River Road (27 page)

T
he police are talking to Warner Colfax,” Mason said. “He admits the gun is his, but he swears he did not shoot Ashley.”

“What about Ashley?” Lucy asked.

“She made it through surgery okay. Lost a lot of blood, but the doctor says she will probably survive. According to Whitaker, she doesn’t know who shot her. The bullet caught her from behind. She never saw the shooter. She believes that it was Warner Colfax. But Whitaker says they are also looking hard at Cecil Dillon.”

“Everyone knows that when a woman gets killed the police always put the husband or the significant other at the top of the suspect list,” Lucy said.

Mason and Deke looked at her.

“I watch a lot of police procedural shows,” she explained.

“Well, in this case Whitaker has both a husband and a significant other on the suspect list,” Deke said.

They were gathered once again on the front porch of Deke’s cabin. Lucy and Mason were on the swing. Deke leaned against the railing. Joe was sprawled at the top of the steps, off duty once again.

“For what it’s worth,” Lucy said, “I’m inclined to believe Cecil.”

Mason and Deke looked at her again, this time as if she had said something remarkably dumb.

“Because he said he didn’t do it?” Mason asked. “Here’s a little inside tip: Suspects in a murder always claim to be innocent.”

“I know that,” she said. “But think about it. He has an excellent reason to keep Ashley alive, at least until the merger is finalized. Also, I think he’s way too smart to kill her inside his own house.”

“A lovers’ quarrel?” Deke suggested.

“I don’t think Cecil Dillon is the kind of man who would let his emotions get in the way of closing a billion-dollar merger deal,” Lucy said.

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” Mason said. “I don’t see him as the careless type, either. Shooting your mistress in the house you happen to be living in at the time is beyond careless. It’s flat-out dumb. Unless . . .”

“Unless what?” Lucy asked.

“Unless you wanted to make it look like a setup that will ultimately point the finger at Warner Colfax,” Mason said.

His phone rang. He unclipped it, glanced at the screen and took the call.

“Fletcher.”

There was a short silence while Mason listened to the speaker on the other end of the connection.

“Thanks, Chief,” he said. “I appreciate being kept in the loop. Yes, it does change a lot of assumptions.”

Mason ended the call and looked at Lucy and Deke. “That was Chief Whitaker. He got the results of the autopsy on Nolan Kelly.”

“Good heavens,” Lucy said. “With so much going on, I forgot about Nolan. Was there anything that we didn’t already know?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Mason said. “Turns out Kelly was shot before the fire was ignited.”

“My goodness,” Lucy said. She tried to process the news. “That changes everything, doesn’t it?”

“Certainly puts a new light on the situation,” Mason said.

“What in the world is going on here?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t know, but I keep coming back to the drug connection. It makes me think that at least part of the puzzle has its roots in the past.”

“Maybe it would help if we went back to basics and built a family tree,” Lucy said.

Deke snorted. “Which family are we talking about? The Colfaxes? Your family? Our family?”

“None of the above,” Lucy said. “The clan that interests me is the one that Brinker gathered around him that summer thirteen years ago.”

“How the hell do we do that?” Mason asked.

“Leave it to me,” Lucy said. “Building family trees is what I do for a living, remember?”

T
hank you for agreeing to help me, Teresa.” Lucy put a blank sheet of paper on the table and picked up a pen. “There are software programs that can be used to build family trees, but this tree is a little different.”

“I’m happy to help,” Teresa said. “It sounds like an interesting project.”

They were sitting together at a table in the tree-shaded town square. Two plastic glasses of iced tea from a nearby coffee shop were on the table.

“Why do you want to make a diagram showing all the people who were involved in Brinker’s little cult that summer?” Teresa asked.

“Because I think it will help the police figure out who killed Aunt Sara and Mary. It might also point to the person who shot Nolan Kelly and torched Sara’s house.”

Teresa took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “This thing just keeps getting more and more weird. I could wrap my brain around the possibility that Nolan might have wanted to burn down the house in order to destroy any evidence linking him to Brinker and drug dealing in the past. But I can’t fathom why anyone would shoot him.”

“Mason says that when drugs are involved, there is always someone around who is happy to shoot someone else. It’s just part of the business.”

“But that implies that Kelly was still dealing.” Teresa grimaced. “That’s what I can’t quite visualize. I mean, he seemed so normal. He was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, for heaven’s sake.”

“Let’s start with Brinker and Kelly,” Lucy said. “Everyone seems to agree that Kelly was supplying the drugs that Brinker used to spike those so-called energy drinks that Brinker made available to the kids who hung around him. That means Kelly was close to Brinker.”

She drew a box in the center of the page and put Brinker’s name inside it. Then she drew a short line to another box. She wrote
Kelly
in the second box.

Teresa watched intently. “I think your chart is going to look a little like Dante’s nine circles of hell by the time we’re done. It sounds like Brinker hurt everyone he touched.”

“And savored every scrap of the pain he caused.”

“Total psycho.”

“Oh, yeah.”

