“It sounds personal,” Willingham said.
“Like the killer was in a rage,” Dennis added.
Willingham sighed and shook his head, then looked at Tom. “Anybody in her family coming? Her parents are both dead now. What about her brother?”
“He’s in the Middle East on an official trip. I notified his office so they can get word to him.” Meredith’s brother now held the Senate seat their father had occupied for forty-plus years. “I wouldn’t expect him to show up here, though. I think Lindsay is the only relative who’ll care very much about what happened to them.”
“What a shame,” Willingham said. “You reach anybody in Cam’s family?”
“Nobody knows who they are or where they live. Even Lindsay doesn’t know anything about them.”
“Now that’s just plain sad,” Willingham said.
“Yeah.” Tom had never noticed it bothering Lindsay, though.
“You said two possible causes of death,” Dennis put in.
“Right. They found a bullet wound in the back of her skull. We didn’t see that ourselves because Gretchen Lauter didn’t want to turn her over. She was afraid we couldn’t keep the body intact. Anyway, Meredith was shot at least once.”
“Man,” Brandon said. “Talk about overkill.”
“No exit wound, as far as they can tell with all the damage done to the skull,” Tom said. “The slug could still be in her brain. Cam’s been x-rayed, and the rounds that went into him are lodged in his heart muscle. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a slug from Meredith too and we’ll find out whether the same gun was used on both of them.”
The sheriff grunted. “Seems pretty clear they were both killed by the same person. You think the killer went straight from Cam to Meredith? Or was Meredith killed first?”
“We don’t know when Meredith died,” Tom said, “and her body’s in such bad shape, the autopsy probably won’t tell us whether she died before or after Cam. Brandon and I got to their house a couple hours after Cam was shot, and the fire had been burning for a while, but not for two hours. One possibility is that Cam was killed first, then Meredith, then the fire was started. Another is that Meredith was killed earlier, the killer left, tracked Cam down and shot him, then went back and started the fire to destroy evidence.”
“Going to the house a second time would be a hell of a risk,” Dennis said.
“It wouldn’t be a problem time-wise, though,” Brandon said. “It’s just a twenty-minute drive between the two crime scenes. Ragsdale could’ve done it, easy.”
“Didn’t Scotty offer you any kind of alibi?” Sheriff Willingham asked, his voice muffled as he wiped his nose with his handkerchief.
“No,” Tom said. “And we’ve already checked with his parents. They didn’t see him at all yesterday until he came in the store right before closing.”
“Well,” Willingham said, “I’d hate to find out Scotty did this. His mom and dad are good, solid people, and they’re proud of him for finally straightening himself out.”
Tom let that go without comment. He hoped Willingham would go back home after the meeting and leave the investigation to him. The more involved the sheriff became in a case, the more he tended to micro-manage and try to keep Tom from stepping on toes.
“I don’t see how Ben Hern could have killed both of them,” Brandon said. “Don’t we have people saying he was home all morning up to the time he followed Taylor off his property?”
“Not exactly,” Tom said. “All we know for sure is that he was at home when Rachel and Holly got there and for a few minutes afterward. We don’t know where he was when Cam was shot. I have to talk to his assistant and his mother and find out where he was earlier in the morning. Whether they’ll be honest about it is another question.”
“You got any opinion about—” the sheriff started, but a wracking cough overtook him. The other men waited for him to recover his voice. “Which one’s got the strongest motive? Hern or Scotty?”
“Either of them could have done it,” Tom said. “Scotty might have been frustrated over his relationship with Meredith. We’ve seen that kind of situation turn violent often enough. As for Hern, it sounds like Taylor was threatening him with something. Blackmail’s as strong a motive as you could want. And he’s stonewalling us. He says his lawyer’s coming down from New York, and he won’t answer questions until he has representation.”
“Hell,” Willingham muttered. “All we need is some high-priced lawyer from New York in here running rings around us and the prosecutor.”
“Nobody’s going to run rings around me,” Tom said, annoyed by the suggestion. “If Hern’s guilty, we’ll find the evidence.”
