Under the Dog Star: A Rachel Goddard Mystery #4 (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (31 page)

“Tom,” she said, “I keep thinking about Marcy, and her brother too. What’s going to happen to them if Mrs. Hall dies too? Soo Jin’s in the hospital, and Ethan doesn’t care about those kids.”

He hesitated, scraping butter over a slice of toast before he answered. “I don’t know. I’ve wondered about that myself. Losing her husband the way she did would knock anybody for a loop, let alone a woman in her condition. We just have to hope her health will get better after she’s past the shock.”

“She’s not going to recover, Tom. She’s being kept alive by dialysis. That means end stage renal failure.
End stage.
And she’s not going to get a kidney transplant, not with advanced lupus. The woman is dying.”

Tom lifted a forkful of scrambled egg halfway to his mouth, halted and set it down on his plate. “Rachel,” he said, sounding to her like an exasperated adult trying to reason with a stubborn child, “this isn’t our problem. We can’t do anything about it. Those kids are legally Vicky Hall’s son and daughter.”

“She doesn’t
care
about them, don’t you get that? They’re just ornaments to her, pretty little playthings, and now she’s tired of them because they don’t behave the way she wants them to. She doesn’t love them. She doesn’t give a damn about them.”

“You can’t get involved. You have to back off.”

She jumped up, jarring the table and sloshing the coffee from her cup. “You don’t understand. But I know what it’s like for those kids. I know what it’s like to grow up in a house with somebody who’s supposed to be your mother but never shows you any love, never does anything but judge you and criticize you and try to make you fit
her
idea of what you ought to be. I can’t stand—”

“Rachel, stop.” Tom rose and pulled her into his arms. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

She stood rigid in his arms, but he didn’t let her go. After a couple of minutes she felt calmer and stepped away from him. She sat at the table, her head in her hands. “I’m all right. I’m sorry.”

He sat across from her and held out a hand. He withdrew it when she didn’t respond.
You’re going to drive him away,
Rachel told herself, the truth of it cutting like a knife.
He’ll give up trying to get through to you.

“Listen,” Tom said, “I’ll find out what the situation is. I’ll do what I can. One thing Vicky Hall needs is a real nurse taking care of her. I don’t think Rayanne Stuckey’s capable of judging when she needs emergency care.”

Rachel pulled in a deep breath and tried to speak in a level voice, a sane voice. “She doesn’t have any health care training, does she? Why is she working there in the first place?”

“I think she was hired as a housekeeper and a driver, but now she seems to be taking care of Vicky full-time. She—” Tom broke off, his mouth still open, and an expression of amazement came over his face. “My god. Why didn’t I realize—”

He pushed his chair back from the table and stood.

“Realize what?” Rachel asked, looking up at him. “Tom?”

“Gotta get to headquarters.” He gave her a quick kiss. “Come on, Billy Bob. You’re with me today.”

Then he was out the door with the bulldog on his heels.

Frank jumped into Tom’s chair.

“What awful thing’s going to happen next?” Rachel wondered aloud.

The cat started eating the leftover scrambled eggs on Tom’s plate.

***

“Burt Morgan’s girlfriend is Rayanne Stuckey’s cousin.” Tom dropped into the chair next to Dennis Murray’s desk in the squad room. “The connection was staring us right in the face and we didn’t see it.”

Dennis considered this for a moment while he sipped coffee from a mug with
World’s Best Dad
printed on it. Steam rising from the coffee clouded the bottom halves of his glasses. “So Morgan told Sylvia about the raid, and Sylvia told Rayanne, and Rayanne told—who?”

“Who do you think?” Tom said. “She’s living with Leo Riggs.”

“So you reckon Riggs is mixed up in the dogfighting?”

“I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised,” Tom said. “He always seems to be working one angle or another. It’s hard to know what’s really going on in his head. He strikes me as somebody who’s so used to lying he does it automatically, whether it’s called for or not.”

