Till Death - Mark Kane Mysteries - Book Four: A Private Investigator Crime Series of Murder, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Stories...with a dash of Romance. A Murder, Mystery & Suspense Thriller

by John Hemmings

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Providence

  We set off early and were in Providence soon after nine o’clock. We located the address on Barbara’s envelope without difficulty. It lay to the north of the city in a road which would be leafy again in the spring. It was a small bungalow standing in a sizeable lot and set back from the road. We walked over there and peered inside; it was currently unoccupied. You can always tell, somehow, when a house has been left empty for a while. The look of it is different in some indefinable way from a house whose occupants have gone shopping.

  We walked over to the mailbox and opened it. There was a package inside. It was about the size of a large library book. We took it out. It was sealed securely with duct tape and bore a label which said: ‘Printed Matter’. We took it back to the car with us.

  “I guess Barbara was planning to come home,” I said. “Are you going to open it, or shall I?”

  “Me, me,” said Lucy. She produced a pair of nail scissors and cut through the duct tape. She sliced open the package and we peered inside. There was a layer of bubble wrap, and inside that were neat bundles of one hundred dollar banknotes.

  “We’re rich,” she said.

  Lucy took out the bundles and counted the notes. In all there was twenty thousand dollars. There was something else in the package too. It was a copy of a marriage certificate; the marriage certificate of Cody Breen and Elizabeth Burrows.

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  *

  I got a call from Lance Calley the next morning. There’d been a complication, he said. I felt myself squeezing the receiver hard in my hand. How simple did I have to make for this guy? I sighed heavily.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “The prints came through from the lab, so because of my tip-off a team went to the hospital to ask Miss Green if she was willing to voluntarily submit her prints and a sample of her DNA for analysis.”

  “And?”

  “Like I said, there was a complication. She’s slipped into a coma – she can’t give her permission for anything.”

  “Are you in the office?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well stay there. I’m coming on down.”

  I drove into town and went to the station. The time had come to get a warrant to search the place where Barbara had been staying. They could support the application by a statement to the judge that they were acting on information from a reliable source. I knew the police would have no difficulty. They wouldn’t have to reveal my name to the judge – simply support their application for the warrant by telling him that the information came from a source that had proved accurate on several occasions in the past. I could only imagine the public outcry if the police tried to obtain fingerprint impressions and a DNA swab from a comatose patient. In any case the doctors were unlikely to let the police anywhere near her. They needed to search the apartment. They’d find Delmar’s property in her closet and Withers would confirm that she’d been staying in his apartment. The prints lifted from Delmar’s apartment had already been examined and some good specimens had been obtained, in addition to those from Delmar. The comparison of those prints and the profiling of Barbara’s DNA could wait, although I imagined the finding of Delmar’s property in Barbara’s apartment would speed things up quite a bit. Probably revealing me as his source would steal some of Calley’s thunder, but I couldn’t help that. He’d still have the cold case to claim credit for.

  Over the next couple of days there was a flurry of activity. It was even enough to get Calley animated and he called me regularly to keep me in touch with developments. Barbara’s condition was unchanged. The burr-hole procedure had not been as successful as hoped. The problem was the continued seepage of blood into the subdural region. It was too long after the accident to suspect that she’d been on Warfarin or some other anti-clotting medication. The new theory was that she had a hematologic condition associated with a tendency to hemorrhage. They were considering other options.

  The South End apartment was searched and Delmar’s effects seized. A sample of Barbara’s DNA was obtained from the hospital, though not directly from her. Fingerprint impressions were obtained; the doctors’ concerns about her medical condition over-ridden by the possibility that their patient was a serial killer.

  On Tuesday afternoon Lucy called Atterbury. As usual he didn’t pick up but he did call her back later. She gave him a brief synopsis of the events that had unfolded since our return home. I sat and listened to the call.

  “Everything points to Delmar’s accomplice being the killer,” she told him. “The matter’s in the hands of the police now and they’re confident of a conviction in due course. We couldn’t have done it without you Atterbury.”

  After she hung up she said, “He was quite emotional on the telephone. I guess the whole thing has confirmed how wise his decision was to get out of that kind of life.”

  “Well that’s everything wrapped up,” I said. “If the police screw things up now it’s out of our hands.” I looked over at Lucy. She was sitting quietly, a contemplative expression on her face. “Let’s get dressed up nice again,” I said. “We’ll find a fancy restaurant and I’ll buy you dinner.”

  We’d promised each other that we wouldn’t discuss the case over dinner. We’d lived with it for long enough and it was time to give ourselves a break. But after the meal, as we walked to the car, there was something Lucy wanted to get off her chest.

  “So we can be sure now that Don wasn’t involved in Delmar’s death, can’t we?”

