Ready, Aim, Under Fire (Lexi Graves Mysteries, 10)

by Camilla Chafer

“I know who killed Fiona and I need to get to him before my brother does.”

  “Which bro… Never mind. Do you have any backup?”

  “No. Garrett isn’t picking up.”

  “Give me the address.” I started to protest but Maddox yelled, “Give it to me now!”

  I reeled off the address.

  “On my way. Do not engage,” said Maddox before he hung up.

  “Call Garrett,” I yelled again.

  “Calling Garrett,” said my phone. I thought I detected a hint of smugness in the voice.

  Without ringing, the call went directly to the answering service. “Garrett, I’m on my way to the Pattersons’ house. If you hear this before you get there, please don’t go inside. It’s Dr. Patterson. He killed Fiona and I can prove it.”

  I turned the corner, putting my foot on the gas and flooring it. When I screeched to a halt outside the Pattersons’ house, my stomach lurched. Garrett’s car was already parked outside. I looked around for the Pattersons’ cars but couldn’t see them. With Garrett’s car empty, I had to assume he was already inside the house. One or both of the Pattersons must have parked their cars in the double garage.

  Instead of aiming for the front door, I jogged to the garage, trying to find a crack to look inside. The garage adjoined the house, although recessed slightly backwards, leaving only a small, circular window for light above the electric doors. There was no way I could see inside. I sorely needed a ladder but couldn’t see any available to use.

  With no other options, I stooped and scurried in front of the house, peeking in all the windows as I moved stealthily, hoping I could catch a glimpse of Garrett and the Pattersons. There was no sign of them in the first window so I moved on, peeking through the tall window panes on either side of the door, and then onto the next window. I rose slowly, my arms brushing against the brittle leaves, my eyes rising past the sill.

  Garrett was facing me, talking. Mrs. Patterson had her back to the window. A wave of relief flooded over me. I made it before Dr. Patterson arrived. Mrs. Patterson looked fine. There might even have been enough time to explain to them both what happened. I dropped to the floor again, shuffling backwards towards the door so they wouldn’t see me snooping. I was just preparing to turn around when behind me, I heard the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked.

  “Don’t move,” said Dr. Patterson. “Get up very slowly.”

  “Which is it? I can’t do both.”

  “Get up,” said Dr. Patterson with audible exasperation etched into his voice. “Put your hands in the air. Don’t make any sudden moves.”

  I wasn’t sure what kind of sudden moves he didn’t want me to make so I shelved the idea of any cartwheels, flying kicks, or Miss Universe promenading. Instead, I got up very slowly and raised my hands in the air, turning around when he instructed me. “Go inside,” he said, stepping back to let me pass. “Scream and I’ll shoot.”

  “In front of all your neighbors?” I asked.

  “Do you see anyone?”

  That was a good point, I didn’t see any but I didn’t tell him that. Plus, it was in my best interests to get inside and alert Garrett. My brother almost certainly had a gun.

  “Someone will hear the gunshot.”

  “My neighbor’s son’s motorcycle has been backfiring for the past three weeks. No one will notice a thing. Open the door,” said Dr. Patterson when we stopped in front of it.

  I reached for the handle. “I know it was you,” I told him. “I know you killed Fiona.”

  “You don’t know anything!”

  “I know everything.”

  “Inside,” he said, nudging the gun into the small of my back. I pushed the door open and Dr. Patterson stepped in after me. “Go into the living room.”

  “Okay.” I moved forwards slowly, my hands still in the air. As I entered the room, two sets of eyes turned on me. Garrett’s mouth dropped open in alarm as Dr. Patterson stepped out from behind me.

  “I found this one outside,” said Dr. Patterson.

  “Do something,” I hissed to Garrett. “Shoot him and I’ll explain everything later.”

  “Lieutenant Graves won’t be shooting anyone,” said Mrs. Patterson to my surprise. That was right about the moment I saw the gun she had fixed on Garrett.

