by Jessica Beck
“So far, so good, and I owe a great deal of it to you.”
“Don’t give me too much credit,” I said. “You’re the one doing the work.”
“It’s not work if you love doing it,” he replied with a grin. “I won’t forget that you’re the one who got her to agree to give me another chance.”
“I’m glad you’re making the most of it.”
I headed back to the shop and finished cleaning up, something that was much easier now that I was sold out of donuts. I was just filling out my deposit slip, as meager as it was, when Grace tapped on the front door.
It looked as though she was ready to start investigating again with me, but I wasn’t sure how happy she’d be about it when she read the last few names that were left on our list. The only legitimate suspects we still had besides the man now in jail were two good friends of ours. I’d discounted Ellen, feeling as though she wouldn’t kill her last surviving brother under any circumstances. It had been crazy to include her name in the first place, almost as insane as it was to add Polly and George. A part of me wanted to just let everything go and trust Chief Martin when he said that he’d solved the case, since my true list of viable suspects was probably worthless. After all, he got paid to find the bad guys, while Grace and I were amateurs at it, no matter what our success rate had been in the past. Even Jake had open cases on his desk, crimes that he’d been unable to solve over the years for one reason or another. How arrogant was it of Grace and me to believe that we had to be the ones who caught up with every culprit? If I knew what was good for me, I’d let this go and move on with my life.
If only I could find a way to shut up that nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that the killer was still somewhere out there.
Chapter 19
After I brought Grace up to date on what Chief Martin had told me, she looked as deflated as I’d felt hearing that nearly all of our suspects had alibis for the murder.
“Where does that leave us?” she asked.
“In reality, the only ones left who need alibies are Polly and George.”
“Why didn’t Chief Martin ask them for theirs?” Grace asked.
“George is his boss. Unless he has a better reason to suspect him that he does right now, it’s a delicate issue to dance around.”
“Well, he’s our friend. How much more delicate is that? You realize that he’s not going to like the questions that we have to ask him, don’t you?”
“I’m beginning to wonder if we should just do what everybody keeps telling us and drop this entirely. Chief Martin is so sure that he’s got the right man for it. What if we alienate George and Polly for nothing? I couldn’t stand to hurt those friendships, could you?”
“No, they both mean a lot to me as well. Is there any way to ask George for an alibi without arousing his suspicions?”
I thought about it, and then I shook my head. “The man has better instincts than most cops still working the job. He’ll know what we’re doing before we even get the chance to open our mouths. I can’t see any way possible that subterfuge could work, and in many ways, Polly is just as sharp as he is. I keep thinking that this crime is too ordinary for either one of them to have committed it. Does that make any sense at all?”
“It might, if we thought that it had been premeditated, but from what Chief Martin told us, it looked like a simple assault gone bad. With George’s temper, I’m afraid that it fits the pattern all too well. I don’t guess we have any real choice, do we?”
“We might as well go ahead and get it over with,” I said as I shook the keys to my Jeep.
“You’re right. Well, it was nice knowing you,” Grace said.
“I second that, but maybe we’ll figure out a way to survive this before we get over there.”
Grace pointed to the building where George’s office was located. “I don’t see how. Should we drive around some first before we tackle them?”
“Are you suggesting that we stall?” I asked her.
“Absolutely one hundred percent,” she replied.
I thought about it, and I realized that most likely, delaying the inevitable would do us no good at all. Then again, it did postpone our pain, and at the moment, I was all for anything that could do that. “Why don’t we drive over to Union Square? Maybe there’s something there that we missed?”
“It’s worth a shot,” Grace said. “And if nothing else, it buys us at least an hour before we have to go talk to George.”
I knew it was foolish to delay the conversation that we needed to have, but I didn’t care. The air conditioner in my Jeep wasn’t much, though. “Maybe we should take your company car instead,” I suggested.
“Why? Do you feel like riding around in style for a change of pace?”
“Actually, it’s your air conditioning that I covet. My Jeep’s great for most kinds of weather, but it’s not exactly suited for this heat we’re having.”
“That makes sense to me,” Grace said. “I’d be happy to drive.”
As we headed out of town, I asked my best friend, “Are we wrong in pursuing this? Could Larry Landers really have killed Morgan Briar?”
“I guess that it’s possible, but if he did, why would he wait to do it in April Springs?” Grace asked.
“It could be that he wanted to divert suspicion onto our town instead of his,” I said. “If Morgan were killed in Union Square, we might have a totally different list of suspects.”
“That’s true,” Grace said.
She added something else, but it was lost on me. I’d never considered the possibility before, but it kept echoing over and over in my mind. How would we have handled things differently if Morgan had been murdered in Union Square? The first thing we would have done would be to look at the suspects there a little harder. But planning it that way would take a pretty cunning mind, and none of his victims that we knew of could ever be accused of being master criminals. Which one might know enough about how the police investigate a crime to intentionally try to lead everyone digging into the murder astray?
