Cold Justice: A Judge Willa Carson Mystery (The Hunt for Justice) (6 page)

“We do.”

“Why not ask for assistance from one of your colleagues, then?”

Kemp shrugged.

Which was okay. I figured I knew the answer to this one. The situation was similar to a man asking for directions. A very powerful man. A man used to making decisions and telling people what to do. In other words, hell would absolutely freeze over before he’d admit to his colleagues that he needed anything, let alone ask for help on a case if he could get some secret talent off the books.

Which meant I held all the control here. Or at least, control over the next couple of hours.

The way I saw it, I could refuse, which was totally against my nature and wasn’t really an option. I’m not one to stand on the sidelines much. Randy Trevor would have remembered that about me. Option two: I could go into a meeting completely ignorant of the situation to joust with a man I didn’t really know any more and who did have jurisdiction and probably access to more information than I could get quickly on my own. Better choice: I could wheedle a bit more information from Trooper Kemp before I made up my mind.

The warm coffee I held in my hands seemed to beckon me. I sat at the kitchen table and gestured Kemp toward the other chair as I sipped, stalling, running through things in my head.

I hadn’t recovered from the bloody visions behind my closed eyelids during my nap. George had probably walked over to the mansion and he’d be back shortly. He’d be willing to drive in the blizzard, maybe. I loved to drive on the open road with the convertible top down on my car in Tampa. But driving in blizzards and whiteouts? No thanks.

“You know what’s going on here, don’t you?” I asked. Kemp didn’t confirm, but he didn’t deny, either. He just drank his coffee and waited. “Don’t you think I deserve to be on an equal playing field with everyone else?”

He took his gloves off and got comfortable in the chair, but he kept the big brimmed hat on. I watched him think about things.

After a bit, he said, “Leo Richards, the fellow you found this morning? The murder victim?”

I nodded.

“The situation is a bit more curious than you know. Because he’s been missing for more than a year. Almost fourteen months, to be precise.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d been having financial trouble on top of some other family problems and you know how that puts stress on a marriage. January was a year ago, he and his wife had a major blowout. Broken furniture, holes punched in the wall, the whole nine yards. Her sisters were there and all three of them were terrified. He left the house in anger, jumped into that Toyota SUV you almost slammed, and—” he shrugged again.

“He didn’t even try to contact his child in all that time?”

“Wife says not.”

“What about his job?”

“He had a partner in his hardware business who hasn’t seen him in the past fourteen months, either. David Mason. I believe you met him earlier today at Eagle Creek Cafe, didn’t you?” Kemp continued to drink his coffee but he watched me closely. How did he know where we ate lunch or that we met Mason?

Somehow, his research on me had included where we went after we left him at the murder scene. That was the important piece of Intel.

“Where did Richards go when he left town?”

“We don’t know. Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Detroit. Wherever he could find a casino or a poker table, would be my guess,” Kemp said.

“He was addicted to gambling?”

Kemp nodded. “Caused him and his family no end of grief, I can tell you.”

Probably created quite a few local enemies, too. Some of them might even be capable of murder. “Did you try to locate him after he disappeared?”

“He’s a grown man. If he wants to desert his family, there’s no law against it as far as I know. Not the sort of thing we’d conduct a nation-wide manhunt over, anyway.”

“Makes him a deadbeat dad and a sorry human being, though,” I said.

“You got that right.”

“Didn’t the wife try to find him?”

“The family hired a couple of private investigators, I’m told. But they didn’t find the guy. People don’t want to be found, there are still lots of ways to hide in this country.”

“If that’s what happened,” I said. People are kidnapped for ransom or human trafficking or any number of reasons. But Leo Richards might not fit those victim profiles. I’d need to know a lot more about him than I did now to figure that out.

“Meaning what?”

“There should have been a plane ticket or something,” I replied.

