Deadly Grace

WELCOME TO HAVENWOOD,ANGLING CAPITAL OF MINNESOTA!YOUR 4-SEASON PLAYGROUND!

What Cruz knew about fishing would fit on a toothpick wrapper, so he was in no position to argue with that municipal claim to fame. But he did wonder about those painted trees. For the entire eighty-mile drive from the airport, he’d seen nothing but rolling prairie landscape, bleak, barren and mostly snow-covered under a massive gray winter sky that stretched from horizon to horizon—scarcely a hill or a tree to be seen, except for the occasional spindly shelter belt planted by some farmer to keep the wind from carrying off all the rich agricultural topsoil.

He’d started out that morning with a sense of liberation, like a kid playing hooky. The feeling of well-being had lasted through his arrival in Minneapolis. But then, as he drove out of the city, northeast along an interstate that hugged the upper reaches of the Mississippi, the cold began to settle into his bones and the scenery grew monotonous, broken only by a few small, colorless towns with weathered grain elevators and balloon-shaped water towers. He asked himself why he couldn’t have managed to wangle an assignment someplace a little more exciting and a whole lot warmer. Minnesota in January was nobody’s idea of a holiday.

When he’d left Haddon Twomey’s office at the National Museum of American History the previous afternoon, he’d had no intention of jumping on a plane and flying out to Minnesota in his quest to track down the elusive Jillian Meade. Instead, he’d returned to the office with little to show for his morning’s efforts. The one good piece of news when he got back to the office was that Sean Finney, thankfully, had gotten off his duff for a change and gone out to do some actual legwork in the field. Cruz had settled in to enjoy an afternoon of relative peace at his desk, in spite of the jangling phones and noisy conversations all around him. Pulling out the list of interview questions that had come in with the blue alert from ScotlandYard, he’d put in a long-distance call to the Minnesota number Haddon Twomey had given him. If he couldn’t find Jillian Meade in the flesh, he’d track her down by phone, ask her about her recent travels, and then decide whether to leave it at that or follow up with a more in-depth interview once she returned to the capital.

But three tries later, he was still receiving the same recorded message telling him the number was not in service. He’d called the long distance operator, who was able to confirm that the number he had was a good one, as far as she could tell from her listings, and was assigned to a party by the name of Meade, Grace S., residing at 34 Lakeshore Road in Havenwood, Minnesota. The operator had tried to put the call through for him, but she’d had no more luck than Cruz. The line, she said, seemed to be down. Cruz asked if a winter storm was the problem, but the operator said no, she was right there in the Twin Cities, and the weather across the state was cold but sunny—had been all week, except for some light flurries, and as far as she knew, no other problems with phone lines had been reported in the vicinity of Havenwood. The problem seemed to be at that one location only.

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.”