by CJ Lyons
“It definitely wasn’t Gus or Amy,” she answered.
“Can I borrow your phone?”
“There won’t be any news on Nick or Gleason, not yet.”
“I know. I just want to check in back home.”
Judith shrugged. It was almost four in the morning back in Pittsburgh, but knowing Wash he’d still be up—or would already be up. Wash had a twenty-something’s metabolism that refused to heed the sun’s schedule. Lucy dialed his cell.
“Hello?” he answered hesitantly, probably surprised by the strange number on his caller ID.
“It’s me, Lucy. Just checking in, letting you know everything’s okay here.”
“Any reason why it shouldn’t be?” She heard computer keys clicking in the background as she shifted the phone to her right ear, the one farthest from Judith. “Oh, wow, you guys have been busy.”
“I was afraid you might see something online. Nick has a broken leg; they took him to a hospital in Seattle. I’m with Judith, heading back to the motel.”
“Wait. Judith Keenan? Did you get my messages about her? I’ve been texting and emailing—I even called your friend, and asked her to tell you to call me.”
“No, sorry. I lost my phone. What happened?” She kept her tone light.
“Well, I checked those death investigations. The only names that popped were the two coroners. But when I dug deeper into Judith’s, I found she has a string of deaths she’s connected to, going back way to before she moved to Idaho. Two other husbands died—one from a heart attack, the other in a boating accident.”
“No, don’t wake Megan. What else happened?” She smiled at Judith and made a quacking gesture with her fingers.
“Nothing that ever looked suspicious—until you start to add them up. All from different jurisdictions, going back decades. Plus she had different names because of being married more than once, so no one police department or medical examiner ever got the chance to piece things together. Including some weird shit. Like a fellow veterinary student died of a nitrous oxide overdose—making Judith valedictorian by default. And there’s more.”
“No worries, I’ll get back to you first thing. As soon as I hear from the hospital. We’re pulling up to Judith’s motel now, so I need to go.”
“Do you want me to send backup?”
She rolled her eyes. Finally. For a genius, sometimes Wash could be a bit dense. “Sure, why not?”
“Okay, but it might take them awhile. Be careful. Better yet, just get out of there and let the cops sort it all out.”
“Wish I could do that. Give her a kiss for me.” Lucy hung up.
Judith took her phone back and slid it into her pocket as she pulled the SUV to a stop. She hopped out and was around to Lucy’s side just as Lucy was opening the door. It swung wide to reveal Judith holding a semi-automatic pistol aimed at Lucy. “What gave it away?”
Lucy started to play along, but she was just too damned tired of people pointing guns at her—plus the gleam in Judith’s eye said she wouldn’t be fooled anyway. Lucy climbed down from the van, keeping her hands in plain sight. The only weapon left to her was the walking stick, now collapsed and resting in her pocket.
“Let’s go,” Judith told her. Together they traveled through the dimly lit reception area and down the grand hall. Judith was smart, keeping enough distance that Lucy had no chance at tackling her, but remaining close enough that there was no way she could miss Lucy if she pulled the trigger.
Finally, they ended up in the zoo. Judith had Lucy stand back against the railing above the tiger’s enclosure. She reached for a large cattle prod from the collection hanging on the wall, eying Lucy, clearly making a plan. Below Lucy the tiger stirred, rolling upright from where it had been lying on a boulder, and making a low throaty noise as if protesting the human intrusion into its peaceful evening.
“It would be so very easy,” Judith said. “After all, Tabby is fascinating. You lean over the enclosure barrier to get a better look, and oh my, that clumsy, weak ankle of yours gives way, and whoops! You fall inside. I, of course, think quickly and grab my trusty tranq gun, but you move into my line of fire and get the dart instead. No time to reload, so I use the electric prod—accidentally on purpose agitating Tabby with seventy-thousand volts if she hasn’t already pounced. Then I single-handedly fight off the massive beast and eventually subdue her, but it’s too late for poor, poor Lucy.” Her grin was more tiger-like than Tabby’s. “I’d be a hero. And no one would question me. They never do.”
