Broken Places (6 page)
No. Neither of them would have described Ben’s behavior that way to Cam Taylor’s daughter. Lindsay was distraught over her parents’ deaths. She was misinterpreting what she’d heard.
Rachel’s impulse was to defend Ben, but she didn’t want to start a pointless argument. Letting Lindsay’s statements go unanswered, she lifted one of the kittens to the table.
“Six degrees of separation,” Lindsay said.
“I beg your pardon?” Rachel focused on the kitten, delivering the tiny amount of vaccine through a fine needle before the animal realized a protest was called for. “Good boy,” she murmured.
“You know what they say, that any two people in the world can be connected in six steps. But in our case, it’s even less. My grandparents lived in McLean when my grandfather was in the Senate, so my mom spent most of her time there when she was growing up. She came to Mason County as a V
ISTA
with Karen Hernandez. Karen left Mason County, and a few years later she was living in McLean. She had a son, who became your friend. Now you and Ben Hern live in Mason County. And I grew up here. I used to be Tom’s girlfriend. Now he’s seeing you.”
“Small world.” Rachel set down the kitten and picked up another.
“You’re a long way from home,” Lindsay said.
“I like it here.” Rachel administered a second injection, set down the kitten and reached for another.
“I can understand why you wanted to move to a place where nobody knew you. I mean, the way your mother died, then that drug addict shooting you.”
Rachel looked up sharply, meeting Lindsay’s gaze before she could control the impulse. Lindsay’s large blue eyes mocked her with an expression of feigned innocence that stirred Rachel’s deepest anxieties. Placing the third kitten on the table, she said, “You seem to know a lot about me.”
“It’s all a matter of public record. It’s amazing how much you can find out about people these days.”
Good god, what was Lindsay up to? Rachel tried for an offhand, distracted tone when she asked, “And why would you be searching public records for information about me?”
“I care about Tom. I wanted to know who he’s involved with.”
What else had Lindsay learned? How deeply into Rachel’s past had she probed? Noticing the tremor of her hand when she administered the vaccine, Rachel told herself,
Don’t let her get to you. Don’t.
She made another kitten swap.
”It’s a big change, isn’t it?” Lindsay said. “Don’t you miss everything?”
“Such as what?” Rachel’s mouth had gone dry.
“Restaurants, shopping, museums. This must seem like a real backwater to you. And you don’t have any family here either.”
“There are compensations.”
“Oh? Like what?”
Straightening, with a kitten snuggled against her chest, Rachel met Lindsay’s eyes. “Like Tom,” she said. “He’s more than enough for me.”
Rachel saw something shift in Lindsay’s face, the pretended innocence fading, replaced by the same hostility Rachel had glimpsed when they’d first met.
Lindsay pushed away from the door frame and said, “I’ll be seeing you around, Rachel.”
As she watched Lindsay’s brisk exit from the stable, dread settled over Rachel like a smothering shroud. Why had she said that? Why had she goaded Lindsay, as if she were claiming Tom as her property?
Lindsay worked in the state crime lab. She probably had access to a staggering amount of information, any database, any old records she wanted to examine. Had Rachel just given her reason to keep digging until she assembled all the bits and pieces that would add up to the truth?
My god, what have I done?
Gravel pinged the car’s fenders as Tom pulled off the road in front of Scotty Ragsdale’s house. “Take it easy,” he told Brandon, “and let me do all the talking. Your job is to keep an eye on him and be ready for anything.”
The night was dark in the way only a mountain night can be, the moon no more than a dim glow behind looming hills. When Tom killed the cruiser’s beams, the single remaining pinprick of light came from a window of Ragsdale’s house, a hundred feet back from the road.
“He really take a shot at you one time?” Brandon asked.
“Oh yeah. Almost took the top of my head off. He missed me by a couple of inches. That happened not long after I moved back from Richmond and took this job.”
Ragsdale had been cranked up on meth, using his rifle like a broom to whack merchandise off the shelves in his elderly parents’ hardware store in Mountainview, making threats one second and begging for help the next. Tom and two other deputies responded to his mother’s 911 call. The second Scotty saw the uniforms come through the door, he opened fire. He got away with the assault by agreeing to yet another round of inpatient treatment.
“As far as I know,” Tom said, “he’s been clean ever since, making a living doing carpentry and refinishing furniture. Really turned his life around. If he’s involved in these murders, it’s going to be more than his parents can take.”
Tom and Brandon approached the house, Maglites trained on the ground in front of them, free hands resting on their holstered Sig Sauers.
