Candidate for Murder

by Lauren Carr

  Reaching into his pocket for his cell phone, Murphy stood up. “I’m Lieutenant Murphy Thornton. US Navy.” After rubbing the screen of his cell phone against the material inside his pocket, he extracted his hand and stuck it out to Collins from across the bed. “I was the CO leading the team that found Tawkeel after he escaped from Brussels.” The phone tumbled out of Murphy’s pocket, bounced across the bed, and fell to the floor at Collins’ feet. “Damn!”

  Andrew Collins picked up the phone.

  “I hope I didn’t break it,” Murphy said, which prompted Collins to press his thumb on the screen and to sweep it across the phone. The cell phone unlocked and came to life. With a sigh of relief, Murphy took the phone, careful to touch only its edges.

  “Well, Tawkeel, I’ll be sure to tell the rest of my team how you’re doing. We’re all pulling for you.” Murphy shook his hand. “We’re glad we were able to be there for you.”

  With a farewell nod to Andrew Collins, Murphy spun on his heels and left the hospital room. While making his way down the hallway, he snatched a plastic trash bag from a cleaning cart and carefully slipped his cell phone inside it before going down the elevator and out to the courtyard to find Jessica and Gnarly.

  “Gnarly, you really need to learn to not eat everything that’s put in front of you,” Jessica said while rubbing the German shepherd’s tummy.

  She was sitting on a park bench, and Gnarly was sprawled out next to her with his head in her lap. His gas was so intense that even outdoors, Jessica had to turn her head and hold her breath occasionally.

  “I’m going to kill Tristan,” she said.

  A dark-haired man wearing a doctor’s jacket strolled down the path and took a seat on the park bench across from them. Nodding a greeting in Jessica’s direction, he took a plastic container out of a lunch bag and opened it, revealing a salad.

  His nose twitching upon picking up a scent, Gnarly lifted his head and peered over the handrail of their bench to study the doctor eating across from them.

  “Gnarly, no,” Jessica said in a low voice. But her words meant nothing, and Gnarly scrambled onto his stomach, launched himself off of the bench, and galloped over to the doctor.

  “Gnarly, halt! No!” Jessica jumped up to run after the German shepherd, who had stopped directly in front of the doctor and planted his bottom on the ground.

  The doctor stopped eating with his fork, filled with lettuce, in midair. He stared at Gnarly, whose tail was wagging.

  “I’m so sorry, doctor.” Jessica grabbed the dog by the collar. “Bad boy, Gnarly! That’s not yours.”

  “Did you call him Gnarly?” Putting down the fork and the plastic bowl, the doctor stared at the dog, who was wagging his tail with his mouth open. “It is you.”

  Gnarly yanked free from Jessica’s hold and jumped into the doctor’s arms. Patting and petting Gnarly, the doctor delivered a kiss to the side of his head. “I can’t believe it’s you! What a good boy! I’m so glad to see that you’re okay.”

  “You know Gnarly?” Jessica asked.

  “Oh, yes.” The doctor smiled while Gnarly licked him all over his face. “We served together in Iraq.” Breaking free from the enthusiastic dog, he held out his hand to Jessica. “I’m Dr. Drew Samuels. I was a medic on Gnarly’s team during my last tour overseas, before going to med school.” He sucked in a deep breath and wrapped his arms around the German shepherd’s broad chest. “I was there when his handler was killed.” He pulled back to look into Gnarly’s brown eyes. “That was a bad day for all of us. Huh, boy?”

  Gnarly licked his snout.

  Jessica slid down onto the bench next to him. “Sergeant Belle Perkins.”

  Drew nodded his head. “Last I heard, Gnarly had been discharged. I guess you have him now.”

  “My father does,” she said. “Gnarly is visiting.” She offered him her hand. “Jessica Faraday, by the way. My husband is Lieutenant Murphy Thornton, navy. He’s visiting a friend of his here at the hospital.” She smiled when she saw Murphy crossing the courtyard in their direction.

  After greeting Murphy with a hug and a kiss, Jessica introduced him to the doctor petting the German shepherd, who had zeroed in on the salad.

