He pictured the simplicity and grace of his mother’s island home off the coast of Spain, the place where, as a young girl, she had attracted the attentions of his father, an Oxford student on break. José, their only progeny, grew up in England, but after his father’s untimely death, his mother had returned to Ibiza, where she struggled to maintain her beautiful home and beachfront. He had no doubt she would throw open the doors in welcome, never asking why he’d returned.
The picture of bougainvillea and white sand was so vivid in José’s mind that when the telephone rang, he had to shake his head to remember where he was.
Candi’s voice was high-pitched, agitated. “Can I come over? I really need to talk to you.”
“About what?” he asked as he riffled through papers on his rolltop desk. “I’m kind of busy.”
“That girl, Melissa, the one who died.”
His jaw clenched. “What about her?”
“Well, don’t you think they’re going to figure out where she was? I mean, somebody’s going to talk, and then they’ll come to you and me. You know they will.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t get sucked back into this. He just couldn’t.
“Well? What are we going to say?”
“About what? She was there at the party. So what?”
“But we were all doing drugs.”
“Actually, I wasn’t.” He started shoving books into a packing box.
“I really want to talk to you.”
“Listen, Candi, if anyone asks,” he said, knowing he was being dismissive to someone deserving of more, “you don’t know anything about anything. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.”
“But what about Melissa? She was a classy lady and she treated me nice. I don’t think she just fell in the water and drowned, do you?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“What? I hate trying to talk to you on the phone. How about if I just come over,” she wheedled.
“I’m on my way out.”
“When will you be back?”
He sighed. “I’m taking a job out of state, so I may not be in touch for a while.” Before she could respond, he clicked the off button on the phone and ignored its almost immediate ringing.
It was late afternoon by the time Candi turned off the freeway and passed through a couple of towns with populations in the triple digits. Twice she had to backtrack, but her sense of direction was keen, and eventually she recognized the road leading to Ross Johnson’s cabin. Pulling in behind his car, she checked herself in the rearview mirror and applied lip-gloss before exiting her Camaro.
If she’d expected a warm welcome, she was sorely disappointed. Ross glowered at her through the screen door the way her dad always did when the Jehovah’s witnesses came, and asked in a growly voice like her dad’s, “Do you want something?”
“It’s Candi,” she said. Her smile faltered. “Remember me?”
He squinted into the sunlight, then nodded and opened the door. In a tone only slightly less hostile, he asked, “What brings you here?”
“You,” she answered coyly. “I missed you.” She dipped her right shoulder, letting the strap of her camisole slip.
His expression was dubious as he ushered her into the living room and gestured toward the bar. “Help yourself,” he said, plunking down in a leather recliner.
She grabbed the nearest bottle and poured herself too much brandy. “Oops.” She giggled nervously. “I guess you’ll have to help me drink this. I don’t want to, y’know, not know what I’m doing.”
Ross Johnson stared right through her.
She took a gulp and sat on the arm of his chair, where he laid a hand on her shoulder. He might as well have been comatose for all the feeling he put into it. She tilted her head and her short bob swung forward in a way most men found seductive, but Ross Johnson wasn’t most men. He’d blown hot and cold at that weekend party, leaving her wondering if she’d done something really dumb. Her girlfriends at the club said he was probably gay. Who else would pass it up, they’d asked, and for that she had no answer.
She kicked off a sandal and stroked his leg with her bare foot.
He seemed to come out of his stupor a bit and pulled her closer. “So what’s the deal?” he asked, his voice harsh. “José wouldn’t help you with the rent, so you decided to come here looking for a sugar-daddy?”
It was like he could read her mind or something. Shit! But that was only part of it, and if he already knew what she was thinking, she might as well say it. “I’m scared,” she said simply. “I keep thinking about Melissa, and how she was here and then they found her dead, y’know, after she left here.” She bit her lip. “I don’t know what to do.”
His eyes were contemptuous slits. “Why do you have to do anything?”
And then, even though it hadn’t gone so well with José, she wound up blurting it out in much the same way to Ross. “I mean, what if they come and ask me if she was with your friend that weekend. I saw him on TV, that Martin guy, the president of Bradford College. He just flat-out lied! So what if they ask me about something that would, y’know, look suspicious since we didn’t see her again after that.”
As she continued, she felt his tightening grip on her shoulder. She snuffled and looked around for a tissue, slipping off the chair to grab the box from the bathroom.
When she came back, Ross was standing. He kissed her roughly on the mouth and she began to think this might turn out better than she’d feared.
“I was thinking,” she said in her little girl voice, “Maybe we could go away, y’know, just the two of us, someplace romantic, and then we wouldn’t have to answer any questions or worry about anything at all.”
He kissed her again, then guided her, not to the bedroom as she’d anticipated, but to the front door.
“What are we doing?” she asked, her voice cracking.
“We are doing nothing. You are going home and forgetting about that whole weekend. You shouldn’t have trouble forgetting things.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying nobody cares what you have to say. Nobody’s going to take you seriously or ask your opinions. You’re nothing but arm candy.”
