I dug my cell phone out of my tote bag and called him. After six rings, voice mail picked up. I flipped the phone closed without leaving a message. It was six thirty-three. Probably, I thought, he was home and in the shower, washing away the workday’s dust.
* * *
Wes called as I was pulling out of the parking lot. I slipped in my earpiece and punched the ACCEPT CALL button.
“I’ve got news,” Wes said, his voice nearly pulsating with excitement. “Big news. Bonzo-big news.”
Bonzo-big, I repeated silently. “What?” I asked.
“Two things. First, Brooke Michaels, Alice’s granddaughter, inherits everything. Poor little rich girl, huh?”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Because when I called the mother, Alice’s daughter-in-law, Darleen, and asked for a comment, she was shocked. The bequest was news to her, and I can tell you she was none too happy. As far as I was concerned, I was the bearer of good news, but she sure acted like I was an ambulance chaser, if you know what I mean—ready to pounce on an innocent victim. Why, do you think?”
I paused, considering the options. “Maybe she expected that her husband would inherit everything.”
“That’s what I figure, too. Not that it matters given the legal snarl everything is in. Little eight-year-old Brooke will be lucky to get her inheritance in time to pay for college.”
“That’s true, isn’t it? I mean, every investor will probably sue the estate to try to get their money back. God, Wes, what a nightmare.” I thought for a moment. “Just because Alice’s will was news to Darleen doesn’t mean it was news to Randall. Maybe he learned of his mother’s intentions and snapped. Or maybe Darleen was lying about being surprised. Do they have alibis?”
“I’ll check.” Faint scratching sounds alerted me that he was writing himself a note. “What about Alice’s investors? Could one of them have killed her? Or maybe Lenny, her former employee?”
“For revenge?” I asked. “I mean, killing Alice won’t help them get their money or job back.”
“Revenge is a biggie, though,” Wes said. “What other reasons can you think of?”
“Lots,” I replied, thinking that sometimes, maybe often, things are less complicated than we expect them to be. “I mean, don’t investigators look for people who hated the victim? Like a love relationship gone bad?”
“Good point,” Wes said, “but she was long divorced. I mean, like twenty years, plus.”
“Was she dating anyone?”
“At her age?”
I shook my head at Wes’s myopic view of love. “You’re never too old to love, Wes. If you don’t know that now, you will.”
“I guess. I’ll ask around about who she might have been seeing. So how was it being interrogated?”
“I wasn’t interrogated,” I protested, irritated at Wes’s incendiary language. “I was interviewed. There’s a difference.”
“How did it go?” he asked, unabashed.
“Fine. I couldn’t tell them anything new.”
“Who else was there?”
I told him, thinking it was happening again. Wes had a gift for getting me to confide in him, to trust him as if we were close allies. Which, as I thought of it, we were.
“Where’s Randall?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“Yup,” Wes said, chuckling again. “At his lawyer’s, looking for ways to break the trust. My contact says his wife called for an emergency appointment and made him keep it.”
“On the day his mother is murdered. That’s unbelievable, Wes.”
He chuckled. “I know. From what I hear their relationship is all about his doing as he’s told.”
“Ick. So what’s your second piece of news?”
“The weapon used to kill Alice was probably a target pistol, like a Ruger. They found shell casings near the path that leads from your place to the church parking lot.”
I gasped, shocked and horrified at the thought that a sniper had used my woods as a hiding place. A shiver ran up my back. I’d strolled along that path a hundred times. Two hundred.
“If it is a Ruger,” Wes continued, “that’s like the most common target pistol in the world, or at least one of them, which means it’s unlikely to help them find the killer.”
It will help them convict him once they know who he is, I thought.
“They’re checking prints on the shell casings,” he added.
“It’s completely creepy, Wes.” A click sounded, indicating a text message had just arrived. Ty, probably, I thought, wanting to know how I was doing. “I’ve got to go, Wes. I’m driving.”
“Give me something, Josie,” he whined. “About the interrogation or something.”
