Dosed to Death

by P. D. Workman

  Kenzie looked at him steadily, but he didn’t back down. Finally, she nodded. It was true, she and Zachary really couldn’t alibi each other. Anything either of them said would be suspect. Burknall, an unrelated third party, would be a better witness if called on to verify what procedure had been followed.

  “Do you know where the thermometer we used for Mr. Dewey is?” Kenzie asked Zachary.

  “I put it back where it came from. Let me go see.”

  He walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him to keep unwelcome guests from just wandering in. Kenzie pulled back each of the corners of the outer blankets, and then unwrapped the taco folds she had made, exposing the woman’s body to view.

  The blood and the holes in her nightgown seemed even more pitiful in the light filtering into the room through the windows. How could anyone have done that to her? How could anyone have any excuse for killing this woman, a lovestruck newlywed on a snowy honeymoon? Especially—Kenzie hated to even consider the thought—her new husband. Had they had a fight? Had he done this to her because he was high? Delusional? Or had it been something even more base? Jealousy or a life insurance policy? Who would do such a thing to a defenseless young woman?

  Kenzie examined each of the stab holes more carefully, pulling the nightgown this way and that to see the size and shape of the wound and the skin around it. She took another video with her phone, getting in several close-ups. With Burknall there observing, she didn’t dare undress the body. That would be for the proper authorities to do. And Kenzie was not the proper authority in this case.

  When would they have cell coverage again? Kenzie looked for any signal bars on the display of the phone, but there was still a little “no service” notation there instead. Zachary returned with the thermometer. Kenzie tried taking the body’s temperature. The numbers on the thermometer counted down, and then 999 and ERR alternated on the LCD screen. A fever thermometer was not calibrated to read temperatures that low. Kenzie sighed. “That didn’t work. I’ll have to go with other signs I can see and feel, then.”

  Neither of the men said anything as she repeated the exercise of searching for a pulse, pulling back an eyelid and shining the phone’s flashlight LED into her eye, and feeling the stiffness of the limbs and the ice crystals formed underneath the rubbery skin.

  “You think the stab wounds killed her or the cold?” Burknall asked.

  “The stab wounds.”

  “There is a lot of blood.”

  Kenzie shook her head. “No, there really isn’t. There’s some, but not a significant amount. And the flow differs between the earlier stab wounds and the later ones.”

  “Because the blood pressure dropped as she bled out?” Zachary suggested.

  “No. Because the heart was no longer pumping. It’s only seepage. Postmortem blood loss.”

  Kenzie examined Mrs. Collins’s hands, which were cut. “Defensive wounds on the hands. She fought off her attacker before she was stabbed.”

  “So she saw it coming.”

  “Yes. She knew what was happening. It didn’t take her off guard.”

  Kenzie continued her examination, but there wasn’t much else to find. She would leave any trace to the medical examiner whose job it was. Looking for hair, skin under Mrs. Collins’s nails, testing the blood to ensure that it was all hers and there hadn’t been a contribution from the killer. Eventually, Kenzie sighed and wrapped the blanket back around the body loosely.

  “That’s about all I can do here.”

  “What’s next?” Zachary asked.

  “Nothing. Go back to our cabin.”

  “We have to find out who did this, though.”

  “It’s really not our jobs. Leave it to the police to investigate. We don’t want to mess anything up.”

  “Who knows when the police will get here. In the meantime, there is a killer at the resort.”

  Kenzie held Zachary’s gaze as she turned her phone off and slid it back away. “It’s not our job. Our job is to keep ourselves and your family safe. If we go bumbling around getting involved in something like this, you don’t know what could happen. I don’t want to be in this guy’s crosshairs.”

  After opening the window to keep the room cold, they moved out of the room in a group. Kenzie still had the house keys and locked the bedroom door. Zachary had already retrieved the masking tape, and she sealed the room and initialed the tape as she had with Mr. Dewey’s room.

