Poisoned Ground Series, Book 6

by Sandra Parshall

  They all fell silent as they ate. After a couple of minutes, Morton popped the last of his sandwich into his mouth and said, “Brandon, give your mom and dad my compliments. They make the best sandwiches I’ve ever tasted. They saved me from having to eat pasta salad with my wife and her sisters.”

  ***

  In mid-afternoon, Tom and Brandon headed out to the Hollinger farm. Jake’s truck sat in the driveway, but Tom’s pounding on the front door brought no response. As they’d done on the day of the murders, he and Brandon set out to locate Jake. Thinking he might still be working on the fence Lincoln Kelly had knocked down, they went there first.

  The fence was back up, and a row of crows perched on it, preening their feathers in the sun and carrying on a quiet conversation among themselves. The small herd of white and chocolate-colored Merino sheep grazed on late season meadow grass, and goldfinches chattered as they foraged among wildflowers gone to seed. Jake was nowhere in sight.

  “I doubt he’s in the cornfields,” Tom said. “He’s probably already plowed them under for winter. Let’s head over to the barn.”

  As they walked, Tom caught sight a couple of times of the barn’s faded red roof, but the rolling landscape and several massive old pecan trees obscured most of the building. Jake hadn’t harvested the fallen nuts, and squirrels pawed through the leaf litter to collect them and carry them off to store for winter.

  They were crossing a low spot, with no view ahead, when a gunshot rang out.

  The birds took wing and the squirrels scattered.

  “Aw, no,” Tom groaned. It could mean nothing. It could be something harmless. But he knew it wasn’t. “God damn it.”

  His heart pounding, he took off toward the barn with Brandon beside him. When they crested a slope, the weathered old barn loomed before them, a couple hundred feet away. And Jake Hollinger was running from it, streaking toward a stand of evergreens.

  “Tavia!” Jake cried. “Tavia!”

  Tom changed course and, with Brandon on his heels, raced after Jake.

  He heard Jake screaming before he saw what had happened. “Oh God, oh God. Tavia, Tavia!”

  By the time Tom and Brandon reached him, Jake was on his knees in the grass, rocking back and forth and clasping Tavia Richardson’s limp body to his chest.

  ***

  Tom was still trying to pull Jake away from the body when Brandon returned from his pursuit. Bending over, hands on his thighs, Brandon gasped, “Nothing. Didn’t see anybody. But I found the weapon. Hunting rifle.”

  “Jake, come on now.” Tom tugged on the sobbing man’s arm. He had been gentle up to this point, but he wanted Jake under control before the EMT unit showed up. Not that they could do anything for Tavia. As Jake held onto her, Tom had felt her neck and wrists for a pulse and found none. He couldn’t see the entry wound because of the way Jake held her, but he saw the hole the round had blasted open in her back on its way out. One of Jake’s hands covered part of the wound, and her blood drenched his skin and the cuff of his plaid shirt.

  Brandon moved to the other side of the two, grasped Jake’s arm and helped Tom pull him upward. Jake held onto the body, dragging it with him.

  “Let her go,” Tom told him. “You hear me? Let Tavia go. Put her down.”

  They needed several more minutes to pry Jake’s arms off the body and return it to the grass. As two emergency techs charged toward them, equipment bags banging against their legs, Tom led the still weeping Jake back to the barn.

  Inside, Tom steered Jake to a bench along one wall. His sobs echoed in the dim and nearly empty space. A tractor and a long rack of hand tools took up one corner. No animals were inside at the moment, but a mixture of odors familiar to Tom, sheep manure and lanolin, permeated the building.

  Tom stood over Jake and tried to break through his grief. “Did you see anybody? Did you see who did it? Come on, Jake, I need you to talk to me.”

  Jake shook his head. “No. Nobody.”

  “Was anybody here with you and Tavia? What happened here?”

  Jake took a shuddering breath and swiped his shirtsleeve across his nose. “There wasn’t anybody else here. She was going to walk home. She likes to walk.” He choked up again. “I was still in the barn when I heard the shot.”

