I called up the next entry, dated November 18:
Unidentified human remains, discovered washed up along the base of a beachside cliff near Cancun, Mexico, are thought to be those of former El Paso resident Richard Lowell Matthews, who disappeared almost three weeks ago while on an early-morning walk. While confirming that remains have been found, Mexican authorities say that a positive identification will have to await the arrival of dental records that are expected in Cancun sometime tomorrow.
Sergeant Ignacio Palacios of the Cancun Metropolitan Police Department reported that the autopsy had revealed the presence of a gunshot wound that was most likely the cause of death. The case is being investigated as a possible homicide.
Candace Matthews, former El Paso real estate agent and wife of the missing man, expressed frustration at the lack of urgency surrounding the investigation. “They didn’t even bother calling me until after they’d already done the autopsy. How can that be? With Rich already reported missing, shouldn’t they have come to me first?”
So Richard Matthews was dead, possibly of a gunshot wound. Down the hall the hair dryer switched off and on as Mel wielded hot air and a brush to force her hair into submission. In the weeks and months Mel and I had lived together I had learned to welcome the dryer’s ungodly racket. It was an audible and daily reminder of how my life had suddenly changed for the better. It announced to me and to the world at large that another person had come into my previously solitary life. This morning, though, that hair dryer felt more like a screeching buzz saw slicing into my heart.
Surely not, I told myself. Surely it couldn’t be happening again, could it? Maybe I’m mistaken. After all, Mexico is a big place. There are lots of resorts she could have gone to that weren’t Cancun. Or maybe I’m wrong about the timing. Then again, maybe I’m not.
Once before I had fallen for a beautiful but flawed woman, one who had transformed herself into a one-woman vigilante brigade for both convicted and suspected child molesters. Smitten, I had been blind to Anne Corley’s inexplicable interest in the death of a young girl at the hands of members of a local religious cult. My inability to grasp the seriousness of the situation had led inevitably to Anne’s death-and almost to mine as well.
Now history seemed to be repeating itself. Only yesterday Mel had told me that she was still haunted by learning too late of her best friend’s incestuous relationship with her father, a relationship that had eventually resulted in Sarah Matthews’s tragic suicide. Mel had told me that she still agonized over having done nothing to avenge her friend’s death. But was that true? That friend’s pedophile father had now turned up shot to death. I had personally witnessed the fact that Mel Soames knew her way around the business end of a handgun. How could I be sure she had nothing at all to do with Richard Matthews’s death, especially since there was a chance Mel had been in the same area at the time of his murder?
You’re jumping to conclusions, I admonished myself. You’ve got no proof she was involved. Give it a rest.
The hair dryer switched off permanently. The bathroom door opened, freeing a cloud of steamy air. A heady combination of fragrances wafted down the hallway. There was shampoo, hair spray, and perfume-in short, all the individual fragrances that worked together to make Mel Mel.
Guiltily, like a kid caught reading prohibited Playboy magazines, I closed the screen containing the most recent El Paso Herald article and hurriedly typed Thomas Dortman’s name into the search field.
Mel emerged from the bathroom wearing a short silky robe, the hem of which skimmed the bottom of her equally silky panties. She came over to where I was sitting and brushed the top of my head with a kiss as she collected my empty coffee cup from the end table at my elbow. “Refill?” she asked.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
“What are you working on?”
I could have asked her about Richard Matthews right then, but coward that I was, I didn’t. I wasn’t ready. The idea that history might be repeating itself was too appalling.
“Dortman,” I lied.
Mel stood in front of me, with my cup in one hand and the other on her hip. “Look,” she said reprovingly. “Anthony Cosgrove has been missing and/or dead since 1980. And most of the guys on my list have been gone for months if not years. This is Sunday. Other than last night at dinner, we’ve been so caught up in work that we’ve neglected Scott and Cherisse the whole time they’ve been here. We also haven’t been very diligent about keeping tabs on Lars. How about if we give ourselves the whole day off and pay attention to people instead of cases?”
Concerned that Mel’s womanly wiles might somehow allow her to see into the workings of my computer and divine what I had been doing prior to typing in Dortman’s name, I immediately capitulated.
“Great idea,” I said, slapping shut the laptop’s lid. “It’s the weekend. Let’s forget about work for a while. It’ll do us both a world of good.”
Mel disappeared into the kitchen and returned with my replenished coffee cup, which she handed over to me. As she did so her forehead knotted into a puzzled frown. “You look upset,” she said. “Is something the matter?”
“No, nothing,” I said, probably a tad too quickly. “I’ll go shower-if you’ve left me any hot water, that is.”
The last was a joke. My condo is equipped with an instant hot water heating system that can replenish itself almost as fast as someone can use it. And Mel joked right back.
“A cold shower might be good for you now and then.” She grinned.
The shower wasn’t cold, but it could just as well have been. I stood in the powerful flow that cascaded down from a ceiling-mounted showerhead while my body was pounded with spray from a collection of wall-mounted showerheads as well. Steam may have been circling upward toward the ceiling, but I felt chilled.
Surely she wasn’t involved in the death of Richard Matthews, I told myself. Surely not. It was probably a robbery gone bad, a fatal but otherwise ordinary mugging. Or maybe Matthews got involved in the drug trade to supplement his retirement income.
But there was a part of me that held otherwise-part of me that was afraid my worst nightmare was about to happen all over again.
The easiest thing and probably the best thing would have been to come straight out and ask Mel about it right then. But cops don’t ask questions unless they have a fairly good idea of what the real answers should be. Anne Corley had lied to me with utter impunity, and I was determined not to be that stupid again. So before I asked Mel any questions I needed to find out some of the answers. To do that, I’d be operating solo. Mel may have been my partner in every sense of the word, but if she had somehow stepped onto the wrong side of the thin blue line, I was the one who would have to figure it out-and do something about it.
Standing there with the punishing water pummeling my body, I was suddenly struck by an idea. There was one other person in the world who had been betrayed by Anne Corley in much the same way I had been; one other sucker who, if I told him my suspicions, would immediately grasp all possible ramifications. After all, my friend and attorney, Ralph Ames, had been Anne Corley’s friend and attorney long before he became mine, and she had suckered him, too.
Leaving the shower running full blast, I stepped out onto the bath mat, hotfooted it into the bedroom, retrieved my cell phone, and took it back into the bathroom, where I dialed Ralph’s number.