Rooted in Murder

by Emily James

  Case had a propensity to play rescuer more than he should, even down to trying to protect Daphne from me when I was her lawyer. I could see his grumpiness with me and avoidance of my calls for what they were now—he didn’t want me to find out that he and Daphne had dumped Lee’s body.

  But when I weighed all the evidence, I had to think maybe Mark was right. Case Hammond was a decent guy.

  “The chief wouldn’t have suspended Case unless he had strong evidence against him,” Mark said. “Are you sure about this case? We made Grady a deal, but you don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with.”

  I wasn’t comfortable with this case for so many reasons, but not for the reason Mark assumed. He had to mean that I didn’t have to work this case if it meant violating my principles and defending a guilty person.

  I finished my last bite of fish, letting the flakiness practically melt in my mouth. I wanted to explain to Mark why I felt committed to this case, but this was my first test. I couldn’t tell him what they’d done that night and that they claimed they hadn’t killed Lee.

  I could tell him what I knew about them as people. “I want to. It’s like you said, Case Hammond is a good guy. And Daphne is a single mom with a sick kid.”

  Mark went to the cupboard and brought back a plate covered with aluminum foil. “Compliments of Nancy.” He pulled back the foil to reveal cookies filled with cream. From the color, maple syrup was likely involved in the recipe. “What’s wrong with Daphne’s daughter?”

  The fact that Grady hadn’t talked about Gina’s illness at work probably shouldn’t have surprised me. He didn’t seem embarrassed by her or Daphne, but bringing his personal life to work would have tarnished the perfect-cop image he seemed to want to maintain.

  I bit into a cookie. Why didn’t I have this skill? Baking made everyone happy. Instead I got the skill that came with death threats and people who lied. Mark’s mom would say it was because God gifted everyone according to the special purpose He had for them. Someone had to defend the innocent and chase the truth. Besides, based on my most recent conversation with my friend Isabel, being a baker wasn’t any guarantee of safety. She’d already gotten herself embroiled in a murder investigation since leaving Fair Haven.

  “Nikki? You’re not in a sugar coma already, are you?”

  I couldn’t help but smile. It faded as fast as it came thinking about Gina and how she was in danger of losing the people who took care of her. Could Grady care for her on his own if both Daphne and Case ended up in prison? “Sickle cell anemia. Daphne’s only real family support is Grady. Her daughter’s dad is dead, and his parents cut them off when they found out Gina was sick. They said it was a genetic disorder, and it didn’t run in their family so she couldn’t be their granddaughter.”

  Mark finished chewing and reached for another cookie. “They’re right.”

  I shook my head. “It runs in Daphne’s family. Gina got it from her side.”

  Mark laid his half-eaten cookie down. “Not if she has sickle cell anemia. It’s inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern. Both parents have to carry the gene for the child to have it. If only one parent passes on the gene, then the child would only be a carrier.”

  Biology had never been my thing in high school. I was too squeamish to ever want to know what happened inside of any body, including my own. Autosomal recessive meant nothing to me, but Mark’s explanation did.

  Lee Mills couldn’t be Gina’s father.

  But I knew someone who could, and the whole lying group of them was about to lose me as a lawyer unless they could give me a really good reason to stay. They couldn’t say I hadn’t warned them.

  15

  I texted Daphne and told her I’d be there in ten minutes—no arguments—and that I wanted to talk to her alone.

  She was the one I was most likely able to break. In part because she was a woman and I was a woman, but also because her first priority was Gina. If she lost me and had to go with a public defender, her chances of staying out of prison went down dramatically. She was lucky I wasn’t my parents.

  Daphne had the front step light on when I pulled up. Inside, I stripped off my coat and shoes and headed straight for her living room without being invited. Daphne wore pink sweat pants, a white t-shirt, and a big, fuzzy cardigan, like she’d been ready for bed.

  She stood back a bit, her lips tight. “Are the police coming to arrest me?”

