it look accidental. Or hire a guy to fake a burglary.’
‘Doc Stiff,’ I said.
‘Explain that.’
‘A homicide detective I knew. Used to be a biology teacher. His thinking was, the hotter the blood, the sooner and simpler the killing. He called it the Index of Passion. Not saying these doers kept a cool head exactly, but this took thinking and planning and patience.’
‘Doc sounds like a pretty smart guy,’ she said. ‘Anyway, your bad guys went to all that trouble for some reason. Any messages around the body, or on it?’
‘No note, no anonymous calls, no hieroglyphics carved on her chest,’ I said, watching Mutt groom himself. ‘Wayne found a Roman coin, but there’s no telling how it got there or if it had anything to do with the killing.’
‘A Roman coin?’
Suddenly Mutt came to attention. He looked first toward the back door, then the garage entrance, the fur along his back standing up, his eyes huge. Hearing nothing myself. but catching his mood like an instantaneous virus, I said, ‘Hold on a minute, LA. I’ll be right back.’ I grabbed the Glock and a flashlight, checked to be sure there was a round in the pistol’s chamber, and slipped out the front door. As I waited for my eyes to adjust I listened carefully to the night. I hadn’t expected to hear crickets or cicadas at this time of year, but even taking that into account it seemed unnaturally quiet out here. I started working my way slowly around the house, staying as deep in the shadows as possible. Nothing in front, nothing in the driveway, nothing anywhere around the house that I could see. I stood motionless again, listening, hearing only the menacing rumble of a Harley somewhere in the middle distance, and behind that the faint hum of the interstate that could only be heard from here on a quiet night. I switched the flashlight on and made a non-stealth circuit of the house. Still nothing.
Back inside, I picked up the phone, saying, ‘I’m here.’
‘What happened?’
‘The cat spooked,’ I said.
‘Only you would have a watchcat. What spooked him?’
‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe some colleague of his dropping by. Coyotes come through sometimes, but usually not before three, four in the morning.’
After a short silence LA said, ‘I don’t like the sound of that, Bis.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Where were we?’
‘The coin.’
‘Right – the mystery coin. Wayne says it hadn’t been in the ground.’
‘So it got dropped there recently,’ LA said. ‘Meaning you can’t rule out that it was your bad guys who dropped it. And if they did – ’
‘If they did, it was probably on purpose – ’
‘ – so why? What’s the message? And who’s it for?’
‘If I could figure out that last one it’d probably tell me who did it.’ I told her we’d found out Gold got a call from a pre-paid phone around eight the night she was taken. The conversation had ended at 8.19 p.m. after eight minutes and a couple of seconds. Gold had then left the house and gone to her office, checking with the call centre from there at 8.44, no messages. Her purse, snapped shut and apparently unrobbed, had been left on a corner of the receptionist’s desk, the front office lights still on and Gold’s green BMW parked unlocked in front of the office door.
‘All they wanted was her,’ LA said. ‘Better bet they showed up in something like a utility van.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Nothing unusual in or close to her car. No fingerprint results yet, but I doubt they even touched it – no reason to unless they were going to steal it. All the back rooms, Dr Gold’s office included, were locked and dark when the secretary came in the next morning.’
‘What about the husband?’
‘He’s younger than her, runs a computer and data-service company that’s doing okay financially. Can you profile something like this?’
‘Not like you see on TV,’ she said. ‘Even when you can, all you usually end up with is “white male, twenty-five to thirty-five, not good with relationships”, yakkity-yak. Try getting a warrant with that.’
‘Well, with you on the case we’re takin’ our game up a notch, right?’
She was silent for a few seconds, which I spent looking at the pictures above the mantel. Then she said, ‘I’m coming to see you.’
‘Hey, great,’ I said. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘Nothing. I’m signed up for a conference in Miami, and I’m taking a week off before that.’
‘To do what?’
‘Pay you a visit, what else?’ she said. ‘Horn-in on your cases – car chases, explosions, trading quips while you cuff the perps.’
‘Where’s all that coming from?’
‘Prime time,’ she said. ‘Think you’re the only one who’s got a TV?’
‘What if I signed you on as a consultant?’ I said.
‘Well . . . ’ she said, like somebody looking a used car over, which told me two things: one, she was not going to need any more persuading, and two, she would now name her real price. ‘Okay, here’s the deal,’ she said. ‘I’ll make it a week if you’ll weld some bookends for my office – that credenza behind my desk.’
‘Weld?’
‘Yeah, with your blowtorch. Like that stuff you used to make with the ragged edges.’
‘Acetylene torch,’ I said.
‘Okay, acetylene,’ she said. ‘If that’s what flips your fritters.’
On a farm or ranch the number-two rule – number one being: never trust the weather – is that everything breaks, meaning that to be useful around the Flying S as a kid I had to learn basic cutting and welding. I still kept an oxyacetylene rig and an old Lincoln buzz-box in my backyard workshop where I sometimes roughed out odds and ends like makeshift trivets, doorstops, paperweights – even a pair of candleholders that from a certain angle looked a little like the Grand Tetons – out of scrap metal as a way of clearing my head. Jana liked them and used them for bookends, garden sculpture or just general decoration.
‘Your soul and your hands understand line and mass better than you do,’ she’d said with that quirky little smile of hers.
I visualised LA’s office and the oak credenza, directly under a skylight, where she kept the leather-bound TS Eliots Gram had left her, held up by a few other volumes stacked as bookends. Rough-cut steel wouldn’t look bad there.
‘Done,’ I said. ‘But how about saying a few psychological words, just to convince me I’m not making a mistake here.’
She snorted. ‘I’ll see what I can do with your dead psychologist,
