By The Howling (10 page)

“What’s that?”

“I called GML Headquarters—the insurance company Pamela Smith works at.”

“We’ve been trying to get a response out of them since yesterday,” David said, not without discernible consternation. “How did you—?”

“I had contacts there from my FBI days—close to the top. They were quite cooperative. Pamela Smith was, indeed, on assignment. But she wasn’t working an art fraud case—which is what would most likely apply if Susan was her target. She was working life insurance fraud. Susan’s parents are both alive and there is no record she ever was married. No one, really, to insure but herself. I think we’re looking for an entirely different motive here. They mentioned something about a black widow operation. I’ve asked them to send a copy of the file to you at the sheriff’s office, and they should have faxed it there by now.”

“Oh,” David responded. “Then this is more complicated than I thought.”

“And there’s something worse than that, David.”

“What?”

“So far this murderer has kept a step ahead of us. How did the murderer get to Susan before we did? That’s one of the greatest questions—and most interesting, to me, at least—to this.”

“Well,” David said after a short pause, “I might have a theory on that. I’ll check it out and let you know if there’s anything in it—I would be in pretty hot water if I mentioned it and it turned out that there was nothing in it. But for now, if you have a pen and paper, I’ll give you the address in Easton. We won’t move the body or mess around with anything else until you get here. I won’t be here, though. I’m off to the sheriff’s office to check a few things.”

“I’m on the way,” Charlotte said after noting the address down. And as she clicked off on the call, she was already standing and calling out to Brenda in the kitchen.

“Hold the waffles, Brenda, and get dressed, please. We’re off to Easton and then to Annapolis.”

A head appeared from around the edge of the swinging door. “We? You’re taking me with you?”

“I sure am,” Charlotte said, trying to pull up her most winning and confident smile to flash at Brenda. “I don’t want to let you out of my sight now.”

“Ooo. Possessive. I’ll have to think whether I like that,” Brenda answered, but she smiled broadly and dipped back into the kitchen, and Charlotte heard the sounds of ingredients and pans being swiftly put away.

As soon as Brenda was out of sight, the smile on Charlotte’s face turned to a worried frown. Not wanting Brenda out of her sight didn’t mean quite what Brenda thought it meant. Increasingly, Charlotte’s well-tuned brain was telling her that it wasn’t a coincidence that Pamela Smith and Brenda’s mother were murdered in the same, remote spot. Chances were good that Brenda herself was in danger—and the only way Charlotte could be sure Brenda was safe was to keep her close by.

* * * *

Charlotte introduced Brenda to a former assistant of hers in the lobby of the FBI office in Annapolis. Margaret Fancel was immediately star struck and, even after being told why, was only too delighted to walk Brenda down to the shops at the Annapolis harbor while Charlotte took her digital camera up to her old offices to do some quick face recognition work and to conduct a search through the files. Brenda was happy for the company, although she declared that she could have found the harbor herself.

Charlotte wasn’t really sending Margaret along for the company. As star struck as the young FBI agent was, she was also quick to assess and react to situations and was a crack shot with the gun she kept in the holster under her jacket. Having just discovered the wonders of Brenda, Charlotte was taking no chances with her well-being.

Charlotte had left her cell phone in the glove compartment of Brenda’s car, not wanting to set off the collection of security-check machines in the FBI office between the entrance and the labs on the third floor. She was to think in days to come that this had been a mistake.

Two hours later the two were speeding back to Hopewell in Brenda’s sports car, with Charlotte frantically trying to raise Deputy David Burch on her cell phone.

At length, the sheriff’s office called her—but the call wasn’t from him—it was about him.

“Sorry, Ma’am, his cruiser was sideswiped off the road on route 50 between Easton and Hopewell. He said he was on his way there to make an arrest. And he said he was trying to get hold of you, but you weren’t picking up.”

“Is he—?”

“No, he’ll pull through. But he’s still unconscious. The cruiser turned right over. I’m told the driver’s side is a mess.”

“Blue paint on the swipe marks?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes, how did you know?”

Charlotte didn’t answer. She had information to convey and time was of the essence. “Does your office know who he was going to arrest?”

“No, Ma’am. He said it was sort of a delicate matter. He’d been to a judge, but he wouldn’t tell us who he was going after.”

