Boyd, ever watchful, stepped in front of me. “Help you with what?”
“I’m starving.” She put her hands on her waist, bent over, and panted. She was about sixty, and her thin blond hair had dark gray roots. “I…I’ve been here before, and…Yolanda always gave me”—here she blushed—“gave us, some of us, that is, extra food. After dinner, at the back door to the kitchen.” She straightened and wheezed. “We paid her,” she added, then reached into the copious pocket of even-more-copious pants and pulled out a wad of cash. “I can pay you.”
Boyd turned to face me, so that his back was to the woman. He gave me a
“It’s all right,” I said soothingly to the woman. “I don’t have anything right now, but I can bring you something tomorrow.”
“Oh, thank God,” said the woman, who made her way back down the path while we waited behind.
“Didn’t she come here to lose weight?” Boyd asked, once the woman was out of earshot. “Why sabotage yourself like that?”
“It’s probably like being able to get drugs in rehab. Those clinics are one of the best places to score. So if she wants a dessert, I’ll bring her one.”
“Kee-rist,” said Boyd. “And I thought cops were the most cynical guys in the world.”
AT HOME, TOM was upstairs taking a shower. I checked our voice mail: there was nothing from Bogen the jeweler about Jack’s clock, and that irritated me. Finally I went upstairs, and on impulse, joined Tom in the shower. That proved more rejuvenating than any old hot springs pool.
“I’m hungry,” Tom whispered in my ear, when we were embracing, afterward, in the steamy bathroom. “You?”
I nodded assent. We put on pajamas and trekked down to the kitchen.
“How was the spa?” Tom asked. He was ladling spoonfuls of Chilled Curried Chicken Salad onto glass plates.
“Exhausting.” I opened bottles of imported beer—what I’d been told was the proper drink to go with curry— and placed cold glasses on our table. I told him about Isabelle’s revelations, which were more puzzling than eye opening. I then said I had gone into the Smoothie Cabin to hunt around.
Tom closed his eyes and shook his head. “Yeah, Boyd confessed to me. Did you find anything?”
“Don’t get mad at Boyd, okay?” I told him about Boyd suspecting that he saw “something” in the fruit cocktail, and how I had taken samples from jars of preserved fruit and powdered supplements.
“If Boyd comes back with anything,” Tom said matter-of-factly, “we won’t be able to use it in court. You know that, right?”
“I know, I know,” I said, although I wasn’t convinced. Plus, we still had Marla’s smoothie and fruit cocktail to get analyzed. It had been served to her, so she had the right to have it analyzed, correct? I said, “Lucas was up there. It looks as if he’s already starting to spend Jack’s money.”
“He’s not going to be able to spend it until the coroner’s office gives him a death certificate, and there won’t be any death certificate until we know more—”
He stopped talking when he saw my eyes pooling. The day had been so bone-crushingly busy, I’d somehow put the fact that Jack was dead on the back burner of my mind. But now Tom’s use of the term “death certificate” gave Jack’s premature departure from this life a finality I wasn’t ready to face.
“Miss G.” His voice was warm. He took my hands in his. “We shouldn’t be talking about this. Remember, Father Pete said you should take a couple of days to grieve.”
“A couple of days. Right. If I were to spend a couple of days moping around the house, I’d go stark raving bonkers. Hold on a sec.” I left the kitchen, blew my nose in the bathroom, washed my hands, and returned with a box of tissues. “Please tell me more about the case. I really want to know.”
“You know we’ve tentatively linked Finn’s death with Jack’s? That’s partly owing to the note Jack wrote you. It’s not much of a link, but it’s a link.”
“So…did the pathologist confirm that the heart attack was directly caused by Jack being attacked?”
Tom shook his head. “The connection isn’t certain. But given the head trauma that Jack did experience, it’s clear that someone tried to kill him out at the spa, and almost succeeded. Well, did succeed, in the end, because he just died later.” Tom narrowed his eyes at me. “You all right?”
“Fine. But the person who attacked Jack couldn’t have counted on Jack having a heart attack in the hospital from his injuries.”
“Exactly.”
It took me a second to understand what Tom was implying, and when I did, it chilled me to the bone. “The call Doc Finn received the night he was murdered came from within Southwest Hospital. Are you saying that someone in the hospital might have…helped Jack to have a heart attack? Might have poisoned him or…?”
“It’s obviously a possibility. Jack had a history of heart disease and he’d been badly injured, but the heart attack was still very sudden. Even closely monitored the way he was, we can’t rule out tampering. So the pathologist is checking everything in Jack’s system against the meds he was taking for his heart condition. Those meds, by the way, were in his house.”
“Right,” I said. “And remember, Lucas was already inside the house when I used Jack’s keys to get in. So maybe he planted something, or took something away.”
“We’ve talked to him, again. He says he didn’t touch anything, and we can check his house, if we want. You don’t like Lucas, do you?”
My shoulders slumped. “I’m not sure he’s a killer. But he’s like the cousin you never really got along with, the cousin you suspected was trashing your toys and stealing from your mother’s purse, but you could never prove anything.”
Tom grinned. “Your professional psychiatric opinion, no doubt.”
I shrugged. “What else have you found out?”
“Nothing. These tests take a bit of time, you know, Goldy, even when you’re doing things on an expedited schedule, which we are.”
I rubbed my forehead. “I can’t think of what to do.”
Tom knew better than to tell me to do nothing. He said, “I’ll tell you how you can help. We have all the technical expertise, the teams going out talking to witnesses, the labs doing their tests. But what you’re particularly good at is dissecting…people’s relationships. It’s not the
I exhaled so disconsolately that I knew Tom sensed my frustration. Finn had stuck his nose into some kind of hornets’ nest and had dragged Jack into it behind him. Had it been very odd, or even criminal, activities performed by Victor Lane at the spa, or an entirely different problem? I felt no closer to an answer than I’d been when I woke up Monday morning and learned of Jack’s death.
Tom looked around the kitchen with a thoughtful gaze. “You want to cook?”
I was so startled by his suggestion that I actually laughed. It was already after ten, and I had to get up at five. But Tom knew what would make me feel better—apart from shenanigans in the shower, that is.
Thirty minutes later, Tom had finished the dishes, and I’d made the same chocolate cookies I’d made the other day. They were so flaky, the first one I made broke off in my mouth. Hmm. While Tom was putting the dishes away, I decided not to spoon ice cream into the middle. Instead, I whipped together a buttery, extra-creamy vanilla frosting, and spread it between two of the cookies. Yum! Tom agreed.
I would give—not sell—the resulting cookie sandwiches to any person who presented herself at the spa kitchen’s back door the next evening.
“I can’t believe you’re making those for these spa guests who are trying to lose weight,” Tom commented.
“Boyd was right beside me,” I said defensively, “when the lady wanting the treats approached us on the path.”
“Sort of like getting drugs in rehab.”
“That’s what I told Boyd.”