A man’s shape appeared in the window, then moved away. A moment later the front door opened and Ragsdale’s rangy silhouette filled the doorway, his face in shadow.
“Scotty, it’s Tom Bridger. I need to talk to you.”
“I’ve got nothing to talk to you about.” Ragsdale’s voice cracked on the last words. He sagged against the door frame and raised both hands to his face.
“Scotty? What’s wrong? Can we help you?”
Ragsdale didn’t answer.
“Stay on guard,” Tom told Brandon in an undertone. “I don’t like the way he’s acting.” Raising his voice, he said, “Scotty, can we come in? If something’s wrong, maybe we can help you.”
“Nobody can help me,” Ragsdale choked out. He wrapped his arms around his waist and bent over as if in pain. “It’s too late.”
With Brandon behind him, Tom climbed the steps to the porch.
Ragsdale looked worse than he had in years, his shaggy brown hair sticking out in a dozen directions, his tee shirt soiled down the front and wet under the arms, every wrinkle on his middle-aged face etched deeper by emotional turmoil. His pupils appeared normal. If he’d been high, they’d be the size of dinner plates.
“Come on, Scotty,” Tom said. “Let’s sit down and talk.”
Ragsdale stumbled back into his house and over to the couch. He collapsed onto it and stared into space, a tremor running through his body.
Tom and Brandon both swept their eyes over the living room, looking for accessible weapons. Tom didn’t see a gun or knife out in the open, but anything could be hidden under the fast food wrappers on the coffee table. Tom lifted the wrappers, found nothing underneath. Satisfied, he cleared a spot and sat on the table facing Ragsdale. Brandon stood to one side of the couch.
“What’s wrong, Scotty? What’s bothering you?”
Ragsdale took a deep breath, sat a little straighter. “You know what happened,” he said, his voice thick.
“Tell me.”
“Meredith—” He broke off, gulped back the rest of his words.
“What about her?”
“Stop playing games with me. I know why you’re here.”
“Meredith Taylor died today,” Tom said. “Is that why you’re upset?”
“
Upset?
” Ragsdale shot to his feet and lurched away from the couch. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a goddamn train.”
Wandering the room, Ragsdale stopped to stare at the pile of clothes on an easy chair, moved on to a tall bookcase crammed with hardcovers and paperbacks. He seemed to forget Tom and Brandon were there.
Tom rose and walked over to Ragsdale. “Scotty, come on back and sit down.”
When Tom touched his shoulder, Ragsdale flung out an arm and whacked Tom across the chest. “Get off!”
“Hey now!” Brandon barked, bolting toward them.
“It’s okay,” Tom said. Brandon halted. “Scotty, I want you to sit down.”
To Tom’s surprise, Ragsdale obeyed and returned to the couch. “Let’s get this over with.”
Taking his place on the coffee table again, Tom asked, “How did you hear about Meredith?”
Ragsdale’s voice came out low and hoarse. “I was in the store—Some people came in, they were talking about it.” Not quite meeting Tom’s eyes, he added, “I heard there were a couple of witnesses when Cam got shot. That woman vet and the Melungeon girl who works for her. Is that true? How much did they see?”
Tom didn’t like the sound of this. Despite his efforts to keep anyone from learning Rachel was on the scene before the shooting, people were already magnifying her role—and Holly’s. “I don’t know who’s spreading that story,” he told Ragsdale, “but it’s not true.”
“You wouldn’t tell me if it was. Did somebody say something about me? Is that why you’re here?”
Keeping his voice level, Tom asked, “Why would they say something about you? Were you there when Cam was shot?”
“Hell, no. You’re not pinning that on me.”
“Did you see Meredith today? Did you go over to the Taylor house this morning?”
Ragsdale threw him a defensive look. “No. Somebody says I did, they’re lying.”
“Why would anybody lie about that?”
“Some people can’t stay out of other people’s business.”
“Are you sure—”
“I’m sure.”
Tom watched Ragsdale pull a handkerchief from his pocket, drag it over his face, blow his nose.
“You and Meredith were good friends, weren’t you?” Tom asked.
Tears filled Ragsdale’s eyes, but he blinked them away. “She’s the only person in this whole fucking county that ever treated me with any respect. I probably wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for her, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be clean. She came to see me every week when I was in rehab. That’s more than I can say for my own damned family. They dumped me in that hole and forgot about me.”
“How long were the two of you friends?”
“Right from the start. When she first came here as a V
ISTA
volunteer.”
“But she was a few years older than you, wasn’t she?”
