SUICIDAL SUSPICIONS: A Kate Huntington Mystery (The Kate Huntington Mystery Series Book 8) (34 page)

He tried to recall what he’d been thinking about. Oh yeah, why was this woman telling him about some teacher accused of abusing the girls at the Catholic high school?

But Sybil Coleman had changed the subject and was now regaling him with stories about her kids. “The children are involved in so many activities. Catherine’s in the drama club. That’s where she is right now, rehearsing. And all my boys are quite athletic. Sam plays football. The twins are at Little League practice, and Bernadette has a piano lesson this afternoon. I need to pick her up in a little while. So I hope this won’t take too long.”

You don’t have to keep me entertained while I wait for your husband.

The words formed in Skip’s brain but it seemed like too much effort to say them. His eyelids drooped. He hoped Coleman got home soon. This woman was putting him to sleep.

“Would you like more coffee?”

“No, I’m fine.” His words sounded a bit slurred to his ears. He leaned forward and placed his almost empty cup in its saucer. The dishes rattled.

Mrs. Coleman frowned at him.

As he leaned back again, the room did a slow spin.

A part of his brain was telling him that something was wrong, but a strange euphoria had settled over him.

“Another cookie, Mr. Canfield?”

“No… thank you.” The words left his mouth a couple beats after he’d thought them.

The woman launched into another story about one of her kids.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Kate tried to be patient as Sister Michelina worked her way through the decades of the rosary. Finally the nun said the final prayer and crossed herself.

Kate rose from her chair to help the elderly woman up off her knees.

When they were both seated again, Kate said quietly, “Thank you for telling me about Father Sam.”

The nun looked at her, her face puckered in confusion. “Father Sam? Well, he was one of the ones who told me to keep quiet.” The confusion cleared. “Oh, you’re thinking he was the abuser. No, no. It wasn’t him. The other one, he took the kids into the church basement and turned out all the lights. Then the janitor would take over and make them take their clothes off…”

The other one?
Panic shot through her.
There was only one other priest at St. Bart’s.

The nun was still talking but Kate wasn’t listening. Father Bill was the abuser, and Skip was planning to go talk to him today.

She jumped up and bolted for the foyer. “Manny!”

~~~~~~~~

Something jiggled in Skip’s shirt pocket and made a funny, purring noise. It tickled. He tried to laugh but nothing came out.

His mouth was parched. He reached for his coffee cup. His hand jerked forward, several seconds after his brain had told it to move. It hit the edge of the saucer, rattling the cup.

Mrs. Coleman snatched the cup and saucer away. “Don’t you dare break that. This set was my mother’s.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “I think we’re about ready to get started here.”

Adrenaline jolted through his system, but it did him no good. His muscles were no longer reliably obeying his brain’s orders.

Mrs. Coleman had a cell phone in her hand–an old-style flip phone. Her smart phone sat on the coffee table. “Bill, I need you to come home. Now! Something’s happened and I need your help. Have another of the parents bring the boys home after practice.” She went quiet.

Skip’s pocket jiggled and purred again. It registered that his own phone was vibrating with an incoming call. He somehow managed to fumble it out of his pocket. It fell on the floor.

“It’s complicated. Just get here fast, before Catherine and Sam get home.” Mrs. Coleman disconnected and stepped over to where Skip was fumbling around on the floor. She kicked his phone out of his reach.

He looked up at her and his head swam. “Wha’d ya do that for?” He wasn’t sure if he actually got the words out or not.

Next thing he knew he was down on the floor on all fours, his butt having slid off the sofa. That struck him as funny. He rolled over onto his back, knocking against the coffee table and rattling the china. His stomach shook with laughter that wasn’t coming out of his mouth.

His brain was trying to think. He knew he was in danger, but he felt surprisingly blasé about it. His gun. He should try to get it out. His arm just flopped around when he told it to go for the pistol.

Sybil Coleman leaned over him. She knocked his arm out of the way and slid her hand under his lower back. It came out with his gun in it.

She smiled down at him. “Don’t worry, Mr. Canfield. It won’t hurt a bit.”

