Death in a Summer Colony

by Aaron Stander

  “So what have we proved?” asked Sue.

  “That the means for poisoning Malcolm was present and easily accessible. The autopsy suggested that the poisoning was of short duration, probably talking place over a few days. Did you listen to Pepper Markley’s interview from yesterday?”

  “Yes, before I started to work on the affidavit. There were things I didn’t understand. Why didn’t they just teach the cook to do the cappuccino?”

  “Remember Pepper said Jill was…and these are her words…trying to rehabilitate Brenda. So the question is why?”

  “I see where you are going. Was this something Jill did occasionally, or was it part of a larger scheme. Did Brenda start poisoning her husband, or was Jill pulling the strings. And if this is the scenario, why did Brenda, or Brenda with Jill’s assistance, stop?” asked Sue.

  “I don’t know how well Brenda was functioning. But Jill is a very bright woman. If she was behind the poisoning, she wanted to make sure Brenda would take the rap. In fact, it would have ended like this, with Brenda dead. But someone got spooked. Pulled back before the poisoning was correctly diagnosed.”

  “The problem is,” started Sue, “all we have so far is the arsenic in Malcolm’s hair, the report of his illness, and a partially depleted container with a compound containing arsenic found in the greenhouse.” She gave Ray a mocking smile. “A substance you can probably find in most of the garages, sheds, and barns in this county. Do you want to take our evidence to the prosecutor or should I?”

  “Maybe you will find some prints on the container. While we’re here, let’s give the rest of the place a quick look,” said Ray.

  He reopened the drawer where he found the screwdriver and looked over the contents. Then he moved over to the next drawer. He surveyed the neatly arranged contents: spools of wire with bright coverings, green tape, florist scissors, pruners, craft knives, and three box cutters next to two containers of extra blades. His eyes swept over the contents a second time. In a back corner of the drawer, partially hidden under rolls of tape, was a rosewood handle with two brass rivets. He pushed the tape aside. The handle was attached to a triangular black leather sheath. With a gloved hand, Ray carefully removed the object and set it on the bench. Sue came to his side. He released the snap on the leather strap that secured the blade and carefully pulled a weapon from its scabbard.

  “Nice piece of cutlery you’ve got there. Looks like the type of implement Dyskin was talking about. He called it a push dagger. Time for a little dusting,” said Sue.

  Ray stood back and watched, knowing that Sue didn’t like chatter as she worked. Finally she looked up at him. “Some very nice prints. The blade looks clean. I wonder if the scabbard absorbed any blood or other residue?”

  “We should get this to the State Police lab. Today. Have someone drive it to Grayling.”

  “I should do that,” said Sue. “Maybe I can use the old girl network to get them to give this a quick look. If they find blood, maybe I can get the type and start the process to see if there is a DNA match with Malcolm.”

  “Take the brandy bottle and the coffee container. Check the contents and get prints. And get her phone added to the search warrant.” Ray inhaled deeply. “So where are we? We have Tom Lea’s eyewitness account, backed by the scent of patchouli oil. Could Brenda have offed Wudbine alone?”

  “What you are asking is could Brenda have switched off the power, gone backstage and killed Wudbine in what, less than a minute, and then passed Tom Lea?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think so. Highly improbable.”

  “Agreed,” said Ray. “Someone has cleverly been stacking the evidence against Brenda. Who? And how did they get her to conveniently die? Get over to Grayling and see what you can find out. I’ll see if Hanna has anything that will help. I also want to make contact with Pepper.”

  “Grubbs is always at the scene of the crime,” said Sue.

  “Yes, I’m noodling around with that.”

  45

  Ray heard a vehicle braking to a stop in his drive, then one door slamming, followed 15 or 20 seconds later by the second door being slammed. Hanna came through his front door, releasing the latch, then shouldering her way into the room, her arms full of packages.

  “No paddling clothes?” asked Ray.

