Chapter 8
“You can have the dog,” Janelle McGowan told Nikki as they stood at the edge of the fence surrounding Billy Huber’s house and yard. It was afternoon and hot, mosquitos and flies buzzing over early-blooming weeds and wildflowers. Nearby, on the sparse gravel lane, a huge RV was idling.
“You’re serious?”
“Yeah. Just pay the damned vet bill.” Janelle, a large woman in a tank top and shorts, surveyed the property, staring out at the piles of junk. “Either you take him or I put him in a shelter or whatever. I said as much to the vet—Dr. Whatever.”
“Vasquez.”
“Sounds right.” Frowning, sweat running down her temples, Janelle added, “And that goes for anything else you want.” She gestured to the yard. “Dear Lord Jesus, how am I supposed to get rid of all the junk so I can sell the place?”
It was a rhetorical question, Nikki knew, and one for which she had no answer.
“I suppose I could light a match to the house and call it good. Maybe the old coot had fire insurance on the place.”
The old coot being Billy Huber.
Janelle shook her head, sunlight catching in the strands of blond visible in her short, brown hair. “Just kidding, but, holy shit, what a mess.” Turning toward the idling motor home, she yelled, “Al!”
When there was no response, she muttered something under her breath, then shouted more loudly. “Al!” A beat, then, “Albert, come out here!” She stomped her sandaled foot in frustration and kicked up a puff of dust.
A big man came lumbering down the two steps of the motor home. “Hold your horses,” he drawled as he crammed a Stetson onto his balding head. A plaid, western-cut shirt was stretched over his belly, pearly snaps barely holding the fabric together. “What’s the matter?”
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter! Do you see this?” She swept a meaty arm expansively to indicate all of the Huber property. “Do you? It’s a mess, that’s what it is! And now I’ve got to do something about it? Oh, good Lord! By the way, this is—Mickey Gillette. She’s with the press.”
“Nikki. Nicole,” Nikki corrected as the big man tipped his hat.
“Okay. Nikki. But, Al, what the hell am I gonna do with all this junk?”
“You don’t gotta do anything, not today,” he said and slung a long arm around her shoulders.
“Except talk to the cops. Goddamn, if someone else hadn’t done it, I swear, I woulda killed Billy myself, if I’d seen how bad this all was.”
Not exactly the grieving daughter.
As if she had read Nikki’s mind, Janelle clarified, “Look, Billy … he wasn’t my dad, okay?
I mean he was. Biologically. But—” She made a face.
“Between you and me, he wasn’t much of a father.
Ever. I don’t think Mom ever really loved him.
I should’ve done a DNA test to find out if there was any blood connection because I sure didn’t have anything in common with him, but, hey, it’s too late now, and I get to go down to the morgue and ID his body, make it official, you know.
As if I didn’t have anything better to do. ”
“Do you know anyone who would want to see your father dead?”
Janelle looked at her as if she were an idiot. “Didn’t you hear a word I said? He was a loser. A snake in the grass—knee high in this case,” she said as she gazed at the weed-choked pasture. “He was someone who would steal from a blind guy. So, yeah, I think anyone he met might want to kill him.”
“Anyone in particular?”
She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “He didn’t get along with people in general. Not his family. Not his bosses, when he had them, not his neighbors, not anyone.”
“What about friends?”
“Did he have any?” Her face was blank. “None that I know of.” She glanced at her watch. “Look, I’ve got to get on the road. As I said, I’ve got a dead body to identify, and then there’s a lawyer in Savannah and …” Her shoulders slumped, and she sighed loudly. “I don’t need this.”
“We’ll get through it,” Al said, and again squeezed her shoulders. “One day at a time, and well, you got the property.”
Janelle looked over her father’s place again. “It’s worth something, I guess,” she said dubiously. “Fine, fine. Let’s get on with it. And you”—she added, shrugging off his comforting arm and pointing at Nikki—“deal with the damned dog.”
“I will,” Nikki promised and wished she’d learned more than the obvious facts that Janelle Huber McGowan hated her father and seemed to be mad at the world.
Like the man who’d sired her.
Maybe the apple doesn’t fall so far from the tree after all.
“So here’s what we know about that rock from the William Huber crime scene,” Clint Darden, one of the lab techs, said, his deep voice clear through the phone connection at the station.
Reed had been about to leave the office when he’d gotten the call and now was seated at his desk again, pen in hand.
From his chair, he kicked the door to his office closed, blocking out the sounds of the department, the incessant ringing of phones and chunk of the fax machine over the buzz of conversations.
Darden continued, “The mark on the back of the polished stone is the number nine. In Hebrew. When you hold the stone upright to read that number, then rotate it side to side, it reveals the number nine in Arabic, or the numbers we use today.”
“If we assume that the numbers are the same.”
“Yes.”
“And we don’t flip the stone end over end?” Reed said, thinking aloud.
“Again, yes,” Darden agreed, and Reed considered it, wasn’t going to rule out that the Arabic side wasn’t a six. Yet.
“But that’s not the most interesting thing about the rock,” Darden told him.
“What is?”
