Under the Dog Star: A Rachel Goddard Mystery #4 (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (16 page)

“Are you worried about having him here?” Rachel asked.

“No, I’ll watch out for him. I won’t put him outdoors alone, day or night. Lord, if anything happened to Billy Bob, Tom would kill me.”

And it would break Simon’s heart, Rachel thought. She watched the boy and the dog playing in the late afternoon sunlight. It was hard to believe this happy child had endured so much loss in his short life, but Rachel had seen how quickly his buoyant mood could turn to despair when any part of his carefully constructed little world was threatened. Simon had lost both his parents and both his Bridger grandparents in the same road accident. Only Tom and Simon had survived. Although he’d been so young that he didn’t remember the crash, he was aware of how much was missing from his life. Rachel doubted that Tom, who had been driving when the accident occurred, would ever stop blaming himself.

Darla broke into Rachel’s thoughts. “The county fair starts next weekend. Let’s all go together if the guys wrap up the Hall case by then.”

“You and I can take Simon if Tom and Grady have to work.”

“Yeah, that’ll be fun.” A second later Darla frowned and shook her head. “Lord, it’s awful what happened to Dr. Hall. I didn’t know him, and I hear he was a real s.o.b., but just thinking about the way he died—” She shuddered. “I sure hope it doesn’t turn out somebody in the family was behind it. I’ve been married to a cop so long that’s the first thing that comes to mind when anybody’s murdered, that it was the husband or wife or one of their kids.”

“The Halls are a strange bunch of people,” Rachel murmured. Pity pierced her heart when she thought of Marcy, a scared little girl who seemed utterly alone in an alien place. Like Simon, she had already endured more loss than any child should experience, and she didn’t have the kind of loving home and family Simon had to protect and nurture her. What would happen to Marcy if Dr. Hall’s death ended up ripping that family apart?

***

Tom flipped through
Field & Stream
at the end of the grocery aisle, keeping an eye on Phoebe James while she rang up a big grocery order for a chattering dark-haired woman. Her face blank, Phoebe grabbed and scanned automatically, shoving items down to the elderly man working as a bagger. Tom counted four frozen pizzas, six loaves of white bread, ten pounds of baking potatoes, four gallons of milk, big bags of apples and oranges. “Teenage boys are bottomless pits,” the customer said. She added with a laugh, “We could have a swimming pool and a new car every year if we didn’t have boys to feed.”

Phoebe didn’t respond, but Tom chuckled, remembering his own mother’s astonishment at how fast he and his older brother Chris could empty the refrigerator.

Phoebe read out the customer’s total in a voice flat with weariness. Tom hadn’t seen her in a while, and he didn’t remember her as this slump-shouldered, sad-eyed woman with gray showing at the roots of her dark hair and deep lines framing her mouth. Against the purple of her store smock, her face looked colorless.

The manager, Russ Tandler, sidled up to Tom and whispered, “Is something wrong? What are you doing here? You’re not shopping.”

“Just waiting to talk to Mrs. James,” Tom said. “Routine stuff, nothing to get excited about.”

Tandler, a small man around forty with scalp already showing through thin brown hair, squinted as if he detected something a lot more sinister than Tom was revealing. “Is she in some kind of trouble?”

His voice was too loud and attracted the attention of customers in the express lane. An elderly woman with blue-tinted hair stared with frank curiosity. Phoebe James still hadn’t noticed Tom’s presence.

“No, she’s not in trouble, Russ,” Tom said. “Take it easy. When she finishes this order, will you give her a break for a few minutes so I can talk to her? Then I’ll get out of your way.”

Muttering under his breath, Tandler cut through an unused checkout lane to reach Phoebe James. He leaned close and whispered to her.

Only then did she shift her gaze, searching for Tom. When she made eye contact, he raised a hand in greeting. She responded with a frown that deepened the crease between her brows.

After she handed the customer her receipt, Phoebe approached Tom with a puzzled look. “What is this—No, wait,” she said. “Don’t tell me until we’re out of earshot. Russ said we can talk in his office, but I’d rather not.”

