Less Than Frank.

Lynn Bulock.

To Joe, always.

And To his mother, Louise.

Without her, there wouldn't be a Gracie Lee.

Acknowledgments.

As usual, I owe a great deal to so many for their help on this book. Thanks to Craig and Kristine Beeker for their help in reminding me to give G.o.d the glory in everything. To Lou Fiore and Dennis of Dreamtree Construction for showing me how skillful, honest contractors work so that I could make Frank their polar opposite. And through this deadline and several others, Leonardo, Letty and the rest of the crew at Three Amigos have kept me supplied with the best fish tacos in Ventura County. Thanks also to the three people, besides my wonderful family, who listen to me whine the most: Annie Jones, Linda F. and my fantastic agent, Nancy Yost.

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.

Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.

-Matthew 10:16.

Chapter One.

I love my son dearly but I do believe he's the worst bathroom hog in three counties. I'd forgotten how long Ben spent on the simpler tasks in life, such as taking a shower, until we had to share the same bathroom on a regular basis for the first time in over a year.

I'm already getting ahead of myself. My name is Gracie Lee Harris, and I am a transplanted Midwesterner slowly getting used to a new life in Southern California. After nearly eighteen months here, I feel like I belong now-for the most part. It hasn't been an easy time of it, but anyplace where you can wear shorts and a T-shirt the week after Thanksgiving has its good points.

Of course, my friends who are natives would say that the mere fact that I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts this late into the fall was proof that I hadn't adapted yet. My Missouri blood just hasn't thinned enough to be cold yet at sixty degrees. To me, "cold" means you have to sc.r.a.pe stuff off your windshield and those little hairs inside your nose freeze when you go outside to get the newspaper. Here, "cold" means anything in the fifties or below, and that's when folks start wearing their heavy sweaters.

The change in weather and how people react to it has taken almost as much effort to get used to as the more severe changes in my life. I moved out here as a woman married less than two years to a handsome self-employed businessman. Then Dennis Peete promptly drove his car off the road, leaving him comatose in long-term care for close to six months while I bunked in with my mother-in-law. And that was the fun part.

From there things only got worse, other than the fact that I found a wonderful group of women to support me during a really rough time when Dennis died. The Christian Friends group at Conejo Community Chapel kept me sane during what I can easily say was the worst period of my life so far. But even they, with their bountiful wisdom, didn't have many hints on how to get a teenaged male out of the bathroom.

In fact, in an odd twist of things, I am the only one in my particular group to have much experience with teenaged males at all. Linnette Parks, our group leader and my new best friend, has two daughters just past the teen stage and launching into adulthood. Dot Morgan, who is my landlady now that I am living in her garage apartment, has a daughter as well. Candace is in her thirties, but has Down syndrome and functions on a teen level most of the time. She lives in a group home in Camarillo, and I've met her several times when she's come home to go to church with her mom and dad at Conejo Community Chapel with the rest of us.

Lexy Adams doesn't have kids yet, although not for lack of trying. She may look like an early-thirties go-getter attorney, but she'd love to have baby drool stains on that blazer lapel, believe me.

The Christian Friends member I knew the least about, Paula Choi, lost her only daughter in a car crash a few years before I'd joined the group. And the newest member of the group besides me, Heather Taylor, has a beautiful nine-month-old daughter, Corinna Grace, who also happened to be my late husband Dennis's child.

It's a long story, and one we're done hashing over, for the most part. Heather and I are still trying to get our hands on the money that vanished once we gave it to Dennis, but that's going to go on for a while. Thanks to the way he left things, his estate and his late mother's have been tangled up together in a legal dispute that may take years to get through the courts.

Of course that tangled legal web was somewhat to blame for me sharing one lone bathroom with my college freshman when he came home weekends and such from Pacific Oaks Christian College. He'd spent the long Thanksgiving weekend with me in the apartment, and even put off going back to his dorm today until he absolutely had to. Apparently my company was preferable to five other male suite-mates when it came to preparing for cla.s.s on a Monday morning.

