Twelve to Murder (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (18 page)

“Delaware?” David replied.

Deciding to think more on his idea, Mac set his phone down without dialing.

“That’s what she says,” Bogie said. “And she will only talk to the man in charge of the investigation in person. She claims to have evidence that’ll bust this case wide open.”

“Wide open?” While David was hopeful, he was equally doubtful.

“Her exact words,” Bogie said. “Are you and Mac coming in?”

David looked over at Mac, who was smiling at the doubt in his face. “We’ll be right there.”

Chapter Nineteen

“Zachery Harris’ address, according to his driver’s license, was in New Jersey,” David noted during the drive back down the mountain to the Spencer police department. “He drove all the way down here from his place in West Orange. What does he have to do with this woman in Delaware?”

Not as perplexed by the address as the police chief, Mac shrugged. “With the Internet, people are connecting all over the world. My son, Tristan, has professors, fellow students, and colleagues in science who he considers actual friends and mentors, even though he’s never met any of them. Whatever this woman has, she considers it important enough to get into a car and drive five hours to hand deliver it to us.”

At the station they found a woman who appeared to be in her sixties sitting on the sofa in the reception area. At first glance, she resembled a character out of a comic book. Her shape was round. Her hair was a thick cloud of blue curls that encircled her head. Her face was equally round. Her pantsuit was steel blue, which matched her hair. Even her big eye glasses were round and blue.

As soon as she saw David and Mac, she jumped to her feet and clutched a valise to her chest as if she feared they would snatch it from her. A wide smile stretched across her wide face when she looked Mac up and down.

Bogie came out of his office to make introductions. “Chief, this is Rita Jarvis, she was a friend of Zachery Harris—”

“Not his friend,” Rita interrupted the deputy chief before turning back to the police chief. She licked her lips. “I was Zachery’s literary agent.” She offered David her hand while clutching the valise with the other. “I take it you are the chief of police.”

“Yes, I am David O’Callaghan.” He shook her hand. “And this is—”

“Mac Faraday.” They were shocked by the squeal in her tone. “Robin Spencer’s only child.” Her eyes wide with adoration, she pushed past David to step up to Mac. “I loved your mother.”

Taken aback by her enthusiasm, Mac backed up a step. He could hear Tonya giggling behind him. “I’m glad,” was all he could think to say.

“I was her number one fan,” Rita gushed. “I read every single one of her books and short stories and saw all of her movies and went to see her plays in New York. I loved Robin. Half of my books have her autograph. I once stood in line four hours in New York to get her autograph on
Fatal Flight.
” Giggling she fingered her blue curls. “She liked my hair. She called the color stunning. I dye it myself.” She brushed the fabric on her dress. “Blue was Robin Spencer’s favorite color. Did you know that?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t.” Mac shot a glance to David behind her. The police chief’s expression mirrored his own thought.
This woman is a nut and she’s wasting our time.

“It is such a pleasure to meet you.” She offered Mac her hand.

Grasping her hand, Mac injected congeniality into his tone to ask, “I understand you knew Zachery Harris...”

“Yes, I did.” Nodding her head, she continued to gaze into Mac’s eyes. “You must get your eyes from your father. Robin’s eyes were violet.”

“My daughter inherited Robin’s eyes,” Mac said. “Tell me about Zachery Harris.”

She paused, as if to recall the purpose for her visit. “I was his literary agent.” She opened her valise and searched through the contents.

“So you told us already,” David said. “Did he tell you why he was coming to Deep Creek Lake?”

“No,” she said during her search. “He stopped by my place in Delaware on Thursday. I was surprised to see him, I mean, actually meet him. We’ve done everything via emails and phone calls. Even our contract was done over the Internet. That was how I fired him…with an email.”

“Then you weren’t his literary agent?” Mac asked.

“For his one and most likely only book.” With a giggle, she shrugged before resuming her search. “I guess now that he’s dead,
The Abduction of Lenny Frost
is his first and last book. I’ll be lucky if I can get another book published after that fiasco. The publisher is looking to get their advance back, including my ten percent—” She sighed. “I should have known better.”

She extracted a thumb drive from the pouch and handed it to Mac. “Zachery gave this to me and told me to find the police detective in charge of the investigation and to hand it to him personally if anything happened to him. I assumed when I saw on the news that he was killed in a police shoot out that ‘something happened.’” Her hand still in his, she smiled. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the detective in charge of the investigation would be Robin Spencer’s baby.”

Mac extracted his hand from hers and examined the thumb drive. “Do you know what is on this?”

“No, Zachery made me promise not to open it. He said to just give it to the police. He claimed he had no one else he could trust.” She licked her lips. “I guess this means that we’re working together on this case.”

“Not really.” David reached around her to take the thumb drive. “Thank you very much for bringing this in. We’re sorry that you drove all this way. We could have come to pick it up.”

Gazing up at Mac, she replied, “No problem at all.”

Glancing over the top of her head, Mac gestured with a jerk of his chin for someone to usher Rita out.

