Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

lawyer, right?”
    “Yes. Hi, Ricky.”
    “Listen, would it be unethical—I mean, would you have a conflict of interest… ? Look, I need a lawyer.”
    “Your three minutes are up,” said the operator.
    “Ricky, give me your number. I’ll call you right back.” I’d suddenly realized his voice didn’t sound right. This wasn’t the cocky Ricky of the morning. This one sounded scared. When I had him on the line again, I said, “Okay, talk slowly. Is this about Sadie?”
    “No. It’s not. I think someone else is dead.”
    “You think?”
    “Can you meet me in Pebble Beach? Now?”
    “Ricky, listen to me. If you’re not sure this person’s dead, call the police.”
    He gave me the address and hung up. Damn! Why did the term bimbo apply only to women? Frenzied, I dialed the number Ricky had given me and held my breath. Someone answered on the fifth ring. “Ricky?”
    “You want the guy who was just here?”
    “Please. It’s an emergency.”
    “Hey!” Whoever it was shouted in my ear. “Hey! Some lady wants you. It’s an emergency.”
    To my surprise, Ricky came back. A good sign. He was behaving like a little boy afraid to defy his mother. If you had to have a kid for a client, it might as well be an obedient one.
    “I can’t take your case if you’re not going to follow instructions.”
    “Okay. She’s dead. I’m sure. I’m certain. Okay?” He sounded more frightened and more childlike with each word. He hung up again, this time resoundingly, now the petulant child. But I believed him. Whoever the woman was, I didn’t think anything could be done for her. I hoped my instinct was right.
    Ava was hovering, starting to wash the dirty wineglasses. I was sure she’d heard every word, but too bad, I wasn’t used to using a kitchen as an office. “Tell Julio I had to go out,” I said briskly. I’d memorized the address Ricky gave me, but now I wrote it very deliberately on the memo pad beside the phone. “If you don’t hear from me in two hours, call the police and give them this address, will you?”
    I hoped that thus being taken into my confidence would discourage her from telling Julio or anyone else what she’d heard—and it would serve as a genuine backup in case Ricky was up to no good. But somehow I wasn’t really nervous about that. For all I knew, he had killed the woman he’d called about, but I didn’t see him doing any more damage in his current state.
    I found him pacing outside a mammoth Spanish-style house, a beautiful house up a long driveway with a gate. The gate had been left open.
    Ricky’s face was red. I was sure he’d been crying. He was no longer wearing the baseball cap, and he’d changed to fresh jeans and a clean shirt.
    “Come,” he said, and he led me to a side window, a broken one, broken from the outside, the shards of glass resting on thick carpeting inside. The room was a kind of library, or perhaps a study, lined with books (though many had been tossed on the floor) and furnished with desk and chairs. It was a good, functional workroom and would have been a lovely, restful area as well if it hadn’t been for the revolting spectacle of a woman dead on the floor, and the disarray of her fight for her life. A Lhasa apso rose from its post beside the body, trotted to the window, and nearly tore its tiny paws to shreds on broken glass as it tried to climb the wall, barking, snarling, and protecting. “Does she look dead to you?”
    “Yes.”
    “She is. I did a dumb thing.”
    “Yes?”
    “I’m the one who broke the window. She didn’t answer the door, and Mellors was barking, back here—that was the funny thing. He should have been up near the front door, where I was. So I came and looked in the window. I saw her like that and—I just didn’t think—I broke the window and jumped in. Mellors bit me.” He held up his right hand, punctured at the wrist.
    I murmured something about a tetanus shot, my mind racing, trying to take it all in.
    “She was cold. I think she’s been dead a long time.”
    “Why didn’t the alarm go off when you broke the window?”
    His boyish face registered utter bewilderment. “The alarm?”
    “A house like this must have an alarm. Did you turn it off when you came in?”
    “No. My God, if it
had
gone off—”
    “And why didn’t you phone from here?”
    “I panicked. I made sure she was dead and I jumped back out the window—I even forgot to let Mellors out, the library door is shut, that’s why he