Mountain Witness Read online

  She shook her head, uncomfortable with where the conversation seemed to be heading. “It’s not strange. That’s the thing about orphan diseases. They don’t come up in internet searches if they’re so rare that no one has input any information about them into a computer. The doctors said she must have had an orphan disease.”

  “But they couldn’t give it a name?”

  “No, they couldn’t.”

  “Again, why not?”

  She spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “I suppose because her symptoms kept changing. And each symptom came on so suddenly. Really, by the time my parents realized how seriously ill she was, and that she wasn’t getting better, she only had a few weeks left. She died four months after the first day she got sick. But my parents had only started hounding the doctors about six or eight weeks before that. I think that’s why it hit them so hard. They felt guilty for not seeking help sooner.”

  “I can totally see that, a parent thinking their child had a cold or virus, expecting it to go away on its own. It would be particularly difficult to realize how bad it was if the symptoms changed.”

  “Exactly. That’s why my dad spiraled into a deep depression after her death. He felt he should have done more.” She twisted her hands together in her lap. “We all felt we should have done more.”

  She braced herself for his sympathy, not wanting him to feel sorry for her. But, as if sensing how she felt, he gave her one quick empathetic look before grabbing a dry-erase pen and moving to the right side of the board. He wrote “Naomi” and “Symptoms” on top of a new column.

  “Tell me her symptoms, in the exact order in which they appeared, and tell me how long they lasted.”

  “I don’t understand. Why do you want me to relive that pain again?”

  His jaw tightened. “I don’t want to hurt you, Julie. But more importantly, I want to save your life. If that means I have to cause you a little pain to do it, then I will.”

  Had she really thought of this man as her fantasy-hero a few minutes ago? Her perfect man? Because right now, she just wanted to walk out of this office and turn her back on the wounds he was opening inside her.

  “Julie, you told me that you trust me. Was that a lie?”

  His gentle, soothing voice wrapped around her heart like velvet. “No,” she finally said. “That wasn’t a lie. I do trust you.”

  “Then work with me on this. Tell me Naomi’s symptoms. What was the first thing you or your parents noticed?”

  She worked with him for over half an hour on the list. Each time she thought they were done, he’d ask another question, force her to delve deeper into her memory, try to associate each appearance or disappearance of a symptom with some event in her life to help her make sure she had it right.

  Finally, he stepped back from the board, taking it all in. He seemed deep in thought. And when he turned around, Julie could have sworn she saw a flash of anger in his eyes. But the emotion was quickly masked with one of his kind, gentle smiles. He took her hands in his and led her to the door.

  He pulled it open, and she looked up at him in confusion. “You want me to leave?”

  He waved at Donna, who was sitting at one of the desks, typing on her computer. She hurried over, raising a brow in question.

  “Donna, can you show Julie the kitchenette and get her something to drink? I need to make a phone call.”

  Donna smiled and put an arm around Julie’s shoulders. “No problem. Come on, sweetie. Calories don’t count during murder investigations. And thanks to Ashley, Dillon’s wife, we’ve always got all kinds of goodies over here. I’ll pull a batch of her banana nut muffins out of the freezer and heat them up. They’re amazing.”

  She led Julie to what Chris had called a kitchenette but that was really just a long counter against the wall to the right of the chief’s office door and to the left of the main door into the station. It was loaded with cookies and all kinds of other baked goods, with a coffeemaker on one end and both a small refrigerator and a freezer underneath the counter on the other.

  “Soda, coffee or water?” Donna asked. “Pick your poison.”

  “Um, soda, I guess. Something with a lot of caffeine. Thanks.”

  “You got it.” Donna opened the refrigerator.

  Julie looked toward the chief’s office, but Chris had already closed the door.

  * * *

  “SORRY TO BUG you again, Dillon. But this is really important,” Chris said into the phone as he stared at the white board. Just thinking about what he now believed to be true had him wanting to go to the morgue and kill Alan Webb all over again

  “Not a problem,” Dillon whispered. “Give me a second.”

  Chris heard the sound of muted footsteps, as if Dillon was trying not to make any noise. A moment later, a click. “Okay. I’m out of Ashley’s room. This is the first real sleep she’s had since we got here and I didn’t want to disturb her.”

  “Does that mean what I think it means?”

  “We think this scary episode is over now, yes. She hasn’t had any contractions in quite a while. Go ahead. Tell me what you’ve got.”

  “I’m asking you to go way back to your college days, to all those fancy medical classes you took when you wanted to be a large-animal vet.”

  “I’ll pay you back for calling me old the next time I see you, especially since we’re the same age. What classes specifically are you talking about?”

  “Did you take any botany classes?”

  “Of course. I needed to know what kinds of plants were poisonous and recognize the symptoms in case of accidental ingestion by an animal. Why?”

  “That’s what I figured. I’ve got a list of symptoms for you, and then I want you to tell me what comes to mind.”

  There was a long pause before Dillon spoke. “Shouldn’t you be calling an actual botanist or doctor about this?”

