Cold Justice: A Judge Willa Carson Mystery (The Hunt for Justice) (10 page)

The south tunnel led to the basement of the Eagle Creek Cafe building. I couldn’t remember how far away the exits were.

Which way did the two shadows travel? I could have called out to them. But should I have?

Before I could make a decision, someone turned the lights out. Instant total blackness. Which probably meant they’d found an exit and left me inside here. No worries. I’m not claustrophobic.

The green exit door was still unlocked. I could leave, trek outside in the blizzard the way I’d entered. All I needed to do was find the staircase and walk up.

But I couldn’t see anything. At all. No ambient light of any kind. A wrong move in any direction could send me tumbling onto the cobblestone or worse. I could feel along the tunnel walls until I reached the opening, but my sense of direction was impaired by sensory deprivation, too. I wondered whether this was how a blind person felt navigating in the world.

I pushed my hand down into my pocket and patted around for my cell phone. When I pulled it out and pressed the home button, the screen lit up brighter than stadium lights. The battery was almost gone, but for now, until I could find the light switch, I could see.

I heard footsteps above and behind me. I turned and pointed my phone toward Kemp who had stopped when the lights went out. He’d been on his way down the stairs, gun drawn.

“There’s no need for that, Justin. I’m fine. Whoever I followed in here must have left. Can you just reach back and flip—” the rest of my words were stolen by gunfire.

The first shot was true. It whizzed past my head and hit Justin square on the shoulder with enough force to knock him backward. He lost his footing and fell down the last three steps and banged his head soundly against the stone, which knocked him out cold.

His momentum pushed his body into me and I stumbled backward onto the slimy tunnel floor and dropped my phone. I scrambled over the slippery cobblestones to get to it before the screen light shut off and we were plunged into blackness again.

But Kemp had fallen right into my path.

I fumbled to crab over him, but before I reached across his slender torso, the screen shut off, plunging me into total darkness half a moment before the second gunshot whizzed past. I heard the ricochet and more hits before the noise stopped.

I rolled across Justin’s body and slid to the opposite side, patting around the slimy rocks for my phone. When my hand bumped something soft and squishy a quick gasp escaped my mouth.

In the black silence my gasp doubled as a beacon for the third gunshot.

I clamped my lips together, hard, and forced my hands to feel along the disgusting tunnel floor, but patted nothing remotely like my phone.

Shit!

The fourth gunshot rang out and this one didn’t bounce off the walls. It hit someone. I heard a man’s groan followed by hard scrabbling grunts and groans that sounded like a struggle.

I could see nothing. The effect was surreal.

The fifth shot. An unmistakable human female scream was followed by total silence.

I counted silently, “One thousand one. One thousand two. One thousand three.” I made it all the way to one thousand twenty eight before the emergency lights came back on.

I saw my phone had been mere inches from my hand and grabbed it. Kemp’s gun was close, so I grabbed that, too. I pushed the power button on my phone and nothing happened. Maybe the battery drained or maybe the phone didn’t survive the slam against the tunnel floor. Either way, the result was the same. No light. No nothing.
Dammit!

Then I looked around wildly, prepared to duck again but there was no wall to hide behind. Kemp groaned, perhaps returning to consciousness. His wound was bleeding profusely, adding to the slime.

I looked north and south, but the tunnel curved in each direction, cutting off my sight line. Was the gunman hiding around the corners? Or had he found an exit and already escaped?

In the east tunnel straight ahead, I saw the shadow that looked something like an apparition, but knew it had to be a person. Man or woman, I couldn’t discern. Nor did it matter. Because it was holding the gun.

So I took a chance. The most logical option.

“Mason! Kemp’s been shot!” I shouted, and immediately realized my voice was too loud. I lowered it a couple of notches. “David, I know what happened to Leo Richards.” Which wasn’t completely true. But I’d figured out enough to make a plausible guess. “He’s been dead for months, hasn’t he? His murder was staged today to make him look like a victim of the snow sniper. Did you kill him, David?”

