I went for an herbal tea this time, partly because the gunpowder green tea hadn’t seemed to help me out very much, and partly because I was feeling a little tired after that glass of sangria I’d drunk. In most cases, caffeine in the form of some oolong tea might have seemed like the logical response to my wine ennui, and yet I didn’t want to be seesawing back and forth between depressants and stimulants. A nice, fruity herb tea with some thick, chunky leaves seemed to be the better choice.
After rooting around in the pantry a bit, I decided on the raspberry hibiscus, partly because it had a nice, tart taste and a gorgeous color, and partly because the hibiscus petals tended to drape nicely against the side of my teacup. As I brewed the tea and then sat down at the kitchen table, I pleaded with the universe to send me a sign, anything that would lead me to Perry Lockhart’s real killer and prove Max’s innocence.
At the same time, though, I tried not to feel too desperate. Stress always interfered with a reading, and I knew if I allowed my personal feelings to intrude too much, I might end up with a blob that was even less helpful than the heart I’d seen in my last attempt at interpreting the leaves.
The tea smelled wonderful, full of fruit without being sticky-sweet. Once again, I followed the ritual of turning the cup around three times, and then made myself sit there and sip it slowly, watching as my backyard slowly warmed with the colors of approaching sunset.
When the tea was nearly gone, I set the saucer on top of the cup and inverted it, allowing the last few drops to drip onto the dish. I focused as deeply as I could before I pulled the saucer away, revealing the leaves stuck to the inner surface of the cup.
They definitely formed more distinct patterns this time, that was for sure. One was an almost perfect oval, and I frowned at it. Most of the time, an oval signified fertility, since it echoed the shape of an egg. However, since I didn’t have a family and wasn’t thinking of starting one any time soon — not with my dating life in the dumps and Max roiling up feelings I’d spend years trying to suppress — I couldn’t think of why such a shape would have revealed itself now.
Unless Deanne was pregnant. She’d sworn up and down that she had no intention of having a baby until she was at least thirty, but sometimes biology didn’t always behave the way we wanted it to.
But even if my best friend did turn out to be pregnant, I failed to see how that particular fact could have any connection to Perry Lockhart’s murder.
Unless…he’d gotten someone pregnant, and she’d shot him when he told her he wouldn’t have anything to do with her or the baby.
While that scenario sounded to me like something the erstwhile Mr. Lockhart might do, it still circled back to the fundamental problem of access to the weapon. I didn’t see how an angry ex-lover could have gotten her hands on Max’s on-screen gun.
And while I didn’t pretend to be psychic — well, not psychic, psychic, like the kind of person who could walk into a house and immediately tell it was haunted, or who could read people’s thoughts or whatever — I did have fairly good instincts regarding my readings, and something was telling me the pregnant ex-lover theory veered onto entirely the wrong track. I didn’t pretend to understand everything that was going on here, but that wasn’t it.
Okay, then.
Leaving aside the problematic oval, I gazed down into the cup again, eyes tracing the outlines of the leaves there. Quite a few of them made blobs without any real significance, but there was one about halfway up the cup, a small mass with little bits of leaf that looked like ears, and another piece that resembled a snout more than anything else.
In fact, it looked remarkably like a wolf.
A wolf was pretty much always a positive omen in tasseography. Its current position on the inside surface of the cup seemed to indicate I was going to be playing the good friend, helping other people with their troubles.
Well, that was pretty much exactly what I’d been doing for Max, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling I should be getting a different meaning from the wolf head that had revealed itself within the leaves.
But what?
Frowning, I got up from the table so I could fetch myself a glass of ice water. Technically, you weren’t supposed to walk away in the middle of a reading like this, but the fruity tea had made me thirsty for plain water. Besides, I’d already performed the key parts of the ritual.
Now I just had to figure out what they meant.
After a few swallows of water, I stared back down into the cup. Yes, that was definitely a stylized wolf’s head, snout long, ears flattened. In fact, it seemed to remind me of something I’d seen before, although I couldn’t say what.
Why was the wolf important?
Unfortunately, it seemed as though the longer I wracked my brain, the less I was able to come up with. It was like those times back in trig where the formulas had seemed to dance right behind my eyes but couldn’t make their way down through my fingers and into my pencil.
Good thing I really didn’t need a good grasp of trigonometry to run a coffee shop.
