by Mary Kruger
“Where do we go from here?” she asked.
“Wherever it is, we take it slow.”
“Why?” She sat up, pushing her hair out of her face. “We both just admitted there’s something between us.”
“Something that maybe shouldn’t be rushed.”
“I don’t think that’s what we’re doing.”
He drew back. “Ari, how long have you been divorced?”
“A year and a half. Why?”
“Because you do your share of backing off.”
“I do not.”
“After being married to Ted I don’t blame you, but…”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“Ari, there were times when I asked you places and you wouldn’t go.”
“I had Megan,” she said defensively.
“Your mother would be happy to babysit.”
“One of the times you asked she was out to dinner with Chief Mason.”
That stopped them both, and they exchanged smiles. “What do you think’s happening there?”
“I have no idea. She doesn’t talk about it to me. I do know that she’s furious with him right now.”
“Yeah. I was there when she brought your clothes today. The chief’s a bulldog, though. He won’t give up.”
“We’ll see. My mother’s a stubborn Irish girl.”
“Whatever. It’s their problem, not ours.” He gazed at her seriously. “I do like you, Ari.”
She leaned into his hand, which was now cupping her cheek. “I like you, too.”
“I think what we have is too important to be rushed.”
She took a deep breath. He was right. Maybe it was too soon. Maybe they should take this slowly. “Yes,” she agreed.
“Well, then,” he said, and lowered his head again. Just as he was about to kiss her, his pager went off. He glanced at it and sighed. Swearing, Josh got up, running a hand through his tousled hair. “Can I use your phone?”
“Of course,” said Ari whose own hair was tousled. She sat and waited as he took her phone into the kitchen. All she could hear was the murmur of his voice. When he returned, he looked resigned.
“What is it?” she asked, remembering another time when he’d been here and his pager had summoned him to attend to a brutal murder.
He shook his head. “Nothing, just the chief wanting to know where I am.”
She sighed and handed him his jacket. “This always seems to happen to us, doesn’t it?”
“It’s my job.” He shrugged into his jacket. “It’s not usually so crazy. Anyway, I should get going. I have reports to write.”
Ari got up and walked with him to the door. “We always seem to get close during a murder investigation.”
“We’ll change that this time.” He took his jacket from her and put it on. “When this is over, I’ll take you to Roseland.”
“Where?” Ari said, thinking confusedly of a nursery in Acushnet.
“Roseland. The ballroom in Taunton.”
“Is that still open?”
“Last I checked.”
“You’re not seriously going to tell me you ballroom dance?”
“Hey, I do a mean rumba,” he said, holding out his arms as if he were partnering a woman and taking a step, making her laugh. “What can I say? I decided to give it a try. So?” He smiled down at her, his head cocked to the side. “What do you say?”
“Will I have to wear a slinky dress and stilettos?”
“No. At least not the shoes,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.
“Ha. All right. It sounds like fun.”
“Good. Let’s get the investigation behind us, and we’ll make it a date.” He bent to give her a quick kiss that turned out to last a lot longer than either of them expected. “Gotta go,” he said finally, his voice hoarse, and then was gone.
Sighing, Ari closed the door behind him and walked back to the sofa, where she automatically clicked on the television again. On the screen the United States figure-skating champion was just finishing a program that, by the reaction of the audience, had been fantastic.
Ballroom dancing, of all things! What a man, she thought. He cooked, danced, and solved murders. Maybe she could even teach him to knit. Once the investigation was over, that is.
Josh stared with loathing at the report forms on his desk. There were forms to fill out about the initial call to the fairgrounds. There were forms detailing what he had found and what he had done and in what order. There were even forms about Beth Marley and her attempted escape, though he’d had nothing to do with it. Beth, Charlie had told him, was still hanging tough. She had clammed up, just as she had that afternoon. Even worse, her lawyer had finally arrived and was advising her not to talk. Josh glared at the forms. Damn Beth Marley. Damn everything that had happened today.
The phone rang and Paul Bouchard, at his desk across from Josh, picked it up. Immersed in his typing, Josh paid little attention until a certain urgency in Paul’s voice made him look up. “She hasn’t?” Paul said. “Could she have gone out on an errand?” He listened for a moment and then reached for a pad. “Okay, we’ll get on it,” he said, and hung up. “That was Rosalia Sylvia’s husband. He says she never came home.”
“Is he certain?”
“He says he is.”
“How come he’s just figuring this out now?”
“He works the three-to-eleven at the hospital.”
“So he just got home. I wonder—” Josh began, and at that moment his pager went off again. He reached for his phone, his face going rigid as he listened. “I’ll be right there,” he said, and banged the receiver down, rising and reaching for his jacket. “We’ve got another one.”
“Another murder?” Paul asked, getting up as well.
“Yeah. At the fairgrounds.”
“Oh God. Don’t tell me—”
“Yeah. Rosalia Sylvia.”
The fairgrounds were dark as Josh drove in, much too fast, so that his car skidded on the still muddy ground. Bright light spilled out of Barn B, and he approached it grimly. The death of an outsider was a tragedy, but the death of a local resident felt personal. Dimly Josh noted the change in his attitude. Now that he belonged to this town, he wanted to protect the people living there. He strode into the barn.
