Bouchard looked mortified. “Oh, I see. Sorry, Mrs. Brewer.”
“Didn’t you see it when you found the body?” the officer asked.
It was an entirely logical question, and one for which I was not prepared. “Um, you know . . .” I stared down at my feet. “I ran away fast. And please shut my door. It’s freezing.”
“Understandable you wouldn’t see it,” Bouchard said. He told his officer to wait in the squad car, shut my side door, and fixed his eyes on me. “I wish you’d be straight with me, Mrs. Brewer. All the way. I don’t think you’re being completely straight.”
No, I wasn’t, and not being a total dimwit, Bouchard sensed that I was holding some of my cards close to the vest, but I couldn’t divulge the real reason I’d walked into the woods, could I? What I could do was try to help by telling him everything else I knew. “Did you hear Comeau paid a visit to the Dearborns yesterday, after he talked to me?”
“How would I know that?”
“He inspected their back yard.”
Bouchard scratched his chin. “Huh?”
“He went outside and took a serious look around their back yard. He wouldn’t say why—just like he wouldn’t say why he paid me a visit. Have you talked to Comeau since the birdwatching tour?”
“We’re still investigating.”
“These backyard visits are a common thread. First the Dearborns’ house and then mine.”
“Could be.”
“And Comeau is a common thread in both deaths.”
“So are you.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m just saying, you’re not being logical. If Comeau is a suspect, why can’t you be one?”
“You want me to be straight with you? Well, I am being straight, and you’re not listening. You dismiss everything I say. Rancourt wouldn’t do that. In fact, he’d ask for my opinion and he’d trust it. You won’t even tell me when he’s going to be released from the hospital—and don’t pretend you don’t know.”
His eyebrows arched in surprise. “He’ll be out tomorrow and back to work soon after that. Jeez.”
“Was that so hard?”
“You’re welcome.”
“I need to go,” I said, jabbing a thumb toward Emily. “I have a guest. I can see you’re busy, so I’ll try not to complicate things by murdering anyone else.”
Aware of my snide tone, I gritted my teeth in anticipation of what was to come, but Bouchard simply tipped his police cap and said, “I’d appreciate it.”
I resisted the powerful temptation to slam the side door behind him on his way out.
“Yipes,” Emily said. “What’s happening?”
“Bouchard’s being a twit.”
“I mean, what’s gotten into you?”
“Two murders?”
“Are you sure Gavin was murdered?”
“We both know he was.” When I sat across the table from Emily, I saw Minette’s teaspoon, still half full of maple syrup. “I took Minette to her old tree in the woods this morning and left her there. It’s not safe for her in my house until I can prove Comeau tried to break in last night—or until I can make him go away.”
Emily took a sip of tea, set down her cup, and nodded sagely. “That explains why you took Bouchard’s head off.”
I snorted. “That and the fact that he’s an idiot.”
“You were kind of hard on him. He’s doing his best.”
“His best isn’t good enough.” Beyond the kitchen window, a few snowflakes danced in the wind, and the sun I’d seen flickering through the trees just an hour ago had disappeared behind a blanket of low-hanging clouds. “Minette says she won’t freeze out there, but I’m not sure about that. She’s got cotton balls and handkerchiefs, but nothing else to keep her warm, and she’s fifty or sixty feet in the air. Even if she doesn’t freeze, she’ll be miserable.”
“This can’t be her first cold snap, Kate. She’s fifty-seven years old.”
“That’s not even middle-aged by fairy standards. Where’s Laurence?”
“Out running. Or at least he was when I left.”
“But it’s freezing out there.”
“You were outside.”
“I was wrapped like a mummy.”
“What can I say? He’s a better man than I am.”
I sat forward and propped my elbows on the table. “I just thought of something. It’s, well . . . unkind. But Gavin knew about Minette. I didn’t mention it last night, but I was right about him finding something Ray wrote. It was a journal he found taped behind the water heater, all about Ray discovering Minette. Gavin let me take it home to read it.”
“It mentions Minette by name?”
