Shatter the Night Read online

  “A couple of hours. I still can’t believe Caleb is gone. Bull and I went to Edith last night, broke the news to her.” I shut my laptop down and checked my bag, made sure I had my wallet, phone, keys, and snacks. “They were separated; did you know that?”

  “Edith and Caleb? Since when?”

  “A few months.” I poured another half cup of coffee and added a healthy splash of cream. “It must be strange, to be married all those years and then suddenly one or both them decided it was over. Just like that.”

  Brody shrugged as he poured himself a cup of milk. “I guess. Though I don’t think it happens that suddenly. There are always signs.”

  “I suppose. Anyway, this investigation is going to keep me busy.”

  “I know the drill, honey. Grace and I will be fine. As long as I get to see your beautiful face at the end of the aisle in four weeks, I’ll be a happy man.”

  “Four?” My heart dropped as I went to the wall and flipped the pages on the hanging weekly calendar. “Damn it.”

  “I remind you that our wedding is in four weeks and you say ‘damn it’?” Brody groaned. “Do I need to be worried?”

  “No. There’s just so much left to do. We need to get the final head count to the caterer, and my dress should be hemmed another inch. I didn’t even tell you this yet, but the florist screwed up our order. It won’t cost us, but he tried blaming me. How does someone read ‘white roses’ and walk away thinking I want yellow daisies? In November, of all months?” I asked, still fuming over the way the man had tried to pull a fast one on me. “So … maybe we should push the date back again?”

  Brody shook his head. “No way. Clementine offered to help us. I’ll have her figure out the head count and you can squeeze in a dress fitting in the next few days. We’re not pushing our wedding back again. And you know my sisters have plane tickets they’ve already purchased.”

  “You’re right.” I turned away, biting my lip as I rinsed my mug and put it in the dishwasher. We’d originally been scheduled to marry in the middle of September, but I’d postponed things when my grandmother Julia had hit a particularly rough patch and the timing just hadn’t felt right. Brody’s sisters, all four of them, hadn’t been thrilled about changing their travel plans. They were flying in from California and I’d yet to meet any of them.

  Rachel, Mary, Naomi, and Sarah …

  The four furies. Or maybe not. I’m sure they were all lovely women.

  “Thank God for Clementine,” I muttered. We’d originally thought Brody would take on the role of stay-at-home parent, but that had lasted just a few short months. It wasn’t in either of our natures to give up our careers, and to be honest, I knew that being exposed to different people was good for Grace. She and Clementine went to the pool at the rec center, and visited the library, and scheduled play dates with other children in town.

  Brody pulled eggs and fruit from the refrigerator. “Would you like an omelet?”

  “No, I’ve got to run. I had the last of the pizza.” I gathered the rest of my things. “Love you.”

  Brody pulled his head from the refrigerator, where he’d been rummaging through the stacks of leftovers and containers of food. “Did you eat the last avocado?”

  “Guilty. I didn’t think you wanted it.”

  “I always want the avocado.”

  I laughed. “I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. Oh, hey, before I forget, on the topic of the wedding … the Tate Lodge needs the final deposit for the reception. Can you drop a check in the mail?”

  Brody again pulled his head from the fridge and blew me a kiss. “For you, my lady, and for our wedding, I will happily give my hard-earned money away.”

  Outside, I started the car, turned the heat on full blast, and then began the torturous process of chipping away at the ice-skating rink on my front windshield. Once again I cursed our laziness and wished that we’d taken time over the summer to clear out our garage, so that it could be used for what it was intended for and not as a storage room for camping gear, fishing poles, half a dozen bikes, skis, and ice hockey sticks.

  As I got the last of the ice off, Clementine arrived in her beat-up old Ford Bronco. We chatted a few minutes as she gathered her bags from the trunk. She let me know she’d planned to go out of town for a week over the Christmas holiday, to visit an old friend in New York. After a moment of silent panic, I said that was fine, and she agreed to write the dates she’d be gone on the family calendar. A week wasn’t too bad; Brody and I could cobble together temporary childcare and each take a few vacation days. I knew he might have an overseas work trip in December, but surely he’d be back by the holidays.