Since sitting there and staring down into the cup clearly wasn’t going to help me much, I got up again, only this time I took my glass of water into the living room. Television hadn’t seemed too appealing a half hour earlier, but now I knew I needed to give my brain a rest. Either my sluggish synapses would finally make the connection, or they wouldn’t. Trying to brute-force the issue was only going to frustrate me and make the solution that much more difficult to find.
I sat down and started flipping through the channels. My grandmother had DirecTV hooked up a couple of years before she passed, and even though I kept telling myself I needed to cancel the service and just rely on streaming the channels I wanted through a Roku device or something, I’d never gotten around to actually doing the deed.
That was why I had a bunch of stations I hardly ever watched, including the “local” news out of Albuquerque. Since the state’s biggest city was a hundred miles away, most of what went on there didn’t have much significance for me.
I was just about to move past the local ABC affiliate’s five o’clock news when the announcer said, “And here’s today’s Lobos update.”
My entire body went rigid with shock, and I stared at the TV screen, watching as the logo of a wolf’s head with flattened ears and bared teeth appeared for a second or two before they moved on to a discussion of the previous night’s pre-season football game.
The University of New Mexico’s mascot was a wolf.
Since I’d never gone to school there, I supposed I could have been forgiven for not making the connection immediately. All the same, it seemed like way too important a clue to overlook.
Or maybe it wasn’t that important at all. Max had gone to UNM, and maybe that was what the leaves had been trying to tell me and nothing more.
Once again, though, that particular thought didn’t feel right. The connection seemed much more immediate than that.
“All right,” I said aloud. “Who else from Max’s class went to school in Albuquerque?”
If I was even correct in limiting my search to members of his graduating class and no one else. Maybe the murderer had gone to UNM some twenty years earlier.
No, I didn’t believe that. There was some reason why the leaves had shown me the wolf, a thread I just wasn’t picking up yet.
Luckily, all my high school yearbooks resided on the bottom shelf of the antique bookcase in the living room. I hoped that by pulling out the one from my junior year and taking a look at the senior class, something might jog my memory.
Yearbook in hand, I returned to the couch, then flipped back to the pages that contained the photos of Max’s class. Compared to a lot of places, our high school was pretty small, with only about a hundred or so students in each year. Going through them wouldn’t take too much time.
Up near the front was Raylene, since her maiden name had been Brown. In fact, her picture was right next to Evan’s, since his last name was Bryant. Maybe the placement had been a sign to him that they were meant to be together, although it sounded as though she’d needed a bit more convincing than a mere accident of alphabetization.
Wait a second….
Evan had also gone to UNM, barely squeaking in with an assist from his extracurricular activities, since the guy wasn’t exactly what you could call National Merit Scholar material. He’d played football at the university, while Max had decided to focus on acting and leave his quarterback days behind him.
But while neither of them had graduated, Max had made it through to the end of his sophomore year before being discovered and heading off to Los Angeles. Evan, on the other hand, had barely squeaked through to continue as a sophomore, and then had dropped out only a few months in. His father had suffered a minor heart attack around the same time, and the story the family put out was that Evan had left college so he could help out at the dealership, but I’d had my doubts. Most likely, he’d been failing and had used his father’s health as an excuse to leave school so he wouldn’t have to admit to anyone that his grades had sunk him.
Was Evan the Lobo — the wolf — the tea leaves were warning me about?
Maybe. I’d never liked the guy, so I didn’t have a problem believing the worst about him.
Jumping to conclusions, Skye, I scolded myself. Keep going — you’re barely through the alphabet.
Resolutely, I kept flipping pages, doing my best to dredge up from the memory banks any recollections I might have had about who’d gone away to college. Las Vegas was a pretty blue-collar town, so it wasn’t as though we boasted a lot of Ivy League candidates among our ranks. There was Cheryl Cathcart, who’d gotten a scholarship to Stanford, and there was Lewis Mondragon, who was an amazing violinist and who had gotten a full ride at Juilliard.
And there was Shawn Zales, who’d also gone to UNM on a football scholarship. He’d been our team’s wide receiver, and a huge friend of Evan’s. In fact, if a couple of our football players had gotten caught doing something squirrelly together, it was usually Shawn and Evan.
Like Evan, Matt hadn’t made it too far at UNM. In his case, though, it was because an awful rotator cuff injury had pretty much benched him his freshman year, and he’d returned to Las Vegas after realizing his days of football glory had ended before they’d even really begun. I’d sort of lost track of the guy over the years, since we’d never really been friends, although every once in a great while I’d see him at Walmart or something.
