No One Else to Kill (Jim West Series) (12 page)

“True, but you will let me know tomorrow if she gets
afraid tonight, won’t
you?
”

“Eavesdropping, huh?”

“What a good bartender does best,” she said.

“I bet you hear a lot of good stories.”

“I do, but I also hear a lot that I wish I didn’t.
 
You’d be surprised how many customers would
have their heads cut off at my bar if they made me queen of the world.”

“What do you mean?”

“One thing I’ve learned about men and booze, if they drink
enough, they brag about their conquests.”

“Is that so bad?” I asked.

“Not necessarily.
 
We girls do that too, but some of the stories are horrid.”

I didn’t say anything, but I thought I knew where she
might be heading.

“If they made me queen, the next guy that bragged about
taking advantage of a subordinate who can’t afford to lose her job would have
his head chopped off.”

“Well, there are a lot of jackasses in the world.”

“Yeah, and a lot of
them don’t need to be breathing,”
she said.

“Mr. Benson didn’t happen to say anything that ticked you
off, did he?

She grinned.
 
“Remember, I said I would chop off their heads, not shoot them.”

“Just teasing,” I said.

“Do you think they’ll figure out who the killer is?”

“I imagine so.
 
I
think more murders get resolved than don’t, but this one is a puzzler.”

“What do you mean?” Bev asked.

“As far as I know, the murder weapon hasn’t been found, no
one has figured out the motive, and no one seems to have had access to the room
but Randi--”

“That’s your lady friend, right?”

“The one who was here a second ago, yes, but the police
tested her for gunpowder residue and found none. She may be involved in some
way, as any of them could, but I don’t believe the police consider her the
shooter.”

“Too bad,” she winked at me when she spoke and stood
up.
 
“I better get behind the bar before
someone says something.”

“I thought you had an in with the boss.”

“An interesting way to put it, but I doubt if he would be
very supportive of me if the complaint was that I was spending too much time
with one of the male customers.
 
That’s
another thing I would change if I was queen for a day.
 
What’s good for the goose would be good for
the gander.”

She walked back to her position behind the counter.
 
She had grown on me since our first
encounter.

 
finished
my beer and
went back to my room.
 
I had talked more
in the last two days than I usually do in a week. After kicking off my shoes, I
ran through all twenty television channels. It’s always amazed me that most
hotels have a shorter list of channels than any basic cable or satellite option
I’ve ever seen.
 
Lucky for me, this one
at least had the
SyFy
channel.

At a few minutes after six, I entered the dining room, and
for the first time since my arrival, I found everyone already there.
  
Not that everyone constituted a large
crowd.
 
Even Rick, the lodge’s manager,
sat at a corner table deep in discussion with Detective Bruno.

Sean
Bettes
had been released
after all.
 
He and Colt occupied the
other corner table. The four looked like bookends, as each couple leaned in
close together engrossed in their conversations.

The hunting group, at a table to my left, seemed to be
somewhat agitated.
 
Their voices were
loud, and none of them appeared to care who heard them. I could see hands
gesturing to emphasize feelings.

No one noticed my arrival, or if they did, they didn’t
acknowledge my presence. Normally, I would’ve been grateful to be left alone;
however, standing there, I had the irrational desire to be able to listen to
any, if not all, of the ongoing conversations.

I grabbed the table in the center of the room.
 
One of the wait staff must have been waiting
for me to sit down. He stood ready to take my drink order as soon as I sat
down. In Cross’ honor, I stayed with the Heritage Oak wines.
 
Besides, I liked them.

I had a good angle to study Sean’s face.
 
I thought I saw alligator tears and figured
that he was most likely my night time crier.
 
The guy definitely had issues.

The hunting group suddenly quieted down.
 
The wait staff had arrived with their
dinners. Randi looked normal, much as she did earlier in the afternoon.
 
The rest all looked a little tipsy.
 
Too much time at the bar, I bet.

I tried to compare the murder of Cross with other cases I
had been involved in. The known facts matched an Agatha Christie mystery closer
than anything I had seen before.
 
How did
someone get in and out of the room without being seen?
 
How come no one heard the shot?
 
What happened to the murder weapon? How did
the murderer know that Benson would be in the room at that moment?
 
At least the door to the room wasn’t locked
from the inside.
 
That would be an Agatha
Christie plot.

I had already assumed the murderer shot him at the same
time the rest of the hunting group fired off their rounds at the nearby firing
range.
 
I thought one or two of the shots
sounded different, but that would answer only one of the questions.

While any of a number of people may have known Benson
would be in the room at the time, no one except the lodge clerk admitted to
knowing it. The others in the hunting group knew he would be staying at the
hotel, and he had mentioned to some that he needed to work on his Fantasy
Football choices, but according to Detective Bruno none admitted to knowing
specifically when he would be doing it or where.

