Smoke in Mirrors

looking glasses.”
    “People get killed for all kinds of stupid reasons,” Deke growled.
    Leonora waited a beat.
    “Like drugs,” she said quietly.
    Both men looked at her.
    She spread her fingertips on the desk. “That’s one of the connections between Meredith and Bethany, remember? Rumors of drug use.”
    “Bullshit,” Deke said. “Bethany would never have used crap.”
    “Meredith didn’t use it, either. I’d swear to that.” She looked at Thomas and Deke in turn. “Do you have a source for those rumors you said circulated after Bethany and Meredith died?”
    Thomas sank deeper into his chair. “Ed Stovall mentioned them. When I pinned him down about Bethany, demanding details, he said he’d heard the story from a kid he picked up for possession of pot. Stovall said the kid knew nothing solid. Just mentioned some gossip that was going around the local scene about a designer drug, a new hallucinogen that had appeared from time to time in the past couple of years.”
    “Hallucinogen?” Leonora repeated.

    “Something the drug crowd has labeled S and M, apparently,” Thomas said.
    She frowned. “As in sadomasochism?”
    “No. As in Smoke and Mirrors. Ed said that’s what the kid called it. There was no way to confirm the talk.”
    “Because Bethany never used drugs,” Deke said fiercely.
    “Take it easy, Deke,” Thomas said quietly. “No one’s arguing that point. Not even Stovall.”
    “Ed Stovall is an idiot.”
    “I don’t think so,” Thomas said. “He’s definitely anal-retentive, but that’s probably a good thing in a cop.”
    “How, exactly,” Leonora asked, “did Bethany kill herself?”
    “She jumped off a bluff on Cliff Drive,” Thomas said quietly.
    Leonora studied her hands. “People have been known to think they can fly while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. A person might jump off a cliff or crash her car while under the influence.”
    “But we’re all certain that neither Bethany or Meredith would have used heavy drugs, remember?” Thomas said. “And in this case, we’ve got the authorities on our side. They’re not saying the deaths were drug-related.”
    Deke looked up from the catalog. “Doesn’t mean some bastard couldn’t have slipped some unique kind of poison into their food or a glass of orange juice. The routine tests done at the time of death wouldn’t catch something as new and exotic as this S and M stuff, anyhow. It takes a lot of expensive, time-consuming testing to pick up that kind of crap.”
    “But why?” Thomas asked patiently. “Where’s the motive?”
    They all looked at the book again.

    “We don’t have a lot to work with here, do we?” Leonora asked finally.
    “We know one thing for sure,” Deke said. “We know that things don’t add up. We’ve also got these clippings and this book. That’s more than we had before you arrived in town, Leonora.”
    “But where do we go now?” she asked.
    Thomas unsteepled his fingers.
    Leonora and Deke both looked at him.
    “What?” Leonora prompted. “Got an idea?”
    “If you want to start somewhere, Deke,” Thomas said deliberately, “I guess you could check out the murder of Sebastian Eubanks.”
    Leonora frowned. “Why?”
    “What good would that do?” Deke demanded. “Eubanks was killed thirty years ago.”
    “I’m not saying it will get us anywhere,” Thomas said. “But as Leonora just pointed out, we haven’t got a lot to work with. One of the few facts we do have is that, for some reason, the Eubanks murder apparently interested Bethany enough to cause her to make copies of the newspaper stories concerning the case and later Meredith put them into a safe-deposit box for us. That’s something. Not much, I agree, but something.”
    “You’re right.” Deke flattened his palm possessively on the photocopies. “I’ll get on it right away. Doubt if there will be anything out there on the Net because the story is so old but the library has microfilm of the Wing Cove Star that goes back to the founding of the paper.”
    There had been a distinct change in Deke since she had first met him an hour ago, Leonora thought. There was a new crispness in the way he folded his spectacles and dropped them into his pocket. His facial expression was more alert, more alive. The moody, gloomy quality wasgone. In its place was renewed determination. Deke was now a man with a mission.
    She glanced at Thomas. Something in his face told her that he had mixed