Murder on the Horizon Page 7

  “Holy cow!” Gracie shot straight up in bed and tossed back the sheet. “Holy cow!” she yelled again, tipping herself off the camp mattress that served as her bed and ending up on hands and knees on the wooden floor, heavy hair draping both sides of her face. Her nose and upper lip throbbed.

  Gracie shook her head slowly as if she could dislodge the images of Rob swirling inside her head. The feel of his mouth on hers, the warmth of his hands on her body was so vivid, she wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to look up and see him sitting in her bed.

  A faint whine drew her eyes to Minnie, who sat in the darkness six inches away.

  “Ohhh, sorry I scared you, little girl,” Gracie said, reaching over to stroke the silky head. “Scared my friggin’ self.”

  She pushed herself to her feet and padded barefoot downstairs to the kitchen with the dog on her heels.

  A glance at the clock above the doorway told her it was 5:18 a.m. “Too early to be up. Too late to go back to bed.” In the mudroom off the kitchen, she scooped a cup of dry dog food from a giant bag next to the back door and dropped it into Minnie’s silver dish.

  Back in the kitchen, she grabbed up the teakettle, filled it with exactly the right amount of water for two giant panda mugs of coffee. Then she smacked the kettle back on the stove and turned the burner on.

  Hands gripping the edge of the stove, she stared at, but didn’t see the blue flame. “Yeeesh,” she whispered. “That was real. Bad idea to watch a Rob movie. Very bad. Idiotic.”

  Because just like that, Rob Christian was back inside her head. And her heart.

  Rob Christian—British megastar, whose life Gracie had saved on a nightmare search the previous Thanksgiving, the man whose mere proximity set her body aflame from head to toe, the man with whom Gracie had played emotional cat and mouse until the last time she had seen him, when she had realized with a sudden onslaught of self-awareness that she was in love with him. She had left him still sleeping. No note. No explanation. Her inability, or unwillingness, to answer his calls and e-mails in the days following had apparently angered him so royally she hadn’t heard from him in the months since. The mouse had gotten away. Or had he been the cat? Gracie didn’t know and really didn’t want to explore the question.

  Fed and happy, Minnie pranced back into the kitchen. “You ready to go out, little girl?” Gracie walked into the living room, pulled open the sliding glass door, and let Minnie out to do her morning doggie duty down in the fenced-in backyard.

  Gracie had been able to tamp down to numbness her feelings for Rob. Or at least she had fooled herself into thinking so.

  Now, with a single dream, months later, the feelings had roared back to the surface, knocking her feet out from under her.

  Back in the kitchen, the kettle wound up to a whistle. Gracie scooped two heaping spoonfuls of Folgers Instant into the panda mug and stirred in the crystals. “So what am I going to do about him? Call him? E-mail him? How about nothing?”

  A tinny piano played “Für Elise” on her cell phone charging on the counter.

  Gracie looked up at the clock again. “Who’s that this early in the morning?”

  She made no move to answer the call. Anyone she wanted to talk to knew she had no cell coverage at the cabin. Unless she performed aerial gymnastics on the northwest corner of the deck railing, the good old-fashioned landline was the only way to have an intelligible conversation when she was at home.

  The cell phone stopped ringing. Seconds later, the phone on the counter rang.

  Gracie took a sip of scalding coffee, leaned over, and checked the caller ID. Three-one-three area code.

  “Evelyn.” Once again, her mother had forgotten about the three-hour time difference between Michigan and California.

  The phone kept ringing.

  Gracie took another sip of coffee, relishing the liquid caffeine surging through her body. “To answer or not to answer.” It wasn’t like she was doing much of anything else at the moment. She grabbed up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “MoMo is dying!” her mother wailed.

  Gracie blinked. “What?”

  “MoMo. He’s dying. It’s vascular disease. The doctors don’t give him very long.”

  Gracie set her mug on the kitchen table and sank down onto one of the ladder-backed chairs.

  “You need to come to Detroit,” her mother continued in a quivering voice. She blew her nose loudly, then said, “He wants to see you.”