  Chapter Twenty

  “What are you doing here?” asked Garrett, an unmistakable edge to his voice. His strained eyes glanced behind me, assessing the situation. Blood drained from his face and I knew he must have seen the gun pointed at my back.

  “Didn’t you get my messages?” I asked.

  Garrett nodded towards Mrs. Patterson’s gun. “No,” he said, his eyes rolling upwards slightly.

  “I came to rescue you.”

  “Gee, thanks. Doing a great job.”

  “I didn’t say I was finished,” I shot back just as Dr. Patterson nudged me again with his gun.

  “Take a seat,” he told me with another small prod.

  I took the seat adjacent to Garrett, both of us facing the Pattersons. A gold necklace lay on the coffee table. Garrett’s gun was beside it, but sadly, out of snatching distance. At least Dr. Patterson hadn’t frisked me. However, there was no way I could get my gun out without being shot first. “This sucks,” I said to Garrett.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “What are we going to do with them?” asked Mrs. Patterson. For the first time, I noted a trace of alarm on her face. I suspected my own face probably reflected a lot of confusion.

  “I don’t know. Shoot them?” suggested Dr. Patterson.

  “Two bodies? That’s a lot of work!”

  “We can’t leave them. They worked it all out. We have no choice.”

  “What exactly have you worked out?” asked Mrs. Patterson, looking from me to Garrett.

  “One of you killed Fiona,” started Garrett. “I thought it could have been you but now I’m not so sure.”

  I added, “My money was on Dr. Patterson but seeing both of you with guns really throws me. Was it a team effort?” I asked, my jaw trembling despite my glib words.

  “Do you think this is funny?” asked Dr. Patterson. “Tell us what you know. You first, Lieutenant.”

  “We know your daughter, Debby, is dead,” Garrett said bluntly. “She died ten years ago and her body has been concealed in Montgomery all this time. As I was explaining to your wife when she drew her gun on me, the woman who came back is not your daughter. Her name is Marley McFadden. We believe she was your daughter’s friend and took over her life. To paraphrase her words, she didn’t want you to experience the pain of knowing your daughter died.”

  “We know all that,” said Dr. Patterson. “We worked that out already.”

  “So did your friend, Fiona,” continued Garrett. “She warned you, Mrs. Patterson, about the woman we now know as Marley posing as Debby but you were both so adamant she was your daughter. She came to you with her concerns and that’s why you shot her. You probably learned how to shoot from your husband, an accomplished marksman.”

  “Actually,” I chipped in, “Fiona called Dr. Patterson at his office shortly before she died. He had already spoken to Marley on the phone, which gave him an alibi, but then Fiona called. I think Fiona told you she could prove Marley wasn’t Debby and you decided you had to silence her. You snuck out of your office and made your way down the stairwell, ensuring no one would see you leave. You went to Fiona’s house under the pretense of listening to what she had to say and you shot her. In a panic, you tossed the gun and returned to the office, like you never left. You knew your colleagues and employees would blindly vouch for you. Plus, you had already spoken to the fake Debby by phone, so you had the perfect alibi. I think when we run the DNA we found on the grip, it’ll be an identical match to yours.”

  Dr. Patterson nodded thoughtfully. “You’re right, of course, Ms. Graves. All I had to do was say I was busy with paperwork and everyone knew not to disturb me. It was so easy. I didn’t want to kill Fiona but she wouldn’t stop
prying. She was going to ruin everything!”

  “Did you know Marley was Debby?” I asked.

  “We knew someone was pretending to be her,” he replied simply, as if it were a stranger he were talking about and not his daughter.

  “To know that, you would have to…” I stopped, squeezing my eyes shut, thinking hard as the grim realization swam into my brain. “You already knew Debby was dead,” I finished.

  “We knew she died ten years ago,” said Mrs. Patterson. “Debby called us that night. She was full of anger. She said she’d been on a walk in the woods and something happened. She got a terrible pain in her head and thought she collapsed. When she woke up, she was covered in dirt and it was dark and her head hurt terribly. She wanted us to come find her.”