“But I thought Burt’s girlfriend was so set against dogfighting that she made him promise to stay away from it. Why would she want to protect the people doing it?”

“She was probably just confiding in her cousin,” Tom said, “worrying aloud about somebody going after Burt for helping the cops. I’ll bet she has no idea Leo’s involved.”

“
If
he’s involved,” Dennis said.

“Yeah. But this theory feels right to me. We’re on the right track. I feel it in my gut.”

“What about Hall’s death?” Dennis asked. “You think Leo had something to do with that?”

Tom thought for a moment, trying to round up all of Leo’s connections to the Halls and his possible grievances. “He claims he’s okay with the Halls adopting his sister’s kids. And he got a big chunk of money from them to open his garage. But he was quick to tell me he didn’t sell Jewel’s kids.”

“Yeah, right,” Dennis said. “It was just a coincidence the Halls were feeling generous about helping out a small businessman around the same time the kids were up for grabs.”

Unable to sit still, his nerves thrumming, Tom rose and paced back and forth. “There’s no doubt Leo milked the situation for all he could get, but nobody in the Riggs family wanted Jewel’s children.”

“And their real father and his folks never made any legal claim to them,” Dennis said.

Tom stopped and stared out the window, barely seeing the cars in the parking lot, the gaudy leaves that littered the pavement. In his mind he sorted through chunks of information, trying and failing to make them fit together to form a coherent whole. “There’s something going on here that we don’t know about, maybe something that hasn’t even occurred to us.”

Dennis laughed. “Isn’t that usually the case? Anytime we start out with all the information we need, we don’t have much work left to do.”

Tom turned back to Dennis. “We need solid proof. I haven’t come across anything yet that made me think Leo was involved in dogfighting. If he’s got an operation set up somewhere, it’s well hidden. And all the history between the Riggs family and the Halls doesn’t prove a thing about Gordon Hall’s death. A lot of people had bad history with him. The fact that Burt Morgan’s girlfriend and Leo’s girlfriend are cousins doesn’t prove Leo’s involved in dogfighting, either. That’s a big leap.”

“But we’ve got an awful lot of coincidences involving one guy,” Dennis pointed out. “If you ask me, it all points straight at him.”

“Yeah, it does. Maybe our guest over at the jail can give us something that’ll lead to solid proof.”

***

The jail, located behind the courthouse and adjacent to the sheriff’s headquarters, was a short walk away through a connecting passage. When Tom and Dennis opened the door into the jail’s entrance lobby, they found Beck Rasey and Beth Hall arguing at the front desk. The jailer, a retired deputy with a completely bald head, flung a hand in Tom’s direction and said, “Take it up with the captain or move it outside. I’m not listening to any more of this.”

“What are you doing here, Beth?” Tom asked.

“She’s trying to get to my son,” Beck blurted before the girl could answer. A flush of anger darkened his face. “I don’t want her anywhere near him. She’s the reason he’s acting up in the first place.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Beth cried. “We
love
each other.”

“What do you know about love, little girl? Get back in your fancy car and go back to your fancy house and stay clear of my son.”

Beth focused her ire on Tom. “He’s here, isn’t he? You locked him in a cage like an animal. You had no right. He didn’t do anything. It was me, okay? I set your house on fire, not Pete, I swear it. I’ll plead guilty if you’ll let him go.”

Tom frowned at her, wondering what on earth made this girl so willing to throw her life away for the likes of Pete Rasey. “He’s not getting out, not for a while, and you’re not getting in to see him, so you might as well go home. I’ll be over there to talk to you later. Right now, you ought to be with your family. You’ve lost your father, your sister’s been in a serious accident—your mother needs you now.”

“Yeah, sure. It’ll be the first time she ever needed me.” Beth pivoted and marched to the door. Before leaving, she threw a contemptuous glance over her shoulder and said, “For your information, my car’s not
fancy
. It’s a Camry.”

