Home for a Spell (12 page)

Stick to the sunshine.

I was trying to do that, but the storm clouds kept closing in.

And at that moment, so were Stony Mill’s boys in blue. Black and white police cars screeched in from all directions, converging on the various apartment complex parking lots. I saw flashes of movement in one or two of the apartments overlooking the health center and pool area, but then my attention was snapped front and center by the shouts of several officers now approaching fast with their weapons drawn.

“Hold it! Stop right where you are!”

“Don’t move!”

“You two . . . back up and get your hands in the air!”

Were they . . . were they talking to—

“I said, back up and get your hands in the air!”

Marcus backed up two steps and slowly complied, a sneer of open derision lifting his upper lip. I was a bit slower in my confusion. “What are you talking about? We’re the ones who called you. Where’s Tom?” Nobody answered my question, so I prodded, “
Fielding?
”

Right on cue, I saw a familiar figure walking up from the side parking lot through one of the apartment pass-throughs, his cocky walk giving him away even at a distance.

“Look, there he is,” I said, pointing him out. “I
know
him, all right?” I didn’t glance Marcus’s way. I hoped he would see the wisdom of my admission. It was certainly better than having a gun pointed in our direction.

Two officers had already headed over to the far side of the pool to check the body. I saw one of them speaking quietly into his shoulder mike as he unclipped something from his breast pocket and reached out with it—it looked like a long, extendo-rod or radio antenna—to lift at the edge of the body.

“Well, if it isn’t Maggie O’Neill and her . . . compadre in crime.”

The dry humor-but-not present in the too-familiar voice snapped me back from what was going on in the pool. Tom Fielding, Special Task Force Investigator for the SMPD—and my former boyfriend, of course—had stopped ten feet from me and was now standing with his hip cocked out, his hands on his heavy-duty and fully loaded gun belt as he stared at me through his favorite mirrored aviators. The sardonic slash of teeth against the tan of his skin was more a mockery of a smile.

He shook his head at me. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

My patience had seen better days, as had my nerves. “What do you mean, tsk, tsk, tsk? For heaven’s sake, call off your goons, would you? And can I put my hands down? My shoulders are starting to ache.” They weren’t, not really, but it sounded as good an excuse as any.

“My . . . goons . . . would probably respond better to a request accompanied by a very special, very handy word someone came up with a long time ago: ‘Please.’ ”

I gritted my teeth. “Please . . . may we put our hands down?”

“That’s better.” With a single nod from Tom, the cops lowered their weapons and holstered them. They did not, however, snap the leather fasteners in place. They were still considering themselves on guard. To his fellow officers, Tom asked, “Anyone checked the property?”

“Hayden and Olds are beating the bushes right now.”

“Why don’t you four go help out? I’ll take over here with Johnson and Kirkland,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward the two cops closest to the body, one of which was wielding a camera. “Oh, and Chief is on his way. You know what that means.”

The cop closest to him nodded. “We’ll keep the equipment away from him. Maybe someone else can help steer him away from the pertinent areas. I vote for Olds, since he’s the newbie.”

“Olds it is, then. Let him know, huh?”

“You got it.”

Marcus came up behind me and put a protective arm around my waist as I cleared my throat noisily. “Um, your guys will want to head over to the apartment complex’s office.”

Tom’s attention snapped back to me. “Well, of course, but . . .” His eyes narrowed in obvious suspicion. “What will we find at the offices, Maggie?”

“Well, for one thing, the man whose body is floating out there is the apartment manager, Rob Locke . . . and, well, for another thing, the office is a wreck.”

“And you would know this . . . how?”

Before I could say anything more, one of the officers—his name tag read “Kirkland”—came hurrying over, a dripping piece of paper, folded into three, held out in front of him over the extendo-rod in his hand. “We fished this out of the water. It was almost all the way out of his pocket, so I didn’t think it would be a problem. Johnson’s taking photos of the body as we speak.”

