A Darcy Sweet Mystery Box Set Seven

by K. J. Emrick

  “Thanks, Sean. Darcy was just suggesting to me that I should bring him in for a little question and answer session.”

  “Well, Chief, she always was a smart woman.”

  “That’s just what I said.”

  Jon let go of the button and sat back smugly in his chair. “Ready to ask our prime suspect some questions? Like, how his dead brother is alive and why they were holding Annie captive downstairs?”

  She gaped at him. “You were already bringing him in? Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because, my beautiful wife. I like it that I can still surprise you.”

  Grace was standing out in the hallway, watching the interview room through the two-way mirror that made a big window on this side. Charlie was in the room, gloves and windbreaker and sour expression, pacing back and forth with his hands clasped behind his back. His expression was dark, and Darcy couldn’t begin to guess at what he was thinking.

  This man was the heart of this mystery. If they were going to understand it, then they needed to make him talk.

  “Hey, sis,” Grace greeted her. “Crazy thing, isn’t it?”

  “Which part?” Darcy asked in turn.

  “Yeah, right? All of it, really. This guy, too. He was just sitting down in the pizza parlor when I found him, reading the newspaper, like nothing was going on.” She flipped a hand through her hair, glaring through the glass at Charlie. “Can you believe this guy?”

  Jon pulled at his chin with a frown. His other hand held the case folder he had carefully arranged for the interview. “I’m not sure what I believe with this one. Did you get ahold of Maxwell?”

  “Yeah, I filled Sergeant Dillon in. He basically said that since we have everything happening right here in our little town that it makes it our case again, but if we really need his help, he’ll be glad to come down and hold our hand.”

  “That’s what he said?” Jon asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  Grace shrugged. “I’m paraphrasing.”

  Well, Darcy thought, at least they knew for certain Maxwell wasn’t involved in this case. Other than being virtually no help to them at all he was just a… a popinjay. Darcy was beginning to like that word. It suited Maxwell perfectly. At least she could cross him off their list of suspects.

  She kept watching Charlie pacing, five steps one way, five steps the other, back and forth. The strands of his long red hair wisped out as he moved, like a cape around his bald spot. There was something about him that bothered Darcy. More so than knowing he had to be involved with keeping Annie in the basement. Something was off here. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  “You got ahold of Aaron, too?” Jon asked before they went in. “He’s okay watching our kids?”

  “Yeah,” Grace laughed, “but he says he’s going to start charging us all a babysitting fee. I told him I’d rub his feet when I got home, but you guys are on your own.”

  Jon cringed. “I’m not rubbing his feet, even if he is my brother-in-law. Maybe I can find my way to host a barbecue for everyone this weekend but that’s as far as I go.”

  Darcy hated leaving Colby and Zane alone all day. She and Colby had made a deal for a trial run, having her watch her brother, but that was before all of this came up. Staying home alone for eight-ish hours was one thing. This was turning into an all-day affair, though, and that wasn’t part of their deal. She had no doubt Colby would have stepped up if asked and probably handled things brilliantly, but even if she was ready to give it a try, Darcy wasn’t.

  She and Jon had both sent text messages to Colby after getting to the station, and Colby had promised once again that everything was good. She was disappointed to hear that Uncle Aaron would be picking them up. She’d argued a little, but finally gave in. She was fully aware that parents could be unreasonable when it came to their kids. Sometimes, Uncle Aaron was going to have to step in.

  Especially if mysteries like this were going to keep finding their way to Misty Hollow.

  “All right,” she said, impatient to begin. “We know what we need to ask him. Let’s do this.”

  “Darcy, wait.”

  Jon’s hand was gentle on her shoulder, stopping her from reaching for the door to the interview room. He pointed through the glass at Charlie, still pacing. “Remember, we can’t get angry in there. We have to be calm, and we have to keep it together if we’re going to get the answers from him that we need.”

  “Why wouldn’t I stay calm?” she asked defensively.

