December's Secrets (Larry Macklin Mysteries Book 2)

by A. E. Howe

  “You know, it really did make my foot feel better,” I acknowledged. “But I do want to talk to her.”

  Anna, who was working on a project in the living room, had overheard us. “I don’t know why anyone would go to a doctor. Maria can work wonders.”

  “Okay, Maria first,” Cara said, looking back at Mauser, who had settled comfortably on the living room couch. He’d be good until lunch.

  Again, Maria managed to open the door before we got to it. Creepy.

  “I thought you all would be back,” she said, opening the door wide. I couldn’t help thinking about Hansel and Gretel. “I’ll make you some more herbal tea for your aches and pains. Go ahead and have a seat. I’ll be back in a tic.”

  With my tea in hand and, yes, feeling better, I proceeded to ask her about the day she called 911.

  “Have you been able to remember anything else about that day? Anything that was out of the ordinary.”

  “I have,” she said without expanding on it.

  “What?”

  “Terri Andrews.” Again without elaborating. Maria was clearly enjoying her dramatic moment.

  “You saw her that day?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “So you didn’t see her?”

  “Right.”

  “So?”

  “I didn’t see her the next day either,” she stated with a there you go look on her face.

  “I don’t think I quite see your point,” I admitted.

  “Ah, but you see, I had seen her fairly regularly up until then.”

  “She came by often?”

  “Terri went on jogs or runs, whatever she called them, almost daily. Most of the time she circled through the co-op before or after going out on the road. About every other day she’d stop in when she got done for a cup of tea. Sometimes she’d buy some of the liniment I made. It’s really good for the muscles.”

  “But she stopped coming by?”

  “Yes. I can’t remember exactly when the last time was, but I’m sure that she didn’t come by after that day.”

  “Of course, Terri went to Rome. And it was right around that time,” Cara said.

  “Funny about that too.” Again Maria seemed to want us to drag it out of her.

  “What’s odd about it?” I asked.

  “Like I said, about every other day we’d sit and have tea. We’d talk about a lot of things. But most of all she talked about her art. Never once did she say she was going to Rome. I don’t even recall her saying that she wanted to go to overseas to study. Then, poof, she’s gone. Very odd now that I think about it.”

  I had to admit that she might have been onto something. Could Terri have been attacked? Did she have a boyfriend who was avenging her honor? We stayed for a little longer, but I was anxious to follow up with Terri’s parents.

  Cara called them to make sure that they weren’t at the hospital or scheduled for an appointment. “Larry, Deputy Macklin, has a few follow-up questions he wants to ask you,” I heard Cara say. “Mostly about Terri, actually.” Another pause. “My dad? Sure, I don’t think he’ll mind. I’ll call him.” Pause. “No problem, we’ll be over in a little bit.”

  She disconnected the call and turned to me. “Mrs. Andrews said it’s not a problem. Bill’s having some problems with his wheelchair and she wanted me to ask Dad if he could come over and check it out. I’ll give him a call.”

  “Don’t bother. Let’s just go straight to your dad’s house. We can check on Mauser and take your dad with us. Might help having him as a distraction. He can occupy Bill while we talk to Amy and vice versa.”

  Henry was more than glad for something to do. He grabbed his tool box and followed us out to the van.

  Amy Andrews threw open the door for us when we arrived. “Cara, good to see you again. Henry, I’m Amy, I know we met a couple of times when Bill and I moved in. Bill is in the back room. Would you mind taking a look at his chair?” She pointed Henry toward a bedroom and waved Cara and me toward the kitchen table. “We can sit in here and talk if you like.”

  Cara and I sat at the table and Amy offered us both a drink, which we accepted after she insisted. After bringing us both water, she took a chair across the table from us.

  “Now, what did you want to ask us about?” she asked, smiling pleasantly.

  “When did Terri decide to go to Rome?” I asked, thinking I’d start off with something easy.

  “Well, I don’t know exactly. Art has always been her life. And, of course, Italy is the art capital of the world, right? I think she’s always planned on going to Italy.”

