Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (25 page)

“You got any idea what’s behind it? What set him off?”

“No,” Tom said. “He’s not dropping many clues to his motivation. He sent an e-mail that sounded like a love letter, then he put a dead rat in Rachel’s office, where Michelle’s spending her days. He could be the one who threw blood on our porch. Not the most romantic gestures I’ve ever seen.”

Dennis tapped his fingers on the table. “So what are we going to do?”

“Make sure nobody gets hurt, hope the guy trips up and lets us know who he is.” Tom pried the lid off the overstuffed box in front of him. “Right now, we need to go through my dad’s records on the Hadley murder.”

***

Rachel had cleared an hour of her schedule so she could speak to all the staff members one by one, in the privacy of her office. With Michelle temporarily shunted to the staff lounge, Rachel steeled herself and opened the door to the first person she’d summoned.

She told Dr. Diane Davis, a wisp of a young woman who had joined the staff recently, that an intruder had been getting into the building at night, apparently through an unlocked door.

Dr. Davis drew herself up straight in the visitor’s chair, making herself appear a little older. With her slight figure and makeup-free face, her brown hair pulled into a ponytail, she usually looked around fourteen. “I hope you don’t think I’ve been leaving doors unlocked. I’m always very careful about—”

Rachel held up a hand to cut her off. “Whoever did it, I know it wasn’t deliberate. I’m sure none of you would knowingly leave a door unlocked. But the fact remains that somebody has gotten in at least twice without having to break in.”

“What did they take? Meds? None of the equipment’s missing, is it?”

Rachel sighed. How much should she tell the staff? She didn’t want to drag Michelle’s problems out in the open for everyone’s scrutiny. She was amazed that she’d been able to keep the staff from finding out about the dead rat. “Nothing has been stolen that I know of. Not yet, anyway. But there’s been some minor vandalism in my office.” She went on, talking over another question from Dr. Davis. “I hate to do this, and I hope you won’t take it personally, but I’m going to limit the number of people who have keys to the building. Of course, if you know you’ll need to get in after hours on a particular night, you can take a key. I’d like you to sign for it, though, so I’ll always know who has one.”

The young vet’s cheeks flushed pink as she reached into the pocket of her white coat and pulled out a key ring. She detached a key and slapped it onto Rachel’s desk.

“Thank you,” Rachel said, feeling miserable about offending the other doctor. “I’m glad you understand.”

“What good will it do, if the cleaning woman’s got keys? She comes in here at night when nobody else is around. Are you sure it’s not her or somebody in her family?”

“I plan to talk to her about it,” Rachel said.

So it went with the other three vets—denials, protests, indignation, and suggestions that the cleaning woman was to blame. Rachel moved on to the rest of the staff.

Shannon, the front desk manager, would be allowed to keep her key to the front door because she was always the first to arrive in the morning, she never came to the clinic after hours, and Rachel considered her totally trustworthy about safeguarding her key. The clinic’s farm vet, who went to his clients instead of the other way around, and came in only when he needed supplies, would keep his key too.

Holly handed over hers promptly and without argument, as did another aide and a second young woman who worked behind the front desk with Shannon. However, the clinic’s technician, a taciturn middle-aged woman named Marjorie, greeted Rachel’s request with silence and an incredulous expression.

“This is just temporary,” Rachel told her.

Marjorie pulled her key ring from her pants pocket, yanked off two keys, and dropped them into Rachel’s palm, her lips set in a hard red line. Catching Rachel’s eye, she conveyed in one blazing glance the depth of her outrage at being treated as untrustworthy.

Marjorie spun and walked out, back straight and head high. She slammed the office door behind her. Rachel squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and drew a deep, calming breath before following Marjorie. She would have to salve the woman’s bruised feelings. She couldn’t afford to lose the clinic’s only licensed tech.

Before she could catch up with Marjorie, though, Rachel encountered Jordan Gale, who had just walked through the front door with his locksmith’s tool kit in hand. Rachel had asked him to come over and install additional locks on both front and rear doors.

