The Root of Murder Page 23

  “That is not—” Realizing what she had said, Sherry studied her image in the mirror. “Do you really think I have bedroom eyes?” She batted her eyelashes.

  “It’s plain to see what he saw in you.” Kathleen bent over to stick as much of her hands and wrists under the water as possible. “You were the fun wife. The one he could go running to when he got sick of my nagging.”

  “I’m sure you weren’t a nag.”

  Kathleen spun around to face her. “Of course, I was a nag. I had to be. Someone had to run the household. Keep the budget to buy a lovely home. Keep the kids on track for their scholarships. If it weren’t for me, John would have been content to sit in middle management. I made him the man he was.”

  “Oh, so you’re the one who made him a bigamist.”

  Kathleen threw back her head and let out a wail. Sherry caught her as she dropped to her knees. On the floor, Sherry held her while her heart broke.

  The bathroom door flew open. Covering his eyes with his hand, Tony raced in. “Is everything okay in here? Should I call for backup?”

  Izzy returned from the cafeteria with Luke. “He’s hungry and I don’t have enough money to buy him anything.”

  Madison reached into her bag. “Luke, do you like apples and cheese sticks?”

  “I’m not allowed to take food from strangers,” Luke said.

  “Well, I’m not a stranger.” Joshua took the plastic bag from Madison.

  “No, Gram said you were a good guy.”

  “You can have some of this to hold you over until we get you some dinner.” Joshua took an apple slice for himself and held out the bag to the small boy. “Luke, this is Madison. She’s your aunt. Madison, this is your nephew Luke.”

  “Nice to meet you, Aunt Madison.” Luke held out his hand to her. As they shook hands, he asked, “How come I never met you before?”

  Madison became misty eyed. “I’m new to the family.”

  “Do you like dogs? I have a white one. Gramps gave him to me. His name is Munster. Gram calls him a filthy beast.”

  “Madison, thank God I found you!” Elizabeth rushed into the waiting room and ran up to Madison. She was in such a state that she almost knocked Luke to the floor.

  Frightened by the strange woman, Luke hid behind Joshua who sheltered him.

  “I went by your house and you weren’t there,” Elizabeth said while looking at the assortment of people gathered around the waiting room. “I’ve been calling your cell and you didn’t answer. Then, I heard on the news about the accident and I was afraid that somehow you got mixed up in that.”

  Joshua and Cameron stared with interest at the wild-eyed woman shifting from one foot to the other. She was dressed in blue dancing clothes under her heavy winter coat. Her eyes darted around the room—stopping to study each one of them.

  “I had turned off my phone because I had personal family business to take care of,” Madison said.

  “What business?” Elizabeth grasped the necklace. “Did your dad’s murderer come after your mom, too?”

  “No,” Madison said. “Elizabeth, I don’t really want to talk about it. You should be home with Aaron and your kids right now.”

  “But you’re my best friend,” Elizabeth said, while staring at Cameron who was focused on her. “Best friends don’t have secrets from each other.”

  “We’re in the middle of an active police investigation,” Joshua said. “Madison isn’t allowed to talk about it.”

  “She’s allowed to tell her sister,” Elizabeth said.

  “Did Davis marry her mother, too?” Izzy asked Joshua in a low voice.

  Cameron asked Elizabeth, “Does your sister tell you everything?”

  “I don’t have a sister, unless you want to count Madison. We’re as close as sisters.”

  Cameron shot a glance at Joshua, who rose to his feet.

  “Elizabeth, maybe you can help us,” Joshua said. “Madison needs a break. How about if the four of us go get a bite to eat.”

  A wide grin crossed Elizabeth’s face as she trotted toward the door. Once her back was turned, Joshua whispered into Madison’s ear.

  Madison let out a deep sigh. “You’re right, Josh. I didn’t realize how hungry and tired I was. I could use some dinner.”

  “Wait for me outside. I just need to talk to Izzy for a minute. Dinner is on me.”

