A Dawn of Death (20 page)

Almeida patted the jacket pocket where she kept a small notebook. "Do you want to file a report?"

"No. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. Marty was just distracted by his new responsibilities. Nothing intentional. He didn't seem particularly upset with me either. More afraid that I'd be mad at him. We had a perfectly pleasant conversation."

"Not about Sheryl's death, I hope."

Helen wouldn't have minded telling a little white lie or even a fairly dark whopper to Peterson, but she respected Almeida too much for that. "It's hard to avoid the subject completely. Not with Marty taking over the management of her business. But we didn't get into any specifics."

"That's a start," Almeida said. "I'll handle Peterson."

"He won't believe it if you say I gave up too easily."

"Trust me, I know how to deal with him," Almeida said. "He's annoying, but nowhere near as bad as some of the people I run into in domestic abuse cases."

Helen felt a bit guilty about increasing Almeida's burdens. Her job was hard enough already. "If it helps, I'll be discreet. I wasn't even here about Sheryl's death anyway. Well, not directly. I was just checking on my garden, and you can't blame me for being curious about the beefed-up police line."

"I can't blame you, but Peterson can."

There was some shouting over where the Jersey barriers were being unloaded, ordering the onlookers to get back. The first three concrete forms had already been lined up between the sidewalk and the garden, starting at the fence that separated the garden from the ballpark.

Helen nodded in the direction of the work. "What's up with the Jersey barriers?"

"Peterson's idea," Almeida said. "With both you and Dale Meeke-Mason having an interest in the case, he's gone from his usual state of mild irrationality to being totally paranoid. Decided that mere tape wasn't enough because it can blow away or be removed too easily, and you two could claim you didn't know you were supposed to keep out. There's no way to miss the Jersey barriers. He originally wanted to have an officer here on watch around the clock, but he couldn't get the overtime approved, so he came up with this idea. Personally, I think he's hoping you or Dale will climb over the barriers so he can catch you in the act and arrest you. I wouldn't put it past him to stake out the place from the ballpark."

"I'll consider myself warned." Helen glanced at her assigned plot. "What about my plants? I've got seedlings that depend on me." Not that she'd been all that good at protecting them so far, and she had only a tiny fraction of the plantings some of the other gardeners had completed. They were the ones who would truly be inconvenienced.

"The garden will be okay without human intervention for a few days."

"Is that all it will be before the barriers are removed?" Helen said.

"I'd like to think so," Almeida said. "The OSHA expert suggested that we look for the bulldozer's key. It wasn't in the ignition or on the body, and he thought that was odd."

It was good to know what all the fuss was about, but it didn't give Helen any useful leads. "What good will that do?"

"There might be prints on it. Even just pinpointing where the key ended up might be an important bit of evidence. A team will be out later today with all their equipment, and they're good at what they do. They can cover this parcel in a day, two at most. There's no legitimate reason not to release the scene after that."

"Are you sure that will satisfy Peterson?" Helen said.

"Probably not as long as you and Dale are in the picture. I think he's planning to keep the barriers up until an arrest is made. Possibly even until the conviction. If Hank could get away with it, he'd really like to control the scene until the exhaustion of all appeals."

That could take years, Helen thought. Thanks to Peterson, it might become a moot point whether the selectmen voted to sell the garden. It looked like no one—gardener or developer—was going to be using the land anytime soon unless Sheryl's killer confessed to the crime.

She couldn't let the garden be shut down indefinitely. It was time to get some legal advice. Just not from Tate. Even if he'd been willing to talk about legal matters, she didn't think he'd had enough time to get over his foolish reaction to her spending time with Cory.

Fortunately for Helen, answering questions about real estate and probate were Tate's nephew's specialty.

For once, Jack hadn't been prepared for Helen to open the car door and climb into the passenger seat. She'd have liked to think it was because she'd become much spryer and faster and had managed to sneak up on him, but it was more likely he'd been distracted by the phone call he'd just ended.

