by Lauren Carr
“Not this time,” Mac answered.
“Doc Washington is meeting you at the scene.” She handed him a pen to sign for his gold police shield, that of a detective, and police-issued gun, a Colt semi-automatic. “So what’s the word with you and your mother’s lovely assistant?”
Mac paused with the pen an inch from the paper. His eyes met Tonya’s. She arched an eyebrow in his direction. In the two years he had known her, he had never known the motherly desk sergeant to miss a thing.
“Tommy Cruze is dead,” Mac said. “That made our day.”
“Made a lot of people’s day.” She lowered her voice. “Now that the contract on Archie has most likely gone away, is she moving back into the guest cottage or is she going to …” She cast him a naughty smile.
“We’ll see.” He felt his cheeks warm.
“Oh, I should have known,” Tonya laughed. “You’re exactly like the chief. Never kiss and tell. Though Bogie did tell me not only did Archie move into the Spencer Manor’s main house, but also that she moved into your bedroom, which only has one bed.”
Mac joined in her laughter. “The fact that Archie and I are very close was never any secret.”
“Well, I’ll tell you this,” she tapped him on the chest to make her point, “I’m expecting a wedding invitation when you two have your big, swanky social event of the year at the Spencer Inn in the main ballroom. I’ll even buy a dress for the occasion.”
“Don’t worry. Every officer on the force will get an invitation, and we’ll expect them all to come.”
Before Mac realized what he had said, Tonya let out a whoop. “I knew it!” She jumped back and pointed at him. “You did ask her, and she said yes! I could tell when you walked in that you had a glow about you. Tell me how you asked her. Did you get down on one knee? Did she cry?”
Suddenly overwhelmed with tears of joy, she rushed around her desk to take Mac into a bear hug. As soon as she regained her voice, she returned to firing off questions about the proposal: when, where, and how big will the diamond be.
While she was firing off questions, Mac shushed her. Finally, she quieted down so he could tell her, “I haven’t told David yet. So don’t tell anyone.”
“He’ll be happy,” she replied with confusion. “Why wouldn’t you tell him?”
“I haven’t had a chance,” Mac said. “Besides, he may feel like he’s intruding on us living at the manor.”
“I didn’t think about that,” she said. “Once he sells his house, he’ll be able to move into a place of his own.”
“The way the market is, and as old as that house is, it may be forever before he can sell it,” Mac said. “I’m going to offer him the guest cottage.”
“Doesn’t Archie use the guest cottage for her office?” Tonya asked.
Mac clipped the police shield to his belt. “She can use the study, where Robin used to write her books.” Seeing tears in Tonya’s eyes, he feared that she would spill the beans before he had a chance to personally tell David. “Remember, this is our secret. I don’t want David to hear this through the grapevine. I want him to hear it from me.”
“Is Gnarly going to give Archie away?” Tonya wiped a tear from her eye. “He does have to be in the wedding. You can’t not let Gnarly take part in it.”
“There’s someone else I need to break the news to.”
Vacation rentals, ranging from cozy and rustic to luxurious estate living, lined the shore of Deep Creek Lake. There’s something for everyone.
Some homeowners converted their estate homes into bed and breakfasts to help ease the financial burden of owning a home at such an exclusive address. For some, it was the only way they could own on Deep Creek Lake. Other homeowners enjoyed meeting new people from all walks of life in the pleasant setting. In exchange for a room with a view of the lake, the guest would share a filling breakfast with the homeowner, who, intimate with the goings on, could advise where, and where not, to go.
Located along a quiet cove in the Spencer corner of the lake, the Skeltner Cove Bed and Breakfast was a sprawling, three-story log home. A private dock and beach were among the amenities it offered its guests. The county medical examiner’s van was parked in the road at the end of the wooden plank walkway.
When Mac pulled David’s cruiser into the driveway, he saw that the sign for the bed and breakfast had a notice hanging from a hook underneath it that read “NO VACANCIES”.
On his way inside, he paused to admire the view of the lake from the porch. The bridge was a little over two miles away. Across the water, the Dockside Café was so close that he could make out the flashing lights from the emergency vehicles.
“Great view, huh?” a woman’s voice startled Mac out of his focus on the scene across the way. Before he turned around, he placed the voice. It was Dr. Dora Washington, the medical examiner, who had come out of the house while his back was turned. “I see David had to call in his reserves.”
As always, Mac was struck by her flawless figure and blue-black hair that she always wore in a silky ponytail that spilled down to the middle of her back. She looked more like she belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine than cutting up dead people in the morgue.
When he had first met the medical examiner, after getting beyond her physical beauty, Mac was struck by how brilliantly smart she was. Dr. Washington had nailed Mac and David’s sibling relationship by their second meeting based purely on their eye color, cheekbones, and jaw-line. During a consultation in her office, she bluntly asked David for confirmation of her assessment. She had the class to keep that information to herself.
“Not your average tranquil lakeside living.” Mac gestured to the inside of the house. “Are you finished doing your thing?”
