Death on Heels (25 page)

“That’s my cockeyed best friend you’re talking about,” Lacey pointed out, smiling.

“And my best sister. Cockeyed and, no doubt, brilliant. Forever skirting the letter of the law. I’d rather keep my clients out of jail than grab a headline.”

“I don’t care what happens as long as I can get cleaned up first. And rescue my rental car.”

Cherise and Rose caught up with them. “What’s going on?” her mother demanded.

“I’m taking Lacey back to her motel,” Vic said. “You may consider me her personal bodyguard until we leave Sagebrush. And after that too.” He stepped between her mother and sister and pulled Lacey to him.

Rose patted Vic on the back. “You’ve got your hands full,” she said.

“Thanks, Mom,” Lacey said.

“I didn’t say you weren’t worth it. But you were always a handful.”

Lacey exchanged a look with her sister. Cherise took her mother’s arm. “Okay, Mom, Lacey’s got a bodyguard and the motel’s got a bar. Let’s go.”

Ben took hold of Cherise’s other arm. “Did I mention I’m a member of the bar?”

“Chief Donovan?” A careworn middle-aged woman approached Vic. She barely glanced at Lacey.

The woman’s eyes carried so much sorrow that Lacey thought about stepping away from Vic’s rented Jeep to give her some privacy, but he held her close. Behind the woman, a big man put his arm on the woman’s shoulder.

“Chief Donovan?” the big man said. “Can you tell us what’s going on with the search for Cole Tucker? The sheriff’s office won’t tell us a thing.”

“Mrs. Fowler.” Vic grasped the woman’s outstretched hands. “Call me Vic. I’m not police chief here anymore, you know, not for a few years now. I’m a private investigator back East.”

Lacey realized this must be Rae Fowler’s mother. Kitty Fowler grabbed Vic’s hand like a drowning victim reaching for a life raft. But she wasn’t crying. She was dry-eyed and purposeful.

Lacey looked past the woman’s shoulder. A knot of reporters was bearing down on her, with Muldoon bringing up the rear. Someone pointed a camera at them.

“Not here,” Vic said. “We need to get away from these vultures.”

Excuse me. I’m one of those vultures.
But she too had no desire at this moment to be quoted or photographed. Vic and Lacey followed the large man, who turned out to be the woman’s husband, Herb Fowler, to their green and white camper parked at the far end of the lot.

“It’s a little small,” Herb Fowler said, “but it saves on
motels. We don’t know how long we’ll have to be here in town.”

Inside, there was room enough for the four of them to sit around a small built-in table. The camper, though cozied up with white ruffled curtains at the small window, felt closed in by grief.

While Rae had been pretty and round faced, her mother was plain and gaunt, with dark circles under her eyes. Kitty Fowler’s lackluster, pale hair was streaked with gray and pulled back into a messy chignon at the back of her neck. She wore a navy blue knit jacket over matching slacks that hung on her frame. The thin woman had a hungry look, but Lacey suspected it had nothing to do with food. She was starved for justice and had left vanity behind.

“They let Cole Tucker escape,” she said. “How could they do that? I want that monster caught.”

“They’ll catch him,” Vic said. “Just a matter of time.”

Herb Fowler made an effort to smile. He was balding, with a neatly trimmed sandy red mustache, and he wore a blazer over slacks. Herb had been in the army and had the air of a man who knew that life went on in the face of disaster.

“Our son wanted to come with us, but he’s in college and—and this is such a sad business,” he said.

Kitty smiled for the first time. “He’s in his sophomore year. He makes all As.”

“A little different from Rae. She wasn’t much of a student.” Herb grasped his wife’s hand as if he could pour his strength into it. “Our son’s in pre-med.”

The son was the good child, while the prodigal daughter would never come home again. Kitty looked happy for a moment, but then she remembered why she was here, and her smile turned down. Not a day would go by for the rest of her life when the mother wouldn’t think of her daughter’s untimely death, when she wouldn’t wonder what might have been. Would Rae have straightened out, gone to college, gotten married, had babies? She turned to Lacey, a question in her expression.

“He let you get away?”

“Yes. He let me go and put me on a horse.” Lacey found it hard to keep her gaze, but she wouldn’t turn away.

“Why did he let you live?” She closed her eyes for a moment and a tear squeezed out. “Did he talk about Rae? Why he did it?”

Lacey shook her head. “We talked about who might have set him up.”