“Is Sheriff Wainwright there?”

“No, Ma’am, he’s not. Would you like us to—?”

“Good. No don’t track him down. I know who David was going to arrest. And I know the car you’re looking for. I’m going to give you the information, and you are to put some patrol cars out on the road and get them to Hopewell as soon as possible. Oh, and call the county hospital and have someone stationed at Todd Vale’s bedside—and David’s too—and get a couple of police officers over there and on their hospital doors.”

“Yes, Ma’am. As soon as you hang up.”

“And, officer . . . don’t track the sheriff down or tell him what’s in motion as long as you can keep from doing so.”

As she clicked off, Charlotte turned to Brenda and said, “Can this buggy go any faster?”

Brenda smiled, hunkered down in her seat, and muttered a “You betcha” as her foot depressed on the gas pedal.

Chapter Ten

“When did you figure out that it was Rachel Sharp?” Brenda asked, as she handed Charlotte a margarita and settled down in the Adirondack chair next to Charlotte’s facing the lake and set where the dock at her house met the river’s edge.

Charlotte sat there for a moment in silence, holding her drink in one hand and scratching Sam’s crown with the other as he sat beside her and panted happily. Her eyes went to the other side of the river, where the bottom of an orange sun had just touched the top of the shadowed tree line. The undersides of cumulus clouds scudding in layers across the sky reflected the sun’s waning rays and promised a spectacular sunset show to come.

“I’ll admit that I didn’t even consider her until you told me she had been raised here and was part of your crowd when you mother was killed. I try to keep an open mind, but from the moment I found out that Pamela Smith’s was the second murder in that exact spot, I paid more attention to those who were here when your mother died than to those who weren’t. I don’t believe in coincidences all that much. I know they do happen, but I don’t run on the assumption that they have.”

“And for a while I was a key suspect, wasn’t I?”

“For a while, yes. I didn’t want you to be, of course. But my training wouldn’t permit me to discount the possibility. I—”

“That’s quite all right. I wouldn’t have wanted you to be any less professional and thorough than you were. It freed me . . . at last. My mother’s death has weighed on me all of these years. I never thought it was Rachel. I always was more inclined toward Jane or Joyce—or Grady, even, although I guess I always did think of him as too wimpy to carry through with anything that violent.”

“As was I for a while.”

“And in a way, I
was
responsible for my mother’s death. Rachel did it for me. She saw how miserable I was and she did it for me. And having gotten the taste of it, she just went on doing it.”

“You can’t blame yourself. You didn’t ask her to do it. Rachel was responsible for her own actions—even then, as a much younger woman.”

“Ah, those triangular affairs. We were so young, so willing and ready. Invincible and wanting to try it all. And so cliquish. I pursued Jane, while Jane pursued Rachel, and Rachel pursued me. And, at the same time Rachel and Jane pursued that divine young teacher, Grady. Not me, of course. Then . . . even then I was set on a different course. And Grady was willing to please them all, while . . . interestingly enough, pursuing me. I laugh now when I see Grady, see the doddering old man he has become. But it was cruel of Joyce . . . to deny him like that.”

“I wonder if all small villages are like this,” Charlotte mused.

“I rather think they are,” Brenda answered. “And it’s rather comforting in its own way. Hopewell has grown old with the rest of us. There probably are no seething undercurrents here anymore.”

“I wonder. I rather imagine there are—but just with a whole different cast of characters.”

“I suppose you may be right. But I asked you about when you knew it was Rachel, and then we went off on a tangent. A pleasant tangent, of course. I love tangenting with you. But the case, Rachel.”

“Ah, yes. It was Todd and Sam that jolted it in place for me—although until I went to the FBI lab in Annapolis, I wasn’t sure. And I do think it important to be sure. But I sometimes wonder about that. If I had operated on instinct—if we’d sped back to Hopewell as soon as David told me that Pamela Smith was working on a case for GML, I might have made it back to Hopewell before Todd was pushed off that ladder.”

“Pushed? And what does Todd have to do with it? He wasn’t one of our original teenage set here—or perhaps he was and I just haven’t recognized him. Kevin Clagett in disguise perhaps?”

