Rooted in Murder

by Emily James

  McTavish sighed and placed the evidence bag in front of me. The cell phone inside was the same brand, size, and model as mine, but it didn’t have the blue sparkly cover I’d bought. Presumably, the person who took my phone would have tossed the cover to make it less recognizable.

  The phone had clearly already been dusted.

  “Did you find any useable prints?”

  “No,” he said. “Do you recognize this phone as yours?”

  He hadn’t said only yours when I asked about prints, but he might have been withholding that so that I could identify it as my phone without bias. “Not by sight, but it’ll be easy to find out.” I reached halfway toward the bag. “May I?”

  McTavish nodded.

  I opened the bag and took the phone out. I pressed my thumb to the Home key, but nothing happened. The screen should have at least lit up. Unless the battery was dead. Or whoever took it turned it off to disable the Phone Finder feature. It only worked when the phone was on, and Elise had said that my phone disappeared from the map suddenly.

  I pressed the power button. The screen came to life, and I placed my thumb on the Home key again. The phone unlocked.

  “It’s definitely mine. Did Mr. Huffman have it?”

  McTavish opened the evidence bag and held it out to me. “Unfortunately not. When you identified him as your suspected attacker, I sent out uniforms to search the path from where you were attacked to his home.”

  Calling him my suspected attacker grated on me, but McTavish had to remain neutral. Mr. Huffman hadn’t confessed, and we’d been sure up until a few hours ago that Ashley was the one who killed Lee Mills and attacked me. Without Mr. Huffman’s prints on my phone and without my phone in his possession, it’d be even more difficult to tie him to what happened to me.

  “We think he tossed it out of his car because he realized that if he left it at the scene, it could lead people to you. Or your body.”

  A shiver ran down my arms. “And he had no reason to keep it.”

  Except that he had kept it for longer than it took him to throw it away. He’d taken the time to send Mark a text. He must have taken my phone because he wanted to know who else I might have told about any suspicions I had about him.

  Obviously, he wouldn’t have found anything. I hadn’t suspected him at all. In the process of checking, though, he would have noticed all the texts and missed calls piling up from Mark. He must have decided he had to do something about it.

  How had he accessed my phone in the first place? He didn’t have my passcode. He didn’t have professional hacking skills—if he had, they wouldn’t have struggled for money the way they did.

  My throat dried out, and my head felt fuzzy. When I’d woken up in that hole, I’d been missing my right glove. He must have pressed my thumb to the Home key. Once my phone was unlocked, all he would have needed to do to prevent it from locking again was keep it active. “He used my thumb to unlock my phone before he buried me.”

  Elise’s pen clattered to the floor, revealing that she’d been listening rather than working the whole time. “You remember?”

  “I don’t. I figured it out.” Something Chief McTavish said about Ashley and the rusty spots on her necklace came back to me. “But Mr. Huffman doesn’t know that.”

  26

  Mark held my hand like he wasn’t going to let go, like he could prevent me from going through with the plan Chief McTavish and I came up with. “If you do this, and he doesn’t confess, you’ve put an even bigger target on yourself.”

  Chief McTavish moved further down the hallway, giving us some space.

  I held Mark’s hand up to my cheek. It was cold. It felt good against my overheated skin. “If he doesn’t confess, he won’t stick around Fair Haven just to hurt me. He’ll take his wife and head out of the country, and he won’t come back.”

  Mark shifted his grip to twine his fingers through mine. “You’ve always said you were a terrible liar. He might not believe you.”

  I was a terrible liar in my real life, when I was talking to a person I cared about. This wasn’t my life. This was a case. This was a suspect. “Do you remember when we first met and you got so jealous because you thought I was flirting with Jason Wood? But I was only working him for information about my Uncle Stan’s death.”

  Mark gave an I-know-I’m-walking-into-a-trap nod.

