Page 19

As Doreen and Mack sat outside with their warmed-up Chinese food, she asked, “Can you tell me anything about the case?”

“Not much,” he replied. “You’ve done pretty well helping us out, but did you get a chance to see the body? Did you recognize him?”

“I didn’t recognize him,” she confirmed. “I figured it would be the PI who Mathew hired down the coast.”

He nodded. “That’s exactly who he was. His ID was still on him.”

“I don’t imagine he thought this job would be particularly dangerous.”

“Maybe not, but he had information about your house and a notebook on your whereabouts.” She froze and slowly turned her attention from her forkful of food to tilt her head at him. “So, is he the one who tapped my phone?”

“It’s very possible,” he agreed, with a nod, “and maybe the angry guy at your door too. Anyway that’s the premise we’re going on for now. Once the coroner confirms the driver’s time of death, we’ll know better.”

She went back to eating. “We really don’t understand people in this world, do we?”

“No, we sure don’t,” he noted, with a smile.

“And you don’t know who’s after what. Was Mathew really so worried that I wouldn’t talk to him? Sure, I’ve been warned by you guys to not talk to him, but why go hide by Mr. Woo’s for who-knows-how-long, waiting for me to turn up?” she muttered, “And why there?”

“We still had active alerts to detect his presence in town. So, if you think about it, Mr. Woo’s location is a bit out of the way. Nobody really sits around that corner, and chances are that Mathew could have gone undetected for quite a while.”

“I suppose,” she muttered. “It boggles my mind to think about it.”

“Why?” he asked curiously.

She shrugged. “Mathew was not really the kind to sit around and wait. I would have expected him to hire a lackey to do it.”

Mack pondered that for a moment and nodded. “That’s a good point. But who would he have hired?”

“I don’t know. I was wondering if the driver, his Vancouver PI, was the one who took out Mathew. Maybe Mathew had arranged for the PI to sit there and wait for me, but then they got into a confrontation that turned ugly, and Mathew was the one who ended up dead.”

“Maybe, but where was Mathew while the PI staked out Mr. Woo’s? Did Mathew just drive around in the rented Jag, waiting for you to finally show up?”

“Do we have at least an estimated time and day when the PI died? Did he die before or after Mathew?”

Mack shook his head. “The coroner’s working on it.”

“Maybe Mathew killed the PI, hired another driver, who then double-crossed Mathew.”

“Huh, of course in your world, double-crossing people is a common thing, I suppose.”

“No, not in my world, his world,” she clarified, enunciating her words very carefully. “Mathew was the one who chose to live in a world where that deceit was prevalent.”

“Seems it came back to bite him in the end, didn’t it?” Mack muttered.

“It sure did,” she whispered.

He frowned at her and asked, “Are you still upset over his death?”

“No, not any worse than I was,” she stated carefully. “It’s just difficult, knowing that somebody in your life has died in such a terrible way.” He nodded but didn’t say anything else. “It’s not that I’m mourning him or unduly sad or whatever you want to call it,” she clarified. “It’s just such a waste, you know? It didn’t need to happen. I don’t know how it went wrong, but this didn’t need to happen. Two men dead, and Mr. Woo not out of the woods yet, and for what?”

“I agree with you there,” he muttered, “though it seems that death and violence followed Mathew a lot.”

“That’s the thing. He obviously wasn’t expecting a betrayal. He wasn’t armed, correct?” She studied Mack with a raised eyebrow.

He nodded, yet frowned. “That’s right, but he owned a gun, didn’t he?”

“He absolutely owned a gun, though I don’t know that he would have tried to fly with it. However, if the private eye was driving up, I can imagine Mathew not bringing his gun along at all—or maybe gave it to the PI to drive it up. Plus the PI would have had his own weapon as well, wouldn’t he?”

“You would think so,” Mack muttered, as he thought about it. “We didn’t find a weapon on either body though. The PI did have a license for one, but we don’t know for sure that he had it with him. We do have somebody checking out his apartment right now.”

“Which is down on the coast, correct?”

He nodded. “Yep.”