“Yes, and Gavin is close to believing every word of it. I told him and Sierra that Ray was probably making notes for a novel, but that didn’t fly with Gavin. But anyway, now that’s he’s dead, I feel like Minette is—”
“—safer because he’s no longer a threat to her,” Emily finished. “It’s not unkind. It’s true.”
“But what was Gavin doing with my Christmas ornament? Emily, I put it on Minette’s tree, deep in the woods, where hardly anyone walks in winter.”
“I didn’t know that until the officer showed it to Bouchard.”
“Gavin must have taken it. He was at Minette’s tree.”
“Him or the person who killed him.”
“One or both of them knew where to find her maple tree.”
“Well, you did have an ornament hanging from it.”
Horrified, my hand shot to my mouth. Of course! Now who’s the idiot? “Oh, Emily, I led them to straight to it. What was I thinking?”
“I’m assuming you did it for Minette, and—hello?—if I saw a Christmas ornament hanging in the woods, I’d just think how lovely it was. I wouldn’t say to myself, ‘Oh, I know what that means. A fairy lives in that tree.’ Come on, let’s stop worrying about Minette, put our heads together, and solve these murders. The sooner we solve them, the sooner Minette can come home. Anyway, after what happened to you last night, I can hardly sleep, and Laurence is leaving for Tunisia the day after tomorrow.”
Emily was right. Like snow in the wind, my thoughts were all over the place. I needed to gather the facts of both cases and focus. “Tea,” I said, getting up to fill the kettle. “Get some paper and pens from the drawer.”
Ten minutes later Emily and I were fueling ourselves with cups of almond oolong and staring down at four sheets of paper on the kitchen table, one each for our remaining suspects: Comeau, Tom Roche, Joel Perry, and Sierra Dearborn. On each sheet we had written our reasons for suspicion, including the insurance claims and Tom’s affair. It was pretty thin stuff, most of it without hard evidence. But it was all we had, and somewhere in our notes was the real reason Nadine and Gavin had been murdered.
“Would Sierra murder her husband?” Emily asked.
“Who else knew he was in the woods early this morning?” I replied.
“That’s probably true.”
“Her and Gavin’s house in Dover-Foxcroft was destroyed by fire. Did Nadine investigate the fire for their insurance company?” I tapped the first piece of paper. “Tom Roche cheated on his wife and she’s getting his house and half the bakery, which is a loss anyway because of the flood. The connection to Nadine is that she’s an insurance investigator and may have turned down his full claim.”
“Thus ruining him financially, since his wife has all the money.”
“And then we have Joel Perry. He’s a little old to be driving tour buses for a living, don’t you think? I’m sure he was making tons more money as a truck driver. And then, while he was restoring his house in Dexter, it burned down. Was Nadine the investigator on that?”
“Laurence is still researching that,” Emily said. “What about Comeau?”
“He doesn’t have any connection to Nadine that we can find, and we know almost nothing about him. He’s a ghost.”
“Laurence is still looking into him, too.”
“We know he drives a white BMW,” I said. I told Emily of my discovery that Comeau hadn’t run Rancourt’s SUV off the road. “He was visiting the Dearborns at the time, and when I saw his car, it didn’t have a scratch on it. So who went after Rancourt and why?”
Emily rubbed her forehead, trying to make sense of our goulash of clues. “Where do we start?”
“With Rancourt,” I said. “You know what? I owe him some flowers.”
CHAPTER 14
Emily and I asked for Rancourt’s room number, bought a vase of flowers in the hospital’s gift shop, and took the elevator to the second floor. Lord, I hated Franklin Memorial. I’d walked its antiseptic halls many times, and I could still recall Michael’s room numbers from his several stays. I had d told myself I wouldn’t return until the day they wheeled me in on a stretcher, but life plays tricks on you.
When I saw Rancourt sitting up in bed watching TV, some of the sourness in my stomach disappeared. He looked tired but well, and the bandage on his left temple was no bigger than his thumb. Though the dark circles under his eyes hadn’t faded—in fact, they’d grown worse—his complexion wasn’t as chalky as it usually was. No doubt hospital food was an improvement over his usual donuts-and-chips fare, and besides, he’d probably lost five pounds of water weight to the trauma of the accident.
