WHEN WE ALL got back in our respective cars, Newman tried not to be angry with me, but he was upset and couldn’t hide it. I finally saved him the struggle and said, “I behaved badly back there, and I’m sorry.”
Newman’s hands were gripping the steering wheel a little too tight as he tried to keep his voice even. “Aren’t you the one who told me, ‘Don’t be sorry. Do better’?”
“One of the reasons I’m more patient with other people’s rookie mistakes is that I had my share of them. Having a temper that made my mouth run away with the rest of me was one of them.”
“We had things calmed down with Duke,” he said as he eased between the now-open gates and followed the sheriff up the driveway.
“I know, and I am sorry that I lost my temper and made things worse again.” Some sense of movement made me look behind us in time to watch the gates ease shut.
“I called you in to help make things better, not worse,” he said. The trees were huge on either side of the gravel driveway. Again I got the sense that the estate had been here long enough to become one with the forest around us.
“I’m aware of that,” I said, and I could already feel myself getting irritated with the fact that he was harping on it.
My temper is better than it was a few years ago, but I will always have it bubbling close to the surface. One of the things I’d learned in therapy is that fixing your issues isn’t the same thing as getting rid of them. You discard the things that no longer serve you, but some things are so much a part of you that you can’t get rid of them without destroying who you are and how you function as a person. My temper was one of those, but more than that, it was part of my aggression, and aggression was how I did my job and protected the ones I loved, how I succeeded more than I failed. Society views aggressive women as bitches, but sometimes being a bitch is the only way to survive. I’ll take survival over being Miss Congeniality any day.
“You were visibly upset when you got off the phone. You can’t blame Duke for noticing that.”
“No, but I can blame him for making the remark about my boyfriends.”
“I’ve seen people say worse to you, and you let it go,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“So why now? What did Forrester say on the phone that got you so rattled?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You know, I defend you when people say that you’re sleeping with Forrester. I tell them, ‘She wouldn’t have been best man at his wedding if his wife didn’t trust Blake,’ but you’re acting like the phone call was more personal than just partners.”
“Are you asking me if I’m sleeping with Ted?”
“No,” he said, “absolutely not.” He sounded offended, almost panicked in distancing himself from the question, which meant either he really didn’t want to know or he really did.
I debated how much to share with him and finally realized that if I was truly afraid of Olaf and he might become our backup, Newman had a right to know at least part of it. I was still debating when the driveway spilled out into a circle with a huge fountain in the middle of it. The house rose up like a dark cliff face. Even the few lit windows didn’t take away from the sensation that the house was part of the landscape like the forest that bordered everything.
“Is that just a huge-ass fountain or a moderate-size swimming pool?” I asked.
He gave a small laugh, but it was a start. “It’s a fountain. The water around it is too shallow for anything but wading.”
Leduc was out of his car and yelling at another man in a similar uniform. We couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the porch light above them let us see their faces. The second man was fighting not to recoil from the sheriff’s pointing finger, which was stabbing at his chest. If it had been a knife, it would have gone through his heart.
“Who’s Leduc yelling at?” I asked.
“Rico Vargas. Deputy Rico Vargas.” Just the tone in Newman’s voice made me raise an eyebrow.
“I take it he’s not your favorite deputy,” I said.
“No,” Newman said, and got out of the car before I could ask why.
I guessed we were both allowed to keep our secrets. I got out on my side of his car and had to double-time it to catch up with his longer legs.
“What the fuck were you thinking, Rico? This is the kind of shit that Troy usually pulls. You’re supposed to be the smart one,” Leduc was thundering, or maybe it was just the acoustics of the stone arch they were standing under that made his voice into a bass rumble of noise like having a verbal rockslide thrown at you.
Deputy Rico mumbled something, but Leduc yelled, “No, I don’t want to hear one more goddamn excuse from you, Rico!”
We were close enough to hear the deputy say, “But it’s their house. How can I tell them they can’t come into their own house?”
“This is not their house. This is our crime scene!” Leduc said, pushing the flat brim of his hat into Rico’s forehead so that the only thing that kept them from touching faces was the hat.
It took me a second to realize that the hat brim was almost cutting into the skin of Rico’s forehead above his eyebrows. He was taller than the sheriff, so he had to be careful not to stand as straight as he could or the hat’s edge would have cut across his eyes. On some police forces, it would have crossed the line from getting your ass chewed to talking to your union rep, but I guessed on a force this small, there wasn’t a union. Who do you complain to when there’s no one higher than the boss?
Thanks to the sheriff yelling at the gate intercom earlier, I knew that Deputy Vargas had not only allowed family members into the house, but had allowed them to change the security code, which meant without it the police didn’t have access to the crime scene unless the family let them in. Family is almost always the first suspected in a murder. You don’t really want them running amok at the crime scene until you’re certain they didn’t do it.
Newman didn’t exactly yell, but he raised his voice enough to be heard. “When did they release Jocelyn from the hospital?”
Leduc stopped yelling, just stood there with his hat brim shoved into his deputy’s forehead like a knife-edge poised to strike. He nearly growled his next words into Deputy Vargas’s face. “Answer the marshal’s question, Rico.”
Rico swallowed so hard, I could see it from yards away. “I don’t know, Sheriff.”
Leduc moved back minutely so that his hat wasn’t actually touching the other man. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I think he was counting to ten. He spoke in a very careful voice, as if he was afraid of what he’d do if he lost his temper again. “How long has Jocelyn been here, Rico?”
“It’s not Joshie, Sheriff.”
“You said the family was inside,” the sheriff said, frowning at him.
“Yeah, Muriel and Todd Babington are inside.”
“God give me strength,” Leduc said. “Muriel and Todd don’t live here, Rico. It’s not their house. The only one that should be changing the security is Jocelyn Marchand, not Ray’s little sister and her husband.”
“They said they were worried that whoever murdered Ray had the security codes and that there were a lot of valuable antiques in the house.”
“Yeah, and they’ve had their eyes on the valuables in this house for years,” Leduc said, pushing past his deputy. The door wasn’t locked, thank goodness. I’m not sure what Sheriff Leduc would have done to Vargas if he’d allowed himself to be locked outside of the crime scene by possible suspects. Of course, maybe Leduc didn’t see Muriel and Todd as suspects, but I did. If Bobby hadn’t done it, then Aunt Muriel and Uncle Todd had just made the top of my list.