Endowed with Death, page 21
“What if she was upset? What if something scared her or made her feel like she couldn’t stay here?” Tuttle suggested.
“I just… no, I can’t see it. She would never have done that. And…” Hilda looked awkward. “I know Michael wasn’t here anymore, but she loved Mr. Wade too. Not romantically. Nothing like that. She raised him, though. She was his nanny his whole life, and she wouldn’t leave him. I just can’t see her doing that.”
“What if she was afraid of him?” Baker asked.
“Why would she be afraid of him?”
None of them gave any explanation. Hilda looked around at the three of them. “Sylvia never had any reason to be afraid of Mr. Wade.”
“He was never angry at her? I understand things have been pretty tense around here lately. Mr. Wade was under a lot of pressure.” Baker’s voice was quiet, non-accusatory. “It was only natural that he might have gotten angry if he was under pressure. People snap. Say things they shouldn’t. Mr. Wade was a passionate person.”
“Angry at Sylvia? I don’t think I ever heard him say a cross word about her in all the time I’ve been here, and that’s a long time. She said once what a hellion he’d been when he was younger, but that was when he was a teenager or young man. I doubt he’d ever raised his voice to her since then.”
“Did she say how she had handled that? When he’d been a problem as a teen?”
Hilda shook her head. “I’m sure I don’t know. I’ve seen her with teens. She has a way. She’s firm, but unbending. They eventually listen.”
“How has Mr. Wade been lately?” Tuttle asked, stepping closer to Hilda and looking down at her, being a little more intimidating than Kenzie thought was necessary. “If you listen to the news, he’d been going through a lot of stuff the last few months. I assume he had been… difficult to be around when things were not going well.”
“I wouldn’t talk about my employers, detective.”
“Shouting? Violent?” Tuttle raised his voice as if demonstrating. “Was he aggressive? Toward you? Toward his wife? Michael?”
She stepped back from him. “He was not violent,” she insisted.
“Did he fight with his wife?”
“Every man fights with his wife.”
“Had it been getting worse? How did she react when she found out about his latest affair?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Tuttle spoke slowly and clearly as if she might not have understood him the first time. “When Mrs. Wade found out he’d been catting around again. She was upset, wasn’t she? Did she threaten to leave him?”
“No. She wouldn’t do that.”
“Because she would lose her position if she did? Lose all of that money? And what about Michael? Would she lose him too, if they divorced?”
“They wouldn’t divorce.”
“Why? Because there was a prenup?”
“Of course there was a prenup. Everyone has a prenup. It would be stupid not to. But if he was the one who was having an affair, then he would be penalized, not her.”
“So maybe she did threaten to leave him. To take all of that money. They’ve probably been stripping the paint off the walls with their arguments lately.”
Hilda shook her head, but it wasn’t very convincing. They had been arguing, Kenzie deduced. Maybe Terri-Lyn hadn’t threatened to leave him, but they were arguing. And where had Michael been when they were fighting? And how did Sylvia fit into it all? What had happened to her? Had she left on her own?
“Does Sylvia have a car, Hilda?” Baker asked.
Hilda bit her lip. “No, she didn’t drive anymore. There was no need for her to have one.”
“How did she get around when she wanted to leave the property?”
“The chauffeur or someone else would take her. Or we would call for car service from town if no one else could take her.”
“And did she call the car service yesterday or today?”
Hilda hesitated, then shook her head. So she had been concerned enough that she had already checked.
“She packed a bag but didn’t call for a car service?” Tuttle challenged. “Where did she go? How did she get there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did anyone drive her?”
“No… everybody says they did not.”
“Are all of the cars accounted for? She didn’t ‘borrow’ anyone else’s?”
Hilda shook her head. “Of course not. She wouldn’t do that. I told you, she didn’t drive anymore. She wouldn’t take someone else’s car.”
“Then how did she leave?”
“I don’t know.” Hilda’s eyes were wide as she continued to shake her head at the questions. “I don’t know where she could have gone.”
Tuttle looked at Baker. “We’d better start a search of the grounds. Can you give us permission to search?” He addressed the question to Hilda.
“I’m just the housekeeper. I can’t give you permission.”
“Then get Mr. Wade or whoever can give us permission and find out. Impress upon him the seriousness of the situation. If he doesn’t give us permission, we will be forced to get a warrant, and I will not go easy on him after being prevented from getting a warrant the past few days. If harm has come to Sylvia Arnold, and he impedes this investigation, there will be consequences. He won’t be able to talk his way out of it this time.”
Hilda nodded jerkily and left to find Mr. Wade. Kenzie braced herself for the explosion when he found out that the cops were back and trying to get permission to search the property yet again. And this time, it would be a broader search. The whole house. All of the outbuildings. All of the surrounding land where a woman or a body could be hidden.
42
Surprisingly, there was no explosion. And it wasn’t because Cash Wade was away and therefore couldn’t rage at them. Kenzie had been wondering whether they would be able to talk Terri-Lyn into a search if Cash were away. Terri-Lyn wouldn’t care about Sylvia as much as Cash would. And there was also the possibility that she would refuse to do anything he hadn’t directly sanctioned, forcing the police to get a warrant issued.
