A Sensitive Kind of Murder (A Kate Jasper Mystery) Read online

  I just wanted to see Wayne for lunch. That was all. Just in case. But just in case of what?

  I shook off the shiver that settled on my shoulders just as I spotted a parking space in front of the Cortadura Library. I slid my Toyota into the space carefully, turning off the engine and saying a “thank you” to my car for getting me there.

  And then I saw Wayne, walking out of the library with Steve Summers. I smiled upon seeing him, his battered face serious under his low brows. My Wayne, always so serious. But Steve’s slender, lined face looked serious, too. He squinted through his wire-rimmed glasses and said something to Wayne. I stopped smiling. I wondered what they were talking about. Wayne nodded and touched Steve’s shoulder, the male equivalent of a hug.

  The two men parted company at the sidewalk and Steve made his way across the road in the crosswalk, turning to wave at Wayne once more. No jaywalking for him—Steve Summers was a straight arrow.

  I opened my car door, already imagining myself hugging Wayne hello. But I never got that far.

  A car came screaming down the road, a car that looked familiar.

  When the car hit Steve, he was flung into the air as if in slow motion, but he landed with a definite crunch—a crunch that would make me sick later, but that was too surreal now. And then the car backed up and ran over him.

  My body was immobilized. Then I figured it out.

  It had to be a dream.

  Because the car that had hit Steve Summers and was now speeding away was Wayne’s own Jaguar.

  - Two -

  I stared at the back of the bottle-green Jaguar racing down the road for less than the time it took to let out my indrawn breath. I couldn’t read the license plate; it was obscured by something like mud. But even in the time it took me to exhale, I saw the dent I’d put in the car three years ago, backing up into a concrete stanchion. There was no question left in my mind. The fleeing car was Wayne’s vintage Jaguar.

  As I stared for that ever-so-brief moment in time, I wondered if I’d just seen an accident. No, I told myself. When I’d almost hit the tourists, that had been an accident. But I’d swerved to go around them. And I hadn’t backed up over them. And I most certainly hadn’t been driving Wayne’s car.

  Wayne’s car? The thought galvanized me, finally. I wasn’t immobile anymore. Someone had run over Steve Summers with Wayne’s car. Whatever had just happened, it was likely that Wayne would be blamed. My limbs began to move again. And my mouth.

  “You take care of Steve,” I yelled at Wayne, who was already running toward Steve’s body. “I’ll follow the car!”

  And then I began chasing the Jaguar on foot. It never even occurred to me to get back into my own car, which was probably just as well—considering my car’s age, I could probably outrun it.

  But I couldn’t outrun Wayne’s Jaguar. As I ran, I watched the car get further and further away, until it was out of sight. My legs were strong, but my lungs ached and I couldn’t get enough air. For once, I wished I’d taken up jogging instead of tai chi sixteen years earlier. The car disappeared altogether as it turned onto one of the side streets that led to the beachfront.

  Still, I kept running. It seemed endless. I couldn’t even guess how long my legs had been pumping. And then, in that endless time, I turned onto the same street the Jaguar had taken and saw the car again, parked at the end of the street, blocks away, by the water.

  I ran even faster then, or maybe I only imagined that I did. Finally, I reached the Jaguar. I couldn’t see the driver inside. I leaned up against the door, panting and sweating like a summer storm. Then I peeked in the window. No one lurked inside the Jaguar. It was empty, absolutely empty.

  I jerked my head to the side, surveying the scene, hoping to spot the driver. But all I saw was a collage of tourists, milling around, looking murky though my sweat-obscured eyeballs. I reached for the handle on the Jaguar’s door, then thought better of it. I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened back at the library. In fact, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know what had happened. But whatever I had witnessed, I was sure the police wouldn’t want me touching the car.

  With that thought, I collapsed, letting my bottom hit the pavement. There was nothing more I could do. I had run, but I had lost. So I sat there, feeling the ocean breeze cool my wet body, still searching the faces around me to no avail as my breathing began to slow to a series of controlled gasps.

