The waiter dropped off our salads and I waited to answer. “Apparently for Detective Heather he is, even though she doesn’t have any evidence and his hands were swabbed and there was no gunpowder residue on them or his clothes. And his gun hadn’t been fired.”
“Well, there are explanations for that. He could have worn gloves and he could have changed his clothes. As for the gun, maybe he had two. One to shoot her with and get rid of, and one that hadn’t been fired to show the cops.” Mason didn’t say anything, but I had a feeling he knew that from past experience with a client. “Did anybody swab the neighbor’s hands?”
“I don’t think so and it’s too late now.”
We finished dinner and before we parted company, Mason mentioned the time frame of the trip to Santa Barbara. He certainly wasn’t one to put things off. He wanted to go the next day.
Luckily, I had the next day off, so it was no problem. The following morning Mason picked me up and we made a fast stop at the bookstore café to get drinks for the road. I looked in to say hello to my bosses. They were busy rearranging a display, adding a sign that read “Serenity” over a table that featured candles with soothing scents, books on meditation, soothing teas and lavender sachets. Mr. Royal showed me a beaten up e-reader he said he’d found in front of the store when they opened. “I guess the shoplifter had a guilty conscience,” he said. But apparently not about all the crochet pieces.
When I returned to Mason’s black Mercedes, I set a cup of estate-grown Kenyan coffee in the drink holder for him and a red eye for me. “I don’t know what Jaimee drinks,” I said with a shrug before pulling out a bottle of a premade sweetened coffee drink. “So I got her this so she won’t feel left out.”
Mason chuckled and shook his head as he steered the car onto the street. “Nice thought, but she probably won’t drink it.”
“Oh,” I said sinking back into the soft leather seat.
Jaimee lived in a house in a gated community at the top of the mountains, along Mulholland Drive. According to Mason she counted a number of A-list celebrities as her neighbors. As we pulled in front of her huge house, a tan well-built man stood in the front door with one arm around Jaimee and the other holding a bag with a tennis racket sticking out. He was clearly a lot younger than she was.
Mason gave the guy a distasteful curl of his mouth. “That’s Mark. You’d think she could be a little more original than getting involved with her tennis instructor.”
The guy headed toward his silver sports car and Mason muttered something about how it figured he’d drive something like that and he wondered if it had been a gift from her. I took a sip of my red eye and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
With her boy toy gone, Jaimee shut the front door and walked to the car. She pulled open the door on the passenger side and yelped in surprise when she saw me. As soon as she recovered she asked if I’d take the backseat because she had car sickness issues and could only sit in the front.
Mason touched my arm as I retrieved my coffee. “Sorry, sunshine, it must be something new.” He rolled his eyes and sighed.
I offered the coffee drink to Jaimee as we headed down the mountain toward the 101 Freeway. She turned and gave me an uncomfortable smile. “It has sugar,” she said in a reproachful tone as if I’d just offered her a shot of poison.
We headed west on the freeway and the San Fernando Valley gave way to golden brown hills dotted with squat California oak trees. I looked out the window as we whizzed through Westlake, Thousand Oaks and went down the steep grade between jagged mountains toward Camarillo. Jaimee talked on, excited because she was being considered for a new reality show The Housewives of Mulholland Drive. I tuned it all out and took in the panoramic view of farmland and the shimmer of sun off the distant ocean.
By the time we’d gotten past the city of Ventura and were on the thread of highway between the Pacific Ocean and the green scrub-covered mountains, I understood why Mason had convinced me to come along. I wanted to kill Jaimee. It was the