Of course, trying to view him as a suspect didn’t make much sense. He and Max hadn’t been besties, but they’d always gotten along, and I certainly couldn’t figure out why he would have had anything to do with Perry Lockhart.
Still, maybe there was a connection I just hadn’t made yet. At least I knew for a fact that Shawn had gone to UNM and played on the football team, and so that definitely made him a Lobo. Now I just had to figure out why he might be important.
And pray that discovering such an all-important fact wouldn’t take me too long.
I tried searching for Shawn Zales online but didn’t find much — a couple of old articles about his time on the Lobos football team, and that was about it. Nothing on Facebook or Instagram, so whatever he was up to these days, it obviously was something that kept him off social media.
Or maybe he was one of those people who didn’t see the need to post fifty different pictures of his breakfast, or whatever. I had an Instagram account for the coffee shop, but because I was so busy most of the time, I kept forgetting to do anything with it. It didn’t seem too improbable that Shawn might be similarly blasé about the whole thing.
And I almost picked up my phone to send Deanne a text to ask her about Shawn, but then I remembered she and Mike were going over to his parents’ house for dinner that night. Because I didn’t want to interrupt her with something that might turn out to be not so important after all, I told myself I could ask her the next morning.
Under most circumstances, my plan should have worked out just fine. I knew I was feeling urgent, but I also had to tell myself that Max’s trial wouldn’t be happening for almost three weeks, so a delay of a single night wouldn’t exactly be the end of the world. Unfortunately, she sent me a text early the next morning telling me she’d cracked a crown at dinner the night before and had to make an emergency trip to the dentist.
Be in as soon as I can, she added. Sorry!
I told her not to worry about it, even though I was inwardly chafing at yet another delay. But at least she hadn’t said she needed to take the entire day off, and once again I scolded myself for being so impatient.
Maybe I could have asked Max about Shawn, but I didn’t want to raise his suspicions if this turned out to be yet another dead end. Better to poke at it on my own and see if I could come up with something useful rather than get his hopes up over nothing.
In the meantime, I tried doing a few more internet searches on my phone in between customers, but again, all that effort yielded a big fat zero. And because I had to man the coffee shop myself until Deanne arrived, it meant I honestly didn’t have a lot of free time to dig up dirt on Shawn Zales…if such dirt even existed at all.
Deanne finally showed up a bit past one, looking apologetic and a little puffy. “I am so, so sorry,” she said breathlessly as she hurried in. “Dr. Owens was supposed to take me at eleven, but then he kept having emergency after emergency — ”
“It’s okay,” I assured her. No point in beating herself up over something that wasn’t even her fault. And because it was a Friday, things had been pretty busy, but again, she couldn’t control the coffee shop’s foot traffic. “I was able to hold down the fort. How’s the tooth?”
She grimaced. “It’s okay. He put on a temporary crown to hold me for now, but I need to go back in a week. I made the appointment for a Wednesday, though, since that’s usually our slowest day.”
Once again, I told her it was fine and she could take as much time off as she needed. I waited until after she’d gone in the back to grab an apron and had returned to the counter before I ventured, “Hey, do you remember Shawn Zales?”
“Sure,” she said. “Wide receiver, went to UNM, right?”
Just another thing I loved about my friend — she was amazing with names and faces, could remember all sorts of details about pretty much everyone she’d ever encountered, even if those meetings had been brief. That was why I’d really been hoping to pick her brain…I knew her recall would be much more detailed than mine.
“Do you know what happened to him after he had to drop out of college and come back to Las Vegas?”
Deanne frowned, mouth pursing slightly as she dipped into the memory banks. “Um…I know he’s kind of bounced around at a bunch of different jobs.” Her expression brightened, and she added, “Oh, you know that new storage facility they built up on Cinder Road? I heard he’s the manager.”
With those words, everything clicked into place with a certainty I could feel in the depths of my gut. No, I didn’t know for sure that the storage place Deanne had just mentioned was the one where the Perdition Row prop master had decided to store the production’s guns and other props, but the theory made sense — it would have been a little closer to where the bulk of the shooting was being done than Las Vegas’s two other storage facilities, and therefore a lot more convenient.
My expression must have shifted, because she asked, “What is it? Why did you want to know about where Shawn Zales is working?”
