A Credible Threat (The Jeri Howard Series Book 6)

by Janet Dawson

  I didn’t have answers, only a feeling of disquiet when I thought of Perdita and Jeffries and their budding relationship. Richard Bradfield was an ingenious killer with a long list of names and grievances. He’d decided it was his turn for payback. I didn’t want Perdita’s name ticked off that list.

  When I got to the Denver airport I turned in my rental car and headed for the terminal. By then it was seven, cold and dark, and the woman at the United ticket counter said the weather reports were predicting snow. I’d purchased an open-ended ticket when I left Oakland for Denver. There were two more flights out of Denver to Oakland that night. One left in forty minutes, but the flight was full. I tried for a standby on that one. It didn’t work out. I was stuck with the flight that left at nine-fifteen.

  I found a bank of phones and called Wayne Hobart at home. “Where are you?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “Colorado. I just talked with Andi Haskell.”

  “Richard Bradfield’s alibi for his wife’s murder,” Wayne said.

  “Not anymore.”

  “She’ll talk? Sid will be glad to hear that. Of course, we have to catch the son of a bitch first.”

  “Why were you trying to reach me?”

  “Macauley’s still missing,” he said. “And Colin Derrill’s in the hospital.”

  “Since when? And how bad?”

  “Since last night. He was leaving his studio sometime after seven. We know it was after seven because he was on the phone with a friend before that. He got waylaid, beat up pretty bad. He’s in a coma.”

  “Damn,” I said, loud enough that the person at the next pay phone glanced my way. “So you can’t ask him if his assailant was Bradfield?”

  “Bradfield? It’s possible. But that studio of his is in a lousy neighborhood. His wallet was gone and so was his watch. We’ve got some punks in this town who kill people for less than that.”

  “When I saw Derrill a few days ago, he told me he’d had some break-ins at his last place. What if Bradfield was looking for information on Cordelia Ramsey’s whereabouts? She was married to Derrill when Bradfield began stalking her. He might have guessed they had stayed in touch.”

  “It’s possible,” Wayne conceded. “I’ll alert that sergeant up in Mendocino County, just to be safe.”

  “Thanks, Wayne. Listen, I know Sam Kacherian supposedly killed himself in January. Errol found out that much from a friend of his down in L.A. But I’ve got some questions. Where did Kacherian work before he got laid off? He must have had a car, to get his job. Was the vehicle found there where he killed himself? If not, where is it?”

  “You think Bradfield killed him?” Wayne asked.

  “Kacherian lived in Tustin. The car Bradfield had while he lived in San Diego turned up in Garden Grove. Not far as the crow flies. Bradfield could settle a score and gain some transportation at the same time.”

  “I’m on it,” Wayne said. “I’ll talk to you when you get back.”

  I hung up the phone. Then I discovered that Andi Haskell had also told the truth about how suddenly springtime blizzards could cover the Denver area with a blanket of white.

  While I was waiting at the gate, hoping to catch the standby, I’d noticed the first few snowflakes floating down outside the plate-glass windows that lined the concourse. The snow fell more steadily as the flight took off without me. I paced the length of the concourse and had dinner at one of the terminal restaurants. When I checked one of the overhead screens to verify my departure time, I discovered my late evening flight had been delayed, first by twenty minutes, then forty, then an hour.

  The sky kept falling, whitening the runways and frosting the windows. Back at the phones I called Perdita Paxton’s number in Mendocino, but got the answering machine instead. I left a message, asking that Perdita call me at home in Oakland. But by the look of the snow outside the window in Denver, I wasn’t sure I’d be there. I disconnected and called the Garber Street house. Rachel answered.

  “I’m stuck in Denver,” I told her. “There’s a blizzard outside.”

  “Well, it’s raining here. Sheets and sheets of water, pouring from the sky. The weather report last night said chance of showers. Hah! Right now it’s a certainty.”

  Wonderful, I thought. That could cause delays on the Oakland end of the flight. Assuming I ever got off the ground in Denver. “Any more calls? Is Emily there?”

