Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  David jumped in to add, “You had a duplicate wig that you put in Christine’s suitcase to make us think it was her pretending to be Nita. You made sure it was one you’d never worn so as to not inadvertently give us your DNA.”

  “After eight o’clock, when you had everything ready,” Mac said, “you started calling Maguire on Christine’s phone. What you didn’t plan was for him to refuse to come see you. So you started calling every few minutes until he finally came just to get rid of you. As soon as he walked in, you let loose on him with all your rage.”

  David said, “You stabbed him twenty-seven times.”

  “Then you put the steak knife in the dishwasher with the rest of the dinner dishes and turned it on,” Mac resumed. “Now it was onto the next step in the plan. You took off Christine’s clothes, planted the clone phone on which you had planted her fingerprints, and went into the bathroom to shower off all of your evidence and any proof of you being in the room. You even bleached the bathroom. As you had it planned, Christine would come to, find Maguire dead, and everyone would think she did it during a blackout. You’d convince her to plead insanity and she’d go to a hospital and get help.” He sighed and said sadly, “But things didn’t work out that way. Since Maguire took so long to come to the penthouse, it allowed time for the valium to wear off. Christine came to and attacked you. I want to think that you were defending yourself when you either pushed her or she slipped on the wet floor, and hit her head on the corner of the sink. Now your sister was dead.”

  Clutching her stomach, Roxanne broke down into deep sobs.

  Blinking back tears coming to his eyes, Mac swallowed. When he tried to continue, he found that he had no voice. He cleared his throat.

  David picked up the sequence of events. “That was when your whole plan went to hell in a handcart. You panicked. Not thinking about the shape of the wound, you put Christine in the tub to make it look like she’d hit her head on the towel rack while in the shower.”

  Mac found his voice. “You did think to soak her hands and wipe her down with bleach to destroy the DNA evidence from your skin under her fingernails.”

  “I want you both to leave.” Sabrina grabbed her purse resting on top of the luggage. “Now! I’m calling our lawyer, and you can forget about showing your face at Christine’s funeral, Mac.” Snatching her cell phone from her purse, she waved it in his direction. “You’re not family anymore!”

  David told Roxanne, “We have a picture of a VW Beetle registered in your name at the service station in McHenry the night that Christine and Maguire were killed.”

  Sabrina said, “Your picture means nothing. We told you the other day that Big Daddy’s Bug was stolen.”

  “You said Roxanne sold it.”

  Smirking, Sabrina said, “No, we never said that. Did we, Roxanne?” She glared at her sister.

  Checking a text message on his cell phone, David said, “We have a warrant to search a garage in Washington. My officers are there now. They’re about to open the door. I believe we’ll find Big Daddy’s Bug inside. When we do, it’ll prove that, after killing Stephen Maguire and your sister, you drove the VW Beetle that you kept here at the lake back to Washington in order to be there when the call came that your sister had been found dead. I also believe that we’ll find the black wig you wore when you killed Stephen Maguire and, if we’re lucky, the laptop that you used to keep him under surveillance.”

  “Keep your mouth shut, Roxanne,” Sabrina hissed. “They aren’t going to find a thing. Believe me.”

  Mac laid his hand on Roxanne’s shoulder. “The prosecutor will go much easier on you if you cooperate. Once they open the garage and find the Bug and the evidence, they won’t need your confession.”

  “He’s a manipulative bastard,” Sabrina told her while pressing her phone to her ear. “I’m calling our lawyer. Don’t let Mac get to you. You know how he works.”

  “They’re about to open the garage,” David announced. “This is your last chance, Roxanne.”

  Roxanne’s voice was weaker than Mac had ever heard it. “I thought it was the perfect plan.”

  “Shut up!” Sabrina raged. “They’re not going to find anything!” Into her phone, she asked a receptionist for their lawyer.

