by Кей Хупер
Calmly, he said, "Your witness made a mistake. I wasn't up here."
"She's sure it was you."
"She's wrong. It happens."
"I haven't been able to place you down at the barns when you said you were there, Cullen."
"Horses don't make for talkative witnesses. Sorry about that."
"Which means you don't have an alibi."
Cullen shrugged. "If you can find a reason for me to have killed that girl — and believe I would have been stupid enough to use one of my own lead ropes to do it — arrest me."
McDaniel ignored that and instead switched gears. "Another funny thing. That trap door in your tack room."
"Tack room's not mine, it belongs to The Lodge. And we both know that door was made a long time before either one of us was born."
"And you've never been down that ladder? Never been down in those caves?"
Cullen hesitated and swore inwardly. Everybody knew about trace evidence these days, about DNA and such. The human body had a nasty habit of shedding skin cells and hairs and God only knew what else with every step.
And something other than God knew he'd gone down into the earth more than once.
He wished he dared look at the two off to the side, wished he dared ask them if they knew what was going on, if they understood. Because this cop didn't, that was plain. He didn't understand, and not understanding could get a lot of people killed, and worse.
Far worse.
"Cullen? Have you been in those caves?"
He couldn't risk an outright lie that might trap him later, and so answered casually, "Maybe a long time ago. I worked here once before, you know."
"Yes, I do know. You worked here twenty-five years ago. You were working here when Missy Turner was murdered."
He'd been ready for that one. "I was. And I was in the training ring working with a young horse all that afternoon and well into the evening. Along with an assistant trainer and two of the guests. The cops found that out quick enough. I didn't even know the little girl had been killed until I heard all the sirens."
McDaniel consulted his notes, lips pursed.
Cullen wanted to tell him to cut the bullshit but, again, didn't dare. He had no way to be sure he was right, not really, not swearing-on-the-Bible sure, and if it turned out he was wrong, well, he wanted a way out of this mess. Alienating a cop — either of these two cops, especially the fed — could turn out to be a mistake. A big mistake.
It was getting late. Late in the evening and just...late. He could hear his watch ticking, and he hadn't worn a ticking watch in years.
"You left The Lodge not long after, I believe."
"Months later."
"After the fire."
Again, Cullen concentrated on keeping his breathing even. Normal. "Yeah. After the fire."
"We never really knew what started that fire," McDaniel mused. "Any ideas?"
"No. Which is what I told the cops at the time. It was obvious they suspected arson, but I'd no reason to burn the place."
"I suppose not. And you left because... ?"
"Because I was ready to move on." He stopped it there and stared McDaniel in the eye defiantly.
The cop didn't blink. "I see. Well, let me ask you something else, Cullen. How well did you know Laura Turner?"
He shrugged. "She was house staff, I was stable staff. We don't mix much now and didn't at all then."
"You'd both been here for several years; are you trying to tell me you didn't know her at all?"
"Didn't say that. Said we didn't mix in those days. I knew her name, knew her to speak to, to say hello. Knew she had a kid. That's about it."
"Did you go to her daughter's funeral?"
That one caught Cullen unprepared, and he had to settle himself before answering evenly, "All the staff went."
"Just a matter of paying your respects, I guess."
"Yeah. Yeah, it was like that."
McDaniel nodded, and as if it had been a signal, the fed left the silent redhead's side and came to sit in the other chair across from Cullen.
"Still paying your respects?" he inquired casually.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure you do, Cullen. On a hunch, I asked Captain McDaniel to check something for me before we called you up here. And it turns out that the caretaker at the cemetery definitely noticed your visits. Once a week, ever since you came back to work at The Lodge. You visit Missy's grave, and you leave a single flower there."
Some hunch. Some goddamned hunch, Cullen thought.
He found himself gazing into a pair of extremely sharp blue eyes, and debated silently before deciding once again to hold his peace. He couldn't afford to be wrong, couldn't take the chance they'd lock him up before this was finished.
Because it had to be finished. This time.
Still, he had to say something, had to at least appear to cooperate, else they'd lock him up anyway. Part of the truth, he thought, was better than none.
"Okay, so I pay my respects. So I knew Laura Turner and her daughter a bit better than I let on."
He could see he'd surprised the fed, and pressed his advantage to lead the "conversation" in the direction he wanted it to take.
"I knew that little girl didn't belong here. Never should have been here. And sure as hell never should have died here. There's nobody from this place ever visits her. The caretaker told me that. So I visit. And put something pretty on her grave."
Slowly, the fed said, "What do you mean, she never should have been here?"
Cullen hesitated visibly, striving to look reluctant. "I overheard something, okay? Something that made me realize Laura's own little girl had died — and she had stolen Missy away from her rightful parents."
The silent redhead moved suddenly, leaving her chair and coming to join Cullen on the sofa. Her face was pale, those green eyes anxious, and when he turned his head to meet her gaze, Cullen felt an instant, surprising certainty.
So that's it. That's why she's here. He felt his heartbeat quicken and had to fight once again to remain calm.
"Are you sure about that?" she asked unsteadily. "Sure she had been abducted from her real parents?"
