“I can’t believe Nolan isn’t freaking out,” Jez said from her seat at the kitchen counter. She’d offered to stick around to help, to put Nolan in a straitjacket and ship him off to a psychiatrist if necessary, but so far, he’d taken one Xanax and hyperventilated a bit when he realised Juno had also been cut, then gone to the winery to check on the barriques. Now he was in the shower, washing away a layer of sweat and half a lifetime of guilt.
“Maybe it’s a delayed reaction,” Storm suggested. She and Marcel had decided to stay for a day or two, officially to offer moral support, but mostly because they liked free wine.
Marcel deserved the wine because firstly, he was cooking dinner, and secondly, he’d done an excellent job of turning Barbie into Marielle using prosthetic make-up and the right clothing. They didn’t look exactly the same—Barbie was two inches taller and two cup sizes bigger—but the likeness was close enough to fool an acquaintance at a glance. She’d spent an hour watching and listening to the various surveillance videos I’d gathered, enough to imitate Marielle’s gait and speech pattern, and then she’d gone to buy gas and snacks in Mason’s Hill before leaving town. She’d also told two different people she was planning to “take a little trip.” On the way to the border, she’d stopped three more times, dropping breadcrumbs for curious cops to follow if they were good enough at detective work.
Nobody at the San Ysidro port paid much attention to a middle-aged white woman with one small suitcase, especially one leaving the United States, and she’d crossed into Mexico in mid-evening. From there, she’d have dinner with a friend who worked at the US consulate, then head to the airport and fly home on a different passport. An uneventful trip. The only point of note was that the lady working the checkout in Mason’s Hill Market, which wasn’t a market but a subpar grocery store, had asked if she’d sorted out “that mess with Nolan de Luca’s girlfriend,” so Marielle had clearly bad-mouthed me after our altercation on Sunday. I’d have to tread carefully with that one.
Fortunately, character assassination was one of my specialties.
The good news was that Ari—aka Coyote—had also arrived to help with the Marielle puzzle, and she was catnapping in the mostly finished second cottage until dinner. Our first face-to-face meeting had been slightly awkward as we sized each other up, and from the way her eyes widened, I didn’t think she’d expected me to look the way I did. But she’d smiled, and I liked her. Hiring her to help with a case last year had been one of my better decisions.
The not-so-good news? Erin, her assistant, was also coming to help, although thankfully not until the day after tomorrow. It wasn’t that Erin was a bad person or even a bad investigator, but she never stopped talking. Literally. Never. Stopped. I hadn’t yet met her in person, but I’d spied on her plenty, and she was too damn perky. Jez had offered to drug her if she got too much.
“Nolan was freaking out yesterday,” I told them. “But then he just sort of…calmed down. It was weird.”
“Like having-a-stroke weird?” Marcel asked.
“No? I mean, he mentioned a heart attack, but he’s still alive and he didn’t clutch at his chest or anything. And he seems fine now.”
“Then maybe he’s in shock. You should get the doctor back. It would be a crime to let a man that good-looking suffer an early death.” He held a spoonful of béarnaise sauce to my lips. “Do you think this needs more cayenne?”
I took a taste. “Just a pinch.”
He added seasoning, then dropped a salmon fillet into a frying pan filled with a lake of melted butter and a sprinkling of herbs.
“The doc won’t give Nolan a pre-emptive shock with a defibrillator just because he’s hot,” Storm said. “We’ll monitor him.”
“Can someone put the sparklers in the cake before he comes downstairs?”
Even Jez looked perplexed. “Why the fuck would we have sparklers?”
“Because we can’t have a celebratory dinner without a touch of glitz.”
“We’re…celebrating suicide by stupidity nowadays?”
“No, silly, we’re celebrating Echo finally breaking her lifelong dry spell.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re sharing a bed, and he’s obviously smitten. Such a surprise to all of us.”
I wrenched open the refrigerator door, spotted the cake box that had appeared—a real cake box this time—and flipped back the lid. The chocolate-and-strawberry gateau had Congratulations iced across the middle.
“Oh no. No way.”
Jez peered over my shoulder. “I’m actually with Echo on this one. That’s totally inappropriate.”
Storm began laughing, and I glared at her. “At least I shared the same bed with the same man for more than one night running,” I snapped.
“So I don’t like commitment—sue me.”
“To be fair, she doesn’t only like men either,” Jez said.
Storm was still chuckling as she headed outside. “Back in a minute.”
“Hey, I thought you quit smoking,” I called after her. “Again.”
“I did.”
