Just then Brice pulled into a subdivision of small row houses, pulling up to the curb just down from a brown stucco home with a red tile roof and a FOR SALE sign in the front yard.
Turning to me, Brice said, “How do you feel about confronting Michelle and getting some clear answers?”
“You still have your Glock?”
Brice nodded.
“Then I feel pretty good. Let’s do this!” As we got out of the car and began to approach the house, I said, “What’s the plan?”
Brice reached behind him and pulled out his gun. Checking the clip, he tucked it into his waistband and covered it with his jacket. “We go to the door and knock, and hope she opens up and talks to us.”
I made a face. “That doesn’t sound like a great plan.”
“Do you have something better?”
I looked to the house. “Not really.”
“Okay, then,” Brice said, continuing toward the house.
I followed him up to the sidewalk and over to the driveway. “Stay behind me,” he said softly, and I knew he meant that if there was trouble, he’d be on point.
We went to the door and Brice knocked. No one answered, but we could hear the TV playing inside. “Think she’s home?” he asked me.
I used my radar, which at times can be better than X-ray vision. “Hmm,” I said, a bit confused. “I’m sensing her energy, but it’s faint. Maybe she’s in the backyard.”
Brice motioned with his head to follow him, and I did around the side of the house to the privacy fence. He tried the gate and I was relieved to find it open. “Hello?” he called, his hand sliding under his jacket, and I knew he’d have a loose grip on his gun until he could assess the situation. “Michelle Fusco?”
No one replied, and yet, I still felt that faint sensation that Michelle was close by.
As we rounded the yard and looked around, I saw that the back door was open. A fluffy white cat sat perched on a lawn chair, licking its paws. I stopped in my tracks and grabbed Brice’s arm. “What?” he whispered.
“The cat!” I whispered back. “On its paws. That’s blood!”
Brice stiffened, and reached back to tuck me behind him before withdrawing his gun and handing me the keys to the rental. “If anything other than that cat moves, you run as fast as you can back to the car, you hear?”
“Got it,” I told him.
We moved forward slowly, half-crouched and looking all around. Brice stopped at the open door and turned his head slightly. “You stay here.”
I nodded, and moved aside to huddle against the stucco. “Please be careful,” I whispered.
Brice crept forward through the door and disappeared. A moment later I heard, “FBI! Get your hands in the air!”
And then I heard nothing else. The abrupt silence was so eerie that after several long seconds I couldn’t take it and finally crept to the door. Very slowly I poked my head through, wondering if it was a good idea or a very bad one to call out to Brice. Finally I decided to risk it. “Brice?”
No one replied. I gulped. Chancing another few steps, I moved in through the back door and found myself in the kitchen, which was a disaster. The place had obviously been tossed, and most of the contents in the cabinets had been pulled out and strewn about, but there was no sign of Brice or Michelle. I grabbed a frying pan off the floor and held it in front of me protectively. Inching forward through the kitchen into the living room, I searched the place with my eyes. It closely resembled the disorder of the kitchen, except that between the couch and the overturned ottoman I saw a prone figure lying facedown. The carpet under the figure was soaked in blood.
“Oh, no,” I mouthed. The spiky black hair had to belong to Michelle. “Brice?” I whispered again, shaking in fear. Why wasn’t he answering?
Taking a deep breath and summoning my courage, I moved toward the hallway that had to lead to the bedrooms. As I came up to it, I stopped in my tracks. At the end of the corridor were two figures, locked in a kiss.
“Oh, thank God!”
Brice and Candice unlocked their lips long enough to look back at me. “Hey, Sundance,” Candice said. She looked so tired and frail. I was glad Brice was holding her up.
“How’s it going?” I asked, not especially wanting to interrupt the romantic reunion, but . . . um . . . there was a dead body on the floor.
“Not so great,” she said. “I see you decided that instead of flying back home, you’d ask Brice to come here.”
“Seemed like a better plan.”
“Ah. I should’ve figured you wouldn’t listen to reason.”
I shuffled my feet and motioned with my shoulder behind me. “Sooooo, about the dead woman . . . ?”
“She was dead when I got here,” Candice said.
My lie detector backed her up. I pointed to the mess all around the home. “Somebody seemed a little angry after they did her in, huh?”
“Maybe not so much angry as frustrated,” Candice said. She was still leaning heavily against Brice and I badly wanted him to take her to see a doctor.
“Should we go?” I asked him, using my sleeve to wipe my prints off the handle of the frying pan and place it back on the floor.
“No,” Candice answered before her husband could. “Whatever the person who killed Michelle was looking for, I don’t think they found it. She had something worth killing for, something that would’ve put Saline in danger, and I have to find it.”
My brain flooded with questions, and I wanted to sit Candice down and hear the whole story, but I knew that now was not the time, and definitely not the place. “Candice,” I said gently. “Honey, if someone heard the gunshot or even the sound of this place being tossed, they could’ve called the police. We’re sitting ducks here the longer we stay.”
“Abby’s right,” Brice said, and he hugged her closer and began to try to walk with her down the hallway.
