Dead Wrong Page 9

  "Anything for Lieutenant Patton." She nodded and left, quietly closing the door to his office behind her.

  Will swore, his voice loud enough to jar him.

  Then he grunted. What was he doing, getting worked up about the opinion of some young cop who had a bad case of hero-worship for his mother? He should be glad Mom had her acolytes, not peeved because some girl he hadn't noticed in high school was now predisposed to dislike him.

  She wasn't his type anyway.

  Will started to pull the rubber band off the fat file, then hesitated and at last stuffed the file into the briefcase he'd stowed under the desk. Work first, personal later.

  He picked up the remote control and hit Play.

  "Now then," the cop with the thick neck prompted, speaking slowly as if to a child, "you pulled your own blade when you saw the knife in Mr. Amato's hand. Is that right?"

  The cowboy looked like a bobble-head doll. "That's right. Yes, sir. I saw that knife, and I pulled mine."

  * * *

  SHERIFF JACK MURRAY STROLLED into Meg Patton's office and settled into a chair facing her desk. He waited patiently while she finished a phone call.

  Hanging up, Meg said, "Nice suit."

  He looked damn good in a charcoal suit that had cost more than anything that hung in her closet. Funny that after all these years she still felt a proprietary pride because Jack Murray turned women's heads.

  Johnny Murray had been her boyfriend in high school and was the father of the baby she had found herself carrying at sixteen. She'd known he couldn't stand up to her father, though, so she'd fled without ever telling Johnny that she was pregnant.

  He'd taken it better than she deserved when she came back to Elk Springs almost fifteen years later and introduced him to the teenage boy who was his son. What she still couldn't figure out was why the man who by then went by the name Jack no longer stirred her hormones. Will sure would have liked them to get together.

  As always, thinking about Will gave her a pang. He'd been such a good kid. He and she had been closer than most mothers and sons. She'd have sworn they were.

  But she had been wrong, or Will couldn't have turned on her the way he had.

  Now Jack glanced down, as if forgetting what he was wearing. "Had a meeting with the county commissioner and then I spoke to the Rotary Club."

  "Ah."

  He slouched comfortably, but Meg wasn't fooled.

  "Anything new?" he asked, as if mildly curious about the ski conditions for that weekend.

  "A bartender at the Deschutes Inn and Tavern says Amy was there that night until one or so. Here's the weird part—after talking to him, the patrol officer spotted her Kia. It was a block away parked on the street between a couple of cars that belonged to homeowners. He knocked on doors, and everyone thought the car was some other neighbor's. There are two houses on that street that are apparently overloaded with cars. There's always a row of them at the curb."

  "Was the lot at the tavern full that night?"

  "Yeah, maybe. It's that tavern over on Metolius. Has maybe three slots. Anyway, I just got a call. The only prints in it are hers. If it was moved, the guy wore gloves."

  "The bartender see her with anyone?"

  "He thinks she shot a game of pool, maybe danced with a couple of guys. But he says she left alone."

  Jack's tone sharpened. "He's sure?"

  "Yeah." She flipped open the file to read Giallombardo's notes. "He had the weekend off. Has a girlfriend in Ashland. Which is why he missed the initial news reports. Last night was his first night back. He says he told Amy about his plans for the weekend. She told him to have fun and do something nice for his girlfriend."

  "Nobody else left around the same time?"

  "He doesn't think so. He says they weren't that busy, it being Wednesday night. He's having trouble remembering who else was there. She stuck in his mind because she was pretty and she didn't usually come in there."

  "Damn."

  Meg closed the file and sat back with a sigh. "Dead end."

  "What's your gut feeling? Was this personal?"

  "How could it be anything but?" she exclaimed in frustration. "Maybe Amy was chosen at random, but there's a message here for someone. Maybe for us. Maybe…"

  "For Will?"

  She didn't say anything.

  "That's what you're afraid of, isn't it?"

  "Am I paranoid?"

  "I hope so." He sounded grimmer than she'd hoped he would. Reassurance, this was not.

  "I don't know where to go with this," she said tiredly. "We have nothing to work with. This guy was careful. Too careful."

