Catherine Coulter - The Edge

"Give me a couple more days, Mac. We'll go together."

Four days later, all four of us landed in Portland, Oregon. Sherlock and Savich wouldn't let us go alone.

Savich rented a Toyota Cressida and I rented a Ford Explorer at the airport. They remembered us from last time and gave us a distrustful look, but our original rental cars had been returned to the rental company, the repair bills paid, everything right and tight.

I laid back behind Savich's car, bright red and in-your-face, on the road to Edgerton. We pulled into Paul's driveway on Liverpool Street a little over an hour later. It was two o'clock in the afternoon, a Thursday, in early May. A thick wet fog hung over the coastline. Since Paul and Jilly's house wasn't even fifty feet from the ocean, the fog was thick, so thick I could barely see Savich's red car right in front of me. I ached all over in the dampness, a lingering present from my injuries in Tunisia, I guessed. I wondered if this bone-deep damp made Laura's shoulder ache and pull.

There was no one around to see me pop the lock on the front door.

"It's not really breaking and entering," Savich said, providing me some cover as I broke in. "This is your sister's house, after all."

The house felt as cold and hollow as ever.

And empty. If Paul had left any notes or journals or equipment, the cops had taken it. I imagined that he'd taken everything.

"We might as well look," Laura said beside my elbow. "You never know."

Sherlock, humming, went off to the back of the house. I stood there quietly in the living room, wondering just where Paul would have hidden something he hadn't taken.

I turned slowly, taking in the modern art, the glass and furnishings, all cold whites and blacks that filled the long room. I still hated it.

Thirty minutes later I joined Savich upstairs in Paul's laboratory. Savich was looking through an empty closet, singing a country-and-western song under his breath.

I smiled as I carefully scanned the long narrow room, looking, I suppose, for anything that might be out of place, or something that wasn't quite in the right place, like a seam in the wall. Anything that felt even slightly unusual to me.

Nothing.

Savich was singing about Tommy breaking out of that hot, dark Mexican jail…

He stuck his head out of the closet. "I even tapped around the walls. Nothing."

He rose, wiped his hands on his pants, and said, "Well, I say we go over to the Tarcher house and see how glad they are to see us."

I said, "This is probably off the wall, but once Maggie told me that Jilly was sleeping with Rob Morrison.

Let's just go see if he knows anything."

Morrison's cottage was deserted, not even a car parked in front. No fresh tire tracks. The place looked like it had been empty for a good number of days.

Savich tried the front door. It was locked. Savich looked at me and said, "This is personal, Mac." He pulled out his small pick set and went to work. He couldn't get it open. "Interesting," he said.

"It is," Sherlock said, crowding in on him. "Why would you have a Fort Knox lock on a shack?"

"Good question."

I walked around the cottage to the large glass window behind the sink in the kitchen. I whistled as I gently broke the glass. Now this was breaking and entering, for sure.

I managed not to cut myself as I pulled myself in over the sink and jumped to the linoleum floor. The lock on the front door was elaborate, state of the art. It took a minute to figure out. Finally, I flipped three switches and opened the door for Savich and Sherlock.

"A guy lives here?" Sherlock said, looking around.

"Alone? This place is as neat as ours, Dillon, just after Julie our housekeeper's been there."

"Morrison's got a housekeeper too, a retired Alaskan fisherman named Mr. Thorne. I've never met him, but he sure does good work."

We got to it. Twenty minutes later, we gathered in the living room, not a whit wiser than twenty minutes before. We'd found a file drawer that held his insurance papers, medical records, car repairs from three different mechanics, and a few odd letters from relatives, nothing interesting or informative. There were a few framed photos around, but the only one that made me stop cold was one of Jilly, set in a gold frame, facedown on the bedside table. She was standing on a cliff, smiling big, wearing a sundress and big sunglasses.

"The shed beside the house," Savich said. "I want to take a look in there."

The shed looked as old as the dirt it sat on, the wood rotting and smelling of damp, the door rickety. It was locked. Savich gave it a solid thump with his fist. The door shuddered off its hinges and fell inward.

An ungodly odor slammed out at us.

"What is it, Dillon?" Sherlock was crowding him.

"Jesus," Savich said, turning slowly and taking her arms. "Stay back."

We hadn't found Jilly.

We'd found Rob Morrison.

I looked on as Maggie watched them put her lover into a body bag. Two men heaved the body bag up into the coroner's van and slammed the doors. She just stood there, watching the van disappear around a curve about half a mile away from Rob Morrison's cottage.

She'd looked only once at his body, her hand covering her nose and mouth, then walked away and said nothing to any of us for at least ten minutes. Then we'd waited for nearly an hour before the Salem coroner's office and forensic guy showed up, Detective Minton Castanga in charge. Until now, he'd said nothing at all to Maggie, done nothing more than greeted us.

It had started raining just as the coroner's van pulled away. Castanga motioned all of us into the house.

"Talk to me," he said, and sat down on Rob Morrison's sofa.

We told him everything, except we told him we broke into the house after finding the body.

Castanga scratched his chin with his pen and said, "Now, let me get this exactly straight. You federal people have been all over this town for nearly a week now, then you four came here expecting to find Mac's sister, Jilly. Or because Morrison might know where she is?"

"That's right," I said. Laura sat beside me, listing slightly to the left, against my shoulder.

"Do you have any idea who killed Rob Morrison?" He lifted a beautifully polished red apple from the full bowl on top of the coffee table, rubbed it on his jacket arm, and took a big bite.

"None of us know who killed Rob Morrison," I said. "None of us know anything about this. His murder must somehow be connected to the drug operation that's being investigated, but we have no direct knowledge of that. We were just looking around, saw the shed door hanging open, and checked it out.

There was Morrison, dead." So the door hadn't been exactly open. I didn't think Castanga needed to know we were searching Morrison's property.

"Two gunshots in the middle of the back," Castanga said. "Someone wanted him gone and took care of it efficiently. It appears he's been dead for at least four days." Castanga put down the apple core on the polished coffee table, frowned, then gently set it atop the other apples. "Don't want to stain the wood," he said.

"You never cared about staining wood when we were married," Maggie Sheffield said.

"I was young and foolish then."

"Yeah, no more than thirty-five." Maggie stood.

Castanga said gently, "Maggie, I understand that you were seeing Rob Morrison. Hadn't you wondered where he was?"

She shrugged. The pain in her eyes was there for all to see. "He's not known for fidelity. When he didn't call me, I tried to get him a couple of times. Then I just stopped."

"We're really sorry, Maggie," Sherlock said.

"I am too," I said. "He saved Jilly's life."

Maggie's chin went up. "Thanks. Now, I'm going to start interviewing to see what I can find out."