She checked the clock on the dashboard as soon as she turned the engine. It was barely six, and the firing line wouldn’t close until eight that evening. There wouldn’t likely be any way to sneak around if the shooting range was bustling with customers, not to mention Drake, so she started off down the street, heading towards Donna Kramer’s house.
By the time she pulled up the long driveway, having driven to the rural end of Rock Ridge, Kate’s stomach was churning, both hungry and sickened over what she might discover.
The house looked dark except for a subtle glow through one of the first-floor windows. Kate took a deep breath and climbed out of her truck. She was quiet about shutting the driver’s side door. She glanced up and down the street. In both directions, there were only a few houses in the distance, but it didn’t seem like anyone was home.
Quickly, she padded up the walkway, pulling the envelope from her pocket and plucking the key out. She fit it into the door and a surge of excitement washed through her that she was able to turn the key, unlocking the door.
She held her breath as she stepped inside and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. She didn’t close the door behind her, not entirely. She didn’t want to risk the sound of a click when it struck the doorjamb, so instead she left it open a crack and scanned the entryway, which was bare.
Stepping around the entryway, she came into the living room. Other than a couch and coffee table, the room was just as bare. Donna Kramer had moved to Rock Ridge under the auspices of working at the amusement park. Evidently, she was one of the executives sent by the amusement park corporation to oversee the construction of the park. During her short stay, she had struck up an unlikely affair with Dean Wentworth, as well as Tommy Barkow, a man she had ended up killing. Given the secret relationship Donna had undergone with Tommy, and judging by the threadbare living room, Donna might have been in Rock Ridge much longer than the amusement park project’s inception, long enough to oversee a drug operation and keep Tommy Barkow in line as he turned coca plants into street-grade cocaine.
She turned the corner and found the kitchen. It was dim, but unlike the living room, it looked lived in. There were dirty dishes in the sink and a few newspapers resting on the kitchen table. She smelled coffee, though it wasn’t fresh, then spotted a coffeemaker on the counter. After nearing it, she placed her hand on the glass carafe. It was warm.
Turning for the living room, she tried to visualize which window she had seen glowing. There was a hallway at the far side of the living room, so she quietly crept down it, remembering the light had been coming from that side of the house. She paused, listening out for sounds in-between each step.
Up ahead on the left there was an open door. Light spilled into the hallway through the gap in the doorjamb and as Kate neared it, she heard rustling within the room. Though it was faint, it sounded like someone flipping a newspaper open.
She realized her hands were trembling. Fear ratcheted up her spine. She had no way of knowing who she would find on the other side of the door. Would they be armed and dangerous? Would she be able to talk her way out of trespassing? She wasn’t even holding her tool kit.
Scraping together every last shred of gumption she had and reminding herself she wouldn’t be able to help Jason if she didn’t have the guts to see this through, Kate pushed the door open.
Immediately, a young woman bolted to her feet, shrieking and dropping a newspaper. The sheets cascaded over the coffee table in front of her, but Kate’s gaze was locked on the blonde in disbelief.
It was Ashley. Her blue eyes were wide and her mouth gaped open. Taking quick stock of the room—it looked like an entertainment den—Kate saw no sign the woman had been abducted and was now being held against her will. Quite the opposite, in fact. There was a steaming mug of coffee on the coffee table. The television, though muted, was playing the evening news. And Ashley looked freshly showered. There were no bruises or abrasions on her face or wrists. If Kate didn’t know better, she would’ve thought the woman was enjoying any other evening, relaxing at home.
Except that she wasn’t at home.
“Kate?” she asked in delayed response to having been caught, but quickly launched into a strange display, sighing with relief and rushing towards Kate. “Thank God you found me! Are the police here? I’ve been held captive!”
“Ashley, stop!” she blurted out, throwing her hands up so the woman couldn’t embrace her. “What are you doing here?”
“I was kidnapped. Haven’t you been watching the news?”
“Nothing about this situation screams ‘held against your will’,” she pointed out.
Ashley furrowed her brow at her then seemed to decide on what to say next. “They’re going to get back any minute.” Grabbing Kate’s arm, she pulled her into the hallway. “We have to get out of here. It’s not safe.”
“Stop!” she yelled again. “You’re a terrible liar. Now what in the hell is going on?”
“You don’t believe me?” she challenged, stepping up to Kate in a threatening manner.
“Not for a second.”
“If you’re not here to rescue me, then I’ll rescue myself,” she asserted. “But they took my cell phone so I’ll need yours to call the police.”
“What’s wrong with the house phone?” she sneered, exposing Ashley for the clumsy criminal that she clearly was.
“The line was cut,” she stated indignantly.
Kate was about to make a demonstration out of checking, but she didn’t have to. She heard a sudden vibration against the coffee table inside the den, and when she rushed to the table and threw back the newspaper, she found a cell phone buzzing and inching its way across the wooden surface.
Quickly, she answered the call, but Ashley advanced on her. Kate demanded, “Who is this?” She was only able to hear a man bark “Ashley” before the woman grabbed the phone from Kate’s hand and threw it against the wall.