If Randi shot him, a lot of the questions would be
answered. But the police had talked to her and didn’t suspect her, and I didn’t
think she was the shooter either. The gun powder residue test didn’t implicate
her, and what would she have done with the murder weapon? I suspected her swoon
against me at the scene hadn’t been totally genuine, but it matched her
otherwise strange desire to flirt with me.

I wondered again about the lodge staff. Was someone
new?
 
Someone who had
come to the lodge to work, because he or she wanted to be here when Benson
arrived.
 
A cleaning cart would be
a perfect place to hide a pistol equipped with a silencer. A member of the
staff could easily have gone into the room and shot him in the back of the
head.
 
Benson would have ignored someone
who came into the room to empty the trash cans.

After the murder, the individual could toss the weapon
under some dirty towels and stroll casually away.
 
Perfect I thought, except if I remembered
correctly, Detective Bruno had mentioned something about the staff all being
accounted for at the approximate time of death.

A few of the maintenance crew had been allowed back up to
the third floor.
 
I didn’t think they
were part of the lodge’s staff, but I also didn’t think any of them had arrived
before Cross was shot.

I remembered one old case that proved to be extremely
difficult to solve, until we did.
 
It
happened in Colorado, and started with a call by a woman claiming that her
friend had been violently, sexually assaulted.
 
Responding officers found the victim, a woman in her mid-thirties, in
the basement of an empty house, where she had been discovered by her friend.

The victim had been dropped off earlier that day by her
friend.
 
They both worked for a cleaning
service that got homes ready for sale or for the new buyers to move in.
 
That day they were cleaning houses just a few
blocks apart.
 
Fortunately they both had
keys to each house, so whoever got done first could go and help the other.
 
They had a strict policy of locking the house
while they were inside alone.

When the friend arrived at the house where the victim was
working, she found the house locked.
 
She
entered the house and saw the victim’s purse and jacket on a nearby chair. A
portable radio played country music from a local station.
 
The friend called the victim’s name but got
no response.
 
She turned off the radio
and tried again, still getting no response. She looked through all the rooms
before heading to the basement.

She opened the basement door and saw that the basement was
dark.
 
She started to close the basement
door when she heard a moan.
 
She turned
on the basement lights and was shocked by what she discovered. Four separate
pools of blood connected by drops, smears and footprints decorated the otherwise
drab concrete floor in bright red.

She heard the moan again and forced herself to go down the
steps.
 
She saw the victim sitting
against a wall. Her jeans and underpants dangled from one leg. Blood was
smeared over most of her body. Screaming all the way, the friend ran out of the
house to a nearby neighbor.
 
Together,
they called the police and went back to investigate further.

They were still debating what to do when the first police
officers reached the crime scene.
 
Fortunately, they hadn’t disturbed anything.
 
By the time I had arrived, the victim had
already been taken away in an ambulance. The initial prognosis was not good,
but she did survive and fully recover.

At that scene we did have the locked door.
 
Allegedly, there were only two keys to the
house. We could find no sign of a break-in and nothing had been stolen out of
the victim’s purse.
 
Despite the plethora
of blood on the basement floor, the only bloody footprints we could find
belonged to the victim. We finally wondered if the victim could have fallen and
done the damage to herself.
 
The basement
door being shut and the lights to the basement being off seemed to negate that
theory.

We knew our victim suffered a severe blow to the
head.
 
While she had other minor bruises,
the blow to the head appeared to be the only significant trauma to her
body.
 
We found nothing in the basement
that could have served as the weapon.
 
The initial feedback from the hospital indicated she had not been
sexually assaulted.

Our investigation changed focus as we tried to prove or
disprove that this could have been an accident. We agreed it was possible, but
not at all likely, that our victim may have tripped as she stepped onto the
stairs.
 
She would have had to pull the
door shut behind her and either turned off the lights or failed to have ever
turned them on.

Despite our doubts, we looked for anyplace she could have
hit her head on the way down the stairs.
 
Nothing jumped out at us, and the area around the base of the stairs was
one of the few places in the basement where no blood stained the floor.

Our first inspection of the stairs revealed nothing, but a
closer scrutiny of the area around the base of the stairs with the help of a
bright flashlight disclosed a strand of hair and what looked like a tiny smear
of bloody tissue on the screw end of a large bolt that protruded out of the
bottom post supporting the hand rail.
 
The bolt, along with one a few inches lower, fastened the bottom of the
post to the side of the stairs.
 
Only a
few inches higher than the step next to it, it seemed impossible for our victim
to have hit her head on it, but she had.

We figured she tumbled down the stairs, gaining momentum
until her head crashed against the post.
 
The blow to the head might have knocked her unconscious, and the bolt
gouged into her skull at impact. Her hair blocked any immediate splatter and
the speed of her fall pulled her head along with the rest of her body on past
the bottom of the stairs.

Alone in the basement dazed, disoriented, and losing blood
she had moved from spot to spot leaving pools of blood wherever she sat back
down or collapsed.
 
At one point she had
the urge to go to the bathroom and instinctively had tried to remove her
jeans.
 
Her clothing revealed the corroborative
evidence.