by Lauren Carr
“Have you met Sandy Bennett yet?” David asked Mac during their drive out to Nancy Brenner’s home across the West Virginia state line in Morgantown.
As if he expected Gnarly to know the answer, Mac turned to look at the German shepherd filling the backseat. With the dark patches above his eyes knitted together into a questioning expression, he looked like he was replying that he didn’t know either. The dog resumed peering out at the trees and cows in the hillside pastures along the mountain roads.
“The name sounds familiar,” Mac replied.
“She’s in a few of Robin’s books,” David said. “Robin based her on Nancy Brenner. She had the honor of being one of the first women sworn in as a West Virginia state trooper. Back around when I was born, Dad had met her when one of his cases spilled over the state line. He said she was the best and she was. He introduced her to your mother, who created the character of Sandy Bennett, based on Nancy.”
The reference to Robin’s books jogged Mac’s memory. Sandy Bennett was a police officer that Mickey Forsythe would sometimes work with during his investigations. Her sexy beauty disguised a quick wit and deadly aim with her gun.
David recounted Nancy Brenner’s story. “She retired around the same time Dad passed away. She’s got five grandchildren. The same year Nancy retired, her husband got a doctor to sign off on some disease I’ve never heard of, and will never be able to pronounce, to be put on permanent disability. He sits in front of the television drinking beer all day long.”
“What a life,” Mac said with sarcasm.
“I think Nancy got her PI license and went back to work because she didn’t want to join him.”
Once he had crossed the state line, David took an exit onto a side road that wound through the countryside until he found Nancy Brenner’s doublewide mobile home on a hill-top south of Morgantown.
“There she is.” David climbed out of the cruiser and opened the back door.
Gnarly took off for the nearest tree to mark the property as his.
Nancy Brenner didn’t look like any PI Mac had ever en-countered before. Private eyes he had met during his career were hard-drinking men who wore a lifetime of battling the system on their faces. Others were opportunists who had retired and moved into the high-tech field of security work to sit behind desks and swap war stories with other mid-level management types.
Nancy Brenner didn’t fit either of those profiles.
At first, Mac had expected Nancy Brenner to be inside the home. He thought the woman on her knees in an over-sized men’s work shirt digging in the dirt to plant mums was the retired cop’s mother or aunt. She certainly wasn’t the same woman which Robin Spencer had created into a female crime fighter.
With an order to Gnarly not to dig up the flowers as fast as she was planting them, David stepped across the lawn. “Hey, Aunt Nancy.”
Nancy shaded her eyes with her hand and spade and squinted up at them. “My God!”
After hugging her, David introduced her to Mac. “He’s Robin’s son.” While she shook his hand, she studied his face with an eye that he recognized as being that of a well-trained investigator.
Mac could see why Robin Spencer had been intrigued by the female police officer. Even on the wrong side of middle age, she was very attractive. The lines that had crept up onto her face only enhanced her cheekbones. The silver in her blond hair shone in the autumn sun.
“So you’re Robin’s son?”
Mac replied, “That’s what the DNA tests say.”
“What does your DNA say about your daddy?” She glanced from Mac to David and then back again. The corner of her lips curled into a knowing grin. “Don’t need any DNA samples to know the answer to that. The eyes alone say it all.”
When she finally released her grip on his hand, he turned to David. The eyebrow over David’s left eye rose into an arch. If Nancy Brenner had been born a decade later, she probably could have worked her way up from patrol to investigations.
“Well, what do you two boys want to talk to me about?” She went over to the porch where she had a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of sugar cookies waiting. “I take it you’re here about Stephen Maguire?” She took off her gloves and poured the lemonade into a glass.
Sticking his thumbs into his utility belt, David leaned against the porch rail. “How did you guess?”
“I’m retired, not brain dead.” She looked him over. “I must say that gold badge looks as good on you as it did on your daddy.” She reached out to brush her fingers across it. “You’re every bit as handsome as he was.”
“Thank you for the compliment.”
“How are you adjusting to the rich life?” she asked Mac. “What’s it like going from underpaid cop to big man on the Point?”
This wasn’t the first time that anyone had asked Mac about adjusting from the middle class suburban lifestyle of pinching pennies to having more than he could ever need. Before, he would grin, chuckle, and say, “It’s great.”
That was before someone murdered Christine and Stephen Maguire. While David was in on every clue, Mac had been shut out. With all his financial worries gone and living in the stone manor on Spencer Point, he felt like the pampered pooch with the rhinestone collar cooped up inside the mansion watching the junk yard dogs chasing the cat down the street and so wanting to be one of them.
“Retirement takes some adjusting to,” he said.
“Ever thought of getting a PI license?” Her tone was serious.
“I may do that,” Mac replied.
“Mickey Forsythe, look out.” She laughed before asking them, “What do you want to know about Stephen Maguire?”
“Did he hire you?” David asked.
She scoffed. “You know the drill, Dave. My files are confidential. If it gets out that I’m blabbing, especially to the cops, about one of my clients, then no one will trust me and I’ll be out of business.” She gazed at him with the prettiest expression she could muster while being on the wrong side of fifty. “A girl has to make a living.”