  “What are you up to?” Cameron asked him in a low voice.

  “Hunter and I have reopened the investigation into Lindsay Ellison’s accident,” Joshua said. “We believe Elizabeth was driving during the fatal wreck. We need her DNA to prove it though. I can get that sample during dinner.”

  “Be careful. You’d be surprised what comes out of those DNA tests.”

  Joshua got dinner orders from Luke and Izzy, while instructing them not to go anywhere. “If they release J.J. and Poppy before we get back, text me. They’re going to need a ride home.”

  Izzy noted that the sun had set during the hours of waiting in the emergency room. “The horses are going to be hungry.” She never forgot about the critters at J.J.’s farm. “And Ollie and Charley don’t like it when they’re left alone for too long.”

  Joshua took out his phone. Luckily, he had the contact number for the farm’s foreman. “I’ll send someone to take care of them. I hope Charley doesn’t give them too hard of a time.” He escorted Cameron toward the emergency room exit with his hand on her back. “What made you think Elizabeth had a sister?”

  “Haven’t you noticed that necklace she keeps playing with?” Cameron said. “That’s a sister medallion.”

  “Like the ones Izzy, Tracy, and Sarah have,” Joshua said.

  “Hers is half a heart,” Cameron said while zipping her coat. “Which means there’s a sister who has the other half.”

  “But she has no sister.” Joshua grasped her arm and stopped. “Lindsay’s angel was wearing a necklace.”

  “Lindsay’s angel?”

  “The angel Derek saw in his trailer on the night of the murder. The one who planted the murder weapon to frame Derek for Davis’s murder. Derek told me that he knew it was Lindsay because she was wearing a sister’s necklace that Heather had given to Lindsay. She never took off.”

  “Was Lindsay’s necklace found after the accident?”

  “We’ll have to ask the family.”

  Cameron stopped. “She knew Shawn Whitaker was dead.”

  Joshua had taken a couple of steps before he realized what she had said. He turned and cocked his head at her.

  “Until this evening, as far as anyone knew, Shawn Whitaker was only missing,” Cameron said. “The only ones who actually knew he was dead were those of us involved in the investigation, Heather, and Madison.”

  “Yet, just now, Elizabeth asked Madison if whoever murdered her father came after her mother,” Joshua said. “She may have overheard Heather and Madison talking about it.”

  “In light of what you suspect about Lindsay’s accident, do you really believe that?”

  They broke into a run through the double doors leading out to the parking lot. Expecting to find Madison and Elizabeth waiting next to his vehicle, Joshua ran across the lot. As they neared the SUV, they discovered that neither Madison nor Elizabeth were waiting.

  Joshua stopped in the middle of the roadway. “Where did they go?”

  Cameron turned around to search for any sign of the women in the shadows scattered around the darkened lot. In the early evening, many of the hospital’s employees had left for the day.

  A pair of headlights flashed on. The car tore out of a space at the far end of the lot. The tires squealed as the car spun out of its slot and sped toward Cameron—caught in the glare of its high beams.

  As the car raced toward his wife, Joshua dove for her. He grabbed her around the waist and together they landed on the pavement
between two ambulances.

  They heard the blare of horns as the car cut off other vehicles in its escape onto the street and into the night.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “I can’t believe you didn’t get the license plate number,” Cameron told Joshua after snapping orders at Tony to go with the chief of hospital security to find out what their cameras may have captured in the parking lot.

  Anxious to talk to Sherry Whitaker to find out what she knew about Elizabeth Collins, Cameron spun on her heels to go into a meeting room where John Davis’s wives were waiting in private.

  “Excuse me for keeping you from becoming roadkill,” Joshua yelled at her back before returning to his attention to Sheriff Sawyer on his cell. “Get a team out to the Collins place. Cameron will meet you there. We’re taking J.J. and Poppy home. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  Sitting side by side in a couple of padded chairs in the corridor, Izzy told Luke, “They do this all the time. It takes some getting used to.” She jumped out of her seat when she saw J.J. being wheeled toward them. She cringed when she saw a big bandage across his forehead. “That looks like it hurts.”

