Lyle Stedman’s green eyes narrowed.
Trevor Dunnaway was shaking his head slowly. All trace of his usual good humor had fled.
“One of you”—Chase’s voice was quiet, but there was steel in his eyes—“tried to kill me today. One of you has tried before.”
His upraised hands kept them quiet.
“No. Listen to me. That’s why I invited each of you here. All of you—except Henrie O.” His face softened. “Henrie O’s the best investigator I’ve ever known. She’s smarter than three carloads of cops. That’s why when somebody tried to poison me, I thought of her.” The look he gave me was as warming as an embrace.
Not so the response from the others. Their combined glances were almost a physical assault. Distrust. Suspicion. Anger. Jealousy. All aimed at me.
“Poison? What the hell are you talking about?” Trevor looked like a bank president whose bank has just been taken over by the FDIC.
“Poison!” Miranda’s voice shook. “When? Where? Oh, Chase, I knew something was terribly wrong, I knew it!”
Roger stared at his father and mouthed “Poison,” but no sound came.
Chase impassively described the lethal candy and the dog bounding across the room. “His body arched. He tried to breathe. I watched him die.”
“That’s sickening, absolutely sickening.” One hand clutched dramatically at Valerie’s throat. She shuddered. Then her eyes narrowed and her perfect cheeks flamed. “How dare you suggest I would do such a thing! I’ll sue you, Chase, unless you withdraw that accusation.”
“There is no accusation, Val. Yet. You are simply one of several who could have placed the candy in my study.” Chase looked around the point. “One of you,” he said simply. “That’s why you’re all here. And here you are all going to stay until Henrie O figures out which one of you did it, which hand filled that candy with cyanide, which hand held the gun. She’s going to find out the answer.”
“That’s crazy, Dad.” Roger withstood his father’s furious glance, and it occurred to me that he was a stronger man than perhaps Chase realized. “You can’t keep people hostage here. And there has to be some reasonable explanation—”
“Of that?” Chase asked bitterly, pointing at the fallen canvas and the three darkened holes. “Target practice? Accident? Mistake? Which would you pick, Roger?” His quick movement started blood flowing again from his right elbow. One drop, then another splattered onto the stone. Miranda gave a soft moan. Chase clapped the soiled handkerchief to the wound.
Roger jammed his hands in the pockets of his shorts. He looked hot and unhappy and worried.
Sweat beaded Chase’s face, as much, I think, from shock as the heat. “No, this is my island and nobody leaves until I say so. Besides, if any of you give a damn about me you’ll want to cooperate.” His pugnacious, demanding glare swept from face to face.
Which pretty well put it on the line.
Trevor spoke up, and my respect for him grew.
“Chase, I’ve stayed with you through a lot of fights, a lot of hard times. I’ve gone your way even when I didn’t agree with you. But this is wrong. Murder isn’t a parlor game. You’ve got to call in the police.”
Chase’s eyes were steely. “I’m the son of a bitch in charge, Trevor, and you better not forget it.”
“One item you’ve overlooked,” I interposed quietly.
I saw the plea in Chase’s eyes, the deep, passionate, aching demand.
Our gazes locked.
I wasn’t Chase’s servant or employee or family. I could tell him to go to hell.
But there was such raw emotion in those eyes that beseeched me.
I could tell him that his proposal was unbalanced, a plan devised by a mind under too much stress. And I certainly didn’t share his confidence in my superiority as an investigator. The police are professionals. No amateur can match a professional.
But I couldn’t—not for the life of me—turn down the appeal in his eyes.
All right. I wasn’t a cop. But I was a damned good reporter. The jobs have more in common than most cops would like to admit.
I could do it.
If I didn’t do it, Chase would simply send us all back to the mainland. He couldn’t be forced to report the attack to the authorities. And on another day in another way the killer could try again,
It was one of those pivotal moments in life.
Everyone knew it.
Every eye focused on me.
“I will agree”—I saw triumph flare in Chase’s eyes—“on one condition.”
He stiffened. “That is?”
