Ride a Painted Pony (Superromance) (8 page)

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Authors: Carolyn McSparren

BOOK: Ride a Painted Pony (Superromance)
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“Come on,” Taylor said urgently. “I think the crime desk finally woke up.”
“The guy probably wants a handout.”
“He wants a story. That’s a reporter, not a vagrant. Take my truck.” She tossed him the keys.
Without another word, Nick climbed into the driver’s side of the truck, turned the key and waited for Taylor to get in.
The reporter tapped on the window. “Sir, if I could ask you a few questions?”
Nick ignored him, reversed and drove away.
“Whew!” Taylor turned to watch the man, who stared after them forlornly. “Close one.”
“I’m going to have to talk to them sooner or later.”
“Why? Let them get their info from Danny. He’s used to it.” She fastened her seat belt and leaned back. “By tonight they’ll have her identity—and other fish to fry.” She clicked her tongue. “I hope.”
“Yeah. So where we going for breakfast?”
“How fast do you think we can get to Oxford?”
“I can make it in an hour if your radar detector works,” Nick said, then swiveled to look at her. “Remind me not to ask you to lunch. You might want to go to Paris.”
Taylor laughed. “Actually, I wanted to break into the Eberhardt’s house before Danny finds out who she is.”
“That’s illegal.”
“So’s speeding. Besides, it’s only illegal if we get caught I’ll break and enter. You can sit in the car and bail me out if the cops show up.”
“I’m going to be right beside you if you waltz into the Eberhardt house. Count on it.”
He sounded just as bossy as Danny, but she felt a wave of warmth. Danny wanted to control her. Apparently Nick wanted to help if she needed him. A small difference, but an important one.
After they passed the Mississippi line, he said, “Vollmer thinks I did it, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t.”
“I know that.”
At least I think I do
. “But you had means and opportunity. Once they identify the body, they’ll say you had motive as well.”
“Clara was blackmailing me about the horses?”
“Or her husband’s death or something. The point is, Danny wants you to be guilty.”
He glanced at her. “He’s in love with you.”
Taylor flushed. “Not love. We had a thing for a while. It’s been over for months.”
“Not for him.”
“It has for me.” She watched the pines and kudzu flash by. How much should she tell Nick? If Danny planned to arrest him, he had a right to go armed with as much knowledge as possible. She took a deep breath. “My husband, Paul, was killed in a drive-by shooting at an ATM. Danny and his partner caught the case and then caught the three men who did it. I was vulnerable, he was attractive. My hero.”
“What went wrong?”
“He wanted to own me. Nobody does that, not anymore.”
She felt, rather than saw, Nick take his eyes off the road long enough to stare at the set of her profile. “Maybe he’s just worried about you.”
“I don’t report to anybody but Mel, and then only during business hours.” She sounded determined.
“What are we looking for in Oxford?”
“We’ve got to find the records on those remaining animals.”
“You think whoever stole the animals killed Clara?”
“Don’t you? It’s possible the same person killed Eberhardt and burned his store down, too.” She looked at him.
The knuckles on his hands were white around the wheel. “Yeah. I may have been wrong about Eberhardt torching his own place.” He glanced over at her and looked back to the road quickly. “What gets me is that one of those people back there could betray everything Rounders stands for—just for money.”
He frowned and stamped down on the accelerator to pass a truck. When they were safely back in the right lane, he continued. “All I’ve got going for me are these.” He lifted his hands from the wheel for a moment. “I’m not an artist, I’m a glorified carpenter who likes to teach. Rounders—those people—they’re all I’ve got. That, and my reputation as an honest man. I can rebuild my family, but not my reputation.”
Taylor watched his profile in silence. The set of his jaw was grim. Well, it was a grim business, murder, especially when the detective in charge of the case suspected you.
Growing up, she’d had only her uncle Mark to teach her about ethics and morals. Her father delighted in real estate and investment kickbacks that might have been technically legal but were basically dishonest. He’d also been a violent man—especially when he was drunk. Once he’d beaten both her and Bradley so badly that Children’s Services would have intervened in a heartbeat, had anyone reported him. Bradley had inherited all their father’s bad traits. No wonder Taylor had been in a hurry to get out of the house. She’d mistaken her husband Paul for a knight in shining armor, only to find him even more tarnished than the men in her family.
Nick reminded her of Mel Borman, except that Mel was a realist. This man had more than a little Don Quixote in him. Otherwise he’d never have promised to pay Pete Marley for the fake hippocampus. Taylor vowed this particular Don Quixote wouldn’t suffer for his honor—if she could help it.
Ten minutes later they cruised slowly past the Eberhardt house. There were no other cars around, no sign of police activity. Apparently Vollmer had not yet identified Clara Eberhardt’s body.
The Eberhardt house was a nineteen-thirties’ Tudor, set high on a bank among aging trees along a winding road past Rowan Oaks, Faulkner’s house.
Nick circled the block and drove back to park. Taylor directed him to a space two doors down from the Eberhardts’s. “So how do we handle it?” he asked.
“Walk up to the front door and ring the bell. There could be relatives or friends staying there. Maybe someone missed her when she didn’t come home last night.”
“And if somebody answers?”
“We’re tracing the carousel animals. We don’t know anything about a murder.”
“And if no one answers?”
Taylor shrugged and pulled a device that looked like a small cordless screwdriver from her satchel. “Mel tried to teach me to pick locks. He finally gave up and bought me this. It’s a cordless electronic lock pick. Very handy.” She reached into her glove compartment for another pair of surgical gloves and handed them to Nick. She wore driving gloves.
He slipped the gloves on. “What’s the sentence for breaking and entering in Mississippi?”
“Actually, we’re not breaking anything—we’re only entering. Besides, we won’t get caught.” She slid out of the car. Nick followed her to the front door and waited while she rang the bell. It echoed inside the house. When no one answered after several moments, Taylor fitted a pick into her little device and bent to the lock. As she rested her hand on the doorknob, it turned. The door swung open silently.
Taylor stepped inside and pulled Nick after her. He shut the door.
“Anybody home?” Taylor called. Silence. Dust motes danced in the shadowy hallway. The whole place had a disused air, as though Clara Eberhardt and her husband had left months before. Taylor moved to the living room.
“Damnation!” she swore.
“What?” Nick asked as he came up beside her.
Taylor spread her hands. The place looked as though a tornado had swept through it. Chinese porcelain jars lay broken on the oriental rugs, books were torn from bookcases and from their leather bindings. Every piece of upholstery had been slashed. Feathers coated every surface like an early snow.
An antique lady’s desk in the corner had been turned on its side, its fragile legs fractured as though a heavy boot had stamped them. “Someone hasn’t just searched this place, they’ve vandalized it.” Taylor picked her way through then dining room and then to the kitchen.
The Eberhardts had owned lovely things. And someone obviously hated them for it.
Taylor’s steps crunched the shards of delicate crystal goblets. She picked up half a dinner plate and turned it over. “Lowestoft,” she read, and sighed.
Someone—working like a centrifuge—had flung sugar and flour around the kitchen, then broken a jar of molasses on top of the mess. The room stank of it.
Taylor turned to find Nick standing in the doorway.
“This is sick,” he said. He stooped to pick up a Georgian silver teapot in his gloved hands. Its lid had been stamped flat.
For the first time, Taylor felt afraid. Clara Eberhardt’s murder had been savage, but swift. The destruction of this house had taken time, energy and boundless rage. She turned around slowly like a child in a game of blindman’s bluff.
“I don’t think they found what they were looking for,” Nick said. He set the lidless teapot on the kitchen table.
They found more destruction upstairs. Ten minutes later, shaken by the devastation, Nick took Taylor’s arm. “We need to get the hell out of here, Taylor.” When she didn’t move, he took her arm. “
Now!
”
He half dragged her to the truck and hoisted her into the passenger seat. He went to the driver’s side, started the truck and drove away. At the first corner, he stopped and turned right into a residential area.
They both heard the sirens behind them. Taylor twisted in her seat. An Oxford police car slid to a stop in front of the Eberhardts house, and two uniformed policemen climbed out. Nick drove away well under the speed limit.
“Vollmer must have identified the body,” Taylor whispered. “He must have found her purse.”
“Come on, let’s head back to Memphis,” Nick said.
 