Ragsdale stared at his clasped hands dangling between his knees. “She was my sister’s friend. I was just a kid, sixteen years old, but she talked to me about writing like she took me seriously. And when Denise died, she was the only person who cared how I felt about losing her. My parents acted like it only happened to
them
. As if I didn’t love my sister too.”
Denise Ragsdale had died young, before Tom was born, and he knew almost nothing about her. “Yeah, I can see how that would’ve been rough on you,” he said. “So you had ambitions to be a writer? I didn’t know that about you.”
“Well, you can see what my ambitions amounted to.” Ragsdale spread his arms as if displaying himself, the picture of failure. “Meredith was a writer too, and she understood, she didn’t laugh at me. She never has. She hasn’t been much luckier than I have, but she still believes—still
believed
—in me. She still thought I was gonna make it.”
“So you two got together to talk about writing? Read each other’s stories?”
Ragsdale seemed lost in thought, or memories, and didn’t answer.
“Scotty,” Tom said, “were you sleeping with her?”
Ragsdale looked from Tom to Brandon. “You guys—go fuck yourselves. I’m not answering any more questions.”
“What happened, Scotty? Did Meredith try to break it off with you? Did she tell you to get lost? Or did Cam find out and raise hell about it?”
“You’re not getting shit from me. I don’t have to tell you a damned thing.
”
“Scotty—”
“Get the fuck out of my house and off my property.” When Tom didn’t respond, Ragsdale yelled in his face, “Get out!”
“All right, calm down, we’re leaving. But we’ll be back. Count on it.”
“Billy Bob! Come here, boy!” Lindsay crouched in the stable yard and clapped her hands. While Rachel held the rear door of her SUV open, Tom’s tan and white bulldog plopped out and trotted over to Lindsay, his jowls swinging.
You little traitor,
Rachel thought, but instantly felt ashamed of her juvenile reaction. The dog was just greeting somebody he knew. She leaned into the back seat and helped Simon unlock his seat belt. “Watch the drop,” she cautioned as the boy started scrambling out. “Want help?”
“Naw, I can do it.” Simon jumped down, landing on both feet, and beamed up at Rachel. “See?”
“You’re getting bigger every day.” He looked so much like Tom, with his thick black hair and olive skin, and Rachel could see that his features would develop the same chiseled strength that made Tom’s face striking.
“Hey, Simon, how’re you doing?” Lindsay said. She gave the dog a last pat and stood up.
The boy turned shy and uncertain, leaning against Rachel’s hip. She placed an arm around his shoulders. “Hi,” he said to Lindsay.
“You remember me, don’t you?” Lindsay asked, stepping closer, smiling. “Your Uncle Tommy’s girlfriend.”
Frowning in confusion, Simon glanced up at Rachel.
Oh, for god’s sake.
Using a little boy to score points was too much. “Not anymore,” Rachel murmured, hoping only Simon could hear.
“I remember,” Simon said, but he didn’t smile and his voice came out small and timid.
Normally Simon bubbled over with friendliness, so Rachel found his reaction odd and intriguing. “Come on,” she said, taking him by the hand. “Let’s get Mrs. McKendrick and go riding. Come on, Billy Bob.”
Lindsay trailed them to the paddock beside the stable. Was she planning to ride with them? Surely, Rachel thought, she had more pressing things to do in the aftermath of her parents’ deaths.
Joanna, saddling a chestnut mare while Holly attached the horse’s bridle, frowned when she saw Lindsay. “I thought you were going back to the house. Don’t you want to be there in case Tom calls with news?”
“He has my cell phone number. I want to go riding too. I need to get out and do something, get my mind off…everything.” Lindsay’s expression dissolved into sorrow. Tears shone in her eyes.
Joanna shot a
What can I do?
look at Rachel. And that was that. Lindsay saddled a horse for herself. Unless Rachel wanted to sulk and refuse to go riding, an option she couldn’t even consider, she had to accept Lindsay’s presence.
Lindsay fussed over Simon, insisted on lifting him into the saddle when he wanted to use a stepladder, adjusted his feet in the shortened stirrups. Silently looking on, Rachel saw again the odd expression on the boy’s face—distrust? dislike?—and wondered what had caused it.
Holly, who was supposed to ride with them, watched Lindsay smothering Simon with unwelcome attention and announced, “I don’t think I feel like ridin’ after all.”
With Joanna in the lead and Simon behind her, looking tiny on a black mare, they rode the horses up a gentle slope in the shade of oaks and maples. Billy Bob and Nan nosed around in the leaf litter, chased squirrels, and hustled back to the trail when Joanna whistled.
