Under the Dog Star: A Rachel Goddard Mystery #4 (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (5 page)

Rayanne, a sharp-featured woman in her early thirties with bleached blond curls, took the discarded blooms as Vicky pulled them out of the vase.

“Oh, they’re all beyond saving,” Vicky said. She shoved the vase itself, sloshing water and still half full of flowers, at Rayanne. “Get rid of them.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Rayanne struggled to grasp the big vase while holding onto the half-dozen stems already in her hands. One flower slipped from her grasp, and Tom heard her whisper, “Oh, shit.” When he retrieved it and stuck it into the vase she threw a vague, distracted glance his way and didn’t thank him.

Rayanne marched out of the room with a sour twist to her lips, as if she couldn’t wait to dispose of her burden. Ethan and Soo Jin stationed themselves on either side of their mother, and Tom got the strong message that they were there to protect Vicky from him. For the first time Tom noticed someone whose presence puzzled him—Leo Riggs, who owned a local car repair shop, stood by the French doors with his slight shoulders hunched under a sweatshirt and his hands jammed into the pockets of grease-streaked jeans. Leo was David and Marcy’s uncle, their birth mother’s brother, but he was the last person Tom would expect to find in the Hall house. Leo’s eyes met Tom’s briefly, then shifted away.

Vicky was saying something about her husband hating the sight of half-dead flowers around the house.

Turning his attention back to her, Tom asked, “Can I speak to you privately?”

“About what?” Ethan demanded. “There’s nothing you have to say to my mother that you can’t say in front of me.”

“Oh, Ethan, don’t be ridiculous,” Vicky said. “Yes, of course we can speak privately. Children, would you—No, wait, let’s just go into Gordon’s home office.”

“Mom,” Ethan protested.

At the same time, Soo Jin said, “Mother, you need someone with you when you speak to the police.”

“What makes you think that?” Tom asked her. “I’m not accusing your mother of a crime. This isn’t an interrogation.”

Soo Jin took a breath and drew herself up as if trying to stand taller before Tom’s six-feet-plus. “Then what is it, exactly? Hasn’t she already told you everything she remembers?”

“Why do you want to put her through it again?” Ethan added.

“Will you two stop it?” Vicky said. “The last thing I need is all this carping. Now go away and let us talk.”

Ethan and Soo Jin reacted to their mother’s reprimand with the shocked expressions of kids who thought they’d been scolded unfairly. Instead of doing as she asked, the brother and sister trailed Vicky and Tom out of the living room and down the hall. Vicky led Tom into her husband’s home office. He shut the door in Ethan and Soo Jin’s faces.

“You’ll have to excuse them.” Vicky sank onto a small sofa as if coming to rest after a long, exhausting journey. Against the dark green upholstery, her skin had a pale grayish cast. “This is so hard on all of us. They’re just striking out because they feel helpless, and I suppose a policeman makes a convenient target.”

“Are you all right?” Tom rolled the desk chair over to the sofa and sat facing her. “Do you need to see your doctor?”

She shook her head. “I feel as if I need dialysis again already, but I just had a treatment yesterday and I’m not due again until tomorrow.”

“If you need it—”

“I’ll call the doctor in a little while if I don’t feel better.” She sat forward, clasped her bony hands in her lap, and fixed her attention on Tom. “Now. How can I help you?”

“You can start by telling me that you realize your husband wasn’t killed by the feral dog pack.”

“If that’s the opinion of the medical experts, I believe it without question. But Gordon
was
killed by a dog, wasn’t he?”

“By one dog. If the rest of the pack had been there—”

“They would have joined in. They would have torn him apart.” Her voice broke on the last words.

At least one member of the Hall family had accepted the truth. “It was one dog, and someone was with it. Its owner, another person.”

“Who stood by and let his dog kill my husband.” A tear trickled down her right cheek.

“That’s what it sounded like.” Tom hoped she could hold herself together long enough to get through this interview. “It could have been an accidental encounter that went bad, but it was on your land, well inside the property line where you wouldn’t expect to see other people with their dogs. I believe it was a planned attack. It was murder.”

