The Collie Murders: A Serial Killer Crime Thriller (11 page)

With feet that didn’t want to move him, Travis backed himself out of the room and back out into the hallway. Not bothering to use caution, he checked through the other rooms adjacent to the master bedroom. Sam and Paula were nowhere to be found, their rooms undisturbed, their beds made. A sound of feet padding around on carpet caught his attention as he again found himself in the hallway and he caught his first glimpse of the light blue patched sleeve of a paramedic’s uniform. For the second time in one day, he was going to witness as someone pronounced another person he’d known as deceased.

Travis spoke up, his voice like a gong going off in the silence, “He’s in the back bedroom.”

The first paramedic down the hallway was Carl Dempsey, the medic that had arrived for Mrs. Lawson. In a small town, the shifts ran long and the jobs were unforgiving.

Carl asked as he approached Travis, “Would that be Roger Daniels, Deputy Harper?”

Travis nodded slowly at Carl but caught his elbow before Carl rushed inside of the bedroom and attempted to do the impossible. No matter how well meaning and skilled you were, you couldn’t bring someone back from the dead. “Carl, he’s gone. I checked him. I’d say it hasn’t been long. Norma’s only been at my house for about five or ten minutes.”

Carl attempted to smile, got halfway there and stopped trying. He said, his voice just barely above a whisper, “You’d better get back over to your place. Even if it’s natural cause, you don’t need to be around two dead people in one day. Someone’s going to start talking.”

Of all the things Carl could warn him over, that shouldn’t have to be one of them. People in small towns never stopped talking. Without saying a word, Travis walked down the hall, through the living room and back outside where he took a heaping lungful of air. He should have laughed at Carl, should have told him where he could go find a short pier to walk right the hell off of, but he couldn’t stop his brain from factoring out the logic that the man had made a point. Why was it that he had a habit of stacking up coincidences against himself?

His foot had lifted to take the first step toward taking himself back across the street and home, but as he took his eyes from the night sky he’d been questioning, he heard Abby scream.

“Get away from me, you crazy bitch!”

Abby was attempting to run across his yard, her eyes directed at the stomping, jiggling mad woman chasing after her, waving her arms emphatically.

“Get back here and face what you have coming!”

Bewildered, it didn’t take Travis very long to send the signals from his brain to the rest of his body that he might be watching his girlfriend get strangled by a monster in a house dress. Just as Norma Daniels would have caught up to Abby, he was able to catch the woman by the arm and use his body to act as a barrier.

“Mrs. Daniels, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Travis struggled with Norma, surprised at how strong she was, and managed to get her into a position where he could use his greater height as leverage to keep the grief stricken woman under control. As soon as she wasn’t able to move herself, Norma was like a lawn mower without gas. She simply puttered to a stop.

Norma, his mouth near Norma’s ear, said, “If you agree to be calm, we can talk this out like rational people. I know you’re hurting, Norma. This isn’t the way you deal with it, understand? Don’t make me cuff you and take you down to the station.”

When Norma nodded, Travis let go of her and gave her a foot of space to breathe.

Norma eyed Abby, appearing as if she still wanted to choke the life from her, but since she didn’t have any steam left in her engine, she huffed and plopped down on Travis’ front lawn. There was just nothing left for her to do.

Travis peered down at Norma, thankful that she wasn’t trying to kill Abby any longer, and then he passed a sigh towards Abby, who was bent over, her hands on her knees trying to catch her breath. Travis didn’t care what had set Norma off, though he figured it was a mix of grief coupled with the shock of finding her husband of eleven years dead in his bed.

Travis asked, focusing back on Norma, “Where are Paula and Sam?”

Norma shrugged her ample shoulders. “The kids are at my mother’s house. They wanted to spend the night there, and I figured, well, I had wanted to spend some time with Roger. He wasn’t feeling well when he got home from work, and so, I just let him go off to bed.” She put her great hands to her face and continued, speaking though them, “I went to check him when I couldn’t hear his snores no more. Stupid ass! Why did he have to go and leave me? What am I going to do now?”

