Death Trap

by Karin Kaufman

  Standing well outside the collections room door, I cleared my throat and motioned at Turner and then the cup. Turner stepped outside the room and took it from me, gratefully drinking it down in a quick succession of gulps.

  “It looks like the weapon was here,” Gilroy said, pointing at two bare nails on the wall. “Held up by its guard. There aren’t any soil shadows on the wall around it, so it might be relatively new.”

  “It’s medieval in style,” the coroner said, crouching over the weapon. “But I’m certain it’s a reproduction.”

  “How so?” Gilroy said.

  “The style is high medieval, about A.D. 1000 to 1300. More toward the latter part of that, I think. It’s a type of dagger called a misericorde.”

  Gilroy looked astonished. “You never fail to surprise me, Doctor.”

  “A coroner has to know his weapons, Gilroy.” He took quick stock of the room. “And I understand the attraction to the medieval period. I’ve done some study myself. But back to the misericorde.”

  Gilroy crouched down alongside the coroner.

  “An authentic one would be about eight hundred years old and cost at least two thousand dollars,” the coroner continued. “In this condition, much more.” He pointed. “It’s too fresh and clean. No pitting, no discoloration, no damage.”

  “I see that now. What did you call it again?”

  “A misericorde. Originally from the Latin misericordia, meaning ‘mercy.’ In Old French and Middle English, misericorde, ‘act of mercy.’”

  “Why would you call a dagger ‘mercy’?” Turner asked.

  The coroner glanced up at Turner. “It’s not to the modern way of thinking, is it? But this dagger was very much an act of mercy on the medieval battlefield. A knight injured in battle might linger for hours or days, without hope of recovery. This dagger was thrust between his ribs and into his heart, ending his suffering in a matter of seconds.”

  There wasn’t as much blood on Lesley’s blouse as I would have expected, which meant her heart had stopped beating almost instantly after the second blow of the dagger. The misericorde had pierced her heart, just like it was designed to.

  CHAPTER 5

  After the coroner finished his preliminary examination, he called his team upstairs to place Lesley on the gurney and take her body away. Gilroy bagged the misericorde, gave it to Turner, and went back downstairs to finish questioning Stuart. He told me he had one or two more quick questions for him tonight. A more detailed interview would have to wait until tomorrow, when Stuart was more able. Besides, Gilroy said, he still had to talk to Jova, Kip, and Maurice.

  I remained upstairs with Turner—he inside the collections room taking the close-ups of each item in the room as Gilroy had requested, me outside, holding his empty coffee cup and trying to recall the chain of events. I remembered hearing Lesley say, “The room’s this way,” and hearing her call for Stuart. She must have been alone in the collections room, wondering where everyone else was. Why hadn’t Stuart gone with her? Why ask everyone to see his new addition and then disappear?

  “Some of these weapons look authentic,” Turner said. “Not that I’m an expert, but they don’t look new, like that thin dagger does.”

  “Do you think it’s strange to build a whole new room just to house them?” I asked.

  He pivoted my way. “I wouldn’t do it. But then, I don’t collect and I don’t have money burning a hole in my pocket.”

  “Stuart built a greenhouse too. Twice the size of this room.”

  “Must be nice.”

  Turner went back to snapping photos, and I slowly made my way back down the hall for the stairs, peeking into every room as I went. The first door to my right—on my left when I’d raced after Gilroy—had been closed, as it was now. I tried the doorknob. Locked.

  Behind the next door was a mid-sized bathroom. Jova had exited here, flinging herself into the hall and crying, “What on earth?” Looking quite alarmed as I recalled, but that didn’t mean anything. There was nothing remarkable about the room. A small shower stall, a toilet, a pedestal sink. I popped open the medicine cabinet above the sink and found a new tube of toothpaste, an unused bar of soap, and a toothbrush still in its packaging.

  The next door down, to my right, was where Kip had stood, his hand on the doorknob. The room held a twin-sized bed, nightstand and lamp, a dresser, and another oriental rug. I shut my eyes, trying to remember exactly where he’d stood. “Inside the room,” I whispered. Kip had been standing inside the room, his hand on the doorknob as though he’d just opened the door at the sound of commotion in the hallway. What had he been doing in here?

