The Bad Break

by Jill Orr

  I could totally see Brandon being rude to Butter. I’m sure he would have treated me the same way had I not been with Ridley. But being a bully didn’t give you a free pass on anything.

  “Are you going to look into it further? I mean, there were tobacco leaves at the scene and this guy had a clear problem with Arthur and he works with tobacco plants . . .”

  Carl held up a hand to stop me. “We are looking into it. Rest assured.” Evidently Carl hadn’t changed his mind about letting me help. “And I sent the note over to the lab in Richmond to see if they can get any prints off it. I’ll let you know what we hear.”

  He stood to walk me out, and his police scanner crackled to life. I heard him mutter under his breath, “Good Lord, what now?”

  “Sheriff, this is unit five and we are responding to a ten-one-hundred off Route K.”

  “What’s a ten-one-hundred?”

  “Dead body—shhh,” Carl whispered.

  The voice on the radio continued. “Officers were driving on Route K just past mile marker eight-nine when we were flagged down by two men in hunting gear. The men said they were out turkey hunting and found a deceased male lying in the field.”

  The scanner cut out and I sucked in a sharp breath. Carl put a hand out to tell me to calm down. A second later the scanner came back on. “We were able to confirm the presence of a body. We have a white male with what looks like a gunshot wound to the head.” Another cutout, more static. “We found a hunting license identifying the man as one Bennett Nichols of Tuttle Corner, Virginia.”

  CHAPTER 39

  We’ll have to run some tests to be sure, but looks like it was a hunting accident,” Tiffany Peters said to us as we walked up to the spot where Bennett Nichols’s lifeless body lay shrouded by tall grass. “My guess would be that his gun accidentally discharged, hitting him once in the neck, shot clean through his carotid.” She spoke with equal parts authority and glee, her tiny witch-hat earrings dangling as she talked.

  I stayed back a few paces, not wanting to get too close.

  “All right,” Carl said. “Call Dr. Mendez and get him out here.” Then he turned to his deputies and asked, “See any signs of foul play? Any other footprints, anything like that?”

  Deputy Wilmore spoke first. “Yeah, but they’re probably from the two guys that found him. They were friends of Jim Nichols, this is his land. They said Jim told them his son was going to be hunting from 5:30 till about 8 a.m. They didn’t come out here till after 1 p.m.”

  “Tiffany, how long would you guess the body’s been there?” Carl asked.

  “Hard to say without testing it, but I think it’s safe to say at least six hours, since rigor mortis has started.”

  “Okay,” Carl said, turning to Butter. “Did we check those guys’ guns to see if they’d been fired recently?”

  Butter nodded. “We’ll send ’em to the lab to be sure, but I don’t think so. Those guys are real shaken up over this. I don’t think they had anything to do with it.”

  “Has anyone talked to the family yet?”

  Both Butter and Wilmore shook their heads. I didn’t envy that job. I can’t imagine anything worse than having to tell a woman her husband just died, except maybe having to tell parents that their son did. I thought of Libby. How would she take the news? Her relationship with Bennett had been complex and toxic, but longstanding all the same.

  Carl rubbed the back of his neck as he looked over toward the body. “Chances are this was just an accident,” he said, “but I can’t close my eyes to the possibility that it was something more given his involvement with Arthur Davenport. We’ve now got two dead bodies and one attempted murder on our hands. And the common denominator seems to be Libby Nichols.”

  I had to agree with him. I’ll admit I had trouble thinking of Libby as a stone-cold killer, however years of abuse and stress can do terrible things to a person. I guess I could see her wanting to kill Bennett after everything he’d put her through. Less clear was what would have been her motivation to kill Arthur, or David, for that matter? My mind ticked through the possibilities, coming up blank each time.

  “Sheriff?” Deputy Wilmore called out. “Found something interesting over here.” He held up a small gold key with a rounded top. I recognized it right away as the key to a post office box.

  “Now why would a person have a PO box key while he was out hunting turkey?” Carl muttered.