"Sorry, Ms. Binney," Jack said, pocketing his phone. "Zee called to let me know they're coming home tomorrow evening."

Zee was Jack's niece. She and her brother Jay had been in California all winter, looking unsuccessfully for jobs in the entertainment industry.

Jack continued. "They need a ride from the airport. I told them I'd pick them up if you don't need me tomorrow evening."

"I'd like to spend some time in the garden if the weather's nice, but that's all I've got planned. I'm not sure even that will be possible unless we can get rid of those stupid Jersey barriers," Helen said. "I need to talk to a lawyer ASAP."

"Home, then?"

Apparently Tate hadn't explained to anyone except her that their personal relationship precluded a lawyer-client relationship. If she were inclined to be as foolish as he'd been at lunchtime today, she might have thought it was because he didn't want anyone to know they were dating. She didn't actually believe that, but she wasn't entirely sure where their relationship stood at the moment. And since she didn't understand it, she couldn't explain it to Jack.

She offered a partial truth. "Tate's been keeping irregular hours, so I'm not sure he'll be in the garage. I know Adam's in his office, though. I just called to check. He's expecting us."

Jack put the car in gear. "Zee said they're bringing you something for your garden. Wouldn't tell me what it was. Apparently they got it in a shop that sells old movie props. They both thought of you as soon as they saw it."

"That should be interesting." With only a few exceptions, Helen had found that most people had a completely wrong impression of who she was. Like Jack's cousin the car dealer who'd assumed she wanted a luxury vehicle or at least something that had a bit of prestige to it rather than basic, reliable transportation. Before that, when she'd been the state's first lady, many people had underestimated her influence because she maintained a low profile. Later, once she'd started carrying a cane, people had tended to think she was both feeble and feebleminded.

Jay and Zee weren't as shallow as their obsession with Hollywood celebrities might indicate, but they hadn't had much opportunity to really get to know Helen. They'd been her substitute drivers for just a few days, back when she'd gotten tangled up in the investigation of a professional poker player's murder.

"Whatever they got for you," Jack said, "it won't be as interesting as a murder investigation. I'm guessing from the Jersey barriers that the police have decided Sheryl's death might not have been an accident."

"I'm afraid so," Helen said. "They're looking for the key to the bulldozer. They seem to think it's somewhere in the community garden."

"Talk about a needle in a haystack," Jack said. "Two acres is a lot of ground to search for a key."

"It may not even be there," Helen said. "A smart killer would have taken it with him to dispose of, not simply buried it in a shallow grave near the scene of the crime. That's assuming it wasn't premeditated, of course, or he'd have avoided getting his fingerprints on it, so he could have left it in the ignition or put it in Sheryl's pocket."

"So you don't think it was premeditated?"

"It seems unlikely. But I really don't know. I've barely come to terms with the idea that it was murder instead of an accident." Unlike Peterson, Helen wasn't afraid to admit she didn't have enough information to start blaming people for things they might not have done. "I'm worried though that the police will focus on Dale Meeke-Mason. Peterson has something against her, and I heard she has a criminal record."

Jack laughed. "I guess you could call it that. Dale would consider it more of a résumé or a list of her achievements."

"What exactly is her record for?"

"Civil disobedience."

Helen had risked arrest herself in the past by ignoring Peterson's warnings to stay out of his investigations. Of course, she hadn't really believed he'd lock her up. Dale might never have expected anything bad to happen to her either. After all, civil disobedience ran the gamut from chanting a few slogans to facing down police in riot gear. "Just how serious were her run-ins with the law?"

"Serious enough," Jack said. "She's been getting herself arrested at protests and occupations since before she was in the army. In fact, that's part of why she enlisted. She'd just turned eighteen when she went to an event that got a bit rowdy, and dozens of people got arrested. I think it was the first time she was charged as an adult, and the judge gave her the choice of jail time or enlistment. Everyone figured the army stint would make her more of a conformist, but she'd barely been out of the army for a month when she joined a protest and chained herself to the gate of a nuclear plant. That time, she did serve a few days of jail time."

