Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  “Who was me?” Arg. That came out a lot less articulate than I intended. Maybe my nerves weren’t quite as under control as I’d have liked.

  “Chief Wilson.” She seemed to choke on the name.

  Crap. Double crap. If she was related to Chief Wilson, she might be capable of pulling a crazy stunt that would end up with me dead. Worse, she wouldn’t do it tonight. She’d plan it out and be methodical about it. I’d never be able to sleep again. Or eat anything I hadn’t prepared myself…from freshly purchased food.

  The car felt like it was moving even though we hadn’t left the parking lot yet.

  Becky jammed her keys at the ignition, missed, then hit it the second time. She peeled out of the parking lot, her tires skidding slightly. That certainly wasn’t like Chief Wilson. It also wasn’t like the controlled Becky I’d driven here with.

  My head cleared. This didn’t feel like anger directed at me. This was anger directed somewhere else, the kind that exploded everywhere because it couldn’t hit the target it wanted.

  “I think you should pull the car over,” I said in my calmest voice. It didn’t even sound like me.

  My mom was probably already on the phone to the police given how erratically Becky was driving.

  Becky actually followed my directions. She pulled the car off onto the shoulder, put on her four-ways, and rested her head against the steering wheel. “You’re not the only one in the group that Chief Wilson hurt.”

  For a second, my body felt like we’d hit something. Or like something rammed into my chest hard enough to push the air out of my lungs.

  Surely he couldn’t have tried to kill other people. He’d only attacked me because I discovered what he’d done to my Uncle Stan and what he planned to do to his wife.

  She lifted her face to me. Her eyes were dry, and she didn’t seem to be fighting tears the way I’d expected. Her expression made me think that was because she’d cried herself out long ago.

  “He wouldn’t file rape charges because the woman who reported it was dating the man who raped her. And Penny’s husband.” Her hands closed and released, closed and released around the wheel. “Chief Wilson knew. Penny went to him for help years ago, but her husband was one of his officers, and he told her that she was lying and that no one would believe her if she tried to slander a good man. Even now that she’s out of his house, she’s still afraid every day. Since he retired, he’s been following her and leaving messages on her answering machine about how she has to come back to him.”

  The tears I wanted to cry for those women clogged my throat. To be hurt and have no one listen to you, no one defend you. For all the other ways my parents let me down, they would have destroyed the career of anyone who tried to do that to me.

  I could believe every word Becky had said. Chief Wilson had covered up everything in his town that he thought might hurt his run for county sheriff. He wanted Fair Haven to seem like an Eden, and all thanks to his leadership and guidance.

  A car passed us on the other side of the road, its lights blazing into Becky’s car. Even partly blinded from the flash, I recognized it. My mom. She really had been the right choice for this all along. Mark would have charged in prematurely out of fear that something would happen to me. My mom was better at gauging when to wait.

  “Thank you,” Becky said, “for finally making sure Chief Wilson couldn’t hurt anyone else.”

  It was praise I didn’t deserve. I hadn’t been thinking about anyone but myself at the time. “I was trying to get justice for my uncle. Chief Wilson killed him.”

  Becky pulled the car back onto the highway. “I think justice is all most of us want. That, and a chance to start over.”

  Justice and a chance to start over.

  The words rang so loudly in my mind that they hurt. Becky hadn’t named the woman who tried to report her rape and was dismissed. A woman who never received justice.

  A woman who might be Becky. If her rapist was Bruce Vilsack, she might have decided to take justice into her own hands.

  As soon as Becky’s car pulled out of the parking lot of Dad’s Hardware, I took out my phone and did a search on her name. The only thing that came up was her Facebook profile. All her privacy settings were locked down tight, so I couldn’t get a look at her old posts to see if she’d ever shared a non-work-based picture of herself and Bruce Vilsack. I sent her a friend request.

  My mom slid into the passenger seat. “Did you put your phone on vibrate?”

