Stiff Penalty (A Mattie Winston Mystery)

by Annelise Ryan

  The three of us stared at it for several seconds as proof of my claim.

  Finally Izzy asked, “Any idea where this knife is?”

  Bob nodded. “Junior is inside Ames’s house, and he said there’s a bloody knife on the kitchen floor. They’re waiting for Jonas and someone from your office to get there before they start collecting anything. So far all they’ve done is look around, make sure the scene is safe, and chat up some of the neighbors.”

  Izzy and I headed out to the main part of the ER so Izzy could talk to the doctor who had treated Ames to see if there was any other useful information that might help with the autopsy, and to request a copy of the medical record. He charged me with calling one of the local funeral homes to come and transport the body back to the morgue. As we approached the nurse’s station, I stopped short. There, sitting in a chair at one of the computers, was David.

  He looked up, saw me, and frowned.

  I gave back as good as I got, leaning in close and keeping my voice low. “Hello, David. Looks like your shenanigans couldn’t keep me out of the ER after all.”

  “Shenanigans?” he said with a tone of amusement that suggested I was dumber than a box of rocks. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about your attempts to keep me from coming back to work here. You know, that threat you made to leave if Molinaro gave me a job? You knew the hospital couldn’t afford to lose the only general surgeon they had left on staff. And you used that to screw me. Which shouldn’t surprise me since it’s well known that you screw anything that walks by.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “That you screw anything that walks by? No one had to tell me. I kind of figured it out on my own when I caught you playing hide the snake with Karen Owenby, remember? Thanks to that debacle, everyone knows what a skank you are.”

  I saw that some nurses who were standing nearby were listening in on our conversation, though they were making a valiant effort to look like they weren’t.

  Apparently David noticed them, too, because he lowered his voice and moved his head a tad closer to me. “That’s not what I meant and you know it,” he said just above a whisper. “I meant who told you that I didn’t want you working here?”

  “Oh, that was Molinaro.”

  David glared at me, his lips tight. “That’s bull,” he grumbled. “Why would I do that?”

  “Good question,” I shot back. “Why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t,” he said, biting his lip and shifting his gaze away from me.

  I knew he was lying. Judging from the scoffing sounds I heard from the eavesdropping nurses, they knew it, as well. Too bad I wasn’t as good at picking up on his deceptions when we were still married.

  “Liar,” I hissed.

  I heard someone behind me clear their throat and turned around to see Nancy Molinaro herself standing there, scowling. She wasn’t a tall woman—I towered over her by nearly a foot—but there was something about her stocky build, fearless stance, fierce eyes, and hirsute body that scared the hell out of me. I had no doubt she could take me in a fight . . . me and four other people. A rumor about her had been circulating for years, that she was an ex mob moll—or perhaps a mobster who had undergone a very bad sex change—who had been placed in the witness protection program and sent here to hide. I don’t think anyone actually believed this story, particularly since a small town like Sorenson is the worst kind of place to hide. Nothing interesting happens here that remains a secret for long. But that didn’t make Molinaro any less scary.

  In her raspy whisper of a voice, Molinaro said, “If you two kiddos can’t play nice together in our little sandbox here, I’ll be forced to take action.”

  “We’re fine,” David said in an amiable tone that was the polar opposite of the one he’d been using moments before. It almost made me laugh because I realized David was as frightened of Molinaro as I was. “Mattie and I were just catching up.”

  “Is that so?” Molinaro rasped, turning her death-ray gaze up at me.

  “It is,” I lied. “I was just asking David how the construction was coming along on his new house. I saw him pull out of the drive when I was on my way here and was wondering how much progress had been made.”

  “Did you now?” Molinaro asked, narrowing her eyes at me.

  I stared down at her and nodded vigorously, spooked by her intense stare. I probably looked like a bobblehead doll.

  “Why would you need to ask David about the progress on his house?” she asked me. “You live right next door to the place, don’t you?”

