Circle of Influence (A Zoe Chambers Mystery) (29 page)

“Whatcha got?” he asked.

Zoe led him to the base of the stairs and pointed to the lens poking out of the dirty snow and ice.

Williamson squatted and frowned at it. “Did you touch it?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Very sure.” She considered reminding him that she was a deputy coroner and knew about crime scene security. Then she remembered picking up the pill bottles and pocketing her key from Matt’s kitchen table and decided to simply confirm that she hadn’t tampered with the evidence.

Williamson retrieved a camera from the cruiser and started snapping photos. Within minutes, a county car rolled in, and two detectives in long black coats climbed out. One of them conferred with Nate while the other drew Zoe aside to ask her questions. Her name, her address, her phone numbers. Why was she here? Where all had she gone inside the house? What had she touched?

She reluctantly admitted to entering the house, emphasizing that she used to live there. Instead of dreading Matt’s return, she now prayed for it. What if something had happened to him? There she was, having been in his house with intent to…What exactly?

It didn’t matter. If anything happened to Matt, she would definitely be at the top of the suspect list.

Again.

While the county detective didn’t appear pleased with much she had to say, he didn’t arrest her. Instead, he told her to go home, and he’d contact her later. 

Zoe’s fears about the road surface were alleviated when she eased up behind a yellow PennDOT truck. She hung back, watching the de-icing material scatter from the back of the vehicle and coat those wet spots that had turned treacherous. A mile shy of home, the salt truck turned onto a side street, leaving Zoe to fend for herself the rest of the way. 

Mr. Kroll had salted the farm lane, too, and Zoe’s pickup climbed the hill with minimal effort. She didn’t let off the gas when she reached the house. Instead, she chugged to the top of the hill and then coasted toward the barn. She needed to check the animals and welcomed the momentary distraction.

Light shone from the stall windows and seeped out from around the big sliding doors at the end of the barn. Odd. All of the boarders knew to turn off the lights on their way out. There were no cars or trucks parked in front. Apparently, someone had left before dark and not realized the lights were still on.

Pete leaned back in the booth, stuffing down his rage as he listened to Logan’s story and jotted notes.

“I went there to confront Doaks about what he’d done to my sister, but when I got there I found them in the bedroom.” Logan shuddered. “Allison was—was naked—and McBirney was on top of her with his fist drawn back.” Logan clenched his own fist. “McBirney had gouges in his back. Holes. He was bleeding real bad. There was blood everywhere. And Allison was holding a screwdriver.” His voice cracked.

Pete reached across the table to grip the boy’s arm for a moment. “You’re doing fine, son. Take your time.”

Logan nodded. Ran a trembling hand through his hair. “I tackled McBirney. Shoved him off my sister. We crashed into the wall and I—I started beating on him.”

He paused, breathing hard. Reliving the experience, Pete guessed.

“Next thing I know, Allison pulled me off him. She was crying and—and I didn’t know what to do.”

The boy fell silent. Pete gave him a minute to regroup before gently prodding. “What
did
you do?”

Logan’s eyes grew dark. “I noticed Doaks standing there, and I tried to cover up my sister. I was gonna pound him like I’d done with McBirney, but Allison started saying how Doaks had saved her. And that she loved him.” Logan grimaced as if the words tasted foul in his mouth. “Then Doaks started going on about how he knew I wanted to talk to him about Allison, but we had to take care of this situation first.” Logan made air-quotes around
situation
. “He said we couldn’t let anyone find out Allison killed McBirney, and I’d helped finish him off. So he gave me the screwdriver to get rid of, and he was gonna see that Allison got cleaned up, and then he was gonna get rid of the body. It was stupid. I never should have left her there with him. But he kind of made sense at the time, you know? We had to protect Allison. No one could know. And—and…” The boy put his head down on the table, his shoulders quaking with silent sobs.

Pete rubbed his eyes hard. Too bad he couldn’t blot out the mental picture of what the kid had gone through. Both kids. Sylvia’s grandchildren. How the hell was he ever going to make this all right?

Zoe nosed her truck up to the big door and cut the engine. The chill of the night air stung her face as soon as she stepped out of the Chevy. She bustled to the smaller door and let herself through.

Someone had brought the horses in and a few nickered at her entrance. The barn smelled of fresh hay and warm horseflesh. The animals hadn’t been in their stalls for long—no earthy aroma of manure tickled her nose.

Zoe crossed to the message board on the feed room wall. Whoever brought the horses in should have noted whether they’d grained them or just fed hay, as well as any special attention anyone might need. But the most recent note was from the morning. Not only had one of her boarders left the lights on, they’d neglected this duty, too.