“I wasn’t interrogated,” I repeated. Wes was hopeless. “I’m hanging up now.”
“Josie!”
I hung up.
The text message wasn’t from Ty. I didn’t recognize the number and didn’t want to try reading the message while I was driving. I pulled onto the sandy shoulder and set my blinkers. The text was from Cathy, the Rocky Point police civilian admin. CALL ME. URGENT.
I dialed her number, and she answered on the first ring.
“Thanks for calling so quickly, Josie,” she said. “Chief Hunter asked me to call on his behalf. He’s hoping you’ll join him at a location on Garry Road. Do you know it?”
“Sure, it runs from Tripper to Oakmont,” I replied, thinking that Garry wasn’t far from the Farmington house.
“Chief Ellis asks that you go there now.”
“Why?”
“He’ll explain when you get there.”
“All right,” I said, feeling my heart begin to beat harder and faster. “What address?”
“You’ll see his vehicle. It’s a short street.”
I wanted to ask more questions, to keep her talking, to get some answers, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Josie?” she asked.
“You can tell him I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”
Something was very, very wrong.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ellis’s SUV sat on the packed dirt shoulder ten feet behind my company’s van. Three police vehicles, their overhead red lights pulsing and spinning, were lined up in front of it. As soon as I rolled to a stop behind his SUV, the two lead vehicles pulled out. One drove a hundred yards forward toward Tripper, pulled a hard left, and blocked the road. The other backed up a hundred yards toward Oakmont, the way I’d driven in, turned a hard right, and blocked access from that end. Ellis stood next to my van, waiting for me to approach. I stepped out and walked slowly toward him.
“Is this your van?” Ellis called.
“Yes,” I said. I recognized that he was asking for some official record. There was no mystery that the van was mine. PRESCOTT’S ANTIQUES & AUCTIONS was printed in white and gold on a maroon background.
“Do you know why it’s here?”
I glanced around. Garry Road was narrow, flanked on both sides by ancient hardwood forests. The sun was still bright, yet under the thick canopy it could have been twilight.
“No,” I said. “Where’s Eric?”
“Was he driving?”
“Where is he? Was there an accident?”
“When did you last hear from him?”
“Stop fencing with me, Ellis,” I said. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. When did you last speak to him?”
“About four thirty. A little after. I called to tell him about Alice.”
“He didn’t call in after that?”
“Not that I know of. Maybe he called the office.”
“Is anyone still at work? Can you check?”
I jogged back to my car and dug through my tote bag, finally finding my BlackBerry at the bottom, where it had somehow worked itself after I’d tossed it in. There were two missed calls. I held my breath, hoping they were from Eric. They weren’t. Both were from Wes, no surprise. He would have heard about the van on his poli
ce scanner. I called the office, and Fred answered.
“Has Eric called in?” I asked without preamble.
“I don’t think so … Let me check Cara’s message book.”
I heard rustling and footsteps, and then Fred said, “No. Is everything okay?”
“I’ll fill you in later,” I said and hung up. My throat closed, momentarily choking me. “He didn’t call in. I tried calling him about half an hour ago on his cell. It rang, then went to voice mail.” I took a breath, then turned to meet Ellis’s eyes. “What’s going on, Ellis?”
“One of our officers on routine patrol spotted the van off to the side of the road. The officer, assuming the van had broken down, stopped to see if he could help. No one was on scene, and the van was unlocked. He noted significant destruction, so he called it in.”
“What do you mean, ‘significant destruction’?” I asked, shivering as if I’d stepped into an unexpected blast of icy wind.