Rachel was aware every second of Lindsay riding behind her, and she could almost feel the woman’s eyes boring into her back, but she tried to enjoy the excursion anyway. The day had started with the temperature in the low seventies, and the birds seemed energized by the respite from the heat and humidity. Around her, Rachel heard the throaty songs of cardinals, the
cluck-cluck
of two pileated woodpeckers, the chipping and caroling of a dozen other species.
They’d been on the trail for fifteen minutes when Lindsay trotted her horse alongside Rachel’s. With no preamble, she said, “I’ve heard that Ben Hern’s the Howard Hughes of the comic strip world. Is it true he never goes out in public? Is that why you have to go to his house to see his pets?”
Rachel didn’t want to gossip about Ben with this woman, but she was wary of saying or doing anything to trigger the vindictiveness she’d detected just under Lindsay’s polite surface.
“Ben’s reclusiveness is exaggerated,” Rachel said. “I go to the house to see his dog because the animal has arthritis, and hauling him into the clinic would be very painful for him.”
Lindsay didn’t respond to that. Rachel was about to speed up her horse to put some distance between them when Lindsay spoke again, in a mild, conversational tone. “It’s really hard for most people to imagine their friends committing a crime like murder. Nobody wants to think their judgment about people is so bad they couldn’t see what their friend was capable of. I understand that, I really do. Denial is a natural reaction.”
Rachel opened her mouth to answer, then clamped it shut again.
Don’t say it. Don’t let her get to you.
She slapped her legs lightly against the mare’s sides to make the horse speed up.
As Rachel moved ahead, she heard the buzz of a cell phone and her hand automatically went to her shirt pocket. But it was Lindsay’s phone. She was a few feet behind now, but Rachel heard her answer.
“Oh, hi, Tommy,” Lindsay said, her voice sweet and warm.
Police business, Rachel told herself. She would not slow down, she would not eavesdrop.
Lindsay seemed determined that Rachel would overhear. “Sure, I’ll be right in,” she told Tom, her voice a little too loud. “See you soon.” Then she called out to Rachel, “Tell Joanna I had to go back. Tommy needs me.”
Tommy.
Rachel was beginning to hate the nickname. Without looking around, she waved a hand in acknowledgment.
Just police business, she told herself again, but she clenched her teeth and gripped the reins until the leather bit into her palms.
***
Walking into the conference room behind Toby Willingham, Tom couldn’t help noticing the sheriff was listing slightly to the right, like an old hound that was losing its sense of balance. In recent months, the sheriff had lost so much weight that he had to pull his belt tight, bunching up the fabric of his trousers to keep them from dropping around his knees. Willingham was out sick more often than he was on the job, and Tom was more or less running the department. The official story was that the sheriff had a minor heart problem, but his frequent trips to Roanoke suggested something more serious that required a specialist’s care.
Tom enjoyed the work, preferred taking the lead, but he felt both frustrated at not having official authority and sad at watching the sheriff, who had been his father’s friend, fade into a walking ghost.
Tom and the sheriff took seats at the conference room table, where Dennis Murray and Brandon waited.
Tom paraphrased the preliminary report on Meredith Taylor that he’d pressured the state medical examiner’s office to produce. “They won’t give us a cause of death until the autopsy’s done. The burn pattern on the body is consistent with use of an accelerant. Her hair was burned away, and so was a lot of the flesh on the upper body. The killer might have splashed her with gasoline or kerosene. But they’ll have to look at her lungs to determine whether she was still alive when the fire started.”
The image of Meredith’s blackened, mutilated face rose up in Tom’s mind. It was rapidly becoming impossible to think of the corpse as a real woman he had known.
“If the—” Sheriff Willingham broke off and coughed into a handkerchief. Among the alert younger men, he looked exhausted and a decade older than his sixty-three years. He cleared his throat. “If the fire didn’t kill her, what did?”
“It looks like a couple of things could have killed her before the fire started. She took a bad beating, for one thing.” Tom consulted the report. “Blunt force trauma to the head with multiple fractures of the frontal and lateral regions of the cranium and jaw.”
“It sounds personal,” Willingham said.
“Like the killer was in a rage,” Dennis added.
Willingham sighed and shook his head, then looked at Tom. “Anybody in her family coming? Her parents are both dead now. What about her brother?”
“He’s in the Middle East on an official trip. I notified his office so they can get word to him.” Meredith’s brother now held the Senate seat their father had occupied for forty-plus years. “I wouldn’t expect him to show up here, though. I think Lindsay is the only relative who’ll care very much about what happened to them.”
