It's Murder, My Son (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (31 page)

“Why would Betsy want your job? Travis Turner is one of the hottest writers out there right now.”

“But Robin Spencer is a legend,” Archie said. “A hundred years from now, people may not know who Travis Turner is. He hasn’t been around long enough to prove that he has staying power. For all we know, he may be the flavor of the month. Robin Spencer had a track record proven over four decades and eighty books. She’d won every book award out there, plus two Pulitzers, two Oscars for best screenplays, and a Tony for a play that’s still running on Broadway. Any editor or aspiring writer like Betsy would have given their right arm to work with Robin Spencer.”

“Did any of Betsy’s ideas include an escaped murderer posing as a police chief?”

The suggestion startled Archie. Recalling that the last time she had seen Betsy, Chief Roy Phillips was following her into the gardens at the Inn, she asked, “Why?”

“Travis claims Chief Phillips threatened her,” Mac said. “Maybe during her research, Betsy uncovered something that she wasn’t supposed to find out.”

Gnarly galloped up the steps to greet Mac with his tongue in his face. Archie introduced Mac to Bernie, who was scratching her chin.

Mac asked the trainer, “Did he pass your tests?”

Bernie announced, “This is the smartest dog I’ve ever seen in my life—and I’ve seen a lot of dogs in my life.”

“But he got a dishonorable discharge,” Archie said. “If he’s so smart—”

“Probably because he’s smarter than any of those generals,” Bernie quipped. “There’s smart as in being able to follow commands. That’s the type of dogs they want in the army and on police forces. Gnarly is smarter than that. He’s smart enough to come up with his own commands. He’s able to look at situations, analyze them, and come up with what to do on his own without a human telling him. Plus, there’s the added element that he knows he’s smart. If someone tells him to do something he knows in his independent mind isn’t the thing to do, or if he just plain doesn’t respect the one giving him the order, he won’t do it.”

Archie recalled, “Like when that thief was here for that interview. I told him to stop barking at her and behave, and he wouldn’t. He knew I was wrong. That’s why he disobeyed me.”

Bernie agreed. “A less intelligent dog would have obeyed you, and she would have gotten away with all the loot.”

Mac chuckled. “Are you saying Gnarly got a dishonorable discharge for failure to obey a superior officer?”

“Better than it being treason.” Archie smiled.

“You’ve never seen a dog like this before?” Mac asked the trainer.

“Yes, I have, but none on the same level as Gnarly.” Bernie patted the German shepherd on the head. “If there’s a category of genius for dogs, he’s in it.”

Mac and Archie exchanged glances, each trying to form the next question. Mac blurted it out, “If he’s so smart, why is he going around stealing stuff?”

Crossing her arms, Bernie propped a foot up on one of the deck steps. “Mr. Faraday, you were a cop for how many years?”

“Twenty-five.”

“And how many times did you have cases where the bad guy was some smart young kid with too much time on his hands?” She gestured at the subject of their conversation. “Gnarly is a German shepherd. He comes from a long line of working dogs, plus he’s smart. Now all he has to do all day is lie around in the sun and fetch a ball once in a while. He’s bored. He likes to work his mind and he’s got a good one. He’s an unemployed veteran with nothing to do. He needs a job.”

Gnarly gazed up to his master with a pleading look in his big brown eyes.

“Do you know how to cook?” Mac asked him.

*   *   *   *

“Surprised to see me?”

While the sun was bright and warm, breezes sweeping across the outdoor café at the Spencer Inn held a chill that raised goose bumps on guests’ naked arms. Clouds traveling in from Washington threatened to dump rain upon their arrival at Deep Creek Lake. On the other side of the tennis courts, golfers raced the oncoming storm to finish the course. 

Before meeting the county prosecutor for cocktails, Mac stopped at Mayor Pete Mason’s table on the deck overlooking the tennis courts to flaunt the Tarantulas’ failure.

Pete Mason slipped an arm across the shoulders of his companion, a red-haired woman dressed in a purple, backless dress with a plunging neckline. They were sharing shrimp cocktails and champagne. “Why should I be surprised, Faraday? This is your joint.”

“That’s right,” Mac said. “It’s my joint, and I have the right to refuse service to anyone, most especially people who try to have me killed. Enjoy your last meal, Marlstone.”

The mayor smirked. “You must have me confused with someone else.”

“I don’t think so. Good-bye.”

Mac crossed the deck to where Ben Fleming was already drinking a martini. Having spent the afternoon playing tennis, the lawyer wore tennis whites while his host had thrown on jeans and a t-shirt.

They waited until Mac had ordered his own martini before launching into the business of murder. Reminding himself that the Hardwick home blew up only the night before, Mac asked if the Hardwicks had been killed in the blast. So much had happened in the last two days, it seemed like the explosion on Spencer Point had happened days earlier.

“Both of them. They probably didn’t know what hit them.” Ben continued, “Here’s something for our side. David’s DNA doesn’t match that collected from Gnarly. Plus he doesn’t have a mark on him. He’s not the one that Gnarly attacked.”

“I knew that,” Mac said.

