It's Murder, My Son (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (10 page)

“Don’t feel so safe. From what I’ve heard, they’ve targeted the Spencer Inn. They caused so much trouble that they got themselves kicked out.” Ira bit into his cookie and spoke around it. “Now that you’ve come into the picture, they probably envision a big windfall.”

“Kicked out of the Inn?”

“Your hotel offers private club membership. For an annual fee, members get to use the exercise club, golf course—you know—all of the amenities that the hotel guests get.”

“I wasn’t aware of that.” Mac asked, “Why did Jeff kick them out?”

“The Inn doesn’t kick anyone out as long as they can pay their dues. But that pair picked fights with everyone. Jeff got his fill of it, gave them a full refund, and told them not to come back.” Spying a white SUV with black and gold trim crossing the bridge to the Point, Ira crossed the sunroom to watch the cruiser slow down as it approached the Hardwick driveway. “Right on time.”

Mac recognized David’s cruiser. The two men watched David get out of the driver’s seat and pick up a valise in which he carried his notepad and folders from the passenger seat. He slung the strap of the valise over his shoulder.

“You’re in luck,” Ira said. “That’s David O’Callaghan. His pappy was Pat O’Callaghan. He used to be the chief of police until he passed away. That was when we had a real police chief. David’s just as sharp as he was. He’ll set the Hardwicks straight.” He chuckled. “They won’t like it, but he will.”

After thanking his neighbor for the coffee and information, Mac bid him farewell. Ira was still eying the home next door when Mac led Gnarly out the front door to jog past the cruiser and up the driveway to Spencer Manor.

*   *   *   *

“Here.” Gordon directed his wife, “Take a picture of these cuts on my knees where he pushed me down.” He rolled up his pant legs to expose wrinkled red flesh.

Priscilla Hardwick aimed her digital camera at her husband’s knees.

“Do you see that?” Gordon asked the police officer.

David shook his head. “All I see is a pair of ugly knees.”

“They’re red and sore. It takes a couple of days for the bruises to show.” He pointed at his own face. “Guarantee it! By tomorrow this whole side of my face will be bruised where he slugged me for no reason.” He pointed at a red mark on his cheekbone while asking his wife, “Did you get a picture of this welt?”

Obediently, she shot a picture of his face.

David stepped forward to study the mark. “Did you clean up after the alleged assault?”

“It’s not alleged.”

“Did you wash up?”

“No,” Gordon asserted. “I know about collecting evidence. I didn’t do anything except call you and my lawyer.”

David leaned forward to look more closely at the mark on Gordon Hardwick’s cheek. It was round—perfectly round. “Tell me again how you got that.”

“I told you. Mac Faraday blindsided me. He grabbed me in some judo hold and shoved me face down in my own driveway.”

David strolled around the living room while Gordon continued to recount how, after calling out a welcome-to-the-neighborhood greeting, his new neighbor sicced his dog on him before threatening his life.

Their tan poodle was curled up in her bed in the corner of the room. David noted that he had never seen the dog wag her tail. He thought that if he lived in this home, he wouldn’t be wagging his tail either.

He found it. A bottled jar of potpourri rested on an end table. Dust covered the surface of the table, except for a clean ring, evidence of where the bottle had rested until someone picked it up to use as a weapon for a self-inflicted wound.

Next to the bottle, David saw a yellow notepad with line upon line of letters, numbers, and symbols written in a feminine hand. Trying to appear casual in his discovery while picking up the jar, David tried to read the writing but couldn’t. The letters didn’t form words. Curious if they were a foreign language, he picked up the pad to decipher them only to find that they failed to have the necessary spaces to form word breaks.

Priscilla snatched the notepad from his hand. “That’s none of your business.” She rushed down the hallway to where he knew they had their office. 

Holding the jar in his hand, David turned back to her husband. “I don’t see any dirt, grime, or scrape marks in the wound on your cheek, Mr. Hardwick. If you received that by having your face pushed down onto pavement, your face would be dirty.”

“I washed my face.”

David shot back, “You said a moment ago that you didn’t wash it because you didn’t want to disturb any evidence. As a lawyer you know all about preserving evidence. I believe you had an altercation with Mac Faraday in your driveway, Mr. Hardwick. Based on your relationship with your other neighbors, it was only a matter of time. Since Mac is worth over a quarter of a billion dollars, I’m sure you couldn’t wait to find something to lodge a complaint about against him. You started something and he ended it. But you didn’t get hurt enough in your greedy eyes, so you either hit yourself in the face with this jar, or had your wife do it for you.”

Gordon’s face reddened. “Just do your job and take my complaint.”

“No.”

With an expression of disbelief, Gordon Hardwick glanced at his wife who had come back into the room. She had left her notepad with the strange lettering in their office.  He sputtered, “Wh-what?”

“I said no.” David crossed his arms across his chest. “We’ve had it with you, Mr. Hardwick. In the three years that you’ve lived here, I’ve answered more calls to this home to take complaints about your neighbors than I have answered in the entire Point for my whole career. I’m sick of it. The county prosecutor is sick of wasting his time and the taxpayers’ money on your petty complaints. The circuit judges are sick of seeing you and your lawyer in their courtroom. You’re nothing more than the personification of the sleazy lawyer hunting down his next big lawsuit and we’re all sick of it. None of us are going to have any part of it anymore.”

