White Lies Page 4

  A year ago Owen met and married Valerie. It was a second marriage for both of them. Archer had told Jake that Owen and Valerie had met through the auspices of Arcanematch.com. Jake had a hunch that the matchmaking computers at Arcane House, designed to help single members of the Society find life partners from among the community of sensitives, had failed to allow for the possibility that Valerie would morph into a full-blown alcoholic. It wasn’t the first time arcanematch had made a mistake.

  “I’m sorry,” Owen said heavily. He looked at Clare. “Are you all right?”

  Clare stood shoulder-deep in the water. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Shipley.”

  “Are you certain?” Owen asked.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice gentling. “It was an accident. I lost my balance and fell into the pool.”

  Owen’s features tightened. “Valerie hasn’t been herself since Brad was murdered.”

  “I know,” Clare said.

  “I’ve been trying to get her to go into rehab. But she refuses.”

  “I understand,” Clare said.

  Owen nodded humbly. “Thank you.” He looked back toward the house. Valerie had disappeared into the shadows of the veranda. “I’d better take her home.”

  He walked back toward the house, shoulders slumped.

  Jake waited until he was gone. Then he went to stand at the edge of the pool.

  Clare flung her wet hair out of her eyes and looked at him, hands moving rhythmically under the surface.

  “Don’t say it,” she warned.

  “Can’t help myself.” He crouched down on the coping. “I did warn you not to confront her.”

  She made a face. “I thought consultants were supposed to do something helpful and productive in a moment of crisis.”

  “Right. Almost forgot.”

  He rose, walked to the nearby cabana and opened the door. Inside he found a stack of oversized towels on a shelf. He picked up one and carried it back to the pool.

  “How’s this for helpful?” he asked, unfolding the towel.

  “Much better.”

  She took a deep breath and dove back under the water to retrieve her shoes. When she surfaced again she trudged toward the wide steps where he waited.

  “There’s a robe inside the cabana,” he said, draping the towel around her shoulders.

  “Thanks.”

  Clutching the towel, she made her way toward the small cabana. The black suit clung to her body, outlining her lush, rounded hips.

  She stripped off her jacket just before she reached the door. The thin, pale silk shell she wore underneath had been rendered transparent by the water. Jake could see the straps of a dainty bra.

  She disappeared inside the cabana. He considered his options. There was no question now but that Clare Lancaster was a spanner that had just been thrown into the works of his carefully crafted scheme. He had to decide how to deal with her, but first he needed more information.

  The cabana door opened. Clare walked out muffled from head to toe in a thick white terrycloth robe. Her hair was wrapped in a towel. She carried her sopping-wet clothes in one hand and her soaked shoes in the other.

  “I think the party’s over for me,” she said. She paused at the table to pick up her shoulder bag.

  “Looks that way,” he agreed. “I’ll take you home.”

  “Hotel,” she corrected automatically. “I don’t live around here, remember?”

  A small shock of awareness slammed through him. Talk about a slip of the tongue. He had spoken without thinking, meaning his home, or rather the house he rented. What the hell was that about? Probably something to do with seeing her in a robe and knowing that she was naked underneath the pristine white terrycloth.

  “I’ll take you back to your hotel,” he said.

  “Thanks, anyway, but I’ve got a car.”

  “It’s not a problem. It will give me an excuse to leave early. Cocktail-party chatter bores me.”

  “Why come, in that case?”

  He shrugged. “Archer invited me. He’s the client.”

  She gave him an odd look. She knew he was lying to her, he thought. But he sensed that she wasn’t going to call him on it.

  She was trying to figure him out, he realized. Fair enough. He was doing the same thing to her. He smiled slightly.

  “What is so amusing?” she demanded crossly.

  “We’re like a couple of fencers,” he said. “Testing each other’s defenses. Looking for openings. Makes for an interesting game, don’t you think?”

  She went very still. “I didn’t come here to play games.”

  “I know. But sometimes the game finds you.”

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Jake Salter, but whatever it is—”

  He took her arm. “Let’s get you back to your hotel.”

  “I told you, I’m fine. I can drive myself.”

  “Be reasonable.” He steered her toward the veranda. “You’re soaked to the skin. You’ve had a long day. You’ve been through some family drama and a major scene with a woman who seems to hate your guts. On top of everything else, you probably don’t know your way around Phoenix very well. Let me take you back to your hotel.”

  “No, thank you.” Polite but determined.

  “You’re as stubborn as Archer.”

  They reached the veranda. Clare halted abruptly and looked at the open doors.

  “I’m not going to go back inside,” she said, glancing down at her robe. “Not like this.”

  “No,” he agreed. He tightened his grip on her arm and drew her along the veranda. “We’ll go this way.”

  He walked her around the side of the house. When they reached the crowded driveway Jake saw the parking attendant. The young man was hovering over Clare’s rented compact.

  “Looks like my car is blocking another vehicle,” Clare said.

  “That would be mine.”

  She gave a small start and then smiled ruefully. “What are the odds, huh?”

