A Killer Location

by Sarah T. Hobart

  Stacy clumped over and looked at the knob. “I don’t suppose you have a credit card.”

  “I do, but it’s maxed out.”

  “Ha. Reach in my bag and hand me my wallet.”

  I did as she said. She thumbed through about six credit cards before selecting one. “Platinum. Should do the trick.”

  “This is a bad idea.”

  “You’re jonesin’ to get back there, though. I can tell.” She propped herself up on one crutch and went to work on the lock.

  “He might have a—a customer on the worktable.”

  “So I’ll let you go first. Bingo. Got it.” The door opened a crack.

  My feet seemed to be made of lead, but I eased ahead of her. The room was dark. The air was bitter with the smell of ozone, and I gagged as it caught in my throat. Fumbling along the wall, I found a switch and flicked it on.

  We were in a low-ceilinged, windowless room about thirty feet square. At first glance, it resembled a commercial kitchen, with stark white walls and gleaming stainless steel equipment. A long metal worktable abutted the wall to our right. There was a height-adjustable rolling gurney parked next to it. A two-compartment refrigeration unit came next, looking for all the world like a couple of stainless steel Frigidaires tipped on their sides and stacked up. I didn’t particularly want to see what was on ice today. There was a small storeroom in the corner, filled with cardboard boxes of an ominous size and shape. These, I guessed, were Harold’s “economy” caskets.

  Just inside the door to the left was a metal desk, topped by a month-by-month desk calendar compliments of Mortuary Supplies of Winnetka. A jar of pens and a framed photograph of an elderly woman were the extent of the desk ornamentation, except for a newspaper folded to display the business section. I glanced at it and recognized the ad for Atherton & Woods. It made me suspect that Harold had managed to put together his charming visitor’s real identity before it was published in the paper.

  I took in the details to avoid dwelling on the main attraction: a steel box as big as a Ford Econoline, with a fat black exhaust pipe on top that went up to and through the ceiling. A sliding metal door like a guillotine was built into the near end, and a control panel bristling with lights and switches was affixed to one side. One of the lights was flashing red.

  I looked around, in case Harold was lurking in one of the corners just waiting to leap out and shout, “Boo!” No sign of life.

  “We should go now,” Stacy said. Her face was pale under the fluorescent lighting.

  “Not yet.” I moved to the double refrigerator, passing a distasteful-looking apparatus that vaguely resembled a Vitamix juice machine, and wondered if it might be the “pulverizer” Harold had mentioned. That didn’t bear too much thinking about. But when I reached for the handle of the upper unit my fingers went numb. I wasn’t sure I had the grip strength to pull open the door and take a peek inside.

  Stacy shifted restlessly. “I’ve changed my mind about ice cream.”

  “Hope it wasn’t anything I said.” I took a deep breath and yanked open the door. No one was home in the top berth. I sighed and closed the door. Before I could chicken out, I bent down and opened door number two. Empty.

  “See?” I said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “So we can go?”

  “Yeah. In a minute.” I cast an eye over the big furnace. If Harold was basking inside, there wasn’t much I could do to help him. Still…

  The smell of hot wires was stronger by the sliding door. I put my fingers on the handle. It was cool to the touch, but when I tried to move it ninety degrees to the “open” position it wouldn’t budge. I edged around the big sheet-metal box until I was face-to-face with the control panel. The flashing light seemed to burn into my retina. There was an oversized switch underneath the light. I went and grabbed a pen from the jar on the desk and used it to press the raised end. The red light went out.

  As I moved back to the hatch and reached for the handle, Stacy said, “Don’t. Seriously.”

  “I have to.” This time the handle turned freely. I muscled the door up, exposing a latched inner panel. One by one I opened the latches until that, too, slid up and out of sight.

  A gust of ozone enveloped me, and I stepped away, choking, my sleeve over my nose and mouth. After a minute, when the air had cleared, I peered into the brick-lined chamber. It was dark, but there was something inside. I dug a penlight out of my bag.

  “What is it?” Stacy had crept up behind me.

