Lord of the Wings (36 page)

“What secret?” Ms. Ellie asked. “We suspect that William Henry Harrison Brimfield didn't die on the date that's on the War Memorial, but even if he deserted or was court-martialed, who really cares after all these years?”

“He didn't desert or get court-martialed.” I wasn't exactly guessing—the pieces were falling into place. “Or even if he did, that's not what you were trying to cover up. He came home and became Billy Pratherton, Caerphilly's most disreputable bootlegger, didn't he? The bootlegger even the Shiffleys looked down on because he'd poisoned so many people with wood alcohol.”

Brimfield didn't say anything, but I could see through the holes in his mask that his eyes had narrowed and figured I was on target.

“How do you know William Brimfield turned into Billy Pratherton?” Ms. Ellie asked.

“He's not denying it, is he?” I said.

“No,” she said, glancing at Brimfield. “But how do
you
know.”

I decided it was not a good idea to let Brimfield know that a critical piece of evidence was still lying around on the third floor.

“I saw a picture Arabella Walmsley sent Dr. Smoot,” I said. “A picture of her grandparents, Arabella Shiffley and Billy Pratherton. Billy is William Brimfield—you can't miss it. That means the modern-day Arabella is—was—a Brimfield, too. A great-granddaughter of John Adams Brimfield, who founded the Brimfield Corporation. I don't know anything about California inheritance laws, but I bet if they got a good attorney, the Walmsleys would have a fighting chance of getting a piece of the Brimfield fortune.”

“They could certainly cause the Brimfields a lot of expense and embarrassment trying,” Ms. Ellie said. “And the good attorney would be pretty easy—haven't you heard of the big Richmond law firm, Venable, Walmsley, Lightfoot, and Wythe? But do you really think he killed Arabella?”

“I bet she showed up on his doorstep waving a copy of that picture,” I said. “She was delighted to have found another branch on her family tree. But all he saw was someone who might take money out of his pocket. Yeah. I'm sure he killed her.”

“I'd love to see that picture the Walmsleys sent,” Ms. Ellie said.

“I bet Mr. Brimfield would, too,” I said. “But the chief has it. He plans to work with Arabella's parents to get her death reinvestigated as a possible homicide.”

“So the police have it all figured out.” Brimfield reached up, pulled off the Darth Vader mask, and scowled at us. “If that's the case, I'm in a bit of trouble, aren't I? But maybe it's only you who has it figured out. So maybe if I get rid of you, I'm home free.”

“And if you're wrong?” Ms. Ellie asked.

“They can only fry me once.” Brimfield shrugged and smiled a cold, thin-lipped smile. I decided he didn't look that much like the World War I–era Brimfields after all. There had been light and warmth and laughter in their eyes, in spite of their grim surroundings, and his just looked like slabs of pale gray stone.

“Was the scavenger hunt your idea?” I asked.

“Hell, no,” he said. “It was Jimmy Green's idea from the start. I just told him to get the damned photos. I should have known. He never could do anything straightforward. God, but he was annoying.”

“Is that why you killed him?” I asked. “Because he was annoying?”

I didn't really expect an answer.

“No,” he said, with a chillingly humorless smile. “I killed him because he tried to extort more money from me. He called and insisted that I come down here to meet him because he had something important to tell me. And when I showed up, his important news was that the publicity about the museum was making his job harder and he wanted double his original fee.”

“And you didn't like that,” I said.

“I didn't like his threat to go to the police if I didn't comply with his demands,” Brimfield said. “I decided he'd outlived his usefulness.”

“And I bet you decided it before you even came down here,” I suggested. “Why else would you have brought a gun with you?”

“I came prepared to deal with any eventuality,” Brimfield said. I took that for a yes.

“And what if they trace the gun?” Ms. Ellie asked.

Brimfield glanced down at the weapon in his hand.

“I shall dispose of it after tonight,” he said. “And in the highly unlikely event that it falls into police hands—well, I doubt that they would be able to trace it, but if they did, it would only lead back to poor Jimmy.”

“Did he kill Arabella for you?” I asked.

