The Heart of Lies, A Paradise Valley Mystery: Book Two

by Debra Burroughs

“No, sorry. I should have let her know, I guess. Is she okay?” he asked.

  “Fine. We’re going over some final details for the wedding. Why do you ask?”

  “So she’s still going through with it.” Josh spat.

  Why wouldn’t she? What did he know? Emily heard the tension in his voice and sensed he was not pleased with the prospect of this marriage either. Her eyes lowered as she tried to get a read on him.

  “I’m headed over to Lucas’s office. There’s something we need to hash out.”

  “Josh, is there something you want to get off your chest?” Emily asked, hoping to snag a clue what this conflict between Josh and Lucas was about. She glanced over at Maggie, whose eyes were riveted on Emily’s side of the conversation.

  “I don’t want to talk about it right now,” he snarled.

  “But, Josh—”

  “Not now,” he barked. “After I have it out with Lucas, I’ll come home and tell my mom everything. I want you to be there, too, Em. She’s going to need you.” The line went dead.

  “What did he say?” Maggie wrapped her arms around herself.

  “He said he was going to have a talk with Lucas, then he’d be home.”

  “A talk? What does that mean?” Maggie pressed.

  Emily shrugged her shoulders. “He said he’d be home afterward and explain. So let’s give him the chance to do that, okay?” She tried to downplay it and not expose to Maggie the anger she’d heard in Josh’s voice.

  “Okay,” Maggie reluctantly agreed.

  “Didn’t you say we’d be having dinner together, too? I’m getting kind of hungry,” Emily said, changing the subject.

  ~*~

  Josh pulled his car into the parking lot next to the historic Graystone Building and entered the main lobby. He meandered down the dimly-lit hallway and found the door to the suite of offices open. The reception area where Fiona would sit was dark, but light was streaming out of the partly open door to the next office. Male voices were coming from behind the door.

  Josh crept nearer to see if he could overhear the conversation. He recognized Lucas’s voice right away, then he realized who the other man was—his Uncle Sully.

  “I need that hundred thousand dollars back, Lucas!” Sully demanded.

  “I already told you that I would give it back to you in two weeks. You hold up your end of the bargain and I’ll hold up mine.”

  What bargain? Josh couldn’t believe his uncle was in cahoots with this scumbag. He leaned in a little closer.

  “I need it now,” he protested, “not in two weeks. That could be too late. I’ll be ruined!”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Mayor. You’ll live.”

  Josh heard the coldness in Lucas’s voice. His muscles clenched and his fists curled into a tight ball at what he’d heard.

  “I can’t let you do this to us,” Sully cried out in a shaky voice. “When everyone finds out this Whitetail Resort is a scam, we’ll all be arrested. Who’ll take care of my wife if I’m in prison? And what about Maggie? She’ll be ruined, too.”

  “Hey, put that gun away!” Lucas hollered.

  A gun? Josh took a small step forward and clanked into a metal waste basket. Had they heard him? Footsteps were coming toward the door, so he crouched down behind a file cabinet in time to see his uncle fly out of the room and into the main hallway. The sound of a heavy door slamming in the distance echoed through the office and he knew his uncle was gone.

  He stood and stretched to his full height of over six feet tall and faced the door to Lucas’s office. Josh’s athletic body was vibrating with pure adrenaline. He couldn’t comprehend all of what was happening between Lucas and Sully, but he did understand that Lucas was planning to ruin his family, including his mother, and he wasn’t going to let him get away with it. He stormed into Lucas’s office to give him the beating of his life.

  Lucas startled, likely expecting it was Sully returning. His eyes grew big when Josh reached out and grabbed him by the front of his shirt and dragged him to his feet. Lucas was a couple of inches taller than Josh, but he was not as young or physically toned.

  Lucas threw the first punch, but Josh pummeled back until Lucas crumpled limp and bloodied on the floor. The man had gotten a few good punches in himself, but he was no match for the Navy-trained sailor.

