Murder Comes by Mail (30 page)

But the question wouldn’t be shut out. It screamed at him from every side. If not Jackie Johnson, then who? The who echoed through his head until it seemed to be bouncing off everything around him. Who? Who?

He let his feet sink and treaded water while he stared back toward his house. The body was there, a deep shadow under the tree.

And what did you do after you found the body?
Michael could hear Whitt’s voice inside his head.

Went swimming, of course.
What else could a man do when a monster who no longer had a face was laughing in the trees around him? But the lake couldn’t insulate him from the monster laughter. It bubbled out through the water to mock him.

Michael sank below the lake’s surface and swam as fast as he could toward the dock. He must have lost his mind. How could he try to escape in the lake while a monster was stalking the people he loved most? A monster they wouldn’t expect or recognize.

Without a glance in the direction of the body, Michael grabbed up his clothes and ran across the yard. Johnson wasn’t going anywhere. What Michael had to figure out was what the monster who’d put him there planned next.

He dumped his uniform on the porch and took the fastest shower on record after he called 911 to have the dispatcher call in the troops. Justin, Buck, Eagleton. It was going to be a long night.

He dialed Aunt Lindy’s number, then held the phone between his ear and shoulder while he jerked on jeans. His heart didn’t start beating right until he heard her hello.

“Where are you, Michael? I thought you were coming here for the night.”

“Something’s happened. Call Reece and ask him to come over to stay with you until I get there.”

“I’ll do no such thing.” It was easy to hear Aunt Lindy’s frown in her voice.

“Then you go over there. That would be better anyway. Call him up and tell him to come walk you over to his house.”

“What is the matter with you, Michael? You know I’m not going to call Reece Sheridan in the middle of the night to come protect me. The poor man’s hardly in any physical condition to protect himself, much less anybody else. Besides, that Jackie Johnson isn’t going to bother me.”

“You’re right there.” Michael pressed the phone harder against his ear. He needed to make Aunt Lindy realize the danger. “Jackie Johnson isn’t going to bother anybody. He’s dead.”

“Dead?” Aunt Lindy sounded surprised.

“That’s what I said. I found him under my rowboat.” He tried to keep his voice calm, but how could a man stay calm with a dead man in his backyard? A man killed with a saber from his own house. Michael looked toward the cabinet that stored his antique weapons. The doors were closed and locked the same as always.

“Rowboat? You’re not making sense, Michael. What’s this about a rowboat?” Aunt Lindy was using her stop-the-nonsense teacher’s voice.

Michael pulled in a breath. “Jackie Johnson’s body was under my rowboat.”

“Your rowboat?” Her voice rose a little with disbelief.

“Yes. Dead. Under my rowboat in my yard.”

She recaptured her matter-of-fact tone. “I take it he didn’t crawl under there and happen to expire on his own.” When Michael didn’t say anything, she went on. “So who put him there?”

“I have no idea, Aunt Lindy. Until a little while ago, I didn’t know there was another who.”

“All right. We don’t know who. Do we know why? Why go to the trouble of hiding him under your rowboat?”

“And use Uncle Wilbur’s Civil War saber to see that he didn’t crawl out from under it.”

“Uncle Wilbur’s saber? Oh my.” Aunt Lindy’s voice was strained. “I don’t like the sound of any of this. Do you have any possible suspects in mind?”

“I don’t, but Detective Whitt will.”

“Whitt. He’s the man on the news after that poor reporter was killed.” Aunt Lindy let the silence hum on the line a moment. “I think I will call Reece after all.”

“Good. And don’t open the door for anyone else no matter what they tell you. Promise?”

“Michael, I do believe you are trying to frighten me.”

“Is it working?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Michael said again. “Have you heard from Alex since we talked last?”

“No.”

“If she calls, tell her what I told you and make sure she knows to be afraid too. And very careful. Tell her . . .” Michael let his words die off. Then he went on. “Tell her I’m sorry I got her into this.”

After Michael clicked off the phone, he went to the gun cabinet. The locked doors showed no sign of being forced open. He didn’t know when he’d last looked down into the cabinet where he could see the saber on the bottom shelf. Two days. Three. Maybe a week. But now he stared at the empty space where the saber always lay and thought of the stories he’d been told about his uncle Wilbur.

