Cold Justice: A Judge Willa Carson Mystery (The Hunt for Justice)

by Diane Capri

  “What are you talking about?”

  Kemp snorted a little and the corners of his mouth lifted as he nodded his head. “So he didn’t tell you, then.”

  “Didn’t tell me what?”

  “Trevor didn’t tell you that he’s related to both David Mason and Leo Richards?”

  “He did not. He said Mason and Richards were business partners. He said Mason was his brother-in-law.”

  “That’s all true, as far as it goes. They were business partners, and David is his brother-in-law. But that’s not the half of it. Randy Trevor, David Mason and Leo Richards are married to three sisters. This is a tragedy for the entire family, not just a part of the family. They’ve already lost one husband and father in Leo Richards. You want to send another husband and father to prison in David Mason. And then what? Judge Trevor takes on the whole family?”

  So that was Randy Trevor’s dilemma. He wanted to protect his wife’s family. Judges aren’t gods. We have lives. We have families. We have feelings. So his desire was understandable.

  But he was a judge. He had responsibilities that came with the job. If he couldn’t, or wouldn’t fulfill his oath to administer blind justice in this case, the very least he should do was to recuse himself and let an impartial judge take over.

  He was using his power for his own self-interest. Which meant he was corrupt. He’d lose his job and be disbarred. Three families would be ruined for sure if Randy Trevor continued down this path.

  I said, “The wives aren’t helpless, you know. Those six kids have mothers, too.”

  “You met them all today. At the bridge club. In birth order, Madeline, Maureen, and Molly. The 3Ms, folks call them around here. From an old line Pleasant Harbor family. Did they look like they were capable of taking care of themselves to you?” he replied.

  The comment irked me so my words were a bit too testy. “Here’s some advice that may save your life, Kemp. Never underestimate a woman. Every cop should know that much.”

  Kemp grinned and nodded. He’d have tipped his hat again, if he’d been wearing one. “Noted.”

  I said, “So Leo is married to Maureen, the middle sister from a prominent family. And he’s missing for fourteen months. And nobody does anything about that? That doesn’t seem reasonable to me. Does it to you?”

  Kemp might have shrugged again. He said, “The mileage on the Toyota bothers me more. Even if he only drove down to Traverse City and stashed the vehicle somewhere and flew out and drove back to where we found him, the SUV should have more miles on it.”

  I thought again about the victim’s unusually pink skin. There were only two causes I could think of, and neither one of them made any sense. Too many anomalies in this case, for sure.

  We’d finally arrived at Eagle Creek. Kemp’s vehicle plowed two fresh ruts through the snow in the parking lot and slammed into a snow pile higher than the cruiser.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Most people had enough sense to stay home on a night like this. But there were two vehicles I recognized parked close to the entrance. A silver Cadillac I’d noticed there earlier today. The other was our rented Jeep. Parked in the same place George had placed it at lunch.

  So this is where you are. The knowledge made me feel both better and worse. I was relieved he wasn’t dying in a ditch somewhere, of course. But also damned annoyed that he hadn’t let me know he was okay. Now that I knew he wasn’t dead, I considered killing him myself for scaring me. Figuratively, of course.

  I checked my cell phone for messages again. Nothing. The storm must have done something more permanent to the cell network than I’d hoped. I hadn’t received a call in the past several hours and I knew both George and Augustus would have tried to reach me.

  I dialed George’s cell phone, but nothing happened. “Great,” I said under my breath to no one. “Just great.”

  Kemp backed up slightly away from the snow mound, shut down the wipers and the lights, and turned off the ignition. “Just think about it, Willa. You’re a fair judge, they tell me. Find out all the facts before you decide what’s fair here. Can’t you do that much?”

  I made no promises. Partly because the identity of the murder weapon wasn’t the only thing we knew. At this point, David satisfied the three classic criteria every killer possessed: means, motive, and opportunity. Richards had gambled away David’s livelihood and left David saddled with at least half the responsibility for Richards’ family, if Kemp’s appeal was true. He’d been out on his snowmobile this morning when the crime occurred, which meant he had opportunity to commit the crime.

