“Yes, I heard glass shattering in the living room. We were in the bedroom. Becky’s a heavy sleeper, so after I heard the windowpane break, I listened and heard footsteps, and then shook her awake and told her to be quiet.”
“Do you have an idea of what time that was?”
“Before my alarm was set to go off,” he said, offering what he could without mentioning an exact time. “I didn’t look at the clock, but my alarm always goes off at a quarter to seven.”
Kate took note of Scott furrowing his brow. She knew him well enough to have a strong sense of what he was thinking. The house had been broken into just before seven, and it was now fast approaching noon. What had taken Jason so long to call the police?
“What happened next?” asked Scott, urging him to go on.
Jason had slipped into a dissociative state, his gaze softening as though he was looking at nothing in particular, perhaps reliving the event in his mind. He blinked and then trained his attention on Scott.
“I told Becky to stay in the bedroom. I got out of bed, quietly pulled on my jeans, and grabbed a baseball bat from my closet. I thought maybe we were getting robbed, so I took a long moment to debate whether or not I should go out and scare him off, or let him take what he wanted and go. I mean, I was hoping he wouldn’t come into the bedroom.”
“Okay,” said Scott, waiting for more.
“Becky wouldn’t stay put. She whispered that she needed to get dressed.”
Kate considered this detail and completely understood. If Kate had been in her place, there would be no way she’d stay under the covers, undressed, and not ready to defend herself.
“So Becky threw on some clothes. Then I noticed that whoever was in the living room wasn’t rummaging around as though they wanted to steal something. They were walking slowly towards the bedroom.”
“Was the bedroom door open or shut?” Scott asked.
“Shut. But I eased it open.”
“Did you see the man?”
Jason clammed up.
“You said he was approaching the bedroom, so if you opened the door, didn’t you see him?”
“Yeah, no, I don’t know. It all happened so fast. I charged at him with the bat, but he overpowered me.”
“Did you hit him?”
Kate hoped he had. If he did, then the culprit’s blood might be in the hallway, and Scott would have a chance at finding out who he was.
“Not really,” said Jason, vaguely. “If I made contact, it wasn’t a good enough hit. He got the bat away from me.”
Kate interjected immediately, “So you can get his fingerprints.”
Scott met her gaze, but he frowned.
“He took the bat with him,” said Jason. “I didn’t realize it until after he was gone.” He quickly added, “He had a gun.”
“You saw a gun, but you didn’t see his face?”
“We were wrestling around. I didn’t see his face.”
“Did you get a sense of his ethnicity? His height? His weight?”
Jason thought about it, but he seemed unsure and didn’t answer right away. “White, I think. He was my height give or take a few inches. He was strong.”
“Why would he need to fight you if he had a gun?” Scott challenged in a way Kate didn’t like.
“I charged at him. I wouldn’t have done that if I saw the gun. It was like I had tunnel vision. In the struggle, he shot me with something.”
“Shot you?” Kate asked, surprised.
“I felt a needle in my neck. Then the next thing I knew I was collapsing and my vision turned black. When I woke up, I was tied to a chair. It took hours to get free. And when I did, I discovered Becky was gone.”
“Okay, slow down. So you think he drugged you?” Scott asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you show me where?”
Hesitantly, Jason offered Scott the side of his neck he thought the needle had plunged into, but his pointing finger seemed to guess vaguely at the precise location. Scott leaned in close, examining the area, but the frown on his face told Kate he couldn’t tell where the puncture was.
“Did you mention this to the medics?”
“Why would I?”
“Because we will need a blood sample to test for what you might have been drugged with. It’s fine,” he offered quickly so Jason wouldn’t feel like he’d done anything wrong. “Let’s get you to the hospital now before the drug leaves your system.”
“Do I have to go? I mean, Becky is out there somewhere. I want to help find her. I should do something.”
“Jason,” he said sternly. “The best thing for you to do is go to the hospital.”
