Hot Start (32 page)

“Hey, what can I say? It’s a slow news day.”

I got in my truck. Danika leaned into the open window.

“So,” Quinn said, “what did Dino have to say? You did talk to him, right? Anything new? Was it about Congressman Walton? Because you can’t believe some of the bizarre sex stuff I’ve been picking up about that guy.”

“Nice seeing you again, Danika.”

I fired up the engine.

“Hey, do you know who Pete McManus is? He’s a pilot, like you.”

“I know who he is,” I said.

“Well, did you know that he was the one who was having the big hot and heavy affair with Toni? That throws a twist into things, don’t you think?”

“He’s clean.”

“You sure about that?”

Quinn was looking at me with the corners of her mouth turned up, like she knew something I didn’t.

“What’re you telling me, Danika?”

She pulled her head out of the window, glanced both ways to make sure we were alone, then leaned in once more. “Rumor has it,” Danika said, lowering her voice, as if someone might overhear the bombshell she was about to drop, “that Toni left Pete McManus some money in her will. I heard six figures. Not exactly chump change, right?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

Quinn shrugged coyly. “I have my sources.”

“People have been murdered for a lot less,” I said.

It was one of those mindless, throwaway lines to fill the void while your brain works overtime: if Toni Hollister had, in fact, left McManus an inheritance, I wondered if she’d left Eric Ivory one too. Hadn’t Ivory shown me his fancy new watch? Hadn’t I seen him loading up on cases of crab legs and top-shelf wines at Costco? Hadn’t he bought himself a classic muscle car with little apparent regard to price? The guy was talking about taking flying lessons and shopping for a high performance airplane. You don’t do all of that without money. For somebody who’d earned his keep hand-to-mouth for as long as I’d known him, washing and waxing other people’s machines, he suddenly seemed to have a lot of it.

“If Toni left Pete McManus anything,” I said, “there must’ve been a will filed with the court. Wills are public record.”

“Wills are public?” Quinn was skeptical. “No way.”

“Wanna bet?”

“You’re on. How much do you want to lose?”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “If I’m wrong, I’ll tell you everything I know about the case.”

“Plus you have to take me to dinner,” Quinn said.

“Fair enough. And if I’m right, you have to promise to stop following me and leave me alone.”

Quinn smiled. “FYI, I like Thai food.”

I felt sorry for her.

T
HE
CLERK
’
S
office of the Rancho Bonita County Superior Court’s Probate Division wasn’t what I envisioned. I was expecting mahogany counters and marble floors, with a towering ceiling and antique light fixtures, the walls lined with leather-bound law books. Hushed, dignified. What I found instead was ugly and utilitarian. The floors were tired linoleum. Naked fluorescent tubes hung from overhead. Muffler shops offered more charm.

“Name of the decedent?”

The clerk, or whatever her title was, stood on the other side of the counter, her long, twig-like fingers poised above a filthy keyboard as she stared into an old computer monitor, one of those fat, cathode ray tube units that nobody uses anymore. She wore sensible shoes and the disinterested air of a career civil servant nearing retirement, phoning it in.

“Toni Hollister.” I spelled out both names.

Danika Quinn waited beside me without saying anything. The clerk pecked at her keyboard and stared at the computer. “Could it be
Antonia
Hollister?”

“Could be,” I said.

Squinting and tapping a pencil stub against her teeth, the clerk leaned closer to the monitor, then jotted a number on a note pad, tore off the page, and disappeared into the stacks.

“So,” Quinn said, “are you seeing anyone?”

“You mean a shrink? No. Not that some people haven’t suggested it.”

“Not a shrink. I meant, do you have a girlfriend?”

“A girlfriend?”

“Yeah, you know, that thing that’s the opposite of a boyfriend.”

“And you’re asking me this why?”

“Well, I mean, it’s just that, you’ll be taking me out to dinner. I wouldn’t want to, you know, upset anybody.”

“She’ll understand,” I said, lying.

Whatever disappointment I saw in Quinn’s eyes was quickly veneered with a forced smile.

“Good for you,” she said.

