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A pocket door opened at the far end of the combination living room/dining room. A woman stepped through and carefully closed the door behind her. Before my talk with Dale Grover, I had formed a mental image of Calliope Horn-Grover that turned out to be completely wrong. She was a short but formidable-looking woman dressed in a severe black pantsuit topped by a white clerical collar. Her no-nonsense square-toed oxfords looked as though they had been made to kick butt. Her plain face, devoid of makeup, was framed by a wild mane of naturally graying hair. She struck me as a fifty-something woman comfortably at ease with her life, her looks, and her circumstances.
Like her husband, Reverend Horn-Grover greeted me with a genuine smile and a warm handshake.
“I’m Callie,” she said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” Then, turning her attention on her husband, she asked, “Did you offer our guest any refreshments?”
“I did,” Dale said. “He turned me down.”
“Very well then, Mr. Beaumont,” she said, taking a seat on the far end of my sofa. “What can I do for you?”
“I just finished reading through the transcripts of the interview you did with Detective Sue Danielson.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Yes, it was,” I agreed. “But when I mentioned John Lassiter’s name on the phone earlier, you recognized it immediately.”
“Yes, I did. Ke
“But you never reached out to Mr. Lassiter?”
Callie sighed and shook her head. “No, I didn’t. At first when I thought Ke
Shrugging, she broke off.
“And then what?” I prodded.
“Big Bad John was Ke
“You could just as well go ahead and tell him the rest of it,” Dale Grover said.
“The rest of what?” I asked.
Calliope took a deep breath. “Dale and I have had twenty-plus years to think about this and talk about it, too,” she said. “He came up with a theory that I’d never considered.”
“What’s that?”
“The way Ken talked about John Lassiter, it was almost as though he blamed himself that his friend was rotting away in prison. A couple of times he said things to me about going back and ‘making it right.’ But then, almost overnight, he started talking about our having some kind of a big payday coming and about our being able to move into an actual apartment. It was like he expected to come into a sum of money—a lot of money.”
She paused and looked at her husband as if pleading for assistance.
“What Callie is trying to say,” Dale Grover said, “is we think there’s a good chance Ke
I could see the pieces falling into place. “Blackmail?” I asked.
Calliope Horn-Grover nodded as a pair of tears slid down her weathered cheeks. “Yes,” she said softly. “That’s what I think now, too. He knew something about what happened and was maybe even involved in it, and that’s where the money would have come from—blackmail.”
That’s the moment I realized why Calliope was really weeping. It wasn’t just because she had lost the “love of her life.” It was worse than that. She had always thought of Ke
CHAPTER 23
SPEAKING SOFTLY, OWL TOLD SHINING Falls to wake up and follow him. When she tried, Owl could see that she was no longer all asleep, as she had been, but she was not yet fully awake, either.
Evil Giantess had used some red feathers when she put Shining Falls to sleep, and because Owl had no red feathers, he could not bring her completely awake. Owl decided that he would take Shining Falls home with him until he could find some red feathers.
Slowly the girl followed Owl until they came to a water hole surrounded by large rocks. When Shining Falls stepped on one of those rocks, it made a sound. Owl tried to call out a warning, but it was too late. Evil Giantess had heard the noise, and she was awake. Her hair spread out like an evil cloud, and Owl’s feet got tangled in her hair. While Owl struggled to get free, Shining Falls fell into the water.
IT HAD BEEN YEARS SINCE Ava Martin Hanover Richland had actually cleaned a house. She had people to do that detestable chore just as she had people to carry out her other orders. That afternoon she did the work herself, however, and she did a thorough job of it, too. Looking up from her vacuuming, she peeled back the top of her latex glove and studied her watch. In an hour or so, John Lassiter would be a thing of the past. An hour or so after that Henry Rojas would be gone as well.
Nodding to herself, Ava went back to work. She had always been careful to keep her life entirely separate from Jane Dobson’s, and in that regard, she was nothing if not a chip off the old block. Ava had been twelve years old when her mother discovered, quite by accident, that her husband, Ava’s father, was a bigamist with another whole family living in Eloy. A subsequent investigation revealed that there was yet a third family living in Deming, New Mexico.
Ava’s father was a long-haul trucker, and he’d been able to keep all the balls in the air for quite some time until a gallbladder attack unexpectedly landed him in the hospital and put him out of commission for a number of weeks—long enough for the other two families to come looking for him. Ava had watched the unfolding drama from the sidelines. She had never been especially fond of her mother, so she’d had scant sympathy for the woman. What had really fascinated her was how her father had managed to pull off the whole escapade. He’d created separate identities complete with checking accounts and social security numbers—one for each family, paying for it by working part-time jobs with three different trucking companies.
That was all a lot easier to do back in the day before computers and cell phones and in-car navigation systems. Ava was careful. She had never brought her cell phone here, and she’d never used her GPS to come to Jane Dobson’s house, either. There might be a trace of her travels lingering somewhere in the Mercedes’s black box, but she was confident by now her once shiny luxury vehicle had disappeared into some faraway, dusty spot or else it had been reduced to dozens or perhaps hundreds of anonymous pieces.
But that didn’t mean there weren’t traces of her lingering in the house, and once someone found Henry’s body here—however long that took—the cops would be all over the place searching for traces of Jane Dobson. By erasing Jane’s presence, Ava deleted her own as well, and that was the reason for her frenetic but very thorough job of housecleaning. She vacuumed everything. She made sure there were no traces of hair left in any of the sinks, sending a batch of hair-cleaning Liquid-Plumr down the drains.