Ice (A Chris Matheson Cold Case Mystery Book 1) Page 26

  “As chief of farm security, it’s Sadie’s job to carefully vet everyone,” Chris said. “After all, we can’t let just anyone into the clan.”

  Sierra stepped out of the cruiser and threw her backpack over her shoulder. “Hey, Nikki, I brought that game I was telling you about.”

  With a squeal, Nikki raced down the driveway to join her.

  Dressed in a long coat over her cocktail dress, Helen trotted gingerly across the icy barnyard in her high heels. Chris made sure the two girls were inside the house before he greeted her with a soft kiss on the lips.

  “You look pretty,” he whispered to her.

  “And you look…” She noted his worn jeans and heavy coat, stained with dirt from working in the barn. “Rugged.”

  “Don’t worry.” He winked at her before closing the barn door. “I clean up real good.”

  “Why should I care? You’re not my date.” She turned serious. “I’m worried about you being alone with Peyton Davenport. I’ve got a bad feeling about her—especially after you told me about her leading a sex ring and blackmailing teachers when she was only sixteen.”

  “Don’t you trust me?” He draped his arm across her shoulder and they made their way down the hill toward the house.

  “Of course. It’s Peyton I don’t trust. According to your statement, Rachel said that Peyton was crazy.”

  “Rachel was already dead when I received that phone call. Rigor mortis had set in by the time we found the victims. That means somebody besides Rachel lured me to their house.”

  “Peyton is the only other suspect we have in the Tommy Bukowski murder,” Helen said.

  “You’re forgetting about Josie,” Chris said. “The redhead who Tommy was actually seen with the night of the murder.”

  “Peyton claims there isn’t any Josie who works at the Stardust.” Helen trotted to the rear of the cruiser. “Whoever killed Tommy took him to the racetrack to kill him with the horse tranquilizer. The murder occurred after hours. So our killer has to have access to the stables. Peyton has access.”

  “Would Peyton have implicated herself by using her name in Rachel’s cry for help?”

  Helen opened the SUV’s rear compartment. “If things had gone according to plans, you wouldn’t be around now to state that whoever it was that called you used Peyton’s name.” She extracted a thick case file from her bag. “Or maybe Peyton used her name so that you would assume it wasn’t her because who in their right mind would implicate herself?”

  She held out the folder to him. “Your father’s old case file about his investigation into Peyton’s sex ring. Makes for a very disturbing read.”

  Chris read the name printed on the folder. Jocelyn Davis.

  “Did you know that Mr. Newton committed suicide six months after he went to jail for killing Jocelyn Davis?”

  Chris felt as if he had been punched in the chest.

  Helen tapped the folder with her index finger, its long nail painted a deep shade of red. “Peyton may not have snapped Jocelyn’s neck and dumped her body in the river, but she certainly set things in motion to make it happen. Jocelyn was supposedly her best friend. They had gone all through school together.”

  “I know,” Chris said. “Peyton is trouble with a capital ‘T’ which rhymes with ‘P’ which stands for Peyton.”

  “Your dad went so far as to have a psychological profile done,” Helen said. “Peyton Davenport is a dangerous psychopath. Brilliantly manipulative. Incapable of remorse. I want you to read this before you go out with her tonight.”

  “I don’t have time to read a whole report.”

  “Then I’ll read it to you while you get ready.” She took the folder from him. “It’s either that or I’m going to follow you two all evening to make sure nothing happens to you.”

  “Now you sound like my mother.”

  Girlish laughter floated into the mudroom while Chris hung up their coats. They dismissed it as girlish hijinks until the laughter gave way to an “ah.”

  “Doris broke out the photo albums!” Helen shrieked when she looked into the kitchen.

  At the kitchen table, Doris and the four girls leafed through a picture book. With every turn of the page, the girls would swoon or giggle while Doris recounted the story behind the pictures with much animation.

  “Mom, you never told me that you were homecoming queen!” Sierra said with awe.

