Cold River - Carla Neggers [58]
Myrtle rolled her violet eyes as she walked past him into the cabin. She’d never been inside, and from her frown, Grit guessed she didn’t appreciate what she saw. She glanced at him. “Do your own cleaning, do you?”
He shut the cabin door. “You always been a pain in the butt, Myrtle?”
“It’s gotten worse since my Russian friend had his toothpaste poisoned by unnamed assassins and my house was set on fire.”
“Just your office burned,” Grit said. “Your house is intact.”
Andrei Petrov, a controversial Russian diplomat, had died in London over the summer under mysterious circumstances. Myrtle hadn’t been satisfied that he’d just keeled over while brushing his teeth and had launched her own personal investigation. She’d begun to suspect a network of professional killers was responsible for Petrov’s death and started looking into other similar deaths, which had led her to venture out to the site of the hit-and-run that had killed Bruni. Police now could place Melanie Kendall and Kyle Rigby in London at the time of Petrov’s death.
Myrtle had good reason for being a little dramatic.
She stood by the woodstove and put her gloved hands out toward the fire. “This investigation is dead in the water. We’re not getting anywhere. Some rocks fall up in a cemetery and a tarp blows in the wind, and everyone gets all excited.”
“The stonemason’s on probation.”
“For a bar fight, Petty Officer Taylor. In my day, bar fights between stonemasons and mountain men were par for the course. Nobody called the damn police.”
“In your day, duels to the death were legal, too.”
She ignored him. “Whoever hired Kyle Rigby and Melanie Kendall has gone to ground. Their network’s probably disbanded. Law enforcement’s being tight with information, but we’d know if they had a freaking clue.”
Grit shrugged and said nothing.
Myrtle opened up the woodstove. “I grew up in a little town in southern Georgia. We had a woodstove. My grandma would put on a pot of white beans….” She drifted off and got more kindling out of the bucket next to the stove and set it on the anemic fire, blew on the coals and stood back as if she knew what she was doing. She shook bits of wood and sawdust from her glove. “Goatskin. Cost me a fortune. Those mountain men, Elijah and A.J., told me to get some windproof blah-blah-blah gloves. Ugly as sin.”
A.J. had outfitted Grit with just such a pair of gloves. They were fine. “Why are you here, Myrtle?”
She watched flames slowly spread through the kindling. She didn’t look as cold. Grit figured it was the psychological effect of seeing the fire. It wasn’t any warmer in the cabin. “You never told anyone that Charlie Neal was switching places with his lookalike cousin,” she said without looking at Grit.
He didn’t say anything. Instead he pulled on a fleece-lined sweatshirt. If he’d had his way, Myrtle wouldn’t have known about Charlie Neal and his cousin, Conor, either. Feeling guilty over causing Jo Harper to be sent into exile in Vermont, Charlie had done his own investigating after Alex Bruni’s death. He’d conducted his research mostly on the Internet, but he’d also switched places with Conor and headed out into the city on his own, without benefit of Secret Service protection. He’d come to believe, as Myrtle had, that paid assassins were at work and had produced a list of potential victims. Not everyone on his list had checked out—but authorities were paying attention to it. They just didn’t know it came from the vice president’s son.
“The Secret Service think they have Charlie buttoned up,” Myrtle said. “But you know he’s still on this thing. He’s got an IQ of one-eighty and he gets bored easily, and he wants to matter. He’ll find a way to meddle.”
“He can take anything he learns straight to the Secret Service.”
“What if he doesn’t trust the Secret Service?”
Grit pulled the covers up on his bed.
Myrtle kept her sights on him. She wasn’t one to quit. “I’m not saying they don’t deserve to be trusted. It’s just that Charlie