Reluctant as he seemed, Jason rose from the table with Scott, and they made their way through the house and out the front. Kate followed behind them, eyeing the living room as she went and glancing up the hallway towards the bedroom when she could. There was absolutely no damage to the house that she could see other than the shattered window.
Outside, Scott opened the door on the passenger’s side of his truck for Jason to climb in since the medics and ambulance had left. After shutting the door, Scott gave orders to the police officers, as well as the two detectives who would be working the case—Garrison, who had been promoted a few months back, and Masey.
“Call me if you need to get picked up,” said Kate to Jason through the open window of the truck.
“Don’t you have a full day?” he asked.
“I can swing by the hospital and bring you home,” she explained.
When she rounded the hood of the truck, Scott was walking away from his officers towards the driver’s side.
“What do you think is going on?” she asked him.
He pressed his mouth into a hard line. “If the intruder took nothing of value in the house, then I’m thinking the guy believes Becky was the only thing of value. She’s the heiress to a mustard empire, isn’t she?”
“I really don’t know about that,” said Kate, folding her arms. “I’ve gotten to know Becky, and she wasn’t exactly getting a free ride from her parents. If anything, she and Jason have been struggling since she doesn’t work.”
“Is that right?” he asked, curiously. “I thought she didn’t work because she didn’t have to?’
“I think she doesn’t work because she is accustomed to not working, but I have to say, when Jason started dating her in college, her parents weren’t too pleased. When Lance and Amelia came over for dinner, I think they were being polite and keeping up appearances, but I was under the impression Becky didn’t exactly get along with them.”
“The kidnapper might not know that, however,” he countered, which she couldn’t argue with.
There had to be a reason the kidnapper took Becky, and so far, Scott’s hunch was the only logical theory.
“Let me know how it goes at the hospital?” she asked, as he opened the door to the driver’s side and climbed in.
“Of course.”
Kate stood on the curb and watched Scott’s truck pull onto the road and drive off.
Cookie Halpert had been murdered, and now Becky Langley had been abducted?
This was either an instance of “when it rains it pours”…or the two crimes were connected. She wasn’t sure which was worse.
Checking the clock on her truck’s dashboard after climbing in, she saw that she was already late to start painting Hazel Millhouse’s home. Kate dialed her number on her cell, and as soon as Hazel picked up, she told her she was on her way.
Kate realized she was holding the steering wheel in a white-knuckle grip as she drove through town. She kept trying to relax, but it was proving impossible. It was nerve-racking to think Becky had been snatched from her home, and while Kate was grateful Jason had fought and hadn’t been taken, she wasn’t relieved by that fact. The kidnapper wanted Becky for a reason, and didn’t need to take Jason, but what if the kidnapper couldn’t get what he wanted as a result of taking Becky? Would they come back for Jason? Would they kill Becky? She
feared to imagine.
Pulling into Hazel’s driveway, Kate pushed the disturbing thoughts from her mind, stepped out of her truck, and grabbed two cans of paint from her truck bed.
The front door was wide open, as well as the windows, and Hazel’s little toy dog—Mitsy—was flitting across the yard, yipping its head off and running circles.
“Hazel!” Kate called out, as she stepped into the open doorway, having set the paint cans on the walkway. “I’m here!”
Soon the older woman came into view, taking her time walking into the foyer. Hazel had broken her hip several times a few years back, but hadn’t had an incident since, so though her gait was slow, she looked strong and healthy.
“Glad to have you,” she said with a smile, as she passed through the doorway outside. “I hope you don’t mind Mitsy; she is getting a little fresh air.”
“I don’t mind at all,” she said, and then she noticed Mitsy lifting her leg to pee on Kate’s paint cans. “Oh hey!” she exclaimed, starting after the dog and scaring her off before she could.
“Eventually I’ll need all the sides painted, but for now, I’d like the front painted so the neighbors don’t have to look at this eyesore,” she explained.