They stared at one another, and Ashley looked like she was about to explode, but she reeled in her emotions and said, “Please, we need to call the police so I can go home.”
Astonished the young woman was so committed to her lie that she appeared downright delusional, Kate stated, “Oh, I’m calling the police all right. And you’re not going anywhere except to jail.”
“No one will believe you,” she said, folding her arms. “They’ll think you’re cynical and callous.”
“Ashley, you just shattered your own cell phone!”
“No,” she stated in a cool tone as though she had the whole thing figured out. “My kidnappers did.” Without warning, she stalked over to a radiator in the corner of the room, and Kate suddenly noticed a set of handcuffs on the ground. Ashley clamped one of the cuffs around her wrist then hooked the other around the metal pipe at the side of the radiator. “I’ve been captive. I’m a victim,” she stated, sitting on the floor.
It suddenly occurred to Kate that Ashley’s display might shed light on what had happened to Becky. Dean Wentworth had told Kate that Becky hadn’t been abducted, though at the time, to Kate’s untrained eye, he had appeared to be high on drugs. But maybe there was more than an ounce of truth to what he had said.
“Where are you going?!” Ashley yelled, as Kate decisively walked out of the den and into the hallway.
She picked her pace up, jogging through the living room and up the stairs to the second floor, determined to catch Becky Langley in the house. She opened every door and checked every room, but her son’s fiancée was nowhere to be found.
When she returned to the den where Ashley was sulking on the floor, she was furious and out of breath.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she demanded, but the young woman pressed her mouth shut like a brat. “Why was my son given a note with a key to this address? Who left that envelope under his doormat?”
Ashley pinched her eyes shut, stating, “I’m a victim.”
“You’re about to be!” asserted Kate, advancing on the woman, who flinched as so
on as Kate came to a stomping halt where she sat. “You can rot in those cuffs for all I care!”
Ashley glared up at her. “You wouldn’t dare.”
Kate had never been so murderous in all her life, and yet she knew she wouldn’t follow through on her threat. Before she could do something she would regret, she marched through the house and out the front door. If there was fresh air outside, it didn’t reach her lungs as she gasped, overwhelmed with emotion.
It took more strength than she thought she had to calm herself enough to get Scott on the line. As soon as his voice came through her cell phone, she blurted out, “I found Ashley.” She gave him the address.
“You found her? How?”
“Just get here as fast as you can,” she told him, “because trust me, I’m ready to kill her.”
“Why?” he demanded, but quickly offered, “I’m on my way. I’m heading out of the precinct right now.”
“She wasn’t abducted.”
“What?”
“I’m telling you, she wasn’t. I caught her relaxing on a couch as though all was right in the world, and Scott, I’m very scared for what this might mean in terms of Becky.”
It felt like an eternity had passed before Kate saw Scott’s truck barreling down the street with two cruisers and an ambulance behind it. She snorted a futile laugh that Scott had called the medics. Ashley was fine. She wouldn’t need her vitals checked. She hadn’t suffered any trauma. Had Scott not believed her?
As his truck pulled in beside hers, a train of news vans tearing down the street stole Kate's attention. “Damn,” she muttered. Ashley would make the headlines and it wouldn’t be likely any of the reporters would cover the conspiracy angle. They would make Ashley out to be the brave survivor that Kate knew she most certainly was not.
“Where is she?” Scott asked, as he walked briskly up the walkway.
“In the entertainment den, through the living room and at the end of the hall on the left, but Scott,” she said, pressing her hands to his chest to stop him, “when I found her she wasn’t cuffed to the radiator. She had her cell phone nearby. It was only after I discovered her cell that she threw it against the wall and handcuffed herself. She’s guilty as sin.”
Scott met her gaze. His eyes looked severe, but behind them she could tell he was just as confused as she was. “All right. I’ll take it from here.”
Officers Garrison and Tolland met him at the door. Three medics hopped out of the ambulance, the lights of which were whirling and making Kate feel dizzy.
As everyone rushed into the house, Kate stood on the walkway and folded her arms.
Ten o’clock couldn’t come soon enough.
Chapter Nine
When the clock on the dashboard struck ten, Kate was angling her truck off the road and into the amusement park, marveling at the rides, which were all lit up on the eastern side of the park. The western side was dark. Bulldozers sat in shadow. Stacks of construction materials were scattered in haphazard piles. She couldn’t believe Dean’s progress.
She parked in front of the executive trailer, which towed the line between the dark and bright halves of the park, figuring that was where Dean would be.
As she climbed out of her truck and shut the door, she realized she hadn’t set foot here since the botched ransom exchange, the explosion, the terror of that night. Knowing what she now knew, that Becky Langley probably hadn’t been taken at all, she felt the heavy weight of grief pressing on her chest. Lance Langley had almost been killed for nothing. And Jason had sat next to Kate in that surveillance van as though fretting as badly as her. Was Jason on a heroic crusade to find his fiancée no matter what the danger? Or had he known from the start that Becky, like Ashley, was at the center of this evil conspiracy?
She started for the executive trailer. Gravel crunched under her sneakers with each step. Though the trailer windows were curtained, she could see lights within softly glowing. She felt anxious and chills rolled through her, remembering the last time she had seen Greg, her first husband who had disappeared.