“Maguire is dead,” David reminded her.
“I know that all too well,” she said. “Someone offed him before he paid his bill. Do you really think the Maguire family is going to care about the whining of an old lady?”
Mac grinned. “Suppose I paid his bill?”
That was enough to make Nancy take her eyes off David’s handsome face. “Are you serious?”
“How much?” Mac took his billfold out of his back pocket. “If I pay his bill, that makes me your client. You give us the full report.”
She craned her neck to count the bills he was taking from his wallet. After he extracted them from the billfold, she snatched them from his hand, folded them up, and stuffed them into her bra. “Deal.” She tapped him on the chest while flashing him a smile. “I’ll even give you a receipt.”
“Maguire was seen with a young woman on the day he was killed,” David said. “Do you know who she was?”
“You said young,” Nancy noted. “Did she have copper-colored hair? Very skinny?”
David looked to Mac, who had seen her, to confirm the description, which he did with a single nod of his head.
“She says she’s Maguire’s long-lost daughter,” Nancy answered. “Maguire hired me a couple weeks ago. About twenty years ago, he had a fling with a young woman named Connie Hughes while they were students at Ohio State University. They broke it off and she never told him that he was a daddy-to-be. She was a real independent sort and raised the girl on her own. Then, two weeks ago this girl calls up Maguire, calling him ‘Daddy.’ She says her mommy had passed away eight years ago and she had just found out about him. Real soon after that, she had her hand out asking for money. Since she was going to college here in Morgantown, he called me to check her out. I got the impression that he never parted with cash unless he had to.”
David asked, “What did you find out?”
“The girl’s story checked out up to a point. Yeah, the mom died eight years ago, at
which point Connie Hughes’s daughter, Rebecca, moved to Traverse City, Michigan, to live with her grandparents. She’s currently a student at Michigan Tech.”
Gnarly sat up. His nose pointed up the hill across from them. He growled deep in his throat.
“Easy, Gnarly.” Mac observed, “That’s a long way from Morgantown.”
Nancy agreed. “According to the profile pictures on Rebecca Hughes’s Facebook friend page, the girl that contacted Maguire is really Cameron Jones. They were friends in middle school. Cameron spent all of her time in college majoring in sex, drugs, and hip hop and flunked out real fast. Her parents still don’t know. As soon as they do, they’ll cut her off without a cent. I assume that’s why she decided to look up Maguire and pretend to be his long-lost daughter.”
David asked, “Did you tell Stephen Maguire all this?”
“The day he got killed,” she said. “He told me that he was going to let Cameron Jones hang herself.”
“Shortly after which he ended up dead,” Mac said.
“She didn’t do it,” Nancy said.
David wanted to know, “How can you be so sure?”
“I’m not an amateur,” she said. “No one goes killing my clients before I get paid. I checked into it myself. After the scene with Christine Faraday at the Spencer Inn, Maguire did confront Jones. He’d recorded the whole conversation on his phone. Got her trying to shake him down. Threatening to reveal his illegitimate daughter, which I’m sure wouldn’t have gone down well with his high society family. The whole extortion. He produced the recording and told her that, on account of him being such a nice guy, he was going to let her off easy. If she turned around and walked away and never came back, then he wasn’t going to have her arrested for fraud and attempted extortion. I guess Cameron Jones did have a brain in her head because that’s what she did.”
David said, “We found no recordings among Maguire’s personal effects.”
“He recorded it with his phone. She cried to my source about the whole thing.”
Mac was impressed. “Who’s your source?”
“The bartender at iPooli. It’s a cyber café joint right off WVU campus. Students go in to drink themselves silly while being sucked into virtual worlds and games. Cameron practically lives there twittering on her laptop and snorting coke in the parking lot. That’s where she was from shortly after seven until iPooli closed. She went home with her boyfriend who deals coke out in the club parking lot. If you don’t believe that, check with the Morgantown police. Lover Boy has been a person of interest in the drug scene for quite some time. They’ve been watching him, which means they can alibi Cameron.”
“Sounds to me like she might blame Maguire for ruining this dream she had of him bankrolling her way into the party life,” David said.
Gnarly stood up and barked at the hill.
Petting the dog, Nancy peered up the hill. “What do you see, boy?”
Mac asked her, “Since this place is a hangout for such low-lifes, do you think Cameron may be twisted enough to hire one of her boyfriend’s associates to wreak her revenge on Maguire by killing him?”
“Even if one of these geniuses had the smarts to figure out how to pull off a murder at the Spencer Inn, she had no money to pay for a hit.” She reached around behind her back. “Excuse me. I think you boys had better duck.”
“She was a college girl with a body. What more—” David was saying when Nancy drew a handgun from a holster she’d been wearing under her work shirt and plowed into him with her full body to knock him down to the ground into her freshly planted mums.
A potted mum waiting on the porch railing to be planted exploded.
Gnarly’s bark sounded like a wild animal’s roar in the jungle.
The next shot from the hillside shattered the lemonade pitcher.
