If I Should Die

THREE

A loud knock on the door was followed by Patrick calling out, “Lucy! It’s Patrick.”

She again put the sheet over Vanessa’s body in case anyone else was with him, and ran to the door, the digital camera she’d found in Vanessa’s purse now strapped to her wrist. Kyle DeWitt was there, along with Steve. She didn’t want anyone else in the room, and said, “Out of respect for the deceased, I think only Patrick should come in.”

“What’s going on?” Steve demanded. “Is Mrs. Marsh really dead?”

“Yes,” she said. “Please—”

“Oh my God.” Steve ran his hands through his mop of hair. He looked panicked. “This is terrible. What more could go wrong?”

The comment was cryptic, but Lucy didn’t ask him to elaborate. She caught Patrick’s eye and signaled to get rid of the other men. Patrick blocked the doorway. “Steve,” he said, “I need you to contact the Sheriff’s Department.”

“They won’t be able to get up here—”

“Call them. You have a landline, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“I know, it might be down, so try now before the storm gets worse. Tell them we have a deceased female, cause of death unknown, and to send a unit and coroner as soon as possible. Get a contact name and number, and tell them that there’s a retired police detective on scene.”

“You?” Kyle said. “You’re young to be retired.”

“Long story.” Patrick handed Steve one of his Rogan-Caruso-Kincaid business cards. “That’s my contact information and P.I. license number. I’ll call in as soon as I have something to report.”

“But what happened to her?” Kyle asked.

Lucy hesitated, then said, “I don’t know.”

Patrick glanced at her. Lucy was the world’s worst liar, and Patrick realized the situation was serious. “Kyle, would you go downstairs and tell everyone to see what they can do to comfort Trevor? As soon as Lucy and I get a handle on this, we’ll be down.”

He closed the door before either Steve or Kyle could object, then turned to Lucy and said, “What’s going on?”

“I found a needle mark on Vanessa’s neck.”

Patrick walked over to the body and was about to remove the sheet when he saw that Lucy was wearing gloves. “You do it.”

“They’re not latex, but it’s better than nothing,” she said.

“You must have been suspicious from the beginning to put them on.”

“Well, a little. The lid is on the pill bottle.”

“So?”

“Suicides aren’t usually so tidy. She could have put it on, out of habit, but then there’s the fact that she took a shower, but didn’t dress. I just thought—be careful. All the training beats it into you.”

“You can say that again.”

She pulled down the sheet. “Do you see it?” She pointed to the mark.

“Yes, but you must have been looking to notice something so small. At first glance, it could be a pimple or minor skin blemish.”

“I saw it and—” She stopped and turned Vanessa’s head more to the right. “She’s had a face-lift. It’s good work, too—I didn’t notice the marks at first, but I wasn’t looking for them.”

Patrick stared. “I can barely see anything.”

“Like I said, excellent work. But right here under her ear—” She put her finger on the tiny scar. “And there’s minimal tightness, so I think she already had good skin and complexion, no excessive sun exposure. She’s someone who has been well taken care of most of her life.”

“Someone killed her,” Patrick said flatly.

“I think so, but I couldn’t say definitively. We should secure her body and this room.”

“How long has she been dead?”

“One to three hours.”

“We need to question everyone. But Lucy—if the killer suspects that we’re on to the fact that Vanessa Marsh was murdered, no one here is safe.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you do. Lucy, you’ve never been able to lie. Let me ask the questions, okay? I’m going to tell everyone that we need to move the body to a cold environment for health reasons.”

“That’s true.”

“Then you can say that.” Patrick rubbed her arm. “Then I’ll say we have no idea what happened, but it looks like an accidental overdose or possibly natural causes.”

“Before I saw the needle mark, I thought embolism or aneurysm.”

“Good—”

“But will anyone believe she took sleeping pills in the middle of the day and accidentally overdosed?”

