Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (18 page)

David urged her to continue, “To which Maguire replied...”

“He said he’d have to think about it and wanted to get together for drinks at the Spencer Inn the next day to discuss it.”

“Then what?” David urged her to continue.

She asked, “Are you talking about at the place with the pool table on the lake or the Spencer Inn?”

“The place where you saw some woman try to kill him the day before he ended up dead.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “At the lake. After he put me off about giving me any money, I had to go take a leak. I was in the bathroom and I heard this big fight. It was, like, wild. I went back downstairs and there was this crazy woman there and she was screaming like a witch at Maguire. I couldn’t believe he was laughing at her.”

“What was she screaming about?”

 “She called him a liar and he laughed even more. That pushed her off the deep end and this bitch grabbed a screwdriver and went at him with it.”

David sat up straight. “A screwdriver?”

“I don’t think she’s talking about the drink,” Archie said.

Cameron continued, “Maguire took it off her and slapped her down. She took off running out of there.”

David frowned. “Did Maguire tell you who she was?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t give me a name. He just said that she was some crazy bitch who couldn’t take a joke. But I saw her. I could identify her if I saw her in a line up.”

“What did she look like?” David leaned toward her.

In the observation room, Mac and Archie pressed up against the glass.

“She had long black hair…”

*   *   *   *

“Mac, I hate to tell you this, but Christine had been in Spencer at least two days before Stephen Maguire got killed.” David glanced over his shoulder to the back of the cruiser where Mac was sitting in the back seat behind Archie.

Except for the occasional squawks over the radio, the inside of the cruiser had been so quiet since they’d left the police station to find their way to Bonnie Propst’s condo complex that all they could hear was Gnarly breathing in the seat next to Mac. Little had he envisioned his romantic evening with Archie would end with him in the back seat with a hundred-pound German shepherd with bad breath.

“I checked with the security cams at the main inter-sections in McHenry, coming in and out of Spencer,” David said. “We have her car on Route 219 Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Roxanne Burton stated that Christine had told her that she was coming out to the lake house to clear her head.”

David continued gently, “I’m beginning to think that maybe she did kill Maguire. We don’t have any actual evidence to prove she didn’t do it. The clone phone with her fingerprints on it was in her suitcase. This other person that was on the scene could be a witness to the murder. After-wards, they got into a fight. Christine fell, hit her head, and died. The witness panicked, cleaned up the scene, and ran.”

“Even before her illness, Christine wasn’t clever enough to have thought up anything like Maguire’s murder,” Mac said. “It was planned. The wig and smock and getting up to the suite by way of the service elevator. Christine has been out of her mind ever since she took up with Maguire. That’s what made her such a good target for a snake like him. No way could she have planned it well enough to have pulled any part of it off.”

Their silence made him turn to the only one he could turn to. “What do you think, Gnarly?” He stroked the dog’s back. Gnarly answered with a tongue that went into Mac’s ear.

Bonnie Propst lived in a high-rise condominium on a hill overlooking West Virginia University’s campus. Her condo was on the eighth floor of a twelve-story building. Late in the evening, they were lucky that many of the residents were coming and going. Most of them looked like academic types from the university. With the coming and going, it was easy for David in his police chief uniform to get a resident on the way out to hold the door of the main entrance open to allow them, with Archie leading Gnarly on his leash, into the lobby of the secure building.

“The same way Nita got up to the penthouse floor,” Mac noted.

David checked his notes. “Bonnie Propst lives in unit 812.”

On their way up to the eighth floor, Archie petted Gnarly, who sat obediently for her in the back of the elevator. His ears were up at attention. “I think Gnarly likes police work.”

“He’s not on the payroll,” David cracked.

“He was trained by the United States Army,” Archie reminded them.

“He also got a dishonorable discharge for what, we don’t know,” Mac said.

They found Apartment 812 to be a corner unit. After answering the door on the first knock, Bonnie Propst looked displeased when she saw David flash his badge and identify himself as the police chief investigating the murder of Stephen Maguire in Spencer, Maryland. 

