A Tangle in the Vines

by Anna Celeste Burke

  “Bud Lincoln’s dead and I hear his wife isn’t in good shape, but Rikki’s working on it.”

  “Why was Penney’s Uncle Link yelling at her?” I asked.

  “He was trying to make her get into the car, and she didn’t want to do it.”

  “A teenager arguing with her uncle might not have seemed sinister to the police at the time. Especially if the uncle was concerned about the homeless guy talking to her. Surely, they would have checked with Bud and Rachel Lincoln.”

  I breathed a little easier now that I had caught up enough to hear my friends chattering and laughing up ahead. I didn’t cut through the trees this time but continued down a road that led to the side lot where Mick and the movers would park.

  “I can’t believe they didn’t at least ask Bud Lincoln about it. What the Chief told them next may could have convinced them not to take anything he said seriously. The Chief told them he ‘sensed’ that the man in the car was a cop.”

  “As in a ‘sixth sense?’” I asked.

  “Something like that. He couldn’t explain it to them or to me. The driver wore black leather gloves, which lots of drivers other than cops, wear while driving. It was mainly an impression he got from the way the guy behind the wheel ordered them both around. In fact, he tells me that when he heard the girl was missing, he went to the police assuming Dustin was too.”

  “What does Rikki make of the Chief’s suspicion that the driver was a cop?” I asked.

  “She didn’t dismiss the idea. Given that the murders have gone undetected for decades, a killer with knowledge of police protocols would have an edge. There aren’t any Lincolns on the force, and no Lincolns besides Bud and Rachel listed with addresses in the area. I know that because I spent a few minutes searching before I called Rikki.”

  “Shoot! That’s too bad,” I kicked the gravel with my shoe. “I was hoping Little Bigmouth had come up with a short cut to ending this miserable situation. I guess it was a good idea to kick the cops off the property, just in case the Chief is right, and the driver of the Camaro is a member of the police force. It’s also possible, however, that Penney wasn’t speaking to a real uncle, nor does ‘Uncle Link’ necessarily mean Lincoln.”

  “That’s one of the first issues Rikki raised. She looked it up and L-i-n-k is a man’s first name, although I’ve never known anyone who used it.”

  “It’s an awfully big coincidence, though. If Penney left with her uncle, why wouldn’t her mother have told the police that’s who picked her up at the house? Today, when Dahlia asked her about the Camaro, she admitted Penney left in that car, but she told them one Penney’s friend’s parents was behind the wheel. Could the car have been owned by a Lincoln without Rachel knowing it?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely, so maybe she’s not willing to tell the truth.”

  “Why lie about it, Austin?”

  “You said she was terrified. Maybe fear of retribution from the killer or fears that the police will suspect her of being involved in the murder of her daughter—especially if it turns out the killer is her husband’s relative. This was a second marriage, so it’s possible Rachel Lincoln didn’t know all the other members of the Lincoln family.”

  “Maybe this, maybe that…we’re back to square one, huh?” A truck shifted into lower gear behind me. I turned to see the moving van lumbering toward me.

  “I wouldn’t say that. Having Dustin’s name is progress, and we have a better description of him, as well as a possible connection between the Watkins and the Lincolns. Tying Dustin to that awful fire at the Watkins’ place may also produce results. Rikki’s trying to get a better understanding of what’s on the property besides the old structures.”

  “Doesn’t she need the current owner’s permission to traipse around on their land?”

  “The police made an emergency visit to make sure no one had broken in or was ‘squatting’ on the land. The possibility that a dangerous fugitive is hiding on the property won’t allow them to stay put for long without a court order or permission from the owner. She’s working on both angles. Trying to find out who owns the LLC that purchased the property is tricky.”

  “Good luck. One of the reasons people purchase properties using LLCs is so they can conceal their identities. Celebrities do that all the time, so they’re not hounded by paparazzi or stalkers.”

  “I wish we could nail this guy, but it’s a complicated case. It could take a while longer, which is why I already called Peter March and asked him to get here or send a couple of his security team members. You’ve got to kick it up another notch at the house and the theater at the very least.”

