Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  Tonya greeted Mac with her usual toothy grin and asked about life at the manor, Archie, and Gnarly. Sometimes, Mac felt like she was simply going through the paces while making small talk until they arrived upon the topic of Gnarly and his latest escapades. She had three dogs of her own that she clearly loved more than her kids. The dogs were more self-sufficient and independent.

  On this visit, Tonya was unable to resist asking for the low-down on Gnarly’s bone theft. “When are you going to bring Gnarly in for his mug shots?” she asked with a laugh.

  “Depending on what progress David is making on his investigation, maybe Gnarly and I can both get fingerprinted and photographed at the same time,” Mac replied. “Do you think they’ll let us share a cell?”

  When he stepped to the back of the reception area to go upstairs to David’s corner office, she stopped him. “The chief wants you to meet him in the conference room.”

  Mac cringed. He winced a second time when she asked if he would mind turning in the semi-automatic he wore concealed under his shirt. In all the times that he had visited David at the station, he had never been asked to check his weapon.

  While he wasn’t completely up to speed on how the Spencer police did things, Mac was familiar enough with procedure to know that interrogations took place in the conference room where they could be recorded. He half-wished that he didn’t know as much as he did about the workings behind the scenes of a murder investigation.

  Tonya escorted him to the room he had suspected he would be interrogated in. It had a two-way mirror, and a hidden camera built into the intercom.

  “Would you like a soda?” she asked before leaving to return to the front desk. The mention of the soft drink made him realize how thirsty he was. At the same time, he was too offended to appreciate her offer.

  This meeting wasn’t going to be a friendly little sit-down.

  It couldn’t be.

  The media was all over Deep Creek Lake covering the murders in the penthouse belonging to Robin Spencer’s son. The story was too juicy not to cover. Even though his statement had been taken and evidence collected, journalists were still asking, “Has Mac Faraday been questioned yet? Is he a suspect?”

  If David didn’t formally question the media’s prime suspect, then when the real killer was found, the defense attorney would quickly lay the groundwork for an acquittal with insinuations of police cover-up. The fact that Mac was the direct descendent of the town’s founders was enough. If it became public knowledge that the police chief was his half brother, then the media would have the town council screaming for David’s badge. Even with no cover-up, the appearance of an impropriety would be enough grounds to fire him.

  David had to question Mac, and he had no choice but to do it by the book.

  Still, Mac couldn’t help feeling insulted.

  His first instinct was to sit at the table with his back to the camera. Reminding himself of why this interview had to take place, he took the chair of honor facing the camera and two-way mirror.

  Looking at his reflection, Mac wondered if Ben Fleming, the prosecuting attorney, was waiting in the room next door to observe the interrogation. So far, all he had heard from Ben was a phone call urging Mac to let him know if he needed anything. Mac wondered if the Maguire family had been talking to the county prosecutor instead of Jeff.

  Mac wished he was on the other side of the mirror looking in. Now he was going to find out what it felt like to sit on this side of the table. So far, he didn’t like it.

  “Hey, Mac,” David called out when he came in. In one hand he carried a coffee mug. In the other, he had the root beer Mac had requested from Tonya. A bag of donuts hung from the fingertips of the hand grasping the soft drink. “Have you had breakfast yet?

  Having eaten Archie’s croissants and the French toast, Mac clutched his stomach. “Sorry. I’m stuffed.”

  David held a brown accordion folder so thick that it threatened to drop out from where he had it pressed against his ribs with an elbow. After tossing the folder onto the table, David set the root beer in front of Mac before placing a donut from the bag in front of his place. He then went back out into the hallway and called out, “Anybody want some donuts? We have plenty.”

  Alone with the accordion folder that obviously contained files, Mac’s curiosity took hold. He wondered what the collection of files had to do with Christine’s and Maguire’s murders. He saw that there was a yellow notepad under the brown folder.

  “This case has had me running around all over town,” David announced when he came back into the interrogation room. “I’ve been living on fast food.”

  “Murder cases are like that,” Mac said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I hope you don’t mind if I eat while we do this.” The police chief took a bite out of his donut and chewed before washing it down with a gulp of his coffee.

  Both grateful and suspicious about his pleasant nature, Mac eyed the thick folder that David had shoved to the side. “What’s that?”

  “Just some case files.”

  After taking a big bite from the donut, he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, opened his leather-bound note-pad, and took out his pen. “Unfortunately, the DNA from the skin under Christine’s fingernails wasn’t viable. There was bleach all over that room and the medical examiner thinks her hands were soaked or wiped down with it. Forensics didn’t get any usable DNA.”

  “Then the DNA you collected from me was useless.”

  “Of course, you’re aware that bleach destroys DNA.” David spoke around another bite of his donut. “If that was your skin under her fingernails, we can’t prove it.”

