you tell them that you may have been the target here?”
“It’s a small town, Lanie.” He backed her up against the bathroom sink, where she’d been collecting her toothbrush and deodorant. “They’re going to go off and question everyone who might have it in for me, and I thought we could concentrate on figuring out what my father was doing.”
“Won’t they do that, too?”
“Yeah. But we’ve got a head start while they’re here dusting for fingerprints and whatever else it is they do, and I don’t feel like sitting over there at home watching them cart my father’s dead body away.”
She frowned, suddenly very sure that his bed was not in her immediate future. “Okay, but how are we going to get anywhere? The rental car barely made it here last night, and that was ten inches of snow ago.”
She squinted up at him when he didn’t answer immediately, and her stomach gave a nauseating little lurch of anxiety. “I have a feeling this isn’t going to be good.”
Even his tired grin wasn’t reassuring. It was far too mischievous for the present circumstances.
“Remember when I mentioned the snowmobile?”