Death in Room 7 (Pine Lake Inn Cozy Mystery Book 1) (5 page)

Closing his eyes, he let out a slow breath.  “You didn’t know about that, did ya?  Not until I just said it?”

I shrugged one shoulder.  “I still know how to get my son to tell me things, thank you very much.”

“Sneaky woman.”

“Your mother.”  I’ll take that compliment any day.

“Fine.  Horace made sure to tell me, more’n once, that he and Jess were in serious debt.  He blames her for it.  Says she ran up crazy debts and never told him where the money went.  Said she stole his credit card two days ago.  That’s how he tracked her here.”

“She did have Horace’s card.”  I hated to admit that to Kevin.  It was like I was ratting on Jess, even though she was dead.  “She checked in with it.”

“I’ll need a copy of that receipt,” he told me, pouncing on what was probably a good piece of physical evidence.  “I just hope Cutter bagged up anything Jess had in that room.  Horace’s card included.  That’ll show he had a motive.  The missing key and the fuzzy time frame would give him opportunity.”

“Now we just need to figure out the means.”  Another thing I’ve learned from having a copper for a son.  Means, motive, opportunity.

How did he get Jess to sit still like that, and let herself be killed?

“Find that out, add all of that up with the way he reacted when I told him Jess was dead, and I think we’ve got our man.”

“Our murderer,” I corrected.

“Don’t worry, mom,” he promised, true concern in his voice.  “We’ll get this bloke.  He won’t get away with it.”

The Milkbar door opened and closed, and when I looked up to see who it was I couldn’t keep from groaning.  Kevin saw him, too, and quickly stood up from his seat, downing the rest of his drink as he did.  “I’d better go.  Talk to you soon as I know more, right?”

He wasn’t fast enough.  The man was already at our table.  “G’day, Kevin.  Not leaving already, are ya?” 

James Callahan was a reporter for the Lakeshore Times.  Serving Lakeshore, Geeveston, and the surrounding areas, the paper had run in this town for decades.  James had only been at it for the last fifteen years or so.  He was my about my age tall and slim and always quick with a smile.  Truth was, I didn’t hate the man.  Actually kind of enjoyed talking to him, on occasion.  Just not when I’m trying to discuss the murder of a good friend with my son.

Now there’s a sentence you hope never to say twice in your life.

“Hiya, Dell,” he said to me, and for just a moment his liquid blue eyes were looking at me to the exclusion of the rest of the world.  He was the kind of guy friend a woman always felt close to, even though she knew he was just a friend.

Not me.  I mean other women.  I suppose.  Ahem.

Didn’t mean he wasn’t cute, with that sandy blonde hair and those dimples that came out when he smiled.  He was usually dressed in casual clothes, khakis and button-up shirts, but today he looked like he’d dressed in a careless hurry.  His shirt was untucked, his pants wrinkled, and I was almost certain I’d seen two different colored socks on his feet.

“So, Constable Powers,” he said to Kevin.  “Can I get the scoop on what’s happening over at the Pine Lake Inn?”

“You know I have to refer you to Senior Sergeant Cutter,” Kevin answered him in a clipped tone.  “Most I can tell ya is that my mother runs a fine establishment where many folks have enjoyed a room and a meal and a nice time.”

“Can I quote that?” James asked.

“Sure.  Knock yerself out.”  Kevin rolled his eyes over to me, and waved as he walked out of the Milkbar.

I gave half a thought to leaving myself, but James came and sat down across from me, in the seat that Kevin had just vacated, and took a small recorder out of his pocket.  “Don’t suppose you’d care to make a comment?”

“Sure,” I offer.  When he held the recorder eagerly out to me, I smiled and said, “I really do have a fine establishment.”

He pursed his lips and turned the recorder off.  “Now, we both know that’s true.  Rosie’s pikelet’s are the best around.  Not the news I was aiming for.”

“You heard about the death at the Inn?”

“Whole town’s heard about it.  Thought maybe you’d have something more to say.  Seeing as, well, you know.  Was it really your friend that died?”

