Spring Break

by Charlotte Douglas

  I joined in the toast and caught Bill’s eye as he raised his longneck. Like me, he didn’t look convinced.

  When I returned to the office, I called Doc Cline and asked her to compare Sidney’s DNA as well as his father’s to the sample from my Tampa cold cases. If Sidney had killed the Tampa children, that fact would put an entirely new twist on the case.

  With nowhere to go in my investigations until I heard back from Doc and from Archer Phillips on his data search, I bit the bullet and went to visit Mother.

  Estelle answered the door.

  “Is she awake?” I asked, and felt a stab of guilt at my hope for a negative reply.

  “She’s sitting in the courtyard. Go on in and I’ll bring you both something cool to drink.”

  Estelle turned toward the kitchen, and I passed through the living room to the central courtyard of the two-story house. An arching glass ceiling protected the expanse from rain and kept in the air-conditioning. Mother didn’t hear my approach over the splashing of the mosaic-tiled fountain, and I spoke before I reached her to keep from startling her.

  “Hello, Mother. Good book?”

  She set aside the volume she’d been reading, removed her glasses and made a face. “Why every story nowadays has to be filled with sex and violence, I’ll never understand.”

  She formed her sentences slowly and with care. Those actions and a subtle slurring of her words were the only remaining traces of her stroke.

  I sat in the wrought-iron chair beside her. Its plump cushions made it comfortable as well as attractive. “I can recommend some tamer reading. You might like Jan Karon’s Mitford books.”

  I hadn’t had time to read them, but they’d been highly recommended by Darcy and my friend Karen Longwood.

  “Ah, Margaret,” Mother said with a sigh, “you should have remained a librarian. Your life is as rough as these books I can’t read.”

  “Real life often isn’t pretty.” I resisted the urge to defend my chosen profession. I’d tried too many times in the past and failed.

  “I know I’ve led a sheltered life,” she surprised me by saying. “I’ve been lucky in that respect.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Better. This episode has given me lots of time to think.”

  Estelle appeared with a tea tray that held glasses of lemonade and a plate of homemade sugar cookies. She placed them on the table next to Mother, shot me an encouraging smile behind Mother’s back and hobbled away on her bunion-afflicted feet.

  Mother handed me a glass and passed the cookies. I took one, and the first bite reminded me of afternoons with Estelle in the big kitchen when I’d arrived home from school.

  “So, Mother, what have you been thinking about?” I braced myself for an in-depth description of some upcoming social extravaganza.

  “I’ve been thinking about you.”

  Oh, boy. I would have preferred the tedium of Pelican Bay’s social calendar to a litany of my shortcomings.

  “Seton said,” Mother continued, “that if Estelle hadn’t reacted so quickly to my illness, I might have died. That’s a sobering realization, and it’s had me reevaluating many things in my life.”

  I had no idea where she was headed, so I sipped my lemonade and nodded.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t been a very good mother to you,” she said with unfamiliar humility.

  Stunned by her admission, I could think of no response.

  “But I intend to make it up to you,” she continued, “as much as I can in the time that I have left.”

  Her unexpected sentiments brought tears to my eyes. “You needn’t worry about me, Mother. Just concentrate on staying healthy.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been too hard on you, Margaret, dear. I had my own expectations for you, and when you didn’t meet them, I held that against you.”

  She had me now. I couldn’t deny what she’d said, but I didn’t dare agree, either. Mother had never taken kindly to criticism.

  “So I’ve decided to change my ways,” she said with the enthusiasm of someone swallowing a bitter dose of medicine that was supposed to be good for her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to take a more active part in your life.”

  “Hmm,” I said in a neutral tone and took another swallow of lemonade. As much as I’d always longed for her acceptance, more of Mother in my life was a change I could do without.

  “And I’ve decided the perfect way to prove my good intentions,” she said.

  I was afraid to ask. “What’s that?”

