by Carr, Lauren
“Dorcas disappeared in February. Cash, credit cards, ID. Nothing appears to be missing. Look at all these teeth marks. Gnarly must have had this for months.” Mac scratched his head while he thought. “The killer dumped Dorcas’s body in the mine, a popular spot for hikers. He had to know that the body would be found eventually.”
“Long after he took off on a chartered flight to Houston,” she said.
“Why would his killer pretend to be Dorcas on the flight to Houston? Why not someone else? Someone completely off the radar?”
“To throw the police off his trail,” Archie answered. “If Phillips thought he had left the area, then the police wouldn’t be looking for him here.”
Mac stood up. “I’m calling Fleming.”
* * * *
“What are we talking about here? Immunity from prosecution for theft in exchange for Gnarly’s cooperation in identifying Dorcas’s killer?” Ben Fleming found it impossible to keep the amusement out of his voice when Mac phoned him about the chewed-up loot stashed behind the sofa. “Considering what you just told me, I think Gnarly is a canine of interest in this case.”
Once again, Mac was gazing down at the gazebo where Archie waited for him. She had been wearing her red swimsuit under the robe.
“Hey, Ben, what do you know about Pete Mason?”
“He’s a pompous ass.”
“Did you know that Katrina used to be his investment lawyer?”
“No,” Ben said, “but now that you mention it, Mason never did welcome Katrina into Spencer society. I wondered about that.”
“Her firm says a half a million dollars disappeared from Mason’s accounts, but he never filed a claim or charges against her.”
“Maybe Mason decided to take care of it himself,” Ben suggested.
After promising to talk more the next day, Mac hung up and went upstairs to change into his swim trunks. There, he found Gnarly on his bed ripping Betsy Weaver’s bag into tattered pieces.
“What are you doing?”
Leaving the shredded handbag behind, Gnarly jumped off the bed and crawled under it.
“Unbelievable.” He picked up the bits of slimy cloth and cotton filler from the comforter. “A dog burglar living under my own roof.” He tossed the handbag into the trash on his way into the walk-in closet.
In the privacy of Spencer Point, secure behind a line of trees, Mac and Archie relaxed in the hot tub against the jets pulsating their bodies.
After he had slipped into the water next to her, she asked, “Did you find out anything in Washington?”
He shrugged while pouring a glass of wine from the bottle she had opened for them to share. “We met Chad Singleton and his new bride.”
“What’s she like?”
“Very beautiful.”
Archie cocked her head at him. Her eyes narrowed. “How beautiful?”
“She’s blindly in love with her husband,” Mac said. “She claims no one bothered Katrina while she lived in Washington after Niles died.” He felt her foot brush against the inside of his leg. He wondered if it was an accident. Considering that the tub was large enough to hold ten people, he doubted it. He kept his leg still.
“Maybe Katrina was but didn’t tell Rachel. It isn’t like Katrina would have confided in her.”
“Maybe,” Mac said. “Where did Pay Back come from?”
“Everyone wondered that.”
“Someone said something about putting on an act. That got me thinking. Pay Back was all just an act,” he said. “He had to learn enough about Lee Dorcas to know what he looked like and how he behaved. Then Pay Back put on an act, impersonating a man who had a score to settle with Katrina. That would answer the question about where Pay Back went when he wasn’t terrorizing Katrina. Where did he go? Home to change out of his Pay Back costume to re-emerge as fill-in-the-blank.”
Mac was on a roll. “And then when he made his escape on the chartered plane after killing Katrina, he did so wearing his costume. He could have gone anywhere from Houston. He could even have taken the next commercial flight right back here. Round trip in one day and no one would ever have known he left.” He concluded with the question, “Why did he choose the name Pay Back?”
Thoughtfully, Archie wondered, “If he had his own score to settle with Katrina, why not settle it in his own name?”
“To get to her,” Mac suggested. “Finding out that it wasn’t Dorcas, but knowing that someone was after her and not knowing who. That’s mental torture.”