And when I looked at it that way, only one name came to mind.
The only problem was that neither Grace nor I had a shred of evidence that might prove that I might be right.
At least not yet.
“I think I know who did it,” I said so softly that Grace nearly missed it.
“Come again?” she asked.
“I believe that Ellen Briar killed her brother.”
“I know you’re not talking about Blake. We’ve already heard that confession. Why should she kill Morgan?”
“Her reputation as a police officer means everything to her,” I said. “She told us herself that she was trying to make detective and get back on the street. How was her boss going to take it when he found out that she had a blackmailer living under the same roof as she was?”
“She already told him, though, remember?” Grace reminded me.
“No, she told us that she confessed everything to him, but how do we know that she really did it? We just can’t ask her boss straight out.”
“Maybe we can’t, but someone else could.”
Grace shook her head as she asked, “You’re not seriously going to ask Chief Martin to check for you, are you?”
“I don’t have much choice,” I said as I reached for my phone. “Jake’s out of touch, and there’s no one else that I can turn to.”
“Good luck with that,” Grace said as I dialed the chief’s number. “Hang on a second. Before you call Chief Martin, answer me this. Why would Ellen ever let us search Morgan’s room if she were the one who killed him? We found the key there, but the locker at the bus station was already empty, remember?”
“What if she cleaned it out, and then she invited us over to find the key ourselves so that we’d drop our investigation?” I asked.
“I can see that. Go on, make your telephone call.”
It wasn’t something I particularly wanted to do, but if I could prove that Ellen had lied to us, it m
ight just be a crack that we could use to break the case wide open.
“No.”
“You won’t even try?” I asked the chief after he flatly refused my request.
“That is correct. You’ve lost your mind even asking me to do this, Suzanne. I’m going to do you a favor and forget that we ever had this conversation.”
“But what if she’s the one who killed her brother?” I asked.
“Go home, Suzanne.”
I was about to reply when I realized that he’d already hung up on me.
“No luck, huh?” Grace asked as I put my phone back in my pocket.
“No, but I’m not willing to give up that easily. There’s got to be something else that we can do.” After a moment, I added, “I’ve got it. We’ll just have to break into Ellen’s place and see if we can find anything that points to her as the killer.”
Grace looked over at me as though I’d just lost my mind. “Suzanne, even if I accept your premise, which I don’t, at least not one hundred percent, do you realize what you’re planning to do is insane? What if we get caught? That’s going to be a jam that nobody’s going to be able to get us out of, not even Jake. He already told you that himself, remember? When you suggested we break into Ellen Briar’s place before, I never really took you seriously, but this time, it’s exactly what you want us to do, isn’t it?”
“Is it really breaking and entering if we steal her keys at the police station?”
“Yes!” she said loudly.
“Does that mean that you don’t want to do it with me?”
Grace seemed to think about that, and then she shrugged. “No, I’ll go along with you. After all, you’re going to need a friendly face in prison when we both get put away. I just hope they keep us together.”
“It won’t hurt to ask,” I said as I headed over to the police station.
It was time for a desperate act that might just catch a killer.
“What are you two doing here?” Ellen was surprised to see us; that much was clear.
“We need to talk to you outside,” I said, nearly out of breath. “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.” Grace and I had jogged in place outside for a few minutes before we went in. We had a plan, and it depended on Ellen buying our setup if we were going to have any chance of getting her keys without her knowing it.
“I’m on the desk,” she said. “What is it?”
“We found a guy who saw Morgan just before he was murdered. He thinks that he might be able to identify the killer.”
A flicker of alarm crossed her face, and she barked out to Denise, the young woman who’d been vying to replace her, “Take the front.”
Ellen headed for the front door, and it was time to put our plan into action. I stumbled against her as she went through the threshold, knocking her into Grace. As we untangled ourselves, I took the keys I’d slipped off her belt and put them in my pocket.
It had worked.
Or had it?
“Hang on. Something’s wrong,” Ellen said.
Had we been caught in the act? “What is it?” I asked as I put a hand back on the keys. I’d be ready to drop them at a moment’s notice and claim they’d come off her belt in the collision.
She looked outside instead, though. “Where’s your witness?”
“He must have run off,” I said.
“Well, find him,” she barked out.
After we conducted a ten-minute search for someone who was a figment of my imagination, I said, “It’s no good. He’s gone.”
“Did you at least get his name?” Ellen asked with irritation.
“Of course we did. It was Jack Smith.”
“Jack, as in John? Seriously? What did the guy look like?”
“He was kind of average,” Grace said. “We can find him again. I’m sure of it.”
“When you do,” she said, “call me. Don’t tell anyone else. I want to handle this myself. I deserve to be the one who tracks down my brother’s killer.”
“We promise,” I said as we walked back to the station, praying that she didn’t realize that her keys were gone.
