“You mean, if I need an excuse? Hard to sabotage plumbing from a distance, but I bet I could jigger with the wiring connections and hope they call me to find out what the problem is. I’d rather not go with the rats.”
“Okay,” Art began. “Say you make the lights go on and off or whatever, and you get inside the house. What would you be looking for?”
“Uh . . . I don’t know? Jenn’s notes? A small recorder that she hid somewhere?”
“That we aren’t even sure exists,” Art pointed out. “Next idea?”
“Bloodstains? Or bloody clothing? A recently fired weapon?”
“Seems unlikely anyone would shoot her with a rifle inside the house, and that’s what the evidence shows. More likely somebody would have arranged to meet her where they couldn’t be seen, like your woods, Meg, or even farther away. Anyway, physical evidence would be easy to get rid of—just burn the clothes. Assuming her killer got blood on himself trying to move her. As for whatever information she collected, he could pitch the recorder into the swamp—no one will ever find it. Next?”
“The murder weapon?” Seth suggested. “Wouldn’t take much to hide it. But they don’t know the house well, or all the hidey-holes. I can’t guess whether they thought anyone would ever search for anything there. That electrical excuse would come in handy for searching, because you’ve got to get behind walls and under floorboards to follow the wiring.”
“Maybe. The murder weapon wouldn’t belong to your family, right, Seth?”
“Nope. Dad was a plumber and he had no interest in hunting. Neither did Mom.”
“You and your brother never found an old rifle up in the attic and took it out to take potshots at trees?”
“No. There was an old shotgun, in the attic, I think, but we were too scared to try it, if it even worked. But maybe one of the guys brought his own rifle and stashed it somewhere.”
“And likely got rid of it as soon as Jenn was found dead.” Art stood up and stretched, then paced around the kitchen. “Guys, I hate to rain on your parade, but I don’t see anything I can do. Under normal circumstances—whatever those are these days—I could probably search the house, make up some story about you seeing figures skulking around after dark, and I’d have your permission, Seth, of course. But with the eyes of the drug unit watching everything we do, that’s not going to work, and we’ll have made some enemies if we tried.”
“So you’re giving up, Art?” Meg demanded.
“What else can I do? We have a dead woman, shot with a twenty-two rifle and dumped in your woods. We have a sketchy guy who seems to be pretending to be someone he isn’t, who claimed he was looking for her. We have three guys living in the house up the hill who may be drug dealers, or scouts for some bigger drug group, or they may be your typical messy, lazy twenty-somethings just hanging out. There may be more street traffic up there than before, but it could be that the guys just like to party. And on top of all that, I have no jurisdiction here, and Marcus got told to back off. Whatever information exists has to be in the hands of the drug unit, and they aren’t sharing. Have I missed anything?”
Larry spoke up suddenly, almost reluctantly. “I haven’t told you everything. Jenn did give me something to keep for her. She said she didn’t want to leave it at the house, and would I take it and hide it somewhere. And not ask any questions. So I did. Hide it, I mean.”
“Why the bloody hell didn’t you come forward with this sooner?” Art all but yelled.
“Because I didn’t know who to trust. Because I wasn’t sure how she died or who killed her. Because I was afraid you cops would think I had something to do with it. You want more reasons?”
Art took a deep breath. “Sorry. No, I get it. So is it still safe?” When Larry nodded, Art asked, “Will you let me see it? If it’s something personal, whatever’s on it doesn’t have to leave this room.”
Larry glanced at Meg, who gave him a small nod. “Yeah, sure. It’s in a container that I put next to the foundation of the house Seth and I are working on—I didn’t think anybody would go poking around there. Don’t worry, it’s sealed up tight. I never expected that it would stay there long.”
“Then let’s go collect it and see what Jenn left for us.”
