Under the Dog Star: A Rachel Goddard Mystery #4 (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (18 page)

“What I’ve heard is that the Halls didn’t want you anywhere near your sister’s kids.”

Leo paused, his jaw working. “Well,” he said after a moment, “they’ve got a right. The kids are Halls now, under the law.”

“Do you think David misses his real mother?”

Leo expelled an impatient huff. “Man, I don’t know. What are you gettin’ at?”

“Dr. Hall was pretty strict with all the kids. Maybe David hasn’t been happy about that.”

“Now wait a minute.” Leo frowned. “Are you claimin’ the boy had somethin’ to do with Hall gettin’ killed?”

“What do you think? Is David capable of it?”

Leo folded the deposit slip into the envelope, licked the flap, and pressed it closed. When he spoke again, he sounded less interested in the subject of his nephew’s capacity for violence. “Hell, I don’t know. I don’t see how he could, though. Set up somebody to get killed, I mean. He’s just a kid.”

“Do you know anybody else who hated Hall enough to do it?” Tom asked. “Do you know anybody with a dog mean enough to kill a grown man?”

“Nope. Not a one. Can’t help you.”

Tom watched Leo silently for a moment, wondering if the vibe he was getting was simple nervousness under police questioning or something more. Leo had plenty of reason to be grateful to the Halls, and no reason Tom could see to want Gordon Hall dead. David and Marcy might not be thriving in the Hall family, but Tom didn’t detect any sign that their biological uncle was interested in their happiness.

One thing Tom was sure of, though: If dogfights were being held in the county, Leo was likely to know about it, at least secondhand. He lived in that level of society. But would he be honest if Tom asked him a straightforward question? Not a chance. And he might let something slip to the wrong people about the kind of questions Tom was asking.

A line of sweat had appeared on Leo’s upper lip, and he swiped it off with the back of one hand. “Anything else I can help you with, Captain?”

“Not right now,” Tom said. “If you hear anything that might be helpful, give me a call, will you?”

“Oh, you bet. I’ll let you know right away.”

Sure you will,
Tom thought, heading back to his cruiser.

Chapter Eighteen

“At this rate, it’ll take forever to get them all,” Rachel told Tom. She stripped off her denim jacket, stabbed a coat hanger into its sleeves, and hooked it over the rack in the hall closet. “I’m glad we caught one more, but we need to find out where they’re hiding during the day.”

“They could be holed up anywhere in the county,” Tom said. “Let’s hope we’ll get lucky and somebody will spot them.”

“Hope the
dogs
get lucky.” Rachel struck off down the hall for the kitchen, with Frank at her side.

The night’s work had been frustrating, as she and Joe and Brandon chased down reported sightings on four different farms, only to be told each time that they had just missed the dogs. When they finally caught up with the pack, Joe’s van spooked them and he was lucky to get off one shot from the tranquilizer gun. Another scruffy, emaciated mongrel now occupied a run at Holly’s sanctuary.

Rachel grabbed a glass from a cabinet and filled it with tap water. When Tom followed her into the room, she said, “You should see the poor animal we caught tonight. He’s starving. He was very happy to get a meal when we got him to the sanctuary, and he wasn’t shy. He was begging for attention. They haven’t all gone wild.”

Tom leaned against the counter next to her. “I’m glad Ethan’s pals didn’t show themselves.”

“That doesn’t mean they weren’t out there somewhere.” With Mrs. Barker’s warning in her mind, Rachel had been jittery the entire time, scouring the shadows for men with weapons, braced for the blast of gunfire. Now her head throbbed, and the pain and tension stiffened her neck and shoulders. Setting aside her glass, she kneaded one shoulder.

Tom nudged her to turn around, and he pressed his thumbs into the muscles of her neck. “You’re all knotted up. I wish it didn’t get to you this way.”

“I can’t help it. Oh, that feels good.” Rachel inclined her head and tried to relax as Tom’s strong, warm fingers kneaded and stroked her neck and shoulders. “I’ve made up my mind to rescue those animals, and I want to get on with it.”