  “Tonight I am the consummate hunter and gatherer, the chef, too. We will have a leisurely dinner. It’s all fresh. It’s all local. No growth hormones, no MSG. And you’re going to love it.”

  “But I thought we were heading for the big lake.”

  “Ray, something rather amazing is going on. I’m not frantic. I don’t need to go out and paddle my butt off to feel okay. I’m feeling very relaxed. I want to have a good meal and a slow evening. It’s payback time. For better or worse, I’m the cook this evening, and you will love it.”

  “So what’s the menu?”

  “Fresh lake trout from Leland, salad and green beans from Meadowlark, local raspberries to put on a salad, a baguette that even you will find acceptable, and at the end a small glass of sherry with Stilton and biscuits. And, along the way, I’ll serve tall glasses of ice water, still my safest beverage.”

  “How about Brenda Wudbine?” asked Ray.

  Hanna embraced him warmly, pulling him close, waiting as he enfolded her in his arms, then kissed him passionately. Eventually she pushed away. “Careful,” she said playfully, “or you won’t get dinner.”

  “That’s not all bad,” said Ray.

  “True. But at 3 A.M. when you wake up blissfully satiated but starving, you will remember that you didn’t have dinner.”

  “How about Brenda Wudbine?”

  “You keep repeating yourself. Here are the rules of engagement for this evening. There will be no shoptalk until after we have had dessert. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” said Ray. “What can I help with?”

  “Go read your New Yorker. In 20 minutes I’ll have dinner on the table.”

  “Can I ask about Brenda Wudbine now?” said Ray as he sipped from the small glass of sherry Hanna had served him.

  She handed him a folder. “There’s blood work and the prints you requested in there. Your medical examiner is a real character. I guess he’s had serious heart problems recently. He wanted to pick my brain.”

  “And Brenda Wudbine?”

  “Not wanting to violate any protocols before the body was sent to Grand Rapids for a forensic autopsy, I only did a few things, and those were with Dyskin’s permission. First, I interrogated the defibrillator pacemaker.”

  “Voices from the dead.”

  “You could say that. There was nothing remarkable. The device appeared to be operating normally. You can see where the heart stopped beating and the defibrillator fired. It cycled through a number of times. Then you can see the use of the second defibrillator. This would’ve been the EMTs. They obviously noted her Medalert bracelet. When the patient has this kind of pacemaker, the EMTs have to take care to position the paddles so the energy they deliver won’t destroy the pacemaker. It appears the EMTs did everything right. This was a woman with cardiomyopathy, with alcohol probably being a contributing factor.”

  “Anything else?” asked Ray.

  “Yes, two things. First, we did a blood alcohol. Brenda’s was .26. That’s a lot for early in the day. Probably had a residue from the night before, too.”

  “And the second thing?”

  “It looked like she had had a fall. The back of her head showed signs of significant trauma. How did you find her?”

  “We didn’t. She was being loaded into an ambulance. But the person who found her said she was lying on her back in her greenhouse. And yes, there was a brandy bottle and a coffee mug that smelled of alcohol.”

  “How about the floor?”

  “Concrete.”

  “She might have blacked o
ut from the alcohol or had some sort of cardiac incident, hitting her head on the floor as she collapsed. That injury might or might not have been a contributing factor to her death. We’ll know that after the autopsy.”

  Hanna pointed, “Ray, your phone.”

  “Rules of engagement? Phone calls?”

  “Take it.”

  Hanna cleared away the dishes as Ray talked. After a short conversation, he rejoined her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “That was Pepper Markley. She served as a concierge to Malcolm Wudbine. You saw her onstage. She played the young wife of the Vicar.”

  “Yes, I remember her, one very pretty woman. Vivacious.”

  “That’s the one. She told me earlier today she had something to tell me. The circumstances prevented that from happening. I gave her my card.”

  “And she just called with some information that will turn your investigation on its head?”