  “It does.” J.J. told the orderly to stop and pushed up out of the chair. To his surprise, his legs felt wobbly. Poppy grabbed his arm to ease him back into the chair. Seeing Joshua on the phone, he said, “It looks like Dad got a break in the case.”

  “Sort of.” Lowering her voice so Luke wouldn’t hear, Izzy said, “Some crazy lady kidnapped Madison.”

  “Elizabeth,” J.J. said. “She must have tampered with Heather’s car, too. Why?”

  “Jealousy,” Poppy said. “I told you. Didn’t you see it? She was very threatened by Heather, and Heather didn’t like her much either.”

  “Women notice those types of things,” Izzy said. “We’ve got an instinct that you men don’t.”

  “Where’s Luke?” Kathleen demanded to know after she and Sherry learned that Madison was missing.

  Cameron had ushered Sherry and Kathleen into a small meeting room where doctors would meet with patients or their family members in private. Upon learning the news, Kathleen hugged Sherry, a move that surprised Cameron. They continued to comfort each other while Cameron dug for information to help her find Madison.

  “Luke’s with my husband,” Cameron said. “We’ll keep him safe until one of your sons can take him home. Right now, we need to figure out why Elizabeth would do this. I’m hoping that the two of you, since your children have had some sort of relationship with her both in the past and the present, would maybe remember something that—”

  “Elizabeth always got on Heather’s nerves,” Kathleen said. “I told Lindsay that she was odd back when they became friends after high school. She should have listened to me.”

  “I warned Madison about hiring her to work at the dance studio. With it being a new business, it’s not smart to expand too fast.” Sherry turned to Kathleen. “Shawn taught me that when I set up my business.”

  “I taught John that when we were studying business in college.”

  “Then I guess that advice came from you.”

  “Excuse me, ladies,” Cameron said. “Madison is missing. The first few hours are the most crucial.”

  “Do you think it was Elizabeth who tampered with Heather’s SUV?” Kathleen asked.

  “We have detectives looking at the security videos for the business’s around the dance studio to see if they can find evidence of her tampering with it.”

  “She was such a strange bird back when the girls were in dance,” Kathleen said with a frown. “She latched onto Lindsay when they ended up living next door to each other. I always blamed her for dragging Lindsay down even further into drugs.”

  “Elizabeth had problems fitting in,” Sherry said. “I saw that at the dance studio. She’d try to make friends with the other students, but she tried too hard. She’d become clingy.”

  “That’s exactly what she’d do.”

  “I think it had to do with her being a foster child.”

  “She was a foster child?” Kathleen asked. “How would you know that?”

  “Her foster mother told me,” Sherry said. “I talked to all of the parents. You’d be surprised what they told me.”

  “Elizabeth was in the system?” Cameron made a note to check with child services for Elizabeth’s background information. “Elizabeth wears a sister’s necklace. Did she have a sister?”

  “Maybe a foster sister. The foster mother who brought her to Miss Charlotte’s had a couple of other foster children.” Sherry shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. “I did notice Elizabeth wearing the necklace when Madison hired her. She didn’t wear it back when they were in high school.”

  “Is the medallion a half-heart?” The color drained from Kathleen’s face.

  “Yes,” Cameron said. “I saw Heather and Lindsay wearing necklaces like it in a photograph at your home.”

  “Heather and Lindsay got them for Valentine’s day shortly before Heather’s graduation,” Kathleen said. “Lindsay never took hers off. We couldn’t find it after she’d died. We tore that trailer apart. We wanted her to be buried with it.”

  “Elizabeth was with Lindsay the night she died,” Cameron said. “Witnesses saw them together.”

  “Lindsay’s death was particularly hard on Heather. She was her baby sister. Heather felt like she failed to protect her. Then, not being able to find the necklace—that devastated her. We assumed Lindsay threw it away after their fight because she was so mad at her.”

