Wash Her Guilt Away (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 2)

by Michael Wallace

  “And instead, you have a killer who waited for the snow to stop and left without leaving a trace of himself …”

  “Or herself. It could have been a woman.”

  “Right. And whether you believe Peter’s evidence about the light going out, you still have a killer getting away from a cabin completely locked from the inside.”

  “A minor detail. When we find the killer, we’ll find the explanation for that. It’s probably pretty simple once you know.”

  “I don’t want to tell you your business, but wouldn’t it make sense to find the killer by figuring out the locked-room situation?”

  “You’ve been watching too much TV. When I know who has the best motive, I can probably crack it from there. Right now I’m counting five people with decent motives, so I have to do a bit more weeding.”

  “Well, good luck. But if Peter says he saw the light go off at 1:45, you’d better work that into your story before the defense attorney does. Peter’s been a witness before, and he’s probably a pretty good one.”

  “All right. You been paying attention out there? Heard anything interesting?”

  “Just the sound of a marriage possibly cracking up.”

  “That’s tough. You know, one thing about this business that I’ll never like is dealing with personal information that starts to come out after a crime’s been committed. I still remember the first time I had to tell a wife her husband was cheating. He and the other woman were driving back from a rendezvous when a drunk driver crossed the center line and hit them head-on.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “Killed the husband and put the other woman in the hospital for a month. And the drunk just got a couple of bruises. Life’s not fair. Anyway, I had to notify the wife. She brain-locked and couldn’t sort out whether to be crushed because he was dead or pissed because he was fooling around. I could have handled her doing one or the other, but when she just stood there and did nothing, I almost lost it.”

  Gordon nodded, but said nothing.

  “Still, it could have been worse.”

  “How?”

  “I could have been the guy who had to tell the other woman’s husband.”

  Lilly opened the door and came in with a stack of papers nearly an inch thick.

  “The office is locked now, but the reports from Syracuse were there when we went to do it. Sorry, sir, but there’s no telling who might have seen them.”

  “We can always hope for a break, deputy. We’re due for one.” He took the papers from Lilly and held them up. “This should be interesting reading, Gordon. The dutiful wife was apparently quite well known to the police in Syracuse a few years ago. Go along, now, and let me read it. But don’t go too far.”

  7

  PETER WASN’T IN THE LOUNGE, so Gordon started for the cabin. The rain had stopped, and the wind had let up somewhat. The sun was still out of sight, but more of its light seemed to be getting through the clouds overhead. The cold air was bracing and sensually pure. Gordon walked slowly and breathed deeply.

  Peter was lying on the bed reading Vanity Fair when Gordon came in. He set the magazine down and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

  “How did it go with Buck Rogers?”

  “Steady questions as usual.”

  “You know, Gordon, I don’t think he likes me.”

  “He doesn’t like anybody, Peter. Don’t take it personally. I get the feeling he barely tolerates me.”

  “Did he ask you about my seeing the light go out?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Same here, only about 35 times and as many different ways. He seems to think that if he just asks the question different, I’ll give him the answer he wants to hear.”

  “I need to ask you something, Peter. He asked if you could be trusted about that, and I told him he could take it to the bank.”

  “Thanks, but I doubt it impressed him.”

  “Still, I have to wonder. You did have quite a bit to drink that night …”

  “Not as much as you think.”

  “All right, let’s not have that discussion, but just tell me. Are you sure?”

  Peter didn’t answer immediately, but when he did, he spoke carefully and deliberately.

  “I’ll tell you exactly what I told Rogers. I got up to pee and went into the bathroom without noticing much of anything. When I came back into the room, I could see light coming through our blinds from outside, which seemed unusual. I went over to the window and lifted one of the slats. The light was on in that cabin, nice and bright. The blinds were drawn and I couldn’t see anything inside, but you couldn’t miss the light being on. And I noticed it had stopped snowing.

  “I remember thinking it seemed pretty late for Wendy to still be up alone, so I stepped back to the bed and looked at the alarm clock. It said 1:45 exactly. It runs three minutes slower than my watch, but close enough. Then I looked up at our window again and just then the light went out. I got back into the bed, pulled the covers over my head, and was asleep in probably two or three minutes. But I saw what I saw, just the way I told you.”

  “That has to be right,” Gordon said after a slight pause. “The detail is too convincing. There must be something wrong with the medical report.”

  “Far be it from me to criticize my profession, but there’s usually some slop in those reports. It seems like more than usual in this case, but all I can figure is that there’s something that hasn’t been accounted for yet.”

  For several moments, each man was lost in his own thoughts. Gordon finally broke the silence.

  “So what should we do for the rest of this afternoon?”

  “I’m feeling a bit restless. And thirsty. I was thinking of getting a bit of exercise by strolling up to the lodge and having a beer.”

  “I have a better idea. Let me show you Roaring Spring.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The source of Eden River. It’s a little over a mile up that path at the end of Harry’s property, through the National Forest land. I think you’ll be impressed.”

  “Sure. Why not? Work up a bit of an appetite for dinner and all that.”