Sharp sadness filled me again.  “Yes, James, it was.  You can understand why I don’t want to talk about it?”

“Sure can.”  Lifting the little gray recorder up for me to see, he slowly put it away into the side pocket of his khakis.  “Tell me ‘bout yer friend.  What was she like?”

“I’m not going to give you her life to print in the paper,” I tell him, a little more harshly than I’d meant to.

If he was offended by my tone, he hid it well.  “I’m not asking ‘bout her as a reporter.  Just looked like ya need to talk.  That’s all.  So tell me.  What was she like, this friend of yours?”

For a moment I couldn’t speak at all.  For him to set everything aside like that and give me the opportunity to express my grief, well, it was like a gift. I hadn’t expected that.

“I don’t know where to start.”

He nodded his head with a bit of a smile, like he understood completely.  “Just start from the beginning.”

So I did.  Meeting Jess at University, at a party at some weirdo’s dorm room.  From there, everything had just sort of fallen into place for us.  The words kept coming, and James sat there with me, nodding his head, or laughing at the funny bits. 

I discovered this was exactly what I needed.  I needed to tell someone how much Jess meant to me.  I needed someone to know her for the vibrant, amazing woman she had been in life.  I needed that more than the world just now.  James gave me the chance to unburden my soul without ever interrupting me once.

A hard lump of pain that had settled inside my heart worked its way loose and fell away.  I took a deep, deep breath when it did.

We stayed there in the Milkbar for the better part of a half hour, and when I’d said everything I could possibly say about Jessica Sapp, James reached over to pat my hand gently.  “I feel like I know her myself after all that,” he said to me.

I know what he means.  It was almost like I was with my good friend Jessica Sapp, just one more time.

“Jess was easy to get to know,” I said.  “Time was when she had quite the rep for trouble.  Got into more’n a few things she shouldn’t have.  Nothing big, mind you.  Just the sort of things that got her lumped in with the bad kids.”

“Were you a bad girl?”

For some reason, his question made my cheeks heat up.  I’m too old to blush.  Aren’t I?  “No, I wasn’t any kind of a bad girl.  Jess was always way out in front of what the rest of our group would do.  She was my friend, and she was a good one.  Didn’t matter to me what people said about her.”

I scrunch my brow in thought.  Rosie sure seemed to be worried about what kind of girl Jess had been.  Or, still was.  I wondered if maybe my business partner had heard something I hadn’t, some rumor that put Jess in a bad light, all those years ago.

She’d promised to tell me, before we got all sidetracked.  I suddenly had the feeling that I really needed to hear what Rosie had to say.

“James, thank you for sitting with me,” I tell him.  I went to stand up, and that was when I noticed his hand was still on mine.  It felt kind of nice.  When I looked up into his eyes, they were a darker blue then I remembered.  More stormy, like there were thoughts going on behind them that were heating his blood.

Ahem.  Right.  That might be something I needed to look into some other time.  I mean, not literally look into, like I was doing right now, in those intense blue spheres, but…wow.  Got myself turned around there for a moment.

I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it.

But I do take my hand back from his, and stand up from the table.  He stands up with me and for a moment I’m tongue tied.

“If you hear anything,” he says, “about what happened to Jess, I mean, will you call me?”

“As a reporter?”

He shook his head, eyes still on me.  “Not if you’re looking for a friend.”

“I have to go,” I say to him, dodging the entire conversation and knowing that’s exactly what I’m doing, but unable to help it.  James and I have been something close to friends for years, but I’ve never thought of taking it further with him.  Maybe it was the sting of what my ex-husband had done to me, or maybe it was just fear of taking that leap again.  I don’t know.

Leaving him there at the table, I told myself it didn’t matter.  Right now, I had to figure out why Jess had been killed.

And how.
 

I need to talk to Rosie.

Whatever she had been trying to tell me had been something she’d kept a secret since University, apparently, a secret that had bothered her so much that she hadn’t even wanted Jess to come to the Inn.