  “You okay?” a man in madras shorts yelled.

  “Fine,” I tried to call out. My voice squeaked. I waved to show my okay-ness, and then the man was gone.

  I tried not to think as I sat there regaining my breath. But of course that didn’t work any better than chasing the car had. Steve Summers had been hit by Wayne’s Jaguar and run over. The breeze felt too cold now. Steve Summers had to be dead. And I had left Wayne there alone with him.

  I wish I could say that I had run all the way back to Wayne, but I just wasn’t able to do it. Whatever adrenaline had buoyed me to the beach was all gone. I was shaky and my feet hurt. Still, I pulled myself up to a standing position and limped my way back to the Cortadura Library.

  Wayne was out front when I got there, standing guard over Steve’s body.

  As I walked the last few yards to Wayne, he said, “Steve’s dead. I’ve called the police.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment. Until he’d said it, I’d hoped I’d seen something incorrectly. But I’d seen it all too clearly. And now Wayne’s friend was dead.

  “What’s taking the police so long?” I asked. “I must have been gone for at least twenty minutes, maybe more.”

  “I didn’t call them right away,” Wayne explained. “I sat with Steve. I…”

  “Oh, Wayne,” I whispered and held him. He was shaking like he’d been the one doing the running. Then I realized that standing with Steve’s body had probably been the harder task.

  “What can I do?” I asked him. “Can I—”

  And then we heard the sirens.

  The first members of the Cortadura Police Department had arrived.

  The police car screeched up to the curb and a uniformed man and woman jumped out, their guns drawn. Wayne and I parted from our embrace in record time.

  “Get away from the body,” the woman yelled.

  Wayne and I walked slowly away from the crosswalk where Steve Summers lay.

  Wayne cleared his throat. “I called in the incident, officers,” he informed them quietly.

  “Name?” asked the male officer.

  “Wayne Caruso.”

  “Who’s she?” the officer continued, swiveling his head toward me.

  “Kate Jasper, my wife.”

  The guns were holstered. Both the man and the woman looked disappointed. I wondered how much excitement the CPD usually offered them.

  Before I could answer my own question, an ambulance skidded to the curb, an unmarked car screeching in right behind it.

  As paramedics hopped out of the ambulance, a new uniformed man and woman stepped from the unmarked car. The uniformed man was young, with a long, brown face and dark eyes under a buzzcut; the woman could have been his twin, but with blue eyes and pink skin under a blond perm.

  And then an older man pushed himself out of the back seat of the unmarked car. He was a man who would have looked better with a beard, I thought uncharitably, but he probably wasn’t allowed that much facial hair as a policeman. Still, he had a jaw you could hang a hat off of, a long nose with overdefined nostrils like a horse’s, and the meanest eyes I’d seen since my high school algebra teacher’s.

  “Where the hell is Marge?” he asked.

  “Marge?” I repeated.

  “I wasn’t asking you,” he growled. “Samson’s hair! Are you one of the witnesses?”

  I nodded. “Kate Jasper. And you?” I asked. Sometimes my mouth works without permission.

  “Captain Yale Wooster of the Cortadura Police Department,” he answered me, with a long glare to top off his introduction. I didn’t offer to shake h
ands.

  Minutes later, the paramedics were gone. They had agreed with Wayne: Steve Summers was dead. Three of the uniformed officers, Captain Wooster, and Wayne and I were seated in the meeting room of the Cortadura Library where the Heartlink groups were held. The chairs were old, comfortable, and well-padded. The table was real wood. The ceilings were high, and light streamed into the windows. The room smelled of age and books. It should have been a place to be content. But the other officer was out with Steve Summers’ body. And someone from the county was setting up a tent to shield the scene. They’d arrived and started that process before the rest of us had even walked into the library.

  “Okay,” Captain Wooster barked. “So you both saw this car hit your friend and back over him. What else?”

  “It was my car,” Wayne mumbled.

  “What?”

  “The car that hit Steve Summers was mine,” Wayne said more clearly. “My Jaguar.”

