Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1)

by Barbara Golder

  He propped his feet up on the old wood desk, careful to avoid the package, at ease doing so because he’d caught her with her own boots amid the files more than once.

  It was refreshing to know a woman who slumped in chairs, scattered books in piles on the floor and propped her feet up on whatever was handy.

  He glanced around the office as though seeing it for the first time, taking it in now that he knew more about the woman who inhabited it. Nice, too, to know a woman who decorated in something other than lace and chintz. Her office was paneled in wood, with two walls of bookshelves on which the books were neatly arranged, unlike the ones he’d seen at her house. Perhaps she had more respect for her working tomes. He admired the leather Chesterfield sofa and the antique prints on the walls. It was a room he would be comfortable in. Idly, he hoped he’d have the chance.

  She had courage, he’d give her that. She was right about the murders, of course, but proving it was something else. They had talked long into the night, her lawyer’s mind turning the evidence over and over, casting it this way and that, finally deciding to her disappointment that it wasn’t substantial enough to get a warrant for a search.

  “No search, no evidence, and no arrest.”

  He couldn’t tell whether she was disappointed or afraid. She had reason for both. Disappointment because he knew her well enough to know that she was one of those women who was a fixer. It was the core of her motherhood, and he suspected of her life with Dead John. It was her job in life to make things better for the people she loved, and that drive had transferred to her job now that the kids were grown and her husband gone.

  The fear was worse. The fear that the killer would try again, to kill her, to kill others. The fear she would never clear Father Matt’s name. The disappointment might motivate her, but the fear drove her. A month ago it wouldn’t have. A month ago she wouldn’t have cared.

  It was that drive that led her to propose the interview. He’d met with the reporter, Pete Wilson, in the Sheridan Bar. It was pleasant duty, another comfortable room. It was posher than the pubs back home, with the oversized TV screens and the heavy metal music blaring from the speakers. In Ireland, TV screens were smaller and the music more congenial.

  No matter. He made his way past the bar to the little alcove between the main saloon and the pool room in the back and settled onto one of the faded, green, velvet settees. Between the music and the crack of pool balls in the billiard parlor, no one would overhear. It was a perfect spot for what he had to do.

  He was ready for his second drink when Wilson walked in. The reporter had asked what he was drinking.

  “Scotch on the rocks.”

  Wilson returned with two glasses, one scotch on the rocks and one draft beer.

  “I thought you’d be drinking Jameson’s or some other Irish stuff,” he said as he put the glass down in front of Connor.

  “You know the difference between Scotch whisky and Irish whiskey?” Connor asked.

  Wilson shook his head. “Nope.”

  “The letter ‘e’,” Connor said. “Sláinte.”

  He drained half the glass. Setting this interview up had seemed like a good idea when he and Jane had talked, but now he was not so sure. If it didn’t work, if it didn’t flush out the killer, he would have signed her death warrant. It had better work. It had to work. He drained the glass.

  The reporter looked at him curiously. “You’re thirsty this evening.”

  Connor was in no mood for dissembling.

  “Let’s get on with this, shall we? I’ve a scoop for you. There is a serial killer at large in Telluride, and he’s bound to kill again tomorrow.”

  Wilson tried to look nonchalant, but his jaw actually dropped. He recovered his expression and spoke cautiously. “I’m all ears.” And he was. The reporter was leaning forward, tape recorder at the ready, oblivious to everyone else in the bar. “Go on.”

  Connor spun the tale of the murders with little embellishment. The facts were clear enough. He watched Wilson’s face go from mild skepticism to interest to outright horror as he listened. Thanks, Da, Eoin thought. I learned how to hold an audience from the best. By the time he’d gotten to the details of the second murder, more or less, Pete Wilson was savoring the prospect of an above-the-fold story that would reverberate around the world once he wrote it.

  As he drew the conversation out, his writer’s mind crafted the recitation and pushed the reporter toward the story he and Jane had pulled together. The story that, if Father Matt was right, would bring the murderer to justice.

