Lalla Bains 02 - A Dead Red Heart (34 page)

The five minutes ticked off with Jan clutching Del. He said, "I'll go," and took off at a trot.

Another five minutes ticked by and Jan became hysterical. "We've got to do something! Call your boyfriend, Caleb. Call the cops!"

I patted her arm trying to reassure both of us that they were all right. "They went in on foot, and with her in a car, she could've outdistanced them. Maybe the guys are still wandering around the aisles looking for each other. Let's not panic, yet."

Jan was beyond panic. She was now incapable of coherent speech and grabbed me by my shirt."Call Caleb! Call
someone
! Now!"

"Alright, alright. I'm calling Caleb."

Message machine again. I gave him our location and why and then closed the cell. I looked at my watch. What had seemed like hours to Jan, had in fact only been ten minutes since Arny and Del went to look. We were closing in on Pippa, who couldn't possibly know we were following her. I was also sure that Pippa's relationship with Grace Kim held the answer in all of this, and after all I'd been through, I wanted to be the one to ask that question. We'd corner her in her locker and get the truth. "What about that walkie talkie? Did he take it with him?"

"Yes, yes. Call him. Ask what's taking so long?"

I whispered into the mike. "Blue two, this is blue one."

It took a minute to get a response, but when a sultry female voice answered, I knew we were in trouble. "Hello, Lalla Bains. Come on in and join the party. It's number 387."

I looked at Jan's tear-stained face. "I'm sorry. She must have them both." I handed her my cell. "Call the police and wait here till they come."

"No! I'm going with you!"

"If you'll call 9-1-1, tell them there's a gun involved and the police will be here in no time at all. Just stay in the car and wait for them."

She tearfully clung to my shirt, sobbing how she couldn't live with herself if anything happened to Arny or Del.

I agreed it was probably for the best that we go together, flipped open the phone and made the call, closed it and said, "We'll both go and we'll either come out of this together or not."

We took off for the storage unit, leaving the walk-through gate open, hoping the police would be right behind us.

I trotted toward the white Firebird and found Del and Arny slumped dejectedly on boxes in a row just inside a fifteen by twenty locker. "Okay, I'm here, Pippa," I called into the darkened storage locker. "Want to explain why you're keeping my friends prisoner?"

She stepped out of the shadowy interior, pointing a gun at my middle.

"Over there with your boyfriends. Go on."

Jan ran to Arny and Del and, after tearfully hugging them, sat down between them.

I said, "The police are on their way, Pippa."

She gave me a saucy laugh and said, "Then we'll have to hurry, won't we?"

Keeping my eye on her gun, I asked, "Did you kill Billy Wayne, or did Grace?"

With her left hand, she reached down to pick up a bottle with a rag in it. I gasped when she lit it. "Grace couldn't hurt a fly. It started out right, she saw that it was wrong to allow the doctors to talk her dad into giving away her brother's heart. That heart was meant for the love of my life—not some deadbeat prisoner. You're in her locker. It's the one where we put that horrid scribbling of Billy Wayne's."

"Then where's Grace, Pippa?" I asked, trying to control my need to rush at her, grab the gun and pound her head on the ground.

"Beats me. You can spend what little time you have left trying to put out the flames or you can look through the boxes. Maybe she's inside one... or two."

She chuckled at her wit and then threw the flaming glass bottle at my head.

I watched it sail through the air, seeing it not as a bomb about to snuff out our lives, but as a softball lobbed by a batter out into left field.

I stepped backed a bit, then reached out, and with one hand neatly fielded it... and just as quickly pitched it back at her.

Stunned at the sudden change of direction, she fumbled between catching the fiery bottle and holding onto her gun.

Her hesitation meant that the bottle fell at her feet, breaking open. With the fire spreading up her pant leg, she skipped backwards, beating at the flames while trying to hold the gun on the rest of us.

We all stood up, watching her retreat as she swatted at her legs. Seeing that she was losing the battle, she turned and ran. I ran after her, knocking her off her feet. Del grabbed the gun as it fell from her hand and pointed it at her while Arny pulled off his shirt and smothered the fire melting her police issued polyester pants to her legs.

Caleb, Rodney, and several officers charged down the fairway, pulling out their weapons and shouting for us to get back.

Caleb grabbed me to his chest, and Rodney crouched down to speak to Pippa now lying on her back.

Though tears were running into her ears and she was whimpering, she still managed to blame us. "They attacked me!"

Arny stepped forward. "That's a lie, sir. She held us at gunpoint and was going to set the place on fire and leave us to die."

Rodney nodded. "I've no doubt you're right about that, son." He turned to the deputy. "Call for an ambulance."

I looked from Rodney to Caleb and back again to Rodney. "You found the proof?"

Caleb said, "You were right, Lalla. She faked her credentials to get the job here. The real Pippa Roulette is a redhead, but about fifty pounds heavier and wears glasses."

"I'll bet the real Pippa Roulette will be furious to learn that her identity has been used by a dangerous killer."

"That's going to be the tough part. The real Pippa was given a going away party when she got the job here in Modesto, and the Marin city police staff always wondered why she never called to tell them about the new job."

"Oh, no," I said. "So what's our deadly spider's real name?"

"She went by Susan Woods for the Marin job, but we're also checking the system for aliases. That's where we'll probably uncover the link that led her to kill Billy Wayne and anyone else who got in her way."

