Until she remembered the pictures of her beating the crap out of Ferg Rohossen.
Then the remorse evaporated in a hurry. If those pictures fell into the wrong hands—say those of Detective Daphne Simmons, who had made it clear that she didn’t care a whit for Stella—there was going to be all kinds of hell to pay. At the very least, if the pictures got out, it would make it nearly impossible for Stella to continue her covert benevolent aid society for the abused.
But it would probably also mean that a lot of sketchy episodes from the last few years would be dug up and reviewed by Sheriff Dimmit Stanislas as he sat on his wide and lazy ass up in the county seat, and Stanislas had shown how eager he was to find scapegoats for any blight on the department. He’d be pleased as punch to go after Stella—especially if a conviction could boost his dismal reputation.
And even if Goat wanted to help her then—which was very doubtful, since he’d probably be fit to be tied when he realized the extent of Stella’s lawbreaking—he’d be forced to join the efforts against her if he wanted to hold on to his job. Stella figured it was only the crazy red-hot pheromone-drenched electricity between them that had allowed him to overlook her escapades this long. But all the sexual chemistry in the world couldn’t help her if he ever found out just how far she’d gone to deliver her brand of renegade justice, a brand that flew in the face of everything Goat stood for.
At least the envelope of pictures and the flash drive seemed to be blessedly missing, along with Priss and Liman.
But Stella had a sinking feeling that she wouldn’t be able to track down the former without getting tangled up further with the latter.
Chapter Nine
“That’s quite a striking outfit you got on,” Stella observed that night as she and Chrissy hiked through a frost-dead field toward the Porter place, eyeing her assistant’s stretch fleece yoga pants tucked into a pair of pink fake-suede Ugg knockoffs, and the camo-print sherpa-lined flak jacket she’d borrowed from one of her brothers, the hood cinched tight around her pretty face. “You could take that anywhere from a dinner cruise in the Arctic sea, to a hoedown in a hunting camp.”
“Well, you might as well get your mileage out of me now, seeing as I got to mind the shop tomorrow,” Chrissy said, ignoring Stella’s teasing.
Since the farm was a suspected crime scene and all, they were taking the precaution of approaching it overland in the dark. Stella’s Jeep was parked off-road on Monroe land, hidden by a grove of scrubby staghorn sumacs.
“I don’t know about these here flashlights you got,” Chrissy added dubiously. The Blue Dot police models had been a splurge that, on reflection, didn’t merit the price; the white light could blind a person but didn’t do the best job of illuminating the path in front of them.
Stella sighed. “Yeah, sometimes you don’t get what you pay for.”
She gave her backpack a reassuring heft. It was a BlackHawk R.A.P.T.O.R., designed for special ops use, which she bought herself for Christmas after an earlier model was lost in the summer’s deadly outing to the lake. She might never use all the features—she doubted that the built-in jump harness would come in handy any time soon, for instance—but she loved how slick and lightweight and intimidating looking it was.
Inside the pack was her Tupperware spaghetti box full of lock tools. Some were professional models Chrissy had helped her find in dark and illicit corners of the Internet, but her favorites were the homemade jobs she’d crafted out of beer cans. That, and a vibrating Oral-B flossing wand that had its uses in certain situations.
The Porter house was dark. The winds from earlier in the day had died down and now another storm threatened, illuminated by a silver moon that drifted in and out of the clouds. Their footsteps on the porch sounded much too loud, and an answering skittering sound from the bushes gave Stella a momentary start, but the inky form that went flying across the scrubby yard was nothing but a large rat or a small raccoon.
Stella unzipped her pack and got out two pairs of latex gloves that she’d rubber-banded together. She handed one pair to Chrissy and slipped on the other.
“Going uptown, I see,” Chrissy said, tugging the gloves over her hands. For everyday breaking and entering, Stella economized by using Ziploc sandwich bags, which were just fine when a person didn’t need a whole lot of manual dexterity, and cost a fraction what the gloves did.
“Nothing’s too good for Priss,” Stella said sarcastically. “Why, she probably wipes her ass with silk scarves.”
She jiggled the door handle, finding it locked but cheap. “Here, hold the flashlight for me, this won’t take but a minute. I swear, you can’t find a challenge anywhere around here these days.”
