Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (23 page)

A single bullet killed Archie’s mini-laptop.

Mac joined the German shepherd in the wrestling match when he saw the red-head reach for the gun in her holster under her shirt. The man and woman struggled to get a hold of the weapon while Gnarly shook her arm as if to rip it from her body.

The red-head howled like the wounded animal she was.

Grabbing her free arm, Mac attempted to force her to release her grip on her weapon by pressing her forearm against the upper arm with all his weight while trying to keep her finger off the trigger.

“What was that?” Sabrina ran in from the kitchen. “Roxanne said it was a shot.” She stopped when she saw Gnarly and Mac wrestling on the floor with a woman. They were all covered in blood.

Archie plucked Mac’s gun from the floor where it had been dropped in Gnarly’s attack, while jumping to her feet.

“It was a shot.”

Roxanne told her sister. “See, I know a gunshot when I hear it.”

“You’re dead!” the red-head howled. “I’m going to kill all of you and hack you all into little pieces.”

“What!” Sabrina clutched her breast.

“Call the police, please?” Mac gasped out.

Archie tried to take aim at the intruder while keeping Gnarly and Mac out of the shot.

Sabrina pointed at the woman writhing on the floor. “Don’t you see? She stabbed Stephen with a steak knife and then killed Chris.” She ordered Archie, “Shoot her. Now. She’s a killer.”

“I’m trying to, but I don’t want to hit Gnarly!” Archie called out.

The intruder let out a high-pitched screech when Gnarly’s fangs found and punctured an artery that sprayed blood into Mac’s eyes.

Blinded, Mac clutched at his face, which allowed her to regain her grip on the gun and its trigger.

“Bastard!” Before she could pull the trigger, he grabbed the gun with both hands and plunged it down into her gut with the weight of his full body on top of her.

The gun went off.

Archie screamed.

His tail between his legs, Gnarly jumped back and ran to hide behind Archie.

Sabrina and Roxanne resembled twins with both covering their mouths with their hands.

The room was silent while they waited for someone to say something or move, or to simply do something.

Archie ran over to the two people lying motionless in a pool of blood in the middle of the floor. “Mac!”

Gnarly dug his muzzle into his master’s ear.

Taking a deep breath, Mac rose up to reveal his stomach and chest covered in blood. He clutched the gun in his hand.

The intruder’s stomach and chest were covered in blood around the hole where the gun went off while plunged up and under her ribs.

Both horrified at the sight and relieved that Mac was the survivor, Archie threw her arms around him. Seeming to sense a family hug, Gnarly jumped up onto them, smearing them in the intruder’s blood while licking Mac’s face.

“You didn’t want to shoot Gnarly?” he whispered into her ear. “What about me?”

Suddenly aware of what she had said, she smiled. “I knew you could take care of yourself. I never doubted it for a second.”

Chapter Thirteen

“I can’t believe Gnarly ambushed her,” David marveled at the shepherd, who sat obediently while the crime scene officer took mouth impressions for their investigation. “I’ve never heard of a dog actually ambushing an intruder.”

Mac was meeting with David outside while the officers investigated the scene inside the manor. Meanwhile, two officers were searching the Ford parked on the opposite side of the stone wall. Bogie was gathering information from the police database about Emma Wilkes on his laptop in his cruiser. Archie had already discovered much of the information he was uncovering.

For the second time in a week, Mac’s clothes were confiscated by the forensics team for evidence to confirm his account of how he had come to kill a woman who had taken him hostage outside his home. After changing his clothes, he had met with David outside, where they supervised Gnarly, who was threatening to lose his patience with the forensics officer and bite off his fingers.

Admitting that he was equally impressed, Mac said, “He wanted to take her down when she first got the drop on me, but I knew he’d be dead before getting one bite in if I let him. Luckily, he listened to me when I told him to hunt and then kill.”

“You told him?” David was doubtful.

“Did I tell you that the dog trainer discovered that Gnarly knows sign language?”

David corrected him. “You mean hand commands.”