  “And, Dad, you never told us that you were king,” Katelyn said.

  “You also never told me that Chris was your high school sweetheart,” Sierra said. “If I’d known that I would have figured out some way to take advantage of working for his mother.” She winked at Doris.

  “Here they are kissing! Ewwwww!” Emma and Nikki screwed up their noses.

  “That’s Valentine’s Day,” Doris said. “Your father did extra chores for two months to save up enough money to take Helen to the Bavarian Inn for dinner.”

  “You should take her to the Bavarian Inn tomorrow night,” Katelyn said. “It is Valentine’s Day.”

  Before Chris could respond, Helen said, “I doubt if we can get reservations now.”

  “There sure are a lot of pictures of the two of you,” Sierra said. “That was some hot romance. Mom, why didn’t you ever tell me? Homecoming queen. Studly boyfriend. Here, I was thinking you were the invisible woman.”

  “As long as we’re going down memory lane, why don’t we go back to 1970?” Chris removed a photo album from the bookshelf and took it to the table.

  “Christopher,” Doris said with a warning in her voice.

  “What goes around comes around, Mom.”

  Chris flipped open the book and dropped it in the center of the table. The girls uttered a shout in unison at the picture of a seventeen-year-old Doris. In a royal blue evening gown, she posed for the camera with a jeweled crown on her head and a sash declaring her Miss West Virginia.

  “Nonni, is that real?” Katelyn jumped out of her seat. “Were you really a beauty queen?”

  Her face bright pink, Doris looked up at Chris. “I wasn’t going to show them the picture of you naked on the bearskin rug.”

  “Were you really crowned Miss West Virginia, Nonni?” Nikki asked.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Did you get to keep the crown?” Emma asked.

  “Yes, it’s around here somewhere,” Doris said.

  “The last time I saw it,” Chris said, “it was in a crate with Nonni’s old moonshiner’s still out in the garage.”

  “Moonshiner’s still?” Sierra asked.

  “During the Prohibition, my grandparents made the best moonshine in southern West Virginia,” Doris said.

  “Why are you embarrassed, Doris?” Sierra asked. “You were crowned the most beautiful, intelligent, and sophisticated woman in the state. That’s something to be very proud of.”

  “It was how she met Dad,” Chris said. “He was at the police academy down in Charleston and earned extra money providing security for the pageant’s contestants. Mom was Miss Boone County.”

  “I entered because the main prize was a college scholarship,” Doris said, “and a car. A Ford convertible. The day I saw Kirk, I set my sights on him. Of course, so did every other red-blooded girl in the pageant. Tall, broad shoulders, and piercing blue eyes. He was beating them off with a stick.”

  “How did you beat out the other contestants to win Gramps, Nonni?” Katelyn asked.

  Her gray eyes narrowed. Doris paused before she replied, “Beat them? What do you mean by beating them?”

  “All these other beauty contestants were chasing Gramps,” Katelyn said. “So what did you do to win him away from them?”

  “I didn’t win Gramps, darling,” Doris said. “Love, real love, isn’t a competition with winners and losers. Either you love someone or you don’t. And if someone you
love loves someone else and not you—then there really isn’t anything you can do to change that.”

  Katelyn sat up straight. Her eyes narrowed with doubt. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “I wouldn’t kid you about this, sweetie.”

  “You mean back then, if Gramps was interested in Miss Jefferson County, you wouldn’t have wanted to tear her hair out so that you could have him for yourself?”

  “If Gramps was stepping out with Miss Jefferson County, why would I tear her hair out? He’d be the dreadful scoundrel cheating on me—not her. Why is it that when a man cheats, the two women tear each other’s hair out? They should get together and tear the man’s hair out.”

  “Good point, Doris,” Helen said.

  “When I was a young girl and had my heart broken for the first time, my grandma sat me down and told me this,” Doris said.

