Storm Season

by Charlotte Douglas

  Candace’s expression hardened. “And you suspect Tonya because she wasn’t at work today.”

  “The Clearwater Police have tried contacting her,” Bill explained, “but she wasn’t answering her door or her phone.”

  Candace grimaced. “She took cold medicine this morning. It knocked her out. When she came to this afternoon, she was still groggy. She tripped over an ottoman in her condo and wrenched her ankle. That’s when she called me. I came over and wrapped it—I’m a physical therapist—and took her to my house so I can keep an eye on her.”

  “You mind if we talk with her?” Bill said.

  Candace shook her head. “But you won’t have any luck. She took more cold medication right before I came over to pick up a few of her things. She’ll be out like a light for another eight hours.”

  “Maybe we could stop by in the morning,” I said. “Could we have your address?”

  Candace rattled off a house number and street in a nearby subdivision. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to pick up Tonya’s belongings and hurry home. My husband’s watching the kids, and it’s long past dinnertime for all of them.”

  Candace opened the door, stepped into the condo and closed the door behind her. Bill and I headed back to his car.

  “You think she’s telling the truth?” I asked.

  He nodded. “As she knows it.”

  I thought for a moment. “Tonya could have gone to our house, accosted Trish, then twisted her ankle while making her escape.”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Or, sometimes, as Freud supposedly said, a cigar is just a cigar.”

  Bill pulled me into the shadow of an overhanging bottlebrush tree. “I love it when you turn philosophical on me.”

  He kissed me soundly and released me only at the sound of Tonya’s front door slamming above us. I was wishing Candace had taken longer on her errand when he whispered in my ear.

  “Come on. We’ll follow her home.”

  WE SPENT THE NIGHT staked out across the street from Candace’s suburban bungalow. The lights went out at ten. No signs of life were visible until her husband, a short man, dressed in boxer shorts and T-shirt and built like a fire hydrant, came out the front door the next morning and walked to the end of the driveway to pick up his newspaper. Two youngsters with backpacks emerged a little after seven and joined their friends at the corner. When a county school bus arrived ten minutes later, the entire group piled on board.

  Shortly afterward, Candace’s garage door opened, and her husband backed out in a black SUV and drove away, presumably to work.

  I stretched as well as I could, sitting down, and hoped for Adler to show up soon so Bill and I could leave and find a restroom.

  As if in answer to a prayer, Adler and Ralph pulled in behind us in their unmarked car. Adler exited the passenger side, strolled to Bill’s SUV and climbed into the backseat.

  “You guys are probably ready for breakfast,” Adler said. “We can take over from here.”

  I had already explained to Adler earlier by phone what Candace had told us about Tonya’s activities yesterday.

  “You going to question her?” I asked.

  Adler nodded. “But if Tonya was the intruder, she’s not going to tell us. We’ll ask a few questions, then leave and watch what she does.”

  “Any word from Omaha on Steve Haggerty?” Bill asked.

  “Yep. Their detectives claim his car isn’t at his apartment.”

  “He could have left it at the airport,” I said, “in long-term parking.”

  “Possible,” Adler said, “but the hotels in Denali National Park have no Haggerty registered.”

  “Maybe he’s traveling across Alaska,” Bill said, “and hasn’t reached the park yet.”

  Adler frowned. “He hasn’t used his credit cards anywhere in the past few weeks.”

  “Could be he pays cash,” I said, “or uses traveler’s checks.”

  “One thing for sure,” Adler said, “if Haggerty’s wandering the back roads of Alaska, we’ll have a heck of a time tracking him down. When’s he due back to work?”

  “A couple of weeks,” I said, “according to Kim.”

  “So.” Bill scrubbed his hand across his mouth. “Our assailant could have been McClain or Haggerty. And we don’t have enough evidence to arrest or eliminate either.”

  “Or,” I added, “our sniper-slash-intruder could have been one of Wynona Wisdom’s myriad ticked-off readers. The only thing we know for sure, thanks to the break-in at our place, is that someone really is after Kim.”