  “Get up!” Josh roared, standing over his nemesis, but Lucas did not move. Josh reached down and felt for Lucas’s carotid artery, afraid he had beaten the man to death.

  A female voice singing in the distance cut the silence of the empty building. Josh froze and turned an ear toward the sound. Each note brought the voice closer.

  He slinked out of the darkened office and stuck his head into the hall. He could hear footsteps coming down the staircase. He gingerly sprinted down the dim hallway, ducked beneath the staircase, and waited for the woman to pass.

  He watched as Fiona adjusted the earphones on her iPod as she walked into the almost dark office, then he made his escape out the front door.

  CHAPTER 12

  Emily was able to keep Maggie distracted during dinner, trying not to let her know how angry Josh had sounded. He said he’d be home after his meeting and he would explain what was going on, but he still wasn’t home. Now that dinner was over and they had cleared the dishes, Emily wondered how she was going to keep Maggie’s mind off her son.

  “Em, I expected Josh home by now.” Maggie looked at her watch.

  Emily scrambled for something else to talk about. She glanced around the living room and her sight caught on a sparkling crystal paperweight on a book shelf. It was in the shape of a mountain with a sharp peak and spiky crags.

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll be along soon.” She rose from her chair and moved over to the shelf.

  Maggie looked out the living room window, scanning the street in both directions.

  “This is beautiful.” Emily admired the artful piece.

  “What’s beautiful?” Maggie asked, turning around to see.

  “This.” Emily indicated the paperweight.

  “Lucas bought that for me when we were in Sun Valley checkin’ out the area.” She turned back to the window.

  “Lucas bought it?” Emily wondered if it might have his fingerprints on it.

  “Yep, he surprised me with it.” Maggie remained at the window, arms crossed, watching for her son. “I’d admired it at the gift shop and when we got home he gave it to me.”

  “That was thoughtful.” Emily took advantage of Maggie’s distraction at the window and slipped the paperweight into the plastic zippered baggie inside her purse.

  “Lucas is wonderful that way. I can’t imagine what he and Josh would have to disagree about.” Maggie turned away from the window.

  She went back to the dining table and put both hands out, leaning on the edge of the table, pouring over the open books and magazines. She flipped one closed.

  Maggie stood upright, crossed her arms again, and looked at her friend. “I can’t concentrate, Em. Where’s my son? What’s goin’ on?”

  “I thought he’d be back by now too, Maggie. Why don’t we go down to Lucas’s office and find out what’s going on?” Emily suggested. She was getting a little concerned herself.

  Maggie, with worry written all over her face, nodded in agreement.

  ~*~

  At almost seven o’clock, Emily and Maggie entered the Graystone Building and headed directly to Lucas’s office. The door to the suite was open, yet the front reception area was almost dark, lit only by the stream of light coming from where Lucas’s door stood ajar.

  They listened for voices before entering, but there were none. Emily half-expected to hear a shouting match the way Josh had described the encounter he was going to have with Lucas.

  “Should we go in?” Maggie whispered, looking to Emily for confirmation.

  Something didn’t feel right. Maggie must have sensed it too. Emily pulled the gun out of her purse, and handed her bag to Maggie. She kept the gun point
ed to the ground until she checked out the office.

  “Stay behind me,” Emily directed in a soft voice.

  Emily slinked through the front office, peeking into Lucas’s office through the six-inch crack in the door. Then she heard a woman’s voice and she slowly pushed the door open.

  Gloria Wakefield sat in a club chair next to Lucas’s body. She had dialed nine-one-one and was asking for an ambulance and the police to help her son. Her breathing was hard and her face looked pasty and sweaty. She lifted her gaze to Emily.

  “My son—someone’s killed my son!” the elderly woman cried. “I tried to help him, but I think it’s too late.”

  Emily stuffed her gun in the back of her waistband, not wanting Gloria to see it and become even more distraught. The woman’s hands were covered in blood, as was the front of her dress. Emily crouched down beside her chair to see if she was all right, she appeared to be going into shock.