“Maybe,” he shrugged again. He waited a beat, “Like I told you before, this is a small town. He didn’t come home and never went back to work and nobody has seen him since then. He’d ruined a lot of lives already. I’m not sure people cared much about him by then. Guy’s gone and good riddance, you know?”

I took a sip of coffee and almost spit it back. Stone cold. I hated reheated coffee, but I needed warm liquid and now was not the time to get all precious about my caffeine. I popped the cup into the microwave for a couple of minutes.

While I waited, I shook my head to clear it of sleep’s last cobwebs and asked, “Did you check the mileage? On the Toyota?”

“Yes.”

“Loquacious, aren’t you?”

“I try.”

I grinned. I didn’t want to like the guy, but it was hard not to. “And? What did you find out?”

Kemp said, “Well, that’s a curious thing, too. The Toyota is about ten years old. Like most vehicles around here, it’s got a lot of miles on it. Close to two-hundred thousand. His wife says Leo had the vehicle serviced a few days or so before he disappeared. We checked with the mechanic. He said Leo always took good care of the Toyota and the mileage was close to two-hundred thousand last time he serviced it.”

The microwave dinged. I pulled out the cup and took a sip of the heated coffee and burned my tongue. “Crap!” I drew a cold glass of water and swished it around in my mouth, which seemed to help my scalded tongue not one whit.

Kemp looked at his watch. “Judge Trevor is expecting us. We can talk about the rest in the car. Are you going dressed like that?”

Which is when I looked down and noticed I was wearing my pajamas under my cardigan. Now how the hell had that happened? George. Obviously. I hoped.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, as I ducked into the bedroom to slip into my jeans again. It took me only a few seconds to dress in the warmest clothes I owned. I ran a quick toothbrush around my teeth and finger-combed my pixie-cut. I looked again for a note from George, but found none. In three minutes, I was ready. George says I’m fast, for a girl.

I snagged my parka, gloves, and my miniscule purse and dropped my phone into my pocket, wishing I’d remembered to stick it on the charger before my nap. When I returned to the front door to don the hideously huge boots, Kemp was waiting.

“Do you have any theories about who shot Richards?” I asked him with my hand on the knob and before we opened the door to the blasting snow once more.

“Prevailing theory is the guy the media has been calling the snow sniper.”

I halted at the threshold with the door open and the howling wind rushing through, snow swirling around my body. “The what?”

“Let’s go. I’ll tell you about him in the car.” Kemp gave me a little push on the shoulder which made me plant my feet inside the cottage.

“I’m driving my own car,” I said.

He laughed and pressed my shoulder forward again knocking me slightly over the threshold where I planted my feet more firmly. He pulled on his gloves. “That’ll be some trick. Even if you could navigate in this blizzard. Which I doubt.”

I didn’t budge. “I’ve got four-wheel drive and I’ve driven in blizzards before, Kemp.”

He sobered quickly at my steely tone and fierce stare and unrelenting stubbornness. “Yes, ma’am. I’m sure you do and you have. But not today. Because your vehicle’s already gone.”

I whipped my head around to peer through the white stuff. Sure enough, the driven snow covered everything. Trees, shrubs, trash cans. Everything that is except the missing Jeep.

George Carson. Where the hell did you go?

Kemp gave me a little shoulder nudge again and this time, I stepped out into the storm. He followed me and pulled the cottage door closed. Then he moved around in front of me and led the way to his cruiser, which was now as snow-covered as everything else.

Kemp opened the passenger door and I slipped inside. He closed me snuggly within the cold cruiser and trudged around the front and slipped in behind the wheel. Now that he’d secured me inside the car, he honored his promise to tell me more without prompting. “I’m not sure how Leo Richards was involved with the snow sniper. Maybe there was no relationship between the two at all. As far as we can tell, the sniper killed the other three victims randomly. One thing I just found out a few minutes ago, though.”

