Page 16 of Always Murder (The Last Picks #9)

A few hours later, we were all at Klikamuks General Hospital.

All meaning: the Naught family, the Naught family boyfriends (Elliott, David, and yes, even Keme), the sheriff, and me.

Bobby, naturally, had been the first deputy on the scene, and after Millie and I had told him what had happened, he’d done a sweep of the storage facility. By then, though, whoever had done this to Paul was gone. When the paramedics took Paul, Bobby suggested I drive Millie; he stayed to secure the crime scene.

At the hospital, we had to wait before we heard anything. And then we had to wait some more. The good news was that the doctor had done a CT scan, and Paul’s brain didn’t appear to have any swelling. (I’d been tempted to ask if they’d seen a brain, which was mostly nerves, but also partly due to the fact that Paul had been such an idiot.) The bad news (if you were the friendly family sleuth) was that Paul was only allowed one visitor at a time in the ICU. And Christine and the sheriff were taking turns hogging him.

Not that Christine didn’t have a right—I mean, this was her son, after all—and obviously the sheriff needed to see if Paul could remember anything. But it meant I couldn’t get in there and do top-notch investigative work—which, in my mind, meant shaking Paul by the shoulders and shouting, What in the world were you thinking?

To be fair, a part of me knew this was classic displacement. I wasn’t actually angry with Paul. I was angry at myself. Millie had asked me to help him, and what had I managed to do? Stumble around, talk to a few people, and—I was beginning to suspect—alert the real thief to the fact that someone was looking for answers. It wasn’t much of a stretch to figure that my bumbling investigation had led directly to Paul being attacked. And as much as I wanted to blame Paul for lying to me and then disappearing, I was fairly sure nobody would have gone looking for him if I hadn’t kicked over so many anthills.

It also didn’t help that, with Christine still hogging Paul, the rest of us were stuck in one of the hospital’s waiting rooms. It wasn’t bad as far as waiting rooms go. The hospital must have undergone a facelift recently, because everything was Scandi-chic, with lots of pale birch and white pine and so much creamy beige. The minimalist chairs were surprisingly comfortable. A TV mounted in the corner was showing golf—I didn’t think it was live, since it was almost ten o’clock at night, but the guys on the green looked like they were playing in clear, sunny weather. Was it on the other side of the planet? Was it a rerun? Did they show golf reruns? And if they did, who would watch them?

A more pressing question was: what was with all the gnomes? They seemed to be the hospital’s answer to a perennial holiday problem: how do you put up cute stuff without it all being vaguely Christian? Gnomes had never registered on my radar, but here they were. Gnomes on the windowsills, gnomes on the little magazine tables, even a gnome on the mounting arm for the TV. They were all pleasantly plump and had big white beards and there was something about their eyes that made me very much not want to get trapped in this hospital overnight, or on any Fridays that also happened to be, you know, the thirteenth, or during any full moons or new moons or lunar eclipses. Or solar eclipses, for that matter. David and Elliott, clearly bored with playing the parts of Supportive Boyfriend 1 and Supportive Boyfriend 2, were tossing one of the gnomes back and forth. Nobody in the Naught family seemed to have noticed, but Keme was giving them his level nine-point-five glare, which had been scientifically proven to be hotter than the sun.

To be fair, I didn’t entirely blame David and Elliott. Millie had been sobbing the whole time, and Angeline and Kassandra had been on their phones, and Ryan had shambled around the room kicking things (no gnomes were hurt in the making of this waiting room), and Matthew had immediately hidden behind a copy of Popular Science . It was from February 2014, and one of the cover lines asked, Could we finally have a cure for cancer? Hopefully this wasn’t a spoiler for Matthew, but I was pretty sure the answer had turned out to be no .

When the first visitor arrived, the rest of us didn’t openly sigh with relief. But it was a close thing. JaDonna Powers did clerical work for the county and had the most remarkable church hair I’d ever seen. She looked at Millie, who was still sobbing, and she might have taken a step toward her, except Keme actually, literally bristled—I swear to God, his hackles stood up. JaDonna changed course for Angeline and Kassandra.

And I realized I had my opportunity.