“Whyn’t you let me try,” Chrissy said. “Might as well learn something, seein’ as I’m missing family poker night at my folks’.”
Stella selected a narrow tension wrench and handed it to the girl. “What happened to your principles? How you were just going to focus on the shop and the computer stuff and stay out of all the hands-on lawbreaking?”
Chrissy snorted, an unladylike sound that contrasted with the sweet frown of concentration on her full cherubic lips as she held the tool up and examined it in the powerful white light of the flashlight.
“Well, now, I guess I just ain’t got enough starch to resist the lure of the dark side no more, Stella, not when I’m exposed to
you
every durn day. Which end of this am I supposed to use, anyway?”
Stella tapped it delicately with a fingernail. “That there—see where it’s bent? Jimmy that into the keyhole.”
Chrissy got it started, and Stella showed her how to finesse the pins with a narrow hooked pick, and soon the door opened up with a little rattle. “Why, it’s just like Liman’s
begging
to get robbed,” Chrissy marveled.
“Don’t go getting any ideas. We don’t run that kind of outfit.” Stella slipped the tools back in the Tupperware container and snapped it shut with a satisfying little burp. Chrissy pushed open the door and entered the house, snapping on a light switch, which lit up a ’70s-era bean-shaped lamp with a macramé shade. The single bulb made little effort to illuminate the room, casting yellowish shadows over the huddled low-slung furniture, the piles of newspapers and magazines on the coffee table, the collection of dusty beer steins lining the shelves of a laminate entertainment center. “You start on the bedrooms. I’ll take the main rooms. And remember, this flash drive we’re looking for is just a little thing, a—”
Chrissy stopped cold, so that Stella walked right into her, nearly falling on Liman’s musty brown carpet. When Chrissy put her hands to her hips and planted her feet wide and gave her a withering glare, like Clint Eastwood in
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
Stella knew she’d messed up.
“What I meant was—”
“You were
not
about to tell me what a fuckin’ flash drive looks like, Stella Hardesty,” the girl fumed.
“I only meant that it’s not very big, that we need to be looking in—”
“Whyn’t
you
tell
me
what one looks like. Since you know so much.”
“Now, Chrissy, don’t be like that. You know I respect your skills. You know I consider—”
“You best be considering telling me exactly what I’m
lookin’
for. Take your time, Stella, and tell me all about it. Since you’re the
expert
and all.”
Most gals, Stella reflected, tended to the hysteria end of the spectrum when they got flustered. She’d seen it over and over among her customers: The female brain seemed to require a lot of extra oxygen and bosom heaving when it was processing trouble and disharmony.
Not Chrissy, though. Ever since the girl had faced down a pack of angry professional killers during Tucker’s rescue over the summer, she’d developed a repertoire of reactions more suited to, say, a ninja warrior. Her eyes narrowed and her breathing slowed down to what a person might experience if they were laid out on an iceberg and chilled like a shrimp cocktail, and she managed to radiate pure focused menace, as if she could kill with her mind alone.
And that was with people she
loved.
Because, as Stella reminded herself now, Chrissy did indeed love her very much.
Only Stella had done it again, had crossed that one line that provoked Chrissy like nothing else.
She’d questioned the girl’s competence. Unwittingly, perhaps; without judgment, perhaps; but she’d done it, and now there was a whole field of hot coals sizzling between them. Chrissy had taken up computer hacking a few months earlier while she was recovering from being shot up like a prize buck, and she’d spent enough of her growing-up years being told she was just a shade smarter than a stump, that she’d need to trade on her voluptuous good looks to get anywhere, that discovering her own innate technical aptitude was like a junkie discovering the powerful allure of crack.
Chrissy wasn’t just
good
with computers; she was a tech goddess, a byte-whisperer, a cracker of codes, a bloodhound of networks. But on the inside, she was still dragging around the outdated self-image of a girl who barely graduated from Prosper High, who was more likely to be propositioned by her science teacher than expected to complete a lab report, whose own mother hoped only to marry her off to a boy who would support her while she started popping out babies.