“We can tell that it’s been tumbled or polished, smoothed and made to shine, and the numbers were etched into it deep enough to be visible. But—here’s the interesting part—that visibility was enhanced by blood. Stained, I guess you’d say.”
“By blood,” Reed repeated, feeling his pulse tick a little faster as he leaned closer to the desk phone. “Intentionally?”
“Looks like it. Because the blood is only in the crevices that are etched into the rock, almost as if it was painted into the etchings.”
“Why?” Reed asked, even though he knew there was no definitive answer yet.
“Possibly to make the numbers more distinct, so that they appear more clearly in the stone?”
So as not to go unnoticed. The killer, or whoever laid the rock beneath Huber’s body, wanted someone to find it with its hidden message. Or so it seemed. “Ink or paint or any other dark liquid could have stained the rock.”
“Probably.”
Reed tossed the idea of the blood over in his mind. If the killer left the stone purposefully, which seemed all the more likely, he was intent on making his message known. “What kind of blood?” he asked, wondering if somehow Billy Huber’s blood had been smeared onto the rock’s slick surface.
“Still working on it.”
“Let me know the minute you get anything on it—kind, type, DNA, whatever.”
“You got it.”
He hung up and tossed the information over in his mind.
The number nine. In Hebrew and Arabic. On a polished stone.
Left under Billy Huber’s body. He didn’t like it.
Yeah, it was a mystery that intrigued him, but if the killer had left his mark and was intentionally trying to convey some kind of cryptic message, then there was more to Billy Huber’s death than simple murder.
He almost laughed at himself as he reached for his suit jacket. Was murder ever uncomplicated? The death of one human being by another. Even those killings that were acts of passion weren’t simple.
Patting his pants pockets to make certain he had his wallet and keys, he slid on his jacket.
Outside, the day was starting to cool. A spring breeze ruffled his hair as he unlocked the car remotely and then spied his wife standing next to her Outback. She was holding Chloe, who lit up when she saw her father. “Daddy! Daddy!” she called.
Picking up his pace, he noticed that the lift gate to the Subaru’s cargo area was open. Inside, lying on a dog bed in Mikado’s kennel, was Billy Huber’s dog.
“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head as the shepherd, chin on his paws, looked up at him with forlorn eyes. “We’re not taking this dog home.”
“Daddy!” Chloe stretched her chubby arms in his direction.
“Nicole,” he said, eyes trained on his wife as she transferred their child to him and the little girl giggled as he broke eye contact and swung his daughter around.
“Hey, there, princess,” he whispered against her neck, and she laughed, her curly hair bouncing, her eyes bright as she wrinkled her nose.
“Arlo!” Chloe proclaimed, pointing at the cage in the back of Nikki’s car. “Mikado’s friend.”
“Arlo,” he repeated, arching an eyebrow at his wife, who in turn stubbornly lifted her chin.
“Uh-huh!” Chloe nodded sagely as he stopped the twirling.
“Well, Mommy and Daddy need to talk about this.”
Nikki nodded. “We do. At home.”
“Fair enough,” he said, deciding to argue later. They did not need another dog. But he bit his tongue for the time being as he loaded Chloe into her car seat.
After he’d buckled in his daughter securely, he straightened and found Nikki standing beside him. She handed him a plastic bag with what looked like a dozen or so silver pellets.
“Bird shot,” she explained. “Taken from the dog.”
He slid a glance at the animal. Vicious and snarling last night. Demure and quiet now. Possibly still sedated?
“Dr. Vasquez had actually neutered him a couple of years ago. Also, I met with Huber’s daughter, Janelle, who, by the way, told me to keep him. She has no use for him and had planned to give him to a rescue.”
“Which wouldn’t be that bad of an idea.”
She ignored him. “Will the pellets help in the investigation?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” he admitted, “but they won’t hurt.”
“Do you think the killer shot the dog?”
Pierce lifted a shoulder.
“Mommy!” Chloe said through the open door of Nikki’s Outback.
Nikki nodded. “Coming.” To Pierce, she said, “We can talk about this at home.” She slammed the hatch to the cargo compartment closed, while Pierce said to his daughter, “See you at home,” before closing the open door.
Nikki paused to look over the roof of her car. “Arlo is really a sweet dog, and he’s going to be a great pet, once he trusts us.”
“And he’s still under the effects of anesthesia?
” Pierce asked, peering at the shepherd and noticing that the dog’s back and hips had been shaved to expose the stitched wounds where the bird shot had been removed.
The dog eyed him, and he said, “Looks like you’ve got a new home,” as Nikki slammed the cargo door shut.
Nikki smiled up at him from behind the wheel.
Resigned to another pet to add to their ever-growing menagerie, Reed stepped back onto the curb and watched his wife wheel out of the lot.
Pick your battles, he reminded himself, as he climbed into his Jeep and started the engine in order to roll down the windows and turn on the AC.
He figured this particular fight was lost before it even got started.
Did he really care about another animal joining the family?
Not really. As long as the dog—Arlo, he reminded himself—was healthy and not dangerous.
But as he rammed the gearshift into drive, he remembered the snarling beast of the night before with his suspicious eyes and flashing teeth. That wouldn’t do. Nor would the fact that Nikki was always challenging him, sometimes to the point of going behind his back.