by Betty Webb
Once Preston got onto marine animals he never shut up, so I hurried him along. “Who else?”
Another chomp, another gulp. “Ruth and Dee Dee, of course, they never miss Two-Fer Night. Oh, and Zorah, the zoo director, she was there, but I can’t remember who with. The bear guy at the zoo? I remember being surprised that you and the sheriff weren’t there, like you usually are…but, whatever. ‘The course of true love never does run smooth,’ right? I’m sure you two will kiss and make up over the problems you’re having, especially now that he’s got you stashed away at his place. Very romantic.”
Not with a mother-in-law and two kids hanging around, it wasn’t. “Skip the editorial commentary. Anybody else?”
“Touchy, touchy. A few tourists came in, and a gaggle of liveaboarders, but by then Harper and I were well into our third bottle. Listen, I’ve got some Rocky Road ice cream here, and it’s going to melt if…”
“You didn’t say you saw Darleene Bauer there.”
“The president of the Otter Conservancy? Because she wasn’t. Not that I could see, anyway. Now, please, my Rocky Road is doing a Wicked Witch of the West and…”
“Melting. Bon appetite, Preston, and thanks.”
I ended the call, wondering what the heck Zorah was doing dining out with Roger Daltry. One thing was for certain. If Robin Chase heard about it, she’d throw a jealous fit. Big cat keepers were funny that way.
Speaking of zoo employees, why was Lex Yarnell eating dinner with Myra Sebrowski only a couple of weeks after the supposed love of his life had been murdered?
Curious, I called him to find out, only to wind up on voice mail. Then I called Myra.
Voice mail.
A coincidence? Or…
I punched in another number. Darleene Bauer wasn’t picking up, either.
Where was the rest of the world tonight, if not at home, eating? At the library, listening to teenagers recite poetry?
Unable to contact Darleene, I reread, for approximately the tenth time, the notes I’d made about our last conversation. Then I looked at the info on Preston again. Something was off, so I began at the top of the file and reread everything I’d written about the case. It took almost an hour. Finally, eyes blurring and head hurting, I gently nudged Bonz’s head off my leg and went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee. The police scanner was in full yip, calling out codes I didn’t recognize. It sure was a hot time in the old town tonight.
But here, with everyone gone, it was…
Boring.
Which was odd, because as slow as things sometimes were at the harbor, I had never felt bored on the Merilee. Perhaps because boats, unlike houses, existed on a near-human level, and humans can be quite entertaining.
I smiled, visualizing the Merilee rocking peacefully at her berth, an island of hush in a loud world. When all this was over, Joe and I needed to have a serious talk, because there was no way I could give up my Merilee. Hopefully that wouldn’t end our wedding plans, but if it did, so be it. If he couldn’t understand my love for my boat, he didn’t understand me.
Regardless of our disagreement on the issue of the Merilee, it was now time to confide my suspicions about the Booth/Amberlyn case to Joe, so I picked up my cell and punched in the direct line to his office.
Voice mail.
Considering all the traffic on the police scanner, I wasn’t surprised. I left a brief message for him to call me as soon as he had a chance, that I had figured out something he should know, then hung up. Yes, Joe would be angry when he found out I’d ignored his orders to cease messing around in police business, but it couldn’t be helped. Booth and Amberlyn’s killer had to be stopped before another victim was added to the list.
Me, for instance.
As added insurance, I called my old friend Deputy Emilio Gutierrez, but wound up on his voice mail, too. I left the same message and told him to pass it on to Joe as soon as possible.
All this yakking to faceless recordings woke Bonz up. Ears pricked, he stared at me with alert brown eyes. Then he made a sound that could have been a growl. Or a moan.
I looked at him with concern. “Is Bonz hurting?”
He jumped off the bed and landed with a yelp.
“Is it bad?”
You can never tell with an animal. One minute they seem fine, the next minute they’re dead. Bonz had seemed to be healing well from his splintered rib, but a couple of weeks ago I’d seemed to be healing well from my gunshot wound, too, and look what had happened to me.