  “I figure maybe it was psychic karma.”

  “You believe in psychic karma?”

  “Didn’t until tonight,” he admitted. He didn’t like the way the attendant was studying Clare’s car. “I think we may have a problem.”

  “What?” She looked up, keys in hand.

  They were close to the compact now. Jake could see the spiderweb of cracks in the windshield. Clare noticed them a couple seconds later.

  “Oh, damn,” she whispered. “The rental agency is not going to be happy about this.”

  The attendant saw Jake. “I was just about to go talk to my boss.”

  “What happened?” Clare asked.

  “Mrs. Shipley came outside a little while ago,” the attendant said unhappily. “She wanted to know which car had arrived in the last half hour. I told her that it was this one.”

  “Good grief,” Clare said. “What did she do to my windshield?”

  “She, uh, smashed it with a rock,” the attendant said.

  “Where is Mrs. Shipley?” Jake asked.

  “Her husband came after her. Said he was going to take her home. He apologized and said to tell you that he’ll make things right with the rental company.”

  Jake released Clare. “That settles it. You won’t be driving yourself back to the hotel tonight.” He took the keys from her unresisting fingers. “I’ll move your car so we can get mine out.”

  She sighed, resigned now. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Psychic karma, remember?” He opened the door of the compact and got behind the wheel.

  Clare waited, her hands stuffed into the pockets of the robe, while he switched the positions of the two vehicles. When he had reparked the compact, he settled Clare into the front seat of the BMW and went around to the driver’s side.

  He got behind the wheel and drove down the drive and out onto the road that looped through the gated golf-course community. The security guard waved him through the massive wrought-iron gates.

  Clare looked ou
t the window, evidently absorbed by the night and the lights of Phoenix in the distance.

  “I knew that Brad McAllister was murdered six months ago,” he said after a while. “Archer mentioned that the cops believe he interrupted a burglary in progress at his home here in Stone Canyon.”

  “That’s the official theory.” Clare did not turn her head away from the inky-dark view. “But as you may have noticed, Brad’s mother is convinced that I murdered her son. She’s had several months to promote her theory. I understand she’s been quite successful, although Elizabeth assures me that most people in Stone Canyon are very careful not to speculate too loudly in Archer’s hearing.”

  “Archer sure as hell wouldn’t want that kind of gossip going around.”

  She turned her head to look at him. “The police did question me, you know.”

  “Be surprising if they didn’t. You were the one who found the body.”

  “Yes.”

  He glanced at her. She had gone back to studying the night.

  “Must have been bad,” he said quietly.

  “It was.”

  He said nothing for a moment. “How did it happen that you were first on the scene?”

  “I flew into Phoenix that evening to see Elizabeth. There was a mix-up with a message I had left for her. She thought I was due in the following morning. She was out attending a reception for the Stone Canyon Arts Academy when I arrived. I drove straight to her place. The front door was open. I walked in and found Brad’s body.”

  He didn’t need his parasenses to pick up the lingering traces of shock and horror under the simple, straightforward words.

  “Archer told me that the safe had been opened,” he said. “It certainly sounds like an interrupted burglary scenario.”

  “Yes. But that hasn’t stopped Valerie from concluding that I was the killer. She thinks I was having an affair with Brad and that I murdered him because he refused to leave Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth and McAllister were separated at the time. Any idea what he was doing at her house that evening?”

  “No,” she said.

  He did not want to ask but the hunter in him needed to know.

  “Were you sleeping with McAllister?” he asked without inflection.

  She shuddered. “Lord, no. There’s no way I could have been attracted to a man like that. Brad McAllister was a liar.”

  His stomach clenched. She probably hated liars.

  “Everyone lies at one time or another,” he said. Including me.

  “Well, sure.” She sounded startlingly casual about that simple fact. “I don’t have a problem with most lies or the people who tell them, at least, not since I learned how to handle my talent. Heck, I tell lies myself sometimes. I’m pretty good at lying, actually. Maybe it goes with having a gift for detecting lies.”

  He was dumbfounded. That did not happen very often, he reflected wryly. It took him a couple seconds to regroup.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re a human lie detector and you don’t mind that most people lie?”

  She smiled slightly. “Let me put it this way. When you wake up one morning at the age of thirteen and discover that because of your newly developed parasenses you can tell that everyone around you, even the people you love, lie occasionally and that you are going to be driven crazy if you don’t get some perspective, you learn to get some perspective.”

  He was reluctantly fascinated. “Just what kind of perspective do you have on the subject?”

  “I take the Darwinian view. Lying is a universal talent. Everyone I’ve ever known can do it rather well. Most little kids start practicing the skill as soon as they master language.”

  “So you figure there must be some evolutionary explanation, is that it?”

  “I think so, yes,” she said, calmly serious and certain. “When you look at it objectively it seems obvious that the ability to lie is part of everyone’s kit of survival tools, a side effect of possessing language skills. There are a lot of situations in which the ability to lie is extremely useful. There are times when you might have to lie to protect yourself or someone else, for example.”

