Murder, She Wrote Domestic Malice (22 page)

“What type of car does he drive?” Edwina asked.

Carol swallowed hard, setting off another coughing fit. I wondered whether there was an injury to her larynx. She leaned forward, her head in her hands, trying to get her breathing under control. “I don’t know what to do,” she said over and over.

“Please listen to me,” Edwina said to Carol. “We’re going to have to call the police. We take threats to the center and our clients very seriously,” she said.

“You’ll only make him more angry.”

“I understand if I call the police, it will put you at greater risk at home, but I can’t trust that he won’t follow through on his threats. We can offer you shelter. We can relocate you to another town. We can make sure you’re safe. Please, think about it.”

Edwina had picked up the phone when the sound of breaking glass in the front of the building caused us to stiffen. She dialed 911 as I cracked open the door in the foyer that would afford me a view of the building’s entrance. The man I thought could be Carol’s husband stood on the sidewalk holding a tire iron in one hand, a plastic container in the other. I gasped as he tossed the liquid contents of the container through the broken front door and threw a lighted match after it. A sheet of flames flashed up from the floor. Edwina had come to my side and still had the 911 operator on the line. “That’s right,” she said into the phone, “he’s smashed the window, and now he’s setting fire to the building. Please hurry.”

Cogan bellowed, “Carol,” the way Stanley Kowalski yelled for Stella in
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

Edwina grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and I opened the door slightly. The fire was already abating. We couldn’t see Cogan, and I fervently hoped he was gone. Edwina sprayed the lingering flames. Fortunately whatever accelerant Joe had used had burned up quickly, and while the floor and ceiling were charred, it didn’t look as if the whole building would go up in blazes. We heard a siren and watched as a marked patrol car screeched to a halt in front of the building and two uniformed deputies piled out. They yelled through the broken glass. “Is there a rear door?”

“Yes,” Edwina shouted back.

“Please leave by the rear exit,” one deputy said. “And make sure everyone inside gets out.”

As we backed away from the damage, a fire truck arrived, manned by four members of the Cabot Cove Fire Department.

Edwina and I walked through to the room where Carol Cogan sat cowering in a corner, her eyes wide with fright.

“It’s okay,” I said, kneeling in front of her.

“Was it Joe?” she asked in a feeble voice.

“I think so,” I replied. “But it’s okay now. The police and firemen are here.”

Edwina and I escorted Carol outside, where an EMT offered to examine her. She sat on a bench behind the building, head bowed.

To my surprise, Mort Metzger, wearing civilian clothes, joined us. “What happened?” he asked. “I got the call at home and figured I’d better come myself, seeing as it’s the women’s shelter office.”

“Carol, may I explain to the sheriff what happened?” I asked.

She nodded, and I gave Mort a rundown of the evening’s events.

“It’s her husband, huh?”

“She didn’t see who was there.”

“Know what kind of car he’s driving?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “but our client will know.”

Mort squatted in front of Carol and used his softest voice to question her. She told him the make and year of the car. Pulling a two-way radio from his belt, he put out an APB. “You and Ms. Wilkerson will have to come down to headquarters and file a complaint,” Mort said to me. “I hope you can get her to file one, too.”

“We’ll try.”

“Okay,” Mort said, “we’ll roust a carpenter out of bed to put some plywood over that broken door. Looks like the fire’s out, so no problem there. See you down at headquarters.”

I joined Edwina, who sat with Carol Cogan. Edwina had explained Carol’s right to make a statement, to file charges, and to ask for a protective order.

“I’m so ashamed,” Carol said, “that he’d do something like this.”

“You have nothing to feel ashamed about. It was his behavior, not yours.”

“Has he ever been in trouble with the law before?” I asked.

She affirmed that he had. “He got into some fights back in Chester. I don’t know what they were about. Someone dissed him and he knocked them out.”

Edwina asked for and received permission from the firemen to reenter the rear of the building to collect some items. She brought out a bag containing donated clothing and toiletries for Carol, and the three of us climbed in her car for the drive to the shelter itself, making certain we weren’t followed. Carol agreed to spend the night there until the situation could be sorted out. She thanked us profusely, and we left to go to the sheriff’s office.