Instead, Mr. Wade arrived with quiet, measured tread on the thick plush carpeting. Rather than being furious that they had returned and were again demanding the right to do a further search, he looked worried. There was an N-shaped frown line between his brows.
“Hilda said that Sylvia is missing?” Cash asked, looking into her rooms from the hallway as if they might be mistaken and she was just sitting there waiting for him to show up. “How could she be missing?”
A look had flashed between Baker and Tuttle. “That’s an excellent question, Mr. Wade,” Baker said. Maybe they sensed he would be more amenable to dealing with a woman, more likely to be soft and sympathetic. “No one seems to know of any plans she had to leave. She didn’t call a car service. No one drove her unless maybe you did it without anyone realizing it?”
“No. No, I haven’t taken her anywhere. She didn’t go out very often. No one took her?”
“No. Can you think of anywhere she may have gone?”
“Of course not. She wasn’t given to traveling.” He seemed stumped. He looked into her rooms again. “She didn’t leave a note, maybe?”
“There was no note.”
“Her suitcase is missing,” Tuttle contributed. “Maybe she decided that in light of everything that has happened, she needed a vacation.”
“A vacation?” He sounded incredulous. “No, of course not. This was her quiet space, where she went when she needed to get away from it all and relax. She could never be relaxed on a vacation away from her family. She only traveled when she needed to accompany us on a family vacation. That’s the only time she ever used her suitcase. Where would she go?” he asked the room.
No one had an answer for him.
“This is crazy,” Cash said, raising his voice. “She wouldn’t leave me like that!”
Kenzie found it interesting that he didn’t enter Sylvia’s sitting room. Was it because he thought the police wouldn’t let him? It was his own house, and it hadn’t been declared a crime scene. Was it because he had been trained to respect his old nanny’s private space and didn’t dare chance her disapproval?
“Rather than wasting time speculating on where she might have gone,” Tuttle said, “Don’t you think we had better begin a search? If she’s had a heart attack or a stroke, or fallen and broken her hip… she could be lying on the ground somewhere, just praying that someone will find her. Don’t you think we’d better look sooner rather than later? We can float all the theories we want later. For now… I think we’d better act.”
“Yes,” Cash agreed, looking grimly determined. “Yes, by all means. Mobilize the forces. Begin the search.” He looked around for someone else to help, maybe thinking that Hilda was still standing by waiting for instructions, but she had not returned after informing him of the situation. Not finding the help he was looking for, Cash pulled out his phone and hit one of his favorite contacts. “Bill. Sylvia is MIA. She might be hurt or… anything. We need to start a search. Get the men together, and start organizing them. The police will be down in a few minutes to give them instructions.” He looked at Tuttle and Baker, one eyebrow raised in inquiry.
Tuttle nodded and pulled out his phone to call for backup. They would need a lot of people to search a property that big. It wasn’t just the house they would have to worry about. Kenzie thought about wells, septic tanks, and creeks. What places might exist around the property that would make the perfect hiding place for the body of an old woman, especially one as small as Sylvia?
And that was assuming that someone hadn’t taken her off the property in the trunk of his car. There were bound to have been a number of people that had come and gone in the last twenty-four hours. They didn’t know for sure what time Sylvia had disappeared.
“We’ll want dogs,” she told Tuttle, as he started to issue orders for the support he would need. “This is a big place.”
He nodded his agreement. They had their work cut out for them. He and Baker were not going to just walk around the basement or the backyard and find her body hidden under a tarp. It was going to take a massive manhunt to find out what had happened to Sylvia Arnold.
Kenzie still secretly harbored the hope that they would find Sylvia alive. Maybe she had managed to talk her way into a lift into town. Maybe she had called for a ride-share service nobody thought she knew how to use. Maybe she’d had a medical emergency and was waiting desperately for someone to rescue her.
But Kenzie had a bad feeling that they would not find her in time.
It was probably already too late.
With Cash behind the search this time, there was no push-back from the police department or any of the political figures who had been making their influence known over the past few days. Quite the opposite. There was a constant stream of municipal and state police, as well as the FBI, local search and rescue, and every other organization that Kenzie could think of. She didn’t envy Tuttle, trying to stay in control and coordinate everyone in the search.
She worried about evidence being trampled outside, about the woman’s scent being contaminated by all of the searchers, but when the search dogs arrived a couple of hours later, they went straight to work.
They had already checked the septic tank and there were no wells, so two of Kenzie’s predicted body dump sites had been eliminated.
But one of the outbuildings, an old bunkhouse that hadn’t been used by the staff for years, had a root cellar with a loading passage behind the house. One of those mysterious doors set into the ground that Kenzie remembered seeing as a child in some old farmhouses. A bulkhead door.
“Medical Examiner’s Office,” Tuttle announced, as he escorted Kenzie through the small knot of law enforcement officers and staff. “Everyone step aside, please.”
Kenzie could hear Cash bellowing like a bull, mourning the loss of his beloved nanny and threatening retribution on whoever had taken her from him. She hoped he had not seen her there, but had merely been given minimal details of what they had found.
