California Schemin' (24 page)

“You need a vacation,” I said. “Get away from
the job.”

“What I need a vacation from is you getting
yourself tangled up in this murder. I swear all this has taken ten
years off my life. I’ll feel like I’m on vacation once we get you
home again.”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “I’ll feel like I’m on
vacation, too. I miss my dogs.”

Beau hobbled in on a new set of crutches and
sat in the chair beside me.

“Where’d you get the crutches?” I asked.

“They keep these things around, apparently.”
He smiled a lopsided smile.

“You’re not feeling any pain are you?”

“Nope. None at all. I’m hoping I’ve got
enough painkiller to keep me happy until we get home again. I can’t
imagine five hours on a plane without access to them. Brutal.”

The phone rang, and Fogel answered while Beau
melted into his chair and I stared out the window. It had started
to rain, cold early December rain. If this was Vermont it would
have been snow. Now that I was in relative safety, I was free to
really miss home. I knew my animals would be well cared for. I
boarded my neighbor’s horses, and we traded services freely, caring
for each other’s animals on a regular basis. I wasn’t worried about
them, but I missed their company. I’d just gotten reacquainted
after a really long absence when I’d been snatched. Thinking about
home got me thinking about my bedroom, sparsely furnished but full
of light with an old wooden frame that held the mattress so high
off the floor that I needed a stepstool to get into bed. The
beautifully carved head board, the soft mattress. I hoped Annabelle
hadn’t used it as a litter box again.

“Shit!” Fogel’s exclamation jolted me awake
and back into the present. He hung up the phone and looked across
at me. “Wallace disappeared along with Hambecker and the guy you
call Moose. We picked up some of Wallace’s thugs, but they’re all
claiming they haven’t seen Wallace for weeks. We’ve lost him.”

“Hambecker and Moose, too?” I was
disappointed. Okay, they’d flown, but with Wallace? They were the
good guys, weren’t they? Hell, this wasn’t the first time I’d ever
been wrong.

“Who’s going to tell Paris and Wendy?”

Fogel looked at me with eyebrows raised.

“Paris is Hambecker’s girlfriend, and Wendy
is Wallace’s daughter. They deserve to know.” As I talked I got the
sinking feeling that I’d be the one telling the girls. I didn’t
know how Wendy would feel. Wallace was her father, after all. She
might be glad he’d gotten away, but poor Paris. How do you tell a
girl her boyfriend skipped town with a murderer? There was no easy
way to break the news.

Fogel was still looking at me.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not me. You’ve got
policewomen who are trained to do this kind of thing. No way I’m
going to break the bad news.”

“Come with me then. It helps to have a
familiar face when news like this is received. They won’t feel
quite so abandoned.”

I followed Fogel out of his office and down
to the lower floor where we’d left Wendy and Paris in a waiting
room with comfortable couches and vending machines, obviously not a
room for criminals. They were sitting across from each other at a
table playing cards and eating animal crackers.

Fogel grabbed a chair and turned it around so
he could sit backwards on it, his arms resting on the plastic back.
I slid into a chair across from him, snagging a cracker and resting
my elbows on the table. Wendy looked at us and set her cards on the
table face up.

“My father disappeared, didn’t he?” she said.
Fogel nodded. “Damn it! This happens every time something
unpleasant or illegal happens. All of a sudden he’s gone. He must
pay his staff a bundle to lie for him.” She started gathering the
cards and shoving them roughly into their case. “He’s got too much
power for his own good. He gets away with everything. My mom’s
right. He’s no damn good.”

“What about Richard?” Paris asked quietly.
Her voice shook slightly, and I thought she knew the answer. “Will
he be coming here to get us? I know the limo was totaled, and we
have the Jeep.”

I shook my head, and she looked down, but
when she looked back up her face was determined.

“It’s not like I didn’t know he wasn’t going
to stick. For one thing, he was way too old for me. He’s, like,
your age, isn’t he Bree?”

“Um, yeah. I guess so.” Since when was thirty
old? “Actually, I think he was even older than I am.” Take that,
Hambecker.

