Red Light (11 page)

"Did
she come to church alone?"

"Uh-huh. After
worship she showed up at the Singles. We're the twenty to thirty age group. She
introduced herself, said she was a marketing consultant based in Orange County,
just moved from Fort Worth. Grew up there. Said she liked to ride—horses, you
know, liked to skate, liked to visit galleries. She said she was twenty-three
years old, but she looked younger to me. The paper said nineteen. I didn't she
was that young. The part about being an escort surprised me."

"Did
it?"

"Absolutely."

When he looked at
her, briefly, she saw the guilt brimming up into his eyes. He couldn't fool his
own mother, she thought. She made of Aubrey Whittaker's third home state.

"What
did you think of her?"

Spartas breathed
deeply, stirring his drink. "She was a little aloof. Kind of arrogant.
Like the Christian Singles were beneath her somehow. She seemed very
sophisticated. She had a sharp tongue. Tall. Nice and face. Beautiful dark hair."

Merci noted that
Aubrey was a brunette for Spartas. "What did she want from the
group?"

Spartas nodded.
"I wondered, too. What we all want, I guess Fellowship. Friendship. Maybe
somebody to fall in love with. But I don’t know. She didn't seem particularly
interested in our activities, in any our members. Of course, she was only with
us once. Like she was shopping."

"Then
what, you called her?"

She
could feel him wince. He wiped his mouth with his napkin.

"No."

He
looked at her.

"Yeah.
Yes."

"You
want to tell me about that?"

"I wanted to
know if she'd join us on a ski weekend up in Big Bear. She said no."

"Then
you asked to see her."

The wince again, a
psychic shudder she could feel but not quite see. "Yes."

"And when she
explained the deal, you whipped out your credit card."

A big exhale from
Spartas. He looked at her with a mixture of panic and shame.

"Where
did you go?"

"Four
Seasons."

"October
fifteenth, Monday night."

"I
guess."

"Don't."

"Yes,
correct."

"How
much?"

"A thousand for
. . . her. The room was three-fifty. Wine and cheese another fifty."

"How
long were you with her?"

He shook his head. It
seemed to have retreated down between his shoulders. "Five minutes."

When the barmaid
strolled up and asked how they were doing Lance mustered the smile that said
he'd been caught at something. The part about forgiving him was gone.
"Everything's fine, Sherry. Thanks."

Merci watched her
head to the waitress station at the other end of the bar.

"Was
it a good five minutes?"

"Come
on," he said quietly. "Yeah, sure. It was fine."

Merci sipped the
coffee, felt the waves of discomfort rising outward from Lance Spartas.

"You
do it again?"

"No.
Just that. It was . . . well, what's it matter, but that was the first and only
time with, you know, for money." He turned to her then, “This isn't
getting back to the church, is it? That's my whole life, down the drain. The
whole thing."

"You
lie to me and it will."

"I've
been one hundred percent honest with you."

"Good."

"All
I've
done
is worry since the second you called."

He
wiped his forehead with the damp bar napkin, staring at the fish.

"When
she left the hotel that night, were you angry?"

Spartas considered.
He shook his head. "No. I wondered at what I’d just done. How it could
have happened. Angry at myself, yeah. Not at her."

"So that
forty-five you bought three months ago never came to mind?"

He turned to her
again, thin lips parted, eyes wide. "It's under my bed. I swear to God.
I'll show it to you if you want. It's still in the box. It's never been
fired."

Merci said nothing
for a minute, let the accusation hover. Spartas squirmed on his stool.

She leaned up close.
"Maybe it didn't quite go like you said it did. Maybe it went an hour and
five minutes and things just wouldn't line up for you. Maybe she made a crack
about it. Maybe she did more that. A woman can hurt a guy that way. Maybe after
what she did, she
deserved
to get iced. Maybe that made you so furious
you followed her out, fourteen hundred bucks poorer, trailed the snotty
nineteen-year-old home. Thought about it, went back a few weeks later and
evened things out."

"Swear
to my God I didn't."

"You
kill her?"

"No!"

"Want
to?"

"No.
Nothing like that. No."

"What
about the gun?"

"I got it for
home protection," he said. "There was an armed robbery down the
street last summer. The guy who lived there scared them off with a gun. So I
got one, too."

Lance Spartas struck
Merci as the kind of schmuck who'd shoot his neighbor or himself before he
managed to clock a bad guy. The hapless citizen was as dangerous as a creep sometimes.
Like a Sunday driver.

"Then
where were you Tuesday night?"

Spartas smiled like a
man just pardoned. "Christian Singles potluck, thank Goodness! I can prove
that if I have to. Seven until midnight."

She looked at him. He
wasn't her kind of guy, but he was okay—decent looking, clean, more or less the
overgrown boy most men seemed to be. "Why her, Spartas? If that was your
first time paying for it?"

He looked at Merci,
then down into his drink. His face had flushed pink.

"She was the
most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life. She was just absolutely
beautiful. When she said I could own her for a thousand dollars and a good
bottle of wine, I took it."

"Own
her."

"That's
what she said."

"She
proposed?"

"Well, yeah. I
thought she was a marketing consultant, whatever that is. I didn't realize she
was a professional until I had the credit card out. By then, it didn't matter.
Man, I wish I could just go back and have it all to not do over again. I feel
like I've been touched by Satan."

"You
feel anything for her, or just yourself?"

He gave her an odd
look then, something she couldn't read. His voice was a whisper. "I feel
like if her soul goes to hell, I had something to do with it. Like I should
have done something to help her."