“And you believe that?” Kitty asked.

“I do. I don’t believe Tucker could kill anyone. And I’m alive.”

“But the police can’t be wrong. They have the evidence!”

“Kitty,” her husband said, “we want them to be right. But we don’t know—”

“There is a big gaping hole in my life that nothing can fill,” she continued. “As much as I dreaded Rae’s future, I never expected this.” Kitty’s eyes filled with tears.

“Rae caused us a lot of heartache,” her husband said. “But we loved her.”

Kitty choked back a sob. “She ran away before. She was in such a hurry to grow up. You couldn’t tell her being an adult was no bed of roses. That you have to answer to your boss and pay your rent. I never imagined what would happen to my little wild child.”

“You can’t blame yourselves,” Vic said.

“We don’t,” she said. “Not really. We’ve talked it through, over and over, with our pastor. Rae was on a collision course her whole life. I always asked myself, what did I do wrong? Should I be harder? Should I be more lenient? But nothing could stop her. She was on a path to destruction.”

Herb put his arm around his wife. “Don’t torture yourself, Kitty.”

“May I ask you a question?” Lacey asked.

Kitty looked Lacey in the eye. “Go ahead.”

“Do you have any pictures of Rae? I’d like to see what she was like.” Lacey refrained from saying she wanted to know what kind of
shoes
the girl wore. She
knew that would sound tone-deaf to the seriousness of the situation.

“Sure do.” Kitty squeezed out of the booth and opened a cabinet. She pulled out a photo album bursting at the seams with photos of her daughter. “Here she is. Here’s our little Rae.”

Lacey leafed through the pages from the beginning. Rae was a pretty child. Every snapshot seemed to vibrate with her energy. But Lacey wanted to jump to the end to see how she became the rebellious girl who ran away from home. She looked for a picture of Rae wearing cowboy boots.

“I’ve heard things about you, Ms. Smithsonian,” Kitty said.

“We’ve read about your investigating those murders,” Herb added.

Lacey braced herself. She never knew how people would react. “I’m just a reporter.” Vic raised one eyebrow, visible only to Lacey. “Sometimes I notice when things don’t add up.”

“She does that,” Vic said. “And sometimes, the plain truth is cops don’t see everything. I should know.”

Lacey turned a page in the album and paused.
There. Right there. Rae Fowler, maybe six years old, posing in a pair of pink boots.
She took a deep breath.

“Kitty, do you have any idea what kind of shoes Rae might have been wearing when she—went missing? You might not know.”

“But I do know,” Kitty said. “At least I’d bet money on it. She was wearing those silly boots.”

“Boots?”
Don’t get your hopes up.

“She had this pair of cowboy boots,” Herb Fowler said. “Real fancy. We couldn’t get her out of them.”

“I was afraid at first that Rae stole them,” Kitty went on. “She came home from her babysitting job one day—this was back home in Denver—wearing this crazy pair of boots. Rae was just fifteen, I think. I’d never seen anything like these boots. Black with silver leather cutouts. Lightning bolts. And silver trim around the toe and around the heels.”

“Filigreed silver?” Lacey asked, barely daring to breathe. “On the heels?”

“Filigree, yeah, whatever they call it. Looked real delicate. They must have cost a fortune. Rae said Mrs. Hurst, the lady she babysat for,
gave
them to her. God forgive me, I didn’t believe her, and we had a big fight. Rae said I never believed her, and I guess I didn’t.”

Herb picked up the story. “She had this thing about being like a cowgirl. Even when she was a little girl. Don’t know where she picked that up. We bought her a pair of pink cowboy boots when she was, oh, six or seven. There’s pictures in there. She was still trying to wear them when her feet grew too big.”

“Was Rae telling the truth about where those fancy boots came from?” Lacey asked.

Kitty nodded. “I called Mrs. Hurst. Sure enough, she said she gave them to Rae. Mrs. Hurst had them special-made somewhere. Well, she had the money, didn’t she? Said her feet had grown so much after she had her babies, and Rae saw them and just went nuts over them, so she was glad to give them to someone who would appreciate them. Appreciate them. My goodness, Rae adored those boots! How she would polish them.”

“Is there a picture of Rae in those boots?” Lacey tried to sound as neutral as possible. Vic pressed Lacey’s arm as a warning not to go too far, but he didn’t try to stop her. There hadn’t been time to tell him what she’d found up at Thompson’s cabin.

