Trouble in Paradise: A Violet Darger Novella Read online

  “Which part?” Spinks asked. “Stringing himself up from his own ceiling fan or killing himself in general?”

  Owen answered the question with a glare.

  “Hey, I’m not trying to be fatuous here.” Spinks put his hands up in defense. “I’m serious. I did a story once on a guy that supposedly jumped off the roof of the building he worked in. Roger Appleby. Except that everybody I talked to said he was terrified of heights. The kind of guy that takes a trip to Paris and won’t ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Eventually the cops figured out that his business partner had been embezzling all this money, and Appleby was going to turn him in. So the partner got him really drunk, dragged him up to the roof, and gave him a good push.”

  “Jesus,” Darger said.

  “Right?” Spinks blinked. “So all I’m saying is, what specifically makes Owen here say that Sully wouldn’t do something like this?”

  All eyes turned to Owen. He clawed at his beard.

  “It’s not like that. I mean, it wasn’t like he had a phobia of ceiling fans or something.”

  “What about rope?” Spinks asked.

  Darger braced herself for Owen to get angry again, because it sounded like another joke. But Owen considered it seriously and shook his head.

  “No. He worked with rope all the time because of the boats, you know?” He let out an exasperated sigh. “He just wouldn’t do this. I know he wouldn’t. Especially not with Micaela missing. He was determined to find her. He spent the last five days scouring this town for any sign of her. He wouldn’t give up on himself like this. But he definitely wouldn’t have given up on her.”

  “Tell us what happened the last time you saw him,” Darger said.

  “It was last night. We went out looking for the boyfriend. Christiaan. When we came up empty, we ended up in a little tiki bar down by the marina. Sully was getting a little sloshed, so I brought him back here. It was probably a little after eleven when I dropped him off. He texted me maybe twenty minutes later, asking when you all would be in, what time to expect you and all that.”

  “What was his state of mind?”

  “Drunk, mostly. And frustrated. But hopeful. He just kept thanking me for calling you guys.”

  “Did he ever mention suffering from depression?” Darger asked.

  “No,” Owen said. “He wasn’t depressed.”

  Darger tried to keep her tone non-confrontational when she responded.

  “You’ve only known him a few weeks. There’s probably a lot you don’t know about him.”

  Owen’s jaw tensed.

  “I’m telling you, Violet. When I told him you all were coming to help look for Micaela, he practically wept tears of joy.”

  An uncomfortable feeling slithered in Darger’s belly then, and this time it wasn’t motion sickness or nerves. She glanced at Loshak and knew he was thinking the same thing she was. He raised an eyebrow, silently asking if she wanted to be the one to ask. Darger gave the barest shake of her head to indicate that he should do it.

  Chicken shit, she thought to herself.

  “Any chance he, you know, had some kind of altercation with Micaela?” Loshak asked. “You mentioned an argument. Maybe things went too far. And then when he realized what he’d done—”

  Owen sliced a hand through the air, cutting him off.

  “Nuh-uh. No. Sully wouldn’t have harmed a hair on that girl’s head.”

  “Whether he did or didn’t,” Darger winced at the look of betrayal on Owen’s face, “…we still have a missing girl. What’d you guys get from the locals?”

  “Not much,” Loshak said. “As far as the police are concerned, Micaela ran off with her boyfriend and will return in a few days. He said without any evidence of foul play, they don’t have the manpower or the budget to run around the island looking for someone who might not even be missing in the first place.”

  “Noble,” Darger muttered.

  Spinks chuckled quietly and then flicked his eyes at a burly cop with a poof of grey hair and a mustache standing on the front steps of Sully’s house. He was conversing with a man in a labcoat — probably the medical examiner or coroner or whatever the equivalent might be here in Curaçao.

  “That’s Deputy Chief Beethoven over there. He was as pleasant as could be as he sat eating our pastries, but underneath the island hospitality, I got the impression that he wasn’t happy to see us. We tried to offer our assistance to Detective Vinke. Beethoven pretty much told us to fuck off in the nicest way possible.”

