Roth Park was on the near side of Wolverhampton where Roth Creek raced and tumbled over rocks in a gully on its way to the St. Clair River. She followed the winding lane into the park past clumps of trees and bushes. The elevation descended toward the parking area, which gave easy access in nice weather to the open green area used by picnickers and families and, it was rumoured, on warm summer evenings by lovers as a meeting spot. The parking lot was rimmed by hedges, nice and private for secret rendezvous. This time of day with this chill breeze, it was bound to be deserted. She pulled into a parking space next to Morgan’s car and got out, looking around for the young woman, who was not in the driver’s seat as she had expected.
“You’re a freakin’ nosy witch, aren’t you?”
Jaymie turned slowly, trapped between the two vehicles, to find a gun pointed at her, clutched tightly in the hand of a tartan-clad Saunders Wallace.
Nineteen
TOO LATE SHE REALIZED it had all gone topsy-turvy faster than she had imagined it would. “Morgan figured it out, didn’t she?” Jaymie said, trying to calm her racing heart. In that moment, faced with that gun, she fully understood the danger; she could die, right here, right now, in this lonely parking lot. A knife she’d have a chance against. A baseball bat she could hope to fend off. But a handgun? It was made for one thing: killing a human.
“Morgan? Well, yeah, she did figure it out, later than I thought she would, sooner than I’d have liked.” His face was lined and shadowed, his expression grim. “My wife is not too bright, but she gets there eventually.”
His gun riveted her attention. Some people might say that if she had a gun of her own she’d be able to equalize the danger to her life. But unless she had it in her hand, ready, in this moment of crisis, she didn’t see how that was possible. Though Jakob had a rifle on the farm, Jaymie was not a gun person. Her brain and persuasive tongue would be her only weapons.
Jaymie worked at slowing her pulse, controlling her breathing. She’d been in tough situations before, and panicking would not help. As much as she longed to wildly look around, searching for escape, for the moment she needed to focus on Saunders. “She’s probably been figuring it out bit by bit for a while.” If only she had her phone in her hand she could try to figure out how to call 911. Or something . . . anything. Her teeth were starting to chatter—nerves or the cold?
“I can’t believe I fooled her for as long as I did.”
“You weren’t who you said you were, Morgan said. Miss Perry thought she was disillusioned, but I wondered right away if she was being literal, that you aren’t Saunders Wallace.” So far, no nervous quaver in her voice. How long could she maintain the façade of courage when her insides were quivering? “Is there a Saunders Wallace?”
The guy shrugged. “Yeah, but he died at the age of two years four months in 1986.”
“So, who are you really?” Jaymie was trying to slide her glance around, to see if there was anyone else in the park. But they were below road level and the park had large clusters of bridal wreath spirea and forsythia, as well as groves of young trees that hid the parking lot from view and the hedge along the parking lot that trapped her from easy escape. He had thought out carefully where to have her meet Morgan, and where he’d park her car. “You must have a name.”
He ignored her questions, saying, “I see you looking around. Don’t even imagine you can jabber at me enough that you can escape. Morgan is dead, and you’re going to join her. The police will have your last text exchange to confirm your plan to meet.” He smiled, and there was an eerie peace in his expression. “I’ll be heartbroken, of course, to find out what my lovely little wifey was up to. Morgan lured you here, forced you into her car, and then took off, speeding through town and beyond, out to Rock Valley Quarry, where she will accidentally crash the car and it will go up in flames, killing you both instantly.”
A chill ran down her back. He had it all planned out, and so quickly.
“And it will become obvious she was on a killing spree . . . I mean, Baird, and you . . . and then her aunt.” He shook his head, an exaggerated sad expression on his face. “So sad, but there’s proof right on her phone that she’s the one Baird was meeting before he died.”
