Through the windshield, I watched as a young woman climbed out of a pickup that had just pulled into the apartment’s parking lot. “Can’t tell,” I said, squinting and leaning forward, because surely that extra fourteen inches would make the difference. “If she’d turn . . . ah.” I sat back. “It’s Courtney.” Even from this distance I could see the tight ponytail and square forehead. Plus she was dressed in scrubs, which had been a clue right off the bat, but I hadn’t wanted to rely on that alone.
“Is that the other vehicle you saw?” Rafe gestured at the silver-colored truck.
“Could be,” I said. “But you know me and vehicles. All I remember is . . . hang on, isn’t that what’s-his-name? From the hardware store?”
“Luke,” Rafe said. “Luke Cagan. It certainly is.”
We watched as Luke shut the driver’s door of the truck and came around to the front, where Courtney was waiting. Hand in hand, they walked to the apartment’s front door and went inside.
Rafe looked at me and I looked at him.
“Huh,” he said.
I nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking.”
“What else are you thinking? Because I know the wheels up here are churning.” He tapped my forehead.
“I’m thinking that the vehicle I’d seen on the second of July could indeed have been Luke’s. But why would Courtney and Luke have been out there, pretty much in the middle of absolute nowhere?”
We turned to study Luke’s truck.
“No idea,” Rafe said. “How about you?”
I sighed. “None.”
“That means our next step is obvious.”
It certainly was.
* * *
At the library the next morning, I wandered into the break room right about the time everyone else was wandering into the building.
“How long have you been here?” Kelsey asked, deftly scooting in front of me and putting her hand on the coffeepot before my preoccupied brain could order myself to get ahead of her. “Because you have that look,” she said over her shoulder. “The one that means you got here hours ago, long before most people hit their alarms for the first time.”
She was right, but hearing her say it out loud like that made me sound like a ladder-climbing overachiever, which didn’t feel like a good match with my chosen lifestyle here in the laid-back Up North.
“I had stuff to do,” I murmured, watching her fill the coffeepot’s bin to the overflowing point. Kelsey had an amazing ability to maximize the bin’s contents without making a huge freaking wet coffee-grounds mess all over the counter.
Josh and Holly came in together, bickering about the best way to grill steaks. At this point the argument had a good-natured flavor, but that could vanish in a flash, so I skedaddled back up to my office to continue what I’d been doing for the last three hours: using the library’s way-faster-than-the-marina’s Internet access to learn what I could about the properties on that dead-end road in the middle of nowhere.
The obvious step that Rafe had referred to last night was to drive out to the road—which I’d now learned was technically named 158th Street, in spite of the fact that everybody called it the road to Brown’s—and poke around to see what we could learn.
However, Rafe had already committed to helping a friend for a couple of days. This help was to reshingle the friend’s hunting cabin in the Upper Peninsula. The timing was good, because Rafe had just finished the last big drywalling project, and the drywall mud would take time to completely cure.
All of this meant Rafe would be out of town and unavailable for investigative efforts, and he’d made me promise not to go out there on my own. At the time of the promise, I had not had any problem making it, but I’d woken in the middle of the night and heard rustlings from the front of the houseboat.
“Kate?” I’d called. The rustlings continued. I’d eased out from underneath Eddie and padded forward. Kate was tossing and turning in her sleep, her hands over her face, murmuring, “No, no, no.”
I stretched out a hand, but pulled back, not wanting to scare her. “I wish I could help you,” I whispered. “I know this summer isn’t what you thought it would be. You have no idea how sorry I am about that. But I love you. So very, very much.”
Kate’s tossing and turning went on. I continued to murmur words of love and comfort, and at some point she fell into a deeper, more peaceful sleep.
Though I went back to bed, sleep didn’t return, and as the sky brightened, I gave up and headed into the library after leaving what I hoped was a cheerful message for Kate on the whiteboard.
Now my research was done and I wasn’t sure I’d learned anything useful. Yes, thanks to the search capabilities of the county’s website, I had a list of the current property owners and the dates the properties had last been sold. And thanks to Google Earth’s imagery, I could see . . . not much. The satellite had flown over in summer and the only things visible were leaves, leaves, and more leaves. Tree cover that dense could conceal anything from small barns to decent-sized houses, especially if they’d been there a long time.
I sighed and tried to refocus my attention on my immediate surroundings and on the work I should be doing, but my thoughts stubbornly remained elsewhere. Kate needed me to find the killer and I wouldn’t fail her. Would. Not.
So at lunchtime I opened a blank spreadsheet and typed in the ranking numbers Rafe and I had assigned, hoping that a different view of the data would give me some ideas. But at the end of the exercise, I sighed. “This is so not useful.” I slouched in my chair and looked at the names and numbers. “Names,” I said. “Names and numbers and names and numbers and—”
A flash of inspiration struck. If I couldn’t figure out who killed Rex and Nicole, maybe I could figure out who hadn’t, which was almost as good. Little of my theoretical lunch hour had expired, so I grabbed my purse and headed up the hill.
The noon hour at Lakeview Medical Care Facility was a busy place. Visitors were ambling in and out, residents were being escorted to and from lunch, and employees were walking to and from the parking lot on their own lunch hour.
I hurried inside and stopped at the front desk. “Is Heather working today? I have a question for her, if that’s okay.” After a brief consultation with his computer, the receptionist said, “She’s here, but she might be on lunch.”
After thanking him, I pivoted left. Heather’s summer lunchtime spot of choice was outside in a small courtyard, under the picnic table umbrella if it was hot, out in an Adirondack chair if it wasn’t.
I pushed open the door and immediately spotted her sitting in the sun, her face tipped up to its warmth. “Hey, there. Are you awake?”
“Mmm.” She watched with slitted eyes as I dropped into a chair next to her. “Not really. What’s up?”
“How do you feel about tattling on a coworker?” Then, seeing her face darken, I quickly went on. “Okay, that sounded bad. What I should have said was . . .” What, exactly? Once again, I’d jumped in without being prepared. “I’m trying to figure out the movements of some people on the Fourth of July. To help the police figure out who murdered Rex Stuhler.”
Heather’s eyes opened wide. “You think someone here is a killer?”
“Of course not. But it can happen that one person’s movements confirm someone else’s, and that person’s confirms another’s, and so on, if you see what I mean.” I didn’t know exactly what I meant, but either Heather was humoring me or I’d sounded at least vaguely convincing, because she was nodding.
“Sure, I get it. Who are you wondering about?”
“Lowell Kokotovich. Do you know if he went to the fireworks on the Fourth?” I was trying not to get my hopes up; there were a lot of employees at Lakeview, and the odds of her happening to know were—
“His wife did,” Heather said. “I only remember because of that murder. Their youngest is scared of fireworks, so they hadn’t planned on going, but some friends of hers from downstate dropped in unexpectedly, and she went with them.”