Caught Redhanded (2 page)

“911,” I agreed. “I’ll stay here with Martha.”

Jo blinked at me, nodded, then took off, running with remarkable speed. I felt a maternal pride—or what I think such a thing feels like—in her quick reaction. The last time we faced a body together, she’d fallen to pieces. Of course, it had been her ex-husband’s body then.

I sat down beside Martha’s foot on the path. She looked so vulnerable, so sad lying there. So alone. For some reason I wanted to rest my hand on her foot, on her running shoe. I fought the feeling that she needed attachment, touch, because she no longer did. I was the one who did. Death always brings home the fragility of life.

But if I touched her anywhere, even if I only touched her shoe, I might inadvertently destroy evidence. Who knew what she might have stepped in and what trace evidence lingered on that surface?

I blinked as I realized I was assuming murder. Why?

My eyes swept over the area. There was no limb lying nearby that might have fallen on her. In fact, there were no trees close to the path where we were. Also Martha couldn’t have stumbled and struck the back of her head, nor could the soft earth beneath the chicory and phlox and wild mustard have made that horrid gash.

The scene said foul play as clearly as if the weeds themselves could speak.

So I sat by Martha’s foot, careful not to touch her, feeling she deserved someone acting as honor guard or some such thing, though we were obviously too late to shield her from whomever had harmed her.

Suddenly it struck me that her neck had still been warm when I felt for a pulse. My back muscles contracted as I quickly scanned the edge of the woods that stood back about twenty feet from the trail. Dogwood and mountain laurel, their blossoms now gone, mixed with poplar, beech and oak. Whoever had struck Martha might still be nearby. Maybe they were watching me from behind the thicket of bushes? The summer foliage was dense enough to hide a small army if it chose to secret itself behind the trees. Certainly one murderer could be hiding there easily.

Oh, Lord, if he’s there, make him go away!
I remembered my manners and quickly added,
Please!

“They’re on their way,” Jo called as she raced back.

I breathed a relieved sigh. Help was coming and there was safety in numbers, even if the number was only two at the moment.

Jo shoved her picture phone at me. “Here, take a few shots before the crime-scene guys arrive and we won’t be allowed near Martha again.”

“I hate this part of being a reporter.” I climbed to my feet and took the phone.

“Mac would kill us if we missed the opportunity.” She heard herself and made a distressed noise as she looked down at Martha. “Poor choice of words.”

“Yeah.” Trying to be the uninvolved newspaper professional, I took several pictures. When the police arrived, I’d take a couple more of them at work and it would be one of those that actually got printed in the paper. We certainly wouldn’t print Martha, so defenseless, lying here. The pain that would give her family was unimaginable. But we would use them as a reference for whatever we wrote.

Jo stayed carefully on the path, but continued to stare at Martha, looking sad. “I went to school with her younger sister Tawny.”

“Tawny? Like the color of a lion?” It’s amazing the strange things your mind sticks on when reality is too terrible to contemplate.

“Yeah.”

“Interesting. Martha is such a traditional name, biblical and all. Tawny is one of those cutesy modern names.”

“Different moms. Martha’s mom took off when she was about three. Left her with her father. He remarried a couple of years later, and Tawny and Shawna come from the second marriage. Martha was four or five years ahead of Tawny and me, but I always thought she was so cool. She was a cheerleader, the real perky kind who does splits and tumbles. Mac was her tosser.”

“Mac?” I squeaked. “Our Mac?”

Mac Carnuccio was our editor at
The News,
and he was also Amhearst born and bred. He might be many things, but I’d never in a million years have pictured him as a cheerleader. The secrets that lurk in people’s pasts are amazing.

Jolene nodded. “Our Mac. He and Martha went together from high school until well into college. Then when he came back to town to work at
The News,
they dated again, sort of off and on when he wasn’t chasing someone else. He sort of broke her heart.”

That sounded like our Mac.

Jo shrugged and looked thoughtful, always a circumstance guaranteed to bring an unexpected insight. “Or maybe she broke his. Who knows? She dated other guys a lot.”

Now there was an interesting thought. Mac, a ladies’ man through and through, reaping his own whirlwind.

