by Lauren Carr
“Why did she marry him then?”
“Easy,” she explained. “These lonely pathetic women believe these poor misunderstood brutes claiming to be victimized by the system and the media—It’s you and me against the world, babe! Then when they get behind closed doors, they discover that they’ve climbed into bed with Jack the Ripper. But, it’s too late. Now, they’re trapped. She probably thought having him killed was the only way out.”
Mac agreed. “And then when Maguire calls her out of the blue asking questions about Propst’s case, she panics.”
Archie said, “And owning a security company, she would know how to get up to the penthouse suite.”
“But Bonnie Propst had no way of knowing he was going to be in the penthouse,” he reminded her. “He wasn’t registered in the suite. Not only that, but, according to the security tapes, the killer was in the penthouse while Bonnie was having dinner with Maguire in the restaurant.”
“You’re right,” she said. “But who killed Bonnie and why? Maybe it has nothing to do with Maguire. What do you think?”
“I’m more interested in who killed Dylan Booth. His murder was my case and Maguire had written a note to call me. I assume about Booth.” Patting her knee, he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. Saying that he was going to take a nap in hopes of getting rid of his headache left over from Gnarly’s head butt, he stood up, but she cut him off.
“Don’t forget garbage day is tomorrow.”
Banging his head on the underside, Gnarly scampered out from under the table. He loved escorting Mac in taking the garbage bin from the garage out to the curb. It gave him a chance to check the perimeters and remind Otis who was boss.
Gnarly started barking as soon as he hit the sidewalk. He was barking so hard that he bounced all the way to the stone pillars marking either side of the driveway.
“What’s wrong with you? Otis isn’t out there.” Being the only one who hadn’t seen the fat squirrel, Mac was beginning to think he was the butt of a joke.
After twirling around in search of his master, Gnarly spied him in the garage getting the trash bin. His bark took on an urgent tone when he ran over and jumped up as if to “tag” Mac on the back with his paws, before turning back to lead him to the end of the driveway.
“Okay, I’m coming.” Mac followed him to the end of the driveway to see if he could catch sight of the infamous Otis, who had turned Gnarly’s outings into such crazed adventures.
He wished his sense of smell was as acute as the dog’s.
If it had been, he would have had some sense of the danger Gnarly was trying to warn him about.
As soon as Mac saw the back of the black Ford SUV, his hand flew for the gun he kept in the holster under his shirt. At the same time, he felt the barrel of the red-head’s gun press into his side when she stepped out from where she had hidden behind the stone pillar when she heard Gnarly coming.
“Don’t do it! Don’t even think of doing it.” Pushing him back up the driveway, out of sight of his neighbors with both her gun and body pressed against his back, she reached around from behind him and held out her hand. “Now, using only two fingers, hand it to me slowly.”
Meanwhile, Gnarly was standing beside them sounding the alarm for all to hear. It was like the boy who cried wolf when it came to Gnarly’s barking. Archie and the neighbors were all used to his barking at Otis and every other animal on the Point.
Mac slowly drew his gun out of his belt.
She grabbed it and aimed it at Gnarly, who responded by raising the pitch of his bark a notch. “Tell that damn dog to shut up or I’m going to shoot him.”
“Don’t!” Mac yelped, not pleased with the panic that had crept into his tone at the thought of her shooting his dog. “Gnarly!” he snapped. “Quiet! Listen to me.”
To his surprise, Gnarly stopped barking and sat. Concentrating on the months of sessions they had had with the dog trainer, Mac recalled what she had been drumming into his mind with every session. Gnarly wanted his master to be in control. If they were to get out of this alive, Mac would have to convince the dog that he was in control of the situation.
His tall ears poised for his master’s next command, Gnarly gazed up at him.
“Good,” she hissed into Mac’s ear.
“Gnarly isn’t going to give you any trouble,” he told her while keeping Gnarly’s eyes on him. “Okay, boy, do as I say.” Mac made two hand gestures at the dog.
