Frozen Stiff (16 page)

Chapter 24

I
zzy instructs me to call him when I need a ride home and then disappears. As Syph helps me out of bed, I learn that I’ve broken two toes on my right foot, though I don’t know if it happened when I tripped over the tree root running through the woods or when I fell down the stairs with David in tow. I also feel a painful pull in my left hip and when I reach down to touch the area, I feel a neat little row of stitches.

“You cut yourself,” Syph explains. “The firemen said they thought you did it on a small glass shard that was stuck in the frame when you went through the basement window.” I recall the stinging sensation I felt there when I was trying to squeeze my butt through. “It took a few stitches but it was a clean cut. It should heal up fine.”

I settle into a wheelchair, sitting on my right side to favor the left hip, and let Syph steer me over to David’s room.

“I just gave him some Ativan, so don’t be surprised if he starts to fade on you,” Syph warns.

As we push aside the curtain around David’s bed, he manages a little finger wave. There is a fine dusting of soot on him that has him looking and smelling like a charcoal briquette.

“How are you feeling?” I ask.

“They tell me you saved my life,” he says, a total non sequitur.

“Actually it was the firemen.”

“Thass not what I heard,” he says with a beatific smile, his speech slurring. He blinks his eyes very slowly, clearly struggling to reopen them. “Any i-dee it started?” he mumbles.

“I haven’t heard,” I lie, figuring there’s still plenty of time to let him know someone might have wanted him dead. And as I watch his head loll to one side, I figure it’s unlikely he’ll remember anything I say to him now anyway.

“Is he going to be released?” I ask Syph.

“Not yet. They’re going to admit him to ICU for a while to keep an eye on his respiratory and neuro status. But if all goes well, there’s no reason he shouldn’t be home in plenty of time for Thanksgiving.”

Home
. Based on what Hurley told me about the damage, David doesn’t have one anymore. I suppose I should feel saddened by the loss given that it was once my home, too, but oddly enough I don’t. Over the past few months, that house has served as a constant reminder to me of everything I’ve lost. The fact that it’s now gone feels strangely freeing and purifying, as if a monument commemorating the disaster has been destroyed.

I leave David to his Ativan dreams and after hanging out for another hour in my own bed, I check myself out of the ER at eight in the morning and use the ER phone to call Izzy for a ride. He arrives ten minutes later, looking concerned.

“I’m worried about you, Mattie,” he says as we settle into his car. It takes me a minute longer to get in because I have to contort myself like some rubber-jointed circus performer in order to squeeze into his front seat. The task is more difficult than usual thanks to the gigantic flat-footed shoe I’m wearing to protect my damaged toes, which makes walking less painful but gives me a Frankensteinish gait. By the time I’m in the car, my broken toes are throbbing like a toothache.

“You look pretty peaked,” Izzy says.

“I’m okay. I’m just tired, and in pain.”

“And no doubt a bit spooked as well. This arson thing is pretty scary.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, I want you to take today off and get some rest,” he insists. “In fact, take a couple of days. Enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday and I’ll see you in the office on Friday. Arnie can cover for you until then.”

“Thanks. I’ll take the time off, but I doubt I’ll enjoy the holiday very much. I’m having dinner at my mother’s house.”

“I can relate,” he says, and I know he’s thinking about his own holiday meal plans. “If it’s any consolation, I’d rather be doing your dinner.”

“No, you wouldn’t. David’s been invited too.”

“Oh. That should prove interesting.” He pauses and then adds, “Okay, you win.”

Izzy parks in the drive, not bothering to pull into his garage since he’s heading for the office. The day has dawned crisp, clear, and cool—a beautiful November morning—but when I crawl out of Izzy’s car, I detect the lingering stench of burnt wood and plastic in the air, a reminder of the devastation next door. I wave to Izzy as he leaves, then turn to find Hoover and Dom standing in the back doorway of Izzy’s house. Hoover barks and runs over to greet me with his tail wagging happily, and he licks my hands when I reach down to pet him.

“Want some breakfast?” Dom offers.

