Murder in Cottage #6 (Liz Lucas Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) (12 page)

The drive to the airport, parking,
and security all went smoothly. They still had a half hour until their plane
was scheduled to leave. “I need to call Roger. I’ve avoided talking to him all
afternoon, and I can’t put it off any longer. I’m really dreading it. Wish me
luck,” Liz said.

She punched in his number
on her cell phone and took a deep breath. He answered on the first ring. “Hi
Roger. I’m at the San Francisco airport, and I’ll be taking off in just a few
minutes, so I can’t talk for long. I left a message on your voice mail earlier
today. Did you have any luck?”

“Yes. I’ll get to that in
a minute. I’m a little calmer now than I was when you first called, and while
intellectually I understand what you’re doing, emotionally I don’t like it at
all. Anyway, we can talk about that another time. First of all, my
dermatologist friend said that phenol is the ingredient that probably did a
number on your face. He said there’s not much you can do but put a lot of cool
water on it, and he also said aloe vera would be fine and would probably help
to  reduce the itching. Finally, he indicated that your face will gradually get
back to normal, but it will probably take a couple of weeks.”

“Thanks. That’s exactly what
Judy’s friend said who’s a facialist. I guess I’ll have to live with it, but at
least I’m not going to die from it.”

“That’s one thing we can
be thankful for. Okay, here’s what I’ve got for you. I called a friend of mine
who’s with the San Francisco Police Department. He was able to trace Gina’s
recent transactions on her credit card. She flew to Seattle on Alaska Airlines
last night, rented a car, and checked into a motel located near the airport
called the Day and Night Inn for two days. Her mother still lives in
Bellingham, so I called a captain at the Bellingham Police Department and told
him everything we know. I’ll give you her address in a minute. Does that help?”

“Very much. Thanks. Roger,
I can tell from your voice you’re really angry and I’m sorry, but this is
something I have to do to protect the reputation of my spa. I just have to do
it. Please, try and understand.”

“Liz, I’m trying, I really
am, but I’m so worried about you. Is this something you do a lot? Go off
half-cocked? This is a side of you I haven’t seen before, and quite frankly,
I’m not sure I like it. Gina sounds like she’s gone over the edge, and I’m
concerned about your personal safety. Will you promise me you won’t do anything
dangerous? Let the Bellingham Police Department take care of it. Please, for
me.”

“I’ll be fine, Roger, and
no, I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ll be home in a day or two,
and we can put this behind us. Honest. I’ll call you tomorrow. Nite.”

After she hung up from
talking to Roger, Liz turned to Judy and said, “Judy, when we get to Seattle we
need to rent a car and find the closest motel to the Day and Night Inn. That’s
where Gina’s staying. She made a reservation for two nights. We can stake out
the motel in the morning and follow her to see what she’s up to.”

*****

Liz wasn’t sure what Gina had
planned, but her niggle told her to find Gina, follow her, and tell the police
what she observed. She hoped they weren’t too late to stop her from whatever
she was planning to do to her mother.

The next morning Liz woke
Judy up before dawn. They hurriedly dressed, drove their rental car in the
gentle rain to the nearby Day and Night Inn, parked in a remote area of the
parking lot, and waited for Gina to leave the motel.

Several hours later Liz
roused Judy from her nap and said, “Look, there she is. I’m sure it’s her.
She’s got a scarf wrapped around her head, and she’s wearing sunglasses. I
mean, come on, you wouldn’t wear sunglasses when it’s raining unless you didn’t
want to be recognized.

“I think you’re right.
Let’s go.”

Gina drove to the nearby
I-5 freeway and turned north. Judy followed, staying several car lengths behind
her. On the north side of Seattle, Gina exited the freeway and drove into a
Wal-Mart parking lot. Judy parked two rows behind her. Gina walked over to the
entrance of the store and handed some money to a man who was sitting at a table
under a sign that read, “Help Homeless Veterans.”

“Did you see her just give
money to that man?” Judy asked. “I never would have thought she’d give money to
some cause. That seems so out of character from what we know.”

