Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1)

by Barbara Golder

  He sat down on the stool next to me, cradling his coffee in his big hands.

  I shrugged. “I know. One murder at a time, please, and Houston’s, God forgive me, isn’t the most important one. His really was a one-time event, crime of someone’s passion.”

  Connor shrugged and leaned forward to rest his forearms on the counter, hunching, then stretching his back. “It would surely help to know what the connection is.” He wiped a hand across his face and glanced at me. “We already know they were all wealthy outsiders. It turns out they all were written up in the paper shortly before they were shot, for one reason or another.

  Paul Kessler was the subject of one of those profile pieces. Sig Monson did one of those cutesy little sidebar quotes, and it made it very clear he was very rich. Cosette Anira was always in the paper because of her business. Both papers reported on James Webster’s newest climbing opportunity. The fellow whose cabin blew up — I’m still not sure that one belongs, but the timing is right — he was mentioned in an article about the visual arts commission. It wasn’t exactly a secret that they were all rich and prominent in one way or another. But no other connection I can find beyond that, and the fact that they supported Tom. As far as I know they didn’t even know each other.”

  Eoin Connor might be less suspicious of the sheriff, but I wasn’t sure. I kept thinking how easy it would be to get that gun out of the evidence locker. More than that, I wondered why Patterson hadn’t stopped by to pay me a call. The fact that my normally sociable colleague had not been by to visit me nagged at me.

  “But you weren’t written up, were you?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t been in the paper for months. Even the report of Webster’s death didn’t mention me. If the murderer is picking his victims from the paper, I don’t fit. And neither does Ben,” I added in a low voice.

  I still hadn’t shared my suspicions with my sons.

  “Which means you’re overlooking something else. You were picked because you’ve done something to make the murderer uneasy. Uneasy enough to want to shoot you.” Connor’s face was serious.

  “That’s the school solution,” I said, “but for the life of me, I have no idea what that could be. I am completely in the dark on this one.” I paused. It almost had been for the life of me. Or the life of Ben. I pushed the thought away and said, “I was too close just because I was doing my job.” Patterson loomed as a suspect again, but I deliberately shook off the thought of him as suspect. “Maybe you should take a look at the files and see if I am missing something. About all I can say for sure is that my shooting makes it clear that these deaths really are related.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,“ Connor said, posing like a leading man waiting for his fawning fans and making me giggle in spite of myself. “Famous writer that I am.”

  He rose and took his cup and mine to the sink, returning with a cloth to wipe up the damp ring his cup had made on the stone counter. We chatted amiably about his book, and his habit of rising to write at three or four in the morning when insomnia overtook him. About the boys when they were younger, stories of Adam raising a great roar of laughter as they always did. About the latest in Telluride gossip. We were so lost in conversation that Luke had to touch my shoulder to tell me breakfast was on the table.

  After breakfast, Connor and I sat on the balcony. The storm had cleared, so he wiped the chairs dry and left the boys to cleaning the kitchen. Caroline was gone for the time being, Dr. Butcher having been pleased with my progress.

  “I find it odd and more than slightly chilling to be considering a potential assailant every time I think about moving out of the house,” I said as we took seats in the dappled shadows, looking out over the wild green of the rising mountain. The sight was familiar and comforting, and it fit Connor’s presence with me. He was becoming a rather pleasant habit. “I’ve got to get Ben to a safe place. I told Luke and Adam it’s best for them to go on back this afternoon, so they’ll be safe, but Ben is still a target. And if you’re right, he’s still in danger.”

  “It won’t last. We’ll find the bastard who shot you.”

  His expression darkened, and I was impressed that this was now a personal quest, not one he was going to be content to leave solely in the hands of Tom Patterson. I wondered if he still harbored a bit of suspicion, despite his strong words earlier. It worried me that I was relying on a man I didn’t quite trust to solve the crimes and to see that I was safe in the bargain. I shuddered a bit at the thought of Tom Patterson’s being in charge of the investigation. Eoin caught my shiver and patted my hand. I turned mine to take hold of his and held it tight for a moment. He picked up the conversational ball in a teasing tone, but sober as a judge underneath.