  “I guess so. Everything points to Barbara. She had Delmar’s stuff and his death was a carbon copy of the cold case. It would be remarkable if that was just a coincidence. Somehow I can’t quite get it out of my mind that Don went there though – maybe after Delmar had been killed. Maybe he saw him in the tub. Maybe it was him who slugged me.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “A few things. But it was mainly the way he looked at Delmar’s photograph. You remember when Norman looked at Lisa’s photograph and said he didn’t know her? But something in his eyes told me that he did. There are some things you can’t hide, Lucy. And then there was the fact that he never offered us any explanation of where he was that afternoon. And the smile he gave when I warned him about the possibility of the blackmail continuing. None of these things mean much on their own, but…”

  “Well, I guess we’ll never know for sure. Maybe that’s why he gave you the extra grand,” Lucy said, “to make up for slugging you.” She giggled, and dug me in the ribs with her elbow.

  “How’s the new office coming along?” I said. “You said it’d be ready by the end of the month. It’s past the end of the month.”

  “The contractors made a mess of some things,” she said. “I want it to be perfect before you see it; how about the weekend?”

  “The weekend it is then,” I said.

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Lisa

  It was shortly before eleven thirty on Wednesday morning and we were sitting in the Chevy outside The Prestige. After a while we saw the grill opening and we watched as a Mercedes SUV climbed the ramp, popped through the opening and disappeared down the street. We waited for a few minutes and then got out and walked round to the front of the apartment building and rang the bell for apartment 7C. Lisa’s voice came over the intercom.

  “Hi, who is it?”

  “It’s us Lisa, Kane and me,” Lucy said. “Can we come up?”

  “Oh…sure,” she said, and the door clicked open. We rode the elevator to the top floor. Lisa was waiting at the entrance of the apartment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ve missed Don – he’s just left for the gym. He coaches some kids over in Fenway on Wednesday – martial arts, that kind of stuff. I’m afraid he won’t be back until two thirty or maybe three. Would you like me to call him? He only just left.”

  “It’s okay Lisa; it’s you we’ve come to s
ee,” Lucy said.

  Lisa had a slightly bemused expression. “Okay, well come in, please sit down. Can I get you anything?”

  “Actually we’ve got something for you, Lisa. I think you’d better sit down. There’s nothing at all to be alarmed about, but we’ve some important things to discuss with you.”

  Lisa sat down, her brow furrowed in puzzlement.

  “I want you to know that we’re your friends, Lisa,” Lucy said.

  “Okay.”

  “We’ve got something that belongs to you,” said Lucy, handing Lisa the package we’d recovered from Barbara’s mailbox.

  Lisa took hold of the package uncertainly.

  “Go ahead,” Lucy said. “Look inside.”

  Lisa opened the bag. She pulled out the neatly wrapped bundles of banknotes. Her jaw dropped. She looked up at Lucy.

  “But how…”

  “We’ve got a long story to tell you, Lisa. But don’t worry because it’s all good news.”

  She looked from Lucy to me. I nodded.

  “You know how much Don loves you,” Lucy said. “A few weeks back he was worried about you. He sensed that something was wrong. He came to us and asked for our help.”

  “Without telling me?”

  “Sometimes it’s necessary to keep a secret,” Lucy said, “even from someone you love very much.”

  Lisa bowed her head and started to cry.

  “There’s no need to cry because we’ve come here today to assure you that you have nothing to worry about anymore. Cody’s dead, Lisa, and so is Delmar.”

  “Who’s Delmar?”

  “Well maybe you knew him by a different name,” Lucy said. “He’s the guy who was blackmailing you. There was a woman too, wasn’t there? She murdered Delmar after she got the money from you.”

  Lisa looked at us both in astonishment. “How do you know all these things and how…” She held up the packet of banknotes.

  “It’s our job to find these things out, but we’re telling you in confidence. Don doesn’t know about most of this – that’s why we came to see you when we knew he’d be out.”

  “And Cody’s dead? How…when?”

  “He was killed by a fellow inmate at a correctional facility in Minneapolis about a month ago. Delmar shared a cell with him once and got to know about your marriage to Cody.”

  Lisa started weeping again. “I’m so ashamed,” she said.

  “You have nothing to be ashamed about Lisa,” I said. “Lucy and I had a trip to Rapid falls while you and Don were on vacation. We know all about what happened. Norman told us.”

  “I should’ve told Don when we met. I would have told him everything, but I was still married to Cody and I knew he’d never let me go,” she said.

  “Don knows nothing about our visit to Rapid falls. He knows nothing about your marriage to Cody.”

  “But I thought you said he hired you.”

  “In the beginning, yes. But after you’d paid the money he dispensed with our services. He was confident that everything would go back to being normal again.”

  “But you didn’t tell him why I was being blackmailed?”

  “We didn’t know then,” I said. “After you and Don went on vacation Lucy and I decided we’d carry on the investigation on our own. You see, paying off a blackmailer seldom puts an end to the matter – sooner or later they’ll be back for more; and although we knew Delmar was dead we didn’t know if anyone else might be involved.”

  “Yes, I was worried about that,” she said. “But I told them it was all I could give them. It’s all I had. They wanted a lot more.”

  “How much, Lisa?”

  “A hundred thousand. It was impossible. They were angry at first but they finally accepted that I couldn’t pay more, so I thought that would be an end to it.”

  “When we discovered the package with your money there was something else inside,” I said. “It was a copy of the certificate of your marriage to Cody. We destroyed it.”