  “That’s not so unusual.” Darger shrugged. “The locals rarely take kindly to having the FBI poking around their turf.”

  “That or he’s hiding something.” Spinks waggled his eyebrows. “I know our esteemed colleague here likes to think I’ve got a paranoid mind, but with all the nasty publicity the Natalee Holloway case brought down on Aruba, I would think they’d want to get this thing solved before it turns into a three-ring media circus.”

  “On the other hand, not wanting it to become a spectacle could be exactly why the deputy chief doesn’t want anyone delving deeper,” Darger said. “Shining a big spotlight on it doesn’t do him any good no matter how this thing turns out.”

  Owen’s phone chimed, and he pulled the device from his pocket.

  “Shit,” Owen said, his eyes staring down at the phone. “It’s Micaela’s mother, asking for an update. What the hell am I going to tell her?”

  “Don’t say anything yet,” Loshak said. “We still don’t know what’s going on here. If you’re right, and this goes some other way than suicide, Sully’s ex and her new husband would be obvious ‘persons of interest.’ Let the locals handle it. We don’t want to piss them off any more than just being here already has.”

  Swiping a hand over his forehead, Owen returned the phone to his pocket.

  A faint rumble in the distance grew louder. A growling, buzzing engine. Darger recognized the sound. The jerk neighbor with the snake car.

  She expected to see the guy come careening around the curve in the road, but he must have seen the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles from a distance and realized it was in his best interest to not drive like a maniac in sight of the police.

  A local cop in uniform stood in the street, ready to turn any potential rubberneckers away. The car came to a stop, and Darger heard him explaining to the officer that he lived on the street.

  The policeman let him pass, and he rolled on down the road, turning into his driveway, and parking the hideous car under a carport at the side of the house.

  He climbed out slowly, eyes on the commotion next door. His gaze flicked over to where they stood across the street, along with half a dozen or so of Sully’s neighbors. It occurred to her that to anyone else, they looked like another group of lookie-loo types, nosy and eager for details. She didn’t like being on this side of the crime scene tape, but the deputy chief hadn’t invited them across, and they were trying to remain respectful.

  The neighbor slammed his car door shut and approached the cluster of people in the street.

  “What happened?”

  Owen looked to Darger, who looked to Loshak. He shrugged.

  “Sully’s dead,” Owen said.

  The guy’s mouth popped open.

  “No shit? What happened to him?”

  “Found him hanging from the ceiling fan in his living room.”

  “No fucking way. Sully?” The man’s face turned toward the house again, mouth still open. “Sully wouldn’t do that.”

  Owen raised his eyebrows at Darger. A silent I-told-you-so.

  “Unless…” the neighbor said before trailing off.

  “Unless what?” Darger asked.

  But before he could answer, there was a shout from one of the men on the scene. Darger’s head whipped around, and she spotted a uniform standing in Sully’s backyard, beckoning Beethoven.

  “Uh-oh,” Spinks said.

  The few law enforcement officials in the front yard all moved as one to the gate,
like a flock of migratory birds.

  They filed through to the backyard. Owen jogged closer to the house, and Darger and the rest followed.

  One of the policemen stopped them at the gate, but it was easy enough to peer through the chainlink fence. The uni who’d called out to Deputy Chief Beethoven led him and the man in the labcoat over to one corner of the yard. A spot beneath a tangle of small trees and vines. He pointed at the ground and gestured wildly with his arms. But Darger’s eyes were at his feet. Focused on the oblong area where the dirt had recently been disturbed.

  Darger knew what it was. Didn’t want to see.

  Look away, she thought, but she couldn’t.

  The man in the labcoat bent down and scooped some of the dirt away. Something pale stood out against the dark loam of the shallow grave. At first Darger thought it was flesh, but the texture was wrong. It was only when the man in the labcoat lifted the corner that she realized it was a blanket.

