“You look happy,” I said when he joined me. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Brightwell smile in quite that way before.
“It looks like we’ve caught your arsonists. A Fallsburgh police officer pulled over a pickup truck for speeding. When he started to get out of his cruiser, it took off again, but he’d already called in the license plate and taken note of the empty kerosene cans in the back. With a little help from neighboring towns, the truck was stopped and the two men inside are now in custody.”
“I never saw their faces,” I reminded him. “I can’t identify them.” I glanced toward the barn. It was a total loss.
“Chances are good that they left plenty of evidence behind in the house,” Brightwell assured me. “The forensics guys will have a field day.”
I managed a halfhearted cheer before I got into the car and drove myself home. I probably should have accepted the offer of one of the deputies to take me, but all I’d wanted by that point was solitude. I made the trip on autopilot. If I thought about anything at all between Swan’s Crossing and Lenape Hollow, it was how much I needed to shut out the rest of the world and sleep for at least a week.
Chapter Thirty-nine
At noon the next day, I stumbled downstairs for coffee. I’d have hibernated longer if Calpurnia hadn’t kept tapping me on the nose with her paw. After I fed her and myself, I felt half human again, but I was moving stiffly and was sore in places I’d forgotten I had.
I’d already overdone it, between the lawn work and the diary hunting. Add fighting to hold on to the cat, contorting myself into an unnatural position to fold myself into that hidey-hole, and a whole lot of running back and forth, and I had several sets of muscles that were no longer speaking to me. I wouldn’t want to be eighteen again, but I do regret that I’m no longer as physically fit and resilient as I once was.
I’d just spoken to Luke on the phone, fortunately catching him before he heard about the fire from someone else, and was polishing off my second cup of coffee when Detective Brightwell rang my doorbell.
“I’ve come to take your formal statement,” he announced.
“I can’t tell you much more than I did last night,” I warned him. “Coffee?”
Over steaming mugs of Breakfast Blend, I recounted the highlights of what had happened at the Swarthout farm. He recorded me and also took copious notes.
“So, you never saw their faces, but you did hear them speak. Do you think you’d recognize their voices if you heard them again?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
“Let’s find out.”
“You want me to talk to them?” I was appalled by the suggestion.
“That won’t be necessary. I recorded their interrogations this morning. All you have to do is listen.”
Although I felt ill at ease with the notion, I agreed. A few minutes later, I heard a gravelly voice declare, “I’m not talking without my mouthpiece.”
Brightwell’s voice came next: “Call your lawyer, then.”
After a long silence, the suspect grudgingly admitted that he couldn’t afford one.
Brightwell paused the playback.
I shook my head. “His voice isn’t familiar.” I managed a smile. “His language doesn’t even sound like it’s from the right century. Mouthpiece?”
“Not the brightest bulb. I think he’ll crack, but for now I can’t question him until a court-appointed attorney shows up and interviews his new client.”
“If that man was in the house, he didn’t speak. He has a rather distinctive voice. I’m sure I’d have remembered it.” I hesitated. “Is being caught with empty kerosene cans enough to prove he and his pal were the arsonists?”
“We have a decent circumstantial case against both of them, plus the charges for speeding and resisting arrest. They aren’t likely to get bail because they both have records. This guy did time for burglary and the other one was in jail for shoplifting. The problem is that, so far, we haven’t found a fingerprint match for either of them in the house. Forensics is still working on other trace evidence, but a positive ID from you would certainly help get a conviction.”
“They knew I was in the house.” I sounded as shaky as I felt. “That’s why they tried to set it on fire.”
“Then they’ll be charged with attempted murder as well as arson. Give a listen to the second man. If you recognize his voice, it will give me some leverage to convince him to rat out his partner.”
Despite the warmth of the day, I shivered. As if she knew I could use comforting, Calpurnia appeared out of nowhere to place one paw on my thigh. I hoisted her into my lap and began to stroke her soft fur, a routine that soothed us both.
“Ready?” Brightwell asked.
“Not really, but I’d like to get it over with.”
Like the first man, the second demanded to call his attorney. I tilted my head and closed my eyes. There was something about the cadence and timbre of his voice that stirred unpleasant emotions. My stomach roiled.
The speaker refused to answer questions, but he kept talking, taunting Brightwell. The longer he spoke, the more certain I became.
“That’s the man who was coming up the stairs to look for me. The whiny one. He didn’t like being told to set the house on fire with me in it.” I grimaced, momentarily distracted from one bad memory by the equally unpalatable thought that cleaning up all that spilled kerosene was going to be a miserable job.
Brightwell stopped the playback. “What about the man giving him orders? Could it have been the other guy we arrested?”
I shook my head. “No. I’m certain it wasn’t his voice I heard.”
I considered what I’d seen from the kitchen window. Given the distance from the house and the poor quality of the light, I couldn’t swear there had only been two men in the barn. I’d only seen two silhouettes and Detective Brightwell had said that a pair of villains had been arrested, but what if there had been a third arsonist?
I asked Brightwell if that was possible.
