A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) Read online

  “That should be enough—”

  Joshua shook his head. “He gave it to him four years ago. It could have been passed on a hundred times since then. But we also found threads at the crime scene that appear to come from his coat. I’m still waiting for the lab report on that. If they are a match, I could put together a case against him in spite of his girlfriend, who is not credible.”

  “Threaten to try her as an accessory,” Hank advised with a wave of her oyster fork. “There’s nothing like the threat of jail time to take the dew off romance.”

  “Not Heather Connor. She’s headstrong. She won’t break. But I may do that anyway and not just as a ploy to break her. Knowing her genetics, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t all her idea to kill Grace to get her out of the way.”

  Hank washed the last oyster down with a sip of wine and wiped her mouth with the napkin. “Have you considered that maybe girlfriend number two was the perp herself, and not the boyfriend? When she became his alibi, he became hers.”

  He disagreed. “There were over a dozen witnesses. Heather has a head full of bushy hair down to her waist. The perp was wearing a bandana covering his head. There’s no way she could have covered up all that hair. She definitely didn’t pull the trigger.” Joshua watched Hank scrape the remnants of the breading from the oyster shells with her fork.

  “You’re not going to get a conviction until you break that alibi. It plants the seed of reasonable doubt.”

  They broke their conversation while the waiter served their dinners. She had ordered a prime rib while Joshua ordered the veal Parmesan with spaghetti.

  While slicing through the beef, Hank returned to her observation, “Believe me, Tricia was not so perfect. She was a teenaged girl.”

  “And I was a teenaged boy, with all the insecurities that go along with it.”

  “Is it really so far-fetched to think that she led this Doug on? She did take that necklace.”

  “She gave the necklace back when her mother pointed out that it was wrong to accept it,” Joshua argued. “She made a mistake in taking it. She made a mistake in telling Doug that she would go to the prom with him when he was not sure if he would be allowed to go and then accepting the date with Randy. She did not purposely hurt him. Trish would not do that.”

  Hank paused in devouring the meat on her plate to have another sip of her wine. “Wasn’t it you who told me that no one knows what someone is truly like behind closed doors? I seem to recall you saying that it is our job to find out those secrets because usually it is the things we fight to keep hidden that lead to murder. Isn’t that what got Grace killed?”

  “Billy and Heather got her killed.”

  “Which would not have happened if she had stayed in her room after curfew like her parents told her to.”

  “Trish wasn’t like Grace.”

  “You really had it bad for her, didn’t you? How objective are you in this case?”

  “I did not sleep with her.”

  “But that article said otherwise.”

  “It also said that I was sleeping with Gail.”

  Hank laughed. Having had more than one encounter with the late journalist, she knew that Joshua would never be attracted to Gail Reynolds. She picked up her knife and fork as if to resume eating her prime rib, but instead looked at him across the table.

  Aware of her gaze on him, Joshua looked up from his plate and noticed the fingers of her left hand holding the fork. “You’re not wearing your engagement ring.”

  “It is customary for the woman to give the ring back when she breaks off the engagement.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I didn’t want to marry Mark.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t love him.” She stabbed the beef with her fork and sliced through it with the steak knife while she told him, “Mark was the man that any mother would want her daughter to marry. A real Boy Scout—”

  He pretended to be wounded. “Hey, I was a Boy Scout.”

  “Sorry. Mark was handsome, virile, successful, and he loved me.”

  His thoughts turned to Jan and her proclamation of love for him. “But you couldn’t return his love.”

  “Nope.”

  “You tried. On paper, the relationship made total sense,” he explained. “You probably even questioned your own sanity for not being able to love him.”

  “You’re talking like someone who has been there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you started dating yet?”

  The setting had all the trappings for romance, something that was not present in the past at the dinners he and Hank had shared after working late. Joshua had chosen the Ponderosa for their dinner that night. The diners in town were open, and even closer, but without thinking, he had taken her to the golf course and ordered a bottle of wine for them to share. “I don’t know.”

  “We need to be careful.” She looked around the room. More than one pair of eyes was on them. “I haven’t read that article about you and your list of loves, but it is apparent that you are developing a reputation.”

  “So I see.”

  A couple across the room turned away when he returned their probing stare.

  “You having dinner with an old friend will be yet another sexual conquest by morning,” Hank predicted. “If I go back to your place, even if I sleep in the guest room, tongues will be wagging.”

  “I guess that means you’re going to have to stay elsewhere while you’re here. I have a good friend who would love to put you up.”

  “Is it someone you can trust?”

  “I’ve known Jan my whole life. She’d do anything for me.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Figures Josh would have a woman lawyer.”

  Tad stopped typing on his laptop with his fingers poised to resume as soon as he dismissed Jan and her jealousy of the woman who was now her houseguest. “Now you sound like everyone else. Need I remind you that Josh pulled you out from under a lawsuit not too long ago?”

