Her words hit me like a punch to the solar plexus. Clearly she thinks it was Ackerman who killed Callie.
“You tell that son of a bitch that I’ve already gone to the cops and if anything happens to me they’ll be on him like flies on shit,” she says. She’s trying hard to pepper her words with lots of bravado but I detect an underlying shakiness in her voice that tells me her fear of Ackerman is very real.
Sensing that she is about to hang up, I say, “I’m not working for Mike Ackerman. I can’t tell you who I am working for, but I can tell you it’s not him.” She doesn’t say anything, but I can hear her breathing on the other end so I know she hasn’t hung up yet. “Do you think Mike Ackerman killed your sister?” I ask her. The phone beeps three times just as I finish asking the question and I realize the battery is about to die. All I hear of Andi’s answer is “—did.”
“I’m sorry, you cut out and I didn’t hear you.”
“I said the bastard . . . beep . . . to keep her quiet . . . beep . . . tell his wife . . . beep.” After her last comment is broken up by three more beeps, the phone goes dead.
“Damn it!” I throw the cell aside and hear Hoover whimper behind me. “Sorry, boy,” I say.
I sit and think for a minute about Andi’s final comment, trying to make some sense of the part I heard. The words keep her quiet and tell his wife make me wonder if my suspicions about the relationship between Ackerman and Callie are right.
I turn my attention back to the diary and flip it open to the page with the note about police corruption. As I read it again, something nags at the back of my mind and I struggle to figure out what it is. It isn’t until I look at the dead cell phone that it hits me. Callie’s diary entry mentions a phone call and if there was a phone call, there’d be a record of where it came from. I make a mental note of the time and date of the entry so I can later compare it to calls Callie got. Though the entry may have been written hours or even days after the call, I figure it’s worth a shot. If I had my own cell phone, I could call Bob Richmond and ask him if he’s run Callie’s phone records yet, but since I don’t, it’ll have to wait.
Phone calls aside, it all comes back to Hurley. He is the one thing that is common and central to everything that has happened, though not everyone knows it yet. With that thought in mind, I finish my breakfast and drive over to his neighborhood. I cruise down the street slowly, studying the other houses, and then circle around the block to Harold Minniver’s street. I do this several times, not sure what I’m looking for but feeling like there is something here, something that will help me put all the pieces together.
Eventually I park, leash Hoover, and walk up to Hurley’s house. After several rings of the doorbell and a few knocks, I deduce he isn’t home. Curious, I head off the porch and walk around the side of his house to the garage area where the boat is parked. Nothing looks much different than it did when I was here a couple of nights ago.
I peek through the side window into Hurley’s workshop. Sunlight coming in through the window in the bay door creates several sparks of light within the room. I realize it’s coming from bits of metal scattered about and I remember the metal fragments we found in Callie’s hair. One more piece of damning evidence against Hurley.
I study the other doors in the garage and see that the one to the outside has a dead bolt on it, but the one leading from the workshop to the house has just a keyed knob lock. The dead bolt probably doesn’t offer much of an obstacle to someone with Hurley’s lock-picking talents, and once someone gained access to the workshop, getting into the house proper would be easy. Heck, even I could do that and, in fact, I have. I bypassed one of those knob locks once when I was a teenager and locked myself out of the house. All I had to do was slide my library card into the door crack and use it to push back the latch.
I wander out into Hurley’s backyard, to the rear line of the fence where it butts up against Minniver’s yard. There is police tape across Minniver’s back door, which opens into his garage. Similar doors, similar locks—access to one would make it easy to access the other. And that’s assuming that both Hurley and Minniver were religious about locking their doors. Here in small-town America, people often don’t. Plus there’s the missing key to Minniver’s house.
I head back out to the street, Hoover sniffing the ground as we go. Just before we round the front corner of the house, Hoover stops dead in his tracks and raises his nose to the air. Then he barks excitedly several times. Thinking it might be Hurley, I head for the front yard at a fast clip and nearly trip over a white blur that runs into my feet as I round the corner of the house.
“Oh, my, I’m sorry,” says a female voice. “I didn’t know you were there.”
The white blur has materialized into a small dog—some type of poodle-looking thing—and I see that the female voice belongs to an older woman with brown eyes and a gray Joan of Are hairdo.
Hoover sits dutifully at my feet at first, watching the white fuzzy dog approach him. Seconds later he is desperately trying to stick his nose in the little dog’s butt, while the little dog yips and barks and bounces around like it’s on meth.
“Antoinette!” the woman yells, tugging on her leash. Unfortunately, the efforts of the two dogs have resulted in their leashes becoming intertwined and wrapped around my legs, so I nearly fall when the woman keeps pulling.
“Could you please ease up?” I say, trying to hop on my one good foot. The woman finally seems to realize what’s happening and she drops her leash completely. I do the same hoping to make the untangling process a little easier. But the fuzzy white wonder keeps darting in and out between my legs, nipping at Hoover’s heels and making a general pest of herself. As Hoover tries to avoid her bites and sniff her butt instead, he starts running between my legs, too. Finally, in desperation, I reach down and unhook him from the leash completely. Sensing his newfound freedom, he immediately takes off for a nearby bush. Antoinette follows and I manage to get her leash unwrapped from my ankle in the nick of time.
“What are you doing here?” the woman asks, narrowing her eyes at me.
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
“Helen Baxter.”
The name rings no bells so I start to do my own introduction. “I’m Mattie Win—”
“I know who you are,” Helen says, cutting me off. “You’re that nurse who works at the ME’s office now, right?”
I nod, not surprised she knows me. My face along with other more delicate parts of my anatomy recently appeared on the cover of a national tabloid thanks to a rather high-profile case our office handled. That, combined with the fact that I live in a small town where the only thing that moves faster than good news is bad news, has made it hard for me to remain anonymous.
“What are you doing here?” Helen asks again.
“I’m trying to investigate—”
“You’re looking into Harold’s death, aren’t you?” she says. “I live over on the next block and I saw you there at Harold’s house with that cop the other night, and now I see there’s crime tape up on his door. Was Harold murdered, because it wouldn’t surprise me if he was. There have been some very strange things going on in this neighborhood lately.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, getting the distinct impression that Helen doesn’t miss much of what goes on in the area.
But rather than answer me, she yells, “Stop it, you little slut!”
I’m about to be offended when I realize it’s her dog she’s yelling at, not me. Hoover is sitting next to a bush trembling, his eyes big and round. Mere inches in front of him, facing away from Hoover with her shoulders on the ground and her butt stuck up in the air, is Antoinette. Her knobby little tail is twitching back and forth, back and forth, as she whimpers. Helen walks over and scoops Antoinette off the ground, giving me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, Antoinette is in heat and I’m afraid she’s rather desperate to compromise herself.”