“If you’re right, then Katrina’s killer was a vigilante and Pay Back was a symbol of his motive?”
“Pay Back is hell,” he muttered. “Who did I hear say that?”
She asked, “Is Chad a viable suspect? He killed Niles to free Katrina for him to marry, and then decided to get rid of her to have it all to himself. I told you about the Eagle Group.”
Mac recalled, “That’s Niles Holt’s investment group.” He pressed his leg against her foot. She responded by rubbing the underside of his calf.
“Before he died, Niles Holt quietly bought seventy acres on the west side of Deep Creek Lake,” she said. “Last summer, Katrina courted the county commissioners to change the zoning from residential to commercial in order to build a retail development complete with condos and jet ski rentals right on the lake.”
“Chad says that was why she hung around Deep Creek.” He draped his arm across her shoulders.
Archie moved in closer to him. “Maybe Pay Back really had to do with Katrina raping the land.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and looked into his eyes.
The lights from inside the hot tub cast them in a golden glow.
“Mac?”
“What?” He sucked in a nervous breath.
Her eyes locked on his. “When are you going to kiss me?”
“Uh?”
“Yes?”
“I guess…” Mac licked his lips. “Now.”
He brought his lips to hers. He could feel her warm breath on his face.
She brushed her fingers against his cheek.
The silence of the night exploded. The ground shook while the sky filled with red, orange, and yellow hues.
Chapter Fourteen
After the explosion, Archie wasted no time in running to her cottage to call Ira and Francine Taylor, who owned a police scanner.
While Archie changed out of her swimsuit, Mac ran upstairs to the master bedroom balcony in hopes of seeing the source of the excitement on the Point. When he threw open the bedroom door, Gnarly went flying off the bed and under it.
“Now what have you done? Blown up the Schweitzer’s safe?”
Gnarly’s tail wagged where it stuck out from under the bed.
With no time to lecture the dog, Mac rushed out onto the balcony and craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the happenings on the other side of the stone wall and pine trees that separated Spencer Manor from the rest of the Point. He cursed the boundary that obstructed his view. With no such solitude when he lived in Georgetown, he had cherished the privacy the trees and wall provided until now.
He could spy two fire trucks speeding across the bridge onto Spencer Point to extinguish the blaze on the other side of Katrina Singleton’s home. The flames licked the treetops with menace.
“It’s the Hardwick house,” Ira told Archie on the phone. “We saw both Gordon and Prissy pull into their driveway about a half an hour ago. They were gone most of the day. Prissy was bragging to Francine about them winning a day at some spa in Cumberland.”
“Do the fire fighters know that they’re in there?”
“I doubt if it will do any good. We saw it go up. There’s no way they could have survived that explosion. It smells like a gas bomb to me.”
“What about Helga?” Archie tried to keep from choking at the thought of the Hardwicks’ poodle dying in the explosion.
“I doubt if she made it out either,” Ira answered.
As if on cue, the phone rang when Archie stepped through the
deck doors into Mac’s living room. Before she could report her findings, he answered the instrument to discover Violet O’Callaghan on the other end of the line.
“Where’s David?”
Assessing that her demanding tone stemmed from concern for her son’s well being, Mac told the elderly woman that he hadn’t spoken to David since he dropped him off at their home that afternoon.
“Someone set him up,” Violet said. “He got a call right after dinner from some woman he called Rosie. She told him that she had some report, and he went flying out of here like a bat out of hell. I told him to pick up milk on his way home. That was four hours ago. He’s not answering his cell phone.”
Mac felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach. After taking down the name of the grocery store in McHenry, he hung up the phone
Through the living room window, Archie peered down the road. The sound of multiple sirens indicated that on the other side of the manor’s stone wall the fleet of emergency vehicles battling the blaze was growing. Next to her, Gnarly stood on his hind legs with his front paws on the window sill to monitor the action.
