Deadly Grace

Cruz’s next move, after consulting his nationwide directory of local police forces, was to put in a call to the Haven-wood Police Department. Chief Wilf Lunders came across as hearty and friendly, a relative old-timer by the sound of his voice, pleased to be of service, though a little mystified to be getting a call from the FBI. But he was a great admirer of the late J. Edgar Hoover, the chief said, so he’d be pleased to help out in any way he could.

“You say you’re looking for Jillian Meade? Oh yeah, she’s in town, all right.”

“You’re sure of that? You’ve seen her yourself?”

“Yep. Watched her being loaded into an ambulance last night. My own deputy pulled her out of her mom’s house just before it burned to the ground.”

Suddenly, Cruz felt every hair on the back of his neck standing on end. “Her mother’s house burned down? How did that happen?”

“Well, now, I guess that would be the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Coulda been an electrical fire, I don’t know, or it coulda been a problem with the gas lines. Our volunteer fire chief was heading over there to have a look-see by the light of day, along with my deputy and a couple of our men. Couldn’t tell much last night. Fire wasn’t even really burned out till around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., by the time they gave everything a really good soaking. Make sure we didn’t get another flare-up, you know.”

“Chief Lunders? I don’t want to tell you folks how to do your job there, sir, but I think you may have cause to suspect criminal arson.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, you got that right. We do. But how would you know that, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Instead of answering, Cruz sat back, pen tapping out a nervous beat on his knee. “What about the mother?”

“Well, now, as far as Grace goes, that’s the real tragedy. I’m sorry to say she didn’t make it. Sixty-years old and a real lady, she was. A pillar of the community, you know? Lord almighty, even as I’m telling you this, I can hardly believe it myself. You know, that family has had its share of sadness. And as for Grace…well, she will be sorely missed in this town, is all I can say.”

“Has the body been taken out?”

“Yes, they went back in and located it this morning.”

“There’s going to be an autopsy, I hope, to determine the cause of death?”

“Oh, yeah, for sure. There has to be, naturally. Always have to have an autopsy when there’s an unexplained death, don’t you? Mind you, poor Grace’s body was burned up real bad, so I’m not sure what the coroner’s going to be able to determine from it. My deputy was able to confirm that she was already dead at the time the fire got out of control, though.”

“She was dead how?”

Lunders started to answer but was overtaken by a sudden fit of coughing. He excused himself, half-choking, and seemed to set the phone aside for a few moments, but Cruz was able to hear the kind of wheezy, deep-chested congestion that told him the chief was probably a smoker, probably over-weight, and probably moving slowly these days.

A mental image of his own father suddenly flashed through his mind: barrel-chested, gruff and stubbornly refusing to have anything to do with doctors. The old man was still laying bricks and tile in fancy new houses, any one of which probably cost more than he’d made in his entire lifetime. Cruz had seen the old man only briefly at Christmas, although he’d tried to spend a little more time with him last year after he’d resigned his Army commission. He’d taken a few weeks off before starting the Bureau job and flown to California to pull his old Harley out from under its tarp in his father’s garage in Santa Ana. See if the thing still had the muscle to make one more cross-country trip. See, too, if enough time had passed that he and his old man might actually be able to sit down over a beer and have something like a reasonable conversation. Neither of them was getting any younger, after all. Hadn’t happened, though. His father had just shuffled around behind him for the entire three days he was there, grumbling and complaining and dogging his steps, like he thought his son had come back to steal the nonexistent family jewels. Finally, Cruz had given up, thrown the tarp back over the Harley, bought a plane ticket and headed for D.C.

Chief Lunders hawked wetly one last time, then came back on the line. “Sorry about that. Got this thing I just can’t seem to shake. What were we saying?”

“You said your deputy found Mrs. Meade dead when he got to the house, and I was asking how she died.”

“That’s the thing. My guy wasn’t sure. The place was full of smoke. He’s a good man, is Nils, and when he found the body, he wanted to examine it in situ, as it were, see what he could tell based on where he found it and in what condition and all. But he said it was tough to see anything in all that smoke. All he really knew for sure is that she was dead and there was a fair amount of blood. Before he got a chance to figure out what the source of it was, though, Jillian, who he’d already gotten outta there once, came back in, took one look at her mom, dead like that, and went off the deep end. At that point, my guy’s main worry was to get her out alive before the whole place went up. His hands were full, and by the time he got her squared away, there was no going back inside for Grace. The place was an inferno.”