Ignoring Keme’s glare—level nine-point-seven-five, we’re talking past the point of nuclear fusion—I dropped into the seat next to Millie. She had her face in her hands, and her whole body quivered every time a sob rolled through her.

“Millie,” I whispered.

Millie kept crying.

Keme did something with his eyes that made it extremely clear what would happen if I kept pressing my luck.

JaDonna was saying something to Angeline about her hair. Kassandra perked right up and started telling JaDonna—and everyone else in the room—about her hair.

“Millie!” It was still a whisper, but only barely.

Keme kicked my ankle.

“Oh God—” But Millie looked up, and I swallowed the rest of my agony. “Millie, I know you’re upset, but I need you to talk to me.”

“It’s my fault,” Millie said, the words threatening to tip over into a wail.

“It’s not your fault,” Keme said. And then, to me, he added, “You can talk to her later.”

“I’m talking to her now because this is important,” I said. “Millie, take a deep breath. You’re doing this for Paul, right? You want to help him. You did such a good job at the storage unit. You stayed calm. You called for an ambulance. That’s what I need from you right now, so you can keep helping Paul.”

She sniffled a few more times, but when I expected the next sob, it didn’t come. Finally, her voice scratchy, she asked, “But I don’t know what happened to him. I just found him like that.”

“But you know why he was there, don’t you? You know what Paul was doing at that storage unit.”

Millie dabbed at her eyes with a wad of tissues. Her gaze was unexpectedly sharp when she asked, “What were you doing there?”

“I followed you.”

She seemed to consider that before asking, “Why?”

With Ryan and the rest of the Naught family—my current crop of suspects—in the room, I settled for saying, “I can’t tell you right now, but I promise I’ll tell you later.”

“I didn’t steal those packages.”

“I know.”

“Paul didn’t steal those packages.”

“I know.”

“He didn’t, Dash. He wouldn’t do that. I don’t care what anybody says—”

“Millie, I said I know.”

For some reason, that earned me a fresh glare from Keme, even as he rubbed Millie’s arm.

All Millie said, though, was “Oh.”

“What was Paul doing at that storage unit?”

“I told him he could sleep there.”

It’s hard to feel like a super-sleuth when the best thing you can come up with is “You did?”

Millie nodded. “It’s my storage unit.”

“It is?”

(I know: it wasn’t my best work.)

“She makes her jewelry there,” Keme said. “And that’s where she keeps all her supplies.”

“There isn’t enough room at the house,” Millie said. “Paul said he couldn’t come home until he figured out who was stealing the packages, so I said he could sleep there. You’re not supposed to, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt for a night or two. But I didn’t think he’d—I didn’t think—it was supposed to be safe.” Instead of a wail, this time her voice constricted until the last word was thin and small. With what must have taken an effort, Millie continued, “If he hadn’t been there, nothing would have happened to him.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I wouldn’t be too quick to blame yourself. How long have you and Paul been in contact?”

That was the moment I learned Millie would never be a world-class poker player.

“The whole time?”

The words were louder than I intended.

Kassandra looked over—mid-explanation about her conditioner—and snapped, “Excuse me.”

“This is a hospital,” Angeline added.

Elliott gave a disappointed shake of his head.

David squeezed a gnome until I was surprised his little beard didn’t pop off.

“The whole time?” I asked again—more quietly, but with some extra, uh, vim.

“Not the whole time. I really did think he’d disappeared, but then he called me and said he needed help and told me not to tell anybody.”

It took me several seconds—and a long breath through my nose—before I finally managed to ask, “Seriously, Millie? Why?”

“Because he’s my brother—”

“Not why you were helping him. Why couldn’t he come home?”

“Oh.” Millie gave a helpless shrug. “I don’t know. He just said he couldn’t.”

“What was he doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Millie, I swear to God.”

Keme tried to kick me in the ankle again, but this time, I was ready.

“I promise I don’t know. He said he wasn’t going to go to jail and that he couldn’t come home until he figured out who was doing this.”

I thought about returning to the fact that Millie had known where Paul was and hadn’t bothered to tell anybody, but I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere. (Plus, Keme and I had watched this ’80s kung-fu movie where one of the guys breaks another guy’s finger by bending it all the way back, and I didn’t want to give Keme any reasons to try it out for himself.) So, instead I asked, “What happened tonight?”

