Within Range

Chapter Two

Seth was the sole detective on a police force that had only twelve sworn officers altogether, including the chief. If absolutely necessary, he could borrow an officer or two to help in an investigation. So far, beyond keeping the responding officer on the doorstep until the CSI team and morgue van arrived, Seth didn’t want help. He preferred to talk to neighbors and then the husband himself.

He put off speaking to Ms. Boyd’s boss until morning, but did call the day-care operator, who confirmed that Jacob’s mother had picked him up about five minutes before the six o’clock deadline. Until the ME gave him a more informed time of death than he had so far, Seth couldn’t rule out Ms. Boyd. She’d have had to go home to meet the victim, kill her and then pick up her little boy while appearing completely unperturbed. Hard to see her as that cold-blooded...but it was conceivable. It meant she was a hell of an actor, though. He really believed the seesawing emotions he’d seen were genuine.

That said, his instincts were sending up some flares. He suspected that Helen Boyd had secrets.

For now, he wanted to keep her cooperative, so after making his phone calls, he located a suitcase in the hall closet and filled it with the kid’s clothes and toys first, including a blue stuffed rabbit, before invading her bedroom. He tossed sneakers into the suitcase first, took a pair of jeans off a pile in a bottom drawer, a T-shirt and zip-up sweatshirt from the middle drawer, then made himself open the top drawer. It was astonishingly neat, by his standards. He took out an oversize Eeyore T-shirt he presumed she wore as a nightgown, a plain beige cotton bra and two pairs of panties, then closed the drawer before thinking, Wait. Socks. He tossed two pairs in the suitcase, then went to the bathroom.

The crime scene investigators might not be happy with him, but he couldn’t see what they’d learn from Ms. Boyd’s clean clothes or her or her son’s toothbrushes. He did peek in the medicine cabinet, which could often be revealing. In this case...nope. No prescription drugs. Only ibuprofen for her, cherry-flavored painkillers for Jacob, bath powder, floss and hair spray and gel. Stick deodorant, which he tossed into the suitcase along with the toothbrushes and toothpaste.

A minute later, he carried the suitcase and plastic potty seat out to her living room, where he paused to pick up the thin, tattered blanket before going out to her now-empty car. He was taking advantage of unlocked doors to set everything on the back seat next to the boy’s car seat when Ms. Boyd came hurrying out of the neighbor’s house carrying her son.

She told him she’d go to the Lookout Inn, a pricey place to stay, but without driving a distance she didn’t have a lot of choice. The bed-and-breakfast inns in town probably weren’t any cheaper, and wouldn’t afford as much privacy.

“All right,” he said. “One more thing. Would you allow me to look in the trunk of your car without a warrant?”

She recoiled. “You think I—Of course you can look.” Cheeks flushed, she handed over her car keys, then stayed where she was.

The trunk was as tidy as the floorboards of her car and the house. He did lift the cover to be sure no bloody pipe lurked beneath with the spare tire and jack. Nope.

After slamming the trunk lid, he gave her back the keys. “I may check on you later.”

She looked less than happy at the idea, but dipped her head in apparent resignation and leaned into the car to fasten her drowsy son into his seat. A minute later, she drove off.

Left standing on the sidewalk, Seth watched the car proceed cautiously down the street until it turned out of sight. He swore under his breath and rolled his shoulders.

She left him unsettled. And he didn’t think it was just the uncomfortable fact that she was an attractive woman.

After some thought, he decided part of the problem was that her responses had veered from the norm. Which led him back to where he’d started: Helen Boyd wasn’t telling him all she was thinking, by a long shot. But what was she hiding?

* * *

HELEN JUMPED SIX inches at the soft knock on the door of the hotel room even though she’d expected it. She had horribly mixed feelings about seeing Detective Renner again tonight. She wanted to know what he’d learned, of course. How could she make decisions otherwise? But he made her nervous; he watched her with those penetrating blue eyes until she felt as if he was reading her mind.