  Was this going to turn into a lecture on how she couldn’t call me when she needed to check if I was in trouble? Because I had to play my part. It would have been rude to have my phone ringing during the meeting in the same way that it would be rude not to mute it during church or a movie. “Of course.”

  My mom clicked the seatbelt into place. She was supposed to drive my car home, so clearly this was about more than scaring her.

  “What’s going on?”

  My mom flipped her phone toward me. The screen displayed a single text message with an address. It was from Elise.

  My mom was already reaching toward the car’s built-in GPS. “There’s been another death.”

  11

  Even in the dark, it was easy to find the right house. Police vehicles sat out front, lights flashing. The red, blue, and white danced off the front of the house in a way that made it look like it belonged in a Tim Burton Christmas movie. I half expected Jack and Sally to peek their skeletal and sutured heads around the corner. The thought alone made me shudder. Tim Burton’s movies were too creepy for me.

  Elise waved to us from beside the front door. “It might be a waste bringing you out here, but when I called Chief McTavish, his wife said she’d been instructed to tell anyone who called to go bother the consultants.”

  I circled my hands in a walk-it-back gesture. “What’s happened?”

  Elise led us over to where we could put on crime scene gear. “At first glance, it looks like a suicide. He left a note confessing to abusing his wife for years.”

  A note, or the lack of one, didn’t prove or disprove a suicide, but it certainly helped. Especially when it revealed the reason the deceased had felt life wasn’t worth living anymore. “Hand-written?”

  Elise nodded, but her body posture was awkward. She reminded me a bit of a high school chemistry student being asked to perform an experiment alongside a Noble laureate.

  Elise didn’t often get the chance to participate in an investigation, let alone lead one. Maybe she felt like this was above her pay grade, and she didn’t want to disappoint Chief McTavish. Or, more likely, Erik. “Do you have a reason to suspect it’s not a suicide?”

  “Not really. It’s just that most of the suicides around here are teenagers or the elderly. This time it’s a former Fair Haven police officer.”

  Like with any high-stress profession, especially one that involved trusting your co-workers with your life, the police took a death of one of their own seriously. Not that they didn’t take all death cases seriously—they did—but when one of their own died under suspicious circumstances, they became almost anal about making sure they investigated everything. I’d seen it before in DC when an off-duty officer died in a hit-and-run accident.

  But in this case, it might be unwarranted. More police officers died in the United States each year from suicide than from gunfire and traffic accidents combined.

  “Did he have any connection to Bruce Vilsack?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it, but I sent Scherwin to ask Vilsack’s family and roommate.”

  “When did it happen?”

  Elise pulled out her notebook. “The neighbor called 911 about an hour ago and reported hearing what sounded like a gunshot next door. Mark says time of death is consistent with that.”

  I hadn’t realized I’d been holding tension in my shoulders until it let go. It wasn’t likely this case was connected to Vilsack’s, and if it turned out it was, Becky would be off the suspect list. An hour ago, I could alibi her mys
elf.

  My mom and I finished gearing up, and Elise led us into the house. The inside had a 90s décor look to it—blonde wood; a mustard-colored couch with green, blue, and pink pillows; and a coffee table that looked like it belonged outside in a bistro rather than inside.

  “He’s in here,” Elise said. She held open a door.

  My mom went straight in. I sucked in a deep breath, but the air didn’t want to go down, like swallowing something too wide for my throat.

  I could do this. I’d accepted this consultant position, and that meant I had to be a part of things. Whether my stomach liked what my eyes saw or not.

  I ducked past Elise.

  Had it not been for the crime scene techs crawling over everything like ants on a potato chip, the room would have looked like any living room.

  Then I glanced in the other direction.

  My stomach contents rolled up into my throat, and I wanted to sink down onto the floor.

  Mark and my mom now stood next to the man’s body. He was sitting in a chair, but his posture had an unnatural backward slump to it, to one side and with his head lolling backward at an uncomfortable angle.