Before, that had just seemed like an old kerfuffle.  Now that Jess was dead it seemed like it might be something more.  Something important.

It was after four o’clock now.  The dinner rush would be about to start at the Pine Lake Inn.  A lot of the locals enjoyed having dinner with us.  Rosie put on quite a spread, for the guests staying with us, and whoever else wanted to drop in.  If I went to talk to her now she’d be too busy to pull herself away from the kitchen, and I didn’t want to be responsible for another disaster like we had with the trout sauce a few weeks back.  Her focus should be on cooking, not on whatever secret she’d been afraid to tell me all these years.

So.  Talking to Rosie would have to wait.  If the coroner hadn’t made it here yet, he would soon, but the officer stationed on the second floor of the Inn would take care of that.  I’d just as soon not see Jess carted out in a black body bag, anyway.

With no reason to go back to the Inn I decided to catch back up with Kevin and see if he’d found anything out in the time I’d spent talking with James.  Maybe he’d been able to get a judge’s warrant to search Horace’s person and belongings.  I agreed with him that the key to Jess’s room was…well, the key.  We needed to find it.

The police department was a long walk from the center of town.  Lakeshore might be a small place but it was still twenty minutes or so from end to end by foot.  At the westernmost edge of Lakeshore, at the far end of Main Street where pavement gave way to Kookaburra Road again, the houses gradually became fewer as the Monterey Pines grew taller and thicker together.  There were a few storage buildings out this way, and Oliver Harris’s towing and recovery business, and the police station.

The one story building was made of white stucco and red brick.  The bricks had been painted white too, once upon a time, in keeping with the rest of the town, but the whitewash kept coming off in the rains so the town had stopped paying for it to be redone.  The white still clung in odd places and made faint outlines of faces and shapes when you weren’t looking too closely.

A round sign on the front of the station displayed the town emblem, the silhouette of a pine tree in the middle of our three differently shaped blue lakes.  Pine Lake, Gallipoli Lake, and Lake Bowen.  It wasn’t a big building but then again it had never needed to be very big.  Lakeshore was a small town, with small town problems, and a small police force to go with it.  If we needed more police presence we called in the Australian Federal Police.

I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

The front door was a thick wooden thing.  Its hinges squealed a long note of protest as I went in.  The lobby was small too, just like the building, with three plastic orange chairs against the wall facing the service window and its sliding glass.  The counter had a little metal bell to ring because the front desk was never manned.  The police force didn’t have the luxury of hiring a secretary.

I rang the bell twice, and then stood there reading the posters on the walls about missing children and the evils of drugs.  I didn’t have long to wait.  I just wish it had been someone else who answered the bell.

Senior Sergeant Angus Cutter stared at me.  No.  Glared at me.  His blue uniform shirt was pressed and pleated and his badge shone like he’d just polished it.  Pompous man with a head as hard as Ayer’s Rock, but he’s our Senior Sergeant.  He blew out a breath through his white handlebar mustache before he opened the sliding window for me.

“Can’t say I care much for your timing, Miss Powers, but glad you’re here.  Come on in.”

“You’re glad I’m here?”  Well, that was new.  And I was Miss Powers now?  What happened to calling me Dell?  “Why?”

He quirked one eyebrow at me, and his smile got smarmy.  “Because I’m just now arresting your son for murder.”

Cold crawlies wormed their way up my spine.  A ringing in my ears drowned out Cutter’s next words.  Murder?  My son?

Jess.

Oh…snap.

“You’re arresting Kevin for killing Jess?”  The words burned in my mouth.  My son?  “He’s a police officer, for the love of God!  Like you!”

“Don’t matter.  Knew yer son was a no gooder.  Always knew it.  Now I caught him trying to muck up evidence and he won’t tell me where he was last night.  Two and two still makes four, even for us Taswegians.”

“Cutter, you nit!  You didn’t even think this was a murder!  You called it a suicide and practically rushed me out of my own Inn!”