  “I will, or I’ll have one of the guys follow up. But I figured this would be faster and you could at least tell me if what I’m thinking is crazy.”

  “All right. I’ve got my pen and notebook out. Go.”

  It didn’t take long. The anger that had been building inside Chris was now ready to explode.

  “What was this Alan Webb guy’s major in college?” Dillon asked.

  “Botany.”

  “You know what you need to do.”

  “Yeah. I need to exhume Naomi’s body.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Julie was backed into a corner, literally—the one in the chief’s office between the window and the door to the bathroom. It was the farthest away she could get from everyone else in the office, because they’d all lost their ever-loving minds.

  She shook her head, raking the chief, Max and Chris with her glare. She’d have glared at the very nice Donna, too, and even Randy or Colby, except that they were in the squad room handling other cases that had come in.

  “I won’t do it,” she repeated. “Naomi’s gone. Digging up her body won’t change that.” She looked at Chris. “I can’t believe you would ask me to do this.”

  “Did you understand what I explained about the plants? How someone can extract solanine, glycoalkaloids, arsenic—”

  “Oh, I understand just fine. What you’re saying is your police buddy Dillon studied plants in vet school, even though he never became a vet. And based on a short phone call and a list of symptoms I may very well remember wrong you two have come up with a crazy theory that my botany-major husband poisoned my sister. You think he switched up the plants he used so he could confuse the doctors. One set of symptoms would go away, a new set would begin, all so he could make it look like a natural death when there wasn’t anything natural about it at all. Did I get that right, Chris? Did I explain your theory correctly?”

  Tears, again the blasted tears, w
ere running down her face. But this time they weren’t tears of grief or fear. They were tears of anger.

  “Did I get it right?” she demanded.

  Chris slowly nodded. “Except for the part about this all being a crazy theory. I had Max confirm everything by calling a real botanist. We’re not wrong about any of this, Julie. The botanist told us exactly how he could reproduce the same symptoms with plants that are easily available.”

  “Good for you. You get a gold star. Now, if you’re through trying to rip my heart out, I’m leaving.” She shoved away from the wall and strode toward the door.

  Chris glanced at his boss, then moved in front of Julie, blocking her way.

  “Move,” she said.

  “Not until you hear us out.”

  “I’ve heard all I want to hear and then some. I don’t want to hear any more.” She swiped at the tears. Dang it. Why couldn’t she stop crying?

  “Julie, please. We need to talk through this. I believe Alan poisoned your sister. If we can exhume—”

  “No. I told you, no. I’m not changing my mind. And what you’re saying doesn’t make sense anyway. Alan never even met my sister. I didn’t meet him until two months after my parents died, three months after Naomi died.”

  “I know.” His voice was ridiculously calm. He motioned to Max. “Do you have that printout handy?”

  Max pulled a sheet of paper out of his suit jacket pocket and handed it to Chris.

  Julie tried to grab the doorknob, but Chris planted a foot to his left, again blocking her. He opened the paper and started to read what amounted to a short bio about Alan.

  Julie shook her head, her hands fisted at her sides. “Some investigators you people are. You’ve got his birthdate wrong. He wasn’t two years older than me. He and I were the same age.”

  “Max,” Chris said in that infuriatingly calm, soothing voice. “Where did you get Alan’s birthdate?”

  A look of sympathy crossed Max’s face as he answered. “Mrs. Webb, I know your husband told you he was your age. But it was a ruse so he could enroll in the same classes as you without raising red flags. Even more damning, the classes he took at your college were all audited, meaning they weren’t graded and didn’t apply toward a degree. That’s because he’d already graduated. He already had his degree from another school. That’s the real reason he told you he was dropping out. He couldn’t pretend to be getting a degree when you graduated. Dropping out was how he covered up that he was never a degree-seeking student at your school.”

  She shook her head. “No.” But her voice was barely above a whisper. Panic was closing her throat.

  “In addition to his school records, which had his correct birthdate, I pulled his birth certificate and cross-referenced his information in the social-security database. And if that’s still not enough proof, I had a librarian pull a copy of his high-school yearbook. He graduated high school two years before you did.”

  He pulled another piece of paper from his jacket and handed it to Chris. “Even more importantly, I tracked down one of your sister’s friends from college. That’s her written statement in response to my questions. I texted her a picture of Alan off the internet from when he attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony at one of the offices for his father’s company.”

  Chris held the paper up for Julie to see. She refused to look at it.

  “The friend remembered Alan, said he went to a lot of the same bars that she and Naomi went to during Naomi’s senior year, just two months before she got sick. Naomi couldn’t stand Alan. He kept hitting on her and wouldn’t take no for an answer. A month after she first met him, she filed a complaint against him with the local police.”

  “But she never...she never told me about him,” Julie whispered.

  He shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t want to worry her family and figured filing the police report would end the problem.”

  With that, Max pulled another piece of paper out and handed it to Chris.