  I drove into town on roads that were slick with black ice. It was still early and signs of Halloween remained everywhere: fat, orange pumpkins rested in rows on wide Victorian porches beside giant spiderwebs, Styrofoam tombstones, and, in one terrifying case, a pair of seven-foot-tall lifelike clowns with bloody fangs thrusting out from wide, gaping jaws. Candy wrappers, still-glowing light sticks, and discarded plastic jack-o’-lanterns littered the streets.

  As images from the night before began a slow traipse across my mind, I found I was worried about Bull. I couldn’t imagine the level of his grief, and while I knew I had to push my own sadness aside, at least until the case was solved, I also knew it wasn’t a healthy approach to healing. I decided to pay him a visit, armed with sustenance, so I swung by my favorite café, Four and Twenty Blackbirds. After a few minutes of scanning the pastry display, I decided on a couple of danishes and two hot chai teas.

  On my way to Bull’s, I made a quick stop at the edge of the Ashley Forest, the section that butted up to the Montgomery mansion. The air was still, the pine trees and aspens dusted with frost. It would have been beautiful but for the darkness that sat within the woods; it was as though it were a primeval forest, never touched by the sun. I shivered and quickly walked a quarter mile in each direction, checking the ground for tire tracks, cigarette stubs, anything to indicate recent visitors.

  There was nothing, and I left as fast I could, not sure what Edith had witnessed. The noises could have been anything; the woods settling, trees falling (we had experienced some terrific late-summer thunderstorms, after all), even illegal loggers working under cover of night. But the lights … I’d have to come back, perhaps bring a crime scene tech to run some tests on the trees.

  I got to Bull’s house a few minutes before eight o’clock and found him in the backyard, picking a large twig out of his rake, an exhausted look on his face. He wore heavy-duty gloves, a red plaid flannel jacket, and an old pair of work jeans, the dark denim splattered with paint stains. At his feet was an enormous pile of long-ago fallen leaves, their once-brilliant red and gold shades now a mottled, moldy, and decayed sludge of brown and gray.

  “You look tired.”

  Bull looked at me with eyes that leaked and a nose as red as Rudolph’s. He leaned forward and rested on the rake. “That’s because I am tired. I’ve been so darn tired for so darn long.”

  “We can hire someone to do this, Bull. Find a local kid to mow the lawn, rake these leaves. You don’t need to carry the whole world on your shoulders. Not anymore.”

  He brushed off the words with a wave of his hand. “Ah, it’s not the physical stuff, Gem. It’s all of it. First Frank Bellington, now Caleb. It’s hard to be the last man standing.”

  At one time, Frank Bellington had been one of Bull’s closest friends. He’d died the previous fall, but not before a terrible secret he’d been living with had been exposed. I thought at the time that Bull had handled Frank’s passing rather stoically, but I wondered now if that had all been an act.

  Or if not an act, a numbness.

  “I look back at my life, and my friends, and I wonder if I really knew them at all. Caleb was a good man, Gemma—at least I thought he was. But good men aren’t stalked and executed in cold blood. Not like this. This was payback. It was revenge for something.”

  “It’s too early to k
now that, Bull. You’re a good man, and look at some of the crackpots you’ve dealt with over the years. Any one of them could have hurt you, killed you, and you still would have been a good man.” I gently took the rake from his hands. “If you’re tired, stop. Rest. You’ve earned it. Besides, I brought danishes from the Blackbird. And a chai.”

  Bull pulled a handkerchief from the front pocket of his jacket and wiped first at his eyes, then his nose. He smiled sadly. “Thanks, sweetheart. I wish I could tell you that life gets easier as you get older, but that would be an outright lie. The Lord has seen fit to teach us lessons not when we’re ready to receive them but when we least expect them.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about the Lord, but you do, and that’s good enough for me.”

  Inside, we shared a pastry and talked about my grandmother Julia. She seemed to be settling in nicely to her new apartment at Carver Estates, the long-term care facility we’d enrolled her in a few months prior.