Helen had grown used to Jack having the inside scoop on the residents of Wharton, but he didn't usually know quite as many of the details about the people who weren't his relatives. "How do you know so much about Dale? Is she another one of your cousins?"

"Nothing like that. But we sort of went to school together. She's a few years older than I am, and she probably didn't know me back then, but everyone knew her. She was always making a lot of noise, championing some cause or another."

"I thought she was mostly interested in environmental issues."

"Overall, that's always been true, but she usually has a pet project, sees it through to whatever point she deems acceptable, and then moves on to another one. A couple of years ago, she was really into recycling, and once the town adopted a curbside pick-up program, she moved on to the laundry thing. Now that most of the local homeowners associations around here have already amended their bylaws to allow outdoor laundry lines, she's ripe for a new cause. If those Jersey barriers don't come down soon, Dale's going to see it as a declaration of war."

Helen hoped it wouldn't come to that. And she hoped even more fervently that Dale hadn't already started the war over the garden by ambushing and killing Sheryl.

*   *   *

Adam Bancroft had hired an assistant since the last time Helen had been to the office. Behind a nameplate that read
Spencer Nagel
was a young man, closer to Adam's age than her own, in a pale linen jacket and a cobalt blue silk shirt that perfectly matched his eyes. Both Tate and Adam were good-looking men, but Spencer put them to shame with his dark curls, square jaw, and a pronounced dimple in his chin. He wore a Bluetooth headset the same color as his shirt and eyes, and he was speaking into it as Helen arrived.

He ended his call and said, "You must be Helen Binney. You can go on back. Adam's expecting you."

Helen thanked him and headed down the hallway to the smaller of the two offices in the building. Adam still hadn't completely adjusted to being the sole owner of the practice and hadn't moved into the larger space that used to be Tate's.

Helen had met most of Tate's extended family last Christmas, and it had been easy to tell at a glance who was a blood relative and who had married into the family. All of Tate's siblings were tall and lean with dark hair and long, rectangular faces. His nephew Adam Bancroft was almost a dead ringer for Tate, except for the lack of gray patches in his hair. Judging by Adam's constantly tense posture, Helen had a feeling that his hair was likely to be solidly gray before his uncle's was. In addition to looking like Tate, Adam had followed the same career path, attending the same law school and then taking over the practice when his uncle retired last year.

Adam looked up from the papers on his desk. "Come on in, and have a seat."

"Thanks for seeing me so quickly." Helen settled into one of the leather chairs that were far more comfortable than the director's chairs she'd used when first consulting Tate in her garage. "You must be busy if you finally broke down and hired a receptionist."

"Not all that busy," Adam said. "I couldn't afford a full-time receptionist for such a small practice, but Spencer's a jack of all trades. He's got a paralegal certificate, and he's willing to work for what I can afford to pay as long as I'm flexible with his hours. He came back to Wharton to help his parents through some health issues."

"Sounds like the perfect employee for you."

"It's working out so far," Adam said. "So, what can I do for you today? I heard about your latest dead body. You know I'm not as much of an expert in criminal law as my uncle is, right?"

"I'd rather not talk to Tate right now."

"You two having a tiff?" Adam didn't have his uncle's poker face, and his amusement was easy to read.

Helen raised her eyebrows. "So there's never been a moment when you needed some time away from Lily? Or she from you?"

Adam shook his head. "It's more a matter of not being able to spend enough time together. Long-distance relationships can be challenging."

That was the first time Helen had ever heard Adam acknowledge that being with Lily was anything less than perfect. "Is something wrong between you two?"

"I didn't think so, but we usually text every few hours, and I haven't heard from her in more than a day. And she's not returning my calls." Adam's face held both anxiety and confusion. "She didn't say anything about being off the grid, and she seemed fine the last time we talked. I don't think I did anything to upset her. Or if I did, I can't figure out what it could be. I'm starting to wonder if something happened to her."