Travis said nothing as he watched Carl and the other fellow he worked with walk over from Norma’s house to his front lawn. It didn’t make a lot of sense to him why this all had to play out over at his place, but it was the least he could do given the situation. He knew what his brother would be like if he’d found Cory dead, and short of an act of God, would he be as calm as Norma seemed to be now. Attempted murder would be the least of Jon’s actions.

“We’ve called the coroner. They should be here in a little while to take Roger.” Carl directed his attention to Travis. “I think I ought to put a call into your sister-in-law. I don’t think it’s so much of a coincidence that two people happened to die of similar causes on the same day.”

Travis nodded. While he hadn’t put that much together, his cop’s gut was beginning to twist in a hunch. Nothing in Collie happened without a reason.

********

“I can’t believe you’re hungry.” Travis said with a tired smile as he watched Abby down her weight in pancakes. It was probably the one thing universally known in the world; that when in doubt with a rumbly tummy, seek pancakes.

Abby swallowed a bite of her syrup-layered nerve chiller and after she’d made sure her fork was clean, she poked Travis in the hand with it.

“I got chased around your yard by a mad woman. I think I deserve the calories.”

Travis let his eyes roam over Abby, wondering how long it had been since he’d even felt her skin against his. It hadn’t been that long, but with the last two days he’d had, with his brother remarrying and the deaths, it felt like an eternity.

He watched as Abby lifted another bite to her mouth. It was small so she could appear to be a lady, and so it could slide past her light ruby lips without a hitch. She closed her eyes, savoring the taste and it made a twinge of hunger spike in his belly. Hunger, yes, but not for food.

To take his mind in a different direction than it was heading, Travis asked, “So why was Norma chasing you anyway? Did you say something to her?”

Abby took a sip of her iced tea, relishing the homemade taste of it, after she swallowed, she fixed Travis up with a stare. After a minute, she shrugged.

“She was saying something crazy about my father having killed her husband. I told her that wasn’t possible because her husband hadn’t worked for my father. I’d never met her before.”

Travis rested his chin on his fist. “I never did find out what Roger did for a living, but in this town, it wouldn’t be surprising if he’d come to work for him. Most people work for the town in some form or another.”

Abby swallowed another bite of her pancakes. “What’s Norma’s last name?”

“Daniels.”

Abby dropped her fork. It was rare when it happened, but occasionally lightning struck her brain and she went through A to C without going through B. She had an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach, but shook her head against it and attributed it to the blueberry syrup she’d practically inhaled.

She said, “There was a Roger Daniels that worked for my father. He mowed the lawns.”

“Did you know a woman named
Maudette Lawson?”

Abby frowned. “Yeah, she’s my father’s housekeeper. She said that she used to be a teacher, but when the school shut down, she went into taking care of other people’s homes instead of their children. She’s a sweet lady.”

Travis picked up Abby’s tea, took a long pull from it and then set it back down. He turned it around on the table a few times to watch the ice cubes clink in the glass. He said, “When you were coming up to the store this afternoon, did you notice all the cars and people out front?”

“So? There’s cars and people all over the place.”

Travis fixed Abby with a serious look. “Just as you came up with your car, they were loading Mrs. Lawson in the back of Coroner Davidson’s van. She collapsed right there on the store floor.”

Abby put a hand to her mouth. She had actually liked old Mrs. Lawson. She made the best pies on the planet and she liked to talk about her life in a way she’d never heard anybody speak before. She’d lived a full, happy, wonderful existence, and hearing her relate it, it was as if she’d placed you inside. She could make anyone smile.

She said, “You, you don’t think that Norma woman is right do you?”

Despite the heavy atmosphere and the fact that nothing about their conversation had been funny, Travis laughed. He shook his head as he replied, “Honestly, I’d doubt anything Norma said. She told me last year her husband had been abducted by aliens and that the government was going to take him away for experiments.” He chuckled and ran a hand through his hair. “I doubt highly that your father is the mastermind of a murder mystery.”

“Can I get you two the check?”

