Under the Dog Star: A Rachel Goddard Mystery #4 (Rachel Goddard Mysteries)

by Parshall, Sandra

  “Come on,” Tom said. “This isn’t safe.”

  “Don’t worry,” Rachel whispered to the dog. She stroked his head, feeling clumps of dirt and tangled hair under her fingers. “You’re going to be fine.”

  The dog’s eyes rolled toward her and it dropped its head.

  When the door to the run was closed and locked, they all stood watching the dog struggle to his feet, stand on shaky legs for a moment, and sink to his belly. “He’ll be back to normal in an hour,” she told Holly. “Then he can have something to eat and drink. Don’t let your grandmother overfeed him though. He can’t—”

  A commotion near the house interrupted her. They all turned to look.

  “Oh, no,” Rachel groaned when she saw three pickups and two SUVs rumbling toward the dog runs. “The vigilantes have arrived.”

  The vehicles came to a stop and a dozen men piled out, most carrying shotguns and rifles. Ethan Hall, without a weapon, took the lead as the men approached. Tom stepped into his path.

  “You got one of them, didn’t you?” Ethan demanded. “Where is it? We ought to shoot it right here and now.”

  “Nobody’s shooting anything,” Tom said.

  “Them dogs are killers!” a man in the group yelled. “We need to get rid of them.”

  Rachel moved forward to face Ethan. “This is an animal sanctuary. No animals are going to be killed here.”

  Ethan shook his head. “Do you think people in this county are going to let you keep a pack of dangerous dogs alive?”

  “You’re all trespassing,” Rachel said. “You have no right to come in here waving guns around.”

  “Ethan,” Tom said, “I thought you’d come to your senses. I want to see you at headquarters in the morning. There are things you need to know. But right now, yeah, you’re trespassing, and you and your friends are going to get off this property.”

  “Who’s going to make us?” someone called from the back of crowd.

  The men pressed forward, forming a wall of angry faces behind Ethan. Rachel took an involuntary step backward, then stopped herself. She didn’t want them to see how much they scared her.

  “Whatever you’re thinking about doing,” Tom said, “you’ll have to go through me first. You lay one hand on a deputy sheriff and you’ll be in jail for the next year. If anybody points a gun at me, I’ll take it as a threat, and I’ll have to shoot him in self-defense.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Ethan spat out.

  Tom returned the taunt with a calm smile.

  Under the cold light of the flood lamps, Tom and Ethan stared at each other. After a silence that seemed endless to Rachel, the crowd of men began backing off. She realized she’d been holding her breath and forced herself to let it out slowly, breathe in slowly.

  “This isn’t over,” Ethan said. “We’re going ahead with our plans. We’ll track down those dogs and kill them all ourselves, if we can’t count on our so-called public servants to do it.”

  “Just keep the law in mind,” Tom said. “You can’t go on private property without permission, and you can’t fire a gun on public land without a permit.”

  Ethan stalked off, pushing past the other men. They all fell into line behind him, heading back to their vehicles.

  When they were driving away, Tom said, “It’s not going to be safe for anybody to stay here tonight.”

  Rachel looked around at Holly and Brandon, Joe and Tom. Holly’s grandmother, inside for the past few minutes, came out onto the back porch of the house twenty feet away with a dog bowl in hand. “But if everyone leaves,” Rachel said, “the dog’s as good as dead.”

  “Well, I’m not goin’ anywhere,” Holly said. “I didn’t start this place so those stupid people could come in here and kill the animals.”

  “I’m not goin’ anywhere either,” her grandmother said.

  “I’ll stay,” Brandon said, placing an arm around Holly’s shoulders. “And I’ll call a couple of my cousins and get them to come out.”

  They all agreed to that plan, but Rachel felt a deep uneasiness as she and Tom drove away into the night. She gazed up at the sky, knowing Sirius was hiding just below the horizon. Was Mrs. Barker right? Even when it was out of sight, did the dog star hold Mason County in its sinister spell?

