Outside the Wasabi Grill, the man who looked like Matthew McConaughey sat cross-legged on the pavement. He held chopsticks above a platter of sushi on the low table in front of him, the tips floating and quivering like a divining rod.
Lia knelt by him, placing a twenty in his tip jar as he held her with blue, blue eyes. The chopsticks dipped to a slice of dragon roll.
“Fame,” he said. “Taste of the dragon, my love, and it will be yours.”
He lifted the delicacy.
Viola woofed.
Damn dog. If she didn’t open her eyes, maybe Matthew would come back.
“Viola, stop it. I’m here. Gypsy’s here. It’s my apartment and neither one of us is going away. Go upstairs if you don’t like it.”
A hand stroked Lia’s cheek. Her annoyance melted away with the dream. Peter sat on the side of the bed, looking down at her.
She tugged on his shirt. “You can stay, but you gotta take your clothes off.”
“I feel so cheap.”
“I promise I won’t look.”
Peter groaned. “I wish. I’m not done for the night.”
“Two minutes ago, Matthew McConaughey was in love with me. He told my fortune with sushi and said I would be famous if I ate the dragon roll. You woke me up. Now I’ll never be famous. You gotta give me something.”
“Eat the dragon roll? You fell for that?”
She elbowed his thigh.
“He’s a little old for you, isn’t he?”
“This was 1997 Contact McConaughey.”
“Celebrity preacher? He didn’t quite pull that one off.”
“Millions of women across the globe don’t care.”
“You sure that wasn’t Texas Chainsaw Massacre McConaughey? It’s easy to get them confused.”
“That’s pathetic and unworthy of you.” Lia glanced at the bedside clock. “It’s after midnight. What do you need to do?”
Peter kicked off his shoes and slid in beside her. She sat up, leaning against his chest for a bit of normal in a day that had been anything but.
“I have to write the search warrant for Brewer’s place if we want to get in first thing tomorrow. We need to prove he held Jenny against her will, and we have to nail it down before he sees a judge.”
“How is Jenny holding up? I told her she could stay here if she didn’t want to be alone, but she declined.”
“Donna Merrill is with her. Jenny’s tougher than she looks. She’ll make a solid witness.”
“You’ve had a long day. Did Dick have that much to say?”
Peter huffed a humorless laugh. “It took four hours to get cleared on the bullet I put in Susan’s leather seat, and I had to explain to Parker how I missed center mass from three feet. Then there was the added complication of the shot in Susan’s front fender. After that I got to talk to Brewer.”
“Was Parker upset?”
“Unofficially, no. My bad aim saved us all from the mess that comes with a shooting.”
“I’ve seen the videos. I know how fast things can go bad. You took a huge risk.”
His chest shifted under her cheek when he shrugged. “He was face down on the seats. I had time to get off a second shot before he could aim.”
She curled her hand into a fist and gently thumped his chest to emphasize each word. “Don’t. Do. That. Again.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“How did it go with Dick?”
“We got Brewer for stealing Susan’s car. The Davis kidnapping will probably get dropped because it’s not clear he knew Davis was in the car when he took it.”
Lia’s mouth dropped open. “But—”
“I know and you know Brewer knew Davis was in the car, but there’s what we know and what we can prove. If we try, some idiot jury will believe him and it will poison the carjacking. Juries are like that. If one part of a case is bad, they’re inclined to let them walk on the whole thing.”
“But what about Jenny?”
“No one saw Jenny under duress.”
“I said I couldn’t see his hand. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have his gun on her.”
“Speaking of which, don’t you ever do that again.”
“You had no backup. He might have gotten away if I hadn’t delayed them.”
Peter kissed the top of her head. “You could have been shot again. I’d rather let a hundred kidnappers escape than see you hurt.”
Lia rubbed the dime-sized dimple in her thigh. “I won’t sit home and knit when you’re out on a limb like that.”
“Since when do you knit?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I let the air out of two of his tires, Tonto. I had it covered.”
“You could have told me that.”
“I didn’t know you were running to my rescue. But it didn’t hurt having you on the scene as a witness, especially after the way Susan went on about Jenny.”
“Does Dick deny being in the Johnsons’ house?”
Peter snorted, shaking his head so that his chin brushed her hair. “You should have seen him in the interview room, all cocky like he was checking out the talent at happy hour instead of cooling his heels in police custody. Then he tells a story about Jenny picking him up for hot, kinky sex.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“And it’s my job to keep him talking. I have to make like we’re just two guys and everything he says is reasonable. Then I had to walk him through it all, like how she wanted him to tie her up—”
“That’s crazy!”
“It is, but I needed the details. That’s what hangs you.”
