Candidate for Murder

by Lauren Carr

  “And yet she thinks she’s strong enough to lead a whole town,” David said.

  “That attitude is why we requested that Sheriff Turow lead this investigation,” Hugh Vance said as he charged out of the living room. In one hand he held a drink, and he pointed an accusatory finger at David with the other. “Why are you even here?”

  Sheriff Turow turned to face Hugh. Stepping into the man’s space, the sheriff commanded Hugh to back down with sheer force. “This break-in and shooting happened in Spencer, Maryland. It would be impossible to conduct this investigation without the involvement of their police force. Per your request, I will lead this investigation—which means that I’m in charge.” The sheriff turned his attention to the men in the foyer. “Now let’s see where the shooting happened.”

  Bogie led them to the room at the end of the hallway off of the foyer. The Braxtons’ study appeared to be more of a trophy room, with its glass cases displaying Nathan Braxton’s many athletic awards and pictures of him with famous people. Across the room, the executive desk rested a few feet from the glass doors that led out onto the patio—the doors through which the assailant had fled, according to Erin. The door had been closed by the police.

  Surrounded by discarded bandage wrappers, a pool of blood was drying on the floor in front of the desk.

  Aware that Nathan Braxton and Hugh Vance were watching them from the doorway, David crossed the length of the study and stood over the spot where the EMTs had treated the shooting victim. Squatting down to examine the blood spatter, he noted that she had almost crossed the entire length of the room before she’d been shot.

  “Has the gun used to shoot Ms. Devereux been located?” Sheriff Turow asked Bogie.

  “Shooter must have taken it with him,” the deputy chief said. “No shell casing was found either.”

  “Either he took that with him, too,” Sheriff Turow said, “or it was a revolver.”

  “The shooting happened at what time?” David asked.

  “Nine-one-one call was made at eleven forty-two,” Bogie said.

  “I called after I heard the shot, and we found Erin,” Hugh said.

  Rising to his feet, David turned around and noticed that the desk had been cleared of everything but an inbox with a few folders in it. “What was Ms. Devereux doing here in the study so late?”

  “She said that she came in to look for a folder,” Bogie said, pointing to the inbox.

  “Erin does a lot of work here in the study,” Nathan said. “She and Hugh use the desk and the printer or whatever. Erin goes everywhere with Nancy, but when she works here at the house, she uses the study. She did some work after dinner, and I guess she forgot a folder that she needed. She was coming to get it and walked in on a burglar.”

  “Shouldn’t you be outside looking for this animal?” Hugh asked.

  Taking note of Hugh, who was glaring at him from the study’s doorway, David turned around to face the glass doors that filled the wall. The doors led out to the patio. “Did Erin say where the shooter was when he shot her?”

  “She was right where you’re standing, Chief.” Bogie then pointed to the doorway. “The shooter was over by the door.”

  “So she didn’t walk in on him,” David said. “She’d entered the room and walked all of the way across it before he shot her from the door.”

  “He walked in on her,” Sheriff Turow said.

  “The room was dark,” Nathan said. “Maybe the burglar was hiding in the room, and when she got all of the way across it, he jumped out and shot her.”

  David took note of the light switch on the wall by the doorway, but he chose to say nothing. “Then after the shooter shot Erin, he ran across the room, practically jumped over the woman he had just shot, went out the door to the patio, and ran into the thick woods on the mountainside.”

  “That’s exactly what happened,” Nathan said.

  David waited until they were outside and walking down the driveway to their cars to ask the sheriff a question. “Any sign of the shooter or the gun yet?”

  “None.” Sheriff Turow paused while David opened the driver’s side door of his cruiser.

  “You won’t find either,” David said.

  Dallas knew that she wasn’t going to get any information about the shooting by cooling her heels in the hospital’s waiting room. She needed to make a connection. Privacy laws had really put a damper on using hospital employees as a source of information.