That she was dead. That someone had hidden her body.
That they would find whoever it was and demand justice.
The keys to the lock on the door had probably been lost years before or the lock rusted shut. The killer had apparently made no attempt to unlock it, but had simply used a crowbar to pop it open.
Sylvia’s small body lay at the bottom of the stairs, dumped unceremoniously through the doorway rather than carried down and set on the floor. Kenzie deduced she had been dumped by someone who didn’t care about her. Someone who loved her would have taken her down the steps, stretched her out on the floor, arranged her head and her hands. She wouldn’t just be splayed there, half on the floor and half on the stairs, with limbs flung in every direction.
Kenzie looked around the frame of the door before taking a step inside. She had the small scene-of-crime kit she kept in her car. Not as robust as what she would have brought if she had come from the office, but it was sufficient for what she needed to do before authorizing the removal of the body. Booties for her feet so that she wouldn’t track in trace evidence embedded in the treads of her shoes. Purple gloves on her hands so she could touch the body. A stethoscope to confirm death if necessary.
Kenzie skirted the body at the bottom of the stairs and did her job stoically, walling off thoughts of the living, breathing woman she had talked to earlier in the week. The woman who had taken her precious charge to the emergency room. Who had sat and rocked beside the boy’s bed when he had been hurt and sick, comforting him all night long.
She confirmed death. No heartbeat or respiration. Body cold and stiff, in full rigor. Kenzie bagged Sylvia’s hands in case she had managed to scratch her attacker or get any evidence under her nails or between her fingers. She examined the woman for a fatal wound, and found no gunshot or knife wound. Whoever had killed her had been more subtle than that.
Had Sylvia seen it coming? Had she known her attacker? Known that she was going to die?
Kenzie went through the motions of taking a few pictures and looking for any trace evidence on or around the body. She gently lifted Sylvia’s shoulder and head from either side to look at her upper back, neck, and head. No obvious injuries.
Was it possible that Sylvia had died naturally? Perhaps had a heart attack or stroke? And someone had been afraid of the police investigating a second death in the home and had hidden her body to cover it up? A second death to investigate would, Kenzie was sure, open up the rest of the house and grounds for a search for evidence in Sylvia’s death and anything connecting the two. Kenzie’s determination that Michael’s death was a homicide rather than an accident would eliminate the possibility that the two deaths were coincidental.
Kenzie walked around the root cellar, looking around for anything else that had been disturbed or added to the scene. There was no weapon, no hastily scrawled note or other evidence that would point them in the direction of the killer.
Not yet. Kenzie would see about that when she looked at the body back at the morgue. She climbed the steps back out of the cellar and dialed Dr. Wiltshire’s cell, hoping he would not be too groggy on painkillers to deal with her.
He had already heard the news from other quarters and answered on the first ring.
“Kenzie. I was told you were already at the scene.”
“Yes. I’ve had a look around. I’m ready to authorize the removal of the body, but I wanted a second opinion.” She kept her voice low. “With all of the political stuff surrounding this case, I want to make sure that everything I do is double and triple checked. I don’t want any accusations that I’ve missed anything.”
“Of course,” he agreed.
“I’ll send you some pictures, and you can tell me if you want me to walk you around the crime scene. Or the dump site, to be more accurate.”
Dr. Wiltshire made an affirmative noise. Kenzie tapped her screen to gather up the photos she had taken and send them to Dr. Wiltshire. She heard the alert on his end as they were received and waited while he looked through them.
“Not much to see,” he grunted.
“No. There isn’t.”
She gave him a few more seconds to look at them. “Is there anything else you want to see?”
“No. But let’s do it anyway, just to cover all bases. Call me back on video chat, and we’ll walk the crime scene together once.”
“Okay.”
Kenzie hung up, then called him back again immediately on video chat. She framed the root cellar door on her screen and, at Dr. Wiltshire’s instruction, zoomed close to the damage made by the pry bar. Then she walked down the steps. “I don’t think I’ll lose the signal, but it may glitch a bit,” she warned.
Dr. Wiltshire walked her through the steps she had already completed, making her confirm them or do them again. She turned on her flashlight to walk around the body and the perimeter of the cellar, then retrieved the Alternative Light Source from her death kit and did it again. Various molds fluoresced on the walls, but Kenzie could see no blood spatters or other bodily fluids.
“That’s everything,” Dr. Wiltshire confirmed. “I can’t think of anything that you have missed. Go ahead and release the body for transportation and have the crime techs go over the scene with a fine-toothed comb. George is already on his way over.”
Kenzie thanked Dr. Wiltshire for his help and returned to the surface. She nodded at Tuttle, who was maintaining control over the scene. “ME’s office releases the body for removal and transport. Our truck should be here soon. The techs can start working.”
Tuttle nodded. He looked around the small yard surrounding the bunkhouse. It was unmaintained and overgrown. Kenzie would not have known that there was another outbuilding here, but supposed that anyone who had been working in the house for any length of time would have known about it. She didn’t see any litter or footprints left behind by the killer. They had been careful.
