Tar Heart (A New Hampshire Mystery Book 3)

by Mira Gibson

  “I’m not sure it was better,” she countered, lifting the bottle to her lips. She tipped it up, pouring beer down her throat.

  “Do you know why she was paid off and kicked out?”

  Cody cracked a beer open for himself, perhaps getting comfortable in case the conversation stretched into the wee hours.

  Closing her eyes, she breathed, “Christ,” and chugged the rest of her beer.

  Cody was ready on the quick with her third, but she reached for it slowly, anything to buy time.

  She grit her teeth then blurted out, “It was because of one of her clients.” Studying his reaction for signs she wouldn’t have to divulge more, she drank and drank and drank then relented. “The owner didn’t like the client. I’m not being clear.” She sighed out a frustrated groan. “Rose wasn’t paid off. She had pre-paid a shit ton of rent. The only way to get her to leave was to reimburse her, but Ron didn’t have it, like he’d already spent it on, fuck I don’t know. So he convinced the girls to come up with the cash, which made them hate Rose. It was a fucking mess.”

  “Why would the girls do that? Why would they care if Rose stayed?”

  “Because,” she said, exasperated. “Everyone was scared shitless of Rose’s client.” She really didn’t want to have to go there, continue down this road so she straightened her shoulders and stretched her legs off the side of the bed. “If you want my take on Ron…”

  “I do,” he assured her.

  For a moment Mary receded into deep thought, seeing Ron’s face, the spit that had formed in the corners of his mouth, his red face as he’d raged through the lounge. Finally, she said, “He probably killed her, them.”

  Cody hadn’t touched his beer, which bothered her for some reason. Maybe because she would prefer him good and drunk if this conversation was heading in the direction she feared. It would give her hope he might not remember it.

  “Who was the client?”

  Fuck, she thought. There would be no getting around it.

  “Here’s the thing,” she began stalling, buying more time. “And I’ll preface this by saying it took me a long time to put this together. But I’m pretty sure that by the time I worked there Rose only had one client. Like, she wasn’t an escort anymore. And the whole rent arrangement with Ron was like... how do I even say this without saying it?” she asked herself.

  Encouragingly, he told her, “Just say it.”

  “It was a front. Just a front.”

  “For...?”

  “Her affair. She just needed a place she could go to fuck this guy. And when Ron discovered this and found out who the guy was, he was livid.”

  Cody let out a carefully measured breath, but it didn’t conceal how thrilled he was. “Again, who was the client?”

  Touching eyes with him, remorse swallowing her whole, she said, “If I told you, you’d never believe me.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The Center Harbor PD didn’t exactly have a Digital Forensics department. It had a specialist and a room in the basement, both of which reminded Lucas of high school computer science, a course he had hated and failed—eggshell-white walls, steel shelving units holding monitors of varying sizes, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, a bleary-eyed geek fumbling through explanations Lucas didn’t understand.

  “Less technical jargon,” he instructed and Tim pushed his rimless glasses up his nose, staring blankly at him as though he couldn’t put it in plainer terms.

  “The footage was erased after the fact,” he managed, as he rolled his chair towards the table where a 17” PC displayed a black wash, which should have been camera feed from the Wythe Resort’s east hallway. “That’s why there’s fifty-eight minutes of nothing.”

  “Unlike Rose and Benjamin’s house,” he supplied. Their security footage had a jump-cut, indicating the killer had shut off the system before he shot Rose and then resumed recording after.

  “The tape was wiped,” said Tim in a clipped tone, as he typed what looked like computer code into a laptop beside the PC they had been focused on. “Which means I can recover the footage... theoretically.”

  Leaning back in his chair, though it barely gave, Lucas folded his arms. “How long will it take?”

  “Hard to say.” With gusto, Tim hit the Enter key and pitched forward in his chair, nose-to-monitor, but the screen didn’t even blink where they'd both expected an image to surface. He slumped and began gnawing on his thumb.

  Thinking out loud, Lucas asked, “Why would the guy use different methods of covering his tracks?”