Of course that didn't help me out when he went into the bathroom, locked all the doors and took an hour-long shower. Dot and Buck have been planning to renovate the apartment ever since I moved in back in February. The original plans were for the galley kitchen and the bath to both be done when I came home from Ben's high-school graduation in June with Ben in tow.

Thanks to a variety of problems, from the endless number of permits required by the city of Rancho Conejo to the unavailability of some of the appliances they'd picked out and that unfortunate problem at the tile factory, nothing was even started at that point. There were great plans in the works, but no actual remodeling until some time in July. Naturally the first thing to show up then was the portable-how do I put it nicely?-facility that parked on the driveway, required by any construction project of this size. Since then we'd slogged through the kitchen remodel and started, just barely, on the bathroom. At this point Dot and Buck were getting fairly peeved, and personally I was ready to strangle the general contractor, Cousin Frank.

Frank Collins really was a cousin, related to Dot on her mother's side of the family in a distant way. He was one of those relatives she wasn't particularly fond of claiming, and once he'd been working on the apartment where I now lived for a couple of weeks, I could see why.

Somewhere in his late 30s or early 40s with thinning brown hair and a gut that overrode his fashionably low-hanging jeans, Frank was crude, loud and aggravating. He wasn't nice to anybody that worked for him, and half the time didn't even appear to remember their names. I had a sneaking suspicion that the Thermos he carried to drink out of on breaks was loaded with something a lot stronger than plain black coffee, but I hadn't shared my concerns with Dot. She had enough to deal with right now on the remodeling issues with Frank. Why add one more to the pile?

Most mornings he drove a beat-up full-sized pickup truck to the job site before I was really ready to get out of bed, and expected to start work on the bathroom immediately. It was hard enough to deal with when I was the only one in the apartment. At times like this, when Ben was sharing it with me, it was way past annoying. If the early starts had meant that Frank was actually getting something done every day I could be more understanding. Instead, the work is still moving at a snail's pace.

The whole idea of this bathroom remodel was to make this a functioning apartment where two people could share all the facilities without getting in each other's way too much. I think Buck and Dot are still considering that Candace may be back here some day, and while she enjoys as much independence as possible, she's not capable of living on her own.

Even with two independent adults, the new bathroom design will be great once it's done. Dot had the idea to reshape the existing s.p.a.ce into three smaller compartments, with a commode and sink in each of the side units, and a nice shower, tub and lots of storage in the middle unit. She says fancy housing developments call that a "Jack and Jill" bathroom and I'll take her word for it. I've never been able to consider fancy housing developments on my take-home pay, especially in southern California.

The part.i.tion walls are up now on all three parts of the bathroom, and if there was functioning plumbing in my side of the "Jack and Jill" part, life would be a lot easier when Ben showed up like this. Of course with my luck he'd still lock all the doors on all the connecting parts of the bathroom, making it impossible for me to use whatever he's not using anyway. It's a moot point right now, because only half the plumbing is finished to date. One can use "Jack's" side of the bathroom, and the shower works. "Jill" and the tub are coming soon, according to Frank. But then everything has been slated to happen "soon" since Labor Day, so I'm not real optimistic.

I'd gotten up early on this Monday morning hoping to get going with my routine before Ben had to bolt out the door to head for school. He had earlier cla.s.ses than I did this semester, which was truly ironic since he is not a morning person at 18, while I definitely am at 39. But then, I'm "only" doing nine hours of graduate work and working two part-time jobs, while he's taking a full load for a freshman.

Setting that early alarm often gets me up before Frank shows up, and before Ben claims the bathroom on those mornings he's here. But today I managed to hit the snooze b.u.t.ton once and it was my undoing. I got about thirty seconds in the bathroom before Ben knocked on the door telling me he was going to be late for cla.s.s if he didn't get in there right away.

At that point I brushed my teeth quickly, hollered through the closed door to his room that the bathroom was now his, unlocked his door and scuttled through the shower compartment to my room. I didn't even see him through all of that; just heard him thumping around in his room and cranking up the music.