He fired up the ignition and waited for a bit of warmth before he flipped on the wipers. They struggled to move the heavy snow aside. Maybe he didn’t have a snowbrush. “We got the quick and dirty preliminary ballistics report back on the bullet used to kill Leo Richards.”

Those quick reports could be wrong. But they could rule out possibilities and narrow the search for the murder weapon. I reached to fasten my seat belt. I was colder than I’d been in years and when I managed to get warm again, I vowed to stay as far away from snow as humanly possible for the rest of my life. Of course, I’d vowed that before and here I was. “What did the ballistics establish?”

“The gun that killed Leo Richards was not the gun used on any of the snow sniper’s other victims,” he said, reaching his arm out the window and catching the wiper to knock the snow off.

“Did you tell Judge Trevor about that report?”

“Yes, ma’am. Just before I knocked on your door. Doesn’t mean the guy owns only one gun, though, you know?” he replied, half a second before he flipped the fan up to full blast on the defroster. After that, all conversation was lost in the wind.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

By the time we headed out of the cottage driveway, we could almost see through the tiny clear space on the bottom of the windshield.

Kemp concentrated on his driving and I thought about what to ask first when we could turn the blasting fan down low enough to hear each other. I wanted to know about the snow sniper and why he was a suspect when the ballistics were wrong on the murder weapon and whether Kemp had any leads and when the sniper would be arrested and a zillion other questions.

But I didn’t want him to lose concentration while driving on the snow and black ice my experience said was probably underneath it. So I held my tongue and looked at the slowly passing landscape while I made my mental interrogation list.

The world outside the vehicle resembled a snow globe, everything shaken upside down and filled with the blizzard. The town was picturesque and remote and the pristine white snow covered everything ugly underneath.

What rot lay under the beautiful blanket of false serenity falling softly all around me, making travel difficult and clarity impossible? This was a place where a man could disappear for an entire year and no one mourned or seemed to care. Pleasant Harbor was not so idyllic after all.

Snow continued to fall steadily and Kemp had trouble keeping us between the ditches even in the four-wheel drive vehicle and even without my distracting questions. So my inquisition was delayed.

I pulled out my cell phone, which hadn’t rung since we arrived here. Not even once. Today was Tuesday and my courtroom should have been in full swing in the Florida sunshine. My assistant, Augustus, had promised not to call me with trivial questions, but I hadn’t believed him. He’d never honored that promise before. There was no reason to think he’d start doing so now.

I pulled off one of the clumsy gloves to glance at the phone’s screen. One missed call. Okay. At least I wasn’t completely out of touch. The call was from George’s cell. He’d left a voicemail. I pushed the button and held the phone to my ear.

The signal had been weak and the message was garbled and cut off too soon. I listened to it three times before I was able to make out a few words that sounded maybe like “…Sorry I didn’t leave a note…. Couldn’t sleep…. Back soon.”

Otherwise, nothing.

I pushed the redial and got a lot of empty air. I tried the internet browser to look up media coverage of the snow sniper, but couldn’t connect to that, either. No signals. Which wasn’t surprising I guess, given the abominable weather.

I dropped the phone back into my pocket and returned my gaze to peering outside at the blinding white trail ahead of Kemp’s squad car.

“What the hell is going on here?” I didn’t realize I’d asked aloud until he replied.

“Classic misdirection, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?” He held the wheel in a tight grip at the nine and three positions. His body leaned forward as if getting closer to the windshield would improve visibility outside. The cruiser’s headlights seemed to make matters worse because they simply illuminated the heavy snow, but Kemp might have thought they made the cruiser more obvious to others and we needed them to avoid a collision or something.

Before I had a chance to ask another question, he raised his voice to say, “The snow sniper is a rather fanciful moniker, but the media types do like to give these killers a handle. The short of it is that we’ve had three murders in Mid-Michigan before this one, all three had similar characteristics and all were committed by the same weapon. This one is either a change in the killer’s method and weapon or it’s a copycat.”