  “So there was a sea-change, after all. Not content to be alone anymore? Not going to shove the rest of us into a closet?”

  He was as direct as Father Matt and John and my oldest son. Was there something about me that invited such presumption on the part of men?

  “I am not. Gone all soft and emotional, that’s me.”

  There was an ungentlemanly snort of laughter from the other chair.

  “Dear Dr. Jane Wallace, pathologist extraordinaire, you’ve always been soft and emotional, that’s your problem. You just need to find a way to manage it without the illusion of a cast-iron fence around your heart.”

  My usual smart reply flitted across my brain; good that it seemed to be working properly. But this man deserved better than that, and so did my beloved John. I was silent for a long time, turning what he said over in my mind. When I finally spoke, it was with a clarity of understanding I hadn’t enjoyed for some time.

  “It was the only way I had of coping when John died. It’s not the only way I have now.”

  “I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen it save people and I’ve seen it destroy them. You came very close to destruction, Jane Wallace.”

  “I know.”

  “See that you remember. Something tells me you’re a bit hard-headed, that it might take a more than a few times to teach you a lesson. You’ve still a heart full of proper grieving to do, the real kind. It’s not going to be easy.”

  Damn the man. My eyes welled with tears, and I had thought myself finally past them. He sighed heavily, but with a smile on his face, and passed me his handkerchief. It still smelled of peppermint.

  *********

  Lucy Cho clicked on the icon that would set the computer matching prints and turned her attention to the bullet that had come out of Dr. Wallace’s back. It felt strange to be working on the bullet that had almost killed her boss, but that, she figured, was all part of the job. Though she had to admit, for all the hype of Hollywood and real-crime TV shows, being a medical examiner was just about the safest job in the world, if you discounted the risk of hepatitis C and HIV. The old guys in the field, and they were all guys, the ones who wrote the books and gave the lectures, were odd by anyone’s standards.

  Forensic work was a nice gig: job security, because there were always going to be creeps in the world, and because few people wanted to hang out with dead people and crime scene junkies for a long time. Lucy had not been in the business long, just short of ten years, but she had seen people come and go, burned out by the repetitive nature of the work and the brutality of the circumstances. Lucy liked the predictability, and the cases didn’t bother her. Except this one. She would have hated to lose her boss, if for no other reason than she didn’t want to lose her job here.

  She had just seated the bullets in the comparison scope when the computer beeped, signaling that the fingerprint matching software had finished doing its job. She hesitated a moment, then walked back to the computer and looked at the screen. No match. Good. Dr. Wallace would be glad to know the priest’s fingerprints weren’t in the belfry, but it left the question of whose were. She would run the prints against some databases later; for now the fact that these weren’t a match with the exemplars was all she needed to know.

  There were no surprises
on the bullets, either. The scratches matched the ones on the bullets from the Town Park killing, but not the ones from that crazy hippie that Dr. Wallace found in her driveway. The unspent round the sheriff found in the belfry could have matched either, from the looks of it, but Lucy knew looks would not be enough. She finished her examination of the bullets, made the appropriate documenting photographs, and printed out the fingerprint data. Then she searched through her files until she found the photos she had taken the day Dr. Wallace was shot, the photos of the rims of the bullets from the belfry and those from the rifle the sheriff had brought by for comparison. She smiled at the images. They were crisp and detailed, and Dr. Wallace was going to find them very, very interesting.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  JUNE 22, MIDMORNING

  I shooed the men off as soon as the kitchen was cleaned up. I read for a bit and tried watching some television, but daytime TV is even more inane than I remembered. Uncharacteristically, I wanted company. I was toying with the idea of trying to scare up Father Matt when I heard a knock on the door.

  “Coming,” I announced.

