Poisoned Ground (17 page)

Chapter Thirty

The tangy smell of raw pine, pleasant enough when Tom split kindling for the fireplace, stung his nostrils when he crossed a lot where thousands of boards lay bound into pallets. The whine of high-speed saws inside the lumber mill drowned out every other sound in the yard.

The mill looked like what it was, a relic of the early twentieth century, a big wooden building so weathered that no trace of exterior paint remained. It sat on a strip of flat land between steep hills, bordered by the paved road on one side and railroad tracks on the other.

A man using a forklift to load pallets on a flatbed truck paused his work to let Tom pass in front of him, and Tom threw up a hand to thank him.

One side of the building stood open, the metal door of the bay rolled up. Half a dozen men in hard hats and thick plastic ear muffs moved around the cutting floor, shepherding logs along the conveyers to saws that sliced off the bark, then cut the wood into narrow boards.

Wishing he had a pair of earplugs, Tom pulled open a door marked OFFICE. The large room he entered had a counter along the front and three desks, none of them occupied, spaced out farther back. Tracked-in sawdust and bark slivers littered the floor, and a fine film coated the counter. Somewhere a phone was ringing, barely competing with the noise from the mill’s saws, but Tom didn’t see it and couldn’t pin down its location. The small brass bell on the counter almost made him laugh. Was he supposed to tap on that little thing to get somebody’s attention? He’d have better luck using telepathy.

A door at the side of the room opened, and the decibel level rose enough to make Tom’s ears ring. Mark Hollinger strode in, wearing a hard hat and ear muffs, and closed the door on the worst of the noise. He started when he saw Tom on the other side of the counter. Knowing the other man couldn’t hear him, Tom lifted a hand in greeting.

Mark lifted his hard hat and slid the ear muffs’ metal band off his hair and down around his neck. He fixed his strange silvery blue eyes on Tom as he approached. “What can I do for you?”

Tom raised his voice to answer. “I need to talk to you.”

“I’m busy.” The phone rang again, and Mark reached under the counter and came up with the receiver. “Hollinger Lumber,” he said, loudly enough to be heard over the background noise.

What was it like, Tom wondered, to spend every working day, all day long, shouting?

“Yes, sir,” Mark was saying. “We’re loading it right now. It’ll be on the road at daylight, ought to reach you by midday tomorrow. Yes, sir. Thank you for the business.”

The receiver disappeared under the counter again. Mark frowned at Tom as if annoyed that he was still there. “I’m busy,” he repeated.

“I need to talk to you. Is there anyplace quiet?”

Mark let his shoulders slump and screwed up his face in a peevish expression. Without speaking, he rounded the corner and stalked out, not bothering to hold the door. Tom caught it before it could slam shut.

Outside, Tom took the lead, gesturing for Mark to follow him to the cruiser parked outside the high chain link fence.

Once there, Mark balked at getting into the car for their chat. “We can talk standing right here. What’s this about?”

Tom leaned against the front fender and crossed his arms. “I want to talk to you about your father’s will. And Tavia Richardson’s murder.”

“That’s got nothing to do with me.”

“I heard you weren’t happy about your father leaving everything to Mrs. Richardson.”

Mark fidgeted, adjusting the position of his hat. “He wasn’t going to leave her everything. I’d still get the mill.”

“But his land, and all the money from selling it to Packard—provided he does sell—all that would have gone to her.”

Hot color flooded Mark’s face. He stared past Tom, his jaw set in a hard line.

Tom persisted. “Did you know your father was planning to move away with Mrs. Richardson if they sold their land to Packard?”

“He doesn’t talk to me about his so-called love life.”

Tom allowed the anger underlying Mark’s bitten-off words to build for a few seconds before going on. “It must have been hard on you, all the rumors about the two of them while your mother was dying.”

“It’s not like she was the first. He had other women. I don’t know how my mother put up with it.”

“He must have cared about Tavia Richardson, to make her his beneficiary. He says he loved her.”

The ugly sound Mark spat out sounded like a cross between laughter and strangulation. “Like he knows the meaning of the word. He wasn’t thinking about her. He was thinking about me, how he could slap me down, teach me a lesson.”

Tom kept his voice neutral. “I know a lot of fathers and sons that don’t get along, but I’m having trouble understanding why your dad would want to cut you off, especially since you’re a hard worker and he’s leaving the mill to you.”

Too wound up to keep still, Mark paced back and forth beside the car, flinging his hands around in broad gestures as he spoke. “He knows I don’t respect him. I’ll never forgive him for what he did to my mother. So he wants me to fail. He doesn’t give a damn what happens to the business when he’s gone. If he did, he’d be investing in it, bringing it into the goddamn twenty-first century. Other mills have got computers running the machines, but we’re still operating like it’s 1950. We’ll be lucky if we get any business from the resort development.”