In order to make his point clear, he stepped across the room to speak into the little man’s blotchy face. “Hunting season in Spencer is closed, Mr. Hardwick.” 

Gordon was still spewing his vulgar-filled response when David let himself out the front door. On the other side of Spencer Manor’s stone pillars, he could see Mac playing fetch with Gnarly in the grassy yard leading down to the boulder-lined tip of the Point.

Seeing the cruiser pull around the circle drive, Mac stopped the game while holding the ball that Gnarly was fetching. Not wanting to quit so soon, the dog pawed at his master until he tossed the ball down to the water.

“Are you here to arrest me for assault?” he called out.

“We’re not taking any further complaints from the Hardwicks.” David leaned against his cruiser. “What happened?”

“Gnarly dragged me onto their property and Hardwick jumped at the chance to escalate it from unintentional trespass to a vicious dog and assault case,” Mac said. “I advised him that taking me to court could cost him more physical damage than he could gather monetarily. I guess he didn’t take my advice.”

“No,” David said. “But no one here in Spencer is going to play ball with him. Ben Fleming won’t be seen in court with him unless it’s with Hardwick playing the role of defendant. Without being able to get a criminal charge filed, he’d have a hard time getting a civil case for assault going. So you have nothing to worry about.”

“Do I look worried?”

Gnarly was once again pawing at his master. He had brought back the ball, but Mac failed to toss it. David threw it as far as he could toward the water.

Mac asked, “Did the autopsy report come back for Pay Back yet?”

“Yes, but Phillips won’t let me see it. He says I don’t have any need to know the results. So I called the ME and got an unofficial verbal report. He was good friends with my dad.” David frowned. “Dental records were a match. It’s Lee Dorcas.”

“Cause of death?” Mac tossed the ball again for Gnarly.

“Gunshot wound to the head,” David said. “Forensics found the slug in the mine and it did come from the gun we found.”

“But was the fatal wound self-inflicted?”

“Since the body was so badly decomposed, we have no evidence to prove either way. They found gunshot residue on the jacket, which shows that whoever was wearing it fired a gun.” David added, “Yet, there’s no evidence of any dog bite on the body prior to death. But the jacket had Gnarly’s blood on it and showed evidence of being torn up in a dog attack. They also found blood on the jacket that didn’t come from Lee Dorcas or Gnarly.”

“Gnarly attacked someone else who happened to be wearing that jacket.” Mac put the scene together. “That someone else killed Katrina Singleton.”

David continued, “Gnarly attacked him when he left the scene. He was wearing the army fatigue jacket. Gnarly bit the killer and shredded the jacket.”

Mac concluded, “Then, he killed Lee Dorcas after putting the jacket on him to make it look like Pay Back killed Katrina and then killed himself.”

“If that’s what happened, then it’s not a simple murder-suicide.”

“It’s just plain murder.”

Chapter Five

“Someone besides Lee Dorcas had to have a reason to kill Katrina,” Mac told Archie during what had become their daily morning hike.

Afterwards, she would give him a cooking lesson while preparing breakfast, which they ate together on the lower deck down by the lakeshore. Archie may not work for Mac, but she didn’t skimp on sharing her good cooking with him. Besides being a wine connoisseur and fluent in Italian, French, and German, Archie was also a gourmet cook.

In the early morning’s solitude, Mac had taken Gnarly off his leash to let him run while Archie led him on a leisurely trail up the mountain toward Abigail’s Rock, where his great-great-grandmother founded Spencer and Niles Holt met his end. She explained that Abigail Spencer had taken the longer, less strenuous, route to the rock that had taken on her name.

“It isn’t a simple case of murder,” Mac said while navigating the path to keep from tripping over exposed tree roots. “First, the killer had to have known about Lee Dorcas’s threats against Katrina. Dorcas must have been abducted in order to frame him for her murder and stage his suicide. Katrina’s killer went to a lot of trouble. Why did he, or she, go to so much trouble?”

“You’re asking the wrong girl,” Archie replied when he paused to await her response. “I didn’t really know Katrina. No one did except David. They’d known each other since school. He took her death hard.”

Holding something that resembled a rope in his mouth, Gnarly charged down the trail toward them.

“What have you got?” Archie called out to him.

Mac recognized the twisting creature fighting to escape its captivity in the dog’s jaws. “It’s a snake!”

Together, they screamed and ran back down the mountain. Anxious to show off his treasure, Gnarly gave chase. They broke through the woods, across Spencer Court, and toward the lake. When he saw that they were going to be trapped by the dog and reptile, Mac turned to Gnarly with his hand held out in a signal to stop. “Drop it!”

Gnarly stopped. Fiercely, he shook his head before dropping the snake’s limp body to the ground.

After examining the dead reptile, Archie uttered a shriek and covered her mouth. “It’s a timber rattlesnake!” She pointed at the rattle at the end of its tale. “Gnarly saved us from a rattler.” Cooing with affection, she hugged the dog while examining him for evidence of a snake bite. “Did he bite you?”

“I’m not taking you to the vet,” Mac told Gnarly.