“David is missing.” Mac grabbed his car keys from a hook next to the door.
“How did he disappear?” After slamming the door in Gnarly’s face to keep him inside, Archie jogged behind Mac to the garage.
When Mac told her about David getting a phone call from a woman named Rosie, she grinned. Head of the forensics lab, Rosie was one of their best sources. Archie punched a speed dial number into her cell phone and placed it to her ear. After a short conversation, she hung up. “David’s been there, picked up a forensics report from her, and left four hours ago.”
“From there he was going to pick up milk and go home,” Mac said. “Since when does it take four hours to pick up milk?”
* * * *
The General Store on Route 28 didn’t close until midnight. Mac and Archie found David’s truck parked in the corner of the store’s parking lot.
“At least he made it here,” Mac said.
“Why do you flat out assume something bad happened to David?” Archie asked.
“Five unsolved murders. That’s why.”
At the checkout next to the entrance, a gray-haired woman in a yellowed white smock read a celebrity magazine borrowed from the book and magazine rack.
“Excuse me.” Mac reached for his badge in his back pocket to flash at the cashier only to remember that he had retired from police work. “We’re looking for a man. He would have come in shortly after seven o’clock this evening.” He went on to describe David as mid-thirties, athletic build, with blond hair and blue eyes.
Without answering, the clerk looked from him to Archie.
“Hi, Flo. Did you see David O’Callaghan come in here this evening?”
Mac’s face flushed at the reminder that Deep Creek wasn’t the big city of strangers that Georgetown had been.
“Yeah,” Flo said, “he bought a gallon of non-fat milk.”
“Did he talk to anyone?” Mac asked.
“Sure did.” She grinned to reveal a mouthful of rotten teeth. “Yvonne Harding. She’s the lady with the news show. I remember when she was in all those beauty pageants. They were back in the dairy section so long that I about told them that they were going to have to start paying rent. While they were checking out, he told her that there was no sense in taking two cars. So she offered to drive.”
Archie told Mac, “That explains why David’s truck is still here.”
Mac suspected Flo knew the answer before he asked the question. “Did you hear where they were going?”
“The Spencer Inn.”
“How long ago did they leave?”
With a weary sigh, Flo checked the time on the clock over the check out. “They had to have been in here for close to an hour. Maybe three hours ago.”
* * * *
“Why are you assuming the worst?” Archie clutched her seat while Mac raced up the mountain road to the Spencer Inn. “Flo told us how David and Yvonne were acting. He met a woman and decided to go have a drink with her.”
“I’ll feel better if I can see with my own two eyes that he’s okay.”
“David got along fine without his big brother for over thirty years,” Archie said. “He’s a trained police officer. He knows how to take care of himself.”
She hurried to keep up with Mac’s pace across the deck and back to the lounge where soft music and lights created a romantic ambiance. The sound of a couple’s laughter gave away their whereabouts. They found the lounge’s only customers in a corner booth giggling over a joke between lovers—or soon-to-be lovers. An ice bucket and two champagne glasses took up one end of the table.
“Ready for a refill?” David asked her.
“Sure.” She held out her glass to him. When she saw Mac, Yvonne covered her mouth to conceal a gasp. “Mac Faraday!”
David looked up from where he had drained his champagne while reaching for the bottle. “Mac, what are you doing here?” He saw Archie trying to contain her amusement. “Archie! Fancy meeting you two here!” He gestured at the empty side of the booth. “Why don’t you join us?” He grasped Yvonne’s shoulder. “Archie, you know Yvonne Harding. She interviewed Robin quite a few times.”
After ordering a bottle of Dom Pérignon from Robin’s, now Mac’s, special reserve, Archie slid into the offered seat.
“Your mother is worried about you,” Mac told him in a low voice.
“Of course she is,” David replied.
“Someone blew up the Hardwick house tonight.”
His smile dropped. “Were they inside?”