Candice wasn’t having any of it. “If you two want to go, then go,” she said, digging in her heels and refusing to be pulled along. “But I’ve come way too far and been through way too much to give up looking now.”
Brice and I exchanged a look, and I sighed. “How do you know Michelle’s killer hasn’t already found it?”
Candice motioned with her chin to the doorway right next to her. “Come here and take a look,” she said. I moved down the hallway and peered into the central bathroom. Every drawer had been pulled out and turned over. The bathroom floor was littered with toiletries and the like. Even the medicine cabinet had been swept onto the floor. The only neat corner was the kitty litter box by the toilet. Once I’d taken in the room, Candice said, “When you toss a place looking for something, you start with the big stuff, under furniture, in a closet, up on shelves. When you still can’t find it, you’ll toss the bedroom, living room, and eventually the entire kitchen. When you still can’t find it, you’ll get frustrated and impatient and tear up carpeting, pull pictures from the walls, and toss the attic or basement. Whoever tossed this place ended his search by yanking open the medicine cabinet and tossing pill bottles onto the floor. See how they landed on top of the towels and other toiletries? There’s no way Michelle would’ve hidden what he was after in the medicine cabinet. He did that out of anger right before he left.”
“What was she hiding?” Brice asked her.
Candice sighed. “Something Saline wanted to keep well hidden.” And then she started from the beginning and told us all of it. Much of it we’d already guessed at, but it was good to hear her tell it.
Taking up Brice’s hand, she said, “A few days after we got married, my ex-husband called me on the room phone at the Bellagio. At first I just hung up on him, but he kept calling and begged me to hear him out. He threatened to introduce himself to you if I didn’t agree to meet with him, so I did.
“Anyway, Lenny said that he’d been hired by someone to investigate
a woman named Saline Hamon, whose real name was Olive Wintergarden. I knew right away that Lenny was head over heels for her the second he mentioned her name. He told me that Saline was in trouble. Big trouble. She’d recorded something she shouldn’t have on her phone, and she’d done something she shouldn’t have, and she’d likely be dead before the end of the month if someone didn’t intervene.
“Lenny also admitted that he was having an affair with Saline. He was ready to leave Michelle, but he wanted to make sure Saline was safe before he did anything that might alert his wife to the affair. I’ll admit I nearly got up and walked out of the restaurant right then and there. I mean, what the hell did I care if Lenny wanted to screw up yet another marriage? But then he mentioned Sal Kato, and that was a game changer for me. I’ve known Sal since I was nineteen. He’d always been good to me, and I owed him one. Big-time. So, when Lenny showed me proof that Saline was actually Sal’s biological daughter, I knew I couldn’t just walk away.
“I agreed to meet with Saline, and then with Kato, who by now knew that Saline was his daughter. He also knew what she had done and to whom, and he wanted to protect her by sending her away, but she refused. Now that she’d found out who her father was, there was no way she was leaving. Kato offered a solution that might work on a couple of levels. His longtime friend, a retired plastic surgeon, was in a financial jam, and he’d declined all offers to let Sal help him, so Kato instead offered to hire him to alter Saline’s appearance enough so that she could take on a new identity. Saline wore my exact size, even down to my shoes, and, as I already had a fake ID here in Vegas, it seemed like an easy fix. Kato supplied me with some cash for both my trouble and to set Saline up with her new identity. He told me none of it could be traced back to him, so I got to work arranging the apartment and setting Saline up with a company credit card for an LLC that I created online. Then, when I was back in Austin, I hunted for a discreet place to have the procedure done.
“What I didn’t know then was that during all the time I was in Vegas working to help Kato hide Saline, Michelle had become suspicious of Lenny, and she’d started her own surveillance on him. She showed up at our final meeting together and accused us of being back together. It was laughable and I stupidly shrugged it off. What I also didn’t know at the time was that Michelle worked for Kato, who’d taken her under his wing much like he’d done with me a dozen years ago.
“Michelle learned about our plans, and I believe she saw Saline as a credible threat to her close relationship with Kato. Once she got it into her head that Lenny and I were having an affair, well, she knew she could exact her revenge on all of us. She waited and watched for an opportunity, and took out Lenny first. I didn’t even know he was dead until after Saline arrived in Austin and told me that they’d found him dead.
“For all her faults, Saline had been crazy about Lenny, and I don’t know that I could blame her because I’d once felt the same way, until I got smart and left his ass.”
“Did you know Michelle murdered him?” I asked.
Candice shook her head and stared sourly at the prone figure on the floor behind us. “I completely underestimated Michelle,” she told me. “And at the time I didn’t know of her connection to Kato, so I assumed Lenny had been murdered by any one of a number of enemies he’d made over the years. Anyway, I had other things to worry about, namely, meeting Robinowitz at the airport and getting him situated. I left Saline at the hotel and went to pick up the doc, and that’s when Michelle jumped me.” Subconsciously, Candice raised her hand and gingerly touched the back of her head. “She pistol-whipped the hell out of me, and I blacked out. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the back of my own car, covered in a blanket with my hands and feet bound, tape over my mouth, and the sounds of a gun going off. Immediately after that, Michelle got into the car wearing my clothes, a wig that was styled just like my hair, and drove us out of a parking garage. Muddlebrained as I was, I knew exactly what she’d done.
