It's Murder, My Son (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (36 page)

With the gun, David gestured at the secret panel. “Assuming this bag belonged to Milo and his killer didn’t know about it, then how did Katrina’s killer know about this door? Dad interviewed everyone.”

“If anyone knew about Milo’s secret hiding place, they would have taken this stash a long time ago,” Bogie agreed. “His widow and kids certainly didn’t know about it. She could have used this money. It turned out Milo was up to his eyeballs in debt.”

“What about Milo’s drug friends?” Mac asked Bogie.

The older officer shook his head. “Milo made the mistake of cheating the wrong people. We assumed that got him killed.”

“Maybe the killer knew about the secret hallways, but not where Milo had hidden the money,” Archie suggested.

“Or maybe Milo’s murder had nothing to do with drugs or money,” Mac said.

*   *   *   *

At Spencer Manor, Mac made a fresh pot of coffee and warmed breakfast pastries in the oven for Archie and David. Bogie took the bag they had found, along with its contents, to the station. Forensics would run tests on the gun to see if it had been used in any reported crimes.

“Now we know how both Pay Back and Milo Ford’s killer did it.” Archie took a cautious sip of the hot coffee.

“The question is,” David asked, “are they two separate killers or one? The only connection I can see between Katrina and Milo Ford is that they lived in the same house. Katrina didn’t use drugs and had no drug connections.”

“They were both into real estate,” Archie pointed out.

“Katrina inherited her real estate,” David countered. “Milo dealt more in drugs than real estate. Emma Turner ran his legitimate business.”

“Turner?” Mac whirled around from the oven where he was removing the hot cookie sheet filled with cheese Danish. “Is she any relation to Travis?”

David nodded his head. “His stepmother.”

Recalling an earlier conversation, Archie asked in an excited tone, “Wasn’t she murdered?”

“Travis’s mother was murdered?” Mac dropped the hot tray onto the granite counter.

“Stepmother,” David corrected him. “And yes, she was murdered. Travis and I were sophomores in high school. She managed Milo’s real estate office. One morning, she went in to open up the office, and someone shot her in the head and set fire to the building.”

“Betsy told me that Travis thought his father did it.” Archie accepted the roll Mac offered to her.

With a knife, David stabbed the butter in the tub on the kitchen counter. “My father said Milo did it.” He buttered his pastry. “He just couldn’t prove it.”

While drinking his coffee and eating his breakfast, Mac looked from one of them to the other like a spectator at a tennis match.

Perched at his master’s feet, Gnarly favored the food more than the conversation.

“Did you know that Travis was sleeping with her?” She cocked her head at David.

He laughed.

Offended by his laughter, she asked, “Why do you find that so funny? Travis is a hound. He even cheats on Sophia Hainsworth.”

“You never saw Emma Turner,” David said. “Every boy who saw her had fantasies about sleeping with her. Believe me, if Travis had slept with her, he would have shouted it from the rooftops.”

“Except for the fact that she was his father’s wife,” Mac reminded him. “What would Travis’s father have done if he found out that she was being more than motherly to his son?”

David flushed. “Travis’s dad did have a temper.”

Mac responded with a “Hmm,” before popping the last of his pastry into his mouth, much to Gnarly’s disappointment.

“What about Pay Back?” Archie reminded them about the recent murder. “What was he paying Katrina back for?”

“I have no idea.” After refilling his coffee mug, Mac checked his watch. It was only seven-thirty. “I hate to speak ill of someone you cared about, David, but Katrina lived a high-risk life. So far, we’ve discovered that she cheated, lied, stole, and murdered. Any of her victims had reason to kill her. In order to find out which one, we have to figure out who was so enraged that they would go to so much trouble to kill her.”

Chapter Nineteen

“What’s this?” Mac held a potted plant out to Archie.

“That’s a chrysanthemum.” Giggling, she emptied the contents of the pot into her bare hand. “You really don’t know anything about gardening.”

At her urging, they sat on their knees in the flower garden that filled the driveway’s inner circle. Archie had suggested that by taking his mind off the murders with gardening, Mac, like his mother before him, could come to a solution to the case.

Rolling in the flower bed, Gnarly seemed to enjoy working with potting soil more than Mac, whose gardening consisted of handing stuff to Archie. He felt near collapse from boredom.

Relief came when David raced his cruiser through the stone entrance. Dressed in his crisp uniform with the shiny gold chief’s badge pinned on his breast, he climbed from the driver’s seat. “I didn’t know you were into gardening.”

“I’m not.” Mac jumped to his feet to take the sheet of paper that David held out to him. “What’s this?”

“A confession.” He responded to Mac’s questioning expression by clarifying, “That’s a copy of it. The original is in evidence at the station. It came in today’s mail. It was postmarked yesterday.”

Wiping her hands on her jeans, Archie scanned the letter in Mac’s hands. “Who’s it from?”

“Betsy Weaver,” David told them.

Archie objected, “But she was killed Saturday or Sunday.”

Mac reminded her that she had last seen Betsy Saturday evening. “If this was mailed Saturday night, then it wouldn’t have been postmarked until two days later.”