  I felt myself start to sweat beneath her laser glare, and when I realized I was shifting nervously from one foot to another, I forced myself to stop. “I haven’t been over there, and I can’t see the house from my cottage now that the trees have leafed out. The woods between us are thick.”

  The part about the trees blocking my visibility was true, but it wasn’t true that I hadn’t been over there. I had sneaked through the woods several times, curious to see what the new place was going to be like. It was coming along nicely and would make a decent addition to the neighborhood. And despite David’s claim some time ago that the new house would be smaller than the old one, it appeared to be just as large as the original.

  Molinaro harrumphed at my answer, and after giving both David and me one last death glare, she turned and left. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked over at David, who was shaking his head at me.

  “I’ve been here for the past three hours doing an emergency appendectomy,” he said in a low voice. “And as soon as I finished that, I was called down here to be on standby in case Derrick Ames needed surgery. So your claim that you saw me pulling out of my driveway a short time ago was a dumb one. Molinaro knows I’ve been here the whole time.”

  I didn’t much care about Molinaro at this point; I was more interested in David’s timeline. “If you’ve been here for the past several hours, who did I see pulling out of your driveway twenty minutes ago? I know your construction guys don’t work on the weekends, and I also know what Patty’s car looks like. It wasn’t her, and I definitely saw a car pull out of there. In fact, it followed me.”

  David shrugged. “Maybe it was the construction supervisor. I don’t know. As to someone following you, I think you’re being paranoid. This is a small town. Cars don’t have many options.” He gave me his own version of a harrumph and added, “Or maybe this job of yours is finally getting to you.”

  My job with Izzy had been a bone of contention with David from day one, though I’ve never been sure why. Had he been hoping I’d flounder when I left him and my hospital job, forcing me to come crawling back to him? Was he angry that I managed to find a new job and survive just fine without him? Did the job embarrass him for some reason? Was he angry that I was doing something he had no control over? Was he jealous over the fact that I met Hurley on the job? Maybe it was all of those things . . . or none of them. I scowled at him and tried to come up with a witty comeback, but before I could, Izzy walked up to us.

  He nodded at David but didn’t say anything to him. Instead he looked over at me and said, “Have you called the funeral home yet?”

  “No, sorry. I got distracted.” I shot David an irritated look.

  “No problem,” Izzy said. “I’ll do it. Why don’t you and Bob go to the victim’s house and process the scene while I take the body back to the morgue? I’ll ride back with the funeral home.”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  Izzy took out his cell phone and headed back to Derrick Ames’s ER room. Richmond walked up to me and said, “Did I hear you’re coming with me?”

  “I am.”

  “Need a ride?”

  I shook my head. “I have my car here. If you don’t mind, I’ll just follow you.”

  “That’ll work,” Richmond said. “I just need to hit the can quick before we go. Meet you out front?”

  “Sure.” With that, Richmond hurried off to find a bathroom.

/>   “Charming company you keep these days,” David sneered.

  I bent down to whisper in his ear. “Any company is better than spending time with you. Be careful, David. Karma has a way of coming back and biting you in the ass.”

  With that I walked away, feeling the burn of his glare in my back as I went. Little did I know that my warning would prove fortuitous, though not in the way I’d imagined.

  Chapter 5

  Derrick Ames’s house was in one of the older neighborhoods in town, a dozen square blocks filled with an eclectic mix of home styles that ranged from 1950s-era ranch houses to sprawling Victorians built in the early 1900s. The houses were close together, and most of the backyards, including Ames’s, were surrounded by privacy fencing.

  Despite the darkness of the hour, the neighborhood was well lit between the street lamps, the flash bars on the police cars, and the glow from porch and interior lights in nearly every house on the block. Ames’s house was easy to spot, thanks to the yellow police tape strung between towering old oaks to cordon off the property and a police car parked in the driveway. Huddles of neighbors were gathered in nearby front yards, whispering and talking in low murmurs, their expressions curious and concerned. Several were on their cell phones, no doubt assuring that the latest town gossip spread as far as it could as fast as it could. Derrick’s house was a large Victorian with gingerbread trim, the outside of which had recently been painted in shades of blue, yellow, and white. The glass in the front windows had a wavy look to it, making me think Ames had preserved the original panes.

