The Crime That Binds, page 27
“Ryan!” I yelled. “He has a gun! Safety is off!”
Quick as a snake, Skyler punched Ryan in the stomach with his left fist. He bent over, gasping. Skyler lashed out with his foot and kicked him forward to his hands and knees. He sank his fingers into Ryan’s hair, pulling his head back, and put the gun to the back of Ryan’s head.
“Whoever you are, come on out,” Skyler growled.
Though my body moved slowly, my mind was racing. Rafe knew we were here. Maybe the track meet had wrapped up early and he was on his way. Maybe he was driving down the park entrance right now.
“I know you,” Skyler said, staring at me. “You were looking for a Conti for your boyfriend.”
Fiancé, but whatever. If he thought Ryan was my boyfriend, maybe that would play to our advantage. Wasn’t sure how, but there was always that possibility.
“You,” Skyler said, nodding at me. “Get his cell phone out of his pocket.”
“Sorry,” Ryan muttered.
I wasn’t sure why he was apologizing. He was the one who had a gun to his head. “What pocket?” I asked him, pleased that my voice didn’t sound like I was terrified. “For the cell phone?”
“Left front.”
I pulled out the solid rectangle and showed it to Skyler. “Burner phone,” he said. “Smart. But not smart enough.” He grabbed the phone from me and threw hard. It landed in the lake with a quiet plop.
“The recording is gone,” Ryan said in a whispery voice. “No reason to keep Minnie here. Just let her go.”
I glared at him. As if I’d run away and let Skyler do . . . whatever.
“Don’t think that’s going to happen,” Skyler said thoughtfully. “Seems to me the best thing is to get rid of you both. Cleans up all sorts of loose ends.”
No way was he going to get away with a double murder. Triple, counting Pug, which I did. The man had serious mental problems. Which was obvious, really, given the sculpture obsession thing. I tried to take a calming breath, but it didn’t help much. My heart was pounding, my hands were sweating, and my knees were starting to quiver. There had to be a way out of this.
“Okay,” Ryan said. “But what are you going to do with our bodies? One body you could bury in the woods deep enough so the coyotes and bears wouldn’t make a mess in hours. But two? That’s a lot of digging. Not sure how you’re going to do that.”
I stared at him in disbelief. He was trying to deter a killer from killing by using disposal concerns? Seriously?
Skyler made a noise that, under other circumstances, would have been called a laugh. “Like I’m going to worry about hiding anything. All I have to do is make sure I’m not caught. No one has come down this road for the last hour, so I think I’m good. It’s not like anyone has security cameras out here.”
Reflexively, the three of us looked around. And, sure enough, there wasn’t a camera in sight. Not on a post, not on the corner of the restroom building, not in the branches of any tree.
I pulled in a breath. Because there, in a maple tree just overhead, was something I was pretty sure was the lashing tail of a black-and-white tabby cat.
Eddie. Oh, no. The car door must have not shut all the way. And the cat carrier door must have unlatched itself with all the bumps. How had I not checked? How—
I jerked my attention away, not wanting Skyler to see. Keep away, I said, once again trying mental telepathy. Stay up there!
“Maybe you’re right,” Ryan said. “But that still leaves you with a big problem.”
“Only one?” Skyler sounded amused. “Tell me.”
Ryan spoke quietly, and I marveled at his calm. “There are two of us and only one of you.”
“That’s not a problem,” Skyler said. “All I have to do is make sure you’re far enough apart and—”
“Mrr!!!”
Three things happened at the same time.
Ryan hit Skyler’s wrist, pushing the gun down and away. It clattered to the ground.
I hurled myself at Skyler, jumping onto his back and looping my arms around his neck, clasping my hands around my wrists, hauling back as hard as I could.
Eddie dropped out of the tree, panther-like. He landed on Skyler’s head and dug his claws deep into his long, thick hair, all the while howling at the top of his lungs.
“Hang on, Minnie!” Ryan shouted.
That was my intention, but it was hard, as Skyler was turning in circles and grabbing at my arms, at my wrists, at my hands. I put my knees against his back and pulled harder. This man was not going to kill Ryan, not going to kill me, and certainly wasn’t going to harm a hair on Eddie’s furry head.