  Quick! Think of an excuse! “I can’t. I . . . have a dog now.” Yeah, that’s it. A dog.

  “Put the dog in a kennel, for Christ’s sake! It’s a dog, not a child.”

  “And I have a job now, Mother. A good one. I’m managing a camp. I can’t just take—”

  “So take the time off. It’d only be a couple of— Stop it, you naughty girl!”

  “Wha . . . ?”

  “No. It’s that stupid Corky. Ridiculous creature. Take the time off, Grace Louise. Surely you can do that for Morris.”

  Memories rushed back. Morris. The man her mother had married two years after Gracie’s own beloved father suddenly, without note or explanation, had left them. Morris. The man who had inherited an eleven-year-old tomboy filled with anger and resentment. The man who had beaten her and her half siblings. The man who had pressed the glowing end of a cigar to the soft skin of her ribs. The man whose toupee Gracie, years later, had shot off with a shotgun after he had broken her mother’s arm. The man who, in the ensuing verbal altercation, her mother had defended, so wounding Gracie that she had quit her high-paying job as an ad exec, sold her house, given away her belongings, and traveled two-thirds of the way across the country to Timber Creek, California.

  That man was dying.

  “Surely you can do that for Morris,” her mother had said.

  What Gracie wanted to do for Morris was help him along a little by chucking him out of a tenth-floor window.

  Reminding herself that her mother was losing her husband, Gracie took in a deep, cleansing breath. “I really can’t, Mother. I have a group in camp until tomorrow and another one coming in on Saturday after lunch. I have to be here.” She tacked on, “I’m really sorry.”

  Beep! Beep! Beep! The shrill tones of her SAR pager filtered down from her loft bedroom.

  “I have a callout,” Gracie said. “I need to hang up now.”

  “A what?”

  “A Search and Rescue callout. My pager just went off.”

  “I thought you had quit that nonsense.”

  “Nope.”

  Phone to her ear, but barely listening, Gracie took the stairs to the loft two at a time. She grabbed up the pager from the bedside stand. Squinted at the tiny neon screen. MISSING JUVENILE. SHORT TEAM. TRACKERS ONLY.

  “Shit, Baxter. Not again.”

  “What?” came Evelyn’s voice over the line.

  “Mother, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “I’m buying you an airline ticket.”

  “Don’t. Please.”

  “I’ll send you the information.”

  “Mother. No.”

  “I won’t take no for an answer.”

  “Gottagobye.” Gracie thumbed End, listened for the dial tone, pressed Talk, dialed the number for the SO squad room, and said, “Gracie Kinkaid. ETA fifteen minutes.”

  * * *

  GRACIE LOOKED LEFT. Then right. Then left again. No traffic coming. She stomped down on the accelerator and zoomed out onto the boulevard, the main artery running east and west the entire length of the Timber Creek valley and along the southern shore of Timber Lake.

  She checked her watch. To haul on uniform shirt, pants, socks, and liners and lace up her hiking boots, run downstairs, check that Minnie had enough water out back, gather up her gear, run out to the truck, back down the driveway, and careen down Arcturus to the ma
in boulevard had taken her less than seven minutes. “Record time,” she said aloud. “And now . . . hardly any traffic. For once, I won’t be the last one there.” With only those with tracking capabilities responding, she might even been the first. In fact, she might be the only one to show up. One never knew.

  She watched the speedometer inch upward to sixty, then held it there. As the Ranger glided around the curves leading into town, Gracie mentally planned what steps she would take upon her arrival. Park. Run into the SO. Grab a sign-in sheet. Sign her name. Jog back to the SAR storage room. Grab the Pelican case with the HTs. If Warren wasn’t there—he wasn’t a tracker—grab the keys to the Suburban off the hook on the wall. Run outside and across to the SAR—

  Beep! Beep! Beep!

  “Really?” Gracie said. “They called it off?” She unclipped the pager from her waistband and read the screen. “All SAR stand down. Juvenile located.”

  “Well, crap. I’m already here.” She braked and turned right into the SO parking lot. “And no one else is here yet. Boo.” She pulled into a spot and stopped, leaving the engine running. Rather than going into the SO and risking another run-in with Gardner, she called the number for Dispatch on her cell phone. When Gracie identified herself as Search and Rescue, the woman confirmed that the missing juvenile was indeed Baxter Edwards.