  David might not be the killer, but Kemp should be looking at him pretty damn hard.

  After bundling up again, gloves and hood in place, we exited the cruiser and trekked toward the wide porch overhang in front of Eagle Creek Cafe’s door. About half-way across the parking lot, Kemp turned toward the road we’d just left and said, “Look. Look out there and tell me this place isn’t beautiful.”

  I cast my gaze on Eagle Creek Cafe’s surroundings. Evergreen trees, blue spruce, and hemlock pines were laden with heavy snow coating their branches like thick frosting. The never-ending snow, now that I’d accepted it as my constant cloying companion, did seem soft and lacy. Indeed, it was a gorgeous setting.

  But I preferred open roads and sidewalks, Hillsborough Bay and palm trees. I wanted to go back to Tampa. I was beginning to feel like Dorothy Gale and I wished I possessed a pair of magic ruby slippers.

  We started another trek through the heavy snow. As he had before, Kemp walked in front of me to clear a path. I followed a few feet behind, paying attention to the uneven terrain and struggling to keep my balance on the rough stones beneath the snowpack.

  After we’d traveled a few yards, I raised my head and turned my body to look around. Across the gray darkness, floodlights dotted the landscape and perversely contributed to my night blindness. Still, I saw something strangely menacing. What was that? A snowmobile? I hadn’t heard its engine, but it was less snow covered than George’s Jeep or the silver Caddy. What was it doing way over there? Where was its rider? The snowmobile could belong to David Mason. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed.

  The flat parking lot was better lit than the surrounding lawns. Outside the light halos, shadows swayed buffeted by the harsh gale. I squinted through the heavy snowfall, which didn’t improve my weak distance vision any.

  But I definitely saw something.

  Two white tail deer? A couple of black bears? Or Mason with someone else?

  They were too far from me and moving away and there was too much blinding snow. But they didn’t look right. Call it instinct or whatever. I don’t know. But it was damned odd.

  Kemp had tromped ahead toward the entrance, breaking a trail.

  “Justin!” I shouted, but the wind carried my voice in the opposite direction. He plowed onward, head down, focused on reaching his goal.

  I looked again at the receding shadows across the distance. The two had separated slightly. Now they looked more like humans wearing parkas with huge hoods, similar to mine. But what the hell were they doing out there in the no-man’s land between renovated grounds and hardwoods in this blizzard? Where could they possibly be going?

  “Willa!” Kemp’s voice came at me weakly as if from a wide distance, pulling my gaze from the shadows. “Willa! Come on!” He stood on the porch at the entrance door to Eagle Creek Cafe, waving me down the path he’d stomped moments before that was already filling with fresh drifts.

  I waved back and pointed toward the shadows. By this time, they’d trudged far outside the light halos and deeper into the blinding blizzard. Kemp was fifty feet from where I stood. He probably couldn’t see them at all.

  As I watched, they moved into another light pool. The one cast by a stronger floodlight above the narrow wooden door that covered the entrance to the steam tunnels underneath the old hospital. The door was padlocked. Only the tour guide and the maintenance supervisor had keys,
I’d been told when I took the tour years ago.

  One of the shadows raised something heavy and bashed it down hard on the door. Then, he pushed the door open and he shoved the other shadow into the narrow opening and then followed and the door swung closed.

  They were going down into the old steam tunnels. There was nothing down there but damp, cold, blackness. Spiders. Snakes. And dead critters of all sorts. I shuddered.

  The tunnels stretched through the entire complex and once provided state-of-the-art steam heat for buildings that stretched out more than half a mile before the hospital was condemned years ago. The two shadows could walk from there through the tunnels into the main building. Maybe the snowmobile broke down. Maybe they simply wanted to get out of the blizzard for the rest of their travel.

  But it didn’t feel like that to me.

  What made more sense is that they were headed in the opposite direction. Toward the new hospital and the parking garages. They could have driven there, too. So for whatever reason, they didn’t want to be seen.