  “Damn it.” Tom scraped his fingers through his hair.

  “I left the rifle where it was,” Brandon said. “Want me to go get it?”

  “Show me where it is.” Tom told Jake, “Stay right here until I get back. I don’t want you to move. All right?”

  Jake nodded. As they walked out, Tom heard his sobs start up again.

  On their way to the wooded patch, Tom stopped to look at Tavia’s body. The emergency techs knelt on either side of her, but they weren’t working on her. One of them, a middle-aged woman named Janice, looked up at Tom. “Nothing we could do. You don’t want us to transport her yet, do you?”

  “No. I’ve got deputies on the way, and I told dispatch to get Dr. Lauter out here. It’ll probably be about an hour before you can take her.”

  One of them, Tom noticed, had closed Tavia’s eyes. Except for the wound in her chest and the smears of blood on her cheeks, she looked peaceful.

  The rifle lay on a springy bed of pine needles among the trees. Tom stooped to take a closer look without moving it.

  “Why do you think the shooter left it behind?” Brandon asked. “Stumbled and dropped it, maybe?”

  “Maybe. We might get prints. Even if we don’t, we’ve got the weapon.”

  “This is our break, right?”

  Tom looked up at Brandon. “The only problem is, this rifle doesn’t fire the same caliber ammo that killed the Kellys. This isn’t the same gun.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “We have to start looking at this from a different angle.” Tom stood with Dennis and Brandon near the barn, watching the medics place Tavia Richardson in a body bag and zip it closed. Dr. Lauter had been there and gone, releasing the body for immediate transport to the medical examiner’s office in Roanoke. “One thing we know for sure is that Jake Hollinger didn’t kill Tavia. And she’d already agreed to sell her land, so she wasn’t standing in the way of the development. But I can’t believe this killing, three days after the Kelly murders, is a coincidence.”

  “Maybe the other side’s hitting back, retaliating for the Kelly murders.” Dennis cradled his digital camera in the crook of his arm. “Somebody on the anti-development side could have shot Mrs. Richardson.”

  “Aw, God, that’s the last thing we need, an all-out feud with both sides taking shots at each other.” Tom raked his fingers through his hair. He wondered briefly what Rachel and Simon were doing at the moment. She’d told Tom she might take Simon to the river this afternoon, and he’d felt a pang of disappointment that he couldn’t go with them.

  The medics lifted the body bag onto a gurney. They had driven the ambulance into the field and it waited nearby, its rear doors standing open.

  “How many people would be so set against the development that they’d do something like this?” Dennis asked.

  The thought of Joanna McKendrick sprang up, unbidden, in Tom’s mind, and for a long moment he forced himself to face it. Joanna had turned a shotgun on Robert McClure because he showed up at her place to make another pitch for her land. An unloaded shotgun, or so Joanna claimed. Rachel had been present when it happened, but she’d brushed off Tom’s questions about it, insisting that Joanna would never hurt anybody. He could tell, though, that Rachel had been shaken by the incident. He should have pursued the matter, at least talked to Joanna about it.

  Tom watched the medics roll the gurney to the ambulance. Did he believe that Joanna, a woman he’d known all his life, could have committed this cold-blooded killing? No, he thought. An instant later he warned himself: Don’t assume anything.

  “The shooter must have
known she was here with Hollinger,” Dennis said. “Or followed her over here.”

  The medics collapsed the gurney and lifted it into the ambulance. They slammed the doors.

  “Maybe Hollinger was the original target,” Brandon suggested. “Maybe the killer was on his way to shoot Hollinger and he panicked when he saw Tavia coming his way.”

  “If he panicked,” Tom said, “he sure was neat about it. He didn’t even disturb the pine needles on the ground, much less leave footprints. I’m betting we won’t find any prints on the rifle and cartridge either.” He kept saying he, as if he believed, as if he knew, the killer was a man. But wouldn’t a woman, smaller and lighter, be more likely to come and go without disturbing the ground or leaving footprints?