  Tim didn’t answer and that’s what Lucas liked about him. They had been at it all morning, suffering through the painstakingly slow process of trying to resurrect erased footage. They had been combing through, frame-by-frame, as if an image might jump out. For the digital forensic specialist, it was a thrilling challenge. Lucas could see it in the man’s eyes, in the tense flex of his cheeks every time a new idea struck him. Tim enjoyed the battle, but for Lucas it was agonizing.

  He was being punished.

  After a long night of driving aimlessly, slipping in and out of thoughts so deep that his surroundings often disappeared; and after waking up with the sun, feeling bound and uncomfortable only to realize he had slept in his coat, boots, his gun digging into his ribs because he hadn’t removed his holster, Lucas had bolted upright and leapt from the bed. Coffee hadn’t crossed his mind let alone breakfast. Tucker Wythe was missing. Holly was gutted, maybe even terrified, and Lucas was determined to attack this thing from every possible angle in order to find the kid, restore some semblance of her life, win her trust in the process, her heart perhaps since he sensed it contained his own.

  But Cody had shut him down when Lucas had reached the lockers, ordering him to work with Tim before he’d even said good morning. His partner hadn’t looked him in the eye and it wasn’t for lack of time.

  While Cody was off pursuing leads, talking to Ron Conover and the escorts at Diamonds, getting what he could from Roberta King and, God willing, his girlfriend's younger sister, which had to be a bone-cringing endeavor, Lucas was exiled to the precinct basement where he felt like he was being babysat by a pockmarked, balding man who had made one too many excited references to snowshoeing—It’s a sport, you know! and Ski poles only slow me down! and These fifty-eight minutes would be more promising if they were snowy, get it?—each comment punctuating a burst of frantic typing followed by his signature slump.

  When Tim slurped coffee from a mug with the caption, I trip over my wiener in bold under the image of a dachshund, Lucas realized he had been mentally drifting off again, lost in the possibility that Roberta King—the young woman he’d seen leaving the resort, the vixen posed in one of the risqué photos on the Diamonds website—might also be the female he had spoken with while standing over Benjamin Wythe’s body.

  His gut told him she’d had something to do with the murders.

  “How technically savvy would a person have to be to erase the footage?” he asked Tim, who was tapping his thumb on the keyboard spacebar for no apparent reason other than to drive Lucas crazy.

  “A device like this?” For a moment he pondered. “They’d have to be familiar with it in the first place or have the manual, but it’s fairly straight forward. It’s like double-deleting files off a hard drive. You can’t just drag and drop a file into the trash bin. You have to know to empty the trash as well.”

  So the real question was could Roberta gain access to both the Wythe’s house and the security room at the resort?

  The clincher was her motive, which wasn’t jumping out at him. Why would the young girl want to kill the couple and kidnap Tucker days later?

  It didn’t make sense.

  All he knew at this point was that according to the missing hour from the east wing’s footage, Benjamin had been murdered after Rose.

  If Roberta had done it, why hadn’t she taken Tucker immediately after Rose had fallen through the ice?

  In terms of motive, there didn’t s
eem to be any clear-cut answer, but Lucas had researched Roberta King, her harrowing upbringing, the inhumane treatment and methodic cruelty she’d endured, the demonic process of torturing a child into forgetting, into forming blank spaces where memories should be, systematically erasing experiences. Forgetting was a defense mechanism, a way of coping and surviving, which Lucas had read up on extensively. The phenomenon of forgetting could potentially stretch into adulthood, mask aspects of the survivor’s life.

  Had Roberta’s history warped her so completely that her heart had turned to tar, black and sticky, eroding her conscience and eventually compelling her to kill?

  If that were the case, then the same could be said of Lucas—he’d survived a soul-murdering upbringing as well—but as soon as he touched upon the dark possibility, the monitor he had been vacantly staring at flickered gray.

  “Did you see that?” he asked, nudging Tim who was picking a hair out of his coffee. Lucas hit the spacebar, freezing the feed. “Rewind it a few frames.”