  I kept my gaze away from the wound where his temple should have been.

  My mom and Mark were perfectly capable of looking at any detail that needed to be seen up close. Unless they wanted me contaminating the crime scene by losing my dinner, I was better off taking in the big picture. If I was going to keep getting involved with murder cases this way, I should carry a supply of ginger candies in my purse.

  From my wide-angle position, the placement of the dead man’s chair seemed strange compared with the rest of the room. It was the kind of chair I’d have expected to see nestled up to a dining room table, and it wasn’t even angled toward the TV. Instead, had the man been alive, he would have been facing a wall.

  I shifted my view. The wall he’d been facing wasn’t bare. It was one of those family photo walls that were popular when I was little, with the parents’ wedding photo in the center and then family photos and pictures of any children growing out from it.

  If he had committed suicide, he’d chosen to spend his last seconds on earth looking at pictures of his family. That made sense, given that his note expressed grief over how he’d hurt his wife. Mark would probably decree this a suicide by tomorrow.

  I moved closer to the wall.

  My hand flew to my mouth, and I stopped it before the latex made contact. Younger versions of Penny stared back at me from the wall.

  The dead man behind me had to be her abusive husband.

  So many thoughts avalanched through my brain that it was almost a minute before I could sort them out.

  “Elise?” my voice felt small to my ears, like I’d whispered rather than speaking in a normal tone. But I must have spoken normally because Elise joined me. “I think I might have found a connection between Vilsack and your victim. His wife and one of The Sunburnt Arms employees attend the same PTSD support group.”

  “You think his wife did this to him?” Elise asked.

  “She couldn’t have. She was at the support group meeting when the neighbor called 911.”

  But maybe the group encouraged its members to confront the people who’d harmed them. It seemed like a stupid policy if they did, but for all I knew, confronting their attacker for those who’d been victimized was a step in gaining closure. If it was, I certainly wasn’t doing it. One was dead, and for the others, I’d have to travel all over the country. My emotional stability was much better served by never seeing any of them again.

  Elise peered at the photos on the wall like they might have a clue hidden inside. “If you don’t think she killed him, then it’s a loose connection. You’ve been here long enough to know that everyone in this area is connected to everyone else somehow.”

  True enough. “I was thinking more that, in twelve-step groups, one of the steps is making amends with the people you’ve hurt. A support group where the members are victims rather than abusers or addicts might have something similar where they need to confront their abuser. Penny might have told off her husband in such a way that guilt overcame him. It could have even been by email since it sounded like he was hounding her and she didn’t feel safe. Becky might have tried to talk to Vilsack and then had to defend herself from him? Or perhaps he’d mocked her and she lost it?”

  Elise’s mouth formed a small O. “You think Vilsack…?”

  I nodded. Elise was smart. I didn’t have to spell it out for her to figure out that I suspected Bruce Vilsack of raping Becky. It would fit with what his roommate said about him being a bit of a player.

  Elise glanced back at where Mark and my mom had made way for the stretcher and crew who’d transport the body back to Cavanaugh Funeral Home. Mark could conduct a full autopsy there. “As soon as I can get away from here, I’ll run Becky’s name through the system and see if anything pops.”

  “We might have to do legwork on this one instead. It sounds like Chief Wilson might have covered up any reports made.”

  Elise rolled her eyes. “Given everything else he apparently covered up, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll check anyway.”

  Mark left with the body, and my mom joined Elise and me.

  My mom held her hands awkwardly away from her body, as if she wasn’t sure where to put them so as not to contaminate the scene or get anything untoward on herself. She probably wasn’t sure. My parents came in long after a crime scene was released and cleaned. The closest they came to it all was examining photos and reports.

  That made my mom’s reaction to it all that much more impressive. I’d seen a few dead bodies up close, and describing me as squeamish was still an understatement. My mom had gone straight for the body as if she’d worked in a morgue only yesterday.