“Did you see a vehicle other than the truck?” he asked.
“No. I’m probably wrong about there being more of them. Let me listen to that first guy again.”
The second time around, the recorded voice still didn’t ring any bells, but I picked up on something I hadn’t noticed before.
“Is that usual for people accused of crimes?”
“Is what usual?”
“He wanted to call his mouthpiece. It sounds as if he had a specific lawyer in mind. Then . . . well, it’s as if he thought better of that idea, so he asked for an attorney to be appointed for him instead.”
“The court probably assigned him representation the last time he was in trouble with the law. Maybe he wanted the same guy again, then realized that if he hired him himself, he’d be the one paying the legal fees.” Brightwell drank more of his coffee, watching me over the rim of the mug. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure myself. Can you find out that lawyer’s name? The one who defended him before?”
Brightwell went out on the front porch to make his call. I rinsed the coffee mugs, all the while trying to contain my impatience and rein in my notoriously overactive imagination. I was back in my chair at the dinette table by the time he returned.
“Oscar Sanchez.” Brightwell slid into the chair opposite me.
“Of Featherstone, De Vane, Doherty, Sanchez, and Schiller?”
“The same. Do you want to tell me why you don’t sound surprised?”
I took a deep breath. “It’s probably just a coincidence, but that’s the law firm that also handles the Swarthout estate.”
Interest flared in his eyes. “So someone working there would have known that no one lived at the farm, and a nice big abandoned barn was available for hiding something illegal.”
“Exactly. Those storage units weren’t built on a whim. Whoever put them there had to know that the location was remote and security was lousy. Until Tessa messed things up by dying and leaving her property to
me, the people using the barn ran very little chance of getting caught.”
“Which lawyer knew you’d found the storage units?”
“I told Jason Coleman, and he also knew I fired the security company. Leland Featherstone is the lawyer who handled Tessa’s will, so I’m pretty sure Coleman would have reported my discovery to him. Anyone in the firm could have heard about it, and no one there knew I was planning to spend a couple of nights at the farm.”
“I can almost follow the warped logic for burning down the barn,” Brightwell said in a patient voice. “It was no longer safe to use and there was always a possibility that another search might turn up evidence that could identify them. But going after you and setting fire to the house still doesn’t make sense.”
It might, I thought, although I didn’t yet have all the pieces of the puzzle. “I don’t think I’m reaching to suspect there might be a connection to the law firm. Someone from there has to be involved. Even before those men came into the house, they knew they were looking for a woman.”
In giving my statement, I’d repeated what I’d overheard word for word, but only now did I remember the panicked thoughts that had gone through my head while I was huddled in the cupboard under the stairs. I’d distinctly heard one of the men order the other—others?—to find her.
“When you don’t know the gender of someone, the default pronouns are he and him, not she and her,” I explained to Brightwell. “And the man on the stairs, the one whose voice I recognized, said ‘she can’t have gone far’ as he started to climb.”
I closed my eyes, trying to play back the exact words the other man had used. I hadn’t recognized his voice, but the phrase he’d used began to tug at my memory.
“We don’t have time to mess around,” I murmured.
My eyes flew open. For a moment I was speechless with astonishment.
“Go on.” Brightwell was watching me like a hawk.
“There was a third man, and he was the one running the show. He’s the one who told the others to find her and then, just before he ordered the man on your recording to torch the farmhouse with me in it, he said they didn’t have time to mess around. Jason Coleman used that same expression the first time I met him.”
Brightwell looked doubtful. “Why would Coleman, assuming it was him last night, take the drastic measure of trying to kill you? He’s not some low IQ crook, prone to panic and irrational behavior. You said yourself it was too dark to see anyone’s face, even in the moonlight.”
“He couldn’t know that for certain, and he and his henchmen had just set the barn on fire.” I sent Brightwell a challenging look. “Do you have a better theory?”
“Not yet.”
Brightwell’s words sounded dismissive, but the grim expression on his face reassured me. He had every intention of taking a very close look at Jason Coleman.
Chapter Forty
Before Detective Brightwell left my house that Friday afternoon, he set a number of things in motion. First and foremost, he made me promise not to do anything foolish, like contacting Featherstone, De Vane, Doherty, Sanchez, and Schiller myself.
I don’t think he trusted me to keep my word. Within an hour of his departure, Ellen Blume showed up on my doorstep. She was carrying an overnight bag and tried to feed me some cockamamie story about needing a place to stay for a few nights because her landlord was fumigating her apartment building. I pretended to believe her, although I knew perfectly well that if the tale were true, she’d have gone to her mother’s house, which had a spare room, or to Luke’s place, which didn’t.
We let the fiction stand until Saturday morning, when she intercepted me on the way to collect my mail from the mailbox on the porch.
“I’ll get it, Mikki.” She blocked my way, almost stepping on Calpurnia to do so.
When she sidestepped to avoid Cal’s tail, I got around her, reaching the door to the foyer ahead of her. “Even if Jason Coleman is crazy enough to make another attempt to kill me, he’s not likely to do so in broad daylight.”
