We all fell silent. Who was Will working with, or for? It seemed to me there were multiple crimes in there somewhere, but I had no idea who was guilty of what. The kidnapping was pretty straightforward. Beverly had concealed information. And somebody had killed Alex. I leaned toward believing Beverly when she said Will couldn’t have done it, but I could be wrong.
“Do you think Will is still at his house?” I asked, breaking the silence. “You have to know that the police are on their way there now.”
“Probably. He has no reason to think anyone is looking for him. He lives in a pretty isolated area, so no one was likely to have noticed Cam there. And had Cam identified him, someone would have been there already, so by now he would think he was in the clear.”
As in fact he had been, until we’d talked to Beverly.
Denis. Matt had said he was missing—but where would he go? And why? He needed to close his gem deal if he hoped to realize any money to pay off his debts, so why would he leave town now while the dealer was still around? The timing didn’t make sense.
Either Denis was the victim of Alex’s killer, or he was hiding from him. If Will wasn’t the killer, and the killer was still out there, what did he gain by eliminating Denis? Denis claimed not to know anything, so how could he identify the killer—unless he was lying? Something was not making sense here.
Denis’s wife Elizabeth—she was still at home. I stood up abruptly. “Cam, we have to go.”
He looked startled. “What?”
“I’ll explain in a minute. Beverly, thank you for being honest with us.”
“Will there be trouble, about what I said?”
“I hope not. I’ll do my best to prevent it. I hope you’re right about Will, that he’s no killer. And thank you again for looking out for Cam—I will always be grateful for that.”
“It was the right thing to do.” Beverly stood up as if to walk us to the door, but then stopped. “Oh, wait a moment.” She reached into a lower drawer of her desk and pulled out a small dusty backpack. “Cam, I almost forgot to give you this.”
Cam’s eyes lit up. “My laptop?”
“Yes. I didn’t want to leave it with you before, in case you wandered off and forgot it, or someone took it from you. Will brought back whatever he found at the RV. I’ve got your clothes and the rest in the trunk of my car, but I didn’t want to leave this there. I can drop off the rest of your things later, if you don’t wish to take them now.”
“Thank you! This means a lot to me.”
“I thought it might,” she said with a small smile.
Beverly led us out, past the bewildered receptionist, and once again Cam and I found ourselves standing on the sidewalk.
“Okay, Em, what’s going on?” Cam demanded.
“Matt told me that Denis has gone missing again. I don’t think he’d leave town without closing this deal, if he’s so desperate for money. So there must be a good reason—either somebody grabbed him, or there’s something we don’t know. I want to talk to his wife.”
“Em, wouldn’t Matt or someone have done that already?”
“Of course. But maybe whoever talked with her wasn’t asking the right questions. He blew it with Beverly.” Well, that might be overstating it, but he hadn’t gotten everything from her.
He let out a snort. “So you’re going to wangle Elizabeth Ryerson’s secrets from her with sisterly sympathy?”
I swatted his arm. Did I really seem that socially inept? “Cam, don’t look so skeptical. I can be sympathetic if I try.”
“I’m going with you.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, if I’m going to play the sympathy card.”
“Em, there’s a killer out there somewhere.”
“Cam, I know that. I just think Elizabeth might be more forthcoming if you weren’t around.”
“I guess,” he said glumly. I suspected Cam secretly enjoyed the role of sensitive guy.
“Trust me on this. Let’s go.”
Chapter 30
Wearing peridot is supposed to bring success, peace, and good luck.
“Uh, Em? How’re we getting home?”
Oh, right. I had forgotten that Matt had brought us here; my car was at home, Cam’s still impounded. “We’ll go get my car. I could use the exercise, and maybe the fresh air will clear my head.” We set off at a fast clip and covered the half mile to the shop in ten minutes.
When we got there, I realized I needed to touch base with Nessa and Allison. “Cam, can you take the dogs out for a quick walk? I’ll just tell Nessa where I’m going.”
When I walked into the shop, both Nessa and Allison looked up eagerly. “What’s going on?” Nessa said.
