8 Sweet Payback (23 page)

Chapter
29

“What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?!” he shouted.

“I’m cleaning the house,” she
stammered, slipping the phone behind her back. “Remember, it’s my job?”

But his eyes were focused on the
wine rack and the opening beyond.

“You went down there, didn’t you?”
His eyes grew wilder, his face redder, his voice louder. “You snooped in my
private room!”

“I—” She felt the phone buttons
with her thumb, praying that the signal had come back. “It doesn’t matter, Mr.
Gisner. It’s still your house until the auction.”

“You just had to pry around,
didn’t you?” Although he’d lowered the volume, the quieter tone was scarier.
“You
had
to find what’s down there.”

He kept stepping toward her. The
pieces snapped into place.

“Was that the gun that killed
Jessie Starkey?” she asked, edging aside, hoping for a chance at the open door.

Gisner’s
face looked ready to explode, red and puffy. “The justice system failed to keep
him. I had to take care of it.”

“But why, if he was innocent? The
evidence showed that Jessie and Lee didn’t kill Angela. Eventually, everyone in
town would have accepted that.” Her thumb swept across the phone buttons,
pressing the one she hoped was the speed-dial for Beau.

“
She deserved it!
” Gisner shouted. “That little whore!!”

What?
Angela?

“She killed my baby!”

The car accident.
Another step toward the doorway.

“Angela Cayne teased me for
years—showing off that little body, flirting, making me want her. Then she gets
in the car, drunk, and has that wreck, and it’s my Molly who’s gone!”

“Wait—Angie said she wasn’t
drinking that night but she tested positive . . .”

He stepped closer. Sam edged
sideways again.

“So what, if I gave her a little
something to relax her? She wore that tight shirt that showed off everything,
flashed it in front of me all evening. The girl was hot for me, thought she was
in love with me! A little booze, she would have come right in the bedroom with
me, once Molly went to sleep.”

You were coming on to your daughter’s sixteen-year-old friend, gave her
liquor, and then blamed
her
?
The
man was clearly working outside of reality. But then she remembered Angie’s
diary, the lovesick notes about an older man. The girl had gotten in way over
her head.

“But the girls start laughing and
carrying on and decide to go out. In Angela’s car.” His eyes welled up but his
snarl was pure anger.

Two more feet to the door. Gisner
kept facing Sam as she’d subtly circled the perimeter of the wine room, his
back now almost to the basement opening. She edged again toward the light from
the foyer.

“Molly was all I had. She always
was. Heather was a user. Married me for my money and then stayed home all day.
Never did anything useful.”

Except raise a wonderful daughter for you.

“Where did Heather go? She must
have told you her plans.”

“Oh, I know where she went all
right. Straight to
hell
!”

“She’s dead?” Sam got a sickening
feeling that all the searches for Heather Gisner had come way too late. A flash
of the face from her dream—the face that looked so much like her older sister.

Gisner didn’t answer her question.
With wild eyes, he raved about how all women were users who took men for their
money and then acted like sluts. When his gaze traveled to the dark opening
where the steps led downward, Sam realized that it would only take him one big
leap forward to grab her and throw her down there. Had she connected with
Beau’s phone yet?

She spun and dashed for the foyer.

But he was quick. By the time
she’d cleared the doorway, he’d crossed the wine room and grabbed for her arm.
Impossible to get past him and out the front door. She ran across the great
room, hoping she could get the wide doors open before he grabbed her. His heavy
breathing was too close behind.

She ran the other direction,
holding her phone in front of her as she crossed the big room. The little icon
showed that it was searching for a signal. Her feet slithered on the tile
floor. Signal—
finally
! She hit Beau’s
speed-dial once again, kept running.

“Beau, help! Up at the big house! Linden
Gisner’s
chasing me!”

She started up the stairs with
Gisner no more than ten feet behind her. She kept repeating her shouts for
Beau. No time to raise the phone to her ear and find out whether he’d heard
her. The master suite, she realized, offered no protection. The bathroom was
one of those open to the rest of the room. There was a door on the toilet
cubicle, but did it have a lock? Not worth the risk.

Otherwise, the mezzanine. That
would be a sure-death drop to the hard floor of the great room nearly twenty
feet below.