  “You heard me tell Rikki I’m ready to do more to keep us all safe,” I said as I stepped off the roadway to make sure the moving van had plenty of room. The driver of the moving van pulled up alongside me and stopped.

  “Are you the one with the money?” he asked.

  “Give me a minute, will you?” I held up a finger.

  “Here we go again, Austin. How far away are you?”

  “I stopped to fill up the gas tank and call you. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

  “Okay, drive carefully, but I’m taking everyone out to dinner now that we’ve been set free. Please get here in time to join us.” Austin said goodbye, leaving me with a silly grin on my face. Until the mover spoke.

  “Oh, yeah, you’re the one with the money.” I arched a brow and put a hand on my hip in response to the cheeky remark. He tucked his head back inside the truck.

  “Pull into the lot and line up your truck with the stairs that lead up onto the stage—unless you’ve got a hoist.” He gave me a blank look that I took to mean he didn’t have a hoist.

  “Stairs will cost you extra,” he added as he pulled forward.

  “Julie, do we have a hoist?” I hollered. She came running. As soon as the van pulled into the lot, Mick caught up with me and spotted Julie. He rolled his window down and stuck his head out while he kept driving.

  “Julie! Hello, baby!” I ran ahead while she chatted with Mick as he continued to drive with his head and one arm out the window, gesturing wildly as he talked. At least he’d slowed down.

  “Lily, Mick’s got a hoist if we don’t have one,” Julie called out after me.

  “Great!” I said as I searched for Billie and the dogs as the mover maneuvered his truck into place. Judy held onto the back of Billie’s shirt, and he had both pooches on leashes. Thank goodness there was an adult in the group. Zelda, Melody, and Carrie were up on stage, doing fake gymnastics. I hoped they were fake, because if they weren’t, they were so bad that we were going to need another ambulance any minute now.

  Please don’t let it be a new routine they were working on for the play, I thought. That reminded me that we needed the movers to haul furniture from the garage to the theater building. When I cornered the driver and spelled out what we wanted him to do, he agreed—for a price. I had finished the negotiations and written him a big fat check when I heard police sirens. Whoever was driving, was moving fast!

  “If they hassle us again, that’s going to cost you extra too, lady.” The driver planted himself in the entrance to the parking lot with his arms folded across his chest. Dahlia screeched to a halt inches from him when she realized he wasn’t going to budge.

  “Lily, I don’t have time to tangle with Goliath. Get into the car now, please. It’s Rachel Lincoln. She’s in the ER and wants to talk to you. I don’t know how long they can keep her alive.”

  “Judy!” I ran.

  “Go! We know what we’re supposed to do. Don’t worry. We can handle it.”

  “Hey! We need to get in there and turn around,” I shouted to the mover who was scratching his head as I jumped into the front seat of Dahlia’s patrol car.

  “No, we don’t,” Dahlia said. “Buckle up.” Dahlia put her car in reverse and gunned it. Gravel sprayed as we backed up to the intersection of gravel roads. She turned and head back toward paved road leading to the gate and hit th
e siren. I remember very little of the trip after that since I kept my eyes closed.

  17 Dying Declaration

  Rachel Lincoln had walked out of the ER without a release from the attending physician. She’d left her car at the vineyard, but the police had dropped it off for her in the visitor lot. Apparently, she had no trouble locating the car, but didn’t get far before she ended up in a ditch.

  “I’m sorry I had to intrude on your time with your sister,” I said as I left the ICU and spotted Rachel’s sister, Roslyn, who’d been in the room when Dahlia and I arrived. She hadn’t been happy when the police asked her to step out of the room. In fact, she’d refused to do it until Rachel had spoken my name.

  “I’m so sorry for her. I hope Rachel Lincoln makes it,” I told Rikki as soon as Roslyn had gone back into Rachel’s room.

  “I’m sorry, too,” Rikki said. “I don’t know how anyone could have gotten help any quicker than she did given that she was only blocks away. Since the local police were already out on the road searching for her, they must have arrived at the crash site moments after she ran off the road.”