“And did he?”
“Hang himself? There were a number of inconsistencies in his story. I felt filthy after I came out of there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. The payoff is, he thinks he pulled it off.”
“How did he get from kinky sex to the Johnsons’ house?”
“All her idea. He went along for the ride, hoping for more kinky sex. That’s a B and E, but still no kidnapping. The prosecutor wanted to arrest Jenny, but agreed to hold off when I pointed out it was Brewer’s lock rake and we needed to explore her claims of kidnapping before we went there.”
Lia sat up, stretched and yawned. “Poor Jenny. What’s his explanation for why she brained him?”
“Jealous because Susan showed up. That, or she’s nuts. He barely knew her, so who knows?”
“And he stole the car because?”
“He thought she took off with his tools.”
“As if they weren’t all over the parking lot. He has an answer for everything, doesn’t he?”
“Guy didn’t turn a hair. Says he lied to Waller because it wasn’t Waller’s business if he was playing hooky with Jenny.”
“Geezlepete. I’m still half asleep. Make coffee while I get up?”
“Coffee? You?”
“Someone needs to keep you company in your misery”
Lia grabbed a robe and splashed water on her face before she joined Peter in the kitchen. A steaming cup of coffee with cream waited for her on the table. Peter sat on the other side, his face in his laptop and a hand under the table, feeding biscuits to Viola.
Chewy and Gypsy abandoned Lia in favor of treats. Viola growled, sending Gypsy behind Lia’s robe. She scooped up the whimpering pup and cooed.
“There there, little girl. I won’t let the mean, nasty bitch get you.” She held Gypsy pinned to her lap as she took a sip of coffee. “You’re pursuing Dick as an opportunistic fortune hunter, right?”
“That’s the prevailing theory.”
“I’ve been thinking about this all day. What if it’s more? What do you know about Dick? When did he enlist?”
“He has no arrests. I put in the paperwork to get his military records, but that takes weeks unless you have contacts, which I don’t. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking about those vandalized yearbooks and how those same years were missing from Ruth’s set. I’m wondering if we had them but Dick took them.”
“We have no reason to connect Brewer with our break in.”
“Gypsy connects him.”
“How do you figure that?”
“She went crazy in the parking lot today, just like she did during the break in. I think it was Dick, and she remembered his scent. If it was Dick, it means he had a reason to hide something from high school.”
“Like a connection to Jenny? She didn’t know him.”
“People change in thirty years. I bet he wears size eleven shoes.”
“It’s a common size.”
“Don’t be a jerk.”
“You’re connecting dots that may not belong on the same page. He has a lock rake. Why go through the coal chute?”
“He saw the discrete ‘this house is alarmed’ sticker on the door? Tell me this. How old is he?”
Peter rubbed the emerging stubble on his chin. “I don’t remember. Babe, I have a warrant to write and I need to catch whatever sleep I can. Can you play Scooby Doo tomorrow?”
Lia searched Peter’s haggard face. “Can I see the yearbook photos Alma sent you?”
Peter sighed. “If I let you look at them, will you let it go for tonight?”
“Unless I find something.”
Peter punched up a file and pivoted his laptop so Lia could see.
He came around the table and stood behind her. She found Cowboy Dick on the third scanned page.
“Here.” She pointed at the obese boy painting scenery. “Look at the eyes.”
Peter bent over her shoulder. “Maybe, maybe not. Why didn’t they put names in the caption?”
“Are the yearbooks you got from Hughes still in the living room? I bet we find him in the student portraits.”
Greasy hair fell into the eyes of the boy staring sullenly at Lia. “That’s Dick as a sophomore in 1987. No one would recognize him now.”
Peter accepted the yearbook from her and examined the photo. “He definitely got the army makeover. If I’d done the math when I ran him, I would have realized he was too young to enlist when Heenan went missing.” He inserted a slip of paper to mark the page, then set the book aside on the couch.
Lia yawned. The coffee wasn’t working. Probably just as well. “Commodore got his dates wrong or Dick didn’t retire with a pension. Do you think he got kicked out?”
“Maybe. You talk about the attic while you were at Boswell’s?”
Lia tried to remember, couldn’t. “It would be like Terry to tell a contractor about this place. Dick had to know Ruth. I bet he signed her yearbooks.”
“It’s a good bet Brewer knew Jenny, or knew of her. There’s no way to know who vandalized the Hughes yearbooks, or when it was done. Unless we can tie him to the break-in, knowing Jenny only supports the fortune hunter angle.”
“You’ll check his shoes?”
“It’ll be a stretch, but I’ll work it into the search warrant. Anything else, Nancy Drew?”