“You were right about Beverly—turns out the guy in the picture is her brother. Matt and his gang are headed out to his place. Beverly says that he’s the one who kidnapped Cam from the RV. But don’t tell Matt that part.”
“Is he the killer?” breathed Allison.
“I can’t say for sure, but his sister doesn’t think so. Oh, and Denis has gone missing, or so Matt says. This just keeps getting more and more confusing. We figure out one piece, and something else pops up. I’m going over to Denis’s house to talk with his wife.”
“Does Matt know?” Nessa asked.
“Uh, not exactly. But we figure he’s already talked to her, so I’m not trampling on his turf or anything. How’s business been?”
Nessa and Allison looked around the shop, looked at each other, then burst into laughter. “I don’t know if we can handle the crowds,” Allison said.
“Things should be back to normal by next week, once the gem people leave. Not Frank, Nessa! He’s welcome to stay as long as he wants.”
Cam came in, the two dogs dancing around his feet and tangling their leashes, followed by Frank. Cam was carrying a newspaper. “Cam, we use plastic bags for dog poop here,” I said.
“Em, look at this.” He thrust the paper in front of me, folded to show the front-page article about Alex’s death. “That’s not Alex.”
“What?” Three of us spoke in unison. Frank simply grinned, apparently enjoying the new turn of events.
“Of course it is,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“If that’s Alex Gutierrez, he’s not the man who took me out to the RV.”
We all stared at him in stunned silence for several seconds. I was beginning to get a very bad feeling about this. At last, I said, “Describe the man.”
“Mid height, maybe two, three inches shorter than me. Sandy hair, kind of thinning on top. Glasses. Twitchy.”
Nessa, Allison, and I exchanged glances. “That sounds an awful lot like Denis,” I said. They nodded in agreement. “Where did you rendezvous with him?”
“At Alex Gutierrez’s house. Alex sent me directions by e-mail, when we firmed up the details. I told him I’d be there by noon. I arrived a little early, and the guy there said he was Alex—or at least, he didn’t say he
wasn’t
Alex when I introduced myself.”
“Did you go into the house?”
“No. He seemed kind of in a hurry, and I wasn’t in any mood to make polite chitchat, so we just headed out for the RV. He dropped me off, said he’d be back in a week. He’d warned me that phone reception was lousy out there, so we just set a time. And he left.”
“And he had no trouble finding the place?”
“No. Why would he?” Cam looked puzzled.
“Because if it was Denis, Denis claimed he didn’t know where the RV was. Hang on, I’ve got to think this through.”
“Are you going to call Matt?”
“And tell him what? That we think Denis bamboozled Cam? And . . .” I stopped for a moment as ideas started bouncing through my head. “Denis probably engineered the kidnapping, because he knew Cam was out there.”
“And he must know Will—something else he lied about,” Cam added.
“And now he’s disappeared. Things aren’t looking good for Denis, are they? But I still don’t get it—why would he want to kill Alex? Frank, can you find out if that Madagascar dealer is still around, and can you ask if they closed the deal for the stones?”
“Right.” Frank fished his cell phone out of his pocket and retreated to a corner to make a call.
I turned back to the rest. “He said he had no money, so how could he run unless he sold the stones?”
Frank returned quickly. “He’s still at the show, and he hasn’t seen Denis.”
I thought a moment. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. Matt is looking for Will, so that’s covered. Frank, can you go over to the show and keep an eye on the dealer, see if Denis shows up?”
“No worries. What’re you going to do?”
“I’m going to talk to Denis’s wife. Maybe she knows something that she didn’t want to share with the police.”
“Woman’s touch, eh?” Frank said. “Don’t they have ladies on your police force, for the softer stuff?”
“Of course they do, but they don’t always know what questions to ask. Cam, I can drop you at the police station so you can reclaim your car.”
“Em, be careful, please,” Allison said.
“Trust me, I will be. I should be back in an hour or two, anyway.”
Chapter 31
An old process for working peridot to give it shine used vitriol, a caustic metal sulfate.