Tom went to the supply kit one of the guys had brought over and donned a pair of latex gloves. A frown had gathered between his brows as he carefully gripped the corners and ever so slowly peeled the wet folds apart. The frown deepened substantially as he read the words laser-printed onto the page. His gaze lifted to mine, but his glower didn’t lift at all.

“Maggie . . . why is your name on this lease that was in that man’s pocket?”

Of course he had the lease on his body. Sigh. Well, it complicated things but only for the moment. I knew I had nothing to hide, and that the facts would bear me out. Besides, this was Tom. He might not be very happy with me at present, but he would never suspect me of something like this. “Well . . .” I began calmly, “that would probably be because I was supposed to meet him this morning to sign the lease for an apartment here.”

“Huh. I guess that answers my next question, which was, why in the hell are you here. So, that means you’re moving out of loverboy’s house?”

I frowned at him. “How did you—?”

At the same time, Marcus’s grip on me tightened. “That’s none of your business, Fielding, and you know it. You’re out of line.”

Tom’s laugh was caustic enough to stab home the point that he still hadn’t forgiven me for breaking up with him for Marcus. Not yet. “I think the dead man in the pool kind of makes it my business. You know, since it’s my job. How’s about you both make my job easier, huh? I’m going to need to know everything that happened this morning.”

I felt Marcus tense behind me, so I turned and put my hand on his chest to stay whatever comment he was thinking about spouting. It was better that I did the talking. “It is really very simple,” I told Tom. “I had an agreement with Mr. Locke—the apartment manager—to stop by this morning to sign a lease for the apartment he showed me yesterday. When we got here, we stopped in the office and found that it had been broken into and ransacked. We saw lights on in the health center, so we came this way, hoping to find Mr. Locke. We didn’t expect to find him like . . . like that.” I gestured weakly. “So Marcus called 911, and we waited here until your guys got here and pointed their guns at us, and . . . well, there you have it.”

Tom was writing all of this down. Without looking up, he asked, “Did you see anyone at any time while you were here on the premises?”

I shook my head. “No one. The door to the office was standing ajar when we arrived, but there wasn’t anyone there. From there we came directly here, by passing through the health center. The door to the health center was closed but unlocked, and the lights were already on inside.” A flash of an image projected itself onto the blank screen in my mind’s eye. “Oh—I doubt this is relevant, but I did see curtains move in a couple of the apartments. But that was after your men got here, so it’s only natural, right? Whoever was at home wanted to see what the hubbub was about?”

“We’ll be talking to the various tenants in the apartments. Let’s you and me get back to the office and the health center. Did you touch anything? Anything at all?”

“The only things we touched were the doors.”

Tom arched a coolly assessing brow at Marcus. “And you agree with that?”

“It’s just like Maggie said,” Marcus told him. “We got here and found all of this, just like you see things now. I called the cavalry in. They threatened us with guns. Good times.”

Tom ignored the jibe, but I saw the muscle tic in his jaw. “And neither of you knows the manager in any other way?”

I blinked at him. “Are you seriously asking us if we might have any reason to dislike Mr. Locke?”

“Answer the question.” His gaze flicked from the notepad in his hands to my face and back again. “Please.”

I huffed out my breath and crossed my arms. “No. For your information, I had never met the man before yesterday afternoon.”

“Me, either,” Marcus grated out between clenched teeth. “Never met the man.”

Tom nodded, saying nothing. Over by the office, one of his guys gestured at him. He lifted his chin to acknowledge them. To us, he said, “I’d like the two of you to leave the immediate crime scene area—carefully—but stick around for more questioning.”

As soon as he had gone, I fussed to Marcus, “I should have known. I should have known this was not a good idea. It was just another of my not-well-thought-through plans.”

“It’s not your fault someone decided to whack the poor guy, sweetness. How could you have known?”

“I couldn’t. But I’m starting to wonder about this knack I have for running into bad situations. I mean, who wants to be known for that? Maggie the Jinx? No thank you.”

“There’s no way you can possibly think you’re the problem here,” Marcus countered. “You have no idea who this man is or what his story is or who he knows. You just have no idea. Or maybe this really was a burglary gone bad. I mean, we didn’t think so, but we really do need to leave this to the professionals, huh? The people with all of the connections, who can really get to the bottom of things. The people who are paid to do this. Like Fielding. Let him earn his salary.”

