It's Murder, My Son (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (35 page)

She continued. “Victor couldn’t stand Travis. He says he was all gloss and schmooze, but no talent. Travis didn’t want to act. He wanted to be a movie star, which Victor explains are two different things. Then, suddenly, Plain Jane Betsy was dating. Guess who.”

He sat up straight. “Travis Turner.”

She nodded her head. “Victor says it’s not unusual for ambitious actors to try to get in with top agents by dating their employees in order to have a good word put in for them. Victor tried everything he could to warn her, but she was in love with Travis. Suddenly, out of the blue, Travis signed a book deal that made history, and she quit her job to help her fiancée with his blossoming career as a famous mystery writer.”

“Fiancée?” Stunned, Mac repeated the word. “I only saw Betsy once, but from what I saw they weren’t anything other than boss and admin.”

“I saw them together more than you and thought the same thing.” She stood up. “I can’t see Travis—”

“He referred to her as a fat cow.” He gasped. “He had to have been using her. But for what?”

“Editor,” Archie said. “Not to blow my profession’s own horn, but good editors play a vital role in a writer’s career. There’s more to a hot book than a good story. There’s the boring technical stuff.” She concluded, “If Betsy hadn’t edited his books, I guarantee Travis would never have gotten where he is today.”

“If they were romantically involved, why did Betsy stay on after Travis married Sophia?” Mac had to think a moment. His conversation with Travis the day before seemed so long ago. “I don’t get it.”

She said, “You’d be surprised how many women think a cheating man is better than no man at all. I’m willing to bet Sophia knew nothing about it. She told me yesterday that she knew Travis was cheating. Can you imagine what she’d do if she found out that Betsy Weaver was the other woman? Maybe she killed her.”

While reading the e-mail Mac sipped his cold decaf coffee and sat back on the chaise. With Gnarly at the other end, he couldn’t stretch out his legs. When Mac tried to urge the dog off by pushing against him with his feet, Gnarly growled. Eventually, the dog permitted Mac to warm his feet under him.

After a long stretch of silence during which they both turned over the case again and again in their minds, Archie stretched her legs until her feet rested under the edge of his chaise. “What are you thinking so hard about?”

“Where does a frumpy, overweight book editor fit into this? What connection does Betsy have to Katrina? Who was Pay Back?” Mac sighed. “I have this feeling that if we can figure out what he was paying Katrina back for, then we’ll know everything.” He made a circling gesture with both hands. “It will all come together.”

Archie reached for his hand. “Maybe we need to step back and look at the whole picture. When Robin would get to this point in a case, she’d go work in her garden.”

“The security system was never deactivated. It never went off. How did he bypass security?” Mac turned in his seat to study his house.

Archie wondered at the puzzled look on his face. “What’s wrong?”

“Which brings us back to the original locked room murder.” Mac stood up.

“What original locked room murder?” She followed him across the deck and down into the back yard.

“Pat O’Callaghan’s unsolved murder case,” Mac said. “David told me about it. It happened in the Singleton house.”

“Two murders in the same house? Don’t let that get out. Chad will never be able to sell the place.”

They turned the corner of the stone wall to enter Katrina’s beach and trekked up the back yard.

“Someone shot Milo Ford. Neither Robin nor Pat figured out how the killer entered the house, shot the victim, and got out without tripping the security system—the same way Katrina was killed.” Mac paused at the patio to study the house’s outside wall. “How did Pay Back get in to drug the bottle of wine without anyone detecting it?”

“What are you looking for?” Archie asked him.

“A way into the house that will bypass the alarm.”

“Do you mean like the way a cat burglar breaks into the bank through the ventilation system in the dead of night to get away with the big heist?”

“Something like that,” Mac said. “If Katrina changed her code regularly, and the system shows no record of being deactivated with the code, then it must not have been used. But he—”

“Or she.”

“—still got in. They must have had a way into the house that went around the system.”

Gnarly’s whine interrupted Mac’s concentration.

Like before, the dog dug away at the corner of the house. The hole he had been working on the last time they visited the crime scene had grown more than two feet to expose the house’s foundation.

“Gnarly, you’re going to get us all in trouble,” Archie said. “Get out of there!”

The dog clawed at the siding connecting the corner of the garage with the house.

“Stop it, Gnarly!” Mac pulled him away from the house by the collar.

Seeing what the dog had uncovered with his digging, Mac released Gnarly, who resumed clawing at the siding.

Archie knelt next to the hole. “Gnarly has been working at this for a long time. Looks like he’ been digging up the house.”

“Most dogs dig up gardens.” Mac ran his fingers along the side of the house. “There’s a seam here.”

She studied the spot he marked with his fingertips. Instead of the cedar panels that covered the house overlapping each other, the planks rested flush next to each other.

“I wonder…” Mac peered closely at the grain. “Could it be?” He pressed his fingertips into what appeared to be a knothole in the plank.

Click!