  “I don’t know.” I let the thin beam play over the blob on the inner tray. It was the shape of a scoop of ice cream dropped on a hot sidewalk, oozing out in a molten puddle, but with tarnished sharp edges here and there. A scattering of thin metal ribs lay all about it.

  There was a long tool with a metal blade at the end hanging from the wall. I grabbed it and scraped away at the heap, drawing it out toward the overhead light.

  “Thank God,” Stacy said. “It’s just a computer. Or was.”

  I poked at one of the metal ribs. “This is part of a file folder. Somebody tried to burn up Harold’s records.”

  “Looks like they mostly succeeded.”

  I shut the two doors and returned the scraper to its hook. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Even on crutches, Stacy beat me to the lobby, almost falling through the door in her haste. Her arms flailed as she fought to regain her balance, and one of her crutches took off like a missile. It hit the wall with a clatter and landed on the display of urns, knocking several to the floor. A pale gray ceramic oval bounced once, then cracked into two neat halves as if it had been cut with a saw. The silver cube with the stunted tree hit the floor hard. Its lid flew off, and the contents spread across the mauve carpet in a grisly swath.

  Two objects stood out among the chunky shards of what had to be bone. One was a looping tie clip, somewhat tarnished but quite familiar.

  “Harold?” I said.

  The other was a spent bullet.

  Chapter 30

  The police dispatcher informed me that the crematorium was just outside city limits, and that a car from the Highway Patrol would be there within the hour, after it had cleared a traffic slowdown involving stray cows from the 101 interchange north of town.

  “An hour? We just found a body here.”

  “You’re in a mortuary,” she pointed out. “Sounds like a straight-up 459 to me, burglary on commercial premises. Are you employed at the facility?”

  “No, I, uh, we—”

  “But you tell me the back area was secured. How were you able to access it?”

  Right about then, I decided to hang up and join Stacy in the Volkswagen. The light was fading fast, with just a streak of pink across the western horizon. We drove home in silence. When we pulled up to Fickle Court, Stacy showed no inclination for more of my company, instead heading down the drive to her studio.

  “Is everything okay?” I said to her departing back.

  She half turned to look at me over her shoulder. “Only you would ask something like that. Your life is…strange.” She continued on her way, her booted foot dragging a little.

  I clumped up the stairs. Ice cream would have been nice, but there was a knot in my stomach the size of a clenched fist. I searched the cabinets unsuccessfully for baking soda, then opened the refrigerator and grabbed the box I’d stuck above the vegetable crisper to absorb fusty odors. Filling a glass from the tap, I dropped in a spoonful of soda and stirred until it dissolved. Then I drank the whole thing down. It wasn’t beer, but my stomach gurgled and felt a bit better.

  I flopped on the couch. Half past eight. Max would be on his date with Alison. I didn’t even know what movie they were seeing. Some mother I was. Stacy didn’t understand. If anything, I should hover more, not less. There were myriad worries inherent in raising a teen, the kind that woke me up with a dry mouth at 3 A.M. some mornings. Not to mention my kid might be driving this time next year, for God’s sake.

  The irony of my son’s
having both a job and a date while I was home alone and essentially unemployed didn’t escape me, either. I was obsolete. Yesterday’s news.

  I closed my eyes. Mulling over the state of my life was easier, I noticed, than replaying the trip to the crematorium. Maybe it had all been a big practical joke. Maybe Harold was safely tucked away somewhere, laughing his ass off. Maybe he hadn’t actually been reduced to elemental powder, bone bits, and a titanium tie clip. Not to mention a bullet. I squirmed. The knot was back in my tummy.

  Harley trotted out of Max’s room and sat on the rug.

  “I’m just not seeing how it all hangs together,” I told him. He didn’t reply.

  A lot of people seemed to have had it in for Marian Woods. That part was easy enough. Her neighbor, Mr. Williams, for instance. Maybe years of living in the shade of his neighbor’s trees had created some sort of vitamin D-deprived chemical imbalance. Or his obsession with partial-sun perennials had pushed him over the edge. All I knew for sure was that I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of a man with oversized loppers and a gardening fetish.

  But Mr. Williams was as dead as Marian. And it seemed pretty likely the same person had killed them both.