  “Come on!” Kemp shouted, moving his left arm in a big arc as if he could herd me from the storm and into warm safety.

  I mirrored the same gesture Kemp had made, guiding him my way before I turned, pulled off my oversized glove so I could fish out my cell phone and use the flashlight app to reveal the snow in front of me.

  I began to trudge, raising each leg as high as I dared and carefully placing each heavy boot flat into the snow mound ahead, with deliberate speed.

  Away from Kemp. Toward the tunnels.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  After an exhausting slog, I finally reached the green door. Heavy on its antique hinges, it rested open slightly. A thin ribbon of yellow light rimmed the edge, meaning the emergency bulbs burned inside.

  A shiny silver padlock hung open on the rusty hasp. Maybe that meant a planned return through this exit instead of a one-way trip to a building or a different escape route.

  Exertion and stress sweat trickled down from my armpits, clammy and cold.

  I looked for Kemp behind me. He was taller, heftier and thus able to plow through faster than I had done. Still, he was fifty feet back.

  The tunnels were warm and snow free.

  “Kemp! I’m going down!” I shouted into the wind. He didn’t hear me. I arced the app’s flashlight beam a few times and hoped he glanced up to notice. Then I turned off the app and stowed the phone in my pocket. I pushed the green door as wide as I could and left it propped open by the snow bank before I ducked into the narrow stairway that led down into the tunnels.

  Dank odors assaulted my nostrils. I pulled off the bulky gloves and stuffed them into my pockets and hurried as quickly as I dared in the huge boots down the narrow stone staircase, hanging onto both clammy side rails, deeper into the earth.

  The tunnels were below basement level of the old building. Which meant maybe twenty feet or more below the surface. Emergency bulbs encased in metal baskets cast an eerie glow over the ancient bricks.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped a foot or two into the tunnel, balancing awkwardly on the sloped and slimy floor, I saw three travel options. Straight ahead east. Left north or right south.

  Which way did the shadows go?

  I heard my own heavy breathing, but no sounds from the two who had entered barely five minutes before.

  No sound from Kemp behind me yet, either.

  The east tunnel was short, maybe less than fifty feet ahead where it dead-ended under the front parlor of the building. There was no exit at that point, I remembered.

  The north and south tunnels ran a quarter mile each in opposite directions. Exits once existed every one hundred feet or so, but several had been permanently closed.

  The north tunnel led to the residences and a parking garage and, eventually, to the new hospital.

  The south tunnel led to the basement of the Eagle Creek Cafe building. I couldn’t remember how far away the exits were.

  Which way did the two shadows travel? I could have called out to them. But should I have?

  Before I could make a decision, someone turned the lights out. Instant total blackness. Which probably meant they’d found an exit and left me inside here. No worries. I’m not claustrophobic.

  The green exit door was still unlocked. I could leave, trek outside in the blizzard the way I’d entered. All I needed to do was find the staircase and walk up.

  But I couldn’t see anything. At all. No ambient light of any kind. A wrong move in any direction could send me tumbling onto the cobblestone or worse. I could feel along the tunnel walls until I reached the opening, but my sense of direction was impaired by sensory deprivation, too. I wondered whether this was how a blind person felt navigating in the world.

  I pushed my hand down into my pocket and patted around for my cell phone. When I pulled it out and pressed the home button, the screen lit up brighter than stadium lights. The battery was almost gone, but for now, until I could find the light switch, I could see.

  I heard footsteps above and behind me. I turned and pointed my phone toward Kemp who had stopped when the lights went out. He’d been on his way down the stairs, gun drawn.

  “There’s no need for that, Justin. I’m fine. Whoever I followed in here must have left. Can you just reach back and flip—” the rest of my words were stolen by gunfire.

  The first shot was true. It whizzed past my head and hit Justin square on the shoulder with enough force to knock him backward. He lost his footing and fell down the last three steps and banged his head soundly against the stone, which knocked him out cold.