Because I didn’t know for sure whether my suspicions would turn out to be true, I thought it better to keep them to myself for the time being. “Oh, just something I was thinking about, and I figured you might know.” Trying not to be too obvious, I shot a sideways glance at the clock that hung on the wall opposite the bakery counter. Only one-thirty, which meant I had two hours before I could close the coffee shop and hurry off to the storage place to find out whether my suspicions were true. And since Deanne could already tell something was up, I knew if I said I had to leave early to handle something, she’d put two and two together right away…and most likely want to tag along on my errand. While having her as backup had its appeal, I knew I needed to do this alone. If the two of us appeared at the storage facility together, Shane would probably realize we had an ulterior motive for our visit and most likely clam up.
Well, waiting another couple of hours wouldn’t be the end of the world. I guessed that the storage facility had to be open until five or six, maybe even later, since at this time of the year, the sun didn’t start to set until almost seven. That would still give me plenty of time to head over there after work and ask Shawn Zales a few pointed questions.
And hope like hell that he’d actually tell me the truth.
Those last two hours at Levitation Latte dragged like the final class before summer vacation, but at last I was able to lock the doors, help Deanne with wiping down the tables and cleaning out the espresso machine, and then slip out the back. The whole time, I did my best not to show how anxious I was to be on my way, but she must have noticed something, because she said as she was untying her apron, “Hot date with Max this afternoon or something?”
I wrinkled my nose at her. “Not funny.”
The smile she’d been wearing stayed fixed in place. “It just seems like you have somewhere you needed to be.”
“No,” I replied. “I mean, I have to stop at the store on the way home to pick up a couple of things, but that’s it.”
She still looked a little dubious, but, to my relief, she didn’t pursue the matter further. “Well, to be fair, it has felt like an awfully long week, even if it’s only Wednesday.”
A sentiment I totally agreed with. Okay, it had been my bright idea to open the shop on Sunday so I could do some brain-picking, but I wasn’t used to working six days straight and would be very happy when Saturday finally rolled around.
We said goodbye and both got into our cars. Hers was a lot newer than mine, a shiny white Toyota Rav-4 she’d bought only the year before. Even though I supposed I could have afforded to drive something other than my 2006 Subaru, I was fine with it and planned to keep using the thing until I’d run it into the ground.
After all, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone.
Because I’d told Deanne I planned to go to the grocery store, I headed north on 7th Street for a few blocks before doubling back so I could turn onto Cinder Road and drop in at the storage facility Shawn Zales was supposedly managing.
It was the last business located on the street before the land opened up and became populated by ranchettes of three or four acres each, some with horses, a few with goats. The spot where the storage place was located had been a vacant lot for as long as I could remember, and so the business’s construction had been the topic of some gossip and speculation until everyone in town realized there wasn’t going to be anything terribly interesting built on the empty parcel, only yet another storage facility.
As I pulled into one of the three visitor parking spaces located at the gate, I took a quick look around. The place looked like pretty much every other establishment of its type I’d ever seen — i.e. long rows of low buildings with roll-up doors of various sizes set into the concrete — but this one was clearly newer and shinier than most. There was also what appeared to be an apartment built above the office. If getting to live there was part of Shawn’s compensation, the whole setup looked like a pretty good deal.
I got out of my car and did my best to ignore the nervous butterflies fluttering around in my stomach. As much as I’d tried to analyze the situation, there didn’t seem to be too many ways of approaching Shawn beyond asking him point-blank if he’d let Evan Bryant into the storage unit the Perdition Row crew had been renting. It was an odd enough question that I hadn’t figured out how to approach the topic a bit more obliquely.
Well, I’d just have to hope I caught Shawn enough off guard that he’d blurt out the truth.
There was a bell set into the doorframe at the office, and so I pushed it and waited. A minute or so later, Shawn Zales appeared.
He’d always been a big guy, but unlike Evan, he’d gotten thinner since high school, now looking more like someone who went out and shot hoops on the weekend than a man who’d once earned a football scholarship to the state university. But his biceps still appeared pretty chunky as they peeped out from under his loose gray polo shirt emblazoned with the storage facility’s logo, and he definitely didn’t seem like the sort of person you’d want to tangle with.
Not that I had any intention of getting into a confrontation. No, I just wanted to gather what information I could and then get the heck out of there.
Shawn’s light blue eyes narrowed a bit as he caught sight of me standing there. “Skye?” he said, sounding a bit incredulous.
Maybe I should have been grateful that he’d even remembered my name. But since I was here on a mission, I figured I might as well plow forward. “Hi, Shawn,” I replied. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” he said, his tone now guarded, as though he’d guessed I wasn’t there simply to rent a storage unit. If I ever actually got around to clearing out the garage, I might have need of one for the stuff I simply couldn’t bear to toss, but that day seemed pretty far off in the future.