  "You have a couple of pubic hairs."

  "And nobody to match them to."

  He nodded. He looked weary, too, with creases between his brows. "Will isn't returning my calls."

  "He started work Monday."

  "He blew up at me when I tried to prepare him for the possibility that this murder would mean our having to re-examine the Mendoza conviction."

  "And you're surprised?"

  Jack grimaced. "I just didn't expect his reaction to be so heated."

  "Will always was passionate about the things that mattered to him."

  "You mean, he never liked to hear the voice of reason once he made up his mind."

  They shared a chuckle, too brief. She knew he'd been as wounded as she was by Will's bitter accusations six years ago. Will was his only biological child, as Beth hadn't been able to conceive after their marriage.

  Another silence had grown. Jack broke it. "You know this guy is going to kill again."

  "But maybe he's moved on. He might be in Medford or Portland or L.A. by now."

  "The guy was here skiing and the pressure just built up in him until he had to murder a woman."

  She knew what was coming.

  "It was just chance he damn near exactly mimicked a rape and murder that happened here a few years back. That your theory?"

  "More like my prayer," she muttered.

  "Uh-huh." He shifted gears. "Why do you have a newly promoted detective working this one?"

  "I don't know," Meg admitted. "But she's doing a good job."

  That sharp gaze stayed trained on her face for a moment longer. Then he nodded and rose with seeming effortlessness. "Whatever you need…"

  "Yeah. Thanks, Jack."

  After the door closed behind him, she sipped tepid coffee, thought about refilling it and didn't bother. Maybe it would have been better if she hadn't grabbed this case herself. She couldn't bring her usual objectivity to it. For her, it was an emotional minefield. She should be supervising from a distance. As it was, she was depending too heavily on a rookie detective.

  But she knew herself too well to believe for a second that she'd have been content to sit back and wait for reports. Complications just gave her all the more reason not to be passive.

  The phone rang and she grabbed it. "Patton."

  "Hey," her little sister said. "Saw Will in court today."

  "He hasn't been on the job three days!"

  "It was a prelim. Still, he's a shark. He gobbled up some hapless public defender."

  "What were you doing there?"

  "Cooling my heels waiting to give testimony in that feed store arson trial." Abby was an arson investigator. "Stuck my head into Bertrand's courtroom out of sheer boredom."

  "Did Will see you?"

  "No. I faded away before he came out."

  "Still holding a grudge?"

  "He pisses me off." Abby was unrepentant. "He owes you better."

  "Kids don't owe their parents," Meg protested automatically. "What do I do, whine, 'I raised you, I made sacrifices, now you have to be nice'?"

  "Sounds fair to me."

  "Uh-huh. Wait'll Sara hits thirteen."

  "Yeah, five is bad enough." Abby groaned. "She's been invited to two birthday parties this weekend! Chuck E. Cheese's and the roller rink. I hate birthday parties."

  "Can't you drop her and run?"

&nbs
p; "As many parents as possible have been politely asked to stay. For good reason. Would you want to try to supervise twenty kids running wild at Chuck E. Cheese's?"

  Meg just laughed. Prickly Abby, who had been far from sure she wanted to have children at all, had turned out to be a fiercely protective mother. "There's a lot of ugliness out there," she'd said once. "It's not going to touch my kids."

  "Will needs our support. Amy Owen's murder brought it all back."

  "For all of you. Yeah. I figured. Plus, Ben keeps reminding me. Have I mentioned what a lousy invalid he is?" In her usual abrupt conversational style, she abandoned the subject of her husband and asked, "You okay?"

  Touched, Meg said, "I'm fine. I'm not so sure about Will, though."

  Abby didn't want to talk about Will. "You getting anywhere on the Owen girl's murder?"

  "No. We've got zilch."

  "Not even…" Her voice became muffled, then clear again. "Now they want me in court. Sorry, Meg. Later." And she was gone.

  Meg was left to brood.

  A week had passed, and the trail had grown cold. If there'd been one in the first place. She looked down at her own notes, where she was comparing Gillian Pappas's murder with Amy Owen's. She had three columns: 1) Same; 2) Different; and 3) Questions.