Gisner was puffing a bit on the
stairs, now only a few feet behind her. Sam spun and raised one leg. Her foot
caught him in the forehead, sending him crashing back to the landing. But in
the process she nearly lost her own balance. She gripped the uppermost end of
the banister and pulled herself back.

He got up and bellowed in anger as
he started back up the final seven stairs.

The balcony or the bathroom? Sam
had no chance to decide. He was nearly upon her.

Chapter
30

She yanked open the French doors
where the master bedroom overlooked the great room. On the driveway below she
saw flashing lights. The faint sound of a siren drifted up to her.

“The sheriff’s here. You’ll never
get away,” she said, trying to calm Gisner down.

But her voice was anything but
normal and the shakiness only seemed to make him bolder. He charged at her and
she dashed to the balcony.

“Beau! Upstairs!”

Below, she heard the front door
hit the wall as if it had been kicked in.

“Sam! Is he armed?” Beau’s shout
reassured her.

“No! But I’m right at the edge of
the balcony.”

Beau stepped into sight in the great
room below, his gun drawn. “Gisner! Back away!”

For a moment the crazed man
lowered the arms that had been reaching toward Sam’s neck as he charged toward
her. He glanced down.

“Or what? You shoot at me, I’ll
jump and I’ll pull her down too.”

He was still more than six feet
away. Not enough to make certain that he couldn’t keep that promise. Sam risked
a fast glance toward Beau. Two more patrol cars were coming up the drive.

The next ninety seconds crawled.
Faint footsteps sounded downstairs; Sam saw Beau make a couple of subtle
signals with his head; she caught the sound of careful steps, saw a flash of
khaki uniform. She held
Gisner’s
gaze, distracting
him as two deputies eased their way up the stairs, weapons drawn.

“Gisner, give it up,” Rico said,
his service pistol aimed squarely at the killer’s head.

This time, the threat to grab Sam
and jump never came. Gisner realized it would be hopeless to try. Rico’s gun
never wavered. As deputy Withers snapped cuffs around his wrists, Gisner
started protesting.

“I want a lawyer! I’m not saying a
thing.” He kept this up until he was in the backseat of Rico’s cruiser. The two
cars began their descent toward the highway.

Beau let out a shaky sigh and
wiped his forehead. He pulled Sam close to his chest and she felt his heartbeat
against her cheek.

“You had me pretty scared there,”
he finally said. “If he had pulled you over that balcony . . .”

From below, she could see that the
balcony depth appeared much narrower than it actually was. It would have seemed
to Beau that Gisner could reach her with one step.

“I wouldn’t have fired at him
anyway,” Beau was saying. “Not with you right there.”

“At least, with three murders to
his credit, he won’t be out—I hope—ever.”

“Three?”

“He admitted to me that he killed
Angela Cayne. The reasons will sicken you. And Jessie Starkey. I’m also pretty
sure that he killed his wife and that her body was buried in the woods
somewhere around here.”

Beau gave her an incredulous look.
“I’m glad he admitted it to you—but now that he’s screaming ‘lawyer’ we’ll have
a hard time building a solid case.”

“Come with me. There are some
facts he can’t argue with.” She took Beau’s hand and led him to the wine room.

Her flashlight lay on the floor,
the beam shining uselessly into a corner. If only she’d had the heavy object
with her when Gisner faced her on that balcony. She picked it up and aimed the light
around the room. Against the base of the shelving that had slid outward, tiny
flecks of yellow showed.

“I never swept or dusted this
room. I’d actually forgotten, so I started to do it this morning.” She bent
down and picked up one of the yellow strands. “I think this might be nylon
rope. It looks like it.”

“Where Gisner cut a length off a
bigger roll of it or something— If this matches the piece that was on Angela’s
body . . .”

“I have something else to show you
downstairs,” Sam said, leaving the yellow evidence where it lay.

She and the flashlight led the way
downstairs and she sent the beam onto the rifle leaning against the wall in the
corner. Beau walked over to it and looked down the barrel without touching the
weapon.

“Looks like the right caliber for
the Starkey killing. Hopefully, we’ll get prints from this and be able to
ballistically
match it to the bullet. This alone should be
enough to lock him up for a long time.”

So many unanswered questions, even
yet. Gisner must have been keeping close track of Jessie Starkey, in order to
track him to the woods that fateful Sunday morning. But when she asked Beau
about it, he said it was possible they would never know those types of details
now that the man was refusing to talk.