“Mrr!!”
“What I said,” I panted out, holding on for all I was worth.
Ryan put his head down and rammed Skyler’s solar plexus. Skyler’s breath went out in a whoosh! and he staggered. I shifted my weight, trying to tip him off balance, and he staggered a second time.
“MRR!”
Ryan cannoned into Skyler again.
He went down to one knee. I gave him a hip check and sent him to both knees. As he fell, I spotted the fallen branch, grabbed it, and whirled around, whacking Skyler with it just as he was starting to stand, sending him back to the ground.
Ryan, scrabbling around in the gravel, jumped to his feet, holding the gun at the ready. “Don’t move,” he said. “Move and I’ll—”
“Get that mangy ball of fur off me!” Skyler roared.
Eddie, of course, ignored him, and I was sure I saw him flex his claws. Skyler moaned with pain, which in any other circumstance would have concerned me, but this time absolutely didn’t.
I released my grip on Skyler, got to my feet, and was starting to take my jacket off to tie his wrists together, when a car roared into the parking lot. Then another. It was Rafe. And Ash.
“Mrr,” Eddie said, very casually. Using Skyler’s head for leverage, he leapt to the ground and trotted over to the newcomers.
I smiled at Ryan. “It’s just like I’ve been saying all along.”
“It’s going to be okay,” he said.
And then he smiled.
Chapter 22
Minnie! Are you all right?”
Rafe crushed me against his chest. I said something into his jacket that he couldn’t hear, so he uncrushed me, gave me a long kiss while a purring Eddie twined around our ankles, then looked into my face. “Sorry. What was that?”
“Why is Ash here?” Not that I wasn’t grateful, because I was indeed very pleased to see a law enforcement officer put handcuffs on Skyler, but I was puzzled.
“Oh. Him. Well . . .”
The slightly sheepish story came out. Ash had attended the same track meet and, longtime friends that they were, they sat next to each other, and somewhere between the running of the three-hundred-meter hurdles and the four-by-four-hundred relay, Ash asked what I was doing tonight.
“Telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth was the only option?” I asked.
The love of my life shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I? Good thing, too, don’t you think?”
“We would have been fine,” I said, but there was a slight quaver in my voice that wasn’t so sure. I bent to pick up Eddie, and, minor miracle, he let himself be scooped up and cuddled.
A sheriff’s vehicle drove down the road, its headlights sweeping across the parking lot, and came to a stop next to Ash’s vehicle. The uniformed deputy got out, conferred with Ash, and soon Skyler was tucked in the back of the deputy’s vehicle.
Ash and the deputy and Ryan went into a huddle slightly apart from Rafe and myself.
By now it was completely dark. The only light was from the various cars, and the sparkling of the stars up in the clear sky. I looked up, studying the cloudy dust of the Milky Way spreading from northeast to southwest, and tried to grasp that those clouds were actually the light from zillions of stars in one spiral arm of one galaxy.
“You’re cold.” Rafe put his arm around me.
“I’m fi-fine,” I said through chattering teeth. It wasn’t that cold, not really, so I wasn’t sure why I was shivering.
“Yo, Wolverson!” Rafe called. “Minnie’s turning into an ice cube. What’s the timeline here?”
After a short consultation between Ash and the deputy, it turned out that if the park entrance was taped off, none of us needed to be there at all, so Ash did that and we drove to the sheriff’s office in a small caravan, Ryan’s bicycle in the back of Rafe’s truck and Ryan himself riding with Ash. I selected my Happy Songs playlist and by the time we reached Chilson, I’d stopped shivering.
Detective Hal Inwood met us at the front door. “Ms. Hamilton. How nice of you to drop by.”
“Thought you might be missing me,” I said, thinking of all the hours I’d spent in this building, but the grin I tried to send him must have been a sad failure, because instead of tossing out an edgy reply, he gave me a long look and said, “Would you like some water? Or maybe coffee? Half caf, but it’s fresh. Made it myself not ten minutes ago.”
I smiled. A real one, possibly the first true smile I’d ever given him. “Thank you. Coffee sounds fantastic.”
