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

by Parshall, Sandra

  The manager, Russ Tandler, sidled up to Tom and whispered, “Is something wrong? What are you doing here? You’re not shopping.”

  “Just waiting to talk to Mrs. James,” Tom said. “Routine stuff, nothing to get excited about.”

  Tandler, a small man around forty with scalp already showing through thin brown hair, squinted as if he detected something a lot more sinister than Tom was revealing. “Is she in some kind of trouble?”

  His voice was too loud and attracted the attention of customers in the express lane. An elderly woman with blue-tinted hair stared with frank curiosity. Phoebe James still hadn’t noticed Tom’s presence.

  “No, she’s not in trouble, Russ,” Tom said. “Take it easy. When she finishes this order, will you give her a break for a few minutes so I can talk to her? Then I’ll get out of your way.”

  Muttering under his breath, Tandler cut through an unused checkout lane to reach Phoebe James. He leaned close and whispered to her.

  Only then did she shift her gaze, searching for Tom. When she made eye contact, he raised a hand in greeting. She responded with a frown that deepened the crease between her brows.

  After she handed the customer her receipt, Phoebe approached Tom with a puzzled look. “What is this—No, wait,” she said. “Don’t tell me until we’re out of earshot. Russ said we can talk in his office, but I’d rather not.”

  She led Tom to the rear of the store and through a swinging door into the warehouse. They passed three male employees cutting open cartons of canned goods and emerged onto the loading dock. A delivery man was hauling boxes of vegetables from a refrigerated truck.

  “This way,” Phoebe said over her shoulder to Tom.

  She descended a set of wooden steps from the dock to the concrete-paved loading area. The steps wobbled under Tom’s weight. When they reached a bench pushed against a dilapidated fence on the opposite side of the pavement, Phoebe seemed satisfied that they had put enough distance between them and her boss.

  Tom motioned for Phoebe to sit on the bench, but she crossed her arms and remained standing.

  “What’s this about?” she asked. “Something to do with Dr. Hall getting killed? I don’t know anything about that, Tommy. I haven’t got a blessed thing to tell you.”

  “I’m just trying to get a handle on what Hall’s life was like, who liked him, who had a grudge—”

  “A grudge?” Her lips curved in a bitter smile. “You mean like somebody he fired who might have wanted to kill him over it?”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything.” Along with her appearance, her personality seemed to have changed. Tom’s mother had enjoyed Phoebe’s sense of humor and upbeat outlook.” If you haven’t done anything, you don’t have any reason not to talk to me.”

  To his surprise, her chin began to tremble and tears filled her eyes. Covering her face with her hands, she blurted, “But I thought about it! I was mad enough to kill him, and—oh, god forgive me, when I heard he was dead I was glad.”

  “Come on, sit down.” Tom gently steered her to the bench.

  She dropped onto it and leaned forward, arms wrapping her waist, as she wept. “The way he died, it was so awful,” she gasped between sobs. “I never thought I could be glad about something so awful.”

  Tom sat beside her. The delivery guy paused on the loading dock, a box marked BROCCOLI in his hands, to stare across at them. Tom gave him a look that told him to mind his own business, and he went back to work.

  “I don’t think you’re the only one who’s glad Gordon Hall’s gone,” Tom told Phoebe. “A lot of people despised him.”

  Raising her head, she tugged a wad of tissues from a pocket of her smock and blotted her face. A fleck of tissue caught on her lip and she picked it off with a fingertip. “My husband’s been cut back to half-time at the lumber mill, and I don’t make enough here to keep a dog alive.” Her voice broke on a sob. “We might lose our house, Tom. Our home.”

  “God, I’m sorry to hear that.” He laid a hand on her shoulder, feeling the ridiculous inadequacy of the gesture. “But maybe now you can get your nursing job back.”

  She sniffled and looked at him. “You think so? You don’t think she would stand in the way?”

  “Who? Mrs. Hall?”

  “Well, she owns the hospital now, doesn’t she?”