Should I have been honest and told her that aside from my very tentative relationship with Alicia Rosario down in San Diego, there was no one in my life? What would the truth have gained me? A bed buddy for the night? One of those always uncomfortable kisses in the morning and that inevitably awkward, “I’ll call you” moment? I was too old for all that. Besides I’d already lied to Quinn plenty.

With some reluctance, I’d let her tag along with me to the court, to ostensibly confirm what she claimed her sources had told her: that Toni Hollister had included Pete McManus in her will. What I really wanted to find out was whether Eric Ivory was also named as a beneficiary. I had amassed considerable evidence against Ivory. All I needed was a viable reason to explain what might’ve compelled him to pick off the Hollisters in their swimming pool. I wondered if Ivory’d been involved with Toni romantically, as McManus had, and had decided to do away with the couple in a fit of blind rage after she refused to leave her husband—one of those, “If I can’t have you, nobody can” moves. Or was it all about the money? Jealousy may be high on the list of motives for murder, but greed is hard to top.

“Here you go.” The clerk returned with a manila file folder and slid it across the counter. Printed on the color-coded tab was, “HOLLISTER, Antonia R.”

“You’re not permitted to remove the file from the immediate area.” She walked back to her desk and made a phone call, oblivious to other citizens awaiting service at the counter.

Quinn sighed. “You were right. It’s public record.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. You learn something new every day.”

Fastened in chronological order inside the file jacket was what I took to be the usual probate forms. Several drew legal distinctions between Toni’s personal estate and the larger, more valuable community property assets she shared with her late husband. As I flipped through what seemed like endless pages of boilerplate, my eyes began to glaze over—until I came to Toni Hollister’s list of who was to get what upon her demise.

“Talk about generous,” Quinn said, reading over my shoulder.

Generous, indeed. Everything laudatory said about Toni Hollister in life about her warm, giving heart, was confirmed in death on that list. The Rancho Bonita Symphony, the ballet, and opera each got $100,000. The Rancho Bonita Zoo was designated $50,000 as were the local semipro baseball team, the Girl Scouts, the Cub Scouts, the Union Rescue Mission, and several other nonprofits—including, curiously enough, Dino Birch’s animal defense fund.

Sixteen individuals were listed as beneficiaries and bequeathed various sums of money, each six figures. I recognized only one name on the list, and it wasn’t Pete McManus’s. He apparently hadn’t made the cut, but Eric Ivory had—to the tune of $125,000.

“So much for your sources,” I said.

“Win some, lose some.” She ran her index finger down the list. “I don’t recognize any of these names. Do you?”

“No.”

Another lie, I admit, but one I’d committed for a valid reason. I planned to go straight to the police with what I now knew about Eric Ivory. I didn’t need Quinn breaking any stories and giving him advance notice that he was now in my crosshairs.

TWENTY-EIGHT

W
e’d driven to the courthouse separately, which made it

easier to part ways after we walked outside.

“I was really looking forward to Thai food,” Quinn said.

“Maybe next time.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

She offered to buy me a cup of coffee to discuss what new angles “we” might pursue together in the Hollister case. I told her I had people to see, which was true, and ambled toward my truck without letting on about Eric Ivory or my intention to drive immediately to police headquarters, a half-mile away.

“What is it about me you find so distasteful?” Quinn asked, as I turned to walk away from her.

“I don’t find you distasteful, Danika. I find what you do for a living distasteful.”

“The public has a right to know, Logan. My job is to make sure they do. I don’t see how that’s so awful.”

I stopped and turned. Tears were spilling down her cheeks. In my typically blunt, inadvertently tone-deaf style, I’d come down too hard.

“You know something you’re not telling,” she said. “I can
feel
it.”

“You’re right,” I said, walking back toward her, “maybe I do. So here’s the deal. I can’t tell you what it is, but if it amounts to anything, you’ll be the first reporter I call. You’ll be the
only
reporter I call. Just please stop following me. Deal?”

She wiped her eyes with one hand and aimed a classically obscene gesture at me with the other.

“Go to hell, Logan.”

The Buddha said there are four types of friends: the helper; the friend who endures in good times and bad; the mentor; and the compassionate friend. I wasn’t any of those for Danika Quinn. Watching her walk to her car, I wondered if I’d ever been a true friend to anyone.

