She laughed. “You’re right. You really are a glass-half-full kind of guy.”
“You miss your ex-fiancé?”
She stopped laughing and went with the truth. “Nope. The dirty little secret is that I was relieved when it was all over. Miss your ex-wife?”
“Nope. I was relieved, too, when I came home one day and discovered that she had walked out. It meant I could stop trying to fix myself. Lucky for me, she left before Fletcher Consulting started to make some money.”
He removed the last of the tiles and studied the wooden frame and backing for a moment. Then he reached for another tool.
A few minutes later, he eased the fame and backing out of the fireplace, revealing the dark opening.
“Looks like there is something inside,” he said.
Lucy uncoiled and sat forward on the sofa, trying to peer into the darkness. She could make out a large lumpy shape.
“Why on earth would Aunt Sara—” She stopped.
“Got a flashlight?” Mason asked. “If you don’t, I can get one from my truck.”
“Sara kept one in the kitchen. I’ll get it.”
“I think I’m going to need a clean towel, too.”
Lucy jumped up and went into the kitchen. When she returned, Mason took the towel and used it to remove a poker that had been lodged inside the fireplace.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I can’t be positive yet, but I’ve got a feeling that this is not going to be good.”
He set the poker aside and took the flashlight from her. He aimed the beam through the opening. She moved closer and looked into the deep fireplace.
“Looks like a copy of an old newspaper,” she said. “It’s sealed in a plastic bag.”
“Look closer.”
A cold chill iced her blood. “Is that a black garbage bag? Don’t tell me Sara stuffed the fireplace with trash before she covered it with tiles. That would be just too weird.”
“Garbage bags don’t have zippers,” Mason said. “It’s a body bag.”
“Good grief.” Lucy stepped back reflexively. “I can’t believe it.”
Mason used the towel again to reach into the fireplace. He removed the bag containing the newspaper. Lucy glanced at the banner.
“It’s a San Francisco paper,” she said. She glanced at the date and did the math. “Oh, crap. It was published in August, thirteen years ago. That’s the summer when Brinker was in town. Someone circled the headline, Scorecard Rapist Strikes Again.”
Mason turned the plastic bag over to view the other side of the newspaper. “There’s a driver’s license in here.”
Lucy stared at the photo of the young, astonishingly good-looking man. He was blond and blue-eyed, with a charismatic smile that promised dark thrills.
“Tristan Brinker,” she said.
10
She killed him because of what he had planned to do to me, didn’t she?” Lucy said.
“There are still a lot of questions to be answered here, but yes, I think that scenario is the most likely one,” Mason said.
He watched Lucy out of the corner of his eye as he removed two bottles of water from the refrigerator. She probably needed something stronger than water, but she had declined another glass of wine. He could not tell how she was handling the shock of the discovery. She appeared surprisingly calm—maybe somber was a better word. Then again, it was possible she was simply exhausted. It had been a very long night, and it wasn’t over yet.
They were back in the kitchen of the old house. Lucy was slumped in a chair at the table. It was after midnight. Chief Whitaker and the two officers who had accompanied him had finally departed after taking a lot of pictures and bagging up some samples of the debris in the fireplace. The unpleasantly droopy body bag had been loaded into an ambulance and driven off into the night.
A yellow crime scene tape had been strung across the wide doorway into the living room. Whitaker had warned Lucy against building a fire in the newly opened fireplace. She had assured him in a sharp tone that she had no plans to do so. In any event, the chimney would need to be thoroughly cleaned and inspected first.
“Dear heaven.” Lucy shook her head slowly, awed. “My dear, sweet little aunt who practiced yoga, meditated every day and ate a strict organic vegan diet murdered the son and heir of one of the richest men in Northern California and stuffed his body inside her fireplace. It’s unbelievable.”
“There’s still some question about the identity of the body,” Mason reminded her. “The decomp process has been going on for thirteen years.”
“Who else could it be? The date on the newspaper, the timing of Brinker’s disappearance all those years ago, the driver’s license—it all fits.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Mason said.
Chief Whitaker’s last words had been exactly what Mason had expected. “I want you both to come to the station in the morning. I’ll need statements.”
Mason sat down at the table. He opened the bottles of Summer Springs water and placed one in front of Lucy.
Lucy contemplated the bottle as if she had never seen one before. Then she picked it up and drank some of the water.
“It looks like we accidentally closed the only known cold case in the history of Summer River,” she said.
“You never know what you’re going to find when you start down the DIY remodeling road.”
She blinked, brows crinkling in a frown. “That is probably a very inappropriate remark.”
“Probably.”
“So why do I want to laugh?”
“Don’t worry, it’s a nervous reaction.”
“Oh, I see.” She paused. “Aunt Sara would have laughed.”
“If it had been anyone other than Brinker, I wouldn’t have made an inappropriate remark,” he said. “But it was Brinker, and to tell you the truth, it’s a relief to find out that he’s been sealed up in that fireplace all this time. The bastard was one of the monsters. Assuming your aunt was trying to tell us something by leaving that newspaper with the body, Brinker may have been the Scorecard Rapist. Regardless, it’s good to know he hasn’t been out in the world doing bad things to good people for the past thirteen years.”
