Twelve to Murder (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (2 page)

Chapter Two

Spencer’s police chief was waiting in the driveway of the Stillman estate when Mac pulled his red Dodge Viper sports car in the driveway behind the black SUV cruiser. “SPENCER POLICE” was painted on the side in gold block letters.

It didn’t escape Police Chief David O’Callaghan’s notice when Mac slammed his car door shut. “Sorry I interrupted your hot weekend alone with Archie…sans Gnarly.”

Realizing his sign of impatience, Mac apologized. “It’s not your fault. Things were going south before you called.”

“Oh?” A grin crept to David’s lips. His blue eyes, identical in color and shape to those of his half-brother Mac, danced with amusement. In appearance, there was practically no denying that the two men were dipped from the same gene pool. They shared the same body build and facial features. The only real difference showed in Mac’s dark hair and coloring in comparison to David’s blond hair and features.

“Don’t tell me the perfect couple is having a fight,” David said to Mac.

“It’s not a fight.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of, Mac,” the smooth, cultured tone of Dr. Dora Washington responded from behind as she passed him on her way up to the front door.  “The most compatible couples do fight. It’s those who don’t that you need to watch out for.”

With her medical bag hanging from her shoulder, she led them up the walkway to the mansion’s front door. With her long, midnight-blue hair cascading to the middle of her back in a single ponytail and the striking features of a high-fashion model, Doc often caught people off guard when she arrived at a scene to probe dead bodies. Yet, within seconds of hearing her speak, they would be further taken aback by how brilliantly smart the beauty was.

“The reason?” She continued to tell them from over her shoulder, “Couples who fight air their differences and work out their problems. Those who don’t let issues fester until suddenly someone’s top explodes from their pent up anger, usually at which point it is too late to fix.” She turned around to flash Mac a wide grin filled with bright white teeth. “Considering how good of a shot Archie is with that pretty pink handgun she carries, be thankful that you two can air your differences while they’re little more than petty problems. I’d hate to have to come out to Spencer Manor after Archie has blown your head off for leaving the toilet seat up once too often.”

“Mac, haven’t you learned yet that when you live with a woman, you need to put the seat down?” Deputy Chief Arthur Bogart asked while holding the front door open for the medical examiner to step inside. Even at sixty-five years of age, the silver-haired officer had the frame and strength of a body builder. His thick mustache stretched across his face when he grinned.

“That’s one of the things I love most about Bogie,” Doc said while sneaking a coy grin in the deputy chief’s direction. “He’s such a gentleman.”

Bogie’s cheeks turned a deep red.

Before Mac could respond, David asked, “Is that what you and Archie are fighting about?”

“We’re not fighting.” Mac changed the subject. “Is there any sign of forced entry?”

“None,” Bogie said.

Mac pointed to the security company sign in front of the house. “How about the security system?”

“Son says it was off when he arrived an hour ago,” David said. “The security company is sending over a rep to check it out for being tripped and will send us a report of when it was activated and deactivated.”

“Where’s the son?” Mac asked.

“Being checked out by the EMTs.” The police chief pointed to the emergency vehicle at the end of the driveway. “He was hysterical. They’re sedating him.”

“Well, let’s get a look at the crime scene.” Mac brushed past Bogie to go inside the house.

One of the deputy chief’s bushy silver eyebrows rose up into an arch after Mac crossed the threshold.

“They’re fighting,” David mouthed to him.

“About Doc’s comment about me and the toilet seat—”

“Bogie, do I look stupid to you?” David cut him off with a chuckle.

Once he stepped inside, Mac noticed Doc Washington kneeling next to a body up on the landing of the stairway located across the spacious foyer from the front door. The man’s legs were sprawled down the first few steps that were coated in thick blood that had turned a reddish brown. His feet were encased in tan leather boat shoes. Blood splattered the wall several feet up behind where the medical examiner was kneeling.

“Poor guy. It looks like he didn’t know what hit him.” Shaking her head, Doc dug into her medical bag for a thermometer to take the man’s liver temperature in order to determine how long he had been dead.

Taking in a deep breath, Mac made his way up the stairs. As his head cleared the landing, he saw what he expected.

The victim looked like every other man. The guy you see every weekend doing yard work next door. His hair was cropped short to his head and liberally mixed with gray. His bloody body was clad in khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt.

Mac didn’t know anything about him—even his name—but he assumed he had been a fine man…and a good father. Otherwise, why would they need to sedate his son?

“His name is Austin Stillman,” Bogie told them from the bottom of the stairs. “Fifty-nine years old. Senior partner of a public relations firm in Washington. They handle a lot of businesses and politicians.” He gestured to the back of the house. “His wife’s body is in the kitchen.”

“Looks like he was coming down the stairs when he got it in the chest.” Mac noted the size of the holes in his chest and the pattern of the blood on the walls and stair landing. “There’s a second splatter pattern lower on the wall and here on the floor.” He glanced over his shoulder to where Bogie was at the bottom of the stairs. “The first two shots were at a high angle from down there. That dropped him and sent the splatter up high on the wall because he was standing. Then, the killer came up the stairs and shot him in the head while he was down to make sure he was dead.”