After we split up, Grace looked at me anxiously. “Did you get them?”
“It worked perfectly. Let’s go have another look around that house.”
“You’re some kind of criminal genius,” she said with a grin. “Maybe you’re working for the wrong team.”
“I’m happy being one of the good guys,” I said as we headed for her car. “I don’t know how much time we’ve got, though, so we’d better hurry.”
I fumbled the keys a little at the door as Grace stood impatiently behind me. “Do you want me to try it?”
“I’ve got it!” I snapped, and then the right key slid into place.
“Sorry,” Grace said as she looked around behind us. “I guess I’m just a little paranoid.”
“I should be the one apologizing. I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” I said as the door opened.
“Where do we look first?”
“If there’s anything here to find, it’s got to be in that file cabinet,” I said as I hurried to the cabinet. I found the right key immediately, and as Grace and I searched the files, I was almost relieved when I found the police report she had filed about Polly. If it had ever been stolen, it was back in its proper place now.
That’s when I realized that my hunch had been on the money. Ellen had found at least some of the files herself, and instead of turning them in to the police chief, she’d slipped them back into her files. That made her look guilty, or at the very least, culpable in some way.
None of the files for our other suspects were there, though.
“I’m not sure what to do now,” I said as I closed the last drawer. “Should we search the place again?”
“Suzanne, we found one file,” Grace said. “That’s got to be enough proof that she’s involved in her brother’s murder.”
“It won’t work,” I said. “She could have made a duplicate file. Or at the very least, she could lie about it and say that she did. If it’s her word against ours, who is anyone going to believe? We’ve got to find something else.”
“There’s no time,” Grace said as she touched my arm. “Ellen could realize that her keys are gone at any second. If she catches us here, we’re dead, and I mean that literally. We need to come up with another plan later, but right now, we need to go.”
I knew that she was right, but I didn’t have to like it.
“Come on,” Grace said as she pulled me out the door. I quickly locked it behind us, and then I asked her, “How are we going to get Ellen’s keys back to her without her realizing that we stole them in the first place?”
“We’ll just drop them on the sidewalk in front of the police station,” I said. “Somebody will surely turn them in.”
“That sounds good,” Grace said. “Let’s get out of here.”
I started to follow her as I walked past the doghouse, touching the roof again lightly as I went past it.
And then I stopped dead in my tracks.
Grace looked back at me, clearly puzzled by my hesitation. “We have to go, Suzanne.”
“Not just yet,” I said. “Do you remember that I told you that Ellen said she was allergic to just about everything?”
“Sure, I remember.”
“Well, one of the things that she mentioned was that she was allergic to dogs. The question is, why does she have a doghouse on her property, and even more, why is it freshly painted?”
“I don’t know,” Grace said as some of her frustration came out. “Maybe there never was a dog, and she’s just using it as a yard decoration.”
“Or maybe it’s something more. Morgan could have done this himself.”
“Fine, Morgan did it. Does it really matter?”
“It might,” I said as I got down on my hands and knees and started to poke my head inside.
“Are you serious?”
“It’ll just take a second.” I couldn’t see anything
on the ground, but then I looked up. There was new wood there, something built like a shelf. Could it be important?
As I was reaching for it, Grace asked me, “Suzanne, why does this matter?”
“Because I just found this,” I said as I pulled out a thickly wrapped envelope. “He must have put the shelf in when he was painting the doghouse. I’m willing to bet that Ellen told him to tear it down, and he knew that if he did that, he’d lose his perfect hiding place. So he bought himself some time by sprucing it up.”
“Are you saying that these files were never in the locker to begin with? Why did he have the key, then?”
“Maybe he kept moving things around so he wouldn’t get caught,” I said. “We can’t exactly ask him now, can we?”
As I tore away the protective wrapping, I could see all four sets of files inside. A quick glance showed us that they belonged to Heather, Rose, Martha, and a name I didn’t recognize. Perhaps she’d been the one who’d paid Morgan off. If I were still investigating Morgan’s murder, she’d be at the top of my list, but I still believed that Ellen was guilty.
And when I heard that voice behind us, I knew that I’d been right, no matter how little satisfaction it would give me if Grace and I ended up dead.
After grabbing the files from me and quickly glancing at them, Ellen said, “I kept wondering why he cared so much about that stupid doghouse. I should have found these myself. I told him to tear that thing down, and that idiot brother of mine fixed it up instead.”
“You found a few other files yourself, though, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Three were in the bus station locker,” Ellen admitted as she pointed her gun at us. “I never dreamed that he’d split them up.”
“When did you discover what he was doing?” I asked her, trying to buy Grace and me as much time as I could.
“There’s no time to talk about that now,” Ellen said as she looked around her neighborhood. “Get in the house.”
“I’m willing to bet my life that you won’t take a chance shooting us outside,” I said as I pulled Grace toward her car.