It's Murder, My Son (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (43 page)

Travis had to have known about the door and rooms for years. His stepmother must have told him. He could be hiding anywhere to ambush him. He could even have escaped through another exit that they hadn’t discovered.

Mac felt a nudge against his thigh followed by a wet snout pressed against his hand. He grasped the dog’s collar while holding his gun ready to shoot with the other hand.

Gnarly led him down the narrow corridor. Mac tripped around the ladder and several feet further until the dog stopped. With a whine, Gnarly scratched at the wall.

Kneeling next to him, Mac felt around until he found a door handle, not unlike the one they had found that led into the bathroom. He pried his fingers under the crack and pulled it open.

Gnarly charged.

On his hands and knees, Mac followed. The entrance was identical to the other one. It went through a cabinet and came out behind the bar in the home theater. Mac guessed that this was the way Travis had entered the room without Katrina seeing him the night he killed her.

A light over the sink dimly lit the room. Mac crawled out of the cabinet to find Gnarly tearing into Travis’s suit coat left on the floor in the middle of the empty room.

By the time Mac stood up, the dog had become aware of the trick. “Very clever.” He held up the jacket to show the dog. “He took off his coat to throw you off his scent.”

Enraged, Gnarly erupted with a round of barks. Charging the bar, he planted his front paws on the counter and growled at his mirrored image behind it.

Mac searched for places that Travis could be hiding. With no furnishings, there weren’t any.

Behind the bar, he could see his own image looking back at him. It was the same two-way mirror Pay Back had used to watch Katrina’s every move.

The two-way mirror!

“Get down!”

The mirror exploded.

Mac plunged Gnarly to the floor.                                                                   

A rain of shattered glass fell on them.

“Stay!” Mac jumped up to his knees and braced the dog against the bar while firing his father’s pistol into the darkness of the secret room.

When it was over, all was quiet.

They could hear the sirens of the police and paramedics racing to Spencer Point.

Mac rose to his feet. Freed, Gnarly shook to send the glass dust in his fur flying before planting his front paws on the bar to observe the damage. He uttered a whine.

Falling forward onto the bar, Travis laid face down in the broken glass. A pool of blood formed under him.

Mac took the gun from his hand. “Travis?”

“Mac,” he gasped, “don’t worry about me. I’m world famous. I’m going to live forever.”

With that, bestselling author Travis Turner gasped his last breath.

Epilogue

Ironically, Travis Turner’s killing spree didn’t shock the media as much as the motive behind it: to conceal the identity of who had really written his books. The police found twelve completed manuscripts in the famous author’s study. Each had Betsy Weaver’s name written on the title page.

They also uncovered Katrina Holt Singleton’s wedding ring along with a dreadlock wig splattered with Travis’s and Gnarly’s blood.

A DVD that Travis had hidden in his safe proved his motive for killing Gordon and Prissy Hardwick. The disc contained a security recording filmed from their back deck the night of Katrina’s murder. It showed Gnarly ambushing Travis when he left Katrina’s home via the secret door. During the attack, Gnarly pulled the wig from Travis’s head to reveal his face before he beat the dog senseless with the bat he was carrying.

A search of Travis’s bedroom closet turned up the baseball bat. Police found traces of Gnarly’s blood and fur on it. Forensic evidence also revealed it to be the weapon used to crush Katrina Singleton’s throat.

The publishing industry reeled for weeks in response to the news about America’s hottest mystery writer being a fraud. While deciding what course of action to take, Travis’s publisher yanked Travis’s, or rather Betsy’s, fifth bestseller from publication, losing millions of dollars on hardbacks already printed with Travis Turner’s name on the cover. In the end, they set a new publication date to release what they predicted to be the most awaited book of the year: a re-release of
A Death in Manhattan
with Betsy Weaver’s name on the front cover.

Meanwhile, Sophia Hainsworth dropped the Turner name before her chartered jet touched down in New York. A self-proclaimed victim of Travis Turner’s con, she went on the talk show circuit telling and re-telling how the man she loved had misled her.

Truly believing he was a writer, she had been duped into helping him set up a phony alibi for Katrina’s murder. She claimed Travis had told her that he was testing out a plotline for one of his books. Also, he explained away the dog bites with a dramatic story about saving a lost child from a pack of wolves during the blizzard.

Within a week of the news breaking, Sophia accepted a multi-million dollar book deal to pen her memoirs about her marriage to the famous bestselling author who had conned the world.

Archie turned down Sophia’s request to ghost write the piece.

With all the sensational coverage of Travis Turner’s scandal, the residents of Spencer forgot about their phony police chief until a Mercedes registered to their mobster mayor turned up at the bottom of one of Deep Creek Lake’s coves. Roy Herman’s body was in the trunk. He had been shot in the back of the head and had a black diamond tucked in his pants pocket. 

In celebration of the Fourth of July, Mac Faraday hosted his first official party as master of Spencer Manor. Cocktail hour would be followed by a cookout of steaks, chops, chicken, and grilled lobster. After sunset, Spencer was going to be treated to the biggest fireworks show it had ever seen.