She studied him hard.
Beyond the selfishness and fear and guilt was a decent man. Or at least a
decent boy. With a bad conscience and a sheen of sweat on his face.

Merci
slid off the stool, dropped a couple of bucks on the bar.

"Thanks.
Lance, keep the gun in the box and the dong in your pants.

You don't know what you're doing with either of
them."

• • •

Bob del Viggio greeted her
at his job site with a handshake and an appraising eye. He had a crafty smile,
broad shoulders, black curly hair.

Mid-forties, she
guessed, heavy and strong, a big solid ass he was proud of. Chinos, a blue work
shirt, construction boots.

He
led her into an on-site trailer, threw out his super and motioned for Merci to
sit in front of a table littered with blueprints and ashtrays, He poured coffee
into a foam cup; Merci declined. She could see the big blades outside, stalled
by the rain, brown water standing on the building pads.

She
got right to the point—del Viggio's recent credit-card charge by Epicure.

"Yeah, that was
me," he said.

"Who was the
girl?"

"She
called herself Gayla. You know, it's all first names. All made up. I recognized
her in the paper. Aubrey something, it said. That sounds made up, too."

"Tell me about
it."

"Not
much to tell. I went through Epicure, the girl met me down at the Ritz. Two
hours later she left. Pretty much by the book."

Del
Viggio appraised Merci from the other side of the makeshift desk. He sipped the
coffee, looked out a dusty window, then back

"I
donated big to Brighton's campaign last time. Part of his Gold Circle
Club."

"Who
cares?"

He
shrugged, big shoulders tightening the fabric of his work shirt. His forearms
were thick and tanned. "Brighton, hopefully."

"If
you think a few thousand bucks to a campaign chest lets you do whatever you
want, you've got another thing coming."

"That's
not what I meant. What I meant was, I'm a law-respecting guy, I try to play by
the rules, I try to help out good people. And he’s one of them—that's
all."

"So much for the
rules when you called Epicure for a girl."

He
nodded. "Yeah. Look, Sergeant, I shouldn't have done that. I got caught.
You can wreck my marriage, my family, a big part of my business. I'm asking you
not to. Don't, because I didn't hurt her. I sure didn't kill her Tuesday night,
assuming that's why you're here. I…I did what I did, tipped her way too much
and off she went. I bought a whore. I didn't kill her. I can account for my
whereabouts."

Del
Viggio held her gaze across the desk.

"First
time with her?"

"Yeah."

"But
not with Epicure."

"No."

"How
many?"

"Twenty,
thirty."

"Before
Epicure?"

"Yeah,
others. I'm that way."

"Married
and all. Two children, high-school age."

He
nodded, leaned to his left.

"Show
me their pictures and I'll arrest you right now."

He leaned back.
"I'm asking you to let it slide, Sergeant. I don't deserve it. But I'm
asking anyway. I'll do anything I can to help you. You can name it. But don't
wreck me."

His plea seemed
genuine, though Merci detected nothing desperate in it. Del Viggio was a man
used to accommodation.

"It's
..." His voice trailed off.

"It's
what? A tragedy? A shame? Terrible what happened?"

"It's the way I
am," he said. "I don't like it. I don't respect it. But I can't
change it."

"You
own a sidearm?"

"I've
got a Smith revolver under the bed. A trap gun I never use."

Merci studied him for
a long moment. "Tuesday night," she said finally.

Del Viggio sighed and
shook his head. "Cindy. Talk to Goren Moladan."

"Why
not Gayla?"

"Unavailable."

On her way back to
headquarters she stopped by Seashell Cleaners and picked up Aubrey's clothes:
four dresses, two suits, three pairs of jeans, two sweaters.

The clerk looked at
her with uncertainty but said nothing besides "Sixty-two fifty,
please."

B
righton held open the door to his office, shut it
when she was in.

"Listen to that," he said.

She heard the rain
roaring down outside. It took quite a storm to announce itself through the
thick county building walls. The windows were vertical slits and through them
Merci could see the water pouring down. Six hours early, she noted, according
to the news.

"Sit,
please," the sheriff said. He sprawled back into the chair behind his desk
and locked his fingers behind his head. Brighton was a big man, Merci thought
he looked like a farmer: ruddy complexion, veinous hands, pale and sun-beaten
eyes. He was getting near the end of his career and talking to the press about
retirement again.

He'd talked about it
near the end of last year, too, and the year before that. The reporters always
wanted to know who the next sheriff would be. The editorials were a little
stronger this year, she had noted. The papers thought maybe it was time for
Brighton to endorse the young blood he would leave behind.

Merci had always
hoped that the young blood would include hers. A chance to move up. There would
be a big shuffle—-some up, some down, some sideways, some out. It had always
been her personal plan to run the Homicide Detail by the time she was forty,
run the Crimes Against Persons Section by fifty, be elected sheriff by
fifty-eight. Fourteen years ago, when she'd first been sworn and hatched her
timetable, it had seemed possible if unlikely.

But things change.
Tim Hess, her old partner, had been killed in the line of duty by a murderer
called the Purse Snatcher. Merci had dispatched that monster, and she'd gotten
decorated for it. But the sworn men and women of the department knew the truth:
Hess had saved her ass in the eleventh hour, and it was her gun that had been
used to kill him. You didn't run Homicide Detail—let alone the whole Sheriff
Department—unless you had the respect of your people. Even now, at times, two
plus years and a thousand prayers of forgiveness later, Merci Rayborn still
wasn't sure if she respected herself.