Hoover yips his approval—apparently he’s become as much a fan of Dom’s cooking as I have—but my mind is muddled and weary, and all I want to do is go off by myself for a while so I can think. “Thanks, but I’m going to pass for now,” I tell Dom. “I need some sleep.”

Dom looks disappointed, but I note it’s Hoover he’s looking at. I’m starting to worry that people like my dog better than me.

As soon as I’m safely ensconced inside my cottage, I swallow some ibuprofen and curl up on the couch with my broken-toed foot propped on a pillow. Though I’m exhausted, I’m too pent up and in too much pain to sleep. As I ponder the whole incident with the fire and all the deaths that have occurred, my mind reels with trying to make sense of it all. I wonder where, when, and how it will all end and I feel like a captive, spellbound and helpless as I wait for the next catastrophe to strike. The nasty burnt smell outside has permeated the walls of the cottage and, between it and my sense of impending doom, I feel an overwhelming need to escape.

After an hour or so the ibuprofen has made the pain much better but it has also left my empty stomach feeling like someone is drilling a hole in it. I take a shower, dry my hair, put on some clothes, and then get into the hearse with Hoover. Making mental apologies to Dom, I head out to get myself some breakfast and a reward for Hoover for his heroic behavior. A quick turn at the drive-through at McDonald’s earns me some curious stares when I get to the food window—no doubt because of the hearse and my request for “two orders of bacon for my friend in the back.”

I park in the lot long enough for Hoover to snort down his bacon while I enjoy a sausage biscuit and some orange juice. As I munch, I again reflect on the events of the past few days, running all the facts over in my mind. I’ve got two dead bodies, both with close ties to Hurley, and an attempt on David’s life. While I suppose it’s possible that someone has a grudge against David and tried to burn him alive because of it, I find it unlikely. He’s a highly respected and beloved surgeon in the community. Even though every one of these incidents points a finger squarely in Hurley’s direction, I feel pretty certain he’s innocent. The public argument between him and David seems a little too coincidental to me.

But if Hurley isn’t guilty, and he’s right in his assumption that someone is trying to frame him, how did they do it? The evidence suggests that someone broke into his house and stole his hair, the potassium cyanide, and the gas can. It also means that whoever stole the stuff would have had to break into my old house to start the fire and into Minniver’s house to poison his food with the potassium cyanide. Hurley has already shown me how easy it is to bypass a door lock with the right tools and the know-how, and the fact that he possesses both makes him look even guiltier. He could have gotten into Minniver’s house easily enough, even without the missing spare key. My old house would have been a bigger challenge since all the doors had dead bolts and I knew David was obsessive about locking them every night, which explains the broken basement window.

Killing Callie hadn’t required any lock picking, and the knife that killed her is easy enough to explain given that it was outside in Hurley’s boat and accessible to anyone who looked there. All someone had to do was lure Callie here.

With that thought I recall her diary, which is still beneath the seat in my car. When I reach down and drag it out, the cell phone I had stashed there comes with it. I’d forgotten all about the phone and when I flip it open it tells me that I’ve missed a call. I look at the displayed number but don’t recognize it. Then I get the smart idea of comparing this number to the ones in my own cell phone, to see if it matches any of them. I go searching through my purse for my phone but can’t find it. Puzzled, I stop and think back to when I left the house, certain I hadn’t seen the phone in the charger. Then I remember grabbing it last night to call 911, and dropping it when I was running through the woods toward my old house.

“Dang it,” I mutter, making a mental note to go back and look for it.

In the meantime, the cell Hurley gave me still has a slight charge left on it so I dial the number of the missed call. It rings several times and just as I become convinced no one is going to answer, someone does.

“Hello?” says a female voice.

“Hello. Who is this?”

There’s a long silence and then the woman says, “You called me. Who is this?”

I almost slip and give my real name, but at the last second I remember who the phone is supposed to belong to. “This is Rebecca Taylor. I received a call from this number on my cell phone so I’m returning it.”

“Are you the private investigator who is looking into Callie Dunkirk’s death?” the woman asks.

“Yes, I am. Why? Do you have something for me?”

“I might.”

“Can I ask who it is I’m speaking to?”

