The Big Kitty

21

“Murder?” Sunny echoed weakly. Then her voice got louder. “What are you talking about? I’m fine.”

The constable looked as if he’d just taken a big, healthy mouthful of spoiled milk.

He probably wasn’t supposed to give that away, Sunny thought. But who got killed? Then she remembered the boom of the shotgun going off. She’d thought the SUV had gotten damaged. But what if it was the driver? That mental image made her queasy and weak in the knees.

The young man took her by the arm and tried to recover his authority. “You have to accompany me now, ma’am.”

Sunny turned stricken eyes to Ollie Barnstable, who stared at her with something between amazement and fright. “Don’t call my dad!” she begged. “This would just about kill him!”

Sunny clung to the hope that they’d quickly resolve this mess and she’d catch a little rest after the events of the early morning and the late afternoon. But that hope quickly died when she arrived at the police station. The place looked even busier than on her last visit, and it only got more so as people in state police uniforms appeared. Apparently a killing received a full-court press.

Then she got to sit down in an interrogation room with Sheriff Nesbit and a guy in a rumpled suit who turned out to be Lieutenant Wainwright, a state police homicide investigator.

For the next couple of hours, it wasn’t so much good cop/bad cop as tough cop/furious cop.

“What the hell was the big idea of leaving the scene?” Nesbit demanded.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea to stay around where their car stopped,” Sunny replied with complete honesty. “Not when I saw one of them trying to aim a shotgun at me earlier.”

“But why didn’t you stay put after you’d gotten safely away and reported the crime?” Wainwright asked.

“I wasn’t thinking straight,” Sunny admitted. “My boss told me I had to get to the office for an urgent meeting or he’d fire me, so I was freaked out even before I saw the guy with the gun.” She shrugged helplessly, looking at the men. “I need the job.”

She glanced over at Nesbit. “Besides, I had no idea there had been a murder! When I made the other reports, it always just ended up in me wasting—uh, spending—a lot of time on them and then being told that whatever happened wasn’t really a crime.”

The sheriff swelled up so much, Sunny was afraid he was going to explode.

“What other reports?” Wainwright asked as Nesbit sputtered.

“I’ll send for the files,” the sheriff said shortly. He went to the door while Sunny happily outlined for Wainwright some of the things that had happened since she started looking into Ada Spruance’s death.

The state police investigator listened, nodded, and then asked, “Do you own a gun, Ms. Coolidge? Have you ever handled one?”

Sunny stared at him. “No.”

“Do we have your permission to search your car for any weapons?”

Sunny began to wonder if this was the time when she should start talking about a lawyer. But she gave her permission.

“She could have tossed it anywhere between the shortcut and reaching town,” Nesbit growled.

Sunny stared back and forth between the two lawmen. “What’s going on?” she said. “The only gun I know about is the shotgun one of those guys was carrying. I thought I heard it go off when they hit a major bump—”

“It did,” Wainwright told her. “Wrecked the SUV’s transmission and did quite a job on the driver’s right ankle. He was a small-time Portsmouth thug named Eddie Deever.”

“He bled to death?” Sunny asked, horrified.

“The constable dispatched to the scene found two men dead, both with bullet holes in their heads,” Nesbit said. “Probably nine millimeter.”

“And you think I shot them?” Sunny’s voice rose to an indignant squeak.

“They match the descriptions you gave of two men involved in an altercation while you were recently in a known criminal hangout,” Nesbit said.

“I was in O’Dowd’s trying to talk to Gordie Spruance—you remember, the guy who got killed the next day? I think those two staged a fight to distract me while somebody else dumped a handful of pills in my drink!” she replied heatedly.

Both of them glanced at Lieutenant Wainwright and shut up.

“It raises an interesting question,” Wainwright said. “The kill shots were at very close range. Deever’s usual partner in crime, Vernon Galt, was the other person in the car. As you reported, he had a shotgun.”

He looked at Nesbit, gesturing to Sunny. “If they’d been chasing this young woman with the intent of killing her, I don’t think they’d have let her come that close with a weapon.”