Ellis swung open the back doors, and before I looked inside, I met his eyes, trying to intuit what he wasn’t revealing, but got no hint. I turned my gaze to take in the inside of the van. Destruction was right—the van floor was a jumble of splintered wood; shattered porcelain, bisque, and colored glass; shredded leather and papier-mâché; torn fabric; flattened doll torsos; and hanks of hair, presumably from the dolls’ wigs. A blue sugar bowl was intact, lying in the gully between the two front seats. The lid, also unbroken, sat nearby. A wooden level was perched against the bowl. The crates were more or less intact, with several side panels ripped off but not smashed. Most of the glassware and tools appeared to be undamaged. It was the dolls that had taken the brunt of the attack. I reached for the door frame so I could hoist myself up, but Ellis stopped me.
“The crime scene team isn’t here yet,” he said.
“Where’s Eric?”
“There’s no sign of him. There’s a cell phone on the center console. Would you know by sight if it’s his?”
“No.” I dialed Eric’s number and heard the ring on my end. “Do you hear it?”
Ellis walked to the front of the van and leaned in. He nodded, his expression somber. I ended the call and clutched the unit to my chest, stricken at the nightmare images flooding my brain. Eric was somewhere without his phone.
“What’s all that stuff on the floor?” he asked.
“It looks like the objects Eric packed up today. I see splintered slats from the wooden crates he would have used to pack things in, as if someone ripped into them willy-nilly. Those blue glass pieces are from the cobalt glassware collection.” I pointed. “That’s an old wooden plane, from the tools collection. Look at all the doll parts—the dolls sure got the worst of it. There’s a head. That’s a torso over there. Those bits are glass eyes. That white piece of cloth was probably torn from a doll dress. The clumps of hair are from dolls’ wigs.”
“I presume they were in one piece when he went to collect them?”
“Yes,” I said. “It looks like someone tossed the glassware and tools aside but stomped the dolls. Why would somebody do that?”
“You tell me.”
I shook my head. “I have no idea.” I paused, then added, “Maybe the dolls were in the last crate they opened, and they were so disappointed that the crates weren’t filled with gold coins or something, they took it out on the dolls and fled.”
“You think it was a theft?” he asked.
“What else could it be?” I waved my hand dismissively. “Who cares? All I want to know is where Eric is.”
Ellis scanned the woods and the road in both directions. When he looked at me again, I saw caring and concern, which only served to ratchet up my panic.
“It looks as if Eric is missing,” he said.
I stared at him. Eric is missing. His words reverberated in my head. Eric is missing. I couldn’t seem to process what that meant. A roar from what sounded like a motorcycle interrupted my thoughts. I turned toward Oakmont in time to see Wes’s old car screech to a halt at the police barricade. He leapt out and would have dashed to join us if the police officer hadn’t blocked his way.
“What’s going on, Chief?” he shouted from behind the patrol car.
Eric is missing.
Ellis turned his back to him and didn’t reply. “Follow me, Josie,” he told me and walked toward the front of the van, farther away from Wes. “Let’s go over what we know. Not what we think, but what we know.”
I nodded, glad to have something specific to do. Ellis gestured toward the police officer standing by her vehicle. She was tall and blond. Her badge read F. MEADE. She jogged to join us.
“Take notes,” Ellis instructed.
“Yes, sir,” she said and extracted a small notepad and pen from her pocket.
Ellis raised a finger. “One: At a little after four thirty—we’ll get the exact time from your phone record—Eric was at the Farmington house, packing up. Everything was fine. Right?”
I nodded. “Right. He told Jamie and Lorna that Alice was dead. They were upset, left him to close up, and headed straight to the police station.”
“They’re the Farmington sisters, right?”
“Yes.” I explained the sisters’ connection to the dolls and to Alice.
“When did you last speak to them?”
“Just now, at the station house.” I repeated our conversation.
“Hold on a second, Josie.” He lifted his collar and spoke into his microphone. “Cathy, are you there?” A staticky noise sounded, which he seemed to understand as words, because he continued talking. To me the sound was just a sound. “Are Jamie and Lorna Farmington there?” Another crackly noise. “Good. Let me talk to Claire.” A pause, then a noise. “Claire, ask the Farmington sisters about Eric. He was at their house packing antiques, and Josie spoke to him around four thirty.” A longer crackle. “All right, then. Let me know as soon as you get something.” He turned back to me. “When you spoke to Eric, how much more work did he say he had to do?”