“He’s never been arrested in Virginia,” Dennis said, “but I haven’t heard back about New York yet.”
“What’s happened to his mother?” Sheriff Willingham asked. “Why can’t we locate her?”
“Good question,” Tom said. “Her cell phone sends calls directly to voice mail. Her secretary hasn’t heard from her. Hern says he can’t get in touch with her either. Her car hasn’t been spotted.”
“Oh, lord.” Willingham scrubbed a hand over his face. “Are we looking for a witness or another victim?”
Or the killer? “It doesn’t look good,” Tom said. “Lloyd Wilson claims he saw a dark-colored Jaguar at the Taylor house yesterday morning. If Hern can prove he was somewhere else, we can probably assume the car was his mother’s.”
“Maybe all this about Hern and his mother and Ragsdale is just a coincidence,” Brandon said. “Taylor floated some projects that were supposed to make money and ended up losing it instead. Maybe somebody’s been nursing a grudge for a while and finally decided to act on it.”
“He was trying to get a factory built here a few years ago,” Dennis said, “and he raised some money to promote that, but nothing came of it. I doubt any one person gave him more than a hundred bucks, though.”
“The Hogencamp girl who works for Hern,” Tom said, “her dad had a beef with Taylor, and Rachel said she brought it up when Taylor was at Hern’s house. She accused him of stealing from her family. Remember that fight we had to break up about a year ago? Taylor landed in the hospital with some pretty bad injuries, and Dave Hogencamp had to be treated in the emergency room. Neither of them filed charges, but we gave both of them citations for disturbing the peace. Maybe Dave decided to finish what he started.”
“Aw, now,” the sheriff put in, “Dave’s a good man. He might lose his temper, but he wouldn’t murder two people. He sure wouldn’t do something like that to a woman.” He gestured at the medical examiner’s report that described what her killer had done to Meredith.
“I’m going to question him,” Tom said.
That brought a sigh and a sad shake of the head from the sheriff, but he didn’t object. “Who were Cam and Meredith in touch with recently? Have you got their phone records yet?”
“Just the call log on Cam’s cell phone so far,” Tom said. “Nothing unusual showed up. Most of his calls were to and from Meredith, when she was at home and he was out. Cam talked a couple of days ago to the guy who used to sell ads for the paper. A two-minute conversation. On the morning he was killed, the only person he talked to was Meredith, calling him from home.”
“Could it be two people working together?” Brandon said. “One killed Cam, one killed Meredith and set the fire.”
“I’m not ruling anything out,” Tom said. “If two people are involved, there’s always a chance one of them will slip up and catch our attention.”
“Well,” the sheriff said, rising, “keep me updated. Tom, you going to the bank this morning?”
“Right.” Tom stood. “Lindsay’s meeting me here, then I’ll head over to see whether Meredith kept any secrets hidden in her safe deposit box.”
Chapter Twelve
Tom swung open his office door and stopped in his tracks. Lindsay sat behind his desk, holding a sheet of paper in one hand
and wearing the startled expression of an interrupted burglar.
“What the hell are you doing?” Tom marched across the room and snatched the paper from her.
The trapped look gave way to indignation. “I’m trying to get the information you won’t give me.”
“Lindsay,” he said, making an effort to keep his voice down, “you’re not going to read the file. You’re not going to be part of the investigation. I thought we settled that yesterday.” He scooped up the papers she’d spread over his desk and slid them back into the file jacket.
Lindsay stood and crossed her arms. “You’ve got witnesses. I want to know what they saw and heard. I have a right.”
How much had she read? How long had she been sitting here? “Look,” Tom said, softening his voice, “what you have a right to is justice for your parents. I’ll do my damnedest to give you that. But you have to let me do my job without interference.”
“Rachel saw something, didn’t she?” Lindsay demanded. “Or heard something. I want to know what it was, Tommy. Why won’t you tell me?”