She moved to Windstar’s stall and looked in at him. The water bucket was full. He had plenty of hay. But his feed pan was empty.

“So have you had your supper yet or not?” 

He gazed at her with his soft brown eyes, wisps of hay sticking from between his lips.

“You’d lie to me anyway, and say you hadn’t just to get more.” Zoe reached in and stroked his face.

“I fed him.”

Zoe wheeled to find Allison standing in the doorway to the feed room. An oversized black bomber jacket draped from her narrow shoulders. The sleeves swallowed up her arms, hanging well below her fingertips. Her skin appeared gray and her eyes dull and sunken in. With her stringy black hair framing an expressionless face, the teen looked like an extra in a zombie movie.

Zoe grabbed the teenager’s shoulders. “How did you get here? Are you okay?”

Allison’s gaze didn’t meet Zoe’s eye. “I hitchhiked. Like Logan. But don’t be mad. I got everyone in and fed them. All by myself.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Water. Hay. And grain. I followed the chart about who gets what. Did I do okay, Aunt Zoe?”

“You did great, sweetie.” Zoe bent down, trying to place her face in Allison’s line of vision. But the girl still stared blankly downward.

“Good. I wanted to get one thing right before…”

Zoe caught the girl’s face between her gloved hands and leaned in until their noses almost touched. “Allison. Are you all right? Allison?”

Something hit the ground with a soft thud. The teen swayed and crumpled into Zoe.

“Allison?” Zoe wrapped her arms around the girl and was thrown off balance. Zoe managed to break the girl’s fall as they tumbled to the dirt. “Allison!”

“I’ve screwed up everything.” The girl’s voice was so weak Zoe doubted she’d have heard her if she hadn’t been cradling her in her arms. “Tell Mom I’m so sorry.”

“Allison, what’s wrong with you?” Kneeling in the dirt, Zoe repositioned the girl’s left arm that had twisted awkwardly in the collapse. That was when Zoe noticed a dark splotch on her brown gloves. She tugged one off and touched it with her cold, bare finger. The finger came away red and sticky. 

Zoe ripped her other glove off and began a frantic search of Allison’s limp body. Her scalp and neck were fine. Zoe unzipped the too-big jacket. When she grabbed the cuff of the sleeve to pull it off, the fabric was warm and sickly wet to the touch. Skinning the coat from Allison’s arm revealed ugly red gouges across a dainty wrist.

Zoe spotted the knife—one usually kept in the tack room for cutting open bales of hay or bags of feed—lying on the ground next to her. That’s what she’d heard hit the ground before Allison toppled.

“My God. What the hell have you done?” Zoe whispered between chattering teeth. She yanked the second sleeve off to find more gashes, deep enough to reveal tendons. Blood streamed from both of Allison’s wrists, forming puddles in the dirt.

The girl met Zoe’s gaze. Her face contorted. “I’m sorry.” Her frail voice broke in a sob. “It’s all my fault.” She squeezed her eyes shut, and tears trickled down her cheeks. “Daddy. I’m so sorry. It’s my fault he’s dead.” Her voice deteriorated into disjointed mumbling. “Awful…Logan…stabbed…McBirney…”

The girl was making no sense. Zoe quelled her desire to ask questions and instead, shushed her. She needed to get help and to stop the bleeding. “You lie still,” she told Allison as she edged her knees out from under the girl’s head and lowered her to the ground. “I’ll be right back.”

Zoe leapt to her feet and dug in her pocket for her cell phone. Nothing. She checked the other pocket and came up empty. Crap. It was in her truck on charge. She sprinted to the phone by the entrance and snatched the receiver from the hook. The familiar hum of a dial tone was noticeably absent. The lines were still down. One more thing to thank Matt Doaks for.

The call to 9-1-1 would have to wait.

She darted into the feed room. From a metal cabinet in the corner, she gathered a box of sterile gauze pads, a roll of cotton and two rolls of Vet Wrap, tossing everything into an empty bucket. On her way back to Allison, she grabbed a wool horse blanket and a pair of splint boots.

Dropping to her knees beside the girl, Zoe set the bucket to the side and covered Allison with the wool blanket, leaving her lower arms exposed. She examined both wrists. The slash on the left one looked deeper, so she started with it.

“Allison? Try to stay awake, okay?” Zoe ripped open several packets of gauze four-by-fours and slapped them on the gouged flesh, then covered them with a layer of cotton. “Talk to me. You said Logan stabbed McBirney?”

Allison’s eyes opened, rolled back, then focused. “No. Not Logan. Me. I stabbed him. And Matt.”