I pulled on clothes, then went and made breakfast for the two of us. That took about half an hour, but of course his shower took longer. The cinnamon rolls out of a can that I'd put together were cold by now, I'd read the newspaper, and still the kid was showering. I'd looked out the front window a couple times expecting to see movement around Frank's truck, but there wasn't any. It was parked at the end of Dot and Buck's long driveway as usual, and I dimly remembered hearing him pull in this morning, or at least I thought I had heard him. I'd heard some engine noises and door-slamming at some point, anyway.

Beyond that I hadn't heard anything else from him, which probably meant he was expecting to do something right away that needed two men. That usually posed a problem for Frank if he made those plans to happen first thing in the morning, because the only person less reliable than Cousin Frank was his helper, Darnell.

There had been a lot of different subcontractors working with Frank over the months since he started this job, and I'd noticed one thing that they almost all had in common. Everybody had an apprentice or a helper, or something like that, depending on how organized their business was. If they were an actual union shop, there was an apprentice, maybe even somebody working up to journeyman status. The smaller organizations had a helper, and if it was a really small business, that helper was often family and might be part-time. Almost all of them were of the same variety as Darnell; tall, weedy, pushing thirty and likely to vanish on good surf days when they always claimed sickness or a death in the family.

Darnell couldn't claim the death-in-the-family routine because he was marginally related to Frank at about the same distance that Frank was related to Dot. But he found other reasons often enough to fail to show up, and this appeared to be one of those days. I figured he'd probably spent Thanksgiving either at the beach or in Vegas-again-and was recuperating this morning. Since the weather had been only marginal in the last four days, I expected it was Vegas that had claimed his attention. It's only a five-or six-hour drive from Rancho Conejo to the Strip and the devotees take advantage of that whenever they can.

When Frank was left alone like this, he usually commandeered the little house on the driveway and s.n.a.t.c.hed my newspaper to keep him company. Maybe this morning he was turning over a new leaf, because I got my paper all to myself.

It was verging on an hour now and Ben was still in the shower, or shaving with the water running hard, or something. All I knew was that the music thumped good and loud in his bedroom, the water was still running and all the doors were locked. I decided to do up the few dishes I'd used fixing breakfast. That was good time management, but probably a mistake otherwise. The moment my hands were in that lukewarm dishwater, I needed to be where Ben was. And naturally he couldn't hear me knock over the music in the bedroom.

Going down the outside stairs to ground level for the second time this morning, I decided to check the portable potty. Frank must have found another newspaper someplace, because the sign above the door latch was flipped to "occupied." He was as responsive to my knock as Ben.

Normally there would be an easy answer to my problem just on the other side of the driveway. Buck and Dot didn't mind me coming over in emergencies, or even most nonemergencies. Being that close a distance to a friendly landlady was like having family living that close in all the good and bad ways that entailed. Dot felt like an aunt to me most of the time anyway. But this morning they weren't around, having taken off even earlier than I'd gotten up to deliver a puppy from the kennels to a new owner several hours away.

Buck was one of the best dog trainers in Ventura County, and the kennels behind their house were always at least half-full of really nice dogs. He didn't go for purebreds as a rule, catering more towards the intelligent, friendly dogs he could train for movie stunt work or-his favorite-as therapy dogs at the nearby hospitals and nursing homes. Along with my first part-time job as a barista at the Coffee Corner at Pacific Oak, my second paid job was with Morgan Kennels helping out while they were between full-time workers.

Normally I would have been feeding dogs and tidying kennels by now, but since they'd had to get up early for puppy delivery anyway, Dot told me she would take the morning shift today and give me a break. The puppy was the last of a litter to be handed out before Christmas; Buck was adamant about live animals not being Christmas gifts or birthday presents, so they were the one kennel in the area that did little business in December. We'd played with the feisty little lab mix all of Thanksgiving weekend, making sure he got socialized with every person and animal Buck could throw at him so that he'd be a good guy for his new owner. He was probably so worn out that he would sleep on the floor of the van in his crate all the way up to his new home this morning.

Still, that didn't help my current predicament. I went back up the stairs to knock on Ben's door. It remained locked, the music still blasting and I could still hear water running. That didn't help me out any, either. I thought about trying to pop the lock and get into the bedroom at least, but it was a fairly st.u.r.dy door. Coupled with the fact that I had no desire whatsoever to see more of my son than I'd seen since he was about nine and stopped running around the house less than fully clothed, I pa.s.sed on that idea.