  “Have you had problems with Mrs. Hall?” Tom expected Tandler to interrupt any minute and tell Phoebe to get back to work. He hoped she would pull herself together enough to give him some answers before that happened. “Is there any reason she wouldn’t want you back at the hospital?”

  “She’d never go against him. He fired me, and I don’t think she’d give me back my job, not even with him dead.”

  “He let you go because you gave extra pain medication to Naomi Green, is that right?”

  A fresh spate of tears poured from her eyes. “Oh, that poor woman. She was in agony. I couldn’t stand by without doing a thing to help her. She was dying. It was crazy not to give her some relief.”

  “What was Hall’s objection to giving dying patients painkillers?”

  “He enjoyed seeing people suffer.” Her tear-streaked face twisted in a scowl. “I’m convinced of it.”

  “Do you think Wally Green hated him enough to kill him?”

  She pulled in a breath and squeezed her eyes shut as if trying to calm herself. “He wouldn’t have done it, because he has children to think of. He wouldn’t take a chance on being sent to prison and leaving them without either of their parents.” She flicked a glance at Tom. “He talked about doing it, though.”

  “Oh?” This was more than Tom had hoped for, and the prospect of more revelations stirred up a buzz of excitement in his blood. “What did he say, exactly?”

  “I don’t want to get him in trouble.” Phoebe’s knee jiggled as she tapped her foot, but she seemed to realize what she doing and stopped the nervous movement abruptly. “Wally was just blowing off steam. That’s all it was, Tom.”

  “Okay, I believe you. But I need to know what he said.”

  She looked so miserable that Tom wished he could let it go. But he couldn’t.

  “Wally almost went out of his mind watching her suffer,” she said. A loud thunk from inside the vegetable delivery truck made her flinch. “She wasn’t even Dr. Hall’s patient, but he controlled how much narcotic medication patients received. Other doctors couldn’t do anything about it if they wanted to keep their hospital privileges.”

  Another group of people who probably detested Hall, Tom thought. “How did you happen to be talking to Wally about it?”

  “He begged me to help her, to give her something for the pain. He told me he wanted to kill Dr. Hall, but of course I just put it down to the stress he was under. The next time she was due for morphine, I gave her a larger dose, and she was able to sleep comfortably for the first time in weeks.”

  “How did Hall find out about it?”

  “I had to put it on her chart. I couldn’t give a narcotic and not account for it. So I knew he’d find out sooner or later. It turned out to be sooner. He stopped by Naomi’s room that very night and saw how well she was resting, and he read her chart and started asking questions. I asked him to lift the restrictions and allow her own doctor to help her die in peace. I told him it was the decent thing to do. He fired me on the spot.”

  “So Wally told you before his wife died that he felt like killing Hall? Did he say anything after she died?”

  Phoebe hesitated again. A cool breeze swept through the loading area, lifting a discarded chocolate bar wrapper and blowing it against her left foot. She kicked it away with the toe of her nurse’s shoe.

  “Tell me about it, Phoebe,” Tom said quietly.

  She threw up her hands. “All right, all right. I’ve gone this far, I might as well. Wally was completely crushed when Naomi died. He came to see me and said he was sorry I’d lost my job for trying to help her. He sat in my living room and cried his heart out for an hour. He said he wish
ed he could torture Gordon Hall, make him die slowly and painfully the way Naomi did. But he was just venting. By the time he left he was saying that all he really wanted was an acknowledgment from Dr. Hall that he’d allowed her to suffer unnecessarily.”

  But that acknowledgment had never come. Green could have worked himself into a rage again and taken revenge on his wife’s tormentor. “Phoebe,” Tom said, “if you—”

  “You planning to come back to work?” Russ Tandler yelled from the loading dock. “I need you on the register right now.”

  Phoebe jumped up. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  But she was gone, hustling into the store, leaving him with a lot of unanswered questions.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tom leaned in to examine the autopsy photos Dr. Gretchen Lauter pinned on the bulletin board in the conference room. Brandon and Dennis Murray crowded in beside him to take a look. With the blood washed away, the ragged hole where Gordon Hall’s throat had been was unmistakably the work of an animal. In one photo, Hall’s spinal cord showed through the opening.

