The Drake House (12 page)

Wayne and Nick were talking to each other on the other side of the room. Nick had thrown on a T-shirt over his jeans, but his feet were still bare. There was dried mud caked to the bottom of them as he left a trail through her kitchen. Nancy was going to be mad when she got back.

She couldn’t get the ringing fear out of her head long enough to grasp what they were saying. Someone had been out in the woods. With a gun. In her demented nightmare, she wouldn’t even have known if she’d been shot. Nick could’ve been killed. Brad too.

It was all so crazy.

“Maybe it was just a hunter,” she said out of nowhere.

All three men looked at her as if she’d grown a second head. She shrugged. So much for theories.

Wayne pulled something from his pocket and walked to her. “I want you to wear this.”

Trisha looked down at the blue band, a small black box attached to the middle. “You’re putting me under house arrest?” she asked, horrified.

He knelt in front of her. “Look, apple, I can’t make you do anything. But what if Nick hadn’t seen you? We don’t know who was out there tonight. This alarm will warn us when you leave the house at night. You can take it off in the morning if you want. That has a regular snap.”

Nick stared at the floor with a clenched jaw. He wasn’t going to help. Brad wasn’t either by the look of him.

“How am I supposed to sleep in that?” she snapped.

Nick wouldn’t look at her when he answered. “It goes around your ankle. You’ll hardly notice it.”

“And what? Some alarm will go off, alerting the whole house every time I walk out the front door?”

Nick looked at her then. “It’ll send a text to my cell, alerting me only. I’ll set it to only activate after ten.”

Brad finally spoke up, only to agree with them. She was cornered. “Fine,” she said.
What point is there in arguing?

Wayne fastened the thing around her right ankle, snapped it in place, and stood. His weight and age causing a dissatisfied grunt.

Nick crossed his arms. “I need to talk to her alone.”

Brad walked over to her, placing his arms on either side of the kitchen chair she was seated in. “Wear the damn thing, Trish. It’ll make me feel better. And from now on, no one goes out alone until they figure out who was out there tonight. I'm staying here.”

Trisha swallowed and nodded as he straightened. “Wayne, can you walk Brad back to the ranch?”

“Sure thing, apple.”

Trisha stood and locked the door behind them, keeping one of the blankets wrapped around her shoulders. She watched until they were out of sight before turning to Nick.

His arms were still crossed, the muscles in his biceps bulging, the hard lines around his mouth telling her way more than any words would.

He glanced at her ankle alarm before returning his emerald eyes to hers. “This was a little more than
some
nightmare.”

“It’s not always like this. They’re worse in the spring.”

“This is as bad as they get?”

She nodded.

“Have you ever had a sleep study done?”

“Yes, with little help. They kept me for three nights and concluded I sleepwalk. They tried to give me something to help, but I couldn’t work the next day.” Trisha rubbed her eyes. “And it still happened.”

“What do you remember?”

His voice wasn’t as hard now, but he stayed on the other side of the kitchen. “Nothing,” she said. “Not much, anyway.”

It wasn’t the truth, but trying to explain the terror and madness she experienced while asleep would only come across as crazy. There was no point in reliving it. They were just dreams. Scary, stupid dreams. The way he was looking at her said he didn’t believe her lie either, but he said nothing.

“Brad took me to a hypnotist a couple of years ago. No one else knows. He thought maybe remembering something would help. It didn’t.”

He looked away. And that look in his eyes was why she was such a private person. Why she never took a lover for long.

“What are you going to do about the man in the woods?”

He cleared his throat. “I’ll take a look around when it’s light out. But I suspect I won’t find anything.”

Trisha was tired. Bone tired. She couldn’t stand much longer. Turning on her heel, she went into the living room. Nick followed and sat next to her on the couch, turning his body toward her. His eyes took in every inch of her, leaving a scalding path as they roamed, before raising his gaze to her eyes.

“Why don’t you head up to bed. I’ll keep vigil.”

Trisha shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep if I wanted to.” She looked around the room, trying not to ask what she wanted to know. “Do you think the man in the woods has anything to do with the calls?”