“You will from this moment on, so long as we stay on this island, be in the company of one or more persons.”
Chase’s face smoothed out. He even smiled. “Sure. Hell, yes. Look.” The smile fled and in an unaffected, open, wondering voice, he said, “I don’t want to die.” He looked down at the blood-dappled handkerchief. “I don’t want to die,” he said again, so softly we almost couldn’t hear. It was a cry from his heart. Everyone there knew it.
“Dad, oh, God, Dad.” Roger stepped forward and wrapped his arms around his father.
For an instant the two held each other in a tight embrace, then Chase broke loose. “Okay. Point well taken, Henrie O. That’s easy enough to do. No problem.”
That was the most important requirement. I could take on an assignment to search for facts. I wasn’t a bodyguard, and I couldn’t take the responsibility of Chase’s safety.
I wasn’t finished. “Further, if I conclude that I cannot successfully complete my task, the police must be contacted.”
“I understand what you’re saying, Henrie O. But you know and I know what will happen if I go to the police.” Chase’s mouth twisted. “Hell, it’s how I made my first million. Toss the quivering hunk of warm flesh to the wolf pack and ride the story to the end. Maybe it would be poetic justice to see my own family on the receiving end of forty-eight-point heads, but I don’t want it to happen.”
How could I have forgotten that the police, once in, are news sources? The enterprising press corps would love this one. I could see the headline now:
MEDIA MAGNATE CHEATS DEATH IN POSH LAIR;
MURDER ATTEMPT ON PRESCOTT ISLE FAILS;
POLICE INTERROGATING MEMBERS OF FAMILY
If the newshounds probed deep enough, dug deep enough, my own story could become part of a tabloid frenzy, which would then spill over into the mainstream press through articles sagaciously regretting sleaze journalism but quite thoroughly repeating and relishing each and every charge, every rumor and innuendo, no matter how sensational.
And I had a secret I was determined—no matter what it cost—to conceal. Now I, too, wanted desperately to avoid police involvement.
So I’d damn well better figure this out and figure it out fast.
“Henrie O, give it twenty-four hours. That’s all I ask. Twenty-four hours. If you’re stymied by this time tomorrow, I’ll either get the authorities in or everyone will leave the island.”
Twenty-four hours. Chase was agreeing to constant companionship for that period. Certainly we should, with everyone alert, be able to keep him safe for twenty-four hours.
And I had twenty-four hours to meet a deadline that suddenly meant as much to me as it did to him.
“All right. I’ll try.” I looked swiftly away from the gratitude in his face and said brusquely, “Roger, please lead the way back to the house. Everyone, except for Trevor, is to follow you. Enrique, you go last. Keep your eyes open. Notice if anyone touches anything on the path—or off of it, for that matter. Everyone keep an eye on his neighbor and—”
A scowl twisted Lyle’s pugnacious face. “Why is Trevor your buddy?”
“When I heard the shots, he was standing right beside me. I am certain he didn’t shoot at Chase. He knows I didn’t. So if he’s agreeable, we’ll do a preliminary examination here. The rest of you are to stay together. Eat lunch, then”—I glanced at my watch—“we’ll meet in the living r
oom about one.”
As they walked away, Roger in the lead, I checked them out. All wore casual clothes. No one was carrying a gun.
So the gun was either hidden somewhere nearby or the marksman had tossed it as far as possible into the tangle of semitropical foliage.
If the latter were true, the gun would be found only by the greatest good luck.
After a pro forma objection—“As an officer of the court, I feel I must insist that the proper authorities be notified”—Trevor turned out to be an agreeable pupil. We worked in tandem. As I directed him, he made a sketch of the crime scene. We had to estimate distances, but it was close enough. The bullets that had ripped through the canvas were easy to spot on the stone floor. Three of them. I had just suspicious enough a mind to foresee claims of manufactured evidence if I did this on my own. The first imperative was to be sure we had an accurate description of the scene, one we could turn over to investigators at a later time.