The floodlights that had been placed in one corner of the barn illuminated a surrealistic scene, but they didn’t penetrate everywhere, leaving ominous-looking patches of shadow at the corners of the barn. The strobe lights of police cameras, and the flash of blue and red lights from cruisers parked outside only added to the unreality of the scene.
“Josh.” Charlie turned as Josh came near. “Over here.”
“What’ve we got?” he asked as he joined Charlie, though he already knew.
“The victim’s in there,” Charlie said, indicating the farthest bin from the door.
“In the fleece bin?”
“Yeah, of all places.”
“Her husband called the station looking for her just before you paged me.”
“We’re pretty certain it’s her. There’s a tote bag on the floor, on the other side of the bin, with everything spilled out. I took a look at the wallet, but we’re not touching anything else until Briggs gets here. Where were you before, by the way?”
“I was at Ari’s.”
Charlie’s eyes widened, but if he knew more than Josh was saying, he didn’t let on. “Good, because you won’t be getting another break for a while.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Can’t say for certain yet, but it looks like she was smothered.”
“In the fleece?” Josh looked at the bins in disbelief. Of all the screwy ways to kill someone. “Are we thinking it’s the same person?”
“Has to be. How many murderers could be running around this place?”
“Plus the only people left besides police were the suspects. Christ.” Josh rubbed his hands tiredly over his face, feeling nostalgic again for Boston. At least there he’d known w
here he stood. “How could this have happened?” he said, more to himself than to Charlie. At the very end of the afternoon, people had been bustling about, packing up tables and spinning wheels and their wares, and bringing them to their cars. The confusion wouldn’t have been enough to cover this, though. “Didn’t anyone here realize Rosalia hadn’t gone home?”
“Not right away.” Charlie gestured toward the door. “Take a look outside. Her car’s not there.”
“Any idea where it is?”
“Around back.”
“So someone drove it there?”
“Yeah.”
Josh blew out his breath in a silent whistle. Someone’s head was going to roll for this. “And no one noticed Rosalia didn’t make it home?” he asked.
Charlie shook his head. “The patrol car driving by her home thought she’d parked in the garage and there were lights on inside the house.”
“She might have had them on a timer,” Josh pointed out. “We’ll have to ask her husband about that.”
Josh moved a little closer to the bin, though with the crime-scene technicians there, vacuuming the floor and dusting for prints, he had to keep a distance. The vacuuming probably wouldn’t do much good. In a place like this fibers were everywhere, both loose and embedded in the dirt floor. He didn’t envy the lab its job. “Who found her?”
“One of the state troopers,” Charlie said. “He was checking up in here and he heard a cell phone ringing. He traced it to the source and found the body.”
Josh added carelessness to their killer’s profile, or perhaps haste. There probably hadn’t been time to search the body for a phone. “Where’s everyone now?”
“Still at the Welcome Inn, and Winston Barr’s at the Edgewater B and B.”
Josh studied the bins. They were low enough for people to examine the fleeces, but also high enough to make putting something heavy into them difficult. “She might not have been alive when she went in. Or conscious.”
“I thought of that. She would have struggled otherwise.”
“Yeah, and screamed. Jeez.” Again he rubbed his hand over his face. “You know, we might just have caught a break.”
“How so?”
“Now we can hold the out-of-towners for another twenty-four hours.”
A smile spread over Charlie’s face. “Yeah. We can. Chances are good at least one of them’s involved in this. We should be able to get fiber evidence, too, if we narrow it down to one person. She’s bound to have wool on her.”
“Huh. Everyone here will have wool fibers.”
“True, but we may be able to link them to those fleeces in particular.”
Charlie nodded. “It’s a thought. But we’d better get a suspect first, so we can get a search warrant. As it is, we don’t have probable cause.”
Josh nodded, his mind returning to the problem of how the killer had managed to kill Rosalia and still get away. Apart from the participants, the fairgrounds had been filled with police at the end of the day. “Chief, do you know if there was a list—”
“That’s probably Briggs,” Charlie said at the same time, at the sound of an engine stopping just outside the door. “Got the DA coming back, too. What was that you were going to say?”
“It’ll keep,” Josh said as Captain Briggs walked in. He looked a little more disheveled than he had this morning; his hair was a little tousled, and his coat, a Burberry this time, was unbuttoned. Still, he radiated the same air of cool efficiency and command.
“Different method this time,” Briggs said without preamble.
Charlie nodded. “Yeah. Still knitting related, though.”
“Our killer uses whatever’s at hand,” Josh said.
“The question is, why?” Briggs’s hand was on his chin.
Charlie shook his head. “Don’t know. We don’t know the connection yet. Rosalia Sylvia’s a local girl. She didn’t have anything to do with the out-of-towners.”
“But did they have something to do with her?” Josh asked.
“What do you mean?” Briggs said, looking at him.
“Maybe Rosalia saw something she shouldn’t have.”
“Such as?”
Josh shrugged. “A certain knitting needle, say. Or maybe she saw the killer coming into the barn at the wrong time, and mentioned it. We should go over the notes from her interview, just in case.”