Nick ran a hand down his face. Then his cell phone rang. Standing, he fished the phone from his pocket and checked the ID. “It’s Wayne,” he said to her before taking the call.

After listening a few moments, his back went rigid as he stood eerily still.

Trisha stood, the blanket falling onto the couch, alarm consuming her. “What? What is it?” she asked as he returned the phone to his pocket.

“Something happened down at one of the ranches.”

“Oh, God. Is Brad okay?” Her heart was thumping so hard she thought she’d have a heart attack right there.

“He’s fine,” Nick answered shortly. “But one of your other workers isn’t. Get dressed. We need to go down there.”

“Nick, what’s going on?”

“Just get dressed.”

****

Nick
knew
something wasn’t right straight from the get-go. As if what Brad told him about the phone calls wasn’t enough, Trish’s nightmares were. He’d had some himself after the shooting, and the department shrink told him it was normal. He threw words around like “trauma” and “post-traumatic stress.”

Normal, my ass.
There wasn’t anything normal about waking up in a cold sweat having your worst nightmare replayed over and over again. And he didn’t sleepwalk, Trish did. It must be terrifying.

The shrink also told him that dreams were the subconscious way of working out problems. Reoccurring ones typically were linked to memories. Could Trisha know something she shouldn’t, and possibly couldn’t remember it? Something apparently important enough to kill one of her men over?

If this is even related.

He didn’t see how it couldn’t be. Phone calls. A chopped tree. A guy standing in the orchard pointing to her. Someone in the woods with a gun.

Now, murder.

As he paced across the property to the ranch houses, Trisha’s back was rigid as she tried to keep up. Her breaths were visible in the frigid air due to the temperature dropping. The weathermen were threatening a spring snow for tomorrow. It smelled like snow was coming.

“What’s wrong, Nick?” she asked again for the hundredth time, her voice laced with concern.

He didn’t answer her this time either. He didn’t like making assumptions without having anything to go on. He needed to see for himself. Nick was the only one in Small Rapids with any recent crime scene evidence training. Sucked he had to use it. Sucked even more that a sleepy little town needed him for it now. It was the reason he accepted the job after the shooting, so he wouldn’t have to do this again.

He swallowed as they approached the house. Brad was pacing and biting down on his thumbnail when he saw them coming. Wayne was standing in the doorway to the ranch house in question.

“Where is he?” Nick asked.

“The back bedroom,” Wayne answered with a nod over his shoulder.

“Anything get trampled or messed with?”

Wayne shook his head at the same time Trisha boomed, “What is going on?”

Brad went to her and rubbed his hands up and down her arms, demonstrating way more care than Nick could’ve. That pissed him off, but there was no time to dwell on it. A man had just been murdered. One of her workmen. On her property.

“Andrew McArthur’s dead, Trish,” Brad said.

If she had any color left in her face, it was gone now. A hand flew to her mouth seconds before she began trembling. “What…” She cleared her throat, trying at bravado. “What happened?”

Brad looked to Nick for answers. Nick tore his gaze from her, breaking all ties that made this personal.

“Stay here,” Nick said to them, ice forming across his skin. He looked at Wayne for the all clear to go in.

“I called the Madison P.D. They’ll be here within the hour,” Wayne said, handing over a pair of latex gloves and shoe covers. “They demanded we not touch anything.”

Nick hadn’t planned on it. He entered the house. One foot in front of the other, he walked in a straight line to avoid contaminating any evidence. It was still dark, so he paused in the hallway to allow his eyes to adjust.

The last room on the left had the coppery scent of blood as Nick approached. God damn, he hated that smell. Andrew McArthur was sprawled on the hardwood floor near the foot of the bed, one hand over his throat and the other splayed out next to him. His wide, lifeless eyes focused on nothing.

Nick didn’t see any blood. Pulling a penlight from his back pocket, he ran the beam along the floor, near the body. No blood. “Where is the smell coming from?” he muttered to himself.