The only physical traces of the attack were the knocked-over easel, the trio of bullet holes in the canvas, the bloody path of Chase’s frantic scramble to shelter, and the bullets. To the naked eye, they were simply misshapen lumps of lead, but a laboratory could link them to a particular gun. Trevor carefully sketched their position relative to the easel.
That was the easy part.
Then came the painstaking, slow, scratchy business of searching for the marksman’s vantage point. I kept an eye out for poison ivy and poison oak.
We worked in silence. I had plenty of questions for Trevor, but this tedious hunt took all our concentration. Mosquitoes whined and bit. Trevor sneezed from the foliage. I was bathed in sweat.
“Look!” Triumphantly, Trevor held aside a plume of fern.
A cartridge case.
He reached for it.
“Wait!” I waved Trevor back. We were about five feet into the woods. From here a marksman, screened by a fir, had an unobstructed view of Chase standing by his easel. Twenty feet of sand intervened before the stone platform. The easel had been in the middle of the platform, adding another ten feet. All three shots had struck the easel. That was good shooting even though it had missed Chase. At the first shot, Chase would have thrown himself down immediately. A moving target is hard to hit. Or had the attacker intended to miss him?
I asked Trevor to sketch the tree, the cartridge, and the easel while I continued to study the ground. I spotted the second cartridge. The third I couldn’t find. It could have ricocheted away or fallen into the pine straw. But I felt confident we’d pinpointed the site of the shooting. When Trevor finished his sketch, I eased a hefty fragment of oyster shell under the cartridges and placed them securely on the edge of the platform.
The location told me something about the marksman, too. He/she had played it safe, at no time becoming visible to Chase.
Was it caution or cowardice?
Armed, all anyone had to do was walk up to Chase, walk right up to him, and shoot.
It told me a good deal that the attacker had remained at arm’s length. That was all of a piece with the anonymity of poison.
Three shots fast.
Then what?
Chase, of course, had cried out and dived for the shed. From here it might well have looked to the attacker as if he had succeeded. But there would have been no time to be certain, no time to break out in the open and fire into the fallen figure because the shouts and calls would have begun and the rush of people toward the point.
There was only the single path.
“Okay, Trevor, let’s go up this way and see if we can spot where someone could have hidden.”
We gave it up midway up the path. Sure, there were places. Behind that twelve-foot stand of Spanish bayonet. Or crouched behind the yaupon or bayberry shrubs. The most likely was a patch of trodden grasses and ferns about a third of the way up the path. But it may have been visited by a different predator. In one piece of moist ground I saw a ragged imprint of an alligator’s tail.
We scouted that area well. No gun. We looked again where we’d found the cartridges. No gun.
I gazed at the dense tangle of vines and shrubs and trees. “What would you do if you’d just shot at somebody—maybe you think you succeeded—and you heard people coming?”
Trevor used his arm to wipe the sweat from his face. “Throw the damn thing as far as I could and duck behind the biggest clump of shrub I could find,” he said grimly.
• • • •
Once in my room I slipped the cartridges from the shell into a handy plastic bag, which I nestled in a side pocket of my purse. I managed a shower, soothing lotion on bites, fresh clothes, and a quick lunch in twelve minutes. I went by Chase’s study, spent a few minutes getting my supplies, but I still made it to the living room on time. Trevor wasn’t with me. I had given him a special task, and I thought he just had time to do it.
Everyone, except Trevor, was in the living room, including Rosalia and Betty.
I placed a legal pad and a handful of pens on the red-lacquered coffee table, then checked with Chase. “You’ve kept everyone together?”
“Occasional restroom stops, but everyone’s been escorted directly to and from the nearest bathroom on this floor. No one’s had a chance for a private conversation. And since they were all in here—I told them to stay—I took a shower. If they were all in here, it was safe enough.” He shot me a half-defiant, half-embarrassed look. It wasn’t, of course, strict compliance with my directive. But I understood. He had to get clean. He had to distance himself from the kind of sweat—sticky and wet and smelly—that fear creates.