They said Wilbur claimed he never fired a shot that he didn’t worry one of his Rebel brothers might be on the other side in his line of fire. So when they both fought at Gettysburg and his brother, Pascal, was killed, Wilbur went half mad with grief. Well-meaning people told him it couldn’t have been his bullet that ended Pascal’s life, but Wilbur took no solace in their empty words. He told them his bullets could have killed somebody’s brother.

Michael hadn’t killed anybody, but somebody was going to a lot of trouble to make it look as if he had. Why? And who? Most of all, who?

At the first sign of flashing lights in the distance, he stepped out on his front porch to wait. Jasper barely bothered to bark when Buck pulled up into the yard.

Justin was right behind him, and after another twenty minutes, Whitt rolled in, this time with his techs in tow. Lights and camera time.

Michael pointed out the body and the probable murder weapon and stood back as the spotlights went on and the cameras started flashing. One woman nobody bothered to introduce wrapped yellow police line tape around his trees back and forth like a giant web.

Buck went down to take a look at the corpse and then stepped over the police tape to come stand beside Michael. He waved his hand at the yellow tape. “Not much need of this out here, but I guess the stuff’s cheap.”

“I guess,” Michael said.

Buck was silent a minute. “You don’t think he offed himself, do you?”

“And then crawled under my rowboat?” Michael looked at Buck, who kept his eyes on the people surrounding the body. “Not likely.”

“Yeah. Then what do you think did happen?”

“I think there’s a monster out in the bushes we didn’t even know was there and I think he’s laughing.”

“Laughing?” Buck turned to stare at him.

“Laughing.” Michael looked from him to the woods. “This is a game to whoever’s doing it. He’s playing gotcha and I’m it. At least, I hope I’m it.”

“What do you mean?”

Michael turned back to Buck. “I want it to be me he goes after next.”

Justin sidled up beside them. “I’m not running for reelection next year. I don’t care if people think it’s my duty or not.”

“Nobody else will run,” Buck said.

“Then the judge or the governor or whoever will just have to appoint somebody. Anybody but me.” Justin headed toward his hearse to get the gurney. “I’ll need somebody to help me again.”

“Why don’t you hire an assistant?” Buck called after him.

Justin didn’t look around. “Never needed an assistant before today.”

Buck blew out a breath. “Guess it’s my turn, huh?”

“It’s not mine.” Michael kept his feet planted where they were.

Buck punched his shoulder lightly. “Don’t worry, kid. We’ll catch this joker. Nobody can go around killing people the way this perp has been without leaving some trails. We’ll just follow those trails straight to him.”

Michael didn’t bother saying anything. He knew where the trails were leading. The monster had made sure of that.

Whitt dropped any semblance of professional courtesy when he came over to question Michael. “You ready to tell me what’s going on here, Keane?”

“I told you. I came out to locate the source of the bad odor in my yard. I found some fish some kid had left down by the dock, and then when I headed back to the house, I saw Jackson under my boat. Or Johnson.”

“And the probable murder weapon we found down by the lake? The saber. You said that was yours.”

“One of my ancestors carried it in the Civil War.”

“Your uncle Wilton, I think you said.”

“Wilbur,” Michael corrected as if it mattered.

“Right. Got that, Chekowski?” Whitt looked at his partner, who was scribbling notes as Whitt talked. He didn’t expect her to answer him and she didn’t.

The lights they strung up pushed back the night but left deep shadows around the edges of the yard. Michael refrained from telling the detective it might be a little late to get a statement from Wilbur. A hundred-years-plus too late. Instead he kept his mouth shut and waited for whatever the man would say next.

“You hadn’t noticed it missing? It’s not exactly a pocket knife. Seems you’d notice it missing.”

“I hadn’t actually looked inside the cabinet for a few days. I did check to be sure the doors were locked on Monday when I came in and my dog seemed unusually nervous. The night before I found the earring.”

“So you don’t think it was lifted that night?”

“I can’t be sure. I didn’t look inside the cabinet to see if everything was there. Assumed nothing would be missing since the doors were closed and locked.”

“And they were.”

“They were.”