“Now that Tavia Richardson’s gone, maybe your father will change his mind.”

Mark shook his head. “That’ll be the day. He’d leave everything to that woman’s cat before he’d leave it to me.”

If Mark believed he had no chance of inheriting anything but the lumber mill from his father, he had no financial motive to kill Tavia or Jake. But hatred was always a stronger motive than money. Mark had no reason to kill the Kellys, though, unless his motive was so deeply concealed that Tom hadn’t caught a glimmer of it. “Was your father really here on Friday? Did he ask you to lie for him?”

“Soon as you left his place that day, after he fed you that story, he called me and told me what to say when you got around to asking. He made some promises if I’d go along, but I found out soon enough he didn’t mean a word of it.”

Tom nodded. That kept Jake in the picture for the Kelly murders. But he hadn’t killed Tavia. “He told me he’s changing his will again, to make sure there’s no loophole that’ll let you inherit. So Mrs. Richardson’s murder hasn’t done anything for you. Unless you hated her so much that just knowing she’s dead gives you satisfaction.”

Still pacing, Mark stumbled over a rock half-hidden in weeds and swore under his breath. He delivered a swift, hard kick that sent it sailing through the air. It banged into the chain link fence and dropped to the ground. Mark stood with his hands on his hips, shaking his head, anger and frustration mixing on his face. “When I first heard she was dead, I was glad. But it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change what the two of them put my poor mother through.”

“Where were you yesterday afternoon?”

He took a minute to answer. “Hiking. Trying to think, figure some things out.”

“By yourself? Can anybody back that up? Did anybody else see you?”

Mark raised bleak eyes to Tom’s. “Not a soul.”

Chapter Thirty-one

Tom dropped the faxed ballistics report, a single sheet, onto his desk after reading it. Leaning back in his chair, he rubbed his tired eyes. “We’ve got nothing,” he said to Dennis and Brandon. “We can’t seem to get off square one.”

Brandon leaned against the window sill, the darkening sky at his back. “You think the gun that killed Tavia Richardson was stolen from her house?”

“Maybe,” Tom said. “But maybe not. We don’t have any way of knowing for sure what she had and what’s missing. Whoever got into her house must have had a key, and was smart enough not to leave fingerprints. Hollinger swears it wasn’t him, for whatever that’s worth.”

Dennis, slouched in a chair facing the desk, said, “At least we know the gun we found at the scene is the one that killed her.”

“But it wasn’t used to kill the Kellys. And the rifle I took from her house wasn’t either.”

“So what does all this tell us?” Dennis asked. “Two killers? One killer using different guns?”

“But remember that the Kellys and Mrs. Richardson were on opposite sides of the development fight,” Brandon reminded them.

“We know Jake Hollinger didn’t shoot Tavia.” Tom picked up a pencil and tapped it absentmindedly against the edge of the desktop. “But he
could
have shot the Kellys. He lied about his whereabouts and told his son to back him up.”

“And his son could have killed Tavia,” Brandon said. “Mark had plenty of motive.”

“Father and son killers?” Tom shook his head. “It’s possible, but how likely is it?”

“Well, greed does seem to run in families,” Dennis said.

“Speaking of greed, what’s Ronan Kelly been up to?”

“He’s still at his parents’ house. I had guys go by there a couple of times to check. And Sheila’s been busy making funeral arrangements. I’ve been doing as much as I can by phone, checking on their movements, and neither of them was anywhere near Mason County when their folks were killed. You still think Ronan could’ve paid somebody to do it because he thought he was going to get half their assets?”

“Yeah, I think he’s capable of it. Proving it is something else.” Tom dropped the pencil and sat forward. “We’ve got a whole county that’s divided over the Packard project. A whole county full of suspects. And not an ounce of solid evidence against anybody.”

“What about Joanna McKendrick?” Brandon said. “She’s got an alibi for the Kellys, but not Tavia Richardson.”

For a long moment they were all silent, the only sound in the room the scrape of Brandon’s boot soles on the floor as he shifted position. Tom couldn’t forget the way Joanna had looked at him when he’d questioned her at the horse farm. Her sad disappointment had cut more deeply than her anger. If they came out the other side of this crisis with somebody else in custody, would she ever forgive him for believing her capable of lying in wait and murdering a defenseless woman in cold blood? Did he believe that?

Tom thought anybody was capable of anything if pushed hard enough. And Joanna had gone off the rails. She hadn’t been herself since the Packard proposal was announced and the company had started pressuring her to sell her land. Even so, he saw her as a more likely victim than a killer.

“Tom?” Dennis broke into his thoughts.

“I’m not ruling anybody out. Maybe we’ve got people on both sides who are willing to commit murder to get what they want. Maybe we’re making a mistake to keep looking at their families, the people close to them. There might be an angle we haven’t even considered, some connection between these murders that we’re not seeing.”

