DRIVEN: A Rita Mars Thriller

by Webster, Valerie

  “Oh.” Karin stiffened. She noticed her robe falling open and pulled it together.

  Rita breathed a sigh of relief. “Now, I’m sure whoever it was is long gone. Between the police with their gumball lights and the neighbors spilling out into the streets, he probably got the hell out of Dodge.”

  “I’m sure.” Karin stared into her coffee.

  Rita brushed cookie crumbs off her hands with a napkin. “Before I leave, I want you to take my cell phone number. I never turn it off. If you get the least bit worried, if you see or hear something, call me. I can get someone here, even if I can’t make it.”

  “Do you think you should spend the night?” She touched Rita’s arm.

  “You’ll be fine. I promise.”

  Karin VanDreem nodded. She went to the counter and took up a pad and pencil to jot down the number.

  Rita started to reach for another cookie, thought better of it and drew back her hand.

  “Go on. I’ll just end up eating these all myself.” Karin pushed the plate toward Rita.

  “These are great. Thanks.” Rita bit into another. “For the next two days, I’ll be in West Virginia. But I’ll call you several times each day. Remember if anything looks weird, call me.”

  “I will,” Karin said.

  Rita stood to leave. “Keep the house locked. I’ll have a friend of mine do a security check on the doors and windows to see how tamperable they are. And we need to get some motion sensor lights around here. It’s a stalker’s dream out there.”

  “I’ve resisted that idea. It seems so—paranoid,” Karin said as she followed Rita to the back door.

  “You know what they say—just because you’re paranoid . . .”

  “I’ve heard it a million times.” Karin smiled.

  “I’ll come over when I get back in town.” Rita said.

  Karin touched her arm again. “Thanks for being so watchful.” She took Rita’s hand in both of hers. “It makes me feel safer already.”

  Rita could smell the perfume again.

  Chapter 5

  The ride to West Virginia was different this time. Rita drove hard, kept her eyes on the road, ignoring a glorious November sun. The radio was off. Time and miles passed swiftly. While Rita was out of town, Bev was in charge of Karin VanDreem’s security and nothing was going to happen during Bev’s watch. Bev had survived Iraq in the front line of “Desert Storm,” so she was no amateur at vigilance and protective measures. At this point, it was the only sure thing Rita possessed.

  She passed the general store in Bolivar. Two old men in flannel shirts lounged in rockers out front, smoking their pipes. They didn’t look up as she sped by.

  Three miles later she entered the town of Harper’s Ferry. How convenient, she thought - the police station, post office, city hall and a liquor store were housed in the same brick building. Two houses down was the white-columned portico of Friendly and Sons mortuary. It could have been the veranda of Scarlett’s Tara except for the bronze colored hearse parked in the circular drive.

  Rita swung into the parking lot beside the liquor store and walked to the station house. Behind the counter were two metal desks and a radio dispatch console. At one desk sat a brown-uniformed officer. He was the goon who had grabbed her at the motel the day Bobby was found.

  At the radio console sat a woman in uniform pants and a polo shirt; the radio was quiet and the woman was reading People magazine. To Rita’s left was a glass enclosed private office for the sheriff. He wasn’t in.

  “Good morning.” Rita’s entrance occasioned a glance, but the officer didn’t get up. The radio operator turned to stare.

  “Morning.” The deputy was tall, very thin with a slight paunch of skin that folded just at the top of his Sam Browne belt. His face was weathered and lined; ferret eyes glinted at her with suspicion.

  “I’m Rita Mars. I called yesterday about getting information on the Bobby Ellis case.”

  The radio operator looked at the policeman who rose slowly then and took his time in getting to the counter. “The suicide. Yeah, I remember the chief saying something about that.”

  Rita waited for him to offer assistance. When none came, she said, “Yes, he said I could review the files.”

  The radio operator kept watching, but when the policeman glanced back at her with narrowed eyes, she swiveled to face the console again.

  “Sheriff’ll have to get those for you.” The man’s voice was slow and tight with resistance.

  “I can’t just see them now? It won’t take long.”