“When I tipped her after
my treatment she mentioned she gave half of her tips to homeless people. I
remember thinking I hadn’t seen too many homeless people in Red Cedar and yes,
I agree, it seems out of character.”

They followed her into the
store. Both of them wore hooded plastic raincoats they’d purchased at the
airport convenience store the night before. Their faces were still various
shades of reddish purple, but far less noticeable with the raincoat hoods
surrounding them.

“Liz, she’s looking at
phones. Everyone her age has one. Why would she need a second one, and why
would she come here to buy it? If she needed to buy one, she could have bought
it much closer to the motel. That’s the only thing she’s buying. How strange.”

The two women hurried back
to their car, unnoticed. They watched as Gina got in her car and reversed
directions, driving south, back towards Seattle. She went past the Seattle
off-ramps and exited the freeway close to the airport, not far from where
they’d started out a couple of  hours earlier. After several turns, she parked
her car in a hardware store parking lot. Judy stayed in the car while Liz
followed Gina into the store. Gina paid for a box of large galvanized roofing
nails and left. From there she drove to a nearby mall anchored by a large Sears
store. Judy followed her to the small appliance department where she bought a
pressure cooker.

“Liz,” Judy said, when she
returned to the car, “She just bought a heavy duty metal pressure cooker. So
what is she going to do with a phone, roofing nails, and a pressure cooker? I
can’t imagine what she wants them for.”

“Wait a minute. I think I
remember reading something about those things being in the bomb that went off at
the Boston Marathon. I wonder if she’s planning on doing something like that.
Look. Now we’re in a light manufacturing area. What could she possibly want
here? Uh-oh, I think she’s driving into that gun shop parking lot.”

They looked at each other,
both of them realizing that this could potentially be very dangerous for
everyone. Guns killed and there could only be one reason Gina was buying
something from a gun store. Liz followed her into the large store and pretended
to be captivated by the photos on the wall of Weimaraner and Brittany hunting
dogs working in fields with their owners. She was able to get close enough to
eavesdrop on the conversation between the clerk and Gina.

“May I help you?” the
bearded grey-haired man in a red flannel shirt and jeans asked.

“Yes, I’d like to buy some
gunpowder. I’m having a real problem with snails, and I read if you mix beer
with gunpowder and put it in shallow dishes, they’ll crawl in and die. They’re
eating all of my plants, and I don’t know anything about gunpowder. Do you have
different kinds or strengths? I want the strongest I can get, so I don’t have
to do this again.”

“That’s a new one on me,”
he said laughing. “Yes, there are different strengths. Let me get you a can of
our most potent gun powder. It comes in an eight pound container. That should
be enough to take care of the little devils, but at least they’ll die happy.
Me, if I’m ever in an accident, I want to get hit by a truck that’s loaded with
beer,” he said, laughing.

Gina paid him and got back
in her car. Liz discreetly followed her at a safe distance. “Judy, she bought
eight pounds of their strongest gunpowder. You wouldn’t need gunpowder for a
gun, but you would for a bomb. What would she know about a bomb? If it’s not
that, I can’t imagine what she’s going to do with it.”

Once again she returned to
the I-5 and headed north. Two hours later she exited the freeway a few miles
south of Bellingham and parked in the lot of a fast food restaurant.

“Thank heavens,” Liz said.
“I’m starving. Let’s drive-thru and order. That way we can park in the rear of
the lot and be ready when she leaves. I’m not surprised she’s near Bellingham,
I just can’t figure out what she has planned. Do you think I should call the
Bellingham Police Department and tell them what we know?”

“Not yet. Let’s see what
happens.”

Forty-five minutes later
Gina left the restaurant, got in her car, drove a few blocks, and pulled into a
large shopping mall anchored by a movie theater complex. She got out of her car
and headed towards the movie complex.

“Park over there. We need
to find out which movie she’s going to see.”