Her eyes stung. “I know why you’re acting like this,” she said, unable to keep the shrillness out of her voice. “You’re just a stupid prick with a stupider prick, and you’re taking it out on me because you can’t get it up anymore.” She jutted her chin out, almost expecting him to strike her.
Instead, his jaw tightened, then relaxed. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a money clip and peeled off some fifties.
“What’s this?”
He laughed and shoved it into her cleavage. “Money. Go home. Pay your rent. Don’t bother coming back.”
Lee Ann’s departure that evening left Robin feeling more alone than she had in a long time. Robin powered up her laptop and tried to write the final chapter, but after filling the screen with awkwardly worded sentences, she typed, “This is all crap. I need to clear my head.” As she considered another walk, she shuddered at having another run-in with Ross Johnson.
Grover’s eyes followed her path to the kitchen. His ears perked up when the refrigerator door opened, lowered again when the refrigerator closed with no sounds of food preparation.
“No bedtime snack tonight,” she said to Grover. “Sorry.”
The huge dog sighed and rolled his eyes toward the front door.
“You want me to go back, don’t you?”
His tail thumped on the floor.
A single tear fell, which she brusquely wiped away. “I suppose we should go home. Staying upset is just too exhausting, isn’t it?”
Grover stretched and yawned, the tone rising and falling a full octave, and she couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay, we’ll go home in the morning.”
In the morning, Robin took the route that passed the sheriff’s office. She pulled into the small parking lot. Seeing both squad cars there, she almost didn’t ge
t out, but then Deputy Brill swaggered out of the building, touched the brim of her hat and said ma’am in greeting before taking off in her vehicle. A couple seconds later, Robin heard the siren wail.
Inside the front door and down the hall, Robin turned left and peered into the sheriff’s office.
“Hey, where’s that dog of yours?” Harley asked when he recognized Robin in the doorway. “I got him some doggie treats.”
“He’s not my dog,” Robin grumbled. She retrieved Grover from the car and brought him inside where she was forced to watch a ridiculous show of dog training man, even though the man was quite convinced it was the other way around. After several minutes of frolicking, Harley sat to hear the reason for her visit.
He picked up the log and held it in both hands, rolling it as she spoke.
“Doesn’t that look like car paint to you?” she asked. “Before it was cut down it was at just the right height for a car fender to have hit it.”
He nodded wearily as he set the log on his desk. Turning back to Robin he said, “Maybe you can help me with this, because I just don’t see how this log with paint on it connects to the woman we found in the creek.”
“Melissa Dunn,” she corrected him. “She was a human being long before she became just another case on your desk.”
He grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay.”
She suddenly felt foolish for coming in with so much speculation and so little information. She took in a breath and began anyway. “Okay, in the first place, I heard a crash that night. There was a party going on down the road at Ross Johnson’s place, and my first thought was that someone was drunk, got behind the wheel and hit a deer, but there was no dead deer and the tree had a new gouge in it, and Molly Pat—”
“The dog?”
“Yes, the dog. Molly Pat knew something was wrong.” She saw the amused pull at the corner of his mouth and said, “Okay, forget about the dog. Just answer this. Why would somebody cut down that particular tree and none other? It was perfectly healthy except for the gouge with paint in it. Somebody was determined to cut it down and then it wound up in my neighbor’s woodpile, the same guy who hosted a party that night.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you also have a party at your place that same night?” His tone was more playful than confrontational.
Robin couldn’t believe he was equating their parties. “I don’t think there’s any comparison. We don’t have orgies. We never drink to excess. We don’t even—”
Harley held his hands up. “Okay, okay, I hear you.” Then, after some time had passed, he said, “It’s just that there’s nothing I can do about it.”
They both turned at the odd sound, and saw Grover chewing the end of the log. Harley snatched it from his jaws and set it on the filing cabinet.
Robin, seeing her Exhibit A being first damaged, then shelved, said, “Don’t you have some way to check out what kind of car it came from? Can’t you at least do that?”
He shook his head. “I have to justify how I spend my budget here, and, well, this is just a log with paint on it.”
Robin looked at the log, then abruptly took her leave before Harley could see her eyes welling with angry tears.
Just as Sheriff Harley was ready to lock up the office so he could stop for dinner before going home to watch a rented movie, the phone rang. It was Detective Maki from Roseville, who’d been working on the Melissa Dunn case when it was still a missing persons case. Harley hoped they could keep the investigation local, and, as an accidental drowning, that’s where it would stay. And even if it wasn’t accidental, the feds wouldn’t get involved unless she’d been brought across state lines for the explicit purpose of murdering her.
“Afternoon, Sheriff. I’m sure glad I caught you. Say, we got a call I thought you’d be interested in,” the detective said, his hard R’s giving away his original home in northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. “The caller says she saw the Dunn woman that Friday after she was last seen in Minnesota.”
“Uh-huh.”
“At a cabin in your jurisdiction. She even gave me the directions and a name. You know someone named Johnson?”
“A few,” Harley said, leaning forward in his chair and trying not to get too excited. “-on or -en?”