  I stood too quickly and had to grab the arm of the chair to keep from swooning. I might be good to go from Dr. Butcher’s perspective, but I was still about a quart and a half low.

  “Coming,“ I called again, adding, “just not very fast,” under my breath as I went.

  Lucy strolled in when I opened the door. It was around lunchtime, and Lucy was not one to miss a meal. She dropped a folder on the kitchen counter with one hand, licking pale green frosting off the fingers of the other. I have no idea how she keeps that size-2 figure given the amount of pastry she consumes. To her credit, it’s the good stuff, mostly from the artisan patisserie in Mountain Village, nothing junky; but she has to consume at least a thousand calories a day in cake alone.

  “Interesting stuff there,” she said as she examined her fingers for any remaining bits of sugar. “For starters, the prints don’t belong to the priest.”

  “Father Gregory. He has a name.”

  Lucy sent me a sidelong glance, cocked an eyebrow, and wiped her left hand for good measure against her jeans.

  “Father Gregory. Not his.”

  “Well, that’s something.” I tried not to let the relief show in my voice. In the standoff in my mind over whether Father Matt was guilty, one of the desperadoes blinked.

  “And I’ve been thinking. There was a lot of rain a few nights ago, just like this morning. Lots of it. It’s not unusual to get prints off wood these days, but usually it’s inside. Outside the elements tend to degrade the prints over time and a good, hard rainstorm really wreaks havoc. I was a little surprised to find prints, to tell you the truth, especially ones that were this good.”

  “Go on.” I could practically see the wheels turning.

  “I’m thinking these are pretty fresh prints. Like, maybe made after the rainstorm. Not before.”

  “Well, now, that raises all sorts of interesting possibilities.”

  Lucy grinned. She is something of a shark when it comes to evidence. She loves putting the pieces together. “Yeah, well, there’s more. I got a little, tiny partial on the casing of the bullet. There’s not really enough to stand up in court, but I’m pretty sure it matches one of the prints from the railing.”

  My turn to cock an eyebrow. “How sure, Lucy? We don’t play in hunches here. Peoples’ lives depend on it.”

  Lucy pouted. “Not a hundred percent, that’s for sure. But not a hunch, either. Maybe seventy-five percent sure? Anyway, either way, it doesn’t belong to the priest.”

  “Father Gregory.”

  “Yeah. Whatever. Anyway, the reports are there. I did a full spreadsheet comparison on all the samples we have. Houston’s is an outlier because it’s too heavy. 9 mm is my guess. It’s an outlier. So is the one that’s from the bell tower, but it’s a different kind of outlier. The rim markings on it are different from the ones on the casings on the bullets that were left in the rifle that was used to shoot Bedsheet.”

  “Paul Kessler.”

  Lucy ignored me.

  “So, best I can tell, there are two different sources for the .22 bullets. The rim markings on the one from the rifle are odd. I can’t match them to anything. Maybe they are recycled, I don’t know, but it doesn’t look like it. They are definitely not from the same batch as the one from the Belfry. And I just got the printout of ammo sales you asked for, that’s in there too.”

  “Thanks, Lucy. Good job. Buy yourself a napoleon on me.”

  Lucy paused at the door to look back over her shoulder and grin. “No good source around here. I’ll have to settle for a profiterole.”

  I glanced over Lucy’s reports, not expecting to find anything different, and I did not. Relieved as I was that this seemed to clear Father Matt, it still didn’t explain the .22 round in the belfry. I pulled out the ammunition sales list.

  One of the great things about the computer age is that it’s incredibly easy to track purchases of just about everything. All it took was a few well-placed phone calls and a little unaccustomed sweet talking on Ben’s part to get the local purveyors of ammunition to give us a record of who had bought .22 rounds for the last two months, right up until the day I was shot, if the printout dates were to be believed. I started going down the list, increasingly annoyed that none of the viable suspects appeared, but relieved that that included Father Matt. I noted that a sizeable delivery of ammunition had gone to the local very high-end shooting club, Fauxhall. I was surprised that they bought their wares locally.