“I was taking Paul some food from the house, so I waited until I knew nobody would notice.” Millie blushed, and there was something about how she didn’t look at Keme that would have tipped me off even if I hadn’t accidentally overheard their argument earlier that evening. Keme, for his part, looked even more morose than usual. Millie continued, “When I got there, the door was open, and the light was on. I was going to tell Paul off because I thought he’d forgotten to close it. And then I saw the Santa, and everything felt wrong, and when I got out of the car, I found Paul.” She stopped, tears welling again, and she blotted her eyes with the tissues again.

“What Santa?” I asked. “You saw someone dressed as Santa?”

Millie sniffled and nodded. “Going around the far corner. I only got a quick look, and then he was gone.”

“Height? Age? Race?”

“He was Santa .”

“Did he have a bowl full of jelly?”

Millie frowned. “No, he was skinny.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t know. He had the red suit and the beard and the hat.”

“Okay. Did you tell the sheriff?”

She nodded.

“Good. If you think of anything else—anything, Millie—tell the sheriff immediately.”

“Okay.” Her expression tightened with a fresh wave of emotion. “See? It really is my fault—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The words came from the opening to the waiting room, where Christine stood. “This isn’t your fault, Millie. It isn’t anyone’s fault except Paul’s.”

Even Kassandra and Angeline looked up from their phones at that.

Ryan’s jaw dropped. “Mom,” he said. But that was all.

“Close your mouth before you catch a fly, Ryan. And Millie, you couldn’t change clothes? Wash up a little? My God, you’re covered in blood. And your hair.” Christine didn’t miss a beat before wheeling toward Keme. “I suppose it was too much for you to help her.”

Keme didn’t blush easily, but color rose in his cheeks now, and he dropped his gaze to the floor.

“Kassandra, Angeline, thank you for holding things together while I was gone.”

“The nurse was super rude,” Kassandra said.

Angeline piped up with “I think I left my straightener plugged in.”

Christine dismissed this with a wave as she crossed the room. Holding out both hands to JaDonna, Christine crooned, “You are an angel .” And then, confusingly: “I’m sorry you were stuck out here.” And then even more confusingly: “Matthew, you better not have been bothering her.”

“He had his magazine,” JaDonna informed Christine.

For some reason, that made both of them laugh.

I was considering laughing too—if only because it felt like I’d stepped into an episode of Looney Tunes —when Christine noticed me. The politest word for her expression was frosty , and there was a winter crackle in her voice when she said, “Why are you here?”

Can you believe my mind literally went blank?

Apparently, my celebrity status as the town sleuth no longer carried any weight with Christine because she said, “Paul wants ice cream.”

It seemed like a non sequitur until Angeline made a little sound of contempt and Kassandra rolled her eyes and Millie poked me and Keme gave me this look like he was begging me, this one time, to be a normal human.

“Oh, you want me to—” I stopped. “Uh, right. Where do you get ice cream—”

“I don’t know, Dashiell,” Christine said with the exaggerated delivery of someone whose patience had run thin. “If I knew, I wouldn’t need you to get it.”

Ryan nodded like this made perfect sense.

Matthew’s head was bobbling behind his Popular Science .

“Sure—” I began.

Christine made a shooing gesture—along with this noise I’d heard a lady in a park make once when she didn’t want her dog to doo-doo in a flower bed—and I found myself rising from my chair and stumbling toward the door.

“He hasn’t solved a murder in months,” Christine was saying to JaDonna, who was offering sympathetic sounds. “It’s like he’s not even trying.”

Because I am a man of dignity and quiet self-respect, I didn’t look back.

I did find a vending machine, though, and I bought myself a Cloud Cake. It was a Twinkie knockoff, so you know: chemical sponge wrapped around sugary goop. I gave it an eight out of ten. I deducted one point for presentation and another because, honestly? It just wasn’t sweet enough.

After I’d done some responsible, healthy, mature self-soothing—I mean, how frequently did she want me to solve murders? Every month? Every week? Every day? It wasn’t sustainable!—I ambled around. I wasn’t in any hurry to find Paul his ice cream, but I figured I’d better find something . I mean, I didn’t want Christine to be any more disappointed in me than she already was.