“Don’t know. First name of Ross. Sounds like his cabin is real close to where the body turned up. Fancy place, definitely high buck.”
“Yup, I know the one. Ross Johnson, with an O.”
“The caller claims Dunn was at a party there, got high and left. And then, she says, the boyfriend took off. We asked her to come in and make a statement. In fact my partner is interviewing her now.”
“Taping it?”
“Yeah, we’ll make you a copy.”
Harley was wired when he got home. He’d handled plenty of deaths in his career—hunting and boating and farm accidents, car crashes, usually involving a drunk driver, domestic arguments that escalated into violence, one or both of them tanked up pretty good. But this was smelling like murder.
He popped in the movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and sat back with his stockinged feet on the coffee table to watch the opening credits. In a few minutes he was rewarded with another call from Minneapolis.
“She named the vic’s boyfriend,” the detective said without preamble, “her boss, Martin Krause, the president of Bradford College.”
Harley slapped the arm of his chair and whooped.
“You interested in being there when we bring him in?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” They made the arrangements before Harley popped the lid of a Hamm’s and dialed Deputy Brill, who was pulling night shift at the office. “There’s a log sitting on the file cabinet,” he told her. “I want you to take it down to the Madison lab tomorrow. See what they can find out about the paint, and make sure they put a rush on it. And call Connie and see who can cover for you.”
19
Harley woke early and decided to drive to Minneapolis by way of Mickey’s Diner in Saint Paul for good, cheap food and just enough of an edge to put him in the mood for watching a murderer confess. He walked into the yellow-and-red enameled 1930s railroad dining car turned restaurant and sat at the counter next to a man in a business suit. Several stools down sat an old man who looked like he’d walked out of the pages of a Zane Grey novel, with his snakeskin boots and rumpled cowboy hat. The cowboy nodded to Harley and went back to alternately sipping from his strawberry shake and taking drags off a hand-rolled cigarette.
“What’ll you have, hon?” asked the matronly waitress.
Harley ordered up a mess of hash browns, very crispy, and eggs, still runny, then sat back to watch the banter between cook and waitress. The food was delicious. He lingered over coffee, his cup being refilled almost every time he set it down, and felt sure he would have some answers by day’s end.
When he went to the register to pay with his lone credit card, he noticed the sign instructing patrons that tips were expected in cash. He pulled out a couple ones and placed them on the counter.
Arriving at the station, Harley parked near the entrance and sauntered up to the receptionist’s desk. The woman was young and blonde and striking, and Harley found himself stammering when he asked for Detective Maki. Within minutes, the door to the inner offices opened and a trim man in a rumpled shirt held out his hand. Although he had a full head of gray hair, his unruly eyebrows were dark brown.
Harley sucked in his gut and pulled his shoulders back.
“Glad you could make it, Sheriff.” Detective Maki ushered him into an uncluttered office.
“I think you’ll be interested in what we got last night.” Detective Maki popped a tape into the VCR. They watched as Candi Damiano gave her name and address, and quickly moved on to describe the last evening anyone admitted to seeing the dead woman, Melissa Dunn.
Just as the tape ended, another detective announced Martin Krause’s arrival.
On the other side of the two-way mirror, Harley had a few moments
to observe the well-groomed, well-dressed man seated alone at the table. Krause looked every part the college president, unless one caught the occasional wary shift of his eyes or his bobbing Adam’s apple.
Detective Maki entered, setting a spiral reporter’s notebook and a ballpoint pen between them on the table. They went through a few preliminaries before Maki offered Krause coffee.
“Some water would be fine.” When Maki left, Martin scanned the room with its bland off-white walls. He seemed to stare through the mirrored viewing window directly at Sheriff Harley.
Maki returned with a Styrofoam cup of water. “Now where were we? You were telling me about your relationship with Melissa Dunn.”
“Relationship? I was her boss. She was Bradford’s director of Development. She answered to me.” He sat back, opening himself up in the body language of confidence.
“You’re telling me your relationship was strictly professional?”
“Of course,” Martin snapped.
Maki smiled and waited. Krause shifted. Maki said, “Mr. Krause, do you—”
“It’s Doctor. Doctor Krause.”
“Ah, yes. Well, Dr. Krause, do you know a Ross Johnson, who owns a cabin near where Ms. Dunn’s body was found?”
Martin crossed his arms. “I went to college with Ross Johnson. We’re still acquaintances.”
Maki leaned back and crossed his legs at the ankles. “We know that Melissa Dunn was at Mr. Johnson’s cabin the last weekend in May.” Watching Martin’s face he added, “With you.”
Martin slowly took a sip of water and set the cup back down on the table with precision. “Yes, that’s true. She was there with me.”
“And are you still telling me your relationship was just professional? Would you care to explain?”
“Make this good,” muttered Harley behind the mirror.
Krause inhaled deeply through his nose. His eyes shifted briefly to where Harley stood behind the glass. “Yes. She and I were there to get donations for the college.”
Murder at Spirit Falls Page 16