  He flipped it aside, revealing the corpse of Micaela Tolliver.

  CHAPTER 8

  Darger glanced from the grave to Owen. His eyes were fixed on the small mound of disturbed soil, his mouth slightly ajar.

  “Are you OK?” Darger asked.

  He blinked a few times before turning to face her.

  “This isn’t right,” he said, his voice sounding hollow.

  A vehicle door slammed behind them on the street. Darger turned and saw an SUV with the logo of a local news channel emblazoned on the side.

  “The first of the piranhas have arrived,” Spinks said. “Blood was barely even in the water 15 minutes.”

  The reporter and cameraman who stepped from the SUV were stopped at the sidewalk by one of the policemen.

  “Still, not quite the media frenzy we’re accustomed to,” Loshak commented.

  One of the local police came out from the back gate then and waved them away.

  “You need to move across the street with the rest of the civilians and press,” he said.

  “Of course,” Loshak told him.

  Darger took one step away with the others before noticing that Owen had made no move to leave the area.

  “Owen, we have to move back.”

  He pressed his lips together.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he said.

  “I know, but we have to move,” she said, taking his arm and physically pulling him away from the gate.

  When they reached the place where Loshak and Spinks were standing, she released Owen’s arm, watching him for a few seconds to make sure he didn’t storm back over to the scene. He stayed put.

  Darger turned to her partner.

  “You know now that we have two dead American citizens, we technically have jurisdiction,” she said.

  Loshak nodded.

  “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to go swinging our weight around just yet. Let’s give Beethoven a chance to come to us and make nice.”

  The local reporter noticed them and skittered over in her high heels, microphone outstretched.

  “Are you with—”

  Spinks held up a hand.

  “No comment,” he said without making eye contact.

  A van marked with the logo of a different news outlet arrived further down the street.

  “Blood in the water,” Spinks muttered.

  Another SUV, nicer than the first, pulled up to the house. Darger assumed it was more media, but then Micaela’s mother jumped out of the passenger side before her husband could even bring it to a full stop. She hurried over to them.

  “What’s happening? Where—”

  Loshak gestured to where the deputy chief had just come out of the house.

  “I think you ought to talk to the police.”

  Lesley swiveled on her heel.

  Darger watched the cameras for the two news outlets focus on Lesley as she scrambled across the street and up the front steps.

  “Where’s my daughter?” she demanded. “Where’s Micaela?”

  Whatever Beethoven said was too low for Darger to hear. But he gestured toward the back of the house. Toward the shallow grave. He put a hand on Lesley’s shoulder, and the woman buckled at the knees.

  “No. Please no, not my baby. Not my baby!”

  Beethoven tried to catch her as she went down, but she wrenched herself to the side. Facing the road and the reporters, Darger couldn’t help but notice.

  Then she felt a pang of guilt. Who was she to judge a mother’s grief?

  Two men in jackets emblazoned with “Office of the Medical Examiner” wheeled a gurney out the front door. Lesley’s voice took on a more hysterical tone.

  “He killed her! He killed my baby!”

  As her husband reached Lesley and pulled her to her feet, Darger noted that for how genuine the woman’s emotions appeared, there weren’t any tears on her face.

  “Stop it,” Darger murmured to herself.

  Owen inclined his head toward hers.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing. Just talking to myself.”

  Scott held his sobbing wife as the gurney was loaded into the back of a white van. He turned his head and blinked at the two cameramen standing nearby, as if noticing them for the first time. A beat passed. And then he pulled away from his wife.

  “Is this fun for you? Some kind of entertainment?”

  He yanked a yard decoration from the ground. It was shaped like a windmill and had a spike at one end to anchor it into the ground. He pointed the spiked end at the cameras as he advanced on them.

  “Uh-oh,” Spinks said.

  “Should I put on a show for you? Is that what you want? Huh?”