He also wasn’t the only one who could find her here. She approached the door cautiously.

“Who is it?”

The detective’s voice both reassured her and didn’t. Like she had a choice about whether to let him in.

He dominated the room from the moment he stepped into it. She couldn’t quite figure it out, since she had the feeling he was trying to be unassuming. Some of it was size; he certainly topped six feet, which made him a whole lot taller than she was. Broader, too, with impressive shoulders and a rangy, athletic build.

As she backed away, she decided unhappily that the quality was innate. The strength of his control and purpose, his determination, were impossible to miss. She wondered if his police chief or whoever was his direct boss ever dared to give him an order.

Of course, he started by assessing her with those sharp eyes before sweeping the room in search of...who knew? Enemies crouching behind the bed or peering from the closet? At last, his gaze settled on Jacob, sound asleep on one side of the queen-size bed. He looked so small in the big bed, so defenseless.

In a low voice, the detective asked, “Will we wake him if we talk?”

Helen shook her head, knowing her voice softened because of his concern. “An earthquake wouldn’t wake him once he’s really conked out. He’s a very early riser, though.”

His laugh was quiet and a little gravelly. It sent a shiver of reaction over her skin. “I won’t keep you long.” He still eyed Jacob as she led him to the pair of small upholstered club chairs by the window. “He’s past needing a crib?”

“Oh, yes. He was only fifteen months old the first time he climbed out of his crib.” She grimaced at the memory. “He fell, of course, screamed bloody murder—” She pressed her hands to her cheeks, feeling the heat. “That was a poor choice of words.”

Another rumble of a laugh settled her nervousness a bit.

“Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt, but we transitioned to a mattress on the floor pretty quick. Which turned me into the world’s lightest sleeper. Every night, I imagine him wandering around the house while I sleep, completely unaware.” Why was she babbling? “I may not get a good night’s sleep again until he leaves home for college.”

His smile was a little crooked. “According to my mother, that’s no guarantee.”

Helen gave a choked laugh. “Thank you for that thought.” She looked down at the table, clasped her hands together on her lap and struggled for calm before she lifted her chin again. “Have you found out anything?”

“Nothing to explain her death yet, I’m sorry to say. I was able to talk to her husband. You were right. The car at the curb was hers.”

“What about children?” That possibility bothered her terribly.

“Two stepkids,” he said. “Thirteen and fifteen. Her husband is ten years older than Ms. Sloan. The kids weren’t home, so I can’t say how they’ll take her death.”

With a huge lump in her throat, Helen only managed a nod.

“None of the neighbors saw anything helpful, unfortunately. Most weren’t home until five thirty or later. Your Iris naps late every afternoon.”

She closed her eyes momentarily. “I knew that.”

He was silent until she looked at him again, when he said, “So now I have a problem.” All traces of humor or sympathy had vanished from his face. The shadow of his evening stubble only made him appear more threatening. “I have to understand the connection between you and Ms. Sloan. It wasn’t chance she was killed in your kitchen.”

“I don’t know!” Helen cried. “I don’t have a relationship with the woman.”

“After seeing the two of you, I might have guessed you were sisters,” he said slowly.

“That’s ridiculous,” she protested, stiffening when she realized that hadn’t come out as forcefully as she’d hoped. “Even in a town this size, there must be a lot of women with dark hair and brown eyes. And...and about the same height.”

“Close enough in age to be twins.” He sounded both thoughtful and inexorable. “And it’s more than coloring. You have similar bone structure, noses. Straight on, I wouldn’t mistake you for her, but at a quick glance...” Renner shrugged.

Light-headed, Helen could feel the speed of her pulse in her throat. Dear Lord, she should have run. Before this man got too curious about her.