Lia had that look on her face, the one where she wanted to say something but wasn’t sure how to say it. Peter raised an eyebrow and waited.
She took a sip of coffee, then held the cup against her chest. It was something she did, for the warmth, or maybe it helped her pull her thoughts together.
“I want to run something by you.”
“Okay.”
“Picture this: You’re this kid nobody pays attention to, but you hear stuff. You hear about this old magician who doesn’t want anyone to know he only has one leg and it reminds you of a story.”
Reasonable assumptions. He’d go along for the ride. “Where’d he hear the story?”
“Who knows. If Jay Overstreet heard it, Dick could hear it. And Overstreet put it together as soon as the bones turned up. The point is, Dick knew about Malachi’s missing loot, and later he overhears Jenny talking about the leg in drama club. You’re a kid nobody notices, so what do you do?”
“You find the treasure and impress all the people who ignore you.”
Lia flipped a palm over in a classic game show hostess gesture. “And how do you do that?”
“You’re young and dumb. You figure you’ve got it all over an old guy with one leg and you’ll make him tell you.”
“Only it didn’t work, or Brewer would still be living it up in Cancun or wherever the big party place was in the eighties. He never would have enlisted.”
“Probably would have moved on to Cabo, but Cancun will do.”
“Something goes wrong. He kills poor Andrew before he finds out where the treasure is and buries him by the creek. He’s smart enough to use the plane ticket.”
“This is some thread you’re pulling. Why does our young killer return to the scene of the crime?”
“It was a seminal experience. It made him a man. He wonders about it, secretly relives it. Maybe he never gave up on finding the loot, and staring at the grave every so often keeps it alive for him.”
“You have been thinking about this. How does the military fit in?”
“You kill someone. You do your best to hide the body, but in your head that shallow grave is flashing neon lights. Maybe you have bad dreams about it.
“You know you’ll trip yourself up and get caught. You enlist in the army to get as far away as you can, so no one connects you when the body pops up.”
“A modern version of Poe’s telltale heart.”
“Exactly. Only the body doesn’t pop up. Nobody is looking for you. After twenty years you feel safe and you want to come home.”
“You just wrote a great movie about an old yearbook photo and the possibility of a size eleven shoe. Even if we can match the shoe print to Brewer, that’s just another B and E. We confront him about high school, and he says, ‘Yeah, I went to Hughes, so what?’
“Neither of those things gets us a murder charge. I’m not saying you’re wrong—though it’s a monumental long shot—but it’s not enough to even ask him about it. If Brewer killed Heenan, he won’t roll over in interview, not after the performance I saw today.”
Lia’s shoulders sagged.
Peter squeezed her hand. “But you’ve painted a fascinating picture of the crime.”
“What tattoos does he have?”
“That’s a heck of a segue.”
“You say he’s cocky. I’m imagining this sly kid with a big secret he’s really proud of. He needs to commemorate the event, even if he’s the only one who knows what it means. Tattoos are great for that.”
An interesting point, but a dead end. “He has a tattoo for his division. That’s it.”
“Military also runs to medals.” Lia’s eyes flew open. “You said Jenny asked if you found a coin with the bones. What was on the coin?”
“It was Irish. It had a harp on it.”
“What was on the back?”
“I never asked.”
“Dammit, dammit, dammit.” She grabbed her phone and hit the tiny microphone on the Google bar. “Irish coin image.”
Tapping impatiently, she scrolled through the results, turned the phone to Peter. “You’ve got him. The son of a bitch was wearing it the day Terry found the bones.”
“I don’t remember seeing this.”
“It was in a mounting, hanging on a chain around his neck. I bet he hasn’t had it on since I saw it. Maybe he was so used to wearing it he didn’t think about it until I said something at Boswell’s.”
“I’ll be damned. If he was smart, he pitched it down the first sewer grate he came to.”
“You think he’s that smart?”
“No. I think he’s dumb enough to think he’s smarter than everyone else, and he still has it. Which means I need to put it in the search warrant.”
“It’s not evidence of Jenny’s kidnapping. How will you justify it?”
“It would establish a connection between Brewer and Heenan, which would support Jenny’s story.”
“Won’t his attorney laugh you out of court? There must be millions of Irish shillings.”
“We build his coffin one nail at a time, Woman Who Thinks too Much.” Peter looked at his watch. “Two o’clock. I can grab a few hours sleep before I chase down that warrant.”
Lia narrowed her eyes. Peter followed her line of sight to the coffee table where the candlestick sat, now selectively polished to retain Ruth’s fingerprint.
Lia stroked the silver base with her thumb. “I know how to catch him.”