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Elizabeth shook her head and slid the card into a side pocket of her purse. “Come on, let’s get into the car.”
“You don’t want anyone to know you like him,” Chloe said.
“Where’re you getting this? I don’t even know the man.” Elizabeth stepped into the garage and opened the back door of her Escape. Her daughter’s comments bothered her, not just the content, but the perception.
Chloe climbed in and buckled herself into her car seat.
Not for the first time, Elizabeth wondered if her daughter had a little bit of precognition, too. Some kind of ESP or “gift” as Ravinia had called it. “Please, God, no,” she muttered, thinking of her own trials growing up with a sixth sense. A curse, she decided and toyed with the idea, as she had all night, of calling the cell phone number on Ravinia’s list and asking for Catherine.
What she really wanted was just to forget everything, for a little while, but with Detectives Maya and Driscoll breathing down her neck, that wasn’t going to happen. No, Catherine of Siren Song would just have to stand in line.
“You will,” Chloe predicted, her little chin set as Elizabeth backed out of the garage.
She would call Rex as soon as she got to the office. “I will what?” she asked but had lost the thread of her conversation as she moved into traffic. In the shafts of morning light bathing the interior of the car, she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her daughter’s serene face.
“You will know him,” her daughter predicted. “Rex.”
“What makes you say that?”
“When people love each other, they stop at nothing.”
A chill went down Elizabeth’s spine. “Where did you hear that?” she asked sharply. It was not the kind of phrase in her daughter’s lexicon.
Sensing she’d given something away, Chloe just shrugged, and no matter how Elizabeth prodded she wouldn’t say anything more.
The call from Elizabeth came into Rex’s cell around midday. He’d been watching a client’s bookkeeper, another surveillance job, keeping tabs on a woman the client suspected of embezzlement. Money was missing from the candy and card shop owner’s personal account and he’d thought his bookkeeper had been cooking the books, but so far, following Louise Mendez had only proved that the extra time she spent on her lunch hour was to visit her mother at Resting Hills Retirement Home.
She was back at work, so Rex dropped the surveillance and was driving to the office. His cell rang when he was nearly there and he recognized the phone number as belonging to Elizabeth Ellis, information he’d gathered last night after Ravinia had gone to her room and closed the door. He’d stayed up until one AM learning everything he could on Elizabeth Gaines Ellis. It turned out she was a lot more interesting than he’d first thought, and he even had a call into Mike Tatum, a friend who’d worked with him in LA and now was with the Irvine PD, a cop who occasionally assisted him with information not available to the general public, but only when he felt it was warranted.
Elizabeth was calling. He felt his spirits lift as he wheeled into the office parking lot and answered. “Kingston.”
“Hi, this is Elizabeth Ellis,” she said as he cut the engine. “I think I might need your help.”
He checked the time. “Okay. With what?”
“It’s the police,” she admitted. “They keep coming around. They even came by this morning and taped me. They haven’t said it in so many words, but I get the feeling that I’m their number one suspect in my husband’s death, maybe a couple others, including Detective Bette Thronson’s who was apparently shot in her home sometime Tuesday night.”
“It just hit the news,” he told her. “When she didn’t report in, they gave her a few calls, but they didn’t find the body for nearly twenty-four hours.”
“He didn’t say any of that.”
“They try to give you as little as possible, hoping you’ll hang yourself with inaccuracies in your testimony. What do they have as evidence against you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have an alibi for the window of time when the murder occurred, but there’s nothing else.” Her words were coming faster and faster, as if she wanted to get them out rapidly, as if she were scared suddenly. “I was home the night she was killed and
. . . and well, the police think I’m lying. Well, that’s what I think. Look, I didn’t know where she lived. I couldn’t have . . . I didn’t . . . I didn’t even wish her dead!” She sounded frantic.
“Whoa. Slow down. Where are you?”
“At Suncrest Realty, where I work. But could I meet you? Maybe at the house?”
He remembered her not letting him inside the night before. Things must’ve changed drastically. “When?” he asked, climbing out of the car and slamming the door shut behind him. It would take awhile even if he turned around right now.
“How about two thirty or three?” she suggested.
He checked his watch as he crossed the parking lot, the warmth of winter sun against his back. “I could be there around three. That’ll work.”
“Good,” she said on a heartfelt sigh, then she said good-bye and hung up quickly, almost as if she were afraid she might change her mind, or maybe that she could be overheard.