He brought bags from his vehicle
and while he gathered the evidence, Sam told him what Gisner had said about his
attraction to Angela Cayne and his anger over the accident that had killed
Molly. “It fits with some of the things Angie said in her diary, about how
after Molly’s mother went away her dad starting paying the girls more
attention. The man is unbalanced, Beau. You should have seen his face—crazy. He
was angry with Angela both for rejecting him sexually—even though in his
twisted mind he thought she was coming on to him—and for being responsible for
the accident that killed his daughter. Remember how Angie described the Cokes
the girls drank that evening as tasting really sweet and like vanilla? I think
he slipped liquor into hers. Being inexperienced at drinking she probably
didn’t know what she was getting.”

“It looks as if he harbored that
grudge quite awhile. Three years later, he probably went to the Cayne house and
found Angie unguarded. He either walked in or she may have let him inside since
she knew him, but then resisted when he tried to take her away. That accounts
for the disarray at their house, but I’m guessing he brought her here—possibly
unconscious—and strangled her.”

“What kind of a nutcase are we
dealing with?”

“One that, I hope, won’t even
think
of trying to use an insanity
defense. Even though his behavior back then was definitely crazy, he’d have a
hard time substantiating that seven years later.”

He bagged as many of the small
rope fragments as they could find, and took fingerprints from several places along
the railing that led to the hidden basemen—just in case Gisner tried to contend
that someone else had discovered the secret place and put the murder weapon
there. You never knew what angle rich men and their lawyers would try to work.

“So, are you done here?” Beau
asked as Sam locked the door on the big white house for the final time.

“I’m done.”

She followed his cruiser back to
Taos, where a few hours passed as Sam gave her statement, for the record, about
the morning’s events and the things Gisner told her. Much as she didn’t relish
it, she agreed to testify to the whole exchange later in court, if it came to
that.

“Now, what about his wife?” Beau
said. They sat at his desk, eating sandwiches he’d had brought in from
somewhere.

Sam first told him about her vision
the night of the lightning storm and how she’d felt there was something very
familiar about that unknown face, but that she hadn’t made the connection with
the likeness of Heather Gisner they’d gotten from her sister’s wallet photo.

“In the dream, this terrified
woman was backing away, a look of horror on her face. There was a wooded area
behind her, deciduous trees, like the ones that grow along riverbanks.” She
picked scraps off her bread. “I wish I could describe it better. I woke up immediately
after I saw her face.”

Beau set his sandwich down and
picked up the phone, speaking to someone for a few minutes. He ordered special
cadaver dogs and a team trained in looking for old burial sites, explaining
that the suspected death had happened at least a dozen years earlier.

Sam found that she was no longer
hungry.

Chapter
31

It took four days but the team
finally located a set of bones less than a half-mile from the white Gisner
house, in a wooded area along the stream running by the magnificent house that
had never been a home. The post-mortem revealed the bones to be female and of
the same height as Heather. Death had come from violent blows to the head. Althea
Brooks came forward to give DNA so that a more certain match could be made.

And so it was that Sam and Beau
found themselves standing in the cemetery in Taos, where Heather’s remains were
being laid to rest beside those of Molly.

“It’s so sad they didn’t get the
chance to know each other better,” Sam said. Whenever she thought of herself
and Kelly and how close they’d become as adults, it brought tears to know this
mother and daughter would never have that. It also reminded her to be more
appreciative and to savor the times she and Kelly did have.

Althea Brooks, standing a few feet
away, must have had the same thoughts. She’d already broken down when, in a
conversation with Sam, she lamented the fact that she hadn’t done more for
Heather, hadn’t remained closer in their adult lives. She could have offered
sanctuary, or at least encouragement to the sister who might then have been
able to stand up to her psychotic husband and find the nerve to get herself and
her daughter out while there was time.

As for the Cayne family, the new
discoveries might offer a bit more closure. They might also only reopen the old
wounds.

“I’m going to Sembramos before I
head home,” Althea said as they walked away from the graves. “Sally Cayne and I
have been in touch since my last visit. We both feel that Angie and Molly would
never have wanted to see the town torn apart the way it’s been recently. They
were sweet girls, the kind who got along with everyone. They would want to see
us all getting along now.”