  “Maybe he was planning to stop by the post office later—actually that doesn’t make a lot of sense, because this was an early morning hunt and would be over before the post office even opened,” I said. “Or maybe he didn’t want to leave that key lying around for some reason.”

  Carl picked up on my train of thought. “Ted, can you go down to the post office and find out what’s in that box. If Leon gives you any trouble, call Judge DeFreitas and ask her for a warrant.” Then he turned to me. “I need you to go back to the Times office and wait for me to call. I’m going to go see Libby”—I started to argue and he put up a hand to stop me. “You’ll get the story, don’t worry. But I’ve got to go tell a woman she’s lost her husband, and trust me when I tell you that is no place for the press.”

  CHAPTER 40

  I spent the next couple of hours walking around the newsroom trying to act busy. I fed Aunt Beast, bounced on Holman’s chair, looked over the obit draft, called a few sources to interview about the Roy G. Biv story—but I spent most of the time checking my phone. When Carl finally called and asked if I could come down to the station, I was out the door in three seconds flat.

  First, Carl told me that Dr. Mendez had called and said it would be a while till he could say for certain, but he believed Bennett’s injuries were consistent with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. This meant that in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, medically speaking, it appeared to be an accident. When I asked if there was any evidence to the contrary as of yet, Carl said, “Just wait. There’s more.”

  He told me about his difficult conversation with Libby Nichols, and that while she was stoic upon hearing the news that Bennett had died, during the course of the conversation she broke down several times. “She said she told Bennett he wasn’t strong enough to go hunting and he just blew her off. Told her it was his form of relaxation. That woman’s emotions were all over the place. If she was acting, someone ought to give her an Oscar.”

  When I asked whether Carl thought Libby could have been involved in Bennett’s death, he said, “Just wait. There’s more.”

  Deputy Wilmore was able to get access to Bennett’s post office box and inside found a picture of Libby and Arthur Davenport locked in a passionate embrace. The photo, which Carl showed me, looked like it’d been taken from a distance through a window. It had been printed out on computer paper and the resolution wasn’t great—but even still, the two were clearly visible. It had a date stamp on it: the day before Arthur was killed.

  When I asked if Carl thought this made it look like Bennett might have been the one who killed Arthur, I answered my own question before he had a chance: “Don’t tell me: just wait. There’s more.”

  Carl nodded. “The box also contained several empty sample bottles of Digoxicon, the drug that was used to poison Arthur and David Davenport. The way it looks right now is that Bennett found out that Libby and Arthur were still seeing each other, and he killed Arthur because of it. Libby confirmed Bennett was taking this for his heart condition and the pill bottles are being tested for prints.”

  “What about Bennett’s alibi?”

  “All we know for sure is that the time of death was 11:13 p.m. Dr. Mendez confirmed that the lethality of this drug really depends on the quantity used and how quickly it’s ingested. It’s possible that Arthur had been sipping on the poisoned whiskey for hours before he actually died. Libby said Bennett came home Monday evening about 7:30, and before that had been at his office alone—”

  I finished his thought: “—which means if Bennett was the killer, he could have given Ar
thur the poisoned whiskey earlier in the night and then come home to arrange for the world’s most perfect alibi: the sheriff himself.”

  “Exactly.” Carl clenched his jaw. I could see that he was discomfited by the idea that Bennett had played him for a fool.

  Another thought leapt to my mind. “That could also explain why Bennett stabbed Arthur after he was already dead.”

  “How so?”

  “Think about it from Bennett’s perspective: he gives Arthur the whiskey at some point, maybe he stops by his house on his way home from work, let’s say around 6:30. That would have been before Thad got there. Maybe he says it’s a thank-you for saving his life, or gives it to him as a peace offering or something . . .” I was making this up as I went along, my imagination dreaming up the scenario like it was a movie. “Bennett wanted Arthur dead, he told me as much when I interviewed him. Of course, he wouldn’t have wanted a violent confrontation because he wasn’t strong enough after the recent episode with his heart. So he crushes up his pills, gives the tainted bottle to Arthur, and then goes home to work on his alibi.