  “I know how to work a suspect. It’s one of the skills I come by naturally, thanks to my parents’ DNA.” It wasn’t one I was always proud of. It wasn’t a good quality to be able to read people and manipulate them. I’d just chosen to take what would otherwise be a character flaw and use it in the pursuit of good, sort of like how stubbornness and determination were the flip side of the same coin. “Please support me in this. Whether or not he felt he had a good reason to kill Lee Mills, he didn’t have one to try to kill me. He made an assumption without proof. That’s escalation. If we don’t stop him now, he might someday hurt his wife if he thinks she’ll turn on him.”

  I still believed that sweet lady knew nothing about Lee Mills’ death or the attack on me. It’d be hard enough for her going forward if her husband went to prison. It’d be even worse if she had to live with him, not certain if he was guilty or not—or if he confessed to her that he was. My instincts told me it’d only be a matter of time before she couldn’t take that.

  I had to help stop this now before anyone else got hurt, by Mr. Huffman or by their own hand.

  Mark leaned his forehead against mine. “I hated that feeling when you weren’t answering your phone, and the truth ended up worse than I was imagining.”

  “I’m safe here.” I tipped my head back and kissed him. “Chief McTavish will be with me the whole time.”

  He let go of me, his face stern but his lips going to the effort of giving me a smile. “Do your thing.”

  Chief McTavish walked me down the hallway. He didn’t try to give me a pep talk or advice. Strangely, for the first time, I felt respected by him, not just tolerated. He was taking a risk on me. If Mr. Huffman didn’t believe that I woke up long enough to see him, they’d have to let him go.

  We were hoping he’d believe me and feel guilty enough to accept responsibility. If he believed me but didn’t feel guilty enough, he could request a lawyer and this would all be over as well. A lawyer would quickly point out that if I’d really seen him, he wouldn’t be getting a chance to confess. He’d already be arrested.

  We were banking not only on my acting ability, but also on the average person’s lack of knowledge about how the legal system worked. Ashley hadn’t understood it well enough, and she worked for a lawyer. Hopefully the same could be said about Mr. Huffman.

  Chief McTavish opened the door for me and pulled out a chair on the opposite side of the table from Mr. Huffman. He helped me into the chair, playing up my injury and accompanying fragility.

  I sank into the chair and tried to look small. I pressed my knees together and folded one hand over the other in my lap. I’d heard it called the “fig leaf” position before because of the way it made the person look like they were hunching their shoulders and shielding the sensitive parts of their body. I personally thought of it as the “funeral” position. People tended to adopt it when they were in a situation that made them uneasy, like a funeral. It should say I’m vulnerable. I’m trying to comfort myself.

  Mr. Huffman came from a generation that often still saw women as needing a male protector. My body language would send subconscious messages to him before it was my turn to say anything.

  Chief McTavish took the chair next to me, staging the situation so that it would look like I needed him as a shield. “I asked Mrs. Cavanaugh here because, according to the Sixth Amendment, you have the right to confront your accuser.”

  That wasn’t really how the Sixth Amendment worked. It actually allowed for cross-examination of witnesses in a criminal proceeding. McTavish’s lie was close enough to test Mr. Huffman’s knowledge.

  “I already told you.” Mr
. Huffman laid his arms on the table in front of him like a blocker. “I didn’t do anything to her or to Lee Mills all those years ago. If I had, she wouldn’t have come out to lunch with my wife and me today.”

  McTavish made an I’m listening noise. “Do you know how head injuries work?”

  I felt more than saw Mr. Huffman glance in my direction. I was trying to keep my gaze down.

  “No,” was all he said.

  There was still too much iron in his voice.

  “When someone gets hit in the head the way Mrs. Cavanaugh was,” Chief McTavish said, “their brain experiences the equivalent of losing your Internet connection. It can cause temporary amnesia. Some of those memories will return as the brain heals.”

  Mr. Huffman’s torso moved, probably in a shrug but I couldn’t look up to be certain. “So?”

  “So she remembered something about the night she was hit.”