  “I didn’t send her to your place, I swear,” she told Mac. “I was in the shower, and when I came out she was gone. I about went nuts. Then, when she called that she was at the Inn in your suite, it all came together. It was like God had planned it that way.” She grinned nervously. “Stephen would never be able to hurt anyone else ever again. Once his lies came out, I’d be exonerated and get the promotion that I deserved. By pleading guilty to an insanity defense, Christine would get the help she needed at a hospital. She could be out in a few years and maybe even back to her old self.” She sobbed into her hands. “I never expected her to come to so soon. When she saw the blood and Stephen’s body, she went crazy. I thought she was going to rip my skin off. I shoved her off me and she fell.” She let out a shuddering breath. “One minute she was alive and the next—her life was over.”

  Clutching the cell phone, David asked, “What did you do with the wig and the laptop?”

  Sabrina ordered her, “Say nothing else. I have our lawyer on the phone now.”

  David told Roxanne, “You have the right to say nothing else to us.”

  “I know my rights,” she replied. “I want this to be over.” She looked up at Mac. “To tell you the truth, I had no idea how I was going to make it through Christine’s funeral, knowing that I was the one who put her in that casket.” She told David, “The wig and laptop are in the trunk of the car in my garage. They’re in a backpack along with my underwear. I was wearing it when Christine hit her head. She was bleeding all over the place and her blood got on my underwear. That’ll put me in the suite when she died.”

  While David ordered his officers to open the garage, Sabrina screamed at her sister. “You fool! I told you not to tell them anything. They aren’t going to find anything.”

  Roxanne sighed. “Oh, Sabrina, shut up.”

  Sabrina pointed her red-tipped finger into Mac’s face. “This is your fault. You have no sense of family. All this has been to you is another murder case to solve.”

  “It’s good.” David snapped shut his phone. “They found it. Everything was there as you said, Roxanne. The backpack in the trunk with the wig and what looks like blood, laptop, and underwear with blood on it as well. Everything is being taken into evidence.”

  “No!” Sabrina screamed. “That’s not possible!”

  “Why?” Mac asked her.

  “Because…” Her bosom heaved up and down while she squinted at him with eyes angrier than he had ever seen them.

  “Because your husband was supposed to get rid of the Bug,” Mac told her. “He did.”

  David announced, “My officers were at a storage garage that we’ve discovered your husband had rented the day before yesterday.”

  “The day after Roxanne told you what had happened,” Mac said. “You took it upon yourself to fix everything by ordering your husband to get rid of the Bug, and all the physical evidence in it.”

  “That makes you and your husband accessories after the fact,” David told her. “We may also want to charge you with obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence.”

  Mac told her, “You didn’t know about it the day you came out here with Roxanne, because you were upset about the Bug being gone. Roxanne told you that she’d sold it. But then, the next day, you told Archie to shoot Celia Tennyson because she’d killed your sister and stabbed Stephen Maguire with a steak knife.”

  David said, “We didn’t release anything about the murder weapon being a steak knife. There was only one of two ways for you to know that. One, you were there.”

  “Two, the killer told you,” Mac said. “That’s what the two of you were fighting about in my kitchen. Roxanne wanted to tell me the truth. She wanted to confess, but you insisted that she keep her mouth shut
.”

  He said to Roxanne, “You almost told me in the study, but changed your mind.”

  She nodded her head so hard that the tears on her face splashed onto his hand.

  “After Roxanne told you about what had happened, Sabrina,” he continued, “You were furious, especially when she told you about how Stephen Maguire got where he was by lying about his family connections.”

  “Yes, you were,” Roxanne replied.

  Sabrina backed up a step.

  “Was it Roxanne who told you that she believed Sanders had accepted a bribe when he was working for Office of Personnel Management to let Maguire get in with his falsified background or did you put it together yourself?” Mac asked.

  David said, “Your phone records show that you called Hamilton Sanders the evening he was killed. You talked a good seven minutes.”

  “Knowing you,” Mac said, “you were raking him over the coals for everything that had happened to your family as a result of his accepting that bribe years ago.”