Might as well grab the bull by the horns. “Can I ask you something?”
“What?” he replied, now sounding more wary than ever.
“Did you let Evan Bryant into the unit that film crew was renting?”
Shawn crossed his arms and stared at me, expression shifting from caution to shock. A good poker player, he was not.
“How’d you find out about that?”
I supposed I should have been glad I wasn’t dealing with a Rhodes scholar here. Otherwise, he might not have blurted out something so obviously incriminating. And his obvious surprise told me that either the police hadn’t questioned him at all, or even if they had, they hadn’t said anything about Evan because they would have absolutely no reason to believe he was involved.
“I have my ways,” I said, doing my best to sound mysterious.
His lip curled. “Still doing that witchy stuff, huh?”
If that was what he wanted to call it, fine. And if Shane’s misguided belief that I possessed all sorts of supernatural powers made him more inclined to spill the beans, then I wasn’t going to worry about the small subterfuge.
Instead of answering directly, I said, “So, you did let Evan into the unit. How did you keep that little stunt from being recorded?”
Because, even though I didn’t have much experience with storage facilities, I’d noticed there was a closed-circuit camera mounted on the wall above the office door, and so I had to believe there were similar cameras located around the facility.
Wouldn’t the police have asked Shane to hand over those recordings?
He glanced up at the camera, then said, stony-faced, “CCTV fails sometimes, you know.”
In other words, he’d made sure the camera near the particular unit the production crew was renting had failed, or maybe he’d just shut all of them off so there would have been no record off Evan being here at all. And, judging by how uncomfortable Shane now looked, I guessed he was now doubly worried that their maneuverings might have been discovered.
Figuring I’d better plow ahead, I asked, “Did Evan tell you what he wanted in there?”
For a second or two, Shawn paused, his gaze furtively darting around as if to make sure we didn’t have an audience, although we were the only two people in the vicinity. Even the street just beyond the storage facility was quiet.
Then he reached up to scratch his blond head and said, obviously doing his best to sound casual, “He said he wanted to play a joke on Max. It was no big deal.”
Some joke, shooting the director so he could frame Max for the crime. I didn’t mention that, however. It was pretty clear that Shane was in some serious denial, and I didn’t want to say anything that might make him clam up. For now, I just wanted to get as much information as I could before making my escape.
“What kind of joke?” I asked.
Shane glanced away from me. Every single line of his body seemed to signal that he wished he was someplace far, far from here. Maybe he’d put two and two together days ago, even if he didn’t want to admit to himself that his cooperation with Evan’s “joke” had led to an innocent man’s murder.
All right, I wasn’t sure if I could classify Perry Lockhart as “innocent,” but he definitely shouldn’t have gotten dragged into Evan and Raylene’s mess.
“I don’t know what the joke was,” Shane said. “Evan didn’t tell me.”
No, he probably wouldn’t have gone around advertising that he wanted to steal a gun so he could set up Max as the murderer. “You didn’t see what he took?”
“Nope.” Once again, Shawn ran a hand through his hair, ruffling his already mussed locks. “He was carrying a duffel bag, and so I guessed that whatever he’d taken, it was in there.”
Concealing the gun safe, which would have been conspicuous. I wondered how Evan had broken into it, but he probably could have used a lock pick or something. Those portable safes were a clear deterrent to casual crime, but they definitely weren’t impenetrable. I realized then that Kyle hadn’t said anything about the condition of the gun safe when the police recovered it from the storage unit. However, they’d probably reasoned that Max wouldn’t have had the combo and so had done what he needed to in order to break into the safe…especially since he’d played several roles that required the use of a lock pick and therefore might have acquired the actual skill rather than just playing at it.
Before I could say anything in response to his comment, Shawn added, now sounding worried, “I didn’t think it was a good idea, but I couldn’t really stop him.”
“Oh,” I retorted as I sent him a skeptical glance, “why not? Did he hold a gun to your head?”
Oops…bad wording.
Shawn shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and scowled down at me. “No,” he muttered, even as his gaze shifted away toward the street once again. “But his dad owns this storage company. It was Evan who got me the job. I owed him one. It was just for a joke, anyway.”
I stared at him in rebuke at that “joke” comment, and he raised guilty eyes to meet mine. “You seriously still think it was just for a joke?” I demanded.
He was too tanned to exactly go pale, but I could tell my question got to him. “No. I mean, I don’t know. Look, I didn’t have anything to do with any of this!”
