Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6
Page 14
By the time Chief McTavish was done, I didn’t have to ask what would happen next. Holly had made herself look guilty enough that if he didn’t arrest her, he could be accused of negligence at best and favoritism at worst.
As he led her from the room to take her to booking, Holly looked back over her shoulder at me like a child being taken from her mother at the hospital. I really was a newbie at being primary on a case. I hadn’t remembered to tell her what would happen next.
I followed after them. “Wait. I need one more minute with her.”
Holly wrapped both hands around my wrist, clinging. Her eyes were too wide for her face, and tears ran down her cheeks. “I want to go home.”
The same feeling I’d had—the need to comfort and protect—with Drew’s mom and Amy flooded through me. I could almost hear my mother’s critique, that it was my biological clock and maternal instincts and that I should have a child of my own so I could retain objectivity in my work. I prayed that my paranoid projection of her opinion was wrong. I wanted a child someday, but I wanted motherhood to make me more compassionate to others, not less.
I placed my free hand over Holly’s. “They’re going to hold you until you’re arraigned. It should happen tomorrow, before the weekend. The judge will set bail then, and I’ll try to get you home, okay?”
She was shaking her head. “We can’t afford bail.”
Given that Holly had already proven herself a flight risk, bail would be high. She was right to be scared. As much as I might want to help financially, I couldn’t, not unless I could also equip Holly with a tracker anklet and handcuff her to my radiator—if I’d had one. Wise people didn’t gamble their business and the livelihood of their employees on someone who’d already shown they would run if they got scared.
I couldn’t say any of that. It’d only make her more afraid. “Don’t worry about that right now. We’ll figure it out.”
Chief McTavish handed her off to a waiting officer.
I stood in the middle of the waiting area and watched until they disappeared through a door. It felt like all the air had been sucked from the room, leaving me in a vacuum that crushed my lungs.
I couldn’t do this. Not solo. Not without some much better lawyer to put into words the arguments that I built. With so much evidence against Holly, I wasn’t a skilled enough attorney to get her acquitted if this went to trial. Unless I could find enough solid evidence against someone else to have the charges against her dismissed, she was going to spend her maturing years in prison. And when she came out, the girl she was—both good and bad—would be gone forever. She might have been better off with a public defender. Whoever she got might not care about her or her case, but they’d at least be able to string two coherent sentences together in public.
World’s smallest violin, I could almost hear my dad saying. Successful people don’t waste time feeling sorry for themselves.
Sometimes I thought it was a wonder with parents like mine that I hadn’t rebelled, joined a biker gang, and ended up pregnant at sixteen.
But he was partly right this once. I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I had twenty-four hours to prove that Holly didn’t kill Drew. That meant I had to get those pictures from Chief McTavish today.
20
Chief McTavish had retired to his office without so much as a goodbye. If I asked permission to see him, he might turn me away and tell me to come back later or to wait until after Holly’s arraignment, so this seemed like one of those times it was better to ask forgiveness instead.
I pretended to be searching around in my purse for my phone in case the desk officer looked up, and I slowly worked my way back toward the chief’s office.
I didn’t knock.
Chief McTavish had a phone in one hand, a pen in the other, and a look on his face that said I must be a hallucination because I couldn’t have possibly just done what I did.
In hindsight, this might have been unwise. An angry chief was a chief who would refuse my request. I was so tired, I knew I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d deserve any lecture I got from Mark later about leaving the hospital. And he’d better get here soon to pick me up, since my judgment was clearly impaired.
The chief set the phone back in its cradle and stared at me.
I needed to say something good. Fast.
“I’m sorry to burst in on you like this, but you disappeared before I had a chance to ask for some of the material I need.” That didn’t really excuse barging into his office. “I’m still not feeling well, and I wasn’t sure I would be alright if I had to wait.”
I dropped into the nearest chair. It wasn’t entirely a lie.
The chief didn’t respond, but his face went back to nuanced pink instead of the flat red it was trending toward.
“I’m going to need a better look at the pictures on the SD card I turned in to you,” I said. “They could be instrumental in defending Holly.”
Another partial truth. If I told him that I was looking for another suspect in those photos, he might not give them to me. He might simply assign one of his officers to look through them, and I couldn’t leave this in someone else’s hands.
He straightened the picture frames on his desk. “I did my homework better after our last meeting.”
That would explain his slightly less antagonistic behavior toward me recently. I almost asked him what, exactly, he’d found out, but that would have come across as needy, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. My parents were the ones with the reputation for results, as well as for being cutthroat and agnostic to the guilt of their clients. I’d been known for not living up to their reputation and finally quitting because I couldn’t hack it—the disappointing daughter of two success stories.
I clamped my lips shut and waited for Chief McTavish to continue on his own.
He scratched an eyebrow with his thumb and broke eye contact for two blinks. “I’m willing to admit when I’m wrong, and I hope we can have a good professional relationship. Ask for a copy of the pictures out front.” He picked up the phone receiver again. “That doesn’t mean I have to like you. You still poke your nose in where it doesn’t belong.” He pointed the receiver at the door. “Now get out of my office.”