  “But there’s more, there’s more.” Connor shoved his glass across the table towards Wilson. “Fill me up again, and I’ll tell you what it is.”

  Wilson practically sprinted to the bar and returned with amber liquid covering the ice.

  “Why haven’t we heard about this before?” he asked.

  “The sheriff is holding it close to his chest. So’s that female coroner you have here. Sharp as tacks, and she’s got it figured out, just a few loose ends to tie up. The sheriff is afraid she’ll steal his thunder, won’t let her talk to you lads from the paper.”

  “So why are you telling me all this? You’ve no skin in this game. Unless you’re planning on writing a book.”

  “No book. I’ve got no great love for the law. I’ve been on the rough side of the constabulary’s hands one too many times.” Connor winced inwardly. There would be hell to pay when Patterson read this if Wilson was any kind of reporter at all. He’d dropped enough choice quotes. “But she—that coroner woman,” Patterson wouldn’t be the only angry one, he reflected. He hoped Jane would understand the hyperbole. “She’s got it figured out, tapped on to the evidence that will put the killer away.”

  “I’m all ears.” Again. He had been ever since Connor opened his mouth. Ears and hands with pencil scribbling frantically.

  “Remember the gun from that Kessler killing? It’s one of a matched set. Special kind, too. Breaks down for travel. The kind those crazy alpine athletes that ski and shoot use. Not too many around here. Only a matter of time. As soon as the ballistics reports are done, there will be a search warrant, end of story.”

  They’d talked a few more minutes — small chat, nothing more. Pete Wilson was studiously calm, but Connor knew the signs of a writer with a story that needed writing. He knew the reporter was twitching to get back and put his report to bed. Wilson finished his beer, paid the tab, and walked out. Connor had waited until he was sure Wilson was gone, picked up Wilson’s empty glass with his handkerchief, and paid the barmaid a handsome tip to let him keep it.

  He brought his mind back to the present, and he sat waiting for the explosion that was sure to come. If he remembered correctly, it was the sheriff’s custom to have coffee and a muffin at the bakery; he’d probably see the newspaper there. He had to give Pete Wilson credit. As newspaper stories went, it was good. Tight, all the information there, and he didn’t bury the lead. And it was no more fictional than his usual stories. But the lead wasn’t the important part. That was the little tickle about the gun, and God bless him, he had worked that in, almost word for word, in the last paragraph.

  Downstairs, a door slammed, and he heard a roaring voice. A minute or so later, there was the sound of a man stomping down the hall. The office door flew open, and Tom Patterson, red-faced and indignant, filled the doorway.

  “Connor,” the sheriff roared when he recognized Connor at the desk. “Where the hell is she? Where is Dr. Wallace?”

  Connor was calmly filling his pipe with tobacco. The last one I’ll have until I make bail, he thought. Better make it count.

  “Gone, Patterson. She’s gone.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  JUNE 24

  I looked out over the wing of the hired jet. Dawn was beginning to peek over the horizon, pink and gold and cloudless, like summer mornings in Florida generally were. Things in the tropics always started out well, full of promise. It was only later that clouds arose and storms batt
ered, I reflected. Meteorology, a metaphor for life. I smiled. I was nervous about this trip but looking forward to being back where all this had begun. My former life, the one that had been so brutally interrupted, and the one I needed to come to grips with.

  After Connor and Father Matt and I had hatched our plan, I went home and slept the sleep of the innocent. I spent the next day rattling around the house, getting under Pilar’s feet and waiting for Connor’s call, the one that told me he had managed to plant our story with Pete Wilson. In the meantime, I chartered a plane; I still had unfinished business back home.

  The charter plane had left at 2:30 in the morning in order to get me to the airport in my old hometown in Florida by breakfast. Good thing. I had a lot to do, and I wanted to be home by nightfall. I hadn’t asked Dr. Butcher about flying, and I knew that there was some risk, but I was willing to take the gamble. I needed to get back home to tie up loose ends. I could finally see the path out of my misery ahead of me, and ironically, it led right back to where the misery had all started.