Drawing his gun, Mac dove to take cover behind a tree.
“They’re using an automatic rifle up there at the top of the hill,” she called out to Mac. “I saw the sun reflect off the scope. That’s what your dog was barking at.”
While Mac covered them with a round of shots from his gun, David and Nancy rolled together through the flower bed until David was able to reach around her to get his gun out of its holster on his utility belt. They ended up behind the wheel-barrow, which David overturned for them to use for cover.
Gnarly charged down the sidewalk and out into the road.
Mac didn’t need any more information. Gnarly led the way across the road in the direction of the hillside.
Sounding his alarm, Gnarly charged up the steep hill to a roadside park and playground. In the middle of a school day, it was vacant.
By the time Mac caught up to him, Gnarly was sniffing around a bench between two trees that looked out across the valley. The back of the bench provided a brace to rest the rifle in order to take two shots seventy-five yards down the hill to the house with the police cruiser in front of it.
Mac knelt down to examine the ground where Gnarly was sniffing. The two rifle casings in the grass were still hot to the touch.
“Good dog.”
Gnarly didn’t stick around for more praise. The scent was still hot. He took off again toward the parking lot on the other side of the playground.
The black Ford SUV barely missed the dog when it careened around the corner and hit the ditch before swinging out onto the road to make its getaway onto the interstate.
Chapter Eight
“Who does the caddy belong to?” David rolled the police cruiser between the stone pillars and up the circle driveway to Spencer Manor’s front door.
A black Cadillac SUV blocked the entrance to the stone path from the driveway to the wrap-around porch.
There was only one person Mac knew that the Cadillac could belong to. She bought the latest model Cadillacs with the same frequency that Archie upgraded her technological gadgets.
“Christine’s sister.” Mac’s tone alone conveyed everything the police chief needed to know about his ex-in-laws.
David couldn’t hear the rest of his reply over Gnarly’s barking, which erupted when the cruiser passed the oak tree at the corner of the manor’s wrap-around porch. His snarling snout smeared dog drool on the back window in his fervor to get out. When Mac released him from the back of the cruiser, Gnarly charged as if he had forgotten that he couldn’t climb trees.
“What’s gotten into him?” David looked up into the branches to see the source of Gnarly’s fury.
“Otis,” Mac answered while bracing for the scene he suspected was awaiting him inside the manor. “Archie says there’s some giant squirrel that’s been tormenting him.”
David pointed his finger up toward the top of the tree. “That’s the fattest squirrel I’ve ever seen.” When an acorn flew out of the tree to bounce off the top of the cruiser, he yelled, “Hey, did you see that? That piggy squirrel threw an acorn at my cruiser.”
“Gnarly, I’m going to kill you.” Between getting shot at, the shepherd’s barking, and his ex-in-laws waiting inside, Mac was ready for an early cocktail.
“Well, it’s about time,” Sabrina immediately called out from the living room when Mac, David, and Gnarly stepped into the foyer.
He hadn’t seen either of his ex-sisters-in-law since they had accompanied Christine to the courthouse in a show of support when their divorce became final.
After that hearing, Edward Willingham, senior partner of Willingham and Associates, had chased Mac three city blocks before convincing him that he had indeed inherited two hundred seventy million dollars from the birth mother he never knew.
In a black ensemble suitable for mourning, Sabrina Carrington filled the leather wing-backed chair in the corner of the living room. Dripping in ruby jewels, she resembled a queen on her throne holding court, with her surviving sister playing the role of princess in waiting on the sofa across the room.
In a black pantsuit void of any jewels to brighten it up, Roxanne Burton contrasted her sister. She wasn’t only dressed the p
art, she was indeed in mourning. Her eyes were red and swollen. Her face was drawn and pale.
With only eleven months between them, Roxanne and Christine had been more than sisters. They were the best of friends. So close in age and similar in beauty and body type, they had served together as professional cheerleaders for Washington’s football team. Signed by the same agency, they had worked together as models to pay for their college education.
Archie came in from the kitchen bearing a serving tray with tea for them after their long drive from Washington.
“I was beginning to think that you’d deserted your children in their time of need to go off on one of your crazy adventures with one of your friends.” Sabrina directed Archie to leave her English tea on the end table. When unable to decide between the sugar cookie or the tea biscuit, she took both after Archie informed her that they had plenty.
After admiring the exquisite herringbone china cup, Sabrina took a sip of the tea, which prompted a sour expression and a squawk that resembled the honk of a goose. “This is nothing more than hot water. Don’t you know to let tea steep?”
Archie turned around from where she was about to return to the kitchen. “We can let it steep a few more minutes.”
“Do.” Sabrina ordered the tea taken away with a wave of both her hands. “This is totally unacceptable.”
The roll of Archie’s eyes told the two men that the sisters were everything Mac had warned her about. She returned to the kitchen with the rejected tea pot. Having seen enough of the visitors, Gnarly, his tail between his legs, followed at her heels. When Mac heard a door slam in the kitchen, he guessed that she wouldn’t be returning until after their visitors were gone.