  At the edge of Harry’s property, beyond the cabin where the Van Hollands had been staying, there was a fence three feet high and made of crossed timbers. The path from the lodge to the cabins continued along the river through a break in the fence but narrowed to a width of about two feet. On either side of it grew grass, made a lush green from the winter’s rains, with here and there a patch of bluish-purple forget-me-nots. The river at this point was flanked by stands of pine trees of varying sizes and states of health. The path wound through the trees, sometimes running just a few feet from the river, sometimes as much as 150 feet away with the river barely visible through the forest.

  Gordon and Peter trudged up the path, not going too fast and trying to take in as much as they could. The farther along they got, the deeper and thicker the woods got, with the path becoming increasingly covered with pine needles, and the smell of the trees more pronounced. From time to time a pine cone would drop to the ground, or they would see a squirrel scampering up a tree or a woodpecker butting its beak against a pine trunk. Otherwise they were alone in a deep, quiet forest, the silence disturbed only by an occasional bird call or the sighing of wind through the canopy above them. For more than 15 minutes they walked and looked, saying nothing, leaving the peace undisturbed.

  A sound, indistinct at first, seemingly no more than a distant rumble or vibration, became audible at that point. As they moved on, it began to assume the nature of a roar, the sound of water moving rapidly at high pressure.

  “We’re getting close,” Gordon said.

  The noise increased for a few minutes. Gordon and Peter came around a bend in the path, following it out of the trees directly up to the river’s edge, where it ended at a wooden deck with guard railings.

  Stepping onto the deck, they could see the source of the noise 150 feet away. At that point the topography changed, and the g
round rose 30 feet in a straight vertical line to another shelf of land beyond. The exposed side of the cliff they were facing was composed of porous volcanic rock, riddled with holes, and from almost every hole shot a white jet of water that landed in a large pool, a bowl scooped out of the earth by countless years of running water. Near the observation platform, the lip of the bowl narrowed to a width of 75 feet and the water began to flow out of it. That was the genesis of Eden River.

  They stood, looking at it for several minutes without saying a word.

  “All right,” said Peter. “I have to admit I’m impressed. It’s like a waterfall, only it isn’t.”

  “The snow that falls on The Mountain in the winter goes into the ground,” Gordon said, then runs underneath it for about 30 miles. A subterranean river, actually. It gets here, and out it comes. The volume is the same, day in and day out, no matter what the season. And it’s always 52 degrees Fahrenheit, clean and pure as any water can be.”

  They looked in silence for a few more minutes. A gust of wind kicked up and blew the spray from the falling water in their direction, hitting them with a film of vapor.

  “The Native Americans considered this a sacred place,” Gordon said, “and believed that the rocks here were a portal to the world of the spirits and that the spirits released the water when they were at peace. You can see how they thought that.”

  “I guess I don’t really believe that,” Peter said, “but somehow I prefer it to the scientific explanation. It’s a better story, anyway.”

  The rain, which had been absent during their walk to the spring, began to fall again in a slow, steady, soaking shower. They pulled up the hoods on their parkas and started back toward Harry’s.

  It was later in the afternoon now, and the forest seemed darker and more ominous than it had on the way out. There was no birdsong at all, and the trees were dripping rainwater that was filtering down from the canopy. It was easy to feel that they were the only two people left in the world. Several minutes along, Peter stopped.

  “I’m not sure I’m going to make it to the cabin,” he said. “Go ahead if you want, but I’m going to look for a special tree to honor with my presence, if you get my drift.”

  “I get it. I’ll wait here.”

  Peter headed into the woods away from the river, and Gordon moved under a tree with low-hanging branches where he figured there would be more protection from the rain. As he stood waiting, he tried to sort out the details of Wendy’s murder but found himself getting nowhere. He had a vague sense that something he had seen or heard in the past few days connected to something else he had seen or heard in a way that might provide a break in the investigation. But for all his thinking, he couldn’t come up with it. He also had to admit that in some way he didn’t want to. In some way, he realized, he liked all the flawed and quirky people he had met at Harry’s, and he didn’t want one of them to be a killer. Even though one of them certainly was.

  He snapped back to the moment, realizing that he had been thinking about the murder for far longer than Peter should have been away. He turned and looked into the forest in the direction Peter had gone, just in time to see him walk between two trees 50 yards away.

  “Come here, Gordon,” Peter shouted. “You need to see this.”

  With a sigh, Gordon started toward him, making an improvisational path through the trees, walking over wet pine needles and rotten pieces of downed wood, skirting occasional growths of low underbrush. When he reached Peter, they walked another 30 yards into the forest and came to a clearing.

  It was irregularly shaped, somewhere between a rectangle and an oval, about 60 feet by 90 feet. There was no dead wood on the ground, just a carpet of pine needles, and at one of the long ends of the oval/rectangle stood an immense boulder. It was 15 feet wide and ten feet high, and the side of it facing into the clearing was almost perfectly vertical, as if the rock had been sliced through with a bread knife. Its white surface formed a backdrop like the overhang of an amphitheater. A few feet in front of the boulder a circle, eight feet in diameter, had been constructed and carefully framed with smaller rocks, six inches to a foot thick. Inside the circle was a large bed of sodden ashes and pieces of what appeared to have been parts of large logs that hadn’t finished burning.