  “We need a snare,” Adler said.

  “And a decoy,” I agreed. “I can pose as Kim to bait the trap.”

  “No!” Adler and Bill snapped in unison, so fast and loud I jumped in surprise.

  Bill held up his hands in protest. “No way. Not this time, Margaret. This unknown person is a sniper. There’s no way we can protect you from a killing shot at a distance.”

  “Bill’s right,” Adler said. “We can’t risk your getting hurt—or worse.”

  The protective attitude of the two men dearest to my heart threatened to make me teary-eyed. I covered my emotions with gruffness. “Then how do we attract our killer? We can’t put an ad in the newspaper.”

  Bill’s face lit with a grin that held a shimmer of malice. “We let our prime suspects know where Kim is.”

  Adler looked puzzled. “If you can’t protect Maggie, how do you expect to keep Kim alive?”

  I knew Bill well enough to see where he was headed. “By not giving Kim’s true location.”

  “Where will we say that she is?” Adler asked.

  “That,” I said with a glance at Bill, “will take some figuring.”

  Bill nodded in agreement.

  Adler glanced across the street to Tonya’s sister’s house. “Ralph and I will hang around to try to interview Tonya later. Can you meet with us tomorrow morning to plan a setup?”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday.” Bill glanced at me. “You have any objections to postponing our cruise?”

  My heart sank with disappointment, but I knew we couldn’t leave in the middle of a case. “My only objection is that it gives us no excuse for not having lunch with Mother Sunday at the club.”

  Bill was such a sweetheart, he didn’t even flinch at the prospect.

  “How about meeting at nine o’clock tomorrow morning?” he asked Adler. “On my boat?”

  “Works for me.” Adler climbed out of Bill’s car and joined Ralph.

  Bill and I drove away, and in the rearview mirror, I could see Adler in the front seat of the unmarked car, digging into a box of Krispy Kremes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Bill. “I should have told you about Mother’s invitation sooner. She called the condo while Kim was packing. I’d forgotten all about her until just now.”

  He reached across the center console and squeezed my hand. “No problem. Sunday will be a good time to tell her our news.”

  “News?”

  He flicked his gaze briefly from the road to smile at me. “That we’ve set a date.”

  “A date?”

  “For our wedding.”

  “That’s news to me, too. When were you going to fill me in?”

  “We agreed there was no reason to wait once Trish was gone,” he said. “The house is fully furnished. As soon as the back door glass is repaired, it will be move-in ready. We can even have the ceremony there, if you like.”

  I thought for a moment, waiting for the wave of hesitation and reservations that usually assaulted me when we discussed this final step toward commitment. They didn’t come. But I did experience a thrill of anticipation.

  When I didn’t answer right away, his smile turned to worry. “You haven’t changed your mind?”

  I shook my head. If anything, Trish’s recent intrusion into our lives had made me more determined than ever to marry.

  “Do you have a date in mind?” I asked.

  “We’ll have to wrap up this ca
se first,” he said. “And even though we want things simple, we’ll need some time for preparations. A couple of weeks should do it. How about October? On the fourth?”

  “October fourth?” I laughed out loud at the date’s significance. “That’s a big ten-four, Malcolm. I’ll marry you then.”

  “Thought you would,” he said with a pleased grin. “And about damned time.”

  CHAPTER 23

  After leaving Adler and his partner in Safety Harbor, Bill and I returned to the office to check the mail and messages. Darcy was still at her mother’s and wouldn’t come back to work until we gave her an all clear. We didn’t want our unknown assailant accosting her at work or home to demand she reveal where Kim was staying.

  Abe checked in to report that all was quiet on the river front, and Melanie called to say that she had picked up Trish at the airport and taken her straight to the rehab facility. In her hasty and brief exchange, Melanie provided no details, so we didn’t know whether Trish had been checked in under duress or of her own accord.