To introduce himself to Deep Creek society, Mac had invited all of his neighbors and gifted each of them with a party goodie in the form of new leather wallets and purses to make up for what his dog had stolen.

Taking up camp near the outside bar, Violet kept the bartender hopping to keep her martini glass filled. David watched her from a few feet away while sitting with Yvonne, Mac, Archie, Ben and his wife Catherine, and Bogie. Jeff Ingles lingered nearby while ensuring his employees were on top of things. Three cooks from the Inn scurried inside and out in preparation for the grilling. Gnarly cruised the guests and staff for snacks and pettings. Between munchies, he helped himself to cookies that Violet had stashed in a pouch hanging off the arm of her wheelchair.

“If you didn’t keep returning Lee Dorcas’s wallet to Travis, then who did?” Bogie asked Mac while sipping his beer.

Mac laughed, “The only one I can think of is Gnarly. Remember when the police came here after he brought home Dorcas’s head?”

“Gnarly was going nuts,” David recalled.

“He also freaked out when the Hardwicks’ killer was planting the bomb at their house,” Archie said. “It was Travis.”

“But he didn’t go nuts when Roy Phillips came out to see Archie until he attacked her,” Mac said. “Nor did he react that way when I was interviewing housekeepers. The only one he tried to attack was Travis. Looking back, like Travis playing Pay Back to get back at Katrina for rejecting him, I think Gnarly embarked on his own campaign against Travis to make him pay for getting away with murdering his mistress.”

“Kind of sophisticated thinking for a dog, don’t you think?” Ben chuckled.

“So is petty thievery to alleviate boredom.” Mac shrugged with a smile. “Gnarly stole or found that wallet. He brought that sealed manuscript to us. I doubt if he knew the significance of it, but he did sense that it had to be important.” He patted the dog on the head. “Circumstantial evidence points to Gnarly.” Mac’s touch startling him; the German shepherd yanked his head out of the pouch of cookies.

Jeff stopped by their table with a bottle of wine. “Who was Katrina arguing with that night that she hit me with her car? Was it Phillips or whatever his name was?”

Mac answered, “It was Lee Dorcas. He had checked into the Inn one week after Niles Holt’s murder, the same night as the hit and run.”

“What was he doing here?” Archie asked. “Was he stalking Katrina after all?”

Mac reminded David, “Do you remember Dorcas’s lawyer telling us that shortly after Holts’s murder, Lee Dorcas deposited one hundred thousand dollars into his account? He never said where he got it.”

“It couldn’t have been a payoff for killing Holt,” David said. “Dorcas had an airtight alibi.”

“Even so, if I was accused of murder, especially by someone I already despised, I’d start nosing around. After the police talked to Lee Dorcas, he came out here to see what was going on.”

“He blackmailed Katrina,” David concluded.

“Look at it from Katrina’s side,” Mac suggested. “She married Niles Holt intending for him to have a simple accident, but he fights back. She ends up with a bruise on her face, a torn sweater, and a missing five carat necklace. She has to come up with another story. So she used Lee Dorcas, banking on him not having an alibi. Then, to make matters worse, the chief of police comes up with not only a witness, but physical evidence against her. She has to keep him in line.  At the same time, she has the man she accused of killing her husband threatening to blow the case wide open.” He chuckled, “She was between a rock and a hard place. Dorcas had to have been following her and saw her having dinner with the chief of police. They met in the garden afterwards to discuss a settlement in exchange for his silence. She paid him to go away.”

Jeff said, “What I heard was not a negotiation, it was an argument.”

Mac explained, “First, Katrina stole from him, and then she tried to frame him for murder. Dorcas had to have been furious with her.”

“That’s why it cost her so much for his silence.” Seeing that everyone had finished their appetizers, Jeff whispered into his transmitter for the busboys to clear the tables and the chefs to prepare the grill for the main course.

Catherine asked, “Did any of these murders have anything to do with Emma Turner’s or Milo Ford’s murders?”

David said, “The gun we found in the bag in the secret room turned out to be the one used to kill Travis’s stepmother.”

“Emma Turner was an informant,” Bogie revealed.  “She was into drugs and Milo was her supplier. When Ol’ Pat caught her with some cocaine, she struck a deal to snitch on Milo. A few weeks later, she got killed.”

“Dad was convinced Milo did it.”

Bogie told them, “A few months later, Milo got killed off.”

“Travis had to have found out about that secret entrance into the Singleton house somehow,” Mac said. “His stepmother must have told him.”

Catherine asked Mac, “When did you first suspect Travis in all this?”

“When it came out that he had ratted David out, I knew Travis wasn’t what he appeared to be.”

“I thought he was a jerk,” Yvonne said, “but never thought he was a killer.”

Mac agreed. “Just because someone is a phony doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a murderer.”

Ben asked him, “When did it occur to you that he was a murderer?”

“One hint was when he killed Betsy,” David answered.

“If he hadn’t killed Betsy, he may have gotten away with everything,” Mac said. “The mistakes he made in covering up her death revealed how little he knew about the very thing he supposedly wrote about: putting her in the fridge on her back, and then dumping her face down next to the pool. Sloppy.”