  “No, to both questions,” Rachel said. “Emily and Vicki drove up to Mendocino earlier this afternoon. Hope they got there before the rain did.”

  “Mendocino. What time did they leave?”

  “About three. They were hoping to beat the traffic.” Rachel picked up my concern. “Is there a problem, Jeri?”

  “I’m not sure. If the weather cooperates, I should be home late tonight. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

  At least I would if Rita was fast. Which she usually was.

  I tried Perdita Paxton’s Mendocino number again. Still the answering machine. I didn’t leave a message. Directory assistance didn’t have a number for Tom Jeffries in Fort Bragg. He must be unlisted, I thought. I waited twenty minutes and called Perdita’s number again. This time I got a recording that told me service had been temporarily disrupted. Pacific Bell must have been having some problems with the storm front rolling in off the ocean. Telephone communication with the Mendocino coast was no longer an option.

  I called Errol instead. Fortunately, the phones were still working on the Monterey peninsula. “North coast is getting the worst of it,” Errol said. “We’ve had a lot of rain, though. Where are you?”

  “Denver. I had an interesting conversation with our old friend Andi Haskell.” I gave him a rundown of what Andi had told me. Then I made the same request of him that I’d made of Wayne Hobart: more information about Sam Kacherian’s death.

  As I hung up the phone I checked my watch and sighed. I walked to the gate and discovered my flight had been delayed yet again. I found an uncomfortable seat with not enough light, pulled out the paperback I’d brought with me, and tried to read. The airport had filled with disgruntled passengers, noisy crying children and their restless parents, harried-looking businessmen and -women in suits who weren’t going to make it to that early morning meeting in Chicago or New York City. Unable to concentrate on my book, I went to get some coffee and paced the concourse while I drank it, poking my nose in all the airport shops.

  When I returned to my gate, the seat I’d vacated had been taken in my absence. So I sat down on the carpeted floor, leaning against my gray travel bag, and listened to the elderly man next to me regale his companion with tales of getting stuck at airports throughout the West.

  Finally, I dozed off. But it was a fitful sleep. I woke up every time an announcement blasted through the airport’s loudspeaker. Each time, I looked out the window and saw only white.

  Snow. The damn stuff was pretty, if you didn’t have to go anywhere. For the duration, I was stranded, and the ticking clock told me I was running out of time.

  Forty-two

  MY FLIGHT FINALLY LEFT DENVER FOUR HOURS late, touching down at Oakland International at three o’clock Saturday morning. I went home, exhausted, slept for a few hours, then woke to a dark gray sky and the sound of rain pattering on my roof.

  My apartment certainly seemed empty without my cats, as gray and gloomy as the weather outside. I knew from my earlier conversations with Dr. Prentice that Abigail and Black Bart were both well and missing me. I missed them too. I wondered how long it would be before the danger was over and I could bring them home. But the decapitated lemon tree outside my front window was a reminder of just how potent that danger was.

  I showered and dressed. By eight I was in my office, drinking coffee as I listened to the radio recital of power outages, flooding, and traffic accidents caused by the storm that had swept through the Bay Area over the past twenty-four hours. The weather was supposed to improve today, but so far I hadn’t seen any evidence of it and neither had the
guy who was updating me on the hour and half hour. Besides, there was another front waiting offshore, gathering strength.

  The mail had piled up in my absence. The red light on my answering machine blinked at me as well. I sifted through the mail, then checked the messages, mentally sorting through what could wait and what couldn’t. The last message was from Wayne Hobart. He’d talked with the police department down in Tustin. I picked up the phone.

  “You were right about the car,” Wayne told me when I reached him at home. “Kacherian had a little Nissan that was missing when they found the body. Turned up a day later in San Luis Obispo.”

  “Another car got stolen there, right about the same time,” I guessed.

  “Right again. This one wound up in Oakland. Two days after it was stolen.”

  “About the time the phone calls started at the house where Vicki Vernon lives. I’m willing to bet a car was stolen in Berkeley when Ted Macauley’s vehicle was abandoned up by the botanical gardens.”