We were dispersed into two tiny interview rooms, Rafe and me in one, Ryan in another, with Skyler in another part of the building, as he’d been arrested and was in the holding area, being processed into jail.
It took hours to explain everything. I fell asleep more than once, and it was long after midnight that Rafe and Eddie and I went home.
The next morning we were back. Only now I was wide awake, breakfasted, and had a nice hot travel mug of the Round Table’s coffee in my tight grip. Ryan was there, too, along with Hal and Ash. It made a tight fit in the small room, but we were all friends, so it was okay.
Hal, the elder statesman in the room, spoke first. “You look well this morning, Mr. Anderson.”
Ryan grinned. “It was hard to decide what to do first when I got home. Take a shower or shave off the beard.”
Last night we’d learned that two days ago, the downstate police who’d been looking for Ryan had called the sheriff’s office and basically said, oh, yeah, forgot to tell you. We found the guy who robbed the bank. He’d run off to Montana. Got him hauled back to Michigan last week.
I’d wanted to rant and rave about the inefficiency, about the waste of Ash’s time and energy, and especially about the unnecessary trauma Ryan had suffered, but I’d been too tired. And now Ryan looked so happy and content that there seemed little point in bringing it up all over again.
“Then I remembered. My shaver works in the shower. I could do both.” Ryan laughed, and I smiled. The old Ryan, the cheerful Ryan, was still with us. I only hoped the old plumbing in his farmhouse was up to the task of washing away four weeks’ worth of beard.
Hal flipped through a stack of papers and extracted one. “Here’s what we’ve learned since last night,” he said, skimming its contents. “Skyler Ellison’s parents were appalled by his early interest in the art world and did everything in their power to divert him from a career in that direction.”
Though he was still looking at the paper, I could tell by the lack of eye movement that he wasn’t reading any longer.
“Skyler Ellison’s father,” Hal went on, “had a dislike, even a hatred, for that profession. His father’s sister married an artist who abandoned her less than a year after he’d moved them to New York. She was too ashamed to go back home and died a few months later of a cancer that could have been treated—and likely cured—if caught earlier.”
It was a sad story, tragic on many levels. I wondered what it said about Skyler’s relationship with his parents, that he would embrace something that must have been abhorrent to his father.
“Art has a pretty broad scope of professions,” I said. “It doesn’t seem fair to assume everyone in it is a manipulative gold-digging schemer.”
Hal nodded. “True. But the former brother-in-law was a sculptor.”
Ah. Well, there you go. It seemed beyond the realm of possibility that Skyler’s obsession with Conti sculptures could be anything but a reaction to his childhood. And that brought up another question. “Are Skyler’s parents still alive?” I asked.
“His father died ten years ago,” Hal said. “His mother passed two years last Christmas. Congestive heart failure and a stroke, respectively. There were no other children.”
So Skyler was trying to prove himself worthy to parents who had been dead for years? What a messy tragedy for so many people, but mostly for Pug. And Sylvia.
Hal seemed to be waiting for another question, but it wasn’t going to come from me because I was preoccupied with wondering how it would feel to have both parents gone from the world. It was the natural order of things, I understood that. Still, knowing that someday my mom wouldn’t be asking if I ate my vegetables and that my dad wouldn’t always be around to remind me to check my car’s windshield wiper fluid made me want to call my brother. An odd reaction, but there it was.
So it was Ryan who asked the question. “If Ellison didn’t have any brothers or sisters, did he inherit his parents’ estate? Or because he went to art school, did they cut him out of the will like they threatened?”
Hal nodded. Apparently Ryan had asked the right question. “Skyler Ellison did, in fact, inherit the full estate, excepting a few donations to nonprofits.”
“Because his dad died before his mom did.” Rafe put his arm around me. “If it had been the other way around, I bet he wouldn’t have seen a dime.”
“Perhaps,” Hal said. “But I doubt we’ll ever know for certain. What we do know is that, in spite of having liquid assets in the seven-figure range and less-liquid assets of even more value, Skyler Ellison worked for little more than minimum wage in a Chilson art gallery, lived in a marginal upstairs apartment, and drove a vehicle with bald tires and no muffler. Yet . . .”