  I went to the dresser, pulled open the top drawer, and found a two-inch-long, antique-looking cross. Possibly bronze, though it was hard to tell with its greenish patina. Leaving the cross in the drawer, I strode back to the collections room and asked Turner if he’d found evidence that something was missing from the display case under the window.

  “Yeah, looks like it,” he said. “Looks like a cross or something shaped like it is missing from square in the middle of the case. The sun discolored the velvet around it. Why?”

  “I may have found it. Can you tell if anything else is missing from the room?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “I’ll get Gilroy.”

  Before hitting the stairs, I peered into the last two rooms in the hall. On my right was what appeared to be the Hunters’ master bedroom, and on my left, close to where Maurice had been standing, was the door to a cozy library housing several floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

  I met Stuart on the stairway and paused to let him pass. He drew a shuddering breath and kept moving.

  “Can I bring you anything?” I asked.

  Throwing his hand behind his back, he waved me off, and I watched him until he shuffled into the master bedroom and shut the door.

  Downstairs, I decided not to interrupt Gilroy’s interview with Maurice and instead pulled Underhill from the great room to just inside the kitchen to tell him I’d found an old cross in one of the bedrooms. “Stuart was shouting about someone stealing something from him shortly before Lesley was killed, and a cross is missing from a display case.”

  “Thanks, Rachel. I’ll tell the chief.” He stopped me as I made for the coffeemaker. “And Maurice wanted coffee. Do you mind making it? He rubs me the wrong way.”

  I readily agreed since it would allow me to continue with my eavesdropping.

  Dumping another used coffee filter into the trash, I heard Gilroy.

  “I understand you being interested in the Hunters’ library,” he said, “but why didn’t you go straight for the collections room? Why make a detour?”

  “Listen, I wasn’t interested in Stuart’s shiny new addition, all right?” Maurice replied. “The party, so-called, wasn’t exactly a corker, was it? But that library isn’t half bad.”

  “Had you seen it before?”

  “Sure. Stuart invited me. We share some of the same tastes in books, and his enthusiasm for the medieval is infectious.”

  “How long had you known the Hunters?”

  Unlike Brynne, Maurice didn’t hesitate. “Three years.”

  “When and where did you first meet?”

  “I was referred to Stuart when I needed some dental work done. Did you know he retired six months back?”

  “Yes,” Gilroy said tersely.

  “I didn’t. Imagine retiring in your fifties. Dental surgeons make the cash, don’t they? Just look at this house. Stuart’s well and truly a toff.”

  I rolled my eyes at the British slang, scooped coffee into a filter, and started my last brew of the evening.

  “About how many times did you meet with the Hunters in the three years you knew them?” Gilroy asked.

  “Maybe a dozen. Though I was surprised to get an invitation to Lesley’s shindig, since I hadn’t seen either of them in ten months.”

  “Why hadn’t you?”

  Maurice sniffed loudly. “I haven’
t the foggiest. Truthfully? It didn’t bother me enough to ask. It’s not as though I don’t have things to do. Developing websites is time-consuming. Customers are rarely satisfied.”

  “Did anything unusual happen the last time you saw them?”

  “The last time I saw them was when I saw her. Lesley, on her own. She was just coming out of the hair salon and we almost ran into each other.”

  “You spoke?”

  “Briefly.”

  “And?”

  “And we spoke. What do you want me to say? Hello, goodbye. I was never close to the Hunters. We hardly had a deep friendship. In fact, Stuart got on my last nerve sometimes. He asked me once if I could cobble together a website for him at a steep discount. A dentist asks a struggling website developer to do something on the cheap.”

  When I’d poured Maurice his cup of coffee, I took it to the dining room, being careful to look as though I had no interest in the interview.

  “Five hours later,” he moaned as he took the cup.

  “Milk or cream?” I asked.

  “I don’t sully the black.”