  Chapter Ten

  Early Friday morning, Soo Jin Hall sat in Tom’s office and read the preliminary autopsy report twice without speaking. Her face, devoid of makeup except for vivid red lipstick, had the same shell-shocked expression he’d seen on many people who’d lost loved ones to violence.

  She placed the report on his desk. “That’s a horrible way for anyone to die.”

  Tom leaned forward, arms folded on the desktop. In front of him lay the small recorder he’d used to play Gordon Hall’s answering machine message for her. “Yes, it is. The medical examiners—Dr. Lauter here, the pathologist in Roanoke—agree that the damage was done by a single dog. I hope you believe that now.”

  Soo Jin nodded. She was unlike any twenty-one-year-old Tom had ever known. Poised, self-contained, she sat with her spine stiff and straight, not touching the back of the chair. Instead of standard young adult gear, she wore black slacks, a white blouse, and a short black jacket with braid along the front edges and sleeves. Stylish, expensive stuff, all of it. A gold clasp held her ink-black hair at the nape of her neck.

  “I’m sure Ethan will believe it too when he sees the evidence,” she said.

  Tom was glad she’d changed her thinking, because he had a feeling this was the member of the Hall family who was most likely to be honest with him. “Why didn’t he come with you? I don’t mean to sound cold about this, but Ethan needs to start thinking straight and stop interfering in police business.”

  “For the moment he’s channeling his grief into anger at the dogs and the police. He’s devastated by his father’s death, but, being a man, he feels compelled to do something about it, and he doesn’t want anyone to see how much he’s hurting.”

  She’d said his father, Tom noted, not our father. “Then how do you know what he’s feeling?”

  Soo Jin stared down at her hands, which rested on top of her purse in her lap. “Last night I couldn’t sleep, and I was up and walking around. I saw someone on the patio, sitting in one of the chairs, bent over. At first I was startled and frightened. I thought it was an intruder. Then I realized it was Ethan.”

  When she paused, Tom prodded, “And?”

  Soo Jin shifted in her seat, the first sign of discomfort she’d shown; “I went out, and I discovered he was crying. He got mad at me, he was embarrassed that I’d seen him like that. Then he broke down and started sobbing and said it was too late, now he’d never get closer to his father.”

  Tom pulled a pen and notebook from a drawer and laid the notebook open on his desk. “They weren’t close, then? I know Ethan had a rebellious streak when he was a teenager, but didn’t they get past that?”

  Bringing her gaze back to Tom, Soo Jin said, “I haven’t been at home often the past year, and it’s been months since I saw the two of them together. But from what I could tell, I think our father finally accepted Ethan’s decision not to become a doctor.”

  Now Gordon Hall was our father. Did she have ambivalent feelings about the man who raised her?

  “The important thing to our parents is that Ethan is successful,” Soo Jin went on. “He’s advancing rapidly in his job. But he felt like he had a lot of lost years to make up for.” She dropped her gaze. “Now that’s never going to happen.”

  A strong sense of regret would explain Ethan’s overwrought state, Tom thought, as well as his determination to lay the blame on the handiest canine culprits. Tom jotted notes on what Soo Jin had told him.

  She fell silent while he wrote. When he looked up at her again, she said, “I hope you’re looking for evidence against the Rasey boy.”

  “You believe he was involved in your father’s death?”

  “I believe it’s possible.”

  To
m leaned back in his chair and studied her for a moment. She returned his gaze coolly. “If Pete Rasey was responsible for your father’s death, do you think Beth would protect him?”

  “Of course she would, because you’d never make her believe he was guilty. She’s absolutely in thrall to that boy.”

  Tom almost smiled. In thrall? That sounded like something Mrs. Barker would say. “How much do you know about Dr. Hall’s confrontation with Pete?”

  “Which confrontation? There were several.”

  Tom raised an eyebrow. “Tell me about them.”

  “I think their worst clash occurred when he caught them together by the river.”

  “They’d gone on a picnic, right?”