  “I wish. No. She said she has sent me lots of documents. If I connect the dots, I might have the motive. I asked her to tell me more, but she just hung up.”

  “I love a good mystery. Where’s your laptop?”

  Hanna settled next to him at the table.

  “And here’s her e-mail. Her note reads, No one is clean.”

  “I see that, what are the attachments?”

  “PDFs, dozens and dozens.” Ray opened one, then another, then a third. “They seem to be confirmations of hotel reservations. I wonder what this is all about.”

  “Why don’t you print them out, and I’ll make some tea,” said Hanna.

  By the time Hanna brought the tea to the table, Ray was laying out the printed pages. “It looks like three years of reservations. Which would make sense,” said Ray. “Pepper had been with Wudbine for that period. There seems to be two kinds of room arrangements. About half of them are for suites, the other for adjoining rooms. The early ones all list Jill Wudbine as the other occupant. Pepper shows up in the later ones. Then Alyson Mickels makes an appearance. She was Wudbine’s pilot and security person. What do you notice?” he asked.

  “The first reservations are always for two people, Wudbine and one of those three women, never a combination. Give me a minute, I want to rearrange things.”

  Ray watched as she moved the sheets around. Hanna looked through the stacks a second time, making a few changes.

  “I’m feeling a bit like a voyeur.”

  “How’s that?” asked Ray.

  “Don’t you see it? Look. Early on it’s just Jill and Wudbine. That’s true for the first year. The second year it’s mostly Jill, especially true for the multi-day trips. Occasionally Pepper appears, mostly one-night stays, or should I say, stands. That pattern holds true into the last year, then suddenly everything changes. Jill’s out, Pepper’s out. For the last six months he’s only traveled with Alyson Mickels.”

  “It’s not a practically new plot line, is it?” said Ray

  “Nope. Rich and powerful older man, beautiful young women. That one has been around since…the dawn of man and woman.”

  “You know Jill Wudbine is Malcom Wudbine’s daughter-in-law?” asked Ray.

  “That makes the story suddenly a lot darker, doesn’t it,” observed Hanna.

  Ray gestured toward neatly arranged pages. “So you really think….”

  “Look at this e-mail. All she says is No one is clean. Perhaps Pepper is projecting her behavior….”

  “I wondered about that, too.” Ray picked up his phone and touched the top of the recents screen. A moment later he spoke into the phone, “How do you know the same is true of Jill?” He listened. “Thank you. That’s what I need to know.”

  “Well?” asked Hanna.

  “In flagrante delicto. And on more than one occasion.”

  “Well, the message is clear.” She paused, her tone changed. “This thing with Jill, it’s not incest, but it’s pathological behavior of the worst sort. Perhaps the ultimate hostility a father can commit toward a son. I think you have lots of people with a motive. Now I need the beach, Ray. A long walk on the beach.”

  “Ditto.”

  46

  “What did you learn in Grayling?” asked Ray as Sue entered his office early the next morning.

  “I’ve got a good set of prints off the handle of the knife, but the evidence tech—Andy Goodhue, a new guy that I’ve never worked with before—alerted me to something very interesting.”

  “Which is?”

  “The position of the fingers on the handle of the push dagger. The prints were good, almost too good. The fingers had been positioned in such a way to get the maximum area of the fingertips against the wide area of the handle. After we were done lifting prints, he showed me that it would be unlikely for the fingers to fall on the handle in that way if the perp was gripping it tightly to make a kill. In short, Ray, they looked staged.”

  “So you’re suggesting that the prints were obtained from the dying or dead Brenda.”

  “It appears that way.”

  “So who was with Brenda? We know Grubbs was there. Did he do this? Or was it Jill, or Alyson, or Elliott?”

  “Or perhaps someone else?”

