On the Run (31 page)

“But how long would a couple of stray hairs cling to a sofa?”

“Jessie wasn’t the greatest housekeeper. Our first night here, Koop came out from under my bed looking like a giant dust ball with legs. That sofa might not have been vacuumed since Jock and Jessie moved into the house.”

“
You
aren’t suspicious of Mikki, then?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Abilene admitted. “But I’m trying to keep the fact that I don’t like her from influencing my thinking.”

Was dislike influencing
my
thinking? Because Mikki wasn’t one of my favorite people, either.

“But . . .” she started, then trailed off as if she were reluctant to bring up what she was thinking.

“But?” I prodded.

“One time when I was alone with her she wanted to know if the police had asked any questions that sounded as if they thought the deaths might be something other than suicide.”

“Could be simple curiosity.”

“Could be her wondering if she’d pulled off a successful murder, or if she still had to worry the police might investigate further.”

I remembered a few things about Mikki, minor tidbits that hadn’t stirred my suspicions at the time but now looked more meaningful.

Her familiarity with the house. She’d been here, supposedly, only once, and yet she seemed quite knowledgeable about both house and contents. Because she’d searched the place after murdering them?

Her vehemence at claiming she was not surprised that Jock and Jessie had committed suicide. Was she being careful not to raise even minor suspicion that the deaths were not what they looked like?

And then how she’d suddenly become alert when I suggested suicide seemed out of character for Jock and Jessie. Was she afraid I’d interest the authorities in that aspect of the deaths?

Plus her surprising knowledge about guns.

A flash of inspiration occurred to me. Maybe we couldn’t snatch comparison hairs off her head, but there might be another source. I turned and headed full speed for the house, then stopped abruptly after about three steps.

“Now what?”

“I want to check on something, but one of those hairs is about to blow away. It could be gone any minute.”

“But if we remove them from the sofa, there’s no way to prove that’s where they came from,” Abilene pointed out. She lifted a finger to indicate a solution. “Wait here.”

She raced off to the house. I didn’t know what she had in mind, but I went back to the sofa and used my body to shelter the hairs from the gusting wind. The loosest hair was about to let go, and I could almost see the second hair unraveling from the fabric too. The weather vane atop the barn spun crazily as the wind shifted directions.

A minute later Abilene returned with the same butcher knife that had freed Ute from the net. She whacked a six-inch square of fabric out of the back side of the sofa, blond hairs safely attached. Clever girl!

Back at the house I carefully placed the section of upholstery in a large plastic freezer bag, sealed the top, and labeled and dated the bag.

“Very professional looking,” Abilene said. “Just like the detective in a mystery book would do it.”

Which was where I’d gleaned my technique, of course. But was what I had here important evidence in a crime? Or evidence of one LOL’s overheated imagination?

“So now what?” Abilene asked.

I also raised a finger. “Follow me.”

She did, yet with my hand on the knob of the bedroom door, I stopped short. Out at the sofa, this had seemed like a clever idea, but now it felt both sleazy and far-fetched, a feeling enhanced when Abilene said in a horrified gasp, “We’re going to look in their bed for Mikki’s hair?”

“The linen hasn’t been changed since Frank and Mikki were here. We can just take a peek at the pillows.”

After a moment’s consideration, Abilene apparently readjusted her thinking and nodded. “Good idea.”

Actually, we didn’t have to look far. The bed hadn’t been made, and three hairs lay tangled right there on the left-side pillow. I wondered if that was normal loss or if Mikki should think about letting up on the bleach before all her hair wound up on a pillow or down the drain.

I draped the hairs over a tissue from a box on the nightstand, and, back in the kitchen, we compared them to the two sealed in the freezer bag. They looked alike, but then Abilene yanked out one of her own hairs and laid it beside the others. Except that Abilene’s was shorter, I couldn’t see any real difference among the hair samples.

Which was where microscopic examination and DNA came in, of course.

“Now what?” Abilene asked, as she had a habit of doing.

Yes, now what?
I repeated to myself as I sealed the three hairs that we knew were Mikki’s in another plastic freezer bag, labeled and dated also.

Mikki had jumped way up on my list of suspects, but I doubted what we had here would make Deputy Hamilton quick to order laboratory tests. He’d point out, as Abilene and I had already discussed, that even if both hair samples belonged to Mikki, the ones on the sofa could have been there long before the Northcutts’ deaths.

Yet, in my opinion, it was still peculiar that the hairs were there at all. What logical, and innocent, reason would she, or anyone else, have for rubbing her head up against the back side of the sofa? Although, to be honest, I also couldn’t see any reason she’d have done it while committing murder either.

“I wonder if there’s any way to find out if Mikki really was at that cosmetologist convention?” Abilene asked as I tucked the two freezer bags into the bottom drawer of a kitchen cabinet for safekeeping.

I considered how Kinsey Millhone, Jetta Diamond, or various other of my favorite clever private investigators might do it. I nodded slowly. “There might be.”

Abilene went to make certain nothing was left outside that could be damaged by the coming storm. She moved the stepladder off the deck and brought the paintball gun and ice cream freezer that had been left out there inside, and I got on the phone.

I called Elsie at the beauty salon in Dulcy first. No, she didn’t know anything about a cosmetologist convention in Austin. She never went to them. I put in a long-distance call to the Chamber of Commerce in Austin. They had information about various future conventions coming to the city, but the woman didn’t know anything about a recent cosmetologist convention. “But there might be some state or national organization that would know,” she added helpfully.

I eyed the computer. The Internet would undoubtedly be the place to look for such information. But not only could I not access the Internet from the computer, I couldn’t even get past the opening screen that demanded a password. I tried Elsie again to ask about national or regional cosmetology organizations. She thought there might be some, but she didn’t belong.

