by K. J. Emrick
She nodded in silent agreement. “I’ll have to think about this, Jerry. Can you give me some time?”
Before Jerry could answer there was a knock on the heavy wooden door behind them and it flew open.
Chief Ed Rosen stormed inside and pulled a third chair over from the side of the room and set it at the side of Quinn’s desk, folding himself into it. “I heard there was a meeting going on. Figured it involved me.” He folded his arms and thrust his legs out, defiant and arrogant. “So I decided if I was going to be the subject of the meeting then I might as well be here for it. So. What did I miss?”
Everyone took a moment to adjust to the chief’s abrupt entrance. Jerry sat up straighter in his chair, a question on his lips. He was a tiger about to pounce.
Until Quinn held up her hand. She was going to ask the questions here. “Chief Rosen, I don’t appreciate people barging into my office. I know you’re still new in town, but—”
“I’ve been here for a year,” he groused.
“Not quite a year, actually.” With a pleasant smile, she added, “but some people take longer than others to adjust to new surroundings.”
He scoffed at her. “Next time I’ll make an appointment.”
“Indeed. Well. As long as you’re here, please allow me to ask you this. How well did you know Sheila Tucker?”
His beady eyes narrowed. “Is that what this is about? You looking to see if I was involved with the victim or something? For the love of God, she was half again my age!”
Quinn waited for him to stop yelling, and calmly asked the question again. “How well did you know Sheila Tucker?”
“I didn’t know her at all, thank you very much. She’s just another victim. This town’s been collecting them like cordwood recently. That’s why you hired me, to clean things up.”
Cookie wanted to reach out and slap the man. How dare he talk about Sheila that way! Not only was it disrespectful of her friend, it was disrespectful of everyone that Ed Rosen had sworn to protect. Was this really how he saw the people in his town?
“Interesting,” was Quinn’s comment. “So you didn’t have any associations with Sheila Tucker at all?”
“Of course I didn’t. I move in different circles than old folks in retirement homes… wait a minute. You think I had something to do with this? Seriously?”
Cookie was still stinging from his comment about being too good to associate with ‘old folks’ but she wasn’t so shocked that she missed the look that crossed Ed Rosen’s face. He was surprised that they would accuse him of being involved. The man wasn’t anywhere near a good enough actor to be faking that reaction.
He thought Sheila was just some old woman living in a retirement home. He had no idea that she was rich. If he’d known that, then he certainly would have included her in what he called his circle. Rosen was a man who wore his emotions out there for everyone to see. If there was any single redeeming quality about him it was how transparent he was. The man was a complete buffoon, but you always knew where you stood with him.
She looked over at Jerry. He was trying to stare through Rosen, to see into his thoughts. In his eyes, Cookie could see doubts starting to swirl. He was starting to second guess their conclusions, too.
“All of you, listen to me,” Rosen said, leaning as far forward as he could in his seat to pound his knuckles on the mayor’s desk. “I had nothing to do with this woman’s death. I am the chief of police in this town, and I am above reproach. The man who did this is already in custody in my cell, and I’ll make a case against him that sticks just as soon as he stops interfering!”
Now his finger jabbed accusingly at Jerry.
The two men glared at each other, the air turning to frost between them.
Mayor Quinn stood up from her chair. “I see. Well. I certainly understand the situation better than I did before.”
Rosen’s lips curled into a sneer. “Figured you would. I’ve got the man in custody who committed this crime, just like I said. The daughter’s boyfriend. Now. Just as soon as Amanda Tucker wakes up in the hospital over in Bridgefield, I’ll be able to ask her some questions that will wrap this all up. Let me do my job, and this will all be taken care of. You’ll get to see your name in the paper next to a story about how safe we’re making all the good citizens of Widow’s Rest.”
He stood up from his chair as well, holding his hand out to shake the mayor’s. If Quinn was just a moment late in holding her own hand out for him, Rosen missed it entirely. Cookie wondered if this was the end of their investigation. They’d exhausted their suspects, hadn’t they? Despite what Rosen said, the murderer was not Grayson DeBeers. And, in spite of what she and Jerry had been thinking, it was looking like Rosen wasn’t the killer, either.