  Tad was disgusted, not just with Jan for barging in on his lunch of a sub and chips in his office while he was trying to complete overdue hospital reports, but also with his cousin. He had predicted this scene the previous night when Joshua told him about putting Hank up at Jan’s house. Joshua was one of the smartest men he knew, but when it came to women, he was one of the dumbest.

  Giving up on eating any more of his lunch since her barging in, Tad threw the remaining three-fourths of his sub into the trashcan.

  Jan rationalized her jealousy. “Cindy Rodgers told me that he made reservations for two for the reunion. He’s taking Hank. I don’t mind him having a woman lawyer as much as she has to be a pretty woman lawyer.” She blinked back the tears she felt coming to her eyes. “I never got asked to any of the formals or proms. I know Josh told me that he’d never feel for me the way I feel for him, but I hoped that maybe since he was back and the reunion was coming up—”

  “That you two could go as friends.” Tad’s heart ached for her. “He is trying very hard not to send you mixed messages or give you any false hope.” He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know how he feels about this woman.”

  “He looked at her the same way he used to look at Beth and Tricia.”

  “Speaking of Tricia,” Tad opened up his valise and removed a folder yellowed with age. “I’ve got Doc Wilson’s autopsy report on her right here. Complete with pictures of her at the crime scene and in the morgue.”

  She observed the folder. “Where did you find it?”

  “I simply dug through all his old records until I found it.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Nothing we didn’t already know. It was a contact wound. The gun was pressed up against her chest when it was fired and the bullet wen
t right through her heart.”

  “Just like Grace’s murder. What kind of gun was it?”

  “Forty-five caliber Colt revolver. It was left at the scene.” Tad removed color pictures from the envelope and held them up for her to see. He pointed to the picture of Tricia lying on the sofa where her mother had found her. The gun was visible in the picture at the opposite end of the sofa from where her head rested on a throw pillow. “Here’s something interesting.”

  “She looks like she’s sleeping.” Jan tried not to betray the shudder that ran through her body at the sight of her late classmate.

  “Doesn’t she?” he said. “Someone laid her out like that. Her hands are placed across her chest. If she shot herself she wouldn’t have fallen back onto the sofa in such a perfect position.”

  “What if she was lying down like that and then pulled the trigger?”

  “The gun is all the way at the other end of the couch.” Tad pointed at the revolver on the floor. “No, Tricia Wheeler’s death was no suicide, and these crime-scene pictures are all we need to have her death reclassified as a homicide.”

  In his prosecutor’s office, Joshua was flipping through a stack of DVDs in search of a volume of law books for Hank when Tad arrived with three folders tucked under his arm. “Where have you been?”

  “Treating my patients. I do have a full-time job, you know.”

  Never failing to notice a pretty woman, Tad took in Hank, who was sitting on the edge of the desk.

  Joshua apologized and plopped down behind his desk. “I just got off the phone with yet another reporter asking about my love life and my connection to the victims in this murder spree.”

  Tad handed him two of the folders. “I finally got a copy of the report from the forensics lab on Rex Rollins’ and Bella Polk’s crime scenes.”

  “And?” Joshua opened the top folder.

  The doctor shook his head. “Nada. The gun used to kill Rollins traced back to some guy in East Liverpool, who had reported his gun stolen one week before. He’s legit. His house was broken into and some other stuff was stolen along with the gun.”

  Joshua sat back in his chair to study the ceiling.

  “What are you thinking about so hard?” Hank thumbed through the folders.

  “I was thinking about Margo Sweeney Connor, the common denominator of Tricia Wheeler, Gail Reynolds, Rex Rollins, and Bella Polk.”

  “Is there any real connection between the old woman killed in the motel and this Margo?” she wondered.

  “Haven’t you ever played the ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’?” Tad asked her.

  “What’s that?”

  Joshua answered, “It’s a bar game.”

  “I don’t hang out in bars,” she told them.

  “And you call yourself a sailor.” The prosecutor explained, “Name any actor and within a matter of six steps, or less, you can connect him to the actor Kevin Bacon. The object of the game is to use as few steps as possible. Now, let’s go back to the connection of Margo and Bella. If Rex’s landlady stole a copy of his book, which she had to have known about—”

  “We have no proof that she knew about the book,” his cousin pointed out. “According to the motel and phone company, Bella only made local calls, all untraceable.”

  “If she phoned Margo, the call would have been local and untraceable,” Joshua argued. “Even if we can’t prove Bella Polk knew about the book, we have the connection that she was Rex’s landlady and he worked for Margo.”

  “Used to work for Margo,” Tad corrected him. “Past tense.”

  Joshua continued, “Suppose Bella stole the book and tried to blackmail the antagonist, who turned out to be Margo. We’ve got the fatal connection between Margo and Bella.”

  Tad shook his head. “Didn’t you tell me that Karl Connor was doing it with her in the apple orchards when Tricia was killed? That means Margo didn’t kill Trish, which means she has no motive for killing Gail for writing about the Wheeler murder. If anything, knowing Margo the way you and I do, she would have wanted her to write the book so that she could sue her.”

  “Isn’t it ironic that both Margo and her daughter were having sex with someone at the time of their rivals’ murders?”