  Tim dried his fingers on his khakis and scrolled back frame-by-frame until the monitor turned gray.

  Or so he thought it was gray. Upon closer examination he realized he was looking at shadowy gradations. He rolled backwards in his chair, creating more and more distance and staring at the screen as if it were a Magic Eye poster and soon the shape of a hallway, a figure—a woman?—emerged.

  The woman had a child in her arms.

  Lucas felt his throat tighten.

  It was Holly Danes.

  “Yeah, I think we got something here,” Tim agreed, his fingers dancing over the keyboard.

  Suddenly the door swung inward, Cody McAlister filling the doorway and booming out a curt, “Where’re we at?”

  Thinking fast—the last thing he wanted was for Holly to fall under worse suspicion—Lucas advanced as if to greet his partner, but intentionally clipped his knee on Tim’s chair with such force that the specialist bumped into the table, the mug flying from his hand onto the keyboard, coffee spilling everywhere.

  “Whoa,” said Cody, motioning to help.

  But Lucas was already sopping up the spill as an excuse to hit the spacebar. The footage rolled into black before Cody had a chance to glimpse Holly carrying Tucker towards Room 112. “Damn, buddy, sorry about that.”

  “It’s fine,” Tim grumbled, but when Lucas yanked a cord from the outlet and the monitor cut out, he yelped, “No! Don’t unplug it!”

  “Don’t unplug it?” he echoed like a moron, holding the plug in his hand.

  Tim groaned, stripped his glasses off his face, and pinched the bridge of his nose, as Cody began asking, “What’s wrong? Did we lose the footage?”

  Lucas held his hands up, wincing apologetically for the accidental damage.

  “No,” Tim grumbled. “I’ll just re-transfer the still.”

  In praise, Cody clapped his hand against the specialist’s shoulder. “You got a still?”

  “A second ago,” he complained.

  “Of?”

  Tim glanced at Lucas, soliciting an answer, which meant he hadn’t gotten a good look at the hazy image, thank God.

  “Couldn’t make it out,” he supplied. “Shades of gray.”

  Tim stood from his chair, blotting coffee from his khakis, then let out a disgruntled sigh, grabbed his mug, and excused himself.

  As soon as they were alone, the door clicking shut and Tim padding away from it on the other side, Lucas asked, “How’d it go over at Diamonds?”

  Grimacing, his partner shook his head, but there was something disingenuous about his expression.

  “Ron had nothing to say? Does he have an alibi?” he pressed.

  “I don’t know how to say this,” he began as if unwilling to relay any developments. “For the time being...” he trailed off, clenching his jaw and avoiding Lucas’s gaze. “I’m going to go it alone on this one.”

  “What?”

  Combatively, he stated, “I couldn’t get a hold of you last night and this is bullshit.” As Lucas stammered to respond, his mind suddenly reeling with his profound lack of recall—Cody had tried to get a hold of him?—Cody angled in, jabbing his finger at the floor and spitting words through his teeth. “I have been patient time and again. I’ve forgiven your administrative slips. I’ve given you time to get your shit straightened out. I’ve made excuses for you to the Sergeant, which puts my ass on the line. But when you don’t pick up your phone and you don’t return my calls; and I don’t give a shit how late it is or if you’re sleeping, this job is around the clock; then I start to question if my partner is reliable.”

  Running out of steam, Cody’s eyes turned intense and he was breathing so hard his nostrils flared, but all Lucas could say was, “I didn’t know you called-”

  “What were you doing?”

  “What?”

  “Where were you?” he demanded.

  Thrown, Lucas stumbled through his answer. “Out for a drive then home. I crashed the second I got in the door.” It seemed likely, though Lucas had zero recollection.

  “I’m going to ask you something and I want a god damned straight answer.” He pressed his mouth into a hard line to compose himself. “Did you have a personal relationship with Rose Wythe?”

  The question hit him like a pail of ice water to his face.

  An eternity passed before the accusation fully registered. When it did, Lucas exclaimed, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Cody was staring him down and the glint in his eyes told Lucas that his partner actually believed this.

