Tressed to Kill (24 page)

“Rohypnol? The date rape drug?” I asked, bewildered.
“It has many uses,” he said, his eyes cold. “Usually it makes women pliable. I must have given her too much,” he said, staring at his wife’s inanimate form.
“Call a doctor,” Althea ordered. “It’s not too late.”
He barked out a laugh. “A doctor? That
would
mess up the plan. My poor, dear wife, distraught over her mother’s death and our first marital spat, is going to have a car accident tonight.” He feigned distress. “And I’ll be the heart-broken husband—”
“Who inherits Sea Mist Plantation,” I said.
“So you figured that out, did you?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “I knew you were getting too close when that girl from the Records division called to say you were looking for my birth certificate.” He laughed at my astonished look. “Oh, yes. I paid her twenty bucks to let me know if anyone else came around. I told her it had to do with identity theft.”
“Well, aren’t you the clever one,” Althea said sarcastically. Simone moaned, and Althea chafed her hands.
“Not clever enough to discourage this one,” he said, nodding toward me. “I thought the Molotov cocktail would scare you off, but no, you kept poking your nose in. Even when I planted the sword and egged Simone on to get the salon shut down, thinking it would distract you, you kept chasing after me.”
“Well, I didn’t know it was you until today,” I said, “but I had nothing better to do once I didn’t have a job to go to.” I edged a bit away from Mom, thinking that if we were spread out, he’d find it harder to control us. Whatever his plan was, I didn’t think it included letting us all walk out of here whenever we felt like it. I saw Mom eyeing the back door, probably calculating our chances of reaching it before Greg did something. She inched toward it.
“Why did you kill Constance?” I asked, trying to distract him so Mom could make a run for it.
“Why do you think?” he said roughly. “It took her a few days, but she recognized me. She suspected I was shamming it with Simone and that I was only after the money. Sea Mist, specifically, because it should have been mine. Mine! Philip DuBois cheated my father. He stole the land from him and then he killed him.” His voice rose and he stepped closer, fists clenched at his sides. “I was only eleven, but I remember.”
“Remember what?” Althea asked.
He looked down at her as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Him coming back from that poker game, telling my mom he was going to have it out with Philip DuBois. Him and that other guy.”
“William,” Althea said in a carefully controlled voice. “William Jenkins.”
“Yeah, him,” Greg said dismissively.
I didn’t think Greg got the connection. “And . . .” I prompted.
“And when he never came home, I knew DuBois had killed him.”
“Why didn’t you ever say something?” Althea asked, her upper lip poking out so the lines around her mouth deepened.
“My mom,” he said. “I was afraid that if I said anything, Philip DuBois would kill the rest of us, too. He came by later that week and talked to my mom. I didn’t hear it all, but I heard him say we might all be safer if we moved away. He gave her an envelope.”
“Money,” I said.
He nodded. “To help with the moving costs, he said. She took it—she had me and my sisters to protect, you know—and we moved. She said she couldn’t stay in St. Elizabeth where there were so many bad memories. But I knew the truth. And I vowed that one day I’d get back what was rightfully mine.”
“Even if you had to kill someone to do it,” Althea said.
“I didn’t plan that,” he said. He paused, as if listening.
I heard it, too. A scrape of sound out back. Special Agent Dillon! I didn’t let my relief show on my face. “But you did kill Constance,” I said loudly, thinking to cover up the sounds the police made as they approached.
“She was going to put an investigator on me. That’s what she said that afternoon outside the salon. That she was hiring a PI. It wouldn’t have taken him a day to find out I was already married. She’d tell Simone, and years of planning would go up in smoke. Not that marrying Simone was the original plan. But when I saw her name on the list of attendees for the speed-dating event my friend Bob was setting up, I knew I had to seize the opportunity. My wife agreed—she knew I had to do this. Simone and I hit it off, and things sort of snowballed. At first, I planned to marry her and divorce her, taking Sea Mist in the divorce. But then Constance . . .” He frowned, twisting the wedding ring around his finger. “After the town hall meeting, I tried to talk her out of investigating me, persuade her that I loved Simone for herself and that the money meant nothing to me, but she wasn’t buying it. When she pulled that damned sword out of the car, I lost it. I grabbed it from her and . . . It was self defense.”
Hm. A two-hundred-pound man couldn’t defend himself against a woman half his size without running her through? I wasn’t buying it and I didn’t think a jury would, either.
“You’re married?” Mom asked.
She had sidled much closer to the back door. Run, I urged her mentally, run.
She was too appalled by Greg’s confession to make a break for it. “To someone other than Simone? You’re a bigamist?”