  Lisa bowed her head. “Ever since I met Don I’ve had this on my mind – the fear that one day Cody would find me and I’d lose Don. It was a terrible pressure, you don’t know.”

  “I’ve been in this game for a long time Lisa,” I said. “I think I do know. That’s why we were determined to get to the bottom of this and put a stop to it once and for all.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Lisa said.

  “There’s no need to say anything. We were just doing our job. It’s not always that we can help people, but this time it turned out okay,” I said. “But Don knows nothing about the reason you were being blackmailed. You see he said he didn’t want to know – he said that whatever it was he was satisfied with your judgement. He knew that if there was something you were hiding from him there must have been a good reason, and he respected your privacy.”

  “I don’t deserve him,” Lisa said.

  Lucy went over and sat next to her on the sofa and put her arms around Lisa’s shoulders. “Yes you do,” Lucy said. “You deserve happiness. You mustn’t ever think like that.”

  “What…what happened to Delmar’s partner? You said she killed him?”

  “All you need to know is that she won’t trouble you anymore. That’s a promise I can make with certainty. It’s in the hands of the police now, but I can assure you that the police know nothing about the blackmail. They’re only concerned with investigating the murder,” I said.

  Lisa sat for a while looking out of the window. The apartment looked over the bay.

  “How’s Norman?” she said. “I miss him.”

  “Norman did you proud,” I said. “You’ll be happy to know that we met with a wall of silence when we started asking questions in Rapid Falls. It was only because of Mrs. Applebee and her husband that we were able to convince Norman that we were there to help.”

  “Mrs. Applebee?” Lisa said.

  “She was one of your teachers in high school,” Lucy said. “You probably don’t remember her, but she remembered you. She was your English teacher. In fact she asked us to give you this.”

  Lucy handed her the envelope. She opened it and read the note. She started to cry again. She held the note limply in her hand.

  “May I?” I said.

  She nodded and handed me the note. There was a single line. I recognized it. It was a quote from the Greek philosopher, Euripides. It said this:

  ‘Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness’.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  The New Office

  It was Saturday morning and I was about to see the new office. Lucy was full of excitement and in high spirits, which the news of Barbara’s death had failed to dampen. Barbara had never recovered from her coma and her life had slowly ebbed away. We’d been told earlier in the morning.

  “So she escaped justice?” was Lucy’s response to the news.

  “Perhaps there’s a higher justice,” I said. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  “Well we’ve got better things to do than talk about her,” Lucy said. “Are you ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  We drove the short distance to the new office. The sun was shining and the grey mush, which was all that was left of the snow, was rapidly melting.

  “I guess if Lisa wants to go back and visit Rapid Falls again someday there’ll be nothing to stop her now,” Lucy said.

  “I expect she will. She’ll want to see Norman again, and some of her other friends.”

  “Maybe she’ll even take Don,” Lucy said.

  We parked outside the unit and Lucy carefully placed the key in the lock and then opened the door with a flourish. Directly opposite me, on the wall of the reception area was a framed movie poster of Bogart and Bacall from The Big Sleep. I stepped into the room and Lucy sidled past me and sat on a leather sofa. It was the same leather sofa I’d sat on when I went to see a guy named Ray Delgado at a company called Fortun
e Investments & Securities last October.

  I looked around the room. There were posters everywhere; Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, and even Ronald Colman as Bulldog Drummond. I closed the door behind me and found Jack Nicholson staring at me from the back of the door, his nose covered with a band aid. And there, behind the reception desk, was a poster from The Thin Man; William Powell holding Myrna Loy in a tight embrace.

  “Aren’t they great? Don’t you love ’em?” Lucy had drawn up her knees to her chest on the sofa and was laughing uproariously.

  “Does it really matter what I think?” I said.

  “Not really,” Lucy said, hunching her shoulders and grinning. “But that’s not all; this came yesterday. It’s our first letter – so I thought I’d let you open it,” she said, handing me the envelope and a letter-opener from the top of the well-equipped reception desk.

  I sliced open the envelope. There was no letter inside, only a check in favor of Mark Kane Investigations. It was signed by Lisa Maddox, and drawn on the Citizens Bank.

  It was a check for twenty thousand dollars.

  ***

  Follow the adventures of Kane & Lucy in

  Book Five: Missing. Please read on…

  Dean Roberts is a sick elderly man with just one precious thing in his life -- his teenage daughter Marisa. When she mysteriously disappears in Springfield, Missouri on a road trip across America the police draw a blank, so Dean hires Kane and Lucy to find her and bring her home.

  When Kane and Lucy set out for Missouri to find a teenager who has gone missing whilst on a road trip across the States they soon realize that she and her traveling companion have been abducted by a sinister group whose victims are turning up dead – real dead. But what is the motive for her abduction? Nothing has been stolen from her bank account, no demand for a ransom has been made and a telephone call from the missing girl a few days after her abduction only adds to the mystery. In a race against time they enlist the assistance of local law enforcement officers and friends of the pair in a desperate attempt to find the two girls before it’s too late. (See it on Amazon)