  “Because you just rescued a girl he was helping to keep locked up in a dark basement.”

  “Well, yeah, there’s that…”

  Darcy realized he was right. She was angry at Charlie because he had helped his brother do this to Annie, a woman he claimed to love. She felt like it was a completely rational emotion given the circumstances, but he was right. She had helped him interview enough people in that room to know it never helped to lose your cool. She had once watched Jon interview a man who had tried to kill him, and very nearly succeeded, and even then Jon had kept his act together. It was what separated the good guys from the bad.

  Jon was one of the best ‘good guys’ that she had ever known. In a lot of ways, he had made her want to be a better person.

  Like now.

  “I’m good,” she told him. “I promise. Let’s get this guy. And his brother, too.”

  He smiled at her and kissed her forehead. If she hadn’t been ready to face a potential psychopath before, she certainly was now.

  “You two are cute,” Grace told them.

  “Heh,” Darcy laughed. “That’s exactly what Maxwell Dillon told us.”

  Her sister pulled a face. “I take it back, then. Just go nail this guy already, will you?”

  Inside the interview room Darcy found that the scene had already been set for them with one chair on the far side of the single metal table, for Samuel, and two chairs on this side for Jon and her. The black lens of the camera up on the ceiling watched and recorded everything. The rest of the room was bare. No distractions. No clock to stare at. Nothing to take a suspect’s attention away from the questions they were going to be asked.

  When the door closed, Charlie stopped his pacing.

  “Take a seat,” Jon told him. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  “Look, Chief. I’m supposed to be at work. It’s been hard enough to explain why I took so long delivering those pizzas to your house but now I’m in real danger of losing my job. Can we just agree this was all a misunderstanding and let me go? Hmm?”

  Jon was already sitting down. He motioned across the table, never taking his eyes off Charlie. “Take a seat.”

  Realizing that he wasn’t going anywhere until he did what Jon asked, Charlie folded himself into the single chair on his end, hands tucked into his lap. “All right. So I’m sitting. Now what?”

  “Tell us about Annie Pellegrino.”

  The question sent a spasm across Charlie’s face. He had to know he wasn’t here for no reason. He had to assume that Jon knew more than he was letting on. In his position, Darcy would do the smart thing and just start explaining himself.

  That was too much to ask for.

  “Annie’s my girlfriend,” was the answer, followed by a sharp shrug as he placed his gloved hands in his lap. “We’ve been together for about two years now, ever since she broke up with Samuel after a fight. We moved here together to get away from the city life and maybe settle down but now I’m thinking we would have been better off back in Boston. At least we would have had more privacy there.”

  “So you moved here to give her a better life,” Jon asked. “Is that it?”

  “Exactly, Chief. That’s it exactly. Hard to do when I’m constantly being harassed by the police. Maybe we need to move again.”

  Jon nodded, and put the case folder up on the table. He opened it to the very first page. It was a copy of a photograph that had been taken by one of his officers, showing Annie Pellegrino being wheeled out of the house on Ceda
r Street by the EMTs.

  Charlie stared at the photo, and realization slowly dawned in his eyes.

  “I don’t think she’s going to want to go anywhere with you,” Darcy told him. “We found her, there in that room in the basement where she was chained to the floor. The neighbors hadn’t seen her for a week, they said. You’ve been lying to everyone for at least that long.”

  “I haven’t…” he tried to say.

  Darcy pressed him, not letting him get away with another lie. “We gave you every opportunity to talk to us about Annie. This has been going on for days. What happened? Did she threaten to leave you like she did your brother?”

  Charlie’s eyes were almost popping out of his face now. Sweat beaded on his bald forehead. “No. No, you don’t understand…”

  Despite Jon telling her to keep her cool, Darcy could feel her anger welling up inside of her again. “Then why don’t you make us understand, Charlie. You said you loved this girl.”

  “I did. I do, I mean. I do love Annie. She’s the best thing in my life.”