  Her lips curled in an unpleasant smile. “They might have had something to eat, but that wasn’t their primary activity that day.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear they were having sex. Their clothes were strewn everywhere, and they were lying on a blanket on the ground. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Mother told me the Rasey boy had given Beth some kind of drug, and she was so high, absolutely incoherent, that she didn’t seem normal again for several days.” Soo Jin shook her head. “The girl was fifteen at the time.”

  “The girl? Is that how you think of your sister?”

  Soo Jin expelled an impatient sigh. “She’s not my sister, Captain Bridger. I’m not related to any of them. We’re part of the same family, but I’ve never felt much kinship with the others. Perhaps if I’d lived at home, attended local schools—But for a long time, I was just someone who visited on holidays and during the summer.”

  “You went to boarding school, right? When did that start?”

  “When I was nine. By then it was obvious that public schools didn’t meet my needs. My parents found a school that would let me move ahead at a faster pace. If I’d stayed in public school, I would still be in college now instead of my second year of medical school.”

  “You were a prodigy.”

  “If you want to put a label on me,” Soo Jin said.

  “But you missed out on family life, bonding with your siblings.”

  She didn’t have a comeback for that. After a moment of silence, Tom said, “The Halls adopted you when you were a baby, didn’t they?”

  “I was a year old.”

  “How did that come about? Were they looking for a child to adopt?”

  Her already stiff posture seemed to freeze solid. “They were donating their services at a clinic in Seoul and also providing medical care at an orphanage.”

  “The one where you were being taken care of?”

  The little derisive smile twisted her lips again. “I was living there. Whether I was being taken care of is another question. I don’t remember it, but I’ve been told about it.”

  “So they adopted you, and you’re the second oldest child. You were a Hall before any of the others, except Ethan. Why don’t you feel like they’re your family?”

  She rose abruptly, clutching her handbag to her side, and for a second Tom thought she was going to walk out. But she moved to the window and stood there with the mellow autumn sun falling across her face. Without looking at Tom, she said, “I’m fond of my mother. We have more in common than you might imagine. Did you know that she grew up in foster homes? That she doesn’t know anyone in her birth family?”

  “No,” Tom said. “I’d never heard that.” Maybe it explained why the Halls adopted three kids.

  “I admired my adoptive father,” Soo Jin went on. “And he was proud of the way I’ve turned out. He never let me forget where I came from and how different my life would be if I hadn’t been adopted.”

  “Jesus. Most kids would have grown up hating him for that.”

  She turned to face Tom. “You don’t understand. He wanted me—he wanted all of us—to appreciate how privileged we are, but he didn’t want us to be lazy and take it for granted that we could have anything we wanted.” She paused. “I admired his work ethic. He ran the hospital efficiently and according to his own standards.”

  Tom thought that was a strange thing for a kid to find admirable in her dad. “My mother worked there. She was the nursing supervisor.”

  Curiosity brought a subtle animation to Soo Jin’s rigid features. “Did she enjoy working for him?”

  Tom’s mother had thought Hall was a son of a bitch. He ignored her question and asked, “What happens to the hospital now?”

  “It’s held in trust. Mother will administer the trust. And my father’s personal will leaves everything to my mother. There’s no huge profit for any of us in our father’s death, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “Good to know,” Tom said. “To get back to Beth, do you think she would protect Pete Rasey, even if he was responsible for her father’s death? Tell me—” He paused. “Do you think Beth is capable of being personally involved?”

  Soo Jin received the question with no show of surprise. With her head tilted and a slight frown between her eyes, she seemed to consider the possibility of Beth’s complicity in the crime. When she snapped her attention back to Tom, she said, “Yes. It’s possible. I believe Pete Rasey could talk her into it. Beth hasn’t always been troublesome—that started when she became involved with Pete. Until then, she was always the good girl, who did what she was told. And she certainly benefited by comparison with David. He’s been such a headache that he made Beth seem angelic.”