“You stabbed Matt?” Pressing hard with one hand to quell the bleeding, Zoe grabbed a Vet Wrap with the other, tearing into the packaging with her teeth. 

“No.” Allison closed her eyes. Took a breath. “Matt stabbed him. Then I stabbed him. I killed him.”

Zoe anchored an end of the self-sticking bandage with her thumb and began winding it around Allison’s wrist and forearm the same way her mind struggled to wind around the idea of what these grown men had done to Rose’s kids. As her hands did the work, her mind clicked back to Doc’s autopsy report on McBirney.

Only the one wound penetrated deep enough to be fatal—the one that punctured the lung. The other three attempts hit the scapula and exhibited more tearing, but caused no significant damage.

Would Allison have the strength to stab McBirney with enough force to kill him? Zoe contemplated the girl’s thin arm as she bandaged it and decided not likely. But Matt?

Yeah.

Zoe pressed the end of the Vet Wrap in place. A dark patch of blood had already appeared through the bandaging. She picked up the stiff leather split boot and buckled it over the dressing. Ordinarily used to protect and stabilize a young horse’s fragile leg bones, the brace would also immobilize Allison’s wrist and add more pressure to the wound.

Zoe stepped over her to work on her right arm. “Allison?”

The girl gazed unfocused into the distance.

“Why did you do this to yourself?”

Her lower lip quivered. “Matt. I thought he loved me. He
said
he loved me.”

Zoe fought back a primal scream. Those pictures on the computer. Those e-mails. And years ago, the image of walking into her bedroom—hers and Matt’s—to find him with that bimbo from the Tastee Freez. A collage of perversion danced across her brain.

“I knew if I said anything to anyone, he’d get in trouble. I loved him, so I never said a word.” Allison’s sob-ravaged voice hiccupped. “He didn’t mean to kill Daddy. It was an accident. Daddy came to drag me away from him. Said Matt would go to prison. They fought. Matt tackled him and they both fell down the steps. It was—it was like Matt was riding a sled. And the sled was Daddy.” She made a sound like a laugh. Or was it a cry?

Zoe’s hands trembled as she finished buckling the splint boot over the second bandage. The visual Allison painted sickened her. She longed to scoop this child up into her arms.

Allison drew a watery breath around her tears. “And now he wants to break up with me. He didn’t say so yet, but I can tell. He’s tired of me.” She sniffed. “I love him so much. I told him I’d kill myself if he left me and he said ‘go ahead.’ He said that would solve all his problems.”

Zoe shushed her and leaned over to give her a hug without disturbing her bandaging job. “It’s okay now,” she whispered. But she knew she needed to get EMS there or it most definitely was
not
going to be okay. “Allison, where’s your cell phone? Is it in your coat?” Zoe didn’t wait for an answer. She grabbed the bloodied jacket and rammed her hand into one pocket. Nothing. She detected something in the second one before she reached inside. But what she dug out of it wasn’t a phone. It was a bottle of pills. A match to those she’d found at Matt’s place. And it was empty.

“Allison? Did you take these? Allison?”

A faraway smile played on the girl’s lips. “Matt’s my candy man.”

Zoe swore. It wasn’t just Matt’s charm and good looks that bound the girl to him. He was supplying her with prescription painkillers. Her flu wasn’t the flu. He’d cut her off, and she’d been in withdrawal. Zoe stared at the empty bottle as one question screamed inside her brain. Was Allison overdosing in addition to bleeding out?

“Listen, sweetie, I’m going to go out to my truck for a second to get my phone. Then I’m going to call for help. I’m not going to let you die.”

“I don’t wanna die,” Allison wailed.

“I know.” Zoe rearranged the wool horse blanket so that it covered Allison’s arms and tucked it around the girl’s face and ears, too. “You stay still, okay? I’ll be right back.”

“Okay.”

Zoe jogged to the door and let herself out into the frigid cold night. She crossed her arms, tucking her bare hands under them until she reached the Chevy. The door handle was so cold it stung her fingers to touch it. She jumped up onto the seat and searched the dash for her phone. It wasn’t where she usually put it. Must have fallen off. Her fingers located the charger plug inserted into the cigarette lighter, and she reeled it in. The coiled cord bounced back at her without the weight of the cell phone on the end.

What the hell?

She leaned down to search the floor, feeling under the seat in the dark.

“Looking for this?”

Zoe banged her head on the steering wheel as she bolted upright. Standing next to her truck in the light cast by the dusk-to-dawn lamp, holding her phone in his hand, was Matt Doaks.