by Lauren Carr
Her dark eyes wide, Leah shook her head frantically. “I have no idea what happened,” she said. “I was in the kitchen cooking their orders when suddenly there was screaming. I heard dishes and furniture crashing. Sari came running into the kitchen. When I went out, men were on the floor—coughing up blood, twisting, and screaming. They were shaking something awful—” She covered her face. “I once saw—It reminded me of—” Breaking down, she dropped her head into her hands.
Randi told Archie, “Leah’s husband had been known to use poison.”
“It’s a terribly painful way to die,” Leah whispered. “I’ve seen dinner guests in our own home die after sharing an after-dinner cocktail with Mario. They start coughing up blood, shaking and twisting and grabbing their heads—poison that attacked the nervous system. That’s what it was.” She clutched her chest. “Suppose it was planted there for me. He would have used that poison to let me know—”
Randi shook her head. “If it was Mario, it would have been a more direct attack. Like the men with the machine guns.”
“But how—” Archie started to ask when Gnarly let out a bark. Leaping over the back of the loveseat, he charged for the door.
“Who is it?” Grabbing her purse, Leah jumped up from her chair.
Archie stopped her. “It’s Mac. Gnarly always barks at Mac like that. It’s Gnarly’s way of reminding Mac that this is his house and he’s is only letting him stay here.”
Gnarly was jumping on the door when Mac eased it open to make him back up. When he spotted David behind him, Gnarly rushed between Mac’s legs to greet the police chief. It was only due to a quick move on his part that Mac avoided landing face-first on the floor.
Archie rushed into Mac’s arms. “I’m so glad you’re home. It scared the life out of me when Bogie said there had been a hit at the café.”
Mac embraced her tightly in his arms. “I guess Gnarly is good for something.”
David was easing the dog’s paws from his shoulders to the floor. When he saw Randi coming up from the dining room, David’s eyes narrowed into a glare. “Finnegan.”
She stopped to shoot back an equally vicious glare. “O’Callaghan.”
“I need to have a word with you.”
Randi eyed Mac. “You told him.”
“Of course I told him,” Mac said. “This is a major murder investigation in our town. Those were two hired assassins who meant serious business. I couldn’t let David go on working on the assumption that Tommy Cruze was their target when it could have been someone else.” He glanced over at Leah, who was clutching Sari.
Seeing the fear in the little girl’s face upon the two men’s entrance, Archie went over to Sari and knelt down. Mac saw the grip of her blue Ruger stick out from under the back of her shirt. “Sari,” Archie asked, “would you like me to show you the room where you and your mommy will be staying tonight?”
When her mother nodded her consent, Sari slid off the sofa. When Archie reached for her hand, she pulled away and hugged her stuffed dog to her chest.
Leah explained, “Sari doesn’t like it when strangers touch her.” She offered a nervous smile. “It’s hard for her to trust anyone enough to open up to them.” She knelt down to her daughter. “You can go with Ms. Archie. She’s a nice lady. Deputy Chief Bogie is upstairs. He’s here to protect us. It will be okay.” She added in a firm tone, “Just don’t go too far.”
Silently, Sari followed Archie up the stairs. Once they were certain that she was out of earshot, David turned to Randi. “Don’t you think I had a right to know that a major mob target was living under my nose?”
“Leah and Sari live in McHenry,” Randi said. “That’s not Spencer territory. The Garrett County sheriff knows about her. Besides, you won’t have her under your nose much longer. We’re relocating her and Sari. It will take a couple of days to get the relocation all set, but then we’ll be gone.”
“Don’t you think I had a right to know about it this morning when you were in the van and you knew that a major crime boss was marching right into her place of business?”
“Come on, O’Callaghan,” Randi replied with a laugh. “You know damn well how the government works. Nobody tells anybody anything.”
As much as it pained him, David admitted in a soft tone that Randi was right.
“Right now we all need to put our egos in check and concentrate on the matter at hand.” Mac stepped in between the police chief and marshal to separate them. “We have four dead men—”
“Five,” David corrected him.
“Four,” Mac said. “The fed was faking. He was alive when they took him out. That’s why Delaney wanted him out of there so fast.”
“How did I miss that?” David muttered.
Hearing him, Randi smirked when she asked, “What did you say?”
“When a fed tells me to look to the left, I make a point of looking to the right,” Mac said. “Cruze and his body guard coughed up blood. The fed didn’t. My guess is he faked being dead on the off-chance that he was the target. They aren’t going to be looking for a dead man.”
“A man came running through the kitchen and out the back service door when people started screaming,” Leah said. “I saw him come in with the man you said was a federal agent. Was he working undercover for the FBI, too?”
Reminded of the civilian amongst them, Mac and David exchanged glances before Randi ordered Leah, “Forget you heard that.”
“Hey, I’m out of here and in another part of the country in three days.” Shaking her head, Leah held up her hands in surrender. Mac saw a cell phone clutched in her palm. “As far as everyone is concerned, Sari and I were two victims of that poisoning.”
“Another local restaurant bites the dust,” David said. “I pity the fool who buys the Dockside Café with all the so-called victims added to the actual body count.”