  The simple ask aimed a high-powered fire extinguisher at the anger flames I’d been fanning since I figured it out. Maybe she needed to be a little scared first to make her finally be honest with me, but seeing someone that frightened didn’t make me feel good. It made me want to run right at whatever was frightening them and take it out. In this case, I’d be taking out myself.

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “Please sit. The police aren’t coming. At least not right now. But you’ve lied to me again, and this was the last strike.”

  Her eyebrows pulled down in the middle, and she sank to the edge of the couch. “I don’t know what you mean. I’ve told you everything now.”

  If I didn’t know better, I would have said she was telling the truth. “Lee wasn’t Gina’s father. Case is. Sickle cell anemia has to be inherited from both parents. You can’t get it from only one.”

  Daphne shook her head, but then her mouth drooped open. “It was only one time.”

  Aaand now I was a bit angry at myself. “You didn’t know.”

  She shook her head again like she couldn’t help herself. “I thought she was Lee’s. Lee and I were sleeping together regularly, and Case and I…like I said, it was just once.”

  I was pretty sure “just once” was all it ever took, but I could see how she would have assumed the baby was Lee’s. “If I figured this out, the police won’t be far behind. It could look like Case killed Lee because you wouldn’t leave him.”

  “I don’t think so.” She wrapped her sweater tighter around her, like she needed the comfort. “Maybe. It happened because I found out that Lee had cheated on me again, and I needed someone to talk to. Grady was at work, so I went to Case. He said I shouldn’t be with someone who didn’t respect me enough to be faithful to me. I told him I couldn’t break up with Lee. Who else would want me?” Her lips picked up the tiniest bit at the corners. “Case said he would. When he said it, I figured out I’d been in love with him for years.”

  She didn’t need to open the closed door. I could imagine where things went from there.

  Daphne scrubbed a hand across her eyes. “Case worked nights for the next few weeks. We didn’t get a chance to talk about what had happened and what it meant for us. By the time we did, I’d found out I was pregnant, and I thought it was Lee’s. I felt like I had to get back together with him. He promised he wouldn’t cheat again.”

  I had a pretty good guess what happened next. “But he did.”

  “He did. I hadn’t gotten up the courage yet to tell him about the baby.” Daphne sucked her hands into her sleeves. “We had that big fight in front of Hops that everyone saw. He called me afterward and told me that the girl I heard about was before we got back together. So I took him back. I thought I had to. I was having his baby. If I hadn’t gone back to him, I wouldn’t have been anywhere near where he was killed that night.”

  She could see her mistakes now in hindsight, but she shouldn’t blame herself for not seeing them then.

  Still, it left us with a huge problem. The police were going to see motive in the fact that Case and Daphne slept together and Case was the actual father of her child.

  I moved from the chair to the couch. “Are you one hundred percent sure that Case didn’t kill Lee to protect you?”

  She looked down at her knees and then back up to my face. “You should have seen his face that night. He was scared. He made me promise that I hadn’t killed Lee.”

  “Then we need to work together to figure out who might have wanted Lee dead. Because unless I find the real killer, I think Case is goi
ng to prison for this.”

  16

  I stayed with Daphne for another two hours. She walked me through that night again in detail. None of my questions yielded anything new or useful.

  We moved on to the names of the women Lee cheated with. The only good possibility I could come up with was that one of them—or an angry dad, brother, or boyfriend—had done something to Lee. I didn’t recognize any of the names, which meant I’d need Hal to track down their current addresses and phone numbers for me.

  I told her to include anyone she knew or suspected Lee cheated with. She only knew of three for sure, but the suspected list added five more names.

  Once I left, I sat in my car for a minute, waiting for it to warm up, and texted the list to Hal, despite the late hour.

  A response pinged in before I could put my car into drive. Received. Might not be able to get to them until Monday.

