Twice Kissed - Lisa Jackson [73]
His head snapped up. “Walker?”
“One and the same. Called from his ranch in Cheyenne. He’s on his way here. With the sister.”
Reed’s gut told him something was wrong. “Isn’t she from a small town in Idaho?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why would they be together?” he wondered aloud. “I thought the divorce between Walker and Marquise was kinda messy—no love lost—that sort of thing. So why would the twin sister be arriving with him?” Scowling to himself, he spun the seat of the chair and stared out the window for a few long seconds, but he didn’t see the face of the building across the street, nor the few pedestrians bundled in ski jackets or long wool coats, wool hats, boots, and scarves huddled against the wind as they made their way along the sidewalk. Now, his vision was turned inward to the case—the damned case.
“Beats me. Something to ask.”
“Are they bringing the niece—what was her name?” He spun the chair again, glanced down at the notes on his cluttered desk, thought about a cigarette, and found a stick of gum in his top drawer. “Rebecca?”
“Don’t know.” Hannah leaned against the doorjamb to his office, her favorite position when they hashed things out. “Why?”
“Marquise had a lot of pictures of the kid. Almost as many as she kept on herself.” He opened the stick of nicotine-laced gum and plopped it into his mouth as he surveyed the woman who had worked with him for over three years. Attractive, smart as a whip, in good shape and, he suspected, in love with him. A mistake. They both knew it, but didn’t ever broach the subject. It was a line he never intended to cross. Too sticky. Affairs had a way of ending and ending badly. He liked this woman too much to mess things up.
And then there was Karen to consider. They were divorced, had been for years, but…he still kept her picture in the top drawer with his forty-five and empty flask that still reeked of scotch.
“We’ll see if they bring the daughter when they get here.” Folding her arms over her chest and pulling at her right earring, the way she always did when she was thinking hard, Hannah said, “You know, a lot of people close to Marquise are dead.”
“I thought about that.”
“Good. Don’t know if it has any bearing, but it’s odd, I think.” She started clicking the deceased off, lifting fingers as she counted. “First, the stepbrother dies in the ocean, suspected suicide; then the parents split up over his death, try to reconcile, and the mother ends up falling while supposedly cooking dinner in the kitchen, hits her head, and dies with a blood-alcohol level in the stratosphere.
“Next the father, Frank, bereft and broken, has himself a massive heart attack, and the two girls, barely in their twenties, are on their own. They’ve only got each other and a couple of husbands, right? Except that Mary Theresa marries quickly and divorces even faster and the other one, Maggie, she hangs in there, has a kid, then when things get rocky, separates, and the guy has a car accident, ends up in a coma, takes a while to die. According to the hospital records, Dean McCrae’s bloodstream was pure whiskey—kinda like the mom—when he was life-flighted in.” She wiggled her fingers. “That’s a lot of dead bodies for a small family. Now the centerpiece, the golden girl, is missing, probably dead somewhere.”
He reached for his baseball. Gave it a toss. “So what’re you saying?”
“Just that it gives one pause. Nothing more than that.”
“You think there was foul play involved?” The stitched ball landed softly in Henderson’s waiting fingers with Koufax’s signature rolled toward the ceiling. He flung it toward the fluorescent lights again.
Shrugging, pink lips protruding thoughtfully, she turned her palms toward the ceiling. “Probably not. Maybe just a coincidence, but any way you look at it, it’s a helluva string of bad luck.”
The ball landed in his waiting palm. “But these things happen. The brother was a screwup, the mother a drunk, the father a type