Briggs moved toward the bins. “Have you touched the body?”
“Not yet,” said Charlie. “The only thing we looked at was her wallet. Crime-scene techs should be done any minute.”
“Medical examiner coming?”
“Yeah, but he won’t be here for a while, since he’s coming down from Boston.”
Briggs nodded. The technicians were finishing up. One of them signaled to Briggs. He went to talk to the technician, and then came back. “They’re done, but they need the fleeces taken out and put on that tarp,” he said. “We’ll need them for fiber evidence.”
“Okay, so let’s see what we’ve got,” Charlie said, gesturing toward the fleece. “Josh?”
Josh sighed inwardly. Since he had the lowest rank here, he was bound to get the more unpleasant jobs. Face set, he reached down and began pulling out fleeces. “These are heavy,” he noted, carefully placing each fleece on the plastic sheets. “How the hell did the killer manage to move all this?”
“Any thoughts?” Briggs asked.
“Yeah. Find out when each suspect left the barn, for a start. Jeez.” He had lifted out the last fleece, and was now looking at the body. Rosalia’s face had a waxy look to it, and blood was pooled in the cheek that had rested on the fleece. Death had left its mark, yet she looked oddly peaceful. Whatever had happened, she hadn’t known she was dying.
“No way to know if she struggled,” Briggs said, leaning in to look. “Fingernails aren’t broken, though.”
“We’ll know more after the autopsy.”
“Where are all the wool nuts?” Briggs asked.
“Who?” Josh exclaimed involuntarily.
“The people from the festival.”
“All in their rooms,” said Josh.
“Even Beth Marley,” Charlie put in with a grin.
“Hm.” Briggs rubbed his chin again. He didn’t have to say what they were all thinking—that Beth was in for more intense questioning, if her lawyer would ever let her talk. “We need to know who was here, and when. Where’s the record of when people left this afternoon?”
“Did someone keep one?” Josh asked. It was the very thing he had been thinking.
“Yeah. I had one of my troopers keep a list,” Briggs said. He spoke briefly into his walkie-talkie, and a few moments later a trooper handed him a clipboard. “Let’s see.” Briggs’s blunt-tipped finger traced down the paper. “Annie Walker left first, followed by Diane Camacho, and then”—he squinted at the paper, trying to make the writing out—“Marley. Your friend Ariadne was after her. Hm.”
“What is it?” Charlie asked, as Briggs abruptly went still.
“Take a look.” Briggs handed him the clipboard. “The last one to leave, at five twenty-three.”
Josh looked over Charlie’s shoulder, and then made a silent whistle. According to the log, the last person who’d left the fairgrounds was Rosalia.
Chapter 13
“She left?” Josh exclaimed. “How could she have?”
“Unless she came back,” Briggs said.
“How? We secured the entrances, front and back,” Charlie said.
“We’ll have to look into that.” Briggs stared into space. “Is there another entrance to this place?”
“Not that I know of,” Josh said, just as Charlie swore.
“Not an entrance exactly,” Charlie said. “There’s an old dirt road around the curve on King’s Road in Acushnet. There’s a connector from here to there. It comes in at the back of the barns.”
“Why?”
“To bring animals in, back in the days when there were big agricultural fairs here.”
“Locals.”
“That narrows it down.”
“I don’t know,” Josh said. “Does it?”
“How could someone from out of town have known about it?” Briggs demanded. “Are those fleeces in that bin Rosalia’s, by the way?”
“No, she was here as a customer. Those are Nancy’s, remember? She asked if she could leave them here.”
“Is this back road marked?” Briggs asked.
Charlie shook his head. “It’s just a local lane, Pine Lane. The connector to the fairgrounds isn’t used anymore. It’s probably overgrown.”
“It might not be too bad this time of year,” Josh pointed out. “Nothing’s had a chance to grow yet, but the ground is soft. We should find tire prints.”
“There might be fingerprints in Rosalia’s car, too,” Charlie said.
Briggs nodded. “All right. We’ll get forensics on it. We need to talk to Nancy—what is her last name?”
“Moniz, and I don’t think she had anything to do with this.”
Briggs looked up. “She’s the one who was in her van using her phone.”
“Yes.”
“Which she can’t prove.”
“Bill, what reason would she have?”
“We have to at least rule her out,” Briggs said, though they’d found no real reason to suspect her.
“Chief,” Josh said quietly. “Do we know if there are any brochures for the fair around?”
“Maybe. The manager probably has some. Why?”
Josh reached for the paper on the bottom of the pile. “This is an application from a vendor,” he said, handing it to Charlie. “Look. It’s been cut off from something.”
Charlie examined the ragged edge and then looked up, his face quizzical. “So?”
“So isn’t it possible that the brochure had a map?”
“Damn, I bet it did.” He turned toward one of the troopers, but Briggs was already on his walkie-talkie.
“We’ll have one in a minute,” he said. “How long has this Nancy Moniz lived here?”
“All her life.” Charlie didn’t sound happy. It was easier to take the murders with the belief that an outsider committed them.
“Then she’d know about the road?”