“I mean, has anyone asked you for money lately?”
“Just my cousin Harry. But he always asks me for money.”
Maybe Cousin Harry was getting more desperate. Or more brazen. I took down Harry’s info, then asked, “Can you think of anything else? Anything that might explain her behavior?”
“Not really,” he said after handing his credit card to Norma. Neither Cookie nor I had enough to cover our extra coffees, much less our
“Mr. Jacobs,” I said, putting on my big-girl panties, “I have a confession to make. I’m very adept at reading people, and no offense, but you’re holding out on me.”
He worked his lower lip, a remorseful guilt oozing out of his pores. Not so much an I-killed-my-wife-and- buried-her-lifeless-body-in-the-backyard kind of guilt but more of an I-know-something-but-I-don’t-want-to-tell kind of guilt.
With a loud sigh, he lowered his head into his palms. “I thought she was having an affair.”
Bingo. “Well, that’s something. Can you explain why you thought that?”
Too exhausted to put much effort into it, he lifted his shoulders into the slightest hint of a shrug. “Just her behavior. She’d grown so distant. I asked her about it, and she laughed, told me I was the only man in her life because she was not about to put up with another.”
In the grand scheme of things, it was quite natural for him to suspect adultery, considering how much Mimi had apparently changed.
“Oh, and a friend of hers died recently,” he said in afterthought. His brow crinkled as he tried to remember the details. “I’d completely forgotten. Mimi said she was murdered.”
“Murdered? How?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, I just don’t remember.” Another wave of guilt wafted off him.
“They were close?”
“That’s just it. They’d went to high school together, but they hadn’t kept in touch. Mimi never even mentioned her name until she died, so I was surprised at how much it affected her. She was devastated, and yet…”
“And yet?” I asked when he lost himself in thought again. This was just getting interesting. He couldn’t stop now.
“I don’t know. She was torn up, but not really upset about losing her friend. It was different.” His jaw worked as he rifled through his memories. “I really didn’t think much about it at the time, but quite frankly, she didn’t seem all that surprised that her friend was murdered. Then I asked her if she wanted to go to the funeral, and my god, the look on her face. You’d think I’d asked her to drown the neighbor’s cat.”
Admittedly, drowning the neighbor’s cat didn’t really clue me in as much as I would’ve liked. “So, she was angry?”
He blinked back to me and stared. Like a long time. Long enough to have me sliding my tongue over my teeth to make sure I didn’t have anything in them.
“She was horrified,” he said at last.
Damn, I wished he could’ve remembered the woman’s name. And why Mimi wasn’t surprised when the woman was murdered. Murder is usually quite the surprise to everyone involved.
Speaking of names, I decided to ask about the one on the bathroom wall. Having found no foreign objects in my teeth, I asked, “Did Mimi ever mention a Janelle York?”
“That’s her,” he said in surprise. “That’s Mimi’s friend who was murdered. How did you know?”
I didn’t, but his thinking I did made me look good.
Chapter Two
DON’T CROSS THE STREAMS. NEVER CROSS THE STREAMS.
“What are you listening to?” I asked, reaching over and turning down the radio as Cookie drove home. “This Little Light of Mine” was just way too happy for the current atmospheric conditions.
She hit the SCAN button. “I don’t know. It’s supposed to be classic rock.”
“Oh. So, did you buy this car used?” I asked, thinking back to the dead guy in her trunk and wondering how he got there. I still needed to figure out if Cookie had been a black widow before she met me. She did have black hair. And she’d recently cut it. A disguise, mayhap? Not to mention her early-morning, pre-coffee mean streak that made road rage a practical alternative for a healthier, happier Cookie. The departed rarely just hung out on Earth for no particular reason. Dead Trunk Guy most likely died violently, and if I was ever going to get him to cross, I’d have to figure out how and why.
“Yeah,” she said absently. “At least we know where to start with Janelle York. Should I call your uncle on this one? And maybe the medical examiner?”
“Absolutely,” I said supernonchalantly. “So, then, where did you buy it?”
She looked over at me, her brows knitting. “Buy what?”
I shrugged and looked out the window. “Your car.”
“At Domino Ford. Why?”
I flipped my palms up. “Just wondering. One of those weird things you think about on the way home from investigating a missing persons case.”
Her eyes widened in horror. “Oh my god! There’s a dead person in my backseat, isn’t there?”
“Wait, what?” I said in stuttering astonishment. “Not even. Why would you assume such a thing?”
She fixed a knowing gaze on me a heartbeat before she pulled into a gas station, tires screeching.
“Cook, we’re five seconds from home.”
“Tell me the truth,” she insisted after nearly throwing me through the windshield. She had really good brakes. “I mean it, Charley. Dead people follow you everywhere, but I don’t want them in my car. And you suck at lying.”
“I do not.” I felt oddly appalled by her statement. “I’m an excellent liar. Ask my dentist. He swears I floss regularly.”
She threw the car into park and glared. Hard. She would do well in a prison setting.
After transforming a sigh into a Broadway production, I said, “I promise, Cook, there’s not a dead person in your backseat.”
“Then it’s in the trunk. There’s a body in the trunk, isn’t there?” The panic in her voice was funny. Until she flew out of the car.
“What?” I said, climbing out after her. “Of course not.”
She pointed to her white Taurus and stared at me accusingly. “There is a dead body in that trunk,” she said. Really loud. Loud enough for the cop sitting next to us with his window down to hear.
I rolled my eyes. It was late October. Why the hell was his window down? When he opened his car door and unfolded to his full height, I dropped my head into a palm. Thankfully it was my own. This was so not happening. If I had to call my uncle Bob, an Albuquerque Police detective, in the middle of the night one more time to get me out of one of these ridiculous altercations I tended to have with random cops, he was going to kill me. He told me so himself. With an orange peeler. Not sure why.
“Is there a problem here, ladies?” the officer asked.
Cookie scowled at me. “Why don’t you tell him there’s not a dead body in that trunk? Hmmm?”
“Cook, really?”
She threw her hands on her hips, waiting for an answer.
I turned back to Dirty Harry. “Look, Officer O. Vaughn,” I said, glancing at his name badge. “I know what Cookie said sounded bad, but she was speaking metaphorically. We would never really h-have…” I’d looked back at his face, at the almost contemptuous expression lining his mouth, and a vague familiarity tingled along my spine. In