  “I mean this trip specifically.”

  “Oh, months, I’m sure. She told us about it at the last minute, but with the accident it just all worked out that we could stay here.”

  “This was around the middle of October? You were on your way here when the accident occurred, right?”

  “Yes, we were coming to visit Terri. It was the sixteenth of October. I won’t ever forget that date.” Her smile faltered as she thought about the accident that had left her husband crippled. Yet there was something else in her face. Anger.

  I’m slow, but it was coming together in my mind. A cold chill ran down my spine when I realized where this was going.

  “Something happened to Terri?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Why would you say that?” Amy tried to laugh it off, but her eyes were no longer smiling.

  “That’s why you were coming here. She called you and told you that she had been raped, so you and Bill jumped in your car. You were coming to your daughter’s rescue. Hurrying, driving too fast. At night?” I asked, staring straight into Amy’s eyes. Eyes that were now as cold and hard as steel.

  “Aren’t you the smart one? Yes, it was at night. You don’t stop and sleep when you get a call from your daughter telling you that she’s been brutally raped. Three hundred and fifty miles from Montgomery to Gainesville. She called us at ten o’clock. Crying, sobbing. I got her to tell us what had happened. By the time we were on the road, Bill was shaking with fear for Terri’s safety and fury at the animals that did this. I don’t think he could hear or see anything that night except the voice in his head that told him to hurry. To get to her, to protect her and to avenge her.

  “I tried to reason with him and get him to drive carefully. But he was a man possessed. A slick patch. That’s what the highway patrol said. We hit a slick patch. The car spun and hit a tree. Bill’s legs were crushed in the wreckage.” Tears were running down Amy’s cheeks. “He was life-flighted to Shands. Poor Terri, still in pain, had to meet us at the hospital. They saved Bill, but they couldn’t save his legs.”

  Amy raised her left hand to wipe her cheeks, but she kept the right one under the table. “I stood by my husband as he came to terms with the fact that he would be a cripple for the rest of his life. And listened to my daughter recount the horrid, vile attack by those sub-humans that raped and defiled her.”

  “So you killed them.”

  Amy pulled her right hand out from under the table. In it she held a Beretta 92 handgun. “Of course I did,” she said. Her eyes were on me and the gun was steady.

  My hands were on the table, almost touching my full glass of ice water. Without dropping Amy’s gaze, I reached out and tipped the glass over.

  It is almost impossible for a person not to react when a glass is spilled and, sure enough, Amy jumped back. As soon as she moved and I was sure that the gun was not pointing at Cara or me, I shoved the table as hard and fast as I could at Amy, sending her flying backwards. She slammed into the floor with a scream. I limped over to her as quickly as I could and managed to stomp my good foot down on her hand. She released the gun and I bent down to grab it, pointing it at her as she stood.

  “Stop right there.” I could have drawn my own gun on her instead of taking the risk to disarm her, but if she had kept the Beretta I might have had to shoot her. And the truth was, killer though she might have been, I felt sorry for her.

&n
bsp; “Are you all right?” I asked Cara, who looked stunned.

  “Yes.” She checked herself. “Yes, I’m fine.” I saw her look behind me and her eyes got big. A cold hand clutched my heart. I hadn’t thought about Bill and Henry.

  “You can drop your gun now.” I heard Bill’s voice from behind me.

  “Bill, don’t forget he has his own gun too,” Amy said helpfully.

  “Turn around,” Bill told me. I turned slowly to face a rather odd sight. Bill was sitting in his chair with a box on his lap, Henry standing next to him handcuffed to the chair.

  “He has a bomb,” Henry said, his voice shocked.

  I looked closer at the box on Bill’s lap. It was a simple bomb with a thumb-press ignition and four stick fuses.

  “C-4. Amy and I were both in the military. Didn’t know that, did you? That’s ’cause you’re crap at your job. Why the hell wouldn’t you do a full background check on everyone here?” Bill asked, spitting the words out.