So he’d walked in on her before she had a chance to read Rachel’s statement. Maybe her imagination was worse than the simple truth, but Tom would not let the daughter of the victims plow through what little evidence he had.
“I thought you trusted me,” he said.
“I do! But—”
“If you’re going to interfere, you can forget about going with me to the bank. I’ll get a warrant and have the box drilled. If you can’t let me do my job, I don’t want you there.”
Lindsay sighed and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. When she opened them again, she said, “Okay. All right. You don’t have to go to all that trouble. I’ll open the box for you, and I’ll behave myself. I promise.”
***
Within a few minutes the oblong safe deposit box sat on a table next to the evidence lockbox Tom had brought, and he and Lindsay were left alone in a tiny room next to the bank’s vault.
While Tom pulled on latex gloves, Lindsay stood with her gaze riveted on the box and her hands so tightly clasped that her knuckles went white. Since the day before, Tom realized, shock had set in, and the reality of her parents’ murders had left Lindsay looking disconnected, as if she couldn’t anchor herself in the present.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure.” Her voice wobbled. “I’m just really freaked out by all this. It’s surreal.”
Tom removed two manila envelopes with PHOTOS written on them with black marker, an envelope labeled MARRIAGE/BIRTH CERTIFICATES, and one labeled ESTATE TRUST. “Would this be the trust your grandfather set up when you were born? It was for you, right?”
Lindsay nodded. “I have a copy too. The payments went to Mom while I was growing up, to help take care of me. A whopping one hundred and fifty dollars a month.”
“Are you still getting money from it?”
“Oh, yeah, since I turned eighteen, but I’ve been sending it to Mom for years. She needed it more than I did. I can’t cash out the trust until I’m forty. Dear old granddad was a real control freak.”
“At least he cared enough to try to help.”
Lindsay expelled a short laugh. “Yeah, sure. My grandmother badgered him into setting it up. Then he felt like he’d done his good deed, so he left Mom out of his will completely.”
Tom let the subject drop and moved on. He placed the four envelopes in the lockbox and wrote a description of each item on an evidence log sheet. Returning to the safe deposit box, he picked up a clear plastic CD case. The disc inside had RED MOON written on the label area.
“Any idea what this is?”
“One of my mom’s novels. The manuscript file.”
“There are some more of them in here,” he said. “Four, five, six—there must be nearly a dozen CDs here. Did she write that many books?”
Lindsay nodded and blinked rapidly, fighting back tears. “She kept writing and writing and all she ever got published were stories in the newspaper and a few little articles in a regional magazine. So much wasted effort.”
Tom couldn’t come up with anything to say. He didn’t know what it would take to write a novel, but he knew it wasn’t easy, and writing book after book that no one wanted to publish had to be devastating. He placed the CDs in his evidence box and noted them on the log.
“Do you have to take them?”
“I need to verify what’s on them. I can’t take a chance on missing something relevant to the case.”
She exhaled. “Right.”
At the bottom of the box Tom found several blue velvet cases of different sizes and shapes, the kind jewelry came in. “Do you recognize these?”
“No.” Lindsay’s face had suddenly come alive with curiosity.
Tom picked up the longest of the cases, opened it. He and Lindsay stared at a necklace, a broad gold band set with diamonds. Tom whistled. “Is this real?”
Lindsay leaned into him, her eyes on the necklace. “Oh, yeah, it’s real. It belonged to Mom’s Aunt Julia. But she didn’t leave Mom anything in her will. I thought that was really strange at the time because they were so close. I wonder if…I’ll bet she gave Mom this stuff before she died. She asked Mom to go see her in New York last fall. That was just a few weeks before Aunt Julia died.”
“You didn’t know your mother had the jewelry?”
“No.”
Tom opened the rest of the jewelry boxes one by one. Diamond rings, bracelets, earrings. A fortune in jewelry. “Why was she keeping it all,” he asked, “if she wasn’t going to use any of it? Why stash it here? Do you think she was keeping it for you?”
