It's Murder, My Son (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (13 page)

Mac knelt next to the pot. There were brown splotches of what he concluded to be a mixture of Gnarly’s and the killer’s blood. The German shepherd had put up a real fight for his owner.

Once again, Gnarly was digging at the corner of the garage.

“Stop it!”

The dog uttered a pleading bark.

“You’re going to get us arrested for breaking and entering.”

“We’re not breaking anything,” Archie argued.

“He’s breaking their yard.” Mac rose and searched the trees and privacy fence separating the Singleton property from the Hardwicks. He spotted the camera perched on a rod extending up from the corner of the Hardwick’s back deck. It was aimed at the Singleton property. He saw a bright green light lit on top of the unit. “David said the Hardwicks claimed their security camera was broken at the time of the murder. It looks like it’s working to me.”

“Maybe they got it fixed since the murder.” She stepped back inside.

Mac followed her through the door. The room contained a fireplace and bar, behind which a mirror stretched across the rear wall. Unlike the stone floors in his home, the Singletons’ floors were hardwood. Since his first wife’s death, Chad Singleton had removed all the furnishings to put the house on the market.

The click-clack sound echoing throughout the empty room startled both of them. Ready to run when caught trespassing, they whirled around to the open door. His nose to the floor, Gnarly made a sweep of the room before coming to a stop near the bar. With his snout following the scent of his dead mistress, he circled the area before lying down with a whine.

“This is where she was killed.” Archie knelt next to the dog.

Doubtful, Mac compared the crime scene pictures to the placement of the patio doors and the floor next to the bar where Gnarly rested his head between his front paws.

It proved to be the spot.

Mac continued to examine the rest of the pictures in the folder while imagining how the murder happened.

“We can assume that there’s no evidence left since Chad had the place professionally cleaned,” Archie said.

“The first rule in investigating is to never assume anything,” he said. “If there’s nothing left, how did Gnarly lead us here by her scent? I thought he was outside when the murder happened.”

Archie went to the patio door. “Maybe he saw the murder through the door, which would have been locked. When he wasn’t able to get in to save her, Gnarly ambushed the killer when he left.”

Mac opened and shut the patio door. “Did Katrina give the pass code to anyone besides David? Her husband had to have had it. Who else could she have given it to?”

“David told me that Katrina changed the code after almost every incident,” she said.

“How did you get the pass code?”

“Hacking,” Archie confessed. “But if you go to the security company, they’ll have record of the alarm being deactivated just now when I punched in the code. The night of the murder, the security company claims the only break in the system was when she let Gnarly outside. There is no record of any break, deactivations, or trip in the system after that.”

Once again, Mac opened and closed the door while studying the lights on the panel for the security system. He glanced over his shoulder to where Gnarly marked the murder spot.

Referring to the pictures of Katrina’s dead body and the overturned recliner, he crossed the room. Mentally, he uprighted the recliner and stood where it would have been. Standing over the spot Gnarly marked for them, he shuffled through the photos until he came to one of Katrina’s body sprawled on the floor. “Okay, Archie, I want you to lie down here and play dead for me.”

“Why me?” she objected.

“Because you’re a girl. The murder victim was a woman. If it was a guy, I’d play dead but—” He stopped when he saw her pointing to where Gnarly was lying on his back with his paws up in the air.

“There,” she said. “Gnarly’s playing dead for us.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Mac told him.

The cell phone in her pocket interrupted Archie’s laughter. She whipped it out and pressed it to her ear.

“Hello.” Hearing laughter in her tone, she sucked in her breath. “Yes, this is Archie Monday.” She paused. “Yes, he’s here.” She held out the phone to him. “It’s Jeff Ingle. He wants to speak to Mickey Forsythe.”

“I’m not real,” Mac took the phone from her. “This is Mickey—I mean Mackey—I mean—How are you, Jeff?” He listened for a moment before saying, “No, I’m glad you called. I’ll be right there. His drinks are on the house. Try to get him to eat something.”

*   *   *   *

The outdoor café seemed to be serving twice as many customers as it had the previous week when Mac made his first appearance at the Inn. In the short time since moving to Deep Creek Lake, Mac noticed that more boats and jet skis populated the lake with the migration of seasonal residents returning to their summer homes in the resort area.

Staring out at the landscape off in the distance, David sat alone at a table in the corner.

Mac retrieved a bottle of beer from the bar and took the seat across from him. Immediately, he noticed that David’s badge was missing from his uniform’s breast pocket. “What happened?”

“Lee Dorcas’s and Katrina Singleton’s deaths have now both been classified as murder.”

“That’s good.”

David tore his eyes from the landscape. “I’m Phillips’s prime suspect.”

“Why? Why would you have wanted to kill them?”

David closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. He swallowed. “She was scared. She asked me to stay with her while her husband was in the city. So after Mom went to bed at night, I would go over, and one thing led to another and…” He left the rest up to Mac’s imagination.