  Under Same she'd listed the fact that both women were raped, the condition of the bodies including bite wounds, the jockstrap used both as murder weapon and to cover the face and the positioning of the bodies. The coloring and physical type of the two victims were too similar to be coincidence, too. Now she jotted the addition that both women had evidently been picked up late at night outside bars.

  Different: Disposal site, the fact that the killer had apparently used a condom. No skin under Amy Owen's fingernails.

  Questions: Did killer make contact in bar? Why a six-year gap between murders? And finally, did this murder have something to do with Mendoza? With Will? Or was it truly personal, in the sense that the UNSUB wanted to humiliate, torture and erase Amy Owen herself?

  Meg sometimes found that lists offered clarity. This time, she was left with the same questions.

  What scared her was that it might take another murder, another body, to provide any answers.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WILL SPOTTED his friends right away across the crowded room. Travis and a buddy of his, an artist who welded steel into huge sculptures, had already claimed a booth. Jody Cox of the cute pointy face and half-inch-long fingernails was squeezed in next to Bruce Restak, the artist friend.

  J.R.'s Sports Bar was a popular hangout for Will's old crowd, he'd discovered during brief visits home. It was a nice place, packed tonight. Flames flickered in a massive stone fireplace on one side; a bar lined with swiveling stools stuck out into the room like a horseshoe. Huge flat-screen television screens hung above the bar, visible from every seat in the house. Tonight, a hockey game played soundlessly. A side room held pool tables and was as crowded. Voices, shrieks and laughs almost drowned out the music, a top ten favorite by the Dixie Chicks. Pretty waitresses in short skirts, Ugg boots and tight Ts edged through the crowd with trays held deftly overhead. J.R.'s appeared to be the hottest spot in Elk Springs on a Saturday night.

  It took Will ten minutes to wend his way to the booth, because he knew so many people he had to greet on the way. Dirk Whittaker, who'd put on another twenty or thirty pounds since Will last saw him, was well on his way to being drunk, and Marcie seemed pissed, while the other couple with them appeared to be amused by their squabbling. Bronwen Fessler sat on a stool at the bar with a couple of guys, but he stopped when she waved him over. She gave him a kiss that was more enthusiastic than he expected, then said, "Do you know Doug Jennings? He was Amy's husband."

  "We've met." But he hadn't recognized him. No wonder the guy was swaying, glassy-eyed, on his stool. Will held out his hand. "I'm really sorry about what you're going through. We all loved Amy."

  Apparently not noticing Will's outstretched hand, Jennings mumbled, "Loved Amy," and retreated again to his drink.

  Bronwen introduced the other guy, who was Jennings's roommate, but Will didn't catch the name. Amy's ex looked like crap. What was he doing out with friends only a week after her murder? Will couldn't remember the first time he'd even pretended to have fun after Gillian was killed, but he knew it had been months later. He sure as shit hadn't been playing for sympathy from pretty women within days.

  Or was he being uncharitable?

  He excused himself, only to immediately come face-to-face with Karin, the friend of Amy's he'd dated. Why couldn't he remember her last name?

  "Karin," he said, before seeing the man sitting across from her. "Gavin! Hey, aren't you joining us?"

  His buddy said, "Didn't know we were doing anything tonight."

  Damn. Nobody had called him.

  Will shrugged. "No big thing. Travis and I figured we'd run into everybody here. If you two want to join the party, come on over."

  Karin smiled at Will. "That sounds like fun." Belatedly, she said, "If you want to, Gavin."

  Uh-oh. Maybe she thought he hadn't called again just because he was busy finding a place to live and starting work. It was going to be awkward if Gavin thought they were starting something and she was flirting with Will instead.

  Gavin and he had never been best friends, but they'd hung out since—jeez—maybe middle school. Gavin had been too short to play basketball, but he'd been a wide receiver on the high school football team and played outfield in baseball. He'd talked about going pro, but everyone knew he wasn't fast enough to play even minor league. He was a smart guy, but his grades were erratic mostly because of his attitude. He'd gone to the community college for a while, but Will didn't think he'd gotten a degree. He seemed to be doing okay for himself, though, selling cars.

