Jonathan Kellerman - Flesh And Blood

Instead of answering Tish returned inside, came back minus the child and with her hair loosened. Walking halfway across the dirt, she stopped, folded her arms under her bosom, and shouted, “Hunting.”

“Hunting what?”

“Usually he brings back birds. Or a deer.”

Milo muttered, “Dan’l Boone.” To Tish: “Where’s he hunt, ma’am?”

“Up near Castaic. What do you need him for?”

“Doing some follow-up, ma’am – May we come in?”

“Follow-up on what?”

“Your husband phoned me today, and I was getting back to him. How long’s he been gone?”

Tish blinked three times. “Coupla days.”

“So he must’ve called me from somewhere else. He have a cell phone?”

“Nope.”

“But he did take camping gear.”

“Yeah.”

“Guns too.”

“He’s hunting,” said Tish.

“What, the shotgun?”

“I don’t know what he takes. He wraps everything up in plastic. I don’t pay attention to guns – Why all these questions?”

“Just curious.”

“What, you’re saying Lyle could shoot someone?”

Milo paused. “Has that been on your mind, ma-”

“No way,” she said. “He keeps that stuff just for home protection and hunting – that’s all, and I like that. He’s a good man, why’re you hassling him?”

“I don’t mean to hassle, ma’am. So you haven’t heard from Mr. Teague in two days?”

“I told you, he don’t have one of those.” She pointed to the cell phone. Her tone said the deficiency was a crime for which someone needed to be blamed.

“Hmm,” said Milo. “Well, he did call me.”

“Well, he didn’t call me .” Tish aimed for defiance, but her gray eyes filled with hurt. She stepped a few yards closer. “Sometimes he uses a pay phone – What did he want?”

“To talk about Lauren.”

“ Her? What for?”

“She was his daughter, ma’am.”

“Not if you asked her .”

“What do you mean, ma’am?”

Crossing her arms, she covered several more feet, stopped well before the gate. Bare feet, toes grayed with dust. The nacre of chipped pink polish glinting through. “She wasn’t nice to us.”

“Lauren wasn’t?”

“Not to me or him or the girls.”

“I thought she brought the girls Christmas presents.”

Tish smirked. “Oh, sure . Big deal . She comes in wearing her cool clothes and her cool makeup and hypers them up with all that candy and junk, and then when she leaves I’m nice enough to thank her and say she can take home some of the apricot pie I baked from fresh apricots because that’s the kind of person I am, she laughs at me and looks down at the pie slice I’m offering her and says, ‘No, thanks.’ Like I stuffed shit in a crust or something. Then she says, ‘At least you’ve got better manners than him . Thanking me. Which you should, ’cause I didn’t have to do this.’ And I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ And she’s like, ‘You better believe you should thank me, ’cause you don’t deserve a damn thing from me – you’re not even my family and neither is he and neither are your rugrats.’”

Tish’s lip trembled. “Just like that. Nasty mean. One minute she’s playing with the girls, and then she’s insulting us. I could’ve trashed her back, but I just said, ‘Well, sorry you don’t like apricot pie. Good-bye.’ And she laughed again and was like, ‘I came here ’cause I’ve got class – something you’ll never know, chubby.’ Then she prancie-pranced out the door.”

Tish released her arms, let the wrists go limp. “She prancie-prances around like she’s doing one of her strip dances – which is the class she had, a stripper and a whore. So who’s she to be snobbing and styling on me? I was so mad, it gave me a migraine, but at least she was out of here. Then, just as I’m closing the door, she turns around and starts coming back , and I’m like, Okay, Tish, you controlled yourself good, but she’s asking for it. I really thought we were gonna get into it, and I tell you, I was ready. But she musta figured that out or maybe it was the girls, running around the house, in and out of rooms, screaming and wild, all hypered up ’cause of her. Or maybe she was just a chicken – whatever.”

“She didn’t come back.”

“She didn’t come back all the way – just stopped in the middle, right back there.” Gesturing behind her. “Then she gives me a look and laughs and shakes her ass outta here. Laughing – loud, so the neighborhood could hear. That’s what she was after – to humiliate us.”

Milo said, “So what do we do for the next round of yuks?”

“Try to find Lyle?”

We got in the unmarked, and he drove back to Ventura Boulevard. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s call out the hounds and track the sonofabitch. And when we find him, we’ll have a weenie roast and tell ghost stories. While we’re at it, we can work in some fishing.”

“Fishing and hunting,” I said. “Wonder how many firearms he’s packing.”

“Given that bad eye of his, he wouldn’t be much good with a bow and arrow.”

“Jane’s dead, and he just happens to be gone,” I said.

“I’ll call the sheriffs up at Castaic, see if they can locate him, but I’m not putting in a requisition for a search party. Lyle may have all the charm of a warthog with piles, but at this point, before the ballistics and the registration on the gun that did Jane come in, he’s no suspect . And her other husband is. Ruiz and Gallardo should have word soon enough on all of it .”

“Even if the gun was registered to Jane or Mel,” I said, “that doesn’t rule out an outside shooter. Let’s say Jane was afraid, made a run for the bedroom, and grabbed her own gun, but whoever frightened her got hold of it.”

“When it comes to theories, you are human flypaper, my friend. First Dugger for Dr. Bloodlust, now Father of the Year for Lyle.”

“I’ve always been goal-directed.”

“Me too,” he said. “Least that’s what my third-grade teacher said. But screw goals. I need to connect the dots, and right now I don’t even have a pencil.”

At White Oak he said, “The thing that bothers me is maybe I narrowed my focus too quickly. I’m not saying the Duke thing or Lyle is wrong, but there’s always the danger of tunnel vision.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know Lauren… meant something to you, but the hard truth is she sold her body for a living, and women who do that live dangerously. The whole thing could trace back to some other john. Hell, I haven’t even followed up on her supposed modeling – the garment industry connections. There’s a real clean business for you – sweatshops and kickbacks.”

“What about Shawna and Duke ?” I said.

He rotated his head, winced, rubbed his face. “I don’t know, Alex. My gut still tells me Shawna isn’t related to the rest of it.”

“Your gut’s worth listening to.”

“Thanks, Doc – see you next session.”

We traveled in silence all the way to Beverly Glen and Valley Vista, where Milo began the trip back to the city.

He let out a long, raspy sigh. “I respect your intuition also, Alex, but even an O-C pit bull takes a breather between bouts. Let’s both step back for a while. Maybe try to relax.”

ROBIN SAID, “FIRST the daughter, now the mother?”

We were on the big couch in the living room. She was sitting at the far end, just out of reach, still wearing her work overalls and her red T-shirt. I’d come home determined to put everything aside, had ended up talking about all of it: Lauren’s aborted therapy, Phil Harnsberger’s party, Michelle, Shawna, Jane Abbot, Mel Abbot’s senescent terror.