“I know it’s meddling,” Lucinda said now, looking at Max shyly. “But that woman in the rental, the woman our housebreaker was spying on? You said last night, if you could get information on her…Well, I was afraid if I didn’t slip right over there when I saw her break this flowerpot, if I didn’t snatch up the pieces before she threw them away…I don’t even know if a flowerpot can hold fingerprints, but…Am I making any sense…?”
Max looked into the bag, didn’t touch the broken shards.
“When she dropped it on the drive…She looked in such a hurry…It shattered and she just left it there, got in her car and drove off. Can you take fingerprints from this? Will that help find out about her?”
Max was silent for so long that Lucinda began to get nervous. She looked at him uncertainly, and sipped the coffee he’d poured for her. “Those photographs of the children, Max. I worried about that all night, I find that really frightening.”
“As do we,” Max said. He watched Lucinda so intently that she grew increasingly uneasy. She knew she was gushing, and that wasn’t like her. Max put his arm around her as if, she thought, he meant to humor her, to tell her kindly that what she had done was very clever of her, and then send her away.
But instead, he had beeen interested in what she told him about Evina Woods.
“If we can lift some prints,” he said, “and if we can get anything from AFIS on them, if the woman turns out to have a record, we’ll have something to work with.”
Max rose to refill their coffee cups. “So far, on those three tenants, we have false names, false IDs, falsified car registration. That in itself might give us reason to bring them in for questioning, but it leaves a lot of holes.” He picked up the plastic bag. “We have a call in to Arkansas, to check on Evina Woods’s story. I’ll take this back to Dallas, see if he can lift clear prints. If not, we’ll send it along to the lab, where they have more sophisticated equipment.”
“I feel so sure,” Lucinda said, “that Evina was telling the truth.”
Max took her hand, helping her up. “You were bold to go down there and talk with her, Lucinda-I won’t say foolish.”
“She didn’t threaten me, Max, she seemed really scared. When she saw I wasn’t going to call the police, she calmed down. I know that could all have been an act, but…Call it a gut feeling. I think she’s telling the truth.”
She looked intently at him. “I’m not a soft touch, but once in a while, you have to take a chance on someone. This is one of the times…If I’m wrong, I expect I’ll pay for it. This gamble,” she said, “is one I choose to take.”
I N THE DIM garage, as Betty Wicken and Leroy Huffman sorted tools at the workbench, packing them into a canvas bag, Joe approached the blue Chevy van. Slipping up onto a stack of cardboard boxes piled between the van and the wall, he balanced with a forepaw against the van’s window, peering into the dim interior, his nostrils filled with the stink of automotive paint, from the amateurish blue paint job.
Pressing against the tinted glass, he saw not the pristine interior of Charlie Harper’s van, no neatly built-in cupboards, no polished worktable running down one side. Only bare metal bracing and raw composition walls. This ancient, neglected interior had never had any care; it was stripped and ragged, only an empty hulk.
Dropping down to the garage floor, he studied the lettering painted on the van’s side-the hasty, unprofessional logo, an amateurish copy of the more finely spaced CHARLIE’S FIX-IT, CLEAN-IT.
Somewhere, the Wickens had found another old Chevy van and had treated it to a home paint job on a par with what any active five-year-old kid could accomplish.
“Not Charlie’s van,” Kit whispered, narrowing her eyes and lashing her tail.
But Dulcie smiled with relief. “Charlie’s safe, and Mavity’s safe. But why would anyone copy Charlie’s van? What do they mean to do?” Her green eyes flashed. “Setting Charlie up,” she hissed. “But for what? For some burglary?” she said softly. “Or…could this be the missing vehicle that hauled away the dead man?” Her eyes widened. “Did you smell death in there?”
Joe slipped under the van, Dulcie and Kit beside him, and they reared up, sniffing among the axles and brakes. Trying, over the stink of grease and hydraulic and brake fluids, to detect the faintest scent of death; but there was nothing else, no foreign smell.
Dropping down again, they fled among the boxes as Leroy opened the side door of the van and tossed in two bags of tools, some cans of paint, and then ladders, drop cloths, everything one would need to renovate a house, or repair it.
“Are they horning in on Charlie’s customers?” Dulcie whispered. “Pretending to work for her?”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Joe said softly. “And there’s no cleaning equipment, just the repair stuff.” The tomcat frowned. “Doesn’t make sense, unless…Unless they’ve staked out Charlie’s wealthy regulars, meaning to rob them-that would set Charlie up, big-time.”
They looked at one another, feeling sick. Law enforcement families were prime marks for any scam to embarrass or compromise them, to put them on the wrong side of the law. The cats remembered too painfully when Captain Harper had been framed for a double murder.
“That won’t happen again,” Joe said.
But Kit shivered, pushing closer to Dulcie.
“Nothing has happened yet,” Dulcie said. “We won’t let that happen!”
25
H URRYING BY THE station, loaded down with shopping bags, hoping Max was free for lunch, Charlie found him gone. “He had to meet with the judge,” Mabel said. “He went straight there from the Patty Rose School, from talking with Dorothy Street.”
“Another rain check,” Charlie said, laughing. It was well past noon, and she was starved.
“That’s what you get when you marry a cop,” Mabel said good-naturedly. “Lucinda Greenlaw brought in some kind of evidence. They talked for a while, then he headed over to meet Dorothy. Leave your packages here if you want to get a bite.”
Charlie nodded. She didn’t like to leave packages in her SUV, with no locked trunk. Not this time of year, when bright store packages containing free Christmas booty were all too tempting.
Tucking her packages out of the way in Max’s office, she stood a moment wondering what kind of evidence Lucinda discovered. She was headed out of the station, meaning to stop for a quick bowl of soup, when she saw Dorothy Street and Ryan coming out of the courthouse. Ryan was in jeans, work boots, and a red sweatshirt, Dorothy elegant in a soft gray suit, sheer hose, and Italian flats-succeeding very well in her new, businesslike mode. They waved, and Charlie went to join them. Ryan looked mad enough to explode. Meeting them on the steps, Charlie didn’t ask what they’d been doing. This had to be about the permit for the children’s home. “Have you had lunch? I’m starved.”
“I ate with Clyde,” Ryan said. “Scotty called me in the middle of lunch. They’ve denied the permit again. If I die young, of a coronary, you can blame that bunch of bigots!” She glanced at her watch. “I need to get back, meet the landscaper,” and with a wave she headed across the parking lot to her big red Chevy pickup.
Dorothy looked after her, shaking her head with sympathy. Then, “I guess Max stood you up. I rode over with him to pick up some papers. Come on, I’m hungry, too. Want to go back to the inn, have lunch in my office, where we can talk?”