  Of course, his wife was still alive. And hardly mourning his passing, from what I could tell. Suppose she’d followed him over to the Woodses’ home that night, killed him, then collected the windfall from his life-insurance policy? Nothing said that Mr. Williams’s death had to tie in to the other crimes. Could be the opportunity was simply too good for the merry widow to pass up.

  I shook my head. It seemed like a stretch.

  Marian’s estranged husband, Cole, was a possibility. His alibi depended on the word of a few good friends. His affectation of indifference might be as shoddy as his road work, hiding a deep well of anger and humiliation. She’d cleaned him out, then dumped him. Maybe he’d managed to get in the last word.

  I couldn’t rule out Neville, Marian’s stepson, either. As Shanti, he preached peace, serenity, being one with the universe. As Neville, who knows? Gail and I hadn’t gleaned much from our brief interview with the yoga instructor, except that he knew—or suspected—that Marian was getting ready to skip town. Loyalty to his dad, not to mention the loss of the family nest egg, might have been enough of a motive for him to put aside his mantra of nonviolence. And, frankly, I’d always had a prejudice against men who wore tight-fitting briefs as outerwear. It bespoke an almost aggressive confidence in their body image that I couldn’t wrap my head around. But maybe that was just me.

  Bill Atherton, now, was a man who, in my opinion, owed it to women everywhere to cover up. I tried to suppress the image of him in the sauna, wrapped in a white bath towel with folds of pale flesh spilling over it, like an overstuffed burrito. Ugh. Because of Marian, he stood to lose a bunch: his clients, his reputation, even his freedom. Anger seethed under his pleasant manner. One could hardly blame him for wanting to remove Marian permanently from their financial partnership.

  Harley stretched luxuriously, then jumped onto my lap and began to knead my stomach like bread dough. When it was sufficiently pummeled, he curled up, paws extended, the picture of deep kitty relaxation. I tried to achieve the same state of boneless repose, but my heart was racing. There was something I needed to do. Or figure out. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that time was short.

  For a moment, my thoughts strayed to Everett, languishing in a jail cell. How was he faring without his daily aperitif of cheap red wine? He’d seemed genuinely distraught after learning of Marian’s death. But for all I knew he’d stumbled on the truth—that his ex was setting him up for a big fall—and decided enough was enough.

  I shook my head. It didn’t feel right. Because in my heart I knew Harold Hilstrom was dead. And Everett had been behind bars, held without bail. It wasn’t physically possible for him to be at Distant Horizons, systematically destroying records, covering up—what? A link. Marian had been there, had charmed the lonely and vulnerable Harold, had left with a human finger. I was certain of that. Now they were both dead. I wondered if the bullet that had killed Marian Woods could be matched to the one from the urn. Maybe the high heat of the crematorium had altered it somehow. Bernie would know.

  I reached for the phone, then hesitated. There was something I needed to remember, someone I’d talked to who belonged in my mental parade of suspects. If only I could recall—

  I jumped as my phone rang. It was Sunshine.

  “Oh, Sam, I have the greatest news,” she said. “Our landlady accepted our offer!”

  I wrenched my thoughts away from murder and mayhem. “Really? That’s terrific!”

  “I know, isn’t it? And we owe it all to you. Listen, we want to do something for you. How’s all the fresh eggs you could ever want sound?”

  “You don’t have to do anything.” Then I thought of Max’s voracious teen appetite. “Though eggs would be good. How are the chickens doing?”

  “We had them sexed at the feed store today,” she said. “You were right. Belle is a dude. It was pretty educational, to tell the truth. Did you know a rooster doesn’t have a penis? I didn’t.”

  “What do they have instead? Brass knuckles?”

  “A cloaca,” she said seriously. “Anyway, we’ll find a home for her—him, I mean. And we’ve renamed him Beau.”

  “How soon can you find him a home?” Maybe I’d finally get some sleep.

  “Soon. Anyway, I just wanted to pass on the good news. We have a year to come up with a loan. We’re going to call Becky Daley tomorrow and start working on our game plan. Honestly, we’d almost given up. We’d tried just about everyone. Got recommendations from friends. Went through every ad in the Grovedale Dispatch Sunday supplement, even tried the Dispatch’s mortgage broker of the year. He was super nice. But I guess charm doesn’t mean much in the loan business.”