“I mean sign language,” Mac said. “I didn’t believe it my-self until she showed me. She’ll tell him in sign language to get the banana off a table that has about ten objects on it, and not bring it to her, but to take it into another room and put it on a desk, and he’ll do it.” He muttered, “But let me tell him verbally to do it and he’ll pee on my leg.”

“But when the chips were down and you needed him, he listened,” David said.

“Gnarly is a rebel,” Mac agreed. “He had to get her from the rear or she’d have shot him. I gave him two signs. Hunt and kill. He understood and did what I told him for once. When he took off around the house, I was afraid that he may have misunderstood and thought I was giving him permission to hunt and kill Otis. Archie said he came tearing into the house through the back door and hid in the foyer closet, where he waited for us to come in so he could ambush her.”

“You never can tell what he’s going to do,” David said. “Last week, he was the neighborhood shoplifter. Today, he’s a hero.” Seeing Bogie climb out of his cruiser, he called to him. “Did you get anything that might tell us what this woman wanted from me?”

Bogie shook his head. “The SUV is a rental, rented in the name of Emma Wilkes, whose body was found this morning in the trunk of her car. The Washington police told me that the last time she was seen was Saturday night, which the ME puts as the time she’d been killed. She was last seen in a restaurant in Washington with a woman with curly red hair.” He gestured toward the inside of the house where the intruder with red hair was lying in a pool of blood on Mac’s living room floor. “There’s no ID or anything on her. Maybe we’ll get something from her fingerprints.”

“She’s a cop,” Mac stated without doubt. “Or at least she used to be. She was probably suspended for drug use.”

“How can you be so certain?” David wanted to know.

“She patted me down,” Mac said. “She knew what she was doing to be able to overcome and pat down a man who was bigger than her. You don’t just learn that on the streets. She’d had training and experience. At some point, she’d been a cop, which means her fingerprints are in the system.”

Rubbing his forehead as if to physically force everything to make sense, David paced the walkway in front of the house. When he reached the corner, he turned around to see that Mac was still sitting on the porch steps. “You’re sure she said she wanted everything we got on Stephen Maguire?”

“Everything.”

“If she had said the case files, I would think Hamilton Sanders was behind this. No one has seen Hamilton since yesterday, by the way. He’s staying at a motel in McHenry and their housekeeping said that his room wasn’t slept in last night. I think he skipped, which would make sense if he’s behind all this.”

“Great,” Mac muttered with sarcasm. “Most likely, this woman wanted you to bring everything in order to conceal what it was she really wanted. If she wanted a watch, and she said she wanted you to bring a watch, then we would know that the watch was what was significant and could trace it to who was behind it. By saying everything, it leaves us guessing like we’re doing now.”

“Hamilton is after the case files,” David said. “Natasha and the judge want some tape. I say we bring them all in for questioning.”

*   *   *   *

Natasha’s back was to Mac when he stepped up to the back of the love seat in the Inn’s lounge where she and Garrison were having their afternoon cocktails. As he came closer, he saw that she was checking for messages on her cell phone. “Dead people don’t leave messages, Natasha.”

Garrison splashed his drink on the front of his sweater.

Natasha whirled around.

Seeing Mac and David behind them, they gasped.

“Faraday, you look horrible,” the judge said upon seeing Mac’s unkempt appearance. “What happened to you?”

“I had a head-on collision with an assassin,” Mac said.

Natasha regained her composure. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the one someone sent to my home to retrieve Stephen Maguire’s belongings. She killed a potential witness in Morgantown last night. Today, she tried to take me and guests in my home hostage in exchange for all the evidence collected in the Maguire case. I killed her.” He leaned over the seat toward them. “Now you two have been very anxious to get your hands on his stuff.”

“Not anxious enough to break the law,” the judge said.

“All we want is a recording,” Natasha said. “Garrison told you about it. We came clean. Why would we send someone to go after you after admitting what it was we wanted?”

“I don’t know,” Mac replied. “You tell me.”

Natasha waved both hands in a gesture of innocence. “Whatever Stephen got into and got killed over, has nothing to do with me. This assassin you’re talking about is something completely different.”