By the time we arrived, Joe Cogan was handcuffed and in custody.

“Wrapped his car around a tree,” Mort said. “High as a kite, on alcohol and maybe something more.”

Edwina and I gave our report, including that we’d both seen Cogan at the scene of the crime and that I’d witnessed him providing the flammable liquid and igniting it.

“Looks like Mr. Cogan has got himself a slew of charges to face,” Mort said.

“You might ask him about slashing Harry McGraw’s tires,” I said.

“You know that he did it?” Mort asked.

“Just a guess,” I said.

Edwina dropped me home and I locked the door, checking it at least twice. Later, in pajamas, robe, and slippers, I curled up in a comfortable chair downstairs, contemplating the events of the evening while sipping a glass of red wine. Not my usual routine, but it had been that sort of night and I was keyed up. Even with the wine, when I finally retired it took me until almost two in the morning to fall asleep. I was bombarded with weird dreams, one of which woke me with a start at six a.m.: I’d been sitting with Edwina at the women’s shelter office, only I wasn’t there as a volunteer. I was a battered wife, my yellow-and-purple face swollen, my lip split, and tears running down my cheeks. It was, I knew, just a nightmare. My late husband, Frank, was a loving, gentle man who captured insects in the house with a paper cup and delivered them safely outside.

I couldn’t conceive of any husband striking a wife.

But some did. I’d seen it up close and personal, and my appreciation of the value of the Cabot Cove women’s shelter was never higher.

Chapter Twenty-two

E
dwina had left headquarters after we’d given the sheriff our statements about what had transpired that night, leaving Mort and me alone. As he reread my description of what occurred, Mort was receptive to my questions about the attack itself, and any wider meaning it may have had—namely, whether Richard Mauser was in any way involved.

“I’m just raising it,” I said, “because it’s a natural question to have. Cogan worked for Mauser. It’s possible that Cogan slashed Harry McGraw’s tires after Harry confronted Mauser at the council meeting. And if that’s true—that Mauser at least knew about Cogan slashing the tires—it’s also possible that he encouraged him, either overtly or through insinuation, to do damage to the shelter office.”

“That doesn’t hold water for me, Mrs. F. Cogan got himself a snoot full of booze and beat up on his wife. She came to the shelter and her husband came after her. How could Dick Mauser have arranged for
that
to happen?”

“I’m not saying that he did, Mort, at least not directly. But Mauser’s ongoing animosity toward the shelter is very public. It could have inspired a similar hatred in Cogan. He knew his new boss wanted the shelter shut down, put out of business, and when Cogan’s wife threatened to seek help at the shelter, his need for control and penchant for violence, fueled by alcohol, kicked in.”

Mort sat back, raised his arms over his head, and yawned noisily. “Let’s call it a night, Mrs. F.,” he said. “Cogan’ll sober up in his cell and have his day in court.”

“And you’ll question him to see if Mauser had anything to do with the tires, and with the incident tonight.”

“First thing in the morning.”

“Anything new with the Josh Wolcott murder?”

“Not on my end. The trial’s coming up, but you know that. You’re going to be called as a witness.”

When I didn’t say anything, he added, “And you’re still convinced somebody else killed Wolcott, somebody he took for a financial ride.”

“I’m not
convinced
of anything,” I said, “but in my mind a reasonable doubt exists that Myriam Wolcott is guilty. I remember hearing that someone contacted her encouraging her to kill her husband, or even offering to do it himself—assuming it was a man.”

“That’s true. No secret.”

I gave him my best tell-me-more look.

“Well,” he said as we left his office and walked to his car, “I’ll help put your mind at rest. The forensics folks finally managed to trace where those e-mails came from. Seems the sender logged in to be invisible online, sort of erased his identity. That might successfully hide him from most people surfing the Internet, but the forensic boys know how to get around it. They unerased the name, or at any rate the identification of the computer that the messages came from.”

We climbed into his car and pulled away from the sheriff’s office.

I thought about what Mort had said and began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“You’ve invented a new word, Mort.”

“What word?”

“Unerased.”

Mort grinned sheepishly. “Anyway, turns out those messages came from another house in the neighborhood.”

“That’s interesting,” I said.