  His momentum pushed his body into me and I stumbled backward onto the slimy tunnel floor and dropped my phone. I scrambled over the slippery cobblestones to get to it before the screen light shut off and we were plunged into blackness again.

  But Kemp had fallen right into my path.

  I fumbled to crab over him, but before I reached across his slender torso, the screen shut off, plunging me into total darkness half a moment before the second gunshot whizzed past. I heard the ricochet and more hits before the noise stopped.

  I rolled across Justin’s body and slid to the opposite side, patting around the slimy rocks for my phone. When my hand bumped something soft and squishy a quick gasp escaped my mouth.

  In the black silence my gasp doubled as a beacon for the third gunshot.

  I clamped my lips together, hard, and forced my hands to feel along the disgusting tunnel floor, but patted nothing remotely like my phone.

  Shit!

  The fourth gunshot rang out and this one didn’t bounce off the walls. It hit someone. I heard a man’s groan followed by hard scrabbling grunts and groans that sounded like a struggle.

  I could see nothing. The effect was surreal.

  The fifth shot. An unmistakable human female scream was followed by total silence.

  I counted silently, “One thousand one. One thousand two. One thousand three.” I made it all the way to one thousand twenty eight before the emergency lights came back on.

  I saw my phone had been mere inches from my hand and grabbed it. Kemp’s gun was close, so I grabbed that, too. I pushed the power button on my phone and nothing happened. Maybe the battery drained or maybe the phone didn’t survive the slam against the tunnel floor. Either way, the result was the same. No light. No nothing. Dammit!

  Then I looked around wildly, prepared to duck again but there was no wall to hide behind. Kemp groaned, perhaps returning to consciousness. His wound was bleeding profusely, adding to the slime.

  I looked north and south, but the tunnel curved in each direction, cutting off my sight line. Was the gunman hiding around the corners? Or had he found an exit and already escaped?

  In the east tunnel straight ahead, I saw the shadow that looked something like an apparition, but knew it had to be a person. Man or woman, I couldn’t discern. Nor did it matter. Because it was holding the gun.

  So I took a chance. The most logical opti
on.

  “Mason! Kemp’s been shot!” I shouted, and immediately realized my voice was too loud. I lowered it a couple of notches. “David, I know what happened to Leo Richards.” Which wasn’t completely true. But I’d figured out enough to make a plausible guess. “He’s been dead for months, hasn’t he? His murder was staged today to make him look like a victim of the snow sniper. Did you kill him, David?”

  I heard his ragged breathing. His deep voice confirmed my guesses. “No. I didn’t.”

  “Who did kill Leo? Who’s there with you?”

  “I’ve been shot.” He leaned against the tunnel wall and lowered the gun. “Get help, Willa. Before it’s too late.”

  For a moment, I paused. Should I try to leave? He’d recognized me. Could David Mason be trusted not to shoot me when I stood up and became a bigger target?

  “David, who is with you? How is she?”

  Kemp needed help right away. For the woman, it might already be too late. She’d been completely silent. She could be unconscious. Or worse.

  “Madeline Trevor. Ricochet hit.” David’s voice was breathless, weak.

  “You mean it’s Randy Trevor’s wife?” I called back to confirm we were talking about the same person, which was a bit inane under the circumstances. I’d seen Madeline Trevor at the bridge club. She’d looked at me oddly, with what I now realized must have been suspicion. Maybe her husband had told her something about me. Or maybe she remembered me from back in the day. Either way, my presence must have pushed her over the edge.

  “I don’t know how bad,” Mason said. “She planned to kill me. Leave me here.” He seemed to have only enough wind to speak a few words each time. “I’d told her we’d had enough. She pulled a gun. She wanted to kill you. I tried to stop her. We struggled, but the gun went off. I didn’t shoot at you, Willa. I swear.” His voice was weaker with each short sentence.

  Now that the emergency lights were on, I could see the steps leading to the green door and the blizzard, which all of a sudden seemed way less threatening than it had half an hour before. I checked Kemp’s carotid pulse. Still beating. But he remained unconscious. No way could I get him up the steps.