Exposing a Killer

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  “If my hair didn’t still smell like chemical smoke,” Megan said after a fruitless two hours, “I’d think we made this all up.”

  “Not to mention your video.” Jack couldn’t resist tucking an errant curl behind her ear.

  He didn’t think her hair smelled like smoke of any kind. She smelled more like autumn leaves to him—crisp and somewhere between sweet and spicy.

  “The cops are right.” Megan leaned against the trunk of an elm. “That video is next to useless.”

  “Next to, but not useless.” Finding himself gazing at her, Jack forced his eyes away and realized they stood at the entrance to the alley leading behind Cahill’s house. He craned his neck to see the handful of houses between them and the Cahill bungalow. It was dark. The garage door stood open but appeared empty of vehicles. He wanted a closer look. He didn’t want Megan with him when he got a closer look. At the same time, he wasn’t leaving her there alone at the corner of the alley.

  “Want to revisit the tree?” he asked.

  She gave him a look that said he had gone too long without enough sleep. “I think I’d rather have a trip to the dentist.”

  “Let’s walk up here and see what we can, though.” Jack moved around her so he walked between her and the houses on the Cahill side.

  The garage was indeed empty of vehicles. An overhead light showed the usual contents like shovels and rakes and cans of paint, but not so much as a bicycle tire spoke of a mode of transportation having been there.

  “Strange to leave the door open and the light on,” Megan whispered.

  “Unless they’re coming right back.” Jack moved past the garage.

  The gate to the backyard was also open. A bed pillow lay on the walkway around the garage, its feather stuffing drifting around like snow. A pillow was the sort of thing that might fall from overly burdened arms as someone raced to pack a car...

  Or van. A van like the one that had followed them the night before.

  Increasingly uneasy, Jack started along the walkway.

  “Don’t go into the yard,” Megan whispered from the alley. “It could be a trap to lure you in.”

  She was right. Cahill and company might be trying to lure him and Megan into their orbit. Yet they wouldn’t have known the two of them were coming. And this was rather an elaborate trap to be set up at the last moment.

  “I don’t think anyone’s here,” Jack said. “But I’ll check. Wait there in the alley. In fact, close the gate.”

  She didn’t follow him. Neither did she close the gate. Jack felt her gaze upon him as he traversed the short sidewalk along the garage and swished through the grass. Once he reached the bottom of the steps to the deck, the back door had come into view. The open back door. A single overhead light shone on the polished wood floor of a breakfast room...and more.

  He could be mistaken, but he was almost positive there was a body on the floor. He might be seeing another fallen pillow, a frill of dropped fabric. A lost sofa cushion.

  His footfalls ringing hollowly on the wooden planks, he crossed the deck to stand in the doorway.

  He hadn’t been mistaken. He and Megan hadn’t been mistaken the night before. The cops could say the video was too dark and obscure for any conclusive evidence, but they couldn’t dismiss this.

  Not the youngest rookie on the force could dismiss the body lying on the floor, sheltered from the open door by a table and chairs, only her legs sticking out in plain sight—legs wrapped in the same gauzy blue dress she’d worn the night before. The man must have dragged her inside after killing her on the deck.

  “Megan,” Jack spoke as softly yet clearly as he could so she would hear him from where she stood in the alley, “get moving away from here.”

  “Not without you.” She took a step toward him, the flashlight on her phone a bright eye in the darkness around her. “I’m not leaving—”

  “It’s a trap,” he shouted.

  He didn’t know how or where, just knew no one left a door open with a dead body inside without a truly good reason. Trapping two people he had already tried to kill would be a truly good reason to the killer of the woman inside.

  Jack tripped on the threshold. It shuddered beneath his feet. A weakness in an old house, or a trigger?

  He kept backing away, his gaze on the body, the table, the doorway. He saw no wires to indicate an explosive, no movement to indicate a shooter taking aim. The area was shockingly silent, so silent his footfalls on the deck planks sounded like thunder, like branches creaking in a high wind.

  No, not his footfalls. The branches were creaking, casting shadows in the light from the house and his phone flashlight. Yet the night was still, part of the silence.

  “Jack, run,” Megan cried. “The tree—”

  A thunderous roar drowned Megan’s scream. The tree trunk was fine, as straight and solid as ever. The branches were not. Something large and dark was sliding off the roof and into the tree, weighing down the limbs, snapping them off like toothpicks and sliding straight for Jack’s head.

  TEN

  Megan felt helpless. If she ran toward Jack, she would get hurt herself, possibly killed. If she didn’t help him, he would most certainly die. She took the only other action presented to her.

  She entered the yard, grabbed the heavy wrought iron table from the deck and shoved it in Jack’s direction. It screeched across the boards of the deck. Useless. She managed to lift a matching chair and throw it. Her missiles blocked Jack from her sight, but she heard his shout, then the metallic rumble of rock striking iron. Fireflies of sparks flew into the night, and the bass rumbled on and on and on, fading beneath Megan’s shouting of Jack’s name.

  “Here.” His voice was winded, but clear and very much alive. “I’m here.” He moved then, creeping from beneath the twisted mess of table and chairs.