“Hello, Logan. Don’t turn around.”

A man with a raspy voice was standing behind me, pressing something hard into the small of my back. I knew who he was without looking. Eric Ivory.

“Hello, Eric. I see you survived Costco. Not everyone does, you know. People go missing in that place all the time. They usually find ’em in the refrigerated section, frozen solid, like chicken breasts.”

“Shut up.”

I let him frisk me. He found the revolver wedged in my belt.

“You’re no flight instructor,” he said, tucking it into his waistband.

“I’ve had a few of my students tell me the same thing.”

Ivory nudged me from behind. “We’re walking to your truck.”

“Not until you show me your gun.”

“What does it matter? Now I got your gun.”

“It matters, Eric, because if you got the jump on me with one of those pretend-gun-finger-in-the-pocket kind of deals, you’re gonna be drinking your next meal out of a straw. If it
is
a real gun and not your finger, well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. You’re still going to be drinking your next meal out of a straw—assuming I let you live.”

He was right about one thing. Whether he’d been packing real heat or faking it really didn’t matter one way or the other. He could’ve been humping a loaded bazooka and he still was going down. Call me cocky, but as we used to say in Colorado, it ain’t bragging if you can do it.

“I’d just like to know, for my own peace of mind, that I wasn’t so dumb as to get jumped by a knucklehead with a banana.”

Eric Ivory took a couple of steps back and flashed a chrome, .45 semiautomatic, keeping the pistol close to his belly and angled away from the courthouse so no passersby could see it. I had to admire his taste in weaponry. Everybody these days carries a 9-millimeter. Nothing wrong with that. A 9-millimeter will definitely kill the body. But a .45 will kill the soul.

“You’re making a mistake, Eric. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll hand me that gun.”

He jabbed with the barrel. “You’re the one making a mistake if you don’t start moving.”

Never get in the vehicle. Your chances of escaping a kidnapping in one piece are much greater if you resist before the attempted abduction becomes an actual one. That lesson was drilled into me during escape and evasion training when I was in the air force and, later, with Alpha. A smarter man would’ve heeded the lesson, but I wanted Ivory to explain why he’d killed the Hollisters. I couldn’t do that very well if I killed him too fast.

“You’re gonna get in first, driver’s side, nice and easy,” he said. “You try anything, I swear I’ll shoot you.”

“It’s your hanging, chief.”

He didn’t make me hand over the keys, which would’ve stopped me from potentially making a move and driving off before he could get in. He didn’t maintain a minimum three feet of separation between us, which would’ve given him a chance to react had I turned suddenly to attack him. Walking as close behind me as he was also would have surely drawn attention had a sheriff’s cruiser pulled into the jail parking lot at that moment, but we were alone. He waited for me to climb in, then hustled around the front of the truck and jumped in on the passenger side. For an expert airplane detailer, Eric Ivory made one lousy kidnapper.

“Where to?”

“Take a right,” he said.

I exited the lot and turned onto the frontage road paralleling the freeway. I had thought I might catch sight of Danika Quinn still following me, but she’d heeded my request to leave me alone. It was just as well.

“Get on the highway,” Ivory commanded, the muzzle of his pistol pointed at my ribs.

Ahead was an onramp. I got on the northbound 101.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll know when we get there.”

“What do you intend to do with me when we do get there?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just want to talk.”

Talk. Right. And if you believe that . . .

He was fidgety and clearly anxious. One second, he’d be eyeing me; the next, he was glancing out the back window, or down at his phone, then back at me. I could’ve taken him anytime I wanted. We passed a road sign that said, “San Francisco, 220 miles.”

“What did you do in the National Guard?”

He looked surprised. “How’d you know I was in the guard?”

“I know plenty of things about you, Eric.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like, Toni Hollister left you 125 large in her will, and you shot her so you wouldn’t have to wait around too long for it. You shot her husband too, because you didn’t want him claiming community property and screwing up the money.”

Ivory almost laughed. “You got it all figured out, don’t you?”

“Not quite. I’m wondering why would a class act like Toni leave a dirtbag like you a single dime?”