  Hank interjected, “The nut never falls very far from the tree.”

  “Do you seriously think Margo and Heather hired someone to do it for them, in both cases?” Tad squinted at Joshua. “What about her motive for killing Tricia? Not over Randy. How long did Margo and Randy last after she died? Was that love triangle important enough to warrant murder?”

  “Some women, like men, just plain hate losing,” she suggested. “Maybe the motive for this murder was not so much love as pride.”

  Joshua recalled, “I was there when Margo picked a fight with Tricia at noon, less than five hours before she was killed. On Friday, Margo and Gail get into a shouting match at a restaurant in which a witness hears her state that Gail was going to write that book over her dead body. Before the next sunrise, Gail is dead. That same night, Rex Rollins, who used to work for Margo, ends up with two bullets going through his head right after telling a barmaid that he wrote a book about the wicked witch of Chester.”

  “But what about Bella?” Tad asked.

  “Did you know her?” Joshua replied with a question. “What two words would you use to describe her?”

  “Nosy and greedy.”

  “Rex told anyone who would listen that he wrote a book that was going to make him rich and famous. Hearing him say that, how long do you think she waited after he left the rooming house that night before checking it out?”

  Agreeing with a wide grin, Hank finished the theory, “And when her house was torched, she knew who did it when she found out that Rex was dead. Instead of using the book for justice, she used it for blackmail.”

  Joshua concluded, “I’m willing to bet money that Bella’s copy of the book is long gone.”

  Tad reminded them once more, “But Margo has an alibi for Tricia’s murder.”

  “That’s why I want to take a closer look at the death of Dan Boyd.”

  “Who is Dan Boyd?” Hank was having difficulty keeping track of all the players she had already heard about without adding another name to the mix.

  Tad answered, “Margo’s first husband. He was killed while working late at his dental office.”

  “If she didn’t kill Tricia, then what murder could Rex have been writing about?” Joshua laughed out loud. “I just remembered something. When I first mentioned murder to Karl, he said that Margo had her first husband killed.”

  Tad said, “Margo had an airtight alibi for that murder, too. She was hosting a dinner party for about a dozen people. Her husband was killed by a junkie looking for drugs.”

  “From a dentist? What were they looking for? Nitrous oxide?”

  Mary threw open the door and ran in. Her expression was one of horror.

  “Mary—” was all Joshua got out before Seth Cavanaugh strutted into the office.

  “Counselor, I have a warrant here to bring you in for questioning by the special prosecutor in the murder of Gail Reynolds.” He waved a folded sheet of paper with blue backing. Deputies Carter and Hockenberry, who were with him, did not appear as cocky.

  “You didn’t need to get a warrant.” Hank yanked the paper out of his hand and read it quickly. “Seth Cavanaugh, I presume.”

  He observed her feminine figure. “And you are—?”

  “Alana O’Henry. Mr. Thornton’s lawyer.”

  Seth smiled at a victory. “Lawyered up, huh? I haven’t missed the fact that she’s a woman. Another one of your conquests? How long does she have before you kill her?”

  While passing the warrant on to Joshua, Hank stepped between the two men. “You’re out of line, Cavanaugh. I suggest you leav
e.”

  “Not without Thornton.” Seth ordered Carter, “Take him into custody.”

  “You touch him and you’re going to find yourself wearing a cast on your arm and egg on your face.”

  Joshua held up the warrant. “Did you bother reading this, Cavanaugh?” He explained, “It’s not a warrant to take me into custody. It’s to come in for questioning before the special prosecutor—which was completely unnecessary.”

  “All you had to do was ask and say please,” Hank told the investigator. “The warrant says to be at the courthouse in Weirton at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. We’ll be there. If not, then you can put on your show of bringing in your man.”

  Joshua sat down behind his desk. “Now, I am going to ask you to leave my office before I am forced to have my lawyer break both your legs.”

  Seth turned to the deputies. “You heard that. He threatened me with bodily harm.”

  Deputy Hockenberry responded, “I didn’t hear a thing. Did you, Carter?”

  “Nope.”

  The children’s first reaction to the news of the warrant was to be at the courthouse with their father. Joshua insisted that they would not be permitted in the courtroom during the questioning. Only Hank, the special prosecutor, his or her assistant, Joshua, and any prosecution witnesses would be permitted inside.

  Joshua was grateful for the break in the tension during dinner when Tad knocked on the back door. He was accompanied by Sheriff Curt Sawyer. “They got a witness,” Tad whispered before leading them to the study.

  Curt waited for Hank to close the study door before he announced, “A witness has come forward to say that she saw you and Gail together. Sally Powell. She lives next door to the Hendersons and claims that she saw the two of you arguing in the driveway.”

  “Cavanaugh was there,” Joshua argued.

  “Was he there the whole time you were with her in the driveway?” Hank asked.

  “No. Gail was upsetting the Hendersons with this wild theory about a serial killer targeting cheerleaders. I took her outside and ordered him to stay inside to calm them down.”