  “No, ma’am. I have to get permission from the sheriff to take those out.” He rested his spidery fingers on the counter.

  “But he said it would be all right for me to look at them.” Rita could feel the rise of heat and thunder in her chest.

  The radio operator spun around in her chair. “He told me if she—”

  The deputy turned on her. “This is police business, Margie. Sheriff said he’d let her look at the files, he’ll have to be here.”

  “OK, then. Is he around?”

  “He’ll be back directly. Have a seat there if you want to.” He pointed to a long wooden bench against the wall and went to his desk.

  “Thank you.” Clenching her teeth made Rita’s head hurt. As she waited, the radio crackled with a static jittery voice. Rita could make out nothing of the call, but the deputy reached for his ranger hat, plopped it on his head and came around the counter.

  “Margie, those files stay put ‘til the sheriff gets back.” With that he swung out the door without a glance at Rita.

  “Charming man,” Rita said.

  The radio operator craned her neck to watch out the front window. When the tan police cruiser nosed out into the street, she spoke. “Lamar don’t mean anything. He’s just pissed because he didn’t make chief deputy, so now he wants to make everybody else miserable.”

  The woman pointed to a coffee maker. “Want some?”

  Rita smiled and nodded. “Thanks, it’s a long drive from Baltimore. Do you know when Sheriff Carter will be back?”

  The woman handed a Styrofoam cup over the counter. “Lunchtime.”

  It was a little after nine.

  “Three hours?” Rita put her head in her hands. “Can’t we call him? I’d like to get this done.”

  “Sheriff’s out hunting today. Squirrel season.”

  “Great. I’m going to sit here until he bags his limit. Is he going to be as difficult as Captain America?”

  “Shoot, no.” The woman bustled toward a metal credenza. “Now what was the name on that suicide?”

  Rita put down her coffee to pick up her leather portfolio. “Ellis. Robert Ellis.”

  “Sad thing for a family when somebody kills himself.” She rooted through the hanging files. “Now you just go in the sheriff’s office and sit down.” She slipped a manila folder out of the drawer.

  Rita glanced out the window. “What if the terminator comes back?”

  She followed Margie into the office. A potent trail of Taboo wafted behind. Rita hadn’t smelled that since high school.

  “He’s not gonna be back here for hours. That radio call was from his girlfriend in Ransom. Her trucker husband just hit the road.”

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble.” Rita eased into the pliant leather chair behind the desk.

  “I’m the sheriff’s niece. I’m not going to get in trouble. Besides I heard him talking to you on the phone when he said it was all right.” Margie deposited the file on the desk. “You need anything, give me a holler. Copier’s on the table over there.”

  Mary Margaret had told her that the police might not let her make copies; she’d have to take notes. Rita felt like jumping up and giving this woman a hug—except that her potent perfume might transfer. Margie closed the glass door to the office as she left.

  Rita opened the file. On top were the sheriff and coroner reports; below she could see the black and white glossies. Without looking she pulled the reports out a
nd closed the file on the photographs. She’d have to prepare herself before examining them.

  At 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, September 10th, a call came in from the Overlook Inn. A body was found hanging in room 107 from the bathroom shower rod. Lamar Houston was the first officer on the scene.

  Rita tapped the report with her pen. The prose was too articulate for Lamar. She flipped it over to see the signature of Justin P. Carter, Sheriff, Harper’s Ferry. He had the orderly penmanship of a schoolboy. Was he really out shooting cute little squirrels?

  Lamar phoned the chief and Dr. Eustace McClung, coroner for Ransom, Bolivar, and Harper’s Ferry. He left the body in place until both arrived. He made the housekeeper, who had found Bobby, stay in the room until the Sheriff Carter arrived.

  Black and white edges of the police photos caught her eye. Rita glanced down at the manila folder. She touched the tab and pulled back the cover.

  A shot of the entrance to the room. The bed was still made. The curtains to the sliding glass door on the other side were closed.