"Sure enough."
The fed said, "Missy never said a word to even hint that Laura might not be her real mother."
Cullen managed a shrug. "She wasn't but about two when Laura took her. By the time you came here that summer, I imagine she'd forgotten she belonged anywhere else."
The fed's eyes narrowed. "You remember me?"
"Of course I remember you. You could ride any horse we had, even the mean ones, and you didn't mind grooming them afterward. Not such an arrogant little shit as most of 'em were. And I'm thinking you were the one the others followed that summer. The bunch of you spent more time down at the stables than anywhere else." Cullen shrugged again. "And left Missy to play alone, more often than not."
He half expected to get a rise out of the fed with that one, but it was clear the younger man had been a cop too long to let something like that get to him. Then again, maybe he just knew Cullen had said it deliberately.
"Yeah, she didn't care for horses. Which makes me wonder how you spent any time with her."
"I'm wondering something else," McDaniel said suddenly in the slightly-too-loud tone of a man who'd been forcing himself to be silent against his will. "I'm wondering why in hell you didn't say a word after she was murdered about Missy having been abducted. Didn't it occur to you that it might be important information?"
Cullen looked at him and, coolly, said, "Fact is, I did say something about it. To the chief of police. And signed my statement, all right and proper. So they knew then. They knew Missy was a stolen child."
It was nearly midnight when Nate hung up the phone in the lounge and turned to face Quentin. "Well, the chief isn't happy with me. I woke him up."
"How can he possibly sleep with all this going on?" Stephanie demanded. She had come into the room as Cullen was leaving, and had been
filled in by the others.
"Easily. He's six months away from retirement."
Keeping to the point, Quentin asked, "What about Ruppe's statement?"
"The chief denied it ever happened." Nate sighed heavily. "But either you've infected me with your conspiracy theories and I imagined it, or he was badly rattled by my question."
"Which do you believe? Gut instinct."
"He was rattled. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that Cullen Ruppe made exactly the statement he says he made — and for some reason that statement and any information supporting it were expunged from the record."
"Why on earth would they have done that?" Stephanie asked.
"Secrets," Diana said. She was still sitting on the sofa where she had earlier gone to join Cullen. "Someone wanted the secret of Missy's abduction kept under wraps."
Frowning, Stephanie said, "I suppose someone connected with The Lodge might have wanted that. I mean, if Laura Turner was unbalanced enough to have stolen a child, her living here all those years didn't exactly reflect well on whoever had hired her. But to suppress a statement... even if it had nothing to do with Missy's murder, the information in that statement was important to the investigation. It must have taken a pretty big stick or a hell of a carrot to persuade the chief to bury it."
"My father could have done it."
CHAPTER 16
They all looked at Diana, and it was Nate who said, "If we believe Missy was abducted from your family, Diana, then I'd think your father would be the last one we could suspect of suppressing that sort of evidence. They can't have known who took their child, let alone where she was, or they would have gotten her back."
"That's true enough. But suppose my father only found out after Missy was murdered."
"How?" Nate shook his head. "Cullen claims he never knew who Missy really belonged to, so even if his statement wasn't initially suppressed, no one else would have been notified of her death. And as Quentin has pointed out more than once, there was precious little media coverage. Never a picture run in the press that your parents might have recognized, even if the story had made the news outside this area."
Diana was afraid she sounded paranoid about all this, but Quentin kept telling her to trust herself, her feelings and intuitions, and that's what she was trying to do.
She didn't know who had murdered Missy, but she was utterly certain her father had had a hand in the subsequent investigation, and that he was responsible for the suppression of facts and information.
No wonder Quentin had found the trail to Missy's killer so cold for so long.
Holding her voice steady, she said, "I don't know how it happened. But there is something I do know." She looked at Quentin. "When I talked to Dad on the phone, when I told him where I was, he reacted. He was surprised, unsettled, maybe even afraid. Because I was here, at The Lodge. That's what shook him. And why would it have, if there wasn't something here he didn't want me to find out about?"
"Secrets," Quentin said. "At the very least, your father knew of The Lodge. Had he ever stayed here?"
"We can check the records," Stephanie said.
But Diana was shaking her head. "Dad hates resort-type hotels, always has. He stays in one of two types of places when he travels: downtown penthouse hotel suites in the city, or houses or apartments he rents for the duration. Staying at a place like The Lodge, miles from anywhere, surrounded by mountains and scenery, would be his idea of hell."
Quentin accepted that with a nod. "The Lodge is very well known, though, so he could easily have heard of it. But, as you say, he reacted very strongly to the knowledge that you were here, and there has to be a reason for that." He frowned. "Cullen said he'd overheard enough to know that Laura's own child had died and she'd abducted Missy. My question is, who was she talking to when he overheard the conversation?"
Nate grimaced. "Yeah, I sort of interrupted you, didn't I? Sorry about that."
"It's okay. The way he shut down after telling us about his statement, I have a hunch he'd told us everything he meant to, and no amount of questioning would have gotten anything else out of him. Not tonight, anyway."
Diana said, "I wonder if he overheard that conversation before or after Missy was killed. He didn't say."