“The greedy little bitch.” Brimfield suddenly looked angry for the first time. “Pretending she wanted to be reunited with the family she'd never known. I knew what she was really after.”

From what Dr. Smoot had said about Arabella's wealthy family, I didn't think she had much need for money. Brimfield could be projecting his greed on a young woman who only wanted to learn more about her own family. What a jerk.

I was not going to let this jerk kill us. And I sure as hell wasn't going to die listening to the Rancid Dreads mangle “Riders on the Storm.”

He could have fired off a machine gun under cover of the Dreads' performance without anyone noticing. But maybe if I could just keep him talking. The longer he talked, the more chances we would have.

“I still don't understand why Jimmy thought up the whole elaborate rigmarole of the scavenger hunt?” I asked. “What was wrong with just breaking in and stealing the picture?”

“Because Dr. Smoot would have remembered my interest in the picture,” he said. “I told Jimmy to make sure it wasn't obvious that the picture was the target. Of course, what I thought he would do was make a clean sweep. Empty the miserable little museum, so the photo would be only one of dozens of things lost. Still, the scavenger hunt wasn't totally useless. Bet your chief of police is pretty busy trying to track all the players down, much less check their alibis. Pretty easy for me to slip under his radar. And without you two around, the odds of anyone spotting the family resemblance and figuring it out are pretty low.”

Unfortunately, he was probably right. And even if the chief put the pieces together tomorrow, it wouldn't be much of a victory if we weren't around to share it.

“I need to finish this off.” Brimfield glanced at his watch. “I've got an eight a.m. breakfast meeting at the Old Ebbitt Grill. On Capitol Hill,” he added.

As if we cared where he was planning to celebrate our demise.

“So can we stop searching this filthy rubble?” Ms. Ellie asked.

What was she doing? Searching the filthy rubble was keeping us alive. Or did she have a plan?

“You've convinced me that it's useless,” he said. “Get up and go over there.”

Ms. Ellie began following his orders, but as slowly as possible. She glanced at me as if expecting me to do something. I moved as if I was about to get up, then faked a loud sneeze. Brimfield started.

“Bless you,” Ms. Ellie said.

“Sorry,” I said. “It's the ashes. They—
achoo
!”

Brimfield looked annoyed, but didn't seem to notice that along with jerking my head forward violently with each sneeze I was also inching forward a bit. I'd spotted a potentially useful item in the rubble.

“Bless you again,” Ms. Ellie said.

“Get on with it,” Brimfield snarled.

“They usually come in threes,” I said. “The sneezes, I mean.
Ah-ah-ah-choo
!”

With the third sneeze I jerked forward, grabbed the object I'd spotted—the detached head of one of Dr. Smoot's department store mannequins—and flung it at him. Then I rolled, so the shot he fired in my general direction went wide. And Ms. Ellie seemed to have gotten the hint that I'd be sneezing a third time—while Brimfield was focused on me, she lurched forward and slashed at him with the first weapon that came to hand—a wicked six-inch shard of glass from the broken display case.

“You old witch!” Brimfield exclaimed. He shoved her backward with his foot and raised his right hand to point the gun at her.

But while his attention was on Ms. Ellie, I'd grabbed up another weapon—the enormous brass spittoon—and hit him over the head with it. He keeled over into the remains of the glass display case.

“Get his gun,” Ms. Ellie said. “I'll get the roll of duct tape from upstairs.”

She strode out. I carefully plucked the gun from Brimfield's limp hand and moved back to a safe distance before calling 911.

 

Chapter 27

“So we thought Brimfield had an alibi,” I said. “What happened?”

After several lively hours out at the Haunted House, Randall and I were sitting back in the chief's office, sipping coffee and hot chocolate. Daylight was now peeping through the venetian blinds at the chief's windows. We were waiting for the county attorney to review the official statement to the press we'd crafted. The chief had my signed statement. Brimfield was safely locked up in the Caerphilly jail, awaiting the arrival of the high-powered Washington lawyer he'd summoned. Part of me wanted to go home and crawl into bed, but I knew I'd never get to sleep as long as there were still unanswered questions about last night's events, and as long as he'd put up with me, the chief's office was where I could get those answers.