  Richmond and I met in the street in front of the house and ducked under the police tape. As we headed for the house, we heard a ruckus behind us and turned to look. A woman with short, white-blond hair was standing a few feet away, staring at all the vehicles and police tape.

  “What’s going on?” she said in a soft, slightly hoarse voice. I couldn’t tell if the hoarseness was her norm or if it was because she was being strangled with emotion. “What’s going on? Oh my God, what’s going on?”

  One of the other neighbors, a heavy, fiftyish woman in a terry-cloth bathrobe rushed out into the street, put an arm over the first woman’s shoulders, and tried to pull her away, but the blond woman shrugged her off.

  “Mandy, come with me,” bathrobe woman said. “Something bad has happened.”

  Richmond and I ducked back under the tape and approached the two women. The blond woman switched her focus from the cars and flashing lights to first Richmond, then me. “What happened? Is Derrick okay? Are the boys okay?”

  “Who are you, ma’am?” Richmond asked.

  “Mandy Terwilliger. I’m Derrick’s . . . he and I . . .”

  “She’s been dating Derrick,” the neighbor woman said. “And the boys are with their mom.”

  Derrick Ames had good taste. Mandy was a beautiful woman with skin as pale as her hair, a slender build with legs that looked fabulous in a pair of red, peep-toe high heels, and huge green eyes. Her features were delicate, her nails—hands and feet—were manicured and painted a color that matched her shoes, and her lipstick was the same shade, a color my sister calls hooker red. She was wearing a tight-fitting, black pencil skirt with a low-cut, white silk blouse.

  “When did you last see Derrick?” I asked Mandy.

  “Did something happen to him?” she asked, avoiding my question.

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s not here at the house.”

  This seemed to finally divert her attention. “Where is he?”

  “He was taken to the hospital,” Richmond said.

  “The hospital? Is he okay?”

  “No, ma’am, he isn’t,” Richmond said. “Mr. Ames died.”

  “Oh, no.” Mandy Terwilliger’s body sagged, and if the neighbor lady hadn’t been standing next to her, she probably would have gone to the ground. As it was, the neighbor lady caught her and pulled her back to her feet. “What happened?” Mandy repeated. “Was it a heart attack?”

  “When did you last see him?” It was Richmond who asked this time, and he returned the favor by ignoring her question. Finally we got an answer.

  “Um, yesterday, at the school.”

  “Are you a teacher, too?”

  “No, I volunteer in my son’s classroom three days a week. I work part-time at the florist shop downtown on the weekends, noon to around eight-thirty or nine, depending on how many deliveries there are. I . . . I just left there.”

  “How long have you and Derrick been dating?” Richmond asked.

  “Not long, a couple of months. We’ve been keeping it kind of quiet because we weren’t sure how our kids were going to take it. Are the boys okay?”

  “They are,” I said.

  “What happened to Derrick?”

  “Somebody killed him,” the neighbor woman said, apparently tired of our avoidance games. Richmond shot her an angry look, but she either didn’t see it or chose to ignore it. “Someone stabbed him in the chest with one of those big forks,” the neighbor woman continued.

  Mandy seemed dumbstruck by this information, and she looked at Richmond with an inquisitive and disbelieving expression.

  Richmond stepped closer to the neighbor woman and said, “Your name, ma’am?”

  She wasn’t the least bit intimidated. She straightened up to all of her massive, bathrobe-clad glory, nearly sticking her boobs in Mandy’s face. “Rose Carpenter. I live two doors down from Derrick. He taught both my boys when they were in school. Who are you?”

  “I’m Detective Bob Richmond, with the Sorenson Police Department. This is Mattie Winston with the ME’s office.”

  Rose dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “I know who she is,” she said, casting me a dismissive sideways glance. She turned back to Richmond and eyed him from head to toe. “Are you really Bob Richmond?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You look good. You’ve lost a ton of weight.”