  By a great stroke of luck, she caught up with the two EMTs who had treated Erin Devereux’s gunshot wound and had actually been at the crime scene not long after the shooting had taken place. Seeming to admire the way Dallas filled out her jeans, one of the EMTs gave her more than a passing glance when they were leaving the break room after she greeted him with a friendly smile and a hello.

  “Y’all just brought in that lady who got herself shot in Spencer, didn’t you?” Dallas added an extra dose of Texan charm to her drawl. “Do you get a lot of shootin’s in Spencer? It seems like such a nice little town.”

  “No more than in any other place.” The young man with extra broad shoulders had taken note of her accent. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “My, you are observant.” She offered him her hand to shake. “I’m Dallas, from Dallas, Texas.”

  As usual, that was enough to break the ice with the two men.

  “Did she tell you who shot her?” Dallas asked them.

  “A burglar,” they said.

  “And, man!” the younger of the two said, chuckling. “She was mad!”

  “Of course she was mad,” Dallas said. “She got shot. I’d certainly be in a horn-tossin’ mood if someone put a bullet in me.”

  “Nah,” one EMT said. “She was mad at the folks she was staying with.”

  “You mean Ms. Braxton?”

  “Ms. Braxton?” He shook his head. “I didn’t see any women there.”

  The older EMT interjected. “Nathan Braxton. The football player. She was mad at him and at the other guy. She was cussing at them—”

  “What was she cussing about?” Dallas asked.

  “Maybe she blamed them for not having the security alarm on,” the older EMT said. “Look, we were trying to save her life—not that it was a life-threatening injury, but any gunshot wound can be. We weren’t paying attention to who was saying what to who.”

  “But she was mad enough to call her lawyer,” the younger EMT said. “She insisted on bringing her purse with her, and while we were in the ambulance, she called him.”

  “Her lawyer?” Dallas asked. “Are you sure?”

  The older EMT nodded his head. “You’d be surprised by how often that happens—people calling their lawyers from the back of the ambulance on the way to the emergency room.”

  “Smells like a lawsuit,” Dallas said. “Or maybe a shakedown.”

  After saying that they had to get back on duty, the older EMT tore his young partner away from Dallas, and they headed out of the emergency exit. As they were going out the door, a slight man in an expensive suit stepped inside.

  Recognizing George Ward, Dallas ducked into the snack bar just in time to avoid being seen as he made his way to the recovery unit.

  Lawyer, my butt. She called the head of Nancy Braxton’s political party. Now, I wonder what that’s about. Is he a friend, a foe, or a partner in crime?

  Chapter Nine

  Great Falls, Virginia

  In the master suite, Spencer, a.k.a. “Candi,” inched across the width of the king-sized bed toward the sleeping man. The blue-eyed shelty uttered a soft whine and pawed at his arm.

  There was no movement.

  She stretched toward him. Sticking her snout close to his ear, she sniffed his dark hair, which, in the last couple of weeks, had grown long enough to curl slightly at the ends. Moving on to his jaw, she touched hi
s beard with her little pink tongue as if to check out the new addition to his face. In the year that he had been married to her master, Murphy had never had a beard before. Not particularly liking the feel of its scruffy texture on her tongue, she settled for licking the inside of his ear.

  Jerking his head away from the tickling sensation in his ear, Murphy sat up and looked over to the other side of the bed, where the blue-colored shelty was wagging her tail and grinning up at him.

  Not having the energy to open both of his eyes, Murphy looked down at the dog with only one eye open. “Where’s your mother?”

  “Here I am!” Clad in a short, sheer lilac robe, Jessica sashayed into the bedroom. She was carrying two mugs. One contained her coffee with gourmet cream and sugar. The other had green tea—unsweetened.

  After planting a long kiss on Murphy’s lips, she handed him the tea.

  “Who made the tea? You or Nigel?” Murphy asked.

