by Carr, Lauren
“The security system was never deactivated. It never went off. How did he bypass security?” Mac turned in his seat to study his house.
Archie wondered at the puzzled look on his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Which brings us back to the original locked room murder.” Mac stood up.
“What original locked room murder?” She followed him across the deck and down into the back yard.
“Pat O’Callaghan’s unsolved murder case,” Mac said. “David told me about it. It happened in the Singleton house.”
“Two murders in the same house? Don’t let that get out. Chad will never be able to sell the place.”
They turned the corner of the stone wall to enter Katrina’s beach and trekked up the back yard.
“Someone shot Milo Ford. Neither Robin nor Pat figured out how the killer entered the house, shot the victim, and got out without tripping the security system—the same way Katrina was killed.” Mac paused at the patio to study the house’s outside wall. “How did Pay Back get in to drug the bottle of wine without anyone detecting it?”
“What are you looking for?” Archie asked him.
“A way into the house that will bypass the alarm.”
“Do you mean like the way a cat burglar breaks into the bank through the ventilation system in the dead of night to get away with the big heist?”
“Something like that,” Mac said. “If Katrina changed her code regularly, and the system shows no record of being deactivated with the code, then it must not have been used. But he—”
“Or she.”
“—still got in. They must have had a way into the house that went around the system.”
Gnarly’s whine interrupted Mac’s concentration.
Like before, the dog dug away at the corner of the house. The hole he had been working on the last time they visited the crime scene had grown more than two feet to expose the house’s foundation.
“Gnarly, you’re going to get us all in trouble,” Archie said. “Get out of there!”
The dog clawed at the siding connecting the corner of the garage with the house.
“Stop it, Gnarly!” Mac pulled him away from the house by the collar.
Seeing what the dog had uncovered with his digging, Mac released Gnarly, who resumed clawing at the siding.
Archie knelt next to the hole. “Gnarly has been working at this for a long time. Looks like he’ been digging up the house.”
“Most dogs dig up gardens.” Mac ran his fingers along the side of the house. “There’s a seam here.”
She studied the spot he marked with his fingertips. Instead of the cedar panels that covered the house overlapping each other, the planks rested flush next to each other.
“I wonder…” Mac peered closely at the grain. “Could it be?” He pressed his fingertips into what appeared to be a knothole in the plank.
Click!
A three foot wide, six foot tall section of the siding along the wall of the house popped open.
Before Mac and Archie could get over the shock of their discovery, Gnarly stuck his nose in the opening. After squirming his body through, he charged inside. His bark resembled a battle cry.
“Gnarly, wait!” Archie hurried into the darkness after the dog. “The killer might be in there!”
Mac ran in after them.
The room was no more than three foot wide and approximately twenty feet long.
When he darted into the dark room, Mac collided with Archie who had stopped when she found what appeared to be a window looking into the home theater.
“Look!”
Recalling the mirror behind the bar, Mac told her, “It’s a two-way mirror.” His eyes adjusted to the darkness. The room was bare with no paint or wallpaper. Plain wooden planks made up the walls. A ladder led up to the next floor of the house.
Gnarly clawed at the wall at the opposite end of the room.
“What did you find?” Archie knelt next to the dog. “Is there another room behind this wall?”
They squinted to see what held the dog’s interest. One of the panels appeared to be broken. Like the door leading into the secret room, the edges were flush with the wall.
Mac forced his fingers into the hole, grasped the edge of the board, and pulled. The board came out of the wall and dragged a drawer behind it. The drawer contained a canvas bag.
The movement created a cloud of dust.
Gnarly sneezed before pouncing on the bag, which caused more dust.
Archie covered her nose and mouth. “What is it?”
Waving the dust away, Mac opened the bag. Before he could search the contents, Gnarly thrust his head inside. After Mac pushed him away, he extracted a plastic bag containing a white powder from the canvas bag.
“Is that cocaine?” Archie asked.
“Maybe.” Mac set it aside. “Supposedly, a drug dealer built this house.” Yanking the edges of the canvas bag to open it wider, Mac peered inside. “Now I know definitely what this is.” He pulled out his hand to show her a bundle of hundred dollar bills. “It’s time we call our new chief of police.”
* * * *
In spite of his success in negotiating a winning deal for his late father’s job, David didn’t sleep well. Once more, he was in Katrina’s bedroom. Again, she called him to her bed and in the midst of making love, he realized they weren’t alone.
Katrina pointed her finger at the intruder. “Oh, no! It’s alive!”
“No!” David screamed when the intruder aimed his gun at her and pulled the trigger.
He dove for his gun, but it was gone.
The killer aimed his gun at him. “You’re a dead man, O’Callaghan.” He pulled the trigger.
His heart pounding, David sprang up in his bed.
* * * *
“Milo Ford dealt in drugs,” Mac explained to David. “He needed to hide them where the police couldn’t find them. So he must have built this room when he designed the house.”
While Bogie and Archie counted the bundles of hundred dollar bills on the patio, Mac and David searched the series of secret rooms. After his appointment to police chief, David called Bogie to offer him the position as his deputy chief. The position came with a substantial raise, a condition for his accepting the position of chief.
