Taylor Smith - Deadly Grace

“Yeah, I guess I can see that.”

“So, you reenlisted, then stayed on? What kind of work did you do?”

Cruz hesitated, loathe to give details. He’d re-upped as penance for his sins, and penance it had turned out to be when word leaked out that he’d testified against those involved in a murder and subsequent cover-up conspiracy in his old unit. Being the guy who sent four former buddies to Leavenworth had earned him no points with his new outfit. On the contrary. He’d already endured two savage beatings he refused to talk about by the time the Criminal Investigation Division finally moved in and yanked him out of there. When they’d seen he’d taken a couple of criminology courses during his college days, they’d offered to train him as a professional investigator. It had been an offer he knew he couldn’t refuse. The only alternative was to return to a front-line unit and the near certainty of being taken out sooner or later by some hothead’s “friendly fire.”

He wasn’t about to tell Berglund that, though, and not just because the deputy, like so many others, would probably think he should have kept his mouth shut and not testified. No one in the service liked the CID, just like no city cop had anything good to say about internal affairs divisions. Cops who policed other cops and soldiers who investigated other soldiers learned to stick to their own kind and watch their backs.

“It was mostly field work I did,” he told Berglund. “Army life appealed, I guess.”

“Humph. Well, you’ve seen some places, I guess. Me, I did the run between San Diego and Cam Ranh Bay when I was in the Navy. Had a furlough in Bangkok once, attended police academy in St. Paul. Took that vacation in California with the wife and kids. Period. Rest of the time, I’ve been right here.”

“Havenwood seems like a nice town.”

“Yeah, it is. Some people might find it a little slow-moving for their taste, but I never wanted to live anywhere else.” He paused for a moment, as something flashed across his features, like a bad memory or an image of ghosts walking on his grave. “This thing with Grace Meade and the fire and all, though…stuff like that doesn’t happen around here, you know? You get your Saturday night bar fights and too many drunk kids wiping themselves out on the highway every year, but a murder….”

It happened everywhere, Cruz wanted to tell him, but he just nodded.

“How long are you planning to stick around?” Berglund asked.

“Only as long as it takes.”

“You just need a statement from Jillian, right.”

“Pretty much. I wouldn’t mind talking to a few people who know her, too, just to round out the report I have to make back to Scotland Yard. You know, the usual background stuff. Can you suggest some names?”

Berglund seemed non-committal. “I can’t think who, at this point. She’s been gone a long time. She left right after high school. Went to college out east and hasn’t been back here much since. Drops in to see her mother once in a while, that’s about it.”

“What about family and friends?”

“Her mother was the last of her family. Jillian was an only child. Her grandparents helped raise her, but they’ve been gone for years. As for friends…” Berglund shrugged. “You know how it is. You lose touch. Seventeen years is a long time.”

A long time, Cruz noted, but a very precise number—one that Berglund hadn’t even paused to calculate. Was that only because Jillian’s whereabouts had been on his mind since this business with the fire and her mother’s death? Or was there more to it than that? He studied the deputy out of the corner of his eye. Berglund couldn’t be much older than Jillian Meade, and like the man said, it was a small town. They had to have known each other since they were kids. How well? Obviously well enough for Berglund to have counted every year since she’d been gone.

“What about her father?” he asked.

“She never knew him. He was a flyer, killed during the war. Her mother was English. They met over there. Apparently she was working for British special ops, and Joe Meade was flying for the OSS. You know what that was?”

Cruz nodded. “The Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA.”

“That’s the one. They say Grace was quite the bombshell in those days, like some kind of Mata Hari, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, the Brits had sent her behind the lines into France, and Joe was flying secret supply missions to the Resistance. His plane got shot down and the Resistance hid him from the Germans for a couple of months or so while they looked for an opportunity to smuggle him out of the country. That’s how the two of them met. Kinda like a movie, you know. Got married in secret by a French priest and were together long enough that Grace got pregnant, but then they were separated. Joe Meade was killed trying to get back to England, and Grace got stuck in France till the end of the war.”

“So that’s how Jillian ended up being born there,” Cruz said. When Berglund gave him a curious look, he explained, “I saw it on the passport details that were sent over to the Bureau.”

“Oh, right. Anyway, that’s about it. Joe’s folks sent for Grace and the baby after the war, invited them to come and live here in Havenwood with them.”

“And Mrs. Meade never remarried?”

Berglund shook his head.

“You sure know a lot about the family’s history,” Cruz noted.

“Everybody in Havenwood knows that story. Joe Meade’s a local war hero. My kids go to Joseph Meade Elementary School. So did I, for that matter. As for Grace, well, she made her own mark on the town. It can’t have been easy for her, I guess, leaving everything and everyone she knew and coming out here to live. But by the time she died, there wasn’t a thing went on here she didn’t have a hand in. Ran half the town, for that matter. Her funeral’s probably going to be the biggest one the town’s ever seen. I can’t imagine many who won’t be there.”

Except her daughter, Cruz thought.

Muffled voices sounded behind the glassed-in reception area, and they looked over to see an older woman speaking to the orderly.

“This must be the psychiatrist,” Berglund said, pushing himself off the window ledge.

Cruz had to agree. The woman wore no white coat, just a long, belted navy cardigan and slacks, but there was no mistaking the authoritative bearing of someone used to having her way. Sure enough, the orderly nodded in the direction of the two men in the waiting room. The woman disappeared behind a partition, then reappeared, frowning and pushing her way though the heavy door that separated the waiting area from the ward beyond.

Tall and heavyset, she had frizzled, steel-gray hair coiled in a knot on top of her head.A pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses dangled from a chain slung around the collar of the brightly colored blouse she wore under the navy cardigan, a riotous Rorschach test pattern of pinks, white and oranges. As she strode toward them, hands jammed in the pockets of her sweater, the crepe soles of her brown Hush Puppies squeaked on the tiled floor.

“I’m Dr. Helen Kandinsky. What can I do for you gentlemen?”

Her irritable expression put Cruz in mind of Miss Nugent, his junior high English teacher, whose habit it was to send all the “Mexicans” in her classes to seats at the back of the room. They could do what they wanted back there, she said, as long as they kept quiet, because she had no intention of wasting her time on bean pickers. Somewhere in America, people were marching for civil rights, but Miss Nugent obviously hadn’t heard the news. The fact that Cruz’s family had been in California nearly two hundred years cut no ice with her, either. No amount of effort ever earned him more than the standard “C” she handed out to every student with a Spanish-sounding last name, the minimum required to ensure that there would be no repeat appearances in her class.