  “And that was all,” Sabrina said. “I gave him hell, felt better for it, and we hung up.”

  David countered, “But we have a picture of your car in Sully’s parking lot an hour later.”

  “Of course it was,” Sabrina replied. “I was going into town and realized I’d forgotten my shopping list. I turned around in that parking lot and came back here.”

  Roxanne whimpered, “Oh, Sabrina.”

  “Shut up, you ninny. I did nothing wrong.”

  “You killed Hamilton Sanders,” Mac told Sabrina.

  “I did not!” she hissed at him. “You can’t prove anything. You can’t even prove I was ever there.”

  “We can,” Mac said.

  With a hand gesture not unlike that of a magician, she challenged him. “Prove it.”

  “Are you sure you’ve never been to Sully’s?”

  “Not even when it was open,” she said. “They were always too pedestrian for my tastes with their pool tables and beer.”

  “Are you sure about that?” David asked.

  “Positive.”

  Mac replied, “Then what are your fingerprints doing in the ladies’ bathroom?”

  Her mouth fell open.

  “You wiped your fingerprints off the door handles and the screwdriver and tossed it into the lake,” Mac explained. “But you must have forgotten that you’d used the ladies’ room, probably while you were waiting for Hamilton to show up. That tells me that you weren’t planning to kill him, but when he didn’t give you a good enough explanation, or maybe show the proper remorse for what his actions years ago had done, you lost that famous temper of yours and killed him. After getting stabbed three times, he stumbled outside and off the dock. You tossed in the screwdriver, and wiped your fingerprints off the door and anything else you’d touched, except you forgot that before he got there, you’d used the restroom.”

  Roxanne sobbed. “Sabrina, what did you do?”

  The two sisters hugged. When they pulled away, Sabrina clasped Roxanne’s face in her hands. “Don’t worry, sister. Once our lawyer puts Stephen Maguire on trial, no jury will ever convict us.”

  While David waited nearby with his handcuffs ready, Sabrina stood up tall to be led out to the cruiser with dignity.

  Mac stepped over to them. “Sabrina, I’m very sorry.”

  She rejected the apology with a slap across his face.

  Epilogue

  One Week Later

  Has there ever been a good funeral? Has anyone ever left a funeral proclaiming, “Hey, that was some funeral, wasn’t it? Let’s do it again next week.”

  Mac pondered this thought while lying on the sofa with his arm over his eyes trying to block out the last few days.

  He could feel Gnarly staring at him from his love seat as if to ask, “Now that I’ve met all of Christine’s family, what else are you going to subject me to?”

  Under the circumstances, Mac wouldn’t have gone to his ex-wife’s funeral. He would have chosen to go to the cemetery alone to say his good-bye. It was for his son and daughter that he attended the viewing and funeral.

  The Burtons had never been ones to keep their feelings under wraps. With no regard for appearances or respect in front of his children, they were openly hostile toward him. Attending the funeral to give support to Mac and his children, Archie was treated like a home wrecker, as if she’d broken up Christine’s marriage to him.

  When Jessica came to her father’s defense at the reception following the funeral, Sabrina’s daughter slapped her. Jessica retaliated by dumping a filled punch bowl over her cousin’s head.

  Anxious to get on with their lives, Jessica returned to Williamsburg to catch up on her courses at William and Mary; Tristan returned to the Smithsonian to discover a new dinosaur; and Mac, Archie, and Gnarly raced back to Spencer Manor.

  Claiming that she had a headache, Archie rushed off to her cottage before Mac could close the garage door. He didn’t know if her headache was real or symbolic. Knowing his was real, he took two aspirin and reclined in front of the fire-place with a bottle of cognac. He was still trying to erase the memory of the past two weeks when David arrived to check on the manor as was his custom when they were gone.

  When Gnarly refused to budge to allow room for him to sit on the love seat, David took the leather wing-backed chair next to the fireplace after pouring a drink.

  “When did you get in?”