“But . . .” She was still confused about some things Saunders was saying, but she remembered hearing that Baird had been planning to meet someone, though his secretary didn’t know who; he no doubt thought he was meeting Morgan. There was probably a text on his phone from a phone registered to Morgan, maybe a burner. But poor Fergus was really having an unplanned and lethal meeting with Saunders. Jaymie swallowed hard. Wallace must have filched the silver nutmeg grater Morgan had bought her aunt. He planned all along to use it, knowing it would be traced back to her and tie Baird’s death in to the one he planned for Miss Perry. If Morgan had known about the nutmeg grater in Baird’s mouth she would have put it all together, but no one was privy to that information but Jaymie and the police. “You seem to be adept at this kind of thing.”
“It’s not my first rodeo, doll,” he said with the trademark grin that locals had come to recognize and call the Wallace Cheese on his TV ads. “Now get in the car.”
“Where is Morgan?” she asked, stalling, her mind spinning as she tried to think of how to get out of this mess.
“I told you, she’s dead.” He glanced at the trunk.
“This is never going to work, you know,” she said. She had to stay out of that car; once she climbed in, it became her casket. “No one is going to buy that a girl like Morgan could force me into a car and kill us both. I have a bit of a reputation for surviving things like this.”
His face reddened, the color flushing up to the roots of his hair; his natural hair color, growing out under the red dye, was brown with a hint of gray. He was older than he pretended, lines and shadows showing his age. The gun wavered as he trembled with anger. “You think you’re good, but this will be your last performance, and then you’re done. Too bad for the hubs and kid, but you’re a goner.”
He knew about Jakob and Jocie!
He smirked as he caught her panicked expression, and regained his confidence. “Now, get in the damn car or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
“Why, Saunders? What was this all about?” she asked, still desperately stalling, still trying to figure out how to avoid death. “I’m assuming you were trying to kill Lois Perry and . . .” A thought grabbed her and it all made sense. She could see his plan.
“Get in the freakin’ car right now!” he screamed.
She put out her hands in a placating gesture. “I will. I will! But first . . . I’m one of those people who have to know they’re right, you know? It’ll go quicker if you satisfy my curiosity. S-so, let me get this straight: you tried to kill Miss Perry. You had a key.” She paused and eyed the fellow. “Or . . . you had one made from Morgan’s. That way you could sneak in and do things like put dangerous pills in Miss Perry’s dosette, and string the wire across the stairs. When did you do that? It must have been the very day it happened. The back stairs are closest to her sitting room, so she would have used them to go up to bed the night before.”
“That old bat’s hearing is awful,” he growled. “She didn’t even hear me sneak in that morning. I’m a master at planning; I put the screw eyes in place while I was doing home repairs for dear old Auntie Lois the day before,” he sneered. “That way I just had to let myself back in the next morning, attach the wire, and let myself out.” His expression darkened again. “I had told her I’d be by at ten thirty to do a couple more tasks around the house, but I started banging on the back door at ten. That part worked out perfectly.”
That was why she was still in her housedress, and why she didn’t have the appointment marked on her calendar! She didn’t write in a notation if it was just Morgan or Saunders coming over. It also explained why the front door was unlocked; Miss Perry, expecting Saunders at ten thirty, must have descended the front stairs after Estelle left and unlocked it, then gone back
up to change. But then Saunders showed up early. “You knew she wouldn’t be ready yet when you banged on the back door. She rushed down the back stairs to let you in.”
“She should have died, hardheaded old witch!” he grunted, admitting his attempt on her life. “People get caught because the person who dies, their wounds don’t look right, so I figured just make her have a real accident, you know?” He smirked, the know-it-all look so familiar from his TV commercials.
“Weren’t you worried about the police finding the wire?”
He shrugged. “I’d intended to remove it and the screw eyes after she fell, but I heard someone next door and a dog was barking its fool head off. I didn’t want to be seen at Lois’s back door, so I headed down to the river and took off.”
He heard someone . . . that was likely Phillipa Zane coming back for her cell phone! She said Lan’s dog barked every time she entered the house.