  “It’s not the first time we had to pick her up from somewhere,” said Dr. Patterson. “We’ve lost count of the times she took off or ran out of money. She begged us. I told her this is a last time we get her out of a jam. We got to the woods where she said she was and walked around in the dark, calling for her. Then I tripped over something. I thought it was a log but it was Debby. She was just lying there on the ground, barely warm, half inside a hole, like she was in a shallow grave. I felt for her pulse but she didn’t have one. She was already dead.”

  “So you just left her there?” asked Garrett.

  “I didn’t know what else to do! I panicked. How could I explain why my daughter was dead in the woods in the dark? Everyone knew Debby had problems and had given us a hard time over the years. We had to bail her out so often. School, college, boys. She always blamed the adoption for an excuse but she was never really interested in her biological family. She just had a habit of pissing people off. I knew someone would probably think I killed her! Someone did!”

  “If you told the police that, they could have investigated. You could have proved that she called you,” I told him. “You were just a concerned dad who intended to help his daughter.”

  “Plus, the ME thinks your daughter might have suffered an aneurysm. No one killed her,” Garrett told them.

  Dr. Patterson sat down heavily on the sofa, breathing hard. I couldn’t work out if it was from the trauma of reliving the events, or knowing that his daughter hadn’t been murdered after all. Perhaps he was still planning on whether or not to kill us and add two more bodies to his murder spree. If I were asked which reason I felt most comfortable with, I would probably have chosen one of the first two options.

  “Why keep up the pretense?” I wondered.

  “I told Margaret about our daughter right away. We spent all night talking and most of the next day and then more days passed. How could I ever tell anyone? The longer we left it, the worse it looked. Then her landlord reported her missing and we had to go along with it. At least, we didn’t have to pretend things were okay anymore. We expected someone to find her but no one ever did and then the emails started.”

  “It was surreal,” said Mrs. Patterson. “My husband assured me that he saw Debby dead, but then we got the emails and it was almost like she was alive again. I said to him, he must have gotten it wrong. She wasn’t dead after all. She probably woke up in the woods, alone and cold and absolutely furious. I said she, no doubt, intends to make us pay for leaving her there.”

  “At first, we had no idea what to think. I couldn’t go back into the woods. I wasn’t even sure where I found her and those emails… they sounded just like Debby. Whoever was writing them knew all kinds of things about her life, and about us. We agreed it must be her, and assumed she must have wanted something from us. We waited for the demands,” added Dr. Patterson.

  “They never came. It seemed to be enough that Debby would never come home. We didn’t push her. We thought she must hate us.”

  “You never questioned if it was your real daughter?” asked Garrett.

  “Of course we did! There were little things. Debby started talking about taking a cooking class and she always hated cooking. Then she was so sweet and nice to us and almost encouraging. Again, not like Debby at all. We wondered but she knew too much about Debby’s life to be a stranger, so we guessed perhaps she changed, if anyone could change so much. We wondered if by having a near death experience she had finally woken up.” Mrs. Patterson stopped and took a deep breath. “Truthfully, we were relieved she appeared to be alive. We didn’t want to think of our daughter’s body lying out there in the woods. Even if she hated us, we wanted her to be okay.”

  “And that’s why you never pushed the investigation any further?” I asked.

  Mrs. Patterson nodded. “We didn’t want to believe anything else. Plus, an investigation would have been horrible. It would have shamed the whole family.”

  “Why did you ask her to come home?” asked Garrett.

  “I didn’t. That really wasn’t me,” said Mrs. Patterson, looking at her husband. “I didn’t know anything about it until Rod told me after you asked me.”

  “I wrote the email,” admitted Dr. Patterson. “After ten years of wondering if she was our daughter, I figured, she had to be over it by now. We wanted to see Debby again and I saw how hard it was on my wife. We spent all those years without pushing our daughter in case she lashed out, just going along with her travels. Just like always with Debby and I thought we deserved more. I knew she wouldn’t come home just because we asked her so I made up a story about my wife being sick and said she needed to come home. I had to make her feel guilty.”