Sam nodded. Small towns themselves
were a lot like families. When there was strife, everyone felt it.

“So we’ve planned a ‘peace party.’
Everyone in town is invited, so long as they come with a desire for peace.”

“I think that’s a beautiful idea,”
Sam said.

“You and Beau are invited too,”
Althea said. “And if Beau wants to be in uniform, that’s fine. Peace, with a
peace officer to back it up, you might say? But no lawyers—we don’t want anyone
later finding themselves being sued for admitting to their guilty feelings.”
She gave a rueful smile. “We’ll be at the town park at two o’clock.”

When Sam passed the invitation
along to Beau he opted to remain in the Western-style dark suit he’d worn to
the memorial service. She knew the jacket was cut well enough to allow a
concealed holster under it. She didn’t ask whether he was actually wearing it
when they left the house.

The small park was crowded when
they arrived; many faces were familiar now, others were not. Bright cloths
covered the concrete picnic tables and bowls of homemade food were everywhere.
Beau spotted Helen Starkey and Sophie Garcia at one of the tables and offered
to formally introduce Sam to the residents she’d mainly known through police
files and his stories. They walked over to add her contribution of a chocolate
sheet cake to the abundance on the table.

“Helen,” Beau said. “How are you?”

The gray-haired woman looked up,
her lined face more tired than before. “I’m okay. JoNell is helping a lot. And
Bobby says he’ll get started soon on fixing up my house.”

The fact that she talked in the singular
tense made it apparent that she knew, down inside, that Joe wouldn’t be coming
home for a very long time, if ever. He would remain in custody until his trial,
and so much would depend upon whether the jury believed that beating Lee
Rodarte was a flash of uncontrolled temper or a premeditated event.

“I’m so sad that it has come to
this, so sorry about Heather, shocked by that husband of hers,” Helen said. “You
meet a newcomer, think you’re getting to know them. One thing leading to
another, all of us torn apart by it.”

Sophie Garcia rounded the table
and put an arm around Helen’s shoulders. “I know. I know.”

Helen pulled a tissue from the
pocket of her sweater-jacket and quickly wiped at her eyes. “I said I wouldn’t
do this today. The party is about making friends, getting ourselves over the
hurt.”

Sally Cayne stepped over in time
to hear Helen’s words. “Sometimes, friends cry together, Helen. As long as we’re
not judging each other, then sharing our sorrows will bring us all back
together.”

Sally set a big bowl of potato
salad on the food table, then took Sophie’s hand. “I want you to introduce me
to Lee’s cousin over there.”

Only one of the Rodarte cousins
had come. It would take awhile for some of the others to become friendly with
the people of Sembramos; luckily most of the other cousins didn’t live in town but
in other parts of the county.

When they were alone again, Beau
turned to Helen Starkey. “I’m going to recommend leniency for you when your
case comes up. Obstruction of justice is a charge that can go many ways,
depending on the amount of involvement. Since you readily admitted your part and
you led me to the crucial evidence, I’ll tell the court that you helped us
tremendously with our case.”

Helen nodded, dabbed with the
tissue again. When Althea Brooks approached, the tissue got tucked back into
the pocket and the two women smiled at each other.

Beau and Sam left them alone,
wandering among other clusters of people who were chatting quietly. As they walked
up to the group that included Sally Cayne and Sophie Garcia, Sally noticed a
group of Starkey men hanging toward the edge of the park, staying to
themselves.

“Come on, Sam, let’s see if we can
get these guys started eating!” She picked up a plate of fried chicken and Sam
grabbed some paper napkins.

“There’s lots more over there,”
Sally said to Bobby as he took a drumstick from the platter. “Make yourself a
plate, load up on all the goodies.”

One by one they filtered toward
the table, and Sam saw
JoNell’s
husband talking to
Lee Rodarte’s cousin as they both piled food on their plates. Maybe this would work
out after all. She noticed a woman, middle aged with perfectly coiffed hair,
speaking with the two men.

“The mayor, Consuelo Brown,” Beau
said when she asked. “I don’t think she ever thought her job would include
near-riot control, like we had that one night. I notice she looks a lot happier
today.”

Yes, Sam thought, surely being
mayor of a tiny town like this more commonly involved socials in the park than
the type of strife her small community had endured.