Travis turned his head to the right to look at the waitress that was now standing at the edge of their table expectantly. He glanced at a clock on the wall behind her and decided, that, while he was enjoying just being in Abby’s presence without the complication of the problems they had weighing on his mind, she needed to be getting home. Work came early for the pair of them.

Out in the parking lot, Travis trailed his feet as he walked Abby to her car. So many nights passed in this fashion, the two of them simply having talked their way through the time that seemed to be in short supply with them. As Abby sidled close to her car, a moment of inspiration took him and Travis picked up his pace and took hold of Abby and crushed her to his body. His lips found hers as if they were magnetized, and as he pressed, she opened her mouth to him and the kiss deepened. He ran a hand along her side and down over her hip to then curve to rest in the small of her back. He could feel her fingertips grazing the flesh of his neck as they tangled in his hair. Though, as all free dives end up, he had to come to the surface for air.

Abby leaned into Travis, her ear to his chest. From their kiss, his pulse had gone from a walk into a gallop. She wished that she didn’t have to go home, that she could just stay as she was with him and not have to worry about the world around her. In part, that was what he had asked her to do by moving in with him, and as awesome as it would be, she didn’t think she was ready to take that step with him. She had a feeling she was making the wrong decision, but fear had a way of making those kinds of choices seem like the right way to go.

********

Abby left her car in the street that ran in front of the Bradley property and decided to sneak into her father’s house as if she were sixteen again and hoping not to get caught by parental eyes in the darkness. Some of the lights were on, shining through the windows and making some of the hedges that lined the walk up to the front door and garage glow yellow. She doubted that her father was still awake, but the man was often forgetful and left the lights on as he pleased. It had been a never-ending battle with her and Mrs. Lawson in turning all of the lights off at the end of the day.

The thought of Mrs. Lawson’s passing made Abby’s heart twist. There were not many people in her life that meant something to her; they either were there one day and gone the next or they died. Like her mother. Abby shook her head, knowing that the direction of her thoughts couldn’t be leading her to a good mood. It wasn’t like her to dwell on things that she couldn’t change or affect. What happens, happens and you deal with it.

Abby refrained from the hello that wanted to leave her lips as she took off her shoes at the door once she was inside. She wanted to let her father know that she was home, but she didn’t want to wake him. He was worse than a Grizzly bear in hibernation if you woke him from a sound sleep. There would be nothing so pressing in the whole of her existence that would make her want to do that.

She moved from the foyer and thought to head to the kitchen, but as she passed her father’s study, the door of which was shut tight with the glow of a desk lamp shining underneath, she could hear what she thought was a muted argument. If she didn’t know any better, she would have put money into the theory that her father was talking to himself. She moved toward the door, curiosity besting her, and she was near to touching the handle, when the door opened and a man she had never seen before stood in the frame, his appearance larger than life. It was as if the doorway had been a gateway to a movie, a dark thriller riddled with gangsters, and this man simply
walked through it into her reality. As if to convey her thoughts, Abby reached out and touched him.

He wore a leather jacket which smelled of the cattle that had died to make it mixed in a large vat of tobacco, and it was zipped up tight over his flat torso. Faded blue jeans, which were tucked into boots, completed the outfit. When Abby lifted her eyes, she could see a gnarled face that probably once had belonged to a wizened tree, scarred and mean.

Her fingers brushed the leather in front of them and then, startled, retreated to her side. She had never met him sure, but it felt instinctively that she should stay as far from this person as possible.

“Excuse me.”

Abby blinked, not sure if she had said the words or if the man in front of her had, but as she continued to stare at his face, the eyes darkened by the lack of light in the hall, she stepped out of the way and watched as the man passed by her.

“What are you doing lurking outside of my study?”

Abby frowned as her father replaced the man who had stood in the frame of the study’s door. She replied, “I wasn’t lurking. I was on my way to the kitchen when I heard you talking.”

Her father’s next words were not what she would have expected. “What did you hear?”

“Nothing. I thought you were talking to yourself, or that you’d left your television on again.”

She turned, caught the black edge of the mysterious man’s leather jacket disappearing through the front door, and training her eyes back to her father, she asked, “Who is that man?”