“Then I got held up at the office. If everything had gone to plan I would’ve been the one to find her. Dead. I figured the extra time would ensure she was long gone.” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “And I had such a great performance planned! I was going to go in, remove the wire and screw eyes, attempt CPR and bawl my eyes out about dear old Auntie Lois while calling 911. I was looking forward to the publicity as I told the newspaper about my heroic rescue attempt. All that planning wasted.”
All his planning, she wanted to say, was crappy. On TV mystery shows killers were always cool and collected, but in real life people made mistakes, fortunately for the police. “Everything would have been different if you’d removed the wire and screw eyes.”
“Yeah, well, Lady Luck was not on my side, was it?” he snapped.
“No, it was on Miss Perry’s!” she retorted.
He grimaced. “She’s like those cats she moons over . . . nine lives or more.”
“Once Miss Perry died Morgan would inherit the estate, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“And then what?”
“What do you think?” He glared at her impatiently, waved the gun and growled, “Enough chitchat! Get in the car.”
The man seemed completely comfortable with the gun, like it was an extension of his hand. “You had tried to kill her before, hadn’t you? Tampering with her medication was one, and the shot from the riverside was an attempt on Miss Perry’s life.” Maybe he was a lousy shot, since he had only winged her, but he was pointing this gun at Jaymie from ten feet or so; if he shot, he wouldn’t miss.
A flicker of uncertainty revealed his surprise that she knew about the gunshot.
“And the car that almost ran her down in Wolverhampton. One of your car lot cars, no doubt. You’re just not very good at murder, are you?”
“Good enough to trick Baird. Dear Auntie Lois was lucky, that’s all. What did I say about nine lives? But her luck’s about to run out. Look, I’m not going to say this again,” he growled, his voice taking on a guttural rasp as he took a step toward her. “Get in the car!”
Her insides quivered at the increasing anger in his voice, but she hadn’t figured a way out of her predicament. Tears welled. She willed them away, taking a deep breath. She had to risk continuing to talk. “You figured that once Miss Perry was dead, you’d kill Morgan and inherit from her. Plus insurance money, I’m guessing? You must have had your wife insured. Morgan wanting to divorce you must have precipitated this, right?” A cold breeze flattened the grass in the park and chilled Jaymie, but she was focused on her assailant. She had to maintain that focus if she was going to get out of this alive.
Like other killers she had met, caught up in their travails, he couldn’t resist the bait, the chance to relate his clever plan to a willing listener. The hand holding the gun drooped. “So far you’ve got it. I knew what I had to do; Auntie Lois first, then Morgan. If the old lady had died when she was supposed to, none of this other crap would have been necessary. But that Fergus jerk was sniffing around Morgan and trying to get her to convince her aunt to sell the marina property. That wouldn’t have mattered so much, but he was getting in the way, getting too close. I saw his game; he thought he could step on my turf, persuade my wife to leave me. She was stupid enough to tell me he kissed her. She found some . . . well, some stuff I thought I had hidden better and got mad and threw it out that there were other men interested in her.”
“I saw that kiss. She looked surprised and didn’t properly kiss him back, you know. No matter what he or anyone else thought,” Jaymie said, remembering Bev’s claim that Fergus intended to blackmail Morgan once he started an affair with her, “she was not interested in him.”
“It was just a matter of time. Women like you and her can be flattered into sex, and then you think you’re in lo-ove,” he said, drawing the word out with a sneer.
“Women like me and Morgan? I don’t think we have that much in common.”
“You have one thing.” He looked her up and down.
Ah, he was talking about the fact that both of them tended toward chubbiness. It was the old tired trope that overweight or plain women were easily seduced by flattery and a heavy come-on. He wasn’t very bright and he didn’t know women as well as he thought. “So, was the stuff she found about who you really are?”
“That and other things.” He smirked. “I may have been looking around for my next wife on a dating site. She figured out my password and went snooping.”