Gnarly cocked his head at him. He seemed to ponder the wisdom of Mac’s order.
Hoping he was giving him the right command, Mac said, “Go,” before repeating the hand gestures that the dog trainer had taught him.
Without a look back, Gnarly raced up the driveway and around to the back of the house.
“Where’s he going?” she asked when the dog that had previously threatened to tear her apart disappeared out of sight.
“I gave him hand signals to go lie down.”
“You better be telling me the truth and that bitch had better be listening because if he so much as sniffs me, I’ll blow him away.”
Shoving him face first into the side of the garage, she patted him down after holstering her gun into the waistband of her pants. While pressing his gun into his ribs, she ran her hand over his body in search of other weapons that he could use against her. Her moves were thorough and efficient. She didn’t miss a spot. Mac sensed that she wasn’t your average, run-of-the-mill perp.
Finding him clean, she spun him around by his shoulder. “I guess I got you pinned down, Faraday.”
With her face close to his, he could see that it was not so much the years that had aged her, but the mileage. Her eyes were yellowed, grayed out, and glazed—and crazed—from years of chemical abuse. When he had first seen her the night before, he’d thought she was slender and youthful. Up close, he saw that she wasn’t slender, but skinny, with her flesh hanging off her bones.
“Now here is what we’re going to do—”
“Are you going to kill me?” Mac surprised her by interrupting to ask about his fate. “Considering that you’ve already killed Bonnie Propst and shot at Nancy Brenner, I believe it’s most likely that you intend to kill me, whether I cooperate or not. That being the case, I won’t waste either of our time. If you’re going to kill me, kill me now because you’ll be wasting your breath lying to me about how I need to do what you say or you’ll kill me, or do what I say and I won’t kill you. I believe you do intend to kill me no matter what I do.” Patting his chest, he stepped back. “So you might as well shoot me now and go on about your business.”
Her darting eyes and working mouth indicated that his unexpected challenge knocked her off guard. She hadn’t expected such a bold move on his part. It took a full moment for her to regroup. She charged forward with his gun and jabbed him directly below his ribs with it.
“If you don’t do exactly what I want, I’m going to kill everyone in that house, including that crazy dog of yours, in front of you, one by one, before I kill you. If you get me what I want, then I might just let them live.”
Mac wanted to tell her that he doubted it. Instead, he asked, “What do you want from me?”
“We’re going to go into the house. You’re going to introduce me to everyone as Emma Wilkes, a journalist that you’re giving an interview to about your dead wife and her lover. Then, we’re going to go into your study and you’ll close the door. There, you’ll call that stubborn police chief and convince him, I don’t care how, bribe, whatever, to bring you the evidence box with everything he’s got on the Maguire murder.”
Mac scoffed, “He won’t do that.”
She held the gun up to his face and pressed the muzzle up against the bridge of his nose between his eyes. “Convince him. You have a lot of power in this town. Use it. If you don’t, a lot of people you care about are going to die right before your eyes.”
“Okay, you’re the boss.”
He turned around to start up the driveway to the house. The muzz
le of his gun pressed against the small of his back, her breath hot on his neck, she warned him, “Remember, your gun will be aimed at your spine the whole time.”
Taking the steps up to the wraparound porch one at a time, Mac prayed that for once, Gnarly would do as he had ordered him. Ever since he had inherited the German shepherd, the dog was intent on doing everything his way. The trainer claimed it was due to his high intelligence. Gnarly was smart and he knew it. He preferred to come up with his own plans.
If Gnarly had decided to disregard Mac’s order and come up with his own plan, Mac prayed it would work.
When they stepped through the foyer, Archie called to him from the living room. “Hey, Mac, what’s wrong with Gnarly? He went tearing through here like a bat out of hell.”
With her gun in his back, the red-head steered him toward the living room.
Seeing the unexpected guest, Archie looked up from her mini. “Excuse me, I didn’t know we had company.”
