The Lady Who Cried Murder (A Mac Faraday Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  A giant-sized garbage bag rested on the floor in front of the television. The walls, furniture, and clothes were splattered with blood sprays.

  Crime scene! Thinking back to Khloe’s past bids for publicity, David regrouped. On the off chance that it was a real crime scene, he slipped on a pair of evidence gloves. There was a lump under the covers on the bed. Half-expecting to find Khloe’s bloody corpse, David pulled back the covers to discover the lumps were pillows. The sheets were stained red with blood that covered the width and length of the bed.

  This is where it happened…if it happened. Where’s the body?

  Expecting to find Khloe’s body in the bathroom, he opened the door and stepped inside. The sink and counter were splattered with blood across the mirror, counter, floor, and sink. The bathtub had a red bath ring around the edges.

  Where is she?

  Cursing under his breath, David came back into the bedroom.

  The garbage bag.

  He had dismissed it because it was not the shape of a body. Standing in the middle of the room studying it, he realized it was big enough to hold a body—if it was chopped up into pieces. The top of the bag was knotted to seal it tight.

  “One day, bitch, you’re going to meet someone who isn’t going to put up with your bleep!” the other woman on the television was saying to Khloe.

  “Oh, bleep off, Rain Drop!” Khloe said with a laugh in her voice.

  Squatting in front of the plastic bag, David braced himself before pulling out his jackknife and slicing a small hole in the side, only small enough for him to see inside. As soon as he punctured the bag, the rancid smell of decomposition burst forth.

  Holding his breath, David peered in through the hole and saw a tuff of long dark hair. “Damn!” he cursed while widening the hole only enough to see clearly inside. Assaulted by the smell of Khloe’s decayed body, he grabbed his nose.

  “Did you—?” Audrey got out upon making her entrance into the bedroom with the camera operator behind her.

  Catching sight of Khloe’s bloody head, the television show host began screaming hysterically. In an effort to escape, she whirled around to collide into the operator. Stuck within the confines of the doorway, they did what appeared to be a polka that ended with the two of them falling to the floor in the upstairs corridor. Audrey landed on top of the camera operator. When she pushed up to climb off, she threw up on his camera.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mac Faraday fought the yawn working its way from his lungs and up his throat while pulling his red Dodge Viper off the road behind the string of emergency vehicles. Once the car was in place, he suppressed the yawn with one hand while turning off the car with the other.

  Wake up, Mac. You need to clear your head. Back to work. He laid his head back against the headrest. Just one minute and then I’ll…

  With a chuckle, David retracted the paper cup before Mac knocked it out of his hand with his chin. “First day back from vacation can be a killer.”

  “Tell me about it.” Mac opened the door and slid out of the driver’s seat. “Man, it’s cold here.” Shivering, he reached into the pockets of his leather jacket for gloves.

  “Mac, you didn’t have to come when I called you.” David handed the coffee to him. “You’re not an employee. You’re a contractor. You’re free to choose what cases you take. You can even come in later after resting up from your cruise.”

  Mac took as big of a gulp of the hot coffee as he could without burning his tongue and throat. “I like to see the crime scene while it’s as fresh as possible.”

  “Well, this isn’t too fresh.” David led him up the driveway to the porch. “Based on the state of decomp, Doc Washington believes she was killed around four days ago. The crew that came to interview her said that was the last time she posted to her social media accounts, and supposedly she was always doing that.”

  Mac noted the van, limousine, and crowd pushed back behind the yellow crime scene tape. The camera operator was filming all the action. “We need to have our IT forensics team get a list of her sites and download those posts going back several weeks. Based on what I know about Khloe, she wasn’t too private of a person. She may be able to point a virtual finger at her killer.” At the front door, he bent over to examine the lock.

  “No sign of a break in.” David led him inside. “I think she let her killer in and knew him or her.” He jerked his thumb up in the direction of the bedroom upstairs. “She was killed up in the bedroom.”