That left me only with going downstairs and knocking until I got a response out of Frank. He, at least, would open the door to where he was with all his clothes on, even though he'd probably have some rude or snide remark for me. At this point I was willing to endure either. The morning air felt colder every time I went out on the second story deck outside my front door. Going down the flight of stairs, I crossed the short expanse of asphalt to where the green-and-yellow facility stood. For the most part it was an aggravation to have it out on the driveway, where it had been since July. It was a reminder that work on the apartment had been slower than mola.s.ses in January, as my Granny Lou would have said. Right now, though, I was thankful to have the silly thing there.

I'd hoped that maybe Frank would be outside on his cell phone by now, trying to figure out where Darnell was, but the pavement was still empty. First I knocked on the door and called Frank's name softly. I don't know who I was worried about disturbing; with Dot and Buck gone, n.o.body else could have heard me. When knocking politely didn't work, I pounded on the door and jiggled the handle, which I saw wasn't really set all the way to lock, but only about halfway. That made me hopeful that perhaps n.o.body was in there after all, and somebody had just closed the door that way for a prank.

There was still no answer on the other side, but pounding on the door felt like there was something resisting the movement inside. "Come on, whatever's going on in there, it's not funny. Open the door," I said. Or rather yelled by now. That much noise set the outside kennel dogs barking for the first time that morning, but didn't cause any answer inside the facility.

I shoved the door hard in frustration and the latch slid with the movement. All of a sudden the door pushed open towards me with something or someone heavy leaning outwards in a rush.

I expected a roar from Frank, or whoever was on the other side, and braced myself for an argument. Instead the door just kept pushing forward until I had to get out of the way of the falling object cascading out of the s.p.a.ce. Once the door was open I looked down at the asphalt in horror. Frank lay on the pavement not moving, eyes wide open, with a tiny neat hole between his bushy eyebrows.

There was a scream coming from somewhere that was even louder than the dogs barking around me. It took the longest time for me to realize that the scream was coming from me. Only the sight and sound of Ben charging out the front door of the apartment yelling, "Mom? What's wrong?" got me back from the edge of hysteria.

"Go inside and call 911," I told him, trying to keep him away from the area below. Looking down at Frank again, I knew it was too late for even the emergency officers who would respond, but I didn't know what else to do except pray and wait for them to show up. It looked like Ben was going to be late to cla.s.s after all.

Chapter Two.

"I was afraid of this." The detective standing in front of me looked like a television cop on the best shows; tall, dark, handsome and upset. Unfortunately he also looked very familiar. I'd seen all too much of Ray Fernandez last winter when Dennis had been killed.

Ray was the Ventura County Sheriff's Department homicide detective who had briefly considered arresting me for my husband's murder. After that he even more seriously tried to pin the blame on Heather. Fortunately he came to his senses before making a terrible mistake. After several weeks that were traumatic for all of us after Dennis's death, he'd found the person who had actually killed him. And although I'd been a big part of helping him solve the murder, he hadn't seemed real appreciative at the time.

"I had nothing to do with this one, honest," I told him, putting up my palms in a cla.s.sic protestation of innocence. "I just found him."

"That's enough right there to have me concerned, Ms. Harris. Even finding a body gets you involved." He opened his notebook, shrugged his shoulders under a beautifully tailored gray jacket that might have been Armani and gave me a thorough once-over. "Aren't you cold?"

"No, I'm not." I tried not to snap, but it didn't work. He seemed surprised at the strength of my response. "Sorry, but you're about the fourth person in less than an hour to ask that."

Ben had asked when he charged out to tell me he'd called 911. Then one of the paramedics asked when he'd finished with Frank, which unfortunately didn't take long. Apparently it was pretty obvious to a trained medical professional that Frank was beyond help. Probably had something to do with that hole in the middle of his forehead that I suspected was a gunshot wound.

Shortly after that the first police officer on the scene, a uniformed young man from the sheriff's department, had put in his two cents worth as well on whether or not I was cold. He hadn't volunteered an opinion on what had happened to Frank.