I thought back. “Not too much.”
“How long would it take him?”
“I don’t know exactly. Fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour.”
“So that puts us a little after five at the latest. He didn’t call in to the office. Is there anyone he would call?”
“Maybe his girlfriend,” I said. “Grace.”
“Grace what?”
“Abbott.”
“Do you have her number?”
I nodded and scrolled through my phone log. “Should I call her?”
“I will. What’s the number?”
I gave it to him. He punched it in, took two steps away, and said, “Ms. Abbott? This is Chief Hunter of the Rocky Point police. I have an out-of-the-blue question. Did Eric call as he was leaving the Farmington house this afternoon?” He shifted position. “I know it’s odd … Please just answer … He did. All right, then. I’m going to ask you to come join me and Ms. Prescott, Eric’s boss, for some conversation … Yes, I’ll explain when you get here … Shall I send an officer to bring you … That’s fine.” He told her where we were and hung up. “She’s with her brother. He’ll drive her here.”
“She’s got to be upset. It’s awful when you won’t answer questions.”
“I know.” He shrugged. “It’s better, though, that I don’t waste time answering questions that won’t move the investigation forward. She’ll hear what’s happening soon enough.” He took in a breath and raised a second finger. “Two: So we have him in the van calling Grace just before five.” Another finger went up. “Three: Garry Road is a natural cut-through from the Farmingtons’ to your company.” He glanced around. “It’s also a great spot for an ambush.”
“Why?” I asked, my heart tightening at the word. “Why would someone want to ambush Eric?”
He held up a fourth finger, then a fifth. “Four: Someone destroyed the dolls, and the tools and glassware seem incidental. Five: There’s no apparent sign that anyone or anything was dragged through the woods anywhere n
ear the van. I’m no tracker, but while I was waiting for you, I examined the ground cover and low-lying branches and twigs. Nothing is smashed or trampled.”
“How about tire tracks?” I asked.
He held up his left thumb. “Six: There are no tire tracks. It’s been dry, so I wouldn’t expect deep gullies or anything like that, but there’s nothing, so I’m guessing the attackers left their vehicle in the street, transferred Eric into it, and drove away.”
An unmarked black SUV rolled to a stop near the police vehicle blocking the Tripper end of the street. The same woman I’d seen at my company’s parking lot wheeling a pilot’s case stepped out, saw Ellis, extracted her case from the back, and hurried toward us. I glanced over my shoulder. Wes hadn’t moved. His eyes were narrowed, taking it all in.
“Can you video-record first thing?” he asked her as she approached. “I want Josie here to study it, to see if she can figure out what they were looking for, and if they found it.”
“That’s a great idea,” I said, optimism spiking. “I can compare it to the recording I made during my initial walk-through. I have a video record of every object.”
“Good,” Ellis said.
“I’m on it,” the tech said. She wheeled her case to the back of the van.
“What have you done so far?” I asked.
“We’re canvassing for witnesses and beginning the forensic examination. I put in a call to the state police for a tracker.” He glanced at his watch. “He should be here any minute.”
A dark blue pickup truck pulled up beside Wes. Grace was in the passenger seat. Before the car fully stopped, she flung open the door, jumped to the street, and ran in my direction.
“That’s Grace, Eric’s girlfriend,” I told Ellis.
Wes shouted something, which she ignored. The police officer, Daryl, I thought his name was, moved to intercept her but stepped aside when Ellis called to let her through. A man about her age, twenty-three, maybe a little older, got out from behind the wheel and stood for a moment, then ran to join us. He was tall and husky, with neatly trimmed dark brown hair, the same shade as Grace’s. He also ignored Wes’s questions.
“Where’s Eric?” Grace asked.
I didn’t want to break down in front of her, and her wide-eyed panic was contagious. I took a deep breath and told myself to stay calm.
Dolled Up for Murder Page 5