  “Any sign of rape?” Mac asked while slipping on his evidence gloves and plastic booties over his shoes to protect possible evidence on the floor.

  David frowned. “Right now, that’s hard to say.” He caught Mac’s eye. “Her body was completely mutilated. I was in Iraq and Afghanistan and saw a lot over there. Still, this ranks right up there as one of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad.” David led him up the stairs. “How was the cruise to Australia?”

  “Great,” Mac said while observing the blood drops on the stairs.

  “Was Archie right?” A smile worked its way to David’s lips.

  “About what?”

  “That once you got on that cruise ship that you’d like it and not be as bored as you swore you’d be?”

  “No, I was not bored,” Mac said. “It was great spending a whole month with Archie and my kids.” He shot David a grin. “It was like being with a family again. I would have enjoyed that even if we weren’t cruising down under. Jessica and Tristan gave their blessings to Archie and my getting married.”

  “All right.” David gave Mac a high five at the top of the stairs.

  “Next cruise, you’re going to come,” Mac said. “You can bring Chelsea. By the way, how did Gnarly do while we were gone? He was quite mellow when we got in this morning.”

  “He was fine.”

  The high pitch in David’s voice did not escape Mac’s attention. “What did he do?”

  “I took care of it.” Avoiding the suspicious expression in Mac’s eyes, David stepped around him and pointed to the blood on the floor. “This blood leads to the kitchen. We found a butcher knife in the dishwasher—cleaned and sterilized. If that’s the murder weapon, we have no hope for fingerprints or DNA.”

  “He’s a smart killer.”

  “Yep.” David moved over to the wall to pass the two crime scene officers marking and photographing the blood spots.

  “I hate smart killers.” Gazing over the bannister to the floor down below, Mac noted the messy condition of the home. “This house was clean enough to eat off the floors three years ago. What happened? What was Khloe doing here, anyway? I thought Florence disowned her after that stunt she pulled.”

  “That’s right,” David said. “You had already left for your trip when Florence Everest died.”

  “Mur—”

  “Accident,” David said. “A drunk driver plowed into her company van when she was on her way out to Georgetown to remodel a brownstone. That was three weeks ago. As soon as she got word, Khloe came swooping in, expecting to collect it all. After all, she had no siblings or relatives.”

  “Florence had made it very clear that Khloe was disowned,” Mac said. “She made a public announcement about it during the height of the publicity following—”

  David was nodding his head. “Florence ordered in her will that her estate was to be liquidated and her attorney—”

  “Ed Willingham, who happens to be my lawyer.”

  “—was to set up a foundation to provide legal and medical aid to female victims of violent crimes.”

  “Ain’t it ironic?” Mac said, “Khloe lost it all to help victims of violent crimes because she pretended to be one. That doesn’t explain how she ended up in this house and murdered.”

  “Unfortunately, no one changed the locks on the door before Khloe swooped in. She refused to leave. She’s been squatting here illegally, and Willingham has been working through the courts to have her evic
ted so that he could put the place up for sale.”

  “Meanwhile, she trashed her mother’s house,” Mac said.

  With a frown, David shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not sure this is all Khloe.”

  “Was someone shacking up here with her?”

  “Khloe, or someone, was looking for something, I think,” David said. “There are papers all over the place in the study. The safe door is hanging open and someone has gone through all of Florence’s legal papers.”

  “Like maybe Khloe was searching for another will?”

  “My thought exactly,” David said. “But she’s been here for three weeks. Why leave it like this?”

  “Because Khloe was a slug in a bra,” Mac said. “She was too lazy to clean it up.”

  David took him into the bedroom. The television had finally been turned off.

  The medical examiner, Dr. Dora Washington, was poking around at the body inside the garbage bag while Deputy Chief Arthur Bogart peered over her shoulder. The expressions on their faces revealed that this was not your average murder.