  “Bennett was smart enough to know that if you found Digoxigon in his bloodstream, you could easily find out he had a prescription for it, so in order to make it look like Arthur died from a knife wound rather than digitalis poisoning, he goes back into the house after Arthur is already dead and plunges a knife into his chest. He was betting on the fact that you’d probably just take the scene at face value and call it a stabbing death.”

  Carl dropped his head into his hands and I heard him mutter something under his breath.

  “What?” I asked.

  “We left the Nichols house just after midnight. And it never occurred to me to check Bennett’s alibi for the rest of the evening. Dammit.” He smacked his hand on his desk. “If what you’re saying is true, I bungled this entire investigation.”

  I felt for Carl in that moment. No one could relate more to that feeling than me—after all, hadn’t I just made an equally stupid rookie mistake at my job?

  “It’s just a theory,” I said to try to make him feel better. “And honestly, it doesn’t explain why he’d poison David.”

  “Yeah, still no leads on that,” he said, drumming his fingers on his desk, now noticeably more agitated. “But his threatening you fits.”

  I nodded. “If Bennett left his house before dawn to go hunting it’s possible he came by my house on his way to his parents’ land.”

  I didn’t know for sure that I was right, but just the thought chilled me to my core. Any other day, I would have been at home. Had Thad not called me to come to the hospital, Bennett would have broken into my house and found me there very much asleep. What would he have done? Would he have stopped at a warning, or would I have become his next victim?

  “Okay. This is good guesswork, but we’ll need confirmation before we can make any kind of official determination. Let me put Wilmore and Butter on some of this and talk to Lindsey Davis. Until then, let’s keep the details of the PO box out of the paper.”

  I agreed and stood up to leave. “Let me know what you find out.”

  “Thanks for your help, Riley,” Carl said as he walked me out. “It looks like we may have finally found our killer.”

  CHAPTER 41

  As soon as I got back to the office, I decided to come clean to Kay and let her know exactly what I’d been up to over the past few days. She listened without comment as I detailed all the ways that I’d ignored her directive to stay off the story. I held nothing back, starting from my meeting Carl at the hospital, my visits to the Nicholses and Brandon Laytner, and even the threatening note.

  Her eyes narrowed and widened at a few points in my story, but she said nothing until I caught up to the present moment. I thought there was a good chance she was going to fire me when I finished talking, so I decided to make my last comment count. “But now that it seems to be over, I think you should let me write up the story.”

  Kay crossed her arms in front of her and lifted an eyebrow at me. “You want to be rewarded by getting the byline after you directly disobeyed me and went behind my back to do your own reporting?”

  “Yes.”

  Kay gave me an eagle-eyed stare that I returned without flinching. After a few long seconds, the corner of her lip tugged upward. “Holman would be so proud of you right now.”

  It ended up being a long night at the Times, and by the time I had gotten all the stories written it was past 11 p.m. Kay decided the attack on Rosalee’s would go on page one and the update on the Davenport murder would be on page two. I was getting my first front-page byline, and although I was physically exhausted, I was fizzing with adrenaline.

  While I was waiting for Kay to tell me I could go home, I called my parents, who would be back in town just in time for Sunday’s paper. My mother said she’d never been so excited to read a newspaper in her life, and my dad, predictably, cried. Mom asked how Jay was and I told her he was fine, which was sort of true because I had no reason to believe he wasn’t. There’d be time to tell them what happened once they got home; no need to worry them while they were away.

  I texted Ryan and asked if he could keep Coltrane until I got home, and he said he would. So once I got the word from Kay that I could leave, I told him that I’d be home in ten minutes. As I walked toward the newsroom door, I saw Gerlach Spencer sitting at his desk. I didn’t know why he was still at the office; as far as I could tell, he was just sitting there playing Candy Crush on his phone.