Ellen’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t think you bought my story.”
“It was a nice try,” I said consolingly.
After I turned off the security system, I went out onto the porch, collected two bills and a catalog from White Mountain Puzzles, and returned to the living room. Quite deliberately, I ignored the panel beside the door.
“You didn’t reset the alarm.”
“I don’t always leave it on during the day.”
“You know,” Ellen said, “a little cooperation would be nice.”
I punched in the code and headed for the living room. “A little information would be even nicer. Has Brightwell questioned Coleman?”
I settled down on the loveseat with the cat while Ellen took a nearby chair.
“I don’t know, but I assume he’s investigating. Brightwell likes to have all his ducks in a row before he confronts a suspect.”
“And how long will it take to do a background check?” I wasn’t prepared to remain under house arrest indefinitely.
“It will take as long as it takes. He has to make a case against Coleman or rule him out as a suspect. While he does that, he borrowed me from the PD and assigned me to keep an eye on you. It’s a sensible precaution. If you want to kick me out of the house, that’s your right, but if you do I’ll have to sit out front in my car. Stakeouts are not only deathly dull, they’re downright uncomfortable.”
“That’s right. Make me take pity on you.”
“So I can stay?”
“You can stay. To be honest, I’m glad you’re here. I’ll sleep better with you in the house.”
“Good. Now let’s talk about something else.”
“But there must be more you can tell me. What about the two arsonists already in custody? Do you think there’s any chance they’ll be offered a plea bargain if they name names?”
Ellen rolled her eyes. To make clear she intended to change the subject, she picked up the catalog I’d tossed onto the end table and started to flip through it. “I used to love doing jigsaw puzzles. I didn’t know you liked them too.”
“Have you looked in the dining room lately?”
The jigsaw-puzzle table I’d brought with me from Maine was set up in one corner. Beckoning to her to follow me, I pointed out the fold-up legs, the tilt-top mechanism, the sorting drawers, and the cover that keeps the cat from scattering my work-in-progress.
“Lighthouses of the World” was just as I’d left it a week or two earlier. The border was in place and a few of the interior scenes were complete but it was largely unfinished.
Although Ellen and I passed a pleasant afternoon chatting over the puzzle table, that weekend was one of the longest of my life. Did I have second thoughts about my positive identification? Way too many of them. And although Detective Brightwell seemed inclined to believe me when I said Jason Coleman had been at the farm the night of the fire, he couldn’t rush right out and arrest a prominent local attorney on my say-so alone. I’d been in a highly emotional state when I was hiding in that cupboard. If the only evidence against him was my belated recollection that the arsonist had used the same phrase I’d once heard from the lawyer’s lips, Coleman’s defense team would make mincemeat out of me in court.
Then again, if it had been Coleman, and if he still thought I might be able to place him at the scene of the crime, it was anybody’s guess what he’d do next.
By mutual agreement, Ellen and I avoided all mention of murder, fires, and lawyers. As a result, I found out a great many things I hadn’t known before about my cousin Luke. At the same time, I got the distinct impression that Ellen was holding something back. I hoped she was just postponing making a certain announcement until she and Luke were together to tell me their future plans, but I had the oddest feeling that what she was keeping from me was something far different and probably much less pleasant.
Saturday night, I had a hard time falling asleep. I told myself that since no one had arrested J
ason Coleman yet, he probably thought he’d gotten away without being recognized. He might still be worried about what his partners in crime would tell the police, but surely he no longer had any reason to come after me.
My subconscious wasn’t convinced. I didn’t get much rest that night.
On Sunday, I kept myself as busy as possible. I did still have editing to do. Ellen finished another puzzle and started a third from my hoard in the attic. I had kept some of my favorites from past years, on the theory I might want to put them together again one day.
I was just coming downstairs from my office when I heard Ellen yelp in dismay. I had a pretty good idea what had happened—the cat had taken a flying leap and landed in the middle of the puzzle table. Funny thing about that. The cover only works as a cat deterrent when it’s in place. It doesn’t do a thing to protect the puzzle when someone’s actually working on it.
By Sunday night, I was too tired to stay awake and worry. I crashed as soon as my head hit the pillow. As a result, I woke up on Monday morning feeling refreshed. I was also so stir-crazy that it didn’t bother me in the least to have Bella Trent turn up again.
Ellen caught sight of her about two seconds after I did. “Your stalker is back. I guess I’d better go have a word with her. Stay here.”
Bella had parked on the street and was just getting out of her car. While I watched from my front window, Ellen intercepted her. I couldn’t hear what they said, but after a few moments, I saw Bella’s face blossom into a radiant smile. Then she got into her car and drove away.
“Well?” I demanded when Ellen returned to the house.
“She won’t bother you again.”
“Uh-huh.” I’d heard that before.
Ellen just shrugged. I peered at her more closely, noticing the dark circles under her eyes and the slump in her shoulders. I wondered if she’d slept at all since she’d moved in with me. If she took her assignment as my bodyguard seriously, she’d probably been forcing herself to stay awake.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “No one’s after me. Go home and get some rest.”
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