Bogie searched the floor around his feet. “No shell casings. Killer could have taken them with him. They found none in the kitchen, either.”

“The holes could be twenty-two caliber. I’ll have to extract the slugs to make sure.” After extracting the thermometer, the medical examiner noted the reading and the time on her watch. Instantly, she came up with the time of death. “He’s been dead fourteen to sixteen hours. That would put the time of death at between seven thirty and nine thirty last night.”

“Hey, Bogie,” David called from somewhere on the main floor below them, “where’s the victim’s son?”

“The last I saw him, he was in the back of the EMT truck being sedated,” Bogie answered.

His cell phone to his ear, David came hurrying into the foyer from the back of the house. “Chelsea just called. She’s watching a live report on one of the news shows. A reporter is interviewing the son right outside this house. If Fleming sees this, he’s going to have a cow—” His voice rose to a yell. “He’s telling them what he saw when he found the bodies! He’s giving a blow-by-blow—”

Bogie bolted out the door.

David cursed and turned to Mac. “He should have been locked up in the police car and taken down to the station for a statement.”

“Which proves that it pays to know people,” Mac said. “If your girlfriend wasn’t the county prosecutor’s paralegal, you wouldn’t have gotten the heads up that one of your suspects was making his case and pointing fingers right outside the house.”

“Is that why you used your friendship with Ben Fleming to get her a job working for him?” David asked him. “So that we would have eyes and ears inside the prosecutor’s office?”

Mac flashed him a coy smirk.

“Still doesn’t make me immune from getting chewed out by the prosecutor when his jury pool is muddied by leaks to the media,” David said. “We can only hope Ben and his wife were at brunch or some shindig while that was airing. Who let the victim’s son loose anyway?”

“Don’t blame me,” Mac said with a shrug, “I just got here. Can I see the wife’s body?”

“Damn it,” David muttered while turning around to lead Mac back to the kitchen.

“Sounds like someone is having a bad day,” Mac replied.

“At least my girlfriend isn’t mad at me.” David threw open the swinging door and stepped aside for Mac to enter the gourmet kitchen.

The layout of the Stillman’s kitchen was more spacious than the one at Spencer Manor. The appliances were black and the cabinets were white. The tile floor was stark white as well. The granite counters were pitch black.

The bright white color of the floor made the red of the wife’s blood jump out at Mac when he almost stepped on Janice Stillman laying face down right inside the door. Her head was a matter of inches from the door frame. She had three gaping holes in her back and one in the back of her head.

As Mac stepped around the middle-aged woman’s body, he saw her right hand positioned above her head with her index finger resting in a line of blood, which was part of a pattern. Kneeling, he studied it more closely. “What’s that?”

Releasing the door to let it close, David replied, “What does it look like?”

Mac looked at the bloody hand and the letters clearly spelled out in her own blood: L-E-N-N-Y. “Lenny? Who’s Lenny?”

“Lenny Frost,” David said. “According to the neighbors, Janice Stillman had been a talent agent in Hollywood before coming out east with her husband and son. Many of her clients were child stars or pop singers and teen idols. Now they’re on reality shows. When her husband opened up the public relations firm in Washington in the 1990s, she let them go and moved out here. About ten years ago, she opened up a club called Lenny’s.”

“Lenny’s Comedy Café,” Mac said. “I’ve been there. He’s raunchy.”

“He’s also got a horrible temper,” David said. “Bogie pulled up his rap sheet when we saw this. He’s got a long line of assault charges. While the club has Lenny’s name, she owns it.”

Mac looked up from the blood to ask, “Now that she’s dead, who does it go to?”

“Good question. Derrick. Her son. Their only child is the heir apparent.”

“Then he has motive,” Mac said.

“He claims he has an alibi,” David said. “Bogie has a call in to his date. It seems Janice Stillman bought the club as an investment for Derrick after he graduated from business school and to help out Lenny when his acting career went into the gutter after she left him.”

“And this is how he pays her back?” Mac scratched his ear. “Didn’t he win an Academy Award?”

“Supporting actor for playing the kidnap victim in the first Mickey Forsythe movie,” David pointed out. “He was eight years old. I’m sure if you look through your mother’s photo album you’ll see some pictures of him and Robin. They both won Oscars for that movie. She won for best screenplay. Now Lenny’s a second-rate stand-up comic.”

“How the mighty fall.” Mac stood up.

In the stark-colored room, the aluminum foil swan set in the middle of the island stood out like a silver bird in a black and white sea. “They’d gone to the Spencer Inn for dinner.” He picked up the foil package and sniffed it. “Chicken cordon bleu with hollandaise sauce.”

He turned back to the body. Her feet were pointing into the center of the kitchen with her head toward the door.