  “You also can’t clear me,” Mac said. “If I was going to kill Christine and Maguire, the last place I would’ve done it would be my private suite. Every cable news station around has been at the Inn asking when I’m going to be arrested. They’ve been hounding Willingham for a statement, which he won’t give. Do you think I like being under a microscope? Do you think I enjoy getting calls from my daughter, crying because one of her friends asked her if her daddy flipped out and killed her mother? If you can’t use DNA to clear my name, then I’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”

  Even as the words came out of his mouth, Mac regretted allowing his temper to slip. He thought of how many suspects who had spouted similar declarations of innocence that he had ignored.

  “My dad didn’t raise no dummy.” With a chuckle, David referred to his notes. “My officers have questioned everyone at and around the Spencer Inn. No one saw you. Of course, since you’re the boss, your employees could be lying.”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “Hector voluntarily handed over the security tapes immediately. The originals. Of course, he made copies for the Inn’s own investigation. Forensics confirmed that they haven’t been edited. You aren’t on them anywhere after checking Christine in. Nor did your access card get used.”

  “Then I’m cleared.”

  “Were you that quick to clear a suspect when you were a detective?” David asked.

  Mac didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t.

  “You have enough money that you could’ve paid to have it done.” Even though David’s tone was casual, Mac picked up a serious note to it.

  “What would be my motive?” he asked. “Christine did make a bid for part of my inheritance, but the judge laughed her out of court. We were through. I’ve moved on.”

  “Calm down,” David told him. “We took a look at your financials, with a warrant, of course. There’re no suspicious withdrawals or transfers that look like they went to pay for a hit.”

  The police chief concluded, “I know you didn’t do this, but you aren’t the only one that’s had people breathing down your neck. The town council ordered me to haul you in here in the back of a cruiser for the media to see to prove that we aren’t crooked and you don’t own Spencer’s law enforcement. I wouldn’t do it. But I still had to do all I could and look at this from every angle before
I could scratch your name off my list.”

  With a stroke of his pen across the notepad, David put a line through Mac’s name.

  “I appreciate that,” Mac replied. “As long as I’m sitting in your hot seat, can you make it worth my while? Tell me what you do have on Christine’s murder.”

  “T.O.D is ten-thirty,” David recounted from his notes in his case file. “You need a key card to go anywhere in the hotel except the general public areas. Security doesn’t register when a guest opens the door from inside the room to let someone else in. It only registers when the key card is used. Based on the evidence we’ve collected and what we know, Christine had stayed in the suite after you left and never went anywhere, or even used the phone in her room. Her cell records indicate that she had called her sister Roxanne Burton shortly after you checked her in, at around five-thirty, to tell her about her spending the night at your penthouse.”

  “Did you get a statement from Roxanne?”

  David leafed through some reports before stopping to tap his pen on the statement Mac was asking about. “Roxanne told us that Christine had been depressed ever since Maguire left her a few weeks ago. Roxanne suggested that she come out here to a lake house they have to clear her head. She came out on Thursday, which happens to be the same day Stephen Maguire checked into the Spencer Inn. Roxanne swears that it was only a coincidence.”

  Mac was startled. “I never knew Christine was here. I thought she’d come out the same day that she showed up at my house.”

  “She was in Spencer,” David said. “At six-thirty-seven, according to hotel records, Christine ordered two filet mignon dinners and a bottle of red wine from room service, which was delivered at around seven. The server said Christine was alone when he delivered the dinners. Shortly after eight o’clock, her cell records show a series of calls to Stephen Maguire’s cell. He was having dinner with a woman, who we have yet to identify, in the restaurant. Their dinner ended between eight-thirty and nine o’clock. Security records indicate that he used his key card to go up to his floor and enter his room around that time. Meanwhile, from eight o’clock on, Christine kept calling his cell every ten to fifteen minutes—for over two hours until Maguire finally called her back at around ten-fifteen. They spoke for four minutes. He used his key card to take the elevator up to the penthouse floor at around ten-thirty, at which time he was killed.”

  After setting down his pen, David folded his hands on top of the folder. “Did Christine speak Spanish?”

  Mac replied, “Hector told me that you suspect she was stalking Stephen Maguire.”

  “Then you know about the black wig and Spencer Inn cleaning service smock we found in Christine’s room.” David popped the last bite of his donut in his mouth and washed it down with coffee. “The Inn’s security videos have footage of a woman in a black wig who seems to be following Maguire while he was there. Employees who encountered her said she knew very little English.”

  “I can’t believe Christine would kill anyone,” Mac argued.

  David said, “If she had summered here at the lake throughout the years, she would know what she needed to do in order to mix in with Inn employees so that she could follow him. Maguire did ruin her life. According to her sister, a couple of weeks ago she filed a petition to have Christine declared mentally incompetent.”

  “I don’t want my children to think their mother was a lunatic,” Mac insisted. “She was an alcoholic and she had made some very bad decisions but—”

  “Someone went to a lot of trouble to make this happen.” David sat forward in his seat. “Maybe Christine was stalking Maguire, but someone else was in that room. We found a black wig in her things. It had her hair and epidermal cells in it. She wore it. We also found black hairs from a wig in Stephen Maguire’s blood and caught in a class ring he was wearing. Whoever attacked him—stabbed him twenty-seven times—was wearing a black wig. But it wasn’t the wig Christine had in her suitcase. The way the blood was splattered in that attack, the wig would’ve gotten some in it. There was no blood in the wig we found and it hadn’t been washed.”