“See? Too old for me. I’m going back to
college with Wendy. I bet they’ll let me back in.”

“Paris, we’re on winter break. You haven’t
even missed anything yet.” Wendy looked at Paris and rolled her
eyes.

“See, I told you they’d let me back in. Come
on, Wendy, I want to get back to town.” The girls gathered their
purses and jackets. Wendy hugged me goodbye.

“Well, they’re going to be okay,” I said as
they left. “Nothing like youth for bouncing back. What about us?
You going to let us go home now, too?”

“Not until you’ve got tickets and an escort.
I’m not taking any chances with you two.”

Fogel finally agreed that we’d probably be
safe if we stayed in the Law Enforcement Convention’s headquarters
hotel. He gave us a ride to Sacramento, got us checked in and
wished us luck. I noticed him talking to a cop and gesturing in our
direction as we got on the elevator. Not that the place wasn’t
crawling with police officers, but I had the feeling he was making
sure that Sacramento’s finest knew we were here.

Beau collapsed on the bed and fell asleep
immediately. I didn’t know if it was exhaustion or the pain pills,
but he’d earned a little oblivion. Time for me to get cleaned up a
little. I gathered all the little bottles of shampoo, conditioner
and body wash and ran the water hot. I was going to stand in the
water until the memories of the past few days were soaked out of
me.

There was quiet knocking on the door as I was
coming out of the shower.

“Hang on,” I whispered through the door and
pulled on the same dirty clothes I’d been wearing for days. I
stepped out into the hall to find Steve Leftsky leaning against the
wall.

“What were you doing in there? Took you
forever to open the door.”

“Beau’s sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake
him. What in the world are you doing in California?” I asked him
even though I knew.

“Officially, I’m attending the law
enforcement convention. Unofficially, Brooks sent me out here to
help find you. I haven’t even seen the inside of the conference
center, but now that you found me, I can go to the banquet tonight.
The food’s the best part anyway. You can go as my date.”

“You just got Shirl back. I don’t think
that’s a good idea. What if she asked you about it?”

“It won’t be an issue.”

“Why not?”

“She broke up with me again. Said if I took
this assignment, she was leaving for good.”

“Will you never learn? If you had turned it
down, she would have stuck with you forever.”

“I couldn’t turn it down. It was me or no
one. I’ve known you since grade school. I can’t spend my life not
doing what I know to be the right thing because it might upset her.
She should understand. If she was right for me, she would
understand. Come to the banquet with me. I don’t want to be one of
the losers who couldn’t get a date.”

“Okay. I’ll come, provided I can get away
from Beau, Fogel and the FBI.”

The big problem with going to the banquet was
my lack of anything to wear—nothing to wear, no wallet, money or
ID. How the heck was I going to get on an airplane without any ID?
Beau solved the money problem by lending me his credit cards.

“Go,” he said. “Go and spend my money. I
can’t do anything with it.”

So I shopped. New underclothes, black dress
and shoes. Then more new underclothes, the comfortable kind, along
with sweat pants to sleep in, jeans and long sleeved tee-shirts for
the trip home. When I got back to the hotel, I called Fogel and
asked him how he was going to convince TSA to let me through
security with no ID. He said he’d check into it and get back to
me.

I barely had enough time to change and swipe
on mascara and lipstick. The black dress looked good. Beau roused
himself long enough to wolf whistle at me before smiling and going
back to sleep. I was doing the last-minute adjustments when there
was a tap at my door.

Steve let out a low whistle when I let him
into the room. He walked in and did a circuit around me like I was
a show dog or something. I frowned at him as he stood in front of
me again, taking in the package.

“What are you scowling at me for? You are
looking good. I’m thinking I might have to change my personal rules
about making moves on my female friends. Yow!”

“I am not sleeping with you, Steve, so you
can just put that thought right back in your pants, and I don’t
appreciate being treated like a prize poodle being judged on its
conformation. It’s okay for you to compliment me, but after that
you have to ignore the fact I’m the hottest girl in the room and go
back to treating me like your buddy. Otherwise, I’m going to have
to kick your ass.”

