Max had heard it before from other murderers. One minute he can’t believe he could kill someone. The next minute he’s killing that person. Another minute later he can’t believe what he just did.
They put a rope around his neck and each pulled on an end. Beth had worked out the details. When her husband stopped struggling, they took off his clothes and carried his naked body to a freezer in the garage. Beth said she would wait a few days before reporting him missing. “She said we should let the cops look for him,” Huffman said. “After a week or so they would give up. Then we would carry the body up north and leave it deep in the bush. Let the animals take care of him. That’s what she said. She took over, and I let her. We spent the next two days together, mostly in bed. She kept telling me all the things we would do, all the places we would go. And I believed her.” The tears had dried. “Because I wanted to.”
On the second night, Beth said she didn’t like keeping Bob’s body in the house. They would move it and the freezer. Then she would report him missing. Together they loaded the freezer with the corpse inside onto Huffman’s truck.
“She had worked everything out,” he said. “I had told her about the old sugar camp. She said that’s where I should stay until the police stopped looking for Bob. But there was no electric power there. We couldn’t leave the body in the freezer like that…”
“So you stole the generator from the Brenners,” Max said.
Huffman nodded.
He lived at the camp for a week. He would wake at night to hear the generator and freezer humming. Beth brought him a sleeping bag, camp stove and fishing rod. Some nights she stayed with him, and they shared the sleeping bag. Back at the house she cleaned the garage and painted the floor where the freezer had sat for years. Now there was no sign of it.
Two nights ago Huffman woke up. He was sure that he could hear Bob’s voice coming from the freezer, screaming to be let out.
“I’d done the dumbest thing in my life when I helped kill him,” Huffman said. “And I did the bravest thing I ever did when I opened the freezer. And took him out.”
He put Bob in the truck under a blanket. Then, in the dead of night, he drove into town. “I didn’t want animals to get him like Beth had said. So I put him in a ditch where he would be found. And drove away.”
“And took the generator back,” Max said.
Huffman nodded.
“What were you going to do with the freezer?”
“Take it apart piece by piece. Put the pieces in the back of the truck and head for the east coast,” he said. “Drive on backroads and dump a piece every couple of miles. But I needed money for gas and stuff.”
“So you asked Beth,” Max said.
“Yeah.”
“And when you asked her for money, she told you to get lost. She didn’t need you anymore.”
Huffman looked at her. “How’d you know?”
They put Huffman back in his cell. Boucher drove to Sunset Hill to arrest Beth Morton for murder. Max said nothing when he left.
Boucher called Max after he arrived at Beth’s house. “She’s not here,” he said. “There’s no car in the garage. I’d say she left in a hurry. Any idea where we can look for her?”
Max said, “As a matter of fact, I do.”
An hour later Boucher sat at Max’s desk, sipping coffee. A slice of Margie’s apple coffee cake was in front of him. Max was silent, keeping busy, telling herself not to feel smug.
Margie took a call from the Toronto police and handed the receiver to Boucher. He spoke a few words, gave the phone back to Margie and looked at Max. “You were right,” he said. “The woman at the art gallery took the officers to a back room. Beth Morton was hiding there. She’s in custody. Ms. Morton, that is.” He ate some cake and then said, “How did you know she would be at that art gallery? Who is this woman she went to? Where did you get all this info on your own?”
Max was about to speak when Henry leaned into her office. “Take a look outside,” he said. “Nicest sight I’ve seen in weeks.”
Max and PC 1st Class Ronald Boucher turned to look out the window. The sun was about to set in a clear, blue sky.
“Weather people say it’ll be in the high twenties tomorrow,” Henry said. “Gonna stay there all week. I think summer’s found us at last.”
“Such a pretty sight,” Max said. She pictured herself on the porch of her cottage that evening, sipping tea with Geegee. Just wait, she thought, until Geegee finds out she helped solve a murder case. Because she had, with her comment about the generator.
“Hello there.” It was Boucher. He had been watching her sit in silence. When Max turned to him he said, “I’ll ask you again. Who is the woman at the art gallery? And how did you know Beth Morton would go there to hide from us? And what else do you know about her first husband?”
Max smiled. “Have another piece of Margie’s coffee cake,” she said. Summer was here for sure. So was something else. “This is a really good story.”
Boucher said, “I don’t have time for stories.”
Was that a sneer in his voice? It sounded like it.
“All right,” Max said with a smile. “Then how about a lesson? On how to solve a murder?”
PREVIEW OF MURDER AMONG THE PINES,
THE NEXT MAXINE BENSON MYSTERY
Max stepped from the cruiser at 5:37 AM and paused to write the time in her notebook. She had parked on a paved area near the water. Across the inlet the Ainslie Inn rose seven stories high. The inn rarely had a vacant room on weekends. It had been a success since it opened two years ago. Picnic tables were set among pine trees that lined a stone path leading to the inlet of the lake. During the day, many guests bought box lunches at the inn and carried them along the shore to the grove of pines, a ten-minute walk.
The sun rising behind Granite Mountain shone on the far shore of the lake. The inn still sat in shadow. In the low light she saw the body floating a few metres from shore. It was easy to see the long dark hair. It was almost as easy to see that the woman was Lana Jewel Laverne Parker.
Max glanced at the people standing around her. A middle-aged man and woman in tracksuits were arm in arm, the woman’s head on the man’s shoulder. Max was sure they were the ones who first had seen the body and reported it to the desk clerk at the inn. Behind them stood Perry Ahenakew, a First Nations artist who had a small studio down the road. She knew him as a gentle man, a skilled artist. He nodded back at her. Not far behind him was a man named Bucky, who ran a towing service on the highway. Near him, a white-haired man held back his dog on its leash. Behind him a younger man in a light jacket stood shaking his head as though in sorrow.
“All of you,” Max called to them. She raised an arm and pointed to the paved area where she had parked her cruiser. “This is a crime scene. Go to the parking area and wait there. Someone will talk to you later.”
The group shuffled away just as Henry pulled up to park his cruiser behind hers. “Bring a blanket with you,” she called to him. “Keep these people back and get the names of whoever called it in. Then contact the provincials in Cranston. Tell them to send the coroner.” She pulled a pair of rubber gloves from her tunic, put them on, and waded into the lake. She shivered as the cold water reached to her waist.
The woman was floating face down. She wore a black t-shirt and jeans. When Max turned her over she could see, even in the dim light, that the victim had been beaten. She gently pulled the body toward the shore. In her years as a police officer in Toronto she had seen several dead bodies. This one did not shock her, but it made her feel guilty and sad. Guilty that she had said unkind things about the woman. Sad that her young life had been taken in such a brutal way.
JOHN LAWRENCE REYNOLDS has had thirty works of fiction and nonfiction published. His work has earned two Arthur Ellis Awards for Best Mystery Novel, a National Business Book Award and a CBC Bookie Award. His bestselling book Shadow People, tracing the development and influence of secret societies through history, was published i
n fourteen countries and twelve languages. He has also authored several business and investment books, including the bestselling Naked Investor and its sequel, The Skeptical Investor, as well as his assessment of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, Bubbles, Bankers & Bailouts. His first book for this series, A Murder for Max, introduced Maxine Benson to Rapid Reads. He lives in Burlington, Ontario, with his wife, Judy. For more information, visit www.wryter.ca.
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