“Unless we find out what really happened,” Mac said. “Okay, we know they were poisoned, but how?” He turned to Leah.
She clutched her chest. “I didn’t do it.”
“We’re not saying that you did,” David said.
Mac noticed that Randi, who had turned away, was silent in defending the café owner. “I’m sure forensics is testing everything to find the source,” he said. “But I think we can narrow it down the old fashioned way. I noticed that they didn’t have their food yet. So it wasn’t in the food.”
“I was in the kitchen cooking their breakfast orders when it happened,” Leah told them.
“Then the poison must have been in their drinks,” David said.
“What did they have to drink?” Mac asked her.
“Coffee,” Leah said. “Only one of the men didn’t have anything, the one who came in last with the undercover operative. He was the man who ran out through the kitchen.” She added, “And orange juice. I had served them orange juice when I took their orders.”
Mac rubbed his finger across his lips. “Did they all drink the orange juice?”
“All of them, except the agent who ran.”
“Did the bald man with the mustache have orange juice?” Mac asked.
After she nodded her head, David said, “Richardson wasn’t poisoned, so it wasn’t in the juice.”
“It was in the coffee,” Mac said.
Randi said, “They all had coffee.”
“Different people drink coffee different ways,” Mac said. “Some use cream, some use sugar, some use both cream and sugar.”
“It was in either the cream or the sugar,” David said. “The cream was in those little plastic disposable tubs.”
“The big fat man and one of the other men who died had cream in their coffee,” Leah said before shaking her head. “The man who came in last, with the man who ran out, he drank his coffee black—no cream or sugar.”
�
�But he faked his death,” Mac muttered.
“The two men who died, Cruze and his bodyguard, both had cream in their coffee,” David said. “It was in the cream.”
Mac turned back to Leah. “What about the couple who left? What did they have?”
“Nothing,” Leah said. “The man insisted that his coffee had to be fresh. So I brewed a fresh pot. I was bringing it in to him when his wife threw a hissy-fit and they got into a big fight and left. They didn’t have anything.”
“They left, and suddenly people started dropping dead,” David said. “Did they dodge a bullet?”
“—or fire it?” Mac asked.
They all looked up when they saw Bogie coming down the stairs. His uniform was wet.
“What happened to you?” David asked.
“From the upstairs windows, you get a clear view around the lake,” Bogie explained. “While I was watching, I busied myself by fixing the clog in Mac’s toilet.” He turned to Mac. “It was wedged down there pretty tight. So I took the toilet up off the floor and got it for you.” He pulled a yellow rubber duck bath toy out of his pocket.
“What—”
Before anyone could react to the surprise, Gnarly leapt over the back of the loveseat in one bound, grabbed the rubber duck out of Bogie’s hand, and tore up the stairs with it in his mouth.
“I don’t like that … dog,” Leah said. “I don’t like the way he looks at me.”
“Gnarly’s not vicious,” David said. “Possessive of his stuff, but not vicious.”
Randi put her arm around Leah to comfort her. “Leah is afraid of dogs.”
With a sigh, Bogie said, “Guess I better go put the toilet back together again.” He turned to Mac. “Want to lend me a hand? After all, it was your dog, and it’s your toilet that he flushed his duck down.”
“Gnarly,” Mac muttered to the dog that had run up the stairs, “I’m going to kill you.”
“What’s Leah’s story?” Mac demanded of Randi after she had shown the café owner her guest room upstairs.
After Leah was comfortable, Randi rejoined David and Mac in the study where they were enjoying a before-dinner cocktail. After the day they had had, they felt they deserved it.
Of all the rooms in the manor house, Mac felt most comfortable in Robin’s study. There he felt the essence of the woman who had given birth to him.
Robin Spencer’s famous mysteries had been penned in the most cluttered room in Spencer Manor. Built-in bookshelves containing thousands of books collected over five generations took up space on every wall. Robin had left her son first editions of all her books. First editions that famous authors had personally inscribed to her, and books for research in forensics, poisons, criminology, and the law also lined the shelves. With every inch of bookshelf space taken, the writer had taken to stacking books on her heavy oak desk and tables, and in the corner.
Portraits of Spencer ancestors filled the space not taken up with books. After almost two years, Mac was still in the process of learning many of their names and histories. Some appeared to be from the eighteenth century. Others wore fashions from the turn of the nineteenth century and on.
The most recent portrait was a life-sized painting of Robin Spencer dressed in a white, strapless formal gown from the 1960s. She looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor. When he had first seen the picture, Mac was taken aback by how much Robin resembled his grown daughter, Jessica.
The portrait of the demure-looking author filled the wall between two gun cases behind the desk. One case contained rifles and shotguns, while the other had handguns. Some of the guns had been handed down through the Spencer family. Others, the author had purchased for research.
Robin had acquired other weapons during her mystery writing career. The coat rack sported a hangman’s noose and a Samurai sword hung on the wall.
