Dead Giveaway

1

If Daddy were alive and standing beside me tonight, he'd say we've got a skunk down the well. A situation. I was in a parking lot on Houston's south side, leaning against the driver's-side door of my Camry and sipping on a Diet Coke. I wouldn't be getting near the espresso bar to meet with a witness in my new case. Not with crime scene tape strung in front of the building and red, white, and blue police cruiser lights electrifying the night sky like a patriotic carnival.

Folks from the sports bar farther down in the strip mall had wandered out to see what was going on, too. From the number of cars in the lot, the bar must have been packed for the Friday night NBA play-off game. Then a TV station news van pulled into the lot just as the faint mist dampening my hair and bare shoulders turned into a warm June drizzle.

Patches of fluorescent oil from departed cars slicked the blacktop separating me from Verna Mae Olsen, my witness. That's assuming she was inside the coffee joint and trapped by whatever event brought the police here. Maybe someone strung out on a caffeine high had foam in their mouth rather than in their coffee. Those five-dollar brews will piss you off some days. I sure hoped nothing serious had happened in there.

I'd interviewed Verna Mae several days ago in Bottlebrush—a town about an hour from here and as different from Houston as a toy poodle is from a coyote. My newest client, Will Knight, hired me to do what the police couldn't accomplish nineteen years ago—learn who had abandoned him on Verna Mae's doorstep. He and his adoptive parents hoped I'd uncover information about his birth family, and since I'm a PI who specializes in adoption issues, I took on Will's case.

Verna Mae seemed the logical starting point, and I thought I'd heard all she had to tell the other day, but she surprised me by calling tonight. I invited her to my house in the West University section of the city, but she insisted we meet here. Why at this coffee bar, I had no idea, but I'd agreed, and we'd exchanged cell phone numbers in case we missed each other.

Missed each other? Isn't that what just happened? If she were inside the café or sitting in her car watching this police show like I was, I'd feel a whole lot better if I heard her voice. I opened the car door, put the soda can in the cup holder and reached across the seat for my phone. Then I dug in my shorts pocket for her number. When I punched in the digits, it only rang once.

"Why are you calling this phone?" said a familiar male voice.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. It was Jeff, Sergeant Jeff Kline of Houston PD Homicide. My Jeff. The guy I love. He'd recognized my caller ID.

"Talk to me, Abby," he said.

"You-you have her phone," I said. "That's not good."

"Whose phone?"

"Verna Mae Olsen. A witness I was supposed to meet. From what I'm seeing in this parking lot, I'm guessing that might not happen."

"Where are you?" he asked.

"Look out the window and you'll see me."

"I'll do better than that," he said.

The line went dead, and a second later he pushed open the glass door, ducked under the crime scene tape and strode in my direction. He held something in one latex-gloved hand and the badge clipped to his belt glinted in the halogen lights that had been set up to better illuminate the lot and storefront.

My heart was hammering now. Jeff's presence, plus his possession of that phone, equaled more than skunk trouble. By the time he reached me, my mouth was so dry I wasn't sure I had enough spit to talk.

Jeff wore his cop face—tired and all business. I'd seen that look when we first met, the awful day when my yardman was murdered and he drew the case. He held up a small black cell phone enclosed in a Baggie. "Who is this Olsen woman?"

"I-I interviewed her a couple days ago and she asked me to meet her here."

"You can ID her?" he said.

"ID her? You mean..."

"I need you to look at a body," he said, his tone less brittle, tinged with genuine regret.

"Oh, no. What happened, Jeff?"

"I'm guessing a robbery got out of hand. Guessing. That theory could change." He gestured for me to follow and led me toward the coffee bar, a.k.a. the Last Drop. As we walked, he put the cell phone in his pants pocket, removed his gloves and balled them up. Those went in his other pocket.

The rain had picked up by the time we passed the crew of cops on the sidewalk outside the shop. Several nodded at me in greeting. I'd met them when I went with Jeff to one of Houston PD's favorite watering holes. DeShay, his new partner, was talking to a tall young woman with grape hair, low-riding capris and a nose ring. I knew DeShay better than the others, and he looked my way, saying, "Hey, Abby. What's up?" like it was no big deal I'd show up at a crime scene.

We did not enter the Last Drop as I expected. Instead, Jeff led me around back to a wide alley that ran behind the shopping center, probably for delivery truck access. More halogens had been set up, and jump-suited crime scene workers were canvassing the area around the back door of the coffeehouse. On the other side of the alley, a huge grassy ditch for floodwater collection was illuminated, too. Down in that ditch I saw a figure kneeling beside a dark mound I assumed was the body.

Telling me to follow exactly behind him so as not to disturb any uncollected evidence, Jeff walked carefully down the bank, taking a path where the grass had already been flattened by footsteps.

"How could you find anyone back here?" I asked.