  “You think whoever did this has motive to kill anyone else?” Zachary asked. “You don’t think it was just... passion or being high?”

  In other words, he too figured Mr. Andy Collins was the most likely suspect. Women were killed by their husbands. It was an unfortunate fact. There were rare occasions where it was a stranger, but in the majority of cases, it was an intimate partner. And Zachary was right, Collins would not have a motive to kill anyone else. But Kenzie wasn’t sure that meant it was a good idea to confront him with their suspicions. Cornered, he might do whatever was necessary to preserve himself.

  “It might have been. But that doesn’t necessarily make it safe for us to investigate. I think we should just stay out of it. In a couple of days, the police will be here, and they can handle it.”

  They went back downstairs, each thinking their own melancholy thoughts. Kenzie could hear Mrs. Hubbard in the kitchen and went to talk to her, to make sure she knew about the body in the second room upstairs and that she shouldn’t open that door either. As if she wouldn’t be able to figure that out herself by the tape sealing it and Kenzie’s initials on the tape.

  Mrs. Hubbard was sitting at a small table in the kitchen, her face buried in her hands, supported by elbows on the table. She was sobbing.

  “Mrs. Hubbard... it’s okay. I know this is really hard on you, but everything is going to be okay,” Kenzie told her lamely.

  “Gladys,” Mrs. Hubbard sobbed.

  “What?”

  “Call me Gladys.” Mrs. Hubbard sniffled and drew in a long breath, then let it out in a controlled stream. Her body shuddered. Kenzie rubbed her shoulder and neck.

  “Gladys. I’m sorry. It will be okay.”

  “I don’t know how. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or to the Lodge. And we’ve never had such a thing happen to a guest before. Once we had a heart attack, but he survived, and the ambulance took him to the hospital. He was back two days later to get his things. Said they put a stent in, and he was good to go.”

  “It must be shocking to you, I know. But we have to make the best of what we’ve got.”

  “What we’ve got? I’ve got nothing. I’ve got decades of employment at a place where there is no one to give me a reference. I am an old woman and I have to find another job. I don’t want to still be working at this age, let alone looking for a job.”

  “I know. But we’ll get it sorted out.” The words were empty platitudes, but Kenzie had to try to cheer the woman up.

  Gladys Hubbard just continued to cry, sobbing as if her heart were breaking.

  26

  It was difficult to separate herself from the crying woman in the kitchen but, eventually, Kenzie managed to get away, although she felt guilty for leaving Mrs. Hubbard alone with no one to comfort her. Burknall looked into the kitchen at her, but he didn’t go in to talk to her. Whether it was because he didn’t know how to deal with a woman crying—something that was a challenge for most men—or because of something else, Kenzie didn’t know. They seemed to know each other well, but he was still not inclined to go to Mrs. Hubbard’s aid.

  Kenzie was reluctant to get her snow gear on again and brave the elements. But if they wanted to go back to the cabin, they needed to dress and walk down the hill again.

  “I could give you a lift,” Burknall offered, noticing Kenzie’s slow movements.

  “Maybe that would be a good idea,” Kenzie admitted.

  They got dressed and went back out into the frigid air. Kenzie shivered, even though most of her skin was covered. Burknall gestu
red to the sled. He pulled a strap tightly across it. “Sit down and hold on to that. I’ll go slowly.”

  Zachary and Kenzie climbed on board. Burknall did as he had promised, and there was no trouble staying on the sled. He stopped in front of their cabin.

  “Thank you,” Kenzie called to him.

  He nodded and gave a brief salute, then sped off down toward the barn. Kenzie intended to go straight back inside. Her work on the case was done, as she had told Zachary. The best thing for them to do now was to stay well out of the way and leave the rest for the trained law enforcement officers to deal with.

  But as she reached for the doorknob, the door to cabin number four opened, and Redd stood on the threshold.

  “Are you coming in? What are we supposed to do now?”