He paused and tilted his head slightly. “Yet in Mr. Ellison’s apartment, we found the sculpture Mr. Breece had sold to Mr. Mattock, along with seven other Conti sculptures, ranging in market value from the mid–five figures to mid–six.”
Doing math so early on a Saturday morning was making my head hurt. “Up in that ratty apartment, Skyler had sculptures worth more than a million dollars?”
“Yes,” Hal said. “And who they’ll end up with is beyond my pay grade.” He flipped through his stack of papers again. “Now, about Mr. Ian Breece, who was also at the park last night.”
“Yeah, that messed me up.” Ryan shook his head. “For a while I thought maybe they killed Pug together.”
Hal tapped the paper that was now on top. “While Mr. Breece was, and is, in serious financial difficulties, his motives regarding the Conti were straightforward. He and his wife, Felicia, had been given a Conti sculpture as a wedding gift. It was from her parents, but neither Felicia nor Ian cared for it. They decided to sell it, but they also didn’t want to hurt her parents’ feelings, so Ian sold it quietly, to Pug Mattock, after getting an approximate cost from Mr. Ellison at the art gallery.”
So simple, once you knew.
“You said you don’t know what’s happening to the Contis. What about the Valera sculpture? And the Conti that Skyler stole from Pug?” I asked. “He bought it from Ian. By rights it belongs to Sylvia.”
Hal looked at his notes. “Let me clarify. I was speaking about the Contis outside of those two. They are being processed as we speak and will be returned to their owners today.”
I peered at the detective. He’d sounded content. Pleased, even. But maybe I was projecting my feelings onto him. I sent Sylvia a wish that she’d find comfort, if not in the lakeside cottage, then wherever she could. And if Mr. Valera didn’t take their sculpture so his sister could see it, I’d do it myself.
“One question,” Rafe said. “Why was Ian at the park last night?”
Ash grinned. “You should know. You’re the one who posted the ad on that blog.”
“Mr. Breece,” Hal said, “was there for the reason he stated at the time. To get a deal on a Conti. He’d hoped to offer a low price to someone who didn’t know any better, then turn around and sell it at a large enough profit to shore up his farm’s finances.”
Parents and children. Wills and weddings. Two men from two families, and vastly different roads the men had taken, both leading them to Conti’s works. One via what seemed like a thumbed nose to his parents, the other concerned with hurting the feelings of his in-laws. One obsessed with artwork ownership, the other only wanting to save his farm, but their roads had crossed long enough to result in the murder of Pug Mattock.
My thoughts wandered away. I’d spent a lot of time in this room, talking about death. About murder. About the gray aftermath of crime that went on and on for the people left behind. I sighed. Maybe this would be the last time. Maybe after today I’d never have to walk into this room again.
Rafe’s arm tightened around me. He leaned over and whispered, “When Inwood leaves, I have a plan.”
That sounded intriguing. “A good plan?” I whispered back.
He scoffed. “Like I have any other kind.”
Since I had a vivid memory of what had happened last winter after his plan to surprise me with a drive to Mackinaw City to see the blue ice during a near blizzard (“We’ll have the whole beach to ourselves with this kind of weather”), that didn’t rate a reply.
But he did sometimes have good ideas, so I waited patiently while Hal told us the probable months-long timeline for Skyler’s arraignment, trial, and sentencing.
“Any questions?” he asked. When we all shook our heads, he shot me a suspicious look. I looked back with wide, innocent eyes, and he left, shaking his head and muttering about the youth of today.
Personally, I thought that today’s youth couldn’t possibly compete with today’s older folks. Aunt Frances was one of the sneakiest people around—on top of her boardinghouse matchmaking past, she’d been quietly working for years on a Minnie Needs to Marry Rafe campaign. And Sylvia Mattock had texted me her plan to squelch John Pinnock. Every time he did something to make her life miserable, she was going to play the lonely-widow card. If he played loud music, she’d bring him a casserole. If he ran the lawnmower under her bedroom window at five a.m., she’d ask him to fix a leaky faucet. Sylvia was confident that Pinnock would, eventually, make the connection and give it up. I was betting two months; Rafe’s bet was four months, because he said men really weren’t all that bright.