Archie said, “The Taylors saw them go in minutes before it went up.”
“From the smell, I suspect a gas bomb did the job,” Mac said.
David sucked in his breath. “It was only a matter of time. They made a lot of enemies.”
“Were they friends of yours?” Yvonne reminded them of her presence.
“No,” David said. “They were just a couple of lawsuits waiting to happen.”
“Still,” Mac said, “they didn’t deserve to be blown up.”
David agreed before changing the conversation. “Hey, guess what Yvonne told me.”
“What?” Mac didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry that David had let him worry. Reminded that David wasn’t obligated to report to him, Mac became mad at himself.
“Katrina and I got together because she jumped in the back seat of Travis’s car with me when the four of us went out on that first double date,” David said. “It turns out Yvonne wanted to pair up with me. What a kick! Travis and I had it planned to be me and Yvonne, and him and Katrina. But when she shoved Yvonne out of the way to get in the back seat with me, I thought Yvonne didn’t want me.”
The server arrived with the champagne that Archie had requested.
After Archie approved it and the server left, David grinned at his date while caressing her hand. “I remember telling Travis before that date that I didn’t think Yvonne would be interested in me, but he didn’t seem to think it would be a problem.”
Mac noted, “Except Katrina jumped into the back seat to be with you instead of next to Travis in the front seat.”
“Maybe she assumed that a rich playboy like Travis wouldn’t be interested in her,” Archie suggested, “which doesn’t fit with her character profile.”
Yvonne said, “Katrina had no self-esteem issues.”
“It seems very odd that neither you nor Katrina wanted to be coupled with Travis Turner,” Archie told her. “I had the impression that he’s been a stud since way back.”
“Travis had looks, a hot car, and lots of money,” Yvonne said. “Those things always turned Katrina on; but, for some reason, she was never interested in him. Ironic, ain’t it?”
Mac leaned across the table in David’s direction. “What was in that forensics report that you got from Rosie tonight?”
“How did you know about that?”
Archie said, “When
Violet called us, she said that you left after getting a call from Rosie.”
David sighed. “The forensics report in our case file for the Holt murder was missing a couple of pages. The file at the state lab had also disappeared. Rosie found the report in the computer database and printed it up for me.”
“There must have been something in there that someone didn’t want anyone to see,” Mac said.
David removed two folded sheets of paper from his jacket pocket. “It doesn’t make sense.” He handed the report to Mac. “Forensics found cashmere fibers under Niles Holt’s fingernails. They also found fibers on his jacket that are consistent with the cashmere sweater Katrina was wearing when they went up to Abigail’s Rock. Her sweater was stretched and torn when she came down from the rock.”
Mac said, “Plus Robin found Katrina’s necklace hanging from a tree branch below Abigail’s Rock.”
Yvonne interjected, “What does all this mean? It sounds like you’re saying that Katrina killed her first husband.” She let out a quick breath. “That’s why you wanted to see her interview on my show,” she said to Mac. “Did she say something to incriminate herself? What did I miss?”
“Katrina changed her story from her original statement,” Mac said. “Robin wrote in her journal the day of Niles’s murder that Katrina said she saw Dorcas and spoke to him. He told her that pay back is hell. But then, two days later, on your newscast, she said that she was blindsided. She had been knocked down senseless and only caught a glimpse of the guy. He looked like Lee Dorcas, but never said anything.”
“Why would she change her story?” Archie wondered.
Mac explained, “She had to offer some sort of explanation for identifying someone who was hundreds of miles away.”
Yvonne said in a soft voice, “I can’t believe Katrina would have killed anyone. I know she was self-centered, but murder…” She gazed at David. “We all grew up together.”
David frowned. “There’s nothing in the evidence that proves anyone else was on the scene. Even Ira Taylor says no one else went up to Abigail’s Rock that morning. Katrina paid Phillips off to make this report disappear because she killed her husband. I don’t know if she had planned it, or if it just happened.”