  “I don’t understand how the shooter got away,” Brandon said. “We didn’t see anybody, we didn’t hear a car driving off. Whoever it was, they just vanished.”

  Joanna, Tom thought, could have cut across the fields to her own property. She was strong, in good shape. It would have been a quick walk for her.

  The two medics raised their hands in farewell salutes and climbed into the cab of the ambulance. In a couple of minutes they would be on the road to Roanoke.

  Dennis took the rifle and shell casing with him when he left to return to headquarters. A deputy would take them, along with the rifle Tom had confiscated from Tavia’s house, to the crime lab the next morning.

  Tom and Brandon walked across the field to Jake Hollinger’s house, where Tom had told him to wait. The back door stood open, and Tom saw him inside the kitchen, sitting at the table with his head in his hands.

  Jake didn’t look up when Tom and Brandon came in, but he said, “This is the third time.”

  “The third time for what?” Tom asked.

  “Third time somebody’s died on this land. Isaac Jones falling out of the barn loft. Autumn Jones going crazy after her daddy died and coming over here to hang herself in the barn.” Jake pulled in a shaky breath. “Now Tavia. This place has got a curse on it. It’s poisoned.”

  “Jake, listen to me.” Tom pulled out a chair and sat across from him. Brandon remained standing, leaning in the doorway. “Is there anything I need to know? Anything you haven’t told me about? Has somebody been threatening you or Mrs. Richardson?”

  Jake pushed his chair back and stepped over to an under-counter cabinet. He yanked open the top drawer, scooped out a handful of envelopes, and tossed them on the table in front of Tom. “You think we’ve been pressuring Joanna and the Kellys? Take a look at that shit.”

  Tom pulled latex gloves from his jacket pocket and drew them on before he touched the scattered items. Brandon moved closer to look over his shoulder. Some of the envelopes had been addressed with a computer printer and sent through the mail. Others were blank. All of them contained folded sheets of paper printed with similar messages. “TRAITOR. SELL-OUT. ALL YOU CARE ABOUT IS MONEY. YOU’RE HELPING PACKARD DESTROY OUR LAND AND OUR PEACE AND QUIET.”

  “They look like all of them could have been sent by the same person,” Brandon said.

  Tom gathered them into a bundle to take with him. “Do you have any idea who sent them?”

  Jake, slumped against the counter with his arms folded, shook his head. “Tavia got some, too. She just threw them away or burned them. We both got some phone calls, but we just started hanging up, we didn’t even listen anymore. Neither of us ever thought—” His voice caught on a sob, and he hung his head while he pulled himself together. “We didn’t think it would come to this.”

  “Why didn’t you report that you were being harassed?” Tom was always amazed at the things people held back from the police even when their own safety was at stake.

  “I told you, we never expected it would lead to anything. We thought somebody was just blowing off steam.”

  “I want to know if you get any more letters or phone calls,” Tom said. “And I want to know immediately.”

  Jake nodded.

  “I’ll have to let her children know what’s happened.” Tom got to his feet. “I guess I’ll find their phone numbers at her house.”

  “I doubt that. She doesn’t—didn’t—know where they are. She hasn’t heard from any of them in years.”

  Tom wasn’t surprised by that. “Did she have any idea what states they’re living in?”

  Jake shook his head.

  “We’ll have to track them down. I might find something at the house to point me in the right direction. Whether they care or not, they need to know she’s died. And unless she made some other arrangements, they’ll have to decide what to do about her estate.”

  As Tom and Brandon stepped onto the back porch, Jake said, “I’m coming, too. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “No, you’re not coming.” Tom held the door open to speak to Jake. “You don’t have any business over there.”

  “I have to get her cat and bring him back here. He knows me. It’s what Tavia would want.”

  Tom sighed. “All right. But you need to stay out of our way. Lock up this house before you leave. I don’t want you to come back here and find somebody waiting for you with a gun.”