  “Late this afternoon.” Mac sat up and turned his attention to refilling his snifter from the bottle he had resting on the coffee table.

  “I picked up my new cruiser today.” David smiled like a child anxious to show off his new toy. “It has all the bells and whistles.”

  “A boy and his toys,” Mac said. “You have that same expression on your face that Archie gets when she discovers a new gadget.”

  “And you get when you read about a new murder case in the area,” David shot back. “While you’ve been gone, Ben and I have been working on our case against the Burton women. Roxanne is going to testify against Sabrina.”

  Mac uttered an involuntary groan. “Now I’ve turned sister against sister.” He sipped his drink. The alcohol was failing to numb his nerves.

  “You did what you had to do,” David told him. “Ben and I have a question that maybe you can answer.”

  Mac said, “Shoot.”

  “When Roxanne took that call from Cameron, and she got her first lead that Maguire had lied about his past, why didn’t she simply order a background check, which she was in the position to do, and then take her findings to the U.S. Attorney to blow the whistle on him? It would have achieved the same objective. Maguire would have been discredited and she would have been back in the running for deputy.” David asked, “Why the spyware and surveillance? Why did she have to come out to Deep Creek Lake to confront him face to face?”

  Mac replied, “Haven’t you ever had a suspect that got under your skin so much that you had to see his face when you confronted him with the evidence that you’d collected against him?”

  As much as he hated to admit it, David confessed that he had.

  “If Roxanne had simply ordered a background check and taken the results to Hunter, then Christine would still be alive and none of this would have happened,” Mac said. “But she had to see his face, and then…I can imagine that famous Burton temper flaring when he laughed at her. When you think about it, they’d probably both be alive if Maguire hadn’t laughed at her.”

  “That’s so often the case,” David said. “If only the victim hadn’t laughed. If only the victim hadn’t been there at this time, or did that back then. That’s what makes murder such a tragedy.” His curiosity got the best of him. “I guess the funeral didn’t go well.”

  “It was an eye-opening experience for me.” Mac swallowed. “The pound of a judge’s gavel isn’t strong enough to break the bond of marriage. Maybe in some cases it is, but I wonder, in those cases when it does break it, I wonder if the bond was really that st
rong to begin with.”

  “I think you’re right,” David said. “It’s all a matter of the level of commitment. Dad and Robin were never married. Their parents split them up before you were born. But even after years of being separated, when Robin came back, even though they never consummated their love affair because

  Dad was married to Mom, there was a bond there that no piece of paper or gavel could strengthen or break.”

  Mac took a sip of his drink. “Through this whole case, I kept correcting people. Christine was my ex-wife. She wasn’t my wife. We were divorced. But then, when I saw her in that casket, all I could remember was the girl I married and all those years—good years.” He sighed. “I never really got a chance to mourn our marriage. Things changed so suddenly. The day our divorce was final, I received all of this.”

  He gestured at the richness surrounding him. “One day I was a bitter divorced man. Literally, the next day, I was a millionaire playboy. The funeral made me realize the good things, the goodness in the life I had before that’s now gone. My kids are grown and have their own lives. I’m not on the police force anymore. Everything has changed and I’ll never get it back, no matter how much money I have.”

  Together, they drank in silence while staring into the flames.

  David said. “You’re not the same man you were when you and Christine were married. You’re not even the same man you were when you drove onto the Point in that Viper six months ago. I haven’t seen you wear a faded t-shirt in weeks. Your shoes don’t have holes in them anymore.”

  “Only because Gnarly chewed the soles off them,” Mac said. “I liked those shoes. They were broken in.”

  David held up the bottle from the coffee table. “You’re drinking sixty-year-old cognac.”

  Mac admitted, “As much as I don’t want to change, I can see that I have.” He grinned at him. “I like that you don’t give me speeding tickets.”

  “Don’t press your luck.” David drained his drink. “Now that I know you’re all in safely, I should be getting home.” He slapped Mac on the leg. “Do you know what you need?”