“You were having an affair with her!” Mac sounded as if he were speaking to one of his children rather than a stranger who happened to be his brother. “What were you thinking?”

“That no one knew.”

“If nobody knew then how did you become a suspect?”

“Phillips has to be guessing. I kept it a secret, but not because of that.” David corrected himself. “Yes, because of that. I thought if no one knew I was staying there, then Pay Back would make his move and I could catch him.”

“How long did this affair go on?”

“Mid-summer into fall. About five months.” David told him in a firm tone, “I had no intention of sleeping with her. I was going to stay in one of the guest rooms. But, after a while, we got to talking about back when we were in school and it just happened.”

Mac blurted out, “Affairs don’t just happen between grown-ups.”

“My career is officially shot! Isn’t there anything you can do to help me besides lecture me on everything that I’ve been telling myself since Katrina died?” David’s face was pale with fear. “Do you think I’ve not been afraid that this would happen?”

“Why didn’t you tell me to drop it? If I had known—”

“Would you?” David laughed. “Get real. We only just met and I already know that once you pick up the scent of murder nothing will shake you off the trail. You’re as bad as Robin.”

Mac sucked in a deep breath. “I certainly didn’t want you to become a murder suspect.”

“Put yourself in my shoes. If someone you loved got murdered, wouldn’t you do everything you could to get their killer? I couldn’t sit back and let Phillips do nothing.”

“So you pushed for a murder investigation at the risk of being a suspect.”

David reiterated, “I didn’t think anyone knew about us.”

“Someone knew. Otherwise, how did Phillips find out? He isn’t smart enough to have figured it out on his own.”

David went to the bar for another beer.

Mac considered calling Archie to tell her that he wouldn’t be home for dinner until he remembered that she wasn’t his wife. She had returned to the guest cottage to work on an editing assignment. She would be eating dinner alone whether he came home or not. He didn’t need to check in with her.

David returned with two beers. He set one bottle down in front of Mac. “Travis and Sophia knew.”

“Did you tell them?”

“Didn’t have to.” David paused to take a gulp from his bottle. He continued after swallowing. “Travis was there when she asked for my help. Last Fourth of July weekend, I stopped in to have a drink after work. The place was packed. I ran into Travis and Sophia in the lounge, and we had a drink together in the sofa area. The bartender brought me a drink. Katrina had sent it over.” He sighed. “I hadn’t seen her in a dozen years, at least.”

Mac asked, “Was that what Travis was talking about when he said she told you guys about how Dorcas had murdered her husband?”

“Exactly.” David explained, “I was overseas. Archie and Robin had written me about him getting killed. I sent Katrina a sympathy card and she replied. Before that, we hadn’t communicated since school.”

“But then you saw each other here last July and she bought you a drink.”

“I asked her how she was holding up since Niles’s murder.” After another sip from the bottle, he recalled, “Travis and Sophia knew nothing about it. They had been in Europe that summer. That was the first time I heard the whole story about how Dorcas accused her of stealing his inheritance and about him sneaking into her dressing room on her wedding day and telling her that he was going to kill Niles, and about how Niles died.”

“But Dorcas had an alibi,” Mac reminded him.

“She knew that. She thought that maybe since the killer hit her in the head, she got confused and assumed it was Lee Dorcas.” He drained his beer while signaling to a server for another one before continuing. “Whatever the case, she told me that someone was stalking her, and she was terrified. He had followed her back from Washington and was now threatening her here in Spencer. I had to help her.”

“Did she report this to Phillips?”

“She said Phillips was an incompetent.”

Mac smirked. “Perceptive lady.”

“I didn’t straight out offer to go sleep with her right then and there,” David insisted. “I started by offering to check the security in her home. After we had finished our drinks, I left with her. I checked out her house. It seemed secure. We had another couple of drinks and I went home.”

“Did Travis and Sophia hear the part of the conversation about you staying with her?”

David paused to think. “They left after their table was ready.” He sat up. “Actually, I hadn’t agreed to spend nights with Katrina at all at that point. When they left, I had only offered to let her call me personally when anything happened.”

“When did you start sleeping there?” Mac asked.

“It was a good week later. The day after I ran into Katrina, she called me. Pay Back pinned a note to her front door with a knife. He threatened to throw her off Abigail’s Rock the same way he had Niles. I went to her house and checked out the scene. The next day, she called me again. This time, he had broken into her house and written ‘Bitch’ on her dressing room mirror with her lipstick.”

“Was the security system on?”

“Yes, but it didn’t go off,” David said. “I checked with the company and their records show that someone had used her code to deactivate it. Katrina swore that she never gave her code to anyone. After that, she changed it. She kept changing the code, but that never seemed to do any good.”

“When did you start spending nights there?” Mac wanted to know.

“After that,” David said. “Katrina was pretty shaken so I spent the night, but we didn’t get intimate until a couple of days after that.”