Blocking their entrance into her condo with her door, she stated, “If you have any questions about Stephen Maguire’s murder, you’ll need to talk to my lawyer.” She reached be-hind her to snatch a business card from a table and thrust it into David’s hand.

While David tried to negotiate for some information, Gnarly looked up and down the hallway like a censor on duty.

Having met Douglas Propst, Mac remembered him as a vain, antagonistic man who hated not having control, especially over his women.

Bonnie Propst was overweight, something her late husband would have abhorred. In spite of her weight, she had a pretty face. Her clothes and make-up were tastefully applied and she was stylishly dressed in a business suit.

“Stephen Maguire is dead,” David said. “He was killed after having dinner with you. If there’s anything that you can think of—”

“It wasn’t a date,” she said. “That was the first time I had even met him.”

Mac interjected, “If it wasn’t a date, what was it?”

“Business,” she said quickly. “I own a security company. He was opening a business in Spencer and wanted to know about our services. It’s important to have a good security service, especially for a restaurant on the lake.”

“Do you always meet potential clients at five-star restaurants on Saturday night?” Mac asked.

“He set it up,” she answered. “I don’t get invited to the Spencer Inn very often. Who was I to argue?”

Mac and David exchanged glances. Mac chose to toss out the next question. “Did Stephen Maguire mention your late husband during the interview?”

“No,” she answered too quickly.

“Stephen Maguire was the prosecutor in D.C. where your late husband was tried twice for killing his first wife.” Mac said. “Maybe he had some questions about what your husband may have told you about his wife’s murder or the trials.”

 “He’s dead. Long gone,” she responded in a firm tone. “Look, I’m sorry Mr. Maguire is dead, but my dead and for-gotten husband doesn’t have anything to do with it.” She tried to slam the door shut but found the police chief’s foot in the way.

David explained, “Since you work in security and with the police, you have to understand that since you were the last person to see Stephen Maguire alive, we need to know what took place when you met him. What did you talk about? Did anything happen? Did anyone come to the table to talk to him?”

She hissed at him. “Surveillance cameras. Motion detectors. Police and fire alarms. That’s all we talked about. As for what we did, we met at the Spencer Inn for dinner at seven o’clock. I ate shrimp scampi over linguini. He ate the filet mignon. He paid for dinner. I came home. That’s all that happened.” After kicking David in the shin to get him to remove his foot, she slammed the door shut.

David turned to Mac who was petting Gnarly. “What do you think?”

“I think the woman doth protest too much.”

Gnarly exploded into a round of snarling barks. Archie held onto his collar while he lunged at the elevators.

The woman in the car jumped back from the hundred pounds of fur and teeth straining against the collar holding him back from getting at her. Keeping her eye on the dog, she moved slowly to get off the elevator.

Mac noticed that, at first glance, she appeared much younger than her true age. The red curly hair that fell to her shoulders and her athletic figure made him think she was more youthful than the hardness in her face revealed.

This woman has had a hard life.

“Sorry,” Archie gasped at her. “I guess he doesn’t like your perfume.”

“What’s gotten into him?” Mac joined her in grasping his collar.

David muttered, “I knew we should have left him in the car.”

The red-haired woman backed up against the wall to get as far away as she could from Gnarly, who continued to strain to get at least one tooth into her while Mac and Archie dragged him onto the elevator. Her glare said that she was unforgiving of the dog’s anger.

“What’s up with him?” David whirled around to glare at the dog once the doors were shut.

Archie suggested, “Maybe she had a particularly nice dog biscuit in her pocket that he wanted to steal.”

“I thought he was a B&E type of dog,” Mac said, “not an armed robbery sort.”     

Whining, Gnarly pawed at her.

“He didn’t like her,” she explained. “Not everyone likes everyone.”

“Just because he doesn’t like someone, he doesn’t have to rip her throat out,” David said.

Once they stepped outside into the parking lot, Gnarly exploded again into a fit of snarling barks. He lunged on his leash with such force, trying to charge across the parking lot, that Mac had to grab the end of the leash from Archie in order to drag the dog in the other direction to the cruiser.