  “Then how could you do this to her?” Darcy reached across to flip to the next photograph, the one that showed the room with the chain in the floor, illuminated by stand-up lights the state police forensics team had brought in. “You chained her to that floor, you left her there, you weren’t feeding her, she could have died…!”

  She was half out of her chair when Jon felt across, under the table, and took ahold of her hand. He steadied her with his touch. He didn’t tell her not to feel what she was feeling. He didn’t say anything, in fact. He just held her hand and let his own calm ease into her emotions. Darcy took her seat again, and tried to make her face be neutral, even though she could feel the heat in her glare. The anger was there, and it would not be denied.

  Charlie felt it, too, and he had to look away from her. His gaze settled on the photo. “You don’t understand,” he repeated miserably. “There was… I had… I didn’t want to do this.”

  Darcy caught her breath. That was the first part of an admission. A crack in his lies. She let Jon take the lead now, trusting that he would know how to lever that crack open wide.

  “You had to chain Annie up, or you didn’t want to?” he asked Charlie. There was sympathy in that question, an emotion that Darcy certainly wouldn’t have been able to manage for this man. “Did Annie do something wrong? Is that it?”

  “No, no she didn’t,” Charlie moaned. “She was perfect. She is the perfect woman. She would never…”

  “Was she going to hurt herself, maybe? Was that it?”

  “No. No, you don’t understand.”

  “I’m trying to, Charlie. I really am.” There were a few seconds of silence that passed, but Jon didn’t let it stretch too far. “Darcy found Annie Pellegrino chained to the floor in that room. That room, in your house. You said you had to do this. You said you didn’t want to, but you had to. Explain it to me. Help me understand.”

  “I… I didn’t want to…”

  Charlie’s eyes had gone blank. Tears began to fall freely down his pudgy cheeks. There was real pain written there now.

  Jon leaned forward in his seat, flipping another page, and another, photo after photo. “Explain this to me, Charlie. Why would you do this to Annie. Why?”

  The photos transfixed Charlie, held him glued in place to his seat. Then, slowly, his head began to twist side to side. “No. No, not me. You don’t… understand…”

  “Tell me, Charlie.”

  “Not me.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “He made me!” Charlie exploded, as if the pressure had reached a boiling point and now it was forcing the words out of his mouth. “I had to. I didn’t want to, but I had to. He made me do this.”

  Darcy blinked. She was starting to understand the look on Charlie’s face now.

  Jon closed the folder, but Charlie just kept staring at the table as if all of those images were still right there, spread out in his mind’s eye.

  “Tell me,” Jon said, one last time. “Tell me how this happened.”

  Still shaking his head, Charlie spoke in a flat voice, devoid of emotion. “It wasn’t me. He did this. Samuel did this, and he said he would kill me if I said anything.”

  The tears began falling harder, followed by silent sobs that shook his whole body as he hunched over the table, hands in his lap, eyes closed tight.

  “Are you telling me,” Jon said, slowly and deliberately, “that it was your brother who locked Annie in that room? Samuel who was keeping her prisoner? Torturing her?”

  Charlie nodded. It was the best he could manage.

  “You had nothing to do with it?”

  Another shake of his head. No.

  “But you knew it was happening. You didn’t try to help her. You didn’t try to save her.”

  Another shake of his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Samuel said…” His voice trailed off to a complete whisper, and then even lower, and with a hard swallow, he started over again. “Samuel said he would kill me. I believed him. He’s… he’s crazy, Chief. My brother is insane. I can’t… I can’t reason with him. Not anymore. He’s dead inside. Just… dead.”

  Jon flipped the case folder open to a back page of blank paper and pulled a pen from his pocket. He wrote notes for himself as he continued to ask questions. “So the three of you came here from Boston? You, Annie, and your brother Samuel?”