  “Nigel,” she said. “He heats the water to the perfect temperature so that your tea can seep.”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t put in that dose of love that only you can supply.”

  “Well, I’m just going to have to serve that love to you as a side dish.” Jessica plopped down into the bed next to him.

  In silence, they sipped their drinks. Finally, she set her coffee mug aside and slid over to rub her hand across his jaw. “I missed you.”

  “Like the beard?”

  “I don’t know.” She studied his appearance. “You have such a handsome face.”

  After taking a sip of his tea, he set the mug on the nightstand. Then he pulled open the drawer of the nightstand and took out his wedding band, which he had to leave behind when he went on a mission. The risk of anyone tracing his wedding band back to her was too high. He took a moment to admire the ring and the commitment it represented before rolling over to wrap his arms around her. Taking in a deep breath, he took in the sweet scent of her body and the warmth of her flesh in his arms.

  Content, he smiled and looked into her eyes.

  “Now I know why I don’t like your beard. It covers up your dimples.” His dimples, which were deep in both of his cheeks, were the first things that had attracted her to him. With a wave of her hand, as though she were a queen speaking to her servant, she said, “Off with your beard!”

  Murphy climbed out of the bed and bowed deep at his waist. “Your wish is my command, my dear buttercup.”

  Taking in his naked bottom while he marched off into the bathroom, Jessica fell back onto the bed in laughter. “I didn’t mean now!”

  “Nah,” he yelled over the water running in the sink. “It needs to come off anyway before I go back to work.”

  “But don’t you have some home-leave time?” She climbed out of the bed, picked up her coffee mug, and joined him in the bathroom. “You always get time off after a mission.”

  “This time I get a week off.” Murphy splashed warm water onto his face to moisten his beard.

  Knowing that he would be unable to go into details about the mission he had been on, Jessica gently asked, “How did this mission go?”

  Images of Tawkeel’s broken body flashed through Murphy’s mind. There but for the grace of God go I. Angry at what the terrorists had done to his friend and sickened by the knowledge that the same thing could happen to him if a mission ever went sideways, he clutched the sides of the sink.

  “Murphy?”

  He stood up straight. “Fine.” He took his shaving supplies out of the cabinet. “It was a rescue mission.”

  Jessica was surprised by that information. Murphy never discussed his missions.

  “You’ve met Tawki.”

  Jessica had met Tawkeel Said, who they called “Tawki,” when he had helped save her life during a home invasion at their previous home. It turned out that the Iraqi had known Murphy’s father, Joshua Thornton. Joshua had helped Tawkeel and his family escape from Iraq when Tawkeel was a child.

  “We haven’t seen him for a long time.”

  “Nine months,” he said. “He’s been on a mission. Deep undercover. Someone outed him and his handler. His handler was tortured to death, and Tawki would have been killed if we hadn’t gotten to him in time.”

  “Is he okay?”

  Murphy sank down to sit on the side of the tub. “Those animals tortured him for over a week. He’s—” He swallowed. “But he refused to tell them anything, and we got him out alive.”

  “That’s good.” She nodded her head. “He’s going to be okay, right?”

  Murphy uttered a deep, cleansing sigh. “Thing is…Jess, they’re saying that he blew his cover. But our intel going into this mission and tracking him down proves that he didn’t.”

  “Maybe his handler blew it,” Jessica said. “You said he was tortured to death.”

  “Tawki was grabbed the day before his handler was captured.” Because he had gone that far already, Murphy rattled on. “The agency that Tawki was working for was going to leave him out there—let him die. Because he was deep undercover, they said that they couldn’t risk losing any of their people by going in to get him. When word reached the Phantoms, we couldn’t leave him there.”

  “Because Tawki is your teammate,” Jessica said with understanding. “A fellow Phantom.”

  “We followed the intel trail all the way to him. Those around him were good and solid. His cover in that country was secure. The word about the fact that Tawkeel and his handler were spies came from those at the top of the organization he’d infiltrated—from people Tawki had never even met.”