I heard his ragged breathing. His deep voice confirmed my guesses. “No. I didn’t.”

“Who did kill Leo? Who’s there with you?”

“I’ve been shot.” He leaned against the tunnel wall and lowered the gun. “Get help, Willa. Before it’s too late.”

For a moment, I paused. Should I try to leave? He’d recognized me. Could David Mason be trusted not to shoot me when I stood up and became a bigger target?

“David, who is with you? How is she?”

Kemp needed help right away. For the woman, it might already be too late. She’d been completely silent. She could be unconscious. Or worse.

“Madeline Trevor. Ricochet hit.” David’s voice was breathless, weak.

“You mean it’s Randy Trevor’s wife?” I called back to confirm we were talking about the same person, which was a bit inane under the circumstances. I’d seen Madeline Trevor at the bridge club. She’d looked at me oddly, with what I now realized must have been suspicion. Maybe her husband had told her something about me. Or maybe she remembered me from back in the day. Either way, my presence must have pushed her over the edge.

“I don’t know how bad,” Mason said. “She planned to kill me. Leave me here.” He seemed to have only enough wind to speak a few words each time. “I’d told her we’d had enough. She pulled a gun. She wanted to kill you. I tried to stop her. We struggled, but the gun went off. I didn’t shoot at you, Willa. I swear.” His voice was weaker with each short sentence.

Now that the emergency lights were on, I could see the steps leading to the green door and the blizzard, which all of a sudden seemed way less threatening than it had half an hour before. I checked Kemp’s carotid pulse. Still beating. But he remained unconscious. No way could I get him up the steps.

“If I stand up, David, you’re not going to shoot me, are you?” Not that I would trust his answer, but I wanted to keep him talking while I figured out what to do.

“Madeline shot at you. I didn’t,” he replied.

David slid down the tunnel wall and sat on the slimy floor. That decided me. No one would sit on that floor if they had a choice.

“I’m going for help. Don’t move.” I patted around in Kemp’s pockets but didn’t find his cell. “I need a phone. Mine’s ruined. Do you have one?”

“Madeline does.”

“I’m coming to get it. Don’t shoot me.” I walked gingerly over the slimy cobblestones, holding onto the tunnel wall to keep my balance. The last thing I needed was to fall again.

When I reached Madeline Trevor I checked for her carotid pulse, but found none. I patted her pockets until I found her phone, pulled it out of her pocket and dropped it into mine.

I turned to look at David Mason. He seemed to have passed out.

“I’ll be right back. Kemp’s a police officer. If he dies, you’ll be in even bigger trouble than you already are. Stay put,” I said. Would he do it? I didn’t know. But I had to get help for Kemp. I had no choice.

I backed out of the tunnel, keeping a watch on Mason to be sure he didn’t raise the gun. When I reached Kemp, I stepped over him, pulled myself up the steps, keeping as low a profile as I could, both hands on the rusty rails, until I burst into the night air. I ducked inside again and called down.

“David, I can see you from here. If you move, I’ll turn off the light. You won’t be able to get away in the dark.” I flipped it off for a couple of seconds to prove I could and then flipped it back on. “Stay put.”

No reply.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out Madeline’s phone. When I pushed the button, her screen powered on and I almost whooped for joy. Until I saw the text notification that rested there.

I read it twice before the screen turned off. It was a text from her husband, Judge Randy Trevor. Only four words. “Is Mason dead yet?”

EPILOGUE

Two days later, George and I were once again seated at the back table at Eagle Creek Cafe, waiting for Marc Clayton. We’d taken a quick walk through the tunnels because George wanted to see where Madeline Trevor had died. The exit from the tunnels closest to the restaurant would have put her just inside the Cafe entrance. Her plan had been to leave Mason’s body in the abandoned east tunnel and then return to the Cafe to complete her alibi. A plan that would have worked if I hadn’t seen them across the parking lot that night.