Liz overheard Gina tell
the cashier that she wanted “One ticket for Midnight Charm.” They followed her
into the theater and split up. Liz sat three rows behind Gina on the right, and
Judy sat six rows back on Gina’s left, one seat over. She wanted to see if Gina
was texting anyone. Gina sat quietly waiting for the movie to begin, eating a
large box of popcorn.

Two hours later the movie
ended. Judy and Liz followed her as she strolled in and out of the shops in the
attached mall and appeared to be killing time. She spent a long time in the
Barnes & Noble bookstore, going from section to section, looking first at
one book and then another. At 6:15 she began walking in the direction of the
parking lot. She drove out of it at 6:30, and got back on the I-5 freeway. Ten
minutes later she pulled off at a rest stop and parked at the far end, away
from any cars. She opened the door on the passenger side of the car and
inserted her key in the trunk, raising it. She made several trips back and
forth, taking various objects from the trunk and putting them on the passenger
seat and the floor.

“Judy, I’m glad you threw
in those binoculars. Are you picking up anything?”

“Nothing new. She’s got a
Sears bag, a sack from Wal-Mart, a sack from the hardware store, and an
unidentified sack. Now she’s taking the big pressure cooker pot with the lid
out of the bag. I can’t figure out why she’d have a pressure cooker. I remember
my grandmother had one, and I don’t think I’ve seen one since.”

“I don’t have a good
feeling about this,” Liz said. “I think I better call the police in a little
while. Roger gave me the number when I talked to him last night, and Judy,
here’s something I’ve been thinking about.”

“What?”

“Isn’t it coincidental
that it looks like she’s planning to, and I hate to say it, kill her mother,
and someone was murdered at the spa while she worked there? If your daughter’s
theory is correct about using phenol on us because we remind her of her mother,
do you think she killed Barbara because she was about her mother’s age? And
something else occurred to me during the movie.

“When Stephanie and Nikki
came to talk to Bertha and me yesterday morning, one of them mentioned Gina had
said that one of her clients really looked like her mother. They said she was
laughing and saying her mother would get hers too. They didn’t know what she
meant by that, but they thought it was kind of weird. She very well might have
murdered Barbara, and now she plans on killing her mother.”

“Take a seat,” Sgt. Driscoll of the
Bellingham Police Department said to the men and women in uniform who stood in
front of him in the squad room.

“Here’s what we’ve got.
There’s a woman, Gina Anders, who’s been traced to this general location from
San Francisco. Looks like she wants to do a number on her mother. The captain
got a call last night from a San Francisco policeman, and he passed the
information on to us. Evidently this Anders woman worked as a facialist at some
spa not too far from San Francisco and did a real number on the faces of a
couple of older women. She smeared some type of caustic gel on their faces when
she gave them a facial. The daughter of one of the victims is a psychologist,
and she thinks this Anders woman was taking revenge out on the women because
they’re around the age of her mother. That’s the background.”

“Sarge, what in the devil
does some spa have to do with us?” Jim Armstrong, a rookie cop asked.

“Hang on, Armstrong, I’m
getting there. Gina’s mother called her the night before she did a number on
the women at the spa and told her she’d married Gina’s boyfriend. Her roommates
told the spa owner that several times Gina said she wished her mother was dead.
She hitched a ride with a spa employee to the Red Cedar bus depot and told him
she was going to San Francisco and then flying to Seattle. We got her phone
records and found out the call Gina received was placed from a number here in
Bellingham. We traced it to her mother’s home. We also got Gina’s credit card
records and found out she did fly to Seattle from San Francisco night before
last. She rented a car and made reservations for two nights at the Day and
Night Inn near SeaTac airport, but the trail’s gone cold since then. The captain
said we were getting this a little later than he would have liked, but somehow
it got lost in the shuffle. He’s put a high priority on it now.”

“Do you have any photos,
Sarge?”