“Yes. Now I’m waiting for you,” she said. “I told them not to move the body until you got a look at her.” The corner of her lip curled into a smirk. “It will seem like old times for you.”
“Homicide?”
She flipped her ponytail back over her shoulder. “I don’t make that call until I open ‘em up.” She turned around to head back inside.
Mac followed her. “And I don’t make it until I take a look at the scene and speak to the witnesses.”
After stepping across the threshold, she turned left into a foyer stairwell. The dead woman was still resting in a heap at the bottom of the stairs with her feet and legs up above her head. The blood splatters on the hardwood steps and along the wall in the long stairwell were telling. Out of respect, the medical examiner had covered her with a white sheet.
After slipping on his evidence gloves, Mac squatted down next to the body and lifted the sheet to examine her.
She resembled a discarded rag doll. Her pink nightgown was worn and faded. Her hair was thin with bald patches on her scalp. Her arms were withered and thin to resemble skin draped over bones.
“She’s been dead a little over an hour,” Dora said while he peered at the dead woman from every angle. “I pinpoint the time of death at between six-forty-five and seven o’clock. It looks like she bounced down the stairs with her head hitting every step the whole way down.” The doctor was not exaggerating. Her face and head were bloody and scarred.
Mac cocked his head while looking at the scrapes and scratches on her thin arms. Defense wounds.
“Who is she?” He removed the paper bag that Dr. Washington had encased her hands in to preserve evidence. Strands of dark hair were embedded under her fingernails along with black fiber.
“Mary Catherine Skeltner,” she said. “Half of the couple that own this place. Husband is back in the kitchen. I told him to wait for you to get his statement.”
“She put up a fight before going down the stairs.” Mac showed the medical examiner her hands.
“Very good.” She smiled down at him. “It must be in the genes.”
&n
bsp; They heard hushed voices and footsteps coming from the dining room into the foyer. Swiftly, he put the bag back on her hand and sealed it with the rubber band.
“I saw the cruiser pulling in,” the male voice was saying as he approached the foyer from behind Mac. “Now that the police detective is here, I’m hoping that this can be taken care of as quickly and painlessly as possible.”
“Russell Skeltner,” Dora said, “I’d like you to meet Mac Faraday. He’s the detective working for the Spencer police department.”
Mac rose to his feet.
“As you can see, Detective Faraday,” the husband said, “it’s pretty clear what happened. My wife slipped and fell down the stairs. Accidental death.”
“An investigation needs to be conducted before that decision can be made.” When Mac turned around, he recognized the blue running suit and Toronto Bluejay’s ball cap. It was the jogger from the Dockside Café. Mac offered his hand. “We meet again.”
“Really?” Russell Skeltner shook his head. “I’m afraid—”
“Coffee shop this morning,” Mac reminded him.
A wide grin crossed Russell Skeltner’s face. “The runner with the dog. German shepherd. He stole your breakfast.”
“Actually, he didn’t steal it. I bought it for him.”
“That’s not how it looked—”
Tired of his attitude and the smirk on Dora’s face at the reference of the infamous Gnarly winning yet again, Mac nodded in the direction of the dead woman lying at their feet. “What happened here?”
A somber expression filled Skeltner’s face. “My wife was killed falling down the stairs.”
“You seem less than upset about it,” Mac noted.
Russell Skeltner sucked in a deep breath and folded his arms across his chest. “Mary Catherine has been sick for years. Cancer. They did everything to save her. Before she came down with it, she was a vibrant woman. Athletic. We’d go running together every day. After zapping her with everything imaginable, they saved her life, but it ended up being a life not worth living.” He pointed up the staircase. “You can see for yourself. She was taking thirty different pills a day. For the last two years, she has been bedridden and spaced out—sleeping twenty hours a day.”
He ran his hand over the front of his athletic suit. “This morning I went running, like I do every day. Before I left, I set a glass of juice on her bed stand so she could wash down her pills when she woke up. When I came home an hour later, I found this, and a spilt glass of juice upstairs.”
He offered his theory. “She spilt her juice and tried to come downstairs to get another glass, but fell and killed herself.” He concluded with a wave of his arms. “Accidental death.”
Mac looked from him to Dora, whose face was as devoid of expression as that of a professional poker player, and back to the husband of the dead woman lying in a pool of blood between them.
With each second of silence, the muscles in Russell’s face tightened with impatience.
“I need to see your wife’s bedroom,” Mac finally said.
While Dora went to work photographing the body and the scene for her records, Mac followed Russell Skeltner to the kitchen in the rear of the house and up the back staircase to the bedrooms on the second floor level.
“Do you have any guests staying here this weekend?” Mac asked in a pleasant tone. Even though the question was conversational, it was meant to determine if there were any other suspects.
“We haven’t had guests since Mary Catherine got sick,” he replied. “She always wanted to have a B and B on the lake.”
At the top of the stairs, a county forensics officer was taking pictures of the stairs and each blood splatter on the way down. The Spencer police department was rich, but small, which meant they had to use the services and labs of the bigger departments around them for the more serious crimes.
