Looking back toward the field, I saw Julia was making her way toward me, the flashlight illuminating her steps. I joined her at the curb.
“You didn’t see the car?” she asked.
“It was gone by the time I reached the street. She sped out of here.”
Julia ran the light up and down the pavement. “I don’t see any tire marks. We still don’t know who it was.”
“But she knows who we are,” I said. “And she knows what we have.”
CHAPTER 14
Julia cradled our evidence bag on her lap while I drove to the police station on Main Street. I knew Gilroy insisted on having someone man the station until midnight, even with only three officers in the department. And when they were in the midst of an important case, Gilroy, Turner, and Underhill took turns being on call from midnight to seven in the morning. It was just after eleven when Julia and I pulled to the curb and greeted a surprised Derek Underhill behind the front desk.
“We found Pastor Ackley’s phone,” Julia said, setting the bagged phone on the desk.
Admittedly, I felt a twinge of pride in her announcement. We had found the proverbial needle in a haystack.
“No way,” Underhill said. “We looked everywhere. Are you sure it’s his?”
“He didn’t use a pass code,” I said. “Which is a little strange for someone as technologically minded as Sophie said he was. But then again, he probably got a lot of phone calls and messages and didn’t want the hassle of constantly punching in the code. I don’t have one either.”
“You don’t use a pass code?” Julia asked.
“They’re a nuisance.”
Underhill was staring at the phone, angling it this way and that while keeping it in the bag. He glanced up at me. “Where’s the home button?”
I pressed a symbol near the bottom of the phone and the home screen sprang to life. “It’s a newer model, so there’s no button. It’s pressure activated.”
“You don’t even have to swipe it,” Underhill said.
“Nope. He has no safeguards.” I tapped a mail icon. “Now you should be able to see his emails and text messages.”
“Wow. It really is his. This is amazing.”
“It will show five or six missed calls,” I said, “and you’ll see my number alongside them.”
Underhill looked up. “That’s how you found the phone. You dialed it.”
“It was in a small wooded area not too far from Sophie’s cottage. I can show you where tomorrow.”
He nodded, still admiring the pastor’s sleek phone.
“The killer came to get it while we were there,” Julia added.
“Wha—what?” Underhill sputtered. “Who? Which one of them?”
“We don’t know who,” I said. “I ran after her, but I wasn’t fast enough to see.” I recounted our steps, telling Underhill what we had seen and heard, which was precious little. “It had to have been the same person who took the phone from Ackley and threw it into the trees. Only she would know the phone was there without dialing it like we did—and I know we weren’t followed.”
“Now the killer knows we found the phone,” Julia said, her voice fretful.
“I wouldn’t worry, Mrs. Foster,” Underhill said. “She also knows you’d bring it to the police.”
“There may be fingerprints on that phone, but I doubt it,” I said.
Underhill tapped on the email icon through the bag. “Yeah, probably not . . .”
“Anything in his emails?”
“I don’t see any important stuff from Sunday.” He tapped again. “No text messages from Sunday. But I see some vacation photos.”
“Mrs. Ackley will be relieved,” I said. “They’re probably the last photos of her husband. Can I ask you something about your cottage search?”
Underhill laughed and set down the phone. “Seriously, Rachel? You want to ask me about a case? I’m shocked.”
“Very funny. Did Mariette, Tyra, or Alison have laptops?”
“They all did.”
“Now that’s very interesting,” Julia said.
“It’s not surprising,” Underhill said. “Everyone’s got a laptop these days. I’d better call the chief about the phone.”
“You’re not going to wake him up, are you?” Julia said.
“A ringing phone will do that, Mrs. Foster.”
Julia was not smiling.
“I have to, Mrs. Foster. He’ll want to know. This is a key piece of evidence. If I wait until morning, he will not be happy with me.”
“I suppose you’re right. Still, the poor man never sleeps.”
Underhill checked the station clock. “If it makes you feel better, I won’t be going home at midnight like I planned.”
“Now why would it make me feel better to know that you won’t be getting any sleep either? I can tell by looking at you that you’re not getting enough as it is. Just look at the dark rings under your eyes. You look like a prizefighter. And I’m certain you’re not eating well and getting your vitamins.”
“I eat just fine, Mrs. Foster.”
To my eyes, the normally trim Underhill had put on a little weight, but not wanting to impede Julia’s progress, I said nothing.
“Donuts for breakfast every day? I don’t call that eating right,” she said. “And what do you have for lunch? More donuts? A cold sandwich at best? You need proper meals, and that means hot meals.” She was in full grandmother mode. Disappointed in Underhill’s flirtations she may have been, but she cared about him. We both did.
“You know it’s hard to eat right when you’re on the job,” Underhill said.
I saw my opening. “Does Natalie ever cook for you?”
He didn’t flinch, and he didn’t hesitate to answer.
“Sometimes, but to tell the truth, she’s not a great cook. She’d be the first to admit that. And I’m not so hot myself. We go to Wyatt’s every once in a while, but that can get expensive.” He leaned his arms across the desk. “You’ll be happy to know she’s brought dinner to the station, Mrs. Foster. Only a few times, but she tries. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if she can’t cook.”