  She smiled, and her eyes sparkled. “I’m going to give you the biggest wedding Pelican Bay has ever seen.”

  Luckily I had a good grip on my glass or it would have smashed against the terra-cotta tiles of the courtyard. I opened my mouth to tell her that Bill and I had agreed on a simple and private civil ceremony, but the words wouldn’t come.

  All my life I’d wanted Mother’s approval, and now that she seemed on the verge of bestowing it, I couldn’t automatically reject her. February, after all, was ten months away, and Mother could change her mind by then.

  I forced a smile. “I’m glad you’re feeling well enough to be making plans. That’s a good sign.”

  She nodded. “I have to start right away. February will be here before you know it, and there are a thousand details to attend to.”

  Chicken that I was, I held my tongue. I’d wait a week or two until Mother was stronger. Then I’d put a lid on her grandiose wedding plans.

  The message light on my answering machine indicated I’d had callers when I returned home. I pushed Play and heard Archer Phillips’s voice.

  “I have your info on Carlton Branigan, Margaret. Give me a call. Better yet, come by the office and bring a check.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Too curious to wait for the drive into Clearwater, I rang Archer back.

  “What did you find?” I asked after working my way past his mother, who screened all his calls.

  “Carlton Branigan’s whereabouts are unaccounted for on the nights those girls were murdered in Tampa,” Archer said. “No meetings or public appearances on record. That doesn’t mean he was out stalking children, though. He could have been at home with his family, but we’d have no record of that.”

  “What about his car? Did you find out what he was driving back then?”

  “A white Cadillac Coupe DeVille.”

  Deirdre had described her assailant as driving a big white car, but Sidney would have been old enough for a license back then, and Daddy might have loaned him the keys.

  “Did you find any mention of Sidney during that time?”

  “The son? He was still in high school, a private one in Tampa, and living at home.”

  “Thanks, Archer. I appreciate your help.”

  “I’m going to need more than appreciation. You owe me another five hundred.”

  “The check’s in the mail,” I said, and hung up.

  No sooner had I returned the handset to its cradle than the phone rang again.

  It was Adler. “Got the lab report back on those garden gloves. They’re the same make as the fibers we found on Carlton’s body. The stains are a mixture of chlorophyll and Carlton’s blood. And that’s not all. Inside the gloves, we found skin cells belonging to Sidney. Looks like Sidney killed his old man.”

  The pieces were coming together, but the picture still wasn’t clear. “The question is why? Was Carlton molesting his granddaughter? Or was Sidney the pervert and Carlton found out about it?”

  “If we can answer that question,” Adler said, “we’ll know who killed Sidney.”

  “Do you have an address for Ingrid, the housekeeper?”

  “Sure.” I heard the pages of his notebook rustling. “She lives in Pelican Bay in a mobile home park near downtown.” He gave me the street address.

  “Has she taken her polygraph yet?”

  “It’s scheduled for tomorrow.”

  “I think I’ll pay Ing
rid a visit.”

  “Okay by me,” Adler said. “Let me know if you learn something useful.”

  “Deal,” I said. “By the way, you searched Stella’s house after Carlton was killed, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, we were looking for gloves or bloody clothes. Found nothing.”

  “Any sign of a .22 handgun?”

  “Nope,” Adler said. “No guns of any kind in the house.”

  “And no gun found at Sidney’s place?”

  “Nope, but I have divers checking the harbor along the Branigan properties today in case the killer pitched the murder weapon into the water. The chief’s getting pressure from the governor to solve Carlton’s murder, so we’ve been given unlimited resources.”

  “Ain’t politics grand,” I said with a sigh.

  “Hey, whatever works.”

  “Keep me posted,” I said, and hung up.

  A few minutes later I was driving east on Main Street to Palm Haven Mobile Home Park. Unlike many older parks, with rusted-out trailers and residents down on their luck, Palm Haven was a new facility filled with up-to-date, spacious manufactured homes with modern charm and conveniences. The park’s only similarity to its seedier counterparts was its narrow lots that gave neighbors sweeping vistas of one another’s windows.