  “Dr. Samuels served with Gnarly in Iraq.” Jessica arched a telling eyebrow in Murphy’s direction.

  “Then you were there when Gnarly’s handler was murdered,” Murphy said.

  “But Gnarly didn’t do it,” Drew said. “I heard that that was in the news, but I was there. It’s not true. She wasn’t attacked by a dog. She was strangled.”

  “Do you have any idea about who would have done something like that to her, especially when she had a dog like Gnarly in the tent with her?” Jessica asked.

  “Gnarly was sedated when it happened,” Drew said. “He had gotten injured in an attack earlier in the day. Perkins didn’t realize it until much later. A round had grazed his upper leg, near his hip. I know because she came to me for thread so that she could stitch him up.”

  “So you knew Gnarly would be asleep,” Murphy said.

  “The whole team knew.” Dr. Samuels sat up tall in his seat. “Four members of our team got killed that afternoon. We all would have been wiped out if it hadn’t been for Gnarly and Perkins. Why, after they stuck out their necks to save us, would any of us have wanted to kill either one of them? Gnarly should have gotten a medal. I heard that the lieutenant was going to put Perkins in for the Bronze Star, but then she was killed.”

  “Why didn’t she get it posthumously?” Jessica asked.

  Dr. Samuels shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m sorry for the questions,” Jessica said. “But like you said, you saw on the news that someone said that Gnarly killed his handler, and Perkins’ husband asked us to find out the truth and to clear his name.”

  Dr. Samuels nodded his head. “If there’s anything I can do to help.”

  “Someone told us that there was a female member of the team who Perkins had problems with,” Murphy said.

  A slow grin crossed Dr. Samuels’ face. “Do you mean Private Abigail Moss?”

  “We were told that she was the only other woman on the team,” Murphy said. “There was some tension between them.”

  “Yes, there was,” Dr. Samuels said. “Some.”

  “Do you know what that was about?” Jessica asked.

  “I know exactly what that was about,” Dr. Samuels said. “Private Moss and I started dating shortly before Sergeant Perkins arrived at our camp. Abby is a lovely woman, but she’s not one of those soft, feminine girlie girls.”

  Jessica grinned. “She was jealous.”

  Samuels nodded his head. “But she never would have killed Perkins. Perkins was very happily married. There was no competition there. Besides, that afternoon, she’d taken out a terrorist who had pinned Abby and me down while we were trying to save one of the four men who got killed. Perkins nailed him solid. And then that night, I spent the whole night in Abby’s tent. After what we had gone through…That was the night I proposed to Abby, and she accepted. She had no reason to be jealous of Perkins.”

  Distracted by the questions, Dr. Samuels lost track of his salad, which Gnarly had pulled down off of the bench to finish. Before Murphy and Jessica could ask another question, he said, “Perkins had a lot of trouble with Lieutenant Watson.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Murphy asked.

  “His commanding style,” Dr. Samuels said. “Some of the men called him ‘Patton.’ He was—is—completely fearless. No zone is too hot for him to go into. Still, he has a reputation for putting himself and his people in situations that other commanding officers would avoid. But then his people do respect him because he doesn’t send his people in where he himself won’t go first. Many of the people on his team had so much respect for him that they would’ve followed him to hell and back, which is the mark of an excellent leader.
Sergeant Major Scott Scalia, for example, has gone on every tour with Watson that I know of.”

  He paused. “Perkins was furious after the gunfight that afternoon. And when she saw that Gnarly had gotten hurt—whoa! The medical tent was right next to the lieutenant’s—who’s a captain now, by the way. You could hear them yelling at each other all the way over in the medic tent.”

  “What was she saying?” Murphy asked.

  “That it was going to stop, and it was going to stop there and then.”

  “What was going to stop?” Murphy asked.

  Dr. Samuels’ face went blank. “I…I just assumed…well, his full-speed-ahead type of leading. Actually, you can ask him about it yourself. He’s back here in the States. I see him pretty regularly here at the hospital. Maybe he’s in PT because of an injury he got on his last tour?”