  David, the mixed race boy, was also adopted, Tom reminded himself. “What’s his problem?”

  “His problem is his identity.” Soo Jin returned to her chair but sat on the edge of the seat, clutching her purse with both hands, as if she might leap up again at any second. “Our parents adopted David when he was eight. He’s never been under the illusion that he’s their child, in any sense. Marcy was very small when they were adopted, and I’m not sure she remembers their real parents. She doesn’t exactly share her thoughts and feelings. I’ve sometimes wondered if the girl is mildly autistic. It drives our mother to distraction sometimes. Did you know that Marcy was born addicted to meth?”

  “Yeah, I heard that.” Tom’s mother had told him the story of the infant’s harrowing first weeks of life in the hospital as she suffered through full-blown withdrawal. But David was the one on Tom’s mind now. The boy exuded hostility, and Tom had heard talk about him getting into fights at school. A perfectionist like Gordon Hall wouldn’t accept such behavior. And every act of discipline, every critical word, would have increased the boy’s emotional turmoil and sense of isolation in a family where he didn’t belong. Could David have struck out at his adoptive father? Of course. But could he have engineered the kind of death Hall suffered? David claimed to have been inside the house when Hall was killed. Even if that alibi were disproved, as many alibis were in the end, where did the boy get a killer dog that would follow his commands, and where was that dog now?

  Tom tapped his pen on the notebook. “You know, some people would say your parents are saints, adopting three kids, giving them all the advantages. But it doesn’t sound like any of you have been happy in the Hall family.”

  “I didn’t say I’m unhappy. I have a very good life. The Halls are the only parents I’ve ever known, and I’ve always tried to please them. I wanted them to feel I was worth saving from the orphanage.”

  Tom figured he might as well coax as much inside information out of her as he could while she was in the mood to spill family secrets. “What about Dr. Hall and Mrs. Hall? Did they have a good marriage? Do you know if they’ve had any problems in their relationship?”

  She leveled a look at him, her mouth curling in a sour little smile. “The spouse is always the first suspect. Isn’t that the way the police think?”

  “The spouse is also the first person we try to eliminate as a suspect.”

  “Well, Captain, I can tell you that in all the years I’ve lived with them I have never heard them raise their voices to each other.
They were devoted. She adored him, and he would have done anything for her. It’s going to be difficult for her now that he’s gone.”

  “Didn’t they ever disagree when one of the kids needed disciplining?”

  “Oh, no. She left that up to him. Whatever he thought best, she backed him up. He was furious with Beth for seeing Pete Rasey, so she was, too. When he was disappointed in Ethan, so was she. When he forgave Ethan, she did, too. She’s always supported his methods of dealing with David when he acted out. Grounding him, taking away his TV and Internet access and cell phone, that sort of thing.”

  “No physical discipline?” Tom asked.

  “Oh, no. They’ve never believed in striking children. They believed psychological pressures and denial of privileges were more effective.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” Tom asked. “You say you owe everything to the Halls, but you’re not painting a flattering picture of them.”

  “Flattering or unflattering, it’s the truth, and you would have heard it all eventually anyway. I want you to get the investigation over with as quickly as you can. I’m saving you time by providing you with information so you can clear the family members and find the real killer.”

  “Ah. You’re trying to help me clear the family.”

  She met his gaze for a heartbeat, her dark eyes cold and blank. Then she gave him a rueful little smile. “I’m giving you the wrong impression, with all this emphasis on the negative. We didn’t grow up in a hostile environment. We’ve been given every advantage. Now I’ll let you get back to work.”

  Soo Jin rose, gave Tom a briskly businesslike handshake, and walked out.

  Watching her leave, Tom wondered what was really going on behind her mask of cool reserve and disdain. Every advantage, he thought. Yeah, every advantage except love. Children raised without love could look perfect on the outside while harboring demons on the inside. Maybe Soo Jin had come here to reinforce his suspicion of Pete Rasey and make sure he saw Beth as a possible accomplice, while deflecting his attention from herself.