  “Hey Spencer,” I said. “No hard feelings about the Davenport story, right?”

  “Wrong.” He shot me a death stare. “You poached that right out from under me.”

  “Aw, c’mon,” I said. “Your loss was my gain, amiright?” I put my hand up to give him a high-five—and I swear for the briefest of moments he considered doing it out of some sort of Pavlovian response. Ultimately he left me hanging, which was what I hoped he’d do because it gave me the perfect opening to say, “Geez, someone needs to relax!”

  CHAPTER 42

  I walked out of the office and noticed the temperature had fallen quite sharply since the last time I’d been outside. I was glad I’d taken my car to work that morning because after the day I’d had, a two-minute drive sounded better than a ten-minute walk. Thad’s phone call about Tabitha seemed like it happened a lifetime ago, but it had only been just under twenty-four hours. I did a quick mental calculation and realized I’d been up for almost twenty-two hours. I could feel the stress of the day catching up with me in the form of a stiff neck and the beginnings of a headache. I couldn’t remember a time when I’d been more excited to get home and climb into bed.

  Until I got there.

  Parked in my driveway was Ryan’s massive truck and Jay’s sporty BMW convertible. As I turned the corner and saw them both there waiting for me, I considered driving right on by. If it hadn’t been for Coltrane I probably would have.

  I parked on the street and got out of my car. “Hey guys.”

  Both were standing outside of their respective vehicles, leaning against them, Jay with his hands in his pockets and Ryan with his arms crossed in front of his chest. It was like they’d both taken a class on How to Stand Like a Dude. Coltrane, sweet boy that he was, didn’t try to play it cool. He bounded over to me with unabashed excitement and gave me a proper hello.

  “Thanks for taking him today,” I said to Ryan.

  “Happy to,” Ryan said. “I love this guy.”

  “Riley, can we talk?” Jay cut in, impatient for my attention.

  My hand automatically went to my forehead as the pounding began to strengthen behind my eyeballs. “Listen, it’s late and I’ve had a hell of a day . . .”

  “It won’t take long, I promise.”

  I sighed and looked down the street.

  Ryan immediately picked up on the tension. “If she says she’s tired, then maybe you ought to lay off?”

  Jay stiffened. He didn’t seem to appreciate being told what to do b
y my ex-boyfriend. Ironically, that title now applied to him as well.

  “Ryan, it’s okay.”

  “Yeah, Ryan, we don’t need your input here,” Jay said with more vitriol than I’d ever heard him use before.

  “Hey,” I spun around and pointed at Jay. “You don’t get to talk to him like that—”

  “Yeah, you—”

  “Shush.” I swiveled my finger toward Ryan. “You’re just here to drop off Coltrane, thankyouverymuch.” And then I felt bad about being snippy so I added, “I really do appreciate the help.”

  “Fine,” he huffed. “But I hope you’d tell me if you needed something . . .”

  “Goodnight, Ryan.”

  Ryan gave Coltrane one last pat on the head and got into his massive truck. As the engine roared to life, Jay and I stood framed in its headlights.

  “Five minutes? Please?”

  The last thing in the world I wanted to do at that moment was to have a difficult conversation, but I could see he wasn’t going to leave me alone until he “unburdened himself.” I nodded my weary consent and unlocked the door and the three of us went inside.

  “How are you after what happened this morning?” Jay sat on the couch and I purposely sat across the room in the armchair. Of course, Coltrane sat at his feet. I needed to have a talk with that dog about where exactly he thought his bread was buttered—and by whom.

  “It has been a long day,” I said, which didn’t really answer the question. The truth was I didn’t know how I was feeling. I had been so busy all day that the last thing I had time for was to reflect on my feelings. Besides, my feelings were no longer Jay’s concern.

  He took a deep breath and exhaled audibly, like he was in yoga class. That made me nervous. What was he about to say that he needed yoga breathing for?