“I don’t understand.” Her voice came out little more than a croak, but that was surely natural, given what he’d just suggested. “I’m a single mother. New in town. I haven’t been on a date since my divorce. The only man at work who ever asked me out just got engaged to someone else. I do my job, and the rest of the time Jacob is my whole life. How could I have an enemy?”

“Ex-boyfriend. Ex-husband.” Seemingly relaxed, he never looked away.

She could tell him. She could say, I think my ex-husband murdered Andrea, thinking she was me. But then what? Richard was sure to have an indisputable alibi—he’d have been in a meeting with someone like the Seattle city mayor or a congressman. Anyway, admitting to that much would mean revealing her real name—and Detective Renner would soon find a warrant for her arrest. If she’d killed a man in Seattle, why not a woman here in Lookout? Richard was smart enough not to have left so much as a fingerprint behind, she thought bitterly.

Fingerprints. Oh, dear God, if this detective submitted hers, a match would pop up immediately.

Panic pushed her to her feet. She grabbed the chair back for support. Voice shaking, she said, “I don’t appreciate you scaring me this way. Maybe Andrea has been stealing from renters in every house she has keys to. She could have a partner that...that she betrayed somehow. Or a lover. What if they met in other people’s homes during the day? Do you know anything about this woman?” She put everything she had into this scathing speech. “Or did you decide right away that I must be some kind of...I don’t know, ex-CIA agent on the run, or a femme fatale with cast-off lovers hunting for me?”

Standing stiffly, she defied the detective’s continued contemplation.

Seemingly unmoved by her defiance, he said, “I really hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking. And of course my first assumption is that Ms. Sloan was the intended victim, not you. My hope was to get you thinking, in case there’s something you’re not telling me.”

She pretended that wasn’t a question. “This has been an upsetting day. I’d like you to go now.”

His eyebrows flickered, but he bent his head in acknowledgment and rose to his feet as casually as if he’d made the decision himself. As he strolled to the door, he said, “I assumed you were already asking yourself these same questions, Ms. Boyd. You’re smart enough to have been scared. It wasn’t my intention to make it worse.”

Helen didn’t hold back a snort.

Almost to the door, Renner turned, expression inquiring.

“Of course you meant to scare me! Congratulations, you did a great job.” At least that wasn’t a lie.

“You’re wrong,” he said quietly. “Lock the door behind me.” He wasn’t all the way out into the hall when he added in a much harder voice, “I’ll expect you not to leave the area. Do you understand?”

“Yes!” She felt herself vibrating with tension. No chance he wouldn’t be able to see that.

“As long as you’re not her killer, I’m on your side, you know.” He nodded and closed the door behind him.

Helen leaped forward and, with shaking hands, turned the dead bolt and hooked on the probably useless chain. Then she stood still and strained to hear any sound from the hall, with no idea whether he still stood there or was walking away.

In listening to that silence, she had a horrifying thought. If Richard had killed Andrea, where was he now? Had he been somewhere he could watch when she arrived home and the police responded? If he had, he’d know where she was—and he’d have seen Jacob. And that was assuming the private investigator who’d trailed her in Southern California hadn’t seen Jacob.

A dry sob escaped her. Who was she kidding? To know she had a child, Richard had only had to step inside her house. The high chair at the table alone would tell him.

Most of her desperation to escape him had been to ensure he never knew she was pregnant. There was no possibility that he was capable of being any kind of parent. He was the kind of man who lashed out without warning, both verbally and physically. He could smile, wish their dinner guests good-night, close the door and knock her to the floor because she’d done or said something earlier that had displeased him. Even with his housekeeper and a nanny as a buffer, an active boy would try his nonexistent patience. He’d search for her qualities in Jacob and determine to eradicate them, along with Jacob’s every memory of her.

This kind of terror was like being shaken by a vicious earthquake. Even though she’d been sure he had found them once before, she’d let herself get complacent since she moved to Lookout. She liked her job, and Jacob was a happy boy. Their little house had felt safe.