  “Who’d you give the keys to?” the captain demanded.

  “No one.”

  “Oh, come on!” He banged his fist on the table. “Mary’s handbag! You expect me to believe that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Wayne answered quietly but firmly.

  Then, countless variations of this conversation were played out, seemingly as endless as the time I’d taken chasing down the car. I wasn’t even being questioned and my head was spinning, not to mention the sudden ache in my legs. I closed my eyes for a moment—the wrong moment.

  “Awfully convenient, Ms. Jasper,” Captain Wooster’s voice broke into my reverie. “You being there while your hubby’s car takes this guy out.”

  “Huh?” I replied reasonably.

  The captain thrust his face into mine, sneering. I just hoped he wouldn’t hit me with his jaw.

  “You wouldn’t just be making up this little story, would you?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” I said firmly, taking my cue from Wayne.

  And then countless variations on the captain’s new theme were carried out. Maybe he hadn’t been born with that jaw I thought. Maybe it’d just grown and grown after years of interrogation.

  Finally he settled back into his seat and tried another tack.

  “Okay, what did you see?”

  Wayne and I both said “huh” together, then made the inner cranial turn necessary to follow the captain’s new direction.

  “The driver was wearing some sort of black cowl,” Wayne murmured thoughtfully.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Like a big scarf wrapped around the head.”

  “A cowl? A scarf?” The captain sneered some more. “Did you see their face?”

  “No,” Wayne answered. “Whoever it was wore dark glasses, too.”

  “That’s right,” I muttered, remembering.

  “Man or woman?”

  “Couldn’t tell,” Wayne told him. I just nodded. Even without the scarf and dark glasses, it had all been too fast, a blur.

  “Real convenient, sorta like Moses being found in a basket,” Captain Wooster put in. I wasn’t sure what he meant exactly, but I nodded anyway.

  “I chased the car—” I began.

  “You what?” he shouted.

  “I ran after the Jaguar—”

  “On foot?” he demanded incredulously.

  “Yeah, and I found it, too.” I crossed my arms and sat back in my seat. I couldn’t help it.

  The captain leaned forward in his chair and asked, “And who was in the car when you found it, Ms. Jasper?”

  “Um,” I muttered, uncrossing my arms. “No one.”

  “No one! Noah’s tub toys!”

  After what seemed like a few hundred other questions, Captain Wooster finally stopped to ask where I’d found the car and sent one of the uniformed officers to call the location into headquarters.

  “And have them seal it off!” he hollered. “That car’s a murder weapon.”

  Wayne looked sick, even sicker than he had before. His battered face was white, and his eyes were rolling in their sockets under his low brows.

  “Someone else must have seen the…incident,” I interjected, giving Wayne a chance to take a breath before he keeled over.

  The captain snorted. He looked at the two remaining officers. “Anyone come forward with a report yet?” he asked them.

  “No, sir,” they replied in unison.

  “Got any more bright ideas?” the captain asked, and went on before I had a chance to answer.

  “Why were you and your friend here, anyway?” he asked Wayne. I snuck a peek. At least Wayne’s eyes weren’t rolling anymore. His skin tone had ripened to a bilious yellow.

  “We were here for the meeting of our Heartlink Men’s Group,” Wayne informed him.

  “You mean there were other people here?” the head of the Cortadura Police Department demanded. “Ice cream in hell, why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”

  I thought Wayne was prudent in not attempting a reply. Anyway, the captain was changing directions again.

  “So you and some other guys were at some wuss group?”

  I opened my mouth to object to the wording, but Wayne just nodded.

  “Were any of them still around when your friend got hit by your car?”

  “Don’t think so,” Wayne murmured.

  “But each of them knew what time Steve Summers was leaving the group?”

  Wayne nodded.

  “Hot damn!” the captain bawled. “I want names, addresses, and phone numbers on all of them, you hear me?”

  Wayne nodded. He wasn’t deaf. Yet.

  An officer handed my sweetie some paper.

  Wayne began writing, taking out his own notebook from his pocket to work from.