  “Is this the same grandma who made the moonshine?” Nikki asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, she was,” Doris said. “To get back to my point, she told me, ‘Doris, anyone who’ll risk breaking your heart by playing games with it isn’t worthy of it. Only give your heart to someone who sees your love for the precious treasure that it is.’”

  “That is so true,” Sierra said with a dreamy sigh.

  Katelyn fell into silence.

  Doris’s eyes grew misty as she brushed her fingers across her pageant picture. “Gramps was so proud of me when I won Miss West Virginia.” She frowned. “I couldn’t believe my rotten luck.”

  “Why was it rotten luck?” Helen asked.

  “Because Miss West Virginia couldn’t be married,” Doris said. “That meant Kirk and I had to sneak around for a full year. There was no way I was going to let myself get saddled with Miss America. I was bound and determined to marry that man. As soon as I unloaded that Miss West Virginia crown, Kirk and I ran down to the justice of the peace and got married. Christopher came along six months later.”

  “You mean nine,” Helen said.

  “No, six,” Doris said.

  “I was twelve before I did the math,” Chris said.

  “Thank God for girdles or West Virginia would have rocked with scandal.”

  “What was your talent, Nonni?” Nikki asked.

  “I think she just told you her talent,” Chris said.

  “In the pageant,” Nikki said.

  “Let me guess,” Sierra said. “Dance.”

  “You’re never going to guess,” Doris said with a shake of her head.

  “Singing,” Sierra said. “You have a low sexy voice. I bet it was singing. You wooed the judges with a throaty ballad.”

  Shaking her head with a smile, Doris packed up the photo albums.

  “Dad, what’s Nonni’s talent?” Katelyn asked.

  Chuckling, Chris said, “You’ll never guess.” He took Helen by the hand and led her to the back staircase. “I’m going to go get dressed for the dinner.”

  “And you need Helen to help you get dressed, Christopher?”

  Chris held up the case file. “We have studying to do before I go on my date.”

  “Trust me, it’ll all come back to you, Christopher,” Doris said. “It’s like riding a bike.”

  Chris closed his door at the bottom of the stairs leading to his “apartment” in the attic–a sign that his daughters and mother understood. He was to be left alone.

  Resting against a pile of pillows at the head of the bed, Helen removed a report from the case file she had found among Kirk Matheson’s records. “Did you know that Julie Davenport, Mason’s late wife, committed suicide?”

  “Everyone knows that.” Chris sat next to her. “She threw herself off the bedroom balcony of their two-hundred-year-old colonial mansion.”

  “Did you know Peyton was the only one in the room when her mother took that swan dive?” She showed the portion of the report to him. “Steve Sinclair ran interference for the Davenports—not allowing anyone to interview Peyton to find out what had happened in that room. The medical examiner declared it a suicide. But notes in the autopsy indicate that Julie had bruises and abrasions across the back that are consistent with being pushed backwards over the railing.”

  “What would be Peyton’s motive?”

  “She’s evil,” Helen said. “Your mother mentioned a very good point earlier. Experts have identified genetic evidence to support the notion that some people are born with a tendency toward evil? I once read about a case where a man was arrested for raping his son’s girlfriend. The irony was that this same man’s father, was already serving a life sentence for being a serial rapist. Two out of three generations were rapists.”

  “Couldn’t that be environment?” Chris said. “I don’t know about the case, but wouldn’t you think that a family like that would believe women were meant to be abused?”

  There was a loud knock on the door followed by Doris’s voice from the bottom of the stairs. “Christopher, are you decent?”

  A wicked grin crossed his face before he replied, “I’ve never been decent.”

  “Then how about Helen?”

  “Come on up, Doris. Chris and I were just talking.” Helen shoved the report into her bag. “You better get ready. You don’t want to be late for your date.”

  Her cell phone clutched in her hand, Doris held it up for them to see when she reached the top of the stairs. “I was just talking to Sylvia, Felicia’s mom. I had called to give her my condolences.”

  Reminded of their good friend’s death, Chris’s and Helen’s eyes dropped to the floor.