  My eyes locked with his. “I sully mine to a nice tan color.” Good grief, this man was unbearable. Was he kind or even civil around anyone? “Can I get you more coffee, Chief Gilroy?”

  “No, thanks, but please tell Officer Underhill I’m ready. Mr. Salaway, you’re free to return to the great room.”

  Maurice groaned his way to his feet. “Freedom and the great room are not coexistent.”

  “Ten to fifteen more minutes,” Gilroy said.

  “Why can’t I just go home now?” Maurice groused as I started for the great room.

  Because Gilroy wants to find an inconsistency in your story and bring you back for another chat, I thought. Before you go home and have time to mull it over.

  I passed along Gilroy’s message and Underhill motioned to Jova.

  “This is an insanely long night,” she said as she hauled her long legs toward dining room. Her tunic flapped in the wake of her breeze.

  Kip grunted and brushed back his floppy blond bangs. “If I ruin my chances as assistant manager because I’m too tired . . .”

  Brynne sat forward. “Your hair style is reminiscent of college-boy cuts of the 1920s. Did you know that?”

  “Quiet, please,” Underhill said.

  “We can talk about hair, can’t we?” Brynne said. “I didn’t ask him where he was when the lights went out.”

  “When did the lights go out?” Kip said.

  “It’s a figure of speech,” Maurice said.

  Again Underhill called for quiet.

  Where had Brynne gone during the confusion? I wondered. How had she found the back stairs?

  I told Underhill I needed a restroom break and hurried off to the foyer. There it was, the main staircase in plain sight. It was the first thing you saw on entering the front door. I continued to the other side of the house, through a family room with an enormous flat-screen TV into a home office and yet another guest bedroom.

  It was only when I got to the bedroom that I saw the narrow Gothic-style archway that led to the back staircase. How had Brynne found this obscure back way? And where had Stuart been? He’d made it to these stairs after Brynne. Gilroy would ask him his whereabouts tomorrow, I thought, when Stuart was up to it, but it puzzled me. Everyone’s whereabouts at the time Lesley screamed puzzled me.

  Then there was that scream. Why would she shout, “James, no!” as she was being attacked? It was almost as if Lesley wanted to . . . I shook my head. Lesley truly liked James, I could tell. She would never deliberately implicate him in her own murder. And it’s not as if she knew she’d be murdered and could plan implicating him. She had fought her killer, however briefly. The defensive wound to her hand was proof of that.

  I closed my eyes again and replayed the scene in my head. Wait a minute. Had Lesley shouted, “James, no!” or “James! No!” It must have been the latter. She had called out for James, the police chief in her house, and then screamed a final “No!” at her killer.

  To make certain—in this large, almost Byzantine house—that this stairway was the one I’d seen Stuart and Brynne rise from, I darted up the steps. Sure enough, I found myself on the second floor, directly across from the collections room. I told Turner.

  “I found something else,” he said.

  I was again getting the latest news ahead of Gilroy, but Turner, who had been with the department since last December, was already used to my presence at crime scenes and my parallel murder investigations. My friends Holly Kavanagh and Julia Foster—we had dubbed ourselves the Juniper Grove Mystery Gang—couldn’t resist a good mystery, though we tried our best not to step on Gilroy’s toes. Plus, like Underhill, Turner enjoyed jabbering about cases, usually over a good donut from Holly’s Sweets, the downtown bakery Holly owned.

  But most of all, Turner was aware that Gilroy, who had resigned himself to what he’d called my “meddling” and even found it helpful from time to time, no longer complained about me sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. Last month, we had finally turned a corner on that thorny problem. As Gilroy had finally explained, he liked my sixth sense about his murder cases. What he didn’t like was seeing me in dangerous situations.

  “What is it?” I asked as I drew close to the collections room door. For the first time I saw blood on the room’s carpet. Just a few drops, probably where Lesley’s injured hand had been.

  “The chief’s five-year lapel pin.”

  I stepped to the door but didn’t cross the threshold. “What lapel pin?”