  Instead of being reassured, the fact that the police were searching for Rachel Lincoln, made my stomach knot up. If Austin’s informant was correct that the driver of a black Camaro was a cop, who knows what had happened?

  “Who found her car?” I asked.

  “The guy who dropped it off for her here at the hospital. He’s upset about it,” Rikki replied.

  “Could she really have been driving fast enough for the impact to have thrown her from the car?”

  “Dahlia’s at the accident scene now. Don’t tell Dahlia I shared this with you, but if Rachel Lincoln dies, it’ll be from a blow to the back of her head, which has nothing to do with her accident.” I felt dizzy.

  “It’s the Sitter, isn’t it?” Rikki answered my question with a shrug.

  “I’d be a very bad cop to say yes without more evidence, but off-the-record, I believe it’s him—whoever he is.”

  “Could the wound have been caused by a nightstick?”

  “You mean because the killer is a police officer as Chief Little Bigmouth believes, who shared his story with another Deputy Bigmouth, who passed the story along to you?” Rikki asked.

  Nabbed! I thought. When I didn’t respond, Rikki shook her head.

  “Let me buy you a coffee while we wait for Dahlia to return. If I’m speaking off-the-cuff about an investigation in which you’re deeply involved, but not a pro, I ought to make a little effort to do it privately.”

  I followed Rikki through a door marked “Hospital Personnel.” We poured coffee from a pot in a small lounge area. No one else was in the room when we sat down.

  “I’m less certain about the killer being a police officer than I am about the Sitter possibly killing Rachel Lincoln. To answer your question, most officers carry retractable batons now since they’re loaded up with so much gear. Those have a much narrower tip than what you’re calling a nightstick.”

  “Could he be masquerading as a police officer to put his victims at ease?” I asked, suddenly recalling what Dustin had told us about the Sitter being a liar. “He might not know what kind of baton to carry if he’s a pretender.”

  “If the murders were random, dressing up like a cop would make more sense to me as a quick way to gain a stranger’s trust. The more we’ve learned, the more connected all the deaths seem to be. I’m not sure how or why,” Rikki said as she sipped her coffee. “This is not to be repeated, but the third victim’s DNA, a woman we still haven’t identified, shares some characteristics in common with the mother and child.”

  “No! Another Watkins? I didn’t know there were any other Watkins family members.”

  “None of this has been established yet.”

  “It does make this all appear to be connected, doesn’t it?” I asked and then rushed on. “From the way the murders played out, I’d worked up a ritual killer scenario. You know—a murder around the same time of the year every decade, the ages of the victims getting older as if an aging killer chose a new victim close to his own age as he also grew older. Then poor broken Dustin is running around, spouting crazy things about numbers and watching the graves, so the bodies don’t get out.” I quit peering into my coffee cup as if the secret was hidden in the dark brew. When I looked up, Rikki was gazing at me with her mouth hanging open. “What? You’re not buying the maniacal serial killer idea?”

  “Please don’t tell me Austin also shared information from the ME’s office or details about the evidence the crime scene investigators have dug up—quite literally in this case?”

  “Uh, no. Apart from the fact that I’ve lived through two of the murders, I also happened to see an email from Ben.”

  “Has he been gob smacked by your diva pal, Julie, like Austin has been by you?”

  “To be honest, Dahlia left a printed copy of the email from Ben on my dining room table. If Austin or Ben were under our power, as you suggest, I’d already know more than I do, including the fact that a police baton wasn’t the likely murder weapon. Although, now that you’ve told me the same weapon appears to have been used repeatedly since the first murder in 1979—that makes my sicko ritual killer idea a little stronger, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m in deep now, too, aren’t I?” Rikki responded, shaking her head. “My take on the preliminary autopsy findings, is that whatever was used was more like a heavy flashlight. The first victim was a child killed forty years ago, so maybe it’s a cop who’s committed to his old school ‘nightstick.,’ but I doubt the shape is right. What also doesn’t jive with that idea is that forty years ago when the child was killed, the officer would already have been in his twenties. That would make your sicko ritual killer a senior citizen.”