She led Tom to the rear of the store and through a swinging door into the warehouse. They passed three male employees cutting open cartons of canned goods and emerged onto the loading dock. A delivery man was hauling boxes of vegetables from a refrigerated truck.

“This way,” Phoebe said over her shoulder to Tom.

She descended a set of wooden steps from the dock to the concrete-paved loading area. The steps wobbled under Tom’s weight. When they reached a bench pushed against a dilapidated fence on the opposite side of the pavement, Phoebe seemed satisfied that they had put enough distance between them and her boss.

Tom motioned for Phoebe to sit on the bench, but she crossed her arms and remained standing.

“What’s this about?” she asked. “Something to do with Dr. Hall getting killed? I don’t know anything about that, Tommy. I haven’t got a blessed thing to tell you.”

“I’m just trying to get a handle on what Hall’s life was like, who liked him, who had a grudge—”

“A grudge?” Her lips curved in a bitter smile. “You mean like somebody he fired who might have wanted to kill him over it?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything.” Along with her appearance, her personality seemed to have changed. Tom’s mother had enjoyed Phoebe’s sense of humor and upbeat outlook.” If you haven’t done anything, you don’t have any reason not to talk to me.”

To his surprise, her chin began to tremble and tears filled her eyes. Covering her face with her hands, she blurted, “But I thought about it! I was mad enough to kill him, and—oh, god forgive me, when I heard he was dead I was
glad.
”

“Come on, sit down.” Tom gently steered her to the bench.

She dropped onto it and leaned forward, arms wrapping her waist, as she wept. “The way he died, it was so awful,” she gasped between sobs. “I never thought I could be glad about something so awful.”

Tom sat beside her. The delivery guy paused on the loading dock, a box marked
BROCCOLI
in his hands, to stare across at them. Tom gave him a look that told him to mind his own business, and he went back to work.

“I don’t think you’re the only one who’s glad Gordon Hall’s gone,” Tom told Phoebe. “A lot of people despised him.”

Raising her head, she tugged a wad of tissues from a pocket of her smock and blotted her face. A fleck of tissue caught on her lip and she picked it off with a fingertip. “My husband’s been cut back to half-time at the lumber mill, and I don’t make enough here to keep a dog alive.” Her voice broke on a sob. “We might lose our house, Tom. Our
home.
”

“God, I’m sorry to hear that.” He laid a hand on her shoulder, feeling the ridiculous inadequacy of the gesture. “But maybe now you can get your nursing job back.”

She sniffled and looked at him. “You think so? You don’t think
she
would stand in the way?”

“Who? Mrs. Hall?”

“Well, she owns the hospital now, doesn’t she?”

“Have you had problems with Mrs. Hall?” Tom expected Tandler to interrupt any minute and tell Phoebe to get back to work. He hoped she would pull herself together enough to give him some answers before that happened. “Is there any reason she wouldn’t want you back at the hospital?”

“She’d never go against him. He fired me, and I don’t think she’d give me back my job, not even with him dead.”

“He let you go because you gave extra pain medication to Naomi Green, is that right?”

A fresh spate of tears poured from her eyes. “Oh, that poor woman. She was in agony. I couldn’t stand by without doing a thing to help her. She was dying. It was crazy not to give her some relief.”

“What was Hall’s objection to giving dying patients painkillers?”

“He enjoyed seeing people suffer.” Her tear-streaked face twisted in a scowl. “I’m convinced of it.”

“Do you think Wally Green hated him enough to kill him?”

She pulled in a breath and squeezed her eyes shut as if trying to calm herself. “He wouldn’t have done it, because he has children to think of. He wouldn’t take a chance on being sent to prison and leaving them without either of their parents.” She flicked a glance at Tom. “He talked about doing it, though.”

“Oh?” This was more than Tom had hoped for, and the prospect of more revelations stirred up a buzz of excitement in his blood. “What did he say, exactly?”