“Now this is more like we used to
be,” Althea Brooks said, standing beside Sam. “When Heather and I were kids
here, there were lots of community events. I remember running around, playing
tag, like that bunch of kids over there. The moms would bring food, just like today.”

Sam noticed that little Nathan
Garcia hung back until Sophie came over and knelt beside him, saying something
quietly. Poor kid, Sam thought, he’d barely begun to know his father and now
had lost him. No wonder he looked a little stunned. He tagged along behind
Sophie until she gave him a chocolate cupcake. Then his smile brightened. He
turned to watch the other kids while he ate it. Little steps. He would
eventually be fine.

“It’s amazing how one man can have
such an effect,” Althea was saying. “Linden Gisner, coming in here, a newcomer
when he married Heather, thinking that he was somehow better than everyone else
when he started making all that money with his big real estate deals.”

Consuelo Brown had wandered by and
joined them. “It seems like things changed when he began building that mansion.
Like he’d had enough of us and didn’t want to be part of the town anymore.”

“It
was
sort of like drawing a line, wasn’t it?” Althea said. “Heather
felt it, wanted to leave him.”

Everyone thought she had found the
fortitude to go, never realizing what had really happened to her. The group got
quiet for a long moment.

“Linden Gisner is undergoing
psychiatric evaluation now,” Beau said. “He has a ‘charmer’ personality that he
uses to bring women into his life, but he can turn on a dime and become abusive
in an instant. It’s the radical change, from super friendly to wildly psychotic
that keeps people off balance. Heather succumbed to it; Angela might have.
Unfortunately, the outcome wasn’t good for either of them.”

Sam thought of the young woman
who’d been living with Gisner in recent times, Amber. She had to wonder if
reopening Angela Cayne’s case and capturing Linden Gisner might have saved
Amber’s life.

“We’re past that now,” said
Consuelo Brown. “I’m so happy to see everyone moving on. Payback is never as
sweet as we might think.”

Althea gave a contented nod.

Sam doubted that Althea had come
to town with the idea of acting as peacemaker, but it had worked out that way.

Sam glimpsed a familiar face, a
woman taking a bite of the chocolate cake from Sweet’s Sweets. She walked over
to say hello, briefly wondering whether she should say something more about the
wooden box. She’d not gotten the hoped-for results in finding more information
about it, but for now maybe that was the way things were meant to be.

“Mary, hello. Are you from
Sembramos?”

The witch was dressed in a similar
manner as at their first meeting—soft pastels, sandals and her long gray hair
flowing freely.

“My husband is. He grew up here,
and we live just a little way out of town now, between here and Taos.” She
lifted her paper plate. “This cake is amazing. Such a richness to the
chocolate.”

Who knew a witch could also be a
chocoholic?

“Listen, Sam, I was wondering if I
might ask a favor? This thought just came to me.”

Sam felt her smile freeze in
place. If this was about sending a few more fledgling witches her way . . .

“My neighbor is on a Chamber of
Commerce committee that wants to organize a chocolate festival in Taos. She’s
asked me to help with it but, other than loving to eat it, I know exactly
nothing about baking it or shaping it or, really, anything. Would you consider
talking to her about the festival idea?”

Without really waiting for an
answer, Mary reached into a tiny purse that hung by a long strap across her
shoulder. She found a scrap of paper and jotted a number on it, pressing it
into Sam’s hand.

“I know your reputation for great
chocolates, Sam. I know this will be a wonderful match. She’s elderly—I have a
feeling she would have known your Bertha Martinez. Call her?”

Sam started to ask about Bertha and
this neighbor, but Mary had turned away and Sam’s attention was diverted by the
happy shouts of children who were racing back and forth across the grass, a
seemingly boundless source of energy. One day, some scientist would become rich
if he could figure out a way to charge batteries or run automobiles from that
power.

“Sam?” Althea Brooks was back at
her side. “I’m leaving now. It’s a long drive. I’m glad everyone seems to be
getting along again.”

“Thanks to you.” Sam gave Althea a
hug and watched her walk to her car.

Sometimes, all it took was one
person. Big changes come from small acts, Sam realized, and the caring concern
of this one woman had helped dissolve years of hurt and resentment and pain.
There would still be trials; old hurts could flare again. A sunny afternoon in
April wouldn’t fix the world . . . but wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could.