The ladder led up to the second floor where the passages branched out into a maze of narrow hallways. The secret rooms went up to the attic. Peep holes permitted spying in every room.
“This is really creepy,” David breathed when he found the tiny window into the bedroom where he had been intimate with Katrina.
“Pay Back knew everything she did. He came and went without activating the security alarm,” Mac told David. “This is how he did it.”
With their flashlight beams, they scoured the wall of the room on the ground floor, where they found a small door no taller than three feet and not much wider. The oblong knob looked like it belonged on a medicine cabinet.
“Where does it lead?” David called out to Mac once he managed to fit his shoulders through the opening.
Mac felt around. Ahead, he could hear water running. Feeling his way in the darkness, his fingers made contact with a wooden surface that felt like a door on a hinge. Pushing the door open, he plunged toward the light.
After over an hour in the dark caverns of the house, Mac’s eyes were still adjusting to the light when he heard Archie shriek, “Where did you come from?” She had been washing her hands at the sink when he fell out of the bathroom cabinet behind her.
“You wouldn’t believe what’s in this house,” Mac told her.
With no towel to wipe her hands on in the unoccupied home, Archie wiped her wet hands on the seat of her jeans. “Oh, I’d believe it. You won’t believe what we found in that bag.”
On the patio, Bogie was completing an inventory form of the bag’s contents when David and Mac followed Archie outside. “We have seventy-five thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills,” he reported. “The dates on the bills
aren’t any later than the 1990s.”
“Which puts it around the time someone murdered Milo Ford,” David noted.
“Yep,” the older officer agreed. “Your daddy was convinced he was a drug dealer and this proves it.” He held up one of the bags of white powder. “Two kilos of heroin. But that’s not all.” He reached into the bag. “We also have this.” He extracted a revolver.
David took the gun. “I wonder if that’s the weapon used to kill Milo.”
“Leaving it in the secret wall that the police don’t know about would pretty much ensure no one found it,” Archie said.
“But why not take the money?” Mac asked. “Or the drugs? My guess is that the drugs, money, and gun belonged to Milo and he was killed before he could use it.”
With the gun, David gestured at the secret panel. “Assuming this bag belonged to Milo and his killer didn’t know about it, then how did Katrina’s killer know about this door? Dad interviewed everyone.”
“If anyone knew about Milo’s secret hiding place, they would have taken this stash a long time ago,” Bogie agreed. “His widow and kids certainly didn’t know about it. She could have used this money. It turned out Milo was up to his eyeballs in debt.”
“What about Milo’s drug friends?” Mac asked Bogie.
The older officer shook his head. “Milo made the mistake of cheating the wrong people. We assumed that got him killed.”
“Maybe the killer knew about the secret hallways, but not where Milo had hidden the money,” Archie suggested.
“Or maybe Milo’s murder had nothing to do with drugs or money,” Mac said.
* * * *
At Spencer Manor, Mac made a fresh pot of coffee and warmed breakfast pastries in the oven for Archie and David. Bogie took the bag they had found, along with its contents, to the station. Forensics would run tests on the gun to see if it had been used in any reported crimes.
“Now we know how both Pay Back and Milo Ford’s killer did it.” Archie took a cautious sip of the hot coffee.
“The question is,” David asked, “are they two separate killers or one? The only connection I can see between Katrina and Milo Ford is that they lived in the same house. Katrina didn’t use drugs and had no drug connections.”
“They were both into real estate,” Archie pointed out.
“Katrina inherited her real estate,” David countered. “Milo dealt more in drugs than real estate. Emma Turner ran his legitimate business.”
“Turner?” Mac whirled around from the oven where he was removing the hot cookie sheet filled with cheese Danish. “Is she any relation to Travis?”
David nodded his head. “His stepmother.”
Recalling an earlier conversation, Archie asked in an excited tone, “Wasn’t she murdered?”
“Travis’s mother was murdered?” Mac dropped the hot tray onto the granite counter.
“Stepmother,” David corrected him. “And yes, she was murdered. Travis and I were sophomores in high school. She managed Milo’s real estate office. One morning, she went in to open up the office, and someone shot her in the head and set fire to the building.”
“Betsy told me that Travis thought his father did it.” Archie accepted the roll Mac offered to her.
With a knife, David stabbed the butter in the tub on the kitchen counter. “My father said Milo did it.” He buttered his pastry. “He just couldn’t prove it.”
While drinking his coffee and eating his breakfast, Mac looked from one of them to the other like a spectator at a tennis match.
Perched at his master’s feet, Gnarly favored the food more than the conversation.
“Did you know that Travis was sleeping with her?” She cocked her head at David.
He laughed.
Offended by his laughter, she asked, “Why do you find that so funny? Travis is a hound. He even cheats on Sophia Hainsworth.”
“You never saw Emma Turner,” David said. “Every boy who saw her had fantasies about sleeping with her. Believe me, if Travis had slept with her, he would have shouted it from the rooftops.”
“Except for the fact that she was his father’s wife,” Mac reminded him. “What would Travis’s father have done if he found out that she was being more than motherly to his son?”