  Then, reluctantly, I left him and headed to work. At my desk, I quickly skimmed my email messages and saw that a meeting had been scheduled later in the day at City Hall with our police team, the mayor, the fire chief, the city manager, and a few other names I didn’t recognize. It would be the first meeting of many in the investigation; Caleb’s was a high-profile death and everybody, it seemed, wanted to get in on the details.

  I sat back, thinking.

  I wanted to be able to give Chief Chavez something to report at the meeting, something meaningful. I kept going back to the threatening letters; they might be at the heart of this killing. And somewhere, perhaps buried deep in Caleb’s past, might be the key to the sender. Bull himself had said that this was payback, revenge, which implied wrongdoing, either consciously or unconsciously, on Caleb’s part.

  And Edith had said the very first threat referenced lies.

  Lies that Caleb told; or that the sender believed he’d told.

  I sighed. Though the case had kicked off with a fiery and explosive bang, I knew a good part of the investigation would be the opposite; it would be conducting research, interviewing witnesses, and identifying patterns. And so I spent the next few hours knee-deep in our legal databases, putting together a list of the cases that Caleb Montgomery had been involved in, first during his time as a prosecuting attorney, then as a judge. The list was long, with some cases dating back to the 1960s, and it was difficult to know where to start.

  Theoretically, anyone, even a disgruntled neighbor or an obsessive stranger, could have sent the letters, but I had to start somewhere. The personal tone of the letters, the nature of the violence they promised gave me the sense that the sender was someone Caleb had prosecuted or sentenced. Someone he knew, yet someone Edith—his own wife—could not name or suggest.

  I recognized two names that jumped out at me immediately: serial killer Gordon Dillahunt, and John Mark Escher, who’d been responsible for bringing in a devastating wave of methamphetamines into the valley in the 1990s. Dillahunt was currently serving consecutive life sentences in the federal prison in nearby Belle Vista, and Escher had committed suicide after his own young son overdosed on heroin.

  I recognized a handful of other names, perps whose cases I’d been involved with in the last few years. While it was possible any one of them could have sent the letters, these were small-time criminals, people whose lives had been overtaken by drink or drugs, addiction or illness. They were people who’d been easily arrested, not criminal masterminds.

  I finally stopped, rubbed my eyes, and decided to get the intern, Jimmy, to work on cross-checking names on the list against those still in prison and those now deceased. It would be slow and tedious, but Jimmy was energetic and eager to learn. He was a hard worker, the son of two schoolteachers who’d steered him toward a career in education. After more than a decade working as a teacher in an inner-city school system, Jimmy had realized that his passion lay in law enforcement. He’d moved here, to Cedar Valley, after we’d accepted him as an intern. He was taking a criminal justice course at the community college, then hoped to apply to the academy in Denver.

  I found Jimmy in the storage closet.

  Well, it had once been a closet. We’d turned it into a temporary office with a narrow desk and a small chair and a laptop. Jimmy loved it. He’d plastered the walls with vintage newspapers and unscrewed the bare bulb that had hung from the mold-splotched ceiling, preferring instead to use a small green banker’s lamp set back on his desk.

  Jimmy was thrilled to take over my project and promised to get on it right away.

  With his unruly cowlick and wide, eager eyes, Jimmy reminded me of another Jimmy: Jimmy Olsen, the erstwhile young photojournalist employed by the Daily Planet, friend to Clark Kent and Lois Lane.

  Only I was definitely not Lois, or Clark, or Superman, for that matter.

  And it would be good for me to remember that Jimmy, for all his enthusiasm, world experience, and helpfulness, was at the end of the day still just an intern. I needed to keep him out of trouble, not whet his appetite for action even more.

  Back at my desk, Finn leaned over and said with a dramatic lisp, “Come here. I vant to suck your blood.”

  “Get in line, pal.”