Chapter 24
Hearing Larry’s announcement, Meg was torn between frustration and elation. How could he have not known it could be important? Jenn certainly had thought so. But the flip side was, Larry had little reason to trust anyone in his life. He’d made a promise to Jenn and he’d kept it, so clearly it was important to him, and he’d kept the information safe. She was touched that she—they—had won Larry’s trust, but she was also itching to find out what Jenn had left behind.
“When did she give you this?” Meg asked.
“Not long before she . . . died. She didn’t make a big deal about it, just said, ‘Put this somewhere safe, will you?’ So I did. But if I think about it now, maybe she was worried about something.”
Or someone? Meg asked herself.
“And you didn’t ask what it was or why it had to be hidden?” Art asked.
“No. It wasn’t any of my business. But I don’t think she trusted the guys at the house.”
“Art, maybe she’d seen Justin prowling around town,” Meg said, “and that made her nervous. Maybe she didn’t trust him either. And she didn’t have a computer with her, so she couldn’t exactly email whatever she’d collected. I’ve never checked—are there computers for public use at the library?”
“Sure,” Art told her, “but somebody might have thought it was out of character for her to be on the computer there. She was trying to be careful, and obviously she had a good reason to be, given what happened.”
“Maybe we should find out what it is?” Seth suggested. “If she didn’t have a computer, it must be a voice recording. Or handwritten notes, or some combination of those.”
“Guys, why don’t we just go get it and find out what she gave Larry?” Art said, his voice impatient.
“What, you don’t want to call the state narcotics people and wait for them to carry it off to their secret cavern and decipher it?” Seth shot back in much the same tone.
“Seth, let’s just get this done.” Now Art sounded testy. “Can you show us where you put it, Larry?”
“Yeah, sure. We’d just finished repointing the old foundation, but we hadn’t started on the framing. So I kind of hid it next to one of the old piers from the chicken house—I figured I could go back and get it if Jenn needed it. Don’t worry, I sealed it up real well, but I didn’t look at any of it. She asked me not to.”
“Let’s go, then,” Art said briskly.
They all grabbed coats and trooped out the back door, crossing the yard to the growing small structure at the rear of the property. “You guys have gotten a lot done since the last time I saw it,” Art commented.
“It’s small, and the work goes fast. Want one?” Seth told him.
“I’d like a little more room. But it might make a good man-cave, as long as you heat it.”
“Of course we’re heating it. All the comforts of home, just smaller.”
When they reached the building, Larry went around to the side and started scrabbling at the base of the foundation, where it met the dirt. Then Meg looked up to see Justin approaching. “Oh, sh . . . oot. Art, we’ve got company. Wonder what story he’ll give us this time?” Out of the corner of her eye Meg saw Larry slip something into an inside pocket of his jacket and zip the pocket shut.
When Justin was close enough to make himself heard he called out, “Hey, I’m glad I found all of you together. I need to talk with you.”
“Find your girlfriend?” Art asked neutrally.
“Well, that’s one thing I want to talk about. Can we go inside? I’m freezing.”
“Follow me,” Seth told him, and led the way. Art and Meg fell back, trailed by Larry. “How do we play this, Art?” Meg asked in a low voice.
“Pretend we don’t know anything. Let
him talk. Then we’ll see. Would he recognize you, Larry?”
“Maybe, but I doubt it. I mostly stayed out of everybody’s way.”
And if Justin was busy playing drug dealer or buyer or whatever, he would have dismissed Larry as unimportant and concentrated on the other guys, Meg thought.
They all crowded into the kitchen and shuffled awkwardly. “There’s more room in the dining room, if you all want to sit down. Anyone want coffee?”
“Please,” Justin said, still rubbing his hands together to warm them.
Meg set about once again making coffee, while the men milled around the dining room table trying to establish some sort of social hierarchy. Seth was the master of the house—give him points for that. Art was an official representing the law, but he didn’t want to push that role until he saw what Justin might have to say, so he was probably going to play the bumbling country cop to start. Larry was kind of the invisible man, who kept his head down and his mouth shut. Justin was the guest of honor, who had requested this gathering and who presumably had something he wanted to say. And she was the Eternal Coffee Maker. At least nobody had asked her to be a good girl and take notes—yet.