Bogie stepped forward to take her elbow. “Thank you very much for contacting us and bringing in this evidence. We have your contact information—”

“Oh, I’m staying at the Spencer Inn tonight. I was lucky to get a room.” She wrested out of Bogie’s grip and turned back to Mac. “Can I bother you for an autograph, Mac?”

Stunned, Mac stared at her with his mouth hanging open. “Autograph? Mine? Why?”

“You’re Robin Spencer’s son,” she gushed while extracting a marker from her bag. “You are the offspring of a literary legacy. No one in my book group will ever believe I met you if I didn’t get your autograph.” She held out the marker to him.

Mac’s cheeks felt like they were on fire when he reached out to take it. “I need a piece of paper to write it on.”

“You can sign it on my chest.” To their dismay, she unbuttoned the top of her blouse and held it open to expose the top of her left breast. “Just sign your name right here over my heart.”

Unable to contain himself, David whirled around on his heels and went into Bogie’s office. He slammed the door. Tonya bit both lips. Bogie’s mustache twitched while he fought to control his laughter.

Mac swallowed.
Let’s get this over with.
With concise movements, he signed his name across the woman’s breast as quickly as possible.

With the final sweep of his hand, she jerked forward and kissed him on the cheek before he had a chance to back away. “You have made me the happiest woman in the world, Mac!” She snatched the marker from his hand and practically floated out the door on a cloud of ecstasy.

The police station was enveloped in a stunned silence for a full moment after she closed the door. Bogie’s office door opened and David stepped out. Mac’s back was to him.

“Don’t say a word,” Mac said over his shoulder.

“About what?” David’s laughter opened the door for Tonya and Bogie to join in.

“Be thankful, Mac! At least she didn’t take off her girdle and throw it at you.” Tonya doubled over in her chair.

Wiping the tears from his eyes, Bogie grabbed the countertop to hold himself up.

“No one is going to say a word about this to Archie,” Mac ordered. “She’ll never let me live it down.”

“How much is our silence worth to you?” David asked while fighting to regain his composure.

“What do you want?”

David held up his hands to interrupt Bogie and Tonya from answering. “We should ask for something for the station.”

“Yeah,” Bogie agreed. “What do we need that we can extort from Mac?”

“An espresso maker in the break room,” Tonya said.

“No,” David said. “You’re thinking small. You need to think bigger.”

“Bigger than an espresso maker?” Tonya asked.

“I know!” Bogie snapped his fingers. “Just the thing. A helicopter.”

“Yeah!” David grasped Mac’s elbow. “That’s what we want. You buy the station a helicopter and we’ll forget all about your over-aged groupie.”

Mac looked from Bogie, who was nodding his head with a wide grin on his face, to David, who was practically jumping up and down like a child anticipating Santa’s arrival, to Tonya, who was looking at each of them with a grimace on her face. Clearing his throat, he folded his arms. “Okay, I’ll buy the station a helicopter if you can answer one question for me.”

“What’s that?” Bogie asked.

“Who’s going to fly it?”

His face blank of expression, Bogie looked over to David, who gazed back at him.

“I guess we’ll settle for an espresso machine in the break room,” David said.

Bogie agreed. “Sounds good to me.”

“There’s only one file on the thumb drive,” David announced after inserting it into his laptop up in his office. Tonya wasted no time in ordering the espresso machine while Mac and Bogie followed David up to his office on the second floor of the station to examine the contents of Zachery Harris’s thumb drive. “It’s a video.”

David clicked on the file’s icon to open it up and turned the laptop screen around for Mac and Bogie to observe. He moved his chair around the corner of his desk to view it as well.

Zachery Harris’s image filled the screen in a close-up headshot. It looked as if he had recorded the video with his computer’s webcam.

“Hello, I am Zachery Harris,” he told the camera. “If you are viewing this, then most likely, if my agent followed my instructions, you are a police detective investigating my disappearance, critical injury of some sort, or death. I don’t know exactly what happened to me, or how it happened, but I can tell you who did it and why. That’s why I’m making this video.

“They say the wise learn from the mistakes of the generation before them. Well, this is one of those moments.”

Zachery shot them a crooked a grin. “Today is Wednesday night and I am making this video in my home in West Orange, New Jersey. Tomorrow, I will be leaving to go to Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, where I will be preparing for my next project.”

He paused while a solemn expression crossed his face. “This Saturday night, I am going to kill Janice and Austin Stillman.”

“It’s a confession,” Bogie said.

“That’s what it sounds like to me,” David agreed.

Shushing them, Mac leaned over to rest his elbows on his knees. “Listen.”

“This was not my idea,” Zachery said, “and I did not plan this on my own. The idea and orchestrator of the plan was someone else. It is because I don’t trust him that I am making this video to make you aware of how this all came about.”

Pausing, Zachery leaned forward. When he sat back in his seat, he took a sip from a beer bottle. After placing it down, he wiped his brow with trembling fingers. His eyes glazed over while he seemed to gather his thoughts.

