Murder on the Lunatic Fringe (Jubilant Falls Series Book 4) Read online

  “I want… I want to explain myself. I want to say I’m sorry.”

  “I think you pretty well did. You’re bored with your job, you’re bored with me, you got a new job and you’re moving to Akron.”

  “Graham, it’s not just that—”

  “Yeah, it is Elizabeth. Yeah, it is. I gotta go.” I disconnected the call with my thumb and tossed the phone into the passenger seat.

  Her sudden need to apologize surprised me. It could make what I was about to do a little more difficult, I thought to myself. I probably couldn’t go back to my apartment now. She’d see the car, know I wasn’t in Indianapolis, and come knocking at my door. Knowing Elizabeth, she would be insistent enough to drive past my place over and over again until she found me and pushed her reasoning why she wouldn’t marry me down my throat. I couldn’t afford a hotel room; maybe a rental car would be enough to throw everyone off.

  The next exit took me to the Collitstown airport. I pulled off and drove into the airport garage. Parking my car in the last spot on the top level and stuffing my press pass into my pocket, I went in search of a rental counter. Half an hour later, I was back on the highway, this time driving a black Mustang and on my way to taking down Ben Kinnon.

  Chapter 17 Katya

  We are fire and gasoline, Jerome and I. When we fight, it’s an explosion. When we make up, it is again an explosion. This time, the explosion happens in my house, in my bed, at night.

  We fell apart, breathing heavily. I rolled on my side toward him and lay my hand on his cheek. He pulled me close and pressed his lips against my forehead.

  “Katya,” he whispered. “Oh, my Katya.”

  “After trial, Jerome, what happens to us?” I asked softly.

  He sighed, kissed my forehead again, but didn’t answer.

  “Can we stay here? I love my farm and I don’t want to leave it.”

  “It depends on a lot of things— how the trial comes out, for one. You know that.” His words were soft.

  “You will stay with me?”

  “Always.”

  I wrapped my leg around his strong, brown thigh. “Ah-byet,” I whispered into his ear in my native tongue. “Promise.”

  The sound of car wheels on gravel stopped him from answering. Jerome jumped from the bed to the window, pulling on his jeans as he peeked through the curtain.

  “I don’t know who this is—they’ve got their headlights turned off,” he hissed, reaching for his gun on the bedside table.

  Dressing frantically, I peered over Jerome’s shoulder, trying, as he was, to see who was coming up my driveway.

  It was a big car, what they call sport utility vehicle. I couldn’t tell the color in the dark, but there were two people in the front seat. The car stopped and the passenger, a big burly man stepped out, an automatic rifle in his hand.

  “Quick! You know where to hide!” Jerome ordered sharply, poking his gun barrel between the windowsill and the curtain.

  “Jerome,” I whispered touching his shoulder. “I love you.”

  His brown eyes moved from the window to mine. Handing my cell phone to me, his words were quiet. “I love you, too. You know who to call.”

  I ran to the closet, and, pushing my hanging clothes to one side, found the pocket door that opened into the old walls of the farmhouse. Inside the walls, against old plaster and wood, my protectors had nailed a hand-made ladder, which led to a panic room in the attic.

  From the outside, the room looked like a row of old antique dressers and trunks, fronted by a large wardrobe, piled against a wall. The wardrobe was attached to the false wall and had a false back, like the closet, for escape from the front.

  The panic room walls, and the wardrobe, built a few feet away from the real wall, were bullet proof, reinforced with metal.

  I was supposed to hide here if someone suspicious came to my farm.

  As the front entrance burst open downstairs, I pulled the closet’s back door closed behind me and scrambled up the ladder.

  Crawling from the ladder into the panic room, I slid the door behind me closed, my terror growing. Kneeling in the dark, I scrolled through the numbers on the cell phone’s dim screen with my thumb.