  As always, Mac was struck by Dr. Washington’s flawless figure and blue-black hair that she always wore in a silky ponytail that spilled down to the middle of her back. In her black slacks and form- fitting white shirt, she looked more like she belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine than cutting up dead people in the morgue.

  When he had first met the medical examiner, Mac was struck by how brilliantly smart she was—but only after he had gotten over her physical beauty. Dr. Washington had nailed Mac and David’s sibling relationship by their second meeting based purely on their eye color, cheekbones, and jaw-line. During a consultation in her office, she had bluntly asked David for confirmation of her assessment. She had the class to keep that information to herself. While David and Mac’s familial relationship was not a state secret, they preferred to keep it under wraps for the sake of their late father’s reputation.

  “This is one sick animal,” Dr. Washington told Mac when she saw him.

  “He spent a lot of time here.” Bogie led Mac to the bed. “He killed her here in the bed.”

  “It’s too early to know if she had sex with him, either willingly or not,” Mac said.

  “I’ll have to find that out at the morgue,” the medical examiner said. “She was stabbed several times. I see stab wounds on her chest. It almost looks like he skinned her, but I won’t be able to tell anything for certain until I get her back to the morgue and lay her body parts out on the table. It’ll be like putting together a mannequin.”

  “We believe that after killing her,” Bogie said, “he took her body into the bathtub where he dismembered her. Forensics already found blood, hair, and body tissue in the drain. He didn’t go to much trouble trying to clean up after himself.”

  Mac went to look in the bathroom. Squatting, he examined the floor. In the room, brightly lit with high-powered lights, he could see the drag path from the bathroom and across the hardwood floor to where the bag rested in front of the television. “After dismembering her, he put her in the bag and dragged it all the way across the room to leave it there.”

  “That’s how it looked to me, too,” David said.

  “Why there?” Mac rose to his feet. “If he was going to move it, why not take it out to the garbage? If he wasn’t going to get rid of it, why not leave it in the bathroom? Why move it from here,” he gestured to the bathroom, “to there?” He pointed to where the body in the bag then rested. Struck with a thought, he asked them, “Was the television on when the body was found?”

  “Yes,” David said. “As a matter of fact, it was Khloe’s show that was on.”

  “Wasn’t that cancelled?”

  “After one season,” Bogie chuckled.

  “It was a Blu-ray disc with all of the episodes,” David explained. “It was playing one particular episode. The player was set to continually repeat it.”

  “What episode was it?” Mac asked.

  Mac followed Bogie’s and Dr. Washington’s eyes to David.

  “To tell you the truth, I was too preoccupied to watch it,” David said. “When I came in, two women, one of them Khloe, were in the midst of a cat fight over what sounded like a man.”

  Mac looked down at the drag marks on the floor.

  “You’re thinking the killer set up the player to play that episode,” David said. “How do we know Khloe didn’t set it up herself before getting killed?”

  “And she also dragged her dead body in the bag out of the bathroom and across this room so that she could sit there and watch herself over and over again until her body was discovered?” Mac asked.

  “Well, when you put it like that…” David sighed with disgust. “I guess we’re going to be watching Khloe’s show.”

  “That will make a full viewing audience of two,” Bogie said with a smile.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Spencer Manor on Deep Creek Lake

  There’s no rest for dog owners—even if you’re a multi-millionaire. Mac Faraday’s German shepherd was a die-hard morning dog. Gnarly got up at six o’clock in the morning, rain or shine.

  For some unexplained reason, Archie Monday, who had moved into the main house and Mac’s bed from the guest cottage, was not suitable to take Gnarly outside. The dog would ignore her when she got out of bed and called him to go outside with her. Instead, he would sit next to Mac’s side of the bed and paw at him until his master woke up.

  If Mac took too long to get up, Gnarly would jump up onto the bed and stomp on his chest until his master would curse and tend to him.

  After securing the perimeter of all threats—most of them squirrels, ducks, geese, and low-flying birds and occasional aircrafts—Gnarly would return to scratch at the door and demand breakfast. He would finish about the time Mac poured his first cup of coffee. Then, Gnarly would have to go outside again.