She put together a tray with the coffeepot, cups, spoons, sugar and cream. She debated briefly about adding a plate of cookies, but this didn’t seem like a cookies occasion, not if it resulted in identifying Jenn’s murderer. She carried the tray in and set it in the middle of the table, then took a chair next to Seth. He took the lead. “What was it you wanted to talk about, Justin?”
“I’ve been an idiot, I’ll admit that up front,” Justin began. “I’ve made a fool of myself, and pretended I could fool other people, and I may have contributed to getting Jenn killed.”
“Let’s start at the beginning, Justin,” Meg said. “We all know that Jenn was a journalist working for the Boston Globe—she told the state police that when she first arrived. She said that she was doing research for a big article about the growth of the drug trade in this area, which seems to have become a hot new market over the past couple of years. She chose to go undercover and wormed her way into the house up the hill there, and used Larry here as her cover story. The house belongs to Seth, my husband, and Larry works for me in my orchard. We believe she thought that one or more of the other guys sharing the house were involved with selling drugs and she wanted to see how it worked from the inside. Are we right in guessing that she didn’t share her plans with anyone at the newspaper, including you? She might have told her boss, we thought, but it wouldn’t have been common knowledge there. How’m I doing?”
“Better than I did, at the beginning,” Justin admitted. “Look, I really admired Jenn. She was smart, and really good at the job. I wanted to be like her in a couple of years. But she was pretty much a lone operator and she didn’t need a sidekick to slow her down. I picked up a few bits and pieces of information in the newsroom, enough to get a hint about what she was doing, and one day I simply followed here out here. That part wasn’t hard. She didn’t see me, or at least not at first. I hung around for a few days, trying to stay out of sight. I didn’t know enough then to stick my nose in, so I just watched, and paid attention to who was doing what. And then she was dead.”
Art finally spoke. “Did you have anything to do with her death? Did you see anything, overhear a comment that maybe she was getting too close and couldn’t be trusted?”
Justin shook his head vehemently. “Nothing like that—mostly I wasn’t close enough to see or hear anything. I didn’t want to mess up her game plan. And I didn’t know what was going on inside the house, just that a lot of people were dropping by and leaving quickly.”
“Do you know this area?” Art asked.
Justin shook his head “Not really. I didn’t grow up around here. I’m really more of a city boy, although I went to some good schools. So I’d never seen this part of the state until Jenn came out here.”
“So just to be clear,” Art went on, “you did not see anyone threaten or harm Jenn, or drag her out into the woods and kill her?”
“Of course not!” Justin protested. “I would have told someone! You, or that homicide officer in Northampton. Somebody!”
“All right. So Seth found her body in the woods, or rather, his dog Max did.” At the sound of his name Max raised his head briefly, then went back to sleep in his warm corner of the floor. “And Seth called me, and I called the state police, who handle homicides around here.”
“But why did the news say the body of an unidentified woman was found?” Justin asked. “And never reported who she was? Somebody must have known,” Justin said.
Art studied Justin. “The guys in Northampton knew. I talked to the homicide detective there, and it turned out that the narcotics unit told him to keep his mouth shut because they were closing in on busting a nest of drug dealers and they didn’t want to spook them. They wanted to make a big splash and get all the glory—and, to be fair, probably to send a message to any other dealers who were thinking of moving in around here. Let us say that Homicide Detective Marcus was not happy about that, but he went along with the program because he had to—orders from the top. But I believe he was unaware of where Jenn had been since she arrived, and who she was associating with.”
“And then I showed up and almost made a mess of the whole thing,” Justin said glumly. “I talked to him—that was all right, wasn’t it? And he told me he didn’t know anything about my nonexistent missing girlfriend.”