“Because you’re too smart for them,” Lucy said. All she needed to do was buy some time. “The good doctor, always with an answer, a story that feels more real than the unthinkable: that you’re a killer. But it wasn’t always that way, was it? You didn’t start out to kill them, right? You just found yourself coroner in an out-of-the-way, boring county, and it was all so mundane, who could resist making things a bit more exciting? Changing a lab result there—or never running the labs, just forging them. Maybe you thought you were saving the county money or the families some grief, giving them something unique about their loved ones’ deaths, a special story to hang on to.”
“Wrong, wrong, wrong.” Judith laughed. “You’re not as smart as you think you are. I started doing this back in high school. My first boyfriend—he was damn lucky to have me, but he was too depressed, sunken into his emo-funk, constantly whining to me about how miserable his life was, that he should just end it all. I couldn’t take it any more, so I put him out of his misery.”
“You killed him?” In high school? Lucy quickly reassessed the threat Judith posed.
“No. Where’d the fun be in that? It would be over much too quickly. I spent weeks working on him, convincing him to go through with it, until finally he did it—he hung himself. Then I got to play the grief-stricken girlfriend, getting all that attention while getting away with murder.” Her eyes gleamed with excitement. “It was intoxicating. Knowing I was smarter than everyone, playing the kind-hearted bumbling fat girl while all along I was manipulating them to do whatever I damned well wanted.”
“But eventually you did begin to kill. Hands on.” All those strange deaths littering Judith’s past; they weren’t coincidence.
“Not everyone is as accommodating as my boyfriend. Or stupid. But I’m not afraid of death. When I was a kid growing up in Kentucky, it was animals—anyone competing with me in 4-H, I’d sneak a little antifreeze into their animal’s water. But our leader got suspicious and came to talk to my mother, told her maybe I needed help. She laughed in his face. And on the way home, driving over the ice and snow, he passed out at the wheel and spun into a tree at full speed.”
Lucy assumed a look of awe; Judith’s ego was easy to feed. “How’d you do it? You were just a kid, right?”
“Not me. Mom. She spiked his coffee with Gramps’ diabetes pills. The same way she got rid of Gramps when his pension checks stopped coming. Told me to never suffer fools.” She gestured with the gun, pushing Lucy back against the railing above the tiger enclosure. “I know what you’re trying to get me to do, but I don’t mind. It’s nice to have someone I can talk to about all this. Especially as I know no one’s coming to help you and you’ll never be able to tell anyone.”
“Where’s Bill?”
Judith shook her head. “Gone.”
“Did you tell him everything before you killed him?”
“I couldn’t risk it. He’s so much bigger and stronger than me, I had to take him by surprise. Although I admit, he surprised me first. He was asking the right questions, just of the wrong person. He came so close; I wish I knew how. Did he tell you? Is that how you caught on to me?”
“No, he never said anything about you. He never mentioned you at all. Other than as the poor woman whose husband died after dragging her out of her big city job and all the way up here.” If Lucy was hoping that the blow to Judith’s ego would rattle the other woman, she was mistaken—Judith actually smirked at the news that Bill had never suspected her.
“Then how did you find me?” She sounded eager for career advice so she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
Lucy was happy to oblige. Anything to keep her talking.
“We were so focused on looking for a missing person who was wandering lost or perhaps who’d harmed themselves that I never asked the most basic questions of any investigation. Why? Why this victim? Why now? Why here? Or, I should say, why anywhere but here.”
“And did you find any answers?”
“Theories. Why Bill? First I thought it was because he’d made a hobby of re-examining death investigations.”
“Right. His serial killer theory. He told me about it, and asked me to review a few cases that Dr. Carruthers handled over in Idaho County.” She chuckled as if at a private joke.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you loved that. Because you were setting Carruthers up, weren’t you? He’d done something to piss you off, and you were going to make him look like a fool in return.”