  Charlie shook his head yet again. “No. Honestly, it was just me and Annie. We hadn’t seen anything from Samuel since the breakup with Annie, just like I told you. That missing person report…I didn’t realize Annie made that report. I didn’t know… I didn’t know she was going to do that. I wanted nothing to do with my brother, Chief. Maybe… maybe that’s how he found us. That report. Sure. He must’ve heard someone was asking about him now and then… then he tracked us down here. It’s your fault he found us. It’s your fault!”

  Darcy thought of Maxwell Dillon, digging into the case, looking into the missing person report. He must have done more than Darcy realized. It was possible, she supposed, that word reached Samuel back in Boston when his family and friends started getting phone calls from the state police here. It was possible.

  So why did Darcy feel like something was still missing?

  “I was asking you about that room in your basement,” Jon said, ignoring Charlie’s accusations, keeping the interview on track. “Tell me how that happened. Samuel did that?”

  “Yes. Yes, he did! He’s insane enough to do things like that. He’s mean, Chief, just like our mother was and he thinks Annie belongs just to him. He thinks he owns her, like a… like a possession. That’s why he locked her up down there.”

  He took a shaky breath, and Darcy felt her skin crawl as he continued the story. Just like it had down in the basement where she found Annie.

  “Samuel showed up in our house one night and he started screaming that Annie was his and she wasn’t going to leave him ever again, and then he locked her up downstairs and he… he said he’d kill me if I said anything. I’ve been trying to keep it together and figure out what to do and then you started asking me questions about my brother and I just… I just…”

  He ran out of breath again, and he stopped.

  Jon looked at Darcy, tapping his pen against the page of his handwritten notes. “So,” he asked Charlie. “Is that why you were using her debit card?”

  “What? I don’t… I don’t understand.”

  Jon turned the pages in the folder to a report from Annie’s bank statement. He turned the page around so that it faced Charlie. “You’ve been using her debit card. You had to know that we’d find out, eventually, and come asking you about it.”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s it. I figured someone would notice. I figured someone would come looking. I’m just… I’m just glad it’s over. Is she okay? Can I see her?”

  “She’s in the hospital,” Jon told her. Tap, tap, tap went the pen. “No one is going to get
to see her for a while. For now, Charlie, we’re going to need you to stay here while we look into a few things. Can we get you anything? A glass of water, maybe?”

  Something passed over his face at the mention of Annie being in the hospital, but it was there and gone again and Darcy couldn’t tell what it meant. He slumped against the table, dropping his head down, and crying silently. Darcy and Jon left him sitting there.

  Outside in the hallway Darcy found that they had gained more of an audience. Grace was still there, and now Wilson Barton and Kara Larrabee had joined her. Wilson had been at the hospital trying to interview Annie. Those intense brown eyes of his didn’t miss much, although his goatee kept him from looking too serious. Kara and he were dating, more than casually, but they kept it professional when they were working. She was a patrolwoman, and right now the two of them were only here to watch the show in the interview room.

  “Geez, sis,” Grace said to Darcy. “You really should have become a police officer. You’re better in there than some of our junior officers, that’s for sure.”

  Kara raised a hand and waved. “Uh, hello.” She might be just over five feet tall, but Kara prided herself on doing twice as much work as any two other officers at the department. “I sure hope that crack wasn’t directed at me.”

  “Nope,” Grace promised her. “You’ve got it all over some of our senior detectives, in my opinion.”

  With a smirk she tilted her head at Wilson. He winked back at her, not rising to her bait. He knew his position here at the Misty Hollow PD. He’d be the chief himself, one day, if Grace didn’t take the position first.

  And that was only after Jon decided his time was up.

  Jon gave them a nod. “Wilson, anything from the hospital?”

  “Afraid not, Chief. The hospital is intentionally keeping Annie sedated until they can get her electrolytes stabilized. Standard practice, they said, and since we had Charlie in custody, I didn’t think it was necessary to force the issue and have them wake her up.”

  “No, I agree,” Jon said. “That was the right call.”

  “So what do you think?” Darcy asked him. “I mean, his explanation puts a lot more of the pieces in place but there’s still something that’s not right. I just can’t place it.”