Vengeance is Mine - A Benjamin Tucker Mystery (32 page)

“I’m in a bind here,” I said. “I need it in a week. How much if you drop everything else and just focus on this? It’s really important.” We agreed on eight thousand dollars—two thousand when he picked up the damaged portrait, and the remaining six thousand when it was replaced. I think I got screwed, but if there was any chance at all of replacing that portrait before the family returned, I had to go for it. I briefly considered hampering the Plum case to buy time and then mentally slapped myself.

I took Oscar outside to take care of business and explained to him that he might be on death row. “You might want to lay low and steer clear of Lainie for awhile.” He looked at me and wagged again.

 We walked over to take a look at the progress on the fence installation. One of the workers stopped what he was doing to talk to me for a few minutes. “I hope we didn’t disturb you too much. We waited until eight o’clock to start with the blasting.”

“No, no. We’re early risers around here. It’s looking great.”

When we went back in, I called a local florist and then stretched out on the sofa to rest. After two more hours of sleep, I showered and put on fresh blue jeans and a T-shirt.

Lainie finally got up just before noon and staggered into the living area. “Do I smell coffee?”

I went to the kitchen and returned with a large mug and handed it to her. She was a black coffee drinker, but had told me she added cream on the rare occasion when she needed something special. She smiled when she saw that I had laced her coffee with cream.

“Sorry I was so grumpy earlier,” she said. “I get that way when I’m really tired.”

“You weren’t grumpy,” I smiled. “You were sweet … like a
princess
.” She pretended to be offended but couldn’t help smiling back. Oscar looked up at her warily, and she reached down and ruffled his ears.

While Lainie took her shower, Dimitri called to say he was at the front door of the main house. I hurried over and let him in. There were at least three Brackus technicians inside installing the main security control system.

Dimitri took a good look at the portrait. “No. This can’t be repaired. I’d never be able to match the pigments close enough. It would look like he had a wart removed.”

We took it down and carefully packed it in a picture storage crate. He extorted the two thousand dollars, I thanked him, and he left. I wasn’t used to carrying much cash, and Nora’s stash was coming in handy. I’d replace it before she knew the difference, but there was still something just plain wrong about dipping into her money bag to pay for the replacement of her treasured portrait of Henry.

I looked around and surveyed the wreckage. Walker had covered the back window with thick polyethylene plastic sheeting. He had also fastened the exterior door closed in Nora’s bedroom suite with long wood screws. He’d left a note on the kitchen counter saying he would be in and out making repairs.

Lainie was waiting for me when I returned to the guesthouse. She had on the navy blue pantsuit she had worn the first day I saw her at the task force meeting. The Glock was on her right hip in a belt holster.

“What time are your parents flying out today?” she asked.

I struggled to put on my shoulder rig, and looked at my watch. “In about fifteen minutes.”

“Did you call them?”

“Nope.”

“How’s the arm?” she asked.

“Hurts like hell. I’ll have to take a Vicodin, but I’m not taking any more of those things than I absolutely have to.”

Lainie put her hand out. “Give me your keys. I’ll drive today.”

I laughed. “Nice try, MacKenzie. Let me give you a little fact of life about men. You can steal a man’s wife, but you don’t touch his car … or his dog. That’s just the way it is.”

We had burgers at McDonald’s and then swung by Marshak’s at the Cary Towne Center. I waited in the car while Lainie went in and bought two pairs of shorts and a couple of nightshirts that fit. As I waited, I watched a father goose patrol the shrubbery near the entrance where his wife was tending to their nest. It was the damnedest thing. These geese have hundreds of square miles of forests and wooded areas around here, and yet these two knuckleheads chose to make their nest right outside Marshak’s north entrance. And what’s more astounding—they do it every year!

Our next stop was Rex Hospital in Raleigh to visit Officer Stanton. We stopped on the way and picked up the flowers I’d ordered earlier.

When we got to the hospital, Lainie went in first to see if Stanton was up to the visit. We also wanted to give her a heads up, so she wouldn’t think it was Plum walking into her room.