“Because you care about her?” Julia asked. “Care about her more than you care for other women you run into? Women you meet, say, while you’re on the job?”
Underhill was either confused or flustered. I couldn’t tell which. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I guess so. I gotta make that call.” He straightened, grabbed the station phone, and dialed Gilroy.
On that awkward note, I said goodbye for both of us and dragged Julia out of the station and into my car.
“Well, that was subtle,” I said, sticking my key in the ignition.
“That young man doesn’t need subtlety, he needs a rolled-up magazine on the head and a good wake-up call. What is he thinking? Sophie is a married woman.”
“He wouldn’t break up a marriage, Julia. He’s just infatuated by her green eyes.”
“Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t, but he needs to smell the coffee. He’ll be in his forties before he knows it.”
“And end up like me?”
“That isn’t what I meant, Rachel. It’s not your fault that scoundrel ex-fiancé of yours left you at the altar.”
“Not exactly at the altar. Thank goodness it never got that far.”
With a bit of a jolt I realized I hadn’t thought about Brent in weeks. The man who had deserted me on the eve of our wedding almost thirteen years ago, the man whose loss I’d mourned for years, the man whose memory had driven me to Boston for seven years in an attempt to erase him from my past. I hadn’t dreamed about him or tried not to hate him or battled his sudden and unwelcome appearance in my thoughts at the oddest moments. Hallelujah, I hadn’t thought about him at all.
“It’s about time,” I said aloud.
“I didn’t mean what it sounded like,” Julia said.
She gave me a sorrowful, stricken look, quite out of proportion to what she had said to me.
I laid my hand o
n her arm, anxious to reassure her. “It’s all right. If I’d married Brent or anyone else along the way, I never would have met James Gilroy.”
“And you wouldn’t be living in Juniper Grove. That good-for-nothing would have moved you to Denver. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“So let’s not talk about him.”
“All right.”
“I mean ever again.”
“Really?”
“It is so over.”
Julia brushed her hands together, knocking the soot of his memory from her palms, proclaiming a forever end to the topic. She understood exactly what I was saying. “Now you’re talking. Move on, shake the dust from your shoes, forget the past. The finest man in Juniper Grove loves you—what could be better? Now let’s talk about Officer Underhill and Natalie. We need to come up with a plan.”
I laughed as I pulled from the curb. “What would I do without you, Julia?”
i dropped julia off in front of her house before pulling into my garage. We had discussed Underhill briefly and come to the conclusion that there wasn’t much we could do but watch him ogle the gorgeous and married Sophie until Lauren’s and Ackley’s murders had been solved. We both liked Natalie, but more than that, Underhill’s previous relationships, if you could even call them that, had never lasted long, while his relationship with Natalie—lasting three months or more, we didn’t know precisely how long—had broken records. In our opinion, that made her worth pursuing.
My plan was to go to bed immediately. That way, I could wake at a decent hour in the morning. But I was restless after the night’s excitement, my thoughts tumbling, my mind searching for answers. So although I did hop into bed, I took with me a yellow legal pad, a pen, and the notes Julia had jotted on her notepad before our phone hunt. It was time to sort out what I knew and hunt for a connection between Pastor Ackley and Lauren Hughes.
I wrote down the victims’ and suspects’ names, and beneath them, the places where they worked and everything I knew about their jobs, their likes and dislikes, and their character traits. Personality—psychology—might hold the key to solving the case, and frankly, I hoped that it did, because the concrete facts weren’t helping.
Julia had written a question on her yellow pad: “What do the victims have in common?” And beneath it were the words “St. John’s, St. John’s office, Sophie and other women, both work in church office, cottage sale (one hates, one likes).”
St. John’s was the obvious link between the two victims, but what if they were connected by the killer, not the church? What if the church was incidental? Did one of the Cottage Women have reason to kill both Ackley and Lauren?
Then again, if St. John’s was the link, why was it? Did the real estate deal play a part?
It struck me that Lauren’s murder had been planned but Ackley’s murder was a crime of opportunity, carried out on the spur of the moment. One of the women had seen him as a threat, perhaps for the first time, or he had presented himself as a threat, showing up at the cottage, unannounced, maybe, saying he’d discovered something.
I knew in my bones that was it. He’d walked to the cottage to tell the killer what he’d discovered, and the proof of his discovery was on his phone.
Please turn yourself in to the police. It’s the right thing to do. It will go easier for you, and I promise to stand by you. I could see Ackley saying that. And I could see him turning his back on his murderer, walking away into the graveyard, trusting that his words had made a good impression upon a woman who was deep down in her soul a decent person.
And then I could see her call to him. See her approach him, smiling, her knife hidden from view in the pages of a paperback book. I squeezed my eyes shut.
CHAPTER 15
I woke Monday morning to the sound of rain drumming on the roof. In retaliation, I turned over and pulled the comforter to my chin. Two minutes later, my downstairs phone rang.
Groaning, I flopped on my back and glared at the ceiling.
And the phone kept ringing.