  “Oh, man,” Brandon said, a hand over his mouth. He stepped back from the stark display.

  “You okay?” Tom asked. “You can leave if you—”

  “No. No, sir.” Brandon squared his shoulders and drew a deep breath. But he didn’t look at the photos again.

  Tom didn’t have to worry about Dennis, who seemed as inured to violent scenes as Tom was, even though he lacked Tom’s advantage of having worked murder cases in Richmond. His face impassive, Dennis pored over the pictures of Hall.

  As Tom studied the photos, his mind filled with images of a black dog knocking Hall to the ground, sinking its teeth into his throat, gouging out flesh and esophagus, severing arteries. Arterial spray coated the grass as far away as twenty feet. Crime scene techs had found Hall’s thyroid gland near the body, but not so much as a shred of skin and muscle. Tom assumed the dog had swallowed all of it.

  He asked Gretchen, “Do you still believe that only one dog attacked him?”

  “I’m positive.” An expression of mingled pity and sorrow flickered over her face, but she went on in a brisk, impersonal tone. “We might find out more about the breed when the DNA results come back, but that’s going to take a while.”

  “We already know it’s big, with rough black hair, and somebody trained it to be damned vicious. Dogs don’t get that way on their own.” Tom turned from the pictures and pulled out a chair at the conference table. The others followed. Tom and Gretchen sat side by side, with Dennis and Brandon facing them across the table.

  “Have you found any connection between the attack on Gordon and dogfighting?” Gretchen asked. “Aside from what was done to his dog?”

  “No.” Tom rubbed his tired eyes. He’d give anything to go home to Rachel, have a real dinner, and fall into bed. But he would eat fast food, Rachel would be out most of the evening chasing dogs, and he had at least one more stop to make before he could quit for the day. “We don’t have much of anything yet. Dennis and a couple of the other guys have been checking up on people who’ve been involved in dogfighting before, but nothing useful’s turned up.”

  “Three of them are in jail for other stuff,” Dennis told Dr. Lauter, “and the rest have pretty strong alibis for the night Hall was killed.”

  Tom shuffled the papers in front of him and pulled out a report. “The tape I took off Hall’s dog had a couple of fingerprints on it, but they don’t match anything in our local database. Whoever put the tape on Thor has never been printed in Mason County for any reason, and that rules out most of the locals who’ve been involved in dogfighting. We sent the prints to the state to see if they turn up anything.”

  “How’d you track down the dogfighting operations before?” Brandon asked. He’d only been a deputy for a couple of years and had never been involved in a raid.

  “Tips,” Tom said. “People coming to us with information. And that’s probably what we’ll have to rely on this time. Somebody will come forward, or we’ll get something through our informant. Meanwhile, we’ll keep poking around and try to find out where it’s going on.”

  “Well, if Gordon’s death is connected to dogfighting,” Dr. Lauter said, “wouldn’t that rule out family members? And people from work who had a grudge against him?”

  Tom shook his head. “We can’t make that kind of assumption. Like I said, we don’t know enough yet. For now, everybody in the family is a suspect, along with everybody who had a grievance with him.”

  “Not Mrs. Hall, though,” Brandon protested, leaning forward on his elbows. “You don’t think she could have set it up, do you?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely, but we could be surprised before it’s over. We’ve already verified where everybody in the family was at the time of the murder, but that’s no proof of innocence. We need to keep looking at the whole family. Beth and her boyfriend, Pete Rasey—that’s a classic setup for trouble. A girl from a rich family gets involved with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, the dad comes down hard on them, orders them to stay away from each other. The kids lash out and the dad ends up dead. And there’s something going on with David, the younger boy. I want to find out what it is.”

  “The Halls give a whole new meaning to the term dysfunctional family,” Dennis said. He pushed his glasses firmly against the bridge of his nose. “They’re quite a crew. Real interesting history.”

  “Gordon came from a family of prominent physicians,” Gretchen said.

