by Lauren Carr
Rachel said, “I didn’t kill anyone. All I did was blackmail Susan.”
Mac told Neal, “Neither of them killed your wife.”
“Who did?”
Mac turned around. “Greta.” Not seeing her behind them, he asked, “Where did Greta go?”
Archie told them, “She was right behind us.”
Sounding the charge, Gnarly ran from the office and into the kitchen. He took off so fast that he yanked the leash out of Archie’s grip.
They heard a crash in the kitchen.
While David and Bogie secured Rachel and Susan to the desk chair, the rest of them rushed into the kitchen find to Greta at the knife block on the far side of the room.
“Stand back!” The housekeeper held the butcher knife to her own throat. “I’m going to do it! I swear!”
Seeing Gnarly approaching her, Archie screamed.
“Gnarly, come!” Mac demanded. He was surprised when the dog backed up to join him at his side.
“Greta,” Neal asked, “you did it? You killed Ilysa? Why?”
“She was coming between us,” Greta said. “From the beginning, she tried to split us up.”
Not understanding, Neal shook his head.
“Like that time she had gone into my room when you first got married and she saw your pictures. I was in the parlor restringing my fiddle and she came in asking me all kinds of questions about us.”
When she saw David gesture for Bogie to go around, Greta pressed the knife tighter to her throat. A drop of blood seeped from under the blade. “Don’t move or I’ll do it! I have nothing to lose! Now that I have hurt the only man I have ever loved—”
David gestured for Bogie to stay put. “We’re not going anywhere, Greta. We don’t want to hurt you.”
“She told me that there was something wrong with me,” Greta said. “She had no idea what it was to be devoted.”
“You are devoted, Greta.” Out of the corner of his eye, Mac saw Joshua and Cameron slip out from behind the crowd.
If I can move her over just a little bit, they can go out the back without her seeing.
“What happened when Ilysa found the pictures?” Mac slid over toward the strawberries.
As he had hoped, she followed him. “She said that she was uncomfortable with me working for them. Uncomfortable? Why should she be uncomfortable with me?” Tears rolled down her face. “I was here first. I know all about taking care of my family. Who is she to send me away?”
David said, “You were restringing your fiddle and you killed her.”
“What?” Neal gasped. “What are you talking about?”
Archie patted his arm to quiet him.
Confusion crossed Greta’s face. “But then, she came back.”
Behind her, Mac saw Joshua and Cameron slip down the hallway leading to the back door.
Scott was shaking his head. “She came back?”
David whispered to him. “It’s complicated.”
“And then, Ilysa did the painting of when you had strangled her with the wire from your fiddle,” Mac said.
“No, the painting didn’t bother me.” She shook her head. “I hid my pictures after we had the first fight and I killed her. Then, when she came back, I never said anything and neither did she and we got along great...until...”
They held their breath when Joshua emerged from around a corner behind her.
“Why did you kill her the second time?” David asked.
Tears soaked her face. “They started talking about traveling all over the world. She was going to take my man away from me. After everything I’ve done for him. I put off getting groceriesyesterday to drive all the way up to Pittsburgh to kill that blackmailer. How many housekeepers will do—”
Joshua lunged at her from behind and grabbed the arm holding the knife. While he struggled to get the knife, Greta grabbed a second knife from the block and whirled around to swing it at him.
In the path of the knife, Cameron was stabbed in the upper chest. Even after being struck, she kept on going. With both hands on the hand with the butcher knife, she joined Joshua in slamming Greta’s arm against the counter until it dropped from her grip.
In the fight, Greta kept hold of the second knife. She pulled it out of Cameron’s chest and swung it again.
Before she could make contact, Gnarly’s jaws clamped down on her wrist to jerk her back. Her wail reminded Mac of a screech owl that had awakened him many nights since his move to Deep Creek Lake.
Joshua retrieved the butcher knife from the floor and out of Greta’s reach. “That’s a relief.” Only when he stood up, did he see Cameron slumped on the floor clutching her chest with blood flowing out from under her hand.
“Cameron!” Joshua dropped down onto his knees and grabbed her. His heart was beating hard against his chest wall while he watched her eyelids flutter. She was loosing consciousness. “Stay with me, Cam. Don’t leave me now. I’m not through with you yet.”
“Emergency!” David called into his radio. “We have an officer down!”
Chapter Fourteen
It was the middle of the night before they gathered together at the Spencer police department to sort out the details.
After getting her superficial stab wound patched up at the hospital, Cameron made phone calls to her department to report on the Jane Doe, Victim Number Four and Lieutenant Sherry Bixby murders. Between solving two murders and getting wounded in the line of duty, she was due for some serious time off. She was planning to have a long talk with Joshua about that on the long drive home.
Meanwhile, David was up in his office returning a phone call from Special Investigator Harry Bush of the FBI.
After securing Rachel and Susan in their holding cells, which were directly across the hallway from George Scales’s cell; Bogie broke out a bottle of whiskey that he kept in his bottom drawer for such occasions—the closing of a big case. Occasionally, they would hear Rachel and Susan arguing with each other.
“Wait until Peyton Kaplan gets picked up by the FBI for treason,” Cameron said with a laugh. “The four of them can exchange prison stories.”