“Todd was head of the fraud investigations at GML before he retired. That was a coincidence really—and one that I should have paid more attention to. He was completely apart from the issue, really, but Rachel had been on the lam so long for so many years and watching her back so carefully that it didn’t look like a coincidence to her.”

“But, what—?”

“Rachel thought that Todd was on to her—somehow recognized her from a case open from the time he was with GML. She had married that series of men under assumed names and used her medical knowledge to murder them without suspicion until she had done it so often that the people at GML began to put her face to different, similar large payouts. When she learned that an investigator had come into the area from GML, which was one of the companies she had taken hard in her black widow scheme, she assumed that Todd had blown the whistle on her, and she tried to kill him by pushing him off the ladder while he was cleaning his gutters.”

“But she was there; she was giving him medical attention.”

“Yes, she was the first one there—the very first one. She practically admitted it at the time, and I wasn’t listening. And did you notice how irritated she was that I had called the rescue squad? She wanted to get him into her clinic where she could finish the job. That alone raised signals at the time—and then there was Sam, which brought it together for me. I just didn’t know why yet, and I wanted to know why. I was being a bit self-indulgent.”

“Sam? You did mention Sam, didn’t you?”

“Yes, Sam’s our real sleuth here,” Charlotte said. And, hearing his name spoken, Sam raised up on his haunches and put his muzzle in Charlotte’s lap. She took a moment to pet him down and rub her nose on his hairy cheek, which he thoroughly enjoyed. “Not just our sleuth; he was our key witness all along, and we weren’t appreciating that well enough.”

“Key witness?”

“Yes. His howling in the night timed the murder. And then, when you brought him to the B&B when everyone was gathered around Todd on the ground, perhaps no one else noticed, but when he set off on his howling there, he was face to face with Rachel. And the look on Rachel’s face was as precious as it was damning. Sam was there, in the woods by your house, when Pamela Smith was murdered, murdered because Rachel had learned Smith was closing in on her. And Susan Purcell was there, too. That’s why she ran. She saw Rachel at the murder scene—and she panicked and let loose of Sam’s leash and stumbled back out to the road and took the first escape route she saw. She took Pamela Smith’s blue sedan and drove all of the way to Easton. She didn’t leave altogether right away, though, as she was still in the middle of what she was here for.”

“Which was to steal us blind, right?”

“Right. She was pilfering from local houses—taking advantage of her knowledge from her early life of who here had what and of our quaint local custom of not locking our doors. My Japanese porcelain tea set had the misfortune of being put in my dining room window where she could easily see it. And with Susan’s art training, she knew what was worth going for. Of course she was here primarily to steal those paintings from the Barnes. Her whole effort to get the arts center gallery established was focused on that scheme.”

“An altogether unpleasant young woman—but I’m sorry to say that I can see Joyce in her.”

“Yes, I feel a responsibility for what happened to her. I led Rachel to her, and my rustiness off the mark at least contributed to her death. Of course, Rachel had been looking for her from the moment she’d stumbled on Rachel doing away with Pamela Smith.”

“How can you say you contributed to Susan’s death? And this is the second time you’ve indicated that Rachel had knowledge of the investigation. What—?”

“The sheriff. Sheriff Wainwright. He didn’t do it intentionally, of course. But Rachel used him. She had been doing so for some time. It was part of her protection plan and it worked like a charm.”

“I don’t under—”

“David Burch fell into this first. He’s as cautious as I am, but if he had told me what he suspected when he suspected it, he might have saved himself a trip to the hospital. When I suggested that someone was keeping tabs on the investigation and staying one step ahead of us, he immediately thought of Rachel. He knew that the sheriff and Rachel were an item but were keeping it as secret as possible because the sheriff is married.

“Rachel was using him, though—pumping him for information on what we knew and when we knew it. Thus, she knew a GML investigator was on her trail because Smith had to register with the sheriff’s office and Rachel had her antenna up for just such a situation. And then she wheedled out of the sheriff our progress in finding Susan. And she got to Susan before we did. David was on his way to arrest her, the files faxed from GML to him having included photographs he identified as Rachel and then assuring him she was the one. Not wanting to get the sheriff involved, he got the arrest order himself from a judge and was on his way to find Rachel, when she found him instead, driving in Pamela Smith’s car that Susan had taken.”