  When I pulled in front of the address Adler had given me, Ingrid was stowing a suitcase in the trunk of her car. I left my Volvo and approached her.

  “Leaving town?” I asked.

  She jumped, apparently so preoccupied she’d been unaware of my arrival. “I’m moving in with Miss Angela and Brianna for a while. Poor things, all alone in that big house.”

  “May I ask a few questions first? I won’t take much of your time.”

  Ingrid slammed the trunk. “All right. Will you come in?”

  I followed her into the mobile home, whose cathedral ceiling and tall windows made it sunny and inviting.

  “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Just some information. I’m trying to find Sidney’s killer, and I need your help.”

  She pointed to a chair, and I sat. She settled on the end of the sofa nearest me. “I told the detectives. We were all in the kitchen and didn’t see or hear anything.”

  Her face was puffy, as if she’d been crying, but her body language was relaxed, proclaiming she had nothing to hide.

  “Can you tell me why Brianna didn’t want to spend time with her grandparents?”

  Color flooded her features, and she clasped her hands tightly in her lap. “It’s not my place to talk about that.”

  “We need all the facts to solve these murders.”

  “But I’m not supposed to know.” Ingrid’s lower lip quivered, and she was obviously fighting back tears.

  “Know what?” I asked with all the gentleness I could muster.

  “About poor little Brianna. I overheard her parents arguing.”

  I was getting nowhere fast, so I cut to the chase. “Was her father molesting her?”

  “Her father?” Ingrid snapped up her head in astonishment. “Absolutely not! Her father would never—it was the old man.”

  “Carlton Branigan?”

  She nodded. “That’s why Angela and Brianna had gone to Miss Angela’s parents the morning the senator was murdered—because the senator was coming home. They wanted to keep Brianna away from him.”

  “Her parents knew he’d been molesting Brianna and they did nothing?”

  Ingrid shook her head. “They didn’t know until the night before. Brianna had been acting strangely for months, not wanting to visit next door, begging to stay home. The night before the senator returned for spring break, she finally broke down and told her parents what that sick old man had been doing to her.”

  I felt sick myself. “You’re certain of this?”

  “I wish I wasn’t. As I said, I’m not supposed to know, but with so much turmoil in that house, it was impossible not to hear.”

  I thanked her and left.

  With the office less than a mile away, within minutes, I was at my desk and telling Bill what I’d learned.

  Bill lost his usual calm, and his face was suffused with anger. “God, you get used to some awful things in this business, but a man molesting his own grandchild? It makes me want to throw up.”

  “It definitely gives Sidney motive to kill his old man. But with both of them dead and no witness to their confrontation, I guess we’ll never know whether Sidney inadvertently strangled Carlton in a fit of rage or went next door planning to kill him.”

  Darcy buzzed me on the intercom. “Doc Cline’s on the line.”

  I picked up the phone with a pretty good idea of what the medical examiner was going to tell me.

  “I did those DNA comparisons,” Doc said. “According to the samples from your cold case, Carlton Branigan was the man who molested and murdered those three young girls in Tampa.”

  I thanked her and hung up.

  My reaction to Doc’s news was a curious mix of satisfaction and regret. Pleased that the cases that had haunted me so long were finally solved, I was sorry that Carlton was dead, denying me the pleasure of seeing him prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Florida, after all, still had the death penalty.

  Being brutally murdered at the hands of his son was a horrible punishment, but the public humiliation of a trial would have been worse for a man like Carlton.

  “Carlton Branigan was the sexual predator who killed those little girls and abducted Deirdre sixteen years ago,” I told Bill. “Doc matched the DNA samples.”

