Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (7 page)

“Fell down stairs,” Jake put in.
“Yes
, we know that, too. But I still don’t see what that’s got to do with—”

“Carolyn disappearing?” Chip frowned. “I’m not sure. But I think … I’ve just got a funny feeling maybe someone has lured us here.”

At this Bob Arnold’s white-blond eyebrows rose skeptically. Chip’s next words came out in a hurry.

“Lured Carolyn and me, I mean. Someone who knew that she had taken an interest in the Dodd boys and their dead wives. And,” he added, “someone who didn’t like it.”

Bob Arnold rested his chin on his shirtfront and gazed with interest at Chip. “Do tell,” he said.

Chip either missed the sarcasm or ignored it. “See, I put out a few requests for information while I was first checking out the whole Dodd case just in general. I mean, to see if it really was anything Carolyn would want to pursue.”

He looked around at them. “I have,” he added, so modestly that Jake thought it was probably an understatement, “a couple of research contacts.”

Bob’s eyebrows shifted questioningly.

“People who know things, or people who know how to find them out,” Chip explained. “I help them, and they help me.”

Jake looked over again at Ellie, found that her friend had produced a small legal pad from her bag and was busily writing on it.
Stolen car, mask on the breakwater, miss’g woman
, the page read in Ellie’s large, clear handwriting.

And on a separate line: SAM???

Ellie had noticed Sam’s neatly made bed, too, Jake realized, as they’d rushed downstairs. And Jake had complained bitterly to Ellie about the untended dogs that morning.

A quiver of apprehension seized her as Chip continued: “After I put requests on a few of the members-only true-crime discussion boards, I started getting these strange e-mails.”

Bob looked even more skeptical.

“E-mails,” Chip continued, “from someone who said he knew more about the Dodds than anyone else.” He took a deep breath. “He said he’d tell Carolyn what he knew if she met him, here in Eastport.”

Bob cleared his throat, spoke to Ellie and Jake. “The person your friend here’s been hearing from says his name’s Randy Dodd.”

“Chip,” Jake said, “I hate to tell you this, but someone’s been fooling around with you.” It was the nicest way she could think of to put it. “Randy’s the brother who drowned, remember? He’s been dead for two years. Before his wife had the accident, even, he was already—”

“See, but that’s just it,” Chip said, undeterred. “Maybe he’s not dead. Maybe he faked it and he just doesn’t want Carolyn reviving any interest in the whole thing, and he knows she could, so he grabbed her.”

Unaware of the disbelieving stares of his audience, or maybe ignoring them, he went on intently.

“See, Carolyn thinks the Dodd boys might’ve married the Lang girls for the money, and killed them for it. She thinks maybe Randy’s supposed death was part of the plan. That he survived going overboard somehow. That he’s here, now.”

Silence followed this, until: “That’s quite a theory you’ve got there,” Bob Arnold said in disgust. For one thing, in the fact-gathering department, he thought websites were about as reliable as Ouija boards.

“It’s also just about the dumbest thing I ever heard,” he added, getting up from behind his desk.

“You’ve looked for her, right? Your little girlfriend. You checked her motel room, all that.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Chip repeated, starting to sound impatient. “And of course I looked for her. The only reason I waited so long before I came in here to see you was that I still thought she might show up. I mean, what d’you think, I’m some kind of a fool?”

Bob’s answering look said that early indications were not in Chip’s favor on this question. “Son, I’m not sure what you are or what your problem is,” he said.

“But,” he went on, holding up an admonishing finger, “I do know Randy Dodd was out lobsterin’ all alone one morning a couple years back, slipped on a piece o’ herring bait, an’ went over the rail.”

Herring chunks were what the lobstermen used to get their prey to crawl into the traps. Bob’s voice dropped.

“Drowned,” he pronounced gravely. “Body never found. Left three torn-out fingernails, though, meat an’ all still attached to ’em, stuck in his trapline where he must have got tangled in it. You get me?”

He held Chip’s gaze. “I mean, that fella struggled. He tried but he died. Coupla men do it every year or so, tryin’ to make a living. And I don’t know how things are wherever you come from, sonny, but around here that’s no joke.”