"Pure luck. Guy tied up his dog outside while he went in for coffee. Black Lab with a helluva nose. Dog got loose, and here we are."

The crouching figure was in a blue oxford shirt, the fabric on her shoulders splattered with rain. As we drew closer, I could see the victim's feet. The once white tennis shoes were stained brown, and the wide small feet certainly could have belonged to Verna Mae, a short, plump woman around five feet tall. The day we met, I was struck how round and small she seemed in contrast to my client, who checks in at a lanky six-foot ten. Will's a college basketball player and went with me to Bottlebrush to meet with Verna Mae.

The woman in the oxford shirt stood and turned to face us. She had a round face, stringy gray hair, and held up her gloved hands like she was ready to do surgery. "What do you want, Sergeant?" she asked, not acknowledging my presence.

Her gruff manner and the fact she was standing over a dead person made my shoulders tighten.

"Dr. Post, this is Abby Rose. She can possibly ID the victim," Jeff said.

The woman smiled at me. Her teeth were yellowed and her eyes were sharp with interest. She refocused on Jeff. "You found family without having any ID? You have skills I didn't know you possessed, Sergeant."

"She's not family," he answered.

"Oh." The detached, cold expression returned.

"Well then, have a gander. I've cleaned off her face." She waved a hand at the body.

At first I thought the body was covered with fire ant hills, but the smell told me different. They were coffee grounds. Jeez.

I recognized Verna Mae, mostly because of her distinctive gray eyes. They were glassy and wide now, and her chubby face looked like she'd been hammered with a meat mallet. Her broken nose lay against one bruised and swollen cheek, and her bottom lip was split. Blood covered her teeth and chin.

I stepped back. Tried to swallow the hot, sour Diet Coke that rocketed into my mouth.

Jeff grabbed my elbow and pulled me back away from the body. Good thing, because I bent over and vomited everything but my toenails.

He rested a hand on my back as I rid myself of the last ounce of bile, then he put his mouth to my ear and whispered, "You okay?"

I nodded, wiped my lips with the back of my hand.

When I was upright again, Jeff said, "If you're not able to continue, Ms. Rose, we understand." This formal attitude was apparently for the benefit of the doctor, who was again kneeling by the body.

I made myself take another good look, willing my stomach to behave. "That's her. Verna Mae Olsen."

Dr. Post looked over her shoulder at me. From her expression, pukers were obviously a pain in the ass. She dug into the pile of coffee grounds and lifted one of the dead woman's pudgy arms. Wet coffee clung to Verna Mae's skin like dirt. "No rigor or lividity. This corpse is fresher than the grounds they dumped on top of her. Why do you think they did that, Sergeant?"

"Great way to hide a corpse," Jeff said.

"Made a helluva mess," she muttered. "Murderer probably has the stuff all over their shoes. Forensics can probably even match coffee brands these days."

"Yeah," Jeff said. "We bagged grounds already."

"Good, Sergeant. Now, could you take your witness somewhere else? I've called the van to remove the body, and she'll be in the way. And get one of your police friends to clean up her vomit. I don't want me or my people to step in it."

"I'm really sorry about getting sick," I told Jeff as he guided me back up the incline and across the alley.

"No problem." He used the walkie-talkie feature on his phone and said, "Hey, Rick. There's vomit by the body."

"You need me to collect it?" Rick responded.

"Don't bother. Not evidence. A witness lost it. Just wanted you to be aware if you happened to wander up that way again."

"Gotcha," the man answered.

Seems there was a little animosity between the ME and HPD, just as the press liked to speculate. As we arrived at the back entrance to the Last Drop, Jeff clipped his phone on his belt and held open the door for me. I went into a narrow hallway. By now, my shorts and white blouse were soaked, along with my sandaled feet, so the blast of air-conditioning had me shivering from bottom to top.

I noticed a restroom on the right and a storage area filled with huge, clear bags of coffee beans on our left. The aroma was unbelievably strong, and the room might as well have been a goat pasture—that's how pleasant the smell was to me at the moment. With gritty grounds between my toes and the churning in my gut, I wasn't sure I'd ever love coffee as much as I used to anymore.

Jeff rested his hands on my cold shoulders. "You did good. Sorry you had to go through that, but you've really helped us out."

"I feel so bad for her, Jeff. She must have been terrified before... before she died. What could she have possibly done to deserve that beating? She was just this oddball, small-town woman obsessed with a baby she found years ago."

"Let's sit, talk a little more about what you know about her," he said.

"Can I rinse my mouth first?"

"Sure. Want some gum, too?" He patted his shirt pocket where he kept his ever-present pack of Big Red.

"No. I don't want anything even marginally connected to the food pyramid."

"Okay. I'll meet you up front."

I stepped inside the lavatory, closed the door and leaned back, my hand on the knob. I closed my eyes, but that only made me see Verna Mae's battered face again, the face that had been so happy when I'd brought Will to see her.

