Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

slight comfort. Only slight.
    Sue called around to try to find rooms in a motel—and hoped she could take their dog, too. Sneaking a Great Dane into a motel or hotel wouldn’t be nearly as easy as if they had a poodle or a Pomeranian. As it turned out, it didn’t matter; there were no motel rooms available. Seattle’s Seafair celebration had just begun, and thousands of tourists were in the city to enjoy it, filling hotels and motels located within a thirty-mile radius of Seattle.
    It was after 1 A.M. Everyone was exhausted and it looked as though they had no choice but for Sue and Scott to move into Carol’s house; that wasn’t an ideal solution, but at least it was away from their house. From what Cloyd Steiger had told Sue, it sounded as though someone knew exactly where she, Jenny, and Scott lived, what cars they drove, almost everything about them.
    Someone could be outside in the trees watching their house right now, waiting for Sue and Scott to come back home to take a bead on them with a high-powered rifle as they got out of their car. No, they couldn’t go home.
    Sue wished that she could tell Scott and Jenny what was going on. If she could, they wouldn’t be giving her such a hard time. They probably believed she’d really gone crazy.
    It might have been easier if she had.
     
    Yancy Carrothers had enjoyed his freedom for a very short time. He had accomplished some of the items on his mental “to do” list, but he drank too much one night and found himself back in the King County Jail. Once there, he was gripped by anxiety, and he made a number of attempts to get a letter to Bill Jensen, and sent kites out to someone he had worked with before. Yancy also tried to place a number of collect phone calls—the only way jail prisoners can call out.
    At last he had connected.
    On July 24, Bill Jensen had an unexpected visitor. A very attractive young black woman named Lisa was waiting for him in the visiting area. She had a great body, and her hair was done in an intricate series of cornrows.
    Jensen walked to Stall 4 and sat down; Lisa took a seat opposite him, and they each picked up a phone on their sides of the glass partition.
    “Hi,” she said, smiling. “I’m Lisa.”
    “Hi, I’m William. Nice to meet you.”
    Lisa explained that “Y” was in jail again because he’d been arrested for failing to check in with his probation officer.
    “Oh,” Bill Jensen said, looking somewhat relieved. “I thought I got scammed. Is he in here now?”
    She quickly explained that he was, but that it wasn’t because of any trouble about Bill’s “business” transaction with him.
    “Good. I didn’t know what happened. I thought everything went sideways.”
    Lisa shook her head slightly and then discreetly removed a white envelope from her bra, opened it, and removed a sheet of yellow legal paper. She held the bottom quarter of it up to the glass partition so Bill could read it. It was a letter of introduction from Yancy. As he read, Lisa saw a corrections officer heading toward them, and she grabbed the note and hid it between her legs. She made small talk until the guard moved on, and then put the note up to the glass again.
    Bill read swiftly, and then said, “Okay, I got it.”
    Lisa tore the note into small pieces, put it back in the envelope, and sealed it.
    “Good, good,” Bill said, satisfied that Yancy had sent her.
    “You supposed to sign out a prescription and some pills from your property to me?” Lisa asked.
    “Oh shit,” he stammered. “I can’t do it. I thought I got scammed, and my sister came and got all my property.”
    “What’s the message for Y?” she asked.
    “Okay. Let me think. Let me think. Okay, tell him it’s a go.”
    Lisa told him she was concerned that the pain pills were gone. Y’s brother wanted the pills to do his part of the plan. “Can’t you get them from your sister?”
    “No—there’s not any way—not without raising suspicions. Just tell him it’s a go.”
    Lisa explained that Y had a different visitor’s day, and she wouldn’t be seeing him today to tell him that Bill hadn’t come through with his part of the deal.
    “I can have the other half of the money by the fourteenth,” he promised.
    She told him that Yancy didn’t go for people changing plans on him. She ticked off the instructions Bill had for Yancy on her fingertips, asking, “Anything else?”
    “Yeah. Tell him it has to be done by the first because my trial starts the