  “By your own logic, then, if the killer’s much younger, he couldn’t have been more than a kid when this all began forty years ago.”

  “Touché!” Rikki exclaimed. “You remind me of this rich woman lawyer I met when Austin and I worked a case in the Coachella Valley. I couldn’t get her to mind her own business either.”

  “It’s not as if I’m a looky-loo or a nosy journalist trying to get a Pulitzer prize-winning scoop. I have a vested interest in learning everything I can since Dustin Watkins designated me as the next to die.” Given the circumstances that had brought us to the hospital, I shut up.

  “It appears he got that wrong. To poke a few more holes in your sicko serial killer scenario, although there are some regularities with the murders, there are oddities too. The child’s murder and the fire that killed her mother occurred a year apart, not a decade. If the parents were murdered, then the killer resorted to arson, which is a very different choice of weapons than whatever he used to strike his victims on the back of the head. To be a decade apart, the next ritual murder should have occurred in 1989, but there wasn’t another one until 1999.”

  “As far as anyone knows.”

  “Geez, let’s hope that’s not true. It would still be a deviation from the pattern if the body was dumped somewhere else. While the murders in 1999, 2009, and 2019 all occurred around the same time of year, the numbers in Billie’s notebook that could be months and days are all different. So, there’s no set number of days before Labor Day Weekend, a specific cycle of the moon, superstorm, or anything obvious that would add to the ritual idea.”

  “Touché, back at you,” I said, acknowledging Rikki’s points. “What’s happened to Rachel Lincoln doesn’t fit the pattern either.”

  “One of the reasons I wanted to have this chat with you is to hear what you made of Rachel’s dying declaration.” I gulped, realizing that may well have been what it was.

  “She wanted to get the guilt off her chest—more about what she claims she didn’t know than what she did.”

  “That’s the gist of what I got from listening in on your brief conversation. Even with the wire you were wearing, Rachel spoke so softly at times, I couldn’t catch it all. We’ll transcribe the recordin
g and we’ll ask you to go over a written copy to fill in as many of the garbled words as you can. Do you believe she didn’t know, until recently, that the driver of the car was kin?” Rikki asked.

  “If she was unburdening her conscience, I don’t see why she’d lie,” I argued. “Technically, though, if the driver of the Camaro was Uncle Link, that makes him Bud Lincoln’s kin, not Rachel’s. Rachel was a Lincoln by marriage and Penney was a Lincoln because her stepfather adopted her. Rachel never clarified what she meant by kin, so we still can’t be certain she was referring to Uncle Link. Rachel did say she was sorry that ‘Bud made me do it.’ Although she didn’t explicitly say what ‘it’ was, I’m guessing Rachel’s husband was behind the confusing information given to the police. Not wanting to implicate a family member could have been a reason for his being less than truthful with the police.”

  “Judge Brinkley was closed-mouth about it, but he wasn’t sure whose idea it had been to hire him. Maybe Rachel Lincoln was more assertive a couple of decades ago, but my guess is that hiring a lawyer was a decision she would have left up to her husband.”

  “Her shock at learning that her daughter had been murdered was genuine, Rikki. If Bud Lincoln suspected Uncle Link had killed his stepdaughter, he kept Rachel in the dark about his suspicions.”

  “If we believe Rachel, Penney kept it secret from her too. The only reason I can imagine that the ‘boy crazy’ Penney Lincoln kept her relationship with Uncle Link from her mother is that it wasn’t an appropriate one. As you’ve pointed out, Penney wasn’t a Lincoln by birth so he wasn’t really her uncle, but he must have been much older than she was at almost fifteen.”

  “Jesse figured the guy in the car was a ‘college boy’ in his mid-twenties, but if he’s the same guy involved in the first murder in 1979, he was older than that. That alone could have gotten Uncle Link into trouble with the law if Penney had decided to tell Mom. Maybe he stopped her,” I said. “I wasn’t there when Rachel Lincoln ran away from you and Dahlia, but from what she’d said before fainting on the stage, your questions about a black Camaro triggered her meltdown. Is that when she learned the driver was kin?” I asked.