by Beverly Long
Rena smiled. She wasn’t the least bit interested in other stories. A.L. and Tess were coming back to Baywood late tomorrow night, on the eighteenth. Once Tess was here, they would both focus on ensuring her ongoing safety. Time to investigate would be reduced substantially.
She could hardly believe that Tess had been able to talk A.L. into a balloon ride. She really wished she could have been a little mouse in somebody’s pocket, because something had happened on that little jaunt. A.L. wasn’t talking, but there was something in the tone of his voice when he talked about Tess. Perhaps he was just feeling protective of her. That was the likeliest explanation. For all of A.L.’s efforts to come across as a hard-ass, he was a good guy.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Tina said. “I’ll be at the desk.”
Rena started with 1970. Took her a few minutes to get the hang of bringing up the front page and quickly scanning the headlines, but she developed a rhythm. Back then, the paper was six days a week, Monday through Friday and Sunday. And it was a morning edition. And like most newspapers in midsize communities, the headlines from day to day were similar. Sometimes it was national news, like Vietnam or the shooting at Kent State University. Regional or state news was about government, roads and employment or lack thereof. The local news was city council, business, crime and some feel-good stuff that was seasonal. But knowing that Santa was going to be in his hut on Main Street from two to five on Sunday wasn’t what she was interested in.
She trained her eye to look for business or crime. It took her ten to fifteen seconds per front page. And she had to pull back from the machine and rest her eyes every once in a while. It took her an hour and fifteen minutes to do 1970. She kept going. And going. And three hours into it, she found it.
Murder at the Gizer Hotel. It was the April 19, 1973, edition.
She blinked a couple times, took a deep breath and settled in to read the five-paragraph news story. She sorted past the peripheral details and police statements and settled on the facts.
Late the prior night, a woman had killed her husband. There had been an argument; she’d said she’d feared for her life, and somehow, she’d managed to grab a gun that they kept in a kitchen drawer and shot him. He’d been pronounced dead at the scene. No charges had been filed in the case, but they remained a possibility. Names were withheld, but it said the couple’s twelve-year-old daughter had been a witness and that police were interviewing individuals in neighboring apartments.
She paged over to the next day’s edition. Could not find anything. Kept going. Nine days after the original story, on April 27, there was a follow-up.
No charges were forthcoming. The woman, now identified as Marcia Sands, had acted in self-defense to protect herself and her daughter, Gracie. There was a documented pattern of abuse that supported Fred Sands’s violent nature.
Rena paged forward, stared at the screen and then went back. Her daughter, Gracie.
Where had she heard that name? It took just seconds to recall her conversation with Darcy, ex-wife of Poisen Group principal Sean Mallor. She’d said Sean had an older sister named Gracie. Rena had said, Gracie Mallor? Darcy had said no, Gracie Holt.
Sands wasn’t anywhere in there.
But Gracie was a bit of an unusual name.
She looked through another thirty days of papers but saw nothing else. She pushed her chair back from the desk. Gave Tina a quick wave of thanks and left the newspaper. Once she was back in her car, she called the mayor’s chief of staff.
“Hey, Rena,” Claudia Lawson said. “What can I do for you?”
“I need information on a marriage license that would have been issued to a Marcia Sands, sometime after April 1973. I think she might have married somebody with the surname of Mallor.”
“Mallor,” Claudia repeated. “As in Sean Mallor of the Poisen Group?”
“Yes.” Rena quickly brought her up to speed with what she’d seen in the newspaper. When she was finished, she said, “What do you think?”
“He never mentioned a sister,” Claudia said, “but then again, we didn’t spend our meeting time talking about family.”
“There’s no mention of him in either of the newspaper articles. Just of Gracie.”
“Maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe it’s a different family entirely.”
Too many maybes, thought Rena. And her gut was telling her that she needed to talk to Gracie. Witnessing something like Mom killing Dad could really damage a person.
After getting Claudia’s promise that her request had the highest priority, Rena immediately dialed the office’s main number. The temp who was filling in for Violet answered. “Baywood Police Department. Detectives Division.”
“This is Detective Rena Morgan,” she said. “Can you transfer me to either Detective Ferguson or Detective Blithe? If neither of them is there, I’ll take Chief Faster.”
“Detective Blithe is at his desk.”
Good. Blithe was good at details.
“Hey, Rena,” he greeted her.
“Hey, Mark. I need an assist on our serial murderer case.”
“Of course.”
“There was a murder at the Gizer Hotel on April 18, 1973. I need that investigation file pulled.”
“Okay. That will all be paper.”
The department hadn’t started using computers until the late 1970s. There had been a discussion about computerizing the old records, but ultimately, the decision had been made to keep them in hard copy. They were stored in the basement. Accessible if necessary, but out of the way of everyday work. Normally, if they needed an old file, they could put a request in through the system, and it would show up on their desk in a day or two. But in cases of emergency, requests could be fulfilled on the spot if you were willing to stand there and wait for the file clerk to find the file and bring it to you.
“Thank you,” she said. “Once you have it, call my cell.” She hung up and dialed A.L.