  “Several, in fact I’ve already talked with Brad Nguyen in Berkeley. Macauley’s car was probably ditched Thursday or Friday. Two cars were stolen from that neighborhood on Thursday, and two on Friday. None of them located so far.”

  “What about Kacherian’s job?”

  “Not much there. He worked for one of those packing stores. You know, where you can take in your Christmas presents and they’ll box ’em and send ’em. It was a seasonal job. He started working there before Thanksgiving, and he was let go after the holidays.”

  “What was the place called?” I wrote down the name of the company and thanked Wayne, asking how Sid was doing.

  “He took a couple of days off, went up to Sacramento to see his sister. Maybe this will have blown over by the time he gets back.”

  “I hope so.” The rain spattered against my office window, reminding me of what else was blowing over. After I disconnected, I called Rita Lydecker. “Anything on Tom Jeffries?”

  “Yeah. You in your office? I’ll fax the stuff to you.”

  I waited impatiently for the fax line to ring, then snatched the pages as they came out of the machine. Then I switched on my computer and logged onto some databases. With the information Wayne had given me coupled with Rita’s fax, it didn’t take long to connect the dots. I leaned back in my chair and stared at the screen in front of me.

  “Bingo,” I said.

  It took me nearly five hours to get to Mendocino.

  First I had to fight my way past my own fatigue, then through a midday Bay Area traffic jam caused by the nasty weather. It was still raining as I inched my way across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and onto Highway 101. The traffic thinned out as I drove north.

  I bypassed Cloverdale and got on Highway 128, heading northwest toward the coast. But the previous night’s storm had washed a lot of mud and debris onto the twisting two-lane road. At a couple of places only one lane was open as highway crews pushed the obstacles out of the way. When I reached the long tunnel of redwoods that ran alongside the Navarro River, I saw signs warning of flooding. Fortunately, the river had receded, leaving only a scum of mud on the asphalt ahead of me.

  When I got to the coast it looked as though that promised Pacific front was taking its time to make landfall. Above me the sun tried to pierce through the cloud cover, but the clouds hovering offshore were angry and dark, hugging the boiling, surging ocean. As I drove across the Big River bridge into Mendocino the waves assaulted the headland to the west. It started to rain again.

  I tried Perdita’s house first. No one home. Then I drove down Main Street and angled the Toyota into a parking spot.

  Lee was behind the counter at Perdu and she looked surprised to see me. “You drove up from Oakland? I thought the road was closed. We didn’t even have electricity or phones last night.”

  “It’s open now. But just barely. Looks like another front is moving in.”

  “This weather,” Lee said, shaking her head. “It rained like crazy last night, but it was sunny two hours ago.”

  “Where’s Perdita?”

  “She’s not at home?”

  “No. And she wasn’t there last night.”

  “Probably went out to dinner. She doesn’t cook. Her niece and a friend came up for the weekend, got here just before it started raining hard. I wonder if—” Lee stopped. “Maybe they went up to Tom Jeffries’s place in Fort Bragg.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “His house is up north of Pudding Creek,” Lee said, consulting her watch. “But it’s past three. He should be at his store.” Lee jotted an address on the back of one of Perdita’s business cards. “You can’t miss it.”

  I pointed the car north again, speeding up the asphalt ribbon. The rain stopped by the time I drove into Fort Bragg. I found Tom Jeffries’s antique store easily enough, on Franklin Street, which paralleled Highway 1, which became Main Street when it entered town. But Tom Jeffries wasn’t there. Instead an older woman held court behind the counter.

  “You just missed him,” she said. “He and Mrs. Paxton and the girls went to the botanical gardens. He said something about picking up some plants he’d ordered before the rain starts again.”

  I found a phone booth and looked up the Mendocino County sheriff’s substation. It was on South Franklin. I stopped there, looking for Sergeant Sullivan, but he was out in the field. I left a message, then retraced my route south, over the Noyo River, to the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens. I pulled off the highway onto a gravel parking lot and parked near the restaurant, which was now closed. There weren’t many vehicles in the lot, but one, a Land Rover parked near the entrance, looked like the one Jeffries had been driving when I met him last week.