“So, what did the daughter say happened?”

“She hasn’t said anything yet. We weren’t able to get a statement out of her last night. She had real bad smoke inhalation. A concussion, too, they said at the clinic. And then, of course, there was the emotional strain of seeing her mother dead like that. In the end, she had to be sedated. I’m sure she’ll be okay, mind, once she’s had a little time to get over the initial shock. Jillian’s always been a very sensible young woman, so I’m sure she’ll be able to give us a pretty good idea what happened there. Matter of fact, I was just getting ready to go over to the clinic and see if she was up to giving a statement when you called.”

“You’ve got a hospital there in Havenwood? Is that where she is?”

“You betcha. It’s just a little eight-bed job, mind you. Big cases go on over to Montrose, or into the Twin Cities, if it’s real major. But for what Jillian had, they could handle her just fine right here.”

“You mind if I come on up there and talk to her myself?” It was impulse more than rational decision-making, but Cruz’s gut told him this was all far too coincidental. After more than a decade on a homicide beat, he always mistrusted coincidence, and he always listened to his gut. If nothing else, he wanted to see for himself this spinster bookworm with no apparent life outside the dusty back rooms of a museum who had, out of the blue, become the subject of an international police inquiry—only to have her own mother suddenly expire in a manner that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the cases outlined in the British alert.

“What do you think of the idea that Jillian Meade killed her mother and then set the fire to cover her tracks?” he asked Chief Lunders.

“Jillian?” A snort of incredulity whistled down the line. “That girl grew up in this town, Agent Cruz. I’ve known her all her life, and so has everyone else around here. She’s always been a quiet little thing. She’s not hardly capable of something like this, believe me. It wouldn’t be in her nature.”

“That’s probably what people said about Lizzie Borden, too.”

“Well, now, I don’t know about that, but I do know the Meade family. They’ve been living in this town for, oh, I don’t know…several generations, anyway. Trust me, no daughter of Grace and Joe Meade would be capable of something like that. No, I’ll tell you what I’m really thinking, just between you and me and the gate post. Don’t want to say it too loud till we’ve gathered more evidence, but I’m thinking it was a break-in and attempted theft gone bad—somebody from away, you know. Some hippie probably drifted in off the interstate looking for quick cash to buy drugs down in Minneapolis. Grace’s place is on the lake, a real nice spot—on the town side, whereas the summer places are over on the other side. But maybe this drifter saw it, figured it was empty. Or, even if he spotted Grace and Jill, maybe he figured two women like that, all alone in the house, he could overpower ’em, get what he wanted, then skedaddle.”

“I don’t know, Chief,” Cruz said, head shaking.

“Look, keep in mind that Jillian got hurt, too. She had a concussion. Nils, my deputy, said she’d been knocked out, woke up on the kitchen floor. Who knows what might have happened if the neighbors hadn’t called in the fire, and if my deputy hadn’t gotten there fast as he did? She’d have died, too.”

“Fair enough,” Cruz conceded. There was no point in alienating a local police chief until he had more information. That said, he’d want a lot more information before he was prepared to rule out Jillian Meade as a suspect. “Chief Lunders, I’d like to make another request.”

“What’s that?”

“I’d like to ask you to seal off the scene. With all due respect to your volunteer fire chief and your men, sir, I think a professional arson team should go in and cover the ground with a fine-tooth comb. I can set it up through our regional office out there, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Of course, Cruz thought grimly, the local guys had already been tramping around in there when they went back to find the body, and who knew how many other pairs of boots had been in messing up the evidence since. But, with luck, the arson team would find enough of it intact to determine if the fire had had multiple start points or if accelerants had been used, either one a dead giveaway for criminal action.

“Well, no, I guess that might not be a bad idea at that,” Lunders said. “Sure, you go ahead and do that. I’ll get our boys to rope it off and make sure nobody goes in till your arson team gets here. But do you mind telling me what this is all about? Why are you folks taking an interest in this?”

