Jude Devine Mystery Series (92 page)

“I speak a few different languages,” Pippa said. “We always had household staff from other countries and I just started picking up words. Once they knew I was interested, they taught me. I knew Spanish and Italian before I started elementary school.”

“That’s amazing,” Zach said. If his red face and darting glances were any indication, he was smitten.

Jude figured Pippa had to look pretty good to a nineteen-year-old who’d grown up in a nutty polygamist sect where normal dating was unheard of. Zach had been run out of town, like many FLDS boys. The sixty-year-olds who wanted new brides didn’t welcome competition from young males who didn’t need Viagra. Zach was a starving, abused misfit when Jude had first asked Eddie House to take him in. Two years later, he called Eddie “Dad” and no one would recognize him. A local teacher had been tutoring him after school and he was ready to take the SAT this year.

Oscar let out a raucous scream and repeated over and over in heavily accented English, “Where is it?” He followed this with, “Talk. Want to live? Talk.” He then made a strange sound like chimes.

“I’m sorry, baby boy,” Pippa burst into tears. “He’s not coming back.”

She sagged over the table, her head resting on her arms. Oscar stroked her hair with his beak.

“Okay, we’re done with this,” Jude said.

Pippa sat up and wiped her face. “I’m sorry. It’s just, that was his call for Uncle Fabian. He learned it when he was a baby. It’s the sound the old microwave used to make. Whenever the bell went off, Uncle Fabian would go over there.”

“So he thinks your uncle will come to him if he makes the same sound?” Jude was astonished.

Tulley would lose his mind if he could see this. She decided to arrange for her animal-crazy deputy to visit with Oscar next time he was in Cortez. He drove down once a week to work with one of the other deputies. They’d entered their K-9s in a dog competition with a $10,000 prize. Tulley had visions of making a stud dog out of Smoke’m. People would pay a lot of money for bloodhound puppies from a champion.

Pippa blew her nose in a tissue. She looked exhausted, her face taut with grief. “Wait,” she said as Jude reached out to turn off the tape recorder. “There’s something Uncle Fabian said to me before he died. I thought he was talking about Oscar’s food. This is probably stupid. I mean—”

“I’m interviewing a parrot in a homicide case,” Jude said. “Do you think ‘stupid’ is a problem for me?”

Pippa gave a teary giggle and carried Oscar to his cage. He sidled across his perch to stare at her with something close to tenderness. “I love you, Pip.”

“I love you, too.” She blew him a kiss and said, “Question for the parrot.”

“How many?” he responded promptly.

Pippa took a couple of nuts from her bag and showed them to him, “Two nuts.” Having secured his rapt attention, she asked, “Where’s the box?”

Oscar mulled this over, bobbing his head and mumbling to himself in parrot-speak.

Pippa repeated, “Where’s the box? Please.”

With a satisfied puff of the chest, Oscar replied, “God’s in his heaven. All’s right with the world.”

“Browning.” Pippa looked disconcerted. She fed Oscar the nuts.

“Does it mean something to you?” Jude asked.

“Kind of.” With a puzzled frown, Pippa said, “Uncle Fabian used to recite that verse to me when I was little. I don’t get it. Why would Oscar say that now?”

Pippa was obviously tired and emotional. If there was some meaning in the quotation, it would probably elude her until she’d had some rest.

“Sleep on it,” Jude said gently. “Something will come to you.”

She slid the cassette recorder into her pocket and picked up her keys and cell phone. Leaving Pippa to say good-bye to Oscar, she walked out to the front of the house with Eddie. They ambled along the pathway between the aviaries and stopped in front of a large enclosure that housed a peregrine falcon with a permanently damaged wing. A gust of wind caught at Eddie’s hair, twirling a few straight silver strands around the banded feather he always wore. He adjusted the leather thong that secured it, freeing the beaded ties. Turquoise. Coral. Silver. Jude noticed something new, a pair of silver-capped elk teeth swinging from a braid.

Catching her curious gaze, Eddie said, “Zach went on a hunt. My friends in Craig took him.”

Detecting the pride in his voice, Jude said, “His first big game?”

“Yes. Last time he went for five days. Only hit trees. This time a bull elk. Eight hundred pounds. Single shot.”

“Sounds like you’re out of a job, pal.” Jude smiled.

Eddie took his hunting seriously, going out several times a year to bring home the meat that would feed his family and the animals and birds that depended on him. He didn’t like buying beef and chicken from the supermarket. The idea of slaughterhouses offended him.

“You want some elk steak?” he said. “I cut a few pounds of strip loin for you.”

“Sure beats rabbit.” He usually sent her home with something for the pot whenever he successfully hunted smaller game. Jude had gotten past her initial dismay pretty quickly. Anyone who ate commercially farmed meat was on thin ice getting holier-than-thou about others who hunted for the table.

Eddie took a few slivers of meat from the pouch at his waist and fed the falcon. He’d taught it to fly again but it could only manage short distances. The beautiful raptor would never survive in the wild.

As it sucked down the treats, he said, “You’ve been inside too much.”

“That obvious, huh?” Jude sighed. She had full strength in her ankle again, but summer was almost over and she had two major cases to work. At this rate she would be stuck inside 24/7 for the next two weeks and have cabin fever before winter even began.

“Want to come on a cattle drive?” Eddie asked.