Marc joined us, bringing hot coffee. “Sorry I’m late. I stopped off at the hospital to check on David Mason and Justin Kemp. They’ll both recover. Kemp’s shoulder surgery will take a little longer than David’s abdominal wounds, though both of them will be able to return to work fairly soon.”

“What about Randy Trevor?” George asked. He was still a bit angry about him and his wife. George is very protective of me and he takes a dim view of people trying to shoot me. Which I appreciate, of course.

“He’s been transferred to jail in Grand Rapids for now,” Marc said. “So, Willa, tell me what happened.”

I leaned in and folded my hands around the warm coffee mug and wondered if I’d ever be warm again. “When we saw Leo Richards in his Toyota, his skin was unusually pink. I’d seen that before and heard testimony from medical examiners about it, but I couldn’t recall the cause. It’s similar to the cherry red hue bodies have when carbon monoxide poisoning is the cause of death. Pink
livor mortis
results when a body has been frozen.”

“Ah,” Marc said.

“When I remembered that, I knew that Richards was colder than he would have been if he’d simply been sitting after death in the Toyota in winter weather.”

“Well, if he was already dead, why’d they shoot him in the head?” George wanted to know.

“To conceal the real cause of death.”

“Which was what?” Marc asked.

“According to the statement the police took from Leo’s wife, the cause of death was blunt trauma to the right temple. The bullet entered his left temple and destroyed the right side of his head with the exit wound. That obliterated most of the evidence that he’d been hit hard enough to kill him. A good forensic autopsy might still have found the real cause, but they had at least a fifty-fifty chance the coroner would miss it simply because the gunshot wound was substantial and sufficient.” I explained the rest of the story as we finished our meal.

The whole thing had been a family affair.

There was a big fight fourteen months ago, as Kemp had originally told me. But what the sisters left out at the time was that during the fight, Madeline had killed Leo Richards. He’d been out of control in an argument with his wife and her sister had bashed his head in when she hit him too hard with a heavy bookend to stop him.

The three sisters hid the body in Maureen’s basement chest freezer and concocted the disappearance story to cover up. Then they simply tried to carry on normally.

Until things began to fall apart.

When David discovered the extent of Leo’s gambling losses and damage to the hardware business, David hired a private detective to find him. David’s wife, the youngest sister Molly, begged him to stop looking for Leo, but David said he’d never, ever do that. That Leo needed to come back and face his responsibilities. So Molly told David about the murder to gain his cooperation.

Madeline was having trouble holding it together, too. Her behavior became so erratic that her husband, the judge, confronted her and she broke down and told him. Randy took control, which didn’t surprise me in the least. He held everyone together to cover up the crime until the snow sniper came along and gave them all a chance to end the charade.

Randy knew about the impending arrest of the snow sniper. It was his idea to set up Richards’ death as another snow sniper victim and to shoot Richards in the left temple to cause the exit wound to obliterate evidence of the blunt force trauma that had actually killed him. Madeline, Molly, and Maureen pulled off the setup and then attended the bridge club tournament to establish an alibi.

“Leo’s wife, Maureen, gave a full confession this morning,” I said, wrapping things up.

Marc pursed his lips and shook his head. George nodded. There was nothing more to say, really.

It was the pink skin that should have tipped me off to this elaborate cover up. Leo Richards’ body was too pink. I knew that pink came from being frozen and then thawed. But I missed it because the weather was so cold, I thought his body temperature was caused by the atmosphere. Turns out it was caused by his cold family.

George remained angry for a good long while, but his trademark sense of calm returned. We stayed to enjoy Pleasant Harbor for the full week and enjoyed a few of the cozy evenings we’d planned before we returned to Tampa.

I may not have owned a pair of ruby slippers and Madeline Trevor wasn’t the Wicked Witch, but the entire episode reminded me that there’s no place like home.