David flushed. “Travis’s dad did have a temper.”
Mac responded with a “Hmm,” before popping the last of his pastry into his mouth, much to Gnarly’s disappointment.
“What about Pay Back?” Archie reminded them about the recent murder. “What was he paying Katrina back for?”
“I have no idea.” After refilling his coffee mug, Mac checked his watch. It was only seven-thirty. “I hate to speak ill of someone you cared about, David, but Katrina lived a high-risk life. So far, we’ve discovered that she cheated, lied, stole, and murdered. Any of her victims had reason to kill her. In order to find out which one, we have to figure out who was so enraged that they would go to so much trouble to kill her.”
Chapter Nineteen
“What’s this?” Mac held a potted plant out to Archie.
“That’s a chrysanthemum.” Giggling, she emptied the contents of the pot into her bare hand. “You really don’t know anything about gardening.”
At her urging, they sat on their knees in the flower garden that filled the driveway’s inner circle. Archie had suggested that by taking his mind off the murders with gardening, Mac, like his mother before him, could come to a solution to the case.
Rolling in the flower bed, Gnarly seemed to enjoy working with potting soil more than Mac, whose gardening consisted of handing stuff to Archie. He felt near collapse from boredom.
Relief came when David raced his cruiser through the stone entrance. Dressed in his crisp uniform with the shiny gold chief’s badge pinned on his breast, he climbed from the driver’s seat. “I didn’t know you were into gardening.”
“I’m not.” Mac jumped to his feet to take the sheet of paper that David held out to him. “What’s this?”
“A confession.” He responded to Mac’s questioning expression by clarifying, “That’s a copy of it. The original is in evidence at the station. It came in today’s mail. It was postmarked yesterday.”
Wiping her hands on her jeans, Archie scanned the letter in Mac’s hands. “Who’s it from?”
“Betsy Weaver,” David told them.
Archie objected, “But she was killed Saturday or Sunday.”
Mac reminded her that she had last seen Betsy Saturday evening. “If this was mailed Saturday night, then it wouldn’t have been postmarked until two days later.”
David summarized the contents of the letter. “Betsy fell in love with Travis the first time she saw him. When he started having an affair with Katrina, Betsy harassed her until she became so consumed with jealousy that she killed her. The Hardwicks saw her leaving the scene and started blackmailing her. She didn’t have any money to pay them off, so she had to kill them.”
“I didn’t see Betsy Weaver coming out of the Hardwick home,” Mac objected. “That perp was slender and taller.”
“I’m simply telling you what she says in her letter.” David held up his hand.
Archie took the copy of the letter from Mac. “What about Lee Dorcas? What about this whole Pay Back routine?”
“She says she lured him out here pretending to be a promoter with the promise of a singing engagement. She killed him and dumped his body up at the mine where she knew it would be found come spring. She assumed Chief Phillips would call it a murder-suicide and close the case.”
Archie’s doubt matched Mac’s. “I can’t see Betsy being strong enough to walk up that trail to the mine, let alone lug a body up there to dump.”
“All she had to do was put it into the back of an ATV and drive it up there,” David said.
“Don’t tell me you actually believe this.” She shoved the letter into his hands. “Who wants lemonade?” She went inside to prepare the refreshments.
“Whoever dumped Dorc
as’s body would have had to have carried the body through the barricade at the opening in the mine,” Mac pointed out, “which is a tight fit for a thin person. Doing that requires both strength and dexterity. Betsy Weaver didn’t have either.”
“This confession also makes no mention about a man matching Lee Dorcas’s description taking a chartered flight to Houston,” David said. “It can’t be a coincidence that the Monday after the blizzard someone looking like Dorcas flew out of here.”
“Maybe because our killer doesn’t know that we know about that flight.” Mac grinned. “We now know for certain that Betsy’s murder is connected to Katrina’s.” He climbed the steps.
David followed him around the house to the back deck. “I had that dream again.”
“What dream?” Mac sat at the table under the umbrella. After working in the hot sun, he yearned for the shade of the deck.
“This awful nightmare I’ve been having ever since her murder. Pay Back kills Katrina. Only he doesn’t look like Pay Back.”
“What does he look like?” Archie returned to the deck with a pitcher of lemonade and sugar cookies.
“I don’t know. It’s dark.” David lowered himself into a chair. “Katrina and I are together in her bedroom. He’s there. Katrina yells. What she yells doesn’t make sense.”
“What does she yell?” Mac asked.
“‘Oh, no! It’s alive!’ He shoots her and then he shoots me. That’s when I wake up.”
Mac grimaced. “That’s a really odd thing to say when someone breaks into your bedroom while you’re with someone. ‘It’s alive’?”
“That’s what Dr. Frankenstein said when he created the monster,” Archie agreed. “If I were writing a scene like that, I wouldn’t—”
“This isn’t a book, Archie,” David said.
“She’s right,” Mac said. “If someone broke into my bedroom, I would yell ‘Get out,’ or maybe, ‘What are you doing here’—Could that have been—?”
David shook his head. “I remember in my dream that her saying that even surprised me. Every time I dream it, she screams, ‘It’s alive!’ and she’s terrified.”