~~~~~~~~

“Skip’s not answering.” Kate tried and failed to keep the panic out of her voice.

“Call Rose,” Manny said from the driver’s seat as he sped along Eastern Boulevard toward the Baltimore Beltway.

She did so and quickly filled Rose in on what she’d found out and what she was afraid might be happening. She choked up a couple times but managed to get it all out.

“Skip left a message that he was going to this guy’s house.” Rose’s voice was tense. “Do you have the address?”

“Yes,” Kate said.

“Okay. Mac is with me. We’re on our way there now. You guys get there as fast as you can. But Kate,
you
stay in the car.”

Kate didn’t bother to argue. She disconnected and stared out the windshield, willing the car to move faster. But Manny was already risking life and limb as he wove in and out of the traffic.

She prayed a cop didn’t try to stop them for speeding. How would they ever explain all this and get him to let them go?

That reminded her of Judith Anderson. She called the lieutenant, and once again got voicemail. Where the hell was she that she’d have her phone off all this time?

To distract herself from the panic threatening to explode in her chest, Kate pulled the more recent journal out of the file and leafed through it. She came to the last page, light gray with pencil markings, and re-read the scattered words.

She grabbed her phone again and called Dr. Blake’s number. When the receptionist answered, Kate didn’t give her time to say anything.

“I’ve got to talk to Dr. Blake right away. It’s extremely important, a matter of life and death.”

Half a beat, then, “Hold on, please.”

Kate counted off thirty seconds. “Come on,” she muttered. Her mind veered to what might be happening to Skip right now. Bile rose in the back of her throat.

What she thought she was about to find out, would it make any real difference? Only to confirm what they already suspected.

A voice in her ear said, “Hello. Who’s this?”

“Kate Huntington. I need to know something. Did you get Sphinx’s crate from Josie’s apartment?”

“Yeah.” Dr. Blake’s voice was hesitant. “Are you okay?”

No!

But Kate didn’t take the time to answer her out loud. “Was there anything odd about the crate, maybe something scratched on it?”

“No… Wait. Damn! I’m sorry. I’d forgotten all about that.”

“What?” Kate yelled, then stopped to suck in air, trying to calm herself.

“A piece of paper, taped on the underside of Sphinx’s collar. But it didn’t make any sense. It said Frobill on it.”

Kate flipped back a page in the journal to verify what she already knew. Josie’s periods were tiny o’s.

“Could it have been F-R, period, B-I-L-L?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I threw it away.”

“Thanks, Dr. Blake.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’ll get back to you.” Kate disconnected and looked down again at the journal in her lap. “So you really did tell Sphinx.”

“What?” Manny said.

“Josie taped a paper with
Fr. Bill
on it under her dog’s collar, then hinted in her journal that she’d told Sphinx where she was going, that day she was murdered.”

Manny accelerated. He laid on the horn and veered around some cars, then whipped back in front of them. His tires squealed as he took the entrance ramp onto the Beltway.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Rose sat in her car, observing the Colemans’ house. She’d tried her partner’s cell phone. It rang several times, then went to voicemail.

That could mean he was in the middle of a tricky interview with someone. She hesitated to go to the door and perhaps interrupt the flow of things just as Skip was about to cajole the man into confessing, to child abuse if not murder.

Then again, he also wouldn’t answer his phone if he was in trouble in there.

Mac slipped into the passenger seat, quietly closing the car door. “Didn’t see any activity in the back. The front windows are too far off the ground to see in.”

Rose narrowed her eyes as she peered at the large colonial. “Looks like the curtains are drawn anyway.”

Her phone buzzed. She snatched it up off the console between the seats. “Hernandez.”

“Rose, no time to explain.” Kate’s voice, frantic. “I got another piece of evidence. Coleman is definitely Josie’s killer.”

“How far away are you?”

“We’re on the Beltway. Ten minutes, unless we get stopped for speeding.”

