Criminal Intent (MIRA) (5 page)

He paused, fork held aloft. “She doing okay?”

“She’s already going stir-crazy. She said, and I quote, daytime TV is a garbage receptacle catering to nonproductive, nonthinking invertebrates. End of quote.”

He grinned. He could imagine Faith saying something like that. What he couldn’t imagine was her spending the next six weeks flat on her back. “I take it she’s already made the acquaintance of Jerry Springer and Judge Judy.”

“She says she’s overdosing on reruns of
Unsolved Mysteries.
But she’s following doctor’s orders and staying off her feet. She knows Ty will strangle her if she doesn’t.”

He helped himself to a second slice of roast beef. “Everything okay with the babies?”

“According to her obstetrician, everything’s fine. He just wants to play it safe.”

After supper, Jessie cleared away the dishes, gave him a peck on the cheek, and left. It was her night off, and she and her best friend, Becca McLaughlin, were taking in the latest
Harry Potter
movie. Jessie was an amazing kid, a good kid. The best. She’d only been gone for ten minutes, but already the place felt cold and empty without her vibrancy to warm it. Even Buddy felt the loss. The dog lay in front of the couch, his head on his paws, sad brown eyes watching Davy’s every move.

“She’ll be back in a few hours,” he told the dog. “I miss her already, too.” He felt foolish for talking to the damn-fool creature
as though it were human, but Buddy acted as though he understood every word that was said to him. Davy knelt and chucked the dog under the chin. Buddy raised his head and swished his tail back and forth on the rug, and Davy got back up, poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot that was sitting on the sideboard, and headed out to his workshop.

He took a long swig of black coffee and set his cup down on his work table. Out here, the scents of summer mingled with the pungent aroma of sawdust. He opened a can of honey-colored stain, found a clean rag, and turned on the CD player. Kneeling, he began applying the stain to the drop-leaf table he’d just finished making.

The work was familiar, comforting, and as he worked, the sweet simplicity of Keith Urban’s music began working some of the day’s tensions out of his shoulders. Davy Hunter loved working with his hands. Loved working with wood. Loved its fresh scent, its smooth, silken texture, loved the way the stain worked with the grain of the wood to create wonderful geometric patterns that couldn’t be duplicated by man. Like fingerprints, no two pieces of wood were alike, and every work he created was unique.

He took another sip of coffee. It would never be his beverage of choice, but it was all he allowed himself these days. No more twelve-pack pity parties. No more three-day benders. He held a responsible position within the community, and he had Jessie to think about. She might look as though she had it all together, but she was still just sixteen. She was depending on him to take care of her for the next two months.

Davy suspected that was a big part of the reason Ty had wanted him for the job. It kept him out of trouble, gave him something better to do than sit around drinking beer and feeling sorry for himself. The fact that Ty had entrusted the safety of the town of Serenity—not to mention Jessie—to him said something
about their friendship. Like any long-term relationship, it had gone through some rocky times, but in the end it had held strong. This was Ty’s way of letting him know that, in spite of the fact that he’d fucked up royally where Chelsea was concerned, his old friend hadn’t lost trust in him. Ty had given him a chance to redeem himself.

And he would, damn it. This time he’d get it right. This time, nobody would die. For the next sixty days, he’d simply place one foot in front of the other and walk a straight and narrow line. Without wavering, without stumbling, without falling on his ugly mug. He’d prove to all of his detractors that Davy Hunter was a capable, competent human being, and not the worthless piece of garbage that so many people seemed to believe he was.

When the phone rang, he wiped his hands on a clean rag and went to answer it. “David?” said a voice as wispy and insubstantial as a Kleenex tissue. “You have to come over. It’s an emergency.”

“Gram,” he said, his hands tightening on the rag. “What’s wrong?”

“Koko got out, and I can’t find her. She’s not supposed to be outdoors. Somebody will steal her. Or she’ll get run over.”

As gently as possible, he said, “I’m sort of in the middle of something.” He really wanted to get the staining done tonight. Now that he was gainfully employed, he didn’t have much free time to devote to his woodworking projects. Holding back a sigh, he said, “I don’t suppose there’s any way this can wait an hour or two?”