  “It’s the arrest report,” Chris said.

  The room went silent as they all waited. She stared at Max and slowly took the paper from Chris. The paper rattled because her hands were shaking so much. It was a brief report, printed on the police department’s letterhead, with details like the date and the name of the officer who’d taken the statement, a statement signed by Naomi Linwood, their father’s last name, Julie’s maiden name.

  There, at the end of the report, highlighted in yellow, was the name of the man who’d been essentially stalking Julie’s sister—Alan Blackwood Webb. Exactly one month after the complaint was issued, Naomi called their mother to tell her she couldn’t come home for a planned family dinner because she had an upset stomach and had thrown up three times. Four months later, Naomi was dead. And when Julie met Alan Blackwood Webb three months after that, he’d told her how sorry he was that he’d never had the pleasure of meeting her sister or her parents.

  Julie lowered the piece of paper. A low buzz started in her ears.

  “My father,” she said, her throat so tight she could hardly talk, “killed himself, shot himself, shortly after Naomi...died. The funny thing is, he was always so vocal against guns. He didn’t even own one. But no one questioned that. We were all too grief stricken. The police assumed he’d bought it off the street. There really wasn’t much of an investigation.”

  “Julie.” Chris reached for her, but she shoved his hand away.

  “Now, my mother,” she continued, “was devastated when my daddy died. She’d handled Naomi’s death like a soldier. But Daddy—my mom just couldn’t take losing him. Couldn’t sleep. Got a prescription for sleeping pills. They say she drank down the whole bottle of pills with a glass of wine.”

  She choked on the last word, had to cough to clear her throat. “Most people would assume the woman in a household is the wine drinker, and that the beer in the refrigerator is for the man of the house. But my mama...” Julie shook her head. “My mama was the beer drinker. I always thought it was odd that she chose to end her life drinking something she didn’t even like.”

  She looked up at Chris through a wall of tears she could no longer stop. “He killed them. All of them. And I never even asked any questions. I accepted their deaths like everyone else. And then I married their killer.”

  The room began to spin around her. The buzzing got louder and louder until it was all she could hear.

  Until she couldn’t.

  * * *

  CHRIS SWORE AND caught Julie’s crumpled form in his arms.

  “She’s passed out. Get Dr. Brookes,” the chief ordered, waving at Max.

  “No,” Chris said, settling her higher against his chest. “She doesn’t need a doctor poking at her. She needs rest, and peace and quiet. Everything about her life has come into question and she needs time to process it. Max, shove her purse into that duffel and take it out to my truck, will you?”

  “You got it.” Max hurried to do what he’d asked, leaving the office door open behind him.

  Chris followed him out.

  “Hold it,” the chief ordered behind him. “You can’t just walk out of here with the witness. Again.”

  Chris ignored the surprised look on everyone’s face as he strode through the squad room. Max waited at the door, holding it open.

  The chief stubbornly followed Chris into the parking lot and rushed to get in front of him when Chris stopped at his truck.

  “Detective Downing, I’m ordering you to stand down. Take Mrs. Webb back into the station.”

  “Max, mind getting the door, please?” Chris asked.

  Max seemed to be struggling to hide his grin as he held the passenger door open.

  Chris settled Julie inside and fastened her seat belt before shutting the door.

  “Detective,” the chief barked, his face turning red.

&nbs
p; Chris stepped around him and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  The chief stood in the open doorway. “If you do this, you’re as good as resigning.”

  Chris hesitated and glanced at Julie’s tear-streaked face. Somehow, in a ridiculously short amount of time, he’d gone from suspecting her of being a murderess to respecting and admiring her more than any woman he’d ever met. He’d seen her fight when others would have given up. And now, without meaning to, he’d finally ground her down to the point that she’d shut down just to survive. Taking her to a doctor or leaving her at the station to be confronted with the facts and interviewed yet again wasn’t the way to heal her, to make her better. She needed to get away from the trauma she faced at every turn. And he was going to make sure she got exactly what she needed and deserved.

  He turned back toward the chief. “Move.”

  The chief’s face turned so red it looked as if he might have a stroke. Instead of moving out of the way, he called Chris every curse word that Chris had ever heard. And then he reached for his gun.

  Max rushed forward. “Hey, hey, chief. Let’s not get carried away.”

  “Shut up, Officer Remington.” The chief glared at Max before looking back at Chris. “Here, take it. Yours is still locked up in evidence.” He reached in his back pocket and took out a magazine, then slapped that in Chris’s palm, along with the gun.

  “Chief?” Chris wasn’t sure what to say. And he didn’t bother telling his boss he had other guns in the truck. He had a feeling that wouldn’t go over well in the chief’s current mood.

  “That’s all the ammo I got with me,” the chief continued. “It’s enough to keep the rattlers and bears away if you’re heading up into the mountains, which is what I’d do in your situation. But if you run into any other kind of trouble, you call me. Hell, you call anyway. I want regular reports until we get all of this sorted out. You hear me, son?”