“I don’t want to get him in trouble.” Phoebe’s knee jiggled as she tapped her foot, but she seemed to realize what she doing and stopped the nervous movement abruptly. “Wally was just blowing off steam. That’s all it was, Tom.”

“Okay, I believe you. But I need to know what he said.”

She looked so miserable that Tom wished he could let it go. But he couldn’t.

“Wally almost went out of his mind watching her suffer,” she said. A loud
thunk
from inside the vegetable delivery truck made her flinch. “She wasn’t even Dr. Hall’s patient, but he controlled how much narcotic medication patients received. Other doctors couldn’t do anything about it if they wanted to keep their hospital privileges.”

Another group of people who probably detested Hall, Tom thought. “How did you happen to be talking to Wally about it?”

“He begged me to help her, to give her something for the pain. He told me he wanted to kill Dr. Hall, but of course I just put it down to the stress he was under. The next time she was due for morphine, I gave her a larger dose, and she was able to sleep comfortably for the first time in weeks.”

“How did Hall find out about it?”

“I had to put it on her chart. I couldn’t give a narcotic and not account for it. So I knew he’d find out sooner or later. It turned out to be sooner. He stopped by Naomi’s room that very night and saw how well she was resting, and he read her chart and started asking questions. I asked him to lift the restrictions and allow her own doctor to help her die in peace. I told him it was the decent thing to do. He fired me on the spot.”

“So Wally told you before his wife died that he felt like killing Hall? Did he say anything after she died?”

Phoebe hesitated again. A cool breeze swept through the loading area, lifting a discarded chocolate bar wrapper and blowing it against her left foot. She kicked it away with the toe of her nurse’s shoe.

“Tell me about it, Phoebe,” Tom said quietly.

She threw up her hands. “All right, all right. I’ve gone this far, I might as well. Wally was completely crushed when Naomi died. He came to see me and said he was sorry I’d lost my job for trying to help her. He sat in my living room and cried his heart out for an hour. He said he wished he could torture Gordon Hall, make him die slowly and painfully the way Naomi did. But he was just venting. By the time he left he was saying that all he really wanted was an acknowledgment from Dr. Hall that he’d allowed her to suffer unnecessarily.”

But that acknowledgment had never come. Green could have worked himself into a rage again and taken revenge on his wife’s tormentor. “Phoebe,” Tom said, “if you—”

“You planning to come back to work?” Russ Tandler yelled from the loading dock. “I need you on the register right now.”

Phoebe jumped up. “I’ve got to go.”

“Wait a minute.”

But she was gone, hustling into the store, leaving him with a lot of unanswered questions.

Chapter Seventeen

Tom leaned in to examine the autopsy photos Dr. Gretchen Lauter pinned on the bulletin board in the conference room. Brandon and Dennis Murray crowded in beside him to take a look. With the blood washed away, the ragged hole where Gordon Hall’s throat had been was unmistakably the work of an animal. In one photo, Hall’s spinal cord showed through the opening.

“Oh, man,” Brandon said, a hand over his mouth. He stepped back from the stark display.

“You okay?” Tom asked. “You can leave if you—”

“No. No, sir.” Brandon squared his shoulders and drew a deep breath. But he didn’t look at the photos again.

Tom didn’t have to worry about Dennis, who seemed as inured to violent scenes as Tom was, even though he lacked Tom’s advantage of having worked murder cases in Richmond. His face impassive, Dennis pored over the pictures of Hall.

As Tom studied the photos, his mind filled with images of a black dog knocking Hall to the ground, sinking its teeth into his throat, gouging out flesh and esophagus, severing arteries. Arterial spray coated the grass as far away as twenty feet. Crime scene techs had found Hall’s thyroid gland near the body, but not so much as a shred of skin and muscle. Tom assumed the dog had swallowed all of it.

He asked Gretchen, “Do you still believe that only one dog attacked him?”

“I’m positive.” An expression of mingled pity and sorrow flickered over her face, but she went on in a brisk, impersonal tone. “We might find out more about the breed when the DNA results come back, but that’s going to take a while.”