“Sure. None of us knew much at that point, and you were looking for your so-called girlfriend because you were worried about her. All perfectly reasonable. Maybe even logical, given that this is a small town and everybody seems to know everybody else. But nobody knew anything about the woman you described, and we weren’t supposed to call attention to the body that was found, although I’m going to guess that a few people around here might have put two and two together, but they didn’t tell me about their suspicions. And your story really was kind of weak.”
“Huh,” Justin said, as if surprised by Art’s comment. “But you bought into it anyway?”
“I didn’t exactly doubt it, at the time,” Art told him.
Justin turned to Meg. “And then I came and tried out the same story on you, Meg.”
“Yes, but I knew it wasn’t true. Art and I are friends, and since Jenn was found on my land, he shared some of the details with me. He knew I wouldn’t spread it around.”
“But you knew enough to know I was a phony.”
“Yes. Tell me this, Justin: What were you looking for? What did you plan to do?”
“I guess I figured that if the dead woman was in fact Jenn, then maybe I could pick up where she had left off. I mean, if somebody killed her, she must have found something, and I thought maybe I could figure it out.”
“So you never bought into the hunting accident story?” Art asked. When Justin shook his head, Art went on, “Do you know anything about weapons? Hunting?”
“Hell, no! I grew up in Connecticut. I’ve never fired a gun in my life. Of course, if I wanted to avoid suspicion, I’d say that anyway, wouldn’t I?”
Art didn’t respond to that comment. “And you don’t know anything about state regulations regarding hunting in Massachusetts?”
“No, I do not.”
Art turned to Meg. “What do you think?”
Meg looked levelly at Justin. “Based on what we knew—and saw—we were guessing that whoever shot Jenn knew something about weapons but didn’t know much about the legal details of hunting around here. It could have been written off as a hunting accident, if there hadn’t been so many odd things attached already. But that was the story that got fed to the public. There are probably some people who are still hoping the shooter will turn himself in. Although fatal hunting accidents, I’m told, are pretty rare in this state and in most other places. Whoever shot Jenn didn’t think it through, and he made mistakes.”
“But who killed her?” Justin demanded.
“We st
ill don’t know,” Art said. “We do know she wasn’t shot where she was found, but we don’t know how far she was carried before she was dumped. We aren’t sure why she was dumped on Meg’s property, since Meg had nothing to do with any of this. Or maybe that was why—Meg isn’t a hunter, she didn’t know the woman, and she had no reason to kill her.”
Justin leaned forward on his elbows. “But under the circumstances, the obvious candidates are those guys up the hill. The fact that Jenn planted herself there suggests that she suspected they were dealers and wanted evidence to confirm it. And some colorful details to enhance her story—you know, the human interest angle.”
It made Meg sad that Justin seemed to care more about the story than about a woman he had known and worked with. “Justin, how old are you?” she asked suddenly.
“Twenty-five. I’ve been with the paper since college.”
“And how much do you know about drugs?”
Justin looked wary, his eyes shifting between Art and the others at the table. Finally he sighed. “Not a heck of a lot. I mean, I know the names and the facts, but I’ve never, uh, experimented. Maybe a little weed in college. But not the hard stuff—the big-money stuff.”
“Why on earth did you think you were the right person to write this story?” Seth demanded. “You were stumbling around blind.”
Justin straightened his back and looked squarely at Seth. “You’re right. I was hungry for a big story to jump-start my career at the paper, and I knew Jenn was on to something. She was a smart woman and a good writer, and I truly admired her. If by bumbling around in Granford I set off something that led to her death, I am truly sorry. Chief, do the state drug guys have a case yet? Why haven’t they moved on the dealers yet? And the murder?”
“I wish I could tell you, Justin. Maybe they’re still waiting for all the details, or to catch someone important in the act. Maybe they know who’s involved but they have no evidence that would hold up in court and they’d lose their chance, and all the players would scatter to another small town or towns and start over. It’s not all that hard to do. Or maybe they figure that shutting down the drug trade and saving a lot of lives is more important than catching whoever killed one nosy reporter.”
Nipped in the Bud Page 18