  “Did you know the woman who returned wasn’t Debby?”

  “Not right away,” said Dr. Patterson. “She was so similar but I spotted little differences.”

  “The nose job?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Debby had a little bump here,” he said, touching his nose, “but this woman didn’t have one. It was easy to call it a nose job. And as for looking differently, well, everyone changes after ten years. Debby didn’t have many friends or even a boyfriend who’d remember her. Our only other family nearby is my mother and she doesn’t remember anything too well anymore. She’s dying.”

  “I couldn’t stop looking at her at first,” added Mrs. Patterson. “It took a couple of days to be sure but we accepted it eventually. We knew she wasn’t Debby. Then we knew Debby had to be dead.”

  “Fiona suspected that too,” I said.

  “She never knew Debby that well and it had been ten years. We figured if we accepted the new Debby into our lives, then so would everyone else, but Fiona knew right away. She just knew,” said Mrs. Patterson.

  “I still don’t get why you would accept a total stranger as your daughter,” said Garrett.

  “We didn’t. We accepted our daughter. We told everyone our daughter was coming back and she did. We threw a welcome home dinner for her. How could we tell everyone that she wasn’t Debby? She was so charming, so lovely. She was actually a much nicer person than our own daughter.”

  “And she never asked us for anything. Not once in ten years and she had plenty of opportunities. We offered to send her money or plane tickets or to put her up in a nicer hotel but she always refused. Even when she came back, she graciously refused to take anything at all from us. She insisted on paying for her own hotel, her rental car. She even sent flowers. She cooked for us too, using recipes from all the places she traveled to. Debby never did that. She was never so thoughtful.”

  “So you thought you would… what? Keep her around?” asked Garrett.

  “Debby told us she wanted to return abroad because she met a nice man. We knew she was leaving soon so it wasn’t like we would keep her here forever. We knew it was unlikely we’d ever see her again,” said Dr. Patterson. “But Fiona kept butting her head in. She was well aware of the investigation into Debby’s disappearance so we knew it was only a matter of time before she spoke to someone else about our daughter; and then what would have happened? We couldn’t admit she wasn’t ours without saying where the real Debby was, could we? And then it would have been our arrests and court cases and I couldn’t fathom spendi
ng my life in prison for something I didn’t do!”

  “So you killed Fiona,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Patterson. “I killed her.”

  “All we needed was a little more time, but Fiona refused to listen,” said Mrs. Patterson. “She kept bringing it up, and had a couple of times already that day.”

  “Why did you need more time?” I asked, wondering.

  “My mother is dying,” said Dr. Patterson. “She wanted to see Debby before she passed.”

  “Your mother is a wealthy woman,” I started, thinking harder. The Pattersons had to know all about the legal affairs of Rod’s mother. “Debby, I mean Marley, said you took care of her finances when she moved into a nursing home for her care. What happens to her estate when she passes?”

  “It all goes to Debby,” said Mrs. Patterson. “She doted on her.”

  “And if Debby preceded her in death, as she did, what happens to the estate then?”

  “It’s bequeathed to charity.”

  “So, if Debby stuck around until your mom passed, you could all pick up the check?” asked Garrett. I saw the tension increasing in his body, although it was barely noticeable. He could understand a parent’s need to have a living daughter again, I realized, but not when money became a motive to the crime. That changed things.

  “We decided we’d sell our house and move away,” said Mrs. Patterson. “We’ve worked hard all our lives and had a few bad investments, meaning we can’t retire anytime soon. With that money, we could start a new life, far away from here. It belongs to my husband anyway.”

  “Did Debby’s stand-in know about the money?” I asked, hoping that she didn’t.

  “Of course not! We planned to give her some, of course, and help her start a new life and disappear. We were grateful to her in a way. We’ve spent ten years not worrying that my husband will be arrested for murder because we thought she was mad at us and took off.”

  “If Fiona told someone else about the impostor, that money would’ve disappeared,” I stated, finally fully understanding how complicated the Pattersons’ lies had become.