  With no other cases pending, we had no reason to hang around the office, so Bill had driven me to my condo long enough to pack some clothes. The place seemed especially empty without Roger, which I considered weird, having had the pup since only last spring. The human heart is a strange and wonderful phenomenon. It had taken mine more than twenty years to commit to Bill, but that crazy little dog had me at his first woof.

  Because we’d been up all night on stakeout, we returned to Bill’s boat for a long nap. With Kimberly safe and Adler interviewing Tonya, we had nothing to do until the next day, so after we awoke, we took the boat down the Intracoastal Waterway to Clearwater Beach. We docked at a motel owned by a friend of Bill’s and walked to the Beachcomber restaurant for a leisurely dinner.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Bill said as we waited for our drinks.

  “That’s usually dangerous. What’s on your mind now?”

  “Do you want to be married in a church?” he asked.

  I’d considered the prospect of an ecclesiastical venue, so I had a ready answer. “If we choose a church, we’ll have to go through premarital counseling with the minister, schedule the sanctuary and jump through all kinds of hoops. Not to mention the fact that Mother might not be able to resist taking over in such a setting. How about a justice of the peace?”

  He smiled and his eyes twinkled. “Or a notary?”

  “Our in-house one?” Darcy had become a notary to facilitate documenting papers at the office. “You think she’ll agree?”

  “It’s a big responsibility,” Bill said with a serious expression. “Think how she’ll feel if the marriage doesn’t work out.”

  I felt a flutter of panic. “You think it might not?”

  Bill reached across the table and took my hand. “When you marry your best friend and you’ve been in love for decades, how could it not work?”

  Reassured, I nodded in agreement. “You want me to ask Darcy?”

  “We’ll ask her together, once it’s safe for her to come back to the office.”

  AFTER DINNER, WE enjoyed a moonlight cruise on our trip back to Bill’s slip at the Pelican Bay Marina and, after a delicious interval of lovemaking, snuggled into Bill’s wide berth for a good night’s sleep.

  Bill in my arms and a comfortable bed. My life was complete. The only thing absent was Roger, who, I was sure, was having the time of his life at the river and not missing me at all.

  ADLER AND PORTER showed up exactly at nine the next morning, and Bill welcomed them aboard with freshly brewed coffee and a box of Greek pastries he’d purchased at Sophia’s after the nearby restaurant had opened for breakfast.

  The morning breeze, although muggy, had a tang of salt and a hint of coolness, so we sat on the deck and watched the pleasure boats cruising in the channel and tourists feeding the seagulls and pelicans at the end of the nearby fishing pier.

  “Any luck with your interview of Tonya McClain yesterday?” I asked.

  Porter dumped cream in his coffee and shook his head. “Her story matches what she told her sister and her sister told you. She did have watery eyes and a runny nose, so the having-a-cold part of her story checks out.”

  “But she still could have been well enough to have broken into our house,” I said.

  Porter shrugged. “We have no proof, one way or the other.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Adler said between bites of baklava. “We need a place for our trap that’s inaccessible to a sniper. If our killer takes a long-range shot, he’ll be gone before we even figure out which direction the shot came from.”

  “What about here?” Bill asked.

  “On the Ten-Ninety-Eight?” Porter asked.

  Bill nodded.

  I did a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree scan of the familiar site. “No tall buildings in the vicinity, dozens of boats between here and the marina park to block a clean shot and the Pram Club’s building across the channel between this slip and the open water protects from a sniper in a boat on the sound.”

  Bill shook his head. “An accomplished sniper might figure out a way to take a shot, but I’m guessing, if we bait the trap right, our killer will try a more direct approach.”

  “Like he did at your house,” Adler said.

  I nodded. “He—or she—has already made two mistakes, first by killing Sister Mary Theresa, and second by accosting Trish. My guess is that the third time, the assailant will want to make certain he has the right woman before he strikes.”

  “And the only way to be certain,” Porter said, “is a face-to-face confrontation.”

  Adler reached for another piece of baklava. “How do we accomplish up close and personal without putting either Miss Ross or a decoy at risk?”