  “How could they have known?”

  Murphy raised his eyes to meet hers. “Someone told them.”

  “Who?”

  Anger seeped into his tone. “Someone in Washington.”

  David practically drove over the curb when he pulled his cruiser into the first empty space in the emergency room’s parking lot. After slamming the SUV’s door shut, he sprinted through the doors and looked around for Archie or Bogie, who had met the emergency crews at Spencer Manor when the call that Mac Faraday had collapsed and was unconscious had come in.

  Recognizing the police chief, the receptionist pressed the security button to allow David through the doors of the reception area. He found Bogie sitting next to Archie in the waiting room. Donning his service-dog vest, Gnarly was sitting next to Archie with his head in her lap.

  “Archie, how is he?”

  Blubbering, she sprang out of her seat and threw herself into David’s arms. He held her tight while she cried into his shoulder.

  Seeing that Archie was too frightened to speak, Bogie said, “Mac has a fever of one hundred and three, and his breathing was shallow when the EMTs got there. They got him on oxygen. Doc went to find out more. Last we heard, they’d taken him to X-ray his lungs.”

  “I should have made him come to the hospital when he passed out the other day,” Archie said. “This is all my fault.”

  Extracting her from his arms, David grabbed Archie. “Don’t even think like that. It is not your fault. I was there too when Mac passed out. He refused to go and insisted that we cancel the EMTs. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. I should have hog-tied him, thrown him in the back of the cruiser, and driven him here.”

  “That’s why they say doctors should never treat family,” Dr. Dora Washington said as she turned the corner and entered the waiting room.

  Upon meeting Garrett County’s medical examiner, one’s first impression would be that the stunning woman in her early forties used to be a high-fashion model. With her flawless figure and blue-black hair that she always wore in a silky ponytail that spilled down her back, she looked more like she belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine than cutting up dead people in the morgue. Some would be further surprised upon discovering that the beauty was sixty-five-year-old Bogie’s steady girlfriend.

 
; “What have you found out, Doc?” Bogie asked her.

  “They were bringing him out of the X-ray and taking him to an examination room when I left the doctor,” she said. “He’s coming around. Besides the fever, Mac’s dehydrated. They’ve been pumping him full of fluids.”

  “Is it pneumonia?” Archie asked.

  Doc nodded her head. “They’re waiting for the results of the blood tests and the X-rays of his lungs to confirm it. They’re really worried about his fever. They’re going to keep him at least overnight and work on getting it down.”

  “Pneumonia?” Archie said. “That could…People die from pneumonia.”

  David wrapped his arms around her. “Mac’s not going to die.” He eased her over to a chair so that she could sit down. Once she was in her seat, Gnarly climbed up to lick the tears on her face.

  Doc sat on her other side. “You need to have faith, Archie. Mac is a strong, healthy man. He’s fighting this, and he’s going to beat it.”

  “We’re all praying for him,” Bogie said.

  “He was coughing all last night,” Archie said. “I was actually a little mad at him for not going to the doctor, and he said that he was going to stay in bed this morning so that he’d have the strength for the debate—” She gasped. “The debate. Mac won’t make the debate.”

  “Don’t worry about the debate,” David said. “Getting Mac well is more important.”

  “But someone has to take Gnarly, and—”

  “I’ll take Gnarly,” David said. “I can channel him and handle the debate.”

  Bogie and Doc exchanged glances. With a flicker of Doc’s eyes, Bogie captured her wordless order. David was Mac’s half brother. Since Mac’s arrival in Deep Creek Lake, the two had formed a close brotherly bond. Sure, David could’ve gone to the debate, but he would’ve been consumed with worry the whole evening.

  “That’s a no-go, Chief.” With an air of authority that dared David to argue with him, Bogie snatched up Gnarly’s leash. “I’ll take Gnarly to the debate. Archie and Mac need you to be here.”