"You look cold, Ms. Harris," Ray Fernandez said. We were back on formal terms again, apparently. By the end of last spring's investigation he called me Gracie Lee and I called him Ray. "I could lend you my jacket, or you could go inside the apartment and grab a sweatshirt or something."

"Why don't I do that, just to make all of you chilled Californians comfortable," I said, trying not to grind out my words between clenched teeth. I stomped up the stairs, grabbed a black Pacific Oaks hoodie that had been draped over a living room chair, threw it on over my shorts and T-shirt and came back. If I'd had some of those dreadful pastel sheepskin-lined boots the girls all wore, I would have put them on just for effect.

"Now, are you satisfied?"

"That's great. It gave me enough time to call and make sure the crime-scene techs are on their way, and to start my notes," Fernandez said. He looked pretty good this morning; obviously there hadn't been enough stress in his day yet to make him appear to have one of his perpetual migraines. There were still a few crinkles around those golden-brown eyes, but nothing serious yet. What was there already could have been laugh lines, even though I haven't seen him laugh much.

He looked down at the notebook in his hands. "So, it's still Gracie Lee Harris, right?"

"It's going to stay Gracie Lee Harris until the cows come home," I told him, earning a funny look. "Don't worry, there are no cows in the kennels here, just dogs. When I'm upset I revert to things my grandmother used to say. Yes, the name is still the same. And you probably have the address from last time, too."

He nodded. "I knew when the call came in that I'd heard the address before. About halfway here I figured out why it was familiar."

He didn't look all that happy about his memories, either. But then the weeks we'd spent in way too much of each other's company in January and February weren't my favorite times, either. He looked up on the deck, and then around the property. "The information from the dispatcher says that the call was phoned in by a man. Do you happen to know anything about that?"

"Only that your dispatcher is being plenty generous in designating the caller that way. The caller is my son, Ben. He's a freshman at Pacific Oaks now. He's got cla.s.ses this morning, but I told him you'd want to see him before he took off."

Fernandez smiled, a motion that lit up that lean Latino face of his, and definitely insured that I now felt way too warm in my sweatshirt. "Thanks. At least you've started out by making my job easier," the detective said. "Would there happen to be a fresh pot of coffee going? Getting over here did in any chance I had for a cup this morning."

At least he wasn't yelling yet. This was a good sign. "Sure. I can get you a cup when I send Ben out as far as the deck. Could you interview him up there? I don't really want him to get any closer to Frank."

The smile disappeared. "Yeah, sure. I hadn't even thought about that. Sorry. I see so much every day that I don't consider that some people haven't ever seen a dead body."

"As long as you can keep him up on the deck, and facing away from the railing, I think it will be okay," I told him. "About that coffee...you still take it black, right?"

"Right. Thank you." He sounded a little stiff and formal again, but then it was a murder investigation. He had every right to sound that way. I went upstairs to find that Ben was making the most of his time away from cla.s.s by playing a quick game on my computer in the living room. I suggested that he shut the game down, poured the detective his black coffee in one of my better-looking coffee mugs and told Ben to take the coffee outside and let Fernandez take a statement from him.

"Cool. Maybe I can even get him to write me an excuse for my Philosophy of Religion cla.s.s." Ben took the mug and went out the door, while I pondered whether to follow him as a worried mother, or stay inside because he was a legal adult and I suspected the detective would rather talk to him alone.

I went for the "legal adult" argument for a while. Then the worried mother won out about five minutes into their conversation. I slipped out the front door of the apartment as quietly as possible and stood about eight feet behind the detective, watching him talk to my son.

It was odd looking at Ben and seeing him the way a stranger might; tall and thin, with his angular face made even longer by the awful scraggly little patch of chin fur I couldn't convince him to shave off. He looked like a normal college kid in his Pac-Oaks sweatshirt and long, baggy tan shorts. Except for that scrawny little goatee, he also bore a striking resemblance to his father at about the same age. Hal Harris had been a nineteen-year-old college student when I'd met him, and it floored me to see Ben morph into a modern version of his father. He even had the same grin that I'm sure enchanted the girls at Pacific Oaks just as much as it had me back in the dark ages.

