Criminal Intent (MIRA) (10 page)

He got out of the car, went inside, and headed down the narrow aisle toward the soda cooler. His sister was alone behind the cash register, a short line of customers in front of her. After chasing kids all day, Dee worked the four-to-twelve shift at the Big Apple to put food on the table and shoes on their feet. His brother-in-law, Ray, had never held a job for longer than a few months. Every so often, mostly to get out of the house and away from a bunch of screaming kids—not to mention Dee’s mouth—Ray would sweet-talk somebody into hiring him. Highly skilled jobs like washing dishes at Lenny’s
or pulling auto parts for Sonny Gaudette. But the jobs never lasted long, and for the most part, Ray sat on his rapidly expanding ass in front of the TV and let Dee support the family.

If she had half a brain, she would have ditched Raymond Arsenault years ago. But something kept her with him. Maybe it was fear of the unknown. He tried to imagine what it would be like to face life as a single mother of six kids under the age of twelve, but it was unimaginable. Still, Davy would have been willing to help her, if only for the sake of the kids. His sister might be difficult, but she was still his sister.

Davy took his place in line. Behind the counter, Dee made change routinely, joylessly. At thirty-five, her lackluster brown hair was already streaked with gray, and she still carried the thirty extra pounds she’d put on three or four pregnancies ago. When the customer ahead of him left, Davy plunked a six-pack of Pepsi down on the counter. “Dee,” he said.

“Davy.” She checked the price of the soda and rang it up. “How goes the crime-fighting battle?”

“Not much crime to fight.” He pulled out his wallet, handed her a ten.

“That’s what I hear.” She fumbled in the drawer for change, counted it out. “I also hear you’ve taken to rescuing damsels in distress.”

Annie Kendall.
Christ, a man couldn’t pass gas in this town without everybody knowing about it. “Where’d you hear that?”

“You know Serenity. Word gets around.”

“I’ll say.” He pocketed his change, tucked his wallet away. “How’re the kids?” He deliberately didn’t ask about her husband. He’d never had much use for Ray Arsenault, and he never would. His feelings toward Ray were responsible for at least a portion of the tension between his sister and him. Not all of it. But a portion.

Bagging
the Pepsi, she said, “They’re growing too damn fast. I had to take Jill to Wal-Mart this morning because she didn’t have anything to wear. She’s outgrown every pair of pants she owns. I swear to God, that kid’s shot up a good six inches in the last three months.”

Was it his imagination, or was there a hint of accusation in her words? If so, he couldn’t imagine why. It wasn’t his fault she’d chosen to marry a man who wasn’t willing to support her or the children they’d spawned. Clearing his throat, he said, “I saw Gram last night.”

His sister stiffened and crossed her arms over her ample bosom, which strained against the material of her flowered knit top. “Oh?” she said coolly.

“She called me over. Another of her emergencies.”

Dee rolled her eyes. “I just bet. What was it this time?”

“The cat got out. I had to go hunting for the damn thing. Except that after I spent twenty minutes running around the yard calling
kitty-kitty-kitty,
it turns out the cat was in the house all the time.”

Dee propped herself against the cash register. “There’s a surprise. I’ve told you and told you not to run every time she calls. Your life isn’t your own because of her. Why the hell do you think I stay away? I’d be over there three times a day if I let her get away with the stuff she pulls on you.”

He felt a headache coming on, the same headache that had teased him at Gram’s last night. “That’s just the thing,” he said. “It was a ploy.”

“What’d I tell you?”

“But I wasn’t the target.”

“Oh?”

“No. You were. She wants you to visit. She says she hasn’t seen you in months.”

“Oh, Jesus. Here we go again.”

“Look, Dee,” he said, wading in when all his instincts told him
to stay out of it, “nobody’s asking you to take responsibility for the woman. Just stop by for an hour. Bring the kids. It would mean the world to her.”

“No.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake?”

Dee rested both palms on the counter. Leaning forward, she said, “Every time I go over there, she tries to get her hooks into me. I don’t have time to run her errands. I don’t have time to chase her goddamn cat. I don’t have time to deal with her fabricated emergencies. I have six kids. I have this lousy job and a car that’s being held together with rust and duct tape. I’m tired, Davy. Don’t you get it? My plate’s already full. When am I supposed to visit, at three o’clock in the morning? Let me check my date book. Maybe I’m available next Thursday.”