“Let me start at the beginning,” he resumed. “My father was Carson Drake, a great actor. I mean, he was a great talent. But, he wasn’t very tall or big like the major stars. He knew he had the talent. He was obsessed with being famous and became desperate. The last time I remember seeing him, he was happy. He was on his way out—all dressed up in his best suit that he always wore when he was going to a big event to mingle with big names. I was like ten years old. I told him to break a leg and he said that this night, he was really going to do it. From here on out, he was going to be running with the big dogs. That’s what he said.”

Zachery’s face twisted in grief. “That was the last time I saw him. The next thing I know, everyone was saying that my father was a monster who had kidnapped Lenny Frost, a big star, because he was jealous and that my father held him hostage for a million dollars, and then ran off—abandoning me and my mom and sister. Mom said it wasn’t true. Lenny Frost’s agent, Janice Stillman, had promised to represent her and my dad if he worked on this one project for her.

“A year later, when we found out that Janice Stillman was closing up shop and moving to the east coast, we put it together. Not only was my father the fall guy, but my mom was also. She was an actress and model. No one would work with her after Frost’s kidnapping. The Drake name had become mud.”

Grief turned to fury. “The last time I saw my mother, she said that she was going to collect what was rightfully ours. I admit she had had a lot to drink. She was drinking a lot after Dad disappeared. The foreclosure notice on our house was the last straw. I remember her smashing a bottle of vodka against the wall. She said she had proof of who was really the bad guy in all this. Dad had been set up, and she wasn’t going to be the nice lady kowtowing to the big dog anymore. She was going to clear Dad’s name and she didn’t care who she was going to bring down to make it happen. She left…and five days later, she was found tortured to death, tied to a chair, and beaten to a pulp, in an abandoned warehouse in LA. The Stillmans won again.”

Zachery stared into the camera in silence.

Feeling sympathy for the young man who had lost everything at such a young age, Mac, David, and Bogie watched him without saying a word.

“So you must understand why I don’t trust my partner in committing these murders,” Zachery said. “That’s why I am making this video.” He took another sip of the beer.

“Fast forward eleven years,” he said. “My sister Sela has studied and worked hard to become a martial arts stunt woman. She’s good at it, too. She works out at the gym every day. She also became hooked on steroids. But she’s smart. She got help and ended up at the same rehab center in Hollywood where they shoot
Star Rehab
. The celebrities actually have group therapy with the average folks.

“By that time, Sela and I had both changed our last names, so her name was not Drake when she was in group therapy with none other than Lenny Frost, who had no idea that Carson Drake’s daughter was sitting next to him when he confessed to killing a man. He gave no details except to say that it was self-defense. He was backed into a corner and felt like he had no option. If he was to survive, then he was going to have to be smarter. Life in Hollywood, Lenny said, was a case of survival of the fittest. If this man had kept his head and controlled his ambition, then he would not have had to kill him. Then, Lenny told them, he had to live with this killing on his hands and that that was what drove him to booze and drugs.”

“Is he saying Lenny killed Carson Drake?” David asked.

As if to answer David directly, Zachery said, “Lenny Frost killed my father.”

“What about the million-dollar ransom?” Mac asked.

David paused the video. “If Lenny killed Carson Drake in self-defense after he had kidnapped him, why didn’t he simply tell the police that?”

“The money,” Bogie and Mac said in unison.

“If Lenny had told the police that he killed Carson Drake,” Mac said, “they would have expected to get the ransom back. If Lenny hid the body and made it look like Carson Drake had run off with the money, then everyone would have been looking for him and expecting him to have it. Who would ever consider the kidnap victim would have the ransom?”

“Wait a minute!” David said. “Carson couldn’t have had the money for Lenny to take and keep for himself. It was never delivered to Carson. Derrick switched the bags.”

Slowly, Mac shook his head. “But according to Lenny’s statement to the FBI and his interviews with the media, he heard Carson Drake in a phone conversation with an accomplice saying that he had the money.”

“Somebody somewhere is lying,” Bogie said.

The corners of Mac’s mouth curled up. “Exactly.” He hit the button to resume play of the video.

“My sister played it cool,” Zachery recounted. “She never said a word to Lenny at the rehab center. When she told me, we took time to make our plan. We pieced together what we knew about the kidnapping, how Janice Stillman had closed up shop a year later and moved out of the area. Suddenly, they had a lot of money. We remembered how optimistic Dad was when he left that night because he was going to do this one last job, and then Janice Stillman was going to be his agent. Then, doors would finally open for him. We also recalled how Mom figured out who was behind everything and ended up dead when she confronted them. It was Janice Stillman.

“Then, I made an appointment to meet with Lenny Frost. I didn’t tell him who I was at first. He agreed to be interviewed, but he gave me the same bull that he had given to every other reporter about Dad taking off with the ransom to meet his accomplice and split the loot between them. After a couple of months, Sela and I both confronted him with the truth and what he had said in group.