  “I didn’t know Rose Wythe,” he insisted. “Who the hell told you I did?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m off the case because you think I was involved with the Vic?”

  “Something like that,” he said in a low tone.

  It was gradually hitting Lucas what this would mean—if he wasn’t on the case then he couldn’t protect Holly. There was no way in hell he was going to allow his partner to pull him off the investigation. He winced, preparing to disclose a detail that would be a huge gamble in terms of persuading his partner. Ultimately, he didn’t have a choice. It was Hail Mary time and with nothing left to lose, he said, “It wasn’t Rose.”

  Cocking his head, suspicious yet curious, Cody’s brow lifted as if to suggest—Go on.

  “It was Holly,” he admitted. “And it was years ago and it’s over. It was one night.” Reassuringly, he added, “It hasn’t effected how I do my job.”

  Cody didn’t look convinced, but Lucas couldn’t tell which part hadn’t landed quite right, that it had only been one night or that it wasn’t affecting how he did his job.

  “You don’t believe me?” he challenged. “You don’t buy that someone, perhaps someone who’s all amped up watching the news and probably has delusions of grandeur that their statement will crack this thing wide open, could confuse two identical twins?”

  Holding his ground, Cody said, “I trust my source.”

  “Who’s the source?” Lucas closed the gap between them, but his partner edged away. Pissed, he yelled, “You’re being fed fiction and you like the taste,” then started for the door but turned on his heel before leaving. “Did you pass this horse shit on to the Sergeant?”

  “I will when I get a formal statement-”

  “From your delusional source,” he supplied with a disgusted snort.

  “Your administrative failures were enough to get you pulled.”

  Lucas stared at the man and gradually Cody met his gaze.

  “Am I under suspicion?”

  “If there’s an explanation, I’ll hear it,” he offered.

  “I can’t explain something that didn’t happen.”

  “Then explain where you were the night of the murders, or last night for fuck’s sake, because right now I’m having a hell of a time not picturing you distracted by a four-year old.”

  Without thinking, fury took hold and he advanced on Cody, grabbed him by the collar, shoving
him into a shelving unit, its monitors rattling on impact.

  “I didn’t do this,” he hissed, his knuckles turning white, fists balling the man’s shirt, fire flooding his veins. Cody stood his ground but didn’t shove him off or fight back, unwilling to escalate a bad situation like he was some kind of saint. “You need to drop this,” he warned, forcing himself to release his partner, step away, and catch his breath.

  He yanked the door open on his way out and when Tim asked, “Early lunch?” as their paths crossed in the stairwell, Lucas muttered a swear-filled Good luck.

  He wasn’t just off the case. Lucas was staring down the long barrel of being fired, stripped of his badge, desecrated in the news if the accusation against him was strong enough to seal his fate. He didn’t see how it could. He hadn’t done anything, but Cody was smooth and calculating and had a reputation for pulling off miracles. Could his partner convince an entire department of his guilt when nothing could be further from the truth?

  As he left the precinct, walking out into the frigid air—the whitewashed parking lot, sunlight refracting off windshields—the business card he’d found in his locker flashed through his mind.

  Diamonds.

  Someone was setting him up. They had planted the business card in his locker. They had unearthed his long-ago night with Holly. They were fabricating a motive that Lucas had committed those crimes.

  It was fair to assume Cody had confronted Mary Cole last night after he’d seen her soft-porn photo on the escort website. She must have told him that Lucas had been involved with Rose, but why on earth she’d say that, he couldn’t imagine. Cody must have called Lucas to follow through with the claim as dreamt up by the teenage girl. Mary could’ve easily stolen away to the locker room at the precinct and planted the Diamonds business card. He’d seen her there a few times, stopping in after school to see Hannah.

  There was only one explanation forming in his mind—that the girls were behind this—but he didn’t have a shred of proof.

  Ragged patches of ice were frozen to his windshield. After climbing into his Ford, he flipped the wipers on, but even the fastest setting wasn’t clearing the glass so he strained for the backseat and grabbed a scraper.