If only they could be sure…
Jerry cleared his throat, drawing everyone’s attention to him. “You look stressed, Chief. Can I offer you a cigarette?”
He reached for his front shirt pocket.
“Not in my office!” Quinn said immediately. “This is a public building. There is no smoking here.”
“Just as well,” Chief Rosen grimaced. “Smoking killed my mother. Lung cancer. I’ve never touched those things and I never will. Now as for you, Jerry, this is my last warning. Just stay out of my way.”
With that, he stalked out of the office, shutting the door firmly behind himself.
Jerry’s hand went into the pocket he’d been reaching for, and pulled out his notepad. Flipping through it he got to the next empty page and wrote a note for himself.
Quinn smiled down at him. “There never were any cigarettes in your pocket, were there?”
“Of course not, Mayor,” Jerry answered with a smile. “This is a public building. There’s no smoking in here.”
“Interesting,” she said, and even looked impressed.
“Jerry,” Cookie said, “Rosen didn’t do this. You saw the look on his face. Plus, he doesn’t smoke. The man trying to get at Zane was a smoker, remember?”
“I know, Cookie, but that doesn’t mean that Rosen isn’t still behind all of this. Think about it. He’s got zero ties to this community. No reason to care what happens to any of us… I mean look, he could have had someone else tailing Zane. He could have had someone else shoot at Amanda in her house. Rosen’s got people to do his dirty work. Remember how Mason and Cassandra broke into your apartment this morning to threaten you?”
Quinn’s eyebrows both went up this time. This was part of the story that they hadn’t told her yet. “Are you saying two officers from my town’s police department actually broke into your apartment, Cookie? What did they do? Did they do any damage?”
“No,” Jerry answered for her. “They picked the locks. They were trying to scare us away from this case. Which is all the more reason that I believe Ed Rosen is our killer. He doesn’t want anyone finding out the truth.”
“Yes, well,” Quinn said, tossing her long hair over a shoulder so that the feathers stirred and folded her hands at her waist. “That brings us back to what I was saying earlier. What truth are you trying to arrive at, Officer Stansted?”
“There’s only one truth,” he told her, snapping the notebook closed to put it back in his pocket.
“Certainly.” The mayor took her seat again behind her desk. “But history has taught us that many people have dressed up lies to parade them around as truth. For instance, what truth do you suppose Chief Rosen sees when he looks at you?”
Jerry had no answer for that. Cookie knew what Quinn was saying though. Rosen saw Jerry as an interfering nuisance to his way of doing things, and probably as a waste of space that was keeping him from hiring more handpicked officers. The real truth was just the opposite. Jerry was a good man, and Cookie knew that he was only interested in doing what was right. The fact of the matter was that he—and she as well—might be letting their emotions cloud their judgment here.
Was the truth right in front of their faces, but invisible to them because they weren’t looking
for it?
After a moment, Jerry shook his head. “I know a fact when it bites me, Mayor Fieldberg. I’m not looking to pin anyone to the wall. I just want whoever did this to pay for it.’
She smiled at him, but it didn’t touch her eyes. “But you still think that Chief Rosen is the one who did this.”
“Yes, Ma’am. I do.”
“Then I wish you well in your investigation.” She spread her hands before collecting a few of the reports waiting for her at the side of her desk. “Please remember, we’ve had our interview with Chief Rosen. Unless you can prove he did this some other way, then you are still his employee, and you will take your direction from him unless or until that changes.”
“I understand,” he told her, which was a far cry from agreeing. “Thanks for seeing us, Mayor. I was really hoping this would go differently but I guess you can’t always get what you want.”
Cookie stood when he did, and she had to agree with him. It would have been nice if they’d trapped Ed Rosen into confessing right here in this office. To have Sheila’s killer caught so quickly would have been good for her heart. Good for Amanda, too, lying there in her hospital bed recovering from the blow to her head. What was to become of her, Cookie wondered?