  “Are you all right?” Megan ran to him and dropped to her knees beside his still prone figure. “Did you get hit?”

  “Not much. The table stopped it.” Jack pushed himself to a sitting position. He glanced from the table to Megan. “How did you manage to move that thing so far so fast?”

  Megan shrugged. “The strength of adrenaline?”

  “That was...something.” He still sounded breathless.

  She rested one hand on his shoulder. “Are you sure you’re all right? Should I call an ambulance?”

  “No, but we’re going to have to call the cops. That was a trap set deliberately.”

  “For us?”

  “Or anyone who got too close.”

  Megan shook her head. “How would they have had time?”

  “It might have been here for a while to keep people from the house. Step on the threshold and...mashed potatoes.”

  Megan coughed. “Thanks for that image.”

  “Well, see what you think of this image.” He closed his eyes as though he pondered something new. “Explaining what we’re doing here to the cops.”

  * * *

  “Ms. O’Clare, do you always attract trouble?” inquired Sergeant Dave Luskie.

  Megan gave Jack’s uncle a blank stare. If she answered that question, she would concede that she caused trouble at any time. Concede she would not. She had not attracted this trouble. It had found her. She had been happy to turn the matter of Cahill over to the police and let it go. But when someone caused trouble for her and her friends, not to mention her place of employment, she had no hesitation in running the criminals down herself.

  “I didn’t find the body,” Megan answered at last. “I wasn’t anywhere near the house.”

  “You were in the alley behind the house,” Luskie said.

  “An alley is public property.” Megan smiled.

  She could be respectful without giving in to any of the scenarios he had tried to form around her escapade with Jack. She just wished he felt the same way. His disl
ike of his nephew seemed to spill over onto her.

  “You opened the gate,” Luskie said. “That could be considered trespass.”

  “The gate was open.”

  “So you say.”

  “We never touched the gate. Fingerprint analysis will prove that to be true.”

  She had been fingerprinted for the PI license.

  “Gloves. You both know enough to wear gloves when breaking and entering.”

  Megan gripped the edge of the scarred table in the police station interview room. She would not give in to the stereotype that redheads had fiery tempers. She rarely lost hers. But being accused, however obliquely, that she was lying was something that set up her hackles and threatened to provoke her into doing something she always regretted immediately, such as leaping to her feet and shouting that she would not have her integrity questioned. Her mother would have added that an O’Clare was not a liar. Maybe they weren’t, but they knew how to twist the truth.

  And because her mother chose to say something so ridiculous, something that sounded more like it should come from the mouth of a Victorian duchess than an attorney with political ambitions, Megan avoided ever using her family name or connections to promote herself in any way. She was who she was—smart, reliable, honest. If Jack’s uncle chose not to believe her, declaring otherwise would not change his mind.

  She dropped her hands to her lap. “I have nothing else to report, sir. If you think you have reason to hold me, I can’t stop you. I will, however, have to have an attorney before I say anything else.”

  “Do you have reason to say anything else?” Luskie demanded.

  Megan said nothing.

  Luskie sighed and walked from the room. He didn’t go far. Through the door, she heard him speaking on his phone. Just the rumble of his voice, not the words.

  She had no idea what they had done with Jack. She suspected he sat in a room similar to hers, with someone else questioning him. He would be calm, Megan expected, and his story would be the same as hers. It had to be, unless he twisted or stretched the truth.

  She didn’t think he would. He was honest.

  His story wouldn’t be exactly the same. He had gone into the yard because of the open rear door, and he had found the body.

  A body. Cahill, for sure, lying on the kitchen floor like a discarded and broken doll.

  Jack had taken pictures. He hadn’t wanted Megan to see them, but she had looked anyway. She needed to grow immune to grizzly sights like dead bodies. Investigators didn’t find them often, but it was not unheard of.

  With her, it wasn’t heard of at all. Or it hadn’t been until that night. Or had that been last night? But if Cahill had been dead the night before, who had been with the man who chased them?

  Megan sighed and speared her fingers through her hair. Her ponytail band popped, flying across the room, useless. Her hair tumbled around her shoulders, out of control from getting rain-soaked earlier. She dug through her bag, seeking another band. She almost always carried extras with her.

  No band. Not so much as a bobby pin.

  Hearing Luskie end his phone call, Megan straightened in her chair and tucked her hair behind her ears. When he reentered the room, she sat straight, but relaxed, hands folded in her lap. All those lessons in comportment her mother sent her to were coming in handy. Little had her mother known Megan would realize how important they were while she was in a police interview room after being interrogated over a murder. Over a murder she and Jack had probably witnessed after all.

  She hadn’t been mistaken the night before. However much she wished she were wrong, the killing had taken place. The police would take them seriously now.

  She didn’t wait for Luskie to return to his seat before attacking with her own inquiry. “Will you and your brothers in blue decide Jack and I weren’t exaggerating about last night, Sergeant Luskie, sir?”