“THERE’S SOMETHING fundamentally wrong with me,” Taylor said as Nick turned onto Highway 7.
“You sick?” Nick asked. “Want me to stop somewhere?”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. That house affected me more than Clara Eberhardt’s body did. How can I care more about things than about people?”
He dropped a hand on her knee. For a moment she considered removing it, but it felt comforting.
“The murder doesn’t seem real.
That
—” he jerked his head back towards Oxford “—that’s insane.”
Taylor shuddered. “You felt it too? It wasn’t just me?”
“Either we’ve got one murderer
and
one lunatic, or the killer did the searching. Probably last night while we were entertaining your friend Vollmer.”
“You think the killer got angry because he didn’t find what he was looking for?”
“No. That was personal. Who breaks the legs of desks like that?”
Taylor smiled. The destruction of wood affected him more than the destruction of porcelain or crystal, no matter how beautiful. “What was he looking for?”
“Could be a she.”
“I realize that.”
“Maybe evidence linking him or her with Eberhardt and the theft.”
“I wish we’d had time to search. Mel’s taught me some great hiding places even the police sometimes overlook.”
“The last thing we needed was to get caught by the cops in that house.”
“They couldn’t blame you for the destruction. You were with me and the Homicide Division’s finest until two in the morning.” Even as she said the words, she realized their import.
So did he. “I could have driven to Oxford in an hour, spent an hour wrecking that house, driven home and still met you with plenty of time to spare.”
“Yes, you could have. But I don’t think you could have broken that desk.”
“So what now?” he asked.
“Do you know where Eberhardt’s shop was?” Taylor asked.
Nick nodded.
“Could we drive by? I don’t know what it would accomplish, but it’s stupid not to take the opportunity while we’re here.”
Nick turned right on the bypass. Taylor had expected the store to be near the center of town. Instead they drove four or five miles past the city limits before she saw the blackened building on her left.
The store had been housed in a large, low metal complex. The front half facing the road still seemed relatively intact. As they drove into the parking lot, however, they could see that the entire back half had melted and twisted like candle wax.
Nick pointed to the ruins. “The report in the newspaper said they found Eberhardt’s body back there where he did his restoration.”
Taylor opened the door of the truck. Surely after a week the stench should be gone. Was she imagining the odor of roasting flesh? She took a few extra seconds getting out of the truck.
A man came out the front door. He was wiping his hands on a filthy cloth. There was soot on his face, on his jeans and on the black T-shirt that stretched across his barrel chest. He was shorter and younger than Nick, but outweighed him considerably. His shoulders sloped down from his neck—or what passed for his neck—at close to a forty-five-degree angle. His arms hung down nearly to his knees. His body screamed “power-lifter.”

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