Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  Liz threw a fast bucket of cold water on the idea. “Oh, no. No way, positively not.”

  Maddy’s attention ping-ponged back to Anna. “He’s going to get himself locked up for days. I love him.”

  “Ask Asmodeus for help.”

  Maddy’s face crumpled. She heaved an enormous breath. She squeezed her hands together, wrung them, squeezed again. It was like watching an impaled worm wiggle on a fishing hook. Anna felt a twinge of shame, but not enough to apologize. “Why are you involving me in this, Maddy? Go to the police. You invite me to your seminar, you drive me out to see a sigil—which Alex probably carved, by the way—then you come here. Why?”

  “I thought you were a kindred spirit.”

  “No you didn’t. At the Harvest Festival I flat out told you and Paul I was a Christian. How is that confusing?”

  “Christians believe in demons as much as we do.”

  “We don’t talk to them!”

  Liz put a hand on Anna’s forearm, quieting her. Liz Halvorsen the investigator was taking over, which was just as well, Anna thought. Liz could be rational. She hadn’t seen Zoey in that field. Or the thing that hung from the bare branches of that tree. The thing that now filled her with horror.

  “First,” Liz began, “it’s possible Alex killed Russell. Second, we don’t trust the man. Third, he might have something to do with Zoey’s death.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” Maddy wouldn’t consider it. She was adamant in her defense.

  “Hang on, that’s a text,” Liz said, reaching into her purse for her chirping phone. “Well, it really is Halloween,” she said, staring at the phone. She tapped a button and laid her phone on the table, her eyes meeting Anna’s. “Raena Starke just confessed to the murder of Ruby Padilla.”

  “No.” Anna sat ramrod straight. “She didn’t.”

  “She did. She told the police Ruby was going to tell all and she had to stop her.”

  “See?” Maddy chortled. “And I bet you thought Alex killed her.”

  Feeling a surge of anger, Anna turned on Maddy. “Raena was involved in a dirty land-lease deal with a wind-farm company called Aim Renewable Energy. Does that sound familiar by any chance?”

  Liz’s phone chirped again. She swiped the phone’s face and read her text message aloud. “Raena got a big donation for her Congress run. Could be linked to wind company. Details coming.”

  “So it was just as obvious as that,” Anna said. “Bribe and bribe discovered. The company bribes Raena to vote for the wind farm, then someone decides to benefit twice and blackmails Ruby into voting for the IHD, threatening to expose Raena’s dirty business if she doesn’t.”

  “Trouble is,” Liz said, “Ruby’s conscience kicked in. Raena couldn’t let that happen.”

  “So tell me,” Anna said, her eyes meeting Maddy’s, “was it Alex who blackmailed Ruby? The IHD raises the value of his land. Or did you do it?”

  “You’re both out of your mind,” Maddy said.

  “I’m sure Raena knew people who had access to crime scene reports,” Liz said. “It couldn’t have been hard for her to do a little copycatting, try to throw the suspicion on someone else.”

  “What do you mean ‘copycatting’?” Maddy glanced anxiously from Liz to Anna.

  “The murder of Ruby Padilla was made to look like Russell’s murder and the murder of Jennifer Toller in 1983,” Anna said.

  “Who . . .” Maddy tried to finish her sentence. Instead she chewed at her lower lip and took another deep, ragged breath. She was going to ask who Jennifer Toller was, Anna thought, but the charade was too great a burden on her frayed nerves.

  “You know who Jennifer is,” Anna said. “And you know Paul’s real name. Though he thinks you don’t.”

  Maddy squinted at Anna. “How do you know that?”

  “He told me day before yesterday. How long have you known Paul is Raymond Toller?”

  “Alex told me back in August.”

  “How did Alex find out?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “I didn’t care. It was something to hold over Paul, that’s all I wanted.”

  “Why?”

  “I want him out of my life.”

  “So divorce him.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  When another text message popped up, Anna insisted that Liz get down to her website’s business. This was breaking news. “I’m fine, Gene will be home in a few hours, you go,” she said.