“McKittridge,” he answered.
“Hey, I think I may have something.”
“Tell me.”
She did, finishing up with, “I’m heading to Saint Paul to talk to Gracie Holt.”
“Who we know is Sean Mallor’s older sister, but she may or may not be Gracie Sands, who saw her mother kill her father.”
“It’s her. I can feel it.”
“Hmm,” A.L. said.
She waited. That was his thinking noise.
“When I talked to Sean Mallor,” A.L. said, his tone thoughtful, “he said that he’d been born and raised in Smithville. Born and raised.”
The back of Rena’s neck got a chill. “When I talked to Darcy Mallor, she said the same thing. Like maybe she’d heard it often enough that it became rote speech.”
“Because maybe if he didn’t claim Baywood, then nobody would remember that his mother killed his father and his sister saw it.”
“Mallor’s alibi checked out,” she said. Just this morning, she and A.L. had both gotten an email. Mallor did indeed have a train ticket that had been scanned both that morning and night. He had used his credit card at lunch for two guests, for a total bill with tip of $63.11. The charge had been time-stamped at 1:16 p.m. That would have been just right for him to walk back to the office and jump on the afternoon conference call, which both his assistant and the state representative had confirmed. They had gotten confirmation that he’d recently filled a prescription that was used to treat vertigo.
“I saw that,” A.L. said.
“Darcy said that her parents had known of his family. But I think she was talking about Mallor. There was nothing in there about Sands.”
“But maybe the people who lived in Baywood and Smithville all knew that Marcia Sands had married Mallor and the stigma of her killing her first husband lingered on.”
“The newspaper made it sound as if he might have deserved it. Documented history of abuse,
and all.”
“I can’t explain people’s thinking,” A.L. said. “And that was a different time when it came to abused women being believed.”
“I’ll let you know what I hear from Claudia, and I’ll call as soon as I get done talking to Gracie.”
“What if she’s not there? That’s a long way to go.”
“Already thought of that. I’m going to ask Faster to reach out to his counterpart there and see if somebody can do a drive-by and get a visual on her. But I’m not waiting. I don’t want to lose the twenty or thirty minutes that will take.”
“Good idea,” he said.
“How’s it going there?” she asked.
“It’s good,” A.L. said. “Nothing as exciting as what you’re doing, but...good.”
“I thought of something,” she said. “In terms of making sure Tess is safe yet visible.” She and A.L. had discussed that when Tess came back, she would walk her dog, with or without Regina Heller, and also make contact with her office, letting them know that she was back home and ready to come to work Monday.
“What is it?”
“Do you remember that Matt Connell was going to be giving a presentation at Baywood Historic Preservation on Thursday, the nineteenth?”
“Yeah. I mean, I had put it aside, but I do recall Diane saying that.”
“I think Tess should go, be in the audience. If the victims are connected by their support of the Gizer Hotel, then BHP is somewhere in the mix.” She stopped. A.L. would understand, she didn’t need to spell it out.
“I like it,” he said. “I’ll have to talk to Tess, of course, but let’s assume that she’ll go for it. I want you inside the building, in disguise. Do the one you did for the drug bust on Moker Avenue. Hell, I didn’t even recognize you that night. And I want somebody from the state, somebody that nobody knows, taking photos of everybody in the room. He or she can pretend to be enthralled with what Matt is saying and moving around the room to get great shots. We’d set up a camera, but there’s no way to do that without Diane or Gavin Rice knowing, and I want to keep the circle small. I’ll be with Tess on the drive there and back, hiding in her back seat.”
“Got it. I’ll talk to you when I’m done in Saint Paul. Tess holding strong?”
“She’s going to do just fine.”
Rena was fifteen minutes out of town when her phone rang. “Morgan,” she answered.
“Marcia Sands married Jonas Mallor in November of 1974. He adopted her children, Gracie and Sean, shortly after that.”
Finally, a goddamn break. “Thank you, Claudia. I think this explains Sean Mallor’s interest in the Gizer Hotel. He lived there. And I guess that I understand why he didn’t bring it up. I mean, his mother shot his father there.”
“But he wasn’t there, right?”
“I don’t know,” Rena said. “The newspaper account said that Gracie was a witness. I’ve got somebody hunting down the investigation file, so we’ll have more details soon. Maybe Sean was in the apartment but in a bedroom and didn’t see the actual shooting. Maybe he was somewhere else. I don’t know. But I suspect somebody asked those questions at the time.”
“Good luck, Rena,” Claudia said. “We’re all kind of on pins and needles, waiting for the next shoe to drop.”
“I know. Goodbye.” She pressed down on the accelerator. She wasn’t worried about a ticket—just needed to keep it at a safe-enough speed. She hung up the phone but picked it up just seconds later when another call came through. She looked at the number but didn’t recognize it. “Morgan,” she answered.
“This is Grayson Paul with the Saint Paul police department. I understand that you wanted visual confirmation of Gracie Holt at 1439 Winterberry.”
“That’s correct.”
“My partner and I just did a drive-by. Car is in the driveway, and a female, approximate age of sixty, was watering plants in the backyard. Didn’t see anybody else.”