“My name is Andi, short for Andrea. I’m Callie’s sister. When I went into the TV station to pick up some of her things yesterday afternoon, someone mentioned that you’d been there asking a bunch of questions. She gave me your card.”

“Who was that?”

“The girl at the receptionist’s desk.”

“Ah, Misty.”

“Yes. She seemed to think you were working for my mother and me.”

Uh-oh.

“But you’re not. So who are you working for?”

“I can’t reveal that. Sorry.”

“Is it that prick, Mike Ackerman?” Even without her colorful descriptor, the venom in her voice when she mentions his name makes it clear what she thinks of him.

“Why do you think he’s a prick?” I ask, avoiding her question.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she says. “I’m not sticking my neck out so he can chop it off. If you’re working for him, you’ll tell him what I said and then he’ll be coming after me. Next thing you know, I’ll be dead, too, just like my sister.”

Her words hit me like a punch to the solar plexus. Clearly she thinks it was Ackerman who killed Callie.

“You tell that son of a bitch that I’ve already gone to the cops and if anything happens to me they’ll be on him like flies on shit,” she says. She’s trying hard to pepper her words with lots of bravado but I detect an underlying shakiness in her voice that tells me her fear of Ackerman is very real.

Sensing that she is about to hang up, I say, “I’m not working for Mike Ackerman. I can’t tell you who I am working for, but I
can
tell you it’s not him.” She doesn’t say anything, but I can hear her breathing on the other end so I know she hasn’t hung up yet. “Do you think Mike Ackerman killed your sister?” I ask her. The phone beeps three times just as I finish asking the question and I realize the battery is about to die. All I hear of Andi’s answer is “—did.”

“I’m sorry, you cut out and I didn’t hear you.”

“I said the bastard . . .
beep
. . . to keep her quiet . . .
beep
. . . tell his wife . . .
beep
.” After her last comment is broken up by three more beeps, the phone goes dead.

“Damn it!” I throw the cell aside and hear Hoover whimper behind me. “Sorry, boy,” I say.

I sit and think for a minute about Andi’s final comment, trying to make some sense of the part I heard. The words
keep her quiet
and
tell his wife
make me wonder if my suspicions about the relationship between Ackerman and Callie are right.

I turn my attention back to the diary and flip it open to the page with the note about police corruption. As I read it again, something nags at the back of my mind and I struggle to figure out what it is. It isn’t until I look at the dead cell phone that it hits me. Callie’s diary entry mentions a phone call and if there was a phone call, there’d be a record of where it came from. I make a mental note of the time and date of the entry so I can later compare it to calls Callie got. Though the entry may have been written hours or even days after the call, I figure it’s worth a shot. If I had my own cell phone, I could call Bob Richmond and ask him if he’s run Callie’s phone records yet, but since I don’t, it’ll have to wait.

Phone calls aside, it all comes back to Hurley. He is the one thing that is common and central to everything that has happened, though not everyone knows it yet. With that thought in mind, I finish my breakfast and drive over to his neighborhood. I cruise down the street slowly, studying the other houses, and then circle around the block to Harold Minniver’s street. I do this several times, not sure what I’m looking for but feeling like there is something here, something that will help me put all the pieces together.

Eventually I park, leash Hoover, and walk up to Hurley’s house. After several rings of the doorbell and a few knocks, I deduce he isn’t home. Curious, I head off the porch and walk around the side of his house to the garage area where the boat is parked. Nothing looks much different than it did when I was here a couple of nights ago.

I peek through the side window into Hurley’s workshop. Sunlight coming in through the window in the bay door creates several sparks of light within the room. I realize it’s coming from bits of metal scattered about and I remember the metal fragments we found in Callie’s hair. One more piece of damning evidence against Hurley.

I study the other doors in the garage and see that the one to the outside has a dead bolt on it, but the one leading from the workshop to the house has just a keyed knob lock. The dead bolt probably doesn’t offer much of an obstacle to someone with Hurley’s lock-picking talents, and once someone gained access to the workshop, getting into the house proper would be easy. Heck, even I could do that and, in fact, I have. I bypassed one of those knob locks once when I was a teenager and locked myself out of the house. All I had to do was slide my library card into the door crack and use it to push back the latch.