  ***

  Tom opened Tavia’s front door with a key from the ring he’d taken off her body. While Brandon helped Jake gather up all the cat’s food, bowls, and bedding, Tom searched the small desk in a corner of the living room. The cheap, black-covered address book he pulled from the top drawer had only a few entries scattered through it. He looked for the names of her four children and found them—first names only, with no indication of whether the two daughters were now using married names. In each case, the address and phone number under the name had been crossed out and Tavia had written MOVED next to them.

  Feeling a mixture of pity and anger, Tom slid the address book into one of the plastic evidence bags he’d brought in from the car. Maybe Dennis could do one of his Internet searches and track down at least one of the younger Richardsons. Why, he wondered, had they deserted their mother? By all accounts, she was more of a victim of their father’s violence than they were, sometimes deflecting their father’s rage from them and focusing it on herself. Did they see her as weak? Did they blame her for staying with him, not rescuing herself and them? For waiting until they were all gone and scattered before she killed him?

  He slammed the desk drawer shut. A sudden high-pitched “Rowwrrr!” from the kitchen told him that Jake was forcing Tater into the hated cat carrier. Jake hurried through the living room and out the front door with the fat orange tabby clawing the metal grill door of the carrier and screeching nonstop.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Rachel unscrewed the bottle cap and gulped down more ginger ale. She wasn’t being much fun, but Simon didn’t seem to mind. He was exploring the river bank, watching a flotilla of black ducks on the water and hawks flying overhead, and trying to keep Billy Bob away from the flock of Canada geese resting in the grass a hundred feet away.

  Rachel leaned against a tree, keeping an eye on the boy and the dog. The nausea hadn’t completely gone away, but it no longer threatened to overwhelm her. She’d thrown up again at home, behind the closed bathroom door while Simon was in the yard with Billy Bob. Apparently she’d put on a convincing act with Simon and he believed she was okay now.

  What had made her sick? The pastry was so rich, so sweet, that she’d had enough after three or four bites, but she’d finished it to be polite. Maybe she was paying a price for her good manners. Observation of Simon during the time she’d known him told her he had a cast iron stomach, so she wasn’t surprised the pastry didn’t bother him. Maybe the evil Jones sisters had tried to poison her just for the fun of it.

  That thought brought to mind the cackling witches in a Disney movie and made her laugh aloud.

  Simon pivoted in her direction and waved. Rachel waved back, her laughter subsiding to a soft smile. She loved
watching him, loved knowing he would always be part of her life with Tom.

  Her mind kept circling a thought that thrilled her and terrified her in equal measure: Could she possibly be pregnant? Morning sickness didn’t always come in the morning. She should do a pregnancy test. But first she would wait and see if the nausea persisted.

  Lost in thought, she jumped when her cell phone rang. She dug it out of her shirt pocket and answered Tom’s call. “Hi. What’s up?”

  His brief silence, followed by a weary sigh, told her something had happened and he hated having to tell her.

  Rachel pushed away from the tree, her fingers tightening around the phone.

  “There’s been another shooting,” Tom said.

  “Please don’t tell me it’s Joanna.” Nausea roiled her stomach. A mixture of ginger ale and bile rose in her throat. “Please.”

  “No, no, it’s not Joanna.”

  Rachel went limp and reached out for the tree trunk to brace herself.

  “It’s Tavia Richardson,” Tom went on. “She was killed on Jake Hollinger’s farm. I wanted to let you know I’ll be tied up for a while, I can’t say when I’ll be home.”

  “Tavia Richardson? But why her? She’s not opposing the resort development.” Rachel wished she could feel more than the usual sadness for a victim, but she’d barely known the woman and hadn’t particularly liked her. Rather than grief or pity, Rachel felt a clutch of fear for what this death might mean and what might follow it.

  “We’ve got a lot of unanswered questions,” Tom said. “Where are you right now?”

  “At the river with Simon and Billy Bob.”

  “Look, I want you to be careful, okay? Pay attention to anybody who’s around you, any car that’s behind you on the road.” He hesitated. “Maybe you ought to head home. Find a way to keep Simon indoors the rest of the day, without letting him know anything’s wrong. I don’t know what the hell’s going to happen next.”