Shannon, behind the desk, gave the locksmith a flirtatious smile. “Hey, Jordy. You just can’t stay away from us, can you?”

He grinned back. “Hey there, Shannon. How’re you doing?”

“Oh, just fine, thanks.”

Rachel hadn’t paid much attention to the locksmith’s appearance before, but now she noticed how attractive he was, with his boyish face and wavy dark hair. Older than Shannon by a few years, but apparently available. Married men around here always wore wedding rings, and Jordan’s ring finger was bare.

He turned his attention to Rachel. “You know we’re always glad to get more business,” he said, “but are you sure you need new locks? Like I told you before, what you’ve got is the best on the market.”

“I’ll feel better if we add to what we already have.”

“The customer’s always right,” he said cheerfully.

Rachel was relieved that he didn’t press her to tell him what had inspired her sudden concern about security. Rachel didn’t want the stalker story to get around, and she knew if she told a single person, half the county would be gossiping about it by this time tomorrow.

An hour later, all three doors to the outside—front, rear, and the door leading to the dog run—had been equipped with additional heavyweight deadbolts. Rachel sent Holly to the hardware store to have copies of the new keys cut.

After Jordan Gale left, Rachel fingered the new mechanism on the front door and wondered if she’d wasted her money. Reclaiming keys from the staff and urging them to be careful might have been all that was necessary. But how could she be sure?

The only thing she knew for certain was that somebody who scared her half to death had gotten into the building. The frames being askew—that might have an innocent explanation. A mutilated rat in her office cabinet was a different matter.

“Dr. Goddard?” Shannon said. “You’ve got a call. The Sheriff’s Department dispatcher.”

The dispatcher? Rachel’s first thought was that something had happened to Tom. Instead of taking time to return to her office to take the call, she crossed the lobby to the desk in five quick strides and grabbed the receiver from Shannon. “This is Dr. Goddard. What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

“My goodness,” the dispatcher said with a laugh, “I didn’t mean to scare you. I got a report about an injured hawk—a Cooper’s hawk, I think the man said. He sounded real upset about it. He said he saw somebody shoot it and break its wing, but he wouldn’t give me any names because he doesn’t want to get anybody in trouble.”

Rachel blew out a breath. Her heartbeat was dropping back to a normal pace, but anger replaced alarm. Some people thought shooting at wild birds was great sport, and they couldn’t care less if they were maiming and killing protected species.

The dispatcher went on, “He wants somebody to save the hawk and he asked me if we’ve got any wildlife rehabbers around here. I thought you’d want to go out and get it.”

“Did you call the animal warden?” Tom would not be thrilled if she went out by herself in search of a bird.

“Yes, I did call the animal warden first, but he said you’re the only one he knows of who could handle a bird like that when it’s hurt. He doesn’t think he could.”

Of course not. She glanced at her watch. She could manage an hour away from the clinic to pick up the bird. And the stalker was focused on Michelle, not Rachel. Without her sister around, she had no cause to be afraid. And she had to do her job, after all. “Okay, tell me where it is.”

She took notes on the location. A familiar road, one she’d been on last Saturday with Tom and the teenagers doing litter cleanup. She paused, her fingers tightening on the pen, when the dispatcher told her which milepost to look for. It was no more than a quarter mile from the ravine where Shelley’s lifeless body had been found.

Chapter Twenty-five

Hawk, hawk, where’d you go?

Rachel stood on the shoulder of the road, pulling on her elbow-length leather gloves and scanning the woods. A net on a long pole lay at her feet. She’d spotted the bird flopping around in the ditch, one wing wrecked and useless. By the time she’d pulled ahead thirty feet and parked, the hawk had disappeared. Finding it might not be easy in a patch of woods made up mostly of pines and other evergreens.

There.
A movement through the underbrush.