  Kenzie looked at him in consternation. She had asked him to stay with Collins. But for how long? Until the police got there? Was he just supposed to leave Collins and go back to his own cabin? Or was he supposed to stay there keeping an eye on things? Kenzie wasn’t usually involved in that side of the homicide business. Bodies were her thing. Dead ones.

  “Uh...”

  Brilliant.

  Kenzie looked at Zachary. His eyes were bright. He was an investigator. He was often involved, privately, in cases that law enforcement had investigated. He came in and reviewed the evidence, re-interviewed suspects and witnesses, brought in his out-of-the-box thinking to come up with new theories of the crime. He was a good investigator, dogged and determined.

  “Uh... I guess maybe we’d better have a talk with him. Just to reassure him that everything will be handled when the police get here,” Kenzie suggested.

  Zachary nodded his agreement.

  Kenzie swore under her breath. She really did not want to talk to Andy Collins. She did not want to be facing a man who might be a murderer. Pretending that she didn’t suspect him, or that everything would be okay, as she had told Gladys Hubbard.

  Kenzie let out a long sigh, and she and Zachary walked over to the door of cabin four. Redd stepped back and let them in, looking relieved.

  Collins’s cabin was similar to theirs, but not identical. Kenzie got the feeling that they had been built at different times and that an effort had been made to make each cabin unique rather than cookie-cutters.

  Kenzie had made an effort to keep their cabin tidy, which wasn’t easy with other people there, especially a couple of bored children who didn’t like to clean up after themselves, and the usual differences between what Kenzie considered acceptable and what Zachary did. Their big dinner had been cleaned up and Kenzie had tried to stay on top of the random dishes produced by meals and snacks of five people throughout the day. The inside of Collins’s cabin, however, looked like a hurricane had hit.

  There were dirty dishes piled in the sink and on the counter, clothing strewn on the floor, and the furniture all seemed to have been bumped out of position, looking disrupted from their proper groupings. A kitchen table had been tipped over and not set upright again. There were not, to Kenzie’s relief, any blood spatter or handprints on the walls. Mrs. Collins had, most likely, been killed where they had found her body. Despite the mess around them, it didn’t look as though the attack had begun in the cabin and then carried on outside as Mrs. Andy Collins fled her murderous husband.

  Collins was sitting on the couch. When Kenzie entered, he looked around the cabin, as if he were unsure what he was supposed to be doing. Kenzie was equally unsure. What was her role? Just to break the news to him about his wife? It couldn’t very well wait until the police managed to make it through the storm. He had to be told something. And she would have to observe his reactions, to be sure she could tell the police every nuance when they eventually began their investigation. Kenzie looked at Zachary for reassurance. He was the one who was used to dealing with members of the public, whether clients who had lost loved ones or suspected cheating husbands, or whether suspects themselves.

  Zachary smiled reassuringly and nodded. He motioned to the seating around Collins. “Let’s all sit down.”

  Redd hovered nearby. Not wanting to participate in the discussion, but wanting to observe it. Kenzie and Zachary sat down. Zachary pulled an oblong silver box out of his pocket, pressed a button with his thumb, and laid it on the occasional table beside him in a practiced, casual movement. A digital recorder. Good idea. Collins didn’t seem to notice.

  “Mr. Collins,” Kenzie began. It sounded too formal. He would know it was a death notification. “Andy. How are you doing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand what’s going on. I’m so worried about Brooke. When I woke up this morning and she wasn’t here. And the cabin looking like this...” He looked around himself. Kenzie allowed her eyes to travel over the disarray. Books and throw pillows on the floor. Ornaments that should have been on the shelves and side tables tipped over or on the floor. What should have been a tidy, homey cabin looked instead as if a burglar had ransacked it.

  “What happened last night?”

  “I don’t know.” Andy shook his head and rubbed his eyes. He looked haggard, as if he had only managed to get a couple of hours of sleep the night before. Which was probably true.

  There were people coming and going all night.