  Chief McTavish let that hang in the air. He was waiting for Mr. Huffman to ask what, to show that he was at least a little unnerved.

  Mr. Huffman sat in silence.

  It wasn’t a good sign for our dramatization. He suspected we were baiting him.

  Chief McTavish angled toward me. “Mrs. Cavanaugh, I’d like you to tell him what you told me. Take your time.”

  McTavish emphasized my married name again. I wasn’t Nicole here. I wasn’t Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes, attorney at law. I was a wife, triggering Mr. Huffman to think about his own wife and how he’d feel if someone did this to her. Hopefully.

  “I was in and out. Most of the time I couldn’t even manage to open my eyes. But I remember him”—I peeked up at Mr. Huffman—“I remember you taking my mitten off and pressing my thumb to my phone to unlock it.”

  I held my right hand up above the table enough for him to see it.

  Mr. Huffman jerked slightly. It was a very specific detail. One we shouldn’t have been able to guess.

  Don’t think too hard about it, I silently urged him. Say something.

  The pause was stretching too long. In many cases, leaving dead air was a great way to trick people into talking. In this case, it could work the opposite way—giving Mr. Huffman time to talk himself out of saying anything more and into asking for a lawyer.

  I couldn’t look in Chief McTavish’s direction. It’d all be over if I did.

  But I had to do something. We were losing him.

  I looked up and met Mr. Huffman’s gaze directly for the first time since I entered the room. “I just want to know why you did it,” I said softly.

  I didn’t have to fake the wobble in my voice. I didn’t want to go home because I didn’t want to think about how close I came to never going home again. I wanted to keep busy because, as soon as I stopped, I’d think about it. At night, when I was trying to sleep, I’d think about it. About how cold it’d been and how much I hurt. About how my lungs burned and I knew I was running out of air.

  Mr. Huffman’s eyes watered. McTavish shifted beside me.

  Oh no. I’d said all of that out loud. I’d basically done the emotional version of streaking.

  Mr. Huffman broke eye contact. “I thought you knew, and I was scared.”

  It was a partial confession. A partial confession wasn’t enough. A good lawyer could brush it away in court. He hadn’t actually said he’d killed Lee Mills.

  I had to pull myself together and finish this.

  I slid my hands across the table, closer to him. “Mr. Huffman, you always seemed like a good man to me. You sold me your field because of your good memories of my Uncle Stan. You’re not a hardened killer. If you explain why you killed Lee Mills, the district attorney will give you a lighter sentence. They don’t want to send good men to prison for the rest of their lives for one moment of poor judgment.”

  Two moments, but I wasn’t going to push the point. If I could get him to confess to Lee Mills’ murder, he’d be going to prison for enough time that whatever he got for my attempted murder wouldn’t matter.

  Mr. Huffman wiped his hands across his cheek bones. “I didn’t plan to kill anyone. You have to know that. It wasn’t what they call pre-planned.”

  I was pretty sure he meant premeditated. He must have lied about his wife watching crime shows. Most people would have been more interested in my work as a lawyer than in my trees. He’d been afraid to show interest, but also afraid that if he didn’t show interest, I’d be suspicious.

  “After Lee Mills nearly put us under with the damage he did to my combine and our crops,” Mr. Huffman said, “I started driving by the field each night just to check on things. Every year, kids would drive into our field to do things they didn’t want to be caught doing, but it didn’t cause near the level of damage that Lee Mills did in that one night. Crop insurance doesn’t cover that kind of damage.”

  The report I’d heard from Royce was that Lee stole Mr. Huffman’s combine and took it for a joyride, damaging it. He hadn’t also said Lee took that joyride through the unharvested field, running down the crops.

  It was times like this that I wasn’t entirely sure who the true bad guy was. Mr. Huffman shouldn’t have done what he did, but Lee Mills was far from an innocent victim.

  “You found him there that night?” I said softly to keep him talking. He still hadn’t admitted to anything.