  I was ready to give up the search as futile by the time I came to the last page, the most recent dates, all of them after the shootings began. Fortunately for me, my compulsive nature wouldn’t permit me, because in the third line from the bottom, I found an interesting entry, an unexpected but not unfamiliar name. I checked the date against the calendar, the date of the shooting of Cosette Anira and the timeline in the newspaper article. Then I sat back and smiled. One of the desperadoes in my mind holstered his gun and slinked off.

  Some of the pieces were falling into place, but only around the edges. I looked at the reports again, underlined one of the entries, and sent Lucy off to the hardware sporting goods store in Norwood to get hard copies of the receipts from the purchase. Then I called Jeff Atkins. I was hoping he’d remember the name of the boy in charge of the gun locker at Fauxhall, where the rich and the famous and the nervous went to learn how to shoot. It was time I had a chat with him about his clientele.

  **********

  Jane would have his head if she knew that he had taken the boys to town, but they wanted to shop for something for their mother. Grown men, all of them, and they hadn’t got past the little boy stage of wanting to bring a fist full of daisies to their mom to show her they loved her. Typical of boys. Hard to say the words, but everything they did gave voice to the fact that they adored their mother and worried about her. As soon as the gondola let them off, they were off in a pack, arguing good-naturedly among themselves about what to get. The last he heard, it was flowers.

  He debated what to do with his time. Jane needed some time alone, and he was in no mood to work on his book, anyway. It was too soon after breakfast for him to be hungry and too early in the day for a drink. He walked up to Pacific in the general direction the boys had gone and decided to window shop.

  There were people on the streets, but not nearly as many as there should be for a fine summer afternoon, and people hurried from place to place rather than linger on the street to talk or to enjoy the sunshine that had followed the storm. Even the reporters from the national media were keeping a low profile. Not one of them qualified as a remainderman, but not one of them really believed that was the basis for the killings either. There was something about people being picked off in broad daylight that made them nervous.

  The print media were happy to feed off Pete Wilson’s filings, as far as he could tell. He didn’t watch television so he wasn’t sure how this was
playing outside Telluride, but the lack of news trucks meant it wasn’t of particular note. As he passed the glass doors of the Forensic Center, he saw Pete Wilson at the reception desk, no doubt trying to figure out where Jane was. He took some satisfaction in having spirited her away from the spotlight. His condo was a bit secluded, and the two burly guards he hired — one for each end of the hall — assured him that there would be no unwelcome intruders. Jane needed a bit of peace.

  Peace, and a new wardrobe. Eoin Connor wasn’t overly concerned about female fashions, but even Irish farm wives dressed better than Jane Wallace. Ben had brought up some things for her: shapeless, faded jeans, white shirts and a nightgown that would have looked out of place even in a 1950’s sitcom. A pity, she is a fine looking woman, he thought. He paused in front of the White Deer. The window was full of sweaters — out of place in the summer heat — but beautiful. They reminded him of home and he decided to go in.

  The store was beautiful. A Victorian settee and side chair were settled around a tall, stained glass floor lamp. There was a calligraphied sign: the tired husband chair. Several hutches and chests of drawers were scattered about, and sweaters draped invitingly out of them. Shelves held scarves and hats, and the knitwear was supplemented by a variety of purses, a baker’s rack of lanolin-based toiletries, and local artwork on the walls.

  He wandered the store, not quite taken with anything until he came to the back, where a stack of shawls lay highlighted in the light of a crystal chandelier on an oak table. The one on top was a confection of winter colors: mauve, turquoise, dull gold, and sage green. Connor picked it up and drew it out to its full expanse. The pattern was lightly woven, making the piece look like a spider’s web reflecting the changing lights of an evening sky. He nodded approvingly.

  A salesgirl materialized out of nowhere.

  “Very beautiful,” she said. “For your wife?”