They would never be safe. She couldn’t forget again. He wouldn’t give up; she knew that. Monsters didn’t. The best she could do was stay a step ahead. Which meant leaving, as soon as she could figure out how.

Oh, dear God. What if Richard, too, was staying at the Lookout Inn.

With a muffled cry, she darted across the room to test the lock on the slider that led out onto a balcony.

* * *

SETH LAY AWAKE for long stretches that night. Every time he dozed off, he’d find himself starting awake, adrenaline firing through his body like an electrical shock.

Gritting his teeth and punching his pillow into a new shape, he had to convince himself repeatedly that there wasn’t anything else he could have done before morning.

Except, maybe, sleep in the hall outside Helen Boyd’s room at the inn to make sure she didn’t disappear—and that a killer didn’t get to her and that cute kid of hers.

He groaned and rested his forearm over his eyes. Damn it, the woman was right; his initial focus should be on the actual victim’s life, her character, her husband, friends and acquaintances. And it was—he’d talked to her husband for the first time this evening, but he’d go back as many times as he had to. Tomorrow, he’d talk to her boss and coworkers, get the names of friends. Find out if there was even a whisper suggesting she had a lover or might be up to something illicit.

But he’d always paid attention to his gut, and while Helen was trying hard to play the outraged innocent, she wasn’t a good liar. And she was lying; he had no doubt about that. All he had to do was look at the turmoil in her eyes that should be transparent instead of clouded with a darkness he didn’t think was entirely caused by her discovery today of a dead body in her house.

He couldn’t see her as a killer, but he had to be damn sure he was thinking like a cop, not a man drawn to a woman. He couldn’t afford to let himself have even a momentary thought about her as an attractive woman.

Damn. Seth sat up in bed and swung his feet to the floor. He remained there for a minute, head hanging. If he fell asleep with that picture in his head, he risked having an erotic dream involving a woman he would almost certainly interview again in a murder investigation. A woman who’d looked like she hated him by the time she insisted he leave her hotel room.

Not happening.

Even though he wasn’t hungry, he scrambled eggs and ate breakfast to fill the last dark hour before dawn. Then he showered and drove to Hood River to attend the autopsy.

The medical examiner didn’t come up with any surprises. Andrea Sloan was in good health generally. She had been killed by a blow to the head. The ME thought the weapon used was a short length of pipe, considerably fatter than the tire iron in the trunk of Ms. Boyd’s car. The victim had also taken a blow to her side that had broken ribs, probably postmortem. A kick, the ME suggested.

Seth would walk through the house again today now that he had a warrant, but felt sure he wouldn’t find the weapon. The garage was his best possibility, but he’d looked in the window and guessed Ms. Boyd, at least, went in there only to retrieve the lawn mower and return it when she was finished cutting the grass.

He was at the real estate office when it opened, where he started with the victim’s coworkers, all horrified by the news of Andrea’s death. He was assured that she was likable, charming, energetic, with the best sales record in the office. He also learned that she didn’t work on the property management side of the business.

The owner of the office, a woman in her fifties, explained that Andrea had sold a couple of properties for a man named Dean Ziegler, as well as a house to him, and as a favor had agreed to manage his rentals. At Seth’s request, Tina Daley dug in the records, reporting that Ziegler owned an apartment house with ten units and three rental homes.

The only key to any of those units missing was the one Seth had collected as evidence.

Andrea’s assistant, a young woman in her twenties named Brooke Perry, insisted she’d have known if Andrea had received a phone call about a problem at one of the rental homes.

“The only reason I can imagine she’d have been there was if the renter had asked to see her.” Her forehead creased. “Or if Mr. Ziegler wanted to meet her, or insisted she inspect the house, I suppose. But I really think she’d have said if he’d called.” She hesitated. “I was surprised when she left at five thirty. That was early for her.”

“Did she say anything about where she was going?”

Brooke bit her lip. “She said something like, ‘I don’t have any appointments, and anything else can wait for tomorrow.’”