Lindsay laughed, a humorless gust of breath. “As if I’ll ever have any reason to wear stuff like this. I don’t know why she hung onto it. One thing I’m sure of—Dad didn’t know about it. He would have made her sell it all to save the newspaper.”
“She cared about the paper too,” Tom said. “Seems to me that saving it would have mattered more to her than a lot of jewelry she’d never wear.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Tommy, except…She didn’t care about the paper the way Dad did. I guess she didn’t want to pour any more money into a lost cause. Dad couldn’t face the truth, he couldn’t give up his dream any more than Mom could give up hers, but I’m sure she knew the newspaper couldn’t be saved.” Lindsay drew a deep breath and let it out. “If they’d sold the jewelry, they would have been able to start fresh, do something better with their lives.”
Tom placed all the jewelry in the evidence box. “I’ll keep these under lock and key, and I won’t let it get out that we have them.”
“There’s one more thing.” Lindsay pointed into the safe deposit box.
He pulled out another manila envelope. Brown packaging tape secured the flap. He could feel the shape of a CD case inside. Why wasn’t it lying loose like the other discs? What had made this one different, special, in Meredith’s mind? It couldn’t be yet another unsold book.
Tom placed the envelope in the evidence box. “I’ll wait and open it back at headquarters.”
Chapter Thirteen
Rachel smiled as she listened to Simon in the back seat, solemnly instructing Billy Bob about how to handle a horse, as if the bulldog planned to take up riding. “The most important thing you gotta remember is, you gotta stay cool and show the horse who’s the boss. Horses can smell it if you’re scared of them. Miss Joanna told me that.”
Rachel couldn’t let go of her curiosity about Simon’s reaction to Lindsay, but she didn’t want to spoil his happy mood by asking about it now.
When they pulled into the driveway of Darla and Grady Duncan’s rambling Victorian house, Darla rose from a rocker on the porch and came down the steps to greet them. Tall and thin, with light brown hair, she had none of her grandson’s striking features. Simon got his looks from the Bridger side of his family.
“Hey, you two,” Darla said when Simon and Billy Bo
b tumbled out of the vehicle. From the grass stains and dirt smudges on her khaki slacks, Rachel guessed that Darla had taken advantage of Simon’s absence to get some serious gardening done. “Have fun?”
“Yeah!” Simon ran over to hug her. “And Miss Joanna gave me chocolate cake for lunch.”
“But not until after the soup and sandwich,” Rachel clarified.
Darla laughed. “Simon always goes straight to the most exciting part of the story.”
“Come on.” Simon grabbed Rachel’s hand. “You have to see Mr. Piggles.”
“You run on ahead,” Darla told him. “Rachel will catch up.”
Simon charged up the front steps and into the house, with Billy Bob in hot pursuit. When Simon was out of earshot, Darla said, “I heard a while ago about that Taylor girl staying with Joanna. I never would’ve let Simon go over there if I’d known she was there.”
“Lindsay had to go into town, so he wasn’t around her long,” Rachel said as they walked to the house. “I couldn’t help noticing that Simon doesn’t like her. What’s that about?”
“He can see through her. She’s a nasty little piece of work. I never could understand why Tom took up with her again. Well, that’s behind him now, thank god.” Darla paused. “You know, Tom and I have had our problems, but I’m trying to get past that for Simon’s sake. I’m glad he found you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to him. Don’t you let Lindsay Taylor get her claws into him again.”
“I’ll do everything I can to prevent it.” Rachel smiled, but she wondered what she was up against and whether she could trump the years of intimacy Lindsay had shared with Tom.
Inside the house, she climbed the broad, winding stairs to Simon’s room. Billy Bob was already stretched out on the rug, eyes drooping. Simon was talking to Mr. Piggles, a butterscotch and white guinea pig who resided in an enormous cage on a table along one wall.
Rachel leaned down to look in at Simon’s pet. “Hey, there, Mr. Piggles, how are you today?”
The guinea pig responded by rushing to a corner of the cage and grabbing a tiny plastic bowl in his teeth. Facing Rachel again, he waved the little bowl at her while he squeaked.
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