Poisoned Ground Series, Book 6

by Sandra Parshall

  Caught off-guard, Archer hustled to keep up. “Don’t you think she should make up her own mind? You can’t speak for her. She might like this proposal.”

  “Fine. Go talk to her and find out. Why are you coming to me?”

  “I told you that she… Look, will you ask her to hear me out? This could be a good compromise. Good for everybody.”

  “I don’t work for you, Mr. Archer. I’m not your intermediary. I’m not anything to you.” Except, perhaps, a thorn in your side. I hope so, anyway. “Don’t ask me to do your job for you. It’s never going to happen.”

  He threw up his arms in a sudden gesture that made Rachel flinch. She stopped and stared at him.

  “You’re right,” he said. “None of this is ever going to happen.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “You people are impossible, you know that? I’m sick of trying to get through to you.”

  “Then stop. Please. Just give up and go away.”

  Rachel walked on alone, fighting a powerful urge to look back and check the expression on his face. At the foot of Courthouse Hill, where wide stone steps led up to the building, she did look back. Archer was walking briskly in the opposite direction, returning to his office.

  Rachel veered to the left and followed the driveway around the courthouse to the rear. She crossed the parking lot to the Sheriff’s Department headquarters.

  The sound of a raised voice inside made her hesitate before swinging the door open. She couldn’t tell who was yelling. Cracking the door a few inches, she peeked inside.

  At the front desk, where the middle-aged female receptionist looked on with amusement, Tom stood straight and solemn as a totem pole while a red-faced Robert McClure flung his hands about in broad gestures and shouted in Tom’s face. “This is outrageous! If you don’t bring my son to me this minute, you’re going to face serious consequences.”

  Tom regarded him silently.

  “Well, why are you just standing there?” McClure demanded. “Go get my son. And I warn you, if he has a scratch on him, you’ll be facing criminal charges.”

  Rachel pushed the door open a little farther, madly curious about the situation. Why was McClure’s son at the Sheriff’s Department? Sounded like he’d been arrested.

  Tom let a second pass in silence before he asked McClure, “Are you finished?”

  McClure blew out a noisy breath. “I want an explanation of your behavior. But first I want my son out here, where I can see that he hasn’t been harmed.”

  “Don’t worry about your son’s health,” Tom said. “You ought to be more worried about the people he’s harassing.”

  “Harassing? What are you talking about?”

  “Deputy Connolly and I caught him and a friend in the act of placing a bomb in the Jones sisters’ mailbox.”

  A strangled laugh sputtered from McClure’s throat. “A bomb? Is this your idea of a joke?”

  “No, but it seems to be your son’s idea of one. We caught them in the act, Mr. McClure. Your son William and his friend James, Supervisor O’Toole’s grandson. We’ve notified Todd’s parents. They’ll be here shortly.”

  McClure’s face faded from blazing red to chalk white. “You’ve made a mistake. This isn’t possible. My son would never do such a thing.”

  “Like I said, I’m an eyewitness, and so is Deputy Connolly. We’ll see how the prosecutor and the judge feel about it. The prosecutor’s in court right now, so we’ll have to wait for him to get over here at the end of the day. We can probably arraign your son and his friend sometime tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow? You can’t keep my son in jail overnight.”

  “We can and we will. Before the judge can set bail, we have to find out how the U.S. Attorney for this district wants to handle the federal aspect of the case.”

  “Federal… What do you mean?”

  “As I explained to the boys, tampering with a mailbox is a federal offense. Putting a bomb in a mailbox is generally frowned on.”

  Rachel stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind her. She didn’t know whether to be horrified by what she was hearing—a bomb in the Jones sisters’ mailbox?—or amused at seeing McClure thrown for a loop and momentarily speechless. Tom glanced at her with the barest hint of a smile.

  “Oh, and one more thing I want to ask you about,” he said to McClure. For the first time Rachel noticed the papers Tom held in one hand. He brought them up now, held them out for McClure to see.