  The sign at the entrance said the gardens were open until five. Although the sun was trying its best, it didn’t seem like a day for a walk in the gardens. I went through the gate, where there was a shop that sold everything from seeds to the usual T-shirts. There was also a window where a white-haired man collected admission fees. I looked around but didn’t see any of the four people I sought. A young couple in jeans paid the old attendant. Then they strolled off, arm in arm, past a middle-aged man who stared at a display of succulents as though he couldn’t decide which variety he wanted to buy.

  “Do you know Tom Jeffries?” I asked the man at the store. “Tall, silver-haired man, on the lean side. He’s with an older woman and two young women, college-age. They may have had a dog with them, an Airedale terrier. Jeffries was supposed to pick up some plants.”

  “Can’t say as I do,” he said, shaking his head. “But we’ve had several people in and out today, in spite of the weather. There’s Emma. Let’s ask her.”

  He looked over my shoulder at a woman in a smock who’d just come into view, carrying a nursery catalog. I repeated my question and she nodded, pointing at a cluster of large plants in plastic containers. “Yes, they were here. In fact, that’s Mr. Jeffries’s order right there.”

  “Where did they go? It’s important that I find them.”

  “He wanted to show them how the rhododendrons would look,” Emma said. “They’ve started blooming but they won’t peak until May.” She reached for one of the folded brochures and opened it. One side was a map of the gardens. She pointed. “Here are the coast rhododendrons, where the north and south trail meet.”

  I pulled out my wallet and gave the old man the admission fee, then set out, map in hand, through beds of perennials and then an expanse of different types of heather. Ahead of me I saw masses of camellias and daylilies. I found the south trail easily enough, and the area where the coast rhododendrons grew, but I saw no people, save the young couple I’d seen earlier. I stopped at the junction of the north and south trails and listened, hearing only the wind and the crash of waves on the shore to the west.

  Wait. Was that a dog barking? I listened again. Yes, it was a dog. I thought it must be Molly, the Airedale. The sound came from somewhere ahead of me. I looked down at the map. I had a wealth of tr
ails to choose from, all narrower than the one I was on, winding through the woods and into the canyons formed by Digger Creek and Schoefer Creek. Were they hidden from view on one of them or had they stayed on the broader trail that led to the coastal bluff?

  I started walking, sticking with the north trail as it continued west. I thought I heard voices to my left and detoured down the Pine Forest trail to Fern Canyon. But the voices I’d heard belonged to two women strolling along the banks of Digger Creek. They had a cocker spaniel with them. The dog barked at me as I approached.

  “Have you seen a man and three women, with an Airedale?”

  One of the women nodded. “Yes. Butchie and the Airedale had quite a romp. That was about fifteen minutes ago. They were heading in the direction of Cliff House.”

  I consulted the map again and saw the structure she referred to, almost at the end of the bluff that jutted out into the ocean, with a picnic area nearby. I got back on the main path, then left it again on the Shore Pine trail. Up ahead I saw a grassy meadow, then a glint of black and brindle and the distinctive Airedale cut as Molly raced across the path in front of me. I heard nothing but the steady crash of water on rocks. But Molly must have heard something else. She altered course, heading across the meadow for the trees.

  Cliff House at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens certainly wasn’t as grand as the San Francisco landmark I associated with the name. This was a small enclosed rectangular shelter, reached by a narrow path and a series of steps leading down from the main trail. With redwood planks for walls, it was little more than a viewing platform perched on the edge of the cliff.

  I went through the only door, at the southwest corner of the structure, and saw a wide glass window that faced north and looked down at the waves crashing on the rocks below. Across a cove I could see the Georgia Pacific lumber mill dominating the coastal skyline of Fort Bragg. Closer to home I saw Perdita Paxton standing at the railing in front of the window, with Tom Jeffries next to her, his arm around her waist.

  “Hello.” My voice echoed as I spoke.