He shrugged both shoulders in a way that told me he couldn’t care less what I thought.  “That was then.  This is now.  Your son showed me it was murder, then tried to put the blame on the vic’s hubby.  Tried to foul up the evidence, too.  Know what?  Maybe it is good yer here.  Maybe you can talk some sense into him.  Get him to confess.  Be best for him, after all.”

The cold gripping at my heart began to melt away under the heat of a fierce anger.  My hands fisted up at my sides.  “Cutter, I swear I’ll see you bounced out of that uniform.  I swear it on every Bible in every dresser drawer in my Inn.  I’ll get you bounced out of this office.  Out of this town!  I’ll get you bounced so far you won’t be within cooee of the Northern Territory!”

Cutter waited for me to finish.  Then, very calmly, he leaned forward on the windowsill.  “Just try it.  Have a go.  Pretty sure it will take more than one crazy lady to get me removed but have at it. Do your worst.”

Then he winked and slammed the glass window closed.  I watched him walk away, wishing I could think of something to say to wipe that smirk off his face.  A second later he had the door that led from the entry to the offices open for me.  I stormed past him with my blood boiling.  My only concern now was my son.  I can think up nasty things to say to Senior Sergeant Cutter later.

After all, you should never get into a battle of wits with a moron.  Both of you lose.

I’ve been inside the station before.  Hard not to, seeing as how my son is one of the handful of officers.  Maybe in the big cities like Sydney they have tighter security for their police stations.  Here, everyone knows everyone else, and what’s marked as confidential in a file is the same thing floating around the rumor mill around town.  Not much need for security checks and metal detectors here.

The open inner office has its filing cabinets and wooden console desk with radio equipment and telephones.  Also has this old green couch with duct tape covering the rips in it.  I doubt this room has changed much since the previous Senior Sergeant was here years ago.

I was expecting him to have me wait on that couch, but instead he brought me down the hall to the door to his office.  The surprise must’ve shown on my face.

“Your son’s in here, Miss Powers.  I’m just gonna let the two of ya have a nice chit-chat.  Tell him it will go easier on him if he just confesses, right?”

“Is there some reason you won’t call me Dell?” I snap at him.

“Too right, there is.”  He opens the door for me with an overdone wave of his hand.  “It’d mean we were friends.  You two talk.  I’ll be back in a bit.”

He glared at Kevin, inside, before closing the door.  There was a lot of hate in that man’s eyes.

Kevin sat on this side of the desk.  He was sort of sagging in the chair with his hands held loosely in his lap.  When he saw me, he shakes his head.  He doesn’t say anything, though.  Not until the door is closed.  Not that it should matter.  Cutter’s probably listening on the other side of the door anyway.  Truth be told I wouldn’t put it past him to have the office bugged.

When the door closes, Kevin’s words nearly break my heart.

“Mom, I didn’t do this.”

“You think you’ve got to tell me that?”

He shrugged, head still hung low.  “Just thought ya should hear it straight from the source.”

Standing up, he hugs me, and I hug him back.  “Never doubt your mother,” I remind him.  At least I got a laugh out of him.

“I’ll remember that.”

“Now.  What’s this Cutter’s going on about?” I ask him, sitting on the edge of the Senior Sergeant’s desk, hoping my backside is making a mess of the neat piles of paperwork there.

Kevin rubs a hand up over his bristle-short hair.  “He’s gone daft, Mom.  He brought me in here an hour ago, and I thought it was from the report I wrote for him.  The blood trail from the victim…sorry, from Jess to the window, the things Horace said.  Put it all down on paper for him, suggested we needed a warrant to look for the missing key, all that.  So he brings me in, sits me down, and outta the blue he starts asking me where I was last night.”

“So you told him what?”

“I didn’t tell him, actually.  None of his business.  But then he got this look on his face like he just got me over at chess or something.  Starts telling me he knows I messed with the evidence and I need to confess or he’ll bury me.  He’s lost it.”