  Darger and Loshak instinctively took a few steps toward Scott, in case he charged and needed to be subdued. Beethoven and one of his men had the same idea, and they closed in on Scott as he shook the metal windmill in the air.

  “How’s this for ratings?” he howled, launching the object in the direction of the reporters.

  It sailed through the air, landing several yards short with a clang.

  He continued stalking forward, his hands balling into fists at his sides.

  “Mr. Milano,” Beethoven said, getting a grip on the man’s shoulder.

  Scott wheeled around, jerking away from the deputy chief’s grip.

  “Don’t you touch me!”

  He swung his head around, realizing now that he’d been surrounded. His face went bright red.

  “You keep the hell away from me,” he said, eyes bulging.

  He glanced from face to face before locking on Darger.

  She could sense him doing the math and figuring the woman would be the easiest one to get past.

  He made his move, lunging Darger’s way. Loshak must have seen what was about to happen, because he darted between them.

  Scott lowered his head and rammed into Loshak’s gut. Darger heard a whoompf as the air was driven from Loshak’s lungs. The two men tumbled into Darger and all three of them went down. Darger landed hard on her rump, her teeth snapping together so violently it rattled her skull.

  Scott was still wrestling with Loshak, but the agent’s arms snaked around the tan neck and clasped him in a headlock.

  Beethoven strolled over with his hands on his hips and an expression of mild disgust on his face.

  “Mr. Milano, I understand that you have just undergone quite a shock, but you’ve now assaulted two agents of the law. Do you understand what kind of trouble that puts you in?”

  Scott continued to struggle and squirm, though with a bit less gusto. His face darkened toward burgundy again.

  “You think I fucking care?”

  “I would. Assaulting an officer of the law is a felony, Mr. Milano.” The deputy chief inclined his head at Loshak. “Now, I suspect that Agent Loshak here would be willing to overlook this little scuffle, given the extenuating circumstances, if you would promise to control yourself from here on out. Would you agree to that, Agent Loshak?”

  “I would,” Loshak
said.

  “What do you say, Mr. Milano? Can you promise us you’ll keep yourself under control?”

  Scott stopped fighting. He lowered his head and gave a single nod.

  “Go ahead and release him now, Agent.”

  Loshak removed his arm from around Scott’s head and let the man roll away from him. He crawled on all fours for a few yards. Then he pounded his palms into the ground a few times. He arched his back, turned his face to the sky, ripped two handfuls of grass from the lawn, and let out a scream.

  “Micaela!”

  CHAPTER 9

  The two news crews circled around the Milanos to get the best angle of the whole insane circus: Lesley sobbing and Scott beating his fists into the ground and howling his stepdaughter’s name now and again.

  Someone grasped Darger by the elbow. It was Owen. He helped her back to her feet.

  “You OK?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, dusting dirt from the back of her pants.

  Owen stared at the Milanos, his jaw set in a hard line.

  “Quite a show they’re putting on.”

  Darger raised her eyebrows.

  “I was thinking the same thing and feeling like an asshole.”

  “Nah. In my experience, when you see true grief, you want to look away. It’s uncomfortable. This here seems designed to draw the eye. Everyone look at how bereft I am.” He shrugged. “Hell, maybe that does make me an asshole, but I don’t care.”

  They moved back across the street, putting some distance between themselves and the Milanos.

  “Well, you’re probably in shock, to some degree.” Darger put a hand on Owen’s shoulder. “I know this isn’t how you wanted this to go, and I’m sorry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just mean it’s probably hard to wrap your head around all of this. We just found your friend, dead. And then it turns out his missing daughter is buried in the backyard.”

  Owen blinked.

  “Yeah, but Sully didn’t do it.”

  “Owen—”

  “No, I’m telling you. I know how it looks, but it isn’t right.” He took and breath and stared into her eyes. “You have to feel that, Violet. Something feels wrong about this whole thing.”