That growl/groan again.
On stiffened legs, Bonz moved slowly toward the kitchen. Phone in hand, I followed. Maybe he was simply thirsty and wanted to visit his water bowl, but if I saw one more sign of discomfort, I was calling the emergency vet.
When we made it to the kitchen, I heard the same thing he’d heard.
A cat.
Wailing in agony.
I remembered what Colleen had told me: A coyote came down from the hills back there, and caught a rabbit in the yard…There’ve been cats, too…
Nature, raw in tooth and claw.
If I stayed in the kitchen, Nature would take its savage course.
But any animal lover, upon hearing those heartbreaking cries, wouldn’t let it.
I started to grab a broom from the hall closet, but then remembered the sawed-off two-by-four lying just outside. Intent on using it as a scare tactic only, I barged through the sun porch and out the back door, closing it against Bonz, who howled in protest.
“Hey, coyote!” I yelled into the darkness, picking up the two-by-four. “Leave that cat alone!”
Sometimes the mere sound of a human voice will chase away a coyote, but this time it didn’t work. The cat just kept screaming as if it were being torn…
There!
Movement inside the cottage. The coyote had ducked into it and was hiding in the shadows with its screaming prey. I might still be able to rescue the cat in time. If not, the coyote would leave the yard with a full belly.
“Coyote! I’m coming for ya!”
Making as much noise as possible, I held the two-by-four at an angle in front of me to enlarge my silhouette, and then ran, yelling, toward the cottage. The new moon was hiding behind a cloud, lending the yard little light, but from my earlier trip outside with Bonz I knew the location of every board and bag. Coyote would not eat tonight.
But there was no coyote.
Only a less honorable killer.
Chapter Twenty-five
When I charged through the unfinished doorway, my upraised two-by-four took the brunt of the killer’s downward blow, knocking his knife to the ground.
Frasier Morgan stood there, a stricken look on his black-bearded face while his cell phone yowled on.
I didn’t give him a chance to pick up the knife. Instead, I smashed him across the face with the nailed end of the two-by-four and sent the fake beard flying.
The result was ugly.
“That’s for Bonz!” I spat.
For no reason other than the memory of my little terrier’s splintered rib, I hit him again, splattering blood all over his Blue Seas Green sweatshirt.
He stopped moaning.
On my way out the door to rescue the nonexistent cat, I hadn’t stopped to look for a flashlight, but since my eyes had become accustomed to the dark, finding Frasier’s knife wasn’t too hard. Touching it with only my fingertips, I tossed it out into the yard so that when—or if—he regained consciousness, he couldn’t use it again. Finding his phone was even easier since it was the source of the wailing cat recording. I picked it up, muted the recording, and punched in 9-1-1.
“Attempted murder at 49784 La Paloma Lane,” I said. “Attacker down. Send officers and ambulance.”
“Wait! Isn’t that Sheriff Rejas’ address?”
“Yes, and hurry, before my attacker wakes up.”
“How about his mother? And his kids?”
“Safe at the library. Now, hurry!”
“Already on it,” the disp
atcher on the end of the line said. “But you need to know that all the cars, including the sheriff’s, are at the Grampions’ farm on the other side of the valley. They, ah, they’re…” She halted for a moment, then asked, “This is Teddy, isn’t it?”
“Yep, and I don’t care what they’re doing, you need to send someone here right now. The guy I clocked, his name’s Frasier Morgan, and he killed Stuart Booth and Amberlyn Lofland. And he’s tried to kill me, too. Twice!”
The moan on the other end of the line almost matched the renewed moaning of my assailant. Then the dispatcher—I think it was Carol Langley, who kept a small sailboat moored near my Merilee—said, “Oh, Teddy, I’m so sorry, but those bank robbers? They’re barricaded in that farmhouse with Pete and Ellie Grampion and their four kids, and…” Her voice trailed off. “It’s a mess.”
“Are you telling me I’m on my own?”
A quick gulp of air, then “Get out of there now, Teddy! Get in your truck and drive to someplace where there are lots of people!”