  Next shot. The bathroom from the doorway and a man at the faucet end of the tub. He seemed to be straddling the side, but he was slumped, asleep, tired. Rita closed the folder and looked out the glass toward the radio console. Margie had the mike in her hand; her lips moved.

  Rita looked down at the folder again. She’d seen a million Viet Nam, Gulf War, Afghanistan pictures. Worse, they were far worse; children and charred bodies, IED victims, decapitations, field executions. But she had not known those people, read their stories, shared drinks with them, argued politics. She had not held their hands or wiped their tears.

  Rita took a deep breath and reopened the folder.

  Bobby Ellis had a tie around his neck, the wide end knotted at the shower rod. Rita squinted at the rod. Most of the hotels she’d been in recently had tension bars. They never would have held the weight of a grown man.

  Look, Rita, she said to herself. Look for the piece that doesn’t fit. Bobby Ellis was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. He had on socks, but no shoes.

  The next shot covered the body but from a distance. It showed the tiny vanity around the sink. On the Formica counter was a comb; an open tube of toothpaste; two plastic glasses, one shrink-wrapped, the other with water; a toothbrush with the foam of used toothpaste across the top of the bristles. The mirror over the sink was clean and clear, catching Lamar as the photographer.

  After that was a headshot of Bobby Ellis. Rita stared at the closed eyes, the grim downturn of the darkened lips. From the angle of the photograph she could see the lividity of the ligature mark seeping above the tight noose of the tie.

  He looked asleep. At any moment his eyes would open and he would be himself again. But in the last photo, Bobby Ellis remained strung from the tarnished shower rod of a bathroom alcove in a tiny mountainside town in West Virginia.

  “Pretty sad pictures, aren’t they?” A tall shadow fell across the sheriff’s desk.

  Rita jumped up. “Yes, yes, they are.” She held out her hand, but braced herself for another Lamar-like encounter.

  The sheriff was a big man, a mountain, but with a voice steady with kindness and deep-set brown eyes that understood suffering. He didn’t appear quite the slayer of squirrels that she expected.

  “Margie said it was all right and I . . .” Rita scooted out of the way in case Justin Carter wanted his desk back. He wore brown canvas hunting pants and a field jacket, topped by a florescent orange cap. He smelled of pipe tobacco and wood smoke.

  “You take your time,” he said. “Just came by to check and see how things are doing.”

  “I don’t want to get in your way.” Rita gathered the contents of the folder back inside. “I can look at these out there in the waiting room.”

  “Stay where you are. Go ahead.” He pointed at the desk and then perched on the edge across from Rita. “Got what you need?”

  “I think so.” She looked at his eyes again.

  “Found anything?”

  “Not really.” Rita sighed.

  “Families hope, you know. They don’t want it to be the way it is.” He reached to touch the folder. “Suicide means they got to carry some of that guilt.”

  “I think that’s true.” Rita settled back into the chief’s chair. “But are you completely sure it was suicide?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

  Rita wasn’t going to push it. “Well, I appreciate you’re letting me look through the files.”

  Justin Carter slid off the desk to face her. “You find anything strange, you’ll share it?”

  “I’ll do that.”

  The sheriff turned to leave, then stopped in his doorway. “Lamar gives you any trouble, you let me know.”

  Rita looked straight at him, but let his offer pass without acknowledgement.

  Carter exchanged a few words with Margie then left. Now’s the time, Rita thought. She slipped two photos from the file folder and snapped pictures of both. Then she gathered the sheriff’s and the coroner’s reports and went to the copy machine.

  On her way out of the office, Rita asked Margie, “Where can I find Dr. McClung?”

  Margie cackled. “Under the weather about now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Too late in the day,” Margie said. “It’s way past lunchtime and Doc McClung’s into his cups, but good. You need to sneak up on him first thing, before he gets too much hair of the dog in him.”

  “I see.” Rita clutched her portfolio. “So where is it I need to sneak up on him first thing?”

  McClung’s home was one street over from the sheriff’s office. Rita circled by on her way to the Overlook Inn. Every window in the shabby old Victorian had curtains securely draped to protect against light and prying eyes.