  I’d been listening with half an ear, but suddenly I stiffened. “What did you say?”

  “That charm doesn’t mean much—”

  “I have to go.” I disconnected and leaped off the couch, dumping Harley unceremoniously on the floor. Somewhere I had an Arlinda phone book. I rifled through a kitchen drawer, tossing aside restaurant menus, service manuals for appliances I no longer owned, a packet of flower seeds that had burst open. The directory was at the bottom. Now, if only…With shaking fingers, I looked up a name. Not everyone listed an address in these days of security concerns. But there it was.

  “I’m going out,” I told Harley. But he already knew. I could feel his eyes, yellow and resentful, following me out the door.

  Chapter 31

  Foxhill Way was a private lane east of town that ascended into the foothills of second-growth forest. There were only four houses, built for the well-to-do with enough cash and leisure to maintain their own access road, which mostly amounted to excluding the likes of me. The clatter of my valves and lifters had no doubt already set the Neighborhood Watch in motion.

  As I rolled down the street looking for house numbers, a car went past with its brights shining, forcing me to look away. A busy night on the lane.

  Russell Wellburn’s house was the last place on the right, a two-story manse better suited to a family of eight than a single guy with a killer smile. In the deepening dusk, the stained shingles appeared black, and the driveway, illuminated by a couple of security spots, was empty. I pulled right in like I owned the place and shut off the engine. Now what?

  For the second time in less than an hour, I realized I should have called Bernie. Russell was desperate, probably armed, willing to kill to cover his tracks. He’d made a convincing display of grief at the death of his fiancée. I didn’t know why he’d killed her. I just knew the ring had come from her hand, stolen, along with the arsenic-laced finger, from the crematorium. Maybe she’d written a will in his favor. I’d have to let the experts figure that part out.

  I was digging for my phone when a sound permeated my consciousness. Not a chorus of frogs or the gentle burble of a fancy w
ater feature in the yard. A car engine, soft and smooth. The kind a Lexus or a BMW makes.

  I hopped out of the driver’s seat. The garage door was closed. The gentle hum was coming from inside. But nobody would run their car in a closed garage, unless—

  A jolt of adrenaline launched me into motion. The big bay door was locked; my frantic tugging didn’t budge it.

  “Russell!” I yelled.

  I sprinted up three steps to the front door and pounded on it. No one answered. The knob didn’t turn. I flew back to the garage, skidding around the corner, and saw a door set in the side of the house. I tested the knob, then grabbed up a chunk of brick from one of the scalloped flower beds and smashed the single plane of glass. An alarm sounded somewhere. Pulling my sleeve over my hand to protect it from the shards, I reached through and twisted the catch to unlock the door.

  The garage was filled with exhaust. Coughing, I felt around until my fingers touched a switch. The lights came on. A red Mercedes coupe idled in the center of the concrete floor. There was a figure slumped behind the wheel. A length of fat Shop-Vac hose was duct-taped around the exhaust pipe, then threaded through the cracked rear window.

  In half a dozen steps, I was around to the driver’s side and yanking the door open. “Russell!”

  His face was rosy, as if someone had applied blusher to his cheeks. His golden hair had gone flat yellow, the strands brittle as straw. I grabbed him by the collar and hauled him toward me, burbling in panic. He was dead weight. His jacket got hung up on the steering wheel, and, as I tugged, his arms came out of his sleeves and he slid to the concrete, his heels still in the foot well. I reached in and shut off the ignition.

  “Wake up,” I panted, shaking him.

  His eyelids fluttered. He wasn’t gone yet. I flew to the garage door and banged on it, my breathing ragged. A calmer Sam told me to look for the manual override. There it was, in a tangle of Romex on the wall. In another second, the door was rumbling up.

  I hooked my hands under Russell’s armpits and began to pull. I was scarcely aware that someone was by my side, helping, until we’d cleared the door and made it to the night air of the driveway. My breath came in a high-pitched wheeze, and my brain was starved for oxygen. For the first time, I got a look at my companion, a dark-haired guy with wiry forearms and a kind face.