Well, except for providing the means of execution, one that would make sure Max looked like the guilty party. But I didn’t bother to say any of that. This was all way beyond my pay grade, so I’d let the police chief and the D.A. figure out Shawn Zales’ level of culpability.
“He brought it back,” Shawn said next, now sounding desperate.
“Of course he did,” I said wearily. “Because he wanted the police to find the gun with Max’s prints all over it.”
Shawn’s hands were still shoved in his pockets, but I had feeling they were now clenched into fists, even if I couldn’t see them. “What’re you going to do?” he asked, his tone almost resigned, as though he’d realized the jig was up and there wasn’t much he could do about it.
“What I have to,” I said, and took a step backward toward my car, and then another. I wasn’t out of range if he decided to lunge for me, but apparently he’d decided he was already in deep enough without adding assault to his list of transgressions, because he only stood there and watched me as I hurried over to my Subaru and got behind the wheel.
I didn’t look back as I sped away.
As I headed for home, I wondered what my next step should be. Should I call the police directly with my suspicions, or should I contact Max and let him know what I’d found so he and his attorney could discuss what to do next?
Both options had their merits and their drawbacks. For one thing, I feared if I went to the police right away, they’d want to know why I’d suspected Evan at all. Explaining that I’d found some tea leaves in the shape of a wolf’s head in my teacup — and that the leaves had pointed me in the direction of the town’s former Lobos football players — would probably get me laughed right out of the station.
On the other hand, if I handed over my information to Max, he might want to take matters into his own hands and deal with Evan directly. Knowing that his erstwhile friend had done his best to frame him for murder might be just the thing to send him charging over to the Ford dealership to hand out some western-style justice.
My head hurt.
Well, I was almost home. I could brew myself some tea…and studiously avoid looking at the leaves…and then weigh the pros and cons of what I should do with the information I’d just gotten from Shawn Zales.
With the matter decided, I kept heading south on 12th Street, and then turned onto my street and into my driveway. A quick look around told me the paparazzo’s silver SUV wasn’t anywhere in evidence, so it looked as though he really had been sent packing.
Good. I went up the back stairs and into the kitchen. The first order of business was getting the kettle filled and the gas going on the stove. Something friendly and soothing to drink, like peppermint. Its clean, fresh aroma might be just the thing to help clear my head and allow me to figure out what I should do next.
Since the kettle hadn’t been full, it didn’t take long for the water to get hot enough to brew some tea. Once it was ready, I took my mug — a nicely glazed stoneware piece painted with cheerful red and yellow flowers — into the living room, along with my cell phone. That way, if I decided to call Max, I wouldn’t have to go back into the kitchen to retrieve it.
A few sips of tea made me feel better almost immediately, although I still felt edgy, not quite ready to sit down. Even so, I thought this was definitely the best thing for me to have done.
Almost without thinking, I reached for my phone. It just seemed wisest to get in contact with Max first and tell him what I knew, and then he could make the decision as to whether we should pass the information along to his attorney or go straight to the police.
To my relief, he picked up right away. “Hey, Skye,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I think I figured it out,” I told him, and then launched into a full explanation about the tea leaves and the connection between Evan and Shawn Zales, and the stolen gun.
“‘Evan’?” Max repeated, sounding both angry and mystified. “Why the hell would Evan Bryant want to do something like this to me?”
“Because he was jealous,” I said at once. I thought then of that almost-nightmare where I’d bumped into Raylene in the supermarket. In the dream, she’d said, “He loves me,” and at the time, I’d thought she was talking about Max.
But she wasn’t. No, she’d been talking about her husband, the man who must have been consumed with murderous rage when he found out she’d been carrying a torch for her ex all these years.
Okay, that was all pure speculation on my part. But my prickly sixth sense or instinct or whatever you wanted to call it was telling me that was exactly what had happened. Somehow, Evan must have found the letters Raylene had gotten from Max telling her why they’d never be a couple again — and possibly even found a copy of the restraining order — and then when he realized Max was coming to Las Vegas to shoot a movie, he’d finally be able to enact his revenge.
Or I could be completely off base. I’d let the police and the lawyers dig up all the hows and whys. For the moment, the most important thing was to let them know who the real guilty party was here.
“Oh,” Max said flatly, and then, “Oh, shit. Of course. He was pissed about Raylene.”
“Exactly,” I replied. “So, do you want to talk to your lawyer first, or — ”
“Put down the phone.”
Startled, I glanced over toward the short hall that led to the kitchen. Standing there, nearly filling the space with his bulk, was Evan Bryant.