St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

exactly sweat to exterminate it, either. It’s an open secret in the Mormon West.”
    Zack watched while Jill bent over, picked up a rock, and sent it out over the pasture with a vicious snap of her arm.
    “Anyway,” she said, “Mom somehow got word to her aunt.”
    “Modesty Breck.”
    “Yes. A few days later Modesty came and brought us to the Breck ranch. I shed my polyg clothes—bonnet and long skirts—cut off my long braids with a kitchen knife. I learned to ride, rope, brand, handle hay bales, and mend fence.”
    “Your father just let your mother go?” Zach asked.
    “Oh, he came to take us back. Once.”
    “What happened?”
    Jill’s smile was both real and cold. “Modesty ran him off with a snake gun. Told him if he ever walked on Breck land again, she’d kill him and bury him in the kitchen garden, because all he was good for was fertilizer.”
    Zach laughed. “I think I would have liked your great-aunt.”
    “She wouldn’t have liked you. She didn’t have any use for men.Mom took back her maiden name and changed mine, too. None of the Breck women have entered a tabernacle since.”
    “Yet you live in an overwhelmingly Mormon county.”
    “That’s why I was home-schooled.”
    “No wonder you don’t trust the sheriff,” Zach said. “You don’t trust anyone in civil authority.”
    “Not when the Latter-day Saints are involved. Ned Purcell is an elder in the church. Every elected official around here is publicly devout. More than a few of them have plural marriages, though nobody talks about it.”
    “School roll call must get monotonous,” Zach said dryly.
    “Oh, they’re not stupid. Everybody but the first wife picks a last name out of a telephone book. Daddy is called uncle, except for the children of the first wife.” Jill fired another rock into the pasture. “When it comes to women, this place is stuck in the 1850s.”
    “You’ll be happy to know that St. Kilda Consulting is firmly grounded in the twenty-first century,” Zach said.
    “Joe Faroe certainly is. He respected my skill on the river. Actually, he enjoyed it. He really didn’t care that a female was better at something physical than he was. That’s pretty rare in a man, no matter what the year.”
    “You’d like his wife.”
    “I already like his son. There’s nothing wrong with Lane that a few more years won’t cure. He’s going to be a good man.”
    “Full circle.”
    “What?” she asked.
    “From your childhood to the river where you saved Lane’s life to my knocking on your hotel room door because someone threatened to kill you. Funny thing…”
    She raised an eyebrow.
    Zach looked back at her. “You haven’t mentioned the paintings once.”

18
    HOLLYWOOD
SEPTEMBER 14
1:00 P.M.
    N o problemo,” Score said into the telephone. “I’ve got the kind of evidence you can’t use in court, but he’ll sweat big bucks after you show him the airline manifest and the photos from the kiddy whorehouse in Thailand. He’ll not only pay you alimony, he’ll kiss your ass with gratitude for not selling everything to the Enquirer .” He paused. “No, the Enquirer won’t pay more for the photos than he will. Trust me on that.”
    Another phone rang. Someone in the front office picked it up. Seconds later, a light blinked on his intercom, telling him that his next appointment was waiting. He wrapped up his conversation, assured the client that the photos were coming by special messenger to her lawyer, hung up, and hit the intercom button.
    “Send her in,” Score said.
    His door opened to one of his tech specialists. At the moment her hair was dyed black with green tips. The nose and lip studs were missing, but the tongue bell was still there.
    Made him drool to think about it, so he didn’t. She was one of his best techs. He didn’t care if she showed up naked with pins stuck everywhere.
    But she had a way of redlining his temper. No respect.
    “Sit down,” Score said. “What do you have?”
    “Not much,” Amy said. “I ran it through every electronic cleaner program we have. Still sounds like she packed the bug in a suitcase stuffed with clothes.”
    “Better than nothing.”
    Amy shrugged and handed over some pages of script.
    A glance at the first page told Score what he already knew. The locater was alive and well. The subject was about twenty miles from the old lady’s ranch. Heading home, because there sure wasn’t anywhere else in that part of the world to go.
    “Huh. Did she rent