I forced myself out of bed, satisfying my impulse to strangle someone by grumbling aloud all the way down the stairs. Who on earth had the nerve to call so early in the morning? Didn’t they know it was raining? That people slept in on rainy days? That I’d hardly slept at all?
As I reached for my land line—in awe that it had rung fifteen ridiculous times—I caught sight of the clock on the microwave. It was 9:40. For crying out loud.
Holly was on the other end of the line. She was at Holly’s Sweets, dying to tell me that Turner had been spilling police beans while making a later-than-usual donut run. He had told her there were no fingerprints on Ackley’s phone—it had been wiped clean—and an associate pastor at St. John’s said it was strange that no text messages from Sunday were on it since Ackley received twenty or more texts a day on his phone and he never deleted them right away. They were a reminder of people he needed to talk to, prayers that needed to be said.
Most telling of all, the killer had removed the phone’s SIM card, making retrieval of deleted messages difficult if not impossible if the service provider couldn’t help. Because there was wifi in the police station, they hadn’t at first noticed that the card was missing. Ackley’s phone and computer were now with a tech expert, but there was no guarantee he could help.
After I hung up, I dressed, ate a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs, and called Sophie at the cottage. Could we meet at Grove Coffee in fifteen minutes? There were things I needed to know about her friends, and only she could tell me. Thinking it wise to stay mum on the subject for now, I didn’t mention that Julia and I had found Ackley’s phone.
There wasn’t a spot in Juniper Grove that was more than fifteen minutes from any other spot in town, so when I pulled in front of Grove Coffee, Sophie was waiting for me at a small table by a rain-streaked window. I ordered a large coffee with cream and joined her.
“I’m afraid I need to be nosier than last time we talked,” I said, warning her that I was going to pry into her life and the lives of her friends, especially Lauren and Pastor Ackley. But that was the only way this case would be solved, I was certain. Who were the victims as people? What linked them? Why would anyone kill them? Foolishly or not, I’d written Sophie off as a suspect, so I felt no apprehension about asking her questions.
“Go right ahead, Rachel. I won’t sleep until the killer is found.” She spooned brown sugar crystals from a small bowl into her black coffee. “I’ll answer any question you have.”
“Can we start with the night of the murder? Do you remember how long it took you to get to Lauren’s bedroom after you heard her scream?”
“Probably thirty seconds. I wasn’t sure what I heard—I may have heard two screams—and then I wasn’t sure where the sound was coming from. I was just waking up, so I was a little out of it and wobbly on my feet.”
“Tyra came next?”
“A few seconds after me. Then Alison came up the stairs, and Mariette was right behind her.”
“So any of them could have killed Lauren and made it back to their bedroom before you came out of yours?”
Sophie chewed her lower lip, mulling over the question. “It wouldn’t have taken more than ten seconds for Mariette or Alison to make it back to their bedrooms, and for Tyra, maybe five seconds. I wouldn’t have seen any of them.”
I nodded. It was a big house, but all the bedrooms were within a quick sprint of the staircase. “I also need to ask about the sale of your property. Did Mariette suggest the $915,000 asking price?”
“Actually, she suggested an even million dollars after looking at the comps. You know, comparable properties. That was my first asking price. St. John’s wondered if I’d mark it down a little, and I agreed. They were ready to buy, I liked what they planned to do with the land, and I was more than ready to sell. Mariette wanted to come back with an offer of $975,000, but there’s hardly a difference between that and a million.”
“Is the sale still on?”
; “As of this morning. Closing is in two weeks.”
The more I heard, the more legit and innocent the sale looked. I blew across my coffee to cool it and took a sip. “Is the cottage coming down?”
“I think it has to since it sits on the lowest part of the property. It’ll be sad to see it go. It’s where I grew up and where my parents made a life together. All my memories are there.”
I understood that. I’d lost my own parents far too early, and soon after, I’d had to sell their home—the home I’d grown up in. But the small inheritance they had left me allowed me to buy a house in Juniper Grove and write mysteries for a living, and I knew they would have liked that.
“Mariette stands to make a lot of money on the sale,” I said.
“More than sixty-four thousand dollars.” Sophie gave a wry smile. “She’s got more than the usual amount of paperwork to file, though.”
“Tyra said Mariette and Alison argued with Lauren over the sale the evening before she died.”
Sophie turned to the window and stared out at the rain. “I regret that argument. It got nasty.”
“Were you involved in it?”
“No, but I should have put a stop to it.” She cradled her coffee cup, as if for comfort, and inhaled the rising steam. “I’ve wondered if the argument led to the murder. Mariette and Alison went after Lauren with their claws out. So did Tyra. And I have to admit, I let them. It was satisfying. But I think I could have saved her. Maybe.”
She glanced up at me, hoping, it seemed, that I would dispute the idea and dash it with logic to the rocks. I took a stab at doing just that.
“From what I’ve heard, Lauren was her own worst enemy. She was trouble, even murder, waiting to happen. I don’t believe an argument caused her death. Her death was planned before the argument, down to St. John’s ringing bells. Argument or not, she would have died early Sunday morning.”
Death Knell (Juniper Grove Cozy Mystery Book 8) Page 10