The desk officer gave me a disk of the photos that were on the SD card at almost the same moment Mark walked through the front doors.
Mark waited until we were alone in my car to ask about it.
I filled him in on what I’d learned from Holly. I’d gotten her permission to share the information with whoever I needed in order to put together a strong defense. “Since she said he spotted whatever it was while surveilling Shawn White’s drug trade, it should be in among the other pictures he took.”
“Theoretically, but we don’t know what we’re looking for.”
True enough. I redirected my gaze out the window. The sky was a light blue, leaning toward purple as the sun set, but the roads were still darker than usual and full of puddles, suggesting it’d rained earlier in the day. Russ had told me that with the start of the spring rains, the tourist season was officially over. If I had any takers for my free replacement tour, I’d be driving them out in our wagon rather than the sleigh and hoping we didn’t get bogged down in the mud. The snow that had covered the ground a few days ago had disappeared completely.
I wasn’t going out into the woods with any of them, though, until we were sure which one had killed Drew. My involvement in the case wasn’t a secret any longer, and I wasn’t stupid enough to knowingly put myself in a dangerous situation. Despite what Mark might think, I didn’t want to die.
I looked back at Mark’s profile. One of the nice perks of our relationship that I hadn’t thought about before we started dating was that I could watch him without it being weird. “I was thinking that maybe he’d gotten shots of whatever group has been robbing the houses. If we could figure out from the pictures where they were taken, then we can see if any break-ins were reported in that area. We should be able to get the tim
e and date from the metadata if we see anything unusual in the photos to corroborate.”
“Erik said a couple of the kids they identified from the photos already also confessed to robbing houses to get money for the drugs. The chief basically advocated for leniency for them as long as they completed their community service and worked to pay back what they’d taken. If all we see in Drew’s pictures is them coming out of a house that doesn’t belong to them, I don’t think they’re responsible for Drew’s murder. None of them were on the tour.”
I gouged a nail into the seam in my car door. Another theory foiled. On top of Mark’s very logical conclusion, if it’d been teenagers committing the break-ins, Drew probably wouldn’t have tried to blackmail them anyway.
At this rate, Holly was going to jail, and it’d break both Nancy and Daisy’s hearts. “Do you mind helping me look anyway?”
“Have I said no to you yet? Besides, you should still be under medical supervision. A few more nights and I won’t even notice the lumps in your couch anymore.”
21
We arrived back to my house to the aroma of lasagna baking in the oven.
My mouth watered. After hospital food, my cooking would have tasted like a gourmet feast, and this smelled a million times better. Except I knew Mark’s culinary skills weren’t any better than mine. He’d either bought it or… “Please tell me your mom didn’t make us a lasagna.”
Mark gave me a sheepish grin. “She was already making a pan for them, so she said it was no trouble.”
There was no redeeming this. Not only had I thrown up on her, probably ruining whatever she’d been wearing, but she now knew I couldn’t cook. “How are you going to survive my cooking long-term with a mom who can bake lasagna that smells like that?”
His gaze dipped to my lips, and his grin turned cheeky. “You have other redeeming qualities.”
His lips barely had time to brush mine before the soft squeaking from the laundry room where the dogs were turned into full-blown howling. They wanted out to see me. Immediately.
Mark pulled away and headed for the door. “Toby’s been okay, but I couldn’t even get Velma interested in her toys. She’s been lying by the door, waiting for you to come home.”
Two cone-heads emerged from the room as soon as Mark released them from their crates.
Worry spiked in my chest. “What happened to Toby?”
Velma, with her experience wearing the cone, stopped in time, but Toby rammed into my leg, hard, and nearly knocked me over. I grabbed the edge of the kitchen counter to stay upright.
Mark wisely stayed outside of the bruise zone of cones and tails. “He’s fine. I didn’t want to worry you while you were in the hospital and couldn’t do anything about it, but I had to take Velma back to the vet because her incision started to ooze.”
“How should that not worry me?” I tried to get a better look at Toby, but he wouldn’t stop moving, and Velma kept pushing him aside. I wasn’t going to be able to get a decent look at either of them while they were circling me like piranhas that fed on cuddles. “Now I have two sick dogs.”
“One sick dog. One dog who can’t keep his tongue to himself.”
Wait, what? I stopped trying to examine them and let them continue wriggling around me. “You’re telling me Toby is wearing a cone because he’s the one who’s been causing Velma problems with her incision?”
Mark nodded. “The vet figures Toby thought he was helping her by cleaning a wound she couldn’t take care of herself.”
I made a bleck face. “I’m honestly not sure whether to find that adorable or disgusting.”
At least that was one mystery solved. The vet had said Velma shouldn’t have been able to reach the incision, and the allergy treatments weren’t working. We’d hit a dead end. Not unlike Drew’s case.
Mark was saying something to me, but a ringing sound had filled my ears. What if we’d done the same thing in Drew’s case? I’d believed the real killer had to be a reasonably tall man because of the angle of the blow. Mark assumed the same thing. That’s not what the evidence told us, though. It said whoever struck Drew was at a certain angle. One that might have been created by Drew squatting down and the killer standing up.