Well, I wasn’t sure that any of the men on the Stony Mill Police Department set out to become a cop because they wanted to stop killers in their tracks. I doubted that prospect even lit up their radar screens until this last year. Most of them were just ordinary, stand-up guys who wanted a steady job that involved writing traffic tickets and stopping small-time petty criminals. Protect the populace, keep the peace. Not solving murder after murder. I couldn’t imagine any of them even guessing that they’d be signing up for that, not even as a possibility. Least of all Tom. He had, at least, tried to rise to the occasion. I would give him that.

And poor Olds, the newbie cop they had referred to. The poor kid had no idea what he was letting himself in for.

I kept my eye on Tom as he conferred with the one of the guys who had been assigned to working the office crime scene. He glanced down at an object in a plastic evidence bag, then held it up in the bright morning sunlight now coming at an angle through the tree leaves. His expression changed on a dime, and as I watched he said something to his fellow officer and headed back toward where Marcus and I had settled onto a park bench.

“So, you didn’t know this guy, huh?” he said, addressing the question to Marcus.

“Nope. I didn’t know him.”

“Never seen him before.”

“Nope. Never seen him before.”

“Uh-huh.” Tom nodded, matter-of-factly. He held up the plastic evidence bag he’d just been handed by the other officer. “So, maybe you can explain this to me.”

It was a part of a circuit board that had come out of the computer Marcus had just built for Locke and that Uncle Lou had just delivered the afternoon before. Clearly visible on the back of the board was a label that read “Quinn Enterprises,” with Marcus’s home address and phone number listed beneath. Also encased in the bag were many bits and pieces of other broken computer parts, and in the very bottom, what looked like a crushed USB flash drive.

I opened my mouth, but Marcus beat me to it. “I built the computer for him, but I never met the man. He was an acquaintance of my uncle, Lou Tabor. He was looking for some high-powered computer tech, and I was able to provide it.” Marcus shrugged. “In fact, I just finished it. Uncle Lou delivered it yesterday.”

“With me,” I interjected. “He delivered it when he brought me here to meet with Locke about the apartment.”

Tom was once again scratching things down in his notepad. “Uh-huh. The apartment you were about to sign the lease for. Which we found in the dead man’s pocket.” I knew he didn’t
really
believe that I had anything to do with Locke’s death, but the way he kept restating the point was really starting to tick me off. “And how did all of that come about, again? All of these weird . . . connections?”

There was that word again.
Weird
. Unfortunately, I really couldn’t deny that as fact. Sometimes the way things came about . . . it was weird. I couldn’t explain it. Not in any way that a normal, mundane person would be able to grasp and believe in. A very religious person, on the other hand? Well, maybe, although then we’d be drawn into discussions on the wrath of God, when really any godly wrath was simply man projecting human characteristics like revenge and jealousy on a divine being or entity or force that had always stood completely beyond man’s comprehension. Even now. Maybe especially now.

I cleared my throat. The only thing to do was try. “Well, you see, it’s like this. I found out yesterday that Steff—you remember my best friend, Steff, who lives in the apartment upstairs—well, she’s ninety-nine percent sure that she’s going to be moving out of town when her fiancé’s residency program at the hospital is complete. Which will be soon. So, with her leaving and Marcus going back to school for his degree, I decided now would be a good time for a change of scenery for me, too. A new place, a new perspective on life. You know. That kind of thing.” I checked his face, hoping to find understanding there, but all I saw was a closed sort of neutrality. I had to keep trying. “Anyway, Uncle Lou—that’s Marcus’s Uncle Lou—he mentioned this place, and he kind of arranged the whole meet-and-greet with Mr. Locke, and it was just a big coincidence that Marcus had just built a computer for this guy that Uncle Lou needed to deliver, and with Locke managing an apartment complex that had an available property for me to look at . . . well . . . it seemed kind of meant to be.”