When I realized that thought had passed through my head, I decided I was starting to get an idea of what living with that your whole life might do to a person.

I don’t like hospitals. I mean, nobody does except weirdos. But I really don’t like them. I have too many bad memories of feeling alone and scared and abandoned, most of that coming from the time my parents had, well, abandoned me so they could run off to the Edgar Awards.

Wandering the halls brought it all back: the smell of disinfectant, the unrelenting buzz of TV, distant voices. I tried to think about it as a writer. I didn’t love the idea of putting Will Gower in the hospital (that didn’t feel right for my cozy noir), but some authors had their characters end up in the hospital every book. Sadists, I imagined.

But still, an opportunity was an opportunity, and at some point, Will Gower might get hurt, or he might need to visit a client who was in the hospital. What could I capture? What details could I carry over to my story to make it feel real and vivid and immersive? I passed a nurse’s station, where mellow little icicle lights outlined the desk. A pair of high heels peeked out from behind one of the chairs. Maybe someone had to do a quick costume change at the end of their shift, although I couldn’t imagine where they’d be going. Or maybe it was more of a morale booster to keep the male patients’ spirits up. A paper Santa had been taped to the particleboard, but instead of Ho, ho, ho, he was saying, Whoa, whoa, whoa— in my imagination, because the reindeer were getting a little too frisky. Leaning over the counter, a Black woman with her locs tied back was doing something on a chart; she didn’t even glance up as I passed.

No ice cream machines, by the way.

Slowly, what was bothering me worked its way to the surface: Paul wasn’t dead.

I didn’t like that.

Okay, that didn’t come out the way I intended, but you get the idea. Someone had attacked Paul. And I suspected whoever had attacked him would have finished the job if Millie hadn’t arrived when she had. On the one hand, this was good news. (I mean, not for Paul.) It was good news because it meant that we finally had proof that someone else was behind all of this. It was bad news because—well, because I had no idea what all of this actually was. Would someone actually kill to cover up the theft of a few packages? Maybe. People killed for all sorts of reasons.

The other, bigger problem with Paul being alive was that nobody had died yet. (And yes, I know how that makes me sound.) I didn’t want anybody to die. I love people. I mean, in theory. I’m a people person. I’m a people pleaser . I’m pro people, so long as they don’t call me or visit me or come to my house. And stay off my lawn, you dang kids! But leaving my personal feelings about people aside, I’d been to this particular rodeo before, and I had a sense for these things, and the fact that a body hadn’t turned up yet was making my hind end itch. (Is that a mixed metaphor?)

I was still thinking about how pro people I was when a familiar voice called, “Dash.”

I figured they might have meant some other Dash—hey, anything’s possible—so I power-walked toward an intersecting hallway, where I could cut right and—

“Mr. Dane.”

I didn’t exactly groan or stomp or slump. But I did have to remind myself I wasn’t four years old.

Sheriff Acosta was a stout woman with her dark hair in a sensible ponytail. She was kind. She was patient. And she was a consummate professional, which was why she’d won the election hands down and was officially the sheriff, not just acting sheriff anymore. She had this little scar near her hairline, and I desperately wanted to know the story behind it. I guessed that either she’d been a wild child growing up and tried to jump off the swings, or she’d done undercover work, probably drugs, and earned it in a back-alley knife fight. (Okay, look, I desperately wanted to know.)

As she came toward me, a little hint of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“I almost made it,” I said.

The smile was almost there. And then it was gone. “How are you doing?”

“All right. I feel bad for Paul.”

“He doesn’t look good, but the doctors say he’ll be all right.” If you spent enough time around law enforcement, one of the things you quickly learned was that they have this magical ability to make you feel like you’re under a microscope. I suddenly had the sense that I was being examined at 100x power. “Do you want to tell me what’s been going on?”

I didn’t. But I told her anyway.

“That’s more or less what Bobby told me,” she said.

“Excuse me, are you using my boyfriend to double-check me?”