“The Wolcotts’ neighborhood. A couple of blocks away. The Hanley family. We visited the house and talked to everybody there. They all swear they weren’t the ones who sent those messages.”

“Hanley? I know that name.”

“The husband’s a minister at a small church in that neighborhood, the wife’s a nurse’s aide, and the kid, Paul, he sounds like a straight shooter when he says he never wrote anything to Mrs. Wolcott.”

“How old is the son?” I asked.

“Sixteen.”

“Isn’t he friends with Mark Wolcott?”

“Best friends, according to the father. They play video games together all the time.”

“But if no one in the family sent those messages, Mort, then who did?”

“Beats me. The way I figure it, somebody hacked into their computer and sent ’em. Happens all the time, I hear, people hacking into other people’s computers and causing mischief.”

“Or,” I offered, “the boys could be using the computer for something other than games.”

“What are you getting at? You think the Wolcott boy wanted his mother to kill his father? I don’t know, Mrs. F. It sounds pretty far-fetched to me.”

“It does to me, too, when you put it that way, but it also seems far-fetched to think someone would hack into the Hanley computer to send messages to Myriam.”

Mort pulled up in front of my house and left the engine idling.

“I appreciate your sharing that information with me, Mort. Thanks for the lift.”

“No problem, Mrs. F. By the way, Maureen said you were entering a pie this year in the festival.”

“If I ever get a chance to do some baking. How’s Maureen’s entry coming?”

Mort’s sour expression said it all. “You ever taste a blueberry pie with avocado in it, Mrs. F.?”

“No, I can’t say that I have, but Maureen has asked me to be a taster for her.”

“Then I’ll let you decide,” was all he added about his wife’s pie as he came around and opened the door for me. Among our sheriff’s many attributes was loyalty to his wife.

Chapter Twenty-three

I
t came as no surprise that I found myself dwelling upon what Mort had told me about the messages urging Myriam Wolcott to kill her husband and how they’d been sent from a neighbor’s computer—the same neighbor to whom Mark Wolcott often fled when things were difficult at home. Mort had ruled out members of the Hanley family as the source of those messages, including their sixteen-year-old son, Paul, who was Mark’s friend. I was sure that Mort’s reasons for his decision were valid. Someone might have hacked into the Hanleys’ computer. But why would they have chosen that particular one? It was also possible that someone with access to the house could have used the computer to deliver those provocative threats. I didn’t know the Hanley family, nor was I aware of others who may have spent time at their home. I could be sure of only one thing: Someone had sent Myriam those messages. The question was who.

But there wasn’t much time to dwell on that or the upcoming trial. The Blueberry Festival was suddenly upon us. The weather cooperated—the two-day event over a weekend was blessed with cooler temperatures, a cobalt blue sky, and a refreshing breeze off the water.

The festival drew more visitors than previous years. The town was chockablock with new faces, men, women, and children wandering from event to event, tasting the various blueberry concoctions, buying up arts and crafts offered by our more creative citizens, and bidding at the auction that was held in a large tent erected on the high school football field. Spirits were high. A thousand blue and white balloons lined the downtown streets, and store owners had followed through on the color scheme in their windows. Mara’s restaurant on the dock had unfurled a huge sign proclaiming the best blueberry pancakes in the universe and offered mini–blueberry milk shakes for a dollar. The various musical groups alternated, providing toe-tapping tunes, and our local theater group put on a play set in the sixteen hundreds in which early settlers interacted with the local Indian tribes, the Abenaki, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy. Members of the acting troupe had been working on their costumes for months, their efforts appreciated by the theatergoers.

The pie-baking contest was to take place on Saturday afternoon at four, with the pie-eating contest to follow. Maureen had sent me a sample of her entry, which Mort had dropped off. I’d told her as diplomatically as I could that I thought she needed to work a bit at the proportions, but she said that out of all her trials, this was the combination she liked the best. I wished her luck. My submission had come from an old recipe I’d unearthed. I made two, the first to be sure it came out well, and the second to enter in the contest. The pie had no exotic ingredients, just blueberries and a little lemon and vanilla. It tasted good to me—one of my better efforts, I told myself—but I didn’t have any illusions about where I might place in the competition.