“Then we’ll keep digging until we unearth it,” Dennis said.

Tom blew out a sigh and glanced at the window. The lights in the parking lot had blinked on while they’d been talking, as the sky faded from deep blue to black. “Let’s all go home and get some rest. If anything happens overnight, short of another shooting, the Blackwood twins can handle it. Maybe tomorrow’s the day we’ll catch a break.”

***

“Tom’s home!” Simon slid off the stool and barreled out of the kitchen and down the hall with Billy Bob trotting behind.

Rachel, cutting up vegetables at the counter, paused to listen to Simon’s chatter and Tom’s responses. Without seeing them, she knew they stood by the open door of the hall closet while Tom stripped off his equipment belt and holstered pistol and stashed them out of Simon’s reach at the back of the shelf. Their words were indistinct, but the rhythm of their voices made her smile. She could imagine this scene playing out every night, a child—or children—of their own running to greet Tom. Someday,
Rachel thought. But the part of her that still couldn’t believe in her happiness added its insidious whisper: If we ever learn to trust each other completely.

“I’m starving,” Tom said as he came into the kitchen with Simon and Billy Bob in tow. He kissed Rachel and patted Frank the cat, who had been napping on a chair. “Let me get out of my uniform and Simon and I will take care of setting the table.”

Simon followed him out, eager to share his teacher’s astonishing revelations that day about the inner workings of volcanoes. “Can you
believe
that?” Rachel heard him say as they started up the stairs.

The telephone rang. Still smiling at Simon’s excitement, Rachel grabbed the receiver of the wall-mounted phone. Her smile faded when she heard the strained voice of Simon’s grandmother, Darla Duncan.

“What’s wrong?” Rachel gripped the coiled phone cord in her fist, winding it around and around her hand.

“Can Simon hear you?” Darla’s voice broke on the last word, and Rachel heard her husband, Grady, murmuring in the background. “No, I’ll tell her myself,” Darla said to him, her voice muffled as if she’d placed a hand over the mouthpiece.

Rachel freed her fingers from the twisted cord and leaned her palm and forehead against the wall. “Simon’s upstairs with Tom.” She tried to keep her voice level, but it sounded like a hoarse croak to her own ears. “But he’ll be back in a minute.”

Darla drew an audible breath. Her voice had turned brisk when she spoke again. “We wanted to let you know we have to stay another couple of days. Maybe until the end of the week. Can you manage Simon that long?”

Sudden tears burned Rachel’s eyes and her throat closed up. She forced her words out. “Of course we can. We love having him. Darla, what’s—what did the doctors say?”

“It’s not too bad, not really. They want to do another test or two, get another doctor’s opinion. I’ll give you all the gory details when we come home.”

It’s spreading, Rachel thought. It’s not going away.
“Don’t worry about Simon. We’ll take good care of him.”

“I know you will, honey. He couldn’t be in better hands.”

Rachel heard Simon’s cheerful voice then, and the
thump thump thump
of his footsteps on the stairs. She wonder, irrelevantly, how one small boy could make as much noise as a herd of hoofed stock. Blinking to clear her eyes, she told Darla, “Simon’s coming down. Do you and Grady want to talk to him?”

While Simon spoke with his grandparents, Rachel held Tom’s gaze, and without words they shared their fear and sadness and their determination to keep up a good front for the boy’s sake. Whatever Darla and Grady told Simon must have been reassuring, because he hung up with a smile on his face and launched into a description of the great book about dinosaurs his grandparents had found for him.

By the time they got Simon to bed, Rachel felt drained, exhausted by the effort of pretense during dinner and early evening. In the privacy of their bedroom, she and Tom put their arms around each other.

“Darla’s tough,” Tom said. “Let’s hope for the best.”

“I feel terrible for her and Grady.” Rachel’s voice was muffled against his shoulder. “And Simon. That poor little boy has so lost so much already.”

“He hasn’t lost us, and he’s not going to.”

No, he wouldn’t. Tom would always be here for Simon, and so would she. Suddenly she didn’t know why she’d cared about Tom keeping the county officials’ threats from her. Even his suspicion of her good friend Joanna seemed unimportant. It would work out. Tom would arrest the real killer, and Joanna would eventually concede that he had simply been doing his job.

They showered and went to bed. Tom fell asleep quickly, but Rachel lay awake, staring at shadows on the ceiling and trying not to think, not to let her mind wander to the unknowable future. She was still awake when the telephone rang a few minutes past two a.m.

The sound didn’t surprise her. This call, whatever it might be, felt like something she’d been expecting, dreading. Tom stirred as she reached across him in the dark to grab the receiver.

The young female dispatcher blurted an urgent summons. She added, “I know the sheriff didn’t want to be called tonight, but I figured this is too important—”

Tom pushed himself upright and switched on the lamp.

Rachel handed him the receiver. “Somebody set fire to Joanna’s stable.”