They worked steadily for an hour. Between the two of them, they managed to remember the names of most of the people who had belonged to Brinker’s inner circle thirteen years ago. A couple of times Teresa took out her phone and checked the local listings to refresh her memory. Several of the people who had moved in Brinker’s orbit had left town. One had died.

When they finished with the names of those who had constituted the inner circle, they worked steadily outward. At one point Lucy put her own name into a box and then linked it to Jillian and Sara and Mary.

“This gets complicated, doesn’t it?” Teresa said after a while. “It’s starting to look like everyone in town was linked to someone who was close to Brinker.”

“You know the old saying about everyone on the planet being only six degrees of separation away from everyone else?” Lucy said. “But I think we’ve gone far enough out on the tree. Let’s start chopping off a few of the limbs and see what we’ve got left.”

“How are we going to decide who gets the ax?”

“Let’s focus on the drugs. Kelly was getting those designer pharmaceuticals from someone. It’s not like he was brewing them in his own basement.”

“No, Kelly wasn’t much good at chemistry,” Teresa said. “He was a broker. He scored those drugs from someone else. Probably a dealer in San Francisco.”

“If that’s true, then he may have maintained his business relationship with the connection he used thirteen years ago.”

Teresa looked up, frowning. “Why do you say that?”

Lucy hesitated. Mason had been adamant when he said he did not want her to reveal that he had been drugged.

“Because I’m convinced that someone used a hallucinogenic drug to murder Aunt Sara and Mary,” she said.

Teresa looked first startled and then sympathetic. “Lucy, accidents do happen.”

“I know, but bodies don’t show up in the victims’ fireplaces very often. Trust me. Hallucinogens are a connection here, I’m sure of it.”

“Okay, I’m not going to argue with you about it. Keep going. Let’s see where the drug connection takes us.”

“Nowhere,” Teresa announced later. “The drug connection starts and ends with Kelly, and he’s dead. Now what will you do?”

Lucy studied her diagram. Her forensic genealogist’s intuition was aroused. The answer was somewhere in the family tree she had constructed around Brinker. It had to be there.

“I have no clue what to do next,” she admitted. She got to her feet and gathered up the papers she had spread out on the table. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. I’m a genealogist, not a detective. I hope Mason can look at this tree and see some link that I’m missing.”

“That’s a good idea.” Teresa rose and collected the empty cups. “He was three years older than us at the time. He had a different circle of acquaintances.”

“Good point. Thanks for the help on this.”

“No problem. It was an interesting experience. That’s the sort of thing you do for a living?”

“Yes. Usually, I’m looking for lost heirs. This was a different kind of search, which is probably why I didn’t get very far.”

Teresa glanced at her watch. “I’d better get back to the shop. Summer afternoons are always busy. My assistant will be wondering where I am.”

Lucy smiled. “All those tourists looking for wine-country casual outfits.”

“It may be a niche market, but it’s my market. Let me know if you come up with another approach to identifying Nolan Kelly’s drug connection.”

“I will.”

Teresa walked back through the square and disappeared onto Main Street.

Lucy sat quietly for a time. She was overlooking something important. She was sure of it.

She gave up, hoisted the tote and walked back to the inn. She went upstairs to her room and took a few minutes to refresh herself in the bathroom. When she looked at her image in the mirror she thought about the night of the party. It had been thirteen years, but doing the Brinker tree had brought back memories.

Maybe she had been asking the wrong questions. She and Teresa had been looking at those who had been in Brinker’s inner circle. Maybe she should be looking at the wannabes.

She was not the only outsider who had been at the ranch on the night of Brinker’s last party. There had been a lot of other kids hanging around the fringes, moths drawn to the flame.

Mason said it sometimes helped to revisit the scene of the crime.

She grabbed her tote and went back downstairs. Outside, in the parking lot, she got into her car and drove the short distance to Harper Ranch Park.

As usual, there were a number of people walking dogs, jogging and sunbathing in the main section of the park. She found a parking place close to the secluded area near the river where Brinker had staged his parties. She took the charts out of her tote and studied them, one by one, trying to remember who had been where the night of the party.

Teresa’s words came back to her. “. . . Kelly wasn’t much good at chemistry.”

The name in one of the boxes that was very distant from Brinker’s box suddenly stood out as if it had been written in neon. She put the paper down on a nearby picnic table and circled the name twice.

It was you, she thought. You were there all the time.

She hurried back to the parking lot, used her key fob to unlock her car and slipped into the front seat. She left the car door ajar to allow in the slight breeze while she took out her phone. She found Mason’s name on her contacts list.

The passenger-side door opened abruptly. Beth Crosby slid into the seat. She had a gun in her hand.

“Give me the phone,” Beth said.

Lucy handed her the phone. Beth tossed it out the window.

“Now we’re going to take a scenic drive along River Road,” Beth said. “Close the door.”

Lucy realized she was still holding the sheet of paper that contained the Brinker cult family tree. When she turned to pull the car door closed she let the paper slip from her hand. It landed on the ground and fluttered a little. It would no doubt blow away, she thought. But at that moment she could not think of anything else to do.

“Drive,” Beth ordered.