  “Where is it? Where is it?” I whispered in Russian. To protect me, in case I lost my phone, the emergency number for the Witness Security Program (or WITSEC as Jerome called it), the one to call in case we were discovered, had been entered on my cell phone as a fake pizza place, but what was the name? What was the name?

  Furniture crashed on the first floor and two men’s voices echoed through the floorboards of my panic room as their heavy steps pounded up the stairs.

  “Where are you, bitch? Where are you?” I knew that voice: It was Luka Petrov, one of Kolya’s thugs. Luka had been an enforcer for Kolya for many years, collecting his debts, silencing those who would oppose my husband, the man I was to testify against.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot!” Jerome shouted.

  I dropped the phone as gunshots rang out, pushing myself with my legs, crab like, into a corner. Jerome cried out—bullets must have struck him. I covered my mouth with both hands, digging my nails into my cheeks to keep myself from screaming.

  “Where is she?” Luka demanded.

  I imagined him standing over Jerome—I know how Luka works. Kolya taught him well. Like Kolya, Luka doesn’t kill on the first shot. Kolya’s first shot would have wounded, enough to get the victim—like my sister as she held her baby daughter, or now, Jerome—to understand what he wanted.

  There was a thud, probably a kick. Jerome moaned.

  “Where is she? The woman you call Katya—where is she?” Luka screamed. Another thud, another moan. “You have her hidden in this house, yes? Perhaps upstairs?”

  Bullets ripped through the attic floor outside my panic room. Still tight against the wall, I bit the palm of my hand to keep the screams from coming. The floors beneath me, like the walls, were reinforced to keep bullets out, but because the farmhouse was so old, the room was not soundproof. Had I fallen, or screamed, they would know where I was.

  “Maks,” Luka said to another man. “We must take our guest downstairs and show him why it is better to cooperate.”

  No, Jerome! No! I wanted to scream. I knew what came next—more kicks, more punches. First one ear would be cut off, then the other. Luka’s bare hands would pull out teeth, twist private parts, until he got the answer he wanted. Then he would place the barrel of his gun against his victim’s forehead and pull the trigger.

  There was no doubt Luka had learned Kolya’s ways well. I’d seen photos of Alexis’ body, my sister’s husband, after he refused to tell Kolya’s thugs where I went. Next, Kolya had them hunt down Svetlana and baby Nadezhda and kill them in cold blood.

  I’d seen those photos, too. A U.S. marshal had shown them to me when we had to leave my last hiding place, the hills of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

  I’d broken rules by keeping in touch with them and they paid terrible price. Now, I’d broken rules again and someone else who loved me would also suffer and die.

  No one was would be able to find me here in Jubilant Falls, they said. You’ll be safe here in Jubilant Falls. Until once again, I broke the rules and once again, someone suffered.

  I slid one foot across the floor, trying to bring the phone closer to me. I had to call, to save Jerome’s life. In the bedroom beneath me, Jerome screamed in pain as he was dragged to the stairway. More screams as they pushed him down the stairs and he landed with a thunk at the bottom.

  A thick, sickening silence settled upstairs. Was Jerome talking? If he was I couldn’t hear him. Were Luka and his goon torturing him? Was he already dead?

  I reached for the phone and began to scroll through the numbers again— there it was! The name of the fake pizza parlor was the last number in my phone: Zapponelli’s Pizza. I pressed the number, but all I heard was a weird electronic sound. Did the call go through? What was happening? Did the heavy metal walls that kept out bullets also
keep my phone calls in? I’d never had problems making cell phone calls before. I tried again, then again. Why wouldn’t the call go though?

  Heavy footfalls thudded up the stairs to the second floor, then up the attic stairs. Luka was coming for me, roaring, screaming, like an animal. Had Jerome told them where I was?

  Panicked, I dropped the phone as I scrambled back to the ladder in the wall, sliding the wall panel closed behind me. I climbed down into the space between the walls and waited for death.