“And in a fit of frustrated passion—” she waved her arm in the air like she was banging something against the back of a head “—he…”

I frowned at her. “Don’t even go there, Jolene Marie. You know Mac is changing. And even the old Mac would never have done something so violent.”

Jo actually blushed. “Yeah, you’re right.” She leaned over Martha, I thought because she was too embarrassed to look at me. Accusing one’s boss, even in thoughtless speculation, isn’t the done thing.

Jo tensed. “Look. She’s got a tattoo on her left shoulder.”

I looked. Sure enough, sticking out from under the edge of her sleeveless running shirt was the curve of one side of a red heart.

“It has a name in it,” Jo said. Before I realized what she planned to do, she reached over and slid the shirt to the side.

“Jo! Don’t touch!” I could picture the unhappy face of Sergeant Poole of the Amhearst police.

Jolene ignored me just as she ignored anything she didn’t want to hear. “It says
M-A-C. MAC.
” She looked at me. “Our Mac?”

Yikes. The very thought made me uneasy.

“Even if it is, it doesn’t mean anything anymore,” Jolene hastened to say, obviously trying to undo her previous suspicious thoughts. “He’s going with Dawn Trauber now.”

He wishes.
Dawn was the director of His House, a residential ministry to teen girls in trouble, most of them unwed mothers. She was also a strong Christian and Mac wasn’t. I didn’t think he was any kind of a believer, strong or weak, committed or un. Therein lay their problem. In spite of mutual attraction, Dawn was holding tough against too deep an emotional attachment. At least she was trying hard. It was a case of unequally yoked.

“It looks new, doesn’t it?” Jo asked, still studying the tattoo.

I knew nothing about tattoos except that they were permanent and that it hurt to get them. Oh, and that as you aged and your skin sagged, so did your tattoo.

The first response team arrived in an amazingly short time, swarming the area, cordoning off the crime scene with yellow tape. My friend Sergeant William Poole led the police contingent.

“What is it with you two?” he asked, his furrowed face curious as he studied Jo and me. “You turn up at an inordinate number of homicides, especially you, Merry.”

I gave him a sickly grin. “You think I enjoy it?”

He smiled kindly, his furrowed face wrinkling like a shar-pei’s. “Of course you don’t, any more than I do.” His eyes took on a teasing glint. “But I think you love the stories.”

I couldn’t deny that, ghoulish as it made me seem. For a reporter everything is a potential story and bomb-shells like local murders are guaranteed to interest readers. I looked at the crime-scene investigators hovering over Martha. “The stories may be great, William, but I’d rather not have them. They hurt too many people.”

I thought of Martha’s family. Were her father and stepmother about to be devastated? Or wouldn’t they care? Did she have more siblings than Tawny and Shawna, perhaps ones who shared the same mother? Had Martha been close to her much younger half sisters? Where was her mother now? Had Martha had contact with her or had she disappeared completely from her daughter’s life?

Oh, Lord, they’re all going to need your comfort. Be there for them.

William nodded. “This one definitely hurts. I watched her grow up.” He sighed. “Her family lives down the street from us.”

“What kind of a young woman was she?” I asked. There I went, story-writing again.

“Most of the time she was great. When she was in high school, she babysat for our kids. At college she went a little wild for a time—a couple of DUIs, a bust for pot—but she straightened herself out.”

“Did she still live at home?”

“No.” He and Jolene said it together.

“She had her own place,” William said.

“Over in those new condos off Chestnut Street,” Jolene said.

I knew the condos she meant. They were nice, moderately priced units, built about four years ago. They didn’t begin to compare with the luxury condo that Jolene shared with Reilly, but then, not many did. Not many people had an income like Jolene’s. Twenty-five thousand dollars a month for twenty years. She and her late husband, Arnie, had hit it big in the state lottery.

“Did she live alone?”

Jo shook her head. “Her latest boyfriend is Ken Mackey. They share.”

“Mackey?” William cast an unhappy eye in her direction.

Jo nodded but for once kept her mouth shut. Hmm. Definitely something to be learned there. Between Jo’s silence and the way William said Ken Mackey’s name, we had an issue with a capital
I.
When Jo and I were in the office, I’d nail her for the scoop on old Ken.

