The Perennial Killer

Book 5: Gardening Mystery

by Ann Ripley

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Traditional Mysteries; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

On location in Colorado for her syndicated television show, Gardening with Nature, filming alpine butterflies and avalanche lilies, Louise Eldridge can see why this beautiful terrain is as precious as gold. Then the pure Rocky Mountain air is fouled by the discovery of elderly rancher Jimmy Porter's body, shot to death and draped like a coyote carcass over his own backyard fence. Louise soon discovers a staggering list of suspects, since Jimmy's plan to sell his 13,000-acre ranch to a government preservation program left a lot of family, friends, and competitors with much to lose. Throw in a second death, a closed nuclear plant, a CIA investigation involving Louise's husband, and a bullet hole in her cowboy hat, and Louise suddenly realizes she's onto a killer as hardy as the native skeleton weed-and seemingly as indestructible.

Release date: September 16, 2009

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter 1
 
 
WITH ALL THE HYPE SHE’D heard about Colorado and its perfect climate, Louise Eldridge had no idea the place would make her ill. She thought longingly of her home in Washington, D.C., overgrown with vines, sticky, hot, almost unbearable in August. Truly, a muggy hellhole. But Washington was her muggy hellhole—something she was used to. Colorado was a bust so far, with lots of stark, treeless land under a glaring hot sun. It was so hot that the so-called lawn at her rental house had turned into cracked adobe. Three days out here alone, and every single day, she’d wakened with a headache and a queasy stomach. “Altitude sickness,” a local druggist had diagnosed airily, “And the heat could be a factor—we never have heat like this.”
 
“Never? You have it now.”
 
“It’ll all go away in a day or so—the heat and the altitude sickness.” It was two days ago that he’d said that. Louise’s head still ached, and the temperature still ranged around ninety-eight degrees.
 
But things had improved—or had they? At least she was no longer alone, having just collected her family at the Denver airport. Inside her rental car, the air-conditioned atmosphere was cool, actually downright chilly, as she and her husband, Bill, sat in the front seat, carefully not looking at each other. Barely speaking.
 
The chill didn’t affect their ebullient daughter, Janie, who sat in the back seat enjoying her first look at Colorado.
 
“Ooh,” cooed Janie, peering out the window, “look at those darling little creatures.” A cluster of tan, foot-high animals stood together in the field, perched erect as if attending an afternoon kaffeeklatsch.
 
“Prairie dogs,” said Louise.
 
“Yes, prairie dogs,” said Bill, as if he had to reconfirm it to make it true. “And what you have to remember, Janie, is that you can’t fool around with them, as much as you like animals. They’re not like those baby lambs you used to want to take home with you. They’re loaded with bubonic plague. When you go to that wilderness camp, better watch out for rock squirrels, too—I read there’s a plague epidemic among them as well.”
 
“Gee, Bill,” said Louise shortly, “let’s not make everything out here seem terrible for her. Besides, what you’re saying about prairie dogs is not exactly true.” In preparation for her location shoots for Gardening With Nature, Louise had read all there was to read about these little animals, whose unique human qualities of verbal communication were so engaging that they had volunteer groups fighting to save them from extinction. Bill could know only a fraction of what she knew.
 
Her husband looked at her with hurt surprise, and she wished she could take back her words. Suffering from another headache, she knew she was crotchety. Fighting over facts about prairie dogs wasn’t the way to treat a husband with whom she had hoped to reconcile. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s-just that when they have plague, they don’t last long enough to bother anyone.”
 
He looked at her strangely. Poor man: Everything he had said since he got off the plane with Janie had grated on her nerves.
 
What a difference from the way she had pictured their time in Colorado. The late-night phone call he received in Washington last week had started it, changing everything, throwing the family’s future into doubt. Instead of resigning from the CIA as he had intended, Bill was being suckered in again, persuaded to help with some crisis he hadn’t even had time to tell her about before he hustled her onto the early plane to Colorado the next morning.
 
She had only heard the placating words, “One part of the problem is in Boulder County, right where you’re going, so I’ll be out there to join you Friday.” She bit her lip to keep herself from crying.
 
Louise couldn’t believe it at first: his business was right here where hers was. But naturally, his business was much more important than her fledgling broadcast career. He must have told the CIA that she was touring some of the western states, and they had decided to use her trip as a pretext for his assignment. The perfect cover.
 
But the trip wasn’t the whole problem. The next step her husband would take now that he was not resigning, she thought darkly, would be just what the CIA had wanted for some time: a move to Austria. As CIA station chief in Vienna, she knew, his primary task would be to keep nuclear and biological materials out of the hands of rogue states.
 
What should she do—trail after him like the loyal wife, or put her foot down and declare her own rights? The whole topic made her feel hollow inside.
 
By the time Louise had made her way across the arid plains to pick up the two of them at Denver International Airport, she had developed another headache—or was it Bill who made her head ache this time? It flattened her usual jovial spirit, so that even the sight of DIA’s jolly white multiple roofs, like an explosion of small white tents up in the sky, failed to cheer her up. And it didn’t help when her husband greeted her with averted eyes and only a small peck on the cheek. Now, he continued to be polite but distant in the car, while carrying on a lively conversation with Janie. Plague-ridden prairie dogs, indeed, she thought gloomily.
 
 
When they arrived at their rented house north of Boulder, near the little town of Lyons, Louise went straight to bed with codeine-laced Bufferin. That meant Bill still hadn’t had the chance to explain himself. She lay with a cool washcloth against one side of her head and brooded. What a passive person she had been over the years. She had leeched onto Bill and lived his life—not her own. Now, she was paying the price. As her job made her more and more independent, she felt the close union with the husband she so dearly loved tearing apart.
 
It started when she began to work in television—and succeeded at it. And began establishing strong roots in Washington, where she was making a name for herself. That phone call had made the future clear. Bill would never quit his infuriating job as a spy. He would expect her to continue living in his shadow as he traveled from country to country.
 
They were two people with careers on a collision course—or was her drug potion making her overdramatic? With this unhappy thought, she lapsed into a restless sleep.