  Mac had come to assume Gnarly, a kleptomaniac, would use that time to case Spencer Point for potential items to steal. Every couple of weeks, Mac would search Spencer Manor for the stolen goods and return them to their owners.

  By the time Gnarly had finished breakfast and returned outside, Mac would be fully awake. By the time Gnarly had finished breakfast and returned outside, Mac would be fully awake. If Mac was lucky, he could catch a nap after Gnarly returned from his second outing at nine o’clock.

  This morning, Mac decided to catch his nap on the sofa in front of a roaring fire. Between the hot flames and the toasty afghan he curled up under, he was able to drift back to sleep until he heard one of the bedroom doors upstairs open and close. The click-clack of high heels on the granite floor told him that it wasn’t Archie. She went barefoot except for when she absolutely had to put on shoes.

  A freelance editor, Archie had jumped right back into work upon their return from the cruise. She had stayed up until well after midnight editing a novel for a mystery writer whose publisher had a tight deadline.

  “Good morning, Chelsea,” Mac greeted their houseguest without opening his eyes. “I guess you’re going to work.”

  “Some people do have to work for a living,” she said with a smile in her voice.

  Trying to hang onto a thread of sleep, Mac squinted up at her. In the bright morning sunlight bouncing off the lake to spill in through the windows, Chelsea Adams resembled an angel with her platinum blonde hair framing her face in wispy waves. Chelsea’s light blue eyes and ivory skin gave her an almost albino appearance. Her turquoise suit brought out the blue in her eyes.

  Her hair was almost as white as her service dog, Molly, a German shepherd, who was also dressed for work in her gray vest with “Service Dog” stenciled in red block letters on the sides. Suffering from epilepsy since a serious car accident years before, Chelsea had enlisted the aid of Molly, who was trained to pick up early signs of seizures, which allowed her mistress time to take the medication to stop it.

  Since Chelsea’s arrival in Deep Creek Lake, Molly and Gnarly had become fast friends. When she and
her mistress came downstairs, Molly galloped over to sniff Gnarly, who had curled up on the rug to warm himself in front of the fire.

  “I’m very aware of that,” Mac said. “Do you need a ride? I heard David come in around three o’clock this morning. He may not be up yet.” He fought a smile when he saw a flicker of disappointment come to her eyes.

  “You know,” Chelsea said with a cock of her head, “I discovered something very interesting yesterday at the county prosecutor’s office.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You and Ben Fleming go to the athletic club together twice a week.”

  “You didn’t know that?” Mac asked with mock surprise. He folded his arms across his chest.

  Chelsea sat down in the chair across from him. “How is it that the county prosecutor called out of the blue to offer me a position as paralegal in his office when I was looking for a job here in Deep Creek Lake? Not only a good job with a good salary, but they’ll pay for my law school as well.”

  “How is that?”

  “And the rent for the lakeside condo that I’m moving into, which has a view to die for, is a fraction of the other condos in the area and is managed by Spencer Properties, which you own.” Her voice rose in octave.

  “I knew that.”

  “My mother used to say that if it is too good to be true,” Chelsea said, “it usually is. What gives, Mac? You’re calling in favors and losing money on rent to make it almost impossible for me to not move back here to Spencer? Why? What’s in it for you? You certainly aren’t looking to date me, because I see how you look at Archie.” She glanced in the direction of the guest cottage where Mac’s half-brother lived. “Is it David? Did he ask you to do this?”

  “No,” Mac said, “David didn’t ask me to put all this in motion. I consider you my friend, and I hate to see my friends have their dreams shattered by circumstances that are no fault of their own. You were in law school and on your way to becoming a lawyer when a car accident turned your world upside down. I’m in a position to help you realize that dream through a job as a paralegal with flexible hours to allow you to go to law school, through paying your tuition, and through a nice place for you and Molly to live in.”