“You are a master,” Lacey told her, unfolding from the floor. “Manipulator, that is. I’ll go up and brief security about not letting Earl or anyone connected to him onto the property unsupervised. They can’t throw him out without Jake’s say-so, but they can track him on camera and put a team with the boys while he’s there.”
“I’ll have to nap soon, but I’ll tackle the videos again when I wake up. Before I fade out, you didn’t say what Earl’s alibi was for Kitrin’s death. His own little sister.”
“He was with his mommy all morning,” said Lacey. “Even if he wasn’t, what mother would turn in her son on a murder rap?”
She left and Jan pulled her blindfold down. As she retreated into darkness, the mothers in the case drifted across her mental movie screen: Kitrin and her mother both threatened by paternity tests; Andy sleeping with her husband’s twin to get pregnant; Sloane staying with a man she despised for the sake of her son; Cass, whose lucky double pregnancy gave her the financial wherewithal to leave; and Earl’s mother, an unknown quantity who might lie to help her son inherit all Orrin’s wealth. Would she also kill for him?
Dusk was creeping into the room when Jan woke from a nightmare about a balaclava-wearing figure skulking through Jake’s hilltop mansion. She lay there listening to the house’s silence. Terry wasn’t home yet. It seemed odd not to have Rob around, either, but between waiting for Bart to clear him of Kitrin’s murder and finding out Michael wasn’t his son, he’d had a lot to process. She crawled off the couch, made some tea, took her pill, had a few bites of leftover salmon, and contemplated her empty evening. Since she was wide awake and jittery, she might as well be working.
Accordingly, she called up the ranch’s garage video and Jake’s pool gate video, one on each monitor. For a few seconds, the two figures walking across each screen were side by side, moving away from the camera. She stared. She stopped each video and backed it up. She started them again. Then she picked up her phone and texted Lacey. Jake’s pool-gate person and Orrin’s garage person might be the same woman. That’s why she looked familiar to both of us. We’d each been staring at the opposite images.
The phone rang thirty seconds later.
“You’re telling me the person who went into Jake’s pool area last Saturday morning was a woman? Jake has no female staff except the cleaner from the village, and she doesn’t wear the staff polo shirt. The female security guards didn’t start until days later.”
“There’s more I can do, to be sure — measuring the head/neck ratio and so on — but yeah, it looks like the same woman. No wonder the RCMP couldn’t match it to a staffer.”
Lacey sucked in a breath. “You know what this means, right?”
“Not really.”
“If it’s the same woman in both places, that’s Earl’s accomplice. You’re looking at the person who murdered Kitrin.”
“Holy shit,” said Jan.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
At a plastic-covered table in Jake’s gigantic games room, Tyrone worked a gobbet of blue air-dry clay between his fingers. “It’s like I told Michael already, miss,” he said to Jan, his voice still raw from the breathing tube. “After the truck crashed, Pops said Earl would find us in a couple of hours. Pops’ phones were both smashed, and mine had no signal.” He gave a scratchy cough. “We got up the road to the hut — Pops was way slow and needed my help — and spent the night there, but asshole Earl never showed. Sorry, miss. I’m not supposed to say ‘asshole’ in front of ladies.”
“That’s okay, this one time.” Mindful of Sloane’s earlier instruction that the boy be encouraged to talk freely about his experience, Jan said, “And then what happened?”
“The next day, we ate some canned beans and things that were in the tin box he keeps there, and still nobody came. Pops just lay there and gave me orders about food and stuff.” Ty focused hard on his clay. His voice trembled. “When I woke up the next day, he couldn’t hardly talk. He had a big purple bulge on his stomach and he … puked. I had to go rinse out the bucket in the creek after.”
“Gross, bro,” said Michael.
The house steward appeared with a flat box.
Jan looked up. “Yes?”
“A courier brought these, Mrs. Brenner.”
“Oh?” Jan took the box from him. The card tucked under the ribbon read Treats for the brave boys, from Andy and Bart. She handed it to Tyrone.