“I still can’t believe it.” Neal downed the glass of whiskey that Bogie had served him and asked for another. “I always thought I was lucky to be surrounded by good people.”
“I was fooled, too, Pop.” Scott patted his father’s shoulder.
Neal sighed. “At least your wife didn’t get murdered weeks after the wedding and got replaced by another woman without you knowing it.”
Scott signaled for Bogie to top off his glass. “No, my wife only jumped into a conspiracy to steal my stepmother’s painting right over her dead body to buy coke.”
Neal ran his hand over the top of his head. “My wife—wives—used me to steal government secrets from my own company.” He looked over at Mac. “How can I continue as CEO?”
“They were very good at what they did,” Mac offered.
“Actually, you aren’t as big a fool as you thought.” David came down the stairs from his office. “I was just talking to Harry from the FBI. They examined that smart chip that we uncovered from the painting. Do you know what it had on it?”
Joshua said, “The access codes for Hathaway’s satellites.”
David nodded his head. “That disk also had other stuff on it. Viruses. Big, bad, fatal viruses.” He made an explosion noise and spread out his fingers. “Luckily, they ran a full scan of the disk before opening the files. It had the biggest baddest viruses in the IT world. Whoever opened the file on that disk would havewiped out not only their computer, but the whole network with no hope of ever repairing it.”
With a sigh in her voice, Archie told Neal, “She did love you.”
“I don’t understand,” Neal looked from one of them to the other. “Explain it to me. Ilysa or Fiona was selling her painting, which had these secret codes, but there was a virus on the disk.”
Mac explained, “She was in love with you and wanted out. Victor Gruskonov wouldn’t l
et her out. So, she decided to give them what they wanted, plus something extra—a bomb that would destroy their whole computer network.”
“Rendering their computer system and the information she stole for them worthless,” Archie said.
“Scales stated that she had fallen in love with you,” David said. “She was blackmailing both him and Kaplan to resign as soon as the deal went down. She wanted to get rid of them, because they had betrayed you.”
While they were talking, Archie and Tonya went into the backroom. They came out carrying Ilysa’s painting between them. When Neal saw it, his eyes brightened only to become sad again.
“Would you like to take it home with you, Mr. Hathaway?” Tonya offered.
David said, “I talked to the prosecutor. You can take it with you, if you’d like.”
“I don’t know anymore.” Neal slumped.
“Ilysa loved you, Dad.” Scott patted his shoulder. “I have no doubt about that. She had said she painted her masterpiece for you. Remember when she unveiled the one in the foyer? How happy you were when she gave it to you?”
Whining, Gnarly patted his knee with his paw.
Neal stroked the top of the dog’s head. “She did give the traitors a bunch of viruses. I guess she wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t love me.” His eyes were moist when he told them, “Thank you. I think Ilysa…or Fiona…or whatever her name was would want me to have it.”
Archie offered, “Greta loves you, too, in her own warped, homicidal way.”
In spite of the murder of his wife being solved, it was with a sense of sadness that Neal Hathaway and his son carried the painting out with them when they left.
Silence filled the station while everyone reflected on the rich man who had discovered that almost everyone whom he had counted as friend and family, except his son, had betrayed his trust.
It was an unnerving discovery for anyone.
Joshua broke the silence to ask Mac, “How did you know it was Greta?”
“Don’t feel bad.” Mac grinned at him and Cameron. “It wasn’t anything you missed. When Neal came to my place yesterday to tell me about your boss shaking him down, he said that he’d answered the phone because it was Greta’s shopping day.”
Archie gasped. “But the kitchen was filled with groceries today. She couldn’t go shopping yesterday, because she had to drive up to Pittsburgh to kill Sherry who was—But how did she know about the call if she was out when it came in?”
“She hadn’t left yet,” Cameron said. “Greta mentioned that at the hospital. She’d come back inside the house, because she’d forgotten her coupons—”
“Coupons?” Bogie asked with shock in his voice. “She works for this big multi-millionaire and she shops with coupons?”
“Trying to save her boss money,” she explained. “Greta was very loyal to Hathaway. Anyway, she had come back inside when the phone was ringing. They both picked it up at the same time, I guess. When she overheard Sherry blackmailing her man, Greta went into defensive mode.”
Bogie said, “Too bad we didn’t hear about her skinny dipping back then on the night of the murder.”
“They didn’t think anything about it because Greta does go skinny dipping on a regular basis,” Archie said. “Rachel told us that last night.”
“Unfortunately,” Joshua said, “when witnesses are questioned at the time of a murder, they look for something out of the ordinary. Greta swimming naked in the lake didn’t strike any of them as unusual. So, no one mentioned it.”
“But it was unusual,” Cameron said, “because that night, Greta wasn’t simply skinny dipping, she was down there washing off the blood that she had to have gotten on her during the murder.”
Bogie said, “But since neither Rachel nor Susan told us about it—”
“Because they both had their own agendas,” David said with disgust in his tone.
“—we were never able to put it together.”
Mac said, “You could have put it together if you had gotten a look at her room.”