“By then, it’ll be too late. She’ll be gone.” Her voice climbed into a higher register, a step closer to hysteria. “I don’t know what to do.”

Davy glanced at the table he was working on and gave in. What choice did he have? Gram’s emergencies always took priority over everything else.

“Give
me ten minutes to clean up,” he said. “I’ll come over and find your cat.”

He’d tried several times over the past year to convince Gram to sell her house and move into Spruce Run, one of those assisted-living facilities where elderly people could maintain their independence but still receive 24-hour assistance. He’d even brought over a brochure or two and read all the scintillating details to her. Gram, of course, had thought the idea absurd. “Why do I need a stranger on call,” she’d said, “when I already have you?”

That was the problem. She already had him. Perhaps because of her blindness—or maybe it was just orneriness—Gram had no concept of time, no clue that other people had lives they needed to attend to. No matter what time of day or night an emergency arose, she had only to hit speed dial 1 and he’d be there within minutes. The problem was that her definition of emergency and his seldom matched. So far he’d been called out to change the lightbulb in her refrigerator, to chase a raccoon off her front porch, to sniff the milk and make sure it hadn’t soured. And now, to find her missing cat.

When Gram had reached her mideighties and her health had begun to fail, he’d been unanimously elected her caregiver. He got the job by default. Who else was going to do it, if not him? Sure as hell not his sister, Dee, who had six kids and a useless husband and a pinched look about her mouth that suggested she had been sorely disappointed by life. The last time Davy’d had the audacity to suggest that she might consider helping out with Gram once in a while, his sister had gone ballistic. She’d sputtered about how busy her life was, chasing after a half-dozen kids and trying to keep the floors scrubbed and the laundry done, not to mention working to support the family. How dare he, who hung out with riffraff and had nothing but spare time, criticize her for failing to take on yet another responsibility in the form of the octogenarian who’d raised them?

Nope, Dee
wouldn’t be picking up the slack any time soon. Nor would Brian, his kid brother, who’d seen the writing on the wall and blown this town before the ink was dry on his high school diploma. Not that Davy blamed him for leaving, all things considered. They never talked about Brian; he and Dee and Gram, never even mentioned his name. It was as though his brother had died, and the pain was so great that the only way the family could survive was to perpetrate this elaborate ruse that he’d never existed in the first place. No, Brian wasn’t about to come home and take care of his ailing grandmother. The last time Davy’d heard from his brother was six or seven years ago, when Brian had called from New Mexico. He was living in Taos, where he’d made scores of friends. Life was good. He’d met someone. It was looking serious; they’d just bought a small house together. Alec was a chef by trade, and they’d decided that with his culinary talents and Brian’s head for business, they should open a restaurant. But startup costs were killer, and they were short on capital. Maybe big bro would be interested in investing in their little venture?

Davy had sent his brother a check for five thousand dollars. Guilt money. Guilt because he hadn’t been good enough at protecting his doe-eyed, sensitive little brother from school-yard taunts, from Dee’s sanctimonious determination to pretend she’d never even had a baby brother, from Gram’s well-meaning but misplaced attempts to fix the part of Brian that she deemed defective. He hadn’t been able to protect Brian from being unloved, so he’d tried to make up for it with money.

He’d never heard from Brian again. The check had been cashed almost immediately, but Brian hadn’t acknowledged his generosity with so much as a phone call. Davy hadn’t been surprised. Disappointed, maybe, but not surprised. They were one fucked-up bunch, the Hunter clan. He and Brian and Dee were
poster children for dysfunctional. Then again, did anybody really come from a functional family? Had anybody ever seen one? Did anybody even know what one was supposed to look like?

When he pulled into Gram’s driveway, he took a good long look at the house where he’d grown up. At nearly forty years of age, he couldn’t remember a time when the siding had been any color other than a silvery gray. Rot had begun to eat away at the windowsills and the eaves, and the place needed a new roof. He’d offered to spend some money on the house, fix up the worst of the damage inflicted by time and neglect, but Gram had adamantly refused his help. The house, she’d told him, was adequate for her needs. Once she was gone, it would be up to him to decide its fate. For now, she didn’t intend to make any changes.