“Gnarly has lost his mind,” David told Archie as she climbed into the front seat while Mac played tug of war with the dog to get him into the back. “I can’t take him with me anymore. He’s too unpredictable.”

“He was fine until he ran into that woman that came out of the elevator,” Archie said. “Gnarly has a good sense of people. Maybe she’s a bad person.”

“And maybe he’s nuts.” David fastened his seat belt and turned on the engine. “He’s stolen from all of your neighbors and has started shoplifting from the stores on the other side of the lake, damn it.”

They waited for Mac, who had to lift Gnarly up to set him in the back seat. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him.” He climbed in next to the dog and closed the door. “Something’s gotten under his skin.”

David put the cruiser into reverse.

Suddenly, Gnarly was in Mac’s lap. Barking and snarling, Gnarly pressed his nose against the window.

With the dog blocking David’s view in the mirror, he pressed his foot on the brake. “Mac, do something about him. I can’t see.”

“What are you so upset about?” Mac looked through the window to determine what Gnarly wanted so badly.

They were looking at a parking lot. It was only half filled with a variety of vehicles. Recalling that Gnarly was trying to get to the other side, Mac peered in the direction that the dog had tried to drag him. On the other side of the parking lot, far away from the main entrance, where the lighting wasn’t as bright, there was only one vehicle parked in the last space next to the rear exit, which provided easy access to the side roads out of town.

It was a black Ford SUV.

Where did I see a black Ford SUV?

“Mac, do something about Gnarly,” David was saying. “I can’t see to pull out.”

“Wait!” Mac pressed his index finger against the glass. “I think Gnarly is trying—”

The police cruiser jarred with the impact of a blow from overhead.

Archie screamed.

Mac would later recall thinking that he had never realized she was capable of reaching such high notes.

David whirled around to see what had shattered the wind-shield. He only caught a split-second glimpse of it before the front airbags exploded. The shock caused him to hit the gas pedal, which shot the cruiser backwards straight into the path of a van carrying a group of senior citizens. With no time to stop, the van plowed into the cruiser’s driver’s side, which set off the side airbags.

Gnarly, who seemed to be as stunned as everyone else, held Mac pinned against his seat while he cried into his ear. “Gnarly,” Mac moaned while patting the top of his head, “you’re a good dog, but I’m going to kill you.”

The inside of the cruiser seemed to take on the atmosphere of an electrified nightclub with the lights flashing and the sirens going off. The police operator’s voice called out from the radio to confirm notice that the cruiser had been in a collision and needed emergency response. In Mac’s aching head, she sounded like she was calling from another planet.

After David confirmed that they had indeed been in an accident, she asked, “What did you collide with?”

“A dead body.” 

Chapter Eleven

Smirking faces flashed before Mac in his dreams.

Freddie Gibbons Junior sneering during Mac’s interrogation about the seven innocent women he had raped in Rock Creek Park. Each attack escalated in violence. He won the status of killer after strangling his last victim.

He taunted the detective. “Yeah, I did it. What are you going to do about it?”

Then, there was Leo Samuels. The gold and diamonds he wore on every part of his body cost more than the house Mac would later lose to his wife. All had been paid for with blood money collected from his business of drugs and prostitution.

The day Samuels strutted out of the courthouse after Mac’s evidence against him had been tossed out, the gang leader made a point of plowing into the detective. “Later, sucker.” His breath felt hot against Mac’s face.

For an instant, Mac wanted to press his gun against Samuels’s stomach and pull the trigger. He wanted to give his victims the justice denied to them by the system. The same type of justice that someone had given Sid Baxter.

“There’s the bastard,” Mac’s partner cursed.

He started out of a sleepy trance he had fallen into while staring at a spot on the lid of his coffee cup to gaze across the street to where the creature posing as a human being going by the name of Sid Baxter had climbed out of his car. He was clutching an armload of what appeared to be mail to his chest. A plain brown envelope was tucked under his arm.