“So, Mathew hires him down there, arranges for the guy to drive up—or fly up early—and to do his scouting work on me. Mathew flies in later, never one to take the long road trip if he didn’t have to. That is very much him. The PI finds out where I’ll be, which is creepy in itself, and somehow Mathew ends up at the spot, although he’s there early, some two hours earlier.

“Whether by design or not, Mathew would just have this PI guy wait until I showed up and then come and take his place, which would make more sense to me. But I don’t really understand what makes this other guy tick, so who knows? Then they get into an argument, and the PI kills Mathew and takes off. Either the argument or the killing was planned, so the PI tells the other person he’s involved with about what happened. Then the PI gets double-crossed, killed, and stuffed in the trunk of the Jag. And nobody knows anything.”

Mack shrugged. “That works, if you look at it that way, but we still have an awful lot of open threads.”

“No doubt, but I’m not associated with this PI guy, so it should let me off the hook as a suspect a little bit more.”

“Except that he had all kinds of information on you.”

“Of course he did. He’s a private detective and was assigned to track me for some reason.”

He smiled at that. “That’s true. Yet he was potentially somebody you knew and that you had provided that information to.”

“No. He got that info from the phone bug. Otherwise they wouldn’t have found Mathew behind the Chinese restaurant, since he could have just come to my house. If I was part of this, it doesn’t make sense to kill him down there, does it?”

“Right, and that’s what everybody is still trying to figure out.”

She rolled her eyes at that. “Of course they are. Everybody just needs to admit that you don’t have any evidence on me because I didn’t do anything.”

“I don’t have a problem with that, but it’s not quite that easy for the new detective on the block.”

“No, of course not.” She raised both her hands and shook her head. “I hope she was hired with a probationary period in her contract. Dealing with this is definitely getting tiring though.”

“What, not being able to investigate?”

“Oh, I’m investigating,” she muttered. “Obviously so, since I found that body.”

“Which is another problem, of course.”

“Oh, what now? Did I arrange to kill the PI too?”

At that, he burst out laughing. “There are bound to be people who think you did.”

“Sure, people who don’t want to put any real work into finding the real killer. Regardless, I didn’t kill anybody, so that really shouldn’t come into play.”

“Maybe not,” he agreed, with a smile, “but we know that a third party was in the middle of this and, at some point, that vehicle sustained some damage. What we need to do now is to figure out who else was in that vehicle with the ill-fated PI.”

“The city cameras should help with that,” she noted. “Hasn’t anybody found the vehicle throughout the days in question on any of the street cam videos?”

“Not so far,” Mack said.

“And I saw no cameras in the back alley where the Jag was left,” she muttered. “I suppose everything was pointed to the lot to catch anybody who might have been stealing cars.”

“Exactly.” Then Mack looked over at her, and his lips twitched. “I suppose you know all about this kid from the car park?”

She rolled her eyes at that. “I certainly don’t know all about him, but I do know some things. Like the fact that he’s been renting out luxury vehicles, both with or without the concurrence and knowledge of the owners.”

“A tip from Bernard then?”

“Sure, but I guess it’s been a lucrative business for Tony and for the lucky owners who knew about this side gig and got their cut. However, Tony did admit to me that not all the owners were willing or even informed participants.”

“That’s an interesting sideline,” Mack noted. “It’s not the first time we’ve heard of it happening, although I’ve not heard of it happening here before. It is a problem in the larger areas.”

“Interesting,” she repeated. “I guess wherever there’s a criminal element, there’ll always be somebody willing to take advantage.”

He smiled at her. “Absolutely.”

“I still don’t really see the point. Why didn’t Tony just buy one of those luxury vehicles and rent it out himself?”

“But why?” Mack asked. “Then you have to put out the money for it, and those are not cheap vehicles.”

“No, they sure aren’t, but, hey, Tony’s not my problem.”

“Unless…”

“No, not my problem,” she stated, with a glare. “It had nothing to do with me.”

“You realize that Insley still needs to take your statement, right?”

At that, Doreen rolled her eyes. “Why her?”

“Because she’s heading this investigation,” he said calmly, “and it definitely can’t be me.”

“Fine. I guess I need to go down to the station then, huh?”

“Or she can come here.”

“No, she doesn’t need to come here.”