A shudder ran through Vicky, shook her thin shoulders. “Why would somebody do such a thing?”

“Do you know of anybody with a grievance against your husband? Has anything happened lately that stands out in your mind?”

“Gordon was a good man,” she said. “He was generous, always trying to help people. Everybody loved him.”

Was Hall’s wife really as blind to his faults as she pretended? “He ran a hospital. He had lots of employees, the hospital has lots of patients. There must have been people who had disagreements with him. This isn’t the time to hold anything back. Can you think of somebody he’d fired, somebody whose relative died at the hospital—”

“Oh!” Vicky pressed a hand to her mouth.

“What?” Tom said. “Do you remember something?”

“That man whose wife—She died in the hospital and her husband thinks she was mistreated.”

“He thinks the hospital was responsible for her death?”

“No, no. She had cancer that had metastasized. There was no hope of saving her. But her husband claims she was tortured, if you can believe that, because she was allowed to experience pain. He’s been threatening a lawsuit, and he keeps turning up wherever Gordon goes and causing a scene.”

Tom frowned. “We haven’t had any reports about your husband being harassed.”

“No, because Gordon was too kind a person to get the poor man in trouble on top of everything else he’s going through. I begged Gordon to get the police involved, but he said the husband was working out his grief and would come to terms with it eventually.”

“What’s his name?” Tom pulled his notebook and a pen from his shirt pocket.

“Wallace Green. Do you know him?”

“Oh, yeah, I know Wally.” The man was now raising four children alone. “His wife died about six months ago. Breast cancer, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. It was terribly sad.” Vicky shook her head. “She was so young, and it could have been caught at an early stage if she’d seen a doctor regularly. It’s a tragedy, but Gordon wasn’t at fault in any way. He understood, though, that her husband needed someone to blame for her suffering at the end. With any painful death, there’s always a need to make sense of it. Do you think he could have done this? Turned his dog on Gordon?”

“I’ll look into it,” Tom said. “Can you think of anybody else with a grudge against your husband?”

Vicky leaned back, sighed, and closed her eyes as if suddenly overcome with weariness. “I’ll have to think about it. Right now I just—I’m just
feeling
, you know? It’s hard to think coherently when I’m so emotional.”

“I understand,” Tom said. “But I do have to look into your husband’s dealings with other people, personal and professional. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell your children not to stand in my way.”

“I will, Tom, I’ll do that, but Ethan and Soo are both convinced Gordon was killed by those wild dogs, and I don’t know how long it will take for them to see the truth.”

“If they loved their father, and I’m sure they did, they’ll cooperate and help me find out what really happened.” As they rose to leave the office, Tom asked, “By the way, what’s Leo Riggs doing here?”

“Oh, he drove Rayanne to work. You know, I had no idea she was even involved with him. I wouldn’t have hired her, I wouldn’t have her working right here in the house, if I’d known. Now he’s helping Ethan organize people to hunt down those dogs.” Vicky sighed. “If Gordon were still alive, Leo Riggs wouldn’t get through the door.”

“Marcy and David know he’s their uncle, don’t they?” Tom wondered how freely the Halls communicated their contempt for Marcy and David’s birth family to the kids.

“Yes, of course they know,” Vicky said. “And it’s not as if we have anything against Leo personally. But Marcy and David are
our
children now.”

“Do you ever hear from their birth father and his family?” Their black father, their black grandparents. “Have they seen the kids since the adoption?”

“Of course not.” Vicky seemed astonished that Tom had asked such a question. “It would be too confusing for them to have interaction with those people.”

It wouldn’t be easy to enforce a lifelong total separation when they all lived in the same small county, where everybody knew the story of the children’s adoption by the Halls. But that didn’t concern Tom unless it had something to do with Hall’s death. His immediate problem was putting a stop to any plans Riggs had to round up his gun-toting pals for a dog hunt.