  “Not quite a ton, but a decent amount.”

  “Hunh,” Rose said, giving him a second head-to-toe look.

  “And how do you know Ms. Terwilliger?” Bob asked.

  “I know her all kinds of ways,” Rose said, sounding pompous. “I’ve known her since she went to work down at the florist’s shop after her divorce because I send something to my mom in Arizona every month. Plus we serve on the PTA together, and my youngest, Tina, is in the same grade as Mandy’s oldest boy, Ian. And I’ve seen her with Derrick a few times. This is a small town, you know.”

  Boy, did I.

  “Can you give me a number where you can be reached, Ms. Terwilliger?” Richmond asked. “I would like to talk some more with you later.”

  Mandy provided the requested information, and then Rose steered her away. As they reached the steps to Rose’s porch, Rose cast one last appraising look back at Richmond.

  “I think Rose likes you,” I said to Richmond.

  He gave me a skeptical look, shook his head, and then stepped beneath the police tape. I followed suit, but when he headed inside the house, I hung outside, took out the camera I had in my scene kit, and started snapping pictures and a video or two, beginning with some scenes of the street and house. I also made sure to include as many of the neighborhood lookie-loos as I could, knowing that perpetrators often return to the scene of their crimes out of curiosity, to see what the police are doing. After finishing the general scene shots, I switched to focus on a pool of drying blood in the street that had its own police tape perimeter—presumably the spot where Ames had collapsed after exiting his house.

  As I snapped my photos, I was aware of the people who were watching me doing the same thing. Everywhere I looked, someone was holding up a phone, and flashes of light kept firing from every direction. No doubt news of Derrick Ames’s demise would hit the news on Facebook and Twitter long before the TV stations or newspaper got wind of it.

  Once I finished shooting my outdoor pictures, I paused at the bottom of the porch stairs to don gloves and shoe covers from my scene kit be
fore proceeding. I snapped both distant and close-up shots of the stairs, the porch, and the entryway and foyer of the house, taking care to sidestep the blood-spotted trail pointed out to me by the uniformed cop who was standing guard. Once inside, I shut the front door behind me and took a moment to breathe and take in my surroundings.

  I knew Derrick Ames had been in the area for more than a decade, and judging from what I saw he had spent a good portion of that time restoring this place. Many of the original details of the house—stained-glass windows, a polished wood staircase with carved newels, narrow-board hardwood floors—had been lovingly restored.

  The style of the house may have been Victorian, but the furnishings were all contemporary, mismatched, and basic. There was no froufrou anywhere; the place had a definite masculine, utilitarian feel to it. I sidestepped the trail of blood droplets that led down the hallway to a room at the far end—which I assumed was the kitchen, based on the side of a refrigerator I could see—and veered left into the living room, where I found Richmond and Junior Feller, the uniformed officer in charge. Junior was on his cell phone, and he acknowledged me with a little nod. He held up a finger to indicate he was almost done, and we waited for him to hang up.

  As soon as Junior disconnected his call, Bob said, “Tell us what you know so far.”

  Junior, like most cops, carried a small notebook that he used to keep track of information. He flipped it back a few pages and started filling us in.

  “It looks like Ames was stabbed in his kitchen. There’s blood all over the floor and cabinets in there, and we found a bloody knife that appears to have been taken from Ames’s own knife set. I’ve got some guys coming in to help Jonas process the place. He’s out in the kitchen now getting set up. None of the neighbors claim to have seen anyone enter or leave the house around the time of the murder other than when Ames came stumbling out of his house with the barbecue fork in his chest.”

  “Was Ames married?” I asked.

  Junior shook his head. “He was, but he and his wife, Wendy, underwent a rather contentious divorce a little over a year ago. The neighbors said it used to be every time they saw the two of them together for any reason, they were fighting. She lives over on Wilson Street with their two sons: Jacob, who is sixteen, and Michael, who is twelve. According to some of the neighbors, the boys split their time between the two parents, one week here, one week there.”