  He grinned, his lips twisted around a set of plastic toy fangs. He popped the teeth out and set them next to his computer. “I talked with the manager at the Tate Lodge. He’ll have a key to Caleb’s suite waiting for us at the front desk. And I’ve been thinking about the wife. Rich old broad like Edith Montgomery, maybe she doesn’t want to air her dirty laundry in court. She and Caleb were headed for a messy and public divorce. So, she hires someone to pack her husband’s car with dynamite. I spent some time on the county records site. The Montgomerys used to own stock in a national mining company. Or rather, Edith did. She sold the company for dollars on the penny about thirteen years ago; that’s where the bulk of their money came from.”

  “Mining? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Explosives, Gemma. Every mining company uses some form of them or another. It would be easy for someone with the right connections to get their hands on, say, dynamite.” Finn leaned back, tented his fingers, and gazed at me. “By the way, how are you feeling? Late night.”

  “Fine. Though you’re giving me a migraine.” I sighed and turned back to the copy of the list of names I’d given Jimmy. “This isn’t a Hitchcock thriller. You didn’t see Edith last night; she was devastated.”

  Finn stood up and walked to the wall, where he’d started writing out all the details we knew from Caleb’s death. “We need to search the Montgomery house. We’ll get a warrant for the law offices, too, of course, but I’d bet there are still files, notes, paperwork at the main residence. He had to have a home office there.”

  “Let’s start with a search of the Tate and then think about approaching Judge Dumont for a warrant for the house. She’s going to be reluctant to issue it on a grieving widow, especially given that Caleb’s been staying at the Tate for the last five months. The Montgomery house was no longer his primary residence.”

  Finn frowned. “All right, we’ll start with the Tate, but I’m telling you, I don’t like it. The more time we give the widow to clean things up, the less anything of value we’ll collect.”

  “Take it easy. And stop calling her ‘the widow.’ If Edith Montgomery had anything to do with Caleb’s death, she’s not going anywhere.”

  A text came in on my phone: Can you come to the Shotgun? There’s been another incident.

  I groaned.

  “What is it?” Finn asked.

  “Nash Dumont,” I replied and shook my head in frustration. “I’ve been to the theater twice in the last week. Someone’s screwing with him. The first time he called, it was for a trashed dressing room; the second time, it was for a vandalized theater seat. Someone took a knife or scissors and slashed the velvet seat cover to threads.”

  “Did you interview the cast, the crew?”

  I shook my head aga
in. “Nash won’t let me. He said it will spook people if they know what’s happening. So far, the only people who know are Nash, his wife Gloria, obviously, and the stage manager, some woman named Waverly. I can’t wait to see what’s happened now.”

  “Can you get someone else to investigate? We don’t have time for this.”

  “No. I tried that when Nash called the second time; he’s so paranoid. Says it has to be me.” I thought a moment, then realized I could kill two birds with one stone. I texted Nash back and let him know I’d swing by that evening, then I called the courthouse. When I’d spoken with Judge Gloria Dumont the night before, she’d been understandably shaken, in shock. But she’d had a night to sleep on things now and she could have further thoughts as to who might have targeted Caleb.

  I spoke to a deputy court clerk. She said Judge Dumont was tied up in court all day but could meet me that evening at the Shotgun Playhouse.

  * * *

  “Mayor Cabot has bumped up the meeting time at City Hall. Let’s go. She’s keeping everyone on their toes these days,” Chief Chavez announced. He checked his watch and swore. “We’re going to be late as it is.”

  I quickly gathered my purse and jacket. Finn joined me, throwing a tie around his neck, moving awkwardly. He’d been badly hurt by a bullet to the shoulder a few months prior, and every now and then, the old injury acted up. In a low voice, he said, “This murder is going to be politicized. The mayor has been sitting on her ass all these months, twiddling her thumbs, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. This is a case she can throw her weight behind, get on top of. It’s no secret she’s planning to run for governor within the next few years.”

  “You might be right, though I’m sure the mayor, like all our city leaders, likes to be informed for information’s sake,” I whispered back. “I do wonder how much sway she’s got over Chavez. He seems to be kowtowing a little these days.”

  “The chief knows how to play the game.” Finn was heated now. He hated the bureaucratic slowdown that could happen when elected officials stuck their noses into police business. I did, too, of course, but saw it more as the cost of doing business.