Obviously my sleuthing skills fell short of Kinsey Millhone’s and Jetta Diamond’s—by now both women would no doubt have a list complete with phone numbers, addresses, and hair color of people who’d been to a convention in Austin.

A harsh gust of wind rattled the fireplace chimney, and I peered out the window. The storm had definitely arrived. A flash of lightning silhouetted the barn and made it look like the cover of an old Gothic novel. I jumped back when thunder rattled the window. Dust whooshed up from the emus’ well-trampled pen. I was glad we’d gotten those hairs off the sofa. They wouldn’t have survived this.

Abilene came in a few minutes later, hair whipped like tangled straw. More wind blasted through the open door as she fought to close it.

She wiped windblown dust out of her eyes. “A big branch just blew down on the far end of the emus’ pen,” she reported. “It hit the fence and knocked a section of it down.”

“What are the emus doing?”

“They’re all crowded into the shed. But I think they could get out. They’re really nervous. We should go see what we can do with the fence—”

“Not during the storm.”

Another bolt of lightning and blast of thunder emphasized the wisdom of that opinion.

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” Abilene agreed reluctantly.

She paced from window to window, worrying about her emus. Wind-driven leaves whacked the glass. I watched the motor home, wondering if they ever blew over. Rain joined the wind and pounded the ground and deck like attacking bullets. I didn’t see what danger the egg could be in, but Abilene went upstairs to check on it.

“If the electricity goes out and the heating pad goes off, one of us will have to take it to bed to keep it warm,” she said. When I didn’t jump in with an offer, she smiled wryly “I guess that’d be me, right?”

“Right.”

The electricity didn’t go out, and we stayed up until almost midnight. By then the wind had passed, and the rain slackened to a gentle drizzle. I knew Abilene wanted to take a flashlight and go look at the fence, but I said it could wait until morning.

“I don’t think the emus are as stupid as everyone thinks. They’re smart enough to stay inside the shed for the night,” I added.

I heard Abilene get up and go out before dawn the next morning. She had breakfast ready by the time I got up an hour later. The storm had passed, but a layer of clouds still blotted morning sunlight.

“Emus okay?”

“They’re fine. I propped the fence up, but the branch tore the wire in several places. It’s going to have to be fixed or replaced, but I can’t find any more fence wire in the sheds.”

“I’ll call Frank and see if it’s okay to charge some wire at the farm supply store. You think you and I can fix the fence?”

“Oh, sure,” she said confidently.

I called Frank right after breakfast, hoping to catch him before he left for work, which I did. I described the storm and the damage to the fence.

I got a not-surprising response. “Stupid birds,” as if the downed fence were their fault. “I don’t know who you can get to come out and fix it.”

I repeated Abilene’s assurance that we could do it. “If buying the wire is okay.”

“Sure. Whatever the birds need.” He sounded resigned, in a disgusted sort of way. “Oh, I was going to call you anyway. Some people down here may be interested in buying the place later on, and I told them it was okay if they want to come up and look around.”

I was disappointed to hear that, because it would undoubtedly mean we’d have to move on. I suspected Abilene would be even more disappointed than I was. But, given the slow-moving process of estates, especially those without a will, the property might not be sold for a long time yet. I was about to hang up when I remembered there was something I wanted to ask Frank. I took a circuitous approach.

“Your kids . . . I remember you saying your boy’s name is Jeff? And your daughter . . . ?”

“Courtney. She’s fourteen, and he’s twelve.”

“What color hair do they have?”

“They’re both dark brown.”

“How tall are they?”

“Courtney’s shot up like a weed. She must be five-seven already. Jeff’s shorter. Five-three or so, I guess. Why? What’s this all about?”

This eliminated the kids as source of the hairs. They were both too tall to casually brush the back side of the sofa while walking by, and the hairs were the wrong color anyway.

I hesitated, wondering how to answer what was certainly a logical question from Frank. I didn’t really want to tell him I suspected his wife may have murdered his parents, especially with no more to go on than two blond hairs. But untruths stick in my throat like old fish bones, so I just told it the way it was, without making any incriminating connections.

“We found some stray hairs on the sofa where your parents’ bodies were found. I thought maybe they came from one of your children, from when they visited here. But the hairs are blond.”

“Oh, well, Mikki’s blond.” He sounded dismissive and a little impatient that I was wandering around in such trivialities.

“Yes, she is,” I agreed.

That ended the conversation, obviously raising no questions with him, but I found it meaningful that he simply assumed the hairs were Mikki’s.

She now sat at the top of my suspect list like a vulture on a telephone pole. Although an annoying little voice inside me nagged,
Are you sure you should even
have
a suspect list?

The police had no list of suspects. The Northcutts’ deaths were settled with them.

And there were definitely problems with my suspicions of murder. Gunshot residue on Jock Northcutt’s hand. Plus the biggie: the note with Jock and Jessie’s signatures.

So why not just give it up, accept the easy conclusion, and concentrate on emu-egg hatching and fence building?

Because I had that ever-vigilant mutant curiosity gene, to which there appeared to be attached a hard-working suspicion gene. To say nothing about being plain ol’ stubborn.

31

Dulcy Farm Supply sold fencing only in big rolls. Stuffing one into the motor home was rather like trying to cram a zucchini in a keyhole. Crawling over it to get to the driver’s and passenger’s seats up front was also a problem. The next dilemma, of course, would be unloading it when we got home.

A problem we both realized was secondary when we drove up to the locked gate at the driveway. A pair of emus stood on the other side, looking at us with those big, inquisitive eyes.