  She moved her hands as if she wanted to plant them on her hips in her trademarked gesture, then lowered them to her sides again, still keeping them out enough to prevent them from brushing her thighs. “This wasn’t a suicide.”

  12

  Elise’s throat worked like she’d swallowed her tongue. “What do you mean it wasn’t a suicide? He left a note.”

  Her reaction made it clear that calling us in had been a failsafe for her. She’d believed it was a suicide, but because it was a former police officer, she’d wanted to be able to show that she’d done her due diligence.

  My mom motioned for us to follow her back to the chair. With the body gone, all I had to avoid looking at was the blood stain on the floor. A crime scene tech hovered nearby, clearly waiting for my mom’s permission before tagging and bagging the rest of the evidence.

  My mom pointed with her foot to the pen and paper lying on the floor. “Left side.” She stuck her pointer finger out toward where I knew the blood stain and gun lay. “Right side.”

  It felt a bit like when my mom worked with clerking law students. She’d give them enough to see what their conclusion should be if they were paying attention, but she wouldn’t give them the answer. They needed to learn to see the pieces and put them together themselves.

  I hadn’t realized until now that she also worked that way with peers. Maybe to see if they’d come to the same conclusion she had, thereby verifying her deduction. Which meant that I might have misinterpreted when she used to do the same to me. I always assumed it was because she felt I wasn’t competent enough to come to the right conclusion on my own.

  I was pretty sure what the evidence said to me now was the same as what it said to her. Not only did we share genetics, but she’d trained me. The real question was whether Elise would agree. She didn’t come with the same bias I had of seeing the evidence through my mom’s lens.

  “If he wrote the note with his left hand,” Elise said, “he wouldn’t have shot himself with his right. He would have used his dominant hand for both.”

  My mom smiled, but I couldn’t join in. If this wasn’t a suicide, that destroyed my theory about members of the group confronting their attackers and the murder-suic
ide being a consequence of that. And it meant the two murders might not even be connected.

  We needed to figure out if Vilsack had been Becky’s rapist.

  Since Chief McTavish was still out sick, we took over his office. It gave us room to work together. Elise used McTavish’s computer to start running Becky’s name through the system. I settled in with Mark’s autopsy report on Vilsack, and my mom—who seemed like the best choice because no one dared cross her—went with Scherwin to look up the past cases Penny’s husband had been a part of in the hope that we could find a different suspect for his potential murder there. Scherwin had returned from talking to Vilsack’s family and roommate with the news that, as far as they knew, he hadn’t known Penny’s husband.

  Mark’s autopsy report didn’t say much that I hadn’t known already. He’d been killed with a heavy, rounded object. The results from the lab confirmed the blood on the bat matched, so that was our murder weapon.

  He’d lain in one spot for a while before eventually being moved out to Susan and Jurgen Schmitkes’ land. Why whoever killed him left him there so long was a question we still needed to answer. If I’d been forced to guess, it was likely because a guest or someone else was out in the hallway or downstairs at the time and they couldn’t move him then without being spotted.

  Mark had listed time of death as 6:03 pm. That seemed awfully specific given how long post-death they’d discovered the body. With a long gap, the best a medical examiner could do was estimate a range.

  I pulled out my phone. How did you determine TOD on Vilsack?

  “Becky was raped,” Elise said, “but not by Vilsack.”

  I fumbled my phone and grabbed it just before it smashed into the desk.

  Elise spun the monitor around.

  On the screen was a newspaper article rather than a police report. In more detail than I needed, it described how Rebecca Holmes was grabbed by a man she didn’t know while walking home from a late-night college class. When he cut her face for the pleasure of hearing her cry out, she realized he planned to kill her after raping her. She watched for a chance to escape. She got one when he relieved himself post act. Police were able to charge her attacker based on her testimony and DNA evidence, since he was in the system for a B&E.