  “What happened?” Gracie asked.

  “He went missing from the parents’ yesterday evening,” the Dispatcher told her. “Grandma reported him missing early this morning. He showed up at her house about ten minutes ago.”

  * * *

  STUFFING THE TRUCK keys into an outer pocket of her pants, Gracie walked into the Stater Bros. grocery store. Still in field uniform—orange shirt and camo pants, short, black gaiters over hiking boots, baseball cap with the Department chevron on the front and her name in orange script on one side, she felt as conspicuous as a jack-o’-lantern at an Easter egg hunt, swiveling heads and drawing curious looks as she sauntered the aisles.

  She picked up a jumbo jar of Folgers Instant, another of Jif creamy peanut butter, plus three six-packs of PayDay candy bars and took her place in line in the express aisle behind a middle-aged woman with an enormous derriere, wearing pants so tight she looked as if she had been dipped in white pant. Trying to look everywhere except at the woman’s dimpled backside, Gracie dumped her groceries on the conveyor belt, picked out a pack of grape bubble gum from the impulse-buy shelf, and threw it on after, then focused on the rack of magazines at the end of the aisle.

  Her eyebrows shot up. Her jaw dropped.

  On the front page of the Star, in living color, was a picture of Rob, dressed in a tuxedo and looking as dazzlingly gorgeous as ever. On his arm was a young woman—blond,equally gorgeous, and bursting out of a slinky silver dress that looked as if it had been created with less fabric than the hand towel in Gracie’s kitchen.

  Beneath the picture, headlines screamed, ENGAGED!

  “He’s getting married?” Gracie yelled.

  The woman with the painted-on pants turned around, and said, “A tragedy, right? My heart’s broken.”

  The groceries moved forward.

  Gracie snatched the magazine out of the rack and riffled through it, looking for the accompanying article. She found and scanned it.

  According to the article, Rob had indeed, just the day before, announced his upcoming nuptials. Farther down in the column, her own name jumped out at her. “What the—?” She read: When asked about his alleged romance with Grace Kinkaid, the woman who rescued him the previous Thanksgiving, Christian responded, “She’s a terrific girl.”

  “Girl!”

  “Fifteen sixty-two,” the young, male cashier said in a bored voice to the woman in line ahead.

  “She’ll always hold a special place in my heart,” Gracie read. “We’re still very close. She’s like a sister to me.”

  “Sister!” Gracie wadded up the entire tabloid down to the size of a basketball and tossed it into the wastebasket beneath the register opposite. Then she grabbed the rest of the tabloids on the rack and stuffed them in after.

  “Hey!” the cashier hazarded. “You can’t do that.”

  “I just did,” Gracie growled. She dug a twenty and a ten out of the side pocket of her pants and slapped the bills on the belt. Gathering up her groceries in her arms, she squeezed past the enormous derriere whose owner was still fiddling in her purse, and stalked out of the store.

  “A sister?” she stormed. “Three months ago he tells me he loves me. Now I’m his friggin’ sister?” She strode across the parking lot, practically spitting nails from her mouth. “What the hell? What the hell!” She stopped next to the Ranger, cradling the groceries with one arm and anchoring them with her chin, and hauled her keys out of her pants pocket.

  Something slammed into Gracie from the side. With an “Oof!” she bounced off the truck window, slid along the fender, and crashed down onto the nubbly asphalt. PayDays and gum smacked the pavement. The Folgers and Jif rolled in opposite directions across the parking lot.

  “Uhhh,” Gracie groaned, prone on the asphalt. “Hell’s b— . . .”

  “So it is you, you bitch,” a husky female voice spat.

  Gracie squinted up to see someone standing over her, silhouetted against the sky. “Well, I’m certainly glad you shoved me because it was me,” she grunted, trying to sit up, “And not because it was someone you didn’t know.” Brushing the stinging grit from the palms of her hands, she pushed herself to one knee, then to her feet.