“Not everyone thinks like a cop, Lucy. We need to search this room now, before we move the body. I’ll need help—Steve and Kyle.”

“Do you think Trevor killed her?”

“The husband is always the first suspect, and often guilty.”

“He just doesn’t seem—” She cut herself off. Killers didn’t always look the part. “I like him,” she said simply.

“So do I. But we’re cops in this scenario. You didn’t kill her and I didn’t kill her. Therefore, right now we’re the only people we can trust. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“I’ll start here. You take the bathroom and their luggage.”

Lucy started in the bathroom. The shower floor was still damp; the hair dryer was plugged in. She put herself in Vanessa’s shoes—take a shower before dinner, dry her hair before dressing. She’d set out her clothes—another indication that she planned to go downstairs to eat. Vanessa’s makeup, jewelry box, and toiletries were organized neatly on the counter. She wouldn’t leave the hair dryer plugged in all day. She would have put it away. The meticulous way the bathroom was set up indicated that.

How did the killer get the needle into Vanessa without a struggle? It had to be someone she trusted to get that close. And what drug could have such an immediate effect that she would have no time to scream or fight back? It would have to have a paralyzing effect. Had she been drugged while lying in bed? Then why had she lain down in the first place?

Maybe Trevor came in and suggested a midday lovemaking session. They got into the bed and during foreplay he injected her. Up close and personal. Intimate. Watched her die. Was she surprised? Did she beg for her life or demand to know why?

There were few convenient drugs that could kill instantly, but if Vanessa was incapacitated that would make it easier for her killer.

Lucy stepped out of the bathroom and said, “Patrick, the wine by her bed. We need it for evidence.”

“What are you thinking?”

“She was drugged before she was injected. There’s no food in here; the wine is the only thing.” She took a picture of the wineglass and pill bottle. She’d already photographed the body and the puncture wound. She wished Trevor hadn’t moved the body, because lividity hadn’t set in. She could guess, based on the slight discoloration along the right curve of Vanessa’s waist, that she’d been lying on that side for over an hour when she died. Because Trevor had now laid her on her back, the blood and fluids would be pooling on her underside.

Still, Lucy had taken the pictures and hoped someone with more experience than she had would be able to decipher them.

“If I ask Grace for plastic bags for evidence collection, she’ll be tipped off that we think Vanessa was killed,” said Patrick. “I think it’s best we keep the likelihood of homicide to ourselves.”

“I have some ziplock bags,” Lucy said.

He raised an eyebrow. “You normally carry evidence bags around with you?”

“I keep them for travel. Makeup, toothpaste, shampoo. I have some that haven’t been used.”

She opened the door and was startled when she saw lodge owner Grace and her sister, Beth, in the hallway. Had they been listening at the door? Lucy didn’t think so, but she made no assumptions.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Grace said. “Why did you and Patrick lock the door? What happened to Vanessa? Trevor is distraught—”

“I thought you were going to stay with him.”

“Angie and Heather are with him in the library,” Grace replied. “He didn’t want tea. I gave him Scotch. Steve told me you had him call the sheriff. What happened to Vanessa?”

“We don’t know exactly,” Lucy said, obfuscating.

Patrick walked up behind her. “Vanessa is dead, and the sheriff needs to be notified about any unattended death. I can’t tell whether or not she died of natural causes. I don’t know her medical history. I need to talk to her husband first, and then hopefully the sheriff can contact her immediate family and doctor and see if there was some other contributing factor to her death.”

“Oh.” Grace sighed and rubbed her face. “I’m sorry, it’s just so distressing that someone died here at the lodge. Steve is really upset.”

Lucy said, “Steve said something strange. He said, ‘What more could go wrong?’ Do you know what he meant?”