“You two can go home and get ready for work,” William said. “Just stop at the station today and give a formal statement. If I’m not there, ask for Officer Schumann.”

We nodded and turned to leave. I paused and took a few shots of the men and women working the scene. William saw me and gave me an unhappy look, but he didn’t forbid me. I appreciated his trust.

Poor Martha appeared to have trusted the wrong person.

THREE

A
s William suggested, I went home and showered. I ran my mousse-globbed hands through my hair, trying to make it look stylishly spiked instead of like I hadn’t bothered to brush it today. I put on navy slacks, a pink wide-strapped camisole top and a white sheer blouse covered with pink flowers. I liked the way the pink in the cami made the pink flowers in the sheer blouse so vivid. And I immediately felt guilty for thinking about something so frivolous with Martha lying dead.

With a sigh I snuggled Whiskers, my much-pampered cat, for a moment, then went to the kitchen. I kept one eye on the clock as I toasted a couple of slices of Jewish rye nice and crisp. I slathered them lavishly with real butter and ate them with a Diet Coke as I drove to the office, all too aware that deadline was looming. I needed to do my piece on Martha.

This wasn’t the first time I’d written about a crime with which I was intimately connected and I disliked it this time just as much as the first time I’d inadvertently found death. My heart bled for the lost life, for the lost opportunities, the lost joys and sorrows, and most deeply for the lost chances to know God intimately. My soul shriveled at the audacity of someone who thought that the right to decide life and death was his. How heinous, how prideful, how offensive. How evil. It was Cain and Abel wearing modern garb, man killing man for power and greed, love and hate. It was proof positive that mankind had not changed though we dressed better and enjoyed luxuries those biblical brothers could not even imagine.

And there were those left behind who through no choice of their own were forced to share Eve’s sorrow and loss, compelled to forfeit part of their lives, too. I’d seen their faces and their pain. I’d written about it, attempted to comprehend their great bereavement and make readers feel it and understand that as the victim had been robbed of so many possibilities, so had those who loved that person.

I wanted to be a voice for the dead and for those they left behind, to articulate their horror, their despair. If in this way I could make some contribution to the apprehension of the person responsible for all this pain, I would feel I had offered some small compensation to those who remained.

Chin up, shoulders back, I marched into the news-room, Joan of Arc to my own fields of Orléans.

“How many inches?” I called to Mac, the can of Coke still in my hand. I swallowed the dregs as he called back, “As much as you need. We’ll adapt.”

I stared. I wasn’t used to such freedom and it felt strange.

Mac scowled at me. “Just write, Kramer. Fast.”

I blinked. “Right.”

I wrote a straight news piece, not too long since the incident was only an hour or so old and neither I nor the police had had time to gather much information. Then I wrote the personal piece, adding quotes from Jolene to flesh it out, trying my best to communicate the horror without titillating. I dragged the icon for the pieces and dropped them into Mac’s in-box, then sat back in my chair and thought about the morning. I got up abruptly. I wanted to go to the crime scene and see firsthand if anything new and interesting had developed.

I parked in the Bushay lot, now full of cars. Most were those of employees, but several had flashing lights and crackling radios. I followed the jogging path to the yellow crime-scene tape. Sergeant Poole looked up from his blue study of the matted grass where Martha had lain. He stood alone, but clever sleuth that I am, I knew there were other cops somewhere because of the cars in the lot.

William’s craggy face grew ever more furrowed as he frowned at me. “Merry.”

I decided to ignore the lack of enthusiasm in his voice. “Hi, William. Anything new happening?”

He extended his arm to indicate the empty space around him. “As you can see, not a thing.”

“Any comment for the paper? What have the crime-scene guys found?”

“The investigation is continuing apace.”

I cocked an eyebrow at him. He was the only person I knew who said
apace.

“Sorry, kid,” he said, not sorry at all. “That’s it.”

“No weapon? No motive? No suspect?”

“Merry, the woman’s been dead mere hours.”

“Hey, William! Come ’ere quick!”

He and I turned to the woman who burst out of the woods, ducking under the graceful branches of a dogwood. She wore a uniform like William’s without the stripes of rank. Her face was alight with excitement.