I caught my reflection in the smudged oval mirror across from me and saw that my skin was the color of concrete and my hair so wet it looked black rather than auburn. I stepped over to a sink that resembled the bottom of a dirty coffeepot, turned on the faucet and splashed my face. After I rinsed away the taste of bile, I stared again in the mirror, ran my fingers through my hair and pushed back my bangs. I looked like I'd been through a car wash without a car, but this was as good as it was gonna get. I went back out into the hallway and walked the short distance into the coffee shop to give my statement, thinking about Verna Mae lying dead so close by and wondering if her death had some sad connection to my client.

I counted five cops besides Jeff, both uniformed and plainclothes. Three of them had taken advantage of the crime scene location and held steaming cups of coffee. Not the smallest size, either. Two others were interviewing a tattooed, fair-skinned Hispanic kid who couldn't have been more than twenty. His canvas apron bore the Last Drop's logo.

Jeff was seated at one of the half dozen small round tables lining the wall opposite the espresso bar. I took the bentwood kelly green chair across from him. He repositioned himself so his knee fit between both of mine and I mouthed a thank-you for the comfort he must have known this would provide.

"No coffee, I take it?" he asked.

"No," I said emphatically.

"Can you give me the victim's address so I can get someone on this notification?"

I did, and he wrote this in his notebook.

"She was a widow," I said. "Lived alone. I'm not sure who they'll notify."

"We'll contact the local cops for help. I've never heard of this town. What county are we talking about?"

"Liberty," I said.

Jeff waved over a patrolman, tore off the address I'd given him and said, "Get on this notification. Liberty County address."

"Sure, Sarge," he answered, and left for a more quiet corner of the cafe´ to make the call.

Jeff refocused on me. His short blond hair glittered with rain, and the stubble on his chin looked more copper than golden in this light. He took two sticks of Big Red gum from his rain-dampened shirt, unwrapped them and folded them into his mouth. After he'd chewed a few seconds, he said, "As I mentioned, this looks like assault and robbery. Do you know anything about the victim that would make me see this differently?"

"Not really, considering I only met her once. But I can tell you she was alive two hours ago."

Jeff looked at his watch. "Seven?"

I nodded, and he jotted this down. "I take it you couldn't ID her because her purse was missing." I said this more to myself than to him, feeling calm enough to think logically now. "Where'd you find her phone?"

"In the alley. She must have dropped it."

"You couldn't find out who she was from that?"

"Prepaid. Never been used. Didn't even know it was hers for sure until you called. And yes, her purse is missing. So far we have no witnesses to an assault, but we have her name, so maybe we can match her with one of the cars in the lot—although the asshole might have stolen that, too."

"She drives a Cadillac," I said. "Late model, cream colored. I saw it in the driveway when I went to her house."

Jeff rolled his eyes. "She probably had one of those damn Gucci purses slung on her arm and a three-carat diamond on her finger."

"More like one carat," I said quietly. "And a gold Rolex."

"I didn't see those. Christ. Why didn't she plaster a sign on her back that said ROB ME?"

"She struck me as someone who wouldn't have known any better," I said. "Lady wasn't hooked up right, Jeff. Very odd person, and I'm being respectful of the dead when I say odd."

"I'm interested in your take on her, but hang on." He again used his phone to walkie-talkie with Rick. "Look for a cream-colored Cadillac in the lot. Might belong to the victim." He closed the phone and looked at me again. "You say the Olsen woman was obsessed with an abandoned baby case?"

"Yes. Gosh, where do I begin? The interview with her was... strange."

"Strange. Okay. Keep talking."

"My client's a young man named Will Knight."

"Will Knight?" Jeff said, sounding surprised. "How old is he?"

"Young. Nineteen."

"Does he play basketball at the University of Texas?"

"You've heard of him?"

"Heard of him? Why didn't you tell me when you took his case? He's the best product to come out of a Houston high school since Okafor."

"Who's Okafor?"

"Never mind. You say, Knight hired you because he's adopted?"

"Yes. His adoptive parents encouraged him to look for his birth family. Will was abandoned on Verna Mae's doorstep as an infant, something Will has known since he was old enough to understand. Appar ently abandoned babies draw a little press coverage, so Verna Mae's name was in the news. Anyway, Will says he's ready to put some closure on his past."

Jeff grinned. "Closure on his past? Those were a nineteen-year-old kid's words?"

I smiled. "Okay. It's a direct quote from Kate's psych evaluation." My twin sister, Kate, is a psychologist and does workups on all my clients. Adoption reunions can be emotional, and I don't proceed unless I feel reasonably sure the client is mentally prepared.

"Sounded like Kate's lingo," Jeff said. "What's the kid's story?"