  “I was hoping to find a print or two on the scabbard that would help us answer that question. No such luck. After we established there were no prints on the leather, Andy cut open the seams. We could see traces of dried blood on the interior. He seemed confident that there was enough material to get a DNA profile. We should have the results in about five business days. Assuming a match, sometime next week, we can say this was the likely murder weapon. One more thing, the blade closely matches the dimensions cited in Malcolm Wudbine’s autopsy.”

  “The pieces of the puzzle are falling together,” said Ray. “Here are Brenda Wudbine’s fingerprints. Dr. Dyskin was good enough to get us this set before the body was shipped to Grand Rapids.” Ray removed a standardized fingerprint card from a folder and handed it to Sue.

  “So let me do a quick comparison.” She placed the cards side-by-side and examined them closely. “Something’s wrong here.” She studied them a second time. “I see the problem. My mistake. I assumed the prints on the push knife were from the right hand. They are a perfect match with the left hand prints from Brenda’s body.”

  “The pathologists on Malcolm Wudbine’s autopsy said the murderer was probably left handed,” said Ray. “Did you find prints on the brandy bottle and coffee mug?”

  Sue added two more fingerprint cards. She studied them carefully. “They are not of the same quality, but clearly from the right hand. See for yourself.”

  “Agreed. We need to verify this, but it appears that Brenda was right-handed. How about the contents of the brandy bottle and coffee mug?” asked Ray.

  “Andy did a quick and dirty. He’ll send a more complete analysis in a few days. Just brandy and coffee with brandy, no adulterations.”

  “According to Hanna, Brenda’s blood alcohol was .26. Another thing she and Dr. Dyskin noted during their preliminary exam was that Brenda had sustained a blow to the back of the head, consistent with hitting a hard, flat surface, like a concrete floor. Let’s look at the greenhouse photos, I want see the position of the stool.”

  Sue opened the laptop, “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  “Perfect.”

  “The EMTs probably would have pushed it out of their way,” said Sue.

  “Yes,” agreed Ray. “But would they have changed the orientation? What I’m thinking is that Brenda had an early morning visitor, Grubbs or someone before him. Let’s say they were standing on the opposite side of the table. To get at Brenda they would take the shortest route, moving clockwise around the table.” Ray ran his finger over the screen to show the path. “And if they gave her a fairly forceful push, she would have ended up about where Grubbs said he found her. So tossing in
another assumption, if this was the person who planted the knife and put Brenda’s prints on the handle….”

  “They were probably moving fast. A mirror image grab of the hand, a simple mistake.”

  “Or not,” said Ray.

  “I see where you are going. My head is starting to hurt. I think we’ve only encountered one southpaw, Alyson Mickels.”

  “Yes, that’s my memory.”

  “Hold onto that,” said Ray. He laid out the copies of the room reservations, following Hanna’s organizational pattern. “I’ll get a pot of fresh coffee while you look those over. I’m interested in your interpretation.”

  Five minutes later he returned with the coffee and clean mugs.

  Sue gave him a Cheshire Cat grin.

  “Okay, let me have it.”

  “Based on these documents. Looks like Jill was, to put it in the vernacular, Malcolm’s main squeeze. There were occasional segues for a little spice with Pepper, but after Alyson happened on the scene, everything changed. She’s quite the babe.”

  “Let’s go through our top suspects again.” Ray pulled down the whiteboard. “Starting with Richard Grubbs. He’s got motive….”

  “Lots of motives,” interrupted Sue, “motive and opportunity.”

  “And we’ve already talked about the fact that he’s been at the scene of both deaths. And three months ago, when I first encountered Wudbine, Grubbs jokingly said that if Malcolm ever ended up dead, we’d have an almost endless list of suspects.”

  “Grubbs seems to be a kind, rational man,” said Sue. “But he’s only human. There’s got to be rage lurking below the surface. Could he have encouraged Brenda to put a little arsenic in Malcolm’s coffee?”

  “Probably, he seems to be one of her few friends here. How about Pepper? And why did she send me all those documents?”