“It’s a little complicated to go into over the phone. How about if I make arrangements to get that arson investigation going, and then I’ll get on a plane and be out there myself, tonight or tomorrow at the latest. I’ll tell you as much as I can then about where we’re coming from on this.”

“If you think that’s necessary…”

“Yes, sir, I do think it’s very necessary.”

Once past the garish billboard with the fish and the trees, Cruz drove up a small incline in the highway and found himself gazing down on a sweeping vista overlooking a picturesque little town that backed up against an evergreen forest, as advertised, one that extended right to the distant horizon. The town was wedged between the woods and a lake that bulged out from the western bank of the Mississippi, as if the river had sprung a leak in its headlong rush to reach the Gulf of Mexico. The map Cruz had picked up at the rent-a-car counter at the airport said this was Lost Arrow Lake. So maybe the angling claim on the billboard wasn’t such a stretch, he thought. Unless he was up to a lesson in the finer points of ice-fishing, he’d have to take the boast at face value.

The official town marker appeared on the right shoulder of the road and declared his entry into Havenwood, population 2,012. Another blue sign beyond it directed him to take the next right for local police headquarters. His tires kicked up stones as he pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Havenwood Police Department a couple of minutes later. It was a squat, tan building with a prefab look, the kind of utilitarian structure thrown up by cost-conscious municipal councils all across the country. Cruz predicted a drafty squad room, a flimsy two-cell lock-up and a thin-walled office for the chief.

Parking next to a couple of black-and-white cruisers, he climbed out of the overheated rental, his lungs contracting in shock at the contact with air that was at least forty degrees colder than the balmy weather he’d left behind in D.C. Cruz flipped up the collar of his overcoat, wishing he’d remembered to put in the winter liner he scarcely used in Washington. His California-bred bones wondered, as they always did in places like this, what in hell possessed people to settle in such cold climates.

Inside the small lobby, a heavyset, gray-haired woman in a fuzzy pink cardigan sat behind a reception desk. She held a paperback novel in her hand, her arm extended across the black Formica countertop. As Cruz walked in, he saw her lick the tip of her forefinger, turn the page, then read on, her eyes furrowed in a deep squint. The wind whistled as he struggled to close the door behind him, and she glanced up at the sound, then did a double take.

“Hi, there!” Her face softened into a friendly smile as he crossed the speckled linoleum and came up to the counter. Squinting back at her book—a murder mystery, by the look of the cover—she folded over the corner of the page to mark her place, then closed it. “Can I help you?”

Cruz reached into his inside pocket and withdrew the leather case containing his identification badge and photo. “I’m Special Agent Cruz with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said. “Chief Lunders is expecting me.”

The woman set the book aside and took his ID, extending her arm back and forth until she found a comfortable focal length. “Forgot my darn reading glasses on the kitchen table this morning,” she said, shooting an embarrassed glance in his direction. “Let’s see now…Alejandro Cruz.”

“You speak Spanish,” he said. Her pronunciation was pretty near dead-on, including substituting an aspirated “h” for the “j,” instead of the soft “g” that had long ago made him abandon “Alejandro” for “Alex.”

She blushed. “Oh, no, hon, not a word, unless you count ‘una margarita, por favor.’ I got that one pretty much down pat when I won a trip to Acapulco few years back.”

He smiled. “Well, that’s an important phrase to know.”

“I’m Verna Rasmussen,” she said, extending her hand. “Just call me Verna.”

“Nice to meet you, Verna. And you did say the name exactly right, by the way.”

“Well, good. I try. I figure a person’s name is special, so we should make a little effort to get it right, don’t you think? My dad was a ‘Bjorn,’ and he got so fed up with people calling him ‘Ba-jorn’ that he gave up and went by ‘Bub,’ if you can believe it. And, anyway, Alejandro’s an easy one. Like Alejandro Rey, the actor. Right?”

He nodded. “I guess so. Most people call me Alex. And as I say, the chief’s expecting me. Could you tell him I’m here?”

Her gray pin curls gave a regretful shake as she handed him back the ID. “’Fraid he’s not in today, hon.”