  It was only Thursday night. Finding addresses and current phone numbers for the people on my list shouldn’t have been that much of a challenge for Hal. I’d had him dig up much more difficult information.

  Another text zipped into my phone.

  Anderson has me digging up information that he thinks could make a case. He needs it by Monday. I’ll be working all weekend as is.

  It might be time for Hal to hire more staff. We weren’t even his only clients. But in this situation, Anderson’s task had to take precedence. Case hadn’t been arrested yet. My curiosity might take a hit from waiting to track down Lee Mills’ romantic conquests, but my clients wouldn’t.

  Unfortunately, it meant I couldn’t pawn off going to McClanahan & Associates tomorrow on Russ using the excuse that I was too busy. Until Hal got me information on my list of names, my investigation was at a standstill.

  The next morning, I sat in my car outside McClanahan & Associates for five minutes before I convinced myself to turn off the engine. Turning it off gave me a timeline. I’d soon get cold and have to go in.

  Suspecting what I did about Ashley being behind all the delays in the purchase of our property—not to mention the trees that died as a consequence—made me wish I could pull an ostrich rather than facing her.

  I shouldn’t drag my feet. Our payment had been accepted by Mr. Huffman’s bank, and all available Sugarwood staff were out in the field, trying to get our surviving saplings into the ground. I’d teased Mark when I’d kissed him goodbye that it was awfully convenient he had a conference to attend this weekend in Ohio.

  With a day of hard work ahead, I’d only broken away to pay our bill. Between Russ and me, I was the expendable one when it came to planting the trees. I didn’t have nearly the experience Russ had. It made sense for me to go.

  That, and Elise and I had agreed that I should mention to Tom that I felt Ashley had caused unnecessary delays and that made me concerned she might be behind my paperwork disappearing. Elise couldn’t say anything officially yet. We thought Tom should know in the meantime so he could keep a closer watch on her until she’d either been cleared or Elise found solid evidence.

  The heat had drained out of my car, and cold nipped at the exposed skin on my face.

  Maybe this was so difficult because I’d never had to fire anyone. Approaching Tom with this information felt like signing Ashley’s pink slip. If she turned out to be innocent, I’d have placed unfounded doubt about her in his mind. Then again, I knew for a fact that she’d maliciously failed to schedule my appointments with him in the past. Having Tom observe her behavior more closely for a short period of time wouldn’t hurt. It might even make doing future business with them more pleasant if she turned out to be innocent.

  I placed a hand on the door handle, and my phone rang. Elise’s name and a picture of her with her kids flashed on the screen.

  Perhaps she had the evidence she needed, and I wouldn’t have to be the one to talk to Tom after all.

  “I got the phone number of the other buyer from Mr. Huffman,” Elise said, “and it doesn’t match any incoming or outgoing calls from Ashley’s phone records.”

  Granted, I didn’t like Ashley, but even objectively, the evidence seemed to point to her. Elise had suspected her, too. “You checked both her home phone and cell phone?”

  Elise made an mmhmm noise. “She only has a cell phone, and I requested them for a full month before you even started negotiating with Mr. Huffman.”

  Ashley could have a burner phone, but that implied a certain amount of savvy and forethought for covering her tracks that the rest of this situation didn’t show. A woman who went to the trouble of buying a burner phone would have also left obvious signs of a break-in so that the police wouldn’t suspect it was an inside job.

  Besides, if she had bought a burner phone, we’d have no way of knowing or tracking it.

  “What about other numbers?” I asked. “For the buyer. If they’re a big corporation the way it sounded, they might have multiple phone numbers.”

  “I checked that, too.” Elise sounded like she would have patted herself on the back had her arms been long enough. “None of the numbers associated with them either called or were called by Ashley.”

  I tapped my fingers on the armrest. That meant that Ashley probably wasn’t involved in what had happened. Maybe it was all my imagination. Maybe there was no big conspiracy.

  Except that someone had deleted files from their computer system. The odds of that happening accidentally at the very wrong time were astronomically small.