  Bill sat in the chair in front of my desk. “We should check with the Tallahassee police. The Tampa killings stopped shortly after Branigan was elected to the state legislature. I’m betting there are unsolved cases in the capital—or the outlying areas—which can now be traced to Carlton. Predators like him don’t quit. They just change territory.”

  “So now we know who killed Deirdre Fisk and Sidney,” I said.

  Bill nodded. “The problem is proving it.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Bill and I were waiting for Elaine Fisk at the Tampa International Airport concourse when she returned from Pennsylvania the following morning. We led her to a booth in the rear of Ruby Tuesday’s and, over breakfast, told her our suspicions and our plan.

  “I want to catch Deirdre’s killer.” Elaine pushed aside the omelet she’d barely touched, cradled her coffee mug in her hands and gazed at us over its rim. “But is what you’re suggesting legal? I don’t want to do anything that will jeopardize a conviction.”

  “We’re not with the police,” Bill explained, “so technically, entrapment’s not an issue.”

  I drained the last of my coffee. “You ready to make the call?”

  “Let’s do it,” Elaine said with a resolute nod.

  Bill stood and grabbed the check. “There’s a bank of pay phones just around the corner from the restaurant. You can call from there.”

  While Bill paid the cashier, Elaine and I went outside and chose a phone at the end of the row that was fairly secluded from the others. I dialed the number, and when our suspect answered, handed Elaine the phone.

  She took a deep breath and grasped the receiver so hard her knuckles whitened. “This is Elaine Fisk, Deirdre’s sister. I’ve found something you might be interested in.”

  Bill had joined us, and Elaine glanced at us with a hint of panic. He patted her shoulder, and I gave a nod of encouragement.

  “I just finished going through Deirdre’s belongings,” Elaine continued. “She has newspaper photos and a journal that identify the man who abducted her in Tampa years ago. If you don’t want them, I’m taking them to the police and the media.”

  The person on the other end of the line spoke, and Elaine shook her head. “No, I haven’t told anyone. And I won’t tell anyone—for the right price.”

  She listened again. “That sounds fair. I’ll trade you what I have for cash.” Another pause. “Yes, I know the plac
e. Midnight? I’ll be there.”

  Elaine replaced the receiver and wiped her perspiring palm on the front of her blouse. “It’s all set. In the park tonight, the same spot where Deirdre was killed.”

  “Thanks,” I told her. “We’ll let you know what happens.”

  “Stay safe,” she said. “You know you’re dealing with a cold-blooded killer.”

  “One you will have helped put behind bars,” I said.

  With a sad little smile, she turned and crossed the concourse to the escalators that descended to the luggage carousels.

  “Let’s get moving,” Bill said. “We have purchases to make and a park to reconnoiter before dark.”

  At eleven o’clock, I inspected my appearance in the full-length mirror in my bedroom. Hip-hugging, bell-bottomed jeans, a tight little T-shirt that left my midriff bare, and clunky shoes resembled an outfit that Elaine might have worn. A wig of long, pale blond hair and sunglasses completed my disguise. In the bright lights of my condo, I looked like a joke, an older woman clinging too tightly to her long-vanished youth. In the dark at Crest Lake Park, I hoped I’d look enough like Deirdre’s sister to fool our suspect.

  After slipping my gun into a macramé shoulder bag, I called a cab.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was walking toward the bench in the park where I’d met the young hooker a few days earlier. Tonight, at least, she was safe and secure in the shelter and, I hoped, working on getting her life back on track.

  I settled on the bench, pulled a large manila envelope stuffed with blank paper from my purse, and propped it against my hip in plain sight. Now all I had to do was wait.

  On the other side of the lake, traffic whizzed by on Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard, but the park itself was quiet. A slight breeze ruffled the surface of the lake and rustled the leaves of nearby shrubs. The plaintive call of a chuck-will’s-widow broke the stillness. The air had turned cool with a late-season cold front, and I could feel goose bumps rising on my bare flesh. I slid my hand into my bag for a reassuring grip on the butt of my Smith & Wesson.