Лори Касс - Booking The Crook

She was laughing.

“Mom and Land had these huge arguments all the time. Like once a week, practically.”

“They . . . did?”

“Sure,” Anya said. “I was going to tell you about this, but you had someone you had to talk to.”

Out of the vague recesses of my brain, a memory surfaced. That had been the day Graydon came back from training. “I said I’d call you, and I didn’t. I am so sorry.”

“That’s all right. Anyway, Mom said the fights with Land were her weekly therapy sessions. Land called them catharsis. Every time, Mom would end up firing Land. He’d ignore her and keep on doing whatever he was doing, and five minutes later they were best buddies.”

I laughed. “Sounds entertaining.”

“Oh, it was,” Anya said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “They had some knock-down, drag-out fights. You know,” she said, “I don’t think Dad understood their relationship at all. But then he never liked Land in the first place.”

We chatted for a few minutes longer. I told her I’d let her know the second I learned anything from the sheriff’s office, but when I hung up, I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the phone, wondering about the possibility of the worst complication of all.

What if Neil suspected Rowan and Land had been having an affair? What if Neil himself was the killer?

Chapter 15

My dark thoughts about Neil stayed with me through the night and into the morning. Eddie, who’d slept in the exact middle of the foot of the bed, forcing me to have my feet in every place except the place I most wanted them, was of no help whatsoever when I asked him about Neil as I got dressed.

“Do you think I should tell Ash?”

No response.

“Don’t tell me you think I should talk to the slightly scary Detective Hal Inwood instead of the friendly Deputy Ash Wolverson?”

No response again. Yay. “Do you think I should stay home today and tend to your every need?”

“Mrr,” he said sleepily, and rolled over so I could rub his belly.

“Thanks for your help,” I said.

“Mrr,” he said, or almost said, because I was pretty sure he fell asleep in the middle of it.

With no guidance from Eddie, I decided to make my decision the old-fashioned way—with a coin toss. When the quarter I dug out of the bottom of my purse landed heads up, I nodded at it and called Ash. It went to voice mail, and though I tried to be straightforward and concise, there was a good chance my message was long and rambling and lacked any focus whatsoever, just like most of the voice mail messages I’d left in my entire life.

“That went well,” I said after pressing the Off button. Still no response from Eddie. “Sarcasm, my furry friend. That was pure and unadulterated sarcasm. Do you think I’ll sound as stupid to Ash as I did to myself? Never mind,” I said quickly, because Eddie’s eyes had started to open and I didn’t want to hear his answer.

I kissed the top of his fuzzy head and headed downstairs to get the day rolling.

It was a library day, and it rolled along reasonably well from breakfast to noon, when I walked downtown for a prearranged lunch with Rafe.

“This could work out well,” I said, sliding into a booth at Shomin’s Deli.

“What’s that?” Rafe reached across the table for my hands. “Crikey, what have you been doing with those? Packing snowballs barehanded?”

“‘Crikey’? I’m not sure anyone has said that out loud for seventy-five years.”

“About time to bring it back.”

I eyed my beloved, who was smiling at me in a way that made me want to throw myself into his arms and hold him tight, forever and ever. Two things kept me from doing so. One, the table between us would have made the throwing part logistically difficult. Two, if he kept using the word “crikey,” my undying love for him might take a hard turn.

“Hey, you two.” Ash slid into the booth next to me.

Rafe bumped knuckles with him. “Have a seat, why don’t you?”

“Just here to pick up the man’s lunch,” Ash said. “Well, mine, too, but Hal was the one who made me come here because he wants that weird Swiss cheese and olive sandwich.” He made a face. “Bet Hal’s the only one in the world who eats it. Wait, really?” Because Rafe was pointing at me.

“You should try it sometime,” I said.

The fact that Hal Inwood and I shared a taste for anything was a little disconcerting, so I pushed that nugget of information to a back corner of my brain where it could keep company with Avogadro’s number, the laws of thermodynamics, and the Krebs cycle.

“Say, Minnie, you know that message you left this morning?” Ash asked. “I’m looking into it. Just wanted you to know.” He nodded at me, did the knuckle thing again with Rafe, and went to the cash register to pick up his order.

“Message about what?” Rafe asked.

I studied him, but couldn’t detect the least amount of jealousy. Excellent. “It’s about Rowan’s murder,” I said in a low voice.

“Hey.” Rafe frowned. “I thought we were partners in that, just like in everything else.”

“Partners? Does that mean we’re going to play doubles tennis?”

“Not a chance. You play the worst tennis in the history of the game.” Our order was called and Rafe slid out of the booth to fetch and carry. In seconds he was back and we were unwrapping our food: crispy chicken wrap for him, Swiss cheese and olive on sourdough for me. “But in everything else,” Rafe went on as if there hadn’t been any interruption, “we’re a matched set. So spill about what you told my man Ash.”

As I did, I realized there were other things that had gone untold, from Anya and Collier to Bax Tousely. By the end of the telling, our lunches were gone and the ice cubes in our drinks were the size of small peas.

Rafe put his elbows on the table. “Let me get this right. You think Rowan was killed for some complicated reason and that the killer will be revealed because of the combination of an empty sugar packet and a damaged headlight.”

When he put it like that, it sounded weak. More than weak; it sounded stupid. “Well, yes.”

He looked at me long enough for me to decide that what was taking him so long to say anything was that he was trying to figure out how to tell me I was completely bonkers. Finally, he said, “I think you’re right.”

“You . . . do?”

“Absolutely. What you’ve picked up on are the anomalies, and Rowan lived by rules. I bet she had a certain day of the week to do laundry, instead of doing it when the hamper was full.”

I always did laundry on Saturdays, but I was too happy with his approval of my theories to argue about that small life choice.

“So now what?” he asked.

There was only one thing to do. “It’s time to make a list.”

• • •

All I meant was a simple list of murder suspects, but Rafe wanted to make it a lot harder than it needed to be, saying that it should be a spreadsheet with columns of suspect names and rows listing dates, times, possibilities, and scenarios.

I showed him my cell phone, which I’d opened to the notes application. “I’m done. How about you?”

“That’s what I’d call a good start.” He pulled out his cell and snapped a photo. “And you were the one saying how complicated this was. How many complications can you get from a list of five names?”

We parted ways; he drove back to the middle school and I made my way to the library through two inches of new snow. It was, I thought, the perfect amount of snowfall. Not enough to mess up driving in any significant way, but enough to blanket the landscape with a fresh layer of white.

I was still thinking about snow and its powers when I arrived back at the library, and almost ran into a forty-ish woman in the entryway.