David summarized the contents of the letter. “Betsy fell in love with Travis the first time she saw him. When he started having an affair with Katrina, Betsy harassed her until she became so consumed with jealousy that she killed her. The Hardwicks saw her leaving the scene and started blackmailing her. She didn’t have any money to pay them off, so she had to kill them.”

“I didn’t see Betsy Weaver coming out of the Hardwick home,” Mac objected. “That perp was slender and taller.”

“I’m simply telling you what she says in her letter.” David held up his hand.

Archie took the copy of the letter from Mac. “What about Lee Dorcas? What about this whole Pay Back routine?”

“She says she lured him out here pretending to be a promoter with the promise of a singing engagement. She killed him and dumped his body up at the mine where she knew it would be found come spring. She assumed Chief Phillips would call it a murder-suicide and close the case.”

Archie’s doubt matched Mac’s. “I can’t see Betsy being strong enough to walk up that trail to the mine, let alone lug a body up there to dump.”

“All she had to do was put it into the back of an ATV and drive it up there,” David said.

“Don’t tell me you actually believe this.” She shoved the letter into his hands. “Who wants lemonade?” She went inside to prepare the refreshments.

“Whoever dumped Dorcas’s body would have had to have carried the body through the barricade at the opening in the mine,” Mac pointed out, “which is a tight fit for a thin person.  Doing that requires both strength and dexterity. Betsy Weaver didn’t have either.”

“This confession also makes no mention about a man matching Lee Dorcas’s description taking a chartered flight to Houston,” David said. “It can’t be a coincidence that the Monday after the blizzard someone looking like Dorcas flew out of here.”

“Maybe because our killer doesn’t know that we know about that flight.” Mac grinned. “We now know for certain that Betsy’s murder is connected to Katrina’s.” He climbed the steps.

David followed him around the house to the back deck. “I had that dream again.”

“What dream?” Mac sat at the table under the umbrella. After working in the hot sun, he yearned for the shade of the deck.

“This awful nightmare I’ve been having ever since her murder. Pay Back kills Katrina. Only he doesn’t look like Pay Back.”

“What does he look like?” Archie returned to the deck with a pitcher of lemonade and sugar cookies.

“I don’t know. It’s dark.” David lowered himself into a chair. “Katrina and I are together in her bedroom. He’s there. Katrina yells. What she yells doesn’t make sense.”

“What does she yell?” Mac asked.

“‘Oh, no! It’s alive!’ He shoots her and then he shoots me. That’s when I wake up.”

Mac grimaced. “That’s a really odd thing to say when someone breaks into your bedroom while you’re with someone. ‘It’s alive’?”

“That’s what Dr. Frankenstein said when he created the monster,” Archie agreed. “If I were writing a scene like that, I wouldn’t—”

“This isn’t a book, Archie,” David said.

“She’s right,” Mac said. “If someone broke into my bedroom, I would yell ‘Get out,’ or maybe, ‘What are you doing here’—Could that have been—?”

David shook his head. “I remember in my dream that her saying that even surprised me. Every time I dream it, she screams, ‘It’s alive!’ and she’s terrified.”

“What was alive that she thought wasn’t alive? Niles?” Archie looked at Mac. “Could the intruder be Niles?” She turned back to David. “Maybe deep down you knew all along that she killed Niles and felt guilty for sleeping with his killer.”

David dropped his head into his hands. “Niles is dead. He wasn’t Pay Back and he didn’t kill Katrina.”

Archie asked, “Did you know that Sophia threatened Katrina?”

David chuckled, “I answered the call when Sophia came over for a piece of her. Believe me, you would never want to get Sophia mad at you. I came very close to cuffing her.”

Mac asked, “Why did Sophia want a piece of Katrina?”

“Sophia claimed Katrina tried to seduce Travis,” David said. “Katrina told me that it was the other way around and Travis tried to rape her. Sophia caught them. I told Sophia that if I ever caught her over here again that I would arrest her and that wouldn’t look good in the tabloids. My warning must have worked. Katrina never heard from Sophia again.”

“What about Travis?” Mac asked. “Did you question him about Katrina saying that he tried to rape her?”

“According to him, she offered to sleep with him in exchange for his influence to get her zoning request approved. He said, she said. Katrina refused to press charges. I dropped the case.”

Archie said, “Sophia is athletic enough to have committed the murders.”

“Plus she is insanely jealous and violent.” David smiled at the prospect of finding his killer.

“Wait.” She changed her mind. “Sophia was in Europe that first summer. She hadn’t even met Katrina until well after Pay Back showed up.”

“When was that?” Taking a cookie from the plate, Mac asked David, “When did Katrina first talk to you about Pay Back?”

David sighed. “When I ran into her at the Inn last Fourth of July weekend. I was overseas when Niles was murdered.”

“That same summer Travis met Sophia in Europe. They didn’t come back here until the next spring,” Archie said. “Sophia hadn’t even met Katrina until then.”

Mac’s eyes bore into David’s. “Last summer, while Pay Back terrorized Katrina, who would she call for help? The police or you personally?”