If her first job was here in Modesto, then I wasn't the only one who was carrying around a fake badge. But, where was Grace? Had Pippa killed her to keep her from her own guilty conscience? Or, had Grace slipped through the net and escaped to Vietnam? The boxes. Maybe for once Pippa was telling the truth. More than one killer had paid for a year or mor with a storage company and then escaped.

"Caleb," I said, "Pippa hinted that she'd left Grace inside the locker."

He directed two deputies inside to go the through boxes. As Pippa was being lifted onto a gurney, she lifted her head, watching the deputies sifting through boxes.

I asked, "Is she inside the boxes, Pippa?"

She coughed a bitter laugh. "Billy Wayne's stupid paper snowflakes."

Somehow I doubted that we would find Grace alive to tell us what really happened. The longer it went with no sign of her, the more likely it seemed that she was dead. I didn't have long to wait.

An ashen faced deputy stood in the doorway. "Got something here, Sheriff."

As the ambulance drove away carrying Pippa Roulette, I knew that at least some of what she said was the truth. The snowflakes were in the boxes along with Grace's body. She'd killed Grace, intending to leave her for someone else to find when the rent was due.

Chapter twenty-nine:

Above the roof of my porch, stars shimmered in a black summer sky. I had a beer in my hand and more in an ice chest at my feet. Wiping at unexpected tears, I breathed in the late summer night, feeling content to see the lights from Caleb's truck signaling a turn onto our road. They grew brighter as they came closer then shut off as he parked in front of our house.

I held out a beer to him as his consolation prize.

He lightly kissed my cheek and set a large box down on the floor. "I brought you a present. Billy Wayne's snowflakes, complete with poetry. That is if you're still interested."

"Oh, Caleb, that's so sweet of you, but I think I've learned all I want to know about Billy Wayne Dobson. How 'bout you give them to his mom?"

"Good idea, I'll do that tomorrow. And Chief Aguilar is certainly glad that we wrapped this up before he promoted Pippa to sergeant. And now that this bit of embarrassment is behind him, he's just as happy to go easy on Byron."

"Did she hypnotize him? Was that how Pippa convinced him to arrest me?"

"She could've, but the chief recognizes that the kid was simply bowled over with the heady promises made by a beautiful woman. And since the chief was as caught up as everyone else by her act, he was not inclined to prosecute Byron. He gave him a stern lecture, lesson learned. No one in the department will ever get a breath of Byron's involvement with Pippa as long as he keeps his nose clean."

Which reminded me to ask,"What about Rodney? Was there ever any evidence of him involved with drug deals in that block?"

"No Lalla. There's not a whiff of that. Rodney's real problem is his attitude about women. The chief has privately reprimanded him for his unsavory comments to the female staff. Another infraction and he'll be busted back to street cop."

I dismissed the subject of Rodney for something else that had been on my mind. Grace, and why the thought of her always gave me chills. "Did the coroner say that Grace had been in that storage locker for very long?"

He reached out and drew me to him in a tight hug. "Not that it matters now, but Pippa was not the type to leave behind someone to talk. Lucky for Byron—not so lucky for Grace."

I was thinking of Grace in the downtown parking garage and how I'd been too slow to catch up with her. "I only wish…,"

"Don't, sweetheart. We all have choices. Grace made her decision, and she died for it."

"'The more there is, the less you see.' I wonder if Billy Wayne said it because he knew that someone was looking to kill him, never suspecting Pippa. She was a woman in uniform, he would've respected that. She could walk right up to him and take his scissors away from him and... Oh, that's why Spike didn't make a fuss!"

"What're you talking about?"

"Spike hates men, except you and my dad. Certainly any stranger who comes to our door, but he'll roll over for a tummy rub from a woman. Pippa could've walked into our house and tacked that DOA note on my dad's door." I shuddered, wondering why, with her track record for murder, Pippa chose not to kill my dad.

"I remember, when I found Billy Wayne, having the distinct feeling someone was at the end of the alley. She'd come back to make sure he was dead. She was the uniform Mr. Kim saw when he came out to investigate, the ghostly image we both got a glimpse of at the end of the ally. Mr. Kim and I both felt her there, but we were distracted by Billy Wayne's need for the paramedics. Mr. Kim has lost his last living relative because I couldn't talk Grace out of running. I feel that I didn't see anything at all." My own bitter laugh was reminiscent of Pippa's. "The more there is, the less you see. That's me, alright."

"Oh, I don't know about that. Pippa was guilty of the same profiling that she very efficiently used on others. She saw you and thought, tall, lanky blonde, ex-model, and figured all it would take to send you running scared was that DOA note on your dad's door and a dead rat in the mailbox."

His words helped assuage my guilty conscience. "It almost worked, too. I thought I was just being paranoid when I kept hearing this little voice in my head saying over and over again,
You're not really interested, Lalla.
"

"And to think I told Pippa to hypnotize you thinking she might be able get some clue that would help us find the killer."

"Then it was a good thing I ignored all of those warnings."

"You always do. That's because you're impetuous."

"And pushy."

"Nosy."

"Determined."

"And you're still going to have to marry me, Lalla Bains."

"Do you still want me? After all I've put you through?"

"I'd rather go through life with you and your quirky nature than go through another year without you."

How could two people be more in love and less alike? Caleb the patient and Lalla Bains the impetuous. I leaned forward to meet his lips in a kiss. "You're the most patient man in the world."