“But Phillips is arguing that David was alone with Gnarly when he took him to the vet. Plus, he was the one who called forensics to collect evidence from the dog. He’s speculating that David planted someone else’s skin and blood on Gnarly to throw us off the trail.”

“That’s so impossible, it’s laughable,” Mac argued. “There’s no way he could have removed every speck of his blood and skin from the scene and replaced it with someone else’s. What do you really know about Roy Phillips?”

“He’s an idiot.”

“David told me that Mason and Phillips supposedly knew each other at the Pentagon.” Mac said, “But that’s not true. Pete Mason was never in the military. Mason isn’t even his real name.”

“Who is he?” Ben demanded to know in a low voice.

Casting a quick glance in the direction of the mayor’s table, Mac whispered, “You’ll find out later.”

“How much later?”

“Soon.” Mac said, “Katrina not only knew who our mayor really was, but she had once been his business lawyer and embezzled money from him the same way she did Lee Dorcas.”

Intrigued, Ben looked over his shoulder and across the café at the table in the opposite corner. Spying the redheaded beauty whispering into the mayor’s ear, he said, “I’ve never seen her here before.”

“You clumsy bastard!” the mayor yelled when the server knocked over his glass, spilling the champagne.

“Excuse me, sir,” the server apologized. “I’ll get you a new glass.”

“Looks like someone is having a bad day.” Mac turned around when he saw the server pick up the glass with a linen napkin and hurry away with it.

Jeff Ingles rushed to the table where the mayor was wiping away the champagne that had spilled into his lap. “I am so sorry, Mr. Mason. Accept our apologies. Our wine steward will serve you another bottle of champagne on the house.”

The mayor continued cursing the server who was now long gone.

“He won’t be waiting tables here at the Spencer Inn anymore. I assure you.”

“That’s for sure,” Mac muttered under his breath.

“What did you say?” the prosecutor asked him.

Mac shifted the conversation back to their original topic. “My source told me that Katrina and the police chief got close soon after she became a widow.”

Ben forced himself to stop studying the mayor who was other than who he said he was. “Who told you that?”

“Their affair lasted only long enough for Katrina to make a contribution to the police department to cover renovating the chief’s office, after which two pages from a forensics report disappeared from her husband’s case file, after which she dumped the police chief like a hot potato and ran back to Washington.”

“Where did you learn all this? What report?”

“The report proving that she killed Niles Holt.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not,” Mac said. “Robin visited the crime scene. She found Katrina’s necklace hanging high up in a tree below Abigail’s Rock. Forensics found cashmere fibers under Niles’s fingernails. They match the sweater Katrina was wearing at the time of the murder. She wasn’t disoriented after being knocked down by an attacker. She was the attacker, and Niles ripped off the necklace and clawed up her sweater while fighting for his life.”

Ben sighed. “That means our police chief is dirty.”

“As dirty as a pig in a pig pen.” Mac sipped his martini.

Ben took a sip of his martini and sucked in a deep breath. “Where do the Hardwicks fit into all this?”

“I think they were lying about not getting any evidence to prove who really killed Katrina. Their security camera isn’t broken. I don’t think it ever was.”

“Now tell me something I don’t know,” Ben said.

Mac replied, “The man I saw coming out of the Hardwick home the afternoon before it blew up fits Pay Back’s description.”

The prosecutor blinked. “Witnesses saw a van belonging to an exterminating company in their driveway. The company swears they didn’t service the Hardwick home.”

“The man I saw also resembled Lee Dorcas’s picture on his driver’s license.

“That’s why Katrina kept saying that it was Dorcas and the police kept questioning him,” Ben said. “Speaking of Dorcas’s driver’s license, did you bring his wallet?”

Mac flushed. He had searched the house before leaving to meet the prosecutor, but couldn’t find it.

“I guess Gnarly stole it back,” Ben chuckled.

“Since the killer looked like Dorcas or Pay Back, I wonder if maybe the Hardwicks got something on their security tape that would have told us who Pay Back is and how he got into the Singleton home without activating the alarm. But, instead of turning that evidence over to the police, they decided to use the opportunity to collect monetarily on it.” Mac asked, “What kind of bomb was it?”

“A gas bomb. It was detonated remotely. They were gone all day at a spa in Cumberland. The spa said the Hardwicks had a two hundred and fifty dollar gift card. Unfortunately, they don’t keep record of who buys their gift cards.”

“The killer sent them the gift card to get them out of the house in order to plant the bomb,” Mac said.

The prosecutor agreed. “Did you know that Robin Spencer used the same MO in one of her books?”

“Really?”

“When I told Catherine about how the Hardwicks were murdered she said that it sounded like
Rub Down at Four, Rub Out at Eight
. The killer lured a couple of shyster lawyers from their home by sending them a gift certificate for an all-day pampering at a spa. While they were gone, he planted a bomb in their house. When they came home all refreshed and renewed, he blew them up.”

Mac shook his head. “My mother’s books sold millions upon millions over the course of four decades. At least a million people read that scenario.”

“But none of those million got into a wrestling match with Gordon Hardwick shortly before they were killed; nor were the Hardwicks suing any of them.”