Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (32 page)

She would worry about the lock later. Right now she had to remove the snake from her office and get over to the ER to be with Michelle. She grabbed the tools she needed and looked around for a secure container to put the snake in. Rummaging through the supplies on the shelves, she found a plastic box with a snap-on lid that should be large enough. She dumped the container’s contents, dozens of bags of syringes purchased in bulk, onto the shelf. Next she located elbow-length gloves of thick leather and pulled them on.

Upstairs at her office door, she realized she had an audience of staff and clients crowded together at a safe distance to watch. “I want all of you to move back,” she told them. “If I can still see you, you’ll be too close.”

They seemed reluctant, but they dispersed.

Clutching both the snake hook and pincer tool in one hand, Rachel pushed the door ajar, moving cautiously in case the snake waited just inside. Although she wouldn’t say she was afraid of poisonous snakes, she had a healthy respect for their cunning and the damage they could do. Knowledge and common sense should protect her, yet she felt her heartbeat speed up and her breath quicken.

She poked her head into the office, her gaze sweeping the floor. She saw nothing. If she couldn’t locate it, she would be vulnerable to attack from any angle. She grabbed the plastic container, stepped into the office, and kicked the door shut behind her.

“Come out, come out,” she whispered, “wherever you are.”

A faint sound of movement, something sliding on the floor. Under the desk?

Drawing a deep breath, she told herself to stay calm. She pushed the plastic container ahead of her and removed the lid.

“Okay now,” she murmured. “Come on out and let’s get this done.” Leaning down, she peered under the desk. What she saw made her jerk back. A rattler at least four feet long lay coiled on the floor in the open center space under her desk. The snake raised its head in her direction, and its muscular body, covered with gray and black blotches and ending in a black tail, began to contract, pulling itself taut as if preparing to strike. As Rachel stared into its cold, unblinking eyes, the snake’s tail lifted and began to vibrate, producing a soft rattle. This was a male, she noted, with a long, thick tail that tapered gradually to the black tip.

Rachel ran her tongue over her dry lips. The instant she went for him, he would go on the offensive. He was big enough to get at her beyond the protective gloves.

She didn’t want to get down on hands and knees because she couldn’t move out of that posture quickly. Bending from the waist, she stuck the snake loop tool under the desk, slow and easy. The rattling grew louder. She felt the end of the pole make contact with the snake’s body.

The snake’s head shot out, mouth agape, fangs going for Rachel’s hand. She gasped and jumped back out of the way, and the snake hit the pole hard enough to knock it out of her grip. Then the snake took off, slithering out from under the desk, its body writhing rhythmically, propelling it across the tiled floor. It aimed for the space between the wall and the back of a filing cabinet.

Standing, trying to catch her breath and slow her heartbeat, Rachel watched the snake wedge its head into the space. “Good luck with that, pal.” She swiped perspiration off her upper lip with the back of her hand. “You don’t seem to know how big you are.”

The snake worked the first foot of its body between the cabinet and the wall before it got stuck.

Rachel watched for a couple more minutes to make sure it wouldn’t decide to back out. But it curled its lower body into a loose spiral and lay still, apparently feeling safe as long as its head was hidden. Rachel approached cautiously. Starting at the tail, she worked the loop up over the snake’s body as far as she could and tightened it. She held the pincer ready in her other hand as she slowly pulled the rattler out of the narrow space.

When its head came free, the snake twisted to strike, but Rachel clamped the pincer on and immobilized its head. Holding the snake’s thrashing body with the hook and pincer, she lowered it into the plastic container. By the time she got the front half into the container, the rear half was out again. She worked with the hook until all of the snake was inside. Hanging on with the pincer until the last second, she pulled off the loop and lowered the lid onto the container. Holding the lid down with one foot, she shuffled it closer to the desk. Her copy of Merck’s veterinary diagnostic manual looked hefty enough to match the snake’s strength. She grabbed it off the desk and dropped it onto the lid.

Leaning against her desk with her face in her hands, she felt every drop of adrenaline abruptly drain from her body.

The snake changed everything.

She knew who had put it here, she knew it wasn’t an anonymous stalker, and she knew Michelle wasn’t the target.

Chapter Thirty-four

Total silence in the cruiser for ninety minutes felt like a blessing to Tom, and the spring landscape of mountainsides dotted with blooming dogwoods and rhododendrons was a bonus. Out of radio and cell tower range, he didn’t have to answer questions, respond to demands, issue any orders. He let himself relax for the first time since he’d seen Shelley Beecher’s plastic-wrapped body lying in a ravine on Saturday.

The respite didn’t last. Without distractions, he had to face his own bedeviling questions about the case. If he blamed Shelley’s murder on her attempt to prove Vance Lankford innocent, he had to ask who would be willing to kill her in order to stop her. If Vance didn’t kill Brian, Hadley’s murderer was still walking around free, and desperate to avoid suspicion. That was as strong a motive for killing Shelley as Tom could ask for—but to believe it, he also had to believe his father had arrested the wrong man in the Hadley case six years before and helped to put him behind bars for life. John Bridger hadn’t been perfect, he’d made mistakes, but he was a fair-minded investigator, and Tom couldn’t accept a mistake of these proportions without rock-solid proof.

Swinging around a curve on the narrow road, Tom encountered a coal truck coming from the opposite direction and realized with a jolt that he’d strayed over the center line. He pulled the cruiser back on course and sped past the truck.

His thoughts shifted back to the case. If Vance had killed Brian Hadley, what could he hope to gain from the innocence project’s investigation? If it was a charade, they wouldn’t find evidence to clear him because that evidence didn’t exist. And it could backfire on him—they might turn up additional evidence to reaffirm Vance’s guilt.