A cluster of homemade bird feeders hung haphazardly from a spruce tree near the kitchen door where Gram waited anxiously. Dressed in a tangerine-colored housecoat, a green cardigan, and pink fuzzy slippers, she bore an uncanny resemblance to a carton of rainbow sherbet. She peered out through the screen as he climbed out of his car.

“Gram,” he said, “you need to keep your door locked. Remember, we talked about that?”

“It’s locked,” she said cheerfully. “See?” She lifted the ineffectual silver hook from its equally ineffectual silver eye and beamed at him. Granted, this was a small town, but even in small towns, things happened. He should know. He’d worked DEA long enough. A couple of coked-up teenagers looking for something to pawn to support their habit could do a lot of damage to a little old lady who was legally blind, a little senile, and far too trusting for her own good.

“You stay inside,” he told her. “I’ll look for Koko.”

He got down on his hands and knees and shone his flashlight under the saggy wooden steps. No cat in sight. With his eyes
trained on the house’s crumbling foundation, where a cat might seek cool shelter on a warm summer evening, he worked his way around to the back. Out here, the ground was crooked as hell, and the grass hadn’t been mowed in a decade or two. If he was a cat, this was where he’d hide. He traipsed the grounds, flashlight playing in a wide arc, grateful for once that Gram didn’t have any close neighbors to wonder what the hell he was doing out here, walking around in circles like a crazy man. “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty,” he said.

No response. “Come on, Koko,” he muttered. “You may have time for fun and games, but I still have a couple hours of work left tonight, and I have to be up at five. You’re not helping much.”

The evening was silent, save for the soft rustle of grass blowing in the breeze. He made his way to the old horse barn and gingerly tested the floor with a foot to make sure he wouldn’t fall through. He’d be willing to bet that nobody’d been out here since he and his siblings were kids. The old floorboards creaked under his weight, but they held up. He checked every corner, every place a small gray tabby could possibly hide, but the only signs of life he saw were a couple of fat spiders hanging overhead.

Great. He might as well kiss tonight’s work goodbye. He’d never get away from here if he didn’t miraculously produce the AWOL feline. Gram might be soft-spoken, but that quaking voice disguised the true hard-ass who lurked behind the facade of serene gentility. Lorena Hunter was the queen of manipulation.

With heavy heart and heavier tread, he trudged back around to the front of the house. Gram was still waiting anxiously behind the screen door. “Did you find her?” she said. “Did you find Koko?”

“Not yet. Let’s give it a few minutes and try—” His attention was snagged by a movement in the kitchen behind her, a
shadow that morphed, right in front of his eyes, into a small, gray tabby. “What’s that?” he said.

“What’s what?”

The cat sat down three feet behind his grandmother and began delicately washing one of her tiny front paws. Pausing for an instant, the dainty creature met his glance, and he would have sworn it was smugness he saw in those narrowed yellow eyes. “That,” he said. “Right behind you. If she got out, what’s she doing inside the house?”

Gram turned away from the screen door. “Koko?” she said feebly. “Is that you?”

The cat abandoned its toilette, stood up and furled itself around his grandmother’s legs. “Shame on you,” Gram said with a delight he found totally unwarranted. “Shame on you for scaring me like that.” She knelt to pat the cat, who rubbed affectionately at her hand. “Naughty, naughty kitty.”

Davy could have come up with a few other choice names for the errant feline, but he held his tongue. At least now he could get back to work.

“I could have sworn she got out,” Gram said with utter ingenuousness. “Oh, well, as long as you’re here, you might as well come in. I have fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. I just made them. I know how much you like chocolate chip.”

He opened his mouth to tell her he didn’t have time for a visit, then decided it would be easier to just roll with it. He’d get away much more quickly if he simply let her have her way. Gram rose back up from her kneeling position with the ease of a twenty-year-old and pushed the screen door open for him. “Sit down at the table,” she said. “I’ll pour you a glass of milk.”

The cookies were heavenly, and still warm. He shot her a speculative glance while she sat across the table from him, beaming as bright as the sun at high noon. It seemed convenient that she’d just happened to be baking cookies when her cat
just happened to escape out the kitchen door. Especially considering that the missing kitty had been here in the house all the time. Was her befuddlement genuine, or had he been royally bamboozled?