  “Okay, I’m a shitty investigator. Fine. Now what?” I asked, figuring a show of strength was better than one of weakness with these two. They were both quickly losing my sympathy vote.

  “First, put down the gun you’re holding, slowly, and then take your gun out of its holster and put it on the ground,” Bill answered.

  “You can’t get out of this,” I said, slowly doing as he said and placing both guns on the floor.

  “Who said I wanted out? Look at me. I’m a broken man.” His voice was forged in anger. A man with nothing left to lose was a dangerous man indeed.

  “What will killing us solve?” My second hostage crisis in two months; you’d think after the first one I would have read up on the subject, but who the hell would have thought it would happen to me again so soon?

  “We’ve fixed most of the problem already. Honestly, I never saw myself surviving. Now my plan is simple. Just blow us up and call it a day.” He tapped the bomb. Poor Henry was trying to stretch as far away from the bomb as he could get.

  “I don’t understand that. Why kill Henry?”

  “Don’t be so stupid! You know why. He let those people move in here without vetting them. I’ve talked to the folks around here. Henry’s the man who decides who can live here and who can’t. Terri trusted this den of hippies. Always telling us how nice everyone was. Who was the guardian of the hen house? Him!”

  He jerked the end of the handcuff attached to the wheelchair and looked at Henry. “You may as well come over here and cuddle up with this bomb. There’s enough C-4 here to level the house and leave a crater ten feet deep. A foot or two isn’t going to help you.”

  “Henry isn’t to blame. He didn’t know that Timberlane was an alias. Timberlane’s real name was David Tyler, but he had a pretty good fake driver’s license. Henry checked him out, but he was checking under an alias, not his real name.”

  “That doesn’t matter. He still heard that Timberlane, whatever his name was, was harassing women and he didn’t kick him out. Not until it was too late,” Bill growled.

  “Amy did the dirty work and you made the phone calls,” I said, trying to keep the conversation going while I thought of a way to get us out of this mess. Turning to Amy, I said, “You tortured Tyler before you killed him.”

  “I liked taking the chair away and putting it back. It got him to talk. And what he went through was nothing compared to what they did to Terri,” she spat back at me.

  “We had to find out who all was involved,” Bill said, adding wickedly, “That’s the chair we used, right over there.” He pointed to a straight-backed Shaker-style chair in the corner. “It was my grandfather’s,” he said proudly.

  Bill was sweating profusely. He didn’t look good at all. If he started to have a heart attack, would he just detonate the bomb? Who the hell knew? But it probably wasn’t worth the chance.

  “You don’t look so good. Maybe Amy could bring you some water.”

  “Maybe you could shut up,” he said, breathing heavily.

  “Bill, he’s right,” Amy said, going to the sink and filling two glasses. On her way to her husband she stopped and looked me in the face before throwing the contents of one of the glasses at me. “That’s for the water trick, asshole.” She was definitely off of my sympathy list now.

  Amy handed Bill the other glass of water and took a towel that was on the arm of the wheelchair and mopped his brow. “You look awful. How do you feel?”

  He smiled up at her. “Love, I’m going to blow the shit out of myself and this asshole. It hardly matters how I’m feeling.” He laughed. “Maybe it’s better if I feel like crap.”

  Amy picked up the guns, putting my Glock on the counter and keeping the Beretta. “You don’t really want to kill anyone else,” I said, though even I didn’t believe it.

  “You’re full of crap. I’m going to send my wife outside and then we’re all going to get ripped into very small pieces.” He indicated the explosive in his lap. “The only one left to explain what happened will be Amy.”

  After everything they’d done, that wasn’t the worst plan. Not great, and it left a lot of loose ends for her to explain, but what else could they do?

  “Is Terri going to believe whatever story Amy makes up? Or is she in on it too?” From the look on Bill’s face I thought I might have pushed him right off the cliff into heart attack valley.

  “Don’t you dare talk about Terri! I’ve put up with enough of your bullshit. Amy, do you think you could explain away a bullet in this asshole? If you do, shoot him.”

  She pointed her gun at me and seemed to think about it. “He’s not worth the bullet,” she said.