“She was killed before she had a chance to put this in the fridge, but she was running away when she was shot in the back.” He pieced the scene together. “They went to dinner at the inn. The killer came in to wait for them.” He went around behind the island and gauged the angle of the shots to the woman’s back. “The murderer hid behind the island. When she came in to put away the doggie bag, he waited for her to get to the island before making his move. Leaving the leftovers on the island, she turned and ran for the door, but she only made it halfway across the room before he shot her in the back.”

David picked up the scene. “Of course, the husband heard the shots and came running downstairs.”

“The killer ran to the bottom of the stairs to kill him when he hit the landing.” Mac was still staring down at the letters written in blood at his feet. “After shooting him in the head to make sure he was dead, the killer came in to finish the job here.”

“Hey, Chief…” one of Spencer’s police officers, a young man known as “Brewster,” startled the two men when he opened the kitchen’s deck door to shout in to them. “We got a witness.” He pointed to the lakeshore. “The neighbor over across the way may have seen the killer coming in.”

Mac followed David out onto the deck and around the corner of the house to where Officer Fletcher was taking advantage of a white-haired little woman’s offer of hot apple muffins.

“Good morning, Gretchen.” David bent over to hug the elderly woman before taking one of the muffins she held out to him.

“Davey Boy,” Gretchen grinned. “I haven’t seen you in ages. As soon as I heard there was a murder here I popped these muffins into the oven. I knew you and your men would be hungry.” She peered closely at Mac while holding out the basket of warm bread to him. “Is this Robin’s boy?”

His mouth full, David nudged Mac with his elbow. “Take one. Gretchen is the best baker on the lake. She used to have a bakery in McHenry. Most popular place in the area.”

“Baked holiday pies day and night through the winter,” Gretchen said.

“Around here, Thanksgiving wasn’t Thanksgiving without one of Gretchen’s pumpkin or apple pies.”

When Mac took a bite of the warm muffin, he could see that David wasn’t exaggerating. Gretchen could give Archie a run for her money when it came to baking. The elderly woman eyed him while he chewed and swallowed the first bite of her muffin. “Thank you,” he mumbled around the baked good. “This is a nice treat.”

“So you’re Robin Spencer’s little boy?” she asked. “The one she based Mickey Forsythe on?”

“I’m not Mickey Forsythe.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

“Robin wrote her first book back when I was a toddler being raised by my adoptive parents,” Mac argued while David finished off his muffin and started on a second one. “Mickey Forsythe was a total figment of her imagination.”

“You look like him and you have a dog just like Diablo.”

“Diablo is less demanding and better behaved than my dog,” Mac said.

“Gretchen,” David cut her off when the little woman was about to interject with her next line of argument, “did you see anything last night?”

“I think I saw the killer breaking in,” she said in a hushed voice. “But I didn’t know at the time that that was what he was doing.”

“Tell me about it,” David replied.

“It was seven thirty last night,” she said. “My show was over, and that’s the time that I go to bed. So, just like always, I went to take Percy outside.” She told Mac, “Percy is my dog. He’s a little Maltese. Tiny thing. Nothing like Diablo. My Percy, bless his heart, is as dumb as a stick, but I still love him.”

David gestured for her to get to the murder.

Thrusting a second muffin into Mac’s hand, she said, “So last night, I take him outside and we’re standing out there in the dark when I hear this bizarre noise. It was like one of those rock guitars going through a whole lot of notes all at once—like they used to do with pianos when the guy would sweep his fingers across the keyboard real fast.” Her eyes grew big. “Well, I don’t play a guitar and I know none of the neighbors are into rock guitars, except maybe Derrick Stillman. So I look over there and that’s when I see that Mr. Stillman’s boat is docked in the lake and there is a light on the back deck…and he was standing right under it—plain as day.”

“He who?” Mac asked. “Derrick Stillman? Their son?”

“No,” Gretchen said with a shake of her head. “This young man had bright red hair. You couldn’t miss it on account that he was standing right under the light. He was playing with his cell phone. He put it into his pocket and then he pulled up the hood on his hoodie, and I saw him use the key to unlock the door and go inside.”

“Bright red hair,” David repeated.

“Like fire,” Gretchen said. “Like that comic friend of theirs that they had here last year. The obnoxious one.”

“Lenny Frost?” Mac asked.

Gretchen shrugged. “Maybe. I remember people telling me he was famous.” She confessed, “He was too far away for me to see his face, but I saw that hair all right. Couldn’t miss it.”

“One of the things Lenny was famous for was his bright red hair,” David noted in a low voice while Mac and he went back to the house after thanking Gretchen for the muffins and ordering Fletcher to get her statement.

“If you were going to break into a house to assassinate two people,” Mac asked, “wouldn’t you make sure your cell phone was off and put up the hood on your hoodie before entering the scene?”

“Why, Mac, what are you saying?” David cocked his head at him.

Stopping, Mac turned to him. “If this case was so easy, why did you call me in?”