Beck looked like he wanted to go after her and throttle her. Watching the door swing shut, Tom wondered again if Beth had slit Soo Jin’s tires in a fit of pique because the older girl insulted Pete. The thought of wading back into the primordial ooze that made up the Hall family relationships wearied him, but he had no choice. He had to get to the bottom of all this.

“Look,” Beck said, “Babs and I stayed up the rest of the night figuring out what to do about this mess. Before we get a lawyer involved and he tells Pete not to cooperate—you know that’s what a lawyer will tell him—”

“Probably,” Tom said. This sounded promising. He waited for Beck to go on.

“I want another chance to talk some sense into him.”

“I don’t know if it’s safe to let you in the same room with him.”

“I know, I know.” Beck ran a hand over his buzz-cut hair. “I lost my temper. Babs did too. It just took us by surprise. But we decided the best thing for Pete to do is tell you what he knows, if it’ll make a difference in the charges you bring against him. If he levels with you, would you give him a break, considering he’s never been in trouble before?”

Never been in trouble before?
Pete didn’t have a record of criminal charges, but he hadn’t been an angel either. Technically, though, Beck was right. “Depends on what he tells me,” Tom said. “How honest he is.”

“If he tells you everything he knows—”

Which he’s not likely to do,
Tom thought.

“—could you see your way clear to go a little easy on him?”

“Beck, despite what Beth says, your boy set my house on fire while Rachel Goddard was inside. He could have killed her. That’s a little hard to overlook.”

“I know it is.” Beck stood with his hands on his hips, his gaze on the floor. “I don’t know if I could, in your shoes.”

Tom let a minute pass in silence. He could hear Beck’s breathing, in and out, sounding as if he’d just run a couple of miles. At last Tom said, “I’ll tell you what. If he gives up the dogfighters, tells me who’s running the fights, where the next fight’s going to be, and anything else he knows about it, I’ll see what I can do to help him. I can’t wipe the slate clean. He’s going to have to pay a price for what he’s done. But if you and Babs want to keep your son out of state prison, I can do that for you—if I’m satisfied with what he gives me.”

Beck let out a rush of air and nodded vigorously. “That’d be a load of worry off our minds. I appreciate this, Tom.”

“Don’t thank me yet. We still have to get Pete to talk.”

Chapter Thirty-two

Rachel slowed as she approached the roadside mailbox with the name Sullivan printed on the side. Dr. Jim Sullivan’s small frame house, set back from the road about fifty feet, had the slightly run-down air of a place whose owner had recently lost interest in it. The white paint looked in good condition, but a long black streak below the gutter indicated an untended leak. Autumn leaves from several oaks and maples lay deep on the lawn and covered half the roof.

No vehicle in the driveway, no lights on in the house. Sullivan must be out making his farm rounds. Rachel drove on.

What am I doing here?
More to the point, how was she going to snoop on Sullivan and find out whether he had a connection to the dogfighting operation? She would have to shadow him night and day to learn anything.
I’m probably just imagining things,
she told herself as she turned onto the road that would take her to the Hall house.
Why would a vet get involved in dogfighting?

She’d wasted time with her detour past Sullivan’s house, and she would have to rush through her visit to Thor, but she hoped she’d get a chance to see Marcy while she was there. Were the kids back in school yet, or were they being kept at home until after Gordon Hall’s funeral? Rachel wondered if anybody was running the Hall household now. Vicky Hall was in no condition to do it. Were the kids fending for themselves?

A glum-faced Ethan let her into the house without so much as a perfunctory greeting.

Standing in the foyer with no idea where to go next, Rachel asked, “Where is Thor?”

“Dad’s office,” Ethan said, hooking a thumb toward the back of the house. He started up the stairs.

“Ethan, wait.” When he stopped and looked down at her, Rachel asked, “I’d like to speak to your mother. Could she—”