Didn’t get much better than that. “Thank you.”
“Our boss told us to sit on her until you arrive.”
She hadn’t asked for that, but she had given Christian a reason to believe that this might be a big break. “I appreciate that. My ETA is another hour.”
“No problem. We’ll be here. Gray Impala.”
There was no chance that Gracie was going to slip away. She put her phone down and drove without interruption for another thirty minutes. When her phone buzzed, she saw that it was Mark Blithe. “Hey, Mark,” she answered.
“I’ve got your file,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“Give me the high points.” She would read it once she got back to the office.
“Male victim, age thirty-seven. Shot at close range with a 9 mm. Call came into the department at 2003 hours on Wednesday, April 18, 1973. Woman identified herself as Marcia Sands and said that she’d shot her husband and killed him. Responding officers arrived at 2011 hours. Victim had taken two slugs to the gut and was later pronounced dead at the scene by the coroner. Woman said that she fired shots in self-defense and she had a long history of injuries consistent with physical abuse. There was gun residue on her hands. Shooting was witnessed by twelve-year-old daughter, who confirmed the mother’s recounting of the event.” He paused, likely because he was reading. “Further investigation confirmed that there had been at least one previous episode of abuse that resulted in Mrs. Sands requiring shoulder surgery.”
Her husband had probably yanked it out of place. “Is there any mention of a second child, a son, a couple years younger than the daughter?”
“Let me see. Oh, yeah, here it is. Just one sentence. ‘A second child living in the home, Sean Sands, was not home at the time of the incident.’”
“Anything else?” Rena asked.
“A note added about a month later. No charges filed.”
“Okay, that’s very helpful. Just leave it on my desk. Oh, I just thought of something. Can you do one more thing for me since I’m driving? Can you look up the death records for Marcia Sands Mallor and Jonas Mallor?”
“Sure. Talk to you later.”
Thirty-seven minutes later, Rena drove by the Impala and waved at the two men. They waved back, and she heard them start their car engine.
She parked, grabbed her portfolio so that she could take some notes and walked up the sidewalk to Gracie Holt’s house. It was a small brick bungalow. The wide concrete railing of the front porch was lined with flower pots full of pansies and other early bloomers. Rena rang the doorbell.
The door swung open. Gracie Holt was wearing jeans and a button-up shirt. She was thirty pounds overweight, and her shoulder-length hair badly needed conditioning. She was not wearing makeup.
“Gracie Holt?” Rena said.
“Yes?” The woman stepped back and Rena immediately got suspicious. She told herself to tamp it down, to not let her emotions lead her.
She pulled her badge, held it steady. “I’m Detective Morgan from the Baywood, Wisconsin, Police Department. I have a few questions for you.”
Twenty-One
“I haven’t lived in Baywood for a very long time,” the woman said.
“We can get to that,” Rena replied. “May I come in?”
“I guess,” she said. She motioned for Rena to take a seat in the living room, which was crowded with a couch, two chairs and a piano that took up one corner. Rena chose one of the chairs, Gracie took the couch.
“May I have your full name?” Rena asked.
“Gracie Lee Holt.”
“And your birth name?”
“Gracie Lee Sands. For a period of time, I was Gracie Lee Mallor, until I married Tobias Holt in 1980.”
“Are you still married, Mrs. Holt?”
“Toby died in 2007. Pancreatic cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” Rena said. “Do you have any children?”
&nbs
p; “No.”
“I understand that you lived in Baywood in the Gizer Hotel,” Rena said.
“Yes.”
“I also understand that in April of 1973, there was an incident in your apartment and a weapon was discharged by your mother, killing your father. And that you were a witness.”
“Yes.”
Rena was getting really tired of the one-word answers. It was as if she’d been coached really well by a defense attorney. “Can you tell me a little more about that day?”
“I’m sure there’s a file somewhere that you can read, Detective.”
“I’m really interested in a first-person perspective.”
“Why? The shooting happened over forty-five years ago. I can’t imagine a reason why anyone would have an interest in the case.”
“If you could just answer the question, please.”
“It was a long time ago,” she said. “And I’ve tried to put it aside.”
“Just do the best you can,” Rena said. “But please be as specific as possible.”
Gracie drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. “My parents got into an argument. There was some shouting and pushing. We kept a gun in the kitchen drawer. The Gizer Hotel wasn’t the safest place to live. Anyway, my mother got it, and as my father was coming toward her, she shot him in self-defense.”
It matched up to what Mark had read to her from the case file. But it was her delivery that was troublesome. It was almost...yeah, almost as if she’d practiced it. Like lines from a play. She’d said it was hard to remember the details, but yet, she’d had no trouble. Had not hesitated once she started.
Maybe that’s how she dealt with the trauma, Rena thought. Maybe she’d compartmentalized it into a paragraph that summarized a horrible night. “What was your relationship with your mother?”
“Fine.”
That was not how most people responded to that question. Generally, they said something like, I loved her, of course.
“And your father?”
“Also, fine.”
“And did your father ever abuse you in any way?”
She shook her head.