I knocked on the door jamb and walked in. “You’re looking good, Detective Rancourt.”
“Kate, Emily.” He grabbed the clicker from his bed and turned off the TV. “You didn’t have to visit.”
“Of course we did,” Emily said. “You’re our favorite detective.”
I set the vase on the TV table and told him Bouchard had said he’d be released tomorrow.
“First thing in the morning,” he said. “Unless I can maneuver my way out earlier. I can’t wait to go home. How do people sleep, what with nurses coming in every five minutes to check on your breathing or stab you in the arm with a needle? And thanks for those flowers.” His gaze slid from the vase to me. “I’ve been told you stumbled on another body.”
“In the woods earlier this morning. Gavin Dearborn. I think he was murdered.”
“That I don’t know, but seeing how he was forty-one, I doubt he just keeled over. I also hear that someone paid your back yard a late-night visit.”
“Comeau,” I said firmly.
“Do you have proof of that?”
“He also had a look at the Dearborns’ back yard, only he asked the Dearborns first. With me, he paid an unexpected visit.”
Rancourt scowled. “What was he up to at the Dearborns?”
“He didn’t say and they didn’t ask.”
“Does Officer Bouchard know?”
“I’ve told him everything, not that it’s made a dent.”
“He’s not listening,” Emily said. She looked around for a chair and dragged one out of a corner before sitting in it. “He practically accused Kate of killing Gavin Dearborn. I mean, honestly.”
“Cut him slack,” Rancourt said, fixing the pillows behind his neck. “It’s his first time heading up a murder investigation and we’re short staffed—and that was before I wound up here. And Kate, I was coming to see you when I was hit. I wanted you to know that Comeau might be a dodgy fellow. He’s one of those people who don’t leave a paper trail behind them, like normal folks can’t help but doing. I had the station look into him after Nadine Sullivan’s murder. Everyone else checked out—normal paper trails—but that doesn’t mean they’re in the clear. You know what I’m saying, don’t you? Be cautious.”
I couldn’t believe I was about to defend Comeau, but Rancourt needed to know he wasn’t the one who ran him off the road. “I found out Comeau drives a white BMW. He was at the Dearborns about the time of your accident, and just before that he was at my house, and I didn’t see any damage to the front end of his car. He wasn’t the one who hit you.”
“It was a dark SUV,” Rancourt said, “and it’s possible it wasn’t related to Nadine Sullivan’s death. Don’t worry, we’ll find it soon enough.”
I was glad he was optimistic, but I sure wasn’t. This case—now three cases if you included his run-in with the dark SUV—was moving at the speed of a snail, and Bouchard was too obstinate to follow up on obvious leads. “Do you know if Officer Bouchard has talked to Comeau lately?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know. He’s catching me up to speed later today.”
Not wanting to impinge on his rest or mealtime, I checked my watch. “It’s noon,” I said. “We’d better let you eat.”
“Yeah, thanks a lot. Hospital food. Another reason to get out of here.”
“It’s got to be healthier than the vending-machine junk you eat.”
He lowered his head and eyed us skeptically. “And what are you planning on doing with the rest of your day, ladies? As if I didn’t know.”
“Earlier we talked to a woman named Sophia at Wildland Birds,” I began.
He grunted at me. When would I stop my busybody ways?
“I think she’s going to ban Comeau from their tours. Did you know that Tom Roche, the Dearborns, and Joel Perry all put in insurance claims over the past few months?”
“And Nadine Sullivan was an insurance fraud investigator, yes,” Rancourt said with a sly grin. “You think I’m not keeping up?”
“Not so fast,” I said. “Did you know Joel Perry used to make a good living as a trucker but now works as a tour bus driver?”
“I didn’t know about the trucking job.”
“Thirteen years. Then the company closed down.”
Rancourt ran a thumb and forefinger down the gray stubble on his cheek. “Couldn’t have been easy for him, financially or otherwise. How did you find out? The aforementioned Sophia?”