  Chapter 18 Graham

  By the time I pulled up to the curb in the rented black Mustang, darkness had fallen. The only light shining on at the Plummer County sheriff’s offices came from Judson Roarke’s office. It was on the fourth floor, above the first three floors that contained the jail administration office and jail on the second floor, the county’s dispatch center on a windowless third floor and an entire first floor of records.

  I called his personal cell to let him know I was downstairs. Within minutes, Sheriff Roarke was at the main door, unlocking it to let me in. I followed him to the elevator and we rode up to his office. Neither of us spoke until we were seated.

  Roarke’s office was very different than Chief G’s city-issue metal chair and desk. Portraits of previous Plummer County sheriffs circled the room. Each portrait had a small brass plate with their names and dates they served, nailed into the bottom of the wooden frame.

  His desk and chair were heavy wooden relics, ornate with scrollwork, from those previous men’s administrations, but clearly, there had been funds through the years to keep them polished and in good condition. Despite the heavy air of history, the office had an atmosphere of accessibility, maybe because Roarke was just starting the first year of his second term and hadn’t settled into the permanence of the last sheriff, a throwback to a time when becoming a deputy was a matter of patronage and old boy networking, not professional law enforcement abilities.

  Roarke had done a lot to change that perception.

  He’d worked himself up from road patrol to chief deputy over his career and he’d seen the department from the inside out. He worked well with the press—I cringed at some of Addison’s stories she told about how inaccessible the office had been, particularly to her—and cleaned out any old guard who didn’t see his vision.

  Right now, he had other things on his mind. Sheriff Roarke looked over his reading glasses at me.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I know.”

  “Does your boss know what you’re doing?”

  “No. I’m officially taking vacation time because of a family health crisis.”

  Roarke nodded.

  “I’ll remember that. Chief McGinnis knows what we’re doing—this is a joint operation. We’re not going to have you wear a wire, just yet, but that may come in the future.”

  “I figured.”

  “Right now, we just want you to get to know him, get him to trust you and find out what his activities are. If he’s seriously involved in any white supremacist activity, we need to watch that. If he’s just a blowhard, running his mouth, then he’s not a lot unlike his buddy Doyle McMaster. Either way, most likely he’ll end up here as one of our taxpayer-subsidized guests.”

  “OK.” My cell phone, the ringer turned off, vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and glanced at it: it was a text from Elizabeth. Without reading it, I stuffed the phone back into my pocket. I had more pressing things to worry about.

  “You understand the risk you could be taking,” Roarke was saying. “These guys are violent and if they think you are not trustworthy in any way, they’ll hurt you—or worse.”

  “Yes.”

  What Roarke didn’t understand was my need to look Benjamin Kinnon in the face, find out what he was about and then exorcise him from my life, no matter what it took. I’d come through an essentially rough start just fine, rose up from drug addicted parents, came out of the foster care system and got an excellent education—thanks, whether I wanted to admit it or not, to Bill and his money.

  My fears over Elizabeth’s possible pregnancy made me think deeply about the relationship a son should have with his father. Except for contributing half of my DNA, Benny Kinnon had been only a small part of my life. There was something else about this man I needed to know, though. What made him the way he was? Why did he turn to a life of crime and drugs? And most importantly, might I become like him?

  A long string of men wandered in and out of my mother’s life on an hourly basis in my young life. Benny Kinnon’s connection had been only slightly more frequent: apparently, he used my mother when he needed laid, a lookout or a fence and he paid her back with drugs or violence.

  He never claimed me as his son. In that way, he wasn’t much different from Bill. Both kept me at a distance: I was an inconvenience, an obstacle standing between them and my mother. Benny used drugs and violence; Bill used a checkbook.

  Roarke slid a piece of paper scrawled with Ben’s west side address on it across the desk.

  “When are you going to meet him?” he asked.

  “Probably not until tomorrow—Wednesday. If he’s a junkie, I figured he probably wouldn’t be coherent much before lunch.”

  Roarke stood and extended his hand. “There’s not many people who would take this kind of risk, you know.”