A tomorrow that would never come for her.

Seth asked for Ziegler’s number and address. The man was evidently retired as a vice president with a local bank. Seth called, found he was home and drove to a spectacular Tuscan-style mansion on a bluff above the river. Turning, he saw Mount Hood seemingly hovering almost near enough to touch, too. Hell of a view all around.

Ziegler turned out to be a slim, silver-haired man who was well-preserved for the seventy-three years old the DMV records said he was.

“I’m shocked,” he repeated several times. “Why would anyone want to hurt Andrea? She’s good at her job because people like her.”

Once they were seated in an enormous living room with gleaming wood floors and a wall of windows looking out at the river, he spread his hands and said, “Tell me how I can help you.”

Seth couldn’t decide how genuine that was, but explained that, at this point, he was trying to get to know the victim, in a manner of speaking. “Hobbies, friends, any problems in her life, of course.”

“Problems? I really don’t think she had any. Well, maybe two.” Ziegler smiled wryly. “Both teenagers.”

“The stepkids.”

“Defiant fifteen-year-old boy, sulky thirteen-year-old girl.” He shrugged. “My sense is that she actually had an okay relationship with them. She’d laugh telling me about them. They’re just at difficult ages.”

Fifteen-year-old boys had been known to kill before...but to follow a stepmother to a house where she wasn’t supposed to be, then take her down with a single, powerful blow? Seth didn’t believe it.

“I’ve met her husband a few times,” Ziegler continued. “Nice guy. Did you know he’s in banking, too? Manages a branch here in town.”

Seth did know that. It had crossed his mind that a real estate agent and a banker could be up to something questionable together, but again...why was Andrea at the rental? In fact, trespassing in it?

“Andrea did have a certain reserve,” Ziegler commented. “I sometimes thought she had to work at being as outgoing as she appeared to her clients.” He frowned. “I do believe her warmth was genuine, and she and Russ had a connection those of us who’ve been divorced three times can only envy.”

Seth left a card and asked the guy to call if he thought of anything that might be helpful in uncovering the reason she’d been targeted.

If she was, he thought again, as he drove down the winding, paved lane from the house.

Next on Seth’s agenda was to stop at the craft brewery where Andrea Sloan’s husband, Russell, had supposedly met two friends right after the bank closed at five o’clock. According to him, he’d left his car in the bank parking lot and walked to the brewery. Andrea had let him know not to expect her before six thirty or seven.

When Seth asked if she had said why she’d be late, he’d answered dully, “She didn’t work conventional hours. Weekends, evenings...” He shrugged. “When somebody looking to buy is free, she made herself available. We didn’t eat dinner most nights until seven thirty or eight.”

There wasn’t any chance Ziegler had intended to sell Helen’s rental, was there? Seth asked himself belatedly. That nobody had told her yet?

Sitting outside the brewery, situated in a handsome old brick building in the oldest part of town, Seth called the man and asked.

“No, as long as I can keep a tenant in it, a little house like that makes more money for me than I’d get from selling it.”

“She hadn’t recommended you sell?”

“She never said a word about it, and I didn’t, either.”

Seth went into the brewery and asked to speak to the manager. A man with a billiard-ball bare and shiny head came out. Prematurely balding, Seth guessed, since the guy didn’t appear much older than he was.

“Sure, I know Russ Sloan,” he said readily. “He’s one of a group of other professionals and downtown merchants who gather here often. He was in yesterday afternoon, in fact.”

At Seth’s request, he reran security footage that showed Sloanwalking in with a second man at 5:11, both laughing, and leaving just before 6:30. Unless he’d hired a killer, that let him off the hook. Especially since finding a hit man wasn’t as easy as many people thought.

Seth thanked him and went back out to his car.

It would take a big slice of his day, but he wanted to talk to Ms. Boyd’s boss in person. He could grab some lunch on the way.