“Not for long,” a new voice said. The back door opened wider, and Amber stood there, the waitress from Doralynn’s. With her blond hair slicked back into a ponytail and dressed in black jeans and a hoodie, she looked older somehow. It was hard to think of her as Greg’s wife. She stepped into the kitchen and closed the door with a kick of her heel. She now stood between Mom and the door, cutting off the escape route. She held something squat and black in her unbandaged hand. A gun, I thought, with a nervous flutter in my stomach.

Chapter Twenty-three

“WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING HERE?” AMBER asked Greg.
“They just—” Greg started.
“You’re Greg’s other wife?” Althea asked, her whole face pursing with disapproval.
“I’m his
real
wife.” Before we could guess her intent, she shoved the gun into Mom’s back. It crackled and Mom yelped, trying to jump away. Amber kept the device pressed into her back for another few seconds until Mom crumpled to the floor, twitching and moaning.
“Mom!” I cried, horrified. I started toward her, but Greg grabbed my arm.
“Stun gun,” Amber said, holding up the device. “She’s not dead. Yet.” Her cold eyes took in the scene. “This is going to be harder,” she said to Greg. “Get the duct tape.”
“You can’t get rid of three of us,” Althea said triumphantly. “You can’t make three people disappear without any questions.”
“Questions we can handle as long as there’s no evidence,” Amber said. One long stride brought her closer to Althea, and she pulled the trigger on the stun gun again. Althea’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she slumped down atop Simone.
“Stop!” I yelled, tears starting to my eyes. I wrenched myself away from Greg and ran to my mother’s still form. She moaned softly, and her hand spasmed. Greg yanked open a kitchen drawer and rummaged through it. He held the duct tape roll aloft, and Amber gave a satisfied nod.
“Tape their hands and feet,” she said, pointing to Mom and Althea. “You can help us carry them,” she said to me, nudging me away from my mother with one knee.
“Carry them? Where?” My gaze scanned the kitchen as I sought desperately for a way to keep all of us from dying.
“To the boat.”
“You’re going to dump the four of us at sea?” A knife block held four wicked-looking blades on the counter. Could I lunge for it and grab a knife before Amber shortcircuited my nervous system with the stun gun? Unlikely.
“Not Simone,” Greg said, wrapping tape efficiently around Mom’s wrists. He tore the end with his teeth and started on her ankles. Her foot flicked out like she was trying to kick him, but the electrical charge had robbed her of coordination and power, and he caught the foot easily.
“We need Simone’s body,” Amber explained. Tearing a length of tape from the roll, she kept her eyes on me as she plastered it over Mom’s mouth, her splint making her awkward. “For Greg to inherit, she needs to be declared dead. So she’s going to have a car accident on that turn out by the old cemetery. Her car will skid into the water, and she’ll drown. So sad.” She delivered the words in the cold, unsympathetic tones of an android. “They’ll find alcohol in her bloodstream”—she nodded toward the wine bottle—“and Greg will tell the cops they had a little spat, and she rushed out before he could stop her. You all, on the other hand—”
She paused, and the look in her eyes gave me the creeps. Greg stepped over Mom’s trussed figure and began taping Althea’s hands behind her back. When he was done, he did her ankles and slapped a piece of tape over her mouth for good measure. Althea bucked, and I could tell she was regaining some control of her muscles.
“We have to make you disappear. The boat. We can put you overboard three or four miles out to sea.”
“You can kill us,” I said, “but you’ll go to jail. Three women can’t just disappear from St. Elizabeth without the police combing every inch of the town.”
“You’re right.” A small smile curved her lips. “But you won’t disappear in St. Elizabeth. Aren’t you on your way to Alabama? Ruthie mentioned it. You can disappear on the road. It’ll be a huge mystery. Maybe you’ll even make one of those crime reenactment shows on the Discovery channel. You’ll be famous.” She looked at Greg. “We have to improvise. We’ll stage Simone’s accident first—”
“She might be found too soon, before we dispose of these three,” he objected.
“You’re right.” Amber bit her lip, thinking. “Okay, we take the boat out and dump them first. Then we stage Simone’s accident, and I drop you back here. I’ll take their clunker and drive to Alabama and abandon it in a rest stop. You’ll be here to play the grieving husband when the police come with the tragic news about poor Simone. I’ll make my way back to New Jersey.”
Amber paused again, and her eyes took on a faraway look as she calculated, “I can call Ruthie from the road somewhere and tell her I had to leave for a family emergency. You wait a decent interval after the funeral, until all the fuss dies down—maybe a couple of months—and come back to your job in New York. We won’t be able to see each other or even talk on the phone while you’re here, but the payoff will be worth it. Is there anything I haven’t thought of?”