  Will was actually a little surprised to see Karin with him, then ashamed of himself for letting the thought cross his mind. Still…Gavin had been a weedy-looking guy in high school, and the years hadn't helped. His hairline was already receding, his eyes were a little too close together, and he had a way of being pushy to the point of abrasiveness that didn't usually appeal to beautiful women.

  As the two followed him to the corner booth, where they all wedged in amid general greetings, it occurred to him that their group had gotten rather incestuous. Everyone had dated everyone at some time since they all started hanging out in seventh grade or so. Any new addition to the group was welcome. In the couple years since she'd arrived in Elk Springs, Karin had already worked her way through most of the unmarried guys, from what he heard. Since Will hadn't called her again, Gavin was probably next on her list. And look at the way Jody Cox was hanging on Travis's artist friend, another newcomer to their longtime crowd.

  Will liked Restak, a hulking fellow with shaggy black hair, acne scars and a hearty laugh. New blood was always a good thing. He was ignoring Jody while he and Travis engaged in some intense discussion about an exhibit that the National Endowment for the Arts had just pulled funding from because of complaints that some of the pieces were obscene.

  "If art doesn't shock us in one way or another, it's not art. It's decor," Restak declared, before draining his mug.

  A waitress brought another pitcher and more chilled mugs. At the same time, another group of friends grabbed the next booth. Vince Baker, who'd been a hell of a shortstop, had married Maria Rodriguez, his cheerleader girlfriend from high school, over the protests of his parents who didn't like the fact that she was Mexican. That's not what they said, but everyone including Maria knew that's why they didn't think she was good enough for him. Will wondered how she got along with her in-laws now. This was the first time he'd seen them in a while. Maria had a glow that probably had to do with her bulging belly.

  Nita Voss had been Will's girlfriend for part of his junior year. He'd dumped her, not all that gracefully, when Christine Nylander arrived as a new student at the high school. He hadn't seen Nita in years; she'd been married and divorced, he'd heard. S
he looked really good in a figure-molding black turtleneck and tight jeans, her curly blond hair tumbling over her shoulders.

  "Hey," he said.

  "Will! Someone said you're back in town." Her gaze wandered from him. "Travis, hi!"

  Before Will got a chance to say anything else to her, Justin Hill, who'd arrived right behind her, wrapped an arm around her and she smiled up at him. She scooted into the booth between him and Maria, still nestled in the curve of his arm. Will could only see the back of her head now.

  Justin had ski-raced with Travis and ended up being a hotshot in freestyle skiing. Travis, who had flung himself down sheer faces polished to gleaming ice in the world's toughest downhill races, had once said with admiration, "You know what? Justin is goddamn crazy. He'll do anything."

  Tonight he gesticulated wildly with his free hand as he described some kind of complicated flip and the way he'd gone down. He guzzled half a mug of beer. "What the hell," he boasted, laying his arm along the back of the booth and half turning so that he was speaking to Will's table as much as his own. "I'll kick butt at the world championships."

  Travis's expression didn't change, but his stillness spoke of regrets he tended to shrug off.

  "Why are you home?" Gavin asked, before Will could change the subject.

  "We have a week break. I didn't make it for Christmas, and the parents like to see me once in a while." Justin lifted a mug in salute to Travis. "Damn shame I don't get to run into Booth over there. We used to find ourselves in the same hotels in places like Schladming or Bad Gastein every so often."

  Travis didn't say anything.

  "Where are you off to next?" Jody Cox asked.

  "Italy. Pozza di Fassa. Then back to Quebec."

  Gavin said, "Did you see Doug Jennings here? Short mourning."

  Will glanced at him in surprise. He wouldn't have said that Gavin was the sensitive type, but the attempt to change the subject was pretty obvious.

  Maria Baker nodded. "He cried when I told him I was sorry about Amy. I think maybe Bronwen talked him into coming tonight. She probably thought it would be good for him."

  "My generous wife." Vince's grin gently mocked her. "More likely she's making a move on him."