Page 129 of Whispers

Not so peculiar, Weston thought, as he snatched the paper from Styles’s hand and folded it neatly. He didn’t want to be reminded that his mother’s gun had been found at the scene. No one claimed the little pistol, and it hadn’t been registered, of course, but everyone in the Taggert family knew that the gun was the one that had been missing from Mikki Taggert’s dresser drawer for weeks. “Yep,” he said, shaking his head and meeting the questions in Styles’s eyes. “Very odd.”

“You’re telling me that Sean was fathered by Harley Taggert?” Dutch demanded, his face ruddy, a cigar clamped between his teeth as he glared at Denver. They sat facing each other in the bar of the Hotel Danvers, a Portland landmark.

“Could be. I have to check on blood types yet.”

“Jesus H. Christ! How long does that take?”

“Not long. A few days. I might even know by tomorrow.”

“Why would Claire lie?”

“You’ll have to ask her that,” Styles replied. He hadn’t touched his coffee laced with brandy, while Dutch was on his second drink.

“What about the night Taggert died? Did he know about the kid?”

Styles shrugged. “The only one who knows the answer to that one is Claire.”

Dutch drained his drink and scowled. “I guess this isn’t the worst news I could get, but it’s not great.”

“Tell your campaign manager—Murdock—and he can do some damage control.”

Dutch rubbed his face and sighed. “People are counting on me to run. I can’t afford to be hit in the face with some old scandal. You’ve got to get to the bottom of this Taggert mess, Styles, before my opponent or Moran does. If we know what we’re up against, we have a chance and if not . . . oh, Christ, let’s not think about that. Just find out what happened that night.”

“I will,” Denver promised, and he meant to do just that, even though his agenda was far removed from Benedict Holland’s.

After work on Friday, Miranda drove straight to the construction site where the next elaborate lodge, an extension of Stone Illahee, was to be built. According to her father’s secretary in Portland, Dutch was going to be overseeing the site preparation all weekend, and Miranda needed to talk to him before he announced his candidacy at a party on Sunday night. Only Dutch could tell Denver Styles to back off.

The man was getting to her, no doubt about it. He’d stopped by the office and her house four different times, and all the while she was with him, she was in knots. It wasn’t so much the questions he asked, but Styles himself. Brooding, thoughtful, with features that could change from pleasant to harsh in a heartbeat, he unnerved her. She, who had prided herself on her cool appraisal of any situation, she, who no defense attorney, hostile witness, or volatile suspect, could rattle. This one man had her second-guessing herself, tripping over her own stories, and ready to jump out of her own skin.

“Take it easy,” she said, driving through the open gate of the chain-link fence surrounding the excavation site. Dust blew across the Volvo’s windshield, and the air smelled dry, without the usual dampness from the ocean. Several pickups were parked haphazardly around the area where trees, grass, and boulders had been scraped from the ground. Dutch’s Cadillac was wedged between a half-ton pickup in primer gray and a station wagon that was a patchwork of colors because of dented and replaced fenders. Dutch wasn’t inside his car, but Miranda spotted him easily.

Chomping on the butt of a cigar, he stood with a group of workmen, staring at a spot in front of an idling bulldozer that was belching black smoke into the hot summer air.

The men were grim, talking in low voices, and Miranda, as she slid out of her car, felt her stomach clench with the premonition that something was wrong—very wrong. Far in the distance she heard the first wail of a siren, and, in an instant, as the sound drew nearer, she realized that for some reason the police were on their way. Her steps quickened across the dirt as dread stole through her. What was it? Had someone been hurt on the job? As she approached, she heard scraps and bits of the conversation.

“. . . been there for years,” a big bear of a man wearing a hard hat and bib overalls mumbled.

“Holy shit, who?” Another worker, skinny with short-cropped hair and r

imless glasses.

“No one missin’ that I know of.” The bear again.

What were they talking about? Who?

“Never seen the likes of it.”

“Me neither,” Dutch said, puffing on his short cigar and staring at his feet where the ground dropped off as the bulldozer had taken a huge bite of earth from the spot.

“Wonder if there’s any ID?”

Behind Miranda, a siren screamed as a cruiser for the county shot through the gates. Still walking, she glanced over her shoulder as the car slid to a stop near her Volvo. Two all-business deputies climbed out and hurried toward the men just as Miranda reached her father’s side. She looked down the embankment at her feet, to the gaping hole in the earth, where the dirt was wet and fresh, and tangled in the debris of leaves, rocks, and litter was a body—little more than a skeleton with a few rags still clinging to its bones.

The contents of her stomach rose, threatening her throat. “Oh, God,” she said, as her father finally noticed her.

“Randa, what’re you doing here? You should be—”

“I’ve seen bodies before,” she snapped back, but something about this decomposed body bothered her, and as the first drip of premonition slid into her brain, the deputies approached.