  “We give specifics to our suspects,” Bill said. “Lead them to believe that Kim is staying on this boat, and that she’s so certain it’s safe, she’s not afraid to be alone here.”

  “How do we do that?” Porter asked.

  “We apologize to Tonya McClain,” I said, “for suspecting her and let the info slip that Kim’s staying here, pretending to assure Tonya that her former boss is safe.”

  “What about Haggerty?” Adler said. “We can’t tell him if we don’t know where he is.”

  “He checks in with Kim’s office every day,” I explained. “Kim can tell the office staff to fill him in on her whereabouts the next time he calls and assure him that she’s all right.”

  “Her staff work weekends?” Adler asked.

  I shook my head. “We’ll have her call them first thing on Monday. That will give us time to set up here.”

  “Speaking of here,” Adler said, glancing past the pilings at the surrounding boats and open dock, “how do we keep an eye on Bill’s boat without sticking out like sore thumbs?”

  “I know the owners of the boats in the slips nearest mine,” Bill said. “None of them lives aboard. I’m sure we can talk them into letting us board their vessels to keep watch on mine.”

  “And how do we convince our killer that Kim’s really aboard?” Porter asked.

  “Lights on timers,” Bill said, “and Maggie and I coming and going with supplies. We’ll keep the curtains drawn so no one can tell what’s really going on inside.”

  Adler grabbed a paper napkin, wiped his hands and picked up his coffee cup. “Only one problem. This isn’t our jurisdiction.”

  “You’ll have to coordinate with Deputy Do-Right,” I said.

  “Who?” Porter asked, and Adler choked on a mouthful of coffee.

  “That’s Darcy’s pet name for Keating at the sheriff’s department,” I explained.

  “I’m sure he won’t give us a problem,” Adler said.

  I threw him an evil grin. “If Keating’s involved, just don’t expect to claim credit if we collar our killer.”

  “Maggie, Maggie,” Adler said with a shake of his head. “If you taught me anything, it’s that who gets the credit doesn’t matter, as long as we catch the bad guys.�
�

  “You coordinate with Keating,” Bill suggested to Adler, “and Maggie and I will contact the owners of the adjacent boats for permission to board and set up our surveillance.”

  “Sounds good.” Adler stood and cast a longing look at the remaining pastries.

  “Take those with you,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, if you’ll be dealing with Keating, you’ll need your strength. And your patience.”

  Bill handed Adler the half-full box. “How about meeting here Monday morning to finalize our plans?”

  “Seven o’clock?” Porter asked.

  Bill nodded. “And I’ll cook breakfast.”

  Adler grinned at me. “You’re a lucky girl, Maggie.”

  “You’ve had your own share of luck,” I told him.

  “Let’s just hope all this luck,” Porter said, “spills over into helping us solve this case.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Sunday lunch at the Pelican Bay Yacht Club with Mother was not as bad an ordeal as I’d anticipated. I’d worn a dress Mother had given me, so she had no reason to disapprove of my appearance. Bill looked exceptionally handsome in his well-cut blue blazer, white turtleneck and khaki slacks. For once, I didn’t feel like an alien among the rich and famous of Pelican Bay.

  My sister Caroline and her husband Hunt joined us and helped navigate over rough spots in the conversation. The major rocky terrain was Mother’s reaction to the announcement of our wedding date.

  “But that’s too soon,” she said with a disapproving shake of her head that didn’t disturb a strand of her expertly coiffed thick white hair. “I won’t have time to plan.”

  I started feeling queasy at the thought of Mother taking over our nuptials.

  Bill, however, came straight to the rescue, bathing Mother in the glow of his killer smile. “But that’s the whole point, Priscilla. You’re covered up with plans for your Queen of Hearts gala in February. All you have to do for our wedding is to show up and enjoy yourself.”

  “I don’t know…”

  Mother hated not having control over every aspect of her life and, by extension, the lives of her daughters, another result of her insecurities.