“He couldn’t stand that I had no formal medical training. He was always was so superior and condescending when we spoke, reminding me constantly that he wouldn’t expect a veterinarian to understand. So, yeah, I had a little fun at his expense. Nothing anyone can prove—which is why I didn’t mind Bill taking a look.”
“Right. That had me headed in the wrong direction for a while. But then I realized the key was in the where, not the why. Or better yet, the where you wanted us not to look. Because you found a clue to where the gold was, didn’t you?”
“That stupid llama—the rock caught in its foot was a gold nugget. I kept going back, even GPS’d it, until I’d narrowed down the area where it was buried.”
“And then you needed to buy time for Davenport and his men to find the gold. Were you always planning to kill them?”
Judith answered with a vague shrug. “They were always planning to kill me. Seriously? All that gold, who wouldn’t? That’s why I had their gear bugged. Even the ground-penetrating radar uploaded to a server I controlled—I knew they’d found the gold before they did. All I had to do was grab it, wait until things calmed down, and I’d be free of this godforsaken place forever. Until you came along.”
“I still don’t understand why you needed to get Bill out of the way. Your guys hadn’t found the gold yet, they hadn’t even started looking with the GPR. So Bill couldn’t have seen anything. But you said he was close—”
Judith smiled. Not the grimace of someone who’s been caught and was now regretting their actions, more like the grin of the Cheshire cat who had rained down chaos and was about to vanish without consequence. “You do realize that none of this girl talk matters? I could decide to let you live, and you still couldn’t touch me. You can never prove anything, not even that I’ve said what I said. Even if you could, you can’t arrest me. I’m sheriff now, so the only authority to arrest me would be the state police or the FBI. But…whoops…murder isn’t a federal crime, is it? So not the FBI. And like I said, there’s no proof of anything, so no state police either.”
She nodded graciously at Lucy as if inviting her to tea. “Do go on. You were going to tell me where, hypothetically, if I did commit any of these hypothetically horrendous crimes, where I went wrong and how you figured out it was—hypothetically—me.”
Judith was right. Lucy had no concrete proof, only vague suspicions—with time, she could establish a pattern, but it would be totally circumstantial, not enough to bring charges against Judith. The woman was too damn smart; had covered her tracks too well. It was sheer dumb luck Bill had stumbled onto her crimes, and even he’d had had no inkling—at least not that Lucy could tell—that Judith was the perpetrator.
Or had he? That text sent to Judith. The one sent while they were in the plane. That couldn’t have come from Bill, not if Judith killed him. Unless…
“You’re wrong,” Lucy said. “I can prove that you killed Bill.”
“Oh, you think so? That’s funny, since you’re my alibi.”
“I have a friend who’s really, really good with electronics. Computers, phones, you name it. He can trace that final message from Bill to the app that sent it. The app you used to make it look like the text had come from Bill’s phone and was sent before he was killed. But what really happened was you wrote the text and had it on a time delay, so it’d come when you had witnesses and could establish an alibi. If Bill died right after sending that text, there was no way you could have killed him. So once we found Bill’s body, you were planning to fake the autopsy results, the body temperature, rigor mortis, time of death, so it all pointed to him dying after the text, not the day before. After all, you’re the coroner, so who’s going to argue? Especially when you’re the one person with an airtight alibi since you were in the air with witnesses. But all it takes is one guy good with electronics, and then someone else will come in and re-do Bill’s autopsy and find the truth. And then—”
Judith’s laughter stopped Lucy cold. “You’re making this way too complicated. Far easier to simply steal his phone and have someone send the text for me. Enough talk. Tabby’s getting restless.”
She hoisted the cattle prod in one hand, keeping the pistol in the other, and moved forward. No amount of talking was going to get her out of here, Lucy realized. She had to take control of the situation. And the only way to do that was to get close enough to tackle Judith.
Rush her? Or provoke her? Judith obviously enjoyed her games; liked to play with her victims. If she’d wanted to shoot Lucy, she would have done it already. At least Lucy hoped so—her life depended on it.