“Are you kidding?” Jude had intended to volunteer for a drive ever since she’d been in the Four Corners. “Did you get that gig with that dude ranch?”

City slickers paid handsomely for a few days’ relentless toil on a working cattle ranch, and twice a year the local dude ranches moved their cattle to or from their summer grazing pastures. It wasn’t unusual to see hundreds of animals marching through the center of town in October. Eddie worked for one of the rangers occasionally.

“Sales are slow at the gallery,” he explained, which was his way of saying he needed the money.

“You can sign me up,” Jude said.

“It’s time for you to get your own horse.”

“I know.”

Jude hired from the same outfit whenever she went riding. She could stable a horse of her own there if she wanted, but something stopped her from making the commitment. In the back of her mind lurked the knowledge that she could be ordered to leave the Southwest anytime and who knew where the Bureau would send her? She didn’t want to gain the trust of a horse and then have to abandon it.

That was the trouble with her life. She couldn’t put down roots knowing she’d only have to tear them up again. Yet without roots she was adrift, marking time in a bleak limbo between past and future. The Four Corners was a place of exile, a self-imposed retreat from all that had held her hostage. She had wondered who she could be if she cut herself loose. The last thing she expected was to become little more than a fugitive from the ghosts she’d left behind.

She had failed to reach an accommodation with the past. Its tendrils refused to surrender their hold on her dreams and her conscience. Ben was unfinished business. Walking away was not an option. She had tried, and failed. Yet there was no real alternative. She could sift through the evidence around her brother’s disappearance a thousand times over—and she had—but there were no new leads. The case was more than cold, it was mummified. There was no direction to take because each led to the same dead end. No matter how many times she explored the familiar paths, her conclusions were always the same. Ben had been abducted at age twelve by an unknown subject, no body had ever been found, and chances were, after twenty-five years, it never would be. The man who had taken Ben would never be brought to justice. Jude’s entire life had been little more than a hopeless quest for the impossible.

A dark inertia gripped her every time she tried to accept that fact, a bleak mood that probably explained the desolate state of her love life. Since her breakup with Mercy and her failure to make something happen with Chastity Young last year, she hadn’t dated anyone. And while hookup opportunities weren’t boundless in the Four Corners, a determined woman could get laid. Jude hadn’t even tried. It wasn’t like her libido had gone on holiday, either. She was in a state of pent-up frustration most of the time.

The situation could easily be remedied. She went to conventions, those sex-fests for cheats and desperates. Someone always hit on her. If she wasn’t picky she could have an orgy at the next advanced law enforcement seminar series if she wanted.

Jude sighed, and the sound of her own expelled breath called her back to the present. Zach and Pippa stood next to Eddie, chatting about Oscar. Zach placed a package of meat in Jude’s hands. She thanked him and praised him for making a clean kill. Eddie said he’d let her know about the cattle drive.

As Pippa got in the passenger door and fastened her belt, she said, “Thank you for bringing me out here.”

“You’re welcome.”

That was something, Jude thought, as she started the engine a few seconds later. For all her failings, she was a good sheriff’s detective.

Chapter Ten

The woman on the doorstep had probably never spent a moment of her life wondering if she was pretty. Debbie knew the type from high school. They were the ones who dated the boys with late-model cars, married a doctor right after college, and had an affair with the pool guy when they got bored taking their kids to soccer.

Eyes the color of forget-me-nots focused on Debbie. “Who are you?” the visitor asked.

She was beautiful, Debbie decided, not pretty. She wasn’t sure what made the difference. The cheekbones, maybe. After years as a hairdresser, Debbie was used to hiding “flaws,” but this woman’s face was so perfectly structured and her features so lovely, she could shave her head and still stop traffic. When makeup artists raved about porcelain skin, hers was the kind they were talking about. In beauty magazines, her looks were classified as “Nordic.” Clients wanted hair like hers, pale honey shot through with platinum and gold, but it would take hundreds of foils to come close to the natural color. She wore it drawn back tightly into a chignon. Very elegant. She couldn’t possibly be from around here.

Debbie remembered to answer her blunt question. “I’m a friend of Jude’s. Debbie Basher.”

The woman didn’t offer her name. “Is Jude home?”

“No, she’s in Cortez.”

“But you’re staying in her house?”

Debbie decided she’d had enough of the twenty questions. “I’m sorry, who did you say you are?”

A wintry blue gaze settled on Debbie’s face. “Dr. Mercy Westmoreland. I’m with the ME’s office in Grand Junction.”

Debbie felt instantly foolish. This woman hadn’t
married
a doctor, she
was
a doctor. Brainy as well as beautiful. It didn’t seem fair. And she was a professional colleague of Jude’s, helping solve crimes. Her job was the gruesome one, cutting up bodies to explain how people died. In that moment, Debbie knew where she’d seen Dr. Westmoreland before.

“Oh, my God. Are you Mercy Westmoreland from Court TV?” Flustered, she backed up a few steps. “I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you. On the program you look more…made up. Please, come in.”

The lovely doctor didn’t move. Debbie’s head spun. Not only was Dr. Westmoreland on TV, she was half of the Four Corners’ most famous lesbian couple. She’d married a British actress. They were the ones whose soirée Agatha and Tulley were losing their minds over. How could Debbie have been so dumb she didn’t know all this immediately?