  Connor called around midnight. My Hispanic bonus families were in bed and asleep. It had not been worth my going to bed, and sleep would not come anyway, but because of my own ghosts, no one else’s. I sat with a family album on my lap and a glass of Jameson’s in my hand, thumbing through the pages, smiling at the memories of my perfect life, my children, my beloved John. I was careful not to let my tears mar the photographs.

  Connor was right. I still had grieving to do, and it was not easy. It was not easy to look back at those happier times, birthdays, school plays, Sunday afternoons in the pool, at posed photos of John and me at one of those boring, pretentious fundraisers our town was famous for. My heart ached for those days. But it was an ache, that’s all. An ache I could live with, not a crippling pain I was going to die from. I wasn’t sure, but it might even be an ache I could get better from, one of these days. But first I had to put my ghosts to rest.

  It was nearly one when I freshened up with a sink bath—no showers yet — and changed. I had taken time that afternoon to have my hair cut, and it hung curly and silver just below my chin. I’d even braved the ministrations of the stylist to tame my brows, though I had balked at her suggestion of a new makeup wardrobe. I put on a silk shirt and pleated slacks, also new, and tied a silk scarf around my neck.

  My eyes fell on my jewelry box. I had brought it with me but hadn’t opened it since I moved into the house. I lifted the lid. Inside were my treasures from John. I put on the pearl earrings he had bought me for our wedding. They lay next to a rosary I had finished making for John the night before he was killed. It was made of rough cut green stones. Zoe had found an ad for cheap, uncut emerald necklaces, and the stones had attracted me: rough, rich, textured with depths of pattern and light that reminded me of John who still delighted me with undiscovered charms after so many years of marriage. I’d ordered two, torn them apart, and assembled a rosary from the pieces. I had forgotten it even existed. I had never gotten the chance to give it to him.

  I passed the stones though my fingers, feeling them run heavy across my hand. I turned over the cross. I’d engraved it to him in the manner of lovers, using our nicknames. He would have cherished it. I sat down in the rocker by the bed, in the quiet, and prayed the prayers, the first time since I had been shot. The creak of the rocker accented my words. The feel of the stones was soothing. It was a beautiful rosary. It deserved to be prayed.

  I held the heavy crucifix in my hands and remembered how hard it had been for me to embrace this devotion when I had married John. His father, Hugh, had given me away on my wedding day, my own father having abandoned my mother when he found out she was pregnant with me. Just before we were to walk down the aisle, he had pressed a cobalt glass rosary into my shaking hands, had taken me aside to the Mary chapel, and knelt and prayed with me. He told me he’d done the same with his two daughters when they married.

  “Janie,” he’d said. “Jesus gave us His mother as our own. I want you to have her as a wedding gift.”

  Hugh made a point of praying the rosary with me whenever John and I came to visit. Most of the time, it would be at the kitchen table, John, his father and I, late at night, after we had driven across the state after work on a Friday, John’s mother bustling around us to make us a late dinner. Hellos, hugs, the rosary, dinner, and then swapping tales of patients and surgeries and autopsies until the small hours, my patient mother-in-law having retired as soon as she laid the food before us.

  I had prayed that cobalt rosary by Hugh’s bedside when he was ill and through tears with John at his casket when he died. As I now moved my fingers from bead to bead on the rosary I had made for John, I felt them close to me: John, Hugh, and Mary nudging me closer to healing and home. The rosary had been my anchor in the days after John’s death, a prayer I could make when my heart was too raw and my mind too numb to pray. It remained my lifeline in the many months after, a connection to the husband who was no longer at my side. Mary understood senseless death and betrayal, and she was still faithful. Why was it so hard for me? Perhaps because Mary met her grief with faith and obedience. I still kept trying to wrestle mine to the ground by will and intellect.