“I spoke to him by phone just yesterday afternoon. He knew I was coming.”

“You came out from Minneapolis?”

“No, ma’am, from Washington.”

“D.C.?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, my, all the way from Washington, D.C.”

Cruz tucked the ID away. “So, what do you think, Verna? Could you give him a call, remind him I’m here?”

“Well, I would, but there’s just no way. Chief Lunders is in the hospital, and he’s not going to be back for a while, I don’t think.” One of her eyebrows rose.

That and her grimace told Cruz there was a long story there that Verna was probably quite prepared to tell him if given half a chance. But, he noted, glancing at his watch, it was past noon. In another couple of hours, the winter sun would start sinking fast before he’d had a chance to get a look at the site of the fire. The arson team was supposed to have gone over the ground this morning and were to have left their initial findings with the chief, but Cruz wanted his own clear picture to go with the team’s findings.

He glanced over Verna’s head to the glass window behind her. It opened into what appeared to be the squad room, with four steel desks facing one another in the center and a bank of file cabinets on the far wall. There was only one officer inside, as far as he could see from his vantage point. A khaki-uniformed officer, with buzzed hair nearly as white as the paper in his typewriter, sat at one of desks, and he appeared to be engaged in the familiar, endless and thankless task of typing up police reports on the ancient Olivetti in front of him. He looked too young to be out of high school.

“Who’s in command while Chief Lunders is laid up?”

“That’d be Nils Berglund, the deputy chief.”

“Could you—”

“—but he’s out on a call right now.”

“Can you get in touch with him?”

“Oh, sure thing!” she said, brightening. She cocked her thumb at the dispatch unit behind her. “I can call him up on the car radio.”

“Would you do that?”

“Sure. Why don’t you have a seat?” She pointed to a row of padded arm chars hugging one wall. “Oh! And here,” she added, pulling out a Tupperware box from a ledge behind her chair and peeling back the plastic lid. “Have a Toll House cookie while you’re waiting. I baked these myself for the guys. Forgot to put ’em in the squad room.”

Cruz took one of her cookies, then headed over to the waiting area while she put out the call. Instead of sitting, something he’d already spent far too much time doing that day, he headed for the bulletin board on the wall opposite, opening his overcoat which suddenly felt oppressively heavy in the heated building. Hot and cold, hot and cold.

He made short work of Verna’s cookie as he scanned the notices on the cork board. In one corner hung a familiar notice, the FBI Ten Most Wanted list, a gimmick J. Edgar Hoover had dreamed up in one of his more creative PR moments back in his early days as Director. Now, the list hung in half the federal, state and municipal offices in the country. Mostly, though, the bulletin board featured local notices about septic tanks, fishing and boating licenses, and the burning of household trash. A clipboard hanging on a peg contained minutes of town council meetings, while a hand-drawn sign down in one corner of the board, covered in turquoise rabbits and colorful eggs, asked for volunteers to help organize the 1979 Havenwood Easter Parade and Egg Roll.

Cruz heard Verna put out the call over the radio to the deputy chief, and a deep voice, broken by static, came back in response. He was just turning to eavesdrop when the last line on the Easter announcement caught his eye.

For more information, please contact:

Grace Meade

Chairlady, Havenwood Easter Parade Committee

Grace Meade, recently deceased pillar of the community and mother of his quarry, Jillian Meade. Now who would the town turn to organize its official Easter celebration? Cruz wondered, as behind him, the deputy’s crackled, baritone voice announced over the radio that he was on his way in.

CHAPTER 5

Montrose, Minnesota

Thursday, January 11, 1979

It was that woman’s voice again, firm but friendly—the kind of voice that wants you to know it intends no threat, but which commands your attention, nevertheless. Jillian lay still, feigning sleep—which wasn’t hard because sleep was never very far away. Hoping it would be enough to discourage the voice. Willing it to just leave her alone.

“It’s Dr. Kandinsky, Jillian. Do you remember? I was in to see you a couple of times yesterday and then again last night.”

Yesterday? Last night? What time was it? What day was it? When she’d opened her eyes a while back—when was that?—Jillian had noticed her watch was missing, taken along with the rest of her things, she supposed. The windows in the room were high and small, and all she’d been able to see out of them was a pale sliver of frigid-looking sky. There’d been daylight, but the shadows were long and blue-tinged, the way they get on cold winter days when the sun over the prairie is brilliant but without any heat in it.