“There is that.” Lucy hoisted her bottle of water in a small salute. “Here’s to Aunt Sara.”
“To Aunt Sara.” Mason raised his own bottle of water.
“Just think, if I had sold the house in as-is condition, the buyer would have gotten a heck of a shock when he took out that tilework,” Lucy mused. “Because sooner or later someone would have opened up the fireplace.”
“Yes.”
Lucy shuddered. “No wonder I couldn’t get to sleep last night.”
Mason leaned back in the chair. “Are you going to tell me that you think this house is haunted by Brinker’s ghost?”
“No, of course not, but this place felt very weird to me last night. I got that icy vibe people get when they walk across graveyards and battlefields.”
“People get that vibe only when they happen to know that they are walking across a cemetery or a battlefield,” Mason said. “The imagination is a powerful thing.”
She shot him a quick glare and then wrinkled her nose. “Never mind the reasons for my insomnia last night. The real question is how could Aunt Sara sleep here in this house knowing that there was a dead body in the fireplace, one she had put there herself?”
Mason shrugged. “Maybe it was all that meditation and yoga she practiced. Could be it endowed her with some Zen-like ability to ignore the body in the fireplace.” He paused for a beat. “Or it could be that she was okay with it because she felt justified in killing Brinker—which she was, in my book, by the way.”
“I wonder if she told Mary?”
“I doubt if we’ll ever know.
But in situations like the one your aunt was facing, the smart thing to do is to follow the Three-S Rule. Got a hunch Sara would have figured that out for herself.”
Lucy frowned. “What’s the Three-S rule?”
“Shoot, shovel and shut up.”
Lucy turned the water bottle between her palms. “Yes. I see what you mean.” She hesitated. “But I doubt if Aunt Sara actually shot Brinker. She didn’t approve of guns, and she didn’t own one. She must have used some other method.”
“I think the ME will conclude that Brinker was killed with one or more blows to the skull.”
“The poker?”
“Uh-huh.” Mason drank some of his water. “There was some stuff sticking to the end of it.”
“Stuff?”
“Hair, I think.”
Lucy sighed. “Well, finding the body in the fireplace tonight certainly explains why Sara and Mary started doing a lot more traveling after that summer. It also explains why she didn’t want me coming back to Summer River to visit her. To her way of thinking, inviting me to stay here in the house with a dead guy would have been very bad karma.”
“I apologize, again, for jumping to the conclusion that you had ignored her for the past thirteen years.”
Lucy gave him a faint smile. “Apology accepted. You’re right, though, there are a lot of questions. The first one that comes to mind is, why hide the body here in the house?”
“Can you think of a better way to make sure it wasn’t found and subjected to a forensic autopsy? Take it from me, it’s hard to hide a body. Over time they have a way of showing up. They wash ashore. They get uncovered by a heavy rain. Developers stumble onto them when they start building houses on previously unused land.”
“I see what you mean,” Lucy said. She shuddered. “No wonder she stopped doing major repairs and renovations.”
“Bringing in a contractor or a handyman or a painter would have been too risky,” Mason said. “Any halfway decent craftsman would have taken one look at that fireplace and started asking questions. He would have offered to give her the name of a good tile man. Sara would have declined. The contractor or the painter would have wondered why she didn’t want it repaired.”
Lucy contemplated that for a moment. “Were you ever a suspect in Brinker’s disappearance?”
“The leading theory at the time was that Brinker was the victim of a drug deal gone bad, but Brinker’s father didn’t want to hear that. If you’ll remember, Hobbs was the chief of police back then, and Brinker senior was pushing him hard. A lot of people saw you leave the party with me that night, and at least one other person, Quinn Colfax, knew there was some bad blood between Brinker and me. So, yes, Hobbs came around asking questions.”
“What happened?”
“Thanks to your aunt, I was able to tell Hobbs the flat-out truth—I had no idea what had happened to Brinker. Hobbs had no proof to the contrary. I told him what Brinker had planned to do to you that night. But I couldn’t prove it, and Hobbs knew that Brinker’s father wouldn’t want to hear that news, either, so I doubt if Hobbs ever told him.”
“Did Hobbs talk to Jillian?”
“Sure. He talked to her, Quinn Colfax, Nolan Kelly and several other people who were known to hang around Brinker. But everyone denied knowing anything about the plan to drug you and rape you.”
“Including Jillian?”
Mason finished the water and set the bottle aside. “Including Jillian.”
Lucy’s mouth twisted into a grim smile. “She lied.”
“Yes.”
Lucy studied him intently. “You said that there was bad blood between you and Brinker. What happened?”
“After I drove you back here that night, I went out to the ranch and waited for the party to break up. It didn’t take long, because someone phoned in a complaint. I had a talk with Brinker—told him not to go anywhere near you again. He made a run at me and slammed into the fender of his car instead.”