“A flash drive,” Stella said carefully, “is, like, a little old thing you stick into your computer that holds a bunch of documents on it. Or, you know, pictures.”
Pictures of me beating the shit out of a scumbag in a barn,
she didn’t add.
“Uh-huh. Right. You still ain’t told me what it looks like. Bigger than a lipstick? Round? Square?”
Stella knew she was being baited, but there was no graceful exit. She sighed heavily. “I don’t know. Um, like a, you know, plug or something?”
“A …
plug
? Stella, do you even know how to turn on your Mac?”
“I. Uh. Well, see the thing is, you always have it on already when I come in and—”
“Forget it,” Chrissy snapped, and started down the hall. “Once I look around in here, I’ll come back out and help you out, since you obviously don’t know your butt from your elbow.”
Stella went to work with a smile on her face.
They kept at it for nearly an hour. Stella worked the living room and kitchen and tiny foyer with the gloomy attention of someone who knows she is going through a pointless exercise. She didn’t want to admit it, but she
felt
in her bones that the drive wasn’t here. That nothing helpful, in fact, was here—no lingering trace of Priss’s presence at all.
The beer stein that had been used to pummel someone in the head—that’s what Stella was assuming, given the hair and skin; knock someone over the head and you were going to get that particular kind of detritus—was sitting safe and secure up in Fayette, under the watchful eye of Detective Simmons’s crime scene staff.
Otherwise, there wasn’t a whole lot to go on. Blooming smudges of black fingerprint powder surrounded the doorframes leading in and out of rooms, the light switches, objects on tables. A pair of chairs that looked as though they belonged on either side of the fireplace had been stacked next to the scratched old walnut hutch in the dining room. In lieu of the usual personal tchotchkes—framed snapshots, ashtrays, figurines—the tabletop surfaces featured wooden bowls of pretzel crumbs and empty beer cans and expired issues of
TV Guide.
Stella checked in drawers and behind the sofas and under the rugs, but the most unexpected thing she came up with was a ticket stub from a matinee showing of
Lethal Weapon 2
. Which suggested nothing other than the possibility that Liman hadn’t cleaned under the rugs in two decades.
She was about to declare the search a bust when she heard the crunch of tires on the drive outside. Chrissy must have heard it, too, because she came hurtling down the hall and grabbed Stella’s arm and yanked.
“Tub,” she snapped, and dragged Stella into the hall bath. She tugged the door nearly closed behind them and led the way into the tub, which smelled of mildew. They stood close together behind the stiff plastic shower curtain.
There was a soft tapping at the front door. Stella could feel her heart pounding hard under her sweat-dampened T-shirt. She touched her pocket for reassurance, wishing she’d brought something a little more muscular than the little Bersa .380 she’d picked up on a whim in the back of an old bait shop in Sikeston. The lightweight little gun fit into a pocket but was probably better for settling arguments at a garden show than for dealing with any kind of real danger.
“You packing?” she whispered.
“You out of your mind?” Chrissy whispered back. “This was supposed to be a simple little treasure hunt. Besides, what makes you think whoever that is needs shot? Prob’ly kids, you know, figuring they can come around and get high and make out, seein’ as the house is empty.”
“I don’t know.…”
“Stella, every last person in Prosper knows Liman’s gone missing. There’s folks that likes crime scenes, too, you know, like a little hobby or something? There’s this bunch on the Internet, calls themselves the CSI-dols, get it, like
idols
—”
She broke off as there was a tinkling of glass—someone had knocked out a pane from the front door. Stella swallowed hard.
“Well, fuck me,” Chrissy whispered softly. “I guess life’s about to get interesting.”
Chapter Ten
“I don’t think this is any kind of innocent little social call.”
“Maybe not,” Chrissy conceded as Stella got the Bersa settled in her hand.
“Anyone here?” a voice boomed. Fast-thudding steps came in and split off into at least two directions, maybe three, from the sound of it.
Another voice, with a thick Chicago accent, chimed in. “Take the hall. I’ll check the kitchen.”
“Not kids,” Stella whispered, stating the obvious.
Chrissy snorted softly. “Bunch a morons, is what that is. Just announced where they was going—what kind of way is that to search a house?”