"Will is biracial," I answered. "Raised by white middle-class parents. He's thought of himself as white his whole life. Then he goes to UT, and things changed. The team and his new friends consider him black. He wants to understand that better. He's okay with it, but it really got him thinking. Smart, insightful kid, if you haven't guessed."

"Hope he doesn't get all stupid when he lands his hundred-million-dollar NBA contract. Sometimes green is the only color that matters with these young superstars."

"You're being judgmental. Will is not your typical, cocky jock. He seems pretty damn normal to me— and to Kate."

"He is an amazing athlete, which means reporters are gonna be on this case like fleas if they find out he's even remotely involved."

"They won't hear it from me," I said.

"Someone in the Department's always taking a leak in the general direction of the press, but let's hope we can keep Will's name out of this. You both went to Olsen's house. When was that again?" He poised his pen for my answer.

"Two days ago. Then she calls me tonight. Says she needs to talk to me. I figured her more as the HighTea-at-the-Warwick-Hotel type than a coffeehouse patron."

"Why couldn't she talk to you over the phone?" he asked.

"Believe me, I asked that question. She said she was in a rush, but would stop here on her way back to Bottlebrush. Said she had more to tell me about Will."

"That was all?" Jeff asked.

I closed my eyes, thought hard about every word Verna Mae and I had exchanged earlier. "That's all I remember, Jeff. Sounds to me like she was here in Houston, but that she didn't come to town just to chat with me."

"Maybe. Or she could have been passing through. Anything unusual about the tone of her voice? Was she nervous? Upset?"

"She seemed the same as when we met in person— someone whose roof wasn't nailed on tight."

He looked up from the notebook, his blue eyes narrow. "Explain."

"First off, the woman was as happy as a hog in a peach orchard when I brought Will to meet her. She may have been surprised to hear from us, but she was prepared. Verna Mae knew everything about Will, had followed his every move since the day he was left on her porch."

"How did that happen? Adoption files in this state are welded shut," Jeff said.

"With the cases I've worked so far, don't you think I know that? First thing I did after talking with Verna Mae was track down the caseworker who picked up baby Will from the local police. She owns a private nanny service now. I'm meeting with her Monday, and sure hope she can shed some light on how Verna Mae learned so much about my client."

"Could the Olsen woman have contacted Will Knight tonight? If she was as obsessed as you say, maybe she came to town to meet with him."

"Will would have called me, especially after how strange she seemed the other day," I said. "She made us both feel about as comfortable as Baptists in Las Vegas. No, I'm thinking Verna Mae had business in the city. Anyone with as much money as she seemed to have has business."

"You should know," Jeff answered with a grin.

"Smart-ass." I used my knee to bump his.

Kate and I inherited buckets of money along with a still-profitable computer company when our daddy died, money that I use to help unwed mothers like my own biological mother had been. The money also helps support my PI business—a business I started to help adoptees locate their birth families. Bottom lines aren't important to me; reunions are.

"Business would be a logical explanation for Verna Mae showing up," I said. "The CompuCan CEO is always calling Kate or me to approve or sign stuff."

"Okay, she may have been in Houston for reasons unrelated to your case," he said. "But from what you've told me, seeing Will Knight the other day might have brought her here, too. Does he live in town?"

"He does. Bellaire. You want me to call him? See if he saw her today?"

Jeff didn't get a chance to answer.

A man wearing a dark suit came in with a uniformed cop trailing on his heels.

"Who's in charge here?" the man said.

Jeff pushed back his chair and slowly rose. "That would be me, sir. How can I help you?"

"What the hell happened?" The man was red-faced, and his bulbous nose bore evidence of more than coffee drinking.

Jeff walked the short distance separating us from the newcomer and stopped within inches of the guy's face. "Who's asking?"

"Jack Brown. I own this place," the man said.

"Sergeant Kline. HPD Homicide. A woman was murdered out back, Mr. Brown, then buried in a pile of coffee grounds. Those grounds your own special gift to the environment, maybe?"

Brown's bluster disappeared. "Wet grounds are heavy. Expensive to have hauled off."

"Yeah. That's what I figured. You cooperate, and maybe the city won't be too pissed off about how you handled your garbage problem." Jeff turned to the cop standing next to the clearly agitated owner. "Show Mr. Brown to a table, and I'll be with him in a minute. Maybe he'd like some coffee."

Jeff came back over and bent close to my ear. "I need to interview this one now that I have his complete attention."

I whispered, "Okay, I can wait."

"Please go home. I'll call you."

"But—"

"And do me a favor? Let me talk to Will Knight first."

He said this nice enough, but he wasn't asking for a favor: Jeff was warning me not to contact my client.

"If you say so," I answered.

Now, sometimes you gotta dance to the tune the band plays, especially when one of the fiddlers is your cop boyfriend. But as I drove home, I had to think long and hard whether this was one of those times.