  “Yeah,” Dennis said, “and he inherited a lot of money, so he could afford to go off and do charity work in Korea after med school. I guess he didn’t have any loans to pay off.”

  “Ethan was born in Korea, wasn’t he?”

  “Yep,” Dennis said, “and they adopted Soo Jin out of an orphanage before they came back to the States. Dr. Hall had a private practice in Boston until his mother died and left him even more of the family money, then he looked around for a hospital to buy. He had his own ideas about how a hospital ought to be run, and he wanted to be the one in charge. That’s how they ended up here. Everybody I’ve talked to says the same thing—Dr. and Mrs. Hall had a real close marriage, devoted to each other, but he was strict with the kids. Not abusive, nobody’ll say that. Just strict. Always expected a lot from them.”

  “Even if someone in the family wanted to kill him,” Gretchen said, “why would they choose this method? Setting up a dog attack? It seems so convoluted. Wouldn’t shooting or stabbing make more sense? That’s the normal pattern with family murders.”

  “Good questions,” Tom said. “And we don’t have any answers. Here’s the situation the way I see it. Hall was killed by a dog. From what I heard on the answering machine tape, somebody was with that dog and didn’t try to stop the attack. It sounded like it was somebody Hall knew. Hall’s dog disappeared and later turned up with his muzzle taped and rope around his neck and one of his back legs. He didn’t run off after Hall was attacked, he was taken and held somewhere.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean dogfighters took him,” Gretchen said.

  “No, it doesn’t. But I’ve seen it before—dogs muzzled so they can’t bite, and tied up and hobbled so they can’t run or fight back. I’ve seen that done to bait dogs, the ones that are used to train the fighters.”

  “And we’ve had all those pet dogs disappearing out of their yards,” Dennis put in.

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “That’s something new. The dogfighting operations we’ve broken up before got their bait dogs in other ways. It’s possible the pets are being stolen for some other reason, but my instincts are telling me all this is tied together.”

  Gretchen smiled at him. “You father used to say that, and when John Bridger’s instincts pointed in one direction or other, everybody was wise to follow. He was always right.”

  “I’ve never known Tom to be wrong,” Dennis said.

  Tom barked a laugh. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.
Now I’ll feel like a total idiot if I’m way off-base here.”

  Brandon asked, “What’re the legendary Bridger instincts saying about the feral dogs? If they didn’t attack Hall, are they part of this in any way?”

  “God, I hope not,” Tom said. “Rachel’s got her heart set on saving them all.”

  “If we could find out where they hole up during the day,” Brandon said, “Rachel and Joe Dolan might be able to get all of them at one time.”

  “As far as I know, nobody’s ever seen them in broad daylight,” Tom said. “I don’t like Rachel out there trying to track them down at night, with Ethan’s buddies roaming around with guns, but I don’t see any other way to do it.”

  “Well, don’t worry about her tonight,” Brandon said. “I’ll make sure nothing happens to her.”

  “Thanks, Bran.” Giving responsibility for Rachel’s safety to somebody else was damned hard, something Tom had to force himself into, but he knew Brandon was rock-solid dependable. Tom had too much work that couldn’t be put off. He couldn’t spend his evening chasing down the feral dogs.

  ***

  Cicero, Rachel’s parrot, landed on her shoulder, shook his gray feathers, and said, “Love you. Love you.”

  “Aw, sweetie, I love you too.” Beyond the window, dusk was fading into night. Brandon and Joe Dolan would arrive shortly to pick her up for another dog hunt. Rachel had downed a quick dinner of soup and sandwich, fed Frank and played with him for a few minutes, and now she had to give Cicero some concentrated attention to make up for her prolonged absences. She slipped her fingertips under his neck feathers and scratched him gently. “I’m sorry I have to leave you.”

  The last thing she wanted to do was go out there in the dark again.

  Mrs. Barker’s words snaked back into her mind. I implore you to take every precaution. There are evil forces at work in Mason County. They surround you, but you are unable to see them.

  Rachel couldn’t cope with unseen forces. She had enough trouble dealing with the ones that were clearly visible.