“Chocolate? Rad.” Yanking off the lid, he bit into one, only to spit it back into his hand. “Strawberry? Andy knows I only eat nuts and caramels.” He bit into several more, but they were all soft inside. Dumping the mangled rejects onto a paper towel, he pushed the box toward Michael. “You want these?”
Michael was fitting a coil of red clay onto the front of a robot. “In a minute.”
Tyrone went back to his blue clay. The steward collected the paper towel and quietly departed.
Jan flattened the base of her three-point white antler onto her brown deer’s head. “You were telling me about your dad being sick?”
The boy nodded. “After the second night, I thought I should find help. There’s a path down the ravine that was supposed to lead us home after he was rested up. So I went down that, but at the bottom I couldn’t tell where I was anymore. The cutline went the wrong way, and I couldn’t see which other way to go before it started to get dark.”
“He spent the night in a tree,” said Michael with great enthusiasm.
Jan smiled. “It probably wasn’t that cool when it was happening.”
“My mom hates that part.” Tyrone squeezed another blob of clay between his fingers. “Hearing it makes her scared all over again.”
“Well, then, it’s a good thing she’s having a rest right now,” said Jan.
“And Granny, too.” Michael rolled red clay into a long tube. “She needs a lot more naps than she used to.”
The first crack of thunder sent Jan’s heart leaping. The boys looked over their shoulders and then went back to their builds while she eyed the roiling clouds through the glass wall. Her phone vibrated. A text from Lacey read: Can you talk? Important.
“I’ll be right back, boys,” she said. “Try not to destroy the place.”
Winding her armchair past the workout machines, she opened the French door and rolled out under the overhanging balcony. Fat raindrops bounced and sizzled on paving stones still hot from the earlier sunlight. She called Lacey. “Okay, what?”
Lacey’s voice was low. “Everything all right up there?”
“Fine. We’re doing clay art in the games room. Why?”
“I’d ask if you’re sitting down, but you almost always are.”
“Bad news?” The goosebumps on Jan’s arms weren’t all from the damp breeze.
“Could’ve been worse, but yeah, it’s bad enough.” Lacey breathed deep and then came out with it. “Orrin nearly died this morning.”
“I thought he was out of danger?”
“Someone doubled his morphine levels. If he hadn’t been hooked up to a respiratory monitor, he’d have stopped breathing completely before the nurses noticed anything was wrong.”
Jan shivered. “Someone tried to kill him in the ICU? Was it Earl?”
“No. As usual, Earl had a rock-solid alibi. That alone is suspicious in my book.”
“How solid?”
“The best. He was at Cochrane detachment, trying to convince the RCMP that his obstruction during the search was all done from the purest of motives.” Lacey’s breath hissed. “He’d been at the hospital earlier. A supervised visit, under the circumstances. He wasn’t left alone for an instant. And Orrin wasn’t in respiratory distress until hours later.”
“Then it’s his accomplice again? I suppose nobody got a photo of this person’s face?”
“Not fully. Nursing-station cameras showed someone dressed in nurse’s scrubs, bending over Orrin’s bed like they were checking vitals, and then shoving what looked like an eyedropper into his mouth. They figure it held subl
ingual morphine. On top of the drugs already in him, and how weak he was, it could easily have killed him.”
“But they don’t just let strangers walk into an ICU.”
“Nope. They either came in with another nurse, or someone gave them the code.”
Jan rubbed a sudden ache in her eyebrow. “And then what? They waited around to be sure it worked?”
“Apparently sublingual morphine peaks in the body around half an hour later. The fake nurse was long gone by then.”
“God.” Was someone coming after the boys next? “It has to be the same woman. Do they at least have a hair colour to watch for now?”
“Sorry. She was wearing one of those hospital caps. Probably short haired, but that’s all I can give you.”
“Whoever this woman is, she seems to be a genius at getting into places she’s not supposed to be. Can I call one of the security guards down here?”
“Yes. And I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Sooner if you can.” Jan disconnected and stared in through the window at Michael and Tyrone lining up all their robots, oblivious to possible danger. A strange woman knocking someone over the head was an obvious threat. Less obvious was a drug that acted after the person administering it was well out of the way. Or … having it delivered? She called Lacey back. “You have Andrea Caine’s number? Can you ask her right now if she sent candy to Tyrone and Michael?”