“What a shame,” Willingham said. “You reach anybody in Cam’s family?”
“Nobody knows who they are or where they live. Even Lindsay doesn’t know anything about them.”
“Now that’s just plain sad,” Willingham said.
“Yeah.” Tom had never noticed it bothering Lindsay, though.
“You said two possible causes of death,” Dennis put in.
“Right. They found a bullet wound in the back of her skull. We didn’t see that ourselves because Gretchen Lauter didn’t want to turn her over. She was afraid we couldn’t keep the body intact. Anyway, Meredith was shot at least once.”
“Man,” Brandon said. “Talk about overkill.”
“No exit wound, as far as they can tell with all the damage done to the skull,” Tom said. “The slug could still be in her brain. Cam’s been x-rayed, and the rounds that went into him are lodged in his heart muscle. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a slug from Meredith too and we’ll find out whether the same gun was used on both of them.”
The sheriff grunted. “Seems pretty clear they were both killed by the same person. You think the killer went straight from Cam to Meredith? Or was Meredith killed first?”
“We don’t know when Meredith died,” Tom said, “and her body’s in such bad shape, the autopsy probably won’t tell us whether she died before or after Cam. Brandon and I got to their house a couple hours after Cam was shot, and the fire had been burning for a while, but not for two hours. One possibility is that Cam was killed first, then Meredith, then the fire was started. Another is that Meredith was killed earlier, the killer left, tracked Cam down and shot him, then went back and started the fire to destroy evidence.”
“Going to the house a second time would be a hell of a risk,” Dennis said.
“It wouldn’t be a problem time-wise, though,” Brandon said. “It’s just a twenty-minute drive between the two crime scenes. Ragsdale could’ve done it, easy.”
“Didn’t Scotty offer you any kind of alibi?” Sheriff Willingham asked, his voice muffled as he wiped his nose with his handkerchief.
“No,” Tom said. “And we’ve already checked with his parents. They didn’t see him at all yesterday until he came in the store right before closing.”
“Well,” Willingham said, “I’d hate to find out Scotty did this. His mom and dad are good, solid people, and they’re proud of him for finally straightening himself out.”
Tom let that go without comment. He hoped Willingham would go back home after the meeting and leave the investigation to him. The more involved the sheriff became in a case, the more he tended to micro-manage and try to keep Tom from stepping on toes.
“I don’t see how Ben Hern could have killed both of them,” Brandon said. “Don’t we have people saying he was home all morning up to the time he followed Taylor off his property?”
“Not exactly,” Tom said. “All we know for sure is that he was at home when Rachel and Holly got there and for a few minutes afterward. We don’t know where he was when Cam was shot. I have to talk to his assistant and his mother and find out where he was earlier in the morning. Whether they’ll be honest about it is another question.”
“You got any opinion about—” the sheriff started, but a wracking cough overtook him. The other men waited for him to recover his voice. “Which one’s got the strongest motive? Hern or Scotty?”
“Either of them could have done it,” Tom said. “Scotty might have been frustrated over his relationship with Meredith. We’ve seen that kind of situation turn violent often enough. As for Hern, it sounds like Taylor was threatening him with something. Blackmail’s as strong a motive as you could want. And he’s stonewalling us. He says his lawyer’s coming down from New York, and he won’t answer questions until he has representation.”
“Hell,” Willingham muttered. “All we need is some high-priced lawyer from New York in here running rings around us and the prosecutor.”
“Nobody’s going to run rings around me,” Tom said, annoyed by the suggestion. “If Hern’s guilty, we’ll find the evidence.”
“He’s never been arrested in Virginia,” Dennis said, “but I haven’t heard back about New York yet.”
“What’s happened to his mother?” Sheriff Willingham asked. “Why can’t we locate her?”
“Good question,” Tom said. “Her cell phone sends calls directly to voice mail. Her secretary hasn’t heard from her. Hern says he can’t get in touch with her either. Her car hasn’t been spotted.”
“Oh, lord.” Willingham scrubbed a hand over his face. “Are we looking for a witness or another victim?”
Or the killer?
“It doesn’t look good,” Tom said. “Lloyd Wilson claims he saw a dark-colored Jaguar at the Taylor house yesterday morning. If Hern can prove he was somewhere else, we can probably assume the car was his mother’s.”
“Maybe all this about Hern and his mother and Ragsdale is just a coincidence,” Brandon said. “Taylor floated some projects that were supposed to make money and ended up losing it instead. Maybe somebody’s been nursing a grudge for a while and finally decided to act on it.”