At the time, this area had been a campsite recently taken over by the Anarchist Freedom Network. There had been a similar trailer. She had braved barging into it to get answers and had walked right into a trap, but Greg had saved her, taking a bullet meant for her. The moment she had seen him burst through the door, their eyes had met. In that second, a flood of memories came rushing back—their marriage, their long history, the details of their life together before he had gone missing.
When she reached the trailer steps, Kate heaved in a deep breath, closing her eyes and shaking off the thought, but as she gripped the railing, opening her eyes and taking the first step, the notion that tonight felt identical to the night her first husband had been killed hadn’t left her.
She reminded herself that Dean was inside. There would be no ambush, no surprises other than the truth, which she had been hunting for all month.
Cautiously, she knocked on the door.
No sooner than she had, she startled when a man behind her said, “Mom?”
Whipping around, she found Jason at the foot of the stairs. She rushed down the shallow steps to him. She threw her arms around him and held him close then urged him back, studying his face.
“Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick. I left you messages.”
“I know,” he said to calm her. “I’m fine.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Dean asked me to come,” he said.
Overwhelmed with questions, she cut him off. “What was your lead on Becky? Who left that note and the key? What did they expect you to do with it?” Whispering intensely, she added, “Why did you kill Donna?”
He had been trying to answer every question, his mouth working and pressing shut, unable to get a word in until she ran out of steam.
“Becky wasn’t abducted,” he stated.
“Dean mentioned as much, but it doesn’t make sense, or it didn’t...” Ashley sprang to mind, but she stuck to the topic at hand. “What did you find out about her? And how did you find out?”
“For the longest time I thought she was kidnapped. I was there. I bought it. And I had been drugged. When I first started looking into it, I was convinced she had been taken. But the closer I got, the less sense it was making.” Jason edged in and began speaking even more discretely. “I had to be really careful, because leads kept pointing to the Langleys’ mustard facility, as well as the inn, but Donna Kramer’s name kept coming up whenever I poked around either location.”
“Donna was peddling the drug shipments,” Kate supplied. “And Tommy Barkow was making it. He set off the explosion here the night we tried to get Becky back. That’s why Donna killed him.”
“Yes, but she wasn’t behind all of this.”
“Drake is,” she blurted out.
“Keep an open mind about that,” he suggested. “We need to talk to Dean.”
“You trust Dean?”
Jason cocked his head as if confused as to why his mother would have a reason not to trust the mayor.
“With all the drugs flying around and Dean’s involvement—you know, the affair he had with Donna Kramer—well, I was at his office earlier and I could’ve sworn he was on drugs.”
Jason almost laughed. “Dean’s not on drugs. I mean, not illegal ones, anyway. He’s on a new prescription and the dosage was all wrong.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive,” said Jason. “Dean is one of the few people I still trust.” Getting back on point, he went on. “I talked to Chucky at the inn and a number of employees at the mustard facility, and then it just clicked. Becky helped set up the operation. There’s no other way to explain those locations, and I’ve kept a close eye on Amelia and Lance. They’re genuinely baffled.”
“Why would Becky be doing any of this?”
“I have no idea. I feel like I don’t even know her anymore. Maybe I never did. I keep coming back to the possibility that maybe she’s
scared or being intimidated like so many others in Rock Ridge, but then when I really think about it, the only people who are scared are the ex-cons who have had no choice but to be pawns at the bottom of the pyramid. And Becky’s no ex-con. She doesn’t even have a traffic violation.”
“Jason,” she said sternly. “I’m worried about you. You’ve gotten yourself in deep with some very dangerous characters. I spoke with Gillian O’Reilly and she told me you’re at risk poking around how you’ve been doing. You can’t pretend to be one of them.”
He looked at her discerningly, his brow furrowing, mouth twisting with a frown. “How many times have you been told not to look into something? How many times have you listened? Of all the people, how can you say that to me?”
Kate took a deep breath and tried to formulate a reasonable justification, but none came. He was right. She was being hypocritical, yet she didn’t care. When it came to the safety of her children, the golden rule was do as I say, not as I do.
“Who have you gotten close to?” she demanded.
“Chucky, Harold—”
“Who’s Harold?”
“He works at the Langleys’ mustard facility,” he answered quickly. “Tommy, Donna, Drake—”
“At this point, Drake has to be the most dangerous.”
“I’m not so sure,” he said. “But I worked my way up from the bottom. I’ve been convincing people left and right that my love for Becky is so strong, I don’t care if she’s a criminal, I just want to be with her. I’ll do anything. And they’re buying it, Mom.”
“Don’t you understand this is going to backfire? Do you think I’m sleeping at night knowing you killed Donna?”
“We both know I had to.”
“You never have to.”
“She was going to shoot you, Mom.”
“Why were you even there?”
“To get Tommy’s equations and instructions,” he said. “And it’s a good thing, too, or else you might not be alive.”
“People know, Jason. People are talking. I couldn’t bear it if you went to prison.”
Mrs. Fix It Mysteries, Season 2 (5 Cozy Mystery Books Collection) Page 36