“One learns to be skeptical of alibis,” the chief said.

“But his sounded like such a good one,” I said. “Hobnobbing with his congressman till the wee small hours of the morning, so he couldn't possibly be down here committing a murder—wasn't that it?”

“You haven't been following this morning's news, then,” Randall said, with a chuckle. “The representative from Brimfield's district just had a press conference. He's checking himself into rehab. Seems he has a drinking problem and is prone to blackouts. Can't remember anything that happened after eight or nine in the evening for the last several months.”

“Convenient,” I said. “Do you think he was lying for Brimfield or does he really not remember?”

“We may never know,” the chief said. “Whether or not he's actually an alcoholic, I suspect his handlers have decided it's a shortcoming his district will find more acceptable than being an accessory after the fact to murder. Suffice it to say that since last night's events, the congressman has demoted our suspect from ‘my old buddy Josiah' to ‘a constituent who has been persistently attempting to sway my position on agricultural tariffs.'”

“The county attorney is considering whether it's worth the trouble of filing charges of making false statements to the police,” Randall said.

“Meanwhile, now that we have probable cause,” the chief went on, “I'm subpoenaing the records from Brimfield's rental car. These days, many of the rental agencies equip their vehicles with GPS tracking devices.”

“So we'll be able to verify that he was in Caerphilly the night of the murder?” Randall asked.

“The odds are good,” the chief said. “And the fact that we caught him in possession of the murder weapon doesn't hurt either. Oh, and I've already heard from the San Francisco police.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “They're reopening the case on Arabella Walmsley's death.”

“And also the deaths of two Brimfield cousins who would have considerably reduced the amount of Josiah's fortune if they'd still been alive when his granddaddy died a couple of years ago,” the chief said.

“And the second victim, Wayne Smith—he was playing the game?”

“He was.” The chief shook his head sadly. “He broke GameMaster's rules by texting a friend about what he was doing. The last text the friend received said that Mr. Smith saw someone going into the museum, and he was going to see if he could sneak in behind him.”

“Brimfield?” I asked.

“Almost certainly,” the chief said. “In Mr. Brimfield's pockets, we found a brand new key wrapped in a piece of paper with a four-digit number written on it. Any minute now I expect Vern will be calling me to confirm that they are a duplicate of Dr. Smoot's key and a copy of the code to his security system—obtained, no doubt, by Mr. Green as part of his plan to steal the photos.”

“Well, that explains how everybody was getting into the basement without our knowing it,” I said. “And did he really think stealing that one copy of the photo was going to keep his secret from getting out?”

“Maybe that's one reason he killed his henchman,” Randall said. “Because he'd found out the guy had gone to all this trouble to steal something that was only a copy. I bet arson at the
Clarion
's offices was next on his list.”

“Chief?” Jabba the Hutt, still in costume, appeared in the doorway. “I just heard from Deputy Paulsen.”

“Since when do we have a Deputy Paulsen?” Randall asked with a frown.

“On loan from Goochland County,” the chief said. “Since he was unfamiliar with the local topography, I decided he would be of greater use guarding Dr. Smoot than patrolling the town. What does Deputy Paulsen want?” he added, turning back to Jabba.

“Dr. Smoot's awake,” he said. “And hopping mad at Brimfield for whacking him over the head and making him miss Halloween. Dr. Langslow and Dr. Carper are checking him out, and they'll call you in a little bit to let you know when Smoot's ready to make a formal statement.”

“Excellent,” the chief said.

Jabba disappeared.

“The pieces are coming together.” I could hear the satisfaction in the chief's voice. “All of the game players we've captured are talking now, and with your brother's offer, we expect even more to come forward to give information.”

“What offer?” Randall asked.

“Rob's offering a free copy of
Vampire Colonies II
to anyone who comes forward to talk to the police about the scavenger hunt,” I explained. “Not an advance copy—they get it on release day. But still—free is good.”