  Liz gathered her things, but before leaving the table, she gave Maddy a long, withering look. A warning: I know you’re here. My friend had better stay safe.

  “Go on, Liz,” Anna said. “Go get ’em.”

  Maddy waited until the front door closed before letting loose her anger. “Keep your nose the hell out of my land and wind farm,” she said, pounding the table with her fist. The meek, begging animal had vanished, and for a moment Anna wished Liz had stayed, but her instincts told her that Maddy was all bluster—just like her tattoo. No demon aficionado pleads for help from a mere mortal.

  “That’s in the hands of the police, maybe the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.” Anna stood up and began to clear the table, hoping Maddy would grasp the rather explicit body language and leave. She didn’t.

  “Alex and I had plans tonight. I don’t understand why he did this.”

  “Your midnight plans?”

  There was a brief silence before Maddy spoke. She was suddenly earnest, restless. “Did he tell you about it? The veil thins at midnight. We’ve been waiting, like a couple of teenagers. But midnight tonight—midnight on his land, with its energy vortex—can you imagine? When we meet, it will—”

  “You mean you’re having sex in his field? That’s what you’ve been planning?” Anna struggled to keep a straight face.

  Ignoring the barb, Maddy said, “What about helping me with Alex?”

  “Why ask me?”

  “I have no one else to ask, OK? Are you happy?” Angry at having to concede that her friends, if she had any, were of no use and Anna was her only hope, Maddy muttered a curse.

  “You haven’t told me why he wants to confess to something he didn’t do,” Anna said.

  “I told you, he wants to be locked up. In the police station.”

  Plate in hand, Anna regarded Maddy with rapidly diminishing patience.

  “Do I have to say it?” Maddy’s voice cracked. “He wants to be protected. He’s afraid of Paul.”

  20

  After telling Maddy to talk to the police and showing her the door, Anna called to check on Clovis and Esther. To her relief, they were both at Clovis’s house, preparing for what Clovis said would be an onslaught of trick-or-treaters. Her neighborhood was half retired people like herself and half young families, and one of Elk Park’s elementary schools was only three blocks away. She wondered aloud if she’d bought enough candy.

  Despite Esther being out of her house and safely with Clovis, Anna worried, and she warned Clovis not to open her door to anyone but children and to stay clear of Paul, Alex, and Maddy for the foreseeable future. Maddy was a fraud. She was into demons as a hobby, and for whatever cachet it gave her with Alex, Paul, and their world, but Alex and Paul were another matter. If Alex was willing to turn himself in to the police and risk sitting in jail for days as the police sorted the matter out, he was genuinely afraid of Paul, and not in an ordinary way. His fear was off the charts.

  Anna retrieved her laptop from her office, turned her cell phone back on, and placed both in the middle of the table. There were six books from the Sadler library she hadn’t yet gone through. Maybe Russell had missed something.

  “Start again, with fresh eyes,” she said to Jackson. He sat at her feet, his ears and tail twitching. “Riley will be here soon, boy. You go get on the couch.” She waved and he obliged, trotting over to the couch and leaping up onto his blanket. He circled twice and dropped into a comfortable ball.

  She had been wrong about
Raena, and her intense dislike of Alex had colored her thoughts and muddied her logic. It was time to think like a genealogist. Facts. Pieces of the puzzle. She took a book off the top of her small stack, found a chapter on Sadler listed in the contents—the first half of it an extensive interview—and turned to it.

  Anna waded through the interviewer’s effusive praise of Sadler’s bee savvy, looking to Sadler’s answers for any concrete information they might contain. “Marking queen bees,” she said aloud, running her finger down one paragraph. Sadler had his honey maker mark his queens with model toy paint, using the standard international color code. Anna flipped to the front of the book, checking the copyright page. With a publication date of 1982 but no date for the interview itself, Sadler might have been talking about either Walter Root or Peter Toller.

  “We’ve tried clipping their wings, too,” Sadler told the interviewer. “It’s controversial among beekeepers, but we’ve had some success.” Anna shuddered. She shut her eyes, but Zoey’s battered body was there, behind her lids.