The phone on Quinn’s desk rang, and she answered it with an apologetic look. Cookie nodded a goodbye and she and Jerry went to the office door.
“Wait, please,” Quinn said. When Cookie looked back, she was holding her hand out as if to draw them back. “This involves you.”
Jerry closed the door again. They waited as Quinn spoke quietly to whoever was on the other end of the call. Cookie couldn’t tell anything from just the one-sided conversation except that whatever it was, it was serious.
With a goodbye spoken in both English and Mohawk, Quinn hung up the phone and looked at both of them from across her desk. “I have news,” she said. “Amanda Tucker is awake. She’s asking for you.”
Hospital food had never appealed to Cookie. Not even before she owned her bakery. Sure, it looked delicious, but she could tell just from the aroma that the pasta sauce needed pepper and oregano. The dessert on Amanda’s tray was vanilla pudding from a cup, which was a shade of yellow that surely wasn’t found in nature.
It would have been hard for anyone to have an appetite with that looking at them. Then again, Amanda did have a lot on her mind. Perhaps too much to concentrate on her lunch tray.
“I’m so scared,” she said to Jerry. “Am I safe here? What’s going to stop the killer from finding me here?”
“I’ve got State Police officers guarding your room,” he told her. “You’re safer here than you would be anywhere else. They’ll keep watching you until you’re ready to leave.”
They were sitting in chairs to the side of Amanda’s bed. Wires snaked out from under her hospital gown and up to a monitoring machine that beeped with information on her pulse and her blood pressure and other things. She had an IV line from a medicine bag running into a vein in her arm. A thick cotton pad was held in place against her temple with white gauze wrapped around her head. Every fifteen minutes a nurse came in to take Amanda’s temperature and write down the information on the screen. A single vase of flowers sat on the windowsill to brighten the room.
The doctor was insistent that she needed to stay at least one more night for observation. Her swelling was down and the color had returned to her cheeks, so medically speaking she was doing much better.
Emotionally, she was a wreck.
“Why is this happening?” This time the question was directed to Cookie. “Why would anyone want to hurt my mother? Or me?”
“It’s the money,” Cookie told her. “Your mother’s money. I never realized your mother had saved so much over her lifetime.”
Amanda shrugged. “She was always good with money. Then she made a few decent business deals and that basically doubled and tripled her savings. She had a few things going with Benjamin Roth, I believe.”
Cookie couldn’t help but smile sourly at that. “Yes. I spoke with Benjamin. He said that he and your mother had some deal going that was going to make the town quite a bit of money.”
“Oh, yes,” Amanda said. “She told me a little about that. She was helping Roth finance an indoor swimming center. There was going to be a water slide and a kiddie pool and everything. People would pay a daily price to take their families there to swim. It was going to be friendly and clean and, you know, fun.”
Cookie could almost see it. “That would be a nice addition to the town, wouldn’t it? And certainly, it would bring in a steady revenue source for us, wouldn’t it? Your mother was a very smart woman.”
“Yes,” Amanda agreed, “she was. Everyone loved her. Why would anyone want to kill her, Cookie? Why?”
“Well, certainly not over that project.” Cookie had wondered what in the world Benjamin Roth could have going with Sheila. Now that she knew, she realized it didn’t play a part in this mystery at all. It all came back to the same thing.
“The money,” Jerry said again. “It all comes back to that money. But, like Cookie said, that was a part of your mother’s life that not everyone knew about. Can you tell us who did know about your mother’s fortune? You, obviously. And Benjamin Roth as well but I’m pretty sure we don’t need to accuse him of doing this.”
“This time,” Cookie mumbled. It seemed every time there was a mystery in Widow’s Rest, Benjamin Roth was circling somewhere near the center of it, and yet always managed to come out smelling like a rose. “So who else knew about that money, Amanda?”
“Um. Well, Grayson did, of course. I told him about it.”