“How are you feeling today?” the voice asked. “You’re looking a little better.”

Better than what? How long had she been there? If this doctor said she’d been in last night…well, fine. It could have been last week or last month for all Jillian knew. She did remember that voice, though, warm and reassuring. Seductive, like a promise of mercy. Or absolution, maybe, for what she’d done.

Her eyes snapped opened. The guardrails were still there, and the green wall. What did I do?

“You’re safe now,” the doctor said. “No one is going to hurt you here. I thought you might like to get cleaned up a little today. You’d feel much better if you did.”

Cleaned up? What happened? She stared at her hand lying outstretched on the crisp white mattress. She recalled someone washing blood off her when she was first brought in, but there was still some under her bitten nails, crusted, brown and guilty looking. She must look godawful, Jillian thought. Her hair was hanging loose and unbrushed, sticky mats clinging to her cheeks and neck and shoulders, and the long bangs flicking against her lashes felt bristled at the ends. Singed, she realized suddenly. Singed like her lungs, which hurt with every breath she took. And she could smell the sour, dusky odor of charred wood. It seemed permanently etched in her nasal passages….

And then, suddenly, it all came back. She remembered the fire. She remembered Nils, and the ambulance, and what had happened after they had examined her in the ER and left her sedated and alone to try to sleep off the shock of the fire. Of what she’d seen in her mother’s house.

She pulled in her arm and curled into a tight ball. Mother! Her mother was dead. Why wasn’t she dead, too? A clipped voice in her head snapped a reply: Because you’re weak!

It was true. She was weak. Twice now, she’d gone to the brink, only to let herself be pulled back. She should have died with her mother. She’d wanted to. She’d wanted to crouch down on the floor next to that small body, take it in her arms and hold it close to her breast, a full-circle reversal of their earliest roles—she and her mother alone at the end as they were at the beginning, finally at peace with one another and with the past, waiting for the purifying flames. But at the last minute, she’d allowed herself to be saved. She’d never had her mother’s iron will.

And then, in the ER…she’d been so close! The needle had been in her arm. All she’d had to do was push down on the plunger and let herself be swept to freedom on a tiny, merciful bubble of air. This could all have been over by now, but instead, she’d hesitated a split second too long and the decision had been taken out of her hands.

Now, here she was…where? Not on the emergency room gurney anymore, that much was certain. Lying in a bed, after having been moved to one of the wards probably. How long had she been here? She vaguely recalled they’d given her something after her stunt with the hypodermic, another tranquilizer, much stronger than the first, which had obviously kept her heavily sedated. For how long she didn’t know, but long enough that she had no memory of being moved to this room. It was obvious she had no tolerance for drugs. Not surprising, she thought grimly. Even in college, at the height of the psychedelic Sixties, she’d never taken anything stronger than an aspirin. The ever-well-behaved daughter of Grace Meade.

She closed her eyes, and immediately, gratefully, found herself sinking once more. The mattress seemed to be absorbing her like some great, downy mouth swallowing her whole. She was Jonah in the belly of a feather tick whale, floating on soft cotton waves, content to go where the flow carried her.

After her stunt in the ER she felt as if she had viscous muck flowing through her veins instead of blood. She didn’t care, as long as she didn’t have to think or remember. Maybe it was more than the drugs. Maybe it was some primitive instinct driving her to shut down rather than face the unbearable. Playing possum in the face of horror.

Her mother would be appalled to see her lying here like this, mute, stupid and filthy. Grace Meade was always at her best, turned out to perfection. In her entire life, she’d never so much as answered a knock at the door without first glancing in the mirror to check her lipstick, pat her hair and smooth down her dress. She’d tried to make her daughter into a miniature replica of herself, but it was hopeless, of course. Jillian had lost the genetic lottery. Had failed to inherit any of her mother’s fine features: her golden hair, her striking blue eyes, or her peaches-and-cream English skin. She was olive-skinned and brunette, like her father, apparently, growing taller and bonier than her mother had ever been.