  She wouldn’t have thought it was possible to dislike someone she had never met, but she didn’t like this Emerson Sadler. He had fathered Paul Gilmartin but never married Paul’s mother, and he had fired an able honey maker in Walter Root so he could hire a kid named Peter Toller, probably to make Jennifer happy. Did he refuse to marry her because she was beneath his station in life? And did he have her killed, clipping her wings while he was at a Denver Halloween party?

  After all her years as a genealogist, it still surprised her how the past never truly died, how it worked its way into the present for ill or good. Something happened at Sadler’s house, going back to at least early 1970, when Jennifer conceived Emerson Sadler’s baby. That something had led to Jennifer’s murder, then Russell’s, then Zoey’s.

  Anna skimmed the rest of the interview. The interviewer was so focused on lauding Sadler that it was little more than an advertisement for Sadler Mountain Gold honey, but the second half of the chapter was more interesting. The author had the courage to delve into Sadler’s fading fortune and the reason for it: Peter Toller. Neither was the author loath to repeat rumors about Sadler and Jennifer Toller. The consensus of the time was that Sadler had fired Walter and hired Peter to keep Jennifer around.

  A rustle of leaves outside the sliding glass door made her look up. Her first thought was that the wind had picked up again. She looked to Jackson, but he was fast asleep on the couch. Surely if someone was in the back yard, he would have awakened. She walked over to the door, making sure the sawed-off broom handle in the track was in place, then took a look outside, admitting to herself that while a broom handle might keep the door from being jimmied open, it wouldn’t prevent someone from simply breaking the glass.

  At most there was half an hour of light left. It was too early for Gene to leave Buckhorn’s, but secretly, selfishly, she wished he would. Ten months with this man and the independence she had gained after Sean’s death had crumbled. She imagined herself decades in the future, alone again after Gene’s death, thoroughly incapable of taking care of herself. Like Esther was incapable. Married so long she couldn’t leave her own front door without someone at her side.

  She pulled her eyes away from the glass and headed back to the table, laughing at her own foolishness. One day Gene would die, and the only thing worse than being a young widow was being an elderly widow, right? Or how about this? Gene had decided he didn’t love her anymore, not enough to marry her, and wasn’t it better to prepare herself for that now? To discuss the merits of independence because she was going to be independent for a very long time? She had been alone with her own thoughts for three years and by now was darn good at talking herself into just about anything.

  She heard rustling again. This was more than the papery sound of autumn leaves on glass. She crept to the sliding door and scanned the back yard for movement. “Some Halloween goofball,” she said to Jackson, who had hopped down from the couch and joined her at the window.

  When he growled, she shot across the living room and ran down the hall for her bedroom. Flinging open her closed door, she knelt, punched code numbers into her gun safe, and removed her loaded Ruger revolver. “Jackson, come back here,” she called.

  With Jackson at her heels, she made her way back up the hall, both hands on her gun, her trigger finger flat on the frame. Where hall met living room, she paused and peeked around the living room wall. Nothing. She listened for sounds coming from the window by the front door and the bedroom windows at the side and back, the other vulnerable points in the house, but the rustling that had sent her racing for her gun had stopped.

  Jackson growled again, his body rigid, pointed at the back yard. Someone was there. A new scraping sound drew her farther into the living room, her eyes rooted to the sliding door. She registered movement—an arm, a leg, a flurry of black and orange—and a figure shot forward, pressing its pumpkin head to the glass.

  She cried out and raised her gun, aligning the barrel with the figure’s chest. In that instant she remembered everything Sean had ever told her: If you have to fire, aim to kill. This is your life, this isn’t a game.

  The figure screamed, raised its gloved hands, and tumbled backward, catching itself halfway to the ground in the bare branches of a large shrub. Screaming still, it fought with the branches, entangling itself in the struggle. Anna pulled the broom handle from the door and pushed it open with her left hand while holding the Ruger in her right. “Do not move!” she shouted. Her gun still trained on the figure’s chest, she kept well back and commanded Jackson to sit at her feet.