I got that corner of a smile again. “I want you to know that we’re going to investigate the attack on Paul and what the connection might be to these package thefts.”

“That’s great. I still don’t know why the freight company didn’t make an official complaint. I mentioned I’m highly suspicious of someone working there, right?”

“You did,” she said. And she even managed to make it sound like this was an ordinary thing that ordinary citizens said to her all the time. “We’ll take a look.”

“At least you can clear Paul from your list. I didn’t want to say anything to Millie, but I was starting to have my doubts.”

Sheriff Acosta didn’t say anything to that.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you serious? You still think Paul might have done this? Someone tried to beat him to death. Or do you think he bashed his own face in?”

Sheriff Acosta didn’t say anything to that, either.

After a few seconds, I mumbled, “Sorry. I ate a Cloud Cake, and there’s still a bit of a sugar high going on.”

“I don’t think Paul attacked himself. But you have to consider how the attack looks.”

“How it looks? What does that mean?”

“Paul was fired for stealing packages. Then Paul disappeared. Then Paul was attacked at a storage unit—”

“His sister’s storage unit,” I put in.

“—where, conceivably, Paul might have been storing those missing packages.”

“But Paul didn’t—” I stopped. “But Millie would have told us.”

Sheriff Acosta nodded, but it was sympathy more than agreement.

“So, what?” I said. “You think Paul did steal the packages, and someone attacked him—why?”

“It could have been a crime of opportunity,” the sheriff said. “Someone was passing by and saw the contents of the storage unit.”

“That doesn’t make sense with Millie’s timeline. And someone who happened to randomly be in a Santa suit?”

“Or it might have been professionals.”

“Professionals like the Turnleys?”

“I’m not suggesting anyone in particular. I’m only saying that someone might have wanted those packages for themselves. Another possibility is that Paul was trying to sell the contents of those stolen packages, and his fence turned on him and robbed him instead.”

They were all logical explanations. They were all, as the sheriff said, possibilities. Aside from Millie’s eyewitness account, there wasn’t any evidence that things hadn’t played out the way the sheriff suggested, and I knew that, at least for now, the sheriff couldn’t simply take Millie’s word for it. And if I hadn’t already been up to my eyebrows in this mess and felt the general weirdness of it all, I probably would have agreed with the sheriff—Paul was the most likely suspect for the package thefts, and the fact that it had come back to bite him probably shouldn’t have been a surprise.

“I’ll be in touch if I have any additional questions,” the sheriff said. “Do you feel up to driving yourself home? I can call Bobby.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m fine. Thanks.” I hesitated. And then I said, “Sheriff, I heard you’re hiring a detective.”

“That’s right. We’re making some changes. I think it’ll be for the best.”

There were probably more eloquent (or at least subtler) ways to go about it, but I was exhausted, so I blurted, “You should hire Bobby.”

The sheriff’s eyebrows went up.

“He’d be great at it. He’s super smart, and he’s good with people, and he’s observant and analytical. He’s your best deputy, and I’m not the only one who thinks that.”

Sheriff Acosta nodded. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

“I know what you’re thinking. I know I’m a problem, and I’m always butting into sheriff’s office business, and you think I’d take advantage of my relationship with Bobby somehow and get inside information or something like that. But I wouldn’t. And it’s not fair to punish Bobby because he made the very questionable decision to date me. This is his dream. You have to hire him. Please.”

A smile—a real one—spread across the sheriff’s face. “Dash, if I hired Bobby as a detective, I’d like to see you try to get information out of him.”

I had to think about that for a moment before I said, “Hey!”

Her smile quickened, and then it was gone. “Thank you for telling me Bobby’s interested in the position. I’ll take what you said into consideration. Goodnight, Dash.”

“Night, Sheriff.”

She left me there.

I waited until the sound of her steps had faded before I took out my phone.

My mind had already jumped back to the investigation. Paul had been trying to figure out who had stolen the packages; that’s what Millie had told me. And that meant Paul—God bless him—had come up with an idea or a plan or something. I understood that the sheriff had to consider all the possibilities. But I didn’t.

I unlocked the phone, pulled up the photo I’d taken of the list of names I’d found in Paul’s pocket, and I tried to figure out what Paul had been doing.