“You did say you started locking your doors after that.”

“The door was locked,” Michael said. “Not that night but after that.”

“So do you have a broken window? A splintered doorjamb?”

“Not that I’ve seen.”

Whitt stared at him, shielding his eyes from the glare of the light with his hand. “I think you’d notice that.”

“I haven’t examined all my windows.” Michael didn’t flinch under the man’s stare. “The lock’s a simple one. Probably wouldn’t hold out much challenge to anybody with some lock picks. The same with the lock on the cabinet.”

Whitt pressed his lips together and gazed over Michael’s shoulder toward the woods beyond the house. Michael wondered if he saw nothing but dark shadows or if he could see the monster lurking there laughing at them. Then again, Whitt probably had no awareness of the trees there at all. He was looking inward at the facts he’d piled up in his head. Finally he blew out his breath and looked back at Michael. “What do you think is going on here?”

“I wish I knew, Detective Whitt.”

Michael met his eyes. Whitt looked away first, glancing over his shoulder to where the lights were brightest around the body. “Sure does ruin the view. Right, Chekowski?”

“Yes, sir.” She sounded surprised that Whitt had even noticed there was a view to see.

The man turned back toward Michael but stared at the ground as if he might discover some new truth there. “You know what it looks like, don’t you, Keane?”

“No.” Michael kept his voice flat. He knew very well where the conversation was heading. “What does it look like?”

Whitt pulled his gaze up off the ground to settle his eyes on Michael. “Two bodies in your backyard or the same as. Evidence for the first killing in your pocket. You admit to owning a probable murder weapon. Two, maybe even three, of the victims knew you and had reason to trust you.”

Behind Whitt, Chekowski stopped scribbling in her notebook and stared at her boss.

With his back to the lights, Michael’s face was shadowed. He turned a bit so Whitt could see his face in full light. He didn’t blink. “I’m not a murderer, Whitt, and even more telling, I’m not an idiot.”

“Most murderers aren’t. Idiots, I mean.” Whitt stared back at him as unblinking as Michael.

“But if I was the murderer, I’d have to be an idiot to hand over the earring to you and to put Johnson’s body under my boat and then pretend I’d simply found him there.”

Whitt pursed his lips again. “What would you have done?”

“Buried him in the woods or weighted him down and sunk him in a deep cove of the lake. I’d have pushed that Oldsmobile into the lake with my old truck and you’d be down to two bodies to worry about.”

“Maybe you were going to. You just didn’t get it done quick enough.”

“So I call in you and your crew to make sure I don’t have time?” Michael waved his hand at the people swarming over his yard.

Whitt looked toward where Justin was finally loading the body on his gurney. “Stranger things have happened. And somebody, might even have been you, threw out the idea that this killer—” Whitt paused and fixed his gaze back on Michael—“this perp might be one of those . . .”

Chekowski spoke up when he hesitated. “Multiple personalities, sir.”

“Yeah, whatever. The shrinks are always hunting excuses.” He leaned a little closer to Michael.

Michael didn’t give an inch or say a word.

“I know you don’t have any kind of smudge on your record. Squeaky clean as far as the computers know.”

“You checked?” Michael stared him down.

Whitt backed up and shrugged a little. “I wanted to see why you left the Columbus police force to come back to this tiny dot on the map. Didn’t seem the normal thing for a man to do.”

“Normal for me. My roots are here.” Michael finally looked away from Whitt to stare out toward the lake. It was hard to see the water past the glare of the lights, but he knew it was there. “Do you have more questions? Or are we finished here?”

“You know we’re not.” Whitt sounded almost sorry. “You know I have to at least hold you for questioning on this. Hard to ignore the evidence.”

“You’ll be making a terrible mistake.” Michael had known it was coming, but it was still a punch in the gut.

“Sir, are you . . .” Chekowski let her sentence sputter out at a look from Whitt.

“Read him his rights, Chekowski.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Michael resisted the impulse to punch Whitt in the nose. “I know my rights.”

31

When Buck came over to them after helping Justin load the body, Whitt told him to take Michael in.

“What the . . . ?” Buck’s mouth dropped open as he looked from Whitt to Michael. “He’s kidding, right?”

Michael let Whitt answer.