Lucy’s brows rose. “I see.”
“Quinn Colfax was a witness to the conversation.”
“I should have known.” Lucy shook her head. “My guardian angel couldn’t let it go. In addition to allowing Brinker to bruise himself on his own vehicle, did you by any chance make threats?”
“More like promises. I let Brinker know that if anything happened to you, he would have to deal with me.”
“He would have believed you,” Lucy said. She was silent for a beat while she absorbed that information. Understanding darkened her eyes. “You thought that if you threatened him he would go after you first. He would have been obsessed with rage because you dared to get in his way.”
“I wanted to distract him.”
“You deliberately made yourself a target. What on earth did you think was going to happen?”
Mason said nothing. He watched as another shock of comprehension struck her. Tension coiled inside him. He had no clue how she would react.
“Dear heaven,” she whispered. “You intended to kill him if he came after you.”
Mason let the statement seethe in the atmosphere between them. There was nothing more he could say.
Lucy took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I need a moment here.”
Mason sat quietly, waiting for the verdict. Thirteen years ago he had been willing to cross the line. Lucy had to know that he probably hadn’t changed all that much over time. He would do a lot for Lucy, but some things he could not do. He could not pretend that he was all that different from the nineteen-year-old he had been that summer. Given the same set of circumstances, he would be willing to cross the line again.
“I don’t know what to say except thank you,” Lucy said. “And I’m very, very glad you didn’t have to do it.”
It was not the reaction he had been expecting, Mason realized. Then again, he hadn’t known what to expect.
“I don’t want your thanks,” he began.
“You were only nineteen. It would have been a heavy burden for you to carry. Aunt Sara understood that. She also knew that Brinker was a monster and a threat both to me and to you. She considered herself to be the adult in that situation. She knew she couldn’t go to the police because Hobbs wouldn’t have paid any attention to her. She took care of Brinker so that you wouldn’t have to do it.”
Mason looked through the kitchen doorway at the crime scene tape strung across the entrance to the living room. “You sound very sure you know what was going through Sara’s mind at the time.”
“I am sure, now that I know her secret and the facts. People tell me that I’m a lot like her, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, not the eccentric, flower-child, student-of-enlightenment thing. But deep down I understood her better than anyone else in the family did. And she understood me. So yes, in hindsight I can imagine her thought processes and her logic.”
Mason nodded. “I get it.”
Silence stretched between them.
“Did you search for him?” Lucy asked suddenly.
“Brinker? Oh, yeah, from time to time over the years. After Aaron got the program up and running I plugged in everything I knew about Brinker. Alice came up with a high probability that he had been murdered the summer he disappeared.”
“Well, it looks like that conclusion may be right.”
“Alice also estimated that there was an eighty-nine percent probability that Brinker had been killed by someone who knew him and that the motive was personal. He wasn’t the victim of a drug deal gone bad.”
“A reasonable conclusion. Brinker was too smart to get caught in that kind of scenario.”
“Yes.”
Lucy regarded him with an expression that could only be classified as one of professional interest.
“Did Alice offer up a list of possible susp
ects?” she asked.
“I fed in all the names of the people I could remember who had been associated with Brinker that summer. The program spit out only one serious suspect.”
Lucy winced. “You?”
“Me.”
“Whew. Good thing Fletcher Consulting was not called in by the local police to consult on the Brinker case at some point during the past thirteen years.”
Mason smiled. “Yeah, that could have been awkward.”
“What about Aunt Sara? Did her name come up in any way in your program?”
“No. But Alice did offer up a couple of other low-probability suspects.”
“Who?”
“Quinn Colfax, for one.”
“Motive?”
“Jealousy. Quinn and Brinker were both in line to inherit their fathers’ financial fund empire, but it was clear to everyone—including Quinn, I’m sure—that Brinker would end up as the guy in charge. If that happened, sooner or later Quinn would have been eased out of the company altogether.”
“Think so?”
“Absolutely,” Mason said. “Brinker wouldn’t have wanted a partner. He would have found a way to get rid of Quinn.”
“Well, that didn’t happen, did it? Who was the other suspect?”
“Nolan Kelly.”
Lucy frowned. “That’s hard to imagine.”
“Not if you were aware that Nolan was the local go-to guy for pot and booze back in the day. He catered to the teen crowd.”
“Okay, I didn’t know that. Why would he have killed Brinker?”
“Where there are drugs, there are guns, and sometimes people wind up dead.” Mason drank some of his water and put the bottle down. “There were always rumors of drugs swirling around Brinker.”
“Do you think Nolan was Brinker’s connection?”
“For the pot, probably. Not so sure about the hallucinogens. It’s hard to picture Nolan as a high-end dealer who had the kind of contacts it takes to get the expensive, exotic stuff that Brinker apparently made available at the parties. Kelly always struck me as a small-time operator. I can’t see him risking a murder charge. And if he was Brinker’s connection, why would he want to get rid of his best client?”
River Road Page 7