A three foot wide, six foot tall section of the siding along the wall of the house popped open.

Before Mac and Archie could get over the shock of their discovery, Gnarly stuck his nose in the opening. After squirming his body through, he charged inside. His bark resembled a battle cry.

“Gnarly, wait!” Archie hurried into the darkness after the dog. “The killer might be in there!”

Mac ran in after them.

The room was no more than three foot wide and approximately twenty feet long.

When he darted into the dark room, Mac collided with Archie who had stopped when she found what appeared to be a window looking into the home theater.

“Look!”

Recalling the mirror behind the bar, Mac told her, “It’s a two-way mirror.” His eyes adjusted to the darkness. The room was bare with no paint or wallpaper. Plain wooden planks made up the walls. A ladder led up to the next floor of the house.

Gnarly clawed at the wall at the opposite end of the room.

“What did you find?” Archie knelt next to the dog. “Is there another room behind this wall?”

They squinted to see what held the dog’s interest. One of the panels appeared to be broken. Like the door leading into the secret room, the edges were flush with the wall.

Mac forced his fingers into the hole, grasped the edge of the board, and pulled. The board came out of the wall and dragged a drawer behind it. The drawer contained a canvas bag.

The movement created a cloud of dust.

Gnarly sneezed before pouncing on the bag, which caused more dust.

Archie covered her nose and mouth. “What is it?”

Waving the dust away, Mac opened the bag. Before he could search the contents, Gnarly thrust his head inside. After Mac pushed him away, he extracted a plastic bag containing a white powder from the canvas bag.

“Is that cocaine?” Archie asked.

“Maybe.” Mac set it aside. “Supposedly, a drug dealer built this house.”  Yanking the edges of the canvas bag to open it wider, Mac peered inside. “Now I know definitely what this is.” He pulled out his hand to show her a bundle of hundred dollar bills. “It’s time we call our new chief of police.”

*   *   *   *

 In spite of his success in negotiating a winning deal for his late father’s job, David didn’t sleep well. Once more, he was in Katrina’s bedroom. Again, she called him to her bed and in the midst of making love, he realized they weren’t alone.

Katrina pointed her finger at the intruder. “Oh, no! It’s alive!”

“No!” David screamed when the intruder aimed his gun at her and pulled the trigger.

He dove for his gun, but it was gone.

The killer aimed his gun at him. “You’re a dead man, O’Callaghan.” He pulled the trigger.

His heart pounding, David sprang up in his bed.

*   *   *   *

“Milo Ford dealt in drugs,” Mac explained to David. “He needed to hide them where the police couldn’t find them. So he must have built this room when he designed the house.”

While Bogie and Archie counted the bundles of hundred dollar bills on the patio, Mac and David searched the series of secret rooms. After his appointment to police chief, David called Bogie to offer him the position as his deputy chief. The position came with a substantial raise, a condition for his accepting the position of chief.

The ladder led up to the second floor where the passages branched out into a maze of narrow hallways. The secret rooms went up to the attic. Peep holes permitted spying in every room.

“This is really creepy,” David breathed when he found the tiny window into the bedroom where he had been intimate with Katrina.

“Pay Back knew everything she did. He came and went without activating the security alarm,” Mac told David. “This is how he did it.”

With their flashlight beams, they scoured the wall of the room on the ground floor, where they found a small door no taller than three feet and not much wider. The oblong knob looked like it belonged on a medicine cabinet.

“Where does it lead?” David called out to Mac once he managed to fit his shoulders through the opening.

Mac felt around. Ahead, he could hear water running. Feeling his way in the darkness, his fingers made contact with a wooden surface that felt like a door on a hinge. Pushing the door open, he plunged toward the light.

After over an hour in the dark caverns of the house, Mac’s eyes were still adjusting to the light when he heard Archie shriek, “Where did you come from?” She had been washing her hands at the sink when he fell out of the bathroom cabinet behind her.

“You wouldn’t believe what’s in this house,” Mac told her.

With no towel to wipe her hands on in the unoccupied home, Archie wiped her wet hands on the seat of her jeans. “Oh, I’d believe it. You won’t believe what we found in that bag.”

On the patio, Bogie was completing an inventory form of the bag’s contents when David and Mac followed Archie outside. “We have seventy-five thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills,” he reported. “The dates on the bills aren’t any later than the 1990s.”

“Which puts it around the time someone murdered Milo Ford,” David noted.

“Yep,” the older officer agreed. “Your daddy was convinced he was a drug dealer and this proves it.” He held up one of the bags of white powder. “Two kilos of heroin. But that’s not all.” He reached into the bag. “We also have this.” He extracted a revolver.

David took the gun. “I wonder if that’s the weapon used to kill Milo.”

“Leaving it in the secret wall that the police don’t know about would pretty much ensure no one found it,” Archie said.

“But why not take the money?” Mac asked. “Or the drugs? My guess is that the drugs, money, and gun belonged to Milo and he was killed before he could use it.”