“Maybe she didn’t know,” the lieutenant countered calmly. “Maybe Weems didn’t tell her where he buried it.”
“But she left his prescription medicines right out there in the open in her bathroom. If she had killed him, if she had wanted it to look like he ran away with another woman, wouldn’t she have destroyed them?”
“I would have,” she conceded. “But that’s just me.”
“Besides, if Dolly did kill him, then where’s all of that money of hers he supposedly absconded with? The man’s not gone. The money is. Who took it? Where is it?”
“We don’t know that yet. We’re still following that particular trail.”
“But she’d still have it, wouldn’t she?” Mitch persisted. “If she were the killer then she wouldn’t be broke, would she? She wouldn’t have needed to rent the carriage house out to me, would she?”
“Those are good questions. I can’t answer them.”
They strode in silence for a moment, Mitch’s chest beginning to heave, his brow streaming perspiration. This woman did not believe in a leisurely stroll. A power walk was more like it.
“What else have you found out?” he asked her, puffing. “That you haven’t given to the media yet, I mean.”
“Mandy Havenhurst has had herself some brushes with the law. It’s on the record. Press will be onto it by tomorrow.”
“What kind of brushes?” Mitch asked curiously.
“Got busted in an upscale St. Louis suburb in 1994 for attempting to murder her live-in boyfriend. Poured kerosene over him while he was asleep and set him on fire.”
“Jesus!”
“Jealous rage, apparently. He suffered extensive second-degree burns, but refused to press charges. Her father paid him off. She cleared out of St. Louis fast and resurfaced in Martha’s Vineyard. Where, in 1996, she rammed her new boyfriend’s Jeep through the sliding-glass doors of his cottage and pinned him and the woman she’d caught him with up against a wall. Same story-no one pressed charges. It would seem,” the lieutenant concluded, “that she doesn’t like it when her man strays on her.”
“I wonder how she feels about Bud being so attentive toward Dolly,” Mitch said, remembering his 3:00 A.M. confrontation with the lawyer in Dolly’s kitchen. “That can’t make her happy.”
“Wouldn’t think so.”
“That’s very interesting,” Mitch said, gasping for breath. Lieutenant Mitry wasn’t even breaking a sweat. “Anything else?”
“We’re beginning to construct a profile of Niles Seymour. And it’s not ultra-flattering. He was your classic career low-life. Always skating right on the edge of the law-selling time-shares in half-built retirement villages, stocks over the phone to unwitting widows. Real boiler-room stuff.”
“Makes you wonder why Dolly fell for him.”
“She was alone and vulnerable. Easy prey for a man who she’d ordinarily know was bad news.”
“This sounds like the voice of personal experience.”
“Well, it’s not,” she snapped, abruptly closing that avenue of conversation.
Nonetheless, Mitch found himself wondering why Lt. Desiree Mitry was speaking with him so candidly. Was this some form of cop game she was playing on him? Was she trying to entrap him into incriminating himself? Was he a prime suspect in her eyes? It hadn’t occurred to him that he might be. But he could imagine no other reason why she was talking with him this way. “Am I on your radar, Lieutenant?”
“My radar?”
“Do I need to start looking for a lawyer?”
“No, I wouldn’t think so.”
“That’s good, because I happen to hate lawyers. They have no moral compass, no sense of personal responsibility, no conscience, no-”
“Before you go any further I should tell you that I used to be married to one.”
“Well, then I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, am I?”
She glanced at him in astonishment. “No, you aren’t,” she said softly.
So her husband had thrown her over for another woman, Mitch surmised. Briefly, they fell silent, Mitch convinced that he was going to suffer a massive heart attack if he tried to keep pace with this tireless gazelle any longer. He pulled up and flopped down on a beached driftwood log, wheezing. “Are you ever going to tell me what I told you?” he asked, squinting up at her.
“Which is what?” Her eyes were scanning the sailboats out on the Sound.
“How you ended up doing what you’re doing.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Graduated from West Point. Got downsized at the end of the Cold War. Went for a master’s degree in criminology. Took the state trooper exam. End of story.”
“You got the highest test score in the history of the state, didn’t you?”
She narrowed her pale green eyes at him suspiciously. “How did you know that?”
“Dunno,” Mitch confessed. “I just did.” Same as he knew that she was holding something back. He wondered what. He wondered why.
“Uh-hunh,” she said doubtfully. “And what else do you know?”
“That you don’t like what you’re doing for a living.”
She let out an exasperated sigh. “What I don’t like, Mr. Berger, is the way you keep doing that
“Doing what?”
“Acting like you know me.”
“It just comes out. Strange things like that happen sometimes between two people. It’s a brain-wave thing. In fact, I happen to know exactly what you’re thinking at this very moment.”
“Which is…?”
“If that somewhat largish white fellow makes one more personal comment about me I’m going to hit him over the head with my Glock so hard he won’t even remember his name.”
“Okay, this time you are way wrong,” she said, smiling at him. “It’s a Sig-Sauer.”
“So I don’t know very much about guns.”
“You’re better off. But keep on busting me and you will get on my bad side.”
“Which means what-I get another cat?”
“It could happen.”
And with that Lieutenant Desiree Mitry resumed walking, her stride even longer and more purposeful than before. She was a good fifty yards away by the time Mitch made it back up onto his feet and started after her.
Bud Havenhurst was fiddling with the trailer hitch on his Range Rover in the courtyard outside of Dolly’s house when the lieutenant drove off in her cruiser. His presence was by no means accidental. He was strictly hanging around there so as to pump Mitch.
“What did she want?” the lawyer asked him with elaborate casualness.
“I’m really not sure,” Mitch answered truthfully.
“Hey, boy, do you play golf?”
“A bit. Why?”
“I wondered if you’d let me drag you out to the club today,” Bud said genially. “We could have a spot of lunch. Play a round. Best place in town to hide out from the press corps.”
“I don’t have any clubs.”
“You can use Seymour’s-they’re in the barn.”
“They’re evidence, aren’t they?”
“Of what?” Bud’s gray eyes twinkled at him playfully. “Is it a date?”
Mitch thought about it, studying Bud Havenhurst carefully. The man’s hearty good cheer seemed forced. He acted rattled and unsteady. He had shaved poorly. Perhaps he had something on his mind. What it was Mitch could not imagine. But he was intrigued.
So he said, “You’re on-just as soon as I check my bed.”
He headed back to his little house and went upstairs, treading softly, to look in on Baby Spice. A truly awful name. He’d have to change it, if he kept her. If he could find her. She was not on the bed, in the bed or under the bed. She was not behind the little dresser where he kept his underwear and socks. That was it for the sleeping