  “What is that?” McClure blustered. “Am I supposed to guess what it means?”

  “Telephone records,” Tom said. “I just walked in the door a couple minutes before you did and got these from Captain Murray. I haven’t had a chance to go over them thoroughly, but it appears that a call was made to Joanna McKendrick shortly after one a.m. last night from your cell phone.”

  “What? Are you out of your mind? I was in bed asleep at one in the morning.”

  “I didn’t say you made the call. In fact, I’d be amazed if you had, so thanks for confirming it wasn’t you. Somebody used your cell phone last night to call Mrs. McKendrick and tell her that her stable was on fire. It sounded like a boy’s voice, she said. And she heard another boy laughing in the background.”

  McClure took a wobbly step backward.

  “Hey, watch it.” Tom grabbed McClure’s arm to steady him. “Don’t pass out on me.”

  “I can’t believe this,” McClure said, his voice losing volume with each word, ending his sentence in a breathless near-whisper.

  “Believe it. Your boy and his friend are in a lot of trouble. Now if you want to sit down on the bench over there and wait for Todd’s parents, somebody will take all of you back to see your sons. But those boys aren’t going anywhere tonight.” Without waiting for a response, Tom gestured for Rachel to follow him.

  Amazed, amused, and gratified, Rachel had trouble holding back her words as she and Tom walked down the hall. Inside his office with the door closed, she exclaimed, “Robert McClure’s baby boy? He set fire to Joanna’s stable?”

  Tom dropped into his chair with a sigh. “I hope that phone call is enough to get a confession out of him. Even if he won’t admit it, I’m going to charge him with arson. Maybe he’ll break down and implicate the O’Toole boy. We’ve got them on the bomb charge, in any case.”

  “Oh my God, this blows my mind.” Hands pressed to her cheeks, Rachel paced the room, too keyed up to sit. “Is the McClure boy the one who called me today?”

  “Probably. And he and his friend probably made some of the other calls too. We found a whole collection of disposable cell phones in the O’Toole kid’s SUV.”

  “Good grief,” Rachel said. “Well, I guess now McClure and O’Toole and the rest of them won’t dare try to push you out of your job.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  She stopped to look at him. “Oh, I never got around to telling you, did I? Lawrence Archer came to see me. He said if I didn’t behave myself and stop opposing the resort development, the Board of Supervisors would find a way to fire you. He said it would be my fault if you lost your job.”

  “That goddamned son of a—” Tom jumped to his feet, sending his chair crashing into the wall behind him. “Where the hell does he get off, telling you something like that? I ought to—”

  “Calm down, calm down.” Rachel moved around the desk to lay placating hands on his chest. “No harm done. I think those boys have wiped out any advantage the powers-that-be thought they had.”

  Tom was making a visible effort to rein in his temper. “I’d still like to take Archer’s head off, just on general principle.”

  “Well, I can’t argue with that. Be sure to include me if you decide to do it.”

  They both laughed.

  “Come here,” Tom said, pulling her into his arms. “I haven’t kissed you s
ince this morning, and I really need to.”

  He did, more than once.

  She pulled away at last, reluctantly, and said, “I came over here to tell you about something. I don’t know if it’ll help your investigation at all, but I thought I should tell you just in case.”

  “Okay. What is it?”

  To avoid the distraction of his closeness, Rachel went to sit in one of the visitor chairs facing his desk. He sat again, and she recounted everything Mrs. Turner had told her.

  “If it’s all true,” she finished, “there’s something very fishy about the way Isaac Jones died. And it all happened because of those pictures Lincoln Kelly took.”

  Tom didn’t respond. He sat with a grim expression on his face.

  “Tom?” she said. “What are you thinking? Does it mean anything?”

  He roused himself, focused on her. “I’m not sure yet. Is that everything Mrs. Turner told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Thanks. It could be useful.”