Where did all this leave Tom? Because the killer had brought Shelley’s body back to Mason County, he had trouble believing she’d been the victim of a random abduction and murder. But if she was killed by somebody who knew her, who had a strong enough motive to do it? The Hadleys were infuriated by Shelley’s work for Vance, but would they kill the girl to stop her? Did anyone besides the Hadleys care that much about what she was doing? Who was the woman Shelley was trying to persuade to come forward, and what kind of evidence could she offer? If it wasn’t Rita, what other woman was close enough to the events to know anything of value? Grace? Was she protecting the Hadleys, out of self-interest?

Tom chewed over these questions for more than an hour as he drove, until the prison came into view.

Vance had begun his life sentence in a maximum security institution on the other side of Virginia, but three years of model behavior won him a transfer to Harper Ridge, a medium security prison closer to home
.
Miles before he reached it, Tom could see the place from the road, a collection of buildings inside an octagonal wall
,
sitting on a leveled mountaintop surrounded by deep ravines.
More than a thousand men lived inside that
wall.

Tom braked at the turnoff and locked his service pistol in the glove compartment before he started up the steep, curving road to the prison. At the gate into the parking lot, he spent a few minutes proving his identity and waiting for the guard to get the warden’s okay for him to enter. He parked where he was told to and approached the gate into the prison compound on foot. From there, he moved through the layers of security and into the main building without incident.

The warden, a tall, chunky man with white hair and a rumpled brown suit, appeared at the final checkpoint to shake Tom’s hand, exchange a few words with him, and turn him over to a young guard.

The guard had big hands and a muscular body that probably earned him the respect of the inmates. He didn’t bother with chitchat as he led Tom down a hall. From behind them, Tom heard the automated steel mesh door slide shut with a grinding noise and lock with a clang. He didn’t see anyone else, but a hum of indistinct voices seemed to seep through the walls and ceiling and gave him the sensation that the building itself was alive around him. Prisons always made him think of the Borg, those cybernetically-enhanced beings in
Star Trek
who functioned as mindless drones in a vast collective that forcibly sucked in new victims.
You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Tom had known more than a few people who were destroyed or changed for the worse by prison. For that reason alone, he hoped to god Vance Lankford was guilty and deserved to be there.

The guard showed Tom into a small room that contained only a metal table, bolted to the floor, and two chairs. When the guard gestured at a chair, Tom sat down. He’d had enough of sitting in the car, though, and as soon as the guard left him alone, he rose, stretched, and walked to the window.

Thirty feet from the building, a couple dozen men wearing orange prison clothes were locked in a small yard surrounded by a six-foot chain link fence. They had divided predictably along racial lines, with whites, blacks, and Hispanics forming separate groups. One young white man, though, marched alone around the perimeter of the yard, his face set in a determined expression, as if he had to meet an exercise goal before his time outdoors ended.

Vance Lankford wasn’t among the men in the yard.

Tom had been waiting almost twenty minutes, long enough to watch the men shuffle back inside and another group take their place outdoors, when he heard the distant rumble of motorized doors. Footsteps sounded on the tiled hallway floor, drawing closer. A different guard, this one a balding middle-aged man, opened the door to the room where Tom waited, poked his head in and glanced around. Apparently satisfied that everything was as it should be, he ushered Vance Lankford inside.

“Go on and sit down,” the guard told Vance, “and don’t get up unless the deputy says you can.” To Tom he said, “I’ll be right outside, deputy. Yell if you need me.”

Vance, without cuffs or shackles, kept his eyes downcast as he approached the table. His gaunt frame acted as little more than a clothes hanger for his prison uniform, and he hitched up the loose waist of his pants before he took a seat. Tom didn’t know him well, but he’d seen him around often enough in the past to be shocked by the change in his appearance. His cheekbones and jaw looked like carved stone beneath taut, colorless skin. A buzz cut that had left his dark hair less than an inch long accentuated the stark angles of his face. Vance was barely thirty. He looked fifty.

Tom almost asked him how he was doing, but thought better of it. He could see the answer in Vance’s dull eyes and the way he slumped in his chair. This was a man who had given up on himself. Maybe he realized Shelley’s death meant the end of his hope for freedom.

“I’m Tom Bridger. We’ve met a few times. I don’t know if you remember me.”

Vance’s gaze flicked over Tom and the right edge of his mouth lifted a fraction of an inch. “I’m not likely to forget anybody connected to John Bridger. And you look just like him.”

“You know Shelley Beecher’s dead, don’t you?”

Vance turned his head to look out the window at the men in the yard. “Yeah,” he said, his voice as flat and empty as his expression. “The woman from the innocence project got in touch. But I heard it from the guards first. They got a real kick out of telling me.”

“She was murdered,” Tom said.

“Well, I’ve got a good alibi, so you can’t pin that one on me.”

Tom watched Vance for a moment, trying to detect some emotion on his face. Distress, anger, disappointment, fear—all of that would be understandable. Did he feel any grief for Shelley herself, any sympathy for her family? Did he recognize the indirect role he might have played in her death? Whatever Vance felt, he hid it behind an impassive mask.

“You didn’t kill Shelley,” Tom said, “but her work for you might have been responsible for her murder.”

Vance leaned forward, meeting Tom’s eyes and showing a spark of life for the first time. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? She was the only person who ever took the time to listen to my side of the story. Why would I want her to get hurt?”

“Were you pushing her to investigate some other person in particular? Dig around for dirt that might make somebody else look guilty? Was she threatening somebody who still lives in Mason County?”

Vance slumped back in his chair, and his face went blank again. “Look, whatever you’re here for, I can’t help you. I don’t know who she was investigating.”

“Are you saying she didn’t she tell you anything? That’s hard to believe. She was doing it for you, after all. You were her client.”