Russell Skeltner led Mac down a hallway at the end of which was the master suite. The door was open to reveal a cluttered bedroom. Numbered place markers and rulers littered the room where the forensics officer, a young woman who Mac noted appeared about the same age as his son in college, had marked evidence to suggest what had led up to the woman’s death.
“We were only here a few years and doing pretty good until it got too difficult for her to manage.” Standing next to the doorway, Russell gestured for Mac to step inside.
The room contained a television blasting a reality program featuring a has-been teen pop star, a bed tray overturned on the floor, and a glass resting in the middle of an orange juice spill. There were clothes scattered about on the bed, a chair, and the floor. On the bed stand was row upon row of pill bottles.
The bathroom door was open to reveal a sink and counter that was cluttered with more pill bottles and women’s cosmetics.
Mac noticed that the indentation in the mattress was in the center of the bed. There was a blood smear on the pillow case and a drop of blood on the bed poster next to the night stand. Both had been marked by the crime scene officer. The blood smear was over two inches long.
“The blood smear is old,” Russell Skeltner told Mac when he noticed him studying it. “Mary Catherine would get nose bleeds—side effect from some of her meds.”
“Where do you sleep, Mr. Skeltner?”
The husband’s head snapped in Mac’s direction in response to the question. “I sleep in one of the rooms at the end of the hall. Mary Catherine slept all hours of the day with the television blaring twenty-four-seven. It was impossible for me to sleep in the same room with that.” He added, “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love her.”
With no response to the answer, Mac knelt down to examine the hardwood floor. Mary Catherine Skeltner had been sick and bedridden for so long that she did not have the time to devote to cleaning—especially her floor. The hardwood floor contained a layer of dirt and dust that had built up. Mac turned on his penlight to study the drag pattern on the floor leading from the bed to the hallway.
When he saw the beam catch on something to create a brilliant spark of light, Mac felt a jolt as his heart seemed to skip a beat. What is that? He lowered himself onto his hands and knees to get a closer look at the object resting against the side of the leg of the bed stand.
“I heard the ME tell you that the time of death was between six-forty-five and seven o’clock,” Mac could barely hear Russell saying. “I left the house at six-thirty to go running like I do every morning.”
Mac resisted the temptation to touch it. “Mr. Skeltner, how’s your eyesight?”
There was a moment of silence before he answered. “Twenty-twenty. Perfect. Why?”
“How about your wife?”
Another pause. “Terrible. She wore glasses. As you can see, she left them on the night stand. Probably another reason she fell down the stairs. She was so hyped up on drugs—”
Mac sat up to see that a pair of eyeglasses with thick lenses was indeed resting on the bed stand. “Then I guess she didn’t wear contact lenses.”
Another pause.
When he didn’t receive an answer, Mac, still on his knees, turned to look up at Russell Skeltner. The two men’s eyes met.
“No, Mary Catherine didn’t wear contact lens,” Russell answered.
Mac called down the hallway to the forensics officer. “We have a contact lens here on the floor that needs to be processed into evidence. It’s not the victim’s or husband’s.”
“My God,” Russell gasped. “Mary Catherine was…murdered! I can’t believe—” He fell back against the wall. “Every day, I go running along the shoreline and cross the bridge to go to the Dockside Café for coffee. Whoever did this must have realized my schedule and…I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Mr. Skeltner, you need to step out of this room into the hall in order for us to contain the scene.”
Mac ushered him out into the hallway to allow the forensics officer in to photograph and collect the contact lens.
While the forensics officer was taking pictures of the lens from various angles, Mac continued studying the drag marks on the floor. There was one clear path in the layer of dust—leading from the bed and through the doorway out into the hall.
“Did you see the piece of her nightgown?” the officer pointed at a piece of material that had caught and been torn from a piece of clothing. “She was definitely dragged on her back to the top of the stairs.”
Pink! Mac smiled. Mary Catherine Skeltner’s nightgown is pink!
“Takes me about twenty to twenty-five minutes to jog to the café every morning,” Russell Skeltner was telling Mac even while he was trying to concentrate on the drag marks in the hall. “Then, I jog back after drinking my espresso next to the lake. I always get there right when they open.” He stepped away from the wall to tell Mac, “That was where we met this morning.”
Mac looked up from where he was studying the torn material that had been ripped from the nightgown Russell Skeltner’s wife had been wearing.
“My wife’s time of death is the same time as when you and I met in front of the Dockside Café.” A wide grin was filling Russell Skeltner’s face. “Guess you can’t ask for a better alibi witness than a homicide detective, can you?”
Chapter Twelve
Mac could feel Russell Skeltner peering out the window from inside his home—laughing at him. I hate killers, especially smart killers who think they’ve gotten away with it. He resisted the urge to slam the door of David’s cruiser. Don’t give him the satisfaction.
Replaying the different scenarios in his mind, Mac was clutching the cruiser’s door handle when he noticed a movement in the other direction out of the corner of his eye. It was so far in his peripheral vision that he almost missed it. When he turned to look over his shoulder, he saw the curtain move in the window of the log cabin across the road.