He needed to stay clear of the room, as he wasn’t in full gear and didn’t want to damage any forensics, but from his view in the doorway he could see ligature marks around Andrew’s throat, guessing the cause of death. No rope. He frowned.

Strangulations were the worst. No blood evidence, no gunshot ballistics. It took a damn cold person to strangle someone. To hold a person for three to seven minutes while their life slipped away.

“Shit,” he said, glancing around.

Andrew’s overnight bag was still zipped and on the bed. The bed was made. A wooden rocking chair in the corner was upright. So was the lamp on the nightstand. No sign of a fight. The window was closed, but the blinds were open. His flashlight beam froze on the wall to the left of the window. There was the source of the metallic smell.

You were warned.

Written in what must be blood on the wall. The hairs stood up on his neck. His blood turned to ice. The morbid message referred to the phone calls. Killing Andrew was about staying away from Trisha. It was about
them.
Someone went to great lengths to make their point clear.

And it
was
personal.

****

Detective Jeff Lafferty of the Madison Police Department was a middle-aged man with a dark, army-approved buzz cut and was about as intimidating as a dust bunny at five feet, five inches tall. His forensics team was in the house now, securing the scene, while Brad, Nick, and Trisha were being questioned at the main house.

Trisha couldn’t get warm.

Andrew is dead.
Andrew who called her ma’am like a southern boy and smiled as if there was always something in life to smile about. Who would want someone like that dead? What kind of crazy bastard could kill someone like him?

Andrew had been a classmate of herself, Brad, and Chuck growing up. Though she was closest to Brad, the four of them were friends, much more than coworkers, and she much more than their boss. It was irrevocably devastating.

Andrew was dead and it was her fault. She didn’t even know why.

Lafferty’s voice was nasally, grating on her very short nerves. Trisha tried to keep calm, knowing freaking out wasn’t going to help. Instead, she focused her gaze out the window toward the sunshine, concentrating on what they knew.

Time of death was approximately four a.m. according to liver temp. Trisha shivered. Anything that referred to liver temp didn’t sound good. It appeared as if he had been strangled. There were no signs of a break-in, indicating Andrew either left the door open or invited his murderer in. That thought alone would keep her up for a week. There was no apparent source for the blood the killer used to write his message on the wall. The message playing over and over in her mind.

You were warned.

Did the killer mean Nick? Her? Her parents, since they got calls when she was a kid too? It was all so close to home. In such a small town. Things like this didn’t happen here. She’d even heard Wayne tell the detective that their last homicide was twenty years ago, and it was a domestic case where a husband beat his wife to death.

Trisha felt like a statistic, like she didn’t recognize anyone or anything.

“Ms. Eaton,” Lafferty called to her from the living room chair, the late day sunshine reflecting off an ugly belt buckle. “I’ll need all the contact information you have for Andrew McArthur.”

She nodded. “Of course,” she said, standing. “My records are in the office. But can I…” Her voice trailed off, realizing what she was about to say. Andrew’s parents had to hear this from her, not some police detective they didn’t know. She straightened. “Can I call his parents first?”

“Go ahead.”

Without a look toward Brad or Nick, she went into her office down the hall and closed the door. With shaking hands, she pulled out Andrew’s file from the tall, gray cabinet and closed her fingers tightly around the manila envelope for strength.

Trisha rounded the oak desk, sat in the high back office chair, and dialed the phone, connecting to the McArthur residence before she lost her reserve. When Andrew’s mother came on the line, Trisha’s voice finally broke.

With her chest aching, she hung up after telling his mother all she knew and that the police would be there soon. She pressed her palms to her eyes, trying to calm down before going back out and facing the guys.

Nick had been like stone. He was a trained detective, and Trisha knew he’d seen this before. But, it had to be hard on him. The warning on the wall seemed directed right at them. It would really help if they had any idea what the killer was talking about. If Nick had any indication, he wasn’t telling.

Standing, she made copies of Andrew’s file and closed the office door behind her. The sooner she got the police out of here, the sooner she could call her workers and have alone time to grieve.