  I lost track of the prayers, repeating them decade after decade until I heard the hall clock chime two.

  I dropped the beads into my pocket, collected my purse and phone —I had not been without it since the day I was shot — set the alarm for the house and headed for the 4Runner. The automatic floodlights came on as I walked across the porch. I had a spasm of fear as I saw a tall figure leaning up against the driver’s door, until I recognized the glow from a pipe. Connor. He straightened up as I approached. I hoped he could tell I was smiling.

  “How did you know I was leaving?”

  “Have you never heard of the second sight? We Irish are famous for it. Clairvoyance runs in our blood.”

  “I’m not so sure about second sight, unless it goes by the name of Pilar or Isa.” I rested a hand on his forearm. “Thanks for being here.”

  “The least I can do. That way I can be assured of your jailhouse visit when Tom Patterson has my hide for your little scheme.”

  “Count on it.”

  We fell quiet, and the silence grew between us. We were so still that the motion-activated flood went dark. Eoin Connor’s form loomed in the shadows, oddly reassuring and disconcerting at the same time. I was becoming accustomed to the smell of his pipe.

  The floodlights flashed back on as Connor took his pipe in hand and placed it carefully on the roof of the 4Runner. He took my hands in his own rough ones, raised them slowly toward him. He regarded them for a long minute, and then bent his head to kiss them gently. I heard the sharp intake of my own breath.

  “Take care, Jane Wallace, and come back whole.” He let go of my hands as gently as he had taken them, retrieved his pipe, and walked down the street. He was whistling softly.

  I remembered the sound with pleasure as the wing of the plane dipped, reflecting bright sunlight onto my face, and the plane began its descent.

  **********

  The Berton place was one of those monstrosities that had sprung up all over town, covering every inch of waterfront — ocean, intra-coastal or river or man-made pond — with faux-Mediterranean palaces. They were all at least three stories, because codes prevented living space on the flood plain in any new construction, and they all crowded the lot lines. John and I had made great fun of these temples of narcissism.

  They were massive: cathedral ceilings, oversized rooms, entire walls made of glass, two full baths for each master suite, and walk-in closets the size of our first apartment, each new builder trying to outdo the last in grandeur. But they were all alike. Same ochre barrel tile roof. Same linen with dark accents exterior. Same curving entryway and porte-cochere. In trying to be so very current and so very individual, their owners, like teenagers trying to be cool, had succeeded only in raising the bar of conformity. I had much preferred our quirky Victorian then, and I
found as I stood in front of the carved door to Kiki’s house, that I still did.

  I raised my hand to press the bell, but hesitated. This was going to be much harder than going to the prison would have been. There I could be, if not superior, at least justified. I had a legitimate, if misguided, reason for revenge on Tommy Berton. I had no such excuse for his wife. I stood a long time amid the hibiscus, ixora and peace lilies in the well-manicured dooryard, before I worked up courage enough to ring.

  Kiki answered the door, clad in shorts and a tee shirt, blond hair disheveled, tanned feet bare. Her blue eyes widened with surprise, then hardened. I hurried to speak before she slammed the door in my face.

  “Kiki, I’m sorry.” Best to get right to the point.

  She looked at me with suspicion. I could see packing boxes in the expansive living room behind her.

  “What do you want? We'll be out of the house by Monday. Until then, it’s still mine.” She brushed a lock of hair from her face as a bead of perspiration trickled down her neck.

  I took a deep breath, which still hurt. A good reminder. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, and started to explain but Kiki interrupted me.

  “Sorry? Sorry.” She repeated the word in a mocking tone. “You’re sorry. Well, good for you. You’re sorry, and I’m out of a home. You’re sorry, and I’m packing when I should be studying for finals. You’re sorry, and my boys can’t stop crying because they have to leave the only place they’ve ever lived, the only friends they ever had. You’re sorry. Well good for you, Jane. Be sorry. You ought to be. You’ve ruined my life. What’s left of it.”