Fernandez must have heard me come out onto the deck, because he half turned. "We're just about done here, Ms. Harris. Of course I'll need to ask you to stick around so that I can take a longer statement from you once I talk with the crime-scene techs for a while. But you're free to go, Ben. Thanks for your help." They shook hands and Ben bounded inside to get his stuff.

"Is it all right if I stand on the deck, or would you rather have me inside?" I didn't want to do anything that would aggravate the detective or make him think I was getting too involved in another murder.

"Either way, as long as this is as close as you come to the crime scene while the techs are down working," he said, heading down the stairs himself.

Since I had no desire to get any closer, staying on the deck was fine with me. I was thankful that Dot had already fed the dogs and dealt with them this morning. With that out of the way I didn't have to ask permission to cut across the driveway and get too close to the crime scene.

I did think of one thing I needed to ask the detective. "Is it going to be okay if Ben gets in his car and goes to school? That's his car around the side of the driveway. I think it's mostly out of your way, and he should be able to get out." Dot and Buck's driveway was wide where it opened up in front of the garage. Not only did it span the width of the three-car-plus building, but there was enough s.p.a.ce at one side to put the footings for the deck and stairway on solid concrete, and on the other to provide s.p.a.ce for another vehicle. Ben usually used that s.p.a.ce when he was here for the weekend.

Fernandez looked up, shading his face with his hand from the morning sun. "I guess that will be okay. Don't let him forget to come down to the station and get his prints taken. For that matter, maybe you can come together some time in the next two days. I suspect we'll find both of your prints around the scene, seeing as you live in the apartment upstairs."

"I know you'll find mine just about everywhere. Ben's won't be quite as many places, probably, because he's not here nearly as often but they'll still be around." I didn't think they'd be too close to the actual scene of the crime at the portable potty, because Ben was usually the person using the inside facilities, making me go outside.

Still, I wasn't about to tell Fernandez any of that. I stood on the deck watching him talk to the crime-scene technicians. The conversation didn't seem to be very heated as all of them went about their work. It looked odd that for the most part they worked around the body right there in the midst of things. From my limited experience I remembered that someone from the medical examiner's office had to "sign off" on the body before they could move it.

I wondered how things progressed from here, and who would have the onerous task of telling Frank's wife about his death. Probably Fernandez got that job, and I didn't envy him at all. I thought I remembered Dot saying that Frank and family lived in Simi Valley not too far from here. If memory served, they had several small children.

Ben came out the door, slamming it behind him and shaking me out of my thoughts about Frank. He was dragging a heavy canvas bag loaded with clean laundry, and juggling his backpack and a grocery sack as well. "Got to run, Mom. Is it okay if I go down there?"

"Detective Fernandez said it was. I would suggest getting his attention before you start down the stairs."

He nodded. "Sure. I took a couple things from the kitchen. Hope you don't mind, but I'm all out of food at the dorm." Of course his idea of a "couple of things" probably meant I was now out of food, but he was a growing boy and he needed it. He put his least-loaded arm around me and hugged me. "I'll call you tonight if I don't catch you to IM, okay?"

Instant messaging was still Ben's favorite form of communication with me. He'd gotten me used to it while he was back in Missouri finishing his senior year in high school and I was out here in California getting used to life last year. And now that he was close by, we still probably spent ten or fifteen minutes a day "talking" to each other that way. What surprised me even more is that he'd taught my mother to be computer literate before he'd left the condo they had shared for almost a year while he finished up high school. I had the odd experience of having a three-way online chat with my son and my mother at least once a week, thanks to Ben's tutoring. Mom loved it because it was so much cheaper than long distance, even if she did have to type.

I hugged Ben back, thinking we'd have plenty to IM about later, and I'd have almost as much to tell my mother. "Go ahead on to school. And be careful out there," I told him. He might look like a grown man, but he was still my boy and I didn't want him disturbed by all of this. I noticed that the crime scene personnel were zipping up a black bag that apparently contained Frank's body. Somebody down there must be from the ME's office. At least Ben wouldn't have to see any more of Frank than he had to.