Kate examined the peeling paint. The house could certainly use a fresh coat or two, but it wasn’t as bad as Hazel had made it out to be.
“Well, that’s no problem,” she said, kneeling and angling a wooden stick under one of the can’s metal lids to pop it off. “I remembered you have a ladder?”
“Oh, yes. Right this way.”
Kate followed Hazel around the side of the house, and when they reached the back, Kate noticed the ladder on its side, resting next to a wheelbarrow and some odds and ends that looked like old furniture pieces.
As Kate lifted the ladder and set it on her shoulder, Hazel remarked, “Shame about Cookie.” She shook her head and grimaced.
Kate wasn’t surprised the old woman had heard. Word traveled fast in Rock Ridge, and since Hazel had been working at the library, a virtual hub of gossip, it was no wonder she knew as many details as Kate, and then some.
“I won’t say I saw this coming,” Hazel went on. “But I had my suspicions.”
“Really? Why is that?”
They rounded the front of the house, and Kate set the ladder against the side of the house then leaned over, catching her breath and pouring blue paint into the tin.
“I didn’t know Cookie well, not beyond ordering her pastries online, which she always delivered to me herself. We had a few chats, but nothing too deep or involved, you know, polite chitchat and nothing too invasive. No prying.”
It sounded like Hazel was concerned Kate might assume she had pried.
“But she didn’t have a mean bone in her body,” she went on. “So when she checked out a library book on shooting guns, it caught my eye.”
“A book on how to shoot a gun?”
“That’s right. It was all about handguns.”
“That doesn’t sound like something Cookie would be involved in.”
“That’s what I thought. Then when she returned the book five days later, I logged it back into the system, and then checked the pages for damage. The library is really cracking down on that kind of thing, or I should say, Mrs. Briar is.”
Hazel shook her head at the woman’s name. Mrs. Briar was the other librarian, and the two of them rarely saw eye-to-eye. In fact, they were as different as night and day. Hazel tended to be warm and welcoming to the library patrons, while Mrs. Briar acted as though anyone who stepped through the door was a huge inconvenience to her.
“Anyway,” she went on. “As I was flipping through, I found a receipt for Drake’s Firing Line. It was itemized and Cookie had rented a handgun and one of the range lanes for nearly three hours.”
“Really?”
“If you ask me, Cookie knew something bad was about to happen and wanted to protect herself.”
“So why not buy a gun?”
“Who’s to say she didn’t?”
“Drake’s Firing Line,” she said, turning the name over in her mind. She hadn’t heard of it.
“I kept the receipt,” said Hazel, as she lifted a finger as if to say, “Wait right here.”
Kate rolled blue paint onto her paint roller, and by the time she was straightening up and angling the long pole of her roller onto the top edge of the house, Hazel returned with the crumpled receipt in her hand.
“It has the address and telephone number,” she pointed out, handing it over.
Eyeing it, Kate noted that the address said Rock Ridge. But when she considered the street number on Holloway Avenue, she realized the firing line had to be located on the very outskirts of town, nearly in the next county, and barely still in Rock Ridge.
“The only person who would really know what was going on with Cookie would be Clara,” said Hazel in a tone that implied Kate ought to have a talk with her.
“I already spoke to Clara,” she said. “She didn’t seem to know anything.”
“Does that sound right to you?” she challenged.
Kate tucked the receipt into the front pocket of her overalls.
“I’ll let Scott know.”
“What the heck for?” asked Hazel, whose expression reminded her of Clara’s. “You work faster, and you’re far more effective.”
“Just because I kept meddling years ago, doesn’t mean I should have,” she pointed out.
“Oh, nonsense. No one in this town wants a killer hiding among us. The sooner they’re caught, the better.”
Kate couldn’t argue there, but there was no reason to doubt Scott’s investigative skills. Focusing on her work so as not to incite Hazel into further debate, Kate began stroking blue paint up and down the house.