When they returned to the living room, Tom realized it was already too late to call a halt. While he and Vicky Hall talked, a dozen men had gathered on the patio, and every one of them held a rifle or shotgun.

“What’s going on?” Tom demanded of Ethan.

“Oh, my lord, Ethan,” Vicky exclaimed. “Who are these people? What are they doing on our patio?”

“I’m getting a search party together,” Ethan said. “We’re going after those dogs, since the Sheriff’s Department doesn’t seem interested in protecting citizens from them.”

“This is not a good idea,” Tom said.

“Leo and Rayanne got all their friends together to help,” Ethan said. “These people don’t want the same thing that happened to my father to happen to somebody in their families.”

Leo Riggs, who still lurked just inside the French doors as if hesitant to venture farther into the expensively furnished room, kept his eyes focused on the carpet. When Tom glanced at Rayanne Stuckey, she dropped her gaze.

“The Sheriff’s Department and the animal warden are going to deal with those dogs, probably starting tonight,” Tom said. “I don’t want a mob of people roaming around with guns, especially not at the same time we’re—”

“A
mob
?” Ethan cut in. “That’s how you describe people who are trying to protect their families from a menace that’s running loose in the county?”

“Those dogs didn’t kill your father, Ethan.”

“Nobody’s shown me any proof of that.”

With some effort, Tom kept his voice level. “I want you to come into headquarters and listen to the answering machine tape. And you can read the autopsy report when we get it. It won’t be pleasant, but it ought to give you the proof you need.”

“If the dog pack didn’t kill him,” Soo Jin said, stepping forward, “then who—or what—did?”

“I’ll do my best to find out. All this nonsense—” Tom waved a hand at the men milling about on the patio. “—just confuses the issue. And it’s going to use up police manpower that could be put to better use elsewhere. If I have to assign deputies to make sure this bunch doesn’t accidentally shoot somebody, that’s fewer officers I have to investigate your father’s death.”

“Don’t worry about baby-sitting us,” Ethan said. “We don’t need any deputies along to slow us down.”

Tom focused on Riggs. “Don’t get mixed up in this, Leo. If somebody gets hurt, it’ll be on your head.”

Riggs shrank back against the wall and hunched his slight shoulders, making Tom think of the Uriah Heep character out of Dickens. He couldn’t see any resemblance to David and Marcy in this man’s sharp features and closely cropped brown hair. “I’m not lookin’ to stir up trouble, Captain. Ethan here asked me to do a favor and I couldn’t rightly say no. Dr. Hall was a good man. I appreciate what him and Mrs. Hall are doin’ for my sister’s kids.”

Tom heard Vicky‘s sharp inhalation.

Riggs hung his head, as if fully aware that Vicky was reacting to the reminder of their connection.

Tom pushed open the French doors and stepped onto the patio. The men gathered there all turned to face him and fell silent.

“I know you guys mean well,” he told them, “but I can’t allow this hunt.”

He could see resistance and hostility take hold in their eyes, but no one responded.

Ethan, following him out, said, “If people allow us on their property, you have nothing to say about it.”

Mumbling started among the assembled men.

“Listen to me,” Tom said. “This is getting to be—”

“Hey, look!” one of the men cried. He pointed toward the woods.

Tom followed his gesture. Down at the bottom of the slope, an animal had emerged from the woods and was limping toward the house.

“Oh my god,” Ethan exclaimed. “It’s Thor. It’s Dad’s dog.”

He started running, with Tom right behind him.

Chapter Five

The German shepherd cringed when Tom and Ethan approached.

“My god,” Ethan said, the color draining from his face. “Look at him. What’s happened to him?”

Several layers of tape bound the old dog’s muzzle. Forced to breathe only through his nose, he labored to pull in enough air, his sides contracting and expanding in a ragged rhythm. In place of his collar, a length of rope dangled from his neck. Dried blood encrusted one hind leg, and Tom saw bite wounds on his neck, shoulders, and back.