“Jeez, all right. I was just appreciating the
dress, that’s all. Apparently that’s not kosher, so I’ll stop.”

We rode the elevator down to the third floor,
and Steve took my arm as we walked into the banquet hall. I got the
distinct feeling that if he wasn’t going to be spending the night
with me, he was going to be darn well certain that no one else
would either.

We found the table we were assigned to, and I
dropped the little rhinestone bag holding my room keycard and
rhubarb lipstick on my chair. Then Steve and I headed for the group
gathered at the side of the room. It was pitifully obvious that we
were in a room full of cops. The percentage of shaved heads alone
would have given it away, but cops also have a way of holding
themselves, which I figure comes from the police academy.

There were a few long-haired slouchers
sitting around a table, so obviously undercover cops it was
painful. They had obviously managed to overcome their cadet
training. We pushed past the group and stood in line at the bar.
While we were waiting for the bartender to pop the tops off our
beers, I made a game of guessing which of the women were cops and
which were wives and girlfriends.

There was a pretty brunette who kept pushing
her curls out of her face and was so awkward in her heels that I
figured she had to be a uniform. The blonde in a red sparkly
sheath, hanging onto the arm of a muscled cop, I took for a
girlfriend. And the redhead in jeans sitting with the longhaired
guys had to be undercover herself.

Being neither wife nor girlfriend should have
made me feel out of place, but I felt pretty damn good. For one
thing I was in a room full of cops, so nobody was going to abduct
tonight. For another, to judge from the looks I was getting, I
cleaned up pretty good. I smiled at the bartender. It was fine
evening.

I took my beer and headed back to the table,
nearly spilling my beer on a guy who leaned back in his chair right
in front of me to shout at his buddy.

“You owe me ninety-nine cent,” he called as I
clipped his chair, juggling my beer and glass. “Oops, sorry
miss.”

“What?” His buddy called.

“Ninety-nine cent. You owe me.”

“There’s no such thing as ninety-nine
cent.”

“What the hell you talkin’ about? You owe me
a buck.”

“Its ninety nine cents, numb nuts. There’s no
such thing as ninety-nine cent.”

I skirted his chair, leaving them to argue
across the room like a couple of teenagers. I put my beer on the
table and picked the clutch up off my chair, but Steve caught my
arm before I could sit down.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s something you've
got to see in the other room.” He steered me away from my beer and
through the tables to a door leading to another conference room. In
the middle of the floor was a shiny new black-and-white police
cruiser. It looked like a modified SUV with a fancy bumper, almost
like a cowcatcher, on the front. Steve pulled me over to it and
opened the driver’s side door.

“Get in.”

I slid under the wheel and looked at the
dash. It was like being in the cockpit of a private jet. Steve slid
in the passenger side. Everything looked high tech and state of the
art.

“It’s the new thing,” Steve said. “A company
called Carbon Motors designed it. They want to market it to police
agencies across the country. So instead of driving re-purposed
Crown Vics, we’d all have these custom built jobbies. Cool,
huh?”

“What are all these things?” I motioned to
the dash. There was an LCD screen built into it. “That’s not a TV,
is it?”

“No, it’s not a TV, it’s a computer. This
thing has all the latest stuff. It automatically runs the number of
every plate the camera in the front bumper picks up. You can even
launch a GPS tracker at a speeding car so you don’t have to give
chase. That’s a big deal. It doesn’t happen much in Vermont, but in
other places high-speed chases end in crashes. Wonder what that
will do to the popularity of the website devoted to police chases?
Anyway, the front of this sucker is bulletproof.”

“Are you telling me regular cop cars aren’t
bulletproof? How come I didn’t know that?” I was feeling pretty
stupid. Considering Tom was captain at the barracks and Steve was a
patrol officer, you’d think I’d know more about it.

“No, most patrol cars aren’t bulletproof.
What I wouldn’t give for one of these.”

“Have you ever been shot at in your car?”

“Well, no, but it would be nice to know that
no one could pick me off in my car. It worries me sometimes.”

We slid out of the car, and I took a look
around it. It was like a glossy new toy.

“What would it take to get you one of
these?”