That meant the killer could have been a woman. Or a short man.
Mark waved a hand in front of my face like we were in a nineties sitcom. “Did the doctor check you for a concussion?”
I batted his hand away. “My head’s fine. I think I found a flaw in our theory about who could have killed Drew the way he died.”
I explained it to Mark.
“You’re right,” he said.
The oven timer went, and he slid on my purple-checkered oven mitts.
Heat spiraled down into my belly. Those goofy mitts and the way he took care of me and my dogs made him extra sexy. The physical boundaries Mark and I had decided to put on our relationship were new territory for me, and at times like this, it was hard to remember why we thought they were important. It was also hard to focus on anything but him.
“But right now that’s your one trump card for defending Holly,” Mark said.
That hard truth snapped me back to what I should be paying attention to—that I might have single-handedly destroyed Holly’s one hope at freedom.
Sometimes I hated how often Mark was right. Nancy would never forgive me if I accidentally proved Holly had done it. “I did tell them I wouldn’t defend Holly if she turned out to be guilty. I’d insist she take a plea deal or find another lawyer.”
Mark set the lasagna on top of the oven to cool for a few minutes. “Have you changed your mind about Holly’s innocence?”
All the evidence pointed to her, but I’d watched her lie to me, and I’d seen the difference in her when she told the truth. I’d also seen how flustered she got when trying to tell her story. Unless she’d faked all her reactions to throw us off—and she’d have to be a high-functioning sociopath to be able to succeed at that—she’d been telling the truth when she said she didn’t kill Drew.
On top of that, Nancy had so much faith in Holly. Love blinded people, but Nancy told me on her visit before my poisoning that Daisy was exactly like Holly at her age, and Daisy turned out well. Holly deserved that chance, too.
“I need to be able to prove that Drew wasn’t standing up before it would even matter.”
The killer could have forced Drew to his knees, but that would have required a weapon, and if they’d had a threatening weapon, they would have killed him with it rather than with my maple syrup tap.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture where I’d found Drew. He’d been lying in the snow at the base of one of the display trees with his camera next to him, so he’d likely been taking pictures right before he was attacked. I knew firsthand that Drew had a knack for finding unique angles. “He might have been kneeling or squatting to get the perfect camera angle.”
I grabbed my phone before Mark could talk me out of it and dialed Erik’s number. I put it on speaker so Mark could hear as well.
Erik answered on the first ring. That was good. He was probably at the station and could check what I wanted.
“Before you tell me that you can’t tell me anything, Chief McTavish has given me some access to the information around Drew’s case because I’m Holly Northgate’s lawyer.”
“Most people start with hello, Nicole.” His voice had that tone that said he was smiling on the inside even if his lips weren’t showing it. “Leading with that makes me think I’ll have to say no to what you’re gonna ask, but you can ask anyway.”
I wouldn’t put it past Erik to shut me down if he thought it would violate the rules. Maybe I should have called Elise instead, but she’d been taken off the case, and asking her to look up anything was like throwing her to the lions—or, more specifically, the lion. “All I want to know is the angle of the last photo Drew Harris took.”
The squeak of his chair and the mumble of voices too far away to be heard clearly filled the line.
I couldn’t hear if he was clicking computer keys, but I imagined the sounds anyway.
“It’s a picture of trees and a wooden bucket,” he finally said.
That explained why the police hadn’t put this together before either. They’d only looked at the pictures to see if Drew took a picture of a person prior to his death. When they saw nothing other than my trees and a maple syrup collection display, they’d moved on. “Where is it taken from? Straight on? From above?”
“Looks like he might have been kneeling, looking up at it. Now are you going to tell me what this is about?”
“I’ll call you back when I know.”
I caught the front end of a sigh as I disconnected, but I wasn’t going to give away what I’d figured out yet. That would have felt like betraying my duty to Holly. Besides, Erik was a good officer. He’d probably run with what I’d had him look at and put it together himself.
I had to hope I hadn’t burned my bridge while I was still standing on it. If we couldn’t find evidence that would tell us who Drew meant to blackmail, the final hole that sunk Holly might have been drilled by me.
As soon as we finished a very generous helping of Mrs. Cavanaugh’s lasagna, along with a salad to make it feel a little healthier, we settled in together on the couch with my laptop and the disc of Drew’s pictures.
My eyes wanted to drift shut. All I wanted was to tuck in close to Mark and rest my head on his shoulder. I hadn’t fully realized how much the poisoning had weakened me until I’d tried to go through a normal day.
But I couldn’t. Holly would be arraigned sometime tomorrow. All I had was tonight to figure out how to get the charges dropped.
I checked the date on the first image and the date on the last one. They’d been taken over a two-week span, with the final set taken the day before Drew confronted Amy. He must have stopped taking photos when he recognized her at the drop location. A quick skim showed that they were all taken at roughly the same spot, from different angles and at different times of day.