  “He never wears it.” With his gloved hand, Turner held up a small blue and gold pin in the shape of an officer’s badge. “It’s for a dress uniform. Every cop has some sort of lapel pin, but we never wear dress uniforms in Juniper Grove.”

  It didn’t surprise me that I’d never seen the pin. Gilroy’s daily uniform consisted of jeans, a shirt, a jacket, and cowboy boots, and lapel pins didn’t figure into it. “How do you know it’s his?”

  “Underhill has one just like it, and ‘Gilroy’ is engraved on the back. Underhill’s name is on his.”

  I stared at the police-issue latex evidence glove Turner wore and the pin he held between his thumb and forefinger. “Where was it?”

  “Up against the leg of the display case. That’s why no one saw it at first.”

  “Could it have been here awhile?”

  “Possibly. But look at the vacuum lines on the carpet. Everywhere but in the center of the room, where Lesley, the coroner, and the chief were moving around. This is a freshly vacuumed room.”

  He was right. Probably in preparation for showing off their new addition, Lesley or Stuart had vacuumed in here. “Are you sure Gilroy wasn’t wearing it?”

  “I’ve never seen him wear stuff like this.” His gaze rose from the pin to me. “When I was up here after you all went downstairs, I heard Stuart accuse the chief. What do I do, Rachel?”

  “You have to bag it, Turner.”

  “I know I do.” He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a clear plastic bag.

  “It’ll be okay. There’ll be an explanation. We know Gilroy didn’t do this.”

  CHAPTER 6

  When we finally left the Hunters’ house, it was just past eleven o’clock. Gilroy drove me home while Underhill and Turner headed to the station to lock up the evidence gathered at the scene. Turner was in charge of the evidence bags, and as far as I knew, he hadn’t told Gilroy about the lapel pin he’d found. Figuring Turner could break the news in the morning, I didn’t mention it as Gilroy drove north to my house on Finch Hill Road. There was some simple explanation for that pin being on the floor of the Hunters’ new addition, and I’d find out about it tomorrow.

  Turner had also photographed and bagged the ancient-looking cross I’d found in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and that, as much as the lapel pin, was on my mind as I got into my pajamas and climbed into bed with a yellow notepad and a cup of mint tea. Whi
le my memory was still fresh, I sketched the first and second floor of the Hunter home and marked where I’d first seen each person appear after Lesley had screamed.

  Every single one of them had been in a position to stab Lesley and race from the scene—to either farther down the hall, like Maurice, or into a room, like Kip and Jova. Brynne, too, was a suspect in my mind. She could have attacked Lesley and then, even in her heels, rushed across the hall and down the second staircase, waiting until she heard Stuart before going up again.

  And the cross thief? Kip was the obvious choice. He’d been standing just inside the door of the bedroom where I’d found the cross, his hand on the doorknob, when Gilroy and I hit the top step of the main stairs. In the confusion before the murder, people heading to separate rooms, calling here and there, it would’ve been easy for him to take the cross, jog down the hall a bit, and stick the cross in the drawer. Later—perhaps asking to use the bathroom on the second floor?—he could have crept to the bedroom and pocketed the cross.

  Jova and Maurice could have done the same thing, but it was Kip I’d seen standing in that room. If he hadn’t been hiding the cross, what had he been doing in there?

  But what if the cross had been stolen earlier? Gilroy and I had been the last two guests to arrive, so it was possible that Maurice, Jova, Brynne, or Kip had hidden the cross before we showed up.

  Sipping my tea, I replayed the earliest part of the evening in my head. Stuart had seemed so cheerful—until he’d started making wisecracks about his guests—and so pleased to see Gilroy, his old friend. Why had he turned so quickly against him? How could he possibly believe that Gilroy would murder Lesley? Lesley, too, had looked happy to see Gilroy. She’d relaxed in his presence. The other guests had made her uncomfortable. So why had they been invited—and to her birthday party, of all things?

  My guess was that Stuart, not Lesley, had made up the guest list, though why she had gone along with his plan to invite people she didn’t care for or in some cases hardly knew was a mystery.