“Tell Manny we’re going in. You stay in the car!”

~~~~~~~~

“What the hell are you doing, Sybil?” A male voice, startled and angry.

The face of the father in the pictures on the wall swam into Skip’s line of vision. The man looked horrified.

Help me!

“I had to incapacitate him, Bill. He’s here about St. Bartholomew’s.”

“Dear God,” the man bellowed. “What have you done?”

They stood over Skip, arguing.

Coleman grabbed his wife by the arms and shook her. “You little fool. I told you not to do this again.”

Again?

“I can’t let you go to jail.” The woman’s voice rose into a wail. “The children need you. I need you.”

“Don’t you get it? Now both of us will go to jail. Where does that leave the kids?”

“We just need to get rid of him. Then everything will be okay.”

“No, Sybil. I’m not committing murder. I’m a Christian. I used to be a priest, for Christ’s sake.”

Ironic that you take Christ’s name in vain in the same breath with “I’m a Christian.”

The room was getting darker. Skip could barely keep his eyes open. He found it fascinating that he was having so little emotional reaction to what was happening.

“We have to call 911,” the man said. “Get him to a hospital.”

“I only gave him roofies. I wasn’t going to hurt him.”

Roofies! Had to have been in the coffee.

The image of the woman touching her cup to her lips, then lowering it again, swam into his mind’s eye.

She didn’t drink any of hers.

“Where the hell did you get roofies?” the man yelled.

“From work. I got them just in case something like this happened. I knew his wife was nosing around. I was afraid they’d find out about you eventually. Look, all we’ve got to do is put him in his car and drive him somewhere. When he wakes up, he won’t even remember that he came to see us.”

Skip was pretty sure that the memory blanks caused by the date-rape drug weren’t that thorough. People usually did remember where they were and what they were doing
before
they were given the drug. But he wasn’t about to tell Mrs. Coleman that her plan was flawed, even if he could have managed to make his mouth muscles cooperate.

“Everything will be fine.” The woman’s voice was steadier, more commanding. “Go move our cars out of the way so we can pull his into the garage. That way nobody will see us putting him in there.”

Silence, a male grunt, then heavy footsteps receding.

A small hand slid into Skip’s pants pocket and felt around.

Hey, stop that! I’m a married man.

The hand pulled something out of his pocket. Mrs. Coleman’s face swam into view. Her eyes were hard. His own truck keys dangled from her fingers. “I tried to warn that nosy wife of yours.” Her voice was low, harsh. “But you two couldn’t leave it alone.”

His keys clattered onto the coffee table, and she moved out of his view. He managed to turn his head a little. A very little.

How much of that damn stuff did she give me?

Despite the drug in his system, his heart rate kicked up a notch when he saw what was now in the woman’s hands.

She plunged the needle into the small vial and drew clear liquid into the syringe. “This will take care of you. Then I have to figure out how to get rid of your wife.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Mac had made his way along the property line and was now hunkered beside a bush at the right, front corner of the house.

Rose hunched over and raced across the grass toward the weeping cherry tree in the middle of the lawn. As she neared the tree, the garage door rumbled and slowly slid up. Startled, Rose darted behind the trunk of the tree.

A paunchy, middle-aged man came out of the garage and walked to a car parked in the driveway.

That’s our killer?

He got in and started the car.

Rose debated–should she try to get back to her car and follow this guy? Mac could check out the house.

But the man didn’t go very far. He pulled past Skip’s truck and parked the car at the curb. Then he got up and jogged back up the driveway.

A few seconds later, a minivan backed out of the garage.

Rose braced herself to bolt for her car as soon as he was a little bit up the street. Skip was probably in that van.

But again the man pulled out onto the street, parked the van there, and got out.

She held her breath as he walked within five feet of her hiding place. He was huffing a little.

He climbed the front porch steps and entered the house.

Movement in the corner of her eye. Rose turned her head. Manny’s car had pulled up behind hers further down the block.

She held her hand up to Mac in a hang-on gesture. Then she hunched over and darted back to the street.

Manny clicked his doors unlocked. Rose climbed into his backseat for a quick conference. She opened her mouth.

Kate pointed out the windshield. “Look!”