Didn’t sound like it to me. Her scheme to leave our car in Alabama was brilliant. Lots of people knew we planned to leave today. When Aunt Flora or someone reported us missing, the search efforts would concentrate in Alabama. Our bodies would never turn up, not if Amber and Greg weighted us before tipping us into the ocean. Susan might say something about us stopping by to ask for Simone, but Greg could talk his way out of that. Sure, he’d say, we’d stopped by, but we’d left when he said Simone was out. No one would be able to prove otherwise, and it would account for our car being outside in case an alert neighbor had noticed it. Rachel had the photo, too—maybe she had even shown it to Special Agent Dillon by now—but no one could identify Amber from it, and Greg could say that’s what he and Simone fought about—his flirting with another woman. People would think he was a slimeball to be kissing another woman so soon after his marriage to Simone, but being a slimeball wasn’t against the law.
Amber glanced out the window. “It’s dark enough. Let’s do it. Take that one’s feet,” she told me, nudging Althea with her toe. “You get her shoulders, Greg. Don’t even think about yelling while you’re outside,” Amber said to me, squatting beside Mom, “or I’ll scramble her brains.” She pressed the stun gun against Mom’s temple.
Fear flickered in Mom’s eyes, and a mute appeal. Her eyes slid to the side. I followed her gaze to the knife block and nodded infinitesimally. She was telling me to try to get us out of this, even if it meant more pain for herself. Hooking my hands under Althea’s ankles, I hoisted her lower half while Greg caught her under her arms and lifted her torso with a grunt. Her butt sagged toward the floor. For a medium-sized woman, she weighed a ton, and I leaned back a bit to brace myself. Greg backed toward the door and I followed. We drew abreast of Amber and Mom. Amber dug the stun gun into Mom’s temple so it dented the flesh.
“Maybe there’ll be another ghost story for St. Elizabeth’s ghost walk after tonight,” she said with a small smile.
My arms pimpled with gooseflesh as I passed her, either from the coldness wafting off her or the hint of breeze blowing from the water. An empty expanse of grass—no potential weapons—stretched between the back door and the wooden dock. Lights glinted from across the bayou but not so close anyone would hear me if I called out. This side of the bayou lay in total darkness, with only the flitterings of fireflies providing sparks of illumination. Even though it was only twenty feet or so to the dock, my shoulders ached by the time we stepped onto the wood. The dock shifted beneath us, and the timbers groaned. The stink of a dead fish slapped at me, and I coughed, almost dropping Althea’s legs.
“Here,” Greg said. He lowered Althea’s shoulders to the dock as we came alongside the cabin cruiser. For a moment, he was distracted and off balance, and I considered shoving him into the water. But the thought of Amber holding the stun gun to my mother’s head stopped me. I didn’t know if a stun gun could kill or permanently disable, but I wasn’t willing to take the chance. Instead, I laid Althea’s legs on the dock, giving her knee a surreptitious pat, and followed Greg back to the kitchen.
“Don’t even think about trying something,” Amber warned as I beat Greg to Mom’s shoulders. He shrugged and hoisted her under her knees. Amber stayed by Mom’s head, stun gun at the ready, as we lifted her and tromped out the door. I’d decided what I had to do and I tensed as we reached the dock. Sorry, Mom, I apologized internally, dropping her shoulders so her upper half crashed to the dock, jerking her away from the stun gun and jolting Greg off balance. In almost the same motion, I jumped at Amber, ramming my shoulders into her stomach. She gave an “oof” of pain and went sprawling, me on top of her. The stun gun skittered past Althea and lodged by a piling.
Greg dropped Mom’s legs and lunged for me. He grabbed my wrist as I scrambled off Amber, perilously close to the edge.
“Get the gun,” he yelled to Amber. She rolled over and scrabbled toward it on her hands and knees. As she scooted past Althea, Althea bunched her legs to her chest and shot them toward Amber, taking the younger woman by surprise and knocking her over the side.
“Hel—!” She cried before a splash drowned her words. Fury twisted Greg’s face into an ugly mask, and he jerked me closer with the hand around my wrist, using his free hand to slap me.
The pain made my head ring and brought tears to my eyes. I sagged forward, and before he could react, I snapped my head up, butting him under the chin and slamming his jaw shut with a force that reverberated down my spine. Before I could jump back, both his arms came around me, and he squeezed me against his chest in a painful bear hug. My back popped, and I was afraid he was going to snap my spine. I cried out wordlessly. I did the only thing I could do. I flung myself sideways with as much force as I could muster, and we toppled off the dock toward the water.