  Now I didn’t know how to proceed. “Do I still talk to Tom McClanahan as planned?”

  “You can’t.” All self-congratulation was gone from Elise’s voice. “If it wasn’t Ashley, then Tom is most likely our mole.”

  At any other time, Elise using the word mole, like we were in a spy movie, would have made me crack up.

  But my heart just felt heavy this time. Tom wasn’t a defense attorney like I was, but we were both lawyers. Why would he do something like this? He could be disbarred. Depending on how hard the Fair Haven police decided they wanted to be, he could face fines or even jail time if they considered it a form of corporate espionage.

  Lawyers did illegal things all the time, but I couldn’t see it in this case. Reading people was my gift. Even though I hadn’t felt I needed to read Tom, I should have noticed something off in the many conversations we had about this purchase.

  It couldn’t be him. Someone must have broken into their offices using a stolen key. That would have been a great cover for the real thief since all eyes would focus on Tom or Ashley.

  My brain clicked in to the fact that Elise was still talking.

  “I’m trying to get a hold of Tom’s phone records. We’ll see if they give us any better answers.”

  I nodded and then remembered she couldn’t see me. “Let me know what you find out.”

  In the meantime, I’d pay my bill like nothing was wrong. I couldn’t let either of them see that I suspected anything. If I tipped Tom off and he turned out to be behind this, he’d have time to destroy any evidence—of this and any other shady dealing he’d helped with in the past.

  17

  I’d once thought that snowshoeing was of the devil based on how it made my body feel like I’d been in a car wreck. Planting trees was worse.

  A long, hot soak in the tub didn’t even help. Then again, neither did the fact that Mark still hadn’t called by the time I got out and dressed. He’d promised to call once he arrived and settled in, and that would have been a couple hours ago.

  Maybe I should make sure my ringer was turned on. Sometimes when I dropped my phone into my purse, the sound button flicked to the off position.

  If it was on, I’d give him ten more minutes and then I’d call him. Considering that worrying about me was part of his regular routine, he couldn’t even tease me about jumping the gun and worrying enough about him to call.

  Besides, this would be our first night apart since we got married. I already didn’t like it. I should have taken Russ up on his offer to babysi
t the dogs so I could follow Mark there. We only had about a dozen trees left to plant, and Russ had called in some of our seasonal workers to help, so he didn’t need me around tomorrow.

  I rifled absentmindedly through my purse for my phone. Actually, there wasn’t anything here that needed me for the weekend. Ohio wasn’t that far. I could pack up and surprise Mark. It would have been better if we’d driven together, but on the way home, we could drive “together” via Bluetooth phone call. I’d love to curl up and read a new mystery while he was in sessions. Maybe I’d even be able to sneak in and learn something new about forensic medicine that could help in a future case.

  I pulled open the lips of my purse in earnest. Where was my phone?

  I moved over to the counter and dumped everything out.

  No phone.

  So I must have left it in a coat pocket. I searched the pockets of my dress coat, my regular coat, and Uncle Stan’s old coat that I still liked to wear sometimes when working around Sugarwood.

  No phone.

  Oh no. When we were planting the last of the trees, Russ saw me put it in my pocket and he warned me about it getting crushed. I’d taken it out and set it on that big fallen tree on the edge of the bush. I must not have picked it back up.

  Not only would Mark be frantic if he’d been trying to reach me, but I certainly couldn’t drive to Ohio without a phone. Not with my navigational skills—or lack thereof.

  I grabbed a flashlight from the shelf where we kept it in case of a power outage. I had to go get my phone.

  The temperature had dropped again, low enough that it felt like my lungs might freeze. I wrapped a scarf around my head and face so only my eyes peered out. When I first saw Mandy do it in preparation for a walk with the dogs, I’d told her she looked like a pink bandit. By the end of that week, though, she had me doing it. It was better than wearing a ski mask.