  Maggie surveyed the brutal scene before her, then she ran in, throwing herself over Lucas. A flood of tears came spilling out and she sobbed uncontrollably.

  “No!” She put her hand on his battered face, then laid her head down on the chest of his blood-soaked shirt. “Lucas! No!”

  Emily was torn between tending to the murder victim’s elderly mother and helping her friend who was hysterically embracing her fiancé’s brutally murdered body. Then Emily had a sudden realization—could Josh have done this?

  “Maggie.” Emily reached for her friend’s shoulders, pulling her gently back. “You can’t be touching the body. You’re compromising the evidence.”

  Maggie turned and glared at Emily. “He isn’t evidence! He’s my world.”

  “I know, I know, but the police are on their way and they can’t find you like this. Come on, sweetie, why don’t you sit down in this chair,” Emily urged, motioning to the club chair beside Gloria.

  With some coaxing, Maggie took Emily’s hand to help her off the floor and into the chair. Lucas’s blood was smeared on Maggie’s pink blouse, and the side of her face and her hands were covered in it. Her mascara had run down her cheeks, but she didn’t seem to care as the tears continued to flow.

  “You doing okay there, Mrs. Wakefield?” Emily glanced over her shoulder at Gloria.

  She quietly shook her head and stared down blankly at the handbag clutched in her lap.

  The scream of sirens split the night air and soon there were police and paramedics swarming the parking lot and pouring into the building. Emily went to the office door and motioned them in from the main hallway.

  Detective Ernie Kaufman stood in the doorway to Lucas’s office. His eyes quickly assessed the crime scene. A bloody body on the floor and two women covered in blood sitting in chairs near it, he had to ask, “What on earth happened here?”

  “Detective, this is the victim’s mother, Mrs. Wakefield,” Emily said, gesturing in the woman’s direction. “You’d better get the paramedics to tend to her ASAP.”

  He took one look at the old woman’s face and agreed. He stepped out of the office. “Hey, Willy,” he called out to one of the EMTs, “we need you in here.”

  Two young men in uniforms brought a gurney into the office and one of them checked Mrs. Wakefield’s vitals. Her heart was racing and her blood pressure was low, he said. He helped her out of the chair to assist her onto the gurney, but she went limp in his arms, grabbing at her chest.

  “I think she’s having a heart attack,” the paramedic yelled. The other EMT took her legs and they lifted her onto the gurney. “Let’s get her to the hospital.”

  Ernie picked up her handbag and laid it next to her as one of the paramedics put an oxygen mask over her face.

  As the EMTs rolled Gloria out, the Detective assigned a policewoman to stay with her until he could sort out what took place. “Make sure you bag her clothes and get a swab of her hands,” he reminded.

  Ernie called for the coroner to retrieve Lucas’s body, before turning to question Emily.

  “What the heck happened here, Emily?” Ernie asked, staring into her face. “Dead guy on the floor, blood all over the old woman, blood all over Maggie—spill it.”

  Ernie had been on the Paradise Valley police force for over twenty years, but it wasn’t until Colin had to take a leave of absence that Ernie took the promotion, against his better judgment, to be the town’s only detective.

  Emily took Ernie by the arm and led him into the other room while a couple of uniforms taped off the crime scene. “The dead man is Maggie’s fiancé. I already said the older woman is his mother, or was.”

  Ernie’s bushy eyebrows lifted in surprise, creating a cascade of wrinkles across his considerable forehead. “All right. Go on.”

  “Maggie and I came here together. When we walked in, Lucas was already dead on the floor and his mother was sitting in the chair calling nine-one-one. She said she found him like this, and that she’d tried to help him but she was too late. I’m assuming that’s how she got the blood on her hands and her dress.”

  “So why does Maggie have blood all over her?” he asked.

  “Because he’s her fiancé, Ernie,” she stressed, her eyes growing round with emphasis. “When she saw him on the floor, she didn’t think about it being a crime scene, she just rushed to him and put her arms around him.”

  “I wish she hadn’t done that,” he mumbled.