  “Okay, I get that kind of lying,” he said.

  “You might lie to an enemy in order to win a battle or a war. Or you might have to lie just to defend your personal privacy. People lie all the time to defuse a tense social situation or to avoid hurting someone’s feelings or to calm someone who is frightened.”

  “True.”

  “The way I see it, if people couldn’t lie, they probably wouldn’t be able to live together in groups, at least not for very long or with any degree of sociability. And there you have the bottom line.”

  “What bottom line?”

  She spread her hands. “If humans could not lie, civilization as we know it would cease to exist.”

  He whistled softly. “That’s an interesting perspective, all right. I admit I’ve never thought about the subject in those terms.”

  “Probably because you’ve never had to think about it. Most people take the ability to lie for granted, whether or not they approve of it.”

  “But not you.”

  “I was forced to develop a slightly different perspective.” She paused. “What I’ve always found fascinating is that the vast majority of people, nonparasensitive and sensitive alike, think they know when someone else is lying. That’s true around the world. But the reality is that the research shows that most folks can detect a lie only slightly better than fifty percent of the time. They might as well flip a coin.”

  “What about the experts? Cops and other law enforcement types?”

  “According to the studies they aren’t much better at picking out liars, at least not in a controlled lab situation. The problem is that the cues people assume correlate with lying, such as avoiding eye contact or sweating, generally don’t work.”

  “You can’t count on Pinocchio’s nose growing, huh?”

  “It’s not a total myth,” she said. “Physical cues do exist but they vary a lot from one individual to another. If you know a person well, you’ve got a much better shot at picking up on a lie, but otherwise it’s a crapshoot. Like I said, lying is a natural human ability and we’re all probably a lot better at it than we want to admit.”

  “You said that Brad McAllister’s lies were different.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “Brad was a different kind of liar,” she said quietly. “He was ultraviolet.”

  “Ultraviolet?”

  “My private code for evil.”

  “Heavy word.”

  “It was the right one for Brad, trust me. The ability to lie is a very powerful tool. In and of itself, I consider it to be value-neutral, sort of like fire.”

  “But like fire it can be turned into a weapon, is that it?”

  “Exactly.” She folded her arms. “You can cook a meal with fire or burn down a house. In the hands of a person with evil intent, lying can be used to cause enormous damage.”

  “What makes you think Brad McAllister was evil? From all accounts he was a devoted husband who stuck with Elizabeth through her nervous breakdown.”

  She whipped around in the seat, suddenly fierce and furious. “That image was the biggest Brad McAllister lie of all. And it really pisses me off that it still stands, even though the bastard is dead.”

  He absorbed that. “What did McAllister do to make you dislike him so much?”

  “Brad didn’t stick by Elizabeth while she went through her nervous breakdown. He caused her breakdown. But Elizabeth and I have given up trying to make anyone, including Archer and Myra, believe that. As far as the whole town of Stone Canyon is concerned, Brad was a heroic choirboy right to the end.”

  Jake gave that some thought. “Okay, what’s your theory of the murder?”

  She hesitated and then sank slowly back into the seat. “There doesn’t seem to be any reason to doubt the cops’ version of events. Brad probably did
interrupt a burglary in progress.”

  “Now who’s lying? You don’t believe that for a minute, do you?”

  She sighed. “No. But I don’t have a better answer, either.”

  “Not even a tiny theory?”

  “All I know is that Brad was evil. Evil people collect enemies. Maybe one of them tracked him down and killed him that night.”

  “But you have no motive, aside from the fact that Brad was not a nice person.”

  “Sometimes that’s enough.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes it is.”

  There was a short silence.

  “By the way,” Clare said after a moment. “We need to watch for the Indian School Road exit.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my motel is on a street off Indian School Road,” she said patiently.

  “Thought you said your hotel was out at the airport.”

  “I lied.”

  Chapter Four

  The best that could be said about the Desert Dawn Motel was that it made no pretense of being anything other than what it was: a run-down, low-end, budget-class establishment from another era. The two-story structure was badly in need of a coat of paint. Rusted air conditioners thundered in the night.

  Most of the landscaping had died back in the Jurassic. Only a few hardy barrel cacti and one wilted palm had survived. The letter s in the red and yellow neon sign snapped and crackled and blinked annoyingly.

  Clare felt a distinct pang of embarrassment when Jake eased the BMW into a parking space near the entrance to the shabby lobby. She suppressed it immediately.

  Jake turned off the engine and regarded the limp palm tree that graced the cracked concrete sidewalk.

  “You know,” he said, “if you had mentioned that you were coming into town this evening, the Glazebrook travel department would have been happy to make reservations for you at a slightly more upscale hotel. I’ll bet they could have found you something where the bathroom isn’t down the hall.”

  “There’s a bathroom in my room, thank you very much.” She unclasped the seat belt and opened the door.

  Jake got out and took her wet clothes out of the trunk. Together they walked toward the lobby.

  “Mind telling me why you chose this place?” he asked politely.