Bob headed for the glass doors, grabbing his hat and duty belt and putting them on as he spoke.

“And that’s what happened. So you can tell any tall tales you want to about how come your girl took off on you,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye peeled for her, and put the word out, just in case. That’s my job and I’ll do it, don’t worry about that. But probably she went home.”

He turned. “Unless by some awful coincidence, in the next day or two, she shows up dead, which you better hope she doesn’t. Because if that happens, the first one I’m coming to talk to about it is you,” he finished scathingly.

Which was a little tough on Chip, Jake thought. But she, too, felt skeptical about his story.

For one thing, if Randy Dodd had wanted people to think he was dead, why reveal otherwise to Chip? Or to his friend Carolyn Rathbone? Or his employer, or whatever? But …

“Bob? Where did you go last night? I mean, after you looked for the guy’s stolen car?”

“Out on the causeway,” he replied. The one that connected Moose Island to the mainland, he meant, linking Eastport to the rest of the world.

There was no ferry, except for a few weeks in summer. The rest of the time there were not enough people living in Eastport to support ferry service.

“Took the night shift for Howie Crusoe. He’s on leave ’cause his wife’s havin’ a baby. Sat there like he always does, trolling for speeders. Why?”

“Oh, just something that occurred to me.” She put the timing together: a stolen car, a disguised guy on the breakwater scaring everyone else off, and—

“So you saw everyone who came onto or went off the island, between—”

“Between ten and three,” he finished for her. “Knew ’em all, too. All their cars, where they’re going, what they’re doing. All the same ones as go back and forth every night for their jobs and so on. No mysterious strangers,” he added dryly.

“And the guy wearing the horror movie mask,” she persisted. “Did he scare the bunch of kids right off the breakwater? I mean, completely off? They ran away?”

Which at that hour would’ve left the breakwater empty, most likely. Bob snorted.

“Sure did. Anyway, that’s what all their moms said when they called me up to complain about it. Although where any of ’em got the nerve to do that, I don’t know. Eleven-thirty’s a good couple hours past when youngsters that age oughta be out on the street at all, you ask me.” Bob shook his head. “Maybe I’ll get myself a mask like that. Sounds useful. Anyway, is that all?” He eyed Chip balefully.

“Yes, Bob,” said Jake. “Thanks very much.”

The police chief slammed out. A silence followed. Then: “Is he always like that?” Chip asked shakily.

Outside, Bob’s old Crown Vic started up with a roar, nearly stalled, and coughed back to stuttering life again a few times more before dying completely.

“Only when he thinks someone’s trying to take advantage in some way,” Jake said. “Stir up something people here would rather forget, maybe, just to make something for themselves out of it.”

Which was how Bob Arnold would’ve viewed a Carolyn Rathbone book, even one that didn’t happen to be about Eastport. He called people who wrote or made films about true crime “the blood-and-guts-ers.”

“And by the way,” she added, “the bar you two were in last night right before your friend vanished? Or boss, or whatever,” she added
quickly before Chip could correct her. “That’s Roger Dodd’s place,” she finished.

Chip looked stunned. “Oh.”

“Bought it right after he got married,” she said. With his wife’s money, she didn’t add, though that was common knowledge.

“Before that, he was a paramedic on the town ambulance.” A job, she also could’ve added, that he’d been happy to give up in order to buy his own business. With his new wife’s cash.

But by all accounts the marriage had been happy. “He just reopened the bar a week ago. Word around town is he’s still pretty torn up about Anne.”

At first Roger had of course come under suspicion; husbands always did. Roger Dodd had an ironclad alibi for the time of his wife’s murder, though, and ever since, he’d been walking around town like a grief-struck ghost.

People felt awful for him. “So if I were you, I don’t think I’d be going on about how the Dodd boys killed the Lang girls for profit. Not around here, anyway.”

Chip nodded slowly, frowning. “We didn’t know the other Dodd brother ran a bar,” he said. “What a blunder. All the research I did, how’d I miss that?”

As a onetime financial pro and longtime Eastport resident who heard what there was to hear—which in Eastport was plenty—Jake could have told him that for tax reasons, the Lang sisters and their husbands had been incorporated for business purposes. So none of their names were in the kinds of public records Chip would have had access to.