“Yes, and we both know why, don’t we?”

We didn’t have to say it.  Ever since the arrests of Roy Fittimer and Alec Beaudoin last year, where Kevin got more of the credit than Cutter, he’d been on the Senior Sergeant’s hit list.  Those were both high profile media events for Lakeshore.  A drug dealer working most of southern Australia, and a murderer.  Kevin had come away looking like the hero no matter how he tried to pass the glory to the Senior Sergeant.  It was Kevin who got interviewed on SBS.  It was Kevin’s quotes in the papers.  Senior Sergeant Cutter had been just a footnote.

He’d had been looking for a reason to get rid of Kevin ever since.

Looks like he found one.

“He thinks I made up the stuff in Horace’s statement,” Kevin told me.  “As if.  Won’t listen to reason, either.”

“Why won’t you just tell him where you were last night?  That would end the whole thing right quick.  Put him in his place.  Give him nothing to hold over you.”

My son’s face doesn’t usually turn that particular shade of scarlet.  It did now.  “See, it’s not just my secret to keep.”

“Ah.” Okay, now I get it.  “So who is she, then?”

“Aw, ma.”

“A mother always knows.  So, tell me.”

He exhaled a breath while rolling his eyes.  “You aren’t gonna like this.”

“What, did you go and marry a stripper?”

He laughed, but then took another breath before he answered me.  “It’s Ellie Burlick.”

I couldn’t help but gasp.  Of all the girls, in all of Australia…  “From last year?  The sister of the girl who died here?  The one who was staying in my Inn?  That Ellie Burlick?”

He nods, once.  “See why I didn’t want anyone to know?”

More fallout from the deaths Alec Beaudoin had caused.  Ellie’s sister had been one of the victims.  Poor girl.  When Ellie came into town to find out why her sister had died, she and Kevin had gotten pretty close.  I just hadn’t realized how close.  Until now.

If it got out that Kevin was dating the sister of a victim in a case where he’d made the arrest, it would cast a shadow of doubt on the whole case.  It would screw up the prosecution of the murderer Alec Beaudoin, cast suspicion on why Kevin made the arrest, make the Lakeshore police department look like a bunch of hicks…

And all Kevin had been worried about was letting his mom know he’d had an overnight guest.

Reaching behind myself, I picked up a random stack of papers and slapped Kevin across his chest with them.

“Hey,” he said, “what was that for?”

“You go out there right now and you tell Cutter who you were with!  You get that nice woman to vouch for you, and stick it up Cutter’s pompous…nose,” I finished, realizing just how loud my voice was becoming.

“Think he’ll back down even then?”  He rubbed at his chest like a big baby.  A big, six-foot-tall baby.  “I mean, he’s my boss but he’s not the brightest bulb in the box.  He’s a real drongo.  If he thinks he can discredit me by dragging Ellie down too, I’m thinking that’s where he’ll aim his spear.”

I hop off the desk and hug him again.  I love my son.  A mother never was so proud.  “You dug yourself into this hole.  Go dig yourself out.”

“Thanks Mom,” he said.  “Been a long time since you had to give me advice.”

“No it hasn’t.  You just don’t notice all the times I tell you what to do.  I’m too good at it.”

He stepped back from me and his face became serious.  “You didn’t come here just to tell me how to be an upstanding bloke, did you?”

“No.  I didn’t.  Although I’m glad I was here to smack some sense into you.  Did you find enough to get a search warrant?”

“I think so.”  His frown was sour.  “Thing is, Cutter won’t go for it.”

Cutter.  The rock sticking up in the middle of the cattle path.  Blocking everything.

Well.  Like I’ve been saying, Lakeshore is a small town.

“You stay here,” I say to him.  “You tell Cutter exactly what you did…well, exactly where you were, anyway.  You tell him.  Give him no reason to push this idiotic arrest.”

“Um, okay.  Care to tell me what you’ll be doing?”

“No.”  I shake my head, and put a finger up to my lips.  “Better you don’t know.”