  “I saw his girl walking back to town alone after dark. No reason I could think of for her to do that except he’d done something unforgiveable to her. I knew he’d still be out in my field. All I planned to do was hold him until the police came and charged him with trespassing and destruction of property. If I caught him red-handed, they couldn’t overlook it like they had before when there was no evidence he was the one who did all that damage.”

  If the timing had been even slightly different for any of them—for Daphne, for Ashley, or for Mr. Huffman—they’d have seen each other with Lee.

  Mr. Huffman pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, something rare anymore. He dabbed at his upper lip. “I heard yelling as I walked up. A male and a female voice. Whatever woman he was with sounded scared. I didn’t see her face.”

  Ashley. So they had almost crossed paths. If she’d seen him, Mr. Huffman would have had a witness to him being there, and things might not have escalated. Or he would have killed Ashley as well. I hated to think it, but he had tried to kill me to cover his tracks.

  “The woman was gone by the time I reached them. He had blood running down the side of his head, and he heaved something gold into the bushes.”

  Ashley’s necklace.

  “I don’t honestly know what happened next. I remember thinking that if someone didn’t stop him, he’d eventually hurt someone bad. The next thing I knew, I was standing over him and he wasn’t breathing. I took off as fast as I could, and I didn’t look back.”

  Whether I believed him or not that he didn’t remember the actual murder didn’t matter. He might have blacked out in rage, or he might have been saying that because he still couldn’t bring himself to admit out loud what he’d done. Either way, we had our confession.

  Just in time, too. I couldn’t have continued this much longer. My head felt tired, my body felt oddly achy, and a knot of dread sat in my stomach that I was probably going to have to find a new lawyer after all. I wasn’t sure I could stand facing Ashley every time I went into Tom McClanahan’s office, knowing I’d almost gotten her arrested for a crime she didn’t commit.

  And if she ever found out, none of my paperwork would ever be properly processed again.

  27

  My doctor stopped us before we were able to leave the hospital after my follow-up CT scan. “If you could stay a few minutes, I need to talk to you. Let me find us an empty room so we’ll have some privacy.”

  Those were never words you wanted to hear from your doctor. Even with all the privacy protocols now in place, if my scans had come back good, he would have either called me later or told us in the hall.

  “What happens if I have a brain bleed?” I whispered to M
ark as we followed the doctor through the halls. “Will I need surgery?”

  Just the thought of brain surgery made me dizzy. And, oddly enough, made me want my mom. I guess there were some situations where people were always going to be little kids wanting their mommy.

  A janitor pushed a cart of cleaning supplies out of an exam room up ahead.

  My doctor hurried ahead and held the door open for us. “This’ll do.”

  His voice was much too cheery. Probably false cheery. Doctors were trained to hide their true emotions from patients. You couldn’t break down and cry every time you had to tell someone they were dying, after all.

  If I’d survived being buried alive only to die from the blow Mr. Huffman gave me to the back of the head, Anderson would soon be defending Russ for murder. Heck, I wasn’t entirely sure Anderson wouldn’t help him plan the murder so that Russ could get away with it and they wouldn’t need to plan a defense.

  Now my brain really was going to crazy town.

  Mark slid his hand into mine. “You’re going to be fine,” he said. “I promise.”

  Easy for him to say. He wasn’t the one potentially bleeding out into his cranium.

  My doctor motioned to the two chairs in the room and leaned against the exam table himself. “Something came up in the course of your scans, and I wanted to make sure you were aware of it going forward.”

  I wanted to tell him to spit out whatever the news was rather than trying to cushion the blow, but my tongue had glued itself to the bottom of my mouth. Mark didn’t say anything, either, probably assuming we’d find out what was going on faster if he didn’t bludgeon my doctor with questions and let him talk instead.

  “When the ambulance brought you in, you were in and out of consciousness, and we couldn’t get much information from you. Your sister…” He glanced to the side like he was trying to remember her name.

  There were only two people he might mean. Neither of them was my sister, but it’d be easy to mistake them for a sister. “Elise? Megan?”