  “What would you do if you found your wife dead on the floor? You’re telling me you wouldn’t run to her and take her in your arms?” Emily asked, trying to put Ernie in Maggie’s shoes.

  “I guess I would,” he replied, shifting his burly weight.

  “Let me take Maggie home now. This is all such a shock to her. They were supposed to be married two weeks from today.”

  “I can’t let you take her just yet. I have some questions for her,” he said.

  “Listen Ernie, Maggie was with me for the last few hours and we came here together just a little while ago. She saw what I saw, when I saw it. She’s not going anywhere, so if you have any questions for her, call her in the morning. I’m sure she’ll be willing to answer them.”

  “But I’ll need her clothes.”

  “What? Why? I just told you she and I came in together and I saw her lay against Lucas, getting his blood on her. She did not have his blood on her prior to that.”

  “If I don’t do it by the book, the DA will chew my butt.”

  “Please, Ernie, have a heart.”

  “All right, if you and she will sign a written statement to that effect and be willing to testify in court to that, if need be, then okay. If the DA has a problem with it, he can just demote me back to officer. I’d prefer that anyway.”

  “Thanks, Ernie.” She patted him on the arm as she started to walk away.

  “You know, Emily, I’m not cut out for this kind of work,” he said, causing her to stop. “I wish Colin hadn’t gone off and left me with this detective job. I liked just being a plain ol’ cop in this town. We hadn’t had a murder in more than twenty years, and now we’ve had three in the last twelve months. I can’t wait ’til Colin gets himself back here. I sure miss that boy.”

  “Not more than me, Ernie. Not more than me.” Emily smiled at him as she turned and went to collect Maggie.

  As Emily helped Maggie out the front door of the building, the medical examiner and the equipment-laden crime scene investigators trudged in. She wished she could stay to observe, find out the truth of what happened, but she needed to get Maggie home before she had a complete meltdown.

  ~*~

  Maggie didn’t say a word the whole way home. Emily left her to her thoughts, having a few serious ones of her own. After having witnessed the clash between Josh and Lucas at the party, she couldn’t help but wonder if he had been involved in Lucas’s death in some way.

  Emily helped her friend into her house and waited while she showered, storing Maggie’s blood-stained clothes in an untouched plastic zippered bag, just as she had promised Ernie she would.

/>   She asked Maggie if she wanted anything to eat, but Maggie said no, that what she wanted was to go to bed and wake up in the morning to find this was all just a bad dream.

  Emily tucked her in and sat in the dark by her bed until she fell asleep.

  Once she was certain Maggie was out, she tiptoed out of the room and gently closed the bedroom door. She grabbed her purse and started to reach for the front door handle when the door opened and Josh walked in.

  He had a black eye and cut lip. Emily glared into his face, waiting for an explanation.

  “Where’s my mom?” He glanced around the house. “Mom!”

  “Quiet,” she admonished. “She went to bed.”

  “Before you left? What’s up with that?”

  “Where have you been, Josh?”

  “Out.”

  She stared at him, evaluating. “Out where?”

  “Just out.”

  “What’s with the black eye and the cut lip?”

  “You should see the other guy,” he smirked, showing her his bloody knuckles.

  “I have seen the other guy—he’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “Dead? I didn’t do it, Emily—I swear.” Josh proclaimed his innocence over and over again, as he paced the living room floor. “I beat the crap out of him, I’ll admit that, but he was alive when I left.”

  “Why, Josh?” Emily was perched on the edge of the couch, keeping her voice down. “What could have possessed you to attack him?”

  Josh looked her in the eye. “He was fooling around with his assistant, okay? I saw them.”

  “What do you mean you saw them?”

  “At the engagement party. They were in the den giggling and probably making out. I walked in on them and they looked surprised.”

  “You said they were probably making out? You didn’t see them actually doing anything?”

  “Well, I think she was wiping lipstick off his lip. Besides, I stopped by his office yesterday afternoon. When I walked in on them, I thought they were a little too cozy then too. And now this. He tried to tell me they were talking business, but they looked pretty guilty.”