Taylor Smith - Deadly Grace

“You’ve got a hospital there in Havenwood? Is that where she is?”

“You betcha. It’s just a little eight-bed job, mind you. Big cases go on over to Montrose, or into the Twin Cities, if it’s real major. But for what Jillian had, they could handle her just fine right here.”

“You mind if I come on up there and talk to her myself?” It was impulse more than rational decision-making, but Cruz’s gut told him this was all far too coincidental. After more than a decade on a homicide beat, he always mistrusted coincidence, and he always listened to his gut. If nothing else, he wanted to see for himself this spinster bookworm with no apparent life outside the dusty back rooms of a museum who had, out of the blue, become the subject of an international police inquiry—only to have her own mother suddenly expire in a manner that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the cases outlined in the British alert.

“What do you think of the idea that Jillian Meade killed her mother and then set the fire to cover her tracks?” he asked Chief Lunders.

“Jillian?” A snort of incredulity whistled down the line. “That girl grew up in this town, Agent Cruz. I’ve known her all her life, and so has everyone else around here. She’s always been a quiet little thing. She’s not hardly capable of something like this, believe me. It wouldn’t be in her nature.”

“That’s probably what people said about Lizzie Borden, too.”

“Well, now, I don’t know about that, but I do know the Meade family. They’ve been living in this town for, oh, I don’t know…several generations, anyway. Trust me, no daughter of Grace and Joe Meade would be capable of something like that. No, I’ll tell you what I’m really thinking, just between you and me and the gate post. Don’t want to say it too loud till we’ve gathered more evidence, but I’m thinking it was a break-in and attempted theft gone bad—somebody from away, you know. Some hippie probably drifted in off the interstate looking for quick cash to buy drugs down in Minneapolis. Grace’s place is on the lake, a real nice spot—on the town side, whereas the summer places are over on the other side. But maybe this drifter saw it, figured it was empty. Or, even if he spotted Grace and Jill, maybe he figured two women like that, all alone in the house, he could overpower ’em, get what he wanted, then skedaddle.”

“I don’t know, Chief,” Cruz said, head shaking.

“Look, keep in mind that Jillian got hurt, too. She had a concussion. Nils, my deputy, said she’d been knocked out, woke up on the kitchen floor. Who knows what might have happened if the neighbors hadn’t called in the fire, and if my deputy hadn’t gotten there fast as he did? She’d have died, too.”

“Fair enough,” Cruz conceded. There was no point in alienating a local police chief until he had more information. That said, he’d want a lot more information before he was prepared to rule out Jillian Meade as a suspect. “Chief Lunders, I’d like to make another request.”

“What’s that?”

“I’d like to ask you to seal off the scene. With all due respect to your volunteer fire chief and your men, sir, I think a professional arson team should go in and cover the ground with a fine-tooth comb. I can set it up through our regional office out there, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Of course, Cruz thought grimly, the local guys had already been tramping around in there when they went back to find the body, and who knew how many other pairs of boots had been in messing up the evidence since. But, with luck, the arson team would find enough of it intact to determine if the fire had had multiple start points or if accelerants had been used, either one a dead giveaway for criminal action.

“Well, no, I guess that might not be a bad idea at that,” Lunders said. “Sure, you go ahead and do that. I’ll get our boys to rope it off and make sure nobody goes in till your arson team gets here. But do you mind telling me what this is all about? Why are you folks taking an interest in this?”

“It’s a little complicated to go into over the phone. How about if I make arrangements to get that arson investigation going, and then I’ll get on a plane and be out there myself, tonight or tomorrow at the latest. I’ll tell you as much as I can then about where we’re coming from on this.”

“If you think that’s necessary…”

“Yes, sir, I do think it’s very necessary.”

Once past the garish billboard with the fish and the trees, Cruz drove up a small incline in the highway and found himself gazing down on a sweeping vista overlooking a picturesque little town that backed up against an evergreen forest, as advertised, one that extended right to the distant horizon. The town was wedged between the woods and a lake that bulged out from the western bank of the Mississippi, as if the river had sprung a leak in its headlong rush to reach the Gulf of Mexico. The map Cruz had picked up at the rent-a-car counter at the airport said this was Lost Arrow Lake. So maybe the angling claim on the billboard wasn’t such a stretch, he thought. Unless he was up to a lesson in the finer points of ice-fishing, he’d have to take the boast at face value.

The official town marker appeared on the right shoulder of the road and declared his entry into Havenwood, population 2,012. Another blue sign beyond it directed him to take the next right for local police headquarters. His tires kicked up stones as he pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Havenwood Police Department a couple of minutes later. It was a squat, tan building with a prefab look, the kind of utilitarian structure thrown up by cost-conscious municipal councils all across the country. Cruz predicted a drafty squad room, a flimsy two-cell lock-up and a thin-walled office for the chief.

Parking next to a couple of black-and-white cruisers, he climbed out of the overheated rental, his lungs contracting in shock at the contact with air that was at least forty degrees colder than the balmy weather he’d left behind in D.C. Cruz flipped up the collar of his overcoat, wishing he’d remembered to put in the winter liner he scarcely used in Washington. His California-bred bones wondered, as they always did in places like this, what in hell possessed people to settle in such cold climates.

Inside the small lobby, a heavyset, gray-haired woman in a fuzzy pink cardigan sat behind a reception desk. She held a paperback novel in her hand, her arm extended across the black Formica countertop. As Cruz walked in, he saw her lick the tip of her forefinger, turn the page, then read on, her eyes furrowed in a deep squint. The wind whistled as he struggled to close the door behind him, and she glanced up at the sound, then did a double take.

“Hi, there!” Her face softened into a friendly smile as he crossed the speckled linoleum and came up to the counter. Squinting back at her book—a murder mystery, by the look of the cover—she folded over the corner of the page to mark her place, then closed it. “Can I help you?”

Cruz reached into his inside pocket and withdrew the leather case containing his identification badge and photo. “I’m Special Agent Cruz with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said. “Chief Lunders is expecting me.”

The woman set the book aside and took his ID, extending her arm back and forth until she found a comfortable focal length. “Forgot my darn reading glasses on the kitchen table this morning,” she said, shooting an embarrassed glance in his direction. “Let’s see now…Alejandro Cruz.”

“You speak Spanish,” he said. Her pronunciation was pretty near dead-on, including substituting an aspirated “h” for the “j,” instead of the soft “g” that had long ago made him abandon “Alejandro” for “Alex.”