“Yeah, but we’ll talk about that later,” I said. “You need to rest and eat.”
“Kate, I can’t tell you who you can and can’t talk to, but there have been two murders, and I don’t—”
“So Gavin was murdered?”
“Stabbed in the back, but it doesn’t look like he died right away. The cold was probably a contributing factor, but I’ll know more after I talk to Bouchard.”
“Was he stabbed where I found him?”
“Approximately.”
“He didn’t try to get up or fight back?”
“He couldn’t, Kate.”
Rancourt gave me a look that silenced further questions. Somehow Gavin had been immobilized by his stab wound and left to die in the snow. I didn’t want to know the gruesome details. But as I was about to leave the hospital room, I turned back from the door and said, “Nadine and Gavin were killed in two very different ways.”
“So it seems,” Rancourt said. “All the more reason to watch yourselves.”
Emily and I climbed back into my Jeep and drove a few blocks north for Angelo’s and a couple Italian sandwiches to go. It was strange not having Minette in my pocket, not seeing her scurry around on the Jeep’s floor or fly up to the console. Emily even pulled a sprig of parsley from her sandwich, ready to give it to Minette as she always did, until she realized Minette wasn’t with us.
I took a few bites of my sandwich, as usual dripping olive oil all over the wax paper on my lap, thinking how different our two murders were. One was clean, if you could call murder clean, in that it was hands-off and required no violence. The second was very violent indeed. Sickeningly so. “I don’t believe Sierra stabbed Gavin. I don’t think she hates him, for one thing, and for another, I don’t think she’s physically capable. She’s not weak, but she’s not . . . vicious.”
“The killer was a man,” Emily said with certainty, “and maybe one who knows anatomy.”
“You’re right.” I shivered involuntarily at the picture her words brought to mind.
“My phone’s vibrating,” Emily said, reaching into her coat pocket. “It’s Laurence.”
Emily listened, said a few yeahs, then hung up and turned to me. “Nadine was the investigator on all three claim
s—Tom, the Dearborns, and Joel. It wasn’t that the insurance companies suspected fraud in their cases, but they payouts were so large they wanted to be thorough and put matters on record. The Dearborns got everything they asked for and Joel got everything he asked for—plus more. Only Tom was denied what he considered full coverage for his bakery. His sprinklers weren’t in working order.”
“So on the face of it, Tom had reason to hate Nadine. But he also had reason to hate his wife.”
“But Carrie Roche is very much alive.”
“Between her divorcing him and Nadine downsizing his claim, he was in serious money trouble.”
“He must feel like his life is over at twenty-seven. The big shot ex-hockey player facing divorce and financial ruin.”
I wrapped up the rest of my sandwich and dropped it in the plastic bag. “Wait just a minute. There’s an obvious question here, and we’ve been missing it. How did all these people with an insurance connection to Nadine end up on the same tour bus? Joel’s the driver and had to be on that bus. But Nadine lived in Skowhegan, Comeau lives in Lewiston, the Dearborns just moved here from Dover-Foxcroft, and Tom lives in Glenburn. Someone made sure all these people would be on the same Smithwell bus at the same time. This was orchestrated, Emily.”
“Comeau didn’t have a connection to Nadine,” Emily said, “and he’s the only one who didn’t. He was there for you.”
“And maybe the Dearborns.” I put the Jeep in gear and backed out of the parking space. “I’m betting Comeau contacted them before the tour, and I need to find out how and why.”
CHAPTER 15
“How are you doing, Sierra?” I asked. “Is there anything I can do? Can I call anyone for you?”
“I have family coming up from Portland,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here. You can tell me about Gavin. I want to hear from your mouth what you saw.” She moved sluggishly across her living room and then dropped to one of her chairs. “The cops are so closed-mouthed. That Officer Bouche, whatever—”
“Bouchard,” I said, sitting opposite her on the couch, silently rehearsing what I would say about Gavin and how I would ask her about Comeau. I’d dropped Emily at home so she could spend time with Laurence in the waning hours before his trip to Tunisia, so I was on my own.
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