  “Where’d you get the C-4 explosive?” I was trying to sound cool, but the truth was I was close to peeing my pants. I’d choose a bullet over a bomb any day. The thought of being blown to smithereens gave me rubber legs. And I really didn’t see a way out of this. I’d done my one parlor trick with the glass of water. I was twenty feet from a very determined suicidal man with a bomb and I had zero chance of getting to him before he had a chance to detonate it. Talking was all I could do, so I talked.

  “I worked in ordinance when I was a captain. One day I was logging in a shipment and realized that there was an undercount. You’d be surprised at how much stuff walks off a military base. I took it just for the hell of it. That was about a year before McVeigh blew up the Morrow Building. After terrorism got to be the watch word, I didn’t know how to get rid of it without getting into trouble. And if I threw it away, there was a chance that it would fall into the hands of a child or a bad person. Joke’s on me, I guess. I’m the bad person.”

  “We can find a way out of this. Just give us a chance.”

  “Bullshit. Amy, get out of here,” Bill said. He watched her leave and didn’t see Henry shift back toward the wheelchair.

  What I saw next helps to explain why other warriors were terrified of the Vikings. Pushed into a corner, they would do things that no sane man would even consider. With Bill momentarily focused on Amy’s exit, Henry reached over and snatched the wires and fuses out of the homemade bomb. He did it so fast that by the time Bill tried to press the button, it wasn’t attached to anything. And if that wasn’t shocking enough, Henry then crammed the wires and fuses into his large mouth and swallowed them. The fuses were about half the length of a pen and smaller in diameter. I know that men have swallowed more and bigger things, but it was still impressive.

  When Bill realized what had happened, he screamed and grabbed at Henry, who pulled away as best he could with his arm still handcuffed to the wheelchair. The chair tipped over, throwing Bill out onto the floor.

  Amy came rushing back into the room, screaming at Henry. In her adrenaline-fueled tunnel vision, she forgot about me. I reached out for her as she passed me. But she realized her mistake just in time, turning away before I could get to her on my bum foot. Then something flew over my head and smashed into Amy’s face. She stumbled back, dropping the gun and falling to the ground. Cara had hurled a cha
ir at Amy. I was impressed.

  I grabbed the Beretta as Cara went over to help her father escape the clutches of Bill, who was tearing at Henry with tooth and nail. Finally she had to just sit on the enraged man while Henry tried to recover and I held the gun on Amy. I pulled out my cell phone and called 911, giving them a CliffsNotes version of what had happened. Then I called Chavez.

  “Playing cowboy,” he joked once he knew we were all okay.

  “I figured that was the only way a case would to get solved down here in gator country,” I answered back, feeling giddy now that everyone was safe.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Hordes of deputies, the bomb squad and crime scene techs showed up and swarmed the house. Henry became an object of fascination, with everyone wanting to see the man that ate a bomb. As he was cut away from the wheelchair and loaded up for a trip to the hospital for X-rays, Henry kept reminding everyone that he’d only eaten the wiring. But it was still impressive.

  “Why’d you eat it?” I asked.

  “That was the only way I knew to be sure that it couldn’t be used. I thought about just ripping it out and throwing it away, but what if he got it again? Or that crazy woman.”

  “If I hadn’t been able to stop Amy, she might have tried to cut you open to get the wires back.”

  With a straight face he said, “That’s why I chewed the wires before I swallowed.”

  I gave him a small salute as the ambulance pulled away. Nope, wouldn’t want to fight Vikings.

  Cara was sitting on the porch steps while techs and deputies came and went around her. I limped over and offered her my hand, pulling her to her feet and into a big hug.

  “Thanks for the chair,” I said.

  “Anytime. Of course, for all you know, I was aiming for your head.”

  “The thought occurred to me.” I got serious. “I hope this hasn’t caused you to consider putting us on hold again.” I knew it wasn’t the right time to bring the subject up, but I couldn’t help myself. After all that had happened, our relationship was still foremost in my mind. I was probably crazy.