The sheriff didn’t have anything to say to that, so Wainwright went on. “The fact that Galt let the shooter get so close suggests that he considered that person to be a friend.”

Wainwright turned back to Sunny. “This young woman already gave a description of the two to the police in another complaint—that doesn’t make her look like a friend.”

Nesbit looked like a kid who’d just seen all his Christmas gifts go up in flames. For one bright moment, he must have thought he could get a quick solution to a murder case and get rid of a political thorn in his side at the same time.

Instead, he obviously faced a lot more work. There was no way for him to pass off these two most recent murders as “accidents,” and there went Elmet County’s so-called spotless crime record.

Wainwright assumed the lead in the interrogation, taking Sunny through the whole chain of events. Along the way, he asked Sunny a number of questions she couldn’t answer—for instance, had she noticed the SUV following her before the attack?

“I don’t know,” Sunny had to admit. “I saw it in the rearview mirror, zooming up, about half a mile after I left home.”

The state police investigator thanked and dismissed her, but she still had to wait for her statement to be typed up so she could sign it.

Finally she was free to go—and found a strained-looking Will Price waiting for her.

“Well, at least they’re not locking you up,” he offered.

She managed a wan smile. “There is that.”

“I called your dad to let him know you’d be a little delayed,” he went on. “I didn’t tell him why.”

Sunny nodded, wondering if tonight would be another anxious bout with her dad’s angina. “Thanks,” she said.

The streets around the police station were pretty quiet early on a Sunday evening as they made their way toward the New Stores. Will told her he’d parked near the MAX office, figuring that would be easier for escorting her home.

“And I am escorting you,” he insisted, “even if they screwed up this attack.” He shook his head. “Looks like the Wile E. Coyote curse continues. I mean, how many times do you hear about hit men launching an attack and killing their own car?”

Sunny relaxed a little as they strolled along. “Actually they may have gone two for two, if they’re the ones who planted that bullet gizmo. First they killed my car—at least the steering—and then their own.”

“Bumbling henchmen,” Will joked.

But all of a sudden, Sunny shuddered. “It’s a shame their boss doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor.”

Will nodded, his face grave again. “This time one of the henchmen got seriously wounded. The damage to Deever couldn’t have been fixed with a couple of bandages and a little bed rest. He would have had to go to a hospital, and Galt must have said as much when he called for help.”

“How do you know he called for help?”

“We found a cheap cell phone in Galt’s pocket. According to the records, he used it to make a lot of calls to another cell phone that, remarkably, isn’t answering anymore. Whoever got the call must have flown over there to beat the squad car.”

“So you’re saying they called their boss for help, and this was his answer,” Sunny said faintly.

“Well, hospitals are bound to ask embarrassing questions and make annoying reports to the police,” Will explained. “So Mr. Genius decided to terminate Deever. And since Galt was likely to disagree, and he had a shotgun, he got taken out first.”

“Brrrr,” Sunny said, “that’s cold.”

“One man’s cold is another man’s business model,” Will replied.

“Ron Shays,” Sunny burst out.

Will nodded. “We know he likes to set up businesses with locals and then get rid of them. So he sets himself up in Portsmouth and recruits some goons. But this time the cycle ran a bit faster than usual. He ended up getting rid of his local talent before he even made any money.”

“Do you think he’s still in Portsmouth pulling the strings?” Sunny asked.

“The Portsmouth cops lost track of him almost a week ago,” Will pointed out. “But I bet he was in Kittery Harbor today, pulling the trigger. Problem is, now he could be in the wind anywhere.”

“No,” Sunny said, and she said it quite definitely. “It’s like you said—Shays hasn’t made any money. Would you imagine a druggie with poor impulse control giving up on six million dollars?”

Will looked at her for a second, speechless. “Put that way, you might have a point.”

“The question is, how do we make him stick his neck out?” Sunny smiled as the glimmerings of a plan began to come together in her mind. “Do you mind taking a little time before seeing me home? I need to talk with Ken Howell.”