“I already know she didn’t. She and Bart are planning to visit this evening, and she’s going shopping for treats this afternoon.”
“Shit!” Jan shoved the patio door open with her foot and whirled her chair around. She smacked into the door frame and had to take another run at it. Then she was inside, zooming around the treadmill and elliptical, brushing under a pull-bar as she cut a corner past the weight machine. “Michael,” she yelled as the boy’s hand lifted to his mouth. “Don’t eat that!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Under the sink light on the game room’s snack bar, Lacey turned over a strawberry cream chocolate. The hole in the bottom was obvious. She showed it to Chad and Jan. After Chad had taken a photo for evidence purposes, she laid the chocolate on a paper towel and sliced the bottom away. Amid the pink strawberry filling was a hard white object. Chad took another photo. She fished out the object with the knife’s point and wiped it on the paper towel. Pink lines of fondant stayed behind, showing the number 54. Chad photographed that.
Lacey put a hand to her neck. “I’m not sure what those numbers mean, but nobody puts pills into candy with good intentions. Did anyone else touch these? Sloane, or Michael’s grandmother?”
“They’re both napping in their rooms.”
“The nanny?”
“Out. She borrowed a staff car for the afternoon. Jake’s holed up in his study. He might be napping, too, but he wouldn’t announce it.” Janet glanced back at the boys. They were absorbed in their robots, unconcerned about the future of chocolates they weren’t allowed to eat. “It must have been Earl or his accomplice. Chad, did you see who brought these?”
Chad, lining up another angle on the little white pill, said, “A woman in a dark-blue ball cap and a grey wind-breaker. She wasn’t in a courier vehicle, but I thought she must be a local contractor. Lots of smaller towns don’t have regular UPS or FedEx delivery. I signed for the box and brought it to the kitchen entrance.”
Lacey turned over more chocolates. Five had gaps in the bottom. “And nothing was unusual about that delivery?”
“Well, she said she was supposed to bring it to the house herself. I told her I had orders to keep everyone out, and she just handed it to me and left.”
“Her vehicle will be on the gate camera.” Lacey pointed to the chocolate box. “Take shots of the box before I turn more over.”
Chad did so and then texted the pictures to her. She skimmed through them before forwarding them to Wayne, Sergeant Drummond, and Constable Markov. Her accompanying text was straightforward: Someone just tried to drug/kill Tyrone Caine and/or Michael Matheson. I am preserving the evidence at Jake Wyman’s. Please advise.
She went back to the boys’ table. “I’m not going to be angry, but I need to know if either of you ate those chocolates. Even licked one of them.”
Michael looked up. “Were they rotten? My friend found a worm in a chocolate bar once.”
Lacey shook her head. “No worms, but they were contaminated with stuff a lot of people would react badly to.”
Tyrone said, “I didn’t think I was allergic to plants, but whatever that plant I ate was, they said I was allergic to it, and I might be allergic to other plants in the allee-um family now. Is it that? Because I bit a couple. But I spat them out right away. They were gross.”
Lacey forced a grin. “You should be safe enough. Alliums are things like garlic, onions, leeks, and asparagus. Can you imagine chocolate filled with garlic?” Predictably, both boys gagged. She went back to Jan and Chad. “You two stay here with them. I’ll track down those chocolates the steward took away and then go over the camera archive for this woman’s face.”
Jan backed and turned her armchair. “My laptop is in my pack. We can compare her with the garage ones, too. Both garages.”
“Good.” Odds were that the same woman would be identifiable at Orrin’s ICU bed this morning. After all, how many accomplices could Earl take into his confidence?
Upstairs, Lacey dug the paper towel filled with bisected chocolates out of the kitchen garbage and carefully examined them. Two contained little white pills. Others were too mangled to tell if the bottoms had been breached. Ty had better be telling the truth about swallowing nothing.
Her phone pinged. A text from Sergeant Drummond read: Instant-release morphine sulphate 30 mg. Any ingested?