  “Maybe she didn’t,” Sherry said. “Maybe she gave it to Elizabeth.”

  “Or Elizabeth took it,” Cameron said as she rose to answer a knock on the door. “What is Elizabeth’s maiden name?”

  “I don’t know,” Kathleen said as Sherry answered.

  “Gallagher. The foster family’s name was Fletcher.”

  “How do you remember that?” Kathleen asked.

  “It’s a gift,” Sherry said with an arched eyebrow.

  Cameron found Tony in the hospital corridor. “Security camera got it all,” he whispered to her.

  Cameron ordered a uniformed officer to stand guard outside the meeting room while she followed Tony through the reception area to the security office. A quick glance out the window revealed that Joshua’s SUV was gone—meaning that he had taken J.J. and Poppy home.

  Tony opened the door to the security center. The chief of the hospital’s security wore a starch white shirt with a gold badge on his chest. Standing behind one of his staff’s chair, he waved to them.

  The security video was paused to show the emergency room entrance. The downward angle of the shot provided a view of the entrance and two rows of parking spaces which ended at a heavy hedge and fence that bordered the lot.

  The video was frozen with Elizabeth and Madison in mid-stride exiting the hospital.

  The officer pressed the “play” button.

  The two women stepped to the end of the walkway and stopped. Madison turned to look toward the door—assumingly in anticipation of Joshua joining them.

  Cameron realized that the women did not know which vehicle belonged to Joshua.

  Her back to the camera, Elizabeth spoke excitedly to Madison. She gestured toward the far end of the lot.

  “She’s asking Madison to go to her car with her.” Cameron pressed her finger on the image of the car in the last space. “That’s the car that almost ran us down.”

  Madison hesitantly followed Elizabeth, who continued urging her. Twice, Madison stopped to look back at the entrance.

  “If we had just come out one minute earlier,” Cameron said.

  “It’s not your fault,” Tony said.

  Upon reaching the car, Elizabeth opened the rear passenger door and pointed inside. Madison stepped around the door and bent over to look at something inside
the back compartment. Close behind her, Elizabeth stepped forward. Madison jerked before Elizabeth shoved her into the backseat.

  “She tazed her,” Tony said.

  “That’s what it looks like to me,” Cameron said.

  Elizabeth looked around to make sure no one saw what she had done. Then, she climbed into the backseat. It was unclear in the security video what she was doing.

  Cameron assumed she was securing Madison—possibly drugging her or bounding her. After a short time, Elizabeth got out and went around to the driver’s side. She climbed into the driver’s seat as Joshua and Cameron ran into the parking lot. As they stopped to look around, Elizabeth’s vehicle started. Abruptly, the lights turned on, and Elizabeth raced toward Cameron, who escaped only when Joshua tackled her.

  “Looks like your husband saved your life,” the chief of security said.

  “I married well,” Cameron said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “I guess we can assume my truck is totaled.”

  J.J. waited until they had crossed the West Virginia state line before breaking the silence inside Joshua’s SUV. He sat in the front with Joshua driving. Strapped into his booster seat, Luke sat in the back with Izzy and Poppy.

  Everyone was lost in their thoughts with worry about Heather’s injuries, Madison’s abduction, and how much worse things could have been. One minute they were dancing. The next, disaster struck.

  “You and Poppy being treated and released after a four-vehicle accident. Heather ending up in serious condition with a head injury.” Joshua shook his head. “Things could have been a whole lot worse.”

  “I could have lost Poppy,” J.J. said in a voice barely above a whisper.

  Joshua shot a reassuring grin in his direction. “But you didn’t.”

  “I’m worried about Heather,” Poppy said. “I’ve only just met her this week, but I like her.” She tapped the back of J.J.’s seat. “I can see why you dated her, J.J. Why you dated Madison, too. They’re so much fun. I could see us all being friends. We need to invite them to the wedding.”