“Yeah, the spa scanned her
photo from their employment records and sent it to us, but I imagine she’s in
some type of disguise. We have the make and the license number of the car she
rented. I’ve already sent out an APB to all the jurisdictions surrounding
Bellingham. For their own safety, I’m going to have Anders’ mother and her boy
toy husband removed from the house, but I want round the clock surveillance on
the house. It looks like that’s where this Anders woman is headed. Since we
can’t seem to locate her, I think we need to stake the house out in shifts. If
she plans on doing something, it will probably be done at her mother’s home.
It’s a pretty rough area, so a couple of under covers sitting in an unmarked
car won’t be noticed. Here’s the information on the vehicle Anders is driving.
Memorize it and let me know immediately if you see it.

“Rick, Louie, you take the
first shift. Here’s the schedule and the address of the mother’s house. If
something’s going down, I’d bet it’s going to happen in the next twenty-four
hours. According to her roommates, it didn’t look like she took anything with
her. They also were worried about her mental state. The spa employee who took
her to the airport said she looked like she was on drugs or something.

“There’s one other
problem. The information the San Francisco police officer gave us was passed on
to him by a criminal law attorney in one of the largest law firms in San
Francisco. His girlfriend is one of the women this Gina did a number on. She
and another woman who was at the spa with her flew to Seattle to see if they
could find Gina. They knew they could ID her. We’ve been requested to keep an
eye out for them as well. Here are their photos, but I guess their faces are
dark reddish purple and swollen from what Gina did to them at the spa. You can
probably ID them from that alone. From what I’m told, these two women don’t
have a clue about what they’ve gotten themselves into. I just hope they don’t
get in the way or get hurt. Any questions?”

“Yeah, what do you want us
to do if any of them show up at the house?”

“Let me know immediately.
I’ll make a decision on what action to take at that time.”

Several hours later Rick
and Louie were drinking coffee from a big thermos jug, parked about half a
block from Gina’s mother’s home, debating the Mariners’ chances of making it to
the World Series. From their position, they could easily see if anyone entered
the house as well as any cars traveling on the street.

“Louie,” Rick said,
putting his coffee in the cup holder. “Check out that grey car. Can you make
the plate?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.” He
called Sergeant Driscoll and told him they’d spotted the car Gina Anders was
reportedly driving. While he was talking to the sergeant, he noticed another
car not too far behind the grey car. “Sarge, looks like Gina’s being tailed,
and from the looks of the two purple balloon faces in it, they must be the two
broads you told us about. What do you want us to do about them?”

“Watch both cars. Try to
keep them in your sight. Gotta go, got another call.”

Two minutes later the
sergeant called Rick back. “Believe it or not I just got a call from the two
broads following Gina. I spoke with some woman named Liz. Turns out they’ve
been tailing Gina all day, and from what she told me Gina’s purchased during
the day, I think she might be planning to blow up her mother’s home. The items
she purchased are clearly bomb-making materials including eight pounds of
gunpowder. That’s enough to blow up the entire house and maybe a couple of
others. Liz told me she remembered reading about the Boston Marathon Bomber and
wondered if Gina was trying to make a bomb like those two psychos in Boston
used. Bomb squad’s on its way. Here’s what the broads saw.” He related the
conversation he’d just had with Liz, telling him what Gina had in her car.

“I told her I had boots
already on the ground at the mother’s home, and that I wanted her and her
friend to stay in their car and not go anywhere near Anders. Make sure they
don’t. Don’t want to have to answer to a bunch of San Francisco mouthpieces and
ambulance chasers from some fancy law firm. Call me when you know something.”

Rick listened to the
sergeant. “Okay, Sarge, we’ll keep an eye on the two plum balloons. I know our
shift has been over for awhile, but I think we’d both like to see how this is
going to play out. We could probably use some more muscle. Have them stake out
the south side of the house. We’ll follow this Gina broad and see what happens.
FYI, Sarge, I got a bad feelin’ about this.”

“Me too. By the way,”
Sergeant Driscoll said, “I just got confirmation that the mom and her boy toy were
taken out of the house before you arrived. If what I think is going to happen,
happens, they’re gonna be glad we got them out.”