It might have been a tear he saw glistening in her eye. Or maybe it was just a trick of the light. “Damn it, Dee,” he said, “the woman raised us. She didn’t have to. She could’ve just said to hell with us and let us go into foster care while Mom played ring-around-the-rosy with the state’s penal system. Instead, she gave up her own life to raise three kids who weren’t her responsibility. Don’t you think we owe her something?”

“Owe her something? She didn’t do us any frigging favors! She should’ve left well enough alone. Maybe I would’ve gotten out of this town if Gram hadn’t kept us here.”

He stared at his sister, disbelief and disappointment grinding away at his gut. She wasn’t going to let it go. No matter how old she got, Dee simply couldn’t let go of the fact that they’d grown up poor.

Oh, they’d always had clothes to wear, and they’d never gone hungry. Gram had made sure they always had enough to eat. Looking back, he wondered how, even with the help of that monthly DHS check, she’d managed to raise three kids on her woefully inadequate fixed income. There she’d been, a
woman in her sixties who should have been enjoying her golden years. Instead, she’d spent two decades and most of her retirement income raising three wild-eyed, ungrateful hellions. It was a miracle she’d survived.

Somehow, being poor hadn’t affected him or Brian, not like it had Dee. They’d been too busy being guys, doing guy things, to take much notice. That seemed to be a major difference between boys and girls. Give a boy a tattered sweatshirt, a pair of smelly sneakers, and a basketball, and he’d be in hog heaven. Girls were different. They needed to be surrounded by pretty things in order to feel good about themselves. Where he and Brian had accepted being poor without giving it much thought, it had eaten away at Dee like a cancerous growth. She had carted the mantle of poverty around on her back, a burdensome wooden cross that had crippled her. He couldn’t remember a time when his sister had been happy. She hadn’t always been the shrew she was now, but growing up in Gram’s household had warped her somehow. The end result was what he saw standing in front of him now.

But damn it, a lot of people grew up poor. A lot of people grew up far worse off than he and Dee and Bri, and they managed to survive their unhappy childhoods. But Dee was stuck somewhere in adolescence, buried beneath the weight of that cross she bore, and thoroughly convinced that she was the only one who’d ever had something bad happen to her. Sometimes he wanted to scream, “Get over it!” but he knew it wouldn’t help. In her eyes, his hostility would simply be further proof that her life was shit and it wasn’t her fault. Dee was looking for somebody to blame, some scapegoat, something she could point to and say, “There, that’s it! That’s the reason my life sucks so bad!”

God help her. She wasn’t going to find it.

A customer came into the store, walked to the soda cooler and took out a two-liter bottle of Coke, then got in line behind
Davy. His sister looked at him pointedly, clearly waiting for him to leave so she could get back to work.

Davy took the hint. Tucking the six-pack under his arm, he said, “I’ll see you around.” And left without looking back.

Louis waited twenty minutes after Wyatt left, just to make sure the old man didn’t return for some forgotten item. Then he got out of the car and walked right up to the front door of Building C as though he had every right to be there. Dressed the way he was, nobody would take him for a B&E man. Nobody would look twice. He looked like every other yahoo in south Florida.

Security in this place was a joke. Louis looked around for cameras, hidden or otherwise, but there were none. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and went to work on the door lock. It took him about fifteen seconds to bypass the lock and let himself into Wyatt’s condo. He did it neatly, without damaging anything. He always did everything neatly, never left any evidence behind. Once he was inside, he locked the door behind him, took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket. He made a quick survey of the layout, checking entrances and exits and closing blinds so he wouldn’t be on display to the other residents of the complex.

In Wyatt’s bedroom, next to the antique dresser, he found a large green-and-yellow parrot in a cage. The creature watched him with bright-eyed curiosity tempered by caution. Louis wondered if the bird could talk. When he was a kid, he’d always wanted a pet bird, but his mother had been allergic, so he’d had to content himself with looking at the colorful pictures in books and magazines instead. “Hello,” he said to it. “Pretty birdie.”

But the bird just stared silently, creeping him out with those beady little eyes. Was it his imagination, or did he really see malice in those inky depths? “Same to you, buddy,” he said, and ambled off to the living room.