  “Since she was enlisted and he was an officer”—Jessica looked up at Murphy for an answer—“could she have put a stop to how he led his team?”

  In deep thought, Dr. Samuels looked down at where Gnarly was lapping up a drop of salad dressing. “Maybe there was something else going on between Watson and Perkins.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Garrett County Sheriff’s Department

  “Are we going to tell Bill Clark that his wife is actively looking for a hit man to kill him?” David asked Sheriff Scott Turow.

  After sending Nathan Braxton to an interview room with his lawyer, Mac, David, and the sheriff had gone to his office to decide how best to handle the situation. At the top of the list was getting an undercover detective to play the hit man who Cassandra Clark wanted to kill her husband.

  Since Bill Clark was a longtime resident of the county, they couldn’t take a chance on using a local police officer. Cassandra might have inadvertently met the officer through Bill. Therefore, Sheriff Turow had called the state police who, after a long discussion, had said that they had an agent from the Rockville, Maryland, barracks who had finished up an operation in Fairmont just the night before. They would send the detective to Oakland, Maryland, as soon as possible.

  “If we don’t give Clark a heads-up and something happens, we’ll be liable for it,” Mac said to David. “You just don’t want to tell him because you have high hopes of messing with his mind.”

  David nodded his head.

  “We can’t tell him right now,” the sheriff said. “If we do, he could let Cassandra know that we’re on to her. We have to keep this between us and Braxton.”

  “Somehow, this whole scenario doesn’t seem right to me.” Exhaustion setting in, Mac sat down. “If Cassie Clark killed Nancy Braxton, how did she know she was going to be down at the lake?”

  “Maybe she followed her,” Sheriff Turow said. “Sat outside of the mansion until Braxton left—”

  “In the middle of the night wearing nothing but her jammies? Luckiest murder-of-opportunity killer I ever heard of.”

  “I still want to know what scared her so badly that she went running out of her home late at night like that,” David said. “Nancy Braxton was not one who scared easily.”

  “What are you two saying?” the sheriff asked.

  “We need to find out what meds Nancy Braxton was supposed to be on,” David said. “Dallas thinks, and I agree, that she was on some sort of antipsychotic medication, and someone substituted sugar pills for the real meds, wanting her to have a breakdown.”

  “The outlandish lies, delusions of grandeur, and mood swings,” Mac said. “Psychosis would explain all of that. And of course, Braxton’s party wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know that.”

  David nodded his head. “The last thing that they would’ve wanted to get out was that they were pushing a mentally unstable candidate on us.”

  There was a knock on the door. Before Sheriff Turow could respond, a woman with long legs, each one bearing a tattoo of a long vine with red roses from her ankle up to her upper thigh, opened the door. The red of the roses matched her long, elegant fingernails and the red on her plump lips. Her long red hair was the color of a new copper penny. She wore high-heeled sandals with straps around her ankles and up her calves. She was dressed in a short leather skirt, a mesh top, and what appeared to be a leather bra holding an abundant bosom. Leather and chains were clasped around her wrists and neck.

  At first glance, the men thought she was a streetwalker who wanted to beg the sheriff to release her with just a warning for soliciting—until they saw that she was wearing a utility belt baring a side arm, handcuffs, and a state-police badge.

  She struck a pose with a hand resting on her shapely hip. “Chris Turow! You owe me sixty bucks, you lyin’, cheatin’ heartbreaker!”

  Behind his desk, Sheriff Turow gazed at her with wide eyes that were even wider than Mac’s and David’s. His instinctive objection was replaced with a wide grin. “Greyson!” Instantly, he was out of his seat and hugging her. Their hug ended in a quick kiss.

  “When did you leave the army?” he asked, taking in her outlandish disguise.

  “When the Maryland State Police made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” she said. “No more tours in the desert.”

  Mac was looking her up and down. In particular, he was impressed with the elaborate tattoos on her legs. “You were in the army?”