  “God, no,” the figure said. A man. A young man. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “Use your left hand only and take that thing off your head.”

  The man raised the front of the pumpkin, wrestling with it when it encountered the branches. “I’m trying.”

  “Now!”

  He yanked hard, the pumpkin scraping the side of his face in the effort. Finally it was off, caught in the braches to the left of his head. Still trapped, his back hovering two feet above the ground, the man began to plead. “I’m so sorry. Please let me go, I promise I won’t come back.”

  He tried to move, for a moment looking like a black spider flailing in a web.

  “I said don’t move, not one inch,” Anna said, filling her words with as much fury as she could muster, hoping to appear just this side of ready to fire. The man had to be afraid of her.

  “Call the police,” he said. “I mean it, it’s OK, call them.”

  “I’ve seen you before.” He reeked of beer.

  “No,” he whimpered.

  “Two nights ago on Bighorn Road.”

  “That was my friend.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Nobody. He said it was a joke. He paid me a hundred bucks and gas money.”

  “Who?”

  “David Smith.”

  Anna glared at the man.

  “I mean it! That’s what he told me. He said you’d think it was funny. I’m just a college student—I needed the money.”

  “What do you remember about him?”

  “He was an older guy, had a beard. Not much.”

  “How did he hire you?”

  “My friend and I were walking on Summit, the guy said, ‘Hey, wanna do something fun?’ and he pointed you out.”

  “On Summit?”

  “You were talking to someone in a red car.”

  Maddy. So Paul had seen her after all. “What’s your name?”

  “Trent Harrison.”

  “Keep very still, Trent,” she said. “I’m getting my phone. If you move, I’ll assume you’re coming through this open door and I’ll shoot. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, yes. Call the police.”

  “I might miss, but my dog won’t.”

  Trent’s eyes shifted to Jackson. “Don’t let him bite me.”

  “Stay, Jackson.” Anna backed up slowly, picking her way carefully until she made i
t to the table. Her eyes and gun on the man, she felt for her cell phone, picked it up, and strode back to him.

  “I want you to tell me if you recognize David Smith,” she said. With her left thumb she navigated her way to a photo of Gene and held up the phone so Trent could see it. “Is this him?”

  “No.”

  Next was the photo of Paul and Maddy at their table under the tent. Anna enlarged it to focus on Paul and showed Trent. “What about him?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” Trent squinted. “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “Was he with anyone?”

  “No.”

  “How did you know how to find me on Bighorn?”

  “It wasn’t me, I said. He paid my friend a hundred bucks too. I need to stand up, please.”

  “Do you have any ID on you?”

  “From CSU.”

  “Throw it here.”

  Trent fished a card from his pocket and tossed it on the ground near Anna’s feet. She slipped her phone into her jeans pocket and picked up the ID. “Harrison, Trent Michael,” she said. “Trent, you keep doing stupid stuff like this and you’re going to get yourself killed. For a hundred bucks.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “A block down.”

  “Jackson, inside.” Her gun still aimed at Trent, Anna backed up until she stood just inside the open glass door. The stupid kid. She couldn’t bring herself to call the police. For a hundred dollars and what he thought was a prank he’d earn himself a police record and might be thrown out of the university. “You can go. I’m keeping your ID. If you ever come back here again—”

  “I won’t, I promise.” Warily at first, then with increased vigor, Trent worked himself free of the shrub. He started to reach for the plastic pumpkin head but thought better of it. Shaking the kinks out of his legs, he hesitantly backed away from Anna. When he came to the ponderosas near her side yard, he lurched sideways and ran.

  Anna shut and locked the glass door, ran for the front door, and watched for Trent. A moment later she saw him—running at top speed down the middle of the street, away from her house. “You’re a good boy, Jackson,” she said, bending down to give him a kiss on the top of his head. “He won’t be coming back. He thinks I’m a crazy woman.” Heaving a sigh of relief, she closed the door.