"Does it matter?" Stephanie asked.
"It might," Quentin said. "If Laura was unbalanced enough to have abducted someone else's child to raise as her own, Missy's murder may well have pushed her even farther over the edge. In that state, she could have told anybody the truth about Missy's parentage."
Nate asked, "You don't remember how Laura acted after the murder?"
"Not really. In those days, there was a doctor on staff here, and I have the vague recollection that he kept her under sedation at least through the funeral. We left just a few weeks later. I remember seeing Laura at the funeral, but not after that."
Somewhat tentatively, Diana said, "She'd kept the secret of Missy's abduction for a long time, years. It makes more sense to me that she might have talked about it only after Missy was murdered."
Nate was making a note in the small black notebook he carried. "I'll ask Cullen. I definitely want to talk to that guy again."
Stephanie sat on the arm of a chair and said, "What creeps me out is the bit about him putting flowers on Missy's grave. Isn't that the sort of thing a killer might do?"
"It's possible," Quentin said. "But not in this case, I think. Besides, what he said about his alibi was right. He couldn't possibly have killed Missy."
Nate looked at Quentin. "Been meaning to ask you, by the way, about that hunch of yours. It seemed to come out of nowhere. Far as I can remember, you've never asked anything about Missy's grave before now."
"I know. A little voice told me now was the time. I've learned to listen to that little voice." He shook his head. "It was when you told us the other maid had identified Cullen as the man she'd seen talking to Ellie Weeks. Up until then, I was interested in Cullen only because he'd been here that summer twenty-five years ago. And because we found that trap door in his tack room."
"And you still believe all this is connected?"
Quentin nodded without hesitation.
Grimly, Nate said, "Well, whether it is or isn't, this is one murder that is damned well not going to go unsolved." He checked his watch. "Shit. After midnight. Once Sally and Ryan finished processing the scene, I okayed the removal of the body; it'll be in the hospital morgue by now. Doc said he'd do a preliminary check, but I want the post done by the state crime lab."
"And I bet they're backed up," Quentin said.
"It won't be fast," Nate conceded. "But it'll be thorough. And that's what I want. In the meantime, we have whatever forensic evidence my CSI team found, and God knows we've got plenty of questions."
"Yeah," Quentin said. "We've got plenty of those."
"Captain, you do realize I have to be up in a few hours?" The housekeeper's voice was frosty.
Nate wasn't intimidated. "One of your maids was brutally murdered not twelve hours ago, Mrs. Kincaid; I would think you'd want to help in any way possible to find out who killed her."
As unaffected by his tone as he was by hers, she snapped, "In the morning would be soon enough for your questions; no one here is going to be running away."
"Still, I'm sure you won't mind answering a few questions tonight." Nate deliberately placed his notebook on the spotless butcher-block work island in the huge kitchen, turning the pages until he found the notes he'd made earlier.
Mrs. Kincaid crossed her arms over her ample bosom and waited, standing on the other side of the island. She hadn't suggested they adjourn to another room nor try to make themselves more comfortable in this one.
"Well?"
Nate didn't allow himself to be rushed, and refused to admit even to himself that he found the big, empty kitchen very cold and more than a little spooky somehow, especially so late at night. He checked his notes, then said to her, "You informed Ms. Boyd that you believed Ellie Weeks was up to some
thing, did you not?"
"I did."
"What was it you suspected?"
"I'm not a mind reader, Captain. But I've worked with young girls long enough to know when one of them is up to no good, and Ellie was."
"So you were watching her?"
"I was keeping a close eye on her, of course."
"Was there anything in particular she did to alert you that something was going on with her?"
"I saw her hanging around Ms. Boyd's office. Her duties took her nowhere near that area."
"She could have just been passing through on her way to another part of the hotel."
"That's what she said."
"You didn't believe her?"
"I know when I'm being lied to."
Nate wondered, but didn't question her on that point. "What else?"
"She kept slipping out to the smoking porch every chance she got, for one thing."
"That was suspicious?"
"She didn't smoke."
"So what do you think she was doing out there?"
"Probably using her cell phone. The maids aren't allowed to carry the things while on duty, but some of them sneak and do it anyway. To call their boyfriends."
"That seems innocent enough," Nate observed, making a note to look for that cell phone.
"Ellie didn't have a boyfriend." Mrs. Kincaid smiled thinly. "Here, anyway."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning she might have been stupid enough to get involved with one of our guests. That was, of course, forbidden. She would have been dismissed the instant I had proof."
"That's what you were watching for? Proof?"
"She would have betrayed herself sooner or later. They all do."
Nate frowned. "You've had that problem before? Maids getting involved with guests?"
"Well, men will be men, won't they, Captain?"
Thinking about the old double standard, Nate said, "Then why blame the maids?"
"Because they aren't being paid to provide... entertainment... for guests. The Lodge is not that sort of place." Mrs. Kincaid drew herself up even more stiffly. "I've told you when I last saw Ellie and what I said to her when I did. If you have further questions, Captain, I'm sure you can ask them in the morning. I'm going to bed."