In a chair in the far corner of the room, Uncle Eugene watched all of the comings and goings. A first aid training dummy, Uncle Eugene had been stabbed in the back, tossed off rooftops, and strangled on numerous occasions—all in the name of research. When he wasn’t being victimized, he sat in an overstuffed chair in the corner dressed in a tuxedo with a top hat perched on his head. With one leg crossed over the other and an empty sherry glass next to his elbow, Uncle Eugene looked like he was taking a break while waiting for the next attempt on his life.
Leah and her daughter would be sleeping in the guest room across the hall from Randi. The master suite would be on one side of her, and David at the other end of the hall.
“She’ll be gone in forty-eight hours tops,” Randi said. “I certainly appreciate you letting her hide out here until we leave.”
“Don’t mention it.” Mac handed her a snifter with cognac. “I noticed when I brought up the poison that Leah insisted she didn’t do it, but you didn’t jump in to defend her.”
“Neither did you,” Randi said.
“I only met her this morning,” Mac said. “You’ve been working with her for how long? You know her. You know her past. Don’t tell me that you don’t suspect that she slipped rat poison into Cruze’s cream out of self-defense when she saw him come into her place?”
“And you wouldn’t have killed Cruze if given half a chance,” Randi said.
Mac looked to David for his back up, which he didn’t offer. Instead, he was staring at Randi with a suspicious glint in his eyes.
“I don’t know about Leah,” she said in a harsh whisper. “I’ve never been able to put my finger on it. I’ve concluded that it’s because she does come from a completely different world than me or any of us. Her father was an assassin with one of the most notorious crime families in Europe. Her mother, an Italian, sent her over here to the United States to get her away from the family business. What her mother didn’t know was that the cousin she had sent Leah to live with had started an American branch of their now international crime organization. When Leah got married, she thought her husband was a successful businessman. She had no idea what business he was in until after she had Sari.”
“Who are her friends?” Mac asked.
“She doesn’t trust anyone enough to have friends.” Randi’s furrowed brow and squint reflected confusion. “None that she speaks of anyway. She’s a totally different animal than Archie has been in the program. I’ve concluded that it has to do with why people come into the program. You’d be surprised how many criminals and criminal types end up in the program. That’s how they come into the evidence they give us. Then, we have witnesses who are innocent, law-abiding citizens who literally are in the wrong place at the wrong time—”
“Like Archie,” Mac said.
“And chose to do the right thing,” Randi finished with a nod of her head. “Leah was raised in a crime family. She was surrounded by drug and illegal arms dealers, crooks, and killers. She’s got a totally different wiring than we do.”
“If she doesn’t have any friends, then why does she carry a cell phone?” Mac asked.
“Maybe for protection,” David replied. “I know a lot of women who don’t carry cell phones to talk to their friends all the time, but only to use if they need help.”
While Randi agreed with David, Mac had a nagging feeling that Leah wasn’t all she appeared to be. Randi is right. Leah comes from a completely different world—a world where killing comes easy. “Would Leah put the lives of innocent people at risk to poison one man?”
“The feds have taken the lead on the murders at the café,” David said. “So we really don’t need to focus on solving them.”
“Except that I don’t like the idea of keeping a possible killer under my roof,” Mac said. “Are the feds even looking for that couple that ran out of the café before Cruze collapsed? They were in the dining room after Leah went back into the kitchen to prepare their orders. They could have planted the poison in the cream. Tommy Cruze
had collected a lot of enemies. He’s hurt a lot of people. Any of them could have paid off one of Cruze’s people to give them a heads up of where he was going, and then arranged to get to the café first to set up his murder.” Excited by the prospect that came to his mind, he added, “The fight could have been staged. We need to find that couple.”
“Have you been listening to me, Mac?” David replied. “The poisoning is not our case. It’s the feds’ case. They don’t like it when locals poke their noses into their cases—believe me. They can be more territorial than Gnarly.”
Randi said, “Well, I am a federal agent and I’m going to investigate this lead. If those hit men that Gnarly took out this morning were there for Leah and Sari, we need to find out who knows where she is and who sent them. If the poison was meant for Leah, we need to know that, too.” She clasped the weapon in her holster with one hand while heading for the door. She paused in the doorway before turning to Mac and David. “Are you two coming?”
David looked over at Mac. “I can see you chomping at the bit to take this on.”
“I got a good look at both of them,” Mac said. “I think they’re tourists. They came to the café from the hotel across the road.”
“Sounds like a good place to start,” Randi said. “What are we waiting for?”
Chapter Fourteen
Gnarly ended up going along for the ride after Leah ordered them to take him because she feared for Sari’s safety.
Usually, the German shepherd would jump at the chance to go with Mac or David, especially in the police chief’s cruiser. Such wasn’t the case this time. Gnarly refused to come when Mac called for him. Eventually, Mac had to lead him by his collar to the car. While urging the dog into the back seat, Mac saw Sari peering out the front window at them. When Gnarly turned back to look at the house, she waved. Mac could see that it was Gnarly she was waving to.
With Randi filling the front passenger seat, Mac had to climb in back with Gnarly. “If I remember Cruze’s murder trial,” Mac said, “he was tried for the murder of Dr. Reynolds, not his wife.”