“And take a chance Frasier could get away? I don’t think so.” I ended the call and punched in another number: Colleen’s cell.
“Don’t come home,” I told her when she answered. “Booth’s killer is in your yard. I’ve got him down on the ground. He’s only semi-conscious right now, but he’s coming around again, so neither you nor the kids should be here. As for Joe, he and everyone else in the department are at the Grampions’ farmhouse where those bank robbers are holding hostages. I’m on my own, but don’t worry, I can handle it.”
I didn’t wait for her reply, just slid the phone into my jeans pocket and gave Frasier another whap with the two-by-four. As soon as he stopped moving, I tucked the two-by-four under my arm and ran to the garden shed.
Like most smartphones, Frasier’s had a flashlight app, and once I clicked it on, finding what I needed was easy. I gathered up a pair of gardening shears, some wire cutters, and what was left of the two-gauge wire Colleen used to attach green beans to their trellises. After picking up one more item, I hurried back to the cottage, where Frasier had regained consciousness and was attempting to stand.
He went down again when I dropped the gardening supplies and gave him another whack with the two-by-four. Geez, the man had a skull like a rock.
Tying someone up with gardening wire isn’t as easy as it sounds. You can’t actually tie the ends together in a nautical knot, just twist them around each other. Doing my best, I bound Frasier’s hands and feet. As an added precaution, I wrapped a longer piece of wire around his ankles, took out the slack, then looped the wire twice around his neck. If he moved, he’d strangle himself.
Satisfied, I stepped away and admired my handiwork. Frasier now lay in a tightly rolled ball, looking like a spooked armadillo.
The next time he regained consciousness I was sitting five feet away from him on a bag of insulation, a pitchfork in my hands, the tines pointing toward his eyes.
“Move and you’re blind.”
“You…you wouldn’t…wouldn’t do…that.”
“You broke my dog’s ribs, you piece of shit.”
“He bit me!”
“Hope it hurt.”
“You…you don’t understand.”
Actually, I did, but it would be nice to have him explain it all to me now that I’d hit the Record app on his phone. Gotta love those things. “What’s to understand, Frasier? Enlighten me.”
“We need…Prime Pacific…” He gulped, then tried again. “America needs oil.”
“In other words, you killed two people out of patriotism? Same reason you tried to kill me? That’s rich. You sure know how to spread the pain around, patriot that you are.”
“Pain? No! If you’d just…stood still when…when I shot…You wouldn’t… wouldn’t have felt…a thing. They sure didn’t!”
I motioned outside, to where I’d tossed the knife. “I hear getting stabbed hurts like hell.”
“Not… not if…you do it right.”
“Okay, you great humanitarian, you. But why not use the gun again when it worked so well the first two times?” I sneaked a covert glance at his smartphone. Still recording merrily away. Maybe it would even pick up the coyote yips drifting over the hill behind us. Drawn by the nonexistent cat’s cries, the animals were ranging close to the house. Maybe they believed I would feed Frasier to them. Which wasn’t a bad idea.
Oblivious to my thinking, Frasier babbled on. “After I…after I shot you…I threw the rifle…into the...the Slough. Had to get rid of it before…”
Into the Slough? That meant the murder weapon was lying in the water, waiting for some curious otter to latch onto it. Joe’s minions would have to fish it out before some innocent otter got shot.
I leaned forward. “Where exactly in the Slough, Frasier?”
“Near where I…I shot Booth. I figured the cops had already searched there, and wouldn’t search again. Please, please loosen this wire. I can’t breathe.”
“You’re breathing fine, you phony.” I shook the pitchfork at him. “Now explain your reasoning behind killing two people. This all started with the otter count, didn’t it? Somehow you talked Stuart Booth into fudging his numbers to make it appear Prime Pacific’s offshore platform wasn’t harming the area’s wildlife. I get that. What went wrong? Judging from this year’s fake numbers, Booth was still doing his job, so why’d you kill him?”
I had already figured out why, of course, but I wanted the entire rotten scheme recorded on Frasier’s cell.