But Chip Hahn’s problems were the least of her worries all of a sudden; she turned back to Ellie. “Sam was on the breakwater last night to help a fellow haul his boat.”

Pull it out of the water for the winter, in other words, so it could be stored under a tarp or a roof from now until spring. Home from
college on his independent-study semester, during which he hoped to finish many of his engineering-major electives in one one fell swoop—

Or swell foop, as he would’ve called it; he was, despite his diagnosis and treatment, still quite severely dyslexic.

—Sam was learning Morse code, doing a biology experiment on seaweed, writing a research paper about the Spanish Inquisition, and auditing a class in electronic communications at the marine center in Eastport.

Still, he made time to do a lot of odd jobs around the dock and elsewhere in town, for spending money and because he enjoyed it. He’d put the brand-new karaoke system into Roger Dodd’s bar, for example, and spent hours testing and tuning the equipment.

“But he didn’t let the dogs out this morning, and his bed was made,” Ellie said.

Outside, Bob Arnold’s car stalled again.

“Right,” Jake said. “That’s why I’m starting to think he didn’t come home last night at all, and I wonder if maybe …”

But Ellie was already on her way out the door, to catch up with Bob Arnold before the Crown Vic finally managed to get its backfiring, fumes-spewing act together.

WHEN CAROLYN RATHBONE WOKE UP, SHE COULDN’T SEE
, speak, or move. Terror set her heart hammering again. Caught …

Gagged with tape and wrapped in a roll of blankets with even her head covered, she’d felt the man lifting her from the car trunk. Sometime after that, she’d passed out. But how long ago?

She couldn’t tell. The faint clang of footsteps going down a metal stair had been followed by the creaking of a dock. Then she was falling, crashing into something hard.

She’d felt a part of her hand twist as it struck something, with a flare of pain that rocketed up her arm. An instant later her head landed and bounced, knocking her unconscious.

Now the surface she lay on, whatever it was, rocked gently. The salty smell of the sea mingled with the harsh reek of diesel fumes, strong even through the blanket.
A boat …

Despair clutched her. He was taking her out onto the ocean, where no one could hear her scream. But then …

“Mmgh.” Her own voice, she thought it must be at first. Through the pain of her injured hand, her head’s awful thudding, and the harsh agony of barely being able to breathe at all, she couldn’t tell what sounds were coming from where.

The boat’s engine started up, a low, liquid grumble not far from where she lay. Fright and nausea mingled as she remembered that she got seasick, and that the tape he’d stuck over her mouth was still there

Not that way, oh please, I don’t want to die, but if I have to, please not like that, not strangling on my own …

Control of her limbs returned suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped inside her. From frozen in terror to wild with it, her heart slamming madly inside the cage of her ribs, she writhed frantically until the side of her face pressed the rough-textured blanket he’d wrapped her in.

Tears and sweat soaked the tape on her mouth. Rubbing her cheek back and forth against the blanket, she managed to peel the strip of sticky stuff—and most of her skin, too, it felt like—partly off. The rest of it came free when she wrenched her jaws apart.

She worked her mouth around, trying to get the stiffness out of her jaw. Then she froze as from somewhere nearby came that odd sound again. A groan of pain, it sounded only half conscious.

A man
, she thought.
Or a boy. Not Chip
. She’d have known his voice. Someone else …

Gulping in huge, luxurious breaths, she tried thinking about what
the sounds might mean but could only get her mind to take in the present moment.

Now. For right now, I’m alive. …
Breathing helped, and so did the realization that at least she’d done something about her situation.

Not that it would make a difference. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, she knew, guys like the one who had her made sure in advance that no meaningful resistance was possible.

And they knew it, too. Because most of them had done it before. So fighting would achieve nothing. And yet …

Her cheek went on burning. Gradually, she realized that she was still rubbing it against the rough blanket. Back and forth …

And now the blanket was moving. With each motion of her head it slid more, until the tightly wrapped hood loosened to a cowl.

A gleam of light penetrated it. Turning slightly, she pushed the blanket’s fold past her right ear. Because …

I want to see
, she thought.
I want to see his face
.