“You know what,” Lucy continued. “I don’t think you killed Bill after all. You’re not smart enough to keep everyone guessing. There’s no way you could have covered your tracks that well. I think you’re the hired help. Davenport was right—there’s someone else behind this. The real mastermind.” She was pulling out every cliché from every bad thriller movie she could think of.
Judith’s posture grew rigid, her shoulders hunching and face blazing with anger. She raised the pistol as if ready to pull the trigger, but her finger never went close. Instead Judith continued her march forward, holding the cattle prod like a lance. Lucy planted her feet, getting ready.
“Bottom line,” Lucy served her coup d’état, “you don’t have the brains. You’re too damn stupid—”
Judith’s shriek of anger cut past Lucy’s next words, and the veterinarian stormed towards Lucy. Lucy waited for her to come within reach and braced herself against the railing as she lunged for the pistol—it could kill her, while the cattle prod would just hurt like hell. Judith triggered the cattle prod and electricity arched out, but Lucy whirled in time and it hit the steel railing, releasing a blaze of sparks that temporarily blinded Lucy. Then it died.
Before Lucy could recover and reach for Judith’s pistol, Judith spun the metal cattle prod around, swinging it like a bat at Lucy’s head.
Lucy twisted and raised her arm to soften the blow and protect her skull, grabbing at Judith’s gun hand with the other. Judith heaved her weight against Lucy, toppling them both over the railing. And into the tiger pit.
Chapter Thirty-One
Judith bore the brunt of the fall, landing on Tabby’s favorite boulder, while Lucy ducked and rolled free, ending up in a clump of bushes. The tiger sprang out of the way of Judith’s flailing arms and legs, seeming as stunned as the two women.
It growled, and Judith tried to hit it with the cattle prod. No electricity sparked, rendering it less than useless and more of an irritant to the large cat now baring its fangs. Judith raised her pistol and aimed between the cat’s eyes.
“No!” Lucy shouted, lunging to put herself between Judith and the cat.
“You think I won’t shoot you, too? Back off before he attacks us both.” Judith scrambled to her feet, balancing on the boulder. Lucy could feel the tiger’s breath hot against her back. The cat was tensed up, panting and making a low rumbling noise deep in its throat.
Judith, now ownin
g the higher ground, took aim at Tabby once again. Lucy pulled her walking stick free, whipped it out to its full length, and swung, taking Judith’s legs out from under her. The gun went off, and the bullet hit the glass wall of the enclosure, the noise echoing through the cavernous space.
Lucy struck again, hitting Judith’s wrist, and Judith dropped the pistol. Lucy dove for it just as a rush of air hit her from behind, followed by a sense of wonder as the tiger sprang. It flew over Lucy and pounced on Judith, swiping at her and sending her flying off the boulder.
Lucy found the gun in the bushes and grabbed it. But Judith was no longer a threat. She lay gasping for air, her clothes slashed, blood seeping through them. The wounds didn’t appear deep, but they were enough to keep her down. Lucy backed away, her eyes on the tiger. Would it go after Judith again now that it had drawn first blood?
But Tabby seemed more interested in reclaiming his spot on the boulder, staring at the humans but not moving.
“Thank you,” Lucy said in a soft voice. The cat nodded then began to lick his paws, still eyeing the two women warily.
She spotted a maintenance door behind Judith, on the other side of the enclosure from the tiger. Not taking her eyes off the cat, she backed up to it, dragging Judith, who was whimpering incoherently, with her. But before she opened the door, she stopped and looked down on the older woman.
“Tell me where Bill is or I’ll leave you here for Tabby to play with.”
The tiger made another one of those deep rumbles… if Lucy didn’t know better, she’d think he understood her and was chuckling.
Judith blanched, pressing her hands against the deepest of her wounds. Blood seeped through her fingers. She’d be scarred for the rest of her life, lucky the cat hadn’t targeted her face or neck. But after what she’d done, Lucy simply couldn’t find it in her to care.
How many people had this woman killed? For nothing more than to feed her own ego. Lucy opened the door, edged through it to safety, and started to close it. “Last chance.”