“You can’t save the whole world, Rachel. You’ll drive yourself crazy trying.”

She sighed. He was right. Why did she do this to herself, again and again? Why did she leap in and try to solve every problem, right every injustice she stumbled across? “Sometimes I envy people who just don’t give a damn,” she said. “I wish I didn’t care so much.”

Tom pulled her back against him. “That’s what I love most about you. How much you care.”

“Oh, really?” Grinning, she twisted to look up at him. “You could’ve fooled me. You’re always telling me to back off.”

“It’s what I love about you, but it also keeps me awake at night, worrying.” He gave her a quick kiss. “Why don’t you take a hot shower, then let me work on those tight muscles some more?”

“Sounds heavenly.” Rachel was on her way out of the room when the kitchen wall phone rang. She paused in the doorway, waiting while Tom answered. It was too late in the evening for an inconsequential call. She felt the same clutch of apprehension she always experienced when the phone rang at night. It was never good news.

Tom frowned, listening. “All right,” he said at last. “I’m on my way.” He dropped the phone onto its hook.

“Oh, no,” Rachel groaned. “What is it?”

“That was Dennis. Soo Jin Hall’s had a serious car accident.”

***

Tom stood on the brink of a ravine with Sergeant Dennis Murray and Deputy Kevin Blackwood and watched two young paramedics make the slow ascent with Soo Jin Hall strapped to a stretcher between them. Fifty feet below, her black BMW tilted toward the right with its front end slammed against a massive poplar tree, the left rear turn signal blinking. The medics had left the driver’s door open and the interior light burning, The silence of the night was broken only by the sound of pebbles, dislodged by the medics’ boots, rolling down the side of the ravine.

Kevin and Dennis had set up portable flood lamps and pointed their vehicles’ headlights toward the scene from opposite sides to give the medics more light. The nearly full moon, high in the sky, added a cold, shadow-filled illumination to the ravine and the surrounding mountains.

“How long has it been?” Tom asked.

“More than an hour since I spotted the crash,” Kevin said. “I was just driving along on patrol and saw the guard rail knocked over, then I saw the car lights down there. I went down and looked in at her, but I couldn’t see much because of the airbag. Just black hair, and blood on the window. She wasn’t moving. I didn’t know whose car it was until I ran the plates.”

“The medics got here before I did,” Dennis said, “and it’s taken them all this time to get her out of the car. That’s a pretty bad angle to work with.”

The paramedics crested the incline and stepped over the flattened guard rail, balancing the stretcher between them without jostling it. They had immobilized Soo Jin’s head in a bulky brace with straps across her chin and forehead. Several straps held her body in place. Blood covered the left side of her face and matted her black hair.

Tom strode alongside as they moved toward the open ambulance. “Has she come to at all?”

“No, sir,” a paramedic with ginger hair answered. “Unconscious the whole time. Her vitals are pretty weak.”

They hoisted her into the ambulance. The second medic climbed in with her and was cracking open a treatment kit as the ginger-haired man closed the door. He jogged around to the driver’s side, and a minute later they sped off toward Mountainview.

“Any idea what caused this?” Tom asked Dennis and Kevin. The car had gone off the road at a sharp curve. A mountain rose on one side, the ravine opened up on the other. The metal guard rail had proven useless against the weight and speed of the vehicle. Tom switched on his Maglite and swept it over the skid marks where the BMW had veered off the pavement. “We’re less than a mile from the Halls’ house. Soo Jin must know every inch of this road. Why would she go off it tonight?”

“Maybe she’d been drinking?” Kevin suggested.

“I don’t think it was an accident,” Dennis said.

“Aw, Christ. Why?”

“Come on down and I’ll show you.” Dennis switched on his flashlight.

Leaving Kevin behind, they picked their way down the slope, using the path the car had gouged through the brush. Tom’s boots slid over scraped-bare earth, caught on protruding roots, collided with half-buried stones.

Beside the tilted car, Tom followed the beam of Dennis’ light and immediately realized what had happened. Both the rear tires were halfway to flat. “What the hell? Two flats at once?”