I faced a room full of uneasy, bewildered people. “I need everyone’s cooperation. I want each of you to write down in some detail precisely where you were when you heard the shots and your subsequent actions until you reached the point. When that statement is finished and signed and given to me, you will be free to come and go as you please with the proviso”—I looked at my weary host—“that you, Chase, stay with Trevor for the rest of the day. And I want everyone in the house after dark. No wandering about alone.”
Chase patted the right hand pocket of his blue blazer. It bulged. “Don’t worry. And I want everyone to know I’m armed.”
“Where did you get it?” How many damn guns were there on this island?
“From the cabin cruiser. I’ve had it for years. You don’t travel in the Caribbean without a gun. I have it, and I know how to use it.” His face was pale, but his voice was strong.
Which came as no surprise to me. Chase was the kind of man who would fight death with every tool at his command.
“Is that the only gun you know about?”
“The only one. Whoever shot at me must have brought the gun to the island.” His left eyelid flickered. A nervous tic. I’d never seen Chase so shaken.
But those bullets had come close.
“All right. I don’t have to warn you to keep the damn thing handy. As I recall, you shoot quite well.” My voice was admiring. Actually, I never recalled Chase having anything at all to do with guns, but I wanted to erect every possible psychological barrier between Chase and his stalker.
I picked up the legal pad and ripped out a sheet for each person and handed these out with the pens. I even gave one to Chase. “Think back. Try to remember the minutes just before the shots. Close your eyes. You may remember something—a smell, a sound—something that possibly could help.”
I waited patiently, listening to the scratching of the pens and the occasional sigh. One of the writers, I knew, was penning a lie.
Lyle was folding his sheet when the door opened and Trevor slipped in. Good.
I stood by the door to receive the sheets.
Lyle gave me a jaundiced look. “Lady, what if it’s a nut? What if Chase was today’s target and tomorrow one of the rest of us gets blown away? It’s going to be hard to explain to the cops, isn’t it?”
“Who else would eat a chocolate turtle from a box on Chase’s desk?” I asked.
“
Yeah.” He glanced back at Chase, almost spoke, then shrugged and walked out.
Miranda, her face sullen, pushed her sheet toward me. “I should be the one to stay with Chase. Why don’t I get to stay with him?”
Before I could answer, her girlish face crumpled again in tears. She hurried blindly past me.
Chase didn’t notice. He stood stiffly by the Adam mantel, his hand clasped tightly to the gun-bulked pocket of his blazer.
Roger thrust his sheet at me. “Miranda, wait, wait a minute.” Over his shoulder he muttered, “Poor little thing’s upset. I’ll see to her.”
Hmm. So Roger was eager to comfort his stepmother. His so-much-younger stepmother. That was worth thinking about.
Haskell ambled over. “I should have had my head examined when I got out of the pool to go see what the noise was all about. Why the hell should I care who tries to blow Chase’s head off?”
“Or I?” Valerie demanded, sweeping past me in a cloud of gardenia perfume.
The secretary edged toward me. Burton gave me the sheet, then looked back toward Chase. “Uh, will you want me in the study now?”
Chase waved him away impatiently, and Burton hurried out.
Rosalia was waiting for Betty to complete her sheet. The two women came to the door together. “We will be in the kitchen.” She glanced uneasily back at her husband, then stepped through the open door.
Enrique poked his sheet toward me, his dark face sullen, and strode past, coming just a bit too close to be courteous.
As they left, I closed the door. I faced Trevor and Chase.
Chase started to speak, but I held up my hand. “Trevor?”
The lawyer had a half-amused, half-embarrassed look on his handsome face. “Damn strange experience. I’ve never searched anybody’s belongings before.”
“So?” I prodded.
“I looked for a box of bullets, another gun, any kind of poison, that sort of thing. No luck.” He ran his hand through his thick blond hair and didn’t look toward Chase.
“But you did find …”
He shot me an agonized glance. “Jesus, prowling in people’s private—”
Again Chase started to speak, then subsided. It was no time to be concerned about host-guest niceties.
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