“She then dumped me half-naked off Highway Seventy-one. Out in the boonies. The last thing I remember before she laughed in my face and took off was her throwing me my phone. She knew the police would try to track me through the GPS, but she also knew it would be my only means of getting help. That’s when I called you, Abs, and left you that voice mail. I had to get you to get that file before the police found it.”
“But why?” I asked her. “What was in that file that was so important?”
“Evidence that I’d been trying to protect Saline,” Candice said. “Nobody knew that she was Kato’s daughter, and in the wrong hands, that file would definitely mark her as a target. Plus, I figured Sal would protect me and back me up when I came forward and explained the story. Little did I know that Michelle had been the one to escort Saline to Austin, so she knew exactly where to find her.
“Meanwhile, I know Michelle was also feeding Sal a story about having delivered Saline into my waiting hands before heading back to Vegas. I’ll bet she made sure to show him the video of me supposedly shooting his best friend in the face, and telling him she couldn’t reach his daughter to further make it seem like I’d suddenly gone psycho on him.”
I knew that was likely exactly correct, because when I met with Sal, he knew his best friend had been murdered by a woman who resembled Candice and he also seemed quite surprised to learn that Saline was in the hospital.
“As for me,” Candice continued, “by the time I stole some clothes and a couple of bucks from a house off the highway, and got back to the hotel, Michelle had already kidnapped Saline. I think that it took her a few days to torture the truth about what Saline was hiding, and where Michelle could get her hands on it. That’s why she came back to Vegas. To retrieve it and use it to her advantage. Michelle’s big flaw, however, was that whatever Saline was hiding, someone else knew about it, and wanted it back. They probably figured out the whole frame-up too, and knew who’d really killed Robinowitz. That’s when they came here and killed Michelle, only they must’ve done that before they could get it out of her where she’d hidden it.”
Candice paused and we all looked around again at the mess. I was just making up my mind that there was nothing here when my radar pinged. Sometimes, I make a great bloodhound. “Hang on,” I said, stepping carefully into the bathroom, careful to disturb as little as possible while I made my way over to the toilet. “You know the one place he didn’t look?”
“Where?” Candice asked.
I bent down and picked up one end of the litter box. Underneath was a file sealed in plastic. I smiled. “I had an aunt who used to hide cash under her litter box. She told me that no thief wants to put his face close to cat poo.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Candice said.
Using my sleeve again, I carefully picked up the file and brought it with me to the doorway. “Now can we go?”
Candice leaned forward and hugged me tightly. “Yes,” she said. “Now we can go.”
We left the house the same way we’d entered, and once out in the yard I searched for Michelle’s kitty, but other than a few bloody footprints, I couldn’t find him.
“What do we do about the cat?” I asked. Candice pointed to a water dish and a bowl on the side of the patio. “I coaxed him outside with food and water,” she said. “We’ll call a cat rescue after we alert the authorities. I know of a good one that’s dealt with cases like this before. They’ll have someone out here working to catch the kitty before the sun goes down.”
“How’re we going to alert the authorities without implicating ourselves?” I asked.
“Have you been in touch with Robert Brosseau yet?”
I smiled as Brice held the gate open for us. “We just came from his substation,” he told her. “We didn’t let on that we were headed here, though.”
“Good.” Candice moved ahead of me and Brice, stopping at the small rock garden just in front of the house to pick up a good-sized rock. After l
ooking around to see if anyone was watching, she pitched it through the front window, then walked quickly away.
Brice and I were a little stunned, but as soon as we got in the car, Candice said, “Okay, Abby, call Brosseau and tell him that you went over to interview Michelle, and when you arrived, you saw that her house may have been broken into. He’ll send a car, and they’ll find her.”
“Should we wait for them to come?” I asked.
“No. We have someplace else to be.”
Brice turned to her. “Where’s that?”
“The man that killed Michelle didn’t find this,” she said, holding up the file wrapped in plastic, “but I’m pretty sure he found the evidence that would clear me of Lenny and Robinowitz’s murder. I want to make a trade, but first we need to call your friends at the Vegas bureau.”
Brice’s brow furrowed. “Why do I think you’re getting ready to do something really stupid?”
“Because I am,” Candice said bluntly. “And because there’s no other way to clear me of murder and get us all back to our lives.”
I didn’t want to say anything, but I had a bad feeling about what Candice might have in mind.
* * *
Several hours later Candice was standing in front of me with her arms raised, angrily telling me how I could . . . um . . . shall we say, “pleasure myself.”
“You’re just mad because I talked the Feds into letting me go with you.”
The female tech finished inserting the tiny microphone on the underside of Candice’s bra and turned to me. I unbuttoned my shirt while she handed me a new one with a camera placed in one of the buttons. I draped that over my shoulders before raising my arms just like Candice had so the tech could affix the microphone.