  He stood, and she knew he wanted her to leave so he could get back to work.

  “All right then,” she said, getting to her feet. “I guess I’ll see you at home later.”

  He walked her to the door and kissed her. Feeling a little let down, she left the building, ignoring Robert McClure on the bench in the lobby. In the parking lot, she saw a woman in casual clothes and a man in a business suit get out of a silver Lexus and rush toward the building. The O’Toole boy’s parents, she guessed. At least one piece of the puzzle had fallen neatly into place.

  Had the information she relayed stirred something in Tom’s mind, or was she imagining things? She would have to wait and see whether anything came of it.

  She was walking back down Main Street to the animal hospital when her cell phone rang in her shirt pocket. Jake Hollinger was calling.

  “I hope you don’t mind me calling this number,” he said. “The girl at the animal hospital gave it to me.”

  “No, no, it’s fine. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, it’s Tater, Tavia Richardson’s cat. You know I’ve got him here with me now.”

  “Yes, I know. How is he?”

  “I thought he was okay. But I’m getting a little worried. He ate this morning, but now he’s acting like he feels bad. He threw up a little while ago, and he seems a little warm to me, like he might have a fever.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Animals are like people. The stress of major changes can lower their resistance to infection. Look, I have time to run out there and see him if you want me to. Or you can bring him in.”

  “Would you mind coming out? I’d really appreciate it. I hate to haul him into the animal hospital on top of everything else he’s been through.”

  “Let me get some things together and I’ll be right out. I’ll see you in a while.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  “They’re positive about that?” Tom asked Dennis between bites of his roast beef sandwich. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until a late lunch, in the form of sandwiches made by Brandon’s mother at the family shop, arrived along with a small basket of donuts.

  “Yep.” Dennis sat next to Brandon in one of the visitors’ chairs, an ankle crossed over a bony knee. Pushing his perpetually slipping wire-rimmed glasses back up his nose, he added, “The Blackwoods managed to talk to three different employees at the lumber mill before Mark Hollinger even realized they were there. Everybody said the same thing. At the time the Kellys were shot, Mark was at the mill, running a saw himself, getting a special order of pine ready for a builder in Fairfax County. It’s going to be used for rustic ceilings in rec rooms, in case you’re interested.”

  “He still could’ve killed Tavia Richardson,” Brandon said, “and he sure as heck had motive.” He popped the last of a frosted donut into his mouth and licked chocolate off his fingers.

  “I’m not ready to give up on the idea of a single shooter.” Tom looked to Dennis again. “You haven’t found anything pointing to Ronan Kelly?”

  Dennis shook his head. “If he’s got the money to hire a hit man to kill his parents, I don’t know where it came from. He’s so deep in debt he’s living on credit cards. One credit card, anyway. He was using four, and three of them have been blocked for non-payment.”

  “If a single shooter killed the Kellys and Mrs. Richardson,” Brandon said, “then it’s got to be somebody who’s not even on our radar. The whole county’s mad about the development, but they’re taking sides, for it and against it. Who would kill a couple who didn’t want to sell, then turn around and kill a woman who did want to sell?”

  “Those letters you brought in won’t help us,” Dennis said. “They could’ve been written by half a dozen different people. Some of them are just words cut out of magazines and pasted on sheets of paper. Most of them came off computer printers, no handwriting at all. When we do have handwriting to look at, there’s not much they have in common, except for three that I think could’ve been written by the same person. Somebody who’s practically illiterate, or wants us to think he is. It’s just garbage, no real serious threats. Bullying.”

  Classic bullying, Winter had said of the calls that came to the Jones house. Tom swallowed the last bite of his sandwich as he shuffled the printouts of telephone records. “Did you get the log for the Jones sisters’ home phone?”

  “It’s in there somewhere,” Dennis said. “I was about to mention it earlier, then McClure showed up and interrupted us. Except for one from Rachel’s cell last weekend and one from Joanna McKendrick yesterday, they all came from untraceable cell phones. I think those two boys were responsible. I mean, you caught them putting a bomb in the Jones sisters’ mailbox, so making a few nasty phone calls wouldn’t be hard to believe.”