  Without a word, they walked over to the circle. The rain was falling more heavily, and they were exposed to it in the clearing, but they hardly noticed. They looked into the fire circle and around at the clearing.

  “Is it my imagination,” Gordon said, “or is it colder in here?”

  “Probably your imagination, but I wouldn’t want to bet on that.”

  Gordon squatted next to the circle and reached for a nub that was protruding from the ash by no more than half an inch. Grasping the end of it, he withdrew …

  A chicken drumstick bone. With no meat or skin remaining.

  He and Peter looked at each other.

  “Strange place for a barbecue,” Gordon muttered.

  “Don’t be dense,” said Peter. “Can’t you figure out what this is?”

  Gordon shook his head.

  “You have a secluded place in the depth of the forest, a fire circle, and animal parts left over. That suggests to me there’s been a witches’ Sabbath here, and not all that long ago. Maybe there really was something to the story about Harry’s daughter-in-law.”

  Gordon looked around the clearing and then at his watch, which showed five minutes to four, though with the overcast and rain cutting off the sun, it seemed darker, almost twilight. Involuntarily, he shivered.

  “It’s none of my business, Peter, but do you mind if I ask how you know about these things?”

  “I used to date a physical therapist who turned out to be a Wiccan. That’s a sort of modern, New Age variety of witchcraft. She said they had ceremonies in remote parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains south of the City. Since nobody lives on a farm anymore, they’d sacrifice a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken instead of using a live animal.”

  “The march of progress, I guess. So did you break up with her because she was a witch?”

  “Of course not. I’m a man of the world and would never allow religion to interfere with romance. She just figured me out faster than they usually do and broke it off herself.”

  “Well, I have to hand it to you. Your bladder has already turned up more clues than Detective Rogers has.”

  “You think this is a clue?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s a strange case, so anything strange may have a bearing on it. I think we need to tell Rogers.”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Peter said. “But my next question would be how people get here. Somehow, I can’t imagine a coven of witches pulling into Harry’s parking lot and tromping past the cabins to walk out to this place.”

  “Let’s look around the perimeter a bit.”

  “Should we split up and cover more ground?”

  Gordon shook his head. “I don’t want to get stuck here alone. Let’s stay within sight of each other and keep moving away from the river.”

  They separated slightly and began slowly walking through the woods. The rain had been falling for long enough that it had percolated through the trees and was dripping on them wherever they went. Gordon looked around carefully and thought he saw a small break in the forest to his right. He headed toward it and came to what appeared to be the end of a rough road, more of a cart track really.

  “Over here, Peter.”

  When Peter joined him, they followed the track for about 150 feet, where it gradually widened and took on a more traveled feel. There, they came to an area where there were no trees by the road and ample room for a vehicle to pull off it. Judging from several sets of fairly fresh tire ruts, several vehicles had.

  “I think we’ve found the witches’ parking lot,” Peter said.

  From the direction that the road was heading they heard the faint rumble of a pickup truck in the distance.

  “This probably leads to County Road A22,” Gordon
said. “The road that goes past the entrance to Harry’s. I’m guessing that’s how the witches got here.” He paused. “If that’s who they were.”

  “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Lions Club,” said Peter. “Look what I just found next to one of the tire tracks.”

  He held up a pink, cylindrical object several inches long. It took Gordon several seconds to recognize it as a vibrator of the type readily available at discreet women’s boutiques in the City.

  “Don’t they say,” he finally said, “that a Black Mass usually ends with a sexual orgy of some kind?”

  “That’s what they say,” replied Peter. “And as an eligible bachelor in San Francisco, I’m sure you realize how hard it is for a hostess to come up with a spare man on short notice.” Peter fiddled with the base of the device and nothing happened.

  “Hmm,” he said. “The battery’s used up. Must have been one hell of a party.”

  8

  IT WAS AFTER FIVE when they got back to Harry’s, and Peter headed straight for the bar while Gordon tried to find Rogers. Don said Rogers and Lilly were in the interview room and had asked not to be disturbed, but he went to knock on the door when Gordon insisted it was urgent. A minute later, Gordon was ushered in.

  “Well now, that’s very interesting,” Rogers said when Gordon finished his story. “But I’m afraid it’s out of my jurisdiction. I’m not a ghost hunter, you see. My job is to catch flesh-and-blood criminals.”

  “You’re not going to look into this?”

  “Not unless there’s something that ties into this murder.”

  Gordon looked at the two men. Rogers seemed annoyed, as he always did, but Gordon thought he noticed a hint of nervousness in Lilly and decided to gently press on.

  “You’re the expert, not me,” he said, looking at Rogers again, “but is it really a good idea to rule something out without at least looking into it first?”

  “Ninety percent of detective work is ruling things out. Some take a while and some are easy. This one seems easy. You found something in the woods a half mile or so from the murder scene that doesn’t connect with anything that’s come up in the investigation so far.” He sighed. “But I’ll hear you out. Do you really believe in this supernatural hocus pocus? Tell me why you think this might matter.”