I felt like time had slowed. Air whistled past my face and then I splatted into the water. The cool wetness seized me, and river water splashed into my open mouth. The impact broke Greg’s hold, but I was beneath him, and his weight bore me down before I could gulp a breath of air. Although my eyes were open, total darkness enveloped me. Frantic, I kicked as hard as I could. My heel connected with something solid that could have been Greg or a piling. I was totally disoriented. A giant hand wrung my lungs like a sponge, and I felt myself running out of air. My ears buzzed, and I knew that in seconds I would open my mouth and suck in not life-giving air, but river water. My arms flailed in a frenzied crawl and moved me toward what I hoped was the surface. I kicked once more and exploded through the darkness, gasping.
After three quick breaths, I spun around in the water to locate Greg and Amber. Amber stood in waist-high water dockside, reaching for the stun gun. I hoped it would electrocute her if she tried to use it in the water. Splashing alerted me to Greg’s presence behind me, and I turned to face him, realizing that my toes had brushed the river bottom. Paddling backward toward the bank, I found myself able to stand. Greg bared his teeth and lunged toward me, seeing escape within my reach. If I could make it to the shore . . . His hand closed around my ankle.
A shot rang out, freezing us all in place. Greg’s grip loosened, and I shook my foot free. My ears ringing, I looked up to see Special Agent Dillon moving onto the dock with a phalanx of cops behind him, his gun trained squarely on Amber as she crouched on the dock as if she’d just hauled herself from the water, her good hand clutching the stun gun.
“Drop it,” Dillon demanded.
She hesitated, then complied. The stun gun plopped into the water. Amber, her hair straggling wetly over her shoulders, stood slowly and raised her hands. A uniformed policeman hurried to cuff her, being careful to stay out of the line of fire.
Special Agent Dillon approached down the muddy bank and leveled the gun at Greg, beckoning to me with his left hand. “Don’t move,” he ordered Greg. I’d never seen him look so grim or so imposing, with the Kevlar vest strapped around him and his eyes as steely as the gun’s barrel. Legs trembling, I slogged out of the river and grasped Dillon’s hand. It closed tightly around mine, and he guided me behind him. “Out.” He motioned with the gun for Greg to leave the water.
Greg spread his arms out, hands at shoulder height, risking a quick glance behind him.
“Don’t even think about it,” Dillon said.
At his tone, Greg apparently abandoned all thought of swimming away and started slowly toward the bank, where two officers searched him and cuffed him. I trotted to the dock and dropped to my knees beside Mom, ripping the tape from her mouth with a quick jerk.
“Sorry,” I said as she winced, “but faster is better. At least, that’s what you always said when taking off Band-Aids. And I’m so sorry I had to drop you. Are you okay?”
“Just a little shaken up. You done good, baby girl,” she said, smiling at me. “Can you get this—?” She struggled to sit up and lifted her taped wrists.
“Let me,” said Hank, squatting beside her. He produced a knife and sawed through the duct tape with ruthless efficiency. His partner was reading Greg Hutchinson his rights, and a female officer I didn’t know was patting down a dripping Amber, whose hands were cuffed behind her. An EMT had freed Althea and was holding a stethoscope to her chest.
“I’m fine,” she said, batting his hand away.
“Thank you, Hank,” my mother said, peeling the tape fragments off her wrists. “I appreciate it.”
I signaled to the EMT to come have a look at Mom. She grimaced but let him examine her.
A hand on my shoulder brought me to my feet. “Are you all right, Miss Terhune?” Dillon asked. The concern in his eyes belied the formal tone.
“Wet, but alive,” I said with a small smile. “I guess you are pretty handy at rescuing damsels in distress.”
“Looked to me like you three butt-kicking damsels were about to win free on your own,” he said, humor banishing the dark look from his eyes.
“Well, we were at least going to do a little damage,” I said. I shivered at the thought of being rolled over the side of the boat, immobilized by duct tape, to drown in the dark wetness of the ocean. I had come too close as it was. “Will Simone be okay? Greg drugged her.”
“Her vitals are good. She’ll be fine,” a paramedic assured me, as his partner rolled Simone out of the kitchen on a gurney. “Although she might not remember everything. We’ll take her in for observation.”
It seemed like dozens of people swarmed the house and lawn as crime scene technicians replaced the EMTs who bore Simone away. Other paramedics helped Mom and Althea to the kitchen. As the adrenaline seeped out of my system, my limbs shook and I felt shivery. I needed to get away. And get dry. As if sensing my need, Dillon took my elbow and walked me down to the end of the dock. Weak moonlight played over the river, and frogs croaked from the bank now that the action was over. The incoming tide must have floated the rotten fish free, because the noxious odor was gone. The boat that would have been our hearse tugged gently at its moorings. Dark water flowed inland, seeming peaceful and unthreatening from my vantage point on the dock. Dillon put an arm around my shoulders and squeezed me up against his side despite my wetness. The bulletproof vest was hard and unyielding, but I rested against him for a moment. “You did a very brave thing,” he said softly. “Thank God you’re okay.”