Lainie buzzed my cell and said it was okay to come up. I passed through several hallways that smelled of antiseptics and cleaning agents as I made my way to Officer Stanton’s room. She beamed shyly from ear to ear when I walked in, and she saw the flowers. I had two dozen yellow roses in a tall crystal water pitcher.

“Oh, they’re so beautiful,” she said. “Thank you so much, Mr. Tucker.”

I smiled and squeezed her hand. “No more Mr. Tucker. Please call me Ben.”

There was a big teddy bear sitting on the table next to her bed. “That’s from the Lieutenant,” she said. “I don’t think he knew what to get me.”

“He cares a lot about you,” Lainie said.

“And he’s kicking himself for what happened,” I added.

“He really shouldn’t.” Stanton hesitated and said, “And I’m very sorry I told him you were the one who shot me. The guy looked just like you, and I was so confused about what was happening.”

“Don’t give it one more thought,” I said. “There was no way you could have known it wasn’t me.”

We spent the next fifteen minutes visiting with her, and left.

I dropped Lainie off at the Cary Police Department, where she would spend the rest of the day in a borrowed office working on the investigation into a series of deaths in the Baltimore area. She ordered me to invest my time getting a haircut.

After stopping at the bank to withdraw two thousand dollars to replace my self-service loan from Nora, I finally broke down and got a damn haircut. When I was finished, I looked like a moron. There was a white ring around my neck and ears where it hadn’t been exposed to the sun in years. I looked like a damn whitewall tire. Well, fine. Screw it. At least they wouldn’t mistake me for Plum unless he decided to make himself look like a moron too.

After parking in my usual spot at the Cary PD, I spent the next forty-five minutes talking to my brother George and correcting my father’s version of his and Mom’s visit. “No, Maggie did not leave me. No, I do not have a new girlfriend living with me. No, I am not selling drugs. Yes, I told them to leave. And yes, I did ask them if they had donated sperm and eggs.” By the time I hung up, I could have pulled my hair out—if it had still been there.

When Lainie got in the car, she eyed me and said, “You got a haircut. Looks good.”

I raised my eyebrows and waited.

“What?” she asked.

“What about my stripe?”

She laughed. “You look like a farmer who just got a haircut. Get out in the garden and do some work for a few days, you lazy, rich Republican.”

“How about we just drive with the sunroof open—and I’m a Democrat.”

We headed back to the estate, so Lainie could get a change of clothes. She’d been around Netter all day and said her clothes “stunk like a stale cigar.” I had to agree. Another reason for the open sunroof.

We picked up a pizza for dinner and arrived at the guesthouse just after dark. I had just gotten the table set when Lainie came out of her room wearing a pale green linen skirt and a slightly darker jacket. But the look on her face told me something was wrong.

“We have to leave, Ben. Right now!”

I tried to read her face. “What’s wrong?”

“Netter called,” she said. “There’s been another killing.”

We each grabbed a slice of pizza and left.

CHAPTER 44

It took twenty minutes to get to 455 East Rickman Drive in Cary. The scene reminded me of the one at Jennifer’s house eleven days earlier. There were eight police cruisers with light bars flashing, an EMS truck, and the inevitable media in full force. The street was barricaded off, so I had to park half a block away. Netter’s car was in front of the Channel Fourteen News truck on the other side of the taped barrier.

Lainie opened her door.

“Call me when you want me to come pick you up,” I said.

She shook her head. “No. You’re not going anywhere. I’m supposed to keep an eye on you, and that’s what I’m going to do. You’re coming with me.”

I got out and followed her toward the house. She showed her FBI identification to Officer Ralph Lacasa, who moved a barricade and allowed us to get closer. As we walked past, I showed him my Rolex watch, but Lacasa just looked at me as if to say “Yeah? So you have a watch.”

We stopped by Netter’s car, and Lainie pointed to it. “You stay in the Lieutenant’s car.”

“You’re kidding, right? It stinks in there.”

“You can put up with it for a few minutes,” she said.

“How about if I just stay right here and lean against the hood?”

She agreed and returned to the officer securing the perimeter. She pointed at me as she spoke to him, and I assumed she was telling Lacasa that I was a potential victim and was not to leave. He looked at me and nodded, expressionless. Lainie brushed a loose strand of red hair from her face and headed into the house. It was a two story structure, with white vinyl siding, black shutters, and black asphalt shingles. There was an attached two-car garage with a large black trashcan rolled up in front of the closed garage doors.