  “We will take another look into things.” He gripped the back of his chair. “The video wasn’t conclusive enough, and since we can only presume what you saw wasn’t any better than the video, your testimony wasn’t much good, either. But now we have a body...”

  “Which you didn’t find when you searched last night?” Megan prompted.

  Luskie stared at a point over Megan’s head—a camera maybe? “We didn’t have a warrant to search and not enough evidence to get one.”

  “But now?”

  “What we conclude about last night will depend on what time an autopsy says the deceased died.”

  That made sense. If she had been gone four hours or twenty-four, the autopsy would say, and Megan and Jack would know.

  “So you believe someone has been trying to harm us?” Megan couldn’t bring herself to say “trying to murder us.”

  “If the deceased died last night, then maybe you have a point.”

  Megan gritted her teeth.

  “Until we have more information,” Luskie continued, “take ordinary precautions when you move about the city, and stay off social media. You might want to ditch your cell phones altogether.”

  Because they could be traced through their cell phones if someone had managed to grab access.

  “The beautiful people can simply get new phones. I’m sure that’s no hardship for you, either, Miss O’Clare.”

  Actually, it was a hardship. Her parents had cut off her allowance when she got her PI license and chose to practice. Though she knew they would come to her aid in any emergency, the cost would be her agreeing to giving up her practice and going back to school.

  The mere idea of it made her sick. She’d be better suited to becoming a doctor if she kept finding bodies and got used to them.

  Luskie rounded the table and stood behind Megan as though he were about to pull out her chair. “Get back to chasing lost dogs and straying husbands, Ms. O’Clare, and leave police work to us. You’re safer that way.”

  “Only if someone isn’t trying to kill me.” Afraid he might be about to pat her on her head, Megan rose before he could pull out her chair. “Then I’m free to go.”

  “You are, but not too far.” He tried to stride past her, but the space wasn’t large enough. “We will probably have more questions.”

  Megan whipped open a door. “I’ll be where I’m safe.”

  But at that moment, she didn’t know where safe was.

  * * *

  Jack needed a decent night’s sleep. He needed a shower and clean clothes and time to recharge his spirit and mind. But he couldn’t go home. His house was probably not safe, even with the explosive device deactivated.

  And what of Megan? He couldn’t send her alone home to that empty apartment. He especially couldn’t send her to that house where Amber had gone. Not by public transit. Not this late at night on her own, even in a taxi. That left one viable solution.

  He didn’t want to take it. Conceding that Grace was better off with her relatives than at home at present was one thing. Asking for himself was quite another. It was asking a favor. They wanted Grace around. They didn’t want Jack.

  No, that wasn’t quite right. Jack didn’t want to owe his aunt and uncle a favor. He wanted to prove to them he was self-reliant. They needed to see he wasn’t that rookie cop who couldn’t cut the job. He could have cut it—if it weren’t for his uncle endangering someone to teach his nephew a lesson. He had a great future ahead of him. He could provide Grace with a great future, too.

  Far away from Megan.

  He shook that thought out of his head. His life had nothing to do with Megan once they got through this crisis. Their futures ran in different directions, directions as divergent as their pasts had been. Right now, this time when they were thrown together was to teach them some lesson.

  Leaving the interview room and seeing his uncle in the corridor with Megan, Jack feared he understood at least what some of that lesson might be.

 
The time had come for him to let past mistakes go. His uncle had surely paid in his heart for his choices where Jack was concerned. Dave Luskie was a good man, had always been a good and honest cop, from all reports. He’d been demoted for the error he made with Jack, and had worked hard to regain his reputation, getting wounded in the process.

  That his uncle wanted to take custody of Grace away from Jack was a wholly different matter, one to be resolved at another time if necessary. For the moment, Jack needed to remember, needed to convince himself, that family was family and helped one another in times of crisis.

  This was a time of crisis if ever one existed.

  He headed down the hallway to meet up with Megan and his uncle.

  “You look tired,” Megan said with a smile. “Did they use the thumbscrews?”

  “I feel more like they used them on my eyeballs.” Jack rubbed eyes he was sure must be as red as Megan’s hair. “I’ve had three hours of sleep since yesterday morning.”

  “Then you’d better go home and get more,” Uncle Dave said.

  “About that.” Jack’s mouth was suddenly dry. He found himself wanting to shuffle his feet and play with the detritus of change and keys in his pants pockets, while avoiding everyone’s gaze. He was fifteen again and asking his uncle if he’d come to the school career day fair and talk about being a cop.

  The last time he’d asked Dave for a favor? Must have been. Jack’s dad had still been alive, a detective with CPD and embroiled in a case that wouldn’t let him go long enough to keep his promise about filling in the role at the fair.

  Uncle Dave had said of course he’d do it and had laughed at Jack’s nervousness. “I learned my lesson with my own boys,” he had said. “I can only hope to make up for it with you.”

  Jack hadn’t understood those words at the time. He hadn’t thought about them until now, when he needed another favor.

  Megan and Dave were staring at Jack with identical quizzical expressions.

  Jack cleared his throat. “Do you think Megan and I could crash at your place tonight? We’d be safest there... If it isn’t too much trouble...”