“Mac,” Garrison said, “you have to believe us. That re-cording might be embarrassing, but it certainly isn’t anything worth sending a renegade cop to kill for it.”

Chuckling, Mac shook his head as he whispered to them, “I said nothing about her being a renegade cop.”

The judge’s face turned red.

Mac turned to the defense attorney. “You’re losing your touch, Natasha. You used to be the best liar in Washington. You slipped up when you said anyone could have slipped that arsenic into Maguire’s champagne. The police never determined what the arsenic had been in. He drank more than champagne that night. He also drank martinis and ate a lot of different foods. But you, for some reason, knew that the arsenic was in his champagne. How is that?”

For the first time in all the years Mac had known Natasha Holmstead, she was speechless.

They locked eyes in a stare down, each one daring the other to blink.

Behind him, Mac heard David speaking in a low tone into his radio.

The stare down ended with David’s hand on Mac’s arm. “Mac, we’ve got to go.”

Mac leaned in close to her as if to kiss her on the cheek. Instead, he whispered into her ear. “We’ll talk more about this later.”

David waited until they were across the lobby and out of earshot of the judge and Natasha before he announced to Mac, “A fisherman found Sanders’s body in the lake.”

*   *   *   *

“He’s been in the water for about twenty-four hours,” the medical examiner announced from where he was still examining Hamilton Sanders’s body on the dock behind the lakeside restaurant and lounge formerly known as Sully’s.

Since the business had been shut down, with no one to care for the establishment, fallen leaves had blown across the dock to fill up crevices and corners and behind the steps that led down from the parking lot along the side of the building.

Between the sun setting behind the mountains, the long shadows of the trees along the shore, the chill in the air, and the rustic décor of the abandoned outdoor cafe on the dock, the crime scene took on an eerie atmosphere.

“That’s why he didn’t go back to his hotel.” David asked the medical examiner, “Have you come up with a COD?”

She showed them Sanders’s bare stomach where she had opened his button-down shirt. Three stab wounds were visible above his navel and below his ribs. “He was stabbed before he went into the water.”

Mac searched around on the dock until he found a brown stain, which he pointed out to David. “Could be blood.”

David stepped closer to the back door of the restaurant. “Here’s another one.”

Like following bread crumbs in the woods, they followed drop after drop until they arrived at the back door.

“Do you think?” David laid his hand, encased in an evidence glove, on the door lever. When he pressed down, the door opened. It had been unlocked.

They stepped inside the darkened room that had only months before been a lakeside bar and game room. Two pool tables rested in the middle of the floor. Tables with chairs, some on top of the tables, others stacked, still others in their places next to the tables, lined the room along the wall.

“I used to come here to drink beer and play pool with my buddies.” There was a wistful note in David’s voice. “I think I even met a few of my old flames in this room.”

“Everyone has a Sully’s in their past.” Mac stepped up to one of the pool tables. “Didn’t Cameron say that she and Stephen Maguire played pool?”

“She said that she met him at a lakeside restaurant,” David said. “This was where they met.”

“It was also where some crazy woman went after Maguire with a screwdriver.”

One of David’s officers came in carrying a clear evidence bag. “They found this in the water, Chief.” He handed it to David.

David held up the bag for Mac to see the contents.

The bag held a screwdriver.

*   *   *   *

The Spencer police station was busier than Mac had ever seen it. With two murders at the Spencer Inn, an attack and shooting at Mac Faraday’s home, and a body found in the lake, the media was swarming for information to explain how everything was connected.

“Has Spencer, Maryland, gone to hell in a handcart since the death of its undeclared queen, Robin Spencer?” some concerned journalists were inquiring of their experts in the studio.

In either case, all twelve officers on the Spencer police force had been called in to do whatever they could to restore order to the resort town.

Bogie seemed to be waiting at the door with his notepad and a case file for David and Mac when they arrived from Sully’s. “They got an ID from the fingerprints on that whack job that tried to kill you, Mac. Her name is Celia Tennyson and you were right. She used to be an undercover cop.”

“Celia Tennyson?” Mac repeated the name.