Kitty nodded and took the album from Lacey and flipped through a few pages. “We would have buried her in those boots. They found her barefoot. I don’t know if you knew that. She loved them so much. But—”

“If they turn up,” Vic said, “I’ll make sure you get them back.”

“There,” Kitty said. “Oh, she was so pretty.”

The photograph was of a teenage Rae grinning and posing triumphantly, just the way she had posed at seven or eight, the cowboy boots front and center, one turned to the side with a good view of the heel. Lacey couldn’t be
exactly
sure the silver bootheel she’d found
came from the boots in the picture, but it looked like it could.

But if one smart-ass reporter said the heel and photo were a match, Sheriff T-Rex would be sure to say they
weren’t.
Lacey slumped back, feeling hot and feverish, her limbs heavy with exhaustion.

“Kitty, would you please show this photograph to the sheriff? This exact picture,” Lacey said. “No, wait, not the sheriff. Take it to Agent Firestone with the CBI. He’s probably still in the Justice Center. Vic, do you have a number for him?”

Vic nodded, a little puzzled. He took out one of his own cards and wrote a phone number on it.

The Fowlers looked at each other. “If it will help,” Kitty said. “If we can get the picture back.”

“They can make a copy,” Vic said.

“Tell Agent Firestone what you told me,” Lacey said. “About Rae’s favorite pair of cowboy boots. That she might have been wearing them when she disappeared. Show him this picture. Please. It’s very important.”

“This might be something? Because she was found barefoot, you mean?”

Lacey hesitated. “I can’t promise anything.”

“The CBI is interested in any information that will help solve the case,” Vic said. “This could be critical.”

Thank you, Vic,
she thought,
for backing me up even though you don’t know what I’m up to.

“Don’t talk to anyone but Firestone, and tell him I sent you,” Vic continued. “That’s my card. And don’t worry—they’re going to catch Cole Tucker.”

“If it’s important—” Kitty clutched the photo album in both hands. “We’ll go right now.”

Herb Fowler opened the camper door. The reporters lounging in the parking lot snapped to attention. Muldoon must have gone to file his story, and Lacey didn’t recognize anyone else.

The media made way for Kitty as she was helped down the steps by her husband. Lacey and Vic followed, and Herb locked the camper. “Now, back off, all of you,” Herb ordered. The reporters seemed torn: follow Lacey
or Kitty Fowler? Grieving parents of a murder victim, or the kidnap victim of the alleged murderer?
Tough call.

Kitty and Herb were swallowed up by the mob of reporters.

“Give it up. I’m not talking to you guys,” Lacey said to the journalists who stayed to shout questions at her. She marched to Vic’s rental Jeep. He waited to speak until he and Lacey were buckled in and the engine on.

“All right, what’s this cowboy boot business all about? You think the killer, if it wasn’t Tucker, was swiping their boots?”

“Vic, I have so much to tell you I don’t know where to start.”

“Doesn’t matter. Start anywhere.” He put his hand on her knee and gently squeezed.

“Two of the victims wore unusual cowboy boots. Corazon liked to go dancing wearing her favorite boots.”

“Tucker offered this information willingly?”

“No, I beat it out of him. The boots were the only thing he remembered about what she wore. That and short skirts.”

“You interrogated him about her clothes?”

Lacey smiled slowly. “It’s what I do, now, isn’t it?”

“I gather you’ve concocted some sort of fashion clue theory, because that’s also what you do.” Vic turned the Jeep toward their motel. “Did the good sheriff appreciate your special talent?”

“You bet. Now, the Fowlers just told us about Rae and her favorite silver-heeled cowboy boots. Taking the victim’s shoes? It wasn’t just to keep them from running away, despite what all you manly lawmen think. And I’m not saying it was a boot fetish, per se, but some killers keep trophies, don’t they? Why not cowboy boots? Especially strikingly unusual ones?”

“Point taken. Anything else you’re not telling me? Okay, anything you haven’t had a chance to tell me
yet
?”

She waited a beat. “I found a heel in the cabin where Tucker took me.” Vic just stared at her. His eyes narrowed and he opened his mouth to speak, but Lacey rushed on. “A black stacked leather cowboy bootheel,
wrapped in silver filigree. Looks like it matches the photograph of Rae’s fancy boots.” She took out her camera and showed him her shot of the heel. “T-Rex wasn’t impressed, but he made me leave it with him anyway.”