  “I’ve known Sylvia for years,” Doris said. “We met when you started dating Felicia, Christopher. Sylvia and I went to lunch to get to know each other better. Well, she asked me if the library carried any erotica books. Of course, I told her that we did and she asked for recommendations. When we got back from lunch, Sylvia checked three books out of the library. Well, the next week she came back and just went on and on. She and her husband had used the sex scenes in the books for a guide. Ever since, she comes in every Friday and checks out three hot books to use for sex manuals. She credits me with saving their marriage.”

  “Mom,” Chris asked, “what did Sylvia tell you when you called just now?”

  “You know that Opie Fletcher that you’re holding for Felicia’s murder?”

  “I’m very aware of Opie Fletcher,” Helen said.

  “Do you know how Felicia came about hiring him to work for her?”

  “How?” Chris asked.

  “Rodney recommended him to Felicia.”

  “No,” Helen said with a gasp.

  “Yes,” Doris said.

  “But Opie didn’t seem to know anything about Rodney when I questioned him,” Helen said. “He told me that Felicia called him out of the blue to come out to do yard work and odd jobs.”

  “After Felicia kicked Rodney out, she found that she needed a man around to do the yard work and fix things,” Doris said. “She didn’t want Rodney coming around to do it. Yet, she didn’t want to hire a man she didn’t know anything about. One day, Rodney gave her Opie’s phone number. He told her that a friend of his recommended him for odd jobs. Sylvia thought Opie seemed kind of strange and asked Felicia about him. Felicia claimed that Rodney had run a background check on him and he was clean.”

  “If Rodney had run a background check on him, he would have seen that he was a suspect in Mona Tabler’s murder,” Chris said. “He had to know because Mona lived only four doors down from them when she was murdered.”

  “Sylvia says the exact same thing,” Doris said.

  “Rodney totally killed her,” Helen said.

  “He must have been planning this for months,” Chris said.

  “That’s why he had Mona Tabler’s case file—because he wanted to set up the key suspect in her unsolved murder,” Helen said.

&n
bsp; “Two murders in the same neighborhood with similar MOs,” Chris said. “The suspect in the first case just so happens to work for the second victim. Victor Sinclair would easily buy that.”

  “But Rodney has an ironclad alibi,” Helen said.

  “Are you sure about that?” Doris asked.

  “Positive,” Helen said. “He was seventeen minutes away at the athletic club. I saw the security recording myself. He arrived at the club a few minutes before seven o’clock and walked out close to eight-thirty.”

  “There has to be another door that he left through to sneak home to kill Felicia and get back in without anyone noticing,” Doris said.

  “Emergency exit. Opening the door sets off an alarm. No way he went out that door without alerting everyone in the place,” Helen said. “Besides that, the gasoline fire would’ve engulfed the whole second floor within seconds. There’s not enough time for him to have set it, get back to the gym, and walk out just as the fire department pulled up to the scene.”

  “Unless he set the fire remotely,” Chris said. “Remember the cord on the lamp was cut to expose the wires, and they were wrapped around a match, which rested on the carpet drenched in gasoline.”

  “Even if the lamp is voice activated, Rodney would’ve had to have been in the house—”

  “Not necessarily.” Chris picked up his cell phone. “There’s a cell phone app for everything nowadays.”

  “Yes, Brad did tell us something about that,” Helen said. “But Felicia threw Rodney out last year. Wouldn’t she have removed him from the home network?”

  “Not necessarily,” Doris said. “Kirk died last year and he’s still listed in our computer network.”

  “If Felicia didn’t set up their home network, she may not have even given Rodney’s access to it any thought,” Chris said.

  “Not only did he have home owner’s insurance, but he had a hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on Felicia,” Doris said. “He’s got a whole lot of reason to kill her and burn down their house.”

  “And he’s got the means to do it.” Chris held up his phone. “I have an app that syncs my phone with our home security system. Not only does the system send notices to my phone, but I can send commands to the system.”