  “His wife knew, too,” I added helpfully. “I mean, she knew when he was leaving.”

  “Who’s his wife?”

  “Laura Summers.”

  “Damn,” Wooster said beneath his breath. “Not the assemblywoman?”

  I bobbed my head up and down, glad to hear him whispering for a change. But it didn’t last long.

  “Quesada!” he yelled at one of his officers. “Get that woman down here, pronto!”

  “The assemblywoman, sir?” the officer with the long face asked.

  Officer Quesada’s clarification was a string of prosaic invective that was apparently reserved for the captain’s own staff.

  “Here are all the names, addresses, and phone numbers, sir,” Wayne declared, handing the captain his list.

  “Okay, you, Orr, get all of these clowns down here now, and I mean now!”

  Officer Orr didn’t ask for clarification. She just got up and grabbed the list. I hoped all she had to do was call these guys, not pick up each one personally.

  “And where in purgatory is Marge?” Captain Wooster whined.

  “Here, Captain,” a good-sized woman with large hands and strong features answered as she came into the room. I could hear the South in those two words. And I smelled something like lilac. It was a nice change from the scent of communal sweat. “Lord, lord,” she went on. “You gonna calm down and act like real folks now?”

  Amazingly, Wooster did calm down. He filled her in on the situation, at length. “So we got this car. And him.” He pointed at Wayne. “And a wife. And a group of ‘sensitive’ guys who might have seen it—”

  “And their wives, kids, and partners?” I couldn’t help adding.

  Wooster whirled his head my way.

  “Well, it makes sense,” I explained. “They probably all knew about the group and when it ended. I did.”

  So Wayne had to write-out a whole new list of names, though most of the addresses and phone numbers were the same.

  “I want them all in here!” the captain bellowed at the last officer standing, the one who’d phoned in about the car.

  And he got them. Assemblywoman Laura Summers was first. Officer Quesada led Laura Summers in, announcing that she’d been alone at her house, hers and Steve Summers’ house.

  I watched Captai
n Wooster. How would he handle the soon-to-be-grieving widow? Wasn’t there supposed to be some gentleness here, some protocol? Wouldn’t it be better to give her the news in the privacy of her home? Assemblywoman Laura Summers was a large woman with an all-American face, blue eyes, golden hair, and a pert nose. And a concerned expression that didn’t look any more feigned now than it ever did. Laura was always concerned—about the rights of children, the rights of senior citizens, the rights of—

  “Tell me what’s going on now, Captain,” she demanded quietly. Determination was in her eyes, but there was fear there, too. My chest hurt, watching her. Was that my heart?

  Captain Wooster asked her to sit, with all the consideration he was probably capable of mustering, which consisted of lowering his voice into normal range and contorting his features into something less angry.

  “That won’t be necessary, Captain,” she replied, her voice slow and serious. Even slower and more serious than usual.

  “Would you like to find somewhere more private?” he asked her.

  “No,” she replied. She glanced at Wayne and me. “These are my friends. Whatever you have to tell me you can tell me here. And now.” There was no mistaking the command in her voice. The captain complied.

  “Your husband was hit by a car,” he told her. “The car then backed up and ran over him. He’s dead.”

  Laura Summers stood like a rock, the only change her skin tone, which seemed to be graying. And her eyes; her eyes sparkled with something. It might have been tears, or anger, or something else entirely.

  “Oh, Laura, I’m so sorry—” I began.

  The captain’s glare cut me off as efficiently as a chain saw.

  I suppose it was just as well. I couldn’t think of the right words to say, anyway. And I lost sight of Laura’s face as Marge got up and put her arms around the new widow. Laura stiffened at her first touch, but then seemed to melt into the support Marge was offering. Big as Laura Summers was, Marge was bigger, at least for the time being.

  My own eyes filled then. Poor Laura. Steve was gone. I literally couldn’t imagine what she must have been feeling. And she wouldn’t be able to grieve privately for long. Her whole life belonged to the public. Damn. It just wasn’t fair.