“Not just two. All four.” Dennis swung his flashlight beam over the front tires. “Coming around this bend, her tires didn’t have enough pressure to maintain traction. And off she went.”

“Jesus,” Tom said. “She must have noticed the car didn’t feel right. Maybe she was trying to make it all the way home. Could she have hit something on the road? I came the same direction she did, and I didn’t notice any debris that could puncture all four tires like this.”

“I didn’t either. I’ve checked my own tires to make sure I didn’t run over anything, but I didn’t see any sign of it.”

They stood in silence, staring at the car. From somewhere in the distance, Tom heard the deep, booming
hoo-hoo hoooo hoo-hoo
of a great horned owl.

The only explanation for this accident that came to him added a whole new level of complexity to the events of the last couple of days. “So we could be talking about sabotage. Maybe attempted murder.”

“Looks like it,” Dennis said.

“Let’s go back up.” Tom’s work here was done. A state police accident reconstruction team would arrive soon to take charge of the scene.

When they reached the road again, Tom said, “We’ll have to find out where she went tonight, where her car might have been parked when it was tampered with.”

“Pretty amateurish kind of tampering,” Dennis said. “Letting the air out of the tires.”

“It did the job.”

“You suppose it’s got something to do with her father’s murder?” Kevin asked.

Tom gave Kevin a look. “What do you think?”

***

Rachel showered, wondering the whole time how seriously Soo Jin Hall was hurt and how much more tragedy would strike the Hall family. Vicky Hall appeared to be seriously ill, not strong enough to endure much more. But did she really care about Soo Jin? Did that adopted child mean as little to her as Marcy and David did?

Toweling her hair dry, Rachel thought of timid little Marcy and her silent plea.
Help me.
Rachel was certain she hadn’t misunderstood. The child was terrified. Rachel couldn’t get rid of the image of David pulling Marcy up the stairs, his hand clamped around her thin arm. What was going on in that family?

“Stop obsessing,” she told herself. Right now all she wanted to do was put the Halls out of her mind, put the dog pack out of her mind, and spend some time with her cat.

She went downstairs to the den, settled on the couch with Frank on her lap, and began brushing him. Cicero slept in his covered cage by the window. The parrot developed anxiety if he didn’t get enough of her attention, and he didn’t seem to accept Tom as a substitute. With the weekend coming up, Rachel decided to give Cicero some special attention, maybe a gentle shower with a spray bottle and a teaching session to work on his vocabulary.

Frank purred on her lap. The old house creaked in a breeze, making Rachel suddenly aware of the silence and her isolation and vulnerability on Tom’s little farm.
You are not invincible,
Mrs. Barker had said.
There are evil forces at work…

Rachel shuddered and told herself to forget Mrs. Barker’s melodrama. She couldn’t let herself be spooked by a self-styled psychic.

The crash of glass in another room made her jerk and drop the brush. Frank bolted off her lap and dived under the couch.

What on earth? As Rachel rose, another crash sounded.

She ran to the door, but pulled up short, stopped by fear. Where had the sound come from? Was somebody breaking in? Was somebody already in the house?

Automatically she reached for her cell phone, which she always clipped to her shirt pocket. But she was in a robe, and her phone was upstairs. No phone in the den. The closest was—where? The kitchen? Tom’s home office?

She was wasting time. She had to do something.

Then she smelled it. Smoke.

“Oh, god, no.” The terror of fire blotted out her fear of an intruder. She ran, following the odor. In the living room doorway, she halted, mouth agape. Glass shards littered the floor under the broken window. Orange and yellow flames ate their way up the drapes.

Rachel shot into the darkened kitchen, grabbed the fire extinguisher from a hook inside the door, and ran back to the living room. She yanked out the pin and aimed at the flames, swinging the extinguisher back and forth as it spewed out a white chemical. Smoke and fumes gagged her and stung her eyes. In the kitchen, the smoke alarm went off, its high-pitched whine assaulting her ears. In the den, Cicero screeched, “Rachel! Rachel!”