  Standing before Gracie, poised to charge like a bull in front of a matador’s cape, was Mrs. Lucas, former neighbor, the bane of Gracie’s existence for years, the wife of the valley’s most notorious drug dealer, who, thanks in part to Gracie, now sat in jail down the hill awaiting trial.

  If possible, the woman looked even worse than the last time Gracie had seen her. Raccoon eyes. Sunken cheeks covered with scabs. Teeth brown at the roots. Dull, dark blonde hair pulled back into a stringy ponytail. Skeletal arms poking out from a loose-fitting black T-shirt. The only thing that hadn’t changed was her dirty, yellowed toenails hanging off the ends of her flip-flops.

  The woman bounced on the balls of her feet, clenching and unclenching her fists.

  Tweaking, Gracie thought. Probably meth. She could prove to be even more volatile, more dangerous than normal. “Nice to see you, too,” she said.

  “You called the goddam cops,” Mrs. Lucas snarled in a voice, phlegmy and low register from too many years of too many cigarettes.

  Gracie didn’t even pretend not to know what she meant. “You shot my dog.”

  “’Cuz you called the cops.”

  “So you admit you shot her.”

  “I ain’t admittin’ to nothing! You called the fuckin’ cops!”

  “You shot my dog.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I followed your tracks.”

  “Don’t prove nothing. If it did, ya woulda had me arrested.” Tears formed in her deep-set eyes. “They took my kid.”

  Gracie had known the county’s Child and Family Services removing the Lucas boy from the home was a possibility, even a likelihood. But she had never received confirmation of that happening.

  She looked over the shorter woman’s shoulder and noticed a crowd of shoppers gathering around in a ragged semicircle. Gracie looked back at the woman in front of her. “I’m truly sorry about that,” she said even though she really wasn’t. The child was better off anywhere other than with his methamphetamine-using mother and drug-dealing father. “I’m getting in my truck. And I’m driving away. Have a super day.”

  She looked around on the ground for her keys, spotted them behind the front tire, and bent to retrieve them.

  Mrs. Lucas head-butted her in the ribs.

  Gracie hit the ground again, this time with the other woman on top of her, screaming an
d kicking with her feet and flailing with her fists.

  Sirens wailed in the distance.

  It was all Gracie could do to grab the woman’s forearms and fend off the blows. When Mrs. Lucas, mouth gaping, aimed her teeth at Gracie’s knuckles, she threw the smaller woman off to the side, rolled up onto her knees, and straddled her, pinning her to the ground, hand on her wrists. Enraged, the woman roared even more loudly, kicking Gracie from behind with her knees and trying to buck her off.

  Its siren winding down, a Sheriff’s Department unit rolled to a stop a few feet from Gracie’s head, with a second unit right behind. She looked up as Deputy Montoya, whom Gracie used to refer to as the Cute Deputy because she could never remember his name, emerged from behind the wheel and rounded the front of his unit.

  “I can’t . . . let her go,” Gracie yelled up to him, out of breath. “She’s trying . . . to kill me!”

  CHAPTER

  10

  GRACIE grabbed a can of beer from the refrigerator, popped it open, threw two Extra Strength Tylenols into her mouth, and swallowed them down with half the beer while standing in the open doorway. She wanted—needed—something stronger, a lot stronger. “A triple, no, a quadruple vodka martini. Extra, extra dry. With two of those big, fat olives. Five big, fat olives.” But since she had no vodka, no dry vermouth, and no olives, a Coors Light would have to do. She held the ice-cold can to the grape-sized bump above her eyebrow. Then to her nose. Then her upper lip. “Ow,” she whispered.

  It had taken three burly deputies fifteen minutes to fully subdue Mrs. Lucas and secure her, handcuffed and screeching verbal abuses, behind the cage in Montoya’s unit. Timber Creek’s big story for the week.

  “Yes,” Gracie had told Deputy Montoya. “I’m refusing medical attention.”

  “You sure? You look a little . . .”

  “Rough?”

  Montoya smiled, showing a row of straight, very white teeth below the black mustache. “Roughed up. You sure you don’t want to press charges?”