He was trolling the internet for his next victim—or wife, as he called her—even as he planned a series of homicides. She was careful to keep her disgust hidden. “So you met up with and killed Fergus, and deposited his body in Miss Perry’s yard. Oh!” Her eyes widened. “Using one of the ATVs from your car lot!” She thought of Jakob’s ATV at The Junk Stops Here, the one that had a front-end bucket that he used to move heavy things. So that was how Saunders got the body up the hill. But he would have needed to climb up and position Baird in the bushes. That was when the scrap of fabric had torn from his jacket on the sumac branch. “Then you set this plan into motion.”
“I wouldn’t have worried about it if Morgan had shut her trap. This is all her fault. For some reason she suspected I was behind the attempts on that poisonous old lady. She was going to go to the police. So . . .” He shrugged. “I did what I had to do. The plan accelerated.”
She heard a noise, and the other car moved. Morgan wasn’t dead at all, but locked in the trunk! A surge of hope thrummed through Jaymie’s blood. “You’re still working out your plan, aren’t you? Morgan is still alive because you need Miss Perry to die before Morgan. If Morgan goes first you get nothing, right?”
“Wrong!” he shouted. “You’re so wrong. It only has to look like the old lady died first. Now, get in the freaking car before I pop you one,” he said, waving the gun at her. “No one will be looking for a bullet in a corpse in a burned-out car.”
A chill raced through her and her stomach turned. She was close to throwing up, she was so scared. “You don’t understand the law, do you?” she said defiantly. “A murderer can’t inherit from their victim, so if it looks like Morgan killed Miss Perry, the will is void. You’d get any insurance on Morgan but you would not get Miss Perry’s estate.”
The gun wavered as he pondered her words. Jaymie’s Explorer was behind her. Could she circle it and duck before he got a shot off? It was worth trying, if she could summon the guts, but it had to be quick and decisive because she needed to get past him to do it. A distraction would help. Would the old look behind you gimmick work on Saunders?
As if sent by heaven, though, a distraction arrived in the shape of a police car with sirens blaring and light bar flashing. Bernie flung herself from the driver’s seat, gun drawn and pointed at Saunders Wallace. “Toss the gun down and get on your face now!” she yelled.
Her partner, Officer Hien Ng, lunged past Saunders, grabbed Jaymie and pulled her behind her Explorer. Wallace did exactly as he was told. As he lay facedown in a puddle, the sound of pounding and screaming came from the ca
r.
“Bernie, Morgan is in the car trunk!” Jaymie cried, still clinging to Ng’s arm. “Saunders—or whoever he is, because he is not Saunders Wallace—was going to kill us both.”
• • •
AFTER SAUNDERS WAS TAKEN AWAY IN CUFFS and Morgan was rescued from the trunk and taken to the hospital for an examination, the others convened at the police station. Jaymie gave her statement, not only what had happened but everything her chat with Wallace had confirmed. Sitting in a conference room with the detective and police chief, Deborah Connolly, Jaymie wearily explained what she knew of Saunders’s plans, finishing with, “He was going to force me into the car, or kill me and then put me in the car, send the car off a cliff to make it look like an accident, kill Miss Perry, and claim the inheritance and insurance.”
“You did the right thing, calling me,” Detective Vestry said. “It saved your life. The better thing would have been to stay out of it altogether.”
“As far as I knew I was going to talk to Morgan,” Jaymie said.
As she told the police all that she knew, she learned that Detective Vestry had gotten her voice-mail message about the same time as a citizen reported that she had seen a man knocking a woman into the trunk of a silver sedan. Wallace, because he was so well known locally, and perpetually wore red tartan, with his dyed-ginger hair, was ID’d as the man doing it. By becoming a minor local celebrity he had broken the number-one rule of a con man, which was to stay out of the limelight. Vestry put Jaymie’s voice mail and the abduction report together and came up with mortal danger for Jaymie; she had a squad car race to Roth Park to intervene.
No Grater Danger Page 21