The
condo had that whitewashed, generic look that he hated. White walls, white carpet, white appliances. Beige vertical blinds hanging in front of sliding glass doors that led to a three-foot by three-foot patio. Except for the bird, it was bland, colorless, and boring. But tidy. Either Wyatt had a housekeeper, or he was exceptionally neat. Not an item was out of place; the houseplants all looked lush and healthy, and he couldn’t find a speck of dust anywhere.

On an end table sat a framed photo of Robin Wyatt Spinney with a big, broad-shouldered, handsome man who must have been her husband. She looked younger than she did in the photo Brogan had given him. She was wearing a floppy straw hat, and the man had his arms around her. They both wore wide grins. It was obvious that they’d been happy together.

Looking around, he spied a second photo, this one of Spinney and her daughter. Both of them stared boldly into the camera, both young and blond and beautiful, both of them knowing that the camera lens would be nothing less than kind to them. But he could see a difference between this photo and the other one; although they were both smiling, something was missing from this photo. The joy had disappeared from Robin Spinney’s eyes. This one had been taken after Mac Spinney died.

A man who kept photos of his daughter where he could look at them every day had to be in some form of regular contact with her. Letters, phone calls, e-mail. Somewhere here, there had to be something that would point him in the right direction.

He started with the desk in the den, because it was the most likely place. He found Wyatt’s bills, neatly organized in alphabetical order, in the top drawer. He was beginning to like this guy. If nothing else, Bill Wyatt was making his job easier. It took him just a few minutes to rifle through six months’ worth
of paid bills. He found nothing unusual, nothing that sent up a red flag. Electric bill, telephone bill, car payment coupons, a single credit card, seldom used and nowhere near the credit limit. Not a single long-distance phone bill.

Louis moved on to the Rolodex, thumbed through it. Not much here. Wyatt wasn’t exactly a social butterfly. Most of the numbers here were pretty standard fare. Dry cleaner, country club, Domino’s Pizza. Nothing that jumped out at him, so he moved on to the computer.

It was a Dell, last year’s basic model without much in the way of bells and whistles. Wyatt obviously wasn’t a computer geek. Louis booted it up, sifted through the hard drive contents and found nothing. He pulled up AOL. Wyatt had a single screen name, and—would you look at that! His password was saved. Trusting guy, especially for a former military man. But of course, for a man who lived alone, privacy wouldn’t be an issue.

Judging by the contents of his e-mail, Bill Wyatt was really into parrots, and most of his mail came from his parrotloving friends. They spoke in some kind of birdie lingo that Louis found hilarious. They referred to their feathered children as fids and to themselves as parronts, and bragged about the accomplishments of those fids as though they were human.

Nut cases, Louis thought. They were all nut cases. He checked the AOL file cabinet and found more of the same. Total dead end. The IE history folder revealed that Wyatt went to parrot forums a couple times a week, did his monthly banking online, and apparently had a weakness for naked, bigbreasted women with names like Honey and Ginger. He wondered if Lottie Trent knew that her boyfriend was into more than just parrots online. Of course, these were modern times. For all he knew, Trent and Wyatt visited those XXX-rated sites together. They could be on their way to Trent’s condo even
now to view their recommended daily allowance of porn. Maybe that’s what they did during those post-dinner rendezvous.

Having gotten more of an education than he wanted, Louis shut down the computer, still no closer to finding Robin Spinney than he’d been when he started. He looked through the rest of the desk drawers, but found nothing there. No phone number scribbled on a sticky note, no address written in the margin of the telephone book. Zilch. Nada. A big zero.

He was beginning to think this was a dead end, and he imagined the look of displeasure on Luke Brogan’s face when he told the sheriff that he’d been unsuccessful at locating Robin Spinney. Brogan’s displeasure wasn’t something he wanted to experience in person. The sheriff could be a mean son of a bitch when he wanted to. No, there had to be a way, and Louis was going to find it.

He was in the kitchen, thumbing through the pages of the wall calendar—parrots, wouldn’t you know it—when he heard the sound of a key in the lock. Louis froze as the front door opened. What the hell? Wyatt wasn’t due home for another—he glanced at the wall clock—forty-three minutes. Panicked, he looked around for an escape route, but the kitchen, which connected directly to the condo’s living room, had only one tiny window over the sink, and there was no way he was going to squeeze through it. That left only one means of escape: directly through the living room that Bill Wyatt had just entered.