She scooped up the net and held it aloft as she pushed into the woods, to keep it from snagging on the cat briers that caught at her jeans. She grimaced with every snap of a twig under her thick-soled athletic shoes. But the racket she made hardly mattered. The bird knew she was after it.

The woods enveloped her, shutting out the midday sun and chilling the air.

The high school kids had cleaned the roadside along here on Saturday morning, before they moved north to the ravine where they’d discovered Shelley’s body. The image of the beautiful young woman shrouded in plastic burst full-blown into her mind, and her throat closed up with anger and sorrow.
Don’t think about it. Shut it out.

A flutter directly ahead caught Rachel’s eye. The hawk scrabbled from beneath a rhododendron, beating its good wing furiously, trying to get airborne. A blue jay screamed alarm from the treetops. The hawk collapsed onto its chest, pushed itself up again and took off, dragging the damaged wing through the leaf litter. It was definitely a Cooper’s hawk, larger than a crow with steely blue-gray feathers across its back, a cap of gray, thick dark bands on its tail, and fine reddish streaks across a pale throat and chest. It could tear an unprotected hand to shreds with its beak and talons. Rachel followed, using the net’s pole to slap aside low evergreen branches. The bird disappeared into a thicket of vines that hadn’t yet leafed out.

“Oh hell,” Rachel muttered. “You just had to go in there, didn’t you?”

A rustle alerted her that the bird had thought better of the hiding place and was emerging from the other side. She crept forward. Up ahead, beyond the thicket, she glimpsed a shallow pool, no more than a collection of rainwater in a depression. The hawk dragged itself toward the water.

The bird stopped beside the puddle, although it still seemed to be straining to move ahead. When Rachel drew closer, she saw a vine tangled around one of its feet. At her approach the hawk fanned its good wing frantically and yanked its trapped foot with no success.

Rachel crouched close by, the net raised. If the hawk broke free and tried to take off, she could easily get it, but she would rather wait until it quieted to avoid further injury when the net went down.

The bird stared up at her, panting through its open beak, a predator become prey and expecting death at any second.

“Just hang on,” Rachel whispered. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She avoided eye contact that might seem like a threat, and gave her attention instead to the massive pine trees around her. Here and there, spindly wild dogwoods reached for the dappled sun in the shade of the evergreens. New leaves had begun emerging on deciduous trees two weeks ago in Virginia’s hill country, but a chill lingered in the air, and night temperatures dipped into the forties. She still missed the glorious warm weather of spring and fall in the Washington area where she and Michelle had grown up.

Gradually, while Rachel sat motionless, the birds that had fallen silent at her intrusion took up their songs and chatter again. A squirrel paused in its descent from a nearby tree to study her before leaping to the ground and scurrying off. She heard the engine of a vehicle on the road, but she couldn’t see it through the dense trees.

At last the hawk lay still, its eyes bright with fear and the knowledge that capture was inevitable. Slowly Rachel lowered the net over it. The hawk jerked just once and emitted a high-pitched cry before hunkering down, resigned.

Rachel snaked a gloved hand under the net and grasped the foot that was caught in the vine. She worked it loose slowly, gently. She peered at the injured wing through the netting. What a godawful mess. Dirt and bits of dry leaves clung to blood-soaked feathers. The humerus was shattered, its jagged ends piercing the skin, and the unnatural fold of the wing told her the radius and ulna were fractured too. She had seen bad injuries from collisions with utility lines and windows but only one thing could wreck a wing this way: a shotgun.

Rachel shook her head and swore in disgust. “Human beings,” she said to the bird, “are capable of anything. But I guess you’ve already come to that conclusion on your own.”

She caught both of the hawk’s legs in one hand and, holding the net down over him, got to her feet. He went limp and flopped over backward. “Oh, come on now. Don’t give up that easily.”

She righted him and he settled in her grip, glaring at her through the netting. If his talons and beak could get to her bare skin he’d show her what he thought of her intrusion into his life.