A search of Greta’s living quarters revealed a closet filled floor to ceiling with pictures of Neal Hathaway that had been collected over the many years that she’d worked for him.
Archie grasped Mac’s arm. “I guess living with a man—Taking care of him day in and day out, through the good and the bad, she began to think of him as more than a boss. She probably started fantasizing about the two of them, until she crossed the line into thinking it was reality. When Ilysa and Neal started planning to go away, Greta thought she was stealing her man away from her.”
Bogie said, “And that was why she killed her. It had nothing to do with the painting—”
“She was too insane to even notice the symbolism in the painting,” Mac said. “The gaunt expression on Greta’s face, and the red tipped fingernails. Only to someone knowing the truth does it stand out. Unfortunately, Ilysa or Fiona didn’t see that Greta was so crazy, that she was incapable of getting the message.”
“Lurch, the maid of death.” Cameron grimaced while tugging at the sling they doctors had given her in the emergency room. “I wish Fiona told me the truth back during Cartwright’s trial. Then, she would still be alive and so would Bixby.”
Joshua slipped his arm around Cameron’s waist. “But then, we never would have met.”
She smiled at him. “That makes this pain in my shoulder worth it.” She kissed him. “Would you like to drive me home?”
“Home is over two hours away.”
She kissed him on the ear. “I meant the Inn. It’s getting late. I want to be there to warn the maid about Irving when she comes in to clean the room.”
Joshua gestured toward the door. “Then, we have no time to waste.”
After promising to meet Mac and Archie for lunch the next day, they left.
“Ah,” Archie grasped Mac’s hand into both of hers. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” Mac asked.
“They’re actually glowing,” Archie said. “They’re in love. How sweet? Nothing is more romantic than falling in love over a juicy murder case.” She tilted her head back and gazed up at him.
Mac bent over to kiss her, only to have Gnarly jump up to plant his snout on her cheek before him. “Gnarly, we need to get something straight. I get the girl in the end.”
Epilogue
In the darkness of the night, with his eyes closed, Mac sensed her looking over at his motionless body. He breathed deeply so that Archie would think he was asleep. It worked. A moment later, she slipped out of his bed and tiptoed out of the room.
Mac counted to three before following.
In the sitting room, he saw her go into the bedroom on the other side of the penthouse and silently close the door. The granite floor was cold on his bare feet when he scurried across it to listen at the door on the other side. The sound of rushing air came from the room. It sounded similar to a hair dryer set on low.
What’s she doing? Drying her hair? Her hair is too short to need a dryer.
Mac cracked the door open to peer inside with only one eyeball. The sound of air blowing became louder.
Her back to him, Archie sat on the bed while adjusting the knobs on what looked like an old fashioned radio set on the night table. A mask and air hose in her hand, she reached up to bring it down over her face and secure it in place with black elastic straps.
His curiosity taking over, Mac opened the door further.
When Archie turned around, he screamed when he saw her face covered with the mask and the hose projecting from her face to where it was attached to the box on the stand. She resembled something from a sci-fi movie.
The mask muffled her shriek. “What are you doing here?”
He pointed at the contraption. “What is that?”
She ripped the mask from her face. “What does it look like?”
“Hannibal Lector, that’s what it looks like.” The mask with the straps over her head did make her resemble the cannibalistic serial k
iller in the movie Silence of the Lambs.
“I know.” Sobbing, she sank down onto the bed. “That’s why I didn’t want you to know.”
Now you did it. When are you going to learn to think before blurting out what you think?
“Know what?” Mac came into the room. Humor. That always works. “Don’t tell that you are Hannibal Lector.”
“No.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
When she didn’t respond, he began to wonder. The sight of the mask, the hose, and machine. He assumed the worst. Even if he wasn’t quite sure what that worst was. He prayed it didn’tinclude death. “What is it?” He sat down on the bed next to her and took her hand. “Tell me.”
She looked over at him. The shame he saw in her eyes made him tighten his grip on her hands. “I snore.”
Mac waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, he asked, “And…”
“Really bad.”
“How bad? How about those little strips you buy—”
“They don’t even start to help.” She waved the mask at him. “In the college dorm, my snoring could be heard all the way down the hall. Talk about a non-existent sex life. When I slept, nobody slept. It wasn’t until I fell asleep behind the wheel of the car that I went to a sleep clinic. I have sleep apnea. It’s really bad. If I tried sleeping without this machine, my snoring would clear out the whole resort.”
Mac went from wanting to hold and reassure her to wanting to toss her off the balcony. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve been thinking that you weren’t spending the night with me because I snored or punched or kicked. Now, I find out it’s you.”
“I told you it wasn’t you.”
“I would have believed you if you had told me that you snored and had to sleep with a vacuum cleaner strapped to your face.”
“Would you have still wanted to spend the night with me if it meant sleeping with a vacuum cleaner hose?”
“If it meant you came with the vacuum cleaner, yes.” Mac grabbed her by the shoulders. “Archie, I love you. I want youwith me. If that contraption is part of the package, then I’ll take it.”
She threw her arm around him. Her mouth found his. With passion that felt as if was going to burst from her body, she held onto him. “You told me that you loved me.”