At that, he stopped, then looked at her curiously. “I thought you would want her to come here, so you didn’t have to go to the station.”

“No, not at all,” she declared. “If she’ll treat me like a suspect, then she can treat me like a suspect in front of everybody. I don’t want her in my home. This is my sanctuary, my space, for me and my friends. And, if I have a choice, she doesn’t belong in that category, and I don’t want her here.”

His breath came out in a quick whoosh, as he sat back. “You really don’t like her, do you?”

She shrugged. “No, I really don’t like her. Why do I have to keep repeating that?”

“You don’t normally take a sudden dislike to people, so what’s going on with this one?”

“I have this funny rule where people who find me capable of killing two men and injuring another man is someone I instantly dislike.” He continued to frown, and she continued to ignore him.

“You’ll have to tell me sometime.”

She looked at him and replied, “No, I really don’t.”

At that, his frown turned to a glare. “We shouldn’t be keeping secrets.”

“Considering you keep a lot of secrets from me,” she reminded him, pointing her fork his way, “that’s hardly fair.”

He sighed. “I don’t mean about work. I can’t let you in on all of that, especially on a current case, and you know it.”

“Maybe you can’t. Yet it’s hardly fair that you get to keep all these secrets, then expect me to tell you everything.” He glared at her, and she shrugged. “And now that I have helped as much as I have, surely you would think that Insley would have the case solved by now.”

“It would be good if you didn’t say that in the interview.”

“Did you arrange for me to go in?”

He nodded. “I arranged for an interview.”

“You weren’t going to tell me?”

“I set it up but wanted to talk to you first.”

“Why did you set it up at the station?”

He pondered that. “Because I figured that’s how you would feel, how you would prefer to do it at the station.”

“And you’re right,” she confirmed, “but I still find it all just very uncomfortable.”

Doreen wanted to push it but didn’t want to make it worse or to have Mack leave prematurely. As long as they were talking, there was a chance she might get information out of him. Yet he would do his best to protect everything too. Including her, and Doreen couldn’t really blame him. Much.

“Whatever. I’ll go down to the station and be interviewed,” she declared, with an eye roll. “Maybe I should start writing a book or something? Then I can do a tell-all.”

“I would hope not. That would hurt a lot of people in the department.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not exactly feeling supported by the people in the department right now.” When he turned and glared at her, she shrugged. “I’m not.”

“She hasn’t treated you like a suspect,” he reminded her.

“She told me how she suspects that I murdered my husband. She probably added on the PI’s death now too, along with Mr. Woo’s attack.”

Mack raised a hand. “You’re still free to do whatever you want. Come to think of it, you haven’t even been interrogated.”

“That’s because nobody has anything on me,” she snapped. “I didn’t do it, remember?”

“You didn’t do it, but we still have to go through the process.”

She sat back and left it again, but she wasn’t happy. She finished her food, then got up and walked into the kitchen, without saying anything.

He followed quickly behind her. “I really don’t want this to cause a rift between us,” he muttered.

“Good, because I don’t either.” Then she turned and looked at him in the eye. “But I really don’t like her.”

“I wish you’d tell me why.”

She pondered that for a moment. “Other than her thinking the worst of me? I’ll have to think about it. I really don’t have an answer at the moment.”

“Do that, please, because it would be helpful to know what it is about her that bothers you so I can understand. For all I know it’s because she’s doing what you would really like to do and aren’t.”

She stared at him. “You think I’m jealous of her because she’s a detective?”

“It’s one of the possibilities that’s gone through my mind. I’m not saying that’s the one. I’m just throwing out suggestions.”

“Good, because that would make me sound incredibly small-minded.” But he could have a point there. She grimaced.

“I’m not saying that,” he said pointedly. “But obviously things are a little on the rougher side with this case, so I’ll head out. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

She watched as he walked back out to his vehicle, and, as he was about to drive away, she called out, “Drive safe.”

He smiled at her. “Will do.”

And that was all the peace-making she could handle for the moment.

Still disgruntled and out of sorts, she finished cleaning up the kitchen and headed up for an early night. Running a hot bath sounded like just what she needed. The perfect thing to help wash away the stench of death once again.