  “All right, we’ve got some of this cleared up, at least.”

  “The little stuff,” Dennis said with a wry grin.

  “Right.” Tom dropped the phone records onto his desk and pushed them aside. Some aspects of the situation were starting to come clear, but others remained stubbornly out of focus. “Let me talk this through. Let’s say the murders aren’t directly connected with the development, not in a straight cause-and-effect way. I think when Packard came in here and started pressuring the owners to sell that whole section of land, it stirred up memories people thought they’d put to rest a long time ago. And that’s where we’ll find the motive for the killings.”

  “How so?” Dennis asked.

  Brandon leaned forward, frowning, elbows on his knees. “It all comes back to Lincoln Kelly, right?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Tom said. “He didn’t have much short-term memory. I can’t even imagine what it was like inside his mind, with all those burned out connections, but we know he was confused, and probably scared about losing control. When Robert McClure started coming around, talking about them selling their property to make way for the resort, Linc got it in his head that they were about to be thrown off their farm, the only place that felt familiar and safe to him.”

  Dennis and Brandon both nodded.

  “That threw him into a tailspin,” Tom went on. “It took him back to another time when he felt threatened—when he found out Marie was having an affair with Hollinger, and he thought he was losing her. So he did the same thing he did the first time around, he set out to make as much trouble for Jake Hollinger as he could.”

  “He dug up those old pictures and started showing them around like they were new,” Brandon said. “He must’ve shocked the heck out of everybody.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Tom said. “We know he went to Hollinger with his pictures of Jake and Marie. Mark was there, and he saw the pictures too. We know Lincoln went to Joanna, begging her to help stop Marie from leaving him. And Winter Jones says he showed up there with pictures of Jake and Autumn, demanding to see their father so he could tell the o
ld man what was going on. It was a replay of what happened all those years ago, when Isaac Jones and Autumn both ended up dead on Hollinger’s property.”

  “The girl committed suicide, but Isaac’s death was an accident, wasn’t it?” Dennis said.

  Tom rubbed the back of his neck, trying to loosen the tension in the muscles. “That’s what most people believe, because that’s what Hollinger said at the time. He claimed Isaac bought a bag of grain from him and he lost his balance and fell out of the loft while he was getting it out on the pulley. But now Winter and Mrs. Turner are both telling a different story. Winter told me the same thing Mrs. Turner told Rachel—that Lincoln showed Isaac pictures of his youngest daughter with Hollinger, and Isaac went over there to confront Hollinger. That’s why he was in the barn that day, not because he needed some grain.”

  “Ah.” Dennis tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Yeah, that makes sense. So how did he really die? I mean, he did fall out of the loft, didn’t he?”

  “I think Jake was working in the loft and Isaac went up there after him. They got into a fight and—what? I don’t know.” Tom threw up his hands. “Jake pushed Isaac? Or Isaac really did lose his balance and fall?”

  “Can we prove any of this?” Dennis asked.

  Tom blew out a sigh. “No. It’s all hearsay. If it’s true, though, it gives Hollinger a motive for killing the Kellys. Just a few days ago, I thought a stupid fight over a fence line was enough to drive Jake to murder. But if Lincoln and Marie knew the real reason Isaac was in Jake’s barn the day he died, and Lincoln was dragging it all out in the open, well, that sure as hell beats the fence line as a motive.”

  “Yeah, for killing the Kellys,” Dennis said. “But what about Tavia Richardson? Why was she murdered?”

  Tom shook his head. “I still can’t answer that. All I know is that Jake didn’t shoot her.”

  Chapter Forty-two

  As Rachel drove out to Jake Hollinger’s farm on the quiet country road, she wondered how much probing she could get away with, how many prying questions she dared throw at him.