“I’ll put on a fresh pot,” said Hazel with a smile. “Come inside whenever you’d like a break.”
“Okay,” she said, laughing. “Sounds good.”
As Kate worked into the afternoon, stroking paint up and down the side of the house and taking coffee breaks whenever she craved caffeine, the temperature rose to uncomfortable levels and Kate told herself for the rest of the summer she would wear shorts. She was sweating like a pig. Soon she had the entire front of the house coated in a thick layer.
She went inside to let Hazel know and get one more cup for the road.
“All finished,” she said when she found Hazel in the kitchen flipping through a coupon booklet.
“Record time,” she said, smiling, as she rose from the table. Her purse was on the kitchen counter, and when she reached it, she fished her checkbook out and a pen.
Kate was quick to write up an invoice. Hazel was one of her most loyal customers, so she kept her labor costs as low as possible and charged her very little for the paint.
As soon as she handed Hazel the invoice, the woman began making out the check.
“I’ll let you know about the other sides of the house. I’m on a very fixed income and the library pays me bi-weekly.”
“No rush,” said Kate. “Just let me know and I’ll swing by.”
Hazel walked her out to her truck then took a moment to look at Kate’s work. “It looks like a brand new house,” she said, marveling. “Great work matching the color.”
“My pleasure,” she said, climbing into her truck.
She waved goodbye, and Hazel started for the door then disappeared inside, Mitsy charging after her and yapping her head off.
Jason had been on Kate’s mind all afternoon, and as starving as she was, she would rather pick her son up from the hospital than eat, so she gave him a call.
“Honey, are you finished up over there?”
“I’m at home.” He sounded exhausted. “Drawing blood only took a few minutes. I got a cab home.”
“So were you drugged?”
“Mom!” He snapped. “I know I was drugged!”
“Yes, I believe you. I mean, did the drug test find anything?”
“They sent it off to
the lab. I think they’ll know by the end of the day.”
“Okay, that’s good,” she said, turning the key to get her truck idling. “I’m about to get lunch. I can come by. Have you eaten?”
“I really want to be alone.”
“Honey, don’t lose hope,” she said, worrying that Jason was falling fast into depression. “Scott knows what he’s doing.”
“I have to go.”
“Okay, talk later?”
But Jason had already hung up.
Concerned for him, she dialed her other son, Jared, who she knew was at the Mayor’s office and would be until six or seven that evening.
When she heard his outgoing voice message start up, she muttered a curse to herself then dove into her message.
“Jared, it’s Mom. If you could check in on Jason, maybe swing by his house for lunch, I’d really appreciate it. Give me a call or text me.”
She hung up and realized that as starving as she was, she would prefer to look into Cookie’s mysterious time at Drake’s Firing Line. Why would a baker suddenly feel the need to know how to fire a gun? Had she been debating buying a firearm? Why would she have felt the need to protect herself in that manner? Why not go to the police?
There were too many question, and she would have no way of guessing the answers, so she pulled out into the road, driving north towards the address of Drake’s Firing Line.
It was twenty minutes before she arrived at the firing line. The building looked like an old warehouse and was situated where the forest met with a small lake.
Kate stepped out of her truck and heard the muffled pops and bangs of guns going off inside. She wasn’t at all a gun person and never understood the appeal. When she had been married to Greg, they often went camping, and Greg had tried to convince her that it would be good for the boys to learn how to hunt. “Over my dead body” had been her reaction, though eventually she allowed Greg to teach Jason and Jared how to set traps for rabbits and other small game.
She was cautious when she pulled the glass entrance door open. Inside, the light was dim, and the sound of guns going off was much louder, but she realized the actual shooting range was set off from the lobby.
A registration desk was situated at the back of the lobby, and she saw a man behind the counter. He appeared to be cleaning a handgun, which was dismantled, its pieces strewn across the counter.
Mrs. Fix It Mysteries: The Complete 15-Books Cozy Mystery Series Page 50