  Rita eased her car back onto the main drag. A Harper’s Ferry sheriff’s car nosed beside her. Lamar glided along dangerously close and glared through police issue sunglasses with gold mirror lenses.

  Rita rolled down Jeep’s window. “Have a nice day,” she called with a leer. Under her breath she added, “Asshole.”

  Lamar tapped the accelerator and turned toward the sheriff’s office while Rita sped ahead. At the end of the street was a five-hundred-foot drop to the Potomac River and on the edge of that precipice was the Overlook Inn. Rita was going to sleep in the room where Bobby Ellis had spent his last night.

  Chapter 6

  Rita wheeled around the Overlook Inn’s circular drive and its raised garden with the flagpole flapping the stars and stripes. At the base of this patriotic gesture was a dense mass of gold and burgundy chrysanthemums. She pulled up in front of the panoramic front porch. The day was as beautiful and crisp as the Sunday she’d driven here to meet Bobby.

  “Rita Mars. I have a reservation.”

  The clerk was the same young woman as that fateful morning. She was thin and unsmiling; today she was dressed in a print shirtwaist dress. The flesh tearing nails still gleamed in blood red.

  “One night?”

  Rita nodded. She glanced around the parlor-like lobby as she drew her credit card from the wallet she carried inside her jacket. Though the sun blistered a cloudless foil sky outside, in here it was grey, the air thick.

  This was a room designed for people built like sausages who wore too many clothes. Directly behind Rita was a scarlet horsehair sofa, its unyielding back stuffed in tight satin. Beyond were spindly straight wooden chairs, tense wingbacks, and two oversized upholstered creations, which promised little comfort. Potted palms in dull brass buckets added a funereal tone.

  “If you’ll just put your tag information here and sign.” The clerk indicated two lines on the registration form, dropped the pen she had used as a pointer and immediately turned to fish a key from the honeycomb of key boxes on the wall behind her. She plunked one onto the worn marble counter.

  Rita handed the registration form back. “This isn’t the room I asked for.”

  The clerk stared.

  �
�I asked for Room 107.”

  “107?” The woman took the key from Rita and inspected it.

  “Yes, I’m the detective who phoned about the Robert Ellis case,” Rita said.

  “The guy who killed himself?”

  “The man found hanged in that room a week ago,” Rita corrected.

  “Let me see if it’s available.”

  “Your manager guaranteed me that room.” Rita tapped her foot. An elderly couple toddled in, smiled at her and disappeared across the parlor.

  “Let me get him.” The young woman hurried to a narrow door at her left. A small metal sign displayed the title “Manager.”

  “Ms. Mars. I’m Gary Simpson. I remember your talking with me.” Simpson wore a polyester, short-sleeved shirt and tie, carried a plastic pen clipped to his breast pocket.

  Rita held out her hand. “I was explaining to your clerk about the room we agreed on.”

  “Of course.” Simpson nodded. The young woman hung behind with downcast eyes as her boss seized control. He picked a key from a lower cubbyhole and pushed it across the counter.

  “Thanks.” Rita took the key. “And before I go to the room, I’d like to ask you both a few questions.”

  “Of course.” Gary glowed with his best hospitality management enthusiasm.

  The three of them settled in Simpson’s closet of an office. Gary behind the Army surplus metal desk; Rita and the clerk, now identified as Eugenia Watkins, sitting in grey metal chairs on the other side.

  “Do you remember seeing Robert Ellis during his stay here?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I ever saw him.” Gary shook his head.

  “I do. I remember him,” Eugenia said, suddenly eager.

  Rita reached into her portfolio and drew out a recent black and white proof Bobby had taken for his press pass. She handed it to Eugenia.

  “Yep. That’s him.”

  Gary shook his head again as he checked the picture and returned it to Rita.

  “I remember him because he was by himself,” Eugenia volunteered. “Men don’t usually come here by themselves, you know. Their wives drag them to the outlet stores down the road, or they come here when the fall colors change. So I asked him was his wife coming up later and he said ‘no’ and I thought that was strange.”