  “What do you remember?” Kenzie prompted. They had to have somewhere to start, She couldn’t just tell him baldly that they had found the body of his wife, brutally stabbed to death.

  “Nothing. We must have had dinner up at the house,” Collins looked over to Redd for confirmation of this fact, and Redd nodded his agreement. “But I can’t remember that, or anything afterward. That doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t I remember?”

  “How much did you have to drink?” Kenzie scanned the detritus around them for empties. They must have had a significant amount for so much disruption and for him to have a memory blackout.

  “It couldn’t have been very much. We had packed everything to go home. But then... we only got a few miles down the mountain before we ran into the storm. We knew that we weren’t going to be able to make it through, so we came back here. Like you said. Thought we would have to stay another night or two... better that way... at least we knew we would get home in safety. If we tried to make it through that storm, there’s no way. We got back here for dinner...”

  “How much did he have at dinner?” Kenzie asked Redd.

  “Not a lot that I noticed. A glass of wine or two. Maybe one before the meal and one with.”

  Collins nodded. “We’re not big drinkers.”

  “And then you came down here to your cabin and...?” Kenzie waited for Collins to fill in the rest.

  He just looked at her blankly. “I told you; I don’t remember. I can’t remember anything from last night.”

  “Mr. Burknall said that the two of you were fighting. Did you have an argument?”

  Collins looked at everything scattered on the floor. “We never fight.”

  “You must have had one last night. You don’t remember what it was about?”

  “No. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  And Burknall had suggested that they were high. “What about drugs? Medications? Maybe you took something for anxiety because of the storm?”

  “No. I don’t have anything like that.” His eyes flicked toward the bedroom.

  “Nothing?”

  “Well... maybe Brooke had something in her bag. To help her to relax. But I don’t know. I didn’t take anything.”

  Kenzie was pretty sure that it was a lie. So what had he taken? Something had made him forget what had happened. And someone had killed Brooke Collins. The most likely suspect had to be her husband.

  “Did you find her?” Collins asked, begging for a happy ending. “What did she say? I don’t know what happened last night, but whatever it was, we can talk about it. Neither of us was in the best mood. We can go back, start over, whatever it was we had a fight about. What did she say?”

  “How do you know that neither of you was i
n the best mood if you can’t remember what happened?” Zachary asked.

  Collins made a motion to take in the state of the cabin around him. “All of this... Brooke not coming back last night... things must have been pretty bad, right? We were both grumpy when we had to turn around to come back. Pretty tense. I need to apologize. To tell her that it doesn’t matter. We can’t let one night derail everything.”

  Collins looked from Zachary to Kenzie.

  “Please.”

  27

  Andy...” Kenzie was not practiced in delivering such news, but she dealt with people who had recently found out about the deaths of loved ones. She knew the right pitch of her voice, the language around death and loss. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this. But we found your wife. We found... Brooke’s body.”

  “Her body,” Collins repeated blankly. “But she’s okay, right? I mean... she has to be. Tell me she’s okay.”

  “I’m afraid... she didn’t make it. She’s dead.”

  “How could that be true?” Andy Collins’s voice rose angrily.

  Wasn’t that the first step? Denial? Anger? Kenzie couldn’t remember what all the stages of grief were supposed to be. She could remember, though, when her sister Amanda had died. How hard it had been to accept that they hadn’t been able to save her, even when they had known that she might not survive. She had faced the specter of death so many times and escaped it. It didn’t seem possible that Amanda had finally succumbed.

  “Brooke was just here,” Collins insisted. “She was just here last night. We just got married. Nothing could happen to her!” He covered his eyes with his palms, fingers digging into his hair.

  Redd was pale too, his eyes wide with shock. He surely must have suspected something, or he would not have been concerned enough to rouse Kenzie and Zachary to have them help with the trouble. And he had probably watched them take the snowmobile up to the house with something on the sled and return without it.

  “I’m so sorry, Andy,” Kenzie told him. “I really am. Are you sure you can’t remember anything from last night?”