I dropped Cam off at the police impound lot and
made my way toward Denis’s home on the fringes of town. As I drove, I tried again to identify a motive for Denis to kill Alex. Okay, Denis had been under a lot of pressure. He’d seen his real estate investments tank, and he’d let Alex talk him into some harebrained scheme to pretty up peridot in order to recoup at least some of his losses. Did he blame Alex for the poor investments? But why kill him? The gem treatment seemed to be working, and there was a buyer lined up for the enhanced stones—why upset the applecart now?
I pulled into the driveway at the house, behind a car I hoped was Elizabeth’s. I parked and approached the door to ring the doorbell. Elizabeth answered after about two minutes, and when she opened the door she looked even worse than she had the last time I had seen her. “What do you want?” Not the warmest of welcomes.
“I wanted to talk to you about Denis.”
“The police have already been here. I told them I don’t know where he is.”
“Then how do you know he’s missing?”
“He’s not here. He’s not at his office. Oh hell, come on in—it’s stupid to stand here on the front step.”
I followed her into the house. The stresses of the last few days had apparently affected her housekeeping standards, for the house was nowhere near as neat as the last time I had seen it. She must really be upset.
“You want something?” she said ungraciously. “Water, iced tea?”
“Water would be fine.” I followed her into the kitchen. There were dirty glasses left in the sink and crumbs on the countertop.
Elizabeth put some ice cubes in a glass, added tap water, and thrust the glass toward me. “Here. Okay, we’ve done the social bit. What do you want to know?”
Right to the point. I answered in kind. “Who do you think killed Alex?”
To my surprise, her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
Her reaction seemed kind of extreme, but was it Alex’s death or something else that was bothering her?
“You’d been friends for a long time, hadn’t you?”
She had turned away and was staring out the window over the sink; there was a view of houses, stacked up like cards, with a glimpse of tawny mountains beyond. She didn’t speak for a long time, but I had the feeling she had something she wanted to say. I waited.
Finally she turned back to me, and her cheeks were wet with tears. “How would you describe Denis?”
“I don’t think I’ve seen him at his best. Nervous, mostly. Intelligent, focused. Obsessive maybe.”
“Pretty close. Sure, he’s smart—he’s a college professor, isn’t he? Me, I’ve got an associate degree from a two-year college that doesn’t even exist anymore. Obsessive? Definitely. He likes everything just so, in its place. He hates anything he can’t control. I can’t imagine how he manages to teach classrooms full of eager young people who actually have minds of their own.”
Hold on—Denis had accused Elizabeth of being compulsively neat. Which one of them was it?
Elizabeth was still rambling on. “We’ve been married for fifteen years. I thought there would be kids, but that didn’t happen. I hate this place. I hate my job. Do you know how goddamn boring insurance is?”
Was she coming to a point anywhere in here? There was a killer on the loose. “If you’re so miserable, why don’t you just leave?”
I watched the struggle on her face before she answered in a tight-throated whisper. “Alex.”
Oh no.
“You mean, you and Alex . . . ?”
She nodded. “Yes. For a couple of years now.”
The next question seemed obvious, at least to me. “So why didn’t you leave Denis and get together with Alex?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t want that. I mean, I think he actually liked Denis, though I guess sleeping with your friend’s wife is a pretty funny way of showing it. And they had this investment partnership going, and it would have been complicated to get out of that, and if they bailed out now they’d lose money.” She swallowed a sob. “I guess they would have lost money anyway, right?”
There was a growing feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. “Elizabeth, did Denis know? About you and Alex, I mean?”
She shook her head again, her hair hanging over her face. “I don’t think so. I certainly didn’t tell him, and I can’t see why Alex would—he was happy with the way things were. Maybe Denis had some idea, but he never said anything. I mean, you’ve been together with somebody this long, you kind of sense things, you know?”
No, I didn’t know, but I was willing to take her word for it. I picked my next question carefully. “Is Denis a violent man?”
Elizabeth snorted. “Denis? He’s a professor, for God’s sake. He has trouble killing a spider in the house. You don’t think . . . ?”
I watched as she realized what I was really asking. If her emotions were always this obvious, Denis must have been clued in about the affair with Alex from the start.