  “Roxie and I met in basic training,” the sheriff said. “Roxie held our class record for the obstacle course.” With a grin, he shook his head. “No one could scale a wall like Roxanne Greyson.”

  “Being chased by all those horny recruits in our class helped.” She laughed. “They’re not real, by the way.”

  Afraid he’d been caught taking in her bosom, which was quite visible in the leather bra, David said, “We weren’t looking.”

  “I was talking about the tattoos.” Pointing to her chest, she said, “These are real. But the tattoos are temporary. I just came off of an undercover assignment with an illegal arms merchant who had a thing for women with tattoos.”

  “Then they wash off.” No longer concerned with discretion, Mac whirled around in his seat and peered closely at her long legs, taking in the detail of the tattoos that snaked up both of them. “They look so real. How long will it take for them to wash off?”

  “At least a week.” She gazed up at the sheriff. “My department tells me you’re looking for a hit man. Who do you need bumped off?”

  “Town councilman running for mayor,” Sheriff Turow said. “His wife is blackmailing the husband of a murder victim into arranging her husband’s murder.”

  “Did this husband kill his wife?” Roxie asked.

  “He has a solid alibi,” David said.

  “But he could have hired someone to do it for him,” Mac said. “He admits that he hated her.”

  “But then why would he have come running to us saying that Cassandra Clark took credit for killing his wife for him and wanted him to off her husband?” Sheriff Turow said.

  “To throw suspicion off of him,” Mac said.

  “If he’d had his wife killed, then he would’ve known that Cassandra was lying when she said she’d done it,” David said.

  “How better to divert suspicion from himself than to throw her under the bus and have her arrested for committing or arranging the murder that he himself had set up?” Mac said.

  “I’ll let you guys figure out who the real culprit is,” Roxie said. “My job is just to role-play. What’s the plan?”

  “Nathan Braxton is going to meet with the suspect and tell her that he has an assassin lined up to kill her husband, Bill Clark,” the sheriff said. “He’ll be wearing a wire. He’s going to try to get her to talk about his wife’s murder, the one she claims she committed. Once we get enough information about that crime, you’ll join in and get her to talk about the murder that she wants you to commit for her. When we have enough, we’ll swoop in.”

  “When will this happen
?” she asked.

  “Tonight,” David said.

  “I’ll need to shower and change,” she said.

  “We can put you up—”

  “You can shower and change at my place,” Sheriff Turow said, interrupting Mac’s offer for her to stay at the Spencer Inn.

  “Are you sure your wife won’t mind?” she asked.

  Sheriff Turow’s face fell. An awkward silence filled the office before he cleared his throat. “Belle died four years ago. She was killed during a tour in Iraq.”

  “I’m sorry.” Roxie let out a breath filled with regret.

  “Is your husband—”

  “We got divorced during my last tour,” she said. “It’s really hard to be married when just as one partner is coming back, the other one gets shipped out. That’s why I joined the state police. I thought that maybe if I had a more stable lifestyle—”

  “Going undercover as a hooker,” David said, grinning.

  “Hey, I’m the best hooker in our department,” she said.

  Mac noticed that Sheriff Turow was fighting the grin that was working its way to his lips.

  Roxanne stood up. “Well, I’d better change into something more suitable for an assassin. I have a go bag in the car.”

  “I’ll get your bag for you.” The sheriff hurried to the door. “I’ll take you to my place, and we’ll get you fixed up in no time.”

  “Are you sure I won’t be any trouble?” she asked on their way out the door.

  “No, I want you to make yourself at home.”

  Once the sheriff and Rosie were gone, Mac and David exchanged glances.

  “Did they just leave without saying good-bye to us?” David asked.

  “They clearly forgot we were in the room.”

  At five o’clock, Caleb Montgomery almost tripped over a soaking-wet child running into the Lakeside Inn as he made his way out of the front entrance to go home. He had to grit his teeth to avoid saying what he was really thinking to the urchin’s apologetic mother, who was chasing the child with a beach towel. With a forced smile, he glanced up the mountain behind him and saw the clearings for the Spencer Inn’s ski slopes.