equally silky panties. She came over to where I was sitting and brushed the top of my head with a kiss as she collected my empty coffee cup from the end table at my elbow. “Refill?” she asked.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
“What are you working on?”
I could have asked her about Richard Matthews right then, but coward that I was, I didn’t. I wasn’t ready. The idea that history might be repeating itself was too appalling.
“Dortman,” I lied.
Mel stood in front of me, with my cup in one hand and the other on her hip. “Look,” she said reprovingly. “Anthony Cosgrove has been missing and/or dead since 1980. And most of the guys on my list have been gone for months if not years. This is Sunday. Other than last night at dinner, we’ve been so caught up in work that we’ve neglected Scott and Cherisse the whole time they’ve been here. We also haven’t been very diligent about keeping tabs on Lars. How about if we give ourselves the whole day off and pay attention to people instead of cases?”
Concerned that Mel’s womanly wiles might somehow allow her to see into the workings of my computer and divine what I had been doing prior to typing in Dortman’s name, I immediately capitulated.
“Great idea,” I said, slapping shut the laptop’s lid. “It’s the weekend. Let’s forget about work for a while. It’ll do us both a world of good.”
Mel disappeared into the kitchen and returned with my replenished coffee cup, which she handed over to me. As she did so her forehead knotted into a puzzled frown. “You look upset,” she said. “Is something the matter?”
“No, nothing,” I said, probably a tad too quickly. “I’ll go shower-if you’ve left me any hot water, that is.”
The last was a joke. My condo is equipped with an instant hot water heating system that can replenish itself almost as fast as someone can use it. And Mel joked right back.
“A cold shower might be good for you now and then.” She grinned.
The shower wasn’t cold, but it could just as well have been. I stood in the powerful flow that cascaded down from a ceiling-mounted showerhead while my body was pounded with spray from a collection of wall-mounted showerheads as well. Steam may have been circling upward toward the ceiling, but I felt chilled.
But there was a part of me that held otherwise-part of me that was afraid my worst nightmare was about to happen all over again.
The easiest thing and probably the best thing would have been to come straight out and ask Mel about it right then. But cops don’t ask questions unless they have a fairly good idea of what the real answers should be. Anne Corley had lied to me with utter impunity, and I was determined not to be that stupid again. So before I asked Mel any questions I needed to find out some of the answers. To do that, I’d be operating solo. Mel may have been my partner in every sense of the word, but if she had somehow stepped onto the wrong side of the thin blue line, I was the one who would have to figure it out-and do something about it.
Standing there with the punishing water pummeling my body, I was suddenly struck by an idea. There was one other person in the world who had been betrayed by Anne Corley in much the same way I had been; one other sucker who, if I told him my suspicions, would immediately grasp all possible ramifications. After all, my friend and attorney, Ralph Ames, had been Anne Corley’s friend and attorney long before he became mine, and she had suckered him, too.
Leaving the shower running full blast, I stepped out onto the bath mat, hotfooted it into the bedroom, retrieved my cell phone, and took it back into the bathroom, where I dialed Ralph’s number.
“Where are you calling from?” Ralph asked once he was on the line. “You sound like you’re standing in the middle of a torrential downpour.”
“I am,” I said. “That’s the shower.”
“Here’s an idea,” he said. “How about if you call me back
“Please, Ralph,” I said. “There’s a problem. Listen to me.”
And he did. I explained it all while the shower continued to roar. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked when I finished. “Try to find out whether or not the remains really do belong to Richard Matthews?”
“That would be a big help,” I said. “And what, if any, progress has been made in finding out who killed him.”
“Anything else?” Ralph asked.
One of the good things about Ralph Ames is that he doesn’t require a lot of explanation. He gets things. And then he goes to work and gets things done. And since he doesn’t necessarily have to concern himself about maintaining chains of evidence and fruit of poisoned trees and all that jazz, he has avenues of investigation that aren’t necessarily open to sworn police officers.
“Mel’s full name is Melissa Katherine Majors Soames,” I replied. “I’m pretty sure she went to Mexico sometime last November. I don’t know for sure when she went or where she traveled, but I think it was sometime before Thanksgiving.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Ralph said. “Meantime, watch yourself.”
That was another thing I appreciated about Ralph. He didn’t stand around jawing or dishing out a bunch of phony platitudes. Since I was worried, he was worried, and he would simply shut up and go to work. That meant a lot.
Mel knocked on the closed bathroom door. I was so startled it’s a miracle I didn’t drop the cell phone into the toilet. “Lars is on the phone,” she said. “Do you want to take it?”
Without saying good-bye to Ralph I pressed the call-ending button. “Tell Lars I’m in the shower. I’ll call him back when I get out.”
Still disturbed by the staggering possibilities, I was disgusted to find that my right hand shook uncontrollably. In the process of shaving I nicked my neck twice and the bottom of my ear once, and I emerged from the bathroom with tiny scraps of toilet paper stanching the flow of blood to keep it from ruining my collar.
Once I was dressed I stood for a few minutes looking at my cell phone on the bathroom’s granite countertop. Part of me wanted to have it with me at all times so I’d be able to hear from Ralph the moment he learned anything. But I didn’t want to have to take a call like that-regardless of his news-in Mel’s presence. She was a cop. She’d be too curious. She’d want to know what the call was about. She’d want to know exactly what was going on.
But I had spent a lifetime living on call. It was too late to change that now. After a wavering moment of indecision I brought the phone along with me. Leaving it behind really wasn’t an option.
Out in the living room I found Mel dressed and ready to go. “Lars was calling to double-check on who was picking him up for breakfast-Scott and Cherisse or the two of us. He also wanted to know if you thought Scott and Cherisse would mind if he brought a friend along to breakfast.”
“A friend?” I asked. “What kind of friend?”
“Her name is Iris,” Mel answered. “Iris Rassmussen. According to Lars she was a good friend of Beverly’s.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me that we buried Beverly on Thursday and Lars wants to bring someone else along to brunch on Sunday?”
“I don’t think he meant it like that,” Mel returned. “I’m sure it’s nothing romantic.”
I wasn’t convinced. I thought about Lars’s protestations earlier in the week about how all the single ladies in Queen Anne Gardens were camped out at his front door and jockeying for position before Beverly was even cool to the touch. And now this?
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that as far as I knew, Scott and Cherisse were supposed to pick him up,” Mel answered. “As for the rest of it, I said I was sure it would be fine but that you’d call him back as soon as you could.”
“It isn’t fine,” I grumbled.
“Come on,” she said. “He probably just wants to have someone along who’s his age, someone who’s on the same page he is.”
“I’ll bet Iris is on the same page, all right,” I told her. “Let’s go.”