  “I know.” I shook the sheriff’s hand. He escorted me back down the elevator and to the front door. Neither of us spoke until Roarke opened the door.

  “Be careful.”

  “I will.” I slid into the front seat of the Mustang and pulled my cell phone out to see Elizabeth’s text message.

  Where R U, Kinnon? Don’t believe Indy, she’d texted.

  U R right—not Indy, but out of town. Don’t believe? Check airport garage 4 my car, I texted in reply.

  It’s easy to lie to someone who breaks your heart. Maybe more lies would come as easily tomorrow when I knocked on my father’s door.

  Chapter 19 Katya

  Cringing behind the safe room wall, I hung on the ladder inside the wall, listening in terror as Luka, roaring outside wardrobe door, tried to break through the reinforced back.

  He threw himself against it over and over, shaking the walls of the old farmhouse. The marshals assured me I wouldn’t be hurt behind the wall of the safe room, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be scared. I know what Kolya’s thugs could do. If he broke through, my death would be slower and more painful than Jerome’s.

  The metal held. Terrified, I flattened myself against the back wall as, with a roar, he pulled the wardrobe’s front door off in frustration, the hinges groaning.

  “I know you’re in there!” he raged in Russian.

  A hail of bullets sank into the reinforced wardrobe back—and stayed there. Luka roared again in fury.

  I exhaled as his footsteps faded into the distance. He was leaving—but was he leaving the house? If I went downstairs, would I find him sitting on my couch, waiting for me? Had my call to the emergency team gone through? Were they on their way to save me? I couldn’t take the chance.

  Carefully, I slipped down the ladder, back into my bedroom closet. Stepping away from the false back door, I peeked out of the closet. The room was empty. On tiptoe, I went to the window and moved the curtain aside to look. The big SUV still sat in the driveway.

  Were Kolya’s thugs still in the house? Were the marshals on their way? Who knows? I slipped back into the closet and up the ladder, back into the panic room.

  Stepping across to the wardrobe’s reinforced back, I ran my fingers across the raised metal lumps and shivered. I must leave. I must get out.

  I opened the false door and slipped outside. In a few steps, I was at the attic’s rear window.

  I stepped out onto the roof and shimmied down rain gutter to the rear porch roof until I felt safe enough to jump to the ground.

  A siren echoed in the distance, blue and red lights lighting up the night. Was it the marshals? Were they coming down my road? Had the
call gone through? Were they coming here? Would I be safe now? The sound of footsteps pounding up the stairs told me I couldn’t wait to find out.

  I jumped from the porch roof to the ground and, as bullets rained around my feet, ran into the night. Once again, I was escaping, running in terror for my life.

  Chapter 20 Addison

  Away from work, my taste in books tended toward something I could quickly get lost in. Maybe it was the snail’s pace in the newsroom that was drawing me toward the lurid true crime story that I held in my hands.

  I was reading in bed when Duncan, wearing a pair of pajama bottoms, entered the bedroom, fresh out of the bath and rubbing his wet hair with a towel. I looked up at him and smiled. The hair on his chest was dotted with silver now. The six-pack he had when we first married was a little less defined and had a little more of a paunch, but with his wide shoulders and narrow hips, after twenty-five years, he was still the man of my dreams.

  Tossing his towel across the back of a chair, Duncan flipped back one of Grandma McIntyre’s Depression-era quilts and slid into our antique Jenny Lind bed.

  Our bedroom was basically the front half of the old McIntyre farmhouse’s second story. It was a large but narrow room, with a small closet, like many other houses from the 19th century.

  We’d never updated the house since taking over the farm from Duncan’s parents, so Isabella’s bedroom was at the back of the house, next to a small bedroom we sometimes used for guests, but which was used mostly storage for out-of-season clothes. The three of us shared the single upstairs bathroom with a claw foot tub.

  Because of their large family, Duncan’s parents turned a downstairs back parlor into their own bedroom. That parlor now did double duty as the farm office and a seldom-used formal dining room.