No, she typed back, and asked the steward, “Is there a naloxone kit in the house?”
He looked scandalized. “Of course not.”
She added Bring naloxone in case and sent it, only to receive another text saying Delayed. Semi overturned on Hwy 1 overpass. She was on her own. She bagged the chocolates — box and all contents, whether mangled or not — in a paper grocery sack and got the steward to lock it in the household safe. Smoothing masking tape over the door’s edges, she wrote her initials over the makeshift seal.
“Nobody disturb this until the police get here.”
Shocked and silent, the steward and cook nodded.
In the security office, the woman on camera duty cued up the point where Chad had accepted the box. The delivery woman kept her head down, leaving the dark-blue brim of her ball cap toward the camera. The only part of her vehicle that showed was one brown front corner, obviously older. The RCMP would have the challenge of matching that to a make, model, and year. Lacey asked the duty guard to copy out the full clip and send it to Wayne’s Calgary office.
As the footage uploaded, the woman said, “Wait. What’s this?”
Lacey looked over her shoulder. The gate hadn’t been entirely closed when the woman left. She’d walked away when Chad was watching, but as soon as he went toward the house, she ran back and squeezed through the closing gate. She raced toward the stables, her messenger bag flying out behind her.
Lacey grabbed the guard’s radio. “All security personnel, attention. Intruder alert. A woman approximately my height, wearing a dark-blue baseball cap and a grey windbreaker, entered the grounds twenty-four minutes ago. She was heading for the stables. She may have changed to staff clothing there, so watch for any women and stop everyone you don’t personally recognize. Coordinate a perimeter sweep and buildings check with Travis.” She told the guard, “Scan forward from that point on. If she’s changed clothes, or if there’s a facial shot, I want to know ASAP.”
She left the office, locked the pool doors, locked the door into the garage, and then phoned the steward on her way back downstairs. “Please lock every outer door and window in the house immediately. No exceptions. If Mr. Wyman complains, I’ll take full responsibility.” She hurried int
o the games room. “Slight change of plans, guys. We’re going to move your art project into the guest suite for now.”
As Jan helped the boys pack up the robot army and other supplies, Lacey took Chad aside. “I realize this might bring back some stress for you because of Capilano Gorge, but you have to protect these boys. Stay in the suite with them, windows and doors locked, curtains drawn, until I or the RCMP gives you the all-clear. The woman who delivered these chocolates, she’s inside the grounds.”
Chad paled under his tan. “I won’t fail again.”
Lacey slapped him on the shoulder. “I’m sure you won’t.” But she wasn’t sure at all. His errors had compromised security here at every stage. At least this way, she knew where he was. Out in the grounds, he’d be on his own and potentially even more of a liability.
She escorted the group into the suite, checked each room, and then double-checked that the French doors were locked, drawing the curtains across.
“All of you stay here until I come back.”
She was only three paces down the dim hallway when her phone dinged. A photo text showed a woman with short auburn hair grabbing at a blue ball cap beside the stable wall. Where had she seen that face before? Turning back to the suite, she held the phone out to Chad.
“Is this the woman who brought the chocolate?”
Chad nodded.
Jan came to look, too. “That’s Mrs. Harder.”
Tyrone looked up from his robot warriors. “Earl’s mom? What’s she doing here?”
Lacey stared at the photo. Giselle Harder, formerly Caine. She’d been the climber in the helicopter with Lacey and Jake, catching a lift down from the Ghost River cliff. Which day was that remote well-site trip? Tuesday, said her phone calendar. The morning after Orrin’s Range Rover was sabotaged. Giselle had been at the ranch for the birthday weekend and not left until Tuesday. Except for that midnight visit to the garage, she’d stayed off the security cameras during the birthday weekend, not much of a challenge when her granddaughters had damaged the ones covering the main terrace, bluff staircase, and gym exit. Earl could easily have obliterated her name on the fob list. For all Orrin’s paranoia, security locks, and surveillance cameras, he’d been taken down at last by an overlooked ex-wife from a thirty-year-old divorce.
Why the Rock Falls Page 30