I tried not to look at the house because of what I knew to be inside. But with each person entering or leaving the structure, human nature caused me to glance over to see what was happening.

Lauren Roman, the News 14 Carolina reporter, recognized me and shouted for me to come over and answer questions. I pretended I didn’t hear her.

Lainie eventually came out to fill me in on what was going on.

The victim was thirty-seven-year-old Judith Elizabeth Krauss. She was divorced and lived with her boyfriend, Kenneth Stokely. He found her body at approximately seven o’clock this evening when he returned from work. Lainie said the boyfriend was in a state of shock, hysterical. Paramedics were trying to calm him down.

The house showed no signs of forced entry. All exterior windows and doors were closed and locked.

Photos found by investigators showed Krauss to have had a remarkable resemblance to previous victims Clancy and Knudsen. Similarly, Krauss’s head had been removed, and she had been posed on the master bed holding a Bible open to Romans 12: Verse 19.

Two officers escorted a man from the house. He was white as a ghost.

“That’s Stokely,” Lainie said.

I looked at a man paralyzed with grief, barely able to walk. The officers helped him into a police cruiser about fifty feet from where we were standing.

Netter walked out of the house, pulled off his latex gloves, and lit a cigar. He looked our way and headed in our direction.

“Man, it’s a fuckin’ mess in there,” he said. “Almost identical to the Clancy scene.” He looked at me and grinned. “Nice ears.”

“Why don’t you take the flying bite on my ass?”

He chuckled. “We are
touch-y
today. Anyway, I suppose you’ll be wanting to take pictures,” he said.

I nodded.

“Well, it’ll have to wait ‘til tomorrow. The forensics guys’ll be here most of the night.”

Netter and Lainie turned and headed back into the Krauss residence. The wind had picked up, so I zipped up my jacket to shield myself from the chill. I then leaned back against Netter’s car and folded my arms. It was going to be a long night.

CHAPTER 45

Tuesday morning, the media swarmed in front of the Cary Police Department like vultures circling over an animal carcass. Lainie and I walked briskly past them and into the building. The task force meeting would focus on the Krauss killing, and again, I was barred from attending. The thought of fighting off the media sickened me, so I spent the next hour sitting on a black upholstered bench in the lobby.

Finally, Lainie came out and filled me in on the details.

 “It was definitely Plum,” she said. ‘The head was removed, and the body was displayed exactly like Clancy and Knudsen. The severed head is missing. Same Bible, same version, same publisher, opened to the same passage. The doors and windows were all locked except the front door. There were bloody footprints that appear to match those from the other crime scenes, but we won’t know for sure for a couple of days.”

She continued. “Neither Krauss’s boyfriend, Stokely, or her family knew of anyone who would want to harm her. She and Stokely had an unusually tranquil relationship. Stokely said they never argued, and close friends, co-workers, and family members supported that claim.

“Dunwood’s people are looking for links between Krauss and the other victims, but so far they’re striking out, the same as before.”

She took a sip of cold coffee and made a face. “Yuck. I also presented a theory that, after the incident at the cemetery where Plum was wounded, he may have changed his M.O. for discarding the heads. I believe when he’s done with Krauss’s head, he’ll give it to
you
.”

I huffed and glanced up at the ceiling. “Christ! Was there any
good
news?”

Lainie smiled. “Yes, in fact, there was. Lisa Stanton will be released from the hospital this afternoon. She’s going to stay with her parents until she’s recovered enough to be on her own. She’ll also be attending mandatory counseling to deal with emotional trauma.

“Anyway,” she added. “Netter’s going to give a statement to the press about the Krauss killing, and then he’ll be at the crime scene all day. He said it’s okay if we want to stop by and take a look around, but it would have to be around one o’clock.”

“Let’s do it.”

I followed Lainie to her temporary cubicle where she reviewed emails pertaining to the Baltimore killings. We finally left at eleven thirty and stopped at the Highlands Country Club for something to eat. Lainie was impressed by the sheer opulence of it all. “Always wondered how the other half lived.”