Grace shook her head, but Beth said, “Grace, we can’t keep it secret.” She put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. “There have been several mishaps since Leo died. One of our main generators broke down. It was under warranty, but it still required us to close for two weeks before it could be repaired. The root cellar was left open one night and most of our food was eaten by a bear. That cost us thousands, to repair the door and replace the stock. And Steve had an accident last month, totaled his truck, and was lucky he wasn’t injured. That boy has been working himself too hard, trying to make this place into everything his father wanted.”

“Leo was special,” Grace said. “He had a way about him.”

Beth frowned. “He also left a lot of things undone, spent all his savings to keep the place up. We can’t simply avoid the seriousness of the situation. And with Steve’s illness—”

“Beth, please!” Grace rubbed her temples. “It’s going to be fine.”

“What about Steve’s illness?” Patrick asked.

“He’s been forgetting things,” Beth said, ignoring Grace’s plea. She lowered her voice. “We think he forgot to secure the root cellar. But he won’t go back to the doctor, and we’re both worried sick about him.”

Patrick said, “We need to move the body.”

“Why?” Grace asked.

Lucy said, “The warm house will accelerate the rate of decomposition, and the smell will spread. In addition, there are health issues to take into consideration, as all the bedrooms share ventilation.”

“I didn’t think about that,” Grace said. “But where? How?”

“I’m going to ask Alan and Kyle to help me move Vanessa’s body to the root cellar,” Patrick said.

“But our food is down there!” Beth said.

Patrick said, “Can you bring up as much food as you can store inside? Anything that isn’t canned or vacuum-sealed. Lucy and I will wrap the body securely, to minimize any contamination. And if you have any large plastic sheets, we could use them.”

That would have dual purposes, Lucy thought. It would also preserve evidence on the body for the coroner and sheriff.

Beth paled, and Grace said, “I’ll get it. The food we can’t fit in the lodge, we’ll bring to my house, Beth.”

As they walked down the hall, Lucy overheard some of their conversation.

“You need to sell this place, Grace.”

“It would destroy Steve. I can’t.”

Lucy hurried down to her room and retrieved her baggies—she had four that she hadn’t used—and returned to Vanessa’s room. “Let’s use these judiciously.”

“The wine. I want to save the glass as well—but we can put it in a paper bag.”

“That I don’t have, but there’s stationery in every desk. We can wrap it in that.”

They preserved the wine and the glass, then finished searching the room. Lucy went through Vanessa’s purse. She hadn’t changed her driver’s license, it was still under her maiden name of Russell, but there was a copy of the marriage certificate. They’d been married in Phoenix, Arizona, last week. The best man was Nelson Russell—Vanessa’s brother maybe?—and the maid of honor was Christina Morgan.

Lucy went through the camera one last time to make sure she had taken all the pictures she thought the police would need. The body, the wine, the pills, the general layout of the room, close-ups of the possible lividity and the needle mark. She’d also taken pictures of Vanessa’s hands and arms, which didn’t indicate that she’d fought back—no obvious bruising, scratches, broken nails, or fibers. She scrolled through earlier pictures and noticed that Vanessa or Trevor had taken many pictures of the grounds—the lodge, the barn, the surroundings. Some were dark and hadn’t come out, but Lucy didn’t delete any. She didn’t want any photos to be missing—each was digitally numbered.

The earliest pictures were of Vanessa and Trevor on their wedding day. They seemed happy. Trevor beamed at Vanessa. The wedding was lavish, at least from what Lucy could tell from the few pictures saved on the camera.

She set aside the camera. She looked through Vanessa’s address book, then went through her receipts.

“Anything?” Patrick asked.

“Nothing that stands out to me.”

“I’m going to insist that no one come into the room, and ask for all the keys, but that’s no guarantee that there isn’t an extra floating around.”

“Grace probably has a master key.”

“I wrapped her body in the sheet and top blanket,” Patrick said. “When we get the plastic sheet, I’ll move the body. Find Steve and ask what the sheriff said. Then we’ll talk to Trevor. It’s time for you to put that criminal psychology degree to work, sis.”