The armed visitor called out, “I’m Emma Wilkes, an investigative journalist. Mac was kind—”
“But Emma Wilkes is dead,” Archie blurted out before she had time to rethink her response.
Mac’s scream was drowned out by the wave of emotions and actions that flooded the room like a tidal wave.
Instantly, the intruder drew the gun she’d been holding against the small of Mac’s back and aimed it at Archie, who, realizing the stupidity of what she’d said as soon as the words had come out of her mouth, dove for the floor.
The second before the gun shot went off, the red-head’s arm was taken into a toothy vice that sprang from the closet behind her. Catching her forearm directly below the elbow, like a whale nabbing a seal at the surface of the ocean from down below, Gnarly dragged her down to the floor.
A single bullet killed Archie’s mini-laptop.
Mac joined the German shepherd in the wrestling match when he saw the red-head reach for the gun in her holster under her shirt. The man and woman struggled to get a hold of the weapon while Gnarly shook her arm as if to rip it from her body.
The red-head howled like the wounded animal she was.
Grabbing her free arm, Mac attempted to force her to release her grip on her weapon by pressing her forearm against the upper arm with all his weight while trying to keep her finger off the trigger.
“What was that?” Sabrina ran in from the kitchen. “Roxanne said it was a shot.” She stopped when she saw Gnarly and Mac wrestling on the floor with a woman. They were all covered in blood.
Archie plucked Mac’s gun from the floor where it had been dropped in Gnarly’s attack, while jumping to her feet.
“It was a shot.”
Roxanne told her sister. “See, I know a gunshot when I hear it.”
“You’re dead!” the red-head howled. “I’m going to kill all of you and hack you all into little pieces.”
“What!” Sabrina clutched her breast.
“Call the police, please?” Mac gasped out.
Archie tried to take aim at the intruder while keeping Gnarly and Mac out of the shot.
Sabrina pointed at the woman writhing on the floor. “Don’t you see? She stabbed Stephen with a steak knife and then killed Chris.” She ordered Archie, “Shoot her. Now. She’s a killer.”
“I’m trying to, but I don’t want to hit Gnarly!” Archie called out.
The intruder let out a high-pitched screech when Gnarly’s fangs found and punctured an artery that sprayed blood into Mac’s eyes.
Blinded, Mac clutched at his face, which allowed her to regain her grip on the gun and its trigger.
“Bastard!” Before she could pull the trigger, he grabbed the gun with both hands and plunged it down into her gut with the weight of his full body on top of her.
The gun went off.
Archie screamed.
His tail between his legs, Gnarly jumped back and ran to hide behind Archie.
Sabrina and Roxanne resembled twins with both covering their mouths with their hands.
The room was silent while they waited for someone to say something or move, or to simply do something.
Archie ran over to the two people lying motionless in a pool of blood in the middle of the floor. “Mac!”
Gnarly dug his muzzle into his master’s ear.
Taking a deep breath, Mac rose up to reveal his stomach and chest covered in blood. He clutched the gun in his hand.
The intruder’s stomach and chest were covered in blood around the hole where the gun went off while plunged up and under her ribs.
Both horrified at the sight and relieved that Mac was the survivor, Archie threw her arms around him. Seeming to sense a family hug, Gnarly jumped up onto them, smearing them in the intruder’s blood while licking Mac’s face.
“You didn’t want to shoot Gnarly?” he whispered into her ear. “What about me?”
Suddenly aware of what she had said, she smiled. “I knew you could take care of yourself. I never doubted it for a second.”
Chapter Thirteen
“I can’t believe Gnarly ambushed her,” David marveled at the shepherd, who sat obediently while the crime scene officer took mouth impressions for their investigation. “I’ve never heard of a dog actually ambushing an intruder.”
Mac was meeting with David outside while the officers investigated the scene inside the manor. Meanwhile, two officers were searching the Ford parked on the opposite side of the stone wall. Bogie was gathering information from the police database about Emma Wilkes on his laptop in his cruiser. Archie had already discovered much of the information he was uncovering.
