Free False Premises by Leslie Caine

business, whereas she’d used my mother’s death to bond with me on a false pretense. I shook my head. “I don’t believe Dave gave her that scar. He seems to be a decent, mellow person.”
    “Yeah. In retrospect, it’s more likely she got it from some botched scam . . . that she chose the wrong mark one time and nearly paid the price with her life. But at the time, I hadn’t even met Holland, and I believed her every word. She was all distraught when she showed up at my house that night, and she had a shiner . . . worse than the one Holland’s got now. And he just barged into my house, screaming at Laura. Far as I was concerned, that was proof positive that the guy was an abusive maniac. So I threw him out, and Laura wound up moving in with me.”
    “Back then, why do you suppose she targeted you over him? It’s so illogical. After all, he’s the millionaire, not you.” Still, the three hundred thousand dollars she’d stolen from Sullivan was a lot of money. . . .
    “Not then, he wasn’t. His company didn’t hit the big time till a year or so ago, shortly after Laura moved in with me.” He snorted. “For a while there, that was the only thing that cheered me up . . . the thought of how badly the timing of Dave’s skyrocketing wealth must have rankled Laura.” He frowned. “Figures she’d find a way to come back to Crestview and scarf up what she missed the first time.”
    My mind raced back through the troubling events of the last twenty-four hours. “I wonder what her relationship was with that gun-toting man in the dreadlocks wig last night. She might be running from him now, as much as from us. For all we know, he could be the guy who slit her throat.”
    Sullivan ignored this tangent and asked, “Need me to walk you to your car?”
    “Actually, I’m going to wait with you, if that’s all right.”
    “Why?”
    Good question. Maybe I just needed to assuage my guilt for not believing him when he’d said that Laura would immediately run away. In any case, my instincts were telling me to stay. I shrugged. “To keep you out of trouble, I guess.”

Chapter 6
    We debated for quite a while about what Laura’s connection might have been to last night’s gun-toting, wig-wearing phony cop. We agreed that he was most likely tracking down Laura to bring her to justice for some previous scam. Because he’d proven to be singularly inept at keeping a low profile, my theory was that he was a scam victim himself, taking matters into his own hands. Steve thought it likeliest that he was “a P.I. who happens to be shitty at his job.”
    I argued, “But neither of those possibilities explains why he was harassing the store manager. Hannah Garrison says he’s been targeting Paprika’s for selling merchandise that he supposedly found offensive.”
    “Maybe the guy’s Laura’s new partner. Their tussle last night could have been staged.”
    “Yeah . . . but why? How on earth could their charade have helped them?”
    “That’s the million-dollar question,” Steve muttered.
    We sat in glum silence for several minutes, till I said, “I’ve got a personal stake in this. I spent days upon days selecting those pieces, dickering about their cost, assembling that magnificent collection of furnishings. Despite what Linda Delgardio told me about not poking around in police business myself, I’d really like to find whoever it was that duplicated Laura’s antiques. That person could be in on this thing with Laura. Evan isn’t an expert on antiques, is he?”
    “No. Though he could’ve studied up on ’em.”
    “He wouldn’t have the resources to manufacture a household of knockoffs himself, would he?”
    “No way. And even if he could , that guy’s not about to do anything resembling manual labor, such as building furniture. Evan’s the sort to call a paramedic if he so much as gets a splinter in his pinky.” Steve fought back a yawn.
    Still determined that we could eventually hit on the answers if we