“Your boyfriend.” Jerry nodded. “Right. He’s still under arrest at the police station. We know it wasn’t Grayson, but we can’t convince Rosen of it.”
“Are you sure?” Amanda asked. “You’re positive it wasn’t him?”
Cookie was surprised. “Well, certainly we’re sure. We thought for sure that you’d leap to his defense. You were dating him, after all.”
“I know, I know, but Grayson… he’s got debts. He’d taken to borrowing money from my mom. More and more of it. I kept telling him to stop but he wouldn’t. If Mom told him no this time, maybe he... maybe he… oh, I just can’t say it.”
“Don’t give it another thought,” Jerry advised her gently. “We know Grayson didn’t do this. Whatever else he may have been, he wasn’t a killer.”
That seemed to make Amanda feel better. She sighed heavily and lay back against the crisp white sheets and elevated back of her bed. “Then the only people I can think of who knew about her fortune for sure would be the people listed in her will.”
“Right,” Jerry said. “The will. We were hoping you had a copy of it? Your mother’s attorney has a copy but he’s claiming attorney privilege. We’d have to get a warrant to see his copy and there’s no guarantee a judge will grant us one. They might see that as a fishing expedition.”
Amanda closed her eyes, and a single tear dropped out of the corner. “I don’t understand all that legal talk but yes, I have a copy of Mom’s will. I was the executrix for her estate. It’s in my house, and I’ll tell you where to find it. Anything to help solve her murder. Anything at all.”
“Do you know what it says?” Jerry asked.
“Sort of. I’m in it, I know, but I really have no idea what the rest of it says. It wasn’t anything I ever wanted to think about, you know? My mother’s dying always seemed like something that wouldn’t happen for a long, long time. Now she’s dead and there’s so much that needs to be taken care of and I just don’t know what I’m going to do about it all.”
Cookie laid a comforting hand on her knee. “We’ll be there to help you through it, Amanda. We promise. You won’t have to go through this alone.”
“If my father was still alive…” Amanda started to say.
Then she stopped, her lips trembling, unable to say the rest of it, but Cookie understood. Sheila hadn’t been with a man for a while now. Am
anda had never married. There was no one left in their family. No one, except Amanda herself.
That also made her their only witness.
“Before you got hurt,” Cookie said softly, “you were going to tell us about a phone call that your mother got. Remember? The call with the man threatening your mother?”
Amanda nodded, turning her head into her pillow. “Yes, I remember. I was telling you that the man threatened her over money. Now here you are, telling me that her money was the reason she was killed. I should have pushed Mom to tell me about the man on the call. I should have paid more attention.”
“It’s not your fault,” Jerry assured her again. “You can help us now by telling us about the voice you heard. You said there was something about the voice. What about it?”
“It’s just that it sounded so familiar.”
Jerry caught Cookie’s glance with his own. “Amanda,” he said, “did it sound like someone you know? Maybe… Chief Rosen?”
“No, it wasn’t him.” Amanda pursed her lips. “I would have recognized it right away if it was. I mean, the guy on the phone was shouting and I would have known if it was… why? What does Rosen have to do with this?”
“Apparently,” Cookie said, “not a single thing.”
Jerry frowned, and in his eyes Cookie could see that he still wasn’t convinced. This was one more piece of evidence that pointed away from the chief, though. If he was involved, he had covered his tracks by having other people do everything for him.
How could they possibly prove that?
The doctor came in to see her shortly after and told Jerry and Cookie they would have to leave to let Amanda have her rest. They had the location of the will, and there was nothing else they could do here except wish Amanda well and promise to come and see her tomorrow.
The State Trooper guarding the hospital door nodded to them from his chair, folding his newspaper over to read the next page. He’d been reading that same paper when they got here. Cookie suspected the man had read every headline and every article about ten times already. These guys were dedicated to their work. She felt much better about Amanda’s chances here in Bridgefield than she would if Amanda was back in Widow’s Rest under the dubious care of Chief Ed Rosen.