  Mac said, “That proves Christine didn’t kill Maguire.”

  “She got into a fight with someone besides Maguire,” David said. “He had defensive wounds, but no scratches. Also, Christine died of a cervical fracture but she didn’t get it in the shower tub.”

  “She didn’t fall and hit her head on the towel rack?”

  “Her blood alcohol level was point-two-six, plus she had enough Valium in her to kill an elephant. It’s unbelievable that she was even conscious.” David marveled. “Her head wound didn’t match with the towel rack or anything else in the shower tub, but it does match with the corner of the sink. We believe that she got into a fight with whoever was cleaning up the bathroom after Stephen Maguire’s murder—”

  “The killer had to be covered in blood after stabbing him twenty-seven times,” Mac agreed.

  “With all the alcohol and drugs in her system, Christine had to be unconscious. The killer puts on her clothes and kills Maguire in order to get his blood on Christine’s clothes to make it look like she’d done it. Christine comes to while the killer is getting rid of the evidence and attacks the killer, getting skin under her fingernails. Christine falls and hits her head. The medical examiner said she died instantly.” He added in a soft voice, “So she didn’t suffer.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “The killer put Christine’s body in the tub to make it look like she’d killed Maguire and then had an accident while cleaning up.” David folded his hands on top of his notepad. “Tell me about Stephen Maguire.”

  “If you’re any type of detective, you’ve already found out all about Stephen Maguire,” Mac countered.

  “I want to know what you know about him.”

  “He was a bastard,” Mac said. “He broke up my family.”

  “Didn’t you two work together?”

  “Yes.” Mac swallowed in hopes of keeping down the anger that he still felt rising inside his chest when he talked about Stephen Maguire. “He was an assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia. I worked with him on some murder cases. In my personal opinion, the only reason he got as far as he did was because he was a Maguire.”

  “I’m not up on the social register,” confessed David.

  “Neither was I until I had the displeasure of working with Stephen Maguire,” Mac said. “In the twenty-odd years that I was a homicide detective, I got to know a lot of U.S. attorneys. Some were okay. Others were great. Maguire wasn’t either. But because his great-grandfather was Everett Maguire—”

  “And that’s important because?”

  Mac chuckled. “You really aren’t into high society goings-on.”

  “All bastards look the same to me no matter who their daddy is.”

  “Everett Maguire was a Supreme Court Justice a hundred years ago,” Mac explained. “He was a blue-blood from off the Mayflower, or something like that. He had eight children. Half of them went on to become self-made millionaires. The other half married into millions. They all went into high society and became movers and shakers about town. Broderick Maguire went into real estate and by the 1940s owned half of D.C. Now, he’s a billionaire. He had seven kids. I think he has like fifty grandkids and a dozen great-grandchildren.” He held up his hands as if he was going to count up the Maguire family on his fingers. “And that isn’t counting Broderick’s brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews. The Maguires own high society in the United States Capitol.”

  “And Stephen Maguire is—was—one of them?” David asked while referring to a report from his case file.

  “What Maguire lacked in legal know-how, he made up for in arrogance and political pull,” Mac said. “He never let anyone forget about his family connections. The judge who presided over my divorce had a son who wanted to get into the same fraternity at George Washington University that Maguire and his family had belonged to. She buried me. The kid got in.”

&nbs
p; David’s expression was one of genuine confusion while he sipped his coffee.

  Mac finished off his root beer. Seeing his reflection in the mirror, he remembered that they were being watched and was surprised that he had forgotten. He guessed that David had appointed his deputy Bogie to do the honors.

  “Has the crime scene been cleared yet?” Mac asked.

  Ignoring his question about the crime scene, David said, “I was hoping that you could clear some things up, but instead I’m more confused.”

  Mac cringed again. He thought of how many times he had started interrogations with a pleasant request that the suspect clear up some confusion. He reminded himself that David had said he was cleared as a suspect.

  David removed two reports from his folder. “I’m sure you know that it’s SOP to run background and credit checks on murder victims.” He turned the report around for Mac to review. “Christine was in hock up to her eyebrows. Did you know that?”

  “Ed told that to me yesterday. Apparently, my ex-wife was living large.”

  “Did Ed tell you about the state of Stephen Maguire’s finances?”

  “He had no reason to check on Maguire’s finances,” Mac said.

  Turning the second report around, David asked, “How long were Maguire and Christine together?”

  “A couple of years.”

  David held the paper down with his hand over the top. “This is where I get confused. The way Jeff is acting you’d think Maguire was Prince William, complete with the silver spoon still in his mouth. But that’s not what I see here.” He slid the report across the table to Mac.

  The personal and financial report read quite differently from what Mac had expected.

  As Mac had expected, the report showed that Stephen Douglas Maguire was a lawyer with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia. He was also a graduate of George Washington University Law School.