“Blm.”
“Stop mumbling.” I poked the pitchfork toward his eyes, stopping less than an inch away.
“Booth was blackmailing me!” he shrieked.
“That’s more like it. Now tell me everything, from the beginning.”
It went like this.
As a prerequisite to rising in the ranks at Prime Pacific Oil, CEO Miles Stephenson Betancourt IV had made it clear to Frasier that he expected him do everything necessary to “soften” the state’s resistance toward any new offshore drilling. It had been an uphill battle for years, since California’s State Lands Commission had already begun decommissioning oil and gas platforms in state waters, making the licensure of new platforms highly unlikely. Part of the reasoning for CSLC’s position was that in the immediate area of the already-existing platforms, more and more dead otters and other marine life had begun washing ashore. Autopsies had proven that toxoplasma gondii had accounted for only some of those deaths; pollution linked to drilling accounted for the others. Thus the importance of accurate otter counts.
Frasier, an ambitious man with access to Prime Pacific’s slush fund, had approached Booth with a proposition: find no sick or dead otters and earn tens of thousands of dollars. The greedy Booth had immediately accepted.
But then the unforeseen happened: Booth fell in love with his Sugar Baby.
“The idiot wanted to divorce Harper and marry that slut,” Frasier moaned.
Infuriated by the slur toward a young woman I had rather liked, I stabbed Frasier’s ass with the pitchfork. Once he got through screaming, he continued.
“Okay, okay! Booth started hitting us up for more and more money until it got to the point where Miles said it had to stop.”
Us? The word made me set up straight. “Miles Betancourt knew what you were doing?” I looked over at the cell phone again: red Record light still on.
“Of course he did.” Frasier nodded his head as much as he was able, given the fact that it was encased in loops of gardening wire. “He began making noises about me finding other work. At the time, Evelyn was bleeding me dry in divorce court, so I…So I did what I had to do.”
“You set up a meet at the Slough, then shot Booth.”
“Mph.”
“Diction!” I shook the pitchfork again.”
“Yes! Yes, I set up the meeting! Yes, I shot Booth!”
“But why kill Amberlyn?”
He took so long to answer I had to poke him again. Once he was through
squealing, he said, “She was going to blackmail me, that’s why! After I…After Booth died, she remembered some of their pillow talk, like the time he told her about the otter count, and she figured it out. So the little slu—” He eyed the pitchfork. “Uh, she called me at my office and told me she needed help with her tuition and maybe I could help her out and that she thought I was sexy so maybe we could have the same sort of arrangement she’d had with him and…”
“And?”
“Me? Sexy? Oh, please. I’m not stupid. I could tell what she was leading up to, the hold she’d always have on me, and you know what I did about it.”
“Say it. Please.” A little politeness never hurt anyone.
“I shot her.”
“But how did you know where she’d be that morning? I doubt she sent out an e-mail blast telling everyone where she was going to be and at what time.”
“Aw, c’mon, Teddy. That blabbermouth Booth wouldn’t shut up about her, always yakking about how pretty she was, how great her body was, how…how flexible. It got to the point where it was downright disgusting. He even told me what gym she belonged to, when she worked out, every piddling detail of her exercise routine, and where and when she jogged. Five miles a day at the same park. PhD or not, the man didn’t have any common sense at all. He’d have flunked out of business school in the first semester.”
Too bad Frasier hadn’t. “Tell me, after all this manipulation, all this killing, what did the officials at the State Lands Commission tell you?”
A bitter laugh. “They wouldn’t give me the courtesy of a meeting, not even when I e-mailed them about the great otter counts. I knew what that meant, that I was dead meat as far as Prime Pacific was concerned.”
“So you started wooing Harper.”
“It was the only thing left to do. Marry my way up the ladder.”
“Did Harper know about any of this?”
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t have cared. But she didn’t know, so you can forget about her. The minute she found out her father was going to help her set up a magazine here in town she dropped her plans about going to New York. As if anybody in New York would put up with the cranky bitch.”