For the second time in a week, Mac’s clothes were confiscated by the forensics team for evidence to confirm his account of how he had come to kill a woman who had taken him hostage outside his home. After changing his clothes, he had met with David outside, where they supervised Gnarly, who was threatening to lose his patience with the forensics officer and bite off his fingers.
Admitting that he was equally impressed, Mac said, “He wanted to take her down when she first got the drop on me, but I knew he’d be dead before getting one bite in if I let him. Luckily, he listened to me when I told him to hunt and then kill.”
“You told him?” David was doubtful.
“Did I tell you that the dog trainer discovered that Gnarly knows sign language?”
David corrected him. “You mean hand commands.”
“I mean sign language,” Mac said. “I didn’t believe it my-self until she showed me. She’ll tell him in sign language to get the banana off a table that has about ten objects on it, and not bring it to her, but to take it into another room and put it on a desk, and he’ll do it.” He muttered, “But let me tell him verbally to do it and he’ll pee on my leg.”
“But when the chips were down and you needed him, he listened,” David said.
“Gnarly is a rebel,” Mac agreed. “He had to get her from the rear or she’d have shot him. I gave him two signs. Hunt and kill. He understood and did what I told him for once. When he took off around the house, I was afraid that he may have misunderstood and thought I was giving him permission to hunt and kill Otis. Archie said he came tearing into the house through the back door and hid in the foyer closet, where he waited for us to come in so he could ambush her.”
“You never can tell what he’s going to do,” David said. “Last week, he was the neighborhood shoplifter. Today, he’s a hero.” Seeing Bogie climb out of his cruiser, he called to him. “Did you get anything that might tell us what this woman wanted from me?”
Bogie shook his head. “The SUV is a rental, rented in the name of Emma Wilkes, whose body was found this morning in the trunk of her car. The Washington police told me that the last time she was seen was Saturday night, which the ME puts as the time she’d been killed. She was last seen in a restaurant in Washington with a woman with curly red hair.” He gestured toward the inside of the house where the intruder with red hair was lying in a pool of blood on Mac’s living room f
loor. “There’s no ID or anything on her. Maybe we’ll get something from her fingerprints.”
“She’s a cop,” Mac stated without doubt. “Or at least she used to be. She was probably suspended for drug use.”
“How can you be so certain?” David wanted to know.
“She patted me down,” Mac said. “She knew what she was doing to be able to overcome and pat down a man who was bigger than her. You don’t just learn that on the streets. She’d had training and experience. At some point, she’d been a cop, which means her fingerprints are in the system.”
Rubbing his forehead as if to physically force everything to make sense, David paced the walkway in front of the house. When he reached the corner, he turned around to see that Mac was still sitting on the porch steps. “You’re sure she said she wanted everything we got on Stephen Maguire?”
“Everything.”
“If she had said the case files, I would think Hamilton Sanders was behind this. No one has seen Hamilton since yesterday, by the way. He’s staying at a motel in McHenry and their housekeeping said that his room wasn’t slept in last night. I think he skipped, which would make sense if he’s behind all this.”
“Great,” Mac muttered with sarcasm. “Most likely, this woman wanted you to bring everything in order to conceal what it was she really wanted. If she wanted a watch, and she said she wanted you to bring a watch, then we would know that the watch was what was significant and could trace it to who was behind it. By saying everything, it leaves us guessing like we’re doing now.”
“Hamilton is after the case files,” David said. “Natasha and the judge want some tape. I say we bring them all in for questioning.”
* * * *
Natasha’s